Selfishness and Altruism

From The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand:

"Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason."

This is the reason why this blog does not exhort the reader to make some sacrifice, despite it being a social work blog and for all my own very selfish :) purposes altruistic in intention. Instead I insist upon the right to choose your own happiness, as opposed to having others choose it for you.

A short note: Be Happy Doing Nothing

Last week I wrote about a young one asking me for advice on how to develop his interests. Today he wrote again to me, "I have no interests. What do I do now?"

....

I told him to be happy doing nothing.

Social work* is, after all, respecting the choices of the client. Apart from special situations of imminent harm or criminality, which are governed by our Codes of Ethics. I think this is something you the reader should know if one day you should ever decide to seek help.


*More accurately this refers to direct social work practice, not the entirety of social work.

On the Notion of Free Will

Work is falling on me like a ton of bricks. In lieu of a proper post, I offer you this, and note it for my own reference as well. =)

Edward O. Wilson writes this in his book On Human Nature, p. 72:

Consider the flip of a coin and the extent of the coin's freedom. On first thought nothing could seem less subject to determinism; coin flipping is the classic textbook example of a random process. But suppose that for some reason we decided to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on a single toss. The coin's physical properties are measured to the nearest picogram and micron, the muscle physiology and exact contours of the flipper's thumb are analyzed, the air currents of the room charted, the microtopography and resiliency of the floor surface mapped. At the moment of release, all of this information, plus the instantaneously recorded force and angle of the flip, are fed into a computer. Before the coin has spun through more than a few revolutions, the computer reports the expected full trajectory of the coin and its final resting position at heads or tails. The method is not perfect, and tiny errors in the initial conditions of the flip can be blown up during computation into an error concerning the outcome. Nevertheless a series of computer-aided predictions will probably be more accurate than a series of guesses. To a limited extent, we can know the destiny of the coin.

An interesting exercise, one can reply, but not entirely relevant, because the coin has no mind. This deficiency can be remedied stepwise [...] Let the object propelled into the air be [...] a honeybee. [...] The bee appears to be a free agent to the uninformed human observer, but again if we were to concentrate all we know [...] and if the most advanced computational techniques were again brought to bear, we might predict the flight path of the bee with an accuracy that exceeds pure chance. To the circle of human observers watching the computer read-out, the future of the bee is determined to some extent. But in her own "mind" the bee, who is isolated permanently from such human knowledge, will always have free will.

Hope

Every year, at around this time, I have thoughts about my own mortality.
Every year, without fail, someone somewhere out there will try his very best to kill me. I do not know who he is, nor who he will be, the next year and the year after that.
Each year, I hope beyond all hope that it will not happen again, but I know better.

And it's not only me, it's my entire family who's involved as well.

I'm referring to CNY driving on Singapore roads.

*

Hope is really a topic best left unexplained - almost everyone knows what it is. It's the quality that makes the events of each day worth living. And it drives the search for meaning.

But for some, each day is "more of the same", and little brightens it.

Part of social work requires the rebuilding of hope. And it has to be the person's own reframing of his situation, and enlightenment about his support networks and habits of self-care, that allow hope to regenerate. No one else can do those for him. No one else can take those steps for him. He has to find within himself the emotion to change.

Often the way is obvious, even to the person.

This bears repeating. Often the way is obvious. But what makes him take it, is an emotion. It may be ratified by post hoc justification, or it may not. That does not much matter.

If I were to advise CNY drivers to be more careful, I could do it till I was blue in the face, and I would still have to drive as defensively as always. Because not everyone would see. Not everyone would see the need to not hurt, not kill, and not threaten to take by force another's life, simply because they are lost on the roads, or impatient, or, good grief, drunk.

Please. Do it. Feel it.

Life Transitions

Disclaimer: This short note is to enhance general knowledge and should not in any way be taken as professional advice specific to any individual’s unique situation. Contact points for social services are available at your nearest Family Service Centre on an islandwide basis. Please feel free to call or walk in for assistance, you are always welcome to come by and talk with us.

The life course perspective looks at the brief lives of human individuals, using time as a linear dimension. It emphasizes the diversity of life experiences that individuals go through. At this point we will take a look at its major concepts.

