This was written over 20 years ago while I was waiting for a new computer to start some consulting work.  In the 90s eastern religions were all the rage and two popular books had appeared.  The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet. It was partly as an answer to those that I wrote The Pessimism of Eeyore.  It was never published and only a few people have ever read it, so now that I finally have a blog site, I thought I might as well put it up.  I am still learning to use the blogging software, so it is not very clear how to get to all of the chapters. You should be able to scroll through the first 9 chapters and then click on Next to get to the rest of the book.

Some of the references in the book are dated, but unless they were just wrong today, I l did not update them.

Eeyore is different.  He is not like any of the other animals in the hundred acre wood.  He is not cute or cuddly.  He doesn’t hum or make up songs.  He is gray, a little disheveled and stands with his feet too wide apart.  And his tail is not attached very securely.  Not unlike some of the rest of us.

This is not a big problem for either Christopher Robin or the other animals in the forest.  They all seem to accept Eeyore for what he is.  They are usually kind.  There were a couple of exceptions.  One day Pooh discovered that Eeyore’s tail was missing.

“That Accounts for a Good Deal,” said Eeyore gloomily.  “It explains Everything.  No wonder.”

“You must have left it somewhere,” said Winne-the-Pooh.

“Somebody must have taken it,” said Eeyore.  “How like them,” he added after a long silence.

How like them, indeed.  Eeyore’s friend Pooh found the tail serving as a bell-pull at Owl’s house.  Owl had found it hanging over a bush, rung it soundly, and when it came off in his hand, taken it home for his own use.  Thoughtless and silly surely, but not really malicious.  Nor was Tigger’s bouncing malicious, even though it got Eeyore very wet.  Tigger doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body.  But then he really doesn’t have any bones in his body.

Often it is just thoughtlessness.  The assumption that everyone is like you, that everyone wants to be like you want to be.  Too many people can’t bring themselves to believe that anyone would want what is not popular and fashionable. Would not want what we want.  But some of us are greatly attached to our very unfashionable and poorly attached tails.  For me it was a black cowboy hat.  I was five and the cowboy hat was part of me, part of who I was.  It was an ugly hat, crumpled and bent.  So my mother was understandably reluctant to let me wear it to Kindergarten.  And when after many tearful battles she finally relented, my teacher would not even argue the point.  No cowboy hats allowed in class.  Not now, not ever.  Since it was not firmly attached, I lost.  She didn’t use it for a bell-pull, but she might as well have.  How like them.

Sometimes having strange tastes actually works in your favor.  Eeyore had pretty well decided that everyone and forgotten his birthday.  But Pooh and Piglet scrambled around to find presents.  Unfortunately Pooh got a little distracted and ate his honey.  This sort of thing happens to Pooh quite a bit.  It makes you wonder if it happens to other Taoist sages.  What Piglet’s Virtue was becoming in this case was all tangled up in his own feet.  The sad result was the bright red balloon he had intended to present to Eeyore popped and became a limp piece of rubber on a string.  So Eeyore’s presents were an empty honey pot and a broken balloon.  Not what most people want.  But Eeyore was delighted because he had something to put something in and something to put in it.  One advantage of pessimist is that they are really easy to please.  Or not very smart.

On the whole the animals in the hundred acre wood were kind to Eeyore and willing to accept him as he was.  But in the outside world things are not always so rosy.  That nice gentle gentleman from Oregon who turns Pooh and Piglet into Taoist sages, goes on to blame most of the ills of the world on Eeyore.  Everything from pollution, to mis-applied technology to radical feminism.  What did Eeyore ever do to him?  How can you make a flop-eared donkey the heavy?

It’s that pessimism thing again.  In fact, in the real world, it is more than just that Eeyore is pessimistic.  It is that he is different.

And for most of the world, different is bad.  There are a variety of reasons for this, of course.  One reason for this is the belief that there is a single standard of goodness.  One formulation of this single standard of goodness was done in classical Greece by Plato.  This concept has filtered down into the cultural sub conscience of western man and become cookie cutter metaphysics.  I doubt that this is really what Plato intended, but the messages of our wise men often are twisted to meet our less noble needs and desires.

The concept of Ideals has a strong epistemological basis.  The fundamental questions of epistemology are what can we know and how can we know it.  One of the puzzles is where concepts and ideas come from.  Take the concept of an elephant for example.  I was amazed many years ago when my two year old son recognized an abstract purple figure on a billboard as an elephant.  Where did he get the concept of an elephant that was flexible enough to recognize even a very abstract representation?  He had never seen an elephant and had only seen a few pictures of them.  Plato’s answer is that there exists an Ideal elephant and because my son had this concept in his mind, he was able to recognize even an abstract instance.

At a simplistic level these Ideals are the metaphysical cookie cutters.  They are templates like the bar in Paris that defines the perfect meter, except that they define elephants, dogs, etc.  The physical elephants we see in the zoo are stamped out with this cutter and baked.  In baking they grow and shrink and distort and become imperfect.  The Ideal contains the essence of being an elephant.  You can also think of it a prescription for making an elephant.  Or a prescription of what an elephant should be.

The problem comes when you apply the concept of Ideals to people.  You end up with the Ideal Person.  While this may not seem too bad, the next step is a disaster.  It is to define goodness as conformity to the Ideal.  The more different someone is from the Ideal, the worse that person is.

Of course each culture, each community, and each individual can define the ideal to be like themselves.  Thus everyone different than us is different than the Ideal and is bad.  This is obviously not what Plato intended.  And there are enough other factors contributing to xenophobia (the more general form of pessimiphobia) that people probably would be pretty much the same even if Plato had never articulated the concept of Ideals.  But the Greeks were not known for their tolerance and it is hard to imagine a Greek statue of a broken down old man — or an Eeyore.

Many more recent philosophical schools (and some ancient ones) have denied the existence of these Ideals.  Their claim is not only that there is no metaphysical Bureau of Standards where Ideals are kept, but also that there is no prescription of essence anywhere.  All that we can do is abstract a description of classes of objects based on real world examples.  This view recognizes diversity as a simple fact of nature rather than as a deviation from an Ideal.  Arguing the epistemological and ontological issues of Ideals is way beyond the scope of this work and would make even Christopher Robin’s head spin.  But in any case, that is even if you adhere to the reality of Platonic Ideals, there is no philosophical justification for claiming that anyone who differs from your own personal view of goodness is bad or strange or weak or weird.

In fact, the worst example of a society which sought to impose a single standard of goodness on itself and the world did not come from anything like a Platonic background.  The Nazi’s claim to a monopoly of goodness did not come from any claimed insight into Platonic Ideals, but rather from survival of the fittest.  Similarly the monolithic value system of communism has a pragmatic origin in what is deemed to be best for the state (by a small and powerful ruling elite).  Narrow and repressive societies can, in fact, derive their claim to a single standard of what is right, proper, and good from almost any source.  Some even claim divine sources.  The issue is not the source, it is the single standard.  Forcing everyone to march to the same drum.  Military parades become the most sacred rites of some of these societies.

Some people have a naive belief that a free market society insures diversity.  I have my doubts.  But then what would a pessimist be without doubts.  A few years ago I stopped into a department store in Munich to pick up a present for my kids.  I took the escalator to the first floor and then to the second.  As I got off on the second floor it suddenly hit me.  I suddenly realized I could be in any department store almost anywhere in the world.  It was the same stuff, arranged in the same way, the same advertisements, the same sales people.  There were Sony tape players and Adidas sport shoes and Fisher Price toys.  Have you ever noticed that every city in the country has the same radio stations?  That everywhere you go there is a Chevrolet dealer who sells his cars in a sicky sweet voice with elevator music in the background?  How long has it been since you have seen a store in a mall that you couldn’t find in a hundred other malls?  We are witnessing the homogenization of western culture.  And the Japanese and Chinese seem more than anxious to pour themselves into this blender.

Ironically, we have learned in the last few years that it is similarity that signals the end of an endangered species.  For many species about to die out the fatal step is that the individuals become too much like each other.  This lack of genetic diversity can often be fatal for the whole species.  If they are all the same they have almost no ability to adapt to changes in their environment.  The real danger is not from being too different, but rather from being too much the same.

The same argument, though much harder to prove, can be made on the social level.  It is in diversity rather than in sameness that our potential lies.  And it is too many people too much like us rather than people too different from us who pose the real threat.

This is not to say that there should not be bounds.  A society cannot treat murderers or rapists as interesting variations in the human spectrum who should be left to do their own thing.  Nor can we allow someone to practice medicine whose only training has been a series of dreams following late night pepperoni pizzas.  But we are better off to set the bounds as wide as possible and abandon forever the concept of an Ideal Person and the practice of judging people by measuring them against our private view of the Ideal.

What I am really saying, of course, is that the bounds should be set at least wide enough to let us Eeyore types in.  We don’t want center stage.  A place in the bog will do fine.  A little damp is OK.  Come by on our birthday once in a while with a pot and something to put in it and we will be happy.

When we hear the phrase “not like us” we think of skin color, religion, or gender.  But it applies much more broadly.  It is people who are poorer, richer, went to different schools, have different jobs, have different priorities in life, wear different clothes, live in different neighborhoods, eat different food, read different books, or read books at all.  It shows up in formal and informal clubs, in homogenous suburbs where people who all went to University live in little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky, anywhere we can retreat from the diversity of the world and relax with the good people — the people like ourselves.

Pooh and his friends set the example.  They were a diverse lot with different personalities, different likes and dislikes, different abilities, and different species.  With them it is not just a question of tolerance.  Too often tolerance is simply “Do what you want, but stay out of my way.”  They were friends, they were a community.  They did things together.  The worked together and played together.  In each tale, a unique characteristic of one of the animals saves the day.  Their diversity was their strength.  And their charm.

Learning to deal with people very different from ourselves is not easy.  Especially pessimists, who by their nature are somewhat standoff-ish.  But befriending an Eeyore can be very rewarding.  We are really quite sweet, eager to please, easy to please, wise, insightful, and above all, interesting.  A life without one or two good pessimistic friends and neighbors is like a garden without turnips.

Whatever you are, pessimist or optimist, Coptic scholar or mud wrestler, do what you believe is right.  (Note that this is very different than simply doing what you want to.)  Sometimes the pressures are tremendous to conform to society’s standard or fashion.  In all cases you loose your individuality when you conform.  In important cases you loose your integrity.  Make your life’s decisions based on your own concept of good and bad, right and wrong, lasting and temporary.  March to the drummer that you hear even when you walk alone.

There are however, dangers in non-conformity.  The first is taking a stand and fighting on trivial ground.  Nothing is more trivial than my Sunday tie.  All the other men wear their ties.  Most of them even wear suits.  I save mine for special occasions.  Funerals, weddings, that sort of thing.  Part of the reason I don’t wear a tie is to protest the judgments that our society makes of people based on their clothes.  But most of the reasons have to do with multiple chins.  I find it easier to concentrate at church if I can breathe.  But it is really pretty silly.  I should just admit that I am a middle aged, overweight Mormon, buy bigger shirts and wear a tie.  Maybe even a suit once in while.  But then there are limits.

