I've become a misanthrope as of late, that is, I'm been experiencing general feelings of distaste for the people I've met recently. They seem tiresome and I have been expending less and less effort to camouflage these feelings. I think everyone goes through this at one time or another, but I want to try and do something constructive with it. The conditions that brought on this mindset are situational - being a foreigner often means that local people approach me the same way, asking the same questions and making the same silly assumptions about me and my world outlook.
At the same time, my fellow travelers and expats often annoy me just as much. On my last flight to Calcutta, I cringed at the sight of a dreadlocked European couple in the airport with their bright baggy hippy circus clothes. I watched a couple cry when airport security confiscated their bowling pins (used for juggling tricks) because they could conceivably used as weapons. One despaired in a thick French accents “But if you take them away I'll have no job! I play with them for the children all over India... Varanasi, Goa, Agra... (all major tourist spots)” I couldn't help but smirk at the absurdity of the sight.
I have a deep disdain for privileged people trying to pass themselves off as poor and downtrodden. This only intensifies in under developed countries. I've really grown to hate the sight of other foreigners in my travels. They make me feel even faker and more self conscious than I already do. Natives recognize my impulse, but don't know what they make of it. They don't understand why I treat the street people and servants with so much respect but offer my cultural compatriots so much disdain. This is just how I learned to approach the world a long time ago, perhaps artifacts of my radicalization or good humanist education in my younger years. Those security guys dealing with the hippies' long hassle just seem so much more deserving of respect. Now, these folks are in no way smart, nor saintly, but they seem authentic.
Feeling better than others isn't satisfying enough for me - I feel bad for being an arrogant narcissist. As bad as this sounds, I really do want to participate in their “improvement” - I don't want other people to look down at them way. This sentiment is what I hope separates me from your average cynic. I realize that being unrepentantly negative about others in this manner is not a fit mindset - it will only end up clouding my mind and rendering me unable to fully experience the company of others. So, I'm contemplating ways to embrace my judgmental tendencies and channel them into a more productive outlet. I'll start the thought process in my experiences abroad and then bring it home.
The mostly upper middle class Indians that I have met are extremely innocent people by my culture's standards. This doesn't mean that they are simply sheltered conservatives. They may know of scandalous things, but their behavior just doesn't reflect it. Thus, they've often got the mentality of a sixteen year old when they are twenty four. This can be really cute or really trying, depending on the circumstances. The guy that brought me to the airport this morning is a bit older than me, is married with a child, and works as an investment banker. He's speaks great English, is well educated, has been exposed to lots of Western media in his life, and has traveled outside India more than once. Yet, I found that he was actually less advanced in his thinking than some of my friends in Bangles that have been afforded much fewer of those privileges. I don't know what exact factors make someone more worldly or mature, but it must have to do with really opening one's mind to wholly alternative conceptualizations of life and grappling with their adequacy. For some reason he never has and perhaps never will. He's just firmly rooted... which is fine, because his life seems quite healthy for all involved.
Perhaps it takes a divorce, death, or job loss to really shake someone out of their mindset. I might make the assertion that different countries have different baseline levels of experience. Like many developing nations, India is just beginning to grapple with a lot of the problems brought on by modernization and adapting cultural mores. They are never really taught in school to think critically or argue effectively, which becomes readily apparent when one brings up hot button issues in a group setting. You hear a lot of really tangential assertions being thrown around, little or no reliable evidence being presented, and quick escalation to finger pointing and emotional appeals. This isn't so different from other places in the world, except that the people involved have achieved much higher average levels of education and affluence relative to others in their society. Most discussions end up in standoffs between the fatalism about everything (India especially) and blind faith in some kind of loosely directed progress guided by the West.
