Author Archives: Will Servant

Robin

I usually try to create some sort of clever title for my posts, as is my wont. Not today. It has taken me several days to even allow the truth in so that I might process it. To me, Jonathan Winters was the greatest comedian of all time. And obviously second, only by a nose, was his disciple Robin Williams.

In late 1975 I, half hippie seeker and half glitter rocker, ventured to San Francisco to find enlightenment and that perfect gig in the sky.  Late in the same year I found a room in a lovely apartment in the Richmond district just north of Golden Gate Park. Several blocks away was a bar I would frequent to watch a band called Shadowfax. And several blocks further west on Clement St., the Richmond’s main drag, was a little place called the Holy City Zoo.  One night I discovered Shadowfax wasn’t playing because of a band member’s illness and decided to venture further down Clement, unexplored territory as it was. Sitting down with an adult beverage I saw on the stage a young comedian, a little raw but with immense talent. It wasn’t difficult to see he was s star in the making.

Robin Williams was true to the “Zoo” until it it closed nearly a decade later. He came back frequently to test out new material and see old friends. Because of the early exposure to this immense talent I followed his career closely. He starred in what is probably my favorite film, the drastically under appreciated “What Dreams May Come”. He had access to places we only dream of. With such access comes a terrible price. This price sometimes cannot be paid. He could easily be compared to Shadowfax, who bore the weight of great knowledge and remarkable magic on his back. His death is tragic in a Shakespearean sense.

I haven’t been able to say anything about this yet. I have been unsure of when I could. But a friend posted a reference to Russ Limbaugh contending that his “leftist worldview” played a part in Robin’s actions. I was furious and still am. I immediate fired of a comment, driven by my anger. As I read it over I knew this was my expression, this is what poured out of my heartbroken soul.

I am reprinting it here. I couldn’t possibly state it better.

Sarah, I can’t bring myself to “like” such sad commentary as yours, that necessarily illuminates the darker side of life. But thank you for not being suckered into accepting the easy dismissal of the serious nature of our failure to address the issues confronting the mentally disordered. You have refused to regurgitate the convenient and conventional condemnations that have been so casually and callously tossed about it the media. You don’t blindly accept the standard gutless and flimsy excuses. These are good things. Robin was not a coward. Rather we are the cowards for not having the guts and compassion to confront depression and other such mental disorders, such as the one I suffer from, Bipolar Disorder.

Last time I checked the brain was part of the body, and as such they are truly serious diseases of the body, like so many others, that require serious considerations for treatment. We have to fight the extant public stigma to the death. Our allegedly loving and compassionate society must give those who suffer mental dis-order our determined efforts to save them from the ravages of these serious illnesses, the same as we give cancer patients, to name but one example.

Am I angry? Damn straight I am. I was a hair’s breadth from the same fate as Robin. I have been inside the cauldron and I claim a modest right to address this issue with a humble level of authority. Some existentialists will say the only truly human decision to leave behind a hopelessly tormented, demented and unholy life is that one made by Robin. Yes, that decrepit life is rotting just around one of life’s corners, but there are many rooms in my father’s house, many other corners to peek around, hesitant and fearful, unsure of what lurks around them. And yet there are so many wonders waiting there for us, even for those who sometimes need to be pulled away from the darkest corners into the light. Every one of us needs to be pulled from the fire at least some time in their life.

Joy has no meaning without sorrow. But if we can only know wisdom through suffering know that we do need not to suffer continuously. We intuit, with support from any and all scripture, as well as sane secular counsel, that we, as a society, can fight relentlessly to free us from the Sisyphus fate of being captured in cycles of pain, caused by any number of devastating dis-eases. We have, can and will defeat them. But can we, as a people, regain some of our inherent compassionate heritage and open our vision to include mental disorders in that litany of destructive cycles? I pray we can and do, sooner rather than later.