The second danger, which I am happier to say is not on my top ten list of flagrant faults, is to react to the pressure to conform to one group by conforming to a reactionary group.  Many things can be said about the flower children of the sixties and early seventies, but non-conformist is not one of them.  Conforming to a smaller or less powerful group does not make you a non-conformist.  It just makes you less popular.  You are still letting someone else make your decisions.

The third danger is to try to make decisions that you are not qualified to make.  Deciding at the age of six to live entirely on Cocoa Puffs may seem like a brave assertion of your independence at the time, but is not really wise.  Deciding at twenty to live on rice is not a lot better.  The next time you want to do something weird, ask yourself if you really have any idea what the hell you’re doing.  It is easy to lie to yourself in this circumstance.  To tell yourself that you are different than other people.  You may in fact, be different, but different does not imply better or smarter.  The weirder it is, the better your reasons should be and the surer you should be of them.

The final danger is to think that you are better than the group just because you don’t conform.  They could be right and you could be wrong.  In fact, they probably are.  The statistics are all in their favor.  Or their decisions could be right for the members of the group even though they would not be right for you.  You should be as tolerant of them as you expect them to be of you.

What I am saying to other Eeyore types is that it is OK to be different.  But only if you are different for the right reasons.  Your worth as a human being is determined by what you do with your life, how you contribute to the families and communities in which you live, and how you relate to those around you.  Not by some measure of how you compare to some imaginary Ideal Person as defined by society, your boss, your coach, or your hairdresser.  You can stay a pessimist.

But don’t expect much on your birthday.

Eeyore is a smart ass.  Well, a smart donkey really, but it comes to the same thing.  When asked by Rabbit what he was doing floating down the river, feet in the air, Eeyore gave the typical smart ass reply:

“I’ll give you three guesses, Rabbit.  Digging holes in the ground?  Wrong.  Leaping from branch to branch of a young oak tree? Wrong.  Waiting for someone to help me out of the river?  Right.  Give Rabbit time, and he always gets the right answer.”

When asked by Pooh whether he had been bounced into the river as a joke or an accident, Eeyore again gives a smart ass response:

“I didn’t stop to ask, Pooh.  Even at the very bottom of the river I didn’t stop to say to myself. ‘Is this a Hearty Joke, or the Merest Accident?’  I just floated to the surface and said to myself, ‘It’s wet.’  If you know what I mean.”

Sarcasm and satire go with pessimism.  They are part of the package.  At first its a temptation, then a habit, and finally an art form.

After having been introduced to Tao by Pooh, and to its finer points by Piglet, it has become clear to me that sarcasm and satire are inherently Taoist activities.  A thing which I never had suspected.  This is best illustrated by the following quote from the obscure but important Taoist sage Pun-tzu:

A farmer went down to his fields every day to work.  When the sun was high overhead he would stop work and eat his lunch under a large tree on the edge of his field.  As soon as he would spread out his lunch, a black bird would start to caw and scold and finally poop all over the farmer’s lunch.  This happened day after day, so finally the farmer went to a nearby city to get help.

He first went to a Confucian teacher and explained the problem.  The Master presented the problem to a class of his students and they argued the pros and cons of various solutions for hours.  Finally they told the farmer that he should cut down the tree.

The farmer was unwilling to loose such a beautiful tree which also provided shade for his lunch and afternoon nap, so he went to a Zen monk.  The monk responded with the following koan:

There was a fisherman walking along the river when a large fish poked his head out of the water and said, “If you are a fisherman I will eat you, but if you are not a fisherman I will eat your children.”  The fisherman replied.  “My wife ran off yesterday with the baker”.  The fish smiled and said, “Now do you understand?”  At that moment the fisherman reached Enlightenment.

The farmer sat with his legs crossed in front of the Monk and thought for a very long time.  Finally he said, “What does this have to do with bird droppings?”  The Zen monk reached over and picked up a large stick and hit the farmer in the back of the head.  “Ah, now I understand”, said the farmer and left.

So finally the farmer found a Taoist sage.  Warily, for his head was still very sore, he presented the problem to the sage.  The Taoist replied almost at once, “Eat your lunch somewhere else.”  The farmer went home and lived a happy and prosperous life.

Sarcasm and satire are a little like the Asian martial arts.  The secret is to use your opponent’s strength and rage against him.  When someone makes a really pompous, smug, or just plain dumb ass comment, there is always the perfect opportunity to deflect it and turn it against him.  Once you get the hang of it, it is easy.  Your smart ass replies just start to flow out of you like water almost without thought or willing.  They just say themselves.

And the opportunities, oh the opportunities.  All you need is a pompous, self inflated, self gratifying, self centered, mean, nasty, or thoughtless victim.  These days a lot of people qualify.  The most fun are the rich and powerful.  A smart ass reply to the CEO or even a vice president can make your day — and ruin your career.  In fact, if you care about your career you need to mind your tongue.  And whatever you do, never, never write sarcastic memos.

I learned this the hard way.  I had started up a group to target a new business opportunity and it was going quite well.  Too well, in fact.  As long as the business was not causing many problems or doing very well, everyone left us alone.  But once we started getting some success, the inevitable transfer from engineering to marketing came.  Now an Eeyore type has enough trouble anywhere in the business world, but waking up one day and finding yourself in the marketing department is a rude shock indeed.  So I wrote the infamous yellow tie memo, pointing out that the only real qualifications my new boss had to manage me were a blue suit and a yellow tie.  It was written in the finest satirical style and became an instant underground classic.  And, of course, made it impossible for me to work there anymore.  I don’t write memos any more.

My favorite targets are people who spend their lives asserting themselves.  Asserting yourself is too often simply another name for being domineering, pushy, and rude.  For assuming that you are better than anyone else and deserve special treatment.  Now there have always been these kind of people in any society.  The trouble with modern western society is that we have come to look on this as a positive quality.  We have chosen these people for our leaders.  We not only condone, but praise this type of behavior.  Business wants to hire managers and sales people who are aggressive and assertive.  If you don’t get the job because your not assertive enough, you can go into assertiveness therapy or take one of a thousand seminars.  Lots of nice people are turned into pushy bastards this way.

Someone asserting himself all over your lunch makes an ideal target for smart ass replies.  Often they are too caught up in themselves to really appreciate even your most clever responses.  However, they usually notice that you are not making the appropriate submissive gestures.  So if they can hurt you, one way or another, it is best to be quite careful.  With practice a really talented smart ass is able to subtly weave sarcasm into superficially submissive responses.  Since your assertive lunch partner will likely miss it entirely, this is merely a small private pleasure.  But it can help get you through the lunch.

Even when attacking someone who is being pompous or silly, don’t allow yourself to get pulled down to their level.  A good smart ass reply is like throwing a glass of cold water in their face.  It should get their attention and remind them that they are saying or doing something mean or hurtful or silly or dumb.  But it should not really hurt them.  If you start using satire to assert yourself and attack someone with the intent of really hurting them, you have missed the point entirely and become no better than your opponent.

Body language is sometimes very effective as a smart ass response.  A raised eye brow, a look of astonishment or surprise, or even a wry smile can effectively poke fun at many an over-inflated ego.  But there is a special danger in body language for pessimists.  It is pretty easy to stop writing memos.  In fact, you can go ahead and write them and then just tear them up rather than send them.  It is harder, but possible, to mind your tongue when the situation calls for discretion.  But controlling body language is all but impossible for me and many other pessimists.  What I think is usually written all over my face and this gets me in no end of trouble.  At least I recognize this.  I would no more attempt to play poker for money than try to make a living as a rock star.  But then a gambling pessimist is pretty much of an oxymoron in the first place.  Given our need to learn to control body language generally, using it for sarcastic responses should only be done with the greatest caution.

Or when you can’t help it.

When we first meet Eeyore he is standing by himself in a corner of the forest where the thistles grow.  If you are ever looking for a pessimist, off in a corner is a good place to start.  We like being off in a corner.  Any corner will do.  Out on the edge of town, in an obscure college, in a corner of the organization chart, making stained glass windows.  Forests are good.  Deserts are wonderful.  Anywhere out of the spotlight, away from the crowd.

It may not be that all pessimists are loners, but there seems to be a very strong correlation.  In fact, this retreat from the main stream of life is in many ways at the heart of the pessimism of Eeyore.  Of course there are lots of simple answers for why this is.  Most of these simple minded explanations come from psychologists, self help book writers, and other, perhaps well meaning, optimists.  All of them are wrong.  Or at least vastly incomplete.

The easiest answer is self doubt.  Self doubt is in fact an occupational hazard for a pessimist.  Many pessimists have this tendency.  Eeyore certainly did.  And I must admit that I slip into it all too often.  But pessimist are not alone in this.  Nor is the corner always the only way to deal with self doubt.  Loosing yourself in the crowd is an even more popular alternative.

Withdrawal and self doubt form a cycle.  Each a cause as well as an effect.  The questions are how the cycle gets started, and more importantly, how to end it.  Again there are lots of answers about how this all starts.  Falling out of high chairs, inattentive Mothers, that sort of thing.  The view from the bog is that there are two main causes.

The first is being different.  We have dealt with that issue at some length already.  At an early age those of us with gray fur, floppy ears, somber dispositions, and wrinkled black cowboy hats soon realize that we are different.  People, especially those who conform to the current fashion of the Ideal Person, are quick to point out any differences we have failed to notice on our own.  As the earliest social groups form, we find ourselves on the fringe, or left out altogether.  The first corner is usually in a playground somewhere.

But these are childhood traumas, often counter-balanced by loving families, a few good friends, success in school or shop or 4H.  Most of us get over these things.  But the next discovery is more difficult to deal with.

It’s called the pecking order.  You find it in almost all social animals, including — especially — man.  What starts out as cute play in baby animals as they wrestle and spar, turns deadly serious when they become adults.  The bigger, stronger, or simply more aggressive animals begin to dominate the others.  In the more complex social structures there are clearly discernible domination hierarchies.

Domestic animals are usually caged or leashed.  And they have been spared the survival of the fittest because they are fed and sheltered by their human masters.  For modern pets, it is survival of the cutest.  You will notice some more aggressive and some less aggressive dogs and cats.  And they occasionally get in fights, if they are able to escape from their homes.  But to a young child at least, it is not clear exactly what those fights are about.

Enter PBS and the nature shows violating the privacy of wild animals.  Especially in the last few years as these show have become more realistic, again and again we see savage battles for dominance and territory.  The announcer is usually quick to point out that one contestant usually withdraws before there is too much blood.  But is all too clear that these are real battles.  Too many of them have too many scars to think otherwise.  The stakes are not just sex once a year (being a dominant male is not all it’s cracked up to be), but often, quite literally life and death.  Even if he survives the battle, a deposed dominant male is usually banished from the group and his chances of living out the year are dim.

