It’s lamentable but true that most people don’t eagerly desire to talk about our purpose in life, why we fail at things, what we truly value, why we exist at all, or what it means that we do. These are the things that really get my engine revving though, and so I struggle to enjoy most conversations.

Broaching these topics when you’ve just met someone, or never talked so intimately, is hard. It takes more perseverance than I have. But talking about extraterrestrials allows for a conversations that easily approximates one about those desirable topics but feels reasonable to broach and comfortable for people to join in on.

One of the big advantages of it is that almost no person alive today has strong and fixed opinions about aliens. About their existence, their nature or their history, almost everyone will reasonably claim ignorance. No major religion says anything about these topics, and neither does science. It’s an area where there are few bits of knowledge and few stones of belief and so we engage with it fully and don’t get sensitive if someone disagrees. Said a different way, conversation killers like “only Ron Paul can save us,” “all people are stupid and secretly racist,” or “now let me tell you how it really works” cannot be executed in such a conversation.

But we can, by proxy, discuss what it means that we humans exist at all. And why alien civilizations might be different from ours. And people’s beliefs about what aliens may do with their civilization reasonably approximate what they desire or fear for ours.

There is more than a little diversion in the technique of using talk about extraterrestrial life as a gateway to talk about our messy terrestrial stuff, but I don’t think it reaches the troubling heights of subterfuge, and so I’m publicly recommending that you try, at least once or twice, to have a conversations about aliens.

It’s worth establishing, to start, what we mean by better. Striving to be better requires being fully aware of difference between the improvable things in your life and those that can’t be. You can’t change your genetics, or the factors that we consider to directly flow from that, nor are you able to change the things outside of yourself. A 5’4” overweight man will never make himself into the most physically attractive mate for a woman who favors skinny men over 6’4” with a different skin tone. Part of getting better is realizing and accepting that reality.

The thoughts, comments, and actions of others are thoroughly beyond our direct control. (It is, however, worth realizing that by changing the way you act, you can in time shape the way you appear to others.) But if you’re going to get angry any time someone disrespects or disagrees with you, you’re going to live a hollow life as other peoples’ rag doll. Thrown around by the impulses of people who rarely think of you at all, you’ll be subject to endless turmoil and frustration, and that’s no way to live.

Essential to this idea of better is this idea that the thing you can control is the way you live. It’s not only within your control, it’s essentially the only thing you control, so why do you think it’s okay you treat it like garbage? There’s a seldom noticed point that I consider relevant: the smaller a person’s area of control the more seriously they take the maintenance of it. Hoarders are generally people who feel they control nothing in the world, or the whole of it. Someone who recognizes that they own their living space and are the sole one responsible for maintenance of it generally treats it quite well.

And so it is with your abilities and mind. They are essentially the only things you have direct control over. Which is different from saying that they’re the only things you think you control. Some people believe their inability to understand mathematics is wired into the system, (barring some rare developmental disabilities) they’re wrong. Some people believe they can exercise complete control over the subservient people in their life (be they family, romantic partners, employees, or even slaves), they too are wrong.

Once one sees fully and exactly what they control and what they don’t, they generally tend to believe in the value of improving it. One of the biggest obstacles people have in understanding the case for better is that they have mistaken beliefs in either their omnipotence or impotence.  The delusions that allow people to believe in either direction are one of the most important obstacles to people living the best life they’re capable of. And they’re far more complex and multifaceted to fit within the purview this essay, so I’ll move on.

If we agree that we control our mind and abilities, we’re left with three basic options: get better, get worse, or stagnate. Getting worse is not easy, but people manage it all the time. When you only learn things because people make you, you’ll forget them quickly and be unable to comprehend facets of the world you once did. This is getting worse. When a boyfriend pushed you to eat better and exercise more, and then left your life, you’re probably going to neglect those things you once did well. That’s getting worse. Generally, we get worse because we were never committed to get better in the first place. We did those things that the wise recognize as good because there was someone pushing us out of the rut, once the pushing stops the rut feels welcoming, like home.

