What I Learned From An Invisible Rabbit
How two talking frogs helped me understand Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve often had those moments where I imagine I’m having a discussion with my kids about some great lesson I want to impart to them about life. In my mind the whole scene is reminiscent of the those black and white public service education videos from the 1950’s. There I sit in the ottoman chair wearing my Mr. Rogers-style sweater vest with my hair firmly set with pomade. I’m lighting a pipe as the warm light of the fireplace puts a nice glow against my face. I begin to lovingly smile and teach my children some piece of tried and true sage wisdom. My kids sit patiently and quietly on the carpet floor at my feet and stare up at me with anticipation. The tender smiles on their faces stretch wide as my oldest asks,
“Why do bad things happen to good people, Daddy?”
Before I can begin my benevolent lecture, the film starts skipping and the projector light burns a hole in the image of me and my beautiful children. The light burns brighter and brighter until I feel a pain in the back of my eyes. Reality comes into focus as it dawns on me that I’ve been napping and my dreams of easy parenting burn away as my youngest son holds a bright flashlight directly into my eyelids. He screams into my ear as if I’m lost in a crowd somewhere down the street.
“DAD, ARE YOU AWAKE?”
The other two children are fighting in the background over who hit the other one first with a stick. Waking to blindness I attempt to arbitrate a resolution of the stick fight with my eyes shut. Then I hear the front door open, and the dogs begin to run through the house. I step into something squishy, and I reach blindly for the ottoman chair. Five minutes later, the dog poop is cleaned up, band aids applied, and all flashlights confiscated. I then try to remember my dream. I try to hold on to the same attitude as my dream avatar, and attempt to teach my kids the concept of critical thinking on a child’s level. This turns out to be another failed reminder of dreams versus reality.
Frog and Toad
I try to figure out ways to teach my kids “how to think” instead of directly telling them “what to think”. For me this is more difficult than it sounds. Two of my children have the attention span of a gnat. Any discussion where I encourage them to be more curious and inquisitive often lasts for about fifteen seconds until a blue car or something else passes by and then they run off to their next distraction.
It's all a work in progress. Google searching, “how to teach your kids to think like a philosopher” gave me recommendations on a book series called, Frog and Toad, by Arnold Lobel. The short adventures of Frog and Toad span several books and they are wonderful. The other day we were re-reading one and it struck me, finally, that I just now got the message.
Toad is sad because his mailbox is always empty. He sits and looks at the empty mailbox hoping, noting the fact that he never receives any mail. This makes him very sad. His friend, Frog, sits next to Toad to provide moral support. The illustration shows them staring at the mailbox and frowning together. Later, Frog decides to cheer up his friend, Toad, by mailing him a letter. However, the mail is to be delivered by a slug so it will take a long time to arrive. Frog runs to Toad’s house and tells him that he mailed him a letter and then discloses the full contents of the encouraging message (because slug delivery takes forever). The two go back outside and stare at the mailbox again. It’s the same illustration as before. They are staring at an empty mailbox, waiting for the mail. In one image they frown because they believe no mail is coming. In the other scene they smile because they believe mail will eventually arrive. In both instances the mailbox is empty. The difference in what they choose to think about determines their perspective (happy or sad).
On the surface, the lesson is a positive one: what you choose to focus on determines how you feel. There is something deeper here though that scratches away at a cluster of thoughts and ideas I’ve tried to parse out over the years that I’ve never satisfactorily resolved. But the rub of it still impresses upon me this value that knowing “how to think” is more crucial than knowing “what to think”. From the starting point of Frog and Toad, I extract two questions for addressing existence.
(1) What is true?
(2) What is useful?
Phrasing it differently, reality and utility spring to mind. This is the point of the discussion, where my wife rolls her eyes, picks up her phone and says “yes honey, that’s interesting. Uh-huh… hmm…yes.” All the while I watch her index finger rhythmically swiping upwards on her Facebook app. Message received. If you wanted a sermon, you’d go to church. Fine, I’ll keep to five minutes or less (jokes not included).
