Social experiments often engender controversy. And the reason is simple: No matter how many data on human behavior one collects in support of a behavioral hypothesis, someone somewhere sometime will express an individuality, either because of creativity or because of defiance for the sake of defiance, producing that exception to the rule. No better example exists in fiction than that portrayed by Rodion Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s murderer in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov’s motives for killing a pawnbroker include his desire to prove he is “the exception,” a motive derived from his poverty-driven despair and pride. When I say “no better example,” I’m hyperbolizing, of course. Yes, there are numerous examples of defiance in every generation of both fictional and real characters. James Dean comes to mind for his portrayal of fictional Jim Stark in the film Rebel without a Cause. * Every generation has its rebellious teens and young adults, all determined to demonstrate their individuality, often by breaking the bonds of propriety. Thus, societal experiments run counter to a drive toward individualism, much like playing “chicken,” as Jim Stark and Buzz do in racing a car toward a cliff in the film. One wonders. Are we going to escape going over the cliff like Jim or go over it like Buzz?
The fashion of any time determines propriety. In 2020 and 2021, for example, wokeism has become an “acceptable behavior,” and as such, it has led to another and become part of yet another societal experiment. But why should I simply declare this in a prose statement? Let’s talk about it, instead. Maybe you disagree.
I’ll start:
“You would think that methane comes to the surface from sources like buried decomposing microorganisms and rotting vegetation in anoxic conditions good for anaerobic bacteria. But guess what someone just discovered.”
You: “It doesn’t.”
“Well, no, it does, but there’s a newly discovered source, also: Aerobic Acidovorax bacteria in Yellowstone Lake water. That means methane producers have been hiding in plain sight. We’ve been thinking rotting vegetation, animal life, and anaerobic bacteria all these years. We’ve been thinking methane escaping from melting permafrost and methane hydrates bursting from the ocean floor. Now we have to monitor a previously unknown source of the greenhouse gas that was always visible but never seen.” **
You: “So?”
“It’s that fact of hiding in plain sight that interests me.”
You: “What about it.”
“It’s so apropos to today’s political stuff. We have a bunch of people in places like Portland, New York, and Baltimore running around saying, “Defund the police and replace them with social workers,” and then we have a bunch of people saying crime’s rising in those cities. And the people who backed the people who favored defunding the police supposedly to make their places safer can’t figure out why there’s a rise in crime, especially violent crime. It’s not that one of the causes is out of sight; it’s in plain sight. Same goes for tens of thousands of people illegally crossing the southern border of the US. A wall, which would have been in plain sight and which would have deterred at least some, if not many, from crossing the border has been replaced by a gap that the people can plainly see. It’s like sources of methane hiding in plain sight in surface water.”
You: “You might have valid point that applies to people. I guess we often don’t see what’s in plain sight, especially when it comes to contentious politics and social reforms imposed on the general population. We go looking for some deep meaning like some deeply buried bacteria and vegetation, when right on the surface where we can plainly see, we miss the obvious. Same goes for public education policies. People say, ‘The kids aren’t learning enough. They are behind the kids of other countries.’ Then they institute some ineffective and unproven methodology that supposedly addresses the causes of failure, like that once fashionable outcomes-based education that actually lowered standards. Remember that one? Or how about this one: Back in the seventies, people tried the “open classroom,” a wall-less school with different teachers and different grades all gathered in a large room, all the classes carried out simultaneously. Yeah, cacophony everywhere. Great learning environment, that. We know that there’s no substitute for hard work when it comes to personal accomplishments, and we know that multitasking is a myth proved to be so by numerous car crashes by distracted drivers.
“I think all this looking for deeper causes when causes lie in plain sight stems from the proliferation of popularized psychological and social ‘theories,’ though they’re more like hypotheses than theories. Too much popularizing going around, like the one about police being inherently the cause of the nation’s inner-city woes. Used to be the role of newspapers and magazines to spread popularizations. Now everyone with a smartphone or computer can spread an easily understandable, but often wrong or unsupported or untested hypothesis. And all those accumulating hypotheses create a culture of propriety.”
“Yep. And you know where I’m headed with this.”
“You: I’m guessing you’re going to say something about those who rebel against today’s propriety.”
“Wokeism foisted on the masses. Government agencies, big-box stores, social media platforms, educational institutions—even higher-ed institutions—all attempting to impose a general propriety on everyone over which they believe they have control. And anyone who rebels is Jim Stark. Anyone who can’t understand that societal reforms often produce the opposite of what they are intended to produce, runs to the explanation that ‘there must be a deeper cause,’ and that’s the cause we need to find and address. So, they think, ‘After all, what we hypothesize should work, and we’re going to keep forcing it on people until it does work.’
“That thinking usually ends up producing rebels. The current government, for example, has decided that it can go into the depths of Central American political and economic systems to find a solution to hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. They believe the root causes of immigration are the causes they have identified by ‘digging deep.’ They see the rotting vegetation underground without seeing the aerobic sources of methane clearly visible in a lake on the surface. And it’s not just the matter of immigration. It’s education, it’s retail, it’s social media, it’s justice, it’s…Everything everywhere all the time. And for all those ‘rebels,’ there’s a dire consequence. Act with the propriety of the times, or suffer the consequences of public condemnation, which is that universal reaction to those who differ from the norm. Today it’s called cancelling, but black-balling, ostracizing, shunning, also work.”
You: “So, what can you do about it?”
“Not much. Most of these social experiments die on the vine. People tire of fertilizing those vines that intertwine through the society. Hybrids will grow in their place as the ensuing generation says the time has come for a new set of hypotheses because the last set didn’t achieve the desired effect. Rebels will arise within the system. Fashion and reform prune the vines of a previous season’s growth. The grapes of wokeism will probably produce a vinegar, and not a fine wine appreciated by the next generation’s social connoisseurs whose tastes will differ. Another social experiment will fail, and so on.”
Notes:
*The film was derived from Robert Linder’s Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944).
**Montana State University. 2 July 2021. Research team publishes groundbreaking methane synthesis discovery. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-team-publishes-groundbreaking-methane-synthesis.html Accessed July 5, 2021. Accessed July 6, 2021.
The fashion of any time determines propriety. In 2020 and 2021, for example, wokeism has become an “acceptable behavior,” and as such, it has led to another and become part of yet another societal experiment. But why should I simply declare this in a prose statement? Let’s talk about it, instead. Maybe you disagree.
I’ll start:
“You would think that methane comes to the surface from sources like buried decomposing microorganisms and rotting vegetation in anoxic conditions good for anaerobic bacteria. But guess what someone just discovered.”
You: “It doesn’t.”
“Well, no, it does, but there’s a newly discovered source, also: Aerobic Acidovorax bacteria in Yellowstone Lake water. That means methane producers have been hiding in plain sight. We’ve been thinking rotting vegetation, animal life, and anaerobic bacteria all these years. We’ve been thinking methane escaping from melting permafrost and methane hydrates bursting from the ocean floor. Now we have to monitor a previously unknown source of the greenhouse gas that was always visible but never seen.” **
You: “So?”
“It’s that fact of hiding in plain sight that interests me.”
You: “What about it.”
“It’s so apropos to today’s political stuff. We have a bunch of people in places like Portland, New York, and Baltimore running around saying, “Defund the police and replace them with social workers,” and then we have a bunch of people saying crime’s rising in those cities. And the people who backed the people who favored defunding the police supposedly to make their places safer can’t figure out why there’s a rise in crime, especially violent crime. It’s not that one of the causes is out of sight; it’s in plain sight. Same goes for tens of thousands of people illegally crossing the southern border of the US. A wall, which would have been in plain sight and which would have deterred at least some, if not many, from crossing the border has been replaced by a gap that the people can plainly see. It’s like sources of methane hiding in plain sight in surface water.”
You: “You might have valid point that applies to people. I guess we often don’t see what’s in plain sight, especially when it comes to contentious politics and social reforms imposed on the general population. We go looking for some deep meaning like some deeply buried bacteria and vegetation, when right on the surface where we can plainly see, we miss the obvious. Same goes for public education policies. People say, ‘The kids aren’t learning enough. They are behind the kids of other countries.’ Then they institute some ineffective and unproven methodology that supposedly addresses the causes of failure, like that once fashionable outcomes-based education that actually lowered standards. Remember that one? Or how about this one: Back in the seventies, people tried the “open classroom,” a wall-less school with different teachers and different grades all gathered in a large room, all the classes carried out simultaneously. Yeah, cacophony everywhere. Great learning environment, that. We know that there’s no substitute for hard work when it comes to personal accomplishments, and we know that multitasking is a myth proved to be so by numerous car crashes by distracted drivers.
“I think all this looking for deeper causes when causes lie in plain sight stems from the proliferation of popularized psychological and social ‘theories,’ though they’re more like hypotheses than theories. Too much popularizing going around, like the one about police being inherently the cause of the nation’s inner-city woes. Used to be the role of newspapers and magazines to spread popularizations. Now everyone with a smartphone or computer can spread an easily understandable, but often wrong or unsupported or untested hypothesis. And all those accumulating hypotheses create a culture of propriety.”
“Yep. And you know where I’m headed with this.”
“You: I’m guessing you’re going to say something about those who rebel against today’s propriety.”
“Wokeism foisted on the masses. Government agencies, big-box stores, social media platforms, educational institutions—even higher-ed institutions—all attempting to impose a general propriety on everyone over which they believe they have control. And anyone who rebels is Jim Stark. Anyone who can’t understand that societal reforms often produce the opposite of what they are intended to produce, runs to the explanation that ‘there must be a deeper cause,’ and that’s the cause we need to find and address. So, they think, ‘After all, what we hypothesize should work, and we’re going to keep forcing it on people until it does work.’
“That thinking usually ends up producing rebels. The current government, for example, has decided that it can go into the depths of Central American political and economic systems to find a solution to hundreds of thousands of people emigrating to the US. They believe the root causes of immigration are the causes they have identified by ‘digging deep.’ They see the rotting vegetation underground without seeing the aerobic sources of methane clearly visible in a lake on the surface. And it’s not just the matter of immigration. It’s education, it’s retail, it’s social media, it’s justice, it’s…Everything everywhere all the time. And for all those ‘rebels,’ there’s a dire consequence. Act with the propriety of the times, or suffer the consequences of public condemnation, which is that universal reaction to those who differ from the norm. Today it’s called cancelling, but black-balling, ostracizing, shunning, also work.”
You: “So, what can you do about it?”
“Not much. Most of these social experiments die on the vine. People tire of fertilizing those vines that intertwine through the society. Hybrids will grow in their place as the ensuing generation says the time has come for a new set of hypotheses because the last set didn’t achieve the desired effect. Rebels will arise within the system. Fashion and reform prune the vines of a previous season’s growth. The grapes of wokeism will probably produce a vinegar, and not a fine wine appreciated by the next generation’s social connoisseurs whose tastes will differ. Another social experiment will fail, and so on.”
Notes:
*The film was derived from Robert Linder’s Rebel without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944).
**Montana State University. 2 July 2021. Research team publishes groundbreaking methane synthesis discovery. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-07-team-publishes-groundbreaking-methane-synthesis.html Accessed July 5, 2021. Accessed July 6, 2021.
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