Laziness, habits, and willpower conservation are also the reason we typically stagnate. Without outside pressure to know more about the universe than the model of the solar system you got in grade school, you’ll only have learned of the demotion of Pluto from planetary status because the news was so prevalent as to be unavoidable. Without a school-mandated councilor there to push you to work with your anger in a healthy way, you’ll probably never get any better than the modest extant to which they were able to help you fill in the bottom of your rut.

Without a self-motivation brought on by a belief that you can be better, your life will be controlled by others. By the things you can’t help knowing, the work you can’t help doing, by the mental reactions others evince in you because you’ve never taken the time to try to control your own mind. At the most basic level, I think the case for better comes down to this: who do you want to control your life: yourself or interested strangers? Surely there exist strangers genuinely interested in your improvement (most such people also have a deep interest in their own improvement, it’s worth mentioning), but leaving yourself at the mercy of strangers nets out as an unwise proposition. Even a few people with a truly sinister interests can easily overwhelm those trying to be of help when they can.

All of that gets to sounding a bit “me against the world”, but it’s not. One of the best and most common reasons that people have for being better in their life is so that they’re able to help others better. Taking care of yourself seems selfish until you try a few times you help others and make the whole situation worse. When we’re not in control of ourselves, our attempts to help others will frequently go wrong. Being the best version of yourself also allows you to be the best help possible for other people. So if you don’t want to to try to be better for your own sake, do it for our sake. For the sake of your family, friends, neighbors, and world. If there’s a better reason to do anything I’ve not found it.

I have a deep and abiding interest in real factual human stories. If there’s one thing that’ll dependably make me weep or shaky with ecstaty, it’s a well-done presentation of a real person encountering real things. What I noticed in reading my Born into Brothels review was that I said almost nothing about how the documentary works as piece of art. The mechanics of its making, the composition of the photography, the pacing of the narrative, none of those were relevant to me. What I concerned myself with was the twin moral imperatives of a documentarian to document and of a person who can help to do so.

It’s possible to read my inability to appreciate art as art as a moral failing. Similar to my conversation aversion, it’s doubtless led to consternation among those who know me and don’t understand my problem. And I’m sure that there’s something to be said for the ability to appreciate art as art.

Since I keep saying it, I should probably be clear about what I mean by “art as art.” Seeing art as art is staring up at the Sistine Chapel and being interested only in the brushstrokes that made it, the picture it presents, and how that strikes you on an emotional level. When I look up at the Sistine Chapel I’ll likely experience some sense of awe (I got one using this approximate), but my mind quickly races to grapple with issues like the reason it came to exist, what its existence means, and what it means that we hold it in such reverence. The technique doesn’t interest me, the intricacies of its creation strike me as mere oddities, and the realities of the visuals strike me as rather banal. In short, I can’t appreciate it for merely what it is.

Life interests me. Fascinates even. But the creations of people who aren’t so fascinated by it to be held in such awe that they want only to document it have always struck me as odd. I just feel like I’m watching deluded people try to entertain other deluded people.

Deluded may be too strong. Sleeping or blind are more accurately what I mean. People driven to create art are usually those who feel the need to make something beautiful or pure or simple. They aim mostly to distill, simplify, and make understandable. I see the irony of doing this, but it feels appropriate to communicate this better with some lyrics from Connor Oberst. The Bright Eyes song Bowl of Oranges ends:

…if the world could remain within a frame
Like a painting on a wall
Then I think we’d see the beauty then
We’d stand staring in awe
At our still lives posed
Like a bowl of oranges
Like a story told
By the fault lines and the soil

It’s not that I don’t think people creating things with the goal of helping others to see the beauty, majesty, hurt, tenderness, etc that underly the weave and weft of the cloth of life is useless or silly. It’s certainly not. If I write for any reason it’s to learn how to convey knowledge of those things better than I currently can.

