A few months back I went on the How to Write the Future Podcast, to talk about my co-written book, Build Better World: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers and the process of creating fictional worlds. This will be the first of a two part podcast.
For the last ten years I’ve been teaching college courses in Anthropology and Geography. But last month I signed on to join Teach for America where I will transition into teaching middle school or high school. Sometimes at the end of the semester I would recite this poem for students, to try and capture everything we’ve learned in the entire term. Also, I wrote this about two years ago, and I realized recently that I never actually posted it even though it’s one of my favorite pieces that I’ve written.
This spoken word poem is inspired by the core message of Anthropology so artfully put by Horace Minor many years ago. he said that anthropology is, “Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.”
This poem also appears in my book, A Luminous Liminality: A Collection of Poetry and Art
It’s all about relations,
No I don’t mean sexual intercourse,
I mean how people build their foundations
How they relate to causation, or build a nation
And what they consider freedom and liberation
The tracks of humanity don’t just stop at one station
The imagination is filled with endless destinations
Everyone has hopes and dreams, sorrows and frustrations
Everyone wants to experience the sensation of cessation of suffering and damnation
Options
We are a range of cultural options
Our choices are the result of a kind of cultural adoption
Humans are a wonder to be sure
We explore, go on tour, only to identify what we consider pure and impure
We fight wars because we are insecure, but wait there’s so much more.
For every detour we endure, we can also find the cure
For our madness
For every act of hate, there one of love pushing back against the sadness
The thoughts people carry are the result of causes and conditions
A steady diet of enculturation a kind of cultural brain nutrition
Of what’s clean and dirty, right and wrong
How best to gather food or sing a song
How to unify a community and get along
Culture is about adapting and understanding where you belong
So much of it is arbitrary but we claim tradition is important because it has. Gone. On. So. Long.
But tradition is selection of past perceptions
Rooted in imagined past and cultural objections
There’s nothing inevitable about the paths we choose
The things we keep, the things we loose,
Or how we use and abuse one another
When we forget that all beings have once been our mothers
And we yell and scream and blame one other.
For our problems
And so it’s relative, the way we know
Our goals, dreams, aspirations, the places that we go
Flow below the assumptions and you will find a place to grow
But take it slow.
Because if you think you know,
You’re wrong.
Relativism is a practice,
lifelong
And that beginners mind, keeps you from getting too headstrong
Don’t assume right or wrong
Just be curious, instead of furious.
Cultural relativism is poison, a disease?
Oh please, I’ve got no interest to appease
The keyboard warriors whose agenda is to throw feces
Like our primate cousins…
Relativism doesn’t mean you allow ignorance to thrive,
It means you contrive to understand what it means to be human and alive
The things we do to survive and strive for
Opens the doors to more
Possibilities
Because every culture is a library of wonder
They all have lessons and wisdom bright with lightning and thunder
So shut up,
listen,
and put down your hands
You don’t have to like, but you should try to understand
American Fundamentalism
Capitalism is a religion,
Economists are the priests,
And until you realize that these systems and money are imaginary, (gold standard or no)
The suffering will never cease.
Debt is our sin,
Our hearts are weighed and tried,
And cast into hell and homelessness,
If our monthly payments backslide.
Our credit scores the earned merit,
Pay tribute to the gods,
To the great titans of banking,
Bailed out in 2008 after committing forgery and fraud.
The stock market is the holy temple,
Where the tendrils of power hoard and hide,
Yet no commodities can be found within,
Just devotees chanting the holy mysteries inside?
And Let us pray to management,
The ones holding land in holy trust
To dole it out to those with the most merit,
Leaving most the parishioner’s with wind and dust
Capitalism is our religion,
The one true American faith,
It is in the market we trust,
Not a deity, but a wraith
This short story is another example of comedic sci-fi that I’ve been working on for some time and will ultimately appear with stories like Simulacra and The Great Magnetic Sock Migration of 2077. So if comedic sci-fi is your thing, Lizard Boobs will be up your alley.
Synopsis: Jerry may have injected Melissa’s laboratory lizards with a gene editing serum that gives them boobs. Will Melissa murder him this time or find some other use for two lizards with very large breasts?
“What in the hell did you do?”
