Episode 42: Blame

Welcome to wisdom from the aerial view a podcast of two old friends sitting around thinking about What's the superpower that can change our lives and the world and the answer to that is in a book written by my dear friend? Dr. Mark Klein, know, we talk a lot on this podcast about all sorts of things But and and you had said to me, let's talk about blame. I don't blame you I think it's a good thing to talk about and I thought why does he want to talk about blame? And then I thought, well, now I know why. So I looked up a couple of things, say, what's the definition? What does blame even mean? Blame is the art of assigning responsibility for a negative event or action. It's a negative response often used to protect one's ego and discharge negative emotions like anger or disappointment. Now, while blame is a common cognitive distraction or even distortion, It can also foster resentment and defensiveness. It can be a pathway to learning and growth when used constructively to acknowledge a mistake or share in responsibility for a problem. Okay, so first things first, good morning, good afternoon. Why did you want to talk about blame? Why was blame top of mind to you?

Blame is such a negative, unuseful, detrimental emotion. It doesn't help. All it does is pull somebody down, often more than one person. Because when you blame something, blame somebody for something, Well, was a good chance that part of the responsibility was yours. And that, the way, that definition was great. And you don't want to really take responsibility for it because it's painful. You know how I always digress in these conversations. I'm going to make an immediate digression, which is, you know, people always, when they're trying to figure out a human being's behavior, another person's behavior, they say, okay.

Yes, sure. Good, that's a thing.

I'm going to figure this person wants this, is going to do X because they want something. They want this, they want that, they want something else. And that's often true. But that's not the main motivator of people's actions. The main motivator of people's actions is avoidance of pain, whether it be physical pain or most often emotional and psychological pain. Blame really serves that purpose. Excuse me, because let's say something happens and you know deep down that part of it is something you did, you made a mistake or you forgot to do something, whatever the reason. And somehow deep down, know that part of that is yours. Your first reaction, that feeling is so painful that the initial reaction for most people is to immediately flip it. if you want to call it projection, whatever in psychological terms, but to flip it and place that responsibility on somebody else's shoulders. It's liberating. It takes the pain away. So that's what we do most of the time when we blame. We see something we don't like, something happens that is unpleasant, form way or another, and sometimes it has nothing to do with us. It's not our fault at all. But other times there's a little, at least a little smidge in a fault. And our first reaction is to immediately blame somebody else. And everybody does this. I have, I don't know anybody who hasn't, who doesn't fall victim to this trait because it's, because that pain is so intense. That pain of responsibility is often so intense.

But it seems as though it starts at childhood, when we're young, when we're kids, when we had, I don't know, did we learn it? Is it nature versus nurture? All of a sudden, something happens on the schoolyard and you blame someone else. Why does it start so early?

I remember when you blamed me and it wasn't my fault. By definition, it's my fault. I'm the male. It's my fault. You know, I don't think it's learned. I think it's innate. know, that pain is so...

Uh-huh. But it was. Actually, it was. And whatever it was, it was your fault.

That's, yeah.

powerful, know, that sense of responsibility or letting yourself down or letting somebody else down is so painful to us psychologically that our bodies immediately resort to, how do I diffuse this pain? How do I deflect it? The way you do it is you put the blame on somebody else. Therefore, the responsibility is not yours. Therefore, why would you feel pain? It's something we need to learn to overcome and hopefully as adults, many of us do, not all of us, and none of us do succeed all the time. And here's the other problem. It's another one of those elements that's dragging our society down because there's two components to this. One is what does it do to myself, to me? And two, what does it do to the community I'm in? So, you you and I talk a lot about what a mess our country is right now, our society is right now. You know, we're not alone. I think probably

Yeah.

