The Sunk Costs of Stinkin' Thinkin'

Certain characteristics are common to all families who are characterized by substance abuse and addiction.  The central character is, of course, the addict, whose addiction and behaviors regularly cause damage to himself and to his family unit.  The pain of the damage caused is the sort of stimulus that would cause reasonable people to try to get to the root cause of the damage and to effectively fix it.  However, a family marked by substance abuse is not reasonable, for as the addiction of the addict progresses, so do his efforts to "train" the members of his family to avoid squarely and honestly facing the root cause of the damage.  Instead of looking for an honest, effective remedy, the family is therefore trained simply to try to control the damage caused by the addict while ignoring the root causes.

A straight-up discussion of root causes is usually off-limits in such families.  These families are not marked by very much honest self-appraisal and self-reflection.  Such self-reflection might provoke an existential crisis, otherwise known as "decompensation," so it is usually avoided like the plague.  Instead, when the family experiences the pain of a fresh episode of damage, they are also trained to look for scapegoats on whom they may project their frustration and anger for the pain they are suffering.  When the family encounters any honest outsider who is willing to openly name the root cause of the family's pain, the family will often unleash a barrage of blaming, scapegoating, projection, and creation of drama in order to deflect attention from the actual "elephant in the room."  As the damage caused by the addiction increases over time, so energy spent in damage control and blame-shifting also increases over time.  This energy and effort represents a sunk cost, that is, it represents resources spent in an activity that yields no genuinely productive results, resources which, once spent, can never be recovered.  Sooner or later the cost of damage control increases to the point where it can no longer be sustained, where the cost of further damage control exceeds the necessary pain of repentance.  At that point, in many cases, both the family and the addict can be said to have "hit bottom."

America's addiction to guns and violence reminds me of the dynamics of a family controlled by substance abuse.  Our fascination with guns and violence springs from the original sins which led to the founding of the United States, sins which this nation has enshrined and glorified rather than acknowledging them as sins.  Moreover, throughout our history, this addiction has led to regular episodes of ever more frequent damage, and ever-increasing pain.  Yet the discussion of the root causes of that pain is off-limits for many members of American society, who will react by blame-shifting, scapegoating, projection and drama creation whenever the subject of root causes is mentioned.

So there was another mass shooting last week; so we also see the attempt to honestly discuss root causes drowned out in yet another flood of drama and blame-shifting by people who would rather die than give up the "freedom" of their addiction.  But there is no discussion of the sunk costs of that addiction.  Yet people who seek to behave as adults should be aware of those sunk costs.  And people who have adult responsibilities involving the safeguarding of life and property have to be aware of those costs.

I am thinking now of the vast number of people addicted to right-wing Kool-Aid in this country who even today deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change, who are unaware that some of the adults who care for them are required to take the effects of man-made climate change into account.  They watch Fox News and listen to their favorite talking heads in environments whose air conditioning was designed by members of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, and they don't realize that for the last few years, ASHRAE handbooks and design guides have begun to address design of HVAC systems for a changing climate.  Why has ASHRAE done this?  Because they are part of design teams who have to design built spaces to withstand the damage done to our climate by our addiction to materialism.  If their designs are inadequate, this results in legal liability.

In the same way, those who design the built environment have, for the last several years, been forced to begin to design built spaces which mitigate the effects of this nation's addiction to guns and violence.  This can be seen in certain building codes such as NFPA 72 (authored by the National Fire Protection Association), which, several years ago, added a section dealing with requirements for mass notification systems in service buildings used by the public.  There is also the increasing attention to architectural design responses to the growing "active shooter" threat (see this, this, and this).  If active shooter incidents continue to increase in this country, I am sure that we will begin to see changes to State building codes requiring explicit design measures for all buildings in which people congregate, whether public or privately owned.  Some of these codes will require expensive retrofits of existing buildings and structures.  There will also be the increased costs of insuring and indemnifying such spaces.  This will greatly increase the cost borne by your average Joe Sixpack as he undertakes a journey to any built public space in his Chevy truck with his Confederate flag flying from the bed and his NRA sticker on his bumper.  He will grumble at the increased cost of going to places (and especially of being allowed entry into those places), yet he won't be likely to make the connection between his enjoyment of "freedom" and the increased cost of that freedom.  Meanwhile citizens like him who live in some of the other "developed" countries won't have to pay such costs, because they aren't all armed to the teeth and most of them aren't unstable.

Perhaps the discussion of monetary costs might actually persuade the masters of our addicted society to take a good look at themselves, because the human costs of our addiction to guns and violence has not had any effect so far.

An Unexpected End to Uninvited Guests?