Jerry shrugged in the flickering fluorescent laboratory light. “I guess I just thought that the world would be better with more boobs?”
“So you put them there? On a lizard? What good are boobs that aren’t on a mammal.”
There they were, two oversized iguanas, with large green mammaries protruding down between their forelegs. Both creatures were struggling to move since their breasts dragged as they walked. One of the creatures had taken to rolling around at the bottom of the tank, exposing two round and erect nipples with strange green coloration stabbing at the sky.
Melissa leaned forward on the stainless steel table she stood behind. Jerry was purposely keeping that table and the specimen’s tank between them. He knew they were her prized lizards but even the lizards in the tank looked nervous.
A few weeks ago I went on the UK based Open Minded Podcast to talk about Anthropology. On Episode 36 titled “What It Means to Be an Individual” We covered a variety of concepts and it was fun and very organic conversation. You can find it below.
Fresh this morning at the end of February of 2024, here is a piece of spoken word poetry titled, Growth. Text is below the video.
Organic,
Certified fresh on grocery store shelves,
Shopping in civility,
In and out like seashells,
On sea shores with shifting tides,
Circulating trash.
There,
Standing over there,
Something untenable,
Titanic,
Trembling walls of plastic,
Like tumors,
Like free trade,
Growing beyond the boundaries of what was always bountiful.
Circulating wealth into the center,
But consecrating that concentration cannot hold,
Beyond borders,
Beyond beauty,
Creeping towards climaxes of cataclysm, catastrophe,
Coffins at higher costs.
Then,
Virtual panoramas rise,
Hiding villainous views.
Prisons of perspective,
Pluralities of Plutocracies,
Lending to lingering hours,
days, weeks, months, years,
of long, lonely lifetimes.
A gaping maw of similarity,
Simulations without suspense of belief in the simulacra.
Marvels generated in single seconds,
For sensual,
Bread and circuses.
Divide and conquer,
Squabble and squander,
The grass is green of yonder,
Keeping you somber,
Silent, with overtly simple explanations,
Of Black and White thinking.
So you can,
Demonstrate your diligence.
Your dedication, and deliberate reconstruction,
Of that simulation,
Of that model,
Of the other,
So that,
Nothing ever grows in you.
Because,
Your certainty shopping at certified organic store shelves,
Is the only ritual you need.
I just turned 40 this month. And I saw someone the other day ask on Facebook, what’s one piece of advice you would give your younger self? And I thought, my younger self was a stubborn ass and had to learn everything the hard way. But then after a conversation with one of my children, I got to thinking, would there be anything I could tell that might help younger me?
So this is it. This short essay is the answer, but really it all comes down to one line:
It is dangerous to believe everything you think.
No matter what you think of yourself, every person you meet thinks you are a different person than you do. Even the casual or passive encounter, has a model of you in their head, a projection of what they think about you and what your reality means to them. They may love you or curse you, or simply want to get around you in the grocery aisle. But no matter what you think of yourself, every person you meet thinks you are a different person than you do.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
We are wrong all the time. Our brains see patterns in things that aren’t there. We see the closet monster or the coat hanging on the chair in the dead of night and feel dread and fear. We see a text message and assume it means one thing when it means another. We will take insult when none was offered. We are wrong all the time.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
We are myth-making machines. We make myths of the day ins and days out of our lives. We talk about how wonderful or terrible it was that something happened to us. Is happening to us. Will happen to us. We will be epic heroes cheered by crowds and perhaps an attractive mate, or victims of grave injustice, but always the starring role of any scene. Because in myth it’s often a lone hero saving the day. We are myth-making machines.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
Stories are symbols of the real. No story you tell is ever real, it is only your model, your projection of the real from your perspective. But your perspective has been shaped from the moment you drew breath. Every experience, every bit of culture taught to you, has shaped the way you approach a topic, a moment, or even an emotion. Stories are symbols of the real.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
Our emotions possess us sometimes. They take away our sense of proportion. They make you eat more, or eat less. Sometimes we welcome that possession in some dark corner of our mind, addicted to our outrage, or fear, or sadness. Or emotions can be like a stranger, climbing inside of you and taking the reins until they are burned out, and then we are left standing with the mess they have made. In one moment, we can undo years of work, trust, or effort or even destroy lives. Our emotions possess us sometimes.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
We are all traumatized, at least a little. Some of us carry around gaping holes in our stomachs from the emotional damage that life thrust upon us. Others carry a hundred smaller wounds, that while not deep, still leave scar tissue. And so, we see through the lens of our pain and misfortune. Our brain prefers a negative bias, because, after all, it kept us alive in ancient times, to assume the worst of everything. So we are stuck with a brain wired to fixate on our suffering and sometimes seek our own dissatisfaction. We are all traumatized, at least a little.
