The Impact Of Violence On Truth
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In the aftermath of yet another school shooting, we delve into mental health and its effect on families and children. The truth of it is that there are certain violence and certain truth that arises from the words that we use. We need to be able to recognize the language we use and how that impacts our outlook on life. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom attempt to take commonly used words and find them alternatives that fit better and are easier to understand. They also touch a little bit on gun control and how to go about it in a way that is beneficial to the entire nation.
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Bill, there are many things that I feel like we could talk about. There are so many shocking events. The reality is there’s a lot of violence going on in the world. It would be helpful to talk about the impact of violence on truth.
That’s the thing that we’re going to address. After the shooting that happened in Dayton, I immediately texted my brother who lives in Dayton with his family to see if his daughter or any of his family members were in the area. Initially, he texted me back, “All good, there was nobody in the environment.” Three hours later, he texted back, “One of my co-workers, his daughter was on the shooter’s hitlist.” This hitlist was reported to a school counselor.
I had heard something about this in the news that he had a hitlist in high school.
If you think about the mental health issue and the limitations of the ability to handle mental health issues, we’ve got to look at what happened to homeless? How do we get homeless? How do we get mental health issues? Here’s the thing that’s unsettling. During the Reagan administration was when all of the health programs that were trying to manage the rise of mental health issues got cut.
This caused the influx of homelessness and mental health issues out into the environment. That then had to be dealt with the hospital system.
The emergency rooms were not equipped to do mental health stuff. The amount of money when a homeless person is sick that shows up at an emergency room got transferred to that directory. That impacted the insurance companies that are now impacting us. It is such a limited mindset that people get into like, “I don’t want to help that person.” Instead of spending a dime on them, would you be willing to spend $10 on them? “I don’t want to spend $10 on them.” That’s what we’re doing. Can we please spend a dime on them rather than spending $10 on them?
The mindset regrettably regarding truth has a limited point of view. A person’s limited perspective of the implications of making a yes or no vote on something, all the different errors that took place because well-meaning people moved into the best discussion of what would take place. A limited mindset when it gets reinforced, what winds up happening is truth is lost. The truth is that I’d rather spend $0.10 on a mental health issue than spend $10. In this case, what are we up to 31 lives or 32?
I was going to say, the loss of life.
We’ve got this whole wiping out of this group of human beings and the mental health issues on that family, on the community, on the nation. Do we want to be a scared place? Do we want to live in a world that lives this way? If we want to support certain groups of special interests, we can go with the gun lobbyists. We can go with the Wall Street hedge funds that made the most money out of keeping gun laws and weakening gun laws. Instead of meeting their need for financial security and the companies and individuals that are shareholders that are funding those funds, but we are not meeting the need for safety. It’s like certain word choices and word phrases. We’ve got to take it seriously. This is big stuff. I opened up Pandora’s Box and wove a bunch of things together. I have developed my adult mind away from my child mind because the child mind is more black and white.
I wish more people would listen to their adult mind and not their child mind. I’m not calling anybody out.
If a child mind has been reinforced around the word choices and the labels of racism, narcissism, bipolar, sociopaths and the definitions that go behind them, you’re going to keep seeing the person in that space. The person that has those blinders on, their eyesight can’t see past the bigger picture. They don’t have the words. What you and I are looking to do on these show is essentially creating privileged moments of consciousness and awareness.
How does privileged come into that?
Because the readers are lucky to get this point. Somehow, they found themselves here. It’s a privilege to shift from a limited black and white narrative all the way to a greater and bigger picture of the way to think and see the world. Let’s see if we can take some language that doesn’t work that’s being used and see if we can give the environment words that will work better.
That sounds great, let’s do that.
Let’s take on one of my least favorite words which is the word, rhetoric. I don’t like it because it’s a $0.75 word or a $1.25 word. It’s not a $0.10 or a $0.05 word. Why is that a $0.75 word? Unless you are in debate school or have went to college, unless you have some sense that the word rhetoric means word choice. Media people, please start using word choice, the phrasing of things, a specific sentence that causes an emotional charge to take place. Please do not use the word rhetoric again.
Rhetoric in common social circles is a label that is used to dismiss what someone says as biased, is it not?
That’s right. Nobody has the mental stretch or capacity to get that analysis that you did. I’m not calling people dumb, I’m calling words ineffective. Words change their meanings over time. Tom, if you and I had zoot suits on and we’re going out to the speakeasy in the 1920s, we’re going to have a gay old time, but now, we’re not.
No, we would not be doing that now.
