August 27, 2021

Afghanistan, Capitalism and Kindness

Afghanistan

History is but baggage that has built up over decades and centuries and sometimes millennia spilling into plain sight overnight. While pundits and politicians are busy figuring out whether Biden or Trump is to blame for the Afghanistan situation, they’ve forgotten the real culprit. Ronald Reagan and his cronies practically created the Taliban out of thin air to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan. Republicans have always operated under the strange assumption that the US government is fully competent at running the world but incompetent when it comes to managing domestic affairs.

In the 1980s, the CIA funded the rag tag Taliban militia through Mohammed Zia Ul Haq, an army general who anointed himself the President of Pakistan after a bloody military coup. There were other tragic side effects to Reagan’s foreign policy shenanigans. Zia used American money to start madrassas (Islamic schools) all over Pakistan and radicalize the population. Zia also funded Kashmiri rebels and began a proxy war with India, which has claimed 1000s of lives. Of course, Reagan’s plan succeeded eventually. Not only did the Russians get out of Afghanistan, their missteps led to the collapse and demise of the Soviet Union itself. Yet, it’s evident that American meddling in the region, on the whole, has caused more pain and loss of lives than anything else.

So, who really is the victor in Afghanistan? The Pakistanis think they’ve “won.” Now that they’ve grabbed the Taliban tiger by the tail, something tells me that they’ve got a few nasty surprises coming.

Comirnaty

It's official. The FDA has granted full approval to Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine, making it the first one in a lengthy process to get approval from federal regulators. This is huge news. Pfizer has renamed its vaccine Comirnaty. Apparently they wanted to get Covid, mRNA and immunity in the name and ended up with a name that sounds like a capital city of one of the erstwhile Soviet states that used to be prosperous once but has now fallen into disrepair.

Soapbox: Are capitalism and kindness compatible?

To state a few things upfront, I believe that capitalism is superior to anything else we have concocted. The way I see it, capitalism is about reducing friction to the bare minimum so the best of us may contribute to society in ways previously thought not possible.

It is a familiar story in America. The tale of the successful businessman posing with his yacht or shiny mansion and revered for his wealth and hard work. While the unemployed man, perhaps residing in a region of the country hobbled by economic depression, losing his home, is criticized for not trying harder or not adequately caring for his family. One of the most prevalent biases of American capitalism is the belief that we live in a just world, and that therefore people get what they deserve. You are rewarded if you work hard. Ergo, they say, the socioeconomically disadvantaged must be lazy and unmotivated.

Capitalism has become largely about self-interest, consumerism, sleight of hand and the bottom line. Our metrics of success are so often tied into bottom lines that we do not pause to consider whether the traits that generate these successes translate to the “stuff” that relationships, families and societies need to function and thrive - empathy, respect, self awareness and kindness. In a system that is profit driven, the raw material for intimacy and connection is rarely cultivated or valued. Empathy and self-reflection typically impede profit making. This system based solely on a bottom line benefits a few and appears to be bad for the mental health of many.

The question to me is not so much how we dismantle our extant capitalist systems but how we can safeguard mental health while keeping most of them.

If we look at ourselves, we’re set up to be these little Darwinian survivors. We are born with really cool sensory apparatus, a brain, and other things. What we forget along the way is that this stuff is there only to help us propagate the species and nothing more. The intersections between our perceptions, understanding, and reality are small and largely accidental. There’s a whole bunch of stuff out there that is beyond our grasp.

Essentially what we do as human beings in our sweet, pathetic ways is mess things up. It’s like we are driving crappy cars and we better be careful about how we drive. If you’re driving a flawed vehicle and you see another person in a flawed vehicle, it seems almost crazy and irrational to start judging that person harshly. A more reasonable response might be, “Wow, you too are crazy.” So if you are a person with even a mild sense of life’s vast unknowns, then humility and kindness would be the rational stances in life.

I was thirty three years old when my wife and I had our second daughter. Money was tight. Expenses were growing. Life was daunting, I remember. I could feel the way society was pressuring me at that time. It was causing a lot of my normally “good” qualities such as an anxiety to learn and be excellent at what I do to torment me. It was severely undermining my ability to be joyful, to be gracious, and rise to the occasion. This was me, a guy with a relatively okay job, a relatively okay mind and health, feeling the pressure and stress. When I think back about it, it dawns on me that this is what cultural discontent is all about. It’s the capitalist dragon with its claws around everybody’s throats and pressing down.

It took nearly a decade for this realization to dawn upon me but once I saw it, it became important to me. The delusion is that we’re trapped inside this little machine that thinks it’s central, and permanent, and all-important and is always thinking it’s about its little victory narrative. But when you step out of it for a second, you see that it’s just a temporary construction of neurology, or karma, or destiny or whatever name you want to assign to it.

Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives. Everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, and other realities. This doesn't mean that people aren't being hardworking or resourceful. Bearing other people's vulnerability, which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, entails being able to bear one's own.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I greatly admired people who were clever. In my 40s, I gravitated to the few who were wise. These days, my role models are even rarer ones who are kind.

What’s the thing that most scares us human beings? What is the monster hiding under the bed? The unexpected answer is kindness, according to psychologists. Kindness, not sexuality, not violence, not money, has become our forbidden pleasure. We walk around believing that we lack natural generosity. The only people who we admit to be kind are Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi, who might as well be aliens from outer space relative to our miserly existence. Over millennia, we have downgraded kindness in society from a universal imperative to the prerogative of specific social groups: poets, priests, charity workers and above all, women.

Why do we fear kindness? Because true kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that self-interest never can. By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, terrified that our hatred might be stronger than our love. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Stay safe. Have a great week ahead!