Victor Frankl and Logotherapy
Keeping fresh in mind my loose lesson learned from Frog and Toad, hang on to the positive idea of how perspective determines your attitude. Now let’s jump back in time to 1944, and imagine we are in Auschwitz Germany, standing inside the fences of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Victor Frankl stands in the rain, and shivers. Wondering at first when, if, and how this will end, he stares at the electric fence enclosing his prison and tries to remember how many people he has watched end this nightmare by running headlong into the fence. Try to understand the anxiety and fear. Try to imagine the humiliation and suffering. Try to understand how difficult it would be to endure. And yet, Victor Frankl grasps on to the notion of humor, or appreciation for the beauty of a sunrise, etc. as lifelines to hope.
One day Victor stands in a trench, digging away at the frozen ground under the harassment of his guards when he finds his most important idea to cling to. He imagines his wife. The first hint of a daydream takes shape, and in his mind, they begin to talk. After a while, he slowly finds a way to continue living, in less despair and anguish than any onlooker might perceive.
For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there…
I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
-Victor Frankl
This was how Victor Frankly survived the concentration camps. He recorded in his later work, “Man’s Search For Meaning,” that he used his technique of logotherapy to help a colleague once who came to him wrestling with the pain having lost his wife. Frankl asked him if his wife could have endured the suffering better if the man had died instead of her. His colleague said, “No it would have been much harder for her to bear this.” Frankl indicated that he should take comfort then knowing that fate released her from that burden. Instead, he suffers the loss instead, sparing his wife that heart ache. Dr. Frankl’s colleague thanked him and left. His perspective had shifted. Now his suffering had meaning because he could view it as love for his wife.
Is Utilitarianism Intrinsically Good?
Holding the perspective where we can see the positive, instead of the negative, provides a powerful utility for progress, as first hinted at with my Frog and Toad reference and painted clearly by Victor Frankl. This leads further into the notion of utilitarianism. If there is a ten-ounce cup with five ounces of water inside, we can choose to either see the cup half empty or half full.
From Frankl, I can readily see the benefits of this philosophy. Turmoil and strife are inevitable, and the usefulness of perspective deserves respect (my meager opinion of course) when recounting the events of Frankl’s experience both with himself and his patients.
Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, discussed what he called metaphorical truth. In this he indicates that it is literally false for a creature to believe that a porcupine can shoot its quills. However, behaving in the belief that the porcupine can shoot its quills, might make the creature more observant of where it put its feet. This might force the creature to give a wider berth to porcupines in the field than it would otherwise. Believing something literally false might increase the survivability of the creature.
Bringing it closer to home, I grew up in a very rural area. A friend of mine’s father lived in a home where the private road approaching his driveway crossed over a fifteen-foot-long bridge. The bridge stood over a creek some ten feet below. On this private and lightly trafficked road, his kids often wanted to play near the bridge. The children, all younger than six years old, would disobey him when he told them to stay away from the bridge because they might fall over the edge. He told them a story that a giant angry wolf lived under the bridge and loved to come out and eat children. A lie of course. However, it worked. The kids who were not afraid of falling off the bridge were indeed afraid of the imaginary wolf. So, they stayed away from the bridge. Believing something that is literally false allowed them to behave in the desired manner to avoid the ‘true’ danger. Frankl could argue why the benefits of utilitarianism can be “good”. From the standpoint of survivability, I can’t argue against this. Should I believe then that a positive perspective is, by nature, always a good thing though?
Could the use of utilitarianism, by the same rationale Frankl indicates, be used in such a way as to commit, or permit atrocity?
Deborah Layton
“In madness there is no way to think logically.”
-Deborah Layton
Deborah Layton, in 1971 was one of the parishioners in a church started in California. They focused on helping people injured by poverty, and drug addiction. They created a community where their value to one another was cemented by their faith and their belief systems. The utility they had gained from practicing their faith, gave them something they believed worth living for. Then the “seductive poison” took its root. The following blossomed.
The belief that their leader, Jim Jones, was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
Rationality, reason, and a love of truth were replaced with obedience, imprisonment, and lies.
The parishioners’ thoughts and beliefs were highjacked and reprogrammed to keep them in line with Jones’s vision: right up to the point of mass suicide and the murder of children.
Looking back, there are a few things I have come to learn. People do not knowingly join “cults” that will ultimately destroy and kill them. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is mostly the innocent and naïve who find themselves entrapped. In their openhearted endeavor to find meaning in their lives, they walk blindly into the promise of ultimate answers and a higher purpose. It is usually only gradually that a group turns into or reveals itself as a cult, becomes malignant, but by then it is often too late…
-Deborah Layton
Neither Debbie nor her mom was deranged. Nor were they unstable women abnormally susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic preacher/politician. People join cults unwittingly. Even reasonable, intelligent people can be fooled by demagogues, and too often, the deeper they become involved in one of these quasi-religious or quasi-political groups, the more difficult it may be to see the potential dangers.
