Robin's Interesting Thoughts

Religion serves many purposes, but I’ve come to believe that one of the most important is helping people cooperate with each other. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Many religions label behaviors that serve the community as “good” and those that are overly self-serving or detrimental to others as “evil”. Individuals are often cast as having a “light side” and a “dark side” or dual influences from “god” and “satan”. Religion helps and encourages people to engage in the former type of behaviors.

Robert Wright realized that we can insightfully describe this using the language of game theory.

Specifically, some situations are “zero-sum” or “win-lose”, meaning that one person’s gain is the other’s loss. For example, if there is only one rabbit to eat, then if I eat it, you go hungry.

Other situations are “non-zero-sum” or “win-win” meaning that cooperation results in gains for both people. For example, if we can only catch rabbits by working together, then cooperation is what allows us both to eat — cooperation leads to abundance.

Humans are equipped to handle both types of situations. If we sense a zero-sum situation, hormones like cortisol flood our body and we become protective, aggressive, and narrow-minded. If we sense a non-zero-sum situation, hormones like oxytocin flood our body and we become generous, caring and creative.

I’ve come to believe that one of the key insights at the core of all successful religions is that nearly every situation can been seen as non-zero-sum. In other words, we can nearly always apply creativity to find win-win solutions (which generate abundance) even if a situation at first seems clearly win-lose. The key hurdle is that our ability to be creative and generous depends on our non-zero-sum hormones being activated. In other words, this is a self-fulfilling prophesy where believing that a situation is win-win is required to put us in the right state of mind and body to figure out what set of actions will make it win-win.

Viewed in this light, many (even most?) religious and spiritual practices are ways of maintaining that community-oriented, win-win mindset. For example, an emphasis on forgiveness helps us return to a cooperative stance with a person who has betrayed our trust. A practice of gratitude inspires us with past examples of generosity and abundance. A weekly gathering helps us stay connected and aware of the community which we all depend on.

It makes sense to me that successful religions became successful in part because they helped communities cooperate and create more win-win solutions leading to abundance, relative to religions which were less effective at promoting cooperation and whose communities thus missed out on valuable opportunities.

The Dalai Lama has often said, “My religion is kindness.”

I’ve come to believe that this has a sound basis in mathematics.

“A tool can give you something concrete that you can imagine using, but a tool is not going to give you persistence… it’s not going to tell you which path to take. It’s not going to give you mettle… when everything feels like it’s been destroyed around you, you can’t just pull out a tool… Where do we nourish and foster the creative imagination that permits you to bring into the world something that does not now exist?”

-John Paul Lederach (via On Being)

“There is a whole section in the bookshop called ‘self-help,’ but there is no section called ‘help others.’ The irony is that success and joy actually come from the service we offer to others. It’s not ‘How can I lose ten pounds?’ — it’s ‘How can I help my friend feel healthy and strong?’ It’s not ‘How can I find my dream job?’ — it’s ‘How can I help someone I care about find their calling?’ It’s the act of service, not the selfish pursuit, that actually helps us solve the same problems we may face in our own lives more effectively.”

-Simon Sinek, Together is Better (p. 131)

“The flavor and the sheer joy of non-doing are difficult for Americans to grasp because our culture places so much value on doing and on progress. Even our leisure tends to be busy and mindless. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete. The wisdom in it, and the equanimity that comes out of it, lie in knowing that something else surely will.

“It reeks of paradox. The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good.”

-Jon Kabat-Zinn
(Wherever You Go, There You Are, p.38-39)

One observation from Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton has stuck with me. He writes:

“More lawyers have come to me for therapy than have members of any other profession, and it’s not coincidence, since so much of their training is to learn to live by rules. One important rule they try to live by is that the proper way to be angry is to have a fight using the rules. They often try to do this in their private lives, with complete lack of success. Perpetual arguing to convince others of the rightness of your case doesn’t work worth a damn in personal relationships, and we all know it but can’t seem to stop.” (p.21)

I thought this was fascinating. You’d expect lawyers and the legal system to be a reasonable place to look for ideas about how to resolve conflicts. Indeed I have repeatedly done so in the past, in both home and work settings. But if I’m being honest, Blanton got it right — my attempts tended to fail miserably, leaving me confused and deflated.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that resolving conflicts has absolutely nothing to do with arguing a case. Quite the opposite, it is a creative process of collaboratively inventing new solutions that have the potential to meet everyone’s needs.

