"Do You Feel Like We Do?"
Maybe America could rally behind a "shared national narrative" like Uruguay has rallied around sustainable living. Or not. But maybe...
I don’t have a ton of funds available to donate here on this Giving Tuesday. (If you do, here’s the Red Cross’s Giving Tuesday link!) But I do have something non-monetary to pass along here that I hope might be helpful.
My spirits were really boosted this Thanksgiving, an unexpected and welcome development to have happen in the home stretch of 2022. Because this time of year has a way of getting a bit gloomy sometimes, doesn't it?
There were some enlightening personal revelations and positive family happenings that contributed to my emotional bump. But I wanted to just throw out a quick movie recommendation that also had a lot to do with it.
It's a Netflix film called Stutz. It sports a 100% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes if that means anything to you. (I tend to trust films that boast a higher critics' score than their audience scores, as haughty as that sounds...although it gets a 97% from the audience, too.)
The promo panel for Stutz that comes up as you scroll through Netflix just displays the face