This is why it is dangerous to believe everything you think.
Hey everyone,
This last fall I was a guest on three podcasts. Two of those podcasts have gone live already. The final one just came out yesterday and is live on YouTube. I had a lot of fun on this episode. We talked about a whole host of different topics on life, culture, anthropology, art, AI, change, and the future. Check out our conversation at the link below
I’m incredibly happy to share the cover for my new forthcoming book Shades & Shapes in the Dark, my first standalone horror novel.
Here’s the book description that will appear on the back of the paperback:
When nine-year-old Clarissa chased a thief through the woods and stumbled upon something sinister, she had no idea how the shadow creature would transform the next four decades of her life. During her journey, she must learn to fight back and find allies while protecting them from the creature’s murderous hunger. Will she let the darkness consume her? Or will she find the secret to cast light on the shadow?
This novel is big, so I’ve decided to release it in six parts. Each of the six parts will be either short novel length, or novella length. Act I is going out to beta readers this weekend. I am wrapping up the rest of the book this month. Once Act I is released a new entry will come out each following month. So you will never have to wait too long I am expecting ACT I to release in February or March of 2024 pending the Beta Review. I will have an exact release date and schedule for all of you after the new year.
I will be releasing a sample of part 1 once the book comes back from my editor to everyone. But, if you’re a paid subscriber on my Substack, you’ll not only get the ebook for free, but you’ll also get it a week early.
I can’t wait for you all to read this. I truly believe this is some of my best work.
Is it really the holidays again?
Do you feel stressed just thinking about a few of your relatives who will create contentious conversations? Who are difficult to deal with? Are you ready for the holidays to be over before they begin?
The best advice is usually to avoid those thorny conversations, to find common ground, and focus on stuff you agree on. It’s good advice. But that’s not always possible. Sometimes you can’t avoid the tough conversations. So why not find ways to make them easier over time?
Ram Dass famously said, “If you think you are so enlightened, spend a week with your family.” And it’s true. Our families can be the most challenging group for us to deal with. There is so much history there that they can struggle to see the person you are now, as opposed to the person you used to be. It’s easy to forget that people change when you’ve known them for decades, especially from childhood.
I’ve been teaching Anthropology, Cross-Cultural Communication, and Diversity for almost ten years. So, I thought maybe I would offer up a few tips to help you navigate the holidays and how we can start healing the division we’re all experiencing.
Before I dive in, I want to ask you to read the whole thing. Quite frankly, when I am out in the world discussing this stuff, people will often interrupt and dismiss some of these tools for a variety of reasons. I will address most of this below, so even if you don’t agree with something I write, I encourage you to keep reading till the end because your question might be answered.
When I teach classes on diversity or communication, students are assigned reading reflections. In the first portion of these assignments, they must fully summarize an article with the core ideas, and the evidence the author is using to make their claims. They are not allowed to inject their opinion in the summary section. Why? Because before you can critique an argument, you have to fully understand it. So, before they are allowed to share their opinion, in the following section, they must first demonstrate they can summarize someone else’s argument.
This is an important life skill.
When someone has contrasting beliefs with our own, we tend to shut down and stop thinking critically. The walls go up. Then we accuse the other person of a lack of critical thinking or ignorance or dismiss them in some way. Who is right and who is wrong isn’t really the core issue here. Neither side is hearing the other and so no one will see a way across the divide.
Don’t listen to someone to prove something. Don’t listen to someone to be right. That is just an emotional reaction. You have allowed your emotions to take possession of you. This means the other person will also react emotionally and the conflict will escalate, and both parties will walk away miserable.
