In that article, I pushed Gladwell’s argument further, and said:

The concept of learned helplessness originated with Martin Seligman, whose research forty years ago (involving the psychological torture of dogs) revealed that we can be conditioned to fear things and to believe we are helpless to deal with them. What he called the “three Ps”, illustrated in the diagram above, determine the extent of this resultant psychosis — we can be conditioned to blame ourselves instead of others for a problem, to see a transient threat as a permanent one, and to see a local, isolated threat as a pervasive one.

In fabricating an excuse to strip Americans of their civil liberties, for example, Bush, with media compliance, inflated the threat of terrorist attacks in the minds of Americans from a symbolic attack on two American monuments to a ubiquitous, permanent and pervasive threat to every American by a massive, globally coordinated and maniacal army supported by conveniently-selected Arab states. And by telling us to ‘be extremely vigilant’, to treat those who opposed his draconian measures as traitors, to be suspicious of any activity by those with swarthy complexions, and to equip ourselves with duct tape, Bush implied that if we were the next victims of this hyperinflated enemy, it would be to some extent our own fault. Thus, a transient, isolated publicity stunt by a small group of rich psychopaths, caused principally by a clash of cultural ideals and bolstered by regional poverty and suffering, was turned for cynical political reasons into a permanent, pervasive war that (”if you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists”) we would be largely to blame for if we didn’t blindly support our government.

Once inculcated with learned helplessness, its effects on a person can be quite perverse. When something bad happens (e.g. he/she loses his/her job to offshoring) that person will tend to blame him/herself, to be overwhelmed by the seeming hopelessness of resolving the problem (”there are no other jobs”) and to see its effect as permanent (”now I’ll be unemployed for life”). Paradoxically, when something good happens (e.g. they get a promotion), this same person will not tend to credit him/herself (”I was just lucky”), and will see its effects as isolated and temporary (”I’ll never get another promotion, and I’ll probably screw this one up and get fired”). To psychologists, these are irrational symptoms of a pessimistic, depression-prone personality. Those vulnerable to learned helplessness conditioning are also, they would seem to be saying, vulnerable to depression.

Depression is one of five bad news coping mechanisms I referred to in a previous article. The other four are denial (”I can’t believe I lost my job, there must be some mistake”), anger/selfishness (”I got shafted, the boss is an idiot”), bargaining/pragmatism (”maybe I can get it back”) and resignation/acceptance (”oh, well, time to try something else”). Those who write about these coping mechanisms tend to view the fifth as being the ‘mature’ mechanism, but that’s subjective — maybe the boss is an idiot, or maybe you can get the job back.

Once you’ve reacted to a situation, the mechanism you use for resolving the situation tends to reflect the same mentality (afflicted with learned helplessness, or not) that manifested itself in the reaction, as the figure below illustrates. Those suffering from learned helplessness tend to believe there is nothing much they can do, that the problem is insoluble or intractable, and that it’s too late to act.

Problem resolution of people who are (red) and are not (green) conditioned to learned helplessness

Seligman has now moved on from unpleasant experiments on dogs to a self-help movement called Authentic Happiness, which is based on his concept of learned optimism, the flip-side of learned helplessness. I don’t think much of it, but then I’m not taken with any self-help or psychological ’solutions’. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason, and rather than trying to ‘cure’ depression maybe we need to understand why it is so endemic to our modern world. Is depression like the ’shutting down’ coping reaction of animals cornered by predators? And is the power elite actually cynically encouraging this sense of ‘learned helplessness’ because it lowers opposition to the status quo, and stifles dissent, even though this elite actually has a lot less power than any of us believe?

It is quite conceivable to me that most people (who are not blog readers, or readers of much of anything of quality) reasonably believe nothing they do makes much real difference, and hence they would not find any news they read actionable anyway. They live day to day, moment to moment, and their decisions are mundane (McDonalds or Burger King). I think they are relatively immune to media spin, but very vulnerable to influence from their immediate communities — neighbours, family members, co-workers, churchmembers etc. They move in crowds, physically, emotionally, intellectually. Belatedly, they were the mass that finally ended the Vietnam War and brought down Nixon, and they are the mass that re-elected both Clinton and Bush because change frightens them more than the status quo.

But is their sense of impotence and their passivity in the face of all the challenges facing the world today:

1. a conditioned learned helplessness perpetrated by the power elite to stifle dissent,
2. a conditioned learned helplessness caused by the media pandering to popular ignorance and laziness,
3. a legitimate ‘acedia’ — a lovely old word that Gene McCarthy used in the Vietnam War protests to describe those who gave up too soon trying to end that war, the ‘freeing oneself of care because the caring is just too painful’, or
4. a legitimate awareness of the reality of the modern human condition (perhaps, as I suggested in this article, because they think all the real power needed to precipitate change lies elsewhere and are not yet ready for revolution, or perhaps because they think no one is any longer in control, so activism beyond simple personal responsible behaviour is futile)?

