The Wizard of Id

Close your eyes and come with me on a little dream journey. Imagine, if you will, that you’re not in Kansas anymore. Courtesy of your gold card (a bargain at a mere 5 million), you’ve arrived in the wonderful world of Ov. You’re surrounded by a troop of flying monkeys, ready to carry out the bidding of a narcissistic wizard. (Spoiler alert — he’ll be unmasked in the end as a common con man, motivated by power and greed, and an unquenchable thirst for loyalty). You’re a bit disoriented — a fly-in from your tornado-ravaged home land will do that! You’ve been welcomed by some apparent friends — one with no brain, one with no heart, one with no courage — but they too will reveal themselves soon enough. You’re sitting in a room that’s not quite round — more kind of egg-shaped. You might almost say . . . oval. You’ve come seeking the support of the Wizard of Id.

And so the surreal cl___er f__k unfolds. Depending on one’s orientation, ‘great television’ or the most shameful, political mugging in multiple decades. Replete with lots of material for analysis — psychological analysis. So. . . where to start.

Perhaps with the wizard himself. What makes a carnival grifter into a self-appointed monarch? What are the essential elements, values and traits that define such an individual:

• • demanding, selfish behaviour
  • unethical, even criminal acts
  • inconsiderate conduct or speech
  • unreasonable nature
  • uncooperative with others

No surprise that these sterling characteristics are the self same descriptors as the Freudian Id, ‘the primitive, instinctual aspect of the psyche, devoid of organization, logic, or reason, harbouring conflicting, contradictory impulses, operating solely on immediate gratification’. Sadly, without the constraints of conscience or the guardrails of rational thought, the Id is a child, fumbling his way through life, without a plan, pin balling between hollow pyrrhic victories and tantrums, empty pleasure and pain. Bring me the broom of the wicked witch (or maybe just some rare earth minerals) and I’ll tell you how to get home. The Wizard’s quid pro quo.

And what’s a charlatan wizard without his winkies — the cast of ‘green guards’, enslaved lackeys so riddled with cognitive dissonance that indeed the sky is green and the grass is blue; holding two absolutely contradictory thoughts in mind, then checking with the Wiz to see what’s ‘true’ (today). What must it be like to celebrate this visitor to Ov one moment as ‘the best kind of ally I could possibly wish for’ then laud the Wiz for trashing this stranger in this very (very) strange land, the next. How soul splittingly sycophantic to hold this stranger’s hand in warm welcome, then delete any evidence of same the next — wave that misanthropic wand, my Wiz. 

We can only hope that, at some point, the curtain will fall away, the props will fail, a quick click of the heels and poof, it will be 2028!

To Tell The Truth

Ah yes, if life were just a game show!  One where lying convincingly is a part of the fun. One where the ‘big reveal’ is applauded. And the stakes are considerably lower for ‘being fooled’. 

A New York Times podcast (This American Life) caught my eye — well, more properly, my ear — this week. The focus: That’s a weird thing to lie about. The opener, a short interview with a neurodivergent journalist, asks a simple question: ‘do you ever lie’. Her considered answer was a qualified ‘yes’ — but, as it turns out, only when the cost to another individual is extremely high. The rest of the time, ‘no’, with tag-on query, ‘what would that achieve?’. Her reference was to all the ‘little whites’ that most of we ‘neurotypicals’ pass along without a second thought. Or the overstated and gushy greeting (‘we must do lunch’). Or the compliments paid without any conviction — and often just patently false (‘love your new look’) — that are essentially unheard and unheeded at best, barefaced untruths at worst. Convivial conventions — with little value added.

We’re currently working our way thru’ two excellent series, Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Astrid — must be neurodivergent month on Netflix! Aside the compelling story lines, the bit about figurative speech (call it what you will, but essentially departures from literal truth) and lying are central themes — as much to highlight the chaos and confusion these practices create for the protagonists as to hold up these commonly accepted behaviours as weirdly ‘normal’. 

I did in fact sit through all 98 minutes of the quasi state of the union ‘address’ a few evenings ago. Almost as taxing were the talking head analyses — a significant chunk of which was devoted to the (inevitable) ‘fact checking’. And, wait for it, the guy lied! This is not news. We’ve had it confirmed by every news source east of Fox. We had it waved at us on the Dem’s myriad ping pong paddle signage. And, before he was summarily marched out of the room, old Al Green, the Texas congressman, shouted his cane-pointing message at the man himself. 