The Jonestown Massacre
Over nine hundred people committed mass suicide and murder under the influence of blind faith adherence to a set of beliefs. Clearly, there are cases where cold hard truth and facts must remain critical when dealing with reality instead of the utility of faith and perception. Perceiving the world through personal preference, or through the lens of another, to avoid seeing hardship or danger (or one’s culpability creating either) does not exempt one from that hardship or danger. I’m also uncertain whether it can exempt one from the responsibility of action considering them.
As Debbie makes clear in this memoir, both she and her mother were searching for a life with meaning—not unlike so many other Americans at that time and since. Except that their search led them to the Peoples Temple and Jim Jones. Having escaped from the Nazis, it was Lisa’s fate to die in Jonestown.
-Charles Krause
Jim Jones’ vision of faith and perspective on community, poverty, and love, sounded like an antidote to suffering and hardship to many. But as Deborah Layton and many others discovered, this perspective on life turned out as poison.
The Superior Orders Defense
Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, was convicted for war crimes against the Jews at the end of world war II.
Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. . . . We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody, and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t. . . . I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.
“There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,” he wrote. "I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty."
Nazi soldiers used the defense of superior orders to justify their genocide during their war crimes trial in Nuremburg. In their view, they could take the perspective of absolving themselves from guilt because the orders were commanded to them rather than of their own accord. The use of perception and faith allow them to avoid the cognitive dissonance we would expect a normal person to endure when asked to perform such horrific acts. While I hold no sympathy for the nazis, it would be a mistake to believe that any of us are not capable of performing harm to others provided we were given some simple tools of dissonance avoidance and coercive orders.
Stanley Milgram Experiments
In 1962, Stanley Milgram conducted behavior experiments in response to claims by the Nazi war criminal, Adolph Eichmann, that he wasn’t guilty of the Jewish genocide because he was only following orders. The Milgram experiments were designed in different variations of the following scenario.
The test subject is participating in an experiment where he/she is told that another person being evaluated will be sitting opposite the test subject and strapped to a chair.
The supervisor gives instructions to the test subject indicating the test is for the benefit of some scientific endeavor.
The supervisor, who administers the test questions, orders the test subject to push a button administering an electric shock to the other person strapped to the chair if they give the wrong answer.
As the experiment proceeds the voltage of electric shocks increases.
In reality, no one is ever shocked. The individual strapped into the chair is pretending to be shocked as part of the experiment.
The study was to evaluate the degree to which one person would willingly harm another person when coerced to do so. Sixty-five percent of all test subjects continued to shock the patient with increasing voltage, even when the patient begged for the experiment to be stopped.
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”
-Stanley Milgram
Emilie Caspar Experiments
Emilie Caspar is one of many scientists who have continued the studies of social coercion started by Stanley Milgram.
Out of these 45,000 orders to send painful shocks, only about 1,340 have been refused, which corresponds to roughly 2.97%. Or, in other words, only about 54 individuals out of 1,500 refused – sometimes – my orders.
When I designed this task, I really thought that no one would ever accept to send a painful shock to someone else, especially for a monetary reward as small as €0.05. In addition, people know the experiments of Milgram, so why would they obey?
-Emily A. Caspar
My takeaway from Caspar and Milgram’s research is not that we should give nazis a pass or that their “following superior orders” defense is justified. Rather, their findings should give me pause to ask myself how susceptible I might be to similar heinous crimes under the right circumstances. No one wants to admit that they have an inner heart of darkness. We want to separate ourselves from the villains we see in society without any hint of credibility to a claim that “there, but for the grace of God go I.”
To Thine Own Self Be True
When is it not acceptable to look at the cup and say, it’s half empty or it’s half full? Under which circumstances can you not afford the utility of perspective? I suppose if the probability of imminent death and suffering to me were the result, then I’d choose utility and perspective. Having some hope of survival keeps me in the game. Beyond that, I see a gradient of uncertainty. Anxiety and stress for making the right decision can often be alleviated by crafting a better narrative of what we see to make it easier to act. Daniel Kahneman makes a keen insight into this in his book, “Thinking Fast and Slow.”
Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern…
It explains why we can think fast, and how we are able to make sense of partial information in a complex world. Much of the time, the coherent story we put together is close enough to reality to support reasonable action…
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgement is missing. What we see is all there is. Furthermore, our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation and suppresses doubt and ambiguity."
-Daniel Kahneman
Using the utility of perspective there is a fine line to walk between seeing the brighter side of things and telling an outright lie.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Imprisoned for his criticism of the Stalin regime of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to prison in the Russian gulag. Much of the history of the gulag would have been lost had it not been for the dedication of Solzhenitsyn to record and recite as much of the events that occurred as he possibly could. Later he published these events in his book, The Gulag Archipelago.
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones...
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
Solzhenitsyn makes it abundantly clear, that you cannot lie to yourself to ease your conscience of what’s happening in the world around you. To do so, to participate in false narratives is to help sustain the tormentors. If the utility of perspective were evaluated as a principle in general, then this seems in stark contrast to Victor Frankl.
Weights In The Balance
The argument for the utility of faith or perspective is a two-edged knife that cuts in both directions. In my mind springs the question: why risk another genocide, or gulag, or Jonestown to preserve a perspective on reality or faith in the story we tell about it? What better tools help deal with reality apart from those of self-delusion, and blind obedience?
There is a metaphor in my mind that encapsulates this idea in a way that I can remember. I imagine a giant set of scales. The scales oscillate, never perfectly at equilibrium. Each side of the scales holds an idea illustrated by quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche.
One side: “The love of truth has its reward in heaven and already on earth.”
The other side: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Too much perspective (a why to live) might cause one to ignore some of the truth in reality. On the other hand, too much focus on the sorrow in reality might strip one of any meaning or purpose for living.
I don’t know how to correctly measure the healthy dose of perspective, but I currently hold to the belief that cold hard truth is more important than anyone’s emotions.
Stirring The Pot
Solzhenitsyn, Layton, Frankl, Milgram, Nietzsche, Frog and Toad.
If I’m going to try and take these ideas and make a decent decision model, then I draw the following conclusions. Unless we are living in the matrix, reality exists. Long term survival and benefit must rely on absolute and critical assessment of facts, and dedicated allegiance to truth, regardless of how those facts accord with my emotions or anyone else’s.
Perspective, meaning, and purpose are tools that should serve to help deal with cold hard facts in a difficult world. Those tools must never be taken as facts in themselves. People (myself included) remain susceptible to coercion and lies provided the story they tell themselves about what they see better accords with their feelings about it.
In the short run of day-to-day life, I want to believe that Frog and Toad have got it right. But if I’m honest with myself, I know that is a policy I don’t want to follow. The unforeseen consequences start to pile up when the avoidance of hard truth and the tidal drift of complacency tosses one to the shores of the gulag, or the concentration camp, or some other kind of hell.
I admit I’m not knowledgeable enough yet on the schools of psychology and philosophy to grapple this problem fully. I’ve had too many friends who have died from alcoholism to not realize the seriousness of inventing excuses to avoiding dealing with a problem until its malignancy is unstoppable. Making up excuses to feel better about absolving myself from responsibility to act rightly should NOT be a goal. So like Socrates says, “what I know for sure, brother, is that I don’t know much of anything.” (the D.W. Eversole translation). In the meantime, I do now prefer to remember some advice a friend once gave me. He said, “People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.”
This reminds me of this old Jimmy Stewart movie called “Harvey”. Jimmy Stewart’s character, Elwood Dowd, believes his best friend is a giant invisible rabbit, Harvey, that only he can see. Most people think Mr. Dowd is suffering from mental instability but at the same time, he is so pleasant and caring that everyone loves his company. As it turns out, in the movie, Harvey (the giant rabbit) is real. There is a scene when Mr. Dowd is confronted about the fact that his sister is trying to have him committed to a mental institution. Mr. Dowd refuses to have any ill feelings toward his sister. When asked about how he can stand by without any righteous indignation about the situation, Mr. Dowd says,
“years ago, my mother used to say to me. In this world, Elwood… she always called me Elwood… In this world, Elwood you must be ‘oh so smart’ or ‘oh so pleasant’. For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
Until I can get a better handle on my philosophy, I too think I’ll take the path of Mr. Dowd and Harvey.