Molehills are boring! I WANT HIMALAYAS!

I've been thinking about the human attitude to doing good stuff, and I've had a thought. To (hopefully) explain it, I'm going to thrust a fictional scenario in your direction.

A man has put on an event to help send money out to starving African children. The event is one of those where there isn't a ticket price, but a lovely big donation bucket to add to as you walk in. A woman walks up to the entrance and puts 50p in the bucket. The man, who is standing behind the bucket for some reason, asks her why she put so little in the bucket, and does she really think that's enough. She responds by explaining she is a recently-single mother with three kids to look after struggling to keep her job, and can't afford to donate a great deal more. The man's reply is something along the lines of "the Africans are suffering too! Think about them!"

The thing I want to get across is that the man isn't interested in the woman's problems, even though he has met her and she would be much easier for him to help than the random African kids. He's more concerned about the people he's never met in a land far far away.

As a song from Evita claims, "distance lends enchantment". It's so much more romantic to try and help those far away in situations we can barely even imagine.
There's no logical reason for wanting to help the far-away as opposed to the close. The single unemployed mother down the road is going to make much better use of your ten pounds than Unicef is, since the money is more concentrated. You're not sharing your donation out between hundreds of millions.

But maybe that's just it. Maybe it's the sheer scope of poverty in the third world which makes it such an attractive cause to throw money at. I think it's perhaps down to that fundamental human drive to want to be a part of, and contribute to, something bigger than ourselves. Often, we interpret that as "the bigger the cause, the better!" Forgetting that every big problem is made of lots of small ones. The devil is in the detail. (Or some similar expression.)

Humans are often accused of "making mountains out of molehills". I think a just as common attitude is to overlook the molehills and run straight for the tallest and most exciting mountains, and probably tripping up in the process.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that we are more attracted to what we see as bigger problems. And I obviously I think trying to improve lives in the third world is good. It just interests me.

Gay Marriage in Britain by 2015?!

According to this, Prime Minister David Cameron is "emphatically [whatever that means] in favour" of gay marriage, and confident of making it a thing by 2015.

Ed Milliband, the Labour leader, and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, are also explicitly pro- gay marriage.

The SNP Scottish government have already introduced a consultation paper on SSM, and are certainly close enough to make the Catholic church react with the usual right-wing nonsense. The Greens, obviously, are in favour. UKIP have never made a statement either way, which is probably the best we can hope for.

Now, I'm all for caution when it comes to getting excited about legislation which might never happen. But when the Tories, of all people, are wanting to bring same sex marriage in, and the only party explicitly against it are the fricking BNP, you've gotta be at least a bit hopeful.

Obviously, there will be a downpour of rhetoric from Britain's religious leaders, Cameron still has to overcome his socially conservative backbenchers, and we have no idea what's going to happen in the Lords.

But still. This is pretty exciting stuff.

I'll be keeping a much closer eye on the issue from now onwards, and will keep you lot posted (not that you need it).

Fingers crossed! 

For The Politically Interested And The Politically Disenchanted:

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party leader, delivered a fantastic speech at their Autumn conference. And, here it is, for your enjoyment: 

Dear Bullied Teenagers,

Hey you guys. (and everyone else reading)

I've wanted to say something to you lot about what you're going though for ages, but I've always held back, because I know nothing I say will ever really be enough. So I apologise in advance for the inadequacy, but, as a "veteran" bully victim and Person of Ever-Constant Insecurity, this is what I have to offer.

So, I know school sucks, because you're being condemned every day for who and what you are. I know you're probably (though not definitely) reacting by hating yourself and lying awake at night wondering what's wrong with you and how to sort yourself.

I don't know what they've decided is wrong with you, whether it's how you dress, or how you speak, or some physical feature of your body. I don't know what you'd change about yourself if you could. I don't know what your insecurity homes in on when you look in the mirror.

Just know that we all go through it. We all know we're not perfect, and most of us react to that by assuming that means we're not good enough. Know that those mocking you, laughing at you, kicking you, degrading you, treating you like shit because of something you are generally aren't thinking your flaws. They're thinking about their own, and have decided to make you the person they take that out on. That's unforgivable of them, but again, we all do it to some extent.

