Plausible Story

Seven Minutes

Forgive the indulgence, but if I had known about this seven-minute summary, I wouldn't have had to watch six years' worth of the Sopranos in a month. I present this to you, dear readers, to spare you that lost month. Thank god for other people's obsessions.

Torture

I don't own a television. Nor do I get cable. Nor do I have the time to guarantee that I will be free for nine (9) successive Sundays in a row this spring. Therefore, I do not want to hear about the final nine (9) episodes of the Sopranos. I do not want to read about them. I do not want to know what happens to Tony. I do not want to speculate in what terrible fashion Christopher and/or Anthony Jr. and/or Paulie and/or Silvio gets whacked, or by whom. If Carmela never makes a profit off her spec house, if she never figures out who killed Adrianna, I don't want to know. Do you hear me? I don't care if Tony reaches self-actualization, or finds god, or goes to jail, or becomes a grandfather. I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.

Background: earlier this year, on the recommendation—nay, the command—of my thesis advisor, I rented and watched the first season. Then, on my own recognizance, I rented the second season. Things went downhill from there, and turned into the third, and the fourth, and yes, the fifth season in quick succession. This is how novels don't get written. By the time I finished Season 5, the first part of the sixth season was already in the video store, so I had to watch that, too. Then the show stopped. Then I discovered what the rest of the world already knew: nine more episodes in the pipeline, set to debut this month.

I don't care. You can't make me care. I'll see them on dvd or not at all. Spoiler comments will be deleted unread. You have been warned.

Update: I knew there was a reason not to watch the season premiere.

Bull

I misquoted Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit yesterday, and out of context, too. To be fair, I didn't have the book in front of me; its final line, or my approximation of it, simply got stuck in my head. Here, then, is its background. He writes:

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry.

Basically, he's saying that people have stopped thinking critically, and that this makes people susceptible to the idea that the world is too mysterious even to try to understand. Think of how the creationists push "teaching to the controversy" regarding the origin of species when there is no scientific controversy about evolution, sowing doubt, in effect, in empirical reasoning.

He continues:

One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

This may be a straw-man argument. I'm not sure I follow (or agree) that disbelief in determinate truth in the external world would lead someone to solidify their self-construct. On the other hand, George Bush has styled himself "the Decider," and his self-construct seems indestructible, even when the world he acts upon is objectively de-structible. Replace the word "sincerity" with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" and the passage makes more sense.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them.

If we can't understand the world around us, he says, how can we expect to know ourselves?

Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things.

Selves are slippery fishes, he says. And this is where the promises of the motivational gurus to provide us with the keys to our self-actualization fail. The promises might sound convincing, buoyed as they are by our individual need to have those keys open our doors (okay, now I've mixed the metaphors of buoyant fish and locked entryways—nice). Which is not to say that the words of any guru, heard by a self at the right moment, might not trigger an actual bout of growth. What he's saying is that self knowledge is more difficult than other forms of knowledge, and someone who promises otherwise is probably bullshitting.

This leads to his (much qualified) punch line, which I had earlier misquoted:

And insofar as this the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Perhaps this is also bullshit. The whole essay can't help resembling its topic to some degree, and this concluding line packs such a neat wallop that he just ended the argument right there.

Sincerity

Michael J. reports that he walked on hot coals this weekend. He and 4,000 of his closest friends. All part of this guy Tony Robbins and his motivational seminar megachurch.

I happened to run into Mr. J. at lunch, and he filled me in on some of the specifics. The 4,000 people. The guided meditation. The ninja staffers in black masks. The staffer who gripped his shoulders, put her face to his face, and yelled, "HAVE YOU WALKED YET?"

As he spoke, I tried to eat my sandwich. Mr. J. (a pretty smart guy) is thrilled with the experience. But his story made me feel increasingly nauseous. I mean, let's review:

• mob-sized crowd
• hyper-charismatic preacher
• black-clad agents
• $900 workshop fee tithe x 4,000 people = $3.6 million gross to the charismatic preacher and co. (not counting book sales)
• hot coals

Actually, on reflection, the thought of hot coals themselves isn't what gave me the heebie-jeebies. Implausible as it sounds, there's a fairly simple scientific explanation for why humans can walk on coals. If I desired to walk on burning coals, and someone I knew and trusted offered to assist, and 4,000 of my closest friends were nowhere in sight, I might consider doing it. I can't see wanting to do it—I'll ski Tuckerman's for my next adrenalin rush and keep my $900, thank you—but to each her own.

There's also a fairly rational explanation for why large crowds are susceptible to suggestion and charisma. My stomach's churning just thinking about it.

Don't get me wrong; I know that hordes of people love to brush elbows with hordes of other people and pay lots of money to hear mellifluous-voiced evangelists proclaim the answers to all life's problems. It's the not-so-secret Secret. It's the Power of Positive Thinking (TM). The preachers drip with sincerity and embrace every word they speak, and if we could only follow them—if we could only follow them—if we could only follow them ... (and if it doesn't work, it's our fault) ...

Many people also, I know, approve, admire, and envy the capitalist drive to connect the twin forces of mob mentality and adrenalin. And lord knows where the world would be today if enterprising individuals hadn't motivated the mobs around them.

An aside. Just this morning, I finished reading Harry Frankfurt's recently reissued treatise, On Bullshit. My mother lent it to me over the weekend, probably at about the same moment Mr. J. was walking on fire. It's a slim little essay that leads up to a quite elegant punchline:

"Sincerity is bullshit."

What, I wonder, would Harry Frankfurt make of Tony Robbins?