But surely civilized man has risen above these domination hierarchies.  No such luck.  You find domination hierarchies almost everywhere you look.  The will to dominate begins in the human families among children just as it begins among puppies and kittens.  Since children are usually born one at a time, it is usually the older child that tries to dominate the younger siblings.  But not always.  Sometimes an aggressive younger child will actually dominate an older brother or sister, often causing both of them real problems in later life.  Your kids aren’t fighting over nothing.  It is just that the fights have almost nothing to do with the trivial issues at hand.  They are fighting for dominance.  Unfortunately, some of the worst problems between siblings arise when they are not able to fight openly for some reason.  The competition can fester and poison the relationship for life.

As we grow up and go to school, we are exposed to formal and informal social groups.  Again and again, there is competition for dominance.  Who will decide what a group of friends will do after school?  Who will pick the topic for the group to report on?  Who will decide who is one of us and who is not?  Who will be the leader of the gang?  Of course, for most of our lives as young children and teenagers, we are subject to various levels and forms of domination from adults.  They tell us what to do and how to do it.  They set the rules and try to run our lives.  The rebellion of youth is usually against the domination by parents, teachers, and other adults.  It doesn’t really matter what they are telling you to do.  The problem is just that they are telling you what to do.  That they are trying to control you.  That they are in a position of dominance.

As we move into adulthood, the groups and social structures get even more complex.  For some of us, work is a real killer.  Aside from an abortive attempt at an academic career, my early years went pretty well.  I was young and inexperienced and expected to be told what to do.  But more importantly, I was lucky to work in environments which encouraged and rewarded innovation and where the domination was the natural leadership of the older, more experienced, and more skilled.  But as you begin to master your craft, the experience and skill levels no longer correlate so well with the management levels.  One day you wake up with a boss who doesn’t seem to you to be qualified to tell you what to do based on skill or experience, whose only real qualification seems to be aggressiveness and the willingness to do whatever the next level boss wants done.  In the worst cases, this can be someone who seems to be more concerned with their own position and place in the pecking order than with the success of the enterprise.

The trouble is not so much in the structures themselves.  In many situations a hierarchical organization is clearly the most appropriate to meet the needs of society.  I am not advocating anarchy here.  The trouble is in the way the people in the upper levels of these organizations treat those in the lower levels and in what people will do in order to move up the pecking order.

The dominant individual doesn’t just kill off all the weaker individuals.  That doesn’t leave him much left to dominate, nor anyone left to feed him.  Rather he demands a gesture of submission from each of the members of the group at regular intervals.  You have to roll over and expose your belly to him.  Of course you in turn get to dominate those below you in the hierarchy.  You get to show your teeth and growl at them and they have to roll over for you.  In the military they encode the submissive gestures in salutes.  Other organizations have other signs of submission.

If you feel strong enough and aggressive enough, you may one day decide to challenge the individual over you.  You growl back.  Then the battle begins.  One of you withdraws or is defeated.  In complex social groups, the challenge may be made by a group of younger individuals.  But one still ends up on top.

In human organizations, the signs of submission are sometimes, but not always, more subtle.  A domineering boss doesn’t usually show his teeth.  Growling is usually enough.  And you don’t have to show him your belly.  But you have to find some submissive gesture to let him know that you are willing to submit and do whatever he says.  You have to show him that you are loyal and will support him in whatever he says.  You have to kiss up.

Being submissive to your boss is not enough.  He expects you to dominate those under you.  You are supposed to know how to keep your troops in line.  Hierarchical organizations want people who know how to play the game.  They like people who are ambitious.  They like climbers.  The fast track crowd who know what to wear and what to drive and who to drink with and when to submit and when to challenge.

Those who don’t want play the game at all are the greatest threat to the organization.  Bosses are used to dealing with the employee that wants their job.  That’s the way its supposed to be.  The problem is with the employee who doesn’t want to move up the organization at all.  For a while there was a myth in corporate America of the “individual contributor”.  They almost never survive (well I didn’t at least).  They are too hard to control, too unpredictable, and they keep forgetting to make the appropriate submissive gestures.  When someone no longer wants to move up the organization, his boss has lost the most important carrot and must resort to the stick.

So how do you deal with the pecking order that infests so many corporate, academic, and government organizations.  One approach is just never to get involved.  Many people, lots of Eeyore types among them, choose careers or jobs that do not require them to fight for their slot in the organization chart.  They practice a craft, or run a small business, or ski a lot.  Right from the start they choose some nice quiet corner where they can make a living without having to face the pecking order of a large organization.

Others survive for a while in the corporate, academic, or civil service jungles until they finally bale out or are thrown out.  I always imagined that my personnel file had a red stamp across it warning “Not management material”.  Still I had somehow stumbled to a director level before I was thrown out.  I am not really sure why I was “made redundant”, to use the delightful British euphemism for getting laid off, but I firmly believe that the underlying reason was that I did not fit into the pecking order very well.  Not “sound”, to use another British term.  Too independent, not enough submissive gestures.  And worst of all, not able to keep what I really think from being written all over my face.

So I looked for a quite place in the bog.  Something with a few thistles to keep body and soul together, but where there was little competition and no organization.  No more pecking orders for a while.  Quite a lot of us Eeyore types are former warriors from organization charts, now off in a corner licking our wounds and discovering that you can, to some degree at least, get out of the game.  It is not just that we don’t want to be dominated.  It is as much that we don’t want to dominate.  We simply don’t want to play the game at all.

A third option is to choose your organizations carefully.  While oppressive domination hierarchies are all too common among humans, there are lots of examples where individuals and even organizations are able to rise above this baser instinct.  Where human values manage to transcend animal values.  Where respect, decency, and tolerance overcome the will to dominate.  Where skill, dedication, and hard work are the measure by which people move up the organization.  My experience has been that, especially in large organizations, there are pockets where humanity and concern for human values dominate, and others where its pretty much dog eat dog and cover your ass.  So sometimes it is not so much a matter of choosing the right organization as the right group.

Once you have found a good group, staying there can be hard, and costly.  Especially if you are forced to pass up a promotion to stay there.  Passing up a promotion, or even not actively seeking a promotion, will set of alarms in many organizations.  I was accused of being “un-American” because I did not want to apply for the vice president position.  Perhaps it is un-American.  Not only in America, but in all industrial societies, we have let the primitive concept of a pecking order become a measure of success.  How many people report to you?  Are you the CEO?  A vice president?  A director?  A Manager?  Are you the chair of the committee?  Are you the president of the club?  Are you on the congregation’s advisory board?

But Eeyore types know there are other, more meaningful measures of success.  You don’t necessarily need to be in the spotlight.  You don’t need to be near the top of some pecking order.  You don’t need a big house on the hill or a fat Mercedes.  You can be off in a corner, and still live a happy, useful life.  Success has to go with goals.  If your goals are domination and status, then the pecking order is the place for you.  But if you have other goals in life, you may want to ask yourself if you are being dragged along by the crowd, trying to find safety in numbers, doing what everyone else is doing, because everyone is doing it.  Never mind that most of them have no idea why.  You may want to bail out, a least for a while, and find a quite corner, off in the bog to think about things for a while.

I used to think that the pecking order followed the three laws of thermodynamics.  You can’t win.  There is always someone over you, and even if you are the most powerful person in the world today, you won’t be tomorrow.  You can’t break even.  If you are not moving up the pecking order, you are, or soon will be, moving down.  And you can’t get out of the game.  Here is where I have changed my mind.  I now think that you can indeed get out of the game.

Of course, you can’t really escape completely.  You have to work and live in this or some other society.  And in any society there will be some domination hierarchies.  Some you can escape, but others you have to learn to live with.  Besides, man is a social animal.  The will to dominate is the down side of being social, but there is a positive side.  There are family and friends and Pooh and Christopher Robin.  There is concern and caring and love.  So Eeyore lives in the corner in the bog, but stays in the forest.  He thinks about

“Why and wherefore and inasmuch as which?”

and tries to avoid the pecking order.

But it usually gets you in the end.

It is clear that Eeyore suffers from loneliness.  This is not an unusual state of affairs for a pessimist.  Eeyore’s most obvious problem is his belief that the other animals don’t like him.  This is not, in fact, true.  Even though Pooh and Piglet’s birthday presents don’t quite make it to Eeyore intact, and the sticks for the house they build for Eeyore come from his old house, they do mean well.  The have gone out of their way to do something nice for Eeyore.  And Eeyore is delighted with his birthday presents.  Pessimists are people of simple pleasures.  Sometimes just having a popped balloon and a pot to put it in is just fine.  Eeyore even likes his new house.

Why then does he continue to believe that no one cares and no one likes him?  When I was a kid we used to sing:

“Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,

Guess I’ll go eat worms.”

Actually, I didn’t sing it so much.  It was my mother who sang it to me when I was being an Eeyore.  She has always been a bright and optimistic person, so it has been hard on her to have an Eeyore in the family.

It is nor clear how Eeyore got that way.  He is introduced to us already a full fledged pessimist.  So I can only comment on how I got this way.  With me its a phobia.  An inordinate fear of humiliation and rejection.  The operative word is “inordinate”.  No one likes humiliation.  No one likes rejection.  But most people learn to deal with these as part of the aches and pains of life.  For some of us, however, humiliation and rejection become major traumas.

In sixth grade, I spent three months at a strange school in Pasadena.  Strange in more ways than one — this was back in the late 50’s during the California experiments in education.  As I was walking home after school one afternoon, the cutest and most popular girl in the class called me over to look at my baseball mitt.  She told me she wanted to see if it was like her brother’s new mitt.  I was delighted that she paid any attention to me, for whatever reason, and went over to her panting like an expectant puppy.  She didn’t look at the mitt.  She just stamped on my foot as hard as she could and said that if I ever corrected her in class again she would kill me.  I stood there unable to move while she ran off to her friends laughing and giggling.  My foot hurt.  But I soon got over that.  The humiliation hurt much more.  And I still struggle with that at times.

This kind of thing happens to us all.  The difference is that most people are able to get over the humiliation as well as the sore foot.  Those of us who aren’t have a harder time.  We become pessimists.  We make friends very carefully and very slowly.  And we seldom let ourselves believe that people really like us.  We only really open up to a few close and trusted friends.  We are always on our guard against any situation that could possibly expose us to humiliation or rejection.

One escape is playing the buffoon.  Putting yourself down before anybody else gets the chance.  Stumble and bumble.  People laugh at you, but you know this is not the real you.  “I’m getting too old to program”, is what I used to tell them at work.  Even though I was the best programmer in the place.  At the job before, I used to entertain the group with my misadventures building our house.  They were amazed when we finally finished it and invited them out for dinner to a wonderful house, designed and mostly built by my wife and myself.  My stories of misadventure as a do-it-yourself car mechanic, however, were all too true.