Know that perfect is not the same as good enough. All that your flaws prove is that you aren't perfect, but that's irrelevant. Imperfect people do awesome stuff all the time, everywhere. Everyone you admire is imperfect. Everyone who has ever improved the world or the human experience is imperfect. Your job isn't to be perfect, and never was.
So when that part of you tells you about you flaws over and over again, try to remember that everyone else has roughly the same amount of flaws too. There's no reason not to try and overcome or minimalise the effect of some of those flaws, but they aren't what's most important about you. They aren't what defines you as you.

Also, your job isn't to deal with the bullying. You're going to come up with a lot of advice, either directly or through works of fiction, that says your job is to put the bullies in their place and reform them or outfight them or whatever. But that can't work. There are too many insecure hotheads in a given secondary school to stop bullying from happening, and the causes of bullying are too fundamental for you to overcome them with karate or quick wit.
I know that sounds pessimistic, but it actually isn't. Once we get rid of the unattainable goal of making bullying stop happening, you can focus on what's really important- surviving it. Because that's what humanity needs you to do. We need you to come out of the other side of the sucky period known as secondary/high school alive and well and still "yourself" enough to offer the gifts/benefits you have to give the world.

That's about all I have to say. Just try and wade through the shit, and I'll wait here on the other side with a towel for when you leave school. Deal?

Much Love,
Sam Copson

Peer Pressure

I've been thinking a lot about peer pressure lately. There's a lot to be desired from our attitudes towards it.

Peer pressure is defined as any influence on a person's behaviour by their social group. As such, it is hardly the inherent force of evil most people seem to think it is these days. As always: the hyper-individualist attitude of "don't listen to what anyone thinks ever!" is just as damaging as the conformist attitude of "if you're different in any way you deserved to be mocked about it".

We all know what the problem is with the conformist attitude, so I won't go into it here.

But the problem with the other response, blocking every kind of peer pressure out and telling yourself that no-one's view of you matters, is highly problematic. As a human being, pretty much everything you do ever is going to affect other people in some way. And when you have power like that, you always have the moral responsibility to use it for the most possible good/least possible bad. You cannot effectively enact that responsibility if you are not in tune with what other people think about the things you do.
To put that in real terms- if you don't listen to other people's views on your relationship, you're more likely to hurt your boyfriend or girlfriend. If you don't listen to other people's views on your attitude, you're more likely to end up inadvertently snubbing people you actually like, causing offence, and ending up with no friends. And so on.
The other benefit of peer pressure is it provides you with greater awareness of other people, and helps you to develop social skills. This really applies to younger children; but those who paid no attention to what other people thought early in life generally have more problems with starting relationships (of all kinds) later in life.

So, with that in mind, the big question is this: where do we draw the line?

While we must allow peer pressure to shape us in some way, it's all too easy to take that too far, too. A lot of the times, people's criticism of you stems only from their own struggling egos, and a desire to crawl up the social ladder. As such, this criticism has precious little to do with you, in any real sense.
So how do we let ourselves be guided by the constructive without taking the inconsequential to heart?

I think the issue lies in how you process the pressure from your peers that you receive. The people who become desperate, insecure approval-slaves are the ones who have a gut reaction to "other people think this = I must do it". This is wrong, simply because people are often wrong. No, the healthy response to peer pressure is to take it in rationally, and make us of it as just another factor in the ongoing process of self-reflection.
In other words, what we should be doing is this:
peer pressure => reflection => = take in other factors => more reflection => conclusion => action
When all too often we simply do:
peer pressure => action

So, that's that.
Don't take everything other people say about you to heart, but do take it into account in a healthy and constructive way.

I think that's the closest I'm going to get to a satisfying summary on the matter.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently (because I'm sure you were all emotional wrecks without your regular Mouth of Copson fix), I plan to blog more in the days to come.

Ciao! 

So, Should We Try To Turn Gays Straight?

So a common issue for discourse between social liberals and social conservatives is whether homosexuality is an inevitable characteristic, or whether it is a dysfunctional phase that one can overcome if one is to take the right steps. In other words, whether gays are gay for life, or whether they can stop being gay with the use of what is known as "ex-gay therapy".

Therapy to help/convince homosexuals become heterosexual is one of the most bitterly controversial points in modern politics, particularly in the US of America. Left-wingers and others who believe homosexuals are naturally so, state that ex-gay therapy is psychologically damaging and leads to a feeling of inadequacy, self-loathing and, all too often, suicide. Those who cling to the belief that homosexuality is an inherently unnatural state for any human to be in assert that trying to turn straight is the only healthy thing for homosexuals to do, and that to advise them otherwise is doing them a disservice.

Allow me to take you through why I think what I think about homosexuality.

There is vast diversity among all human characteristics, physical, mental and behavioural. As such, it is unhelpful to have the knee-jerk reaction of labeling any minority characteristics as "dysfunctions". We have to keep an open mind about all rarities, and assess all types of people fairly without automatically thinking a difference from the norm necessarily constitutes a deficit.
So, with that in mind, lets begin our assessment of homosexuality.

Homosexuality is the desire to form sexual or romantic relationships with members of the same sex as yourself.
This is open to two points of contention which could lead to it being declared a bad thing. Homosexual relations cannot produce children, and are interpreted as being condemned by certain religions.

The first argument states that either because a homosexual relationship cannot produce children, there is no point to it, or because people who engage exclusively in homosexual relationships cannot produce children, there is no point to them.
To say that people waste their lives if they don't produce any children is beyond ridiculous, as I have blogged about before. People can benefit the world and the human experience in many other and sometimes better ways than creating children.
And I don't think saying relationships are pointless if no babies are made makes any sense either. People are designed to bond sexually and romantically for a great many social and physical benefits, which help to advance the species and which have nothing to do with reproduction. And these apply to homosexual relationships as easily as they do to heterosexual ones. I don't think you can look at the natural world and possibly say that God/nature intended every single member of a species to make children; many animal species from insects right up to mammals have social structures where only a few individuals are required to produce offspring. And those who do not produce offspring have other responsibilities, which they are held to by their relationships with the other members of their social groups.

So the second point of contention was the religion thing.
Here's the deal. Whether you follow a certain religion is up to you. It's your choice. I don't think anyone can say that to follow all the rules in the Bible or Qua'ran is inherent in human nature. We don't have the innate instincts to stone prostitutes, marry the first person we sleep with or devote the final seventh of our week to prayer. And if following these rules was inherent, there would have been no reason to write them down and have religious leaders teach them to people. So where on earth do religious right-wingers get the idea that the Bible is a guide to innate human nature?
And remembering what this post is supposed to be about, ex-gay therapy, it is not up to anyone to use therapy to try and Christianise, Muslimify, or Hindufy you. Muslims don't counsel people to help them overcome their pork-eating tendencies. Christians don't provide therapy for anyone with the overwhelming desire to work on Sundays. Jews don't counsel people to eat kosher. Etc, etc, etc.

As such, I don't think there is anything about homosexuality which allows it to be considered a dysfunction or mental illness.

But proponents of ex-gay therapy will say, what's the harm? Why not try to help people turn straight if that's what they want?
Well, there's actually quite a lot of harm.
Ex-gay ministries tell gay people that homosexuality, which is part of them, is evil. They teach them that as homosexuals, they have fallen short of the standard required by human beings. Well firstly, this is a lie, as if we follow the logic above, we agree there is no harm in being homosexual. Secondly, it's an extremely harmful lie. The psychological damage caused by being told you are evil, inadequate, inherently harmful to the world, is immeasurable.
It might be some kind of okay if the therapy then proceeded to turn its patients completely straight, thus removing the burden it placed upon them. But, it doesn't do that. Because ex-gay therapy almost never, ever, actually works. Yes, there have been cases where someone has gone into a re-orientation therapy clinic and come out able to have successful relationships with women, but it is such a vast minority. Success rates are rarely cited as above 20%, and when they are, they nearly always collapse in the face of further research. And you have to consider how many patients were actually bisexual, how many are simply repressing their homosexuality, how many were never gay in the first place but went because their parents were concerned with "effeminate" behaviour, etc, etc.