I feel lucky to still breathe the air and witness another daily sunrise. A door opened for me at the last moment and behold, there were instantly four new corners to explore, and one revealed a path that led to renewed life. How many of us have lost their way in the dark and could not find the door that led them to safety? Something as simple as a nightlight fashioned from empathy and love could save so many.

It is frightening and deadly dangerous to have the courage to venture into those areas of the mind that release such otherworldly talent but are also populated by monsters inconceivable to those of us incapable of even knowing those places exist. We suck in the entertaining energy of that talent’s expression. We bask in it’s light and laugh til it hurts. But do we give anything back? We all know you don’t miss the water til the well runs dry. We emptied Robin’s well even as we loved him. There was no water left to sustain him. We are complicit but blameless. Robin went there willingly. He chose that path. It was the corner of the room that shone brightest to him. He saw the demons there but was compelled to bring the shining joy back to us anyway. In the end the monsters won.

We cannot judge. When one is both courageous and a fool who are we to choose which he is? Not I, nor you, nor anyone. There is only one judge.

 

 

Frustration Thy Name is Legion

I’m confused.

Did President Obama have our diplomats in Benghazi murdered to keep us from finding out about the IRS targeting conservatives or did he have the CIA create Hurricane Sandy so we would forget about Benghazi or did he have those kids in Connecticut killed so we would stop blaming him for the hurricane or did he hire those Russian kids to bomb the marathon to make us forget about gun control or did he bribe Snowden to leak NSA spying info so we wouldn’t remember how we killed the Russian kids to cover up that they were Obama’s patsies or did he pay off the jury to acquit George Zimmerman to make us forget how he spied on everyone or did he purposefully screw up the Obamacare website to make us forget Benghazi, again, or did he sign a ton of executives orders like a tyrant to make us forget how awful Obamacare is, again, or did he hire kids from Central America to invade the USA to make us forget Benghazi AND how awful Obamacare is or did he give ISIS the weapons to form their caliphate to make us forget whatever it is we’re not supposed to remember or did he really pay Hamas to fire rockets at Israel, knowing they would in turn eventually invade Gaza and help us forget that he is a treasonous dictator or did he just have the Air Force shoot down the commercial airliner over Ukraine to make Putin look bad and make everybody forget all the horrible stuff he has ever done in his entire life to fulfill his lifelong goal of hatefully killing America, including never deporting anyone and not finding that airplane in the middle of the Indian Ocean?

Wow, I just know Lenin and Hitler and Saul Alinsky and Charles Manson and Bill Ayers and Satan, (who is probably Bill Ayers anyway) are having a beer together in hell and praising their demonic Kenyan love child for destroying America forever. Except for that Charles Manson and Bill Ayers aren’t dead yet I’m sure all of that is true because Mark Levin appeared to me in a dream and told me so.

Actually the reality is much more insidious. Our President is working in league with former Vice President Dick Cheney. Strange but true. His foreign policy is leading us to pine for the return of the Neo-cons and their Plan for a New American Century. That little trick of calling him the worst president in his lifetime (which means the worst President in history) shouldn’t fool anyone.

Yes folks, what we need is a cleansing dose of military backed world dominance. Just throw a little more money at the Pentagon and we can once again enforce that elusive concept known as American national security interests, with massive destructive power, at will. Of course we all know how @70 years of that has worked out. I mean we haven’t had any Brave American soldiers killed or maimed for nearly a week now. Maybe.

Perhaps the current concurrent crises in the Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine will delay us initiating the Crusades 2.0 we have been so joyously hurling ourselves toward. That would be a consolation prize of dubious but little value. Perhaps some high roller somewhere took a ton of money on Brazil and bought off Colombia to injure Neymar and then bought off the home side, Black Sox style, to blow the match with Germany. Of course that cheat will be using his new found riches to back that cute corporation who sat behind him in biology, way back in middle school, in her quest to become the first corporation to be elected to congress (at least officially).

So excuse me, as I’m off to find some closely held religious beliefs I can use to enable me to break laws I find inconvenient, while letting sinners do whatever they please, providing they buy what I’m selling and they aren’t women who work for me.