But what is true is that what they produce is much less interesting to me than what they meant by it. I’d rather consider the artist than the work as it sits before me. Perhaps this is actually how most people respond to art, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say it, so I did.

Political horse races are an easy and banal beat. The vast majority of the stories that reporters spend their time covering are the one they’re being horse-fed by the campaigns. These reporters are jumping campaign bus to campaign bus on their way from campaign stop to campaign stop, hopefully pausing once in a while to actually put their ear to the ground and learn what people feel about all the hubbub.

Obviously there are uses to having all these journalists. Sometimes they get to ask the candidates real questions, and sometimes those questions won’t be met with a well-rehearsed dodge. And when those situations arise, it’s nice to think that your reporter will be there to ask really penetrating and valuable questions that shed new light on the story.

But has that happened yet this campaign season? Were all the beat reporters in the White House in the lead up to the Iraq War of 2003 of any value at all in making the country more aware of the war’s foolishly assembled proximate causes? Were that same cluster of reporters any better at asking the hard questions about what would happen after the country’s inevitable victory?

Defenders of the old journalistic order act as though it’s a catastrophe every time a paper cuts its staff. As though we’re losing some valuable insight into the ways of the world. But the simple reality is that for most of the 20th century reporters served in massively inefficient silos. Every paper, magazine, radio station, and TV channel that wanted a seat at the journalistic table acted as though it existed in a vacuum, and that it was truly vital that they were at the battlefront of every war, at every campaign stop, in every capital where things may happen.

In the well-connected world we currently inhabit the value of reporting for yourself from the campaign trail is massively marginal. Almost no value is realized by having ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, The New York Times, et al following the same campaign in almost the self-same way. What we really could see some benefit from, where these old dinosaurs could really prove the value of their massive staffs, would be to take 10 or 20 reporters currently following every moment of the campaign and disperse them across Washington looking for the under-reported stories. There are certainly important things going on in that town that aren’t sufficiently reported-on for people out here in the world.

The problem that news organizations still don’t have their heads around is the value of truly unique reporting in the networked world. When the paper was the way most people got their news, it was valuable for the paper to focus on the biggest 20 stories in the world and provide up-to-date reports on it. The economics even allowed them to have their own man on each of those scenes. It’s become increasingly clear in the dawn of the 21st century that there’s no room for that model any more.

Perhaps what we need instead is to have a few reporters per issue or candidate. One woman covering Mitt Romney’s campaign will be the one the New York Times gets a progress report from. And when ABC needs a stand-up piece on the front-runner, they go to her. And when Time wants  a longer think-piece about the implications of the Romney campaign, they also go to her. This sort of freelance-reporting seems like a pretty obvious way the journalism business could save money and sacrifice minimal value.

What’s absolutely clear is that shredding the vestigial print-business isn’t the only thing old-school news organizations will need to do in a new world. The sheer volume of people currently dispatched to report on all the latest bleatings of the campaigns drives that point home crystal clear.

What I struggle to buy into is the rather popular correlate that these flow states are good and worth seeking and preserving. That they make us better at our tasks and thus make us better in life. I’d make no quarrel with the idea that they can do those things, but I’d strongly dissent from the idea that they consistently do those things.

To pick a common example, you’re a programmer. You’re a pretty good programmer, and you’re currently working hard on a project that’s offering opportunities to learn new things from time to time, but generally you’re just enjoying using your tools in slightly different ways than you have in the past. Here flow is clearly a useful thing. When you can get into that groove, you’ll probably be faster and more accurate than you would outside of it. And it feels great too, just being there pounding and creating and getting toward the goal.

But here’s how flow has you trapped: you don’t really want to be  a programmer your whole life. You’d really like to be the kind of person who hires and helps programmers to create projects far bigger and more ambitious than you’d ever manage yourself. You know this, but every day you arrive at work and you just plod until you flow and you stay that way (with a few breaks) until quitting time. You’re never making any progress on this big long-term goal because you’re stuck in a flow trap.