There is a more positive side to all of this.  Not liking crowds is a perfectly acceptable choice.  Having a few good friends rather than a large group of acquaintances is also a perfectly reasonable approach to life.  Not everyone is a social butterfly.  Nor should everyone be.  Eeyore said it best:

“Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing.  We can’t all, and some of us don’t.  That’s all there is too it.”

“Can’t all what? said Pooh, rubbing his nose.”

“Gaiety, Song-and-dance.  Here we go round the mulberry bush”

“Oh!” said Pooh.  He thought for a long time and then asked “What mulberry bush is that?”

“Bon-hommy,” went on Eeyore gloomily.  “French word meaning bonhommy,” he explained.  “I’m not complaining, but There It Is.”

Being alone can be quite nice.  Gives you a chance to think about things.  To ponder about “why and wherefore”.  To enjoy the sunshine and the forest.  Eeyore was just ahead of his time.  Today we know that “bogs” are really “wet lands” that should be prized, enjoyed, and preserved.

The problem is not being alone, but being lonely.  Not having company when you want it.  Here again we have to be careful not to impose a single standard on everybody.  Almost everyone needs companionship.  But different people need different amounts.  Someone who stays in for several days knitting in her bedroom may be perfectly happy.  You don’t necessarily have to go in and drag her to the Mall.  In many cases those you may feel inclined to diagnose as lonely simply need less company than you do.  Some very productive people who make major contributions to life are loners.  It’s an OK thing to be.

But lonely isn’t OK.  For the lonely, the only advice I have goes back to another incident from my youth.  I was a little older this time, 16 or 17.  Our neighbors had a pool and I was trying to learn to dive.  I not only share Eeyore’s pessimism, but also his athletic prowess.  So arms and legs were flying everywhere.  I was trying to learn to do a half gainer, which means you jump off the board forwards and arch back into the water backwards.  A beautiful dive — if it’s done right.  But I was too chicken to really try it.  Finally, I went for it.  Splat.  I did a perfect quarter gainer, which means you jump off the board forward, arch back into the water, and land flat on your back.  Not a pretty dive — and painful.  But it freed me to go on to learn some other dives.  I never did learn to do a decent half gainer, but I did manage a full gainer.  The secret was that after I landed flat on my back, I said to myself, “That’s the worst it can get”.  So I wasn’t so afraid anymore.  (Nor very smart — As anyone who has ever done gainers knows, it can get a lot worse.  You can hit your head on the board).

Humiliation and rejection hurt.  Like landing on my back hurt.  They hurt a lot.  But you can get over them.  You can pick yourself up, dry yourself off (I know this isn’t the normal metaphor, but I got started with this diving thing), and try it again.

One thing that often gets in the way of positive and fulfilling relationships with other people is our level of expectations.  Sometimes we expect too little, and sometimes we expect too much.  In either case, we have a tendency to pre-judge people.  When my sister and I were just starting in school one of our neighbors was a gruff old man.  We were scared to death of him and made up stories about the awful things he did to little boys and girls.  Then one day when we were playing on the sidewalk in front of our house, one of the wheels came off our wagon.  The mean old neighbor happened by and stopped to see what was wrong.  He went to his garage, got some tools, and put the wheel back on the wagon.  But more importantly, he talked with us for a while.  It turned out he was really nice and had not eaten a little kid in his whole life.

Sometimes we are really good at making up stories about the people around us.  Often for no more reason than that they are old or young, or black or white, or Jewish or Mormon, or they wear clothes that are too old or too fancy.  Like my young son used to say about the people on the “other” channel when we lived in Canada, maybe they just speak spinach.  Any excuse is good enough to make someone the target of our projections.

But they are still just our projections.  Our prejudices.  It is all too easy for a pessimist, somewhat lonely and withdrawn, to imagine all sorts of terrible, or just annoying, things about other people.  You have to admit, Pooh and Piglet, at first glance, don’t appear to be prime candidates for lasting friendships.  They won’t ever become vice presidents, won’t ever be elected to the Academy of Sciences, won’t ever win the local tennis championship, won’t ever make the society page.  It would have been easy for Eeyore to dismiss them as silly, bumbling, and useless.  Often friends come from unexpected places.

I decided at one time to draw the line at people who play golf.  This was after I had sworn off golf myself after a brief addiction.  Although this rule was threatening to end some close and satisfying friendships, I was still clinging to it, when the unthinkable happened.  My father took up golf.  Not only took it up, but became an immediate addict.  He even sucked my mother into it.  Now it might not seem too unusual for a man in his fifties to suddenly take up golf, but I wouldn’t have been more surprised if my mother had taken up belly dancing.  He wasn’t really a golf sort of person.  He ran wild rivers and packed horses into the deep wilderness.  He was on the ski patrol almost before the ski patrol had ever been invented.  He built houses and churches and barns, all in his spare time.  He developed abstract theoretical models of the physics of the solar atmosphere, did complicated integrals on the grocery bags while I was getting my hair cut, and traveled to remote corners of the world to solar eclipses and scientific conferences.  He would never take up golf.  Shows you what I know.

The problem is in the phrase “golf sort of person”.  You can replace “golf” with anything and the problem remains.  Most of our generalizations about this sort or that sort of person are hopelessly unfounded.  They are simply prejudices with no foundation in fact.  People are complex, multi-dimensional beings.  There is often very little correlation between these dimensions.  And even if there are statistical correlations, like say between cowboys and not liking ballet, there are still lots of exceptions.  Enough to sell out the Bolshoi in Laramie Wyoming.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to get to know the person as an individual.  You can’t simply assign them to a class and assume that they will have all of the attributes of the class.  As a class small squeaky pigs are not exactly appealing.  Yet Piglet turned out to be a good friend to Eeyore.  Eeyore could well have said to himself, “I’m not going to have anything to do with him, he’s a runt pig!”, and missed a very good friend who brought him popped balloons and pansies.

Prejudice can work in both directions.  Some people fit into our “good” categories in some respects and so we assume that they will be good people and good friends.  They might drive the right car, have the right occupation, go to the right church, like the right sports, and still turn out to have very little in common with us at the fundamental human, or stuffed animal, levels.  Superficial matches make poor friends.  A positive prejudice is still a prejudice.  It is a judgment based on an unjustified generalization.  Based on no real evidence.

The worst positive prejudice is popularity.  Of course, you should not reject someone because they are popular, but you should not attempt to build a friendship on this basis.

Eeyore types are like the Marines, we are looking for a few good friends.  Not everyone will do.  Sometimes it is best just to avoid the self-centered, self-important, and pompous altogether.  But you have to find out about a person, or an animal, first, before you can decide.  Tigger is a good case in point.  Not that he is likely to be a best buddy, but beneath all the bounce and bravado, he is really OK.  He’s just Tigger.

Friends aren’t perfect.  We all have faults.  Sometimes they make mistakes, and bounce you into the river, getting you very wet indeed.  But if you are a real friend you can’t de-bounce Tigger.  Or if your middle-aged buddy starts dying his hair, you can’t just dump him.  There are worse things in the world than an over-active bounce or orange hair on a fifty year old man.  You have to stick by friends and hope they stick by you.

For some of us, the hard part of being a friend is not so much accepting the friend as he is, but accepting ourselves as we are.  Pessimists are not big on positive self-images.  We tend to be a little weak in this department.  Actually, many of us have the problem illustrated in the old joke “I would not want to be friends with anyone who would have a friend like me”.  On the one hand we have delusions of grandeur.  We are diamonds, usually in the rough.  Prodigious talents, usually undiscovered.  Brilliant minds, usually unrecognized.  In this mode we are far too grand to associate with Pooh Bears and Piglets.  But on the other hand, we are plagued by anxieties.  Maybe I won’t measure up.  Maybe I won’t be able to do it.  The old fears of humiliation and rejection.  In this mode, Owl and Rabbit may seem like real threats, so we had better just stay home in the bog.

Both images are probably wrong.  We are probably not as grand as we suppose in our inflated moments and probably not as bad as we fear in our anxieties.  Facing the real truth about ourselves is one of the hardest things we can do.  And the most liberating.  No one is very fond of people who pretend to be something they aren’t.  And since we Eeyore types are not very good at pretending, it never works for us.  But people might actually like us if we would just relax and be ourselves.

I must admit that I am not really very good at this friendship business.  But my wife is.  She has lots of very good friends.  Every once in a while, when she gets fed up with my solitary ways, she patiently explains to me that the most important part of having friends is being a friend.  She is the ideal example.  Always doing things for people.  Baking bread for the neighbors, taking a special treat to someone who is having a hard time, calling them on the phone and just talking.  It seems that this business of having friends not only involves the risk of humiliation and rejection, but also a lot of hard work.

But it is worth both the risk and the effort.  For pessimists as for anyone else, the only real meaning and worth in our lives come from the relationships we have with other people and the contributions we make to those around us.  Very few people when they come to die think back on their 65 Mustang, their last promotion, or the new tile in the bathroom.  It is our family and friends that give meaning to our lives.  My old boss said of his father that he collected friends like some people collect stamps.  In this life, and the next, friends are infinitely more valuable than stamps.  So its time to get out of the bog a little more often and try a little harder to be a good friend.

But watch out for that little girl in the playground.

When we first meet Eeyore, he is standing with his front feet well apart and his head on one side.  Those of us who have been there recognize this stance, even though the painful truth is kept from the children.  Eeyore has a bad back.

Stress related illness.  Bad backs, bad stomachs, bad hearts, too fat, too thin, twitches, twinges, pains in the head, and tails that come off.  All from too much stress and bean burritos.

There is, of course, another possibility.  It may be that “stress related illness” is just a term that doctors have made up to cover the fact that they don’t know what the hell is wrong with you, nor how to make it feel better.  Poohs and Piglets and Rabbits have nice, regular health problems.  The kind they cover in Med School 101 with an easy diagnosis and a reliable cure.  Eeyores get symptoms that are only covered in the footnotes or appendices of the medical texts, or not at all.  So when we go to the doctor, he pokes around for a couple of minutes, “Hmm’s” for a while, and finally announces that we have a stress related illness and that will be $90.  I’ve tried this with headaches, backaches, stomachaches, and a neck that makes popping noises.  It’s always the same.  “Stress related illness, that will be $90.”

After a while you finally get used to having a headache all the time.  Sometimes it’s a little better and sometimes a little worse, but it’s always there.  But it’s like street noise, after a while you just get used to it and don’t notice it so much.

