We all mess up. We get angry, we do mean things, we make bad decisions. Some kinds of messing up are small things that everyone moves on from, others can land you in prison, and of course there's a whole range of stuff in between.
Whether or not we are aware of having messed up at the time that we do it, a big part of how we learn what "counts" is by experiencing the consequences. In _Engineering for a Safer World_ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world), Nancy Leveson writes about various facets of how sociotechnical systems contribute to (often catastrophic) accidents. She notes a pattern of investigations into why big accidents occurred concluding that the problem was some low-level employee not adhering to safety standards. But that in reality almost no one adheres to safety standards 100% of the time. Instead, people make mistakes and bend the rules and whether or not these broken rules produce negative outcomes determine how seriously those rules are taken, moving forward. Sometimes this decision is actually just fine. Sometimes it lays the systemic groundwork for a catastrophic outcome. Sometimes hindsight is 20-20.
If you go through 30+ years of adult life behaving in ways that hurt people and you do not experience any personal catastrophes, and maybe don't even hear the voices of the people you hurt, life moves on, and you (and others with similar backgrounds and patterns of behavior) continue to thrive, I can imagine how easy it might be for a person to trick themselves into thinking that the hurt they inflicted must not have been so very bad.
What is happening right now, with increasingly widespread examination of privilege, rape culture, the #metoo movement, and so on, is a big learning process as the feedback loops following certain behaviors are undergoing rapid change. You do something a thousand times with no enduring consequences, and then the thousand-and-first time something that you'd taken for granted gets taken away. A response of "where did *that* come from?" is natural. In the case of Mr. Kimmel and many others who have been in the spotlight recently, it is not good, healthy, compassionate, or enlightened but insofar as we respond to conditioning, it is still natural. The flip side of this is that what is happening now, in 2018-2019, might be just the first stages of a long learning/relearning process. We don't know how this will play out.
Another part of the learning process is the reactions of bystanders, who of course have made their own mistakes in the past. Maybe I see someone from my social circles do something she has done a thousand times before with no ill consequences and then, in the changed cultural environment, they are suddenly be stripped of a status-marker for the exact same behavior, and questions arise about what *other* rules might be changing. It can be scary.
So, I very much hear where you're coming from. It's not so much that it's hard for old dogs to learn new tricks as that it is hard to unlearn old behaviors that we've been trained to perceive as okay.
Hopefully in the years and decades ahead we can make the conversation, and the ebb and flow of consequences for behaviors, productive enough that we can all learn to be better.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-01-02 03:54 pm (UTC)We all mess up. We get angry, we do mean things, we make bad decisions. Some kinds of messing up are small things that everyone moves on from, others can land you in prison, and of course there's a whole range of stuff in between.
Whether or not we are aware of having messed up at the time that we do it, a big part of how we learn what "counts" is by experiencing the consequences. In _Engineering for a Safer World_ (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world), Nancy Leveson writes about various facets of how sociotechnical systems contribute to (often catastrophic) accidents. She notes a pattern of investigations into why big accidents occurred concluding that the problem was some low-level employee not adhering to safety standards. But that in reality almost no one adheres to safety standards 100% of the time. Instead, people make mistakes and bend the rules and whether or not these broken rules produce negative outcomes determine how seriously those rules are taken, moving forward. Sometimes this decision is actually just fine. Sometimes it lays the systemic groundwork for a catastrophic outcome. Sometimes hindsight is 20-20.
If you go through 30+ years of adult life behaving in ways that hurt people and you do not experience any personal catastrophes, and maybe don't even hear the voices of the people you hurt, life moves on, and you (and others with similar backgrounds and patterns of behavior) continue to thrive, I can imagine how easy it might be for a person to trick themselves into thinking that the hurt they inflicted must not have been so very bad.
What is happening right now, with increasingly widespread examination of privilege, rape culture, the #metoo movement, and so on, is a big learning process as the feedback loops following certain behaviors are undergoing rapid change. You do something a thousand times with no enduring consequences, and then the thousand-and-first time something that you'd taken for granted gets taken away. A response of "where did *that* come from?" is natural. In the case of Mr. Kimmel and many others who have been in the spotlight recently, it is not good, healthy, compassionate, or enlightened but insofar as we respond to conditioning, it is still natural. The flip side of this is that what is happening now, in 2018-2019, might be just the first stages of a long learning/relearning process. We don't know how this will play out.
Another part of the learning process is the reactions of bystanders, who of course have made their own mistakes in the past. Maybe I see someone from my social circles do something she has done a thousand times before with no ill consequences and then, in the changed cultural environment, they are suddenly be stripped of a status-marker for the exact same behavior, and questions arise about what *other* rules might be changing. It can be scary.
So, I very much hear where you're coming from. It's not so much that it's hard for old dogs to learn new tricks as that it is hard to unlearn old behaviors that we've been trained to perceive as okay.
Hopefully in the years and decades ahead we can make the conversation, and the ebb and flow of consequences for behaviors, productive enough that we can all learn to be better.