The purpose of honor

After having recently been around some conspiracy theorists, and just now seeing stupid shit like the popcorn viral marketing campaign, I’m starting to think that there may be a reason why codes of honor exist, and why lying and deception haven’t (until recently, in the USA) become the rule of the day. It’s probably something that could be studied from an evolutionary or a game theory perspective, but I’m not an expert in those disciplines.

But imagine a society in which nobody trusts everyone, and everyone is full of shit, and it’s impossible to tell whether someone is lying to you or not? What would happen if you have to assume that everyone is lying all the time? Kind of like the modern-day business world. Or medieval courts. Or politics in the post-WWII spy-vs-spy era and in the modern-day Republican all-bullshit all-the-time climate?

It’d be like living in a hall of mirrors. You wouldn’t know what reality was. Wouldn’t such a society soon collapse? Too much energy would be wasted trying to to figure out what is real and what is not. The most hokey and bizarre theories would be plausible. There’d be no bearings. It’d be a full-on society-wide paranoid psychosis… kind of like the one that the conspiracy theorists live in.

I can think of two ways out of that hole. First, teach science and the scientific method! Arm people from childhood on with critical thinking skills and the ability to understand chains of causality, logical fallacies, and how to weigh evidence. Secondly, re-establish some kind of code of honor in society, and strictly punish– economically, socially, and criminally– people who lie, especially at high levels of society.

Conspiratorial leaps of illogic

After many years of working with computers and hanging around computer people, and especially with troubleshooting and debugging, I’ve developed a physical sense of tight logic and good causal and evidentiary connections. I now find it physically jarring and just wrong when there’s a break in the chain of logic. Which is why I find conspiracy theory stuff painful to read, watch, or listen to.

I’ve been working with a musician lately who is a big fan of Jordan Maxwell, is a 9/11 truther, and who is quite convinced that the world is controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati Freemasons (fnord!). So he sent me a Jordan Maxwell video and I watched it. Or tried to. Maxwell does a lot of research, but it is kind of scattershot and riddled with holes, allowing him to jump to completely unfounded conclusions almost every minute or two. About a third of the way in, the leaps of painfully wrong illogic were too annoying, and I couldn’t continue.

Example: Maxwell is going on about the Masons. Fine, I know a bit about the Masons since I dated an Eastern Star member for a few years, and got to know her family who were all involved in that. So Maxwell is presenting the different orders and such, pretty interesting stuff, including things I didn’t know like the differences between the various rites. And he mentions the Third Degree Master Masons, and the term “the third degree”. Then he asserts that the term “the third degree” refers to interrogation because “the police force is a Masonic institution”. What the fuck??!

No, sorry. “The third degree” commonly refers to a tough, coercive, merciless interrogation because the initiation rite to make it into the third degree of the Masons is rumored to be really difficult, traumatic, and allegedly sadistic. So cops, and others, whether they are masons or not, have used that term to indicate a harsh interrogation. Maxwell casually asserts that all the various police forces in this country (there’s one for every county and almost every municipality in the whole nation!) are a great masonic conspiracy, just because they occasionally use a term that comes from Masonry. That was a leap large enough to startle me.

There’s plenty of others. His analysis of visual symbolism is just as interesting as his take on language, but similarly weak in logic and bizarre in its conclusions. He’s kind of like a paranoid Joseph Campbell. He infers from the common use of symbols like the eye in the pyramid, the cross and the crown, etc, that the world is under the control of an occult conspiracy. I learned first hand and at a very young age that the use of symbols doesn’t indicate any kind of conspiracy, or even that the people using the symbols have any idea what they mean.

When I was young, and played in heavy metal bands, we tended to use in our visual communications lots of upside down crosses, pentagrams, blood-spatterings, blackletter lettering, umlauts, etc. And hysterical parents and legislators and newsmedia breathlessly concluded that we were all satan worshippers, or Nazis, or druids, or all of the above. Horseshit. We were white suburban middle-class kids, trying to look tough. We used those symbols because they looked cool. And the Occam’s Razor explanation of the use of, say, the use of Masonic, Egyptian, and/or Rosicrucian symbolism by the rich and ruling classes is the same: it looks cool, it looks "official", it looks regal. It’s much more likely to be done for the same reason that so many banks and government buildings in the USA done in the neoclassical style: aspirations of, and intimations of, legitimacy– not conspiracy. I could be wrong– I haven’t proven anything– but Maxwell doesn’t either. That’s my point. It’s very different to offer a likely and mundane explanation with qualifications, than to present a completely stunning and complex one as fact without any kind of logic to back it up. Why do so many people miss that distinction?