Bad backs are harder to ignore.  They grab you and get your attention.  I was raised in the 50’s and 60’s (no not the 1850’s) when science and technology was going to solve all our problems.  So it was a major blow to me when I learned that something that seemed as simple as a bad back had no effective cure.  No wonder drug.  No real cures, but plenty of advice.  And it seems like the less medical training a person has the more sure he or she is that they can cure my bad back.

Of course, there are always strange cures for things in folk medicine and old wives tales.  Putting onions around your neck to cure pneumonia, things like that.  But back cures are all pretty weird.  You cannot tell which cures came from doctors and which from the butcher just by looking at them.  They all seemed to be either common sense or nonsense.  But even more remarkable is that for every advice to do something, there is someone else who is equally adamant that action should be avoided at all costs.  So it was swim and don’t swim, walk and don’t walk, jog and don’t jog.  Do sit ups and the last thing in the world you should do is sit-ups.  Heat — no, not heat cold.  Braces — no, avoid the braces.  Therapy — no, that is a waste of time and money.  Take aspirin and avoid aspirin.  The only advice that was not contra-indicated by some other person or book was my boss’ advice to drink a half a bottle of vodka.  But Mormons are not allowed to drink vodka, even for a bad back, so I don’t know if that works or not.

I did finally get over it.  Not entirely, of course.  It still bothers me at times, sometimes a lot.  Eeyore could probably tell that I have a bad back, but Pooh and Piglet wouldn’t notice.  So I will add my bits of advice for dealing with a bad back, and stress in general, to the immense pile of contradictory advice.

For me, the most important step was the recognition that this was a problem that no one else was going to fix for me.  I had finally found a doctor, with a bad back himself, who seemed to be helping.  I had a bit of a relapse and went back to him, expecting him to fix me up.  “You still have a bad back”, he said, “that will be $90”.  I was really depressed.  But as I hobbled back from my car to my office after the disappointment, I finally realized that I was going to have to do it on my own.  No one else could fix me.  At least not for the amount of money I had.

I stopped reading books about bad backs, stopped spending $90 a week for doctors and therapists, stopped listening to Aunt Whatever-it-is-I-can-fix-it, and started to deal with the problem myself.  Looking back, I’m not even sure what I did that was that different.  I did some gentle exercises, but I had done those before, I walked and finally started to jog again, and I tried to relax a bit.  But most of all, I went on with my life the best I could and tried not to think about it, not to talk about it, not to let it dominate my life.

I wish I could say that the headaches and bad back were the only stress related illnesses that have bothered me.  But I have pretty well run the gamut (except of course, the too thin bit).  I have been less successful in dealing with the stress itself than the various symptoms.  But that never stops anyone from giving advice.

Getting off in a corner somewhere and avoiding domination hierarchies helps me a lot.  I am convinced that being vice president would have shortened my life considerably.  Being a vice president is like being a quarterback in the NFL.  You have to be able to take the constant pounding.  Three hundred pound linemen with names like “Bubba” try to separate parts of your body and spread them around on the artificial turf.  If your knees aren’t up to it, you need to find something else to do with your life.

I once saw a man in a wheelchair riding a motorcycle.  His wheelchair sat on a kind of platform on a sidecar and there was some sort of improbable linkage from handle bars mounted in front of the wheelchair to the motorcycle.  I couldn’t tell how he controlled the gas.  My first reaction was admiration.  “Isn’t it wonderful that he has overcome his limitations and is still able to ride his motorcycle”, was my first thought.

But being a pessimist with Eeyore’s inclination to ponder things, I thought some more.  “Hmm”, I thought to myself, “it is very likely that this guy was crippled in the first place in a motorcycle accident.  Motorcycles are deadly.  Every single kid I knew in high school with a motorcycle ended up in the hospital sooner or later.  Nobody’s chances on a motorcycle are very good.  And however clever that setup is, his control of that motorcycle is probably somewhat limited.  This guy is crazy, he doesn’t know when to quit.”

And then I thought of one of my favorite scenes in Monty Pythons Search for the Holy Grail.  You know the one.  The Black Knight challenges the White Knight at the bridge.  After a fierce but brief battle the Black Knight’s arm is cut off.  But still he challenges and will not give up.  He goes on to loose the other arm and both legs until finally just the stump is left trying to fight with the White Knight.  And what are they fighting over.  “Truth, justice, and the America  way?”.  Hardly.  They are fighting for domination.

Now I am not saying that we should easily give up our life’s work or abandon some worthy cause when the going gets tough.  There are times when the only thing that we can do to keep our integrity and humanity intact is fight to the death.  But there are other times when honor and human dignity are not really at stake, when the real issues are only money and status.  In these cases we need to know when to quit.  It is not worth hobbling around for the rest of your life with bad knees to play in one more playoff game.  It is not worth a massive coronary to be vice president.  The most important thing I have learned about stress is that there are times when you have to get out of the line of fire.  Find a nice patch of thistles in a bog somewhere.

My second strategy for dealing with stress comes from the same boss who had the vodka cure for bad backs.  However, this cure I was able to try and it works pretty well.  Not always and there are dangers and side-effects.  But on the whole it is an effective strategy.  It’s called “Magooing it”.  Of course, Mr. Magoo had the advantage that he could not see all the dangers around him and so went happily on his way.  The rest of us just have to put our head down and ignore the chaos around us.

The secret is to find some short term, immediate job that needs to be done, concentrate fully on doing it, and ignore the threats and dangers that seem to be swarming around you.  The difference between this and simply sticking your head in the sand is that you are doing something.  It may not be the most important thing.  You may be straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic.  But at least you are doing something.  A major cause of stress is the feeling of helplessness.  Doing something, almost anything, helps a little.

In some cases, the causes of stress are well beyond our control.  Some idiot running your company into the ground, some idiot running the country into the ground, a self destructive son or daughter, the hole in the ozone layer, an assignment at work that is impossible, an unrealistic sales quota, pimples.  Of course, you have to be careful not to rationalize, but if you truly can’t do anything about the problems, find some way to ignore them and actually do something about something you can fix, even if it is relatively trivial.  Even if Magooing it does nothing more than get you through the storm in one piece so that you are ready to get back to the major battles, it is a useful approach.

Of course, if the problems are things that you can do something about, then Magooing it should be no more than a short term escape to catch your breath.  Mr. Magoo lives in a fantasy world.  The real world is less kind.  The last thing in the world a pessimist is going to recommend is stepping blindly off a building with the hope that some bird will swoop down and save you.

The third thing I have learned is to find the source of your anxiety.  You know that something is wrong.  There is a danger somewhere, a threat.  But you have not really identified the cause.  Parts of our anxiety closets are all too well known to us, but other parts are unexplored territory.  What the hell is it that we are afraid of anyway?  Each of us has very personal dreads.  Mine may seem silly to you and yours to me, but our own personal fears are very real to each of us.

I have found it helpful to inventory and categorize my anxiety closet every once in a while.  It’s a little like cleaning the garage.  I haul all the junk onto the driveway, sweep up a little dust, brush off a few cobwebs, do a little sorting, and then put if all back in time to catch the last Saturday football game and escaped into a large bowl of popcorn.  I haven’t really solved any of the problems, haven’t repaired the antique bed or figured out why the old fridge is leaking.  But at least I know what’s there.

Every once in a while it’s time to clean out the anxiety closet.  Find out what’s there.  If things have gotten worse lately, find out what’s new or what has changed.  Contrary to many people, I do not believe that identifying the problem automatically entails its solution.  Nor do I believe that our problems come from our ancient histories, except in rare and severe cases.  We are no longer afraid of falling out of the high chair.  This is not to say that we haven’t had many of the same problems since we were very young, but rather that for most of us the real causes of our current problems are in the here and now.

Which brings us to the final issue.  And here is where most of us fail.  It is facing up to our problems and dealing with them.  Nobody else is going to do this for you.  Like a bad back, you have to deal with it yourself.  This isn’t to say that you can’t ever find help.  If you have very serious problems you should find help.  But its like the light bulb joke:

“How may therapists does it take to change a light bulb?”

“I don’t know, how many?”

“Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.”

Not only do we have to want to change, we have to do most of the work ourselves.  At best the therapist is like a personal trainer, showing us exercises and giving encouragement, but we still have to do the exercises ourselves.

For pessimists at least, this is a slow and arduous process.  No magic book, no weekend in the woods with the guru of the month, no sudden realization is going to make it all better.  At best we make progress a few steps at a time.

Sometimes it is best to start with the small things.  Eeyore was out in the snow.  It was cold.  And he kept hoping that someone would remember him there.

“And I said to myself: The others will be sorry if I’m getting myself all cold.  They haven’t got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that’s blown into their heads by mistake, and they don’t Think, but if it goes on snowing for another six weeks or so, one of them will begin to say to himself: ‘Eeyore can’t be so very much too Hot about three o’clock in the morning.’  And then it will Get About. And they’ll be Sorry.”

But although Mr. Hoff forgot to mention it in his discussion of this incident, Eeyore did not simply wallow is his self pity.  At least not for long.  He built himself a house.  He was not coming to complain to Christopher Robin that he did not have a house, but rather that the one he built had vanished.

Building himself a house did not solve Eeyore’s feeling of loneliness.  It did not make him self -confident.  It did not cure his bad back.  But it did get him out of the cold and snow and help keep him warm.  It was a start.  One less problem he had to worry about.  One less stress in his life.

Start small.  Don’t go after some terrible monster in your anxiety closet right off the bat.  Slaying dragons is not for pessimists.  Step on a few ants first.  Maybe go after a rat or two.  Pay the bills, do the taxes, look under the car to see where the green gunk is coming from.  Then tackle something a little bigger.  Tell your boss that there is a good chance your group won’t make the schedule, do the market research you pretended that you had done in that report, get out the manual and learn how to really use the spread sheet program, start on those journals you need to read for your re-certification, start the investment program so that you can survive a layoff.

For many of us, the worst monster in our anxiety closets, the worst cause of stress, is that we will be found out.  It is that someone will peek around the screen and see the pathetic little man behind the booming voice of the Wizard of Oz.  The difference between image and reality will be our next topic.

For all of us will be found out in the end.

All of the animals in Eeyore’s world, and all of the people in ours, pretend at times.  They pretend to understand when they don’t.  They pretend to be brave when they are afraid.  Pretending is a way to cover a weakness.  We all do it.  Even pessimists.  But pessimists sometimes pretend in the negative key by playing the fool.

Pretending, even once in a while, is not right, of course.  Not something Christopher Robin really approves of, but it such a common and natural weakness that it’s hard to get too upset about it.  Nobody is going to scold Pooh for pretending that he understands a big word when he doesn’t really have a clue.  He even has problems with medium sized words, after all.  And it doesn’t take long before Pooh admits that he is not keeping up with the conversation.