What to do instead?
Take a breath and listen. Don’t just listen to what they are saying, but try to understand where their concern comes from. What’s at the root of their fear and anxiety? It’s often different than you might think. What are their desires? Their hopes? What does a good future look like to them?
This leads to the next point…
After nearly a decade of teaching, I’ve come to believe that the Devil’s Advocate approach is well, a devil. Meaning that it’s rarely a useful approach. The position of the Devil’s advocate masks itself as sincere critique, but most of the time, it ignores the concerns of the other person and seeks only to undercut someone else’s argument. It’s often dishonest, and disingenuous.
There are spaces where it’s possible to use the devil’s advocate well. If you’re in the midst of a debate in some kind of performative setting, where there is a moderator or someone able to continually keep both people in bounds, it can work. But the Devil’s Advocate isn’t a tool to persuade someone to your side, it’s to persuade an audience to your position. That’s a completely different tool. You’re not going to connect with the person you’re arguing with by using the Devil’s advocate approach, at least not usually. Yes, there are some people who can get something from this approach, but again, in my years of teaching on these topics, I’ve found nine times out of ten, it causes more problems than it solves.
What to do instead?
Use a kind of soft Socratic approach. You have to be gentle with this approach because remember, Socrates pissed enough people off that they made him drink poison. The goal is not to make the other party feel stupid or ignorant (which is what got Socrates killed) but to open the door for them to think about their viewpoint. Ask questions motivated to understand what the other person is saying. These questions should be rooted in an earnest curiosity to investigate their true thoughts and desires.
You’d be surprised how many people build a wall with their beliefs to try and prevent themselves from feeling overwhelmed by information. Soft Socrates can help them recognize that wall, to see that they’ve created a blockage between themselves and others.
How do you do this?
Don’t try to argue your beliefs. Don’t try to make appeals that work on you. Everyone has empathy, it’s a matter of who they have empathy for, and what they feel personally connected too. If someone doesn’t like immigrants, talking about women and children suffering, isn’t going to work in a direct approach.
Ask questions that show them you are empathetic to them, that you’re willing to listen and want to understand them. This builds rapport and creates space for them to share their deeper feelings and thoughts over time, and allows you to speak to them in a way they may understand in the future.
Again, you don’t have to agree with their beliefs or ideas (you can disagree with them intensely), but being able to summarize someone else’s argument effectively, is a really powerful tool for a number of reasons. Remember, this is just a conversation. Nothing is lost if they don’t ultimately agree with you, because, well, they already don’t. So ask lots of clarifying questions. If you can understand their point of view, you can learn to speak their language.
Ask questions like:
You keep bringing this up. Why is this issue more important to you the others?
Can you help me understand how and why you came to that conclusion?
If they got their ideas from a media personality consider: Where do you think that this person got their ideas and information? Have you seen this personally?
Was there something that you experienced that made you feel this way?
How might someone else interpret that experience?
It sounds like you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have too. But do you think you can explain the beliefs of people who disagree with you? Do they all think that way?
How do you think the other side came to their beliefs?
Why do you think their conclusions are as important to them, as your conclusions are important to you?
What do you think is important for other people to know about this topic? Why is that?
Is there another way of thinking about that issue that you can at least partially agree with?
What do you have in common with the people you disagree with?
Wow, it sounds like you care a lot about this issue. How can we solve this issue in a way that benefits everyone involved?
The point with this approach is to establish common ground and to get them thinking that there are other ways of interpreting the same information. You’d be surprised how often someone who believes the opposite things as you, wants very similar things.
In general, people want to know that their basic needs are going to be met. They want to have the peace and freedom to pursue their interests and desires, and that people will care about them when something happens. Yes, even bigots want these things.
If you’re new to my work, you may not have heard of the Three C’s (well, my three C’s) before. I gave a Ted Talk on this back in 2021 and you can certainly watch that if you want a full breakdown, but in brief, it’s important to remember the elements that make up identity.
Context – The cultural system into which someone was born. This includes all the available cultural knowledge they grew up with, the time in history, and important historical events that will have shaped their thinking. This is the entire system into which they were born, not their personal experience.
