The Forgetting Pill

It seems that it is now possible to selectively erase memory. The discovery is being touted as a treatment for erasing painful memories. While the discovery is in the laboratory phase, it is only a matter of time before the treatment is offered to the general public. No one likes painful or traumatic memories. So a treatment like this one would almost certainly be taken up by a large number of people.

Should a treatment like this be used? This questions is related to another one: what makes a personality? All of us undergo many different experiences in our lifetime. Some of these are pleasant, many more are unpleasant and a few are downright traumatic. Generally speaking, we also do not retain all the memories of all our experiences. However, every experience, pleasant or unpleasant, helps to develop our personality. These experiences help us to become a unique individual. Over time, they help us to grow and mature mentally. Why is a person in their 40s generally considered more mature than someone in their 20s? The answer lies in the greater number and variety of experiences that the older person has gone through.

So the question becomes, what will happen to our personality if we start to selectively erase memories? What is the criteria for erasure? If experiences help us to mature, then surely erasing the memory of those experiences will cause us to regress. Will that not make us less than what we are? How will anyone grow or learn if unpleasant experiences can be easily and selectively erased? It is said that we learn from our mistakes. How can we learn if we choose to forget about them? I feel that this is an alarming development. Unfortunately I fear that all too many people will choose to erase memories that they consider painful. This will not enhance us as human beings. It will instead degrade us to become little better than animals living in a rosy haze.

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• To Remember, Or To Forget ... (thefrailestthing.com)
• Memory (shelvesandboxes.wordpress.com)
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Hypocritical Attitudes

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of molesting a hotel employee. The former governer of California and the fearsome Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger admits to fathering an illegitimate child with a member of his staff. Singer Chris Brown is accused of assaulting fellow singer Rihanna. Charlie Sheen has a spectacular meltdown which is all over the news. Some members of the clergy in America are apparently unable to keep its pants zipped up. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is accused of frolicking with girls young enough to be his grand daughters. South Carolina Governer Mark Sanford flies off to Argentina to visit his mistress without informing his family or staff.

Are these people nuts? They seem to think they have a right to behave in any fashion they see fit. These people really seem to believe that normal rules of conduct, decency and morality do not apply to them. And then they have the cheek to lecture the rest of us on issues of morality! The examples given above are taken from developed countries. Developing countries have much more egregious examples of public figures behaving abominably privately while donning a public mantle of morality. For example, members of the Saudi royal family are famous for hijinks abroad while maintaining a puritanical state domestically. It is this mismatch between private behavior and public posture that outrages. These figures seem to consider the rest of the population no better than children who must be admonished about proper behavior. This is an insult to our intelligence. It is also rank hypocrisy.

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Royally Married

Royalty continues to exert a strange fascination over us. The interest shown in the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton was phenomenal with about 2 billion people worldwide watching the event live. It really does not matter what your views may be about royal families. You may consider them to be scum of the earth and leeches on the body of the nation, when it comes to their activities, most of us are highly interested. Consider the situation like this: if you have read any article or seen any program on royalty, then it means you consider them to be important enough to devote a certain portion of your life to knowing more.

Another thing that comes out in relation to royalty is class consciousness. In the case of William and Kate, we have a situation where two people met in university, liked each other, started dating and eventually got married. All perfectly ordinary in Western societies and completely unexceptional except that one of the parties happens to be royalty and the other a commoner. This was an aspect that was highlighted throughout the relationship and especially in the run up to the marriage. A commoner marrying royalty! A descendant of coal miners marrying into a descendant of people who had not seen the inside of a mine for centuries. Very few people seem to ask the question so what? Is there anything special about the genetic heritage of royalty that sets it apart from "commoners"? Ofcourse not. This reaction speaks volumes about our attitudes towards people and our assumptions regarding class.

There is a kind of snobbery in this. The feeling that I am better than someone else because I am richer, or better looking or come from a more prominent family or whatever. The feeling that my genetic stock is in some fashion superior because of my station in life. So we give those less fortunate or different from us pejorative terms like trailer trash, bimbo, redneck, camel jockey and many others. This feeling is also what impels many people to obsessively research their ancestry usually in the hope of discovering some sort of a royal link. Most of us, specially if we are middle class, suffer from it. Perhaps this is at the root of our obsession at the "common" origins of Kate Middleton.

Arrogance

Arrogance is a fascinating emotion. No body likes it and yet all of us are guilty of it to some degree. What is interesting about this emotion are the reasons people are arrogant about. Almost inevitably, the main cause of arrogance for any one has nothing to do with any personal achievement. Indeed people who have actually achieved something are usually not arrogant. Root causes of arrogance largely stem from family lineage or family wealth or looks. All of these things are essentially luck of the genetic lottery. Someone born to a rich family could just as easily have been born on the other end of the social spectrum. If you are blessed with good looks, you personally had nothing to do with it. So in cases of obvious arrogance, there is no firm foundation for this emotion. The reason for which a person is arrogant is completely outside that person's control.