Not only am I confused but my reasons for being frustrated are legion.

It’s Just Really Wrong

In my last post I complained about what I perceive to be media’s constant promotion of the crisis of the moment and what that entails. This anger was precipitated by the recent mass murder in Isla Vista Ca. by a UCSB student. But the primary cause of my anger has been the portrayal of the perpetrators of many of these cruel and murderous acts as people who are “mentally ill”. Although it is true that many horrible crimes of this nature are committed by people with mental disorders, the manner in which people with mental disorders are portrayed is mostly terribly misinformed, wildly wrong and/or wholly demeaning.

I have a few caveats which I will reveal here. First, I have a severe and persistent mental disorder. This is a clinical term but in essence it means I have a mental disorder from which there is currently no opportunity to recover. My disorder is luckily being managed with medication. Not everyone is so lucky. This circumstance makes me particularly sensitive to the stigmas and false perceptions people like me are constantly subjected to. It most certainly informs my opinions about this issue.

Second, I want to make it perfectly clear that my comments and conclusions about what is happening are in no way, let me repeat, no way, intended to downplay, deflect attention from, deny or otherwise diminish the very real causal responsibility of persons with mental disorders, in this and many other events of this type. My issue here is not that the people committing these crimes are mentally disordered. It is in the perception of mental health as a whole, of people with mental disorders and the language used in reference to both that informs my expression.

As time passes it becomes more universally accepted that mental disorders are primarily caused by physical dysfunction of the brain. This can be from traumatic brain injury, from chemical imbalances in the brain, from chemical addictions that affect certain areas of the brain, from genetic deficits, and from other factors that influence brain function. However, the cruel distortions of information about mental disorders and those who suffer with them remain alive, often strengthened by the decades of stigmas built from the passing of myths from generation to generation. We also have an unfortunate history of insensitivity regarding how these people have been treated, from having parts of their brains removed surgically to being locked in the attics of shamed families.

Many of the distorted perceptions about mentally disordered people remain with us to this day. All to often when people hear the words “mentally ill” they see a picture of a wild-eyed and violent person who sees demons that tell them to do bad things and who must be constrained and sedated. They are referred to with colorful names such as wacko and sicko and nutjob, batshit crazy and psycho. The truly unfortunate thing is that although these representations have been proven to be overwhelmingly false, the stigmatized perceptions remain strongly entrenched among a majority of the populace.

The even more truly unfortunate thing is that the media reinforces these prejudicial perceptions. Especially damaging is the consistent use of pejorative terms like maniac, lunatic, and madman etc. to refer to a person with a mental disorder. Nowhere is this more clear than in the media discussion that universally occurs when a mass murder is perpetrated by an obviously mentally disordered person. They are routinely referred to as deranged, crazy, insane and demented. The term mentally ill is thrown around haphazardly without any qualifications.

As many of these murders are committed by gunmen the inevitable debate centers on the juxtaposition of our second amendment rights versus the right of innocent people to live without being gunned down by “madmen”. Invariably the question is raised in the media that asks how many undeserving innocents need to be murdered before guns are taken away from “mentally ill” people. Panels of experts discuss how various segments of society need to recognize and act on the “warning signs” and “red flags” of mental illness. It is intimated that if we can just take care of the “problem” of mental illness that somehow magically these terrible incidents will cease. A more plausible problem in all of this is the fact that pro gun rights groups such as the NRA use this “mental health” solution as a way of deflecting scrutiny from the proliferation of guns with the capabilities of massive mayhem, and the easy access to them.

I am under no illusions that citing facts will do much to change the perceptions and judgements of many of the very people who need them to change, but I feel compelled to say something about it. Let me try to give you my take on all this without getting too emotional. And then let me offer some opinions I feel may help address the crucial social issue of the escalating frequency and severity of acts of mass violence.

1. A very small percentage of people with mental disorders are violent and represent a real threat to society. An overwhelming majority of “crazy” people present no threat of harm to anyone.