The phrasing of the word gay has been utilized here like other words have changed their meaning. We’ve also got to be mindful of, “Here is the messaging that’s taking place.” When somebody takes a word and associates the word caravan with the word invasion, what they’re doing is creating an emotional response to certain word choices that are doubling down on the racetrack bias that the listener has bought into. We went over a race track bias in the past. When somebody is at a racetrack and they’re betting on a horse or a dog or out gambling, what they’re doing is they put their bet down. In the last five minutes, “I’m sorry no more bets.” You didn’t get there in time, the urgency, the anticipation thing, 73% of bets at the racetrack are double down bets. They’re not initial bets.
It's a privilege to shift from a limited black and white narrative to a grayer, bigger picture of the way to think and see the world.
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People are sticking with that horse.
They’re sticking with the horse. They’re sticking with the trifecta. They’ve done the research. They’ve put their $10 in and then in the last five minutes, they put another $50 or $70 on it. They’re reinforcing the bias or the belief that they have.
Is that because people don’t want to be wrong?
Their self-worth does not want to take the hit of who they betted for or who they voted for is that person. I don’t want to be associated with my self-worth, “He can’t be that bad.” The woman standing behind him in the rally holding up “Women for Trump” is in the confirmation bias of betting down. Her vote was the initial 22%. Now, she’s standing in the rally with the remaining 73% of the bet going, “I have to stand with this person that said and did all of these things because I bet on him first. I’m not going to take my bet and putting on those Democrats because they’re angry people.” They’re much angrier than the President who’s calling the Democrats angry people. What he’s doing is he’s placing the anger of their lives in a specific target. You’re angry, focus it on the Democrats, immigrants or on the health care issues. We have a better health care but they won’t vote for it. It is like, “That’s what took place.”
Can you see how the violence is going up? The violence is going up because of word choice. Also, the media especially the reporters, newscasters and the writers, please pick word choices and word phrases that don’t use the word “lie.” Replace the word with “truth looks like.” Don’t use a label and diagnosis. Those words don’t help us. Does that make sense about why you and I and the rest of the population are bewildered about, “Why is that person still having a MAGA hat on? Why is that person still holding that belief of going to a rally? Why is that person holding that?”
That does help with that quite a bit, Bill. It also helps me understand how there are two different truth perspectives to a lot of the statements being made by the President. Take his White House speech after these two events. His White House speech is much from a language perspective and start to contrast to what he says at his rallies and what he writes in his tweets.
I feel sad and disheartened around authenticity not being there. I feel unsettled because he is making the truth sentence that we as a nation need to disavow. Me as a person is not going to be counted on the “We as a nation.” When I leave off the personal, when I’m sending a signal to passively that the reader doesn’t even understand that they’re getting. The bias is that I’m doing what the job says for me to do. I am not that kind of person because you have betted on me and the language, the word choice that says that these are the people that are causing my pain. Instead of saying like President George W. Bush said, “These are not the people that are causing your pain. I am going to make the speech at a mosque to say do not hurt these people.” Right after that speech that George W. Bush did at the mosque after 9/11, hate crimes went down against Muslims. He said, “This is not them, don’t hurt them for these other people.” Strong separation.
It’s another stark contrast from what our President is saying, which is that the guns didn’t pull the trigger and that everybody who does these things is mentally ill. He said many different things and then also he tries to tie any legislation on gun control to immigration reform. Although, they were veiled statements in his White House speech but they were there.
The interesting part of that is we went down in another episode to the three levels of to raise dopamine, reward, anticipation, uncertainty. Notice that fits in the category of the uncertainty and the anticipation that he might do something but the uncertainty about whether it’s going to get done or not. I’m betting a great deal because he’s such a master marketer, seller of a brand and a brand identity. A lot of people can pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy one of the expensive locations that he has in the different environment.
When you’re selling something like that and the person’s going like, “I’ll live off of Central Park and I’ll live right in this building. It’s got the Trump thing to it. I have the money, who cares, I’m going to throw it out.” Why? Because you are known to live in this location.
Some of those people are starting to realize the value of their property might be dropping. Over a period of time, the great replacement is going to be the replacement of his names on buildings. Is it starting to take place? Yes, some places are taking his name off the building. They’re noticing that people are not going to come to this place. They’re losing their market share. They’re getting hit in the pocketbook by associating his name with their product or service or location.