I think we need to teach logic and critical thinking in schools. More people need to understand that simply putting two facts next to each other, but not connecting them in any kind of causal way– like showing the gin and vermouth to each other in a very, very dry martini– is not enough to draw any conclusion. Likewise to train people to become physicaly uncomfortable with “facts” that aren’t backed up by any kind of evidence. Things like that stand out as obviously to me as a function call that is misspelled, or a wire that isn’t plugged in: “Oh, hey, there’s the problem!”. More people need to be physically startled when such leaps are made. I think we’d have better politics, better software, and things will run more smoothly.

Zappa’s love-hate relationship

Scott Thunes in his blog mentions Zappa having the weirdest love-hate relationship with jazz that he’d ever seen.

In reading what Zappa has written or said in interviews, I’ve determined that Zappa had a weird love-hate relationship with everything. Love-hate relationships are just how Zappa approached the universe. They were his mode of relating to things.

He had a weird love-hate relationship with modern music, as evidenced by countless interviews and also his 1984 speech to ASUC, printed in its entirety in his 1988 autobiography.

He also had a weird love-hate relationship with rock and pop music as well– writing catchy rock tunes and then giving them lyrics like “Titties n’ Beer”.

He had an especially weird love-hate relationship with musicians in general– his bit in his autobiogaphy about the “human element” evidences this, and many interview quotes both dissing and praising the various musicians he’d hired and worked with.

He had a very weird love-hate relationship with politics– he absolutely hated it, derided it as “the entertainment branch of industry”, despised watching it on the news, but he couldn’t stay away from it, and kept on top of it religiously.

He had a weird love-hate relationship with parenting, considering he hated the whole Ozzie n’ Harriet stereotype and loathed doing any kind of family activities with his kids, but he definitely loved his kids and was a doting dad.

And, as reported in some unauthorized biographies and also by his and his wife’s own admission in interviews and in the book (“Gail has said in interviews that what makes our relationship work is that we hardly talk to each other”), they had a weird love-hate relationship with each other as well.

Zappa’s whole thing was love-hate relationships. He was notorious for exalting and deriding things at the same time, taking them very seriously and also snidely dismissing them at the same time. He was so rich in irony, he couldn’t do anything without taking the piss out of it.

It’s all eyebrows.

Handshaking

I know a singer-songwriter who thinks handshakes are stupid and refuses to do them.

I’ve never thought they were stupid, necessarily, but I’ve noticed that, in the music world, handshakes are done very often (and very creatively), and it’s taking some getting used to.

When I was in the high-tech marketing world, handshakes were done upon initial meeting and not again. Men and women would use handshakes when introducing themselves or getting introduced. Of course, it was the standard, bland, square, “white” handshake– nobody dared do anything fancier or “hipper”.

I also noticed that engineers and technical people were a lot less enthusiastic about handshakes and tended to want to get them out of the way, and salespeople a lot more enthusiastic about them and seemed to consider them a lot more important. Being part of the “nerd” tribe myself, I’ve never been much for handshakes, but found them useful as a tool to help remember someone’s name when meeting them. I got used to that, and it seemed comfortable.

Then I spent 7 years almost exclusively in the world of stay-at-home moms. I noticed that full-time moms don’t shake hands, even when meeting for the first time. The few (and proud!) of my fellow stay-at-home dads followed the mom’s convention; I don’t think I shook anyone’s hand for years unless it was someone’s husband I was meeting for the first time– following the business convention. So I’d gotten unaccustomed to shaking hands, and also formed the opinion that it was a “guy thing” that remained in the business world as a result of it having been male-dominated for so much of its history.

Then I got involved briefly in politics, and it was back to the business convention: handshakes when you meet someone, and men and women used them. And they tended to be executed with the “salesperson” level of enthusiasm, but again, only on meeting someone.

And, now that I’ve gotten back into the music world, it’s a lot more touchy-feely. Everyone shakes hands, and hugs, at the beginning and end of each rehearsal or gig, upon each casual meeting, even if you’ve just been working together the night before, and often in creative ways– hand slaps, soul handshakes, bumping knuckles, and sometimes combinations thereof.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe it’s because– unlike much of the business world which is more gender balanced– music remains largely a boy’s club. Maybe musicians are just more physical, warmer, and emotive. Maybe it’s because music is a lot more like sales or politics: it’s a people thing. Maybe it’s due to the strong influence of African-American culture in the music world. I have noticed that my use of the square, businesslike “white” handshake seems out of place and even gets odd looks occasionally, so I’m trying to loosen up and get used to the other variations. It’s definitely a different way of doing things, and that songwriter who dislikes handshakes is really swimming against the tide.