This poverty of abstract reasoning in respect to social problems is not my major concern. I'm much more interested in helping people deal with the more immediate threats to their well being. I've met a lot of people with personal problems that I notice and classify right away. The last place I stayed was a hotbed of substance abuse, demotivation, and dysfunctional marriage. CouchSurfing offers guests the unique opportunity to enter people's lives for a short period of time and get a fairly in depth snapshot of their lives. Sure, that last phrase is an oxymoron. I know many readers will insist at this junction that you can't really get to know people in such short spaces of time. They probably believe coworkers, family members, or therapists would have a better chance of "knowing" someone. However, I would suggest that there are problems with the observational positions of these ideal types... they are too "involved". Yes, I know this sounds like a classic privileging of laboratory style "objective detachment"... but it isn't.
Sometimes, having relatively less knowledge about the totality of an individual is a good thing. By “thin slicing” people through short bursts of interaction and narrow observational views, we can avoid informational overload that often confuse the issues. the better they will be at accurately diagnosing their character traits. There have been some good experiments with psychologists making diagnoses utilizing more and less complete information about a patient. What they have found is that once the level of detail crosses a certain threshold, the diagnoses no longer improve. Moreover, they often become noticeably worse as often contradictory signs produce second guessing. Family members usually have that same problem coupled with inhibition and distortion that comes from having to bear the daily consequences of living with the person. Basically, someone with problems is harder to deal with if their life is tightly bound up with your own.
When I see people with classic personal problems, I feel the desire to help. I know what happens if no one does anything to alter another's behavior – nothing changes. And my position as a stranger, even as a foreigner, offers a kind of allure of expertise and the perception of balanced views. However, I am often slow to say anything about the pathologies I see. And the more time I spend with the people, the harder it becomes to break out of the friendly repertoire we've established to talk about really hard, prying issues. Still, I have often dreamed about becoming some kind of amateur traveling therapist. The idea of helping people see themselves in a different way and using that to work through their problems is especially enticing to me. Anyhow, I don't have any training and I don't know if I could stomach the required years of school for professional certification.
Therapy is generally expensive. It's a needed service that should be decommodified. Churches and similar religious institutions sometimes do a good job for members of their congregation, but there is still a huge gap for most people. There is an avenue for this in social networking systems. I remember telling my friend Kristy, a therapist who works with adolescents, that she should start taking her patients' MySpace pages into consideration because they represent an important means of public presentation of self that could be very helpful in diagnosis. Perhaps this too could get a therapist bogged down in relationship details, but the bigger problem is that such investigation routes are widely seen as unethical. The mediated digital identities found on social networking services are formally public, yet the implications of background checking individuals by them are complex.
Casey Fenton (the creator of CouchSurfing) told me last summer that he believes the next generation of social networking would tap "emotional knowledge". I still don't really know what that means (see my blog on moods), but I do agree that there is potentially something of substance here. There is the potential for some sort of decentralized therapy services to emerge out of this space. My self perception, like everyone else's, is subject to "looking glass self"... how other people act towards me. I become a more self aware only when people are honest enough to tell me how they really see me. This often happens in subtle gestures that are hard for most of us to accurately discern. What I propose instead is a way for individuals to tell others how they perceive them in the most comfortable and helpful fashion possible. It must strive to minimize apprehension and shame for both parties and use established mechanisms to show the recipient of feedback that those offering it have an established record of insight and compassion. This should serve to take the edge off some of the common harshness that tends to be found in electronic communication.
I'm trying not to fall towards making this an online intervention, but in some ways that is what this spells out. If a person realizes that trusted others consistently have the same complaints/concerns about their behavior, the next step would be to offer means to change it. Think of this as a decentralized diagnosis/prescription process. If an individual chooses to take recommended steps to alter their behavior, there should be a way for them to report on their experiences/progress, much like in a support group. I'm sure we could look to AA chat rooms and bulletin boards to get an idea of how this works and where it falls short. Still, there is no rule that all this interaction has to be text based or online. It would be easy to incorporate video and offline interaction, so long as it was recorded in such a way that lends itself to the overall process.
As usual, you may think I'm crazy for even proposing this, but this is near futurism... it's coming soon in one form or another and it will leverage digital media. I'm sure most readers are in support of anything that provides an alternative to very expensive mental health counseling. Just making an honest public assessment of an individual after you have met them could be one solid step along this path. Do me a favor: take a case study of someone you know and wonder about how such a process might or might not be able to help them.