Flow traps aren’t inherently as pernicious as they may sound. (Though they can be: video games, I’m looking at you.) You’re still doing good things while you’re writing code, you’re just not getting any vision of the new vistas of possibility that you think you’d really enjoy. The problem with a flow trap is that it makes you think you can just keep coding your way out of writing so much code, and you can’t. There’s a drastically different skill-set you need if you want to go from the kind of person who writes code well to the kind of person that helps people to write code well.

Real tangible progress in your life, real growth in your skill-set, requires you to step out of the flow and take on things you don’t even have an inkling of how to take on. It requires you to be uncomfortable and for things to be hard. Because that’s where you really learn new things, see new vistas, and gain mastery of the world you’d never thought possible.

It was in the midst of a conversation about this basic issue that I think I may finally have arrived at a somewhat interesting and novel point: the internet has made me more averse to average conversations than I otherwise would be. I doubt that it’s true that the internet is the reason that I have this basic aversion, but I do think it’s true that nature of the internet exacerbates this tendency I have in a way that’s led to extra consternation in myself and the people who are subjected to the effects of this aversion.

It’s relevant but not crucial that I note in advance that I came of age at the same time as the internet. I’m not completely certain, but I vaguely recall that I first used the internet at age 8. It was dialup, I had little conception of how to use it, but I knew that with the help of my parents it could take me to Nintendo.com, and that’s all I wanted to see anyway. As I got older, we got faster modems and I saw broader and more interesting things on the internet. In 17 years a lot has changed on this little old network, and I’ve seen a lot of it, intently watching from the front row.

The internet represents, to my mind, nearly the whole of useful knowledge. That’s hardly to say that everything interesting that’s ever existed is on the internet, but there is at least some testimony to those things that are interesting and not on the internet which can be found on the internet. Surely in a pre-internet age I might have been making this same basic point—X is more compelling to me than most people—about TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, or books; but because of my age I’ll be talking primarily about the internet.

Because of the permissive access the internet allows, I believe some things that would be unfathomable to people in the past. I believe that information is something in nearly infinite supply from nearly infinite sources more reliable than any single person I’ve ever known. Knowledgeable opinions are so dime-a-dozen to me that the idea that I’d want a person’s uninformed opinion about anything strikes me as laughable. Things that make me laugh? I reliably secure that on the internet, and it’s way funnier than even the funniest comedian (it, after all, contains all comedians). These beliefs culminate in this basic issue: what do you get from talking to other people that I can’t get better on the internet?

As information gathering pursuits, conversations are deeply broken. They’re useful as bias-gathering journeys, but few people have biases interesting enough to keep me attentive. People cite a sense of camaraderie that can be engendered by conversation, but I’ve never been aroused to one by idle chit-chat about the weather, sports, news headlines, or the latest events of a person’s lfe. Surely there are other benefits people think conversations provide, but it’s not useful for me to offer one sentence rebuttals to all of them.

My basic point, though, isn’t to rehash the reasons that most conversations feel hollow. It’s to convey the idea that as information becomes more universally available (something that’s been happening since the printing press, but has accelerated in the age of the internet), the value of the knowledge held by any single person declines. And the value of the information held by an average person becomes ever less remarkable. This very reality—that few people possess any knowledge or wisdom that can’t be more reliably found elsewhere—is doubtless one of the reasons that I possess such a virulent strain of conversation aversion.

But any deep inquiry into the nature and course of revolutions should quickly lay bare some very critical roadblocks. First and foremost, any revolution must inherently govern the same territory that was managed by the old regime. People think they can start fresh on New Year’s Day, forgetting that they’ll still have the same basic thought patterns, tendencies, and mental habits they had before. The brain is malleable, but like with soft soil your habitual paths will have made a noticeable groove; it takes hard work to wear away old trails. It will not be easy-going the first time you endeavor to cut across all the old ruts.