To return to our journalist, perhaps more newsworthy is ‘why bother’. You won the election. Your party controls both houses. You have a majority of the Scotus nine in your pocket (although some hint of balanced and independent thought does surface from time to time on that front). And you have an entirely, sycophantic following, prepared to cheer your every utterance, arrayed in front of you. So why embellish, distort, or flat lie about so very, very much? 

A quick Google of motivations underlying (pun intended) that ubiquitous but generally reviled practice (fibbing) produced way too many links. But one such look offered the following:

Motive ‘A’	Motive ‘B’
Avoiding punishment	To win the admiration of others
Obtaining a prize (when other ways are not available)	To exercise power over others by controlling the information they receive
Protecting another person from being hurt or punished (a la our journalist)
Protecting oneself from physical harm
To get out of an awkward social situation
To avoid embarrassment
To maintain privacy without notifying others of the intention

As far as my late night viewing, I’d have to go with door number 2 (if I can mix game show metaphors). Some recent reading on the consuming power of social media kicked up the following reference from Leo Braudy’s four decades old book, The Frenzy of Renown: 

The lust for recognition has become so great in the twentieth century as to manifest itself in outright insanities.

Seems attention’s the thing . . . wherein to catch the conscience (if such exists) of the ‘king’. 

            Been trying to make some sense of life lately.  Been looking in some pretty heady places too. Some practical: Marc Bloom’s The Marathon — What It Takes To Go The Distance.  Some psychological: The Rhythm — Being Your Best In Sport & Business (Richard Lonetto’s brief and expensive treatise on “that harmonious balance of mind and body, enabling one to function at his best”).  Some plain desperate: How To Do Almost Everything (Burt Bacharach’s 1970 classic, for those of you who may have missed it).  Not much luck.

            Oh, I rediscovered Joe Henderson’s, Hal Higdon’s, and David Costill’s strategies for a successful race.  I now know that straight lines are bad; waves, with calm troughs, preceded by a preparatory state of excitement and followed by an equally charged point of release (sounds a little orgasmic to me) keep one in “rhythm”.  And last (and arguably, least), I have had it reaffirmed that leather hat bands should be wiped regularly with a soapy cloth to stave off build-up of oil and soil — thank you, Burt.

            What’s the search all about?  Seems a long-established and eminently sensible decision made some five years ago has been recently called into question — and I’m wondering why.  To wit: No More Marathons!  I have come to terms with any number of realities in my forty odd years.  That my high school gym teacher was right — I would lose a major portion of my hair by the late 1980’s.  That my parents were right — I would someday look back and understand why they put up with me as an adolescent.  And most significantly, that I was right — I am a middle distance runner, ill-equipped to go 42.2 kilometres.

            All this collected wisdom aside, the Forest City Marathon dangled out there like a sure thing in the fifth at Western Fair.  Hard to resist.  A little shift in training emphasis, a modest extension of mileage, four months of prep time — should be a piece of cake.  For better or worse, this is one cake that failed to rise.  Training has soured over the past several weeks, fatigue is constant, essential mileage has dwindled, and “test races” have been disappointing.  My search, then, at first was to find some answers to the immediate and disturbing question: how come hard work hasn’t produced the expected (and strongly yearned for) result?

            As has often been the case for me with running, asking the obvious question has led to a deeper truth, a truth that sports physiologists and psychologists (and, God forbid, even Burt) rarely address.  That life, no matter how much we may will it to be otherwise, is fraught with cycles — undeniable, unavoidable, sometimes inexplicable and, more often than not, frustrating and angering — highs and lows that come and go at will.  The best we can do is to identify them and know our place within them.

            In this particular struggle, I found my answers in two surprisingly divergent sources: the Tao te Ching (as reworked by John Heider in The Tao of Leadership)

            Natural events are cyclical, always changing from one extreme toward an opposite…That is  the way of nature: to relax what is tense, to fill  what is empty, to reduce what is     overflowing…The wise man follows this natural    order of events (and in so doing) becomes potent and successful (p. 153).

and elsewhere,

                       All behaviour consists of opposites or polarities.  If I do anything more and more, over and over,    its polarity will appear.  (Striving to be beautiful makes a person ugly.)  The wise man does not   push to makethings happen, but allows process to unfold on its own (p. 3).

and in a wonderfully simple lyric from a tune by Mark Knopfler:

                        Sometimes you’re the windshield

            Sometimes you’re the bug

             Sometimes you’re the Louisville Slugger

              Sometimes you’re the ball

              Sometimes it all comes together

               Sometimes you’re gonna lose it all.      

                                                            The Bug, Dire Straits

Guess it was just my turn to be the bug.