With academic psychology and allied disciplines that study human behavior dominated by people who share your (and my) cultural outlook, why isn’t there a sort of expert plan for cultural transformation, e.g. on guns? Is it that all the best people at doing practical psychological operations go work for advertising firms, the CIA, or some other institution that’s part of an antagonistic culture? I mean, it doesn’t even seem like there’s any effective infiltration of the online forums where some of the nuttier cultural elements thrive. Are the psychological techniques that are known to work also things that people in our culture would really prefer to believe didn’t work?
I've come to think that most ideas about managing other people's culture through some technique are a kind of hubris. Though there are examples that bear thinking on. Tobacco is a good example where there were a lot of failed ad campaigns and initiatives that were mostly failures because they approached transforming a habit as a simple one-and-done thing, because they underestimated the tobacco industry's tenaciousness and resources (or didn't think it was going to be a fight), and because they had the wrong time frame in mind (a few years rather than decades). Instead it took tons of ads, lots of dead people that other people saw die, lots of information, lots of medical advice, lots of general cultural disapproval, lots of workplaces sending smokers outside, lots of pushing to get smoking to stop seeming cool in movies and TV. E.g., it was what I describe in this essay as a struggle: political, social, cultural. You have to enlist people at every level and staging ground of social life and you have to be patient.
As happens all too often in this argument, Tim, you miss one of the major issues of gun violence in this culture: Guns’ use in domestic homicides. Women living in a house with guns present are more in danger of being killed in a domestic dispute than they are anywhere else. (Yes, even if the same women think themselves safer because of the guns that may be turned on them by their partners.) I’m far less concerned with male suicide rates than I am with the rates they pick up those guns and slaughter vulnerable members of their households, often before killing themselves.
Or to put it differently, what my formulation above isn't thinking about clearly is that it is not merely public space and public safety that are at stake here, but private space--most signally the private space of the household, and the cultural formation that sees guns and the male capacity for violence as the way the household is protected (a proposition that some women 'in' that culture accept) while not wanting to examine the extent to which the reality of that household involves women living in fear of the masculinity the culture has privileged. And that I think might not change even if guns were not involved; there are similar ideas about men and households in places where guns aren't available or common. But in the US the gun is an especially deadly signifying technology to weave into that vision--deadly for women and children.
It's a crucial point. But that's where this sense of being part of culture becomes so so troubled; sometimes everybody in a household is inside the same habitus and sometimes they absolutely aren't. So whether women in households where gun ownership, manhood and the threat to women are connected see themselves the way I think many of the rest of us see guns--as something that make the world feel unsafe and frightening--is maybe THE question that matters in the sense of what it takes to make a culture change or recede.
With academic psychology and allied disciplines that study human behavior dominated by people who share your (and my) cultural outlook, why isn’t there a sort of expert plan for cultural transformation, e.g. on guns? Is it that all the best people at doing practical psychological operations go work for advertising firms, the CIA, or some other institution that’s part of an antagonistic culture? I mean, it doesn’t even seem like there’s any effective infiltration of the online forums where some of the nuttier cultural elements thrive. Are the psychological techniques that are known to work also things that people in our culture would really prefer to believe didn’t work?
I've come to think that most ideas about managing other people's culture through some technique are a kind of hubris. Though there are examples that bear thinking on. Tobacco is a good example where there were a lot of failed ad campaigns and initiatives that were mostly failures because they approached transforming a habit as a simple one-and-done thing, because they underestimated the tobacco industry's tenaciousness and resources (or didn't think it was going to be a fight), and because they had the wrong time frame in mind (a few years rather than decades). Instead it took tons of ads, lots of dead people that other people saw die, lots of information, lots of medical advice, lots of general cultural disapproval, lots of workplaces sending smokers outside, lots of pushing to get smoking to stop seeming cool in movies and TV. E.g., it was what I describe in this essay as a struggle: political, social, cultural. You have to enlist people at every level and staging ground of social life and you have to be patient.
As happens all too often in this argument, Tim, you miss one of the major issues of gun violence in this culture: Guns’ use in domestic homicides. Women living in a house with guns present are more in danger of being killed in a domestic dispute than they are anywhere else. (Yes, even if the same women think themselves safer because of the guns that may be turned on them by their partners.) I’m far less concerned with male suicide rates than I am with the rates they pick up those guns and slaughter vulnerable members of their households, often before killing themselves.
Or to put it differently, what my formulation above isn't thinking about clearly is that it is not merely public space and public safety that are at stake here, but private space--most signally the private space of the household, and the cultural formation that sees guns and the male capacity for violence as the way the household is protected (a proposition that some women 'in' that culture accept) while not wanting to examine the extent to which the reality of that household involves women living in fear of the masculinity the culture has privileged. And that I think might not change even if guns were not involved; there are similar ideas about men and households in places where guns aren't available or common. But in the US the gun is an especially deadly signifying technology to weave into that vision--deadly for women and children.
It's a crucial point. But that's where this sense of being part of culture becomes so so troubled; sometimes everybody in a household is inside the same habitus and sometimes they absolutely aren't. So whether women in households where gun ownership, manhood and the threat to women are connected see themselves the way I think many of the rest of us see guns--as something that make the world feel unsafe and frightening--is maybe THE question that matters in the sense of what it takes to make a culture change or recede.