The courts are built on punishments, blame, winners, and losers. Conflict resolution is built on a search for opportunity and shared goals.

The two have essentially nothing in common except that they are both methods of dealing with a dispute.

I think it’s telling that our legal system evolved directly from the methods used by kings and patriarchs to issue decisions. We merely replaced the sovereign with a set of laws, interpreted by judges and juries. We the people hold the power to create the laws (at least in theory), but we remain subjects of those laws and juries, just as we used to be subjects of the king. If we do not follow the rules, we are judged and punished by an outside arbiter. The rule of law.

There are many reasons why this doesn’t work well anymore, at least in normal life. For one thing, we want to be free, autonomous adults — not subjects to an outside authority (not even one called “fairness” or “justice”). For another, the technique of punishment focuses our minds on fear, scarcity, and self-protection, all of which work against any quest for peace and reconciliation.

Of course, fighting it out in a courtroom is preferable to fighting it out on a battlefield. And trial by jury is certainly preferable to the whims of the monarch. But do we really need to be fighting at all?

Could we be using some of that energy instead on inventing new ways of living together and helping each other such that people feel less compelled to commit crimes in the future?

This is the direction known as restorative justice and it is clearly on to something.

Perhaps the spouses of lawyers have known it all along.

A friend was recently telling me about a frustrating encounter they had had with a relative.

“I was trying to have an open-minded discussion but it became clear that their political beliefs were simply whatever the NRA endorsed. How was I supposed to engage with that? It left no room for debate.”

I suspect a lot of people have found themselves in a situation similar to this. We’d like to be able to talk with people on the other side of the political spectrum but cannot seem to find a bridge. I tried to bring to mind what I’ve learned about nonviolent communication. What question could be asked that would invite connection rather than judgement and conflict? Something that would reflect our genuine curiosity? Something that would honor the fact that everyone is the expert of their own experience?

How about this:

“Why is the NRA so important to you?”

“We spend our lives rushing around hardly pausing
to breathe” my friend said. “Are we
human beings or human doings?”

I wondered the same as I sat
at a committee meeting listening
as the debate circled back for the third
or fourth time.

And yesterday at the department of motor vehicles
as a representative reached for a form,
assisting the gentleman twenty six ticker spots
ahead of me

And as I drove home, stopping behind
a woman cautiously awaiting an opportunity
to turn left

While a crane leisurely hoisted a beam
into its place on a new overpass, then meandered back
to the pile where a few thousand more
were ready

And this morning as I sat at the window
watching the birds in the soft morning light
as a light snow fell around them.

I think I am both.

A human being
impatient
And a human doing
nothing.

(inspired in part by “The Present” by Billy Collins,
from The Rain in Portugal)

“Life-alienating communication both stems from and supports hierarchical or domination societies, where large populations are controlled by a small number of individuals to those individuals own benefit. It would be in the interest of kings, czars, nobles, and so forth that the masses be educated in a way that renders them slavelike in mentality. The language of wrongness, should, and have to is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves — to outside authorities — for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings.”

-Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication (p.23)

The building blocks of community, as outlined by Peter Block (in his book Community: The Structure of Belonging) and summarized for the Enlivening Edge community conversations:

• Invitation rather than mandate
• Possibility rather than problem-solving
• Ownership rather than blame
• Dissent rather than resignation and lip service
• Commitment rather than barter
• Gifts rather than deficiencies

In the entire history of the world, not one person has ever chosen to be born. It’s simply not a power we have. We’re a planet composed of people who found ourselves here and are doing our best to make the most of it.

All this is obvious, yet it’s just so existentially strange.

I suppose the uneasiness many people feel about birth control has to do with this. Deciding to have or not have children really is a way of playing god.