At the world-level, it’s easy to miss the fact that any revolution that cuts off the metaphorical head of the snake will still exist within the environment the snake inhabited. In more traditional language: allies, interest-groups, and citizens will still have the same basic interests in a new world order that they had in the old one. Businesses will still want a stable and friendly regime, the military will still want its power and toys, etc. The reason the military is currently prevailing in Egypt is that the military previously prevailed in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak may have been the head of the snake, but the tree upon which he rested remained in place available for anyone who it likes to climb.

The language of revolutionaries is easy. It is nice, and clear-cut, and simple. Those things are bad and these things are good. Because of this, it’s a terrible way to actually see the world, but a great way to misunderstand it. The soft revolution that Barack Obama promised in the 2008 election never materialized because one cannot make a new world by words alone. The only way to truly forge a new order is to systematically disassemble all the interest groups that made up the old order. To do this quickly (that is: in a revolutionary way) almost always requires either killing people or making them scared for their life and safety.

And that’s a thing I absolutely abhor. All sane freedom-loving people similarly abhor it. But those revolutions that succeed require a strong force of violence—either physical or psychological—to carry them through. And this is certainly no guarantee of long-term success. China was a brutal and suppressive state for much of the mid-twentieth century, making it one of the most durable and ideologically pure communist revolutions carried out. While it still exists in name, anyone who thinks that the Chinese Communist Party today rules over a country that the party’s founders would have appreciated is a fool.

The “revolutions” that succeed, and are looked upon fondly even after the newness have worn off, are barely revolutionary. The only notable revolution I can think of that one could meaningful call a success in the fullness of time is the American. But it’s worth making clear that the American Revolution was only revolutionary insofar it it was a revolt against a very small feature of the existing power structure. The Americans were largely satisfied with the basic political landscape in which they existed, they just didn’t like the nature of the head of the snake. Nothing about the day-to-day life of Americans changed much after the revolution, save for the location from which taxes were applied and protections offered.

Other revolutions, the Eastern European “revolutions” of 1989 come to mind, which eschew violence and succeed are held against feeble regimes. I’d even argue that it makes less sense to think of 1989 as a revolutionary moment, than as when it finally became clear that the Bolshevik revolution could not last. The militaristic psychological control exercised by Communist bureaucrats to keep themselves in power—the only thing that made it appear to last—had run out of believers to enforce it.

In the fewest words possible, the anti-revolutionary case is this: revolutions do not work. They are enticing, they are exciting, and they have no ability to forge lasting change. Neither in personal nor political life will any sensible person ever ask for a revolution. Because sensible people know that the world is complacent, lazy, and uncomfortable with change. Sensible people know the world is too complicated for revolutionary language, revolutionary ideas, or revolutionary soldiers to achieve a lasting and praiseworthy impact.

Before I explain to you the immense power behind the incorporation of game-like mechanics into your life, it would help if you were more immediately aware of your life’s perfectibility. So, a few things to consider:

• Is there something you’ve always wanted to do but have never done?
• What are the things you consider most important for a person to accomplish in their life? Are you doing them?
• Is there one giant important goal that you’d love to accomplish in your life but have no idea how you would even begin to do it?
• Do you find yourself spending your time doing neutral to harmful activities in your life, even when you know there are positive things you could be doing?

OK, enough making you aware of your failings. Now, I want you to suspend for a second all attachment you have to plausibility, practicality, and propriety and just go on an imagination trip with me. Let’s go.

You just got back from work—a place you spend your time in exchange for currency, but don’t feel a strong affection for or sense of purpose in—rather than flipping on the television and tuning out, you decide to investigate this new thing you heard about. Your friend swears that it’s changed her life and you’re curious to know if it’s for real.