But Owl is different.  Owl is not just pretending once in a while.  His pretense is systematic and calculated.  He is maintaining an image.  The image is that he is educated and wise and superior.  The truth is otherwise.  Owl is taking advantage of the natural gullibility of stuffed animals.  He is systematically pulling their legs, and sometimes even their tails.  Now having someone pull your tail may not seem like much.  Especially if you don’t have one.  But for Eeyore and his soul mates, it is humiliating.  And it hurts.

To be fair to Owl, he is probably a victim of society’s image of what an owl should be.  He is just doing what the other animals expect.  Owls are supposed to be educated and wise.  He is an owl, therefore he must be educated and wise.  It is what everyone expects.  Not the least, what he expects of himself.

Systematic pretense in order to live up to a stereotype hurts everyone.  When you spend your life pretending to be something you are not, you miss out on life.  You are too busy trying to be something else to search for your real nature, your real talents, your real skills, your real likes and dislikes.  The reality is that owls have big eyes to see in the dark, not to read books.  Make believe is a wonderful escape from reality.  Temporarily.  But it cannot provide a lasting substitute for finding and developing you real nature.  I suspect Owl would have a lot more fun floating silently across the forest floor on a moonless night than trying to keep awake reading the Critique of Pure Reason.

Some people are very good at pretending.  Not Owl, he is hopeless.  But some people seem to pull it off for their whole lives.  Some of these people even manage to make useful contributions.  A pastor who does not believe in God may serve his whole life and do a lot of good in his congregation.  But that is the exception rather than the rule.  Even those who are never exposed to the general public, never show up on Hard Copy, often do a lot of damage.  Somebody may actually believe that they know what they are talking about and take their advice.

Imagine going to a doctor who just pretends to be good at medicine, a mechanic who pretends to know about your car, a lawyer who pretends to understand the law.  Or more likely, a doctor who has pretended to keep up on the latest findings, but has really been spending all her extra time in investment seminars.  Or a mechanic who has pretended to look up the setting for your valves, but is really just guessing.  Or a lawyer who has pretended to prepare your case adequately, but really spent the afternoon playing tennis.  Usually, pretending is not good enough to get the job done.  Most people whose lives are built on systematic pretenses are like Owl, easy to spot and pretty useless in a crisis.  The dangerous ones are the ones that are harder to spot.  The ones we believe and give our trust and our money and our love.

At least Owl’s pretending is fairly benign.  His goal seems to be merely a little status in the forest.  He just wants to impress Pooh, he is not trying to sell him life insurance.  But it tends to get worse when the stakes get higher.  When it’s just honey and acorns, there isn’t much temptation.  But put Owl on commission or offer him a performance bonus and things could get much worse.  Even the lure of tenure or a promotion will put strains on a person’s, or a birds, integrity.

Pessimists are particularly sensitive to pretense when it involves friendship.  With so few friends and such cautious natures, we find the easy friendship of paid friends both embarrassing and a little insulting.  A paid friend is someone who is somehow getting rewarded for being your friend.  It may be a salesperson, a manager, a politician, or whatever. The pay is not always money.  It may come in other more subtle forms such as advancement and recognition.  But there is still something he wants and so he is willing to do whatever it takes to get it.  And whatever it takes, in this case, is to be your friend.  So he is suddenly interested in whatever you are interested in.  Suddenly on a first name intimate basis.  Suddenly you are his long lost buddy.

Pessimists have learned from sad experience to watch out for people who are being paid to be our friends.  This is not to say that we don’t want the people we meet or buy things from to be friendly.  But we react very badly to the sleazy old pal bit.  It makes us want to take a shower, if we could just find a soap that would cut through sleaze.  And most of us have had a few bad experiences with people we thought were our friends.  Not necessarily come over to dinner friends, but friends none the less.  When the crunch comes, you find that they were somehow getting paid for that friendship.  And when the pay stops, so does the friendship.  Suddenly they are gone.  Along with your tail.  No friend, no self-respect, and no tail.  So you chalk it up to experience and move a little deeper into the bog.

One of the most unfortunate trends in industrialized societies is towards de-personalization.  It affects many aspects of our lives, but is perhaps best illustrated in our work places.  I am old enough to remember when organizations at least pretended that they cared about individuals.  When they at least gave lip service to the importance of their employees, not just as job descriptions, but as individuals.  When they would make a place for a talented, hard working employee, even if he or she didn’t fit into the organization chart very well.  When everyone worked together to get through the tough times and everyone shared in the good times.  And it only rained on Thursday evenings.

More and more business and other large organizations are being run by buzz words.  A few years back the buzzword was Quality.  It was a nice concept.  And even though it quickly lost meaning by over-use, it still tended to put emphasis on the employees as individuals who did their jobs with skill and integrity.  But like an old faded billboard, the Quality sign is quietly being taken down.  In its place is Economy.  Manage the bottom line.  Do it for less.  Who can you get rid of and still make this quarter’s numbers?  Can you replace a skilled, experienced worker with a cheaper person?

The argument is that this is reality of tough economic times.  The reality is that we are selling the seed corn.  Skilled, experienced employees, research and development, loyalty and integrity.  These are the building blocks of the future.  And they are all on the auction block.  Because by concentrating exclusively on the short term, organizations can pretend that they are doing well.  Costs are down, profits are up, and the jobless rate continues to climb.  Organizations, like people, can pretend only so long, then reality catches up with them.

Unfortunately, it is hard to talk about integrity or loyalty or humanity when dealing with organizations.  It is not that businesses and other large organizations are immoral.  It is that they are amoral.  It never crosses the mind of the Vice President who pretends that he cares about his employees, or the sales person who pretends that he cares about his customers, or the dean who pretends he cares about the students, that he is doing something wrong.  Pretending is what it takes to get the job done.  And doing whatever it takes to get the job done is the first commandment in business.  The only measures of right and wrong are success and failure.

The second commandment is don’t get caught.  If you end up on 60 Minutes, you loose.  The people who live their organizational lives by these rules would be both shocked and hurt if you accused them of being immoral.  We have allowed our society to degenerate so that these are simply the rules of the game.

It’s even worse.  The pretense and lack of integrity endemic in business and other organizations spills into our private lives.  If you spend all day on the phone covering up a mistake your company made so that your customer won’t think it is your fault, it becomes all too easy to apply those same skills to cover up an affair.  If it is OK to lie a little and cheat a little in business, then it is tempting to think that it is OK in your personal life.  If you can lie to your employees, you can lie to your kids.  If you cultivate the right image and personality to work your way up the corporate ladder, it seems natural to cultivate the right image and personality in your congregation, or club, or circle of friends.  You learn to say what is expected, do what is expected, and pretend to be what people want you to be.

One of the greatest disappointments in life for pessimists is when someone we know and respect, maybe even think of as a friend, is exposed.  Not the Pooh sort of pretending, or even the Owl’s puffed up image, but the hard core, self serving, taking advantage of people, covering your nasty deeds kind of pretending.  Finding out that people we respect or even love have just been pretending can be a major cause of pessimism.  Imagine discovering that Christopher Robin tortures Piglet every night or that he is fattening up Pooh to sell to a strange sect that sacrifices stuffed animals during some bizarre religious rite.  Pessimists know a lot more about people than we ever wanted to know.

I wish I could claim that pessimists are immune to pretending.  That it doesn’t affect us, since we can always see through it, and that we never do it.  Unfortunately, neither of these is the case.  Pessimism means that you expect others to be pretending, of course.  So we may be slightly better than the Polly Anna types at recognizing, and avoiding, the worst of the pretenders.  But the ones who are really good at it still take us in.  And we are just as shocked and stunned as normal people when we find out the truth.

Nor is it true that pessimists are never guilty of pretending themselves.  We tend to avoid some of the situations that encourage some forms of pretending.  I don’t think there are many hard core pessimists in sales and marketing.  We also avoid management whenever possible.  But we are none of us all we pretend to be.  This pretense is a major cause of stress since there is always the fear, and for those of us plagued by the belief in a final judgment, the inevitability, that we will be found out.  Owl probably consumes mass quantities of antacid.  Eeyore, of course, lives on it.

How does pessimism deal with the lack of integrity all around us?  First of all, we try to avoid people who are paid to be our friends.  Of course, we may have to deal with these people at times.  But we try not to allow ourselves to believe that friendship bought and paid for is real.

Pessimists always consider the possibility that this person is just pretending.  Even when, especially when, they are telling us what we want to hear.  This does not mean that we trust no one.  Eeyore has learned to trust Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin.  If you trust no one, you have not just isolated yourself in the bog, you have left the forest altogether.  There can be no meaningful, loving relationship without trust.  This does mean that we are much more careful than most about choosing the people we trust.  Care in choosing friends and loves is no guarantee that we will never be wrong and never get hurt.  But it helps reduce the risk.  Stuffed animals make a good choice.

Then there is the problem of our own pretenses.  My mother -in-law once tried to comfort one of her grand daughters who was afraid of the dark by telling her that she had a Father in Heaven who loved her and would watch out for her.  My niece later wanted a drink.  As she sat in bed drinking it she asked, “Can that guy up there see me drinking my milk?”  It’s no good pretending if someone knows the truth.  If you don’t believe in God, or if the God you believe in can’t see you drinking your milk, then think about all your friends, who will find out eventually.

When it comes to integrity, I have five categories of people.  The first category are the worst and I simply avoid altogether.  Don’t go anywhere near them.  When you get a pushy sales person on the phone, don’t try to be polite, just hang up.  If they show up as your professor, drop the class.  If they come out on the basketball court with you, suddenly remember something you have to do.

The second category are OK to be around, but always keep one hand on your wallet.  One of my bosses had a simple sales philosophy which he also applied to other areas.  His philosophy was find out how much money the other person has, and take it.  These people can be very good, so even if your hand is on your wallet, it doesn’t hurt to take it out and check once in a while.  Or if you are female, make sure you still have your bra on.

The third category are people you trust, as long as the temptation is not too great.  You don’t have to keep one hand on your wallet, but don’t leave money lying around.  This is where everyone starts out and where most people end up.  It is not so much that you don’t trust them, but that you don’t know.  So you play it safe.  Owl would probably go here.  Probably Tigger.

The fourth group are the people you trust.  The people you would give a thousand dollars to hold for you until next week.  And not ask for a receipt.  The people you try to be around as much as possible and make your friends.  Pooh and Piglet would go here.  Although, with these two, I would be a little careful about anything more valuable than say a quarter.  But not because they are dishonest.  However, they tend to be a little absent minded and careless,  Remember what happened to Eeyore’s birthday presents.

The final category are very special indeed.  They are the ones you would let hold the rope.  This goes back to an old Mormon story.  It is about some botanists who found a very rare plant that they wanted to collect, but it was on a ledge over the edge of a cliff.  They asked a little boy playing in the field nearby if they could lower him over the cliff to get the plant.  He said, “Sure.”, but then ran off.  A few minutes later he came back with a farmer.  “This is my Dad”, the boy said, “I want him to hold the rope”.  Despite all the pretending and weakness in the world, there are indeed people that you would let hold the rope while you were lowered over the edge of a cliff.  People you would trust blindly.  People of integrity.  People who are not only impeccably honest, but responsible and capable.  For Pooh and Eeyore, it was Christopher Robin.  These are our real friends and loved ones.  The lights of our lives.  The joys of our being.

