Open Everything: A Note or Two on the Implications of America

Constitutional democracy = open government. Community-driven software = open source. America = open everything.

I don't think the main point of the constitutional democratic movement was necessarily to open the functioning of government to everyone. But in America, to an extent, that was the end result. One of the big ideas here was that anyone could become President if they worked hard enough. Before, of course, not everyone could become kings or queens. You had to be of royal family. This seems obvious, but the radical and revolutionary nature of constitutional democracy, at the time, cannot be understated.

And the full implication, which has culminated in many ways in the Internet, is absolutely stunning: Anyone can be anything at all if they put their mind to it. To put it another way, everything is open.

This concept of "open" has an elegant geometry that has been refined through our culture acting out these ideals. It is really a beautiful idea, which I feel should be examined, so we can capitalize on the American dream and fulfill it in our own lives. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

What does it mean that something is open? In some ways, it's obvious. If I want to be a CEO of a corporation, I can be one. How? The easiest way, of course, is to form my own corporation. I have a feeling that a lot of people thinking about the philosophy of openness will stop there. But I don't think that's good enough.

Anyone can form a corporation. In America, it's ridiculously easy. But will the corporation make money? Now to my mind, the idea that "anyone can become a CEO" has absolutely no relationship to the concept of openness if anyone can be a broke CEO, but only a handful of people can actually make money at it. The concept of openness is much more complex than that.

I like Andy Warhol's statement: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." This statement has been lauded as getting to the very heart of what America means. And through Warhol's life work, in a lot of ways, he made it happen. Not only was his life a rags-to-riches story, but after he became famous, he made everyone he ever contacted, including heroine addicts, working class drag queens, and so on, literally famous. He created a dialog between working class and superstar cultures. And everyone could be a star if they found their way to his little working space in New York City.

This concept of openness has a lot more meat than the superficial idea that anyone can be a CEO of a corporation. Whether you're a CEO of a corporation is determined by whether the Secretary of State in your state has a copy of a piece of paper in their filing cabinet. Whether you're famous, whether you're a star, on the other hand, has to do with whether scores of people think wonderful thoughts about you. This is far more meaningful.

It may not look it at first glance, but a similar thing is going on even in the example of the everyman CEO. If people are enticed by the idea that anyone can become a CEO of a corporation, it doesn't have to do with just your title, or with a piece of paper, but with whether scores of people think wonderful enough thoughts about you to give you money. This, I think, is what the idea of openness is all about.

So where does it come from? How do you get scores of people to think wonderful thoughts about you? The answer is really simple: you must think wonderful thoughts about everyone else. They then can't help but think wonderful thoughts about you, because that's how people's psychology works.

Unfortunately, there are systemic obstacles to thinking wonderfully about each other. This is what oppression is, and yes, oppression still exists. But the light at the end of the tunnel is the opposite of systemic oppression: systemic openness.

The constitutional democratic process is exactly that—systemic openness. It is a system characterized by openness. And the only way to fully realize the implications of the constitutional democratic process, and fulfill the promise it holds for the human race, is to open every system.

So not only should anyone be allowed to be President of the U.S. government, everyone should be allowed to be the President of Coca Cola. There should be a pathway towards being that President as well. For all genders. For all disabilities (within reason). And so forth.

Openness has a couple of logical implications. It means people are held accountable to those they affect in their decisions. It means everyone who has a stake in something has an ability to affect it in some way. It means that autonomous actors, in whatever form they take—corporations, individual people, collectives, and so on—have the power to do dialog and dialectics with one another to form a new idea within the context of the organizations which they feel involved with. There is nothing that "we just don't talk about." Someone, somewhere, has to talk about it, especially if it's a problem, or else it won't serve a purpose of any kind.