2. The people we must actually be afraid of are those who demonstrate a real potential to be a danger to themselves and others. These people represent a small percentage of the mentally disordered but comprise a large percentage of those who commit these crimes. It is less difficult to identify these people than many of us think. Mental health professionals can often recognize these tendencies, even in the young.

3. One dangerous segment of the population are those who unreasonably feel persecuted or shunned. Whatever it is that causes their suffering they cannot help but blame others. When the pain becomes too great they lash out at those they feel have wronged them. There are people who have hallucinations that tell them that some person or group of people is responsible for their misery and must be eliminated. But these people are few and far between.

4. A particularly dangerous segment of society are those with severe antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as sociopaths. These people display little or no compassion for anyone else and are singularly concerned with fulfilling their own desires to the exclusion of everything else. They can be exceedingly dangerous in that they are very intelligent and can conceal the severity of their antisocial tendencies from scrutiny. They can plan and execute elaborate schemes and can elude law enforcement for long periods of time. They can affect any type of personality and behavior they feel will help them accomplish their ends. They normally have complete disdain for anyone who interferes with their selfish goals and have no remorse in removing them as obstacles in any way they find expedient. It is from this sliver of society that I feel many of these so-called “maniacs” come from. Yes, they are severely mentally disturbed. And yes, there desperately needs to be better ways society can identify and address the unhealthy behavior of those with these disorders, the ones who represent a true danger to society. But the remedies are not so readily simple as some would blithely offer.

What can we do?

I do not claim to have the answers but I do have some ideas. We definitely need to be better informed as a society, across the board, about the real nature of mental disorders and those affected by them. We must fight to educate our citizens, especially our youth, about the truth of these chronic disorders. When I describe my own disorder I tell people there is a part of my body that has an imbalance of substances that make me unable to properly process certain chemical reactions. This problem cannot be cured but can be managed by medications that help me live a “normal” life. Younger people usually tell me they are sad my body is broke but glad that the doctors can make it better. They could care less about which part of my body isn’t working like its supposed to. They only care that my life isn’t ruined by it. Adults invariably say “You must have Diabetes”. And Diabetes is similar to Bi-Polar Disorder in those aspects. When I tell those adults that no, it isn’t Diabetes, and they learn the truth many of them give me one of those “Come on don’t mess with me” looks. But they often get a little sheepish when they realize what I am really saying. Mental disorders are primarily chronic physical diseases, as much as Crohn’s Disease or Psoriasis. But they are just not perceived in the same way. These false perceptions must be changed. As with any cycle of misinformation and dysfunction the first cracks and eventual first breaks in the circle are the hardest to realize and are daunting. They must be changed if we are to make any progress in changing hearts and minds.

The rather large elephants, in this case, are the decisions made in the conference rooms of major news to use language that supports the misconceptions and prejudices that surround mental disorders and those who suffer them. As long as people on TV use derogatory language to define mental health and its effects it will be hard to change things. I’m not sure there is a realization that the offensive terminology used to describe people with diagnosed mental disorders is as vile and disgusting as the n word and other pejoratives. There needs to be wholesale sensitivity training for those in the media, training that extends beyond race and gender issues, and also beyond disability issues that are more prominent. If this evolution doesn’t happen the country will continue to be subjected to language that very few people question as inappropriate which perpetuates the misconceptions many Americans have about those of us with chronic mental disorders.

