RT @unfederaling What it is: a Federal #budget. How it was reported: as a bar room contest. Yep, that's how we saw it. It was all #pinball.
I was reading Politico’s recap (http://bit.ly/hZzKey) of the budget negotiations which galvanized Capitol Hill last week. We were all glued to stories of late night dealmaking.
It wasn’t a story of fine minds and high ideals meeting in a very impressive building, amongst classical columns and well-polished oak and marble. It was more like a few guys in the back of a roadside bar. Huddling around a pinball machine, throwing down petty bets and seeing who could make the pinball table make the most noise. Flash the wildest lights. Or scare the other guy into full tilt.
As in many suspense movies and one well-known fairy tale, the deadline was midnight. The solution came not long before that. With a sense of urgency, followed by a sigh of relief. It made excellent media narrative.
As the Politico story said, there were winners and losers to what eventually emerged from this meeting of pinball wizards. Or were there? Was the meeting up on The Hill about the Federal Budget? Officially it was. That was the document on the table.
But take a look, symbolically here, at the table. The table that provided the place and the context for its creators to gather. On what sort of table was that document crafted? Was it a table where facts were shared and a sacred mission was upheld? Or was it a contest?
It was the second.
Well that’s just how people do things, you say.
No, I’d say - that’s just how lizards do things.
Consider the lizard. How does it survive? By taking care of its most instinctual needs. Its brain ‘thinks’ in precisely this way.
While we as humans give ourselves credit for more, quote-quote “advanced” sorts of capabilities, like being rational and reasonable, logical and articulate, even kind and altruistic, we always do so in balance. Balancing our finer brain with related tendencies of much more primal status. It’s the interactivity of these different urgent, essential aspects of ourselves that makes us, and this midnight-focused budget battle, so compelling.
For the lizard, survival is power and vice versa. Life is not about politely weighing alternatives, nor measuring the advantages of negotiating with an opponent. It’s a lot simpler than that. It’s about crushing the adversary. The lizard loves a contest, craves attention, wants control and wants to be right. Doing all of these things enable the lizard to survive for yet another day. The lizard brain works accordingly.
Say we’re gathered around a pinball machine. There happens to be a budget on the machine too. People wait outside the bar for your answer on it. But inside the bar, bells are ringing, and lights are flashing. It’s a contest, and bets have been put down. You look around the bar. Everyone inside the bar is watching you and cheering you on. Will you stand up to say, I have to think through this budget with a deep standard of care. I have to negotiate with the gentleman across the pinball table. Or will you move that document aside, saying, “the people outside the bar can wait. I’ve got a pinball game to win! I’ll have time for the rational and reasonable – later!”
It’s easy for us to say that we want a government that works. But saying that and having that are two different things. While it’s in vogue at the moment to rail against those who serve in government, call upon them to stop all of the politics, open their minds and eyes, and show a bit of competent action, that doesn’t begin to approach the wider picture.
The lizard brain is not specific to politicians. It’s something we all need to be aware of. Aren’t we a bit lizardlike too?
Stepping away from the pinball machine for a moment, Consider two awareness actions we can approach right now.
1) When we read, watch and listen to media coverage, do we simply consume, or do we ask questions? Do we recognize polarized structures of argument and associative techniques that may be designed to make us feel a certain way, rather than know a certain thing, from all sides? For example, when two pundits are pitted against each other on political TV, do you salivate at the idea of a contest, and root for only one side?
2) What do we demand of our elected politicians? If we vote for an ideologue, and praise him or her for being unbending in their views, as if unbending were equated with survival or strength, how can we then criticize them for failing to negotiate an agreement? We have told them to be uncompromising. Yet we expect them to compromise.
There is one thing about negotiation that frustrates our higher and lower selves alike. Negotiation takes time, and like our friend the lizard, we’re not ones who like to wait. Yet perhaps we must take the difficult step of being patient with this process, even as we’re told that urgency and midnight coaches-turned-pumpkins are the stuff of great power, and better headlines.
All the same, we can be decisive. We can reject the lizard's powerful allure, its addiction to a blind and false sense of victory. No matter how tempting the idea of winning is to our political representatives and the media that cover them, it only works if the citizens, those who elect and encourage, decide to embolden and validate it.
It happens only if we say that a budget can be crafted atop a loud and unglamorous pinball table. When it could be created – and could reflect – a far more hallowed and dignified place.
Images above via: http://www.spyhunter007.com/dan_wilton_dw_pinball.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizard