by jenks

two kinds of people

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.”
– Robert Benchley

This election process is driving me crazy. I wish we could just pick someone already, and get the fuck on with it. I mean, yes, I do hope a particular someone gets picked, but the longer that keeps not happening, the more disturbing this whole having to root for “my” side, and having to hate the other side, and having to bear witness to an ever increasing enmity widening the divide between the two sides, thing is becoming. Is anyone else feeling worn out, here? And it’s no longer relegated just to the 24-hour news cycle anymore. It’s in, like, everything. Video games, porn, pumpkins! Tried choosing a cup at 7-11 lately?

It’s like Bloods vs. Crips gone wild out there!

Binary battle lines are permeating the atmosphere, and they’ve been seeping into everything I seem to be writing recently, too. From the “sluts” vs. “virgins” pop-culture war, to the schism in conservative vs. liberal moral psychology, to PCs vs. Macs even. That’s all within the past month. It feels like everything is being forced to become a dichotomy. Which is a really dangerous kind of trap to get stuck in, and it’s prompted me to take a step back, and examine this phenomenon itself, rather than end up writing yet another post that would inadvertently fall into the same pattern. What I’ve realized is–surprise surprise!–I have two very powerfully conflicting reactions to this polarization that will be holding our reality hostage officially for 3 more weeks, but whose legacy will linger much, much longer.

Wait, before I get in to that, I just want to say that I realize that it’s not like this election invented the social/cultural/psychological divide between liberals and conservatives that politics has been exploiting since who knows when, but I really do think this particular election season has galvanized it to a degree that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in the United States in my lifetime. A few weeks ago on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart suggested to guest, Bill Clinton, that “This election has apparently taken us all the way back to 1968 and the Nixonian and McGovern culture divide.” So it’s clearly not new, what’s going on today, but its degree of vehemence is not particularly familiar to anyone under 40, either.

Watching the preceding two elections go down, it had become increasingly clear that the left simply wasn’t getting it. It was like the nature of the electoral playing field had changed in some very crucial way, and the Democrats hadn’t gotten the memo. Which is why it feels like Barack Obama has offered a total departure from the kind of democratic nominees we’d gotten used to. People aren’t for Obama just because he’s the non-republican option. They are actually for what HE represents (which is, amazingly, a myriad of things to a broad spectrum of people, which he has, nonetheless, managed to bring together into a miraculously unified concept, and that unto itself is yet another aspect to his appeal), and they are for him in a fervent, decisive way that for the past 8 years has seemed to be the sole province of Republican candidates. So yeah, on the one hand, I can definitely say it’s been pretty gratifying to all of us who’d gotten tired of losing during that time, to watch the Democrats pull their shit together, and run a seriously strategized, legitimately competitive campaign. Booya. Bring it on. Go, team, go!

But here is what I personally find incredibly dismaying–even more than the right’s recent effort to cast Obama as a Muslim terrorist (I’m kind of surprised it took them this long), even more than the prospect of Sarah Palin possibly getting to make decisions about…. anything whatsoever (well, ok, dismaying on par with that)–is it’s precisely because Obama has been so successful at mobilizing the left, and the right has been forced to stake out even more desperately polarizing territory in response, that we’ve now gotten to a point where the cost of an election involves tearing the country limb from limb, first.

I said that this kind of social division that makes the air itself feel dense with tension is like nothing I’ve ever experienced in the U.S., but I have felt it somewhere else before: Jerusalem. There is a word in Hebrew that’s used for how Jerusalem feels–“Lachatz.” It literally translates to “pressure.” And in that city, that’s had contention in the air for millennia, that is, indeed, the right word. Like something intensely volatile, tenuously bottled up. In Jerusalem the binary conflict is ingrained, literally, into the walls, and it demands a constant vigilance of one’s affiliation. There are certain sections of the city where you are not allowed to go if you are Jewish, and others you cannot go to if you are Arab. Making sure you’re staying on your team’s side is not just a matter of politics, it’s how everyday life plays out. That’s what this election season, which has turned even regular, every-day actions into declarations of allegiance, is reminding me of. There’s this incessant perpetuation from all directions, whether it’s the media, or our friends, or slushie cups, of an us-vs.-them mentality, and I feel like it’s affecting how we think about everything right now, political or not.

Obviously, this is more or less inevitable when you’ve got a two-party election, and while it’s not like there’s anything that can be done about that situation now, I think it’s important to be aware, while we’re cheering our team on, of the underlying hazard in enjoying the polarization too much. Our human proclivity for this kind of binary divide is one of the most dangerous social situations that we can–and perpetually do–get ourselves into, and the massive eagerness with which both sides are relishing this particular battle is a little bit freaking me out.

Maybe it’s making me lose my sense of humor, too, cuz I totally can’t seem to find stuff like “McCain Be Old” to be funny… Or useful, for that matter. On that same episode of the Daily Show, Clinton said, “I’m glad [Obama]’s got people that love him that much. But those are not the people that hold this election.The people that hold this election are the people that think that he is on their side, and he loves them.” In other words, is it really necessary to incite alienation of people who could hold the swing vote, like, oh… you know… old people? Why not take a cue from Sarah Silverman instead, and shlep over to see your grandparents down in make-or-break-an-election state Florida? As Silverman says, “There’s nobody more important or influential over their grandparents than their grand-kids. You. If they vote for Barack Obama, they’re gonna get another visit this year. If not….”