Even when the conversations are not about the mentally disordered, well-meaning adults in the media continue to advance their own, often poorly informed, theories about the why of this violence. They insist that stereotypes such as violent video games and films, suggestive song lyrics, and “politically correct” bans on physical punishment by educators, and the revealing of names and faces of perpetrators are to blame for these murders. While it is true there are correlations between media violence and violent behavior the percentage of youth affected is relatively small and often corresponds with other evidence of violent tendencies in these people. Also, close parental involvement in a child’s life is shown to provide a strong barrier to the deleterious effects of this kind of exposure. So, contrary to the claims of gun advocates, these factors, that are unfortunately broadly accepted, have been shown to have less of a causal relationship to violent crime than has been thought. But they sound quite good in a sound bite, repeated on news broadcasts or in syndicated columns by reporters over and over. For this reason they have found a great deal of traction with the public. Yet even the apparent validity of such proffered causes does not deflect the main focus of blame from the actions of the “lunatics”. Every time there is a mass murder by a “deranged” person the mental health care system is widely discussed, mostly featuring plenty of negativity.

I feel that if we really want to address the sad situation of cultural failure to protect our citizens we will need to venture into some very sensitive areas. As it stands now mental health professionals are only required to reveal personal information about their patients if they break a law. For example, if you tell your therapist that you were depressed because you took heroin they would be compelled to inform the authorities because the use of heroin is illegal. But if you told them you wanted to shoot your mother they would be unable to legally inform law enforcement because of the broad ranging HIPAA law, which protects our health records from being revealed if they are individually identifiable. As with many threats to people’s welfare, law enforcement can only act if a crime has been committed, and not if one is expected or imminent. At this time, in order for us to have any preemptive ability to confront the potential violent actor, the immediate family must get involved. But this raises another example of the stifling effect stigmas have in affecting our ability to help our troubled youth and young adults. Families have responded, out of shame, to the realities of mental health issues within their midst with numb inaction and denial. This familial shame may be even more difficult to overcome than societal prejudices, which are formidable in and of themselves. Also serving as an impediment to the reintroduction of involuntary hospitalization as a viable solution are HIPAA law protections for minors and adolescents over 18. Designed to protect minors from avoiding treatment out of fear of parental reprisals, the law makes it difficult for health professionals to inform families of the fact they find their children potentially dangerous.

So we are left in a position where those who can act are afraid to and those who should act cannot. Those whose job it is to help the disordered have their hands tied when it comes to warning the rest of us. The dangers in allowing mental health professionals to work together with families and law enforcement are real and substantial. The slippery slope argument here is valid. The opportunity for abuse is palpable. The rights of families to protect themselves from intrusion are clear and strong. These factors muddy the waters considerably when we try to make it easier for society to bring those with the potential to harm into the light of day. Without the surety of strong professional medical recommendations to do so, it will be difficult to legislate any effective gun control measures that are not overly broad or ineffectually narrow. And the difficulties in addressing involuntary celibacy are obvious.

It seems that some will do whatever must be done to deny their own complicity in this cancer afflicting our society. The hard fact is, like it or not, that violence is not only an accepted but is the preferred means of conflict resolution in our world. Violence is learned behavior and frankly, an American child learns a great deal about violence well before they ever touch a video game or watch a violent action film. Our young boys learn plenty about misogyny and male privilege at a very young age. When we combine the false legitimacy of violence with guns and hatred for women how can we expect anything other than what we have witnessed. I feel we must accept our own role in creating and nurturing this evil. We must. This is not an easy task. It’s difficult to accept responsibility for such abject horror. But we must.

That the parents of this young man were aware of his danger to society and took measures to provide him with professional help could not prevent his act. That the authorities had interacted with him in a way that should have raised cause for alarm did not result in a good outcome. We feel helpless. Yet we seem not quite willing to do things that help reduce the incidence of these crimes.

There must be some way to make it legal to prevent someone with the inclination to do harm from being allowed to own a firearm without them first committing a crime. Yet there must also be a way to protect that same person’s sensitive health information privacy. There must be a way to involve parents and provide them with resources and help they need to intervene on behalf of their children. At the same time an adolescent must be safe from parental abuse. There must be a way to get all of us to accept our role in making our world as violent as it is.