Correct.

out of million people, probably 349 million agree with us that there's a problem. here's, and the reason I wrote this chapter, by the way, the reason I focused on this is I read an article by a New York Times columnist, and I've seen him speak many, you know, he's been on TV, I've seen him, I won't mention his name, but. was, in order to not come back, Jeff Bezos was the worst person in the world. Amazon was the worst, he was the worst. He abused his employees, he ripped off the country, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm thinking, come on. Now this blame of billionaires. This is a perfect example of what the problem is with the concept of blame. So he happened to be talking about billionaires and used Jeff Bezos as the example, but you hear it all the time, billionaires are the worst, we don't need any billionaires, in fact, they're the worst thing that happened to the country. And when I was telling you before we came on live that I'd just been in... Santa Barbara and we had visited the Getty Villa. have you also been to the Getty Center, the big Getty Museum out there in Los Angeles? It's fantastic. It's a fantastic museum. And the Getty Villa is also very interesting. So here's the guy who was a billionaire, who's the richest guy of his era. And you can certainly make a case that he had, I don't know anything about how he, I know he's an oil magnate, whether he, how fairly he played what he did to get, I don't know, I have no idea.

I I have not, no.

But most people who gather that kind of money have, you know, they're at least competitive, right? So we can say that.

you

But without people like the Rockefellers and the Gettys, we wouldn't have these incredible museums. We wouldn't even have libraries. We'd have, there are so many things that these people leave behind when they're done that are so valuable. So you have to look at the whole picture. know, and I actually took, let's stick with billionaires for a minute, if you don't mind, because I found this fascinating. So I did a little bit of my own data analysis. So do you know how many billionaires there are in the United States?

Mm-mm.

I don't know. How many? How many billionaires in the United States? Probably close to 4,000. markekleinmd (07:18.6) Okay, go on. Take a guess. How many billionaires?

No, 800, not that many, right? That's all, right? 800 people, we're talking about 800 people out of 350 million. The average billionaire has $7 billion in assets. So...

That's all, huh? Okay.

And they're all named Trump.

The total of all these billionaires is about $5.6 trillion. To give you an idea, the U.S. national budget, if you want to call it that, that's called how much we spend. We spend just short of $7 trillion a year. So now these billionaires collectively have $5.6 trillion, not an insignificant sum, but we spend more than that every single year. Let's say we added that wealth tax that a lot of these people want to place on these billionaires. And I'm not making a comment about whether it's a good idea or not. Just showing the numbers. The high end is about 3%, a 3 % wealth tax. That means we don't... tax these people on the basis of how much money they earn every year, we tax them on what they're worth, right, which is quite complicated to figure out. But anyway, forgetting that, 3 % of $5.6 trillion is $168 billion, right? And we know $168 billion is a real lot of money, but compared to the national spending of $5.6 trillion, it's a nothing burger. It comes out to be $480 per American. So that's not going to solve any problem, right? So bashing billionaires might sound good politically, but it's not going to solve the problem. Besides the fact that the wealth tax has been tried in Europe and doesn't work. My point is we can blame billionaires. That's great. But they're not going to solve the problem. And it's the same thing when we blame other people about something that goes wrong, when really we had a stake in it. We're not solving our own problem. We're hurting ourselves. What you really want to do is get comfortable accepting responsibility. Because what happens then is you become, we always talk about becoming a person of substance. At that point, you're strengthening yourself. You're stiffening your ability to handle life, to deal with life. So you're going to make mistakes. You're going to do things wrong, like everybody does. Instead of immediately blaming somebody, accept the blame. Embrace the blame.

just we talk about embracing every moment, embrace the blame. And what happens is you get that short term pain, but in the long term, you're building something so much stronger. So I use the billionaires as an example of blame, but really what it comes down to is learning how blame is such a negative emotion and doesn't solve any problem. And in fact, weakens the fabric of our own personalities as well as weakening the fabric of our society.

Well, it's interesting to me, when you look at blame, seems to me that's almost the definition of politics. So they do. That's exactly what they do. And I think that's part of the issue of why the blame game continues and why children, younger people, for example, we talk, we always talk about social media and how the media, the regular media handles these kinds of things and what we see on a daily basis. All you have to do is turn on the television or turn on your iPad and whatever. So it's on television.

yeah.

on social media, it's all about blaming. We have to blame somebody else. I didn't do this, you didn't. That's number one. Number two, I was thinking about billionaire, and you're right, we do like to blame billionaires for everything. And yet, the kinds of programming that is offered on television, like Downton Abbey and the Gilded Age, we watch it too. While on the one hand we blame them, on the other hand, we envy them. And that's kind of interesting too, when you think about...

social media.

