Volume 3, Issue 20, June 2, 2005

Parallel Universes in Los Angeles

Author: Dr. Siegfried Othmer

Last Thursday I heard my first symphonic concert at the new Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles. The acoustics of the hall are magical. There are no bad seats, and there is a remarkable “presence” to the sound wherever one sits. It is very suitable to the modern era where we can have high fidelity to the upper treble scales without having to worry about scratches on records marring the experience, or about differential phase delay in speakers muddying the sound. So our hearing is increasingly being challenged by modern music in the upper registers, and without significant penalty. The downside is that in such a live venue as Disney Hall every sound from the audience is heard as well.

When a minimalist piece is being played, one cannot help being aware of the audience. And it prompted me to think about how the whole experience of this orchestra symbolizes the ongoing battle of civilization against entropy—disorder. First there was the construction of this remarkable building—at a cost of over $110 million (or was it $160 million? Maybe it was $200M...), on the site of what had been a parking lot for decades. Then there is the whole enterprise of the Los Angeles Philharmonic itself, this organism of organisms, only understandable if one knits together a knowledge of its long past with the present. And finally there is the elaborate construction of our experience on this particular evening, where all aspects of our environment are so carefully controlled—not only the acoustics, but the speed and volume of the airflow through the building, the exclusion of any external sounds and vibrations, the lighting, and then, finally, the performance itself. What struck me was the ease with which this careful construction of our experience could be disrupted, how fragile it all was. If just one person in the audience of more than a thousand had another agenda, the evening would be ruined for us all. We got to hear a piece that had been commissioned by the Philharmonic itself, and it had been performed only one time previously, at the opening of Disney Hall. So there was an element of uniqueness to the experience as well. One could not just walk out and buy the CD.

The next day I drove downtown to be part of a program called “Voices for Youth,” which an organization called Mosaic (out of Seattle) was putting on for the residents of LA in order to expose them to the lives of inner-city youth. We came just to be “entertained” by readings and poetry and dances that were put on by inner-city youth after a two-day retreat in the local mountains. The stories one heard were variously moving and frightening, and the variety of talent displayed in memorized recitations, in dance, and in musical performance was incredible. Here was the same struggle of trying to create an ordered existence in the presence of entropy. Only here entropy was winning. Of course, in the end entropy always wins, and in fact it is always winning at every moment. We extract our little triumphs of civilization only at the cost of more entropy.

Whereas in Disney Hall entropy had been elaborately banished from our visual and auditory awareness, these children were threatened by it constantly—by living with unpredictable and unreliable family members, by living on unsafe streets and in unsafe neighborhoods, by being challenged beyond endurance by their peers, by living in the constant presence of the failure to construct a viable existence, by being unable to banish fear, and in the end by having to contend with their own disregulated and poorly nourished nervous systems.

Yet these children were resilient. They were not beaten down. One of them came down from the stage at the end to shake my hand. No words were exchanged. What bond of identification could there have been between the black kid with the too-big pants and this bespectacled white man with graying hair? At another moment, one of the kids jumped in a single bound back up on the stage in a smooth, cat-like movement. No wasted motion. No drama. I thought back to the comparison David Suzuki drew between gazelles in Africa and our domesticated animal herds—before making the point that we had domesticated ourselves along with our farm animals. There was a wildness here like that of the gazelles. There is a herd with which to identify, but ultimately the gazelle is on its own in evading the lion. These kids were part of a different herd, yet also fighting their individual battles. In only one piece had the group sung together. Every other performance on stage was individual, or in very small groups.

The book “The Liar’s Club” is being reissued after ten years, and the author said wistfully, “A dysfunctional family is one with more than one person in it.” Ultimately, of course, things trace back to the dysfunctional self, and to the variety of potential selves that we carry forward within us. If one applies the family model to these contending selves within the self, how unlikely that these children should make all of the right choices at the various choice points along the way? How does the gyroscope of their moral compass stay wound up?

As it happens, the event drew others whom I had worked with many years ago in connection with our children’s Waldorf school. I had not seen them in many years. Our gyroscopes are wound up, simply because they were wound up long ago by intact families at a much simpler time. But all that we could do at this moment is to show some solidarity with the struggles of these children. The impulse to help is met, once again, by entropy on all sides. How does our society allow things to come to such a state?

The Listening to Youth program was taking place at the Mount Saint Mary’s College campus just a few miles from Disney Hall. But the events were worlds apart. Now the city fathers want to build on the success of Disney Hall to construct a viable downtown. The corner stone will be a $1.8B development right next door to Disney Hall. Asked whether this will indeed mean the revival of downtown, former mayor Richard Reardon in a moment of honesty declared, “Oh, that’s a bunch of baloney. It’s just a bunch of rich guys getting richer. I’m one of them.” It will mean just more high-rises with their sheer walls jutting up from the sidewalk, demarcating as dramatically as possible those on the inside from those on the outside.

The fond belief that our society will be furthered by the investments of the elite is increasingly unsupportable. Corporations have some $600B in the bank right now that they don’t know how to invest. Exxon has $25B sitting in cash, and that hoard is increasing at $1B per month. Their exploration budget is not even being increased. Warren Buffet has $40B ready to invest, and he does not know what to do with the money. Even high tech companies have this problem. Microsoft has some $30B in the bank. Last year they gave more than $30B back to their stockholders. At the same time, our government has seen fit to give the rich another $100B in tax cuts, so that they would finally bestir themselves to invest it in the economy. Instead of growing and creating wealth, however, they are simply accumulating it, through real estate and other means. Every passing day means a significant transfer of wealth from the lesser to the richer in our society.

Our government has focused solely on creating lift for the economy without equally focusing on the drag that is keeping it from moving forward. But we know that in an airplane no realistic amount of lift can overcome ice on the wings. Increasingly our society is encumbered by dysfunctional institutions. The capitalist predators are not an answer to this. They are hunters when we need gardeners. They go for very select game in our society, when the whole ecosystem needs cultivation.

Ironically, what sustains this charade, this feint of forward movement, is the hope still to be found among our most despairing, and to be found also in the eyes of the children I witnessed. Somehow they still believe that individual solutions are possible in the face of our collective failure. Such hope is the most primal of our healthy illusions. One should do nothing to disturb it. And individually, of course, some of them will succeed. But more and more of our society will be going steerage, and there are only society-level solutions to such society-wide problems.

John Kenneth Galbraith, now 91 and ailing, once said of economic matters that “Left to themselves, things rarely work out for the best, except possibly for the powerful.” At this point, things are hardly being left to themselves. Rather, they are being carefully stage-managed, and the invisible hand of Adam Smith has become the cat’s paw of the elite, reaching into the public purse and disemboweling our public institutions.
What happens when the last bubble bursts?

There is the temptation to despair about the ability of our institutions to anticipate crises rather than react to them. By contrast, working with neurofeedback we have the balm of a rather immediate reward for our efforts. It is a remarkable antidote to pessimism with respect to issues on the larger stage. And in fact neurofeedback constitutes a rather comprehensive remedy for a lot that ails our society. Cost-benefit ratios are being sprinkled increasingly through treatments of such issues as early education, addiction, and criminality. None of the quoted values begin to compare with the cost-benefit ratios available with neurofeedback.

At the same time, there is pessimism on the lists with regard to the prospects for neurofeedback. Such pessimism could not be more misplaced. Everything that is happening in the world of neuroscience is tending to confirm, not disconfirm, what we have been saying. It is only a matter of time when the “tectonic revolution” will occur in the mental health field, and all the hand-wringing on the Internet will become a historical curiosity. Note how quickly the world adapted to the realization that neural plasticity was a fact of the human brain. Nobody skipped a beat. Similarly, neurofeedback will simply become a fact, and the world will go on. And it will happen more suddenly than most people think. It is far too late to worry about the fact that it hasn’t happened yet, and to strategize around that. We should instead strategize for the inevitability of the success of neurofeedback.

Dr. Siegfried Othmer