This is quite obviously not a simple problem and there is no simple solution. I wish I had the answer that will satisfy everyone but I do not. All I know is the continued escalation in severity and frequency of these damaging acts of violence, that tear into the very fabric of our lives, represents a much greater issue than just guns, mental health, or hatred of women. It has to do with who we are as moral beings, as stewards of our children’s civility, as responsible members of society. It certainly is not a partisan matter nor should debate on the issue center on esoteric interpretations of our constitution. Amid all the seemingly endless discussion and the knowledge of the issue’s complexity one simple truth remains.

It’s just really wrong and we need to change it.

Now.

It’s Just Wrong

I have been busy caring for my nonagenarian father and trying to get an exceedingly good and moral man elected to Congress. I  have been putting my writing on the back burner. But an issue has arisen in the never-ending litany of crises that I must respond to. Actually it’s very inappropriate bordering on cruel to place it in a category of that nature, but the media has elevated, or dragged it down, to the level of its constant demand for crisis after crisis. I am speaking about the most recent “mass murder” in Isla Vista Ca. near the UCSB campus. Not to diminish the fact that this was a heinous crime of the first magnitude and certainly newsworthy I must find fault with a preponderance of the media coverage of this awful event.

Sadly, it became the latest incident in the chain of crises, some real and some not so real, to be exploited by news outlets ad nauseam, until the next crisis rears its ugly head. One feature of this style of journalism is the not-stop 24/7 saturation coverage done by all of the networks. I believe this is primarily designed to keep their audience from switching channels. What it gives rise to is meaningless fill featuring the same video footage over and over, often having little to do with the tragedy, and anchors asking a never-ending stream of alleged experts the same obvious questions over and over again with slightly different wording. They send lots of field reporters and cameras crews to the scene, desperately hunting down “exclusives” to be used as “breaking news” that can hopefully ace out the other networks and capture even more viewers. In lieu of finding such special content the reporters are constantly filmed in front of the relevant school or apartment or convenience store or hospital, “let’s go to xyz at 123”, and asked a slightly different battery of the same questions over and over, hopefully getting slightly different answers each time. They then return to the anchor who offers some speculation on the motive or cause, meaning or effect of the crisis.

There is a legitimate reason for this repetition, as new viewers, behind the news curve, turn on their sets and deserve to have the facts, limited as they are, reviewed for them. After a modest amount of time virtually everyone in the world has been made aware of the situation and further catch up is no longer needed. But they insist on airing more panels of new experts discussing the very things that have been discussed and discussed and discussed before. Then we see the obligatory, mostly useless, interviews with shell-shocked witnesses and relatives and my particular favorite, the filling of time waiting for the news conference scheduled for 7PM EST that everybody knows will not take place until 8:30.

Another disturbing aspect of this kind of broadcasting is the misleading and downright false information passed on by news staff reporting rumors, without substantiation, in a vain effort to outdo the other networks. These falsehoods can lead to all sorts of bad information reaching the public that at best is confusing and at worst cruel.

This irresponsibility can go on for days, depending on the perceived severity of the crisis. The networks go eye to eye with each other until somebody blinks and actually reports some of the other news that has unceremoniously piled up in the queue, a lot of which is pretty important, or the crisis of the moment is dramatically replaced by another, more horrible or timely crisis.

I know this all sounds terribly rude, unemotional, and mean-spirited. And it is. For that I sincerely apologize. But this sort of thing is omnipresent in today’s world of infotainment and I believe it does a huge disservice to the public, who deserve much more from the news outlets they depend on.

I have digressed into a topic that represents a severe irritant to me. I should have started with my main point but I got really distracted. Therefore I’m publishing this as a separate post and will start over in my next post.

It’s In The Cans

Some time ago my daughter came to me saying she was tired of the ear bud headphones most kids use with their iPods and such. She wanted a “nice” pair of over the ear headphones for college. She was, of course, most familiar the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre, which are de rigueur for anyone for whom street cred is the least bit important. The most popular models are the Solo, which are expensive for a 16 year old at $200, and the Studio, which, for a teen, tempt burglary at $300. The main feature of the Beats, that which gives them their cool factor, is their bass reproduction, which features the same kind of teeth rattling booming that you hear when a car full of gangsta wannabes pulls up next to you at a stoplight. This is what most teens want to listen to whether they are into hip hop, dubstep, death metal or classic rock. Monster sells them in droves.