There is also a form of arrogance that emerges in the work place. The most common reasons for this arrogance stem from one's vast network of connections or from one's qualifications vis-a-vis co-workers or from too rapid promotions or from a hugely inflated sense of self worth: a feeling that you are God's gift to the company. This is also an overt form of arrogance. Such persons are generally extremely unpleasant to work with and morale inevitably suffers with a consequence of a higher turnover. Such persons also tend to get shunned and attempts are made to block them off into a silo.

There is a much more subtle form of arrogance than these though. Almost all of us suffer from this form regardless of how we view ourselves. The basic definition of arrogance is an offensive display of superiority or self importance or overbearing pride. The vast majority of people consider themselves superior in some respect to others. Consider the behavior of drivers on the road. At some point, most of us have accelerated just enough to prevent somebody from overtaking us. A primary feeling in such cases is why should this driver get ahead of me. Does he think himself better than me? This is an example of arrogance. Or consider this: you are at a traffic light (or going about in the market) and a beggar approaches. How do you feel? Again arrogance. This form is extremely difficult, almost impossible to control. It also betrays us in our decision making. All too often we decide not to pursue a course of action because it is "beneath" us even if said course would have been beneficial either financially or otherwise. As soon as we think like this, we exhibit a subtle form of arrogance.

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Ambiguity - II

As I have stated before, we live in a world full of ambiguous situations. However, we seem to be hardwired to avoid ambiguity. This ofcourse made sense in our remote past. If I am a hunter-gatherer, then I better be sure that the shadow I see in the bush I am about to pass is not some lion or other dangerous beast that could attack and kill me. If I am an early farmer, I better be sure about when to plant so that I don't go hungry later on.

So when we encounter ambiguous situations in the modern world, we are unsure how to react. By definition, ambiguous situations are novel ones; If we had encountered a similar situation previously, we would have some idea how to react. The human body has two basic responses to a given situation: fight or flight. Both types require a fairly high level of certainty. Ambiguous situations do not lend themselves to the required level. As a result, our bodies are under almost constant stress. This ultimately leads to high levels of chronic stress related problems in the populace.

Unfortunately, the level of ambiguity in society is not going down. Rather the opposite is happening. Scientific and technical discoveries are on an exponential trajectory. These often lead to a high level of social changes occurring in society. Take the whole social media phenomenon at whose apex Facebook is currently sitting. This has introduced a whole new method of interaction. But the rules are not clear. For example, what is a poke? What happens if I "poke" somebody. Is it polite? Rude? Does it send some kind of message that I don't want to send? If I see somebody's information, am I being curious or am I stalking? Should I bombard my friends with constant status updates? All these are important questions with as yet no clear answers. There is no doubt that as a society we will evolve some standardized response to these types of question in this type of situation. But then we will encounter some new type of situation and again we will have the same problem.

Our situation is like being on a treadmill that keeps going faster and faster and so we have to run harder and harder in order to stay upright. This is ultimately exhausting and many people give up what seems to be a hopeless struggle. Is there then no solution? Are we doomed to keep struggling in the face of new, ambiguous situations that will crop up with monotonous and ever increasing regularity? Personally I am hopeful. I like to think that we will come up with some heuristics to help guide us through this ambiguous maze that modernity has constructed around us.

Ambiguity

We live in an ambiguous world. The old certainties have been stripped away leaving us uncertain of where we stand. This phenomenon has occurred no matter where we live as a proliferation of media outlets, the spread of the Internet coupled with the spread of mobile phones and globalization brought each of us in increasingly close contact with other cultures and peoples. The conflict that this engenders can be seen most closely in the children of immigrants. The people who originally immigrated have had a particular kind of upbringing that inculcated in them a particular set of values both moral and cultural. They expect their children to follow these same values heedless of the fact that the children have grown up in a different cultural context. The clash that almost invariably follows often results in the certainties of the parents being destroyed. Nor is this restricted to immigrants. The mere presence of immigrants with their strange customs and values (and often religion) ends up shaking those of the natives themselves. Just as the interaction of two generations of immigrants results in the old certainties of the parents being stripped away, the interaction of immigrants and natives does the same for the latter.

Changes in the social environment also result in ambiguity. As an example, earlier generations of men were generally speaking sure of their place in the world. They were the breadwinners for the family while their wives were the homemakers. Now that women have entered the workforce in large numbers, men are no longer sure of their place in the world specially if the wife ends up earning more money than the husband. The new conditions have resulted in an ambiguity leaving people unsure of how to behave. Nor is the workplace exempt from ambiguity. Again to take the above example, the induction of women in the workforce has rendered old modes of behavior obsolete without specifying new modes. Again an ambiguous situation has been created leaving people unsure of how to behave.