John H Armstrong

Breaking the Conventional Lies That Surround Us: The Prisons in Our Minds

A Guest Post by Menno Fieguth

Menno Fieguth is a long-time friend and supporter of ACT 3 in Canada. He is also a gifted writer who still stays pretty busy long after formal retirement. When I saw this article that he wrote many years ago (Nelson Mandela was still Prime Minister of South Africa as you will see in the article itself) I asked him if I could re-publish it. 

 

During my years in the Psychiatric Research Department we had numerous animals which were used for a variety of experiments. This included, rats, squirrels, and cats, among others. There were three cats however which somehow ended up being a part of an experiment not intended for them.

The dairy barns at the Saskatchewan Hospital housed not only the official residents, the cows, but a variety of cats which were always well fed. When the barns were to be shut down, there was the problem of the cats. A patient who had been working in the barn, asked a patient who had been helping to look after the lab animals, including the cats, whether it was possible to accommodate three of the animals from the barn for the winter in the luxurious feline apartments located in the research department. Fine! So they were well fed and warm for the winter. So in spring? We'll get back to that later.

I have long admired Vaclav Havel, not only for his thinking but his commitment and determination. After spending five years in prison for speaking out against what he felt was wrong, he ended up being elected as leader of Czechoslovakia. Nelson Mandela spent twenty seven years in prison for similar reasons. The day he was released he went

and made a speech, eventually got elected, and is still the Prime Minister of South Africa today.

I could not help but think of the cats, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela in the same context along with a vague recollection of the Chamber of Horrors down in the basement of the Royal London Wax Museum in Victoria. So I faxed the museum as follows: "Greetings from beautiful scenic Battleford. I would like some information...regarding the story of a man who had been in prison for many years. When he was released, he asked to go back to prison because he felt uncomfortable in the great wide free world."...Thank you kindly. etc."

In a little over an hour I received the following reply:

"Greetings from Canada's Best Blooming City .“

Thank you very much for your fax this afternoon. I just came from the Chamber of Horrors with all the information I could gather for you. The Comte De Lorge was a political prisoner of the King of France for some thirty years. He was released in 1789 during the French Revolution. He was very uncomfortable in the hustle and bustle of society and asked to be returned to his prison He was ignored. He died a few weeks later, a frightened and lonely man.

I hope this will be of help to you. Again thank you for your interest.

Sincerely,

(signed)PF 

Museum Operations

But back to the cats. When they were taken outside in spring, one disappeared, one went right up a tree, and the third cowered against a wire mesh fence all day long. All of them obviously terrified of the freedom of the outdoors.

So! What is the point I am trying to make? I am not sure, except that I have long been intrigued by the difference between The Compte De Lorge and the cats on one hand and the likes of Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela.

After writing the above, I was told about a young man somewhat deficient in his mental capacities. The house in which he and his family were living caught on fire. He helped the others get out and probably some belongings. Then said something to the effect; "I have to stay here". He went back to his room and burned with the building. A horrible story, which I gathered when I heard it, was true. The young man with his limited powers of comprehension apparently could not conceive of a world without his room as its center.

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) said in 1924; "Most human beings today waste some twenty-five to thirty years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them."

Where there is a vision and a purpose, the mind obviously does not have to die, regardless of the circumstances. Of course we know from ancient writings that "Where there is NO vision the people perish." (Someone has added that, “Where there is only vision, you have a nervous breakdown.) ( Of course we must be able to distinguish between a vision and a hallucination ) Could it be that the worst prisons are those prisons of the mind which we either build ourselves or permit others to build for us, or around us, preventing us from reaching our full potential?

 

Why Do We Wait When Danger is So Near?

Yesterday I wrote about the recent storms in the southeastern portion of the United States. The violent storm that hit Joplin, Missouri, killed an estimated 142 people. What we know about this storm and this city is that twenty-minute sirens went off warning people to flee to cover. Many did flee but some waited. Why did these people wait?

William Donner, an environmental sociologist at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, says, “Research generally shows that folks are in denial that a tornado is going to harm them.” I have to confess I know this to be true personally. Why? When the sirens have gone off in my neighborhood, and my wife heads for the basement, I have stayed on the upper level watching a baseball game or working away. I have said, more than once, “I don’t think this is the big one. I’ll be safe.” When I told her I was going to write this she said, “Will you listen to me next time?” My answer was a humble, simple one: “Yes, I will dear.”