So, what we have in the vast majority of cases with patients of reorientation therapy is this.
1. They are consistently told that homosexuality is evil and wrong.
2. They are consistently told that this therapy will work, that sexuality can be changed, that God's love will save them from their gayness, etc.
3. After weeks, months or years of therapy, they are still gay.
Can you imagine what a toll that would take on the ever-fragile (usually young) human ego? The failed therapy will open the floodgates to a thousand feelings of failure, self-loathing, even feeling rejected by God himself, perhaps. They will feel they are a mistake, that they are fatally flawed and evil. And that is entirely the fault of practitioners of re-orientation therapy.
Ex-gay therapy is damaging thousands of young people every year. It's practitioners impose psychological scars on people which often last for life. To be frank, it is wrong on every possible level.

Please, reader, protect the young people of the western world from being bullied and scarred by self-proclaimed "psychologists" trying to further a political agenda, and speak out against ex-gay therapy at every opportunity you get.

It's Okay To Fail Sometimes

So a few hours ago, I posted a big brash blog thing about the potential of humans and how we can all be awesome if only we are to try. But I forgot to address something important, i.e, what inhibits people from trying so often. And that, I think, is fear of failure.

In this world, it's easy to think of life as though we are being scored on how many times we succeed and how many times we fail. Like there's some cosmic tally controlled by Mr. Society, who gives you a big black mark every time you do try and do something, and subsequently fail.

At primary school, we are often told that "winning's not important" and "at least you tried, that's what's matters". But it's difficult for these ideas to stick, primarily because those same adults telling us those things usually don't appear to be putting that idea into practice. And also because not long after we are exposed to the intensely competitive, ego-driven world of secondary school, which causes a lot of our primary school values to be swept away for good.

But I would propose that fear of failure is perhaps the single most unhelpful emotion humans have. To explain, I'm going to try and imagerise how I think trying, success and failure work:

Before you try, you are at ground level. In neutralville. Then, when you try, you are attempting to build blocks to somewhere better. If you succeed, you get to the better place. If you fail, you simply end up where you were before. So failing isn't actually negative in the traditional sense- trying and failing doesn't make anything worse than it was before.

Which is why fear of failure is totally unhelpful. The purpose of fear is to protect you from harm, like, "run away from that ferocious bear!" "don't touch that red-hot garden hoe!" "don't climb into the back of that man's van!" But fear of failure doesn't do that, because failing doesn't hurt you. It's doesn't make anything worse, it just stops things from being better, temporarily.

So if you don't try, you will remain where you are. If you try, then yes, there's a chance you'll fail, but the consequences of failing are the same consequences of not trying in the first place; and, crucially, there is a chance you will succeed, and things will be better.

I know of course, that none of this has much bearing on why people are actually afraid of failure. That is (as far as I can tell) because we are exposed to endless scrutiny as human beings from our equally insecure peers, and what we are really afraid of is the inevitable mockery and belittlement that will come from failing.

This is a difficult fear to transverse. But it's important to remember that people don't generally care about your flaws whilst mocking them. It just makes them feel good for a while. In a week, a day, perhaps an hour- most of those who mocked you will have completely forgotten what it was about. What they are saying (in this context) has no bearing whatsoever on who or what you actually are, or what they actually think about you. Being mocked for failing says absolutely nothing about you, and absolutely everything about the one or several mocking you.

Failing is fine; as is imperfection. Something doesn't have to be perfect in order to be beautiful- which is just as well, because perfection is pretty much imaginary.
For example- I know that this blog post has flaws. It's bizarrely ambiguous, and uses the word "mocking" and it's derivatives far too much. But that's not going to stop me posting it on the internet for potentially (except not actually) all of humanity to see. Because I quite like the point I'm making, and have hope that this post will vaguely help at least someone as they traipse through life.

Just to clarify, this is not a raving of "I am good at this, you should be as good as me". I am crippled by fear of failure far too often. Actually, it's worth noting in general that whenever I do everyday-life-made-better type posts I'm always at least one-third talking to myself. So, yeah.

Point being, do not let fear of failure stop you from doing absolutely anything. Because failure, in the vast majority of cases, has no consequences worth losing sleep over.