Let’s take a look at the environmental movement, for example. I have described what I call ‘light green’ environmentalists, who are optimistic that technology and social awareness will let us resolve the current environmental crises, and ‘dark green’ environmentalists, who are pessimistic sometimes to the point they actually look forward to the end of civilization. The former see the latter as depressed or angry, while the latter see the former as bargaining or in denial. Like liberals and conservatives, they see the same dilemma through irreconcilably different frames, but their core values are the same: They realize, instinctively, emotionally and intellectually, that the only way for the human species to go on is as an integral part of all life on Earth, connected, in balance, living sustainably. They just have different visions of how to get there, and a different sense, not of how much we can do, but of what we should do.

Lots of theories here. What do I believe? Well, I keep thinking about Einstein’s remark, shortly before he died, that it was his experience that the more people knew, the more pessimistic they became. And since I believe most people, for a variety of reasons, know very little about the state of the world and what can be done about it, I’m inclined to believe that many people are pessimistic, not due to learned helplessness, but because they ‘know’ instinctively that the world is facing some massive challenges, that short of a revolution (which few are prepared to precipitate, at least not yet) there is genuinely little they can do to help address these challenges. I think the influence of media ’spin’ on this perception is minor.

And I believe that many people are instinctively coming to realize that no one, no elite, is in control of this world (if any ever was), and that therefore even a revolution would be futile (as indeed most political revolutions in history have been).

I think we have a lot to learn about minor things (like the foolishness of feeling safe in an SUV, and the foolishness of feeling insecure about our child’s safety unless we know exactly where they are every instant), and in these things we are prone to misjudgements both of learned helplessness and of learned (over)optimism. But when it comes to the bigger issues affecting the future of our world, I believe our instincts are pretty good. Perhaps the sense that it’s too late to solve these larger issues, that they are perhaps insoluble, and that there’s nothing we can do individually or through some kind of fantasy ‘collective intelligence’ to save civilization, is not learned helplessness, but rather powerful intuition and collective wisdom. And perhaps those of us with the best instincts (mostly, in my experience, women, poets, scientists and artists) have also realized that this resignation does not need to depress us, or debilitate us. On the contrary, it liberates us from the responsibility to ’save the world’ and refocuses us, our sense of purpose, on making the world better here, now, for those we live with and love, in the communities that define us. Those enlightened people — the women, poets, scientists and artists — have always been focused on opening possibilities here and now, in the moment, in the communities of which they have always known they are a part.

They — and not the self-help gurus and others who would ‘cure’ us of our sense of helplessness and depression, not the politicians and revolutionaries and religious and political and technological salvationists and ‘leaders’, not the media analysts and apologists — are our true models, the ones who quietly, always, have been showing us the way.

It’s interesting to see that when it comes to sharing knowledge or making political decisions, there is very little “attitude” difference between people of “developed” and “non developed” countries. I feel the difference is actually between the thoughts of modern versus non-modern cultures.

Pueblos de Arena (”Sand Towns”) is  a non-profit ’school’ to enable,  facilitate and revitalize community development processes in the Chancay area. Our proposal is to work out the appropriate attitude that leads to well-being (including economic prosperity) by reframing poverty concepts, learning and teaching cognitive strategies, concepts, and introducing alternative money as a way of generating internal community-based commerce.

Six years ago I moved (with my family) from the city to the country. My husband works in agriculture, we have a farm here in Chancay, a small town on the central coast of Per™. From the 10th to 15th centuries the Chancay pre-Incan culture developed here. Fine artists they were, not warriors: textiles, ceramics, feather crafts, wood, dyes, and bone carvings. Being a potter myself, when I arrived in Chancay, I fancied I would find the local potters here heirs of this fine culture. But I found none, just a couple of guys churning out false copies and selling them as originals.

So I thought it would be great to start a ceramics school, rescuing the Chancay ceramic techniques, but little by little I met other artisans who worked with tapestries, gauzes, and all the pre-Incan arts. There is a Chancay necropolis (ancient cemetery) nearby that was damaged and looted by this people (really poor people ñ immigrants from the Andes communities), and as they had to repair what they found the tombs, they learned, and developed very fine skills in these arts. So, I thought, why limit our project to pottery? Let’s create a pre-Incan handcrafts school with modern arts too. But what would we do with these re-learned crafts?  We would need to create a commercial management facility, and develop modern designs with quality standards.