Of course.

the psychology of blame versus envy, I think we have to talk about both. It's not just about blame, it's also about envy. What do you say to that?

I agree with you, think. But again, the whole purpose of our podcast is to help our listeners navigate the world, decrease their stress, find meaning and purpose. So if you keep blaming people, you're not ever going to get either of those. You're not going to accomplish your mission. And it's a very difficult thing to do in the beginning. But so many things we talk about are learned and can be practiced. when...

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

When you're about, when something happens and you're about to blame somebody else, even though you know in the deepest recesses of your heart and mind, a lot of this is on your plate or at least some of it's on your plate, instead of blaming somebody, embrace it, accept it. It's like honesty and integrity. We talked about building this cocoon of integrity. When you stop blaming people and you start accepting responsibility, that cocoon is getting bigger and stronger and your persona is growing. So our initial reaction is to avoid, but what's much healthier is to accept. So if you accept blame, yeah, you know what? And I laugh at myself quite a bit. I don't just laugh when I'm having surgery. I laugh at all the stupid things I do, And there's plenty of them. I'm very entertaining, by the way, because I do a lot of silly, dopey things. Like everybody does, right? We all do. And so now, instead of blaming, my first reaction now is to try and stop that as early as I can. Except what part of this is my responsibility?

you

We will be sure.

accept it, embrace it, learn from it, and then watch as I continually get more comfortable in these situations. So why is it good to get comfortable in these situations? Because that eliminates stress. This is another way to eliminate stress. When you feel the inability to accept and handle your own responsibility, that's very stressful because you're disappointed in yourself. You're upset with yourself. Whereas if you learn to accept responsibility, not blame, but responsibility and not... take that responsibility and shift it to somebody else, which we call blame somebody else. Then you get much more comfortable with who you are. And then the next time something happens, you're not gonna get stressed out or freaked out. You're gonna do the same exact thing. You're gonna accept it. And this is how we decrease stress in our lives. Building that persona, building that foundation of honesty, integrity, in this case responsibility and... learning that we're in control of how we feel about everything. You know, we talk about this a lot that the Viktor Frankl rule, we're in control of how we feel. Just a couple of days ago, I think actually maybe yesterday, something happened and I was starting to get a little, I don't say upset, you know, uncomfortable, distressed, whatever. And I immediately said, whoa, whoa, whoa, on, Viktor Frankl rule, all right? And I felt much better. So these things, all these things together,

So wait, so something happened that upset you. Let's delve into that. So something happened that upset you. Okay. And so you literally had to just say, stop and step back. I mean, and just say, no, I have complete control over my own feelings. Okay. And then it just went away.

Yeah. Go ahead. Delve away.

Yes. Yes. I get it. You know how you. Yeah. Yeah. Because I've been doing it a long time. Right. But but I have to still do it. That's the point. Right. I still am as susceptible as anybody else. And as I've always been. Yes. And but I can stop it much more quickly. So you talk about I know you don't like getting on airplanes. You're not a big flying fan. And I don't really like it either. Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because you're human. Because you're human.

Nope. Nope. Not a fan.

It's not that I'm worried about the plane's gonna come down, because I'm rational to look at the numbers and go, it's really, really unlikely. But I don't like the crowds, I don't like the whole thing, the waiting and the turn, yeah, the whole thing, right? I'm not crazy about it. So we do it, but... Often when I find myself starting to get a little teeny tiny bit anxious, say, Victor Frankl rule, I'm in control how I feel. don't have to feel this way. So the Victor Frankl rule combined with the concept of accepting responsibility, being honest, a person of honesty, being a person of integrity, these things build this persona that help you literally crush your stress. in the beginning of this podcast, you usually start, today you didn't how this podcast is about learning how to crush your stress,

Yeah.