The fact that a particular market segment has particular taste in what they like music to sound like is the basis for my observations of the headphone world, as I have been researching a pair for my daughter as she heads off to find adulthood in college. To get an idea of the positive and negative features of the various brands and models readily available I have been reading the user comments at websites such as Best Buy and Amazon, where the average user would purchase. I figured the more esoteric websites offering lesser known yet quality brands were the domain of audiophiles and aural fanatics and would skew my opinions of a product meant for an iPhone and laptop and not a studio or a top drawer entertainment room featuring class A amps and space age speakers with the best 7:1 surround sound crossover unit.

I found that the consumers who actually took the time to comment and review these products were primarily of two types, serious pro musicians and sonic aficionados with limited budgets who were looking for near state of the art, pro level equipment at high end consumer prices and high school kids who wanted to be cooler than their friends and have phones that were more expensive and had better bass than the ubiquitous ear buds worn by the mere peons.

Regardless of brand, model or price the comments were overwhelmingly either raving positive or bitterly negative. One could pretty much determine which category of buyer the commentary was from by the nature of the judgement. A scathing negative comment was invariably from a musician or self appointed audiophile while the “best I ever heard” comments were from kids whose best previous audio experience likely came from a pair of $12 budget ear buds from Walmart. This disparity speaks to many cultural values, our expectations, our perception of value, marketing, design and manufacturing strategies, who creates our entertainment media and why, the realities of sound frequencies, pressure, recording techniques and the human perception of same, and the broadly diverse range of subjective truth among humans relating to their relative perception of the exact same phenomenon.

It is the disparate perceptions, embraced by different people, of phenomenon witnessed by all people, pretty much from the same viewpoint, that are what I see as important here. People perceive both things and concepts, in some ways the same and in others quite different. The frames people use to process these phenomena depend on which perceptions they accept as true. We communicate our truths through language. If we agree that language deals with things and concepts then it is my contention that all things and concepts have both an absolute and a relative nature. I’ll examine this further.

Let us first look at things. The government gives people Food Stamps. This is a tangible activity. It has a giver, a taker, requirements, a physical transactional document that is honored by certain businesses as valid, and a result. It is an absolute thing whose metaphoric frame can be known by knowing any of those various segments separately. It is real and has a recognizable substance. Yet, different people see and judge its value in dramatically different ways, using radically different language to describe and define it. In this sense it is totally relative and one must be aware of the perceiver’s relative agenda before they can know the other parts of their base frame, see it in it’s entirety, and know the language that triggers it into consciousness. To simplify, the glass that is equally full and equally empty is absolute, tangible and universally knowable. But it is relative to those seeing it as half empty and those seeing it as half full.

Concepts are another thing entirely. Concepts are not tangible and therefore there are often as many perceptions of the definition of a concept as there are people perceiving it. But this does not represent relativity. Contrary to things, there is no physically tangible reality to perceive. The absolute nature of a concept must include every disparate perception, for everyone’s perception is real and has to be included in any definition of the concept.

Perhaps this can be slightly more simply stated by using mathematical set circles to describe these ideas. With things there is a real object which means there is something all viewpoints share. Thus all sets intersect and share points of data. These intersected subsets represent the absolute nature of the thing, qualities that everyone accepts as truth. For example everyone sees that a certain chair is made of wood. People who say it isn’t wood are considered as not being truthful. Their set does not intersect the “truth” subset. The relative nature is represented by all the different sets of perceptions, however slight, of the thing. These relative sets may include subsets of shared perceptions of their own but always include exclusive qualities that separate them from other sets. They are sets on their own and not subsets.

Regarding concepts the sets are much different. In this case all the relative sets are actually subsets of the gigantic absolute set of qualities. Once again they may share qualities, creating other subsets, but are again unique subsets unto them selves and thus relative.