The bias is that when a person is betting on something, it will have a form of stability to it for a certain amount of time. What happens is that the person will get bored at coming back to the same racetrack and not want to bet there because the value isn’t there. That’s a part of the process. This is starting to make some sense about how the impact of violence on the truth is. When violence takes place, the limbic part or the safekeeping part of our brain gets activated and gets energized. It gets activated and energized so much that it wants to reinforce what it’s already voted on and already done.
It seems that the statement our President made about these two mass shootings, I can see the bias on the one side. You look at his speech and you see he was reading from the teleprompter, mechanical, how he was breathing, his mouth was dry. He seemed completely insincere like he was being forced to eat a vegetable he dislikes but he was going to do it because he knows that’s what he has to do. One perspective is this is such a contrast to what he says at his rallies and what he tweets every day, even 24 hours prior after these shootings and 24 hours prior to him making the speech that what he says is not believable. On the other side, you’d have people that are on his team saying that, “There he is. He’s saying there’s no place for white supremacy in America. You’ve got to give him credit for that.” Your belief is reinforced. Instead of bringing us together, it seems that that speech further divided us.
It did further divide us because it wasn’t congruent and it wasn’t in an alignment. Even if he started right now and got his message somewhere to the middle, what will happen is there will be some small modulation about going back to assault rifles. The legislation on assault rifle is expired.
It was passed in 1994 under President Bill Clinton. It had a time clock on it. It was only temporary. Once it expired, you can see all the statistics speak for themselves about how gun violence in America has gone up since then. The other interesting thing that pointed out to me looking back in history is that an assault weapons ban is completely constitutional. It’s been done before. It wasn’t ruled unconstitutional back then. No one even challenged it.
We get into the right to bear arms and well-armed militia. A big part of that is to keep the power in the hands of the people in two different ways. Number one, so you don’t get a tyrannical king or dictator doing things to take things away. The other part of it is that what nation in their right mind, and this is including Russia and China or any nation, would want to come to these shores with their troops? They would not want to come here because we are way well-armed if they show up here. That part has a validity to it. That part has a good anchor to it. It’s like, “Who wants to come here? We got something.” If people are going to be armed, you need to train them and they need to be a part of a group. If it’s a well-armed militia and anybody that once owned an assault rifle, I’m sorry, six months year-long training, follow-up monitoring over the lifespan of that weapon, monitoring on the mental health of the person that’s using it.
We require more training for people to get a driver’s license than we do to get a gun.
It is true and there’s an expectation that people are going to be safe around this thing. What happens is that’s not what’s alive. What’s alive is that there are certain people that are struggling with their own physiology and they can be radicalized. They can be messaged into violence. They can be messaged into belonging to something bigger than themselves. It’s important to belong to something bigger to ourselves, a nation. The words have got to be congruent to the thing that is going to be more of a life serving value set. What does respect for the country look like? What does respect for somebody that is a citizen no matter what the color of their skin is, how they got here and what they’re doing. Are they an add to our society? The numbers are in, immigrants are an add. They’re less violent and they add more value to American and the American society than people that have been here for 2, 3 or 4 generations that move to the place of entitlement.
Who’s entitled? The immigrant doesn’t think they’re entitled. The immigrant thinks they’re glad they’re here and they’re willing to work their butt off in order to get there. That’s what their mindset is. As one of my good friends that is a teacher that teaches in inner-city school, he goes, “Their parents are so happy their kids are here. The kids work in the classroom. The first generation that comes here, they know they have to bite the dust. They know they have to bus tables. They know they have to clean up trash. They know they have to pick from the fields. They’re doing it for their kids and for their grandkids to move forward in the field of time.” That’s a commitment that many generational Americans do not have.
It’s commitment and it’s a sacrifice too. Entitlement is a good word, privilege is probably another. I’ve always been mindful of that. I have tremendous respect for immigrants who are in that position. I come from a family that my heritage goes back to the 1600s and even the Mayflower coming over to America. In my conscious mind, I know that I’m no better than any other American citizen or person that’s come to this country. My wife is in a different generations into the US and having seen her grandparents who came over here when they were children and how hard they worked to give their children and their grandchildren a better life. That’s what by and large the vast majority of immigrants are looking to do.
I’m struck by your example earlier in this episode, where you contrast this speech of George W. Bush after 9/11 who was speaking from a mosque. He was making a unifying statement that this is not what the Muslim faith is about, all Muslims didn’t do this. You could disagree with George Bush philosophically and politically on many different things but you have to admire that integrity and speech and say, “That was the action of a President.” It is in such stark contrast to what our President said. I’m curious as to your reaction whether this is a good statement or an unfortunate statement but after that speech, Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted, “At times like this, it would be helpful if our country had a President.” He’s basically saying the President is not being presidential without trying to state that fact. I don’t know if that was going to help him in the long run but I understand certainly.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s sentence about we need a President here, the word choice of “Need a President” is not going to penetrate the person that’s already put a bet down on, “This is my president.” The bet has already been placed. Would you be willing to hear a sentence that would have worked a little better? It would sound more like this, “Respect, kindness and consideration for the people that have been affected like this needs language and word choice that is more cultivating and more nurturing and more comforting than what the President has to offer. I would prefer the President to be one that would stand for healing and nurturing, not one that creates and reinforces the beliefs that he’s aspiring at the current moment.” What happens is the person that voted or for the values that we hold as American that we’re all in this together. He said, “We’re all in this together.” That’s his value. That’s presidential but the word presidential does not penetrate a person that’s already placed their bet on Donald Trump.
You need to lead more by example. The statement that you make or would make, maybe both, is what does that. It’s not essentially labeling the President, although in a long sentence instead of a single or a couple of words, as unpresidential. I can understand he was probably frustrated when he wrote that.
Whether it’s Joe Biden speech or Mayor Pete Buttigieg or all the different responses regrettably, stop explaining. To all of you candidates out there, stop explaining. Use value-based narrative. Use a narrative that’s going to stick. Stop trying to justify. Drop labels and diagnosis, please.
That’s what they’re all doing. I saw Beto O’Rourke do that, labeling the President absolutely as a racist and all of these sorts of things. That’s going to unfortunately probably breed more violence, is it not?
That’s right. As one famous comedian once said, “If you use profanities and labels, you’re going to win the battle but you’re going to lose the war.” You’re going to get pinned in that you are a profanity guy and that’s going to affect respect, safety, recognition, and trust. You don’t want to use profanity or labels because respect will plummet. That’s exactly what has happened to Donald Trump. He has no idea that his respect has plummeted.
Part of it is he runs on a belief of money equals respect, not language equals respect. It hasn’t affected my bottom line, it increases my bottom line. Why? Any rich person that he’s got to text are throwing money at him. The owner of Home Depot gave him several billion dollars. He dedicated all of his fortune to Donald Trump. I’m going like, “Donald Trump is not stopping this.” The idea is he is going to win the battle of financial increase. He’s going to lose the war of respect and the war for integrity, kindness and cooperation. He’s winning the battle of money.
He thinks that money equals respect and winning. Regrettably, many of the Democratic presidential hopefuls have been on record so angry and frustrated since these two shootings. They’re all using profanity on live interviews on television. I saw one of the late-night programs was pointing that out. That is not helpful to their costs.
Let me start running for President here. I’ll be a presidential candidate. “What protection looks like for the American people is that these weapons of war are not to be used in a peaceful country.” Did I use any profanity? No. Did I speak from passion? Yes. Was it a needs-based or values-based narrative? Yes. What did that do for me? People will look, “He handles this one, he knows exactly what he’s focused on.”
It’s not the enemy image and not the gun person. I want people to have guns. Why? It’s a part of our American identity. People like that. I’m not going to take away that choice, but I am going to protect the nation, our police officers and the public. I’m doing that first. Yes, some people’s rights to have a weapon of war might not get met unless they have six months of training that they’ve been vetted at this time and that gun has a certain life span. It knows where it goes next until it’s melted down at the end of its life span. That’s the way I would go to meet the need for protection, but that’s me.
Join the US Armed Forces Reserves. There are a lot of ways.
There are a lot of ways to shoot this gun and to have the experience of having this gun. There are tons of ways, just not in your home so at the moment of depression or a moment of furiousness you go and take that out on others. That’s the way I would do it. All of a sudden, that’s called a common-sense/mutually respectful way to allow choice with guns and allow protection to take place with the public. Notice I did both of those, choice with guns and the connection to that gun or weapon meet the need for safety and protection for people in a safe country.
There’s something there for everybody, isn’t there?
There is and it’s doable.
It’s helpful certainly for me as a participant to understand a little more about what’s happening and what could be happening.
It’s compassion for the MAGA hat-wearing people, for the people that bet their vote and are doubling down. Don’t call them stupid. Don’t call them names. They’re doubling down on a bet that they made and their identity and self-worth are invested in this. It’s just not the collective safety that we would like it as a nation or the collected respect that we would like as a nation at the moment.
Thank you, let’s leave it there.
Take care. I will talk to you next time.
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