Yes, that's what everybody wants. Who doesn't want that? And these little tricks, actually not even little tricks, they're substantial tricks. make a huge difference. That's why blame, I want to talk about blame because when we blame others, right, that is a major source of stress because it's telling us we're not capable of handing out our own responsibility. But in fact, we are. In fact, we are. So once you start to accept the responsibility and stop dishing blame on somebody else, you feel a lot better in the long run. You start to build this persona of strength, of ability to handle pretty much any situation. You think about politics. We're, as we record this, we're in middle of a another government shut down. And I happened to watch for like 10 minutes. I forget, CNN, I forget what I was watching. And of course they have the Democrat and the Republican. It's their fault and it's their fault. And of course, you you look at this and go, it doesn't really matter. Why don't you just say, hey, let's work this out. Why don't you just say, I hear your point. I get it. You know.

That's right.

You know, but if it's about your ego, which is what politics is all about, power, it's really about power, right? These people all want to keep their positions, they all want to have power. They're not really interested in solving a problem. They're interested in getting reelected, right? That's what they want, the vast majority of them, which is why you see them throwing blame around and unwilling to accept responsibility. You accept responsibility, now you're vulnerable to the electorate and... But the downside is you don't solve any problems, which is where we are, of course, now in our country. We don't solve problems. We just yell at each other and call people horrible names, right? So that sense of accepting responsibility, that sense of understanding that you have culpability in something is not a negative thing. You can turn it into a very positive thing and building this person of strength who can then handle these situations going forward.

You brought up what's going on here in Washington and the government shutdown, et cetera, et I don't know that even the rest of the country is tuned into it or maybe even doesn't care. But those of us who live here, obviously we do care. And here being maybe just the East Coast, I don't know. But the question then becomes, okay, that is part of the ethos. What's going on in the blame game is there. And while we can have, can talk about stress and anxiety, et cetera. How do we get those folks in politics who basically make the rules, who govern what we're supposed to be doing to change the way they think? What happened? How do you get them to understand that the blame game is just not going to solve anything? What do do?

As you know, economists often say that incentives rule the day. People will respond to incentives. So the incentives now for our electoral officials are all wrong. You know, their incentive is to win the primary. How do win a primary? You got to appeal to the extreme of your party because those are the people that vote in the party. Those are people that protest. Those people give money. The extremes of both parties are the ones that drive this process. So you have to appeal to them. OK, so the incentive is appeal to the extremes. Don't compromise. Well, there you go. Right. So incentives are wrong. We have to change our

That's right.

primary system. I mean, I'm not a political science expert, but I can tell you that the way we're doing this now is based on all the wrong incentives. What we should be doing is we should be watching TV and get these people say, yeah, we disagree on this budget thing. We have a problem with the, I think most of us about healthcare. Let's figure it out. What's important to you? Okay, what's important to me is this. What's important to me is this. Okay, let's work it out. That's not that hard. They could do it, right? But they're not incentivized to do that because then they're appealing to the middle and the middle is not who votes in the primaries.

Yeah.

gives them money. So that's the problem. It's a different issue. In this case, blame makes perfect sense because their incentives are telling them, blame the other guy. That's what the incentive is.

Sure, right. And it's also about television. If you ever watch C-SPAN, which is fascinating, they talk about a topic and then they open up the call lines and they have the Democratic line and the Republican line. Now, what purpose does that serve except to say black and white? And we are not a black and white society, it's gray. And even when talking about healthcare, it's your healthcare versus my healthcare. I guess my concern about this is in one of the... thoughts that I had when you said, let's talk about blame. My thought was there's no solution to that. How in God's name we ever going to solve this when any problem, you've got a position, I've got a position and never the twain shall meet. And this, think to me, this is the crux of what's bothering this nation nowadays. There's no middle ground. There's no easy way to say, let's work on this together. We don't want to work on it together. Our politicians don't want to work on it together.

Which problem are you talking about?

because as you say, they're gonna lose the election. But television, the media doesn't do that either. That's not good TV. What's good TV is the pro and the con. So there is no middle ground. And so therefore we will always blame. And how do we get away from that? That's my issue.