Update - 9 March 2020: This post should be taken with a grain of salt.  I wrote it during a time in which most of the West was being flooded with propaganda from Russian sources such as The Vineyard of the Saker, Russia Today, and the blog of Dmitry Orlov, to name a few.  These sources were created as part of a larger Russian campaign of disinformation designed to fragment and fracture the West in order to bring the fractured pieces under Russian influence.  This was in accordance with the geopolitical strategy of Aleksandr Dugin and Vladimir Putin.  Unfortunately I drank some of their Kool-Aid, but I have now detoxed, as can be seen in my much more recent post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance."  Everything the Putin regime has touched has turned to garbage.  One of his garbage deeds was to help install a racist, narcissistic, idiot President into the United States government in 2016.
 
Graduate school is starting again, and I am enrolled in coursework on top of working nearly full time.  Therefore, I can't really do a lot of the research and analysis which has typically gone into many of my blog posts.  I can only formulate opinions based on cursory glances at things of interest.

One thing that has caught my eye over the last four years is the Syrian "crisis", which was manufactured by the United States and its allies in order to secure and maintain American economic hegemony in the Middle East.  It had nothing to do with "human rights violations" or "democracy."  The results of the insurgency which the United States fomented and financed have been ISIS, a partially wrecked country, and a refugee crisis which has exploded into Europe.  The refugee crisis has evoked much hand-wringing in the West, along with the pointing of Western fingers at the Syrians as a nation and a people and accusing them of not being able to manage their own affairs.  This has also been accompanied by the usual round of horrified xenophobia at the thought of pure Europeans having to extend neighborly hospitality to people with dark skin and dark hair from the Middle East.  (Some of that hand-wringing and xenophobia have crossed the Atlantic to the United States.)

But now Russia is rapidly building a military presence in Syria, to the tune of thousands of troops and large amounts of tanks and warplanes.  I don't know what the Russians are planning, and they haven't volunteered to tell me.  (Only fools openly discuss their strategy.)  But what if Russia (along with China, Iran and Iraq) is about to solve the problem of "uninvited guests" in Europe by kicking uninvited "guests" out of Syria?  What if the result of such an action is the immediate cessation of the current refugee "crisis"?  (If outside interests are stopped from further tearing apart the Syrian homeland, why would Syrians choose any longer to be refugees?)  What if a further result is another huge step toward the complete loss of the legitimacy of the West, and particularly of the United States?  What if the United States begins to learn that you can't loot other people's countries and wreck other people's homelands without consequences showing up at your doorstep?

Give Me Some Delicious Reasons...

So, lately I've been in dialogue with a retired clergyman of a mainstream American church.  He and I have had, shall we say, a more than moderate difference of opinion concerning the revival of overt oppression of people of color in this country, and the appropriateness of the mainstream American evangelical response so far.  Those of you who read this blog know that I believe that the mainstream evangelical response has been rather lame, amounting to a non-response - which is why I can't really take mainstream American evangelicalism very seriously anymore, since I now view it as a tool of oppression.  He tends to think that the problem of oppression in this country is much less severe than the facts now indicate, and he tends to talk vaguely of a "race" problem which he assumes to be a bi-lateral grievance between two belligerents who are equally at fault.  The retired clergyman would rather I saw things his way, and our last face-to-face discussion was slightly hot in places.  But amazingly, at the end, he offered to let me write an installment of the weekly prayer email sent to the prayer team at his church.

So here is what I wrote for that week:  

"'Remember the prisoners, as though in prison with them, and those who are ill-treated, since you yourselves are in the body.' - Hebrews 13:3

"I am reminded of this verse as I consider a recent study I conducted in order to prepare for a discussion of ongoing injustice being perpetrated in the United States. One of the elements of that study was the failure of the criminal justice system, which has been guilty of sending many innocent people to prison (and in several cases, to death row). Here are links to some of the sources I read:

• 'Three black men, convicted as teens, exonerated in Ohio after serving 20 years in prison',

• 'Three black men released after 18 years in prison on wrongful murder convictions' (this group is different from the three in the first article),

• 'Exonerations in the United States, 1989-2012' (especially starting at page 30),

• 'Race and Justice: Wrongful Convictions of African American Men',

• 'Wrongfully Convicted African-Americans Wait Longer To Be Exonerated Than Others: Study',

• 'How Often Do Wrongful Convictions Involve Black Defendants?' (The answer is between 71 and 73 percent.)

"Minorities (especially African-American) make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated or sentenced to death in this country, yet the available data seems to indicate that the majority of prisoners of color in the United States are innocent. It is a real challenge for the innocent to prove their innocence and to obtain release from prison, because the criminal justice system purposely makes it hard for convicted prisoners to prove their innocence. Indeed, in 2009, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence.

"Therefore, please remember the prisoners, just as the Scripture has commanded us. Let us remember them in our prayers. Let us pray for their release from oppression and unjust imprisonment. Let us also pray about how we might physically, materially 'show compassion to those in prison' and to their families - Hebrews 10:34. And let us pray for the repentance of the United States."

As I said, it's amazing to me that I was able to send these exact words to the prayer team at that church.  Now I guess I should visit a Sunday service to see how those words were received.  And as for the hard words I have already written about mainstream American evangelicalism (and about present-day American society), I'm praying for some more delicious reasons to eat those words.  We'll see...