A disaster researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted a survey of more than 600 people in Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama who lived in areas struck by tornadoes in 2008 and 2009. When asked whether or not they took action to protect themselves, their families or their property, 59% said yes. But a full 41% said no. 40% took shelter when they heard the warning but 11% wanted more information. 2% called others and 6% protected private goods. 5% did nothing.

We know that waiting for a tornado to appear wastes precious seconds that can save your life. The average lead time from warning to touch down is 13 minutes according to the National Weather Service. Part of the reason for waiting could be that in 2007 the false alarm rate was as high as 75%.

I reflected on this when I read about it and concluded that some of us simply will not heed warnings. Most people do not think about death, as one obvious example, until they are about to die. Why? They know the rates for mortality are 100% but they wait. They have no will, no insurance, no plan for others they love who will be left behind. They live in a kind of “denial” about themselves and their demise. This seems to be human nature. Maybe it is one way of coping with pain and life. But it is not wise.

I also thought about Harold Camping again. (Man, I wish I could just forget about him.) The more “false alarms” people get the more they ignore serious alarms. The danger to the church, and even the world, of people like Harold Camping is that they have sounded the alarm one time too many. Now the world mocks and scorns all the more.

When the next siren goes off will you be prepared to take action? When the sirens of your conscience go off will you seek the Lord or wait for another day?

The Human Art of Prospection

I admit to a growing love for various kinds of psychology and psychological research. The human brain is simply amazing. And much of what distinguishes humans from lower primates, at least in terms of our brain, is in the frontal lobe of the human brain.

After viewing a PBS series on emotional life I was drawn to read the book written by the host of this three-part series. The book, Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert, is a delight. It is funny, well-written, fascinating and incredibly helpful to Christians, even if they reject his evolutionary biology.

If you were asked, says Gilbert, to name the human brain’s greatest achievement you might think of impressive artifacts produced: The Great Pyramid of Giza, the International Space Station, or perhaps the magnificent Golden Gate Bridge. These are great achievements but they are not, argues Gilbert, our “greatest” achievements. A sophisticated machine could produce all of these and much more. Gilbert writes, “Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden Gate or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building anyone of them” (italics his, 5). He then adds, “What’s more, one of these remarkable acts is even more remarkable than the others. To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine---ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be” (5).

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has called the human brain an “anticipation machine,” and “making future” is the most important thing that the brain does. But what does “making future” mean? All brains make predictions about the immediate, local and personal future. They do this by using current events and past events to anticipate what is likely to happen next. When we take Neo, our miniature dachshund, to the vet she begins to shake before we get out of the car. She has memory and anticipates what comes next.

What distinguishes us is found in the idea of later. Human beings can preview in their minds chains of events that have not yet come to pass. Our brains stubbornly insist on projecting into the future even when there is so much to think about today. Why do we do this? Gilbert believes we find this process pleasurable. We daydream about hitting the winning shot, or landing the big fish, or getting the girl we desire, etc. Gilbert calls this activity prospection and defines it as: “The act of looking forward and considering the future.”

We may long for some future we imagine as joyful or we may fear a future that we dread. But the future is there and we think about it by prospecting in our minds. Our large and developed frontal lobe has the ability to look into the future and make predictions so that we might, somehow, seek to control it or even avoid it. From infancy we seek to control things around us to make our future better and safer. We come into the world with a passion for control. In fact, Gilbert says, “Our desire for control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable” (23).

Gilbert says that “We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain---not because the boat won’t respond and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope . . . we experience illusions of foresight” (25).

His whole book works out what this means in normal human experience. It is an exciting read. What fascinated me in particular was Gilbert’s connection of virtue to happiness (both a Greek and Christian idea). Second, I was struck by his acknowledgement that the Christian martyrs learned to die to attain happiness because they truly believed that the happiness of this world would be improved greatly by their better happiness in the next.

The writer of Hebrews says the same when he says that men and women of faith died believing and trusting God, often in dire circumstances. But why? And why did the Christian martyrs die with such hope and grace, dare we say at times with incredible joy?

All these people died still believing what God had promised them. They did not receive what was promised, but they saw it all from a distance and welcomed it. They agreed that they were foreigners and nomads here on earth. Obviously people who say such things are looking forward [prospecting as Gilbert calls it] to a country they can call their own. If they had longed for the country they came from, they could have gone back. But they were looking for a better place, a heavenly homeland. That is why God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them (Hebrews 11:13-16, NLT).