Well, the good news is that it's been different in the past, intermittently. know, again, there's nothing really new under the sun. This kind of thing has happened before. Now it's more obvious because we have 24 hour news cycles, we have social media, everybody's plugged in all the time. They're only hearing what they want to hear or what the algorithm wants to feed them, which only makes it worse. Right. So, you know, I was watching Bill Maher and he had Van Jones on, I think it was Friday night.

Never.

Yeah.

Evangeline Jones was talking about this problem that, that in your social media, you're talking about Arab, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and that, young people are only getting one feed. They're only getting the feed, the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas anti-Israel feed. That's all they see, right? Because the algorithm is just feeding them that stuff and, and you don't see the other side of it. And that's true of so many things. So, It is a very big problem. One, the political one we just talked about that the incentives for the politicians that are run to the extremes to get reelected. You mentioned the media, 100 % right. That's what drives eyeballs, right? Is this conflict, right? So, eventually people get tired of this. They don't like it. And you said there's no middle ground. I think there's a huge middle ground, but we don't hear about them because what you said correctly is that the media isn't going to tell you about, hey, by the way, did know that 80 % of people get along just great, right? Or 70, whatever it is. And that 14 % of the people, I think what Van Jones said, the extremes are 14 % on either side, total, like 7 % on each side or something like that. It's a really small number. But as you said,

Except, know, let me ask you, how does he know that? Where do we get 14 %? They make that up.

He pulled it. No, maybe he was a Paul he saw. Let's let's judge him favorably because he's a good guy. Right. Right.

No, I love the guy. No, no, no, I don't mean him. It's just the point of it is we can make up facts, distort them anywhere we want. in my line of work, I've been doing that for many years. I talk about we have the largest volunteer army in the United States. How do I know that? Because I said so. I mean, we can make things, we can distort if we want, not to hurt anybody, maybe to help our own cause. My problem is, and we talked about this in another podcast, Facts. What are the facts? Is it in fact true that 14 %? Maybe, but maybe not. See, I don't know. The problem is, I don't know.

Okay, but it doesn't matter if it's it doesn't matter if it's 14 % or 24%. It's I think and you're right, we don't know for sure. But but let's put this way, that's who's driving a train at the moment, right? Right. But people do get tired of this eventually. Nothing lasts forever. So one of the things about the aerial view, we haven't actually mentioned the aerial view in this in this episode. But, you know, to refresh everybody's memory, it's a single most important thing I've ever learned in my life bar none.

No.

Yes!

Nothing comes close. Why? Because the aerial view is a perspective that allows you to take all this information that you're hearing and seeing and living through and put it in perspective, in a different perspective, that all things have occurred before and will occur again, meaning societies go up, societies go down, individual lives go up and down. We repeat the same things our parents, grandparents and ancestors repeated in terms of our emotions and our personal growth. Societies repeat again and again. last forever, right? We're still not fighting the Peloponnesian Wars, right? We're fighting different wars, but the point is things, it's not quite a sine wave, but it is a flowing wave, things change. So what happens when this period right now, people don't like it. You're getting to the point now where people are getting upset. without getting, don't,

Yeah.

I don't want to get into the political side because you know I don't have a team. from the aerial view, here's what I see. know, just bear with me for a minute, Enid. know, we have people are very upset, especially on your team with Donald Trump, extremely upset, right? But Donald Trump didn't come out of a vacuum.

Hmm.

Honey, everybody's got a team. Go ahead, go ahead.