A life event is “a significant occurrence involving a fairly abrupt change that may produce serious and long-lasting effects”. A mid-term change in class teacher may be a life event for a child. Other occurrences will be life events for a young adult who is a college student. Having life events is normal. (point)

A transition is “the change in roles and statuses” that occurs as a result of life events. Transitions are also normal. The developmental change in an individual who moves from school/part-time work to full-time work is one such normal transition. (line)

A turning point is a special life event or transition that produces a “lasting shift in the life path (also known as life course trajectory)”. Life events and transitions become turning points when they “close or open opportunities, when they make a lasting change on the individual’s environment, or when they change a person’s self-concept, beliefs, or expectations”. (point/line)

The life course trajectory is, as said, a life path. It is a “long-term pattern of stability and change in a person’s life, and usually involves multiple transitions”. Trajectories can be drawn up for work, health, education, and family, and these in total make up the individual’s life. (line)

(Quotes from the above are from the first chapter of Dimensions of Human Behaviour: The Changing Life Course, 2nd edn, by Elizabeth D. Hutchison. Sage Publications 2003.)

What distinguishes the life course perspective from the well-known psychology theory of developmental stages is its focus on human agency in making choices, the deliberate acceptance that chronological age is not necessarily an indicator of life stages, the other deliberate acceptance that the order, length, and pace of life stages are not universal though they can be broadly generalized, and the importance of linked lives (family, social networks) in affecting an individual’s life paths. What it shares with developmental theory is its acknowledgment of time as a common leveller. You can’t run away from time, both say.

Or so you think.

*

I think that Singapore has lost this sense of time. We grow up, learn our maths and our sciences, learn our languages and mother tongues, get streamed, pursue some form of further education in yet more specialized subjects, get a job, buy a house and thereafter seem to do nothing at all but wait for death. In these stark terms of economic production we pursue the eternal; by describing the modern history and the future of Singapore as one of overcoming constant economic struggle, our linear dimension has become wealth instead of time. This has become our Singapore Story by default, our living legend endlessly reproduced in all our unthinking workers’ lives.

Now, dissatisfaction may be part of the human condition - “the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted”, says the character Dream in Neil Gaiman’s famed Sandman collection. But how dissatisfied can you get with a life’s time, when no one ever outlives it? :) We can only make the best of what comes. There is something very reassuring about knowing that some things shall eventually pass, in the dimension of time.

We grow up, get educated, get a job, buy a HDB flat, and then die.

Is this Dream the choice that you have, with all your heart, made? Or have you just gone with the flow?

“We are particularly prone to ignore information that is contrary to our hypotheses about situations. Consequently we tend to end our search for understanding prematurely. One step we can take to prevent this premature closure is to think about practice situations from multiple perspectives.”

- Gambrill, in Hutchison p. 84

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

Will it change the world? Of course not. Will it change anything? Not directly. But is it worth three hours of your time? Yes, definitely. Bloggers often feel themselves to be at liberty to pass comment on political issues and politicians. They do have, and must have, that liberty. But I cannot help but feel that their commentary and criticisms would be taken so much further, and would be delivered/crafted which so much more insight and clear-mindedness, if they were willing to step up and say these things openly and face to face with the person/policymaker they are criticizing, so that the latter will have the right of reply and also so that you, as a commentator, do justice to your views. [...]

A reply means it is a conversation. [...] It does not mean that I am converted to their thought - often I come away with new points of disagreement. But my perspective is always developed, because it has ventured out of its safety zone, and dared to engage. If we become blase and disinterested, distancing ourselves, then is it really the government's fault when we complain of an affective divide?

- Gayle Goh

Mr Wang, Gayle, Rambling Librarian and Bernard Leong have written about this. Not.