It means that the autonomous actors have communication channels open to them which connect them to all the other autonomous actors they deem necessary to talk to. This doesn't just mean that everyone can send mass emails and online petitions to the President of Coke—it means that the President of Coke will actually listen in some way. Coke has a delicious flavor, and serves as a cultural icon. It is also a cultural ambassador to many other nations. Coke thus has a responsibility to maintain their status in our culture, and if they do something which rubs Americans wrong, we have a right to talk about it, directly to the corporation. Otherwise, Coke is in a state of catatonic schizophrenia, and we're all in trouble.

I like Coke because of the Andy Warhol connection, and because of the fact that it unites Democrats and Republicans. It is our mainstay, much like the Queen of England. In a lot of ways, Coke is invisible. Which is as it should be. As long as it is affordable, we should be allowed to organize our culture around it.

This invisible quality should be the most important quality of leadership in organizations. Organizations should have a powerful main thrust, then keep cool and invisible, so that we can organize ourselves around them. In many ways, the U.S. government is invisible. Who is really in charge? The people who are in charge are invisible. Many of them are corporations, but many are also individuals, because we all hold a vote. The government, then, is what we say it is.

This is how openness works. I hope I live to see the day when every organization in America aggressively takes up a policy of openness. It is the way to innovation, as the Japanese economy proves. We're the premier open organization, but Japan seems to have an edge on us in the idea of openness in corporate decisionmaking. (See here.) But I think we can do better. I think we should prove to the world that we can open everything.

Experiment

Experiment.

The word seems less like a thing and more like a praxis. It seems like a thing we do that involves a certain way of seeing the world. But of course, the word has another meaning. It's not just a verb, but also a noun.

But even the noun seems to carry a lot of verb-ness with it. An experiment is simply a record of the action described by the verb form. But to me, this doesn't carry all of the insight that the word itself implies.

Armament.

The word is similar to the first. For one thing, it rhymes. But I think the relationship goes deeper than that.

What is an armament? It is not a singular thing. It is defined by Webster as "military weapons and equipment." Plural. The insight about the word and its use of the suffix "-ment" is that it is an accretion of something, specifically arms.

Experiment: the accretion of experience. An experiment is nothing less than an accretion of a bunch of experiences. Yes, there may be a scientific method, but really, the scientific method is just a way of clarifying the act of observation, and therefore, of experience. I think this is what "experiment" really means. It doesn't just mean following the scientific method, but systematically experiencing everything. This is what an experimenter does: systematically experiences everything.

Now, what does this insight have to say about the nature of:

Enlightenment?

Jewish Identity Disorder: Psychiatry in Action

We all know that, here in NAZI Germany, there is an epidemic of individuals, invisible to most but tragically evident to some, suffering from a new mental disorder. The very name of the disorder is enough to make you tremble in fear and feel sick to your stomach:

Jewish Identity Disorder.

Here's what we know of the disease. It is generally incurable and chronic. While mostly marked by cognitive features (like believing you're the Chosen People of God, and not believing that Our Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth came to this world to save us for our sins, and various other beliefs not shared by the common culture), the disease also generally results in physical abnormalities. For example, there's a documented correlation between JID and curly hair and hard noses. Furthermore, there is quite a body of research which shows that JID runs in families. There may be a genetic component as well.

While effective treatment of the disease remains ever elusive, the catastrophic toll of JID across The Fatherland cannot be understated. Every day, thousands of Jews are rounded up by the police and shipped to treatment facilities. Many of them never get out. The ones that do get out generally live a life of terrible poverty and social stigma. The stigma is often described as the worst part: many good Jews understand that they have a serious mental illness and need treatment, often, unfortunately, at national treatment facilities. Despite their cognitive inferiority, they understand that there is something terribly wrong with them and that they'll probably never recover. We have to combat this. The time has come for our society to recognize that the profoundly life-changing diagnosis of JID simply doesn't justify treating them as inferiors, even though they are.

Your friends at the National Socialist Party stress the need for a national strategy to address the JID problem. We must also take into account the growing body of literature on recovery. There is a certain percentage of people with JID who only go to a treatment facility once, and, after professional treatment with Haldol and other psychoactives, they come to the conclusion on their own that they in fact aren't Jewish and never were. We also recognize the role of peers—others who have claimed to be Jewish—in treatment, as long as they follow evidence-based practices proven effective in decreasing the symptoms of JID. Also, strict professional boundaries must be maintained. (For obvious reasons, we can't have outside people with JID making personal friendships with inmates at our state-of-the-art treatment facilities.)