The challenge was (and is) the ‘poverty inertia’ that governs the spirit of the people. There is a resignation and feeling of hopelessness about projects in which the community helps themselves, a sense that the only way to live is through government subsidies or through illegal activities or menial, low-quality work. Local workers are lucky to earn $4/day, far too little to encourage learning, hard work and true craftsmanship.

So we must create an environment that encourages personal development and local-culture community-based social welfare (independent of the local government), rescuing what it is now called “social capital”. This means that the community must ‘remember’ that it knows how to provide itself with most of the things it needs, through communal works, alternative and preventive medicine, houses for the old and needy. The community must re-learn to transfer their remarkable knowledge and culture, to remember they have a “knowledge” that is truly their own, and which for centuries allowed them to be self-sufficient and prosperous.

In searching for the methodology that could help us translate the cultural and linguistic differences (in Peru we have several etnias, native communities with different dialects and languages, and our pilot
project is with a community of immigrants from the Andes on the coast) we’ve been investigating the cognitive sciences, cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, anthropology, and, on the other hand,
everything that is related to alternative currencies.

The idea is to give the tools to the community as a whole that will enable them to raise their standard of living, their perspective of their chance for self-sufficiency and prosperity, and at the same time demystify modernity (today they are surrounded by modern advertising and marketing, but none of the prosperity that makes it meaningful), while rescuing their cultural identity and traditional knowledge and wisdom, so they can manage successfully in this modern world.

Once the methodology is developed we plan to implement it bottom-up through small neighbourhood groups, what you called ‘cells’ in your recent cellular organization article (though we prefer not to use the term ‘cells’, because in Per™ we had some very traumatic years of terrorist activity and the terrorists were organized in ‘cells’).

Our proposal takes the form of a ’school’ — we do not want to be seen as a non-government organization (NGO), because people in these communities distrust NGOs), nor do we want to link with any political or religious group. ‘Schools’ are well received and accepted by everyone.

At the moment we have some support from the Universidad del PacÌfico related to the development of educational materials for the introduction of alternative currencies.

We are looking for sponsors for the research we will need to do to develop the methodology (attitude and strategies) and its appropriate teaching and implementation. We would appreciate your comments on how we might identify and attract such sponsors.

Sometimes I feel this ambitious project is possible, and at other times I have many doubts. I want to believe that it is possible. Thanks for reading.

Mariella Rebora (pueblosdearena@gmail.com)
Pueblos de Arena, Chancay, Per™

Lets start with what not to do about the flu:

• Don’t panic about the unavailability of vaccine: The vaccine out there is for established influenza viruses, not for those that haven’t (yet) evolved into pandemic strains. Get a flu shot if you’re at risk from these established strains, but otherwise don’t get stressed if there isn’t enough.
• Don’t assume the risk of pandemic is all media hype: History is punctuated with flu epidemics, and there is no current or foreseeable science that will prevent this from continuing. We’re overdue for a big one. The chances of a flu pandemic in any year varies from about 3% to 10%. It’s rare for any generation to completely escape one. That hasn’t changed — recent science has not equipped us to reduce the risk or severity of flu pandemics..
• Don’t blame the birds: The current poultry flu, the H5N1 strain, does not easily pass from poultry to humans. It spreads from poultry flock to poultry flock, due to (a) the increasingly few different breeds of poultry raised around the world (b) the horrific concentration of farmed poultry, and (c) the high volume of international trade in poultry. These dangerous farming practices mean that poultry flu outbreaks are virtually inevitable and spread like wildfire. As a result, the massive slaughter of poultry is becoming almost routine. Quarantining poultry flocks is pretty futile — there are too many flocks and too much trade to hope that we can hermetically seal off an infected flock from the rest of the world. Although some migratory birds can carry the disease,there is no evidence that non-poultry birds have played any significant role in the spread of poultry flu around the world. The market has done this. And flu is a very adaptable virus — it can mutate to be able to jump from one overcrowded species (poultry) to another (humans). But this happens very rarely, so there is no reason to get paranoid about contact with birds, or even, if that is your preference, from continuing to eat poultry worry-free. And if a mutation of the poultry H5N1 jumps to humans, then the problem has nothing to do anymore with chickens — the pandemic will spread simply and very quickly person to person. Or an existing human flu variant may mutate to make it immune to our vaccines, so the pandemic may well be entirely ‘man-made’. And we can’t “cull” human herds to stop the spread, so it will likely spread faster among humans than among poultry.
• Don’t believe muddle-headed politicians who say that the government is taking care of the problem and there is nothing they as individuals need to do or worry about. Especially presidents of countries who have already shown they are utterly unprepared for and incapable of handling disasters.