Eeyore and the rest of the world’s pessimists would like to propose a boycott on the worst of the pretenders.  Don’t buy from them, don’t work for them, don’t vote for them.  And above all, don’t marry them.  By making pretense less profitable, perhaps we can make it less pervasive.

Pretending is the counterfeit for living.  Integrity, being true to ourselves, our families, our friends, and our colleagues is not easy, especially in a society that condones and even encourages pretense.  But the counterfeit is useless in the end.  And life is too precious to exchange for a counterfeit.  Integrity in our own lives and the lives of the people we choose to have around us, may even bring a certain warmth to the bog.

Besides, if you go on pretending you’ll probably get caught.

Eeyore is a profound skeptic.

“It’s Pooh,” said Christopher Robin excitedly.

“Possibly,” said Eeyore.

“And Piglet!” said Christopher Robin excitedly.

“Probably,” said Eeyore.  “What we want is a Trained Bloodhound.”

Not about to jump to conclusions, this old gray donkey.  And with good reason.  You never can tell, really.  It is always better to see for yourself.  Look between your legs to make sure your tail is gone before you worry about how to find it.

Eeyore and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what we really know and what we can ever hope to know.  This interest in epistemological questions comes from a desire to understand the bewildering world around us.  And from too much time alone in the bog.

Most of what we think we know, we learn from other people.  This brings up some of the fundamental questions of language.  But you have to use language to talk about language.  So this ends up a lot like chasing your tail.  Those of us whose tails are attached none too firmly, tend to be very careful about chasing them.  Wittgenstein told us,

“If you can’t say something clearly, don’t say anything at all.”

(my very loose translation).  What he didn’t tell us, is how to measure clarity.  I found his works on language about as clear as mud.  So by my measure and his rule, he should have shut up.  But we are getting off the track here. Back to questions of knowledge.

What does it mean to know something?  Skeptics and pessimists tend towards a pragmatic definition.  To claim you know something, you must first have some experience with the thing.  Then you must have a model of that thing that allows you to explain the past experience and predict future experiences.  From experience we generate a model, explain the past, predict new experiences, and refine the model.

With this view, itself a model, knowledge is a relative thing.  It is a measure of the quality of our model.  How well it explains.  More importantly, how well it predicts.  Truth is a good model.  Useful for explaining and predicting.  Absolute truth is only a goal approached.  Never a goal attained.

The basis of all knowledge is experience.  Some people forget that you can’t just make this stuff up.  Or they build elaborate models on the flimsiest of evidence.  Vicarious experience makes it possible for us to develop knowledge of things that would be impossible or impractical for us to experience ourselves.  Not many of us will get into inter-galactic space.  Nor can anyone see the really tiny bits and pieces that make up all matter.  Heisenberg gets in the way with his uncertainty principle.  With something called an “uncertainty principle”, Heisenberg is, of course, a major deity for all skeptics.

Experiencing things second hand also lets us escape from some of the really unpleasant things in life.  For me it was more than enough to hear how a veterinarian in our dinner group had to drink the fluid from the eyes of a dead zebra to keep from dying of dehydration.  I would love to see the plains of Africa for myself someday, but this particular experience I can do without.  Or actually meeting Rush Limbaugh.  In his case, even the second hand experience is too much.

But in lots of cases the second hand experience is a poor counterfeit for reality.  Real people seldom behave like characters in sitcoms or soap operas.  And even if the second hand experience is relatively accurate it may be vastly incomplete.  Watching someone else run a rapid in a rubber raft is nothing like doing it yourself.  You don’t wet your knickers watching it on TV.

Sometimes we think the second hand experience will do nicely until we get a chance at the first hand experience.  Once when we were wandering through France, we decided to visit the early man sites to see the cave paintings.  My daughter had been studying about them in school and wanted to see them.  I was less than enthusiastic.  I had seen lots of pictures of these paintings and I am a little claustrophobic, so the thoughts of going down into some musty old cave didn’t exactly thrill me.  But the experience will stay with me my whole life.  The pictures I had seen were two dimensional.  So I was surprised to discover that the walls of the cave were not at all flat.  The pictures that looked almost childish in two dimensions, suddenly took on a whole new life.  The shape of the rock was incorporated into the picture and added shape and body to the drawings of the wild animals.  Then they turned off the lights and simulated a flickering fire with a flashlight.  Suddenly the pictures were magic.  They came alive and even seemed to move.  Comparing the pictures in archeology books to the reality in the cave is like comparing a picture of a strawberry pie covered in whipped cream to eating the real thing.  Second hand experience sometimes just doesn’t cut it.

The trouble with vicarious experience is that it is not only incomplete but also edited.  Editing can change everything.  Someone decides where to point the camera.  What to show and what not to show.  Someone decides which bits to leave in and which to take out.  They change the order, add a little music, mix in other material and suddenly it has nothing to do with the original.  The editor can have all sorts of motives.  She may be trying to make it more exciting, trying to prove a point, or trying to get you to buy something.  Skeptics learn to be very careful with second hand experiences.  We always try to remember that what we are seeing or hearing or reading may have no relation to reality.

Some forms of second hand experience are better than others.  Reading is pretty good.  You can’t read with your brain in cruise control.  You have to think about things a little.  You have to imagine the scene the author is describing, you have to imagine the characters and the events.  Maybe its just that your have to scan and parse the words.

Television is pretty bad.  This is a little surprising.  You would think that the addition of all that visual and audio information would enhance the experience.  This does not usually turn out to be the case.  I am not sure what all the reasons are.  One problem is that television is one dimensional in time.  You can’t go back and check what happened on the last page.  Of course you can rewind a video tape, but the programs are designed for direct viewing.  So things are kept very simple.  It is like baby food, all mashed up and ready to eat.  No chewing, or thinking, required.  I don’t even want to think about what remote controls do to second hand experience.

Not only experiences, but also models are communicated to us from other people.  Most of our models like most of our experiences are, in fact, second hand.  It’s a good thing.  No one could figure out all of science, technology, art, philosophy, and religion on his own.  But there are several problems, besides the inherent limitations of language, when learning from other people.  They may not know the truth.  They may not want you to know the truth.  And they may have a conflict of interests.  As skeptics, we try to watch out for these things.

There are a lot of things no one knows.  Some things everyone realizes that no one knows.  Like why you always put an even number of socks in the laundry, but always get an odd number out.  It may have something to do with Goedle’s theorem which claims that no system, no even socks, can be entirely self consistent.  But no one really knows.  Or why anyone would fold the toilet paper into a point.

There are other things that some people pretend to know, even though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.  Psychologists sometimes claim that they understand how people work or economists claim that they understand how the economy works.  They have lots of explanations.  But neither of them are much good at predicting what will happen next.  These are immensely complicated fields, so predictive models are awfully hard to come by.  Part of the problem is that we won’t allow them to experiment.  At least not with the real thing.  Most of us don’t want people messing with our heads or our money.  When dealing with people or the national economy, failure is unacceptable.  But you can’t learn much from an experiment if you won’t allow it to fail.

The trouble is not so much what we don’t know, as what we pretend to know that we don’t.  There can be various motives for pretending that we know something.  It might be your job.  You might be professor of something or the other like I was, briefly.  Very briefly.  You may think it is true because you want it to be true.  Because it fits into your world view, or improves your lot in life.  Because it will make you more money or make you feel like you are going to recover.  You might become convinced that alfalfa pills will cure hay fever because you want so badly to find something to cure your hay fever.  I have decided that Pepsi cures just about anything.

Lots of people are willing to share their knowledge with us.  Sometimes for a price, sometimes as a step towards selling something, and, occasionally, just because they are nice guys.  You should ask yourself, “Does this person really want me to know the truth?”  Just because your answer is no, it doesn’t mean the person is lying.  You may have mis-judged him.  But it does mean you should be skeptical.  Wait for a little more evidence before signing up.  Some confirmation that paisley ties are really coming back into style.  Some evidence that this is really a special deal.  Just for you.  Just today.

It is not usually too hard to detect people who are deliberately trying to deceive us.  Conflicts of interest are harder to detect.  In some ways almost everyone has some conflict of interests.  Even pessimists.  Most of us have to make a living somehow.  We have to provide some product or service.  And most of us are rewarded for using as few resources as possible.  High revenue, low cost.  The dream of the capitalist world.

Just because someone has a conflict of interest doesn’t mean he is going to cheat you.  It just means there might be something in it for him if he does.  A little extra profit.  So there is a temptation.  A chance to get ahead.  Or a chance to save his skin.  Which means it takes certain integrity and dedication for him to insure the quality of the product or the service.  An integrity and dedication that not everyone has.  So here the questions are “Does this person have an ulterior motive?”  And, “Can I tell?”  Usually it is very hard to tell.  So usually, it is very wise to be careful.  Skeptical.

It is even more important to be careful of the second hand experience and knowledge that you buy than it is to be careful of the second hand cars that you buy.  With the car you can at least tell when you have been had.  When the transmission falls out on the freeway a month later, you know that you made a mistake and call the junk yard.  Bad knowledge is harder to detect and sometimes harder to clean up.  Especially knowledge that we use to run our lives.  If you buy “School is a waste of time.”, you could spend the rest of your life working in a fast food restaurant.  If you buy “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her”, you could spend the rest of your life alone.  And if you buy “Pessimists are really wonderful people once you take the trouble to get to know them”, you could be incredibly happy for the rest of your life.

We need to be especially careful buying news.  Sometimes we think that news is a public service provided by some omniscient and benevolent power for our edification and enlightenment.  In reality it is a business.  People sell news.  There is one of those conflicts of interest here.  This doesn’t mean that there are not dedicated, responsible people in the news business.  But we should not forget that it is a business.  Increase revenue, cut costs, and make a profit.  This applies to every business, including news.

Imagine your local news team covering the storm in the hundred acre wood.  They dispatch a reporter and a cameraman in the van.  They arrive on the scene just as Christopher Robin is pulling Pooh out through the door of what used to be Owl’s house with a rope.  So the reporter sticks a microphone in Pooh’s face and starts asking him questions.  Pooh, not a particularly articulate bear in the best of circumstances, gets completely flustered.  And he isn’t coming through very well on camera.  So the reporter looks for someone else to interview.  Christopher Robin is still off doing something and Piglet is sitting quietly to the side.  So the reporter goes up to Owl who is poking around the wreckage of the house.  “Excuse me sir”, asks the reporter, “Did you happen to see anything?”  Owl looks up, sees, the microphone and the camera and suddenly his eyes light up.  “See anything?”, he puffs, “It was my house.”  Then he goes on to explain how Pooh and Piglet had come for help, as they always do, how the tree had blown down, and how Owl himself had saved everyone.  The storm in the hundred acre wood gets a minute and fifteen seconds with video on the evening news.  And gets it all wrong.