So to summarize, the absolute nature of things are subsets and the relative nature sets, and the absolute nature of concepts are sets and the relative nature subsets.

Back to the headphones. Applying the aforementioned principles, the actual headphones are a real and physical thing. They have an absolute nature, the subset of construction materials, color, name, packaging, which everyone sees as the same, and a relative nature, represented by the sets of semi pro and amateur listeners, with their different perception of what the headphones do, how they perform. These differences are revealed through the reviews. Although the relative sets are all different, the subsets created by the shared perceptions of certain relative sets point to a modestly dualist relationship between those sets. They break down basically into those who, for a number of reasons, think they sound good and those who think they sound awful.

This is where things get interesting from my perspective. There are undoubtedly those who would say that how the headphones sound is not about the physical reality of the thing at all but a subjective thought process, in other words, a concept. This sounds logical but it is not quite accurate. Yes, it is subjective process but it remains a thing and not a concept. Regardless of the relative perceptions of sounds good or sounds bad those perceptions are still dependent on the thing being the thing. Therefore the perceptions are also a thing. This is the logic behind the statement “perception is reality”. The thing itself represents the physics of it’s existence and the perception of the thing signifies the metaphysics of it’s nature.

Where we get into concepts are in the reasons for the perceptions. Yes, reasons also relate to the thing but are not dependent on the thing. A reason may relate to several other things. Reasons that relate to many different things, often in a large shared subset, can sometimes be called ideologies, or a logic of ideas. So a reason can exist outside the realm of the thing and must be considered a separate idea, or concept. This subtle but significant difference between perception and reason is confusing to many of us and, when applied dishonestly, can blur the line between the perception and reality of both things and concepts.

Often when coherent collected concepts, ideologies, are applied to perceptions, things can be made to appear to have several different realities, and the agenda behind the ideology directs and focuses all perceptions of the thing into a particular desired reality, somewhat like cattle being led to the killing floor. Absolute truths can appear relative, and thus subject to seemingly logical doubts that the truth might not really be universal. Relative truths can be made to appear universal and apply to everything. It can get kind of scary.

But back to the headphones. The concepts dealt with here are the “reasons” people use headphones in the first place. They relate to the use of the thing, the headphones, but they are more broad reaching. In this instance they line up in a simple, if over generalized, duality of “I want to be cool and have fun” versus “I want state of the art and have a superior experience”. But they could also apply to a relationship with other things, such as the choice of buying an X Box or an iPad, or the choice of going to a poetry slam or a theatrical play. So the reasoning is more conceptual than tangible and thing specific.

What I find interesting about this is the phenomenon of people using the same words to describe essentially different concepts. This muddying of the waters has been called using contested concepts. Words such as love and freedom have become contested concepts because there are many unrelated ideas that use the very same word to describe all of them. For example the people with the highly disparate concepts above, about headphones etc., could all describe their reasoning as doing what is cool. Cool is perhaps the ultimate contested concept.

So how did I get off onto all this esoteric tangential stuff just from thinking about buying my daughter some headphones. Because sick minds leave no stone unturned when it comes to complicating a simple task. But I do think its not bad to understand that we all share at least some truths about “things” even though there are those who say we don’t. And many of us have very few or no shared “concepts”, outside of a sharing of contested words, when we are often told that we not only do share but must share.

So Monster can market Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones to impressionable kids because they are able to convince them that the concept of being cool can only become an absolute reality when they buy those headphones. This flies in the face of the relative reality that any number of headphones, some more and some less expensive, are perfectly able to satisfy their initial reason for having “good, over the ear headphones”. But it is a clear example of how smart marketers use psychology and knowledge of metaphysics to influence our nation of consumers.

Confusion about absolute and relative truths and ideas, concepts, perceptions and reality abound in our world. But we don’t have to suffer that confusion. It can be as simple as believing what we feel or believing what we are told. Yes, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Just try to remember that both men are in the same building.