It seems to me that there are two issues here: one, talking about the blogosphere in the mainstream media (MSM), which has been cautiously disparaging of 'the new media' at best and virulently abrasive at its jealous worst ('blogs are worse than porn'). And two, the opportunity of having a face-to-face conversation with a Cabinet minister. Gayle's position, if I have not misunderstood it, is that the advantages present in the latter outweigh the pitfalls of the former. Mr Wang's position is simply the uselessness of the latter. (Although he was the first to get the ball rolling. He maintains this view in comments to the post though, at time of this post's writing.) Rambling Librarian says the personal disadvantages he perceived in the face-to-face conversation outweighed its advantages. BL takes a more convivial tone in saying that "the discussion before and after the actual event was actually more interesting" and goes on to hint of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting in his chatter about "surprising excerpts".

So I'm not sure how to title this post, since everyone has begun by talking about very different things. I could turn this into yet another insipid post on the joys of civilised discourse, but the question is: How does meeting someone in person enhance respect for the other?

(I wholeheartedly support Gayle's take on it, by the way. If that makes me '[bursting] with emotion', so be it.)

This isn't an easy question to answer. The Singapore government has often been accused of being a faceless monolith. In fact there is this joke going round about how the Feedback Unit was renamed REACH because its original acronym cut a bit too close to its actual response to citizens. But my cynicism digresses.

As a general rule, it is a given that we don't rob or kill people whose viewpoints and hopes and dreams and actions we know, as compared to those we don't know. (Some of us still do. But it's considered a disease.) Well, it's much harder to coldly kill someone we feel has a wholeness of his own and yet a shared humanity to ourselves, even if it is only something as irrational as having eyes, a nose and a mouth. One only has to look at Mickey Mouse's cute neonate features to understand that humans are very strange. Alternatively, nobody loves a sea urchin but harp seals (oh, so adorable!) were a hot environmental cause a few years ago.

So what makes George Yeo less credible than a harp seal? Is it because he lacks "wholeness of his own self" as a Cabinet minister? Do you think that for any person in a value-judged profession, his professional identity must necessarily have eclipsed his personal one at all times? Even if it is this profession.

"I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP."

- PM Lee Kuan Yew, 1982
via Singabloodypore

Perhaps the story from this is that politicians are people too.

P.S. At the time of this post's completion, Michael Palmer has replied to Mr Wang to apologize and invite him to re-post his comment that was, I quote, inadvertently censored on his p65 blog post.

Comfy Chairs

From the ST, Dec 16 2006:

... thousands of middle-aged managers who lost their jobs during the late 1990s downturn and have yet to make their comeback.

Many have tertiary education, speak good English, own private property and used to hold middle and senior managerial positions paying $5,000 to $20,000 a month.

But these days they shuffle around office buildings and shopping centres, a tatty plastic bag of dog-eared CVs and documents in hand, looking for job-vacancy signs.

They first ended up on the chopping board after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Since then, the forces of technology, management de-layering, right-sizing and outsourcing have shoved even more off their comfy swivel chairs.

[...]

In particular, psychiatrist and suicidologist Chia Boon Hock, who has studied thousands of suicide notes, is keenly watching this vulnerable group. He notes that the chief reason why those aged 45 to 59 kill themselves is financial. (emphasis mine)

Sitting on my comfy swivel chair at home reading about other mature adults being shoved off the ultimate Comfy Swivel Chair ... struck fear into this one's heart, especially when I am wondering about my own financial future here from age 40 onwards.

*

Is it more true that some industries are overhyped and later marginalized, or more that individuals blindly follow trends like lemmings under the 'old social compact' , such lemming-like behaviour subsequently much criticized by the government when things started to go sour? What do you think motivates each and every person's choice of career path?

In another paragraph of the same article, finally even the ST itself has said, "'self-improvement' is a bad word for many in this group, who used up chunks of savings to pay for courses leading to diplomas and degrees, only to find these of little use when the crunch came"! Also see this article by Terence Chong on Dec 11.

Please take heed of your own chairs before they become so much flotsam in the ocean.

Quotes, Humour, and Beginnings

"A woman’s wisdom is her gift to women. Her beauty is her gift to men. Her love is her gift to God. So why do you intend to inflict your wisdom on this poor unfortunate man you say you love?"

- Orson Scott Card, Tales of Alvin Maker: Prentice Alvin

from Wikiquote

Because I choose to.
- Neo, The Matrix