You load up this new thing and it faces you with this question: What are three things you’d most like to accomplish in the next 24 hours? After thinking for a few minutes, you tell it that you’d like to do the dishes that have been languishing in your sink, read a chapter of that book you never get around to spending time on, and get to bed before 10PM. It returns you a challenge: “Right now, go spend 10 minutes working on the dishes.  It’s worth 50 points.”

You don’t really know what these points are, but you’re intrigued enough to take it up on the offer. You acknowledge that you’ve accepted the challenge and it offers you a start button, you tap it and start to work on getting the dishwasher loaded. You do, and are considering if it’s worth trying to do some hand-washing. “4:53 remaining,” it tells you. “Do it,” you think. In five minutes, it dings. “Mission accomplished?” it asks. “Yes, but keep going ‘til it’s done.” It’ll take just four more minutes. “When you finish, you’ll have earned 120 points,” it tells you.

“120. Huh.” You finish up the dishes, leaving them to air dry. “All done?” it asks. After you tell it so, it asks “What next?” It offers you the option of taking a break, earning more points, or defining some more goal. Feeling on a roll with 120, you tell it you’d like to go read some of that book you never get to. “9 points a page,” it tells you.

You start to read it, but your intransigence in picking up the book was justified. The book is dense and requires more concentration than you can muster right now. You return to your new friend and tell it you only managed to read two pages. “How about a break?” it says. “You can come back whenever you’re ready for more.”

After you’ve eaten and watched your favorite television program, you return. “Did you miss me?” it asks. “You have an hour left before your bedtime, do you want to try to read more?” You respond negatively, to which it offers to ask you a few more questions. You answer a number of questions, like what your favorite kinds of rewards are, what led you to start using it, and what the single most important thing you keep failing at is. “Tired?” it asks.

You’re in bed at 9:47, and it says you’ve just earned 70 points. Over the next few weeks, you use the thing off and on. You notice that when you’ve been away for a while, it offers you’ve more points for short-term goals. You’ve noticed that sometimes if offers you activities that you’ve never told it you’d like to do, but you enjoy. You kinda wonder why it’s offering them, but they keep giving you points for them, so why not?

After a few months, you’re confronted with the 23,430 points you’ve earned. It asks what you think a good reward would be for 20,000 points. You say that a new shirt would be nice. It asks if you want to pick it out yourself? You do, it offers congratulations on the redemption and it hopes it’s something you’ll enjoy.

A few more months pass, you use it off-and-on, letting it dictate your not-working time pretty fully some days, barely thinking about it on others. You’ve begun to notice, though, that you feel better when you use it more. That it’s got you exercising twice a week, that you’ve already read two books, more than you did all last year. You’ve been thinking more about what you really value, and you’re starting to think that you should find a new job. It asks you some thought-provoking questions when you tell it about this, but it doesn’t solve it for you.

OK, we’re back. I could continue this narrative forever. Out until the point where you have a body like Adonis, the job of your dreams, more money saved than you’ve ever had, reined in your temper, and finally banked a few chapters of what could be the next Great American Novel. That potential exists, I’m sure of it. And if you followed me down that rabbit hole, I think you may have glimpsed it as well.

The potential I see in gamification isn’t that I use StackExchange a little more because I get a few thousands points when I offer an answer the hive-mind likes. That’s the incredibly small-bore version of gamification. That’s not exciting. What’s exciting is an entire new economy when people earn “money” by doing things they have never managed to accomplish in 20 years of “trying to lose weight.” (Speaking of, the alt-text on this XKCD (hover with a mouse) is a great TL;DR version of this post.)

What I envision is not unlike a massively juiced version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. David Allen’s book had helped thousands of people to be more productive and creative by getting them to a more easeful productivity. What I’m talking about is a way to incorporate prompting, play, and points into an agnostic system that’ll make your life better, and help you to accomplish goals that were never even on your radar without the help of our “game.”

I wouldn’t deny that this isn’t a simple thing I’m proposing, but it’s a thing whose value is abundantly clear to me. Even if we built a system that did only a tenth of the potential the exists within this idea, we’d have a world that was manifestly better in a million little ways. And that, quite simply, is why gamification excites me.

I want to tell you that the world
is still beautiful.
I tell you that despite
children raped on city streets,
shot down in school rooms,
despite the slow poisons seeping
from old and hidden sins
into our air, soil, water,
despite the thinning film
that encloses our aching world.
Despite my own terror and despair.

I want you to know that spring
is no small thing, that
the tender grasses curling
like a baby’s fine hairs around
your fingers are a recurring
miracle. I want to tell you
that the river rocks shine
like God, that the crisp
voices of the orange and gold
October leaves are laughing at death,

I want to remind you to look
beneath the grass, to note
the fragile hieroglyphs
of ant, snail, beetle. I want
you to understand that you
are no more and no less necessary
than the brown recluse, the ruby-
throated hummingbird, the humpback
whale, the profligate mimosa.
I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
“a great and common tenderness”,
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.

(via Mary Grace Orr)

Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.

Precisely. It’s an undeniable truth that people think about doing the right thing far more than they do it. If I did the right thing even half the times that I’ve thought about it but not done so, a non-trivial number of people would hold me up as some kind of personal moral hero. It is so easy to see what the right action would be and so hard to actually carry it out.

But Brooks’s answer to this problem, “sacred codes”, is deeply flawed. I’ve never seen any set of codes that was resilient and multifaceted enough to be much use at all among all the messy problems and circumstances that so often serve as our excuse for inaction.

More so, codes have this very real problem of being unbending. You fail to follow the code a few hundred times and you’re likely to reasonably stop even aspiring to it. Codes like the Ten Commandments have been failing for thousands of years precisely because they’re so deeply codified and unadaptable. If every Jew and Christian in America took seriously the commandment that “thou shall not covet they neighbors goods”, America would be a drastically different place. But instead most of them aren’t even aware that it’s on the list.

This is fundamentally the reason that mindfulness practice, being here now, is so important. As I said in that aforementioned internet comment:

The entire work of mindfulness (meditation), to me, is to close the gap between the things we know intellectually and the things we know viscerally. Knowing the senselessness of anger, the questionable value of fear, the wisdom or compassion, the power of love, our minuscule place in the universe, etc is something most everyone thinks they do. But they constantly act in ways opposite to these things they claim to understand because they’ve not really internalized them and made them a part of their operating procedures.

Empathy is something most people do intellectually. They have the thought: it must have sucked to be a Cherokee. They did everything the white Americans asked of them, many of them became better citizens and Christians than the average white Georgian who was their neighbor. But because they wanted a national identity and were the wrong color, they were pushed hard, behind Andrew Jackson’s saber, off into Oklahoma. We can easily understand this without internalizing it. Knowing these facts, and grasping that it must have been terrible only gets you half the way to responding adequately in such a situation.

You must, if you truly want to act in an empathetic way, internalize the struggle of the Cherokee story. You must, yourself, feel what that must have been like. To have your treaties torn to shreds and your people treated like mere obstacles to other men’s goals. And then you must keep that story with you well enough that you never forget what it feels like to be on that side of a confrontation. So that you can act with the understanding of what it was like to be a Cherokee when you turn your mind to the question of, to take an example, Palestine.

This is not an easy thing. And it’s harder still when you’re actually confronted with an angry Israeli complaining about the explosives that get hurled over the wall and disturb her family’s peace. But no set of rules will make it any easier to do the right thing. Especially when you’re constantly distracted by the thought of dinner, that beautiful girl you saw the other day, how much your finances have suffered for this trip, and your childrens’ questionable life-choices.

What’s needed is for you to sit there with the woman’s anger, the parallels between the Palestinian story and that Cherokee one you feel so well, and your understanding that at base all people want the same things and to frankly and empathetically bring her into full contact with the entire reality of the situation. Only be being completely present with all those realities can you lead others to that place of full comprehension and carry out a wise response.