QOTD – WHAT’S ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND?

Laurence Gonzeles’ book Surviving Survival – The Art & Science of Resilience has a memory-sticky chapter titled The Bear: One Flew East, One Flew West. (No mention of the cuckoo’s nest.)

Fall ’83,twenty-four year old Patricia van Tighem, a Calgary surgical ward nurse, & her husband Trevor, a 3rd year med student, were hiking the Crypt Lake Trail. She got a sense of foreboding – that her husband said was paranoia. Lots of people coming back from the direction they were headed, tho/too. Then the smell: she didn’t know it, but a bighorn sheep had died just off the trail. “She was in The Stream. Chris Lawrence would say that the universe was trying to speak to Patricia. Her amygdala instantly picked up the smell & a single word rose to her conscious mind: bear. Once again, the brain always knows more than we consciously know. Patricia’s subtle inner guess was correct. She voiced her concern about bears. But Trevor’s enthusiasm won out & they pressed on up the trail.”

You know the horror that came. To both of them. But especially to Patricia…& it proceeded from worse, to worse, to worse.

The couple was well-matched in their experiences, seeing traumas in the hospital setting, but diverged 180 from each other in their respective responses to the mauling.

And he lost patience with her (obviously a recurring theme).

“But their experiences had been different in one crucial way. Trevor had had no premonition about the bear. Patricia had ignored the clear warning she had felt.”

“She knew something that many people never have to face: The world really is dangerous.”

She was sensitive, & accurate. (He was neither.)

Lots of explanatory detail I’ve left out…”Sapolsky wrote, “Take a sufficiently severe stressor &, as studies suggest, virtually all of us will fall into despair. No degree of neurochemical recovery mechanisms can maintain your equilibrium in the face of some of the nightmares that life can produce.”

“On December 14, 2005, Patricia van Tighem checked into a hotel in Kelowna, BC, & took her own life, leaving behind Trevor & four children. She had fought the bear for 22 years.”

The Bulls…& The Bears:

“Crowd Psychology & The Auction Market

If the market is a composite personality of its many participants, is it more than the millions of isolated feelings & thoughts of its investors? Social philosophers, psychologists, & sociologists have long observed that groups & crowds (i.e., large groups) develop a psychological profile that finds its common denominator far below the arithmetic average of its members. Nietzsche astutely observed that insanity was an individual aberration but was the rule in crowds. Crowds feel an invincibility that individuals cannot afford, & thereby lose any sense of responsibility or control that might have previously restrained extreme behavior. The dissolution of responsibility & identity in an amorphous crowd causes individuals in it to become highly susceptible to fantasies & ideals, almost of a hypnotic nature. Men worship & fear power & are willing to give their loyalty, even their self-control, to someone or something that can provide it.

The 19th century French physician, Gustave Le Bon, in his pioneering work on the psychology of crowds The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind, plainly states his belief that individuals who join crowds “descend several rungs in the order of civilization.” Since a group is anonymous & therefore not responsible for any consequences, individuals in groups allow themselves to yield to their instincts. The longer an individual remains immersed in a group, the more his conscious personality vanishes, as if in a state of hypnosis. Freud later brilliantly expanded Le Bon’s work in Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego, where he made his most explicit attempt to relate individual impulses to group behavior. He asserted that mental functioning is always linked with object relations. The most obvious link is the process of identification in which there occurs an incorporation of an external ideal into the ego. Group cohesiveness is attributable to this mechanism wherein the members all share the same ideal, the same goals, & the same critical agency. The degree of cohesiveness is directly related to the extent to which this is true. Freud’s verdict was devastatingly simple: men in groups become children blindly following the hypnotic spell of some leader. They abandon their egos & identify with a larger power that functions as an ego ideal. Time & time again, we have witnessed this phenomenon in 20th century affairs & financial markets, often with regrettable consequences.” ~ The Mind of the Market: Spiritual Lessons for the Active Investor, FJ Chu

The bulls & the bears &&& can be dangerous, for sure. But it’s not groups & crowds of bulls & bears that are most dangerous – not even close.