Conditions – These are the personal experiences that someone has had in their life. What kind of exposure to different ideas have they had? What challenges have they faced? What are their religious beliefs, language, gender, class identity, and so on. How do these compare to the norms of the culture (does that create conflict or perceived conflict for them?) These are their experiences within the system they were born.
Choices – Once you have taken the time to understand a person’s cultural background and personal life experiences, you can begin to understand many of their choices, their political opinions, their religious beliefs, and so on. This doesn’t mean you agree with them, but this exercise is to help you recognize them not as that ranting irrational person you can barely stand to be around, but as a complex person who has different thoughts, desires, emotions, and needs.
Humanizing someone is important. Dehumanizing someone is the first step to violence. That doesn’t mean you like what they believe (especially if their beliefs are dehumanizing), it doesn’t mean you agree with what they are saying, but understanding is the starting point to a more cohesive coexistence and to find ways to solve problems.
People do not usually change their minds because someone screams facts at them. They have to connect emotionally with the facts. If you connect with them, and you build trust, they are far more likely to listen to you and given enough time, change their mind.
There are no quick fixes here. People don’t come to hate something in a singular moment. It takes time. Either they are born into a way of thinking and they are raised with it, or something happened to them to put them in a vulnerable position where the seeds of hatred could grow. Hate usually grows from outrage, and these days, all of us, across the political spectrum, consume media that purposely makes us feel outraged. That’s how these companies make their money.
That’s actually optimistic because we’ve created these problems. That means we can uncreate many of them.
As someone who has not only taught diversity for a decade but has lived and worked among other cultures, I’ve heard every argument for why we should or shouldn’t appeal to the humanity of someone who disagrees with us.
Things like:
“You can’t be tolerant of someone who wants to end your existence.”
“Some people just thrive on chaos.”
“They are a narcissist (or some other reason they will never listen).”
“They are willfully ignorant and will never change their mind.”
“I know better because I’m older and more experienced.”
“They are too old to change their mind.”
“They could never understand what I’ve been through.”
“Their generation has xyz issues.”
Maybe these are true. Maybe you’re right and that person will never listen. Have you tried the above approaches? Have you put down your weapons and tried to talk about these things, not to win, not to be right, but to understand? Maybe you have. Maybe my advice doesn’t work for the person or people you’re thinking about.
But it will for someone. And in a world where so many of us feel the rising conflict, every person who listens counts. Every courageous conversation counts. It’s often the little acts that change the world, that bring communities together.
People doubt their beliefs, especially when there are obvious holes in what they think. People are aware at some level, of their own cognitive dissonance. It’s why they get so angry when presented with a sincere challenge to their worldview. When you attack them, it gives them a reason to put aside their doubt, and build a higher wall.
But if you approach things from a different direction, if you meet their walls with an olive branch, sometimes they will open the gate. Given enough time, they might start to take bricks off that wall, enough that they can start to see over to the other side. Even if they never fully change their mind, softening their view can deescalate potential violence and conflict. Even if becomes, well, we know we can’t approach that topic but we still love and care for each other, that’s a victory. If you have even 10% more peace during your holiday. That’s a victory.
No this won’t work every time. It might not work the first time, or the tenth, but if we care about this person, or ever cared about this person, we must remember their humanity.
I am definitely not perfect. I screw this up all the time. Ten years of teaching, and I can’t always make it work. There are some people, and some things that just get under my skin and I have a hard time seeing past that. But over time, that’s less true. Over time, I can talk about complex issues such as race, gender, or oppression in ways that are more accessible and thought-provoking, less attacking, and more about developing connections.
I’ve been the angry activist on the street, screaming and shouting for tyranny to end. I’ve written no end of essays and articles about injustice. I conducted graduate research on media and representation and saw all the terrible ways our system treats differences. I’ve struggled with elements of my own identity for most of my life. I grew up in a deeply segregated community on the East Coast and didn’t understand anything about diversity. But I learned. I changed. I continue to make mistakes and reflect so that I continue to grow.
It’s know it’s hard to be the bigger person, really hard. But I promise you, the payoff is worth it. We just have to try. Sometimes we will make a connection and change things for the better. Sometimes we won’t. But you never know for sure until you try.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and some of this is useful.
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