OK, some basic facts about influenza:

• H5N1 is a scientific description of a strain of influenzas.This strain is very virulent (high death rate), but currently does not spread from human to human, or from other species to humans, as effectively as other flu strains. But since viruses are so opportunistic (mutate in multiple ways so that the more successful mutations evolve to replace less successful ones), it’s almost inevitable that some mutation of H5N1 or of another influenza strain will emerge that is more transmissable, and that’s when the pandemic will occur. That’s will, not might.
• Tamiflu and Relenza anti-virals are not vaccines or super-vaccines. If taken regularly they can stave off the effects of a variety of viruses. But they are far from a panacea, and not nearly as effective as a vaccine targeted to a specific flu variant. And the stockpiles that would be needed to equip an entire population are astronomical, so they will only be useful for front-line emergency workers and already-infected patients, as a supplement to other procedures to try to limit the spread of a pandemic. And there is evidence that the latest flu strains could be resistant to Tamiflu.
• The current ‘business’ of vaccine research and manufacture is archaic and risky. We are beginning to realize this, and improved methods, much more public funding of research, manufacture and distribution of vaccines will eventually improve this. But this will take decades. And there is no way to know whether vaccine technology will ever be able to catch up to the astonishing ability of viruses to mutate opportunistically. So drugs (anti-virals + vaccines) are not the answer. 

So what should we do?

• On a global, national and local basis, we need to develop contingency plans for worst-case scenarios of flu pandemic — coordinated plans for what governments, authorities, companies and individuals will do when a pandemic hits. We need to learn the lessons of Katrina and of history — especially the H1N1 1918 flu pandemic (which did not stem from birds). Those contingency plans include preparing for provision of food, clean water, medicines and heat and other essential supplies to people to keep civil society operating when the economic infrastructure temporarily collapses. They include providing a level of emergency security that was so pathetically absent after Katrina — and that doesn’t mean sending in untrained, unprepared, clueless military recruits. They include designating delivery people as essential (immunized) workers — instead of us all going out for what we need, if these immunized workers bring it to our homes, the risk of spread is drastically reduced. They include identifying and mobilizing people who are found to have a natural immunity to the influenza (even though we won’t know how many or who these will be in advance). And at every level — right down to the local school, hospital, municipal fire and police and municipal planning department — these contingencies plans need to be put in place ready to launch on short notice. And it means establishing a degree of coordination and open, honest communication between governments that today is non-existent and which, for cultural reasons, will not come easily,
• On a global level, we need to help third world countries be prepared to handle a pandemic as well as we do. Pandemics respect no borders, and it is almost fruitless to prepare some countries and not others. This is a lesson some “build a wall” advocates seem incapable of learning. Would we be willing to give our stockpiles of anti-virals to a poor nation infected with H5N1, to try to ring in the infection there before it can spread to us? Don’t bet on it.
• We need to accept that a pandemic is very likely, sooner or later, and that its death toll is likely to be high (anywhere from 5 to 150 million is probably not a bad guess), and that the death toll will be mostly a function of the virulence of the strain, not on anything we do to prevent or try to stem its spread. So let’s say what the politicians won’t: There will be another flu pandemic, and millions are going to die. Our preparedness won’t significantly change that, but it will help us cope with the fallout from that massive death toll, possibly preventing riots, civil strife, wars, and collapse of our economic and health care systems. That alone makes it worth being prepared, even if it doesn’t save a single life.
• At a personal level: (This is what you were looking for, right?) 
• We need to ensure we follow and teach others basic hand-washing, cough- and sneeze-covering (with tissues, by wearing a mask when sick, or if necessary using our sleeve rather than our hands) and other hygiene. This needs to be reinforced with signage, and automated no-touch restroom hygiene in public places. 
• We need to think, at our workplaces, about how we will keep things running when absenteeism suddenly soars to 20% — or 70%.  
• We need to think about switching work to home, and school attendance to home schooling or ‘virtual’ schooling.
• We need to think about what we will do if we are infected but don’t contract the disease — because that natural immunity makes us a very valuable commodity, and perhaps imposes a personal responsibility on us to get out and do volunteer work during the pandemic that we might otherwise not do. 
• We need to learn, and decide, what to do if a loved one becomes ill when we are not.
• We need to have a list of essentials to stockpile now, or at the very first sign of an outbreak. 
• We need to appreciate that if a pandemic occurs, it will become global quickly, and if it hits us, for the most part we will be on our own. No emergency help will rush in — it will be far too late for that. Once it starts, at best our area will be quarantined, at worst completely ignored. And pandemics occur in waves before they subside, so surviving a first infection may not be the end of it — we need to be prepared for the long haul.
• We need to become involved in bottom-up community preparedness programs, ensuring that our local authorities are as ready as we are.

Feel better now?

Thanks to all the writers of level-headed and useful material on this subject, such as WHO, HHS, various science journals and especially Peter Sandman’s wonderful article on preparedness, for the information summarized above.