I was trained early in skepticism.  My father is an astronomer.  Scientists make wonderful skeptics.  These days they learn early to question everything.  But it was not until they learned to question authority that science got much past Aristotle.  He made a great authority.  Ancient, respected, and with an opinion about just about everything.  It is a little ironic, actually, given the emphasis that Aristotle placed on observation and experience that those who professed to follow him skipped over those hard parts and just accepted everything he said.  But eventually scientists begin to observe and then even to experiment and learned that Aristotle got almost everything wrong.  This would not have surprised Aristotle.  What would have surprised him is that in two thousand years people did almost nothing to gather more experience and improve the models.

Aristotle’s models lasted unaltered for a couple of millennia.  Newton’s models lasted for a couple of centuries.  These days it is a rare model that makes it through a couple of decades.  Partly because scientists have become really proficient skeptics.  Back to my father.  It was only natural that all this skepticism spilled over into our home life.  So at five or six, when we would make some harmless assertion about our world like “Jimmy says that dogs can smell fear”, we would suddenly find ourselves in the witness box, being cross examined, with the terrible burden of proof.  How can you tell that dogs smell fear?  What evidence is there?  How could a mental state give off an odor?  Maybe it is just because some people sweat when they are afraid and the dog is smelling the sweat.

It was really scary the first couple of times, but later on we got to like it.  By the time we were teenagers, we could not only defend ourselves, but also challenge anyone.  Friends, school teachers, Sunday School teachers, even Dad.  We would argue happily for hours on end.  But you had to be a little careful with Mom because she took things personally sometimes.  But mostly she was a good sport.  Of course our friends started to avoid us and teachers called us smart asses and once even a “lazy little wart”, and one or two Sunday School teachers had spiritual crises.  But all in all, it was good fun.

I miss it a bit.  Oh, I am still as skeptical as ever.  Just not as vocal and aggressive about it.  I never quite made it to being a scientist.  Companies don’t like people who argue, even about technical issues.  And I married into a family where arguing means you are mad.  Where a friendly argument is an oxymoron.  And the people at church are less willing to put up with probing questions from someone with a bald head, a paunch, and a mortgage.  So to keep my job (which didn’t work), keep my wife happy (which has worked so far), and keep the Mormon Inquisition at bay, I have learned to hold my peace.

But every once in a while, I loose control and ask an impertinent question.

Jews sometimes claim that they are the world champions when it comes to guilt.  But we Mormons can give them a good run for their money.  It comes from this chosen people thing.  Your parents and aunts and Sunday school teachers tell you that you are one of the chosen from the time you start to crawl.  As one of the chosen, you will be great in this life and blessed in the next.  All you have to do is be perfect and save the world.  This is where the Mormons have an advantage over the Jews.  We not only have to save the world, but also convert it.

Of course, there are many sources of guilt.  Not all of them religious.  Your parents may have wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or a professional athlete or a Nobel prize winning scientist.  Your guilt may have more to do with giving up the piano or eating a cheese burger than with getting a little too friendly with your girlfriend in the back seat of the Honda Civic.

In an effort to support us in any field we might choose, my mother used to say, “It doesn’t matter what occupation you choose,” and then the killer, “as long as you are the best in the world at it.”  Even without the “best in the world” business, those of us with successful parents or mentors may find ourselves unable or unwilling to stretch far enough to walk in the enormous footsteps.

Take my father.  He is known and respected world wide as a solar astronomer.  In “Who’s Who”.  He is revered and loved as a church leader.  He lead the congregation, both organizationally and on the job, in building our local church building.  He designed and built our house.  He once was quarterback on a football team that beat UCLA.  He ran a ski area and was half the ski patrol.  He is a master fly fisherman and a skilled and fearless boatman on the white water.  He is equally at home reviewing scholarly articles and handling the horses in the wilderness area.

And at 70, I still can’t beat him in racquetball.

My mother is just as bad.  She raised five children and looks more like our sister than our mother.  In my case, a younger sister.  She has entertained and charmed world class scientists, dined in the Kremlin, in the Kruschev era, and traveled the world.  She has lead the women’s group in the congregation and helped countless new comers, new mothers, and newly weds.  She takes food to the sick and comforts to the sad.  She has an enthusiasm, friendliness, and smile that makes instant friends of everyone she meets.  She is well-read, musical, and elegant.  But you are just as likely to find her on the ski slopes, on the river, or in the wilderness area.  She loves to laugh and have fun and is always the life of any party.

And I still can’t beat her at golf.

These are tough acts to follow.  Sure, you tell yourself that you are your own person, have your own talents, and your own life.  But when you look at the things that they overcame in their lives and all the opportunities you have had in yours, it is a little discouraging.  They grew up in the depression of the 30’s, I grew up in the prosperity and optimism of the 50’s.  You can’t help but ask yourself, “Given all of the heritage, opportunities, and potential, what could I have been?”

If only I would have worked harder in high school, I could have gone to Harvard.  If only I would have stuck with physics I could have been a real scientist.  If only I had built up my strength, I could have been a better boatman.  Pessimists have a lot of “if only” guilt.  It is a large part of what makes up pessimists.

Competing with your parents, siblings, or anyone else, in this way is extremely counter-productive.  We spend too much of our lives in meaningless and destructive competitions.  Most of the time, it is an apples and oranges competition.  We are different people in different situations.  Superficial evaluations are often incomplete and misleading.  While it is true, that my parents grew up in the depression, my father started on his career in a time of tremendous growth and opportunity.  And that football game with UCLA was during the second world war.  Which means everyone on UCLA’s team had to be 4F.  Dad’s team were all the healthy ones who were in the army.  It didn’t hurt that a couple of them were All-Americans.

Different people have different talents, different challenges, and different goals.  Life is not about competition and status, it is about contribution and happiness.  It is more like gardening than like tennis.  Occasionally people attempt to make gardening competitive by judging flowers or vegetables, or even the gardens themselves.  But mostly a garden is just something that brings you joy.  It is different than your parent’s or your neighbor’s garden, but no one worries about ranking them.  It is unfortunate that people have a tendency to try to rank themselves against other people’s lives.  Even more unfortunate that people tend to rank each other.  And a sign of a fundamental weakness in our culture that we have created the cult of the celebrity.

Sometimes childhood guilt is pretty silly.  Once I came home late from a scout camping trip and put my mess kit away dirty.  Years later I would still lay in bed at night and worry that my father would come across that dirty mess kit in the garage.  But I never did just get up and wash it out.  Or even get up and throw it away.  I just laid there and felt really guilty.

Sometimes adult guilt is almost as silly.  For the first few years after I married, I had a real problem being around my father.  I was doing OK, but I knew that I could be doing a lot better.  If only.  I wasn’t measuring up to what I knew I could and should do.  Not measuring up to what I expected of myself.  And I was sure I was not measuring up to what my father expected of me.  I would dread going home and when I got there I would either talk him to death about anything that showed me in a positive light, or withdraw altogether.  I am sure I was hard for him to be around.

But I got over it.  At least mostly.  I still talk a bit too much, once I get started.  The first thing that helped me was the realization that my father did not necessarily expect the things out of me that I had projected onto him.  It really didn’t break his heart that I was not a scientist.  I finally began to realize that he was more concerned that I was happy than that I was famous.  I am sure it would have been nice if one of his children could have understood the books he wrote, but he was in a very specialized field, and did not really expect any of us to follow.

The second thing that helped was a little success of my own.  Nothing works like success.  Not that this probably made much difference to him, but it made a big difference to me.  As I began to feel better about myself, my relationship with my father became much easier.

That’s the way with guilt.  Part of it is imaginary, self imposed, and misplaced.  We need to ask ourselves whether there is a valid basis for this guilt.  Have we really sinned against ourselves, our parents and our God?  Do they really care about what we have done, or more often, not done.  I am sure my father would not have been happy about the mess kit.  But I am also sure, that it would never have been as big a deal to him as it was to me.  My guilt, if not entirely imaginary, was at least way out of proportion to my crime.  That I am not a physicist is a crime against no one.  And perhaps even a great blessing to the world of physics.  Any guilt I felt there, and still feel twinges of once in a while, is misplaced guilt.

Misplaced guilt wouldn’t be so bad, if there weren’t more than enough real guilt to go around.

Some guilt is all too real.  So while you have to be careful not to project your own insecurities on your father or your God, you also have to realize that they do have certain real expectations.  My father may not expect me to be an astronomer, but he does expect me to do my best at my work, whatever it is.  If I do less, I will disappoint him.  If I neglected my family, he would be furious.  This is not to say that I have to accept all of my father’s standards as my standards.  But it is to say that if you accept the standard, and do not live up to it, the sin is real.

It has at times been fashionable to deal with guilt by changing the standard. This is usually accompanied by attaching some label with a negative connotation to the standard.  Capitalist, bourgeois, repressive, Victorian, and middle class are popular choices.  We do, however, need to understand and examine our own belief systems.  We need to know what we think is right and wrong and why we think this.  We need to ask ourselves if we really believe in the rules we have adopted.  But this exercise is best performed before we violate these rules.  Once we have broken the rules, any re-evaluation is in real danger of degenerating into rationalization and self-justification.

The only way to deal with real guilt is change.  This is tough for pessimists.  We are not big on change.  Particularly changing ourselves.  Change takes you outside the comfortable well trodden paths.  It may mean leaving the bog for a while.  It is usually unpleasant in many ways.  But it is usually better than the guilt.  Change at least comes to an end at some point.  Once you have made the effort and made the change, you can go back to chewing thistles in the bog.  But guilt stays with you.  Eats at you and gives you indigestion.  Day in and day out.  So you have to deal with it eventually.

Now at this point, pessimists have another real problem.  Once you have made the change, then you need to forget the mistake and get on with life.  There are many different value systems.  You have to choose the one that you believe in.  But all useful value systems provide a way to recover from mistakes.  Those of us with a tendency to the gloomy view of life, are prone to believe that our mistakes leave permanent marks.  That the rain and mosquitoes and Tigger are a punishment for past sins.  That nothing we can do will free us from the guilt, the flaw, and the punishment.  That there is some flaw in our character or make up that makes us tainted and defective.  That our mistakes come from flaws that are simply part of us and cannot be changed.  It is just how we are.

But whether you are a pessimist or not, this is simply not true.  Whatever your philosophical view of determinism and freedom, the empirical evidence is overwhelming that people can and do change themselves.  Being a pessimist is a valid personality trait, but it is not an excuse.  Especially not an excuse for not dealing with guilt and making the changes in our lives that we need to make.

But you will probably just make more mistakes anyway.