As a marketer, I think one of the most crucial things to understand about people is just how diverse and nuanced the spectrum of identity and culture and personality is. In this long-tailed, custom-tailored, niched-up world we’re living in now, understanding the importance of approaching different groups on their own terms is the difference between success and irrelevance. Less than a month out from what I fully admit is the most important presidential race of my lifetime, may not be the time to start preaching plurality or diversity, or anything that could be undermining to in-group solidarity, but I think even through this process we do need to remember that with people things are not just black and white, or blue and red, or binary at all. One of the things that makes Barack Obama so appealing for me is that, as he himself acknowledges, as the product a Kenyan father, and an American mom, who was born in Hawaii, grew up in Indonesia, and became a Senator in Chicago, his mixed heritage has given him an understanding of America that is informed by a global, and uniquely modern perspective. That’s the kind of perspective that makes sense for the president of the United States when I think about the 21st century future not just of America, but the world.

Now, if we could just get through this election already…..

    



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by jenks

today’s awesome ad award goes to:

Just… WOW! such great creativity and innovation with this. really freakin’ awesome.

CLICK THE SCREENSHOT BELOW TO EXPERIENCE IT >>>

    



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by jenks

poli-psych

Pop quiz:

Do you favor variety, novelty, diversity, new ideas, travel? Or do you prefer sticking to things that are familiar, safe, and dependable?

If you answered yes to the first question, then you are higher on a major personality trait called Openness To Experience (OTE). As psychologist Jonathan Haidt says in his TED talk, “If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of foods they like to eat.” Based on this trait you can also predict people’s political leanings. Robert McCrae, the main researcher of this trait, writes, “Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views, whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right wing views.” If you cross check this information with your answers to the questions at the top, no doubt you’ll find that this holds true for you.

I think it’s a popular perspective among the liberal folk to assume that people who vote for republicans are “blinded,” or “asleep” or something. If only they could just “wake up,” then they’d realize the errors of their ways. (Much like many conservatives think about liberals as well.) Haidt refers to this kind of thinking as a “moral matrix.” A kind of group-psychology framework that makes it hard for either side to really be able to understand why the people over there are making the decisions they are. According to Haidt, what it inevitably comes down to is morals.

Haidt has been studying morality from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, investigating common denominators in what cultures all across the world value as right and wrong in order to uncomver what may be the innate moral predispositions “built in” to the the human exeprience. Thus, his definition of morality is “Any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.” According to his research, there are five distinct moral predispositions, which Haidt calls the Foundations of Morality:

1) Harm/care, related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. This foundation underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.

2) Fairness/reciprocity, related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. This foundation generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy.

3) Ingroup/loyalty, related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. This foundation underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”

4) Authority/respect, shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. This foundaiton underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.

5) Purity/sanctity, shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. This foundation underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

Haidt’s analogy for how these five foundations work to create our personal moral frameworks is that of an audio equalizer. Each foundation is like a kind of “channel” that we can adjust to our own personal levels, according to how meaningful each one is for us. Both liberals and conservatives agree that the first two foundations are critical components of morality, and they set those channels way up high, with liberals tending to set them a little bit higher than conservatives. However, the big divergence point where liberal and conservative viewpoints drastically split apart is on the last three moral channels. Namely, conservatives value Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity as significant foundations of morality, bringing  the levels up, and liberals view these three aspects as having nothing to do with morality, and bring them way down.

This phenomenon, by the way, is not specific just to the U.S. It applies to liberals and conservatives in regions that Haidt and his team studied all across the world, Canada, The UK, Australia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia, South Asia–this split is not a national phenomenon, it’s a human phenomenon. “Liberals,” as Haidt says, “Speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice even at the risk of chaos. If you’re high on openness to experience, revolution is good, it’s change, it’s fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious. And it’s really easy to lose.”

The reality here, then, is that people who vote for republicans are not “asleep” or “unconscious,” and can potentially be “woken up,” or something, as liberals are fond of saying, but that they actually have a totally different sense of morality, and vision of society. In both metaphoric and demographic terms, liberals and conservatives want to listen to different music. Which poses a bit of a problem. Since they can only elect one DJ at a time.

In a 2006 Salon article, Andrew O’Heir wrote:

“It’s a striking fact of modern American life that rural white conservatives have become smarter, better organized and more militant, and that they now largely vote as a bloc. But the notion that there is some sort of equivalent or larger political grouping that opposes them in some coherent way is pure fiction. (See also: Democratic Party, recent history of.) Mann’s supposed metro majority simply does not exist — it’s a welter of races, social classes and economic strata, from the urban poor to the bicoastal intelligentsia to the security-obsessed suburban moms of demographic lore. Being non-rural, non-born-again and non-right-wing does not constitute an identity.”

This lack of a “unified liberal identity”–a concept that’s practically an oxymoron–has left them at a disadvantage, which has been expertly exploited by the united conservative front in recent years. As O’Heir writes, “These days, [conservatives] will support, with impressive solidarity, political leaders and public figures who share their backgrounds and their values, and whom they trust to reverse, or at least slow down, the pace of social change.”

Which makes me wonder–considering what Haidt and McCrae’s findings have revealed about the common affinity for change that liberal, Open-To-Experience personality types possess, perhaps Change itself is the one constant that could finally unite all their disparate identities.

http://camillelo.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/obama.jpg

    



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by jenks

today’s awesome ad award goes to:

Levi’s “unbuttoned” billboard. Fairfax Ave. @ 3rd St. Across the street from the Farmer’s Market.

    



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by jenks

the glitch mob join windish agency

http://www.windishagency.com/assets/1848/GM3.jpg

Big news in Mobsterville this week. My favorite boy-band ever (and also friends, and clients) have officially signed with Windish as their new agency. As their original booking agent, Arin Ingraham, a.k.a The Ringleader Herself, says of this big move: “Watch out world The Glitch Mob has gained access to your sound systems.”

Could not be happier for these fellas. Congrats!

More big capers are afoot!

    



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