He came as a reaction to what people perceived was going on in their world that they didn't like. So they went to, instead of this middle ground, they went to a pretty far shift to the other extreme. So people react to what they see and often they overshoot the mark and their reaction is a little disproportionate to what is actually needed. And then of course, they pendulum will swing back and we get to a new equilibrium. There's something in the world called entropy. important concept. And entropy is a scientific term and here's what it means. It means that the natural state of the universe is things that go from very ordered to very disordered. To have all your clothes very neatly put away in your drawer to a week later having stuff scattered all over the room. Things don't go from dirty to clean. They go from clean to dirty. Things don't go from working... from not working at all to working perfectly. It's the other way around, Engines decay, food spoils, rooms get messy, cities get dirty, crime expands. Entropy is the trend in our universe that things will go from more ordered to less ordered. More order to less order. This is the way it is. And then what we have to do, we have to put in a lot of energy to clean it up. So what we see in our societies is we try really hard to set up these great systems of order. Law and order, governance, social services, all these things to keep a very ordered society. And inevitably, they will start to decay. And the only way to change that the case to put in energy effort, right? can, if your park has now full of bottles and trash, you can go with a group of people and clean it up, put in your own personal energy and boom, the park goes some disordered trash all over the place to order, everything looking neat and clean, the bushes trimmed and so on. this is what happens. We're gonna go, so the story of our societies are to go from order to disorder. And then we react to this disorder and then fix them again.

crime goes up, we put in more resources, crime goes down. The city gets dirty, we put in more resources, we clean it up. So we're in a period now where things are getting a bit dirtier and a bit more disorganized, but for sure, this will flip around. Now, I don't know if it's going to be a week, a month, or a hundred years. I've generally probably not a hundred years, a shorter period of time, but this is what happens. So you have to take these things in a bit of stride. You do the best you can to help those around you to be a positive contributor to society. Put in the energy to reverse that entropy to go from disorder to order and things eventually react and that's what we're seeing now so I don't think when you say what are we going to do about this I don't have an answer for you but I know it will change because that's the way it always is

hope so, because my team, my anti-Trump team, which I am on, is because of all the entropy he has brought to this country. And my team, I might add, is America. Okay, we are just about running at, I'm not saying it's not, I'm just saying we have a team. But I'll end with something that was a Chinese proverb that I really think is terrific. He who blames others has a long way to go on his journey. He who blames himself

My team is America too.

is halfway there. He who blames no one has arrived." Pretty good. Yeah. I know. So I will leave you with the last word. That was my last word. I'm not Chinese and I didn't invent the proverb, but it's a good one. But I will give you the last, the final say.

Beautiful. that's a really good one. Yes. Yes.

Let's stick with that proverb for a second because, you what was very interesting about that is the genius who wrote that took it to the next level, which is not only don't blame yourself, you know, except, except that things will go wrong. So when I say blame myself, I mean, take responsibility, but I'm okay with it because I recognize from the aerial view, this is going to happen. We're all going to be at fault. We're all going to make mistakes. We're all going to err. We talk about why we err. We're all going to do these things. And that proverb is saying, okay, now

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Accept responsibility, take it a step further and don't get stressed about it. Don't get upset about it. Accept it. That's all things. The idea of acceptance is so powerful in so many ways. And I hope that this conversation will at least help some of our listeners find another way to try and minimize their stress.

Right.

Yeah, and I think you're right. think that blame, blame and actually I'm glad you talked about that because blame is just another way of adding stress to our lives, isn't it? I mean, it's very stressful to blame everybody. Yeah, never thought about it in those terms.

It adds stress to your life. Very, very. And I've done it, I look back at my life, I've done it so many times to people I love, friends.

Yeah.

I look back and every time I go, how foolish was I? How foolish was I? So now I try really hard not to do it. And again, it's an effort. Because our natural inclination is to reduce, is trying to offload that responsibility. it's not doing you any favors. There you go. The Chinese proverb is right. Enid (30:05.9) Yeah, because we've been hurt. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Interesting. Yeah, it is. Thank you. I found that in a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant. I did actually.

You know what was gonna say? I was gonna say, did you find that an unfortunate cookie? But I was afraid that might be a little inappropriate to say, but since you said it, well, I'm good with it.

No, I did. It said that and it said, face is your fortune. Of this you are sure. Just look in the mirror. Oh, boy, are you poor. Anyway, thank you, Doc, for another wonderful, wonderful time. I appreciate it. Thank you.

That was great, isn't it? That was great. All right, speak to soon, everybody. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

Peace.