We stress that everyone should read up on the abundant literature regarding Jewish Identity Disorder. The severity of this national problem cannot be stressed enough, and an informed citizen is an empowered citizen. Sieg Heil!

Poor Joe. He's Depressed.

"I don't feel too well today. My son, Joe, is depressed."

"That's too bad! Is he being raped for it?"

"Yes, thank God. Wouldn't want him committing suicide you know."

"I know. It's such a travesty that so many children refuse to be raped."

"Yes! And here's the crazy part; we're not even allowed to rape adults unless they ask for it. I worry that when my child grows up I can't rape him anymore."

"Can you believe how crazy the government is? I mean, I know when my child needs to be raped. I should be allowed to rape him whenever I choose."

"Well anyway, I'm so glad our school has a school rapist. With all these damn budget cuts, a lot of people can't even pay someone to rape their own children."

"We just have to keep fighting. Some people even want rape to be illegal altogether."

"I can't believe how crazy some people are. Especially the Scientologists. I hear that the anti-rape movement actually comes from Scientology."

"It's true: once, I heard Brad Pitt one time go on this crazy rant about how bad rape is because it was all started by some galactic alien at the center of the galaxy."

"The thing is, this is an entire movement of people inspired by the crazy theory that rape was invented by a galactic overlord named Xenu. Oh, they'll deny it, of course. They'll say rape is bad no matter who started it. But who are you going to believe—a rapist, or someone who thinks rape is bad?"

"And what about those people who think rape should be consensual?"

"That's like the worst idea ever! You think someone really knows when they do or don't need to be raped?"

"That's the thing! The people who really need to be raped don't know that they need it. It's so sad that people just won't recognize the humanity in raping people against their will."

"Oh well. I guess we just have to keep raping our children and hope these insane people just go away someday."

"They never will, you know."

"I know."

What is Wrong with People?

Okay. Here's one thing I absolutely hate about the human race. They completely refuse to do the right thing.

Imagine if you were to say, "Rape is evil, it destroys humanity, and it needs to be abolished." Imagine if everybody simply ignored you, then proceeded to institutionalize rape and rape you.

Well, if you say, "Psychiatry is evil, it destroys humanity, and it needs to be abolished," people ignore you.

yeah. It's kind of like that.

You don't know. I've been through psychiatry, and it is one of the most traumatic experiences that a human being can possibly have. And it's getting more and more traumatic every day, forced against younger and younger people. Imagine if I were to say, "Raping children is evil, it destroys humanity, and it needs to be abolished," and everyone thought I was some kind of nutcase, because everybody knows that the best thing to do to a child is to rape him/her. I mean, duh! Rape is healing! Didn't you know? I mean, they do it at hospitals, it must be good for you!

Listen to this. Please. "Madness Radio: Talking About Suicidal Feelings David Webb." Note what he says: "I've known women who have been raped who say psychiatry is as bad as rape." Read this on rape: "The association of sexual assault and attempted suicide within the community." Note the suicide attempt rate: 15%. Teen suicide attempt rate of people with schizophrenia? 50%. But wait, that's just because the illness is traumatic, not psychiatry, right? So I guess we can keep on conspiring behind teens' back and then telling them the thought that people conspiring behind their back is a disease. I guess we can lie to and manipulate them with impunity and tell them how the thought that people are lying to them and manipulating them is a disease. I guess we can tell them how terrible their plight is then tell them how thinking their plight is terrible is a disease. I guess we can assault them with forced medication and tell them that assault is bad. If you don't understand the inhumanity of this, you're not human. Period.

For Christ's sake please read my posts on psychiatry, believe them, and share them.

A Note or Two on Yelling at People

A while back I decided to yell at my therapist. We both agreed that a shouting match was the most appropriate thing to do at that time. No, it wasn't one of those sterile, therapist-y agreements—"I want us to try something new. Let's have a shouting match. Don't be afraid; let it all out." We don't do business that way because it doesn't work. My therapist is a straight-up, no bullshit kind of guy. He wanted an emotional response. Well, he got one.

"Nathan," he said, "you just seem to think these psychiatrists all get together and sit around saying, 'Gee, let's see how many people we can hurt and oppress today.' You really think psychiatrists go to medical school for eight years and live on crappy doctors' wages just because they felt like hurting people was a cool thing to do?"

"They don't have to! The entire system is based on fallacious and fundamentally oppressive assumptions. I don't care what kind of person you are, if you believe that people's minds are diseased, you're going to be oppressive! It's the same as saying you're a flawed person!"

"Great. Tell me: when has a psychiatrist ever told you that you're a 'flawed person?'"

"I've been lucky not to have to work with psychiatrists since the mental hospital. But I know people who have. And if people weren't regularly abused like what happened to me, there wouldn't be a consumer survivor movement."

"See? With you it's always 'Oh, I've heard stories.' What about you? I want you to tell me right now, what evidence do YOU have?"

So I told him my story. I told how I went to the doctor for help because I thought I was sick. How he started talking behind my back to my friends and family about how I should probably get on meds. How I started sensing that people were conspiring behind my back. (Because they were.) And how they hit me with, "You have a mental illness. There's something wrong with your mind and it'll never get better. You'll probably live a half life filled with misery and regret, and take these pills which change the way you see the world but don't make anything better. Oh and be sure to talk to your friends and family about it, see what they have to say. That's important, you know."

"So," He said. "You went to a doctor for help, and he gave you help." (Gasp.) "What a surprise."

"How can you call that help??"

"Look, Nathan. It may have hurt. But he did what he thought was in YOUR best interest. But you give him no credit. You think he just did it all because he had some kind of grudge against humanity."

"You know, NAZI's were all ordinary, nice people too. They only became monsters because they were trained that way. Psychiatrists are trained to believe that people—REAL people—can have something FUNDAMENTALLY wrong with them, with their very minds. That's what they believe."

"Tell me, how many years have you been trained in psychiatry?"

No answer.

"Well I have been trained in psychiatry." (He loads a web page about the WRAP program.) "Look at this program that every mental health professional in the State of Idaho is REQUIRED to take."

From there on I was on shaky grounds. I'd never been formally trained in psychiatry, and though I'd heard things about the consumer-directed movement in mainstream psychiatry, I hadn't looked at it much. There was still a thing or two I wanted to say, though.

Emotions were hot, of course, and the fiery exchange went on deep into the night. But there was nothing about the shouting that wasn't congenial and ultimately beneficial. And we concluded with friendly words: about how he liked to see me "all fired up," how angry we never really get, and so on. The point is: it was beneficial. It was positive and wholesome. If I had not decided to get angry, I would've missed the point.

Let me show you something I made:

The execution may not have been the best, but those goddesses are real. They'll come to me, in the middle of the night after a bad day, wrap their beautiful thighs around me, and get right inside my mind.

They're like, "I fucking hate you. You're a terrible person. I wish you would die. You're bad. I hate you. Just die."

They break my neck. They feed me poison and rip my intestines out. They hurt me, and they don't stop.

They're like: "I hate you. Just die. I fucking hate you."

And suddenly, when the world stops, I burst into tears, look her straight in the eyes, and—the love. We cuddle; flowers bloom, babies coo, birds tweedle, and everything's alright.

You know that feeling of grimacing through an unbearably hot sauna then laying down for twenty minutes in 40 degree water, blissed out like you've taken some cocktail of the most amazing drug, only without the addiction or side-effects... kind of like that. Ladies, I'm telling you, it's hard to compete with an experience like this. (Come to think of it, probably shouldn't try either.)

See, in our culture, we're so rational and deliberating and scientific that we forget the heat of emotions. We forget the value of rage and depression, and of tears. I hate it when people say, "Don't cry." Actually I love it, because it makes you cry. The more they say it the more you cry. That's why it's so nice to say. The trick is, don't analyze and deliberate and come to the reasonable conclusion, "She probably doesn't want me to cry. I should stop now." Because tears are the seeds of joy.

I know it's not right to hurt people. I know it's not right to get angry and yell at someone and put them down. But sometimes, if you're extremely careful, it's the best way to show love. If you REALLY love someone, and if you yell at them lovingly, it's like that hot sauna. It opens your pores and all the bad stuff in the world comes out. Then when you cry together, and hug each other, and the birds and the flowers—it's like the cold water. It's bliss. As long as you love, you can't go wrong.

Peace with an Edge

A lot of time is spent in Buddhism talking about taking reality as it is. This is one of the most wise thoughts a person can think, but in the West, I think there may be a couple problems we should address.

See, we Westerners are used to a work-a-day lifestyle where everything is one thing after another. Everything is so hectic now with fast cars, cell phones, computers, iPads, iPods, and all this money going everywhere at once and seeming to get us nowhere.

And a lot of people complain about commercialism and television and how people spend their lives glued to the television and, now, addicted to Facebook and Twitter et al. One of the great things about American culture is that we hold being critical of our culture as a cultural value. However, I tend to think that people indoctrinated into this self-critical approach end up hating America by default for no reason.

Okay, let's talk about advertising. The word itself seems to evoke cynical manipulation by immoral puppet-masters. But if that's the case, then why is it that advertising is so increasingly consumer-oriented? Why does advertising bend over backwards to make the consumer feel good about him- or herself?

And not all of it is a lie, either. I actually do like to drink Coca Cola. I really do see the benefit in Apple computers. I really believe in the philosophy evoked by the three-word phrase: "Just do it." And what of the advertisers themselves? Immoral puppet masters?

Actually, from my experience, Advertisers are some of the most positive, wholesome, and genuinely decent people you'd want to meet. And I'm not alone in thinking this: Luke Sullivan, author of advertising bible Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! agrees with me: "One of the great things about this business is that you’ll be surrounded by vibrant, interesting, and genuinely nice people," he writes. "I don’t know why the industry attracts them, it just does."

A lot of people blame advertising in part for our hectic lifestyles today, because we're always pushed to want more and more. We see this as such a problem. But I have a radical idea:

How about we just take it as it is?

Unfortunately, when we're told to "take it as it is," I sense that what we really are thinking is "take it with some reservations." Take it like a strung-out, unhappy mother with a disobedient child who's too exhausted to correct him. Take it, but disagree with it, and simply not bother to fight it anymore.

But really, why is the American lifestyle such a problem? Okay, exploitation of the third world is a problem. Monsanto ripping off poor farmers with bad seeds is perhaps the biggest moral failing the world has ever seen. But I'm not talking about that; I'm talking about the lifestyle. Drinking Coke. Watching television. Listening to iTunes. Driving down the street in a BMW yelling at someone over the phone because you and your client(s) want it just perfect.

I actually like getting yelled at sometimes. I like yelling at people, too. It makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. I'm not a bully: I don't like making people feel bad about themselves, and I'll work 110% to make sure that doesn't happen. But the point is, if we just sit around being peaceful all the time, we'll never get anything done.

I hear all the critics now: "What's so important about getting things done? Why can't we just be happy with what we have?" Sometimes, that's okay. It's important to be happy with what you have, and never lose sight of that. But Bodhisattvas must always be trying to make our gurus and precious sentient beings happier. Just sitting around being blissful doesn't get the job done.

America is an immensely active culture. But I think this is one of its strengths, not necessarily a weakness. This is why, in my humble opinion, we don't just need peace: we need peace with an edge. We should be peaceful deep inside, but also edgy and challenging. We should be active and vibrant. We should make people feel happy about themselves and their choices, not by just sitting there, but by engaging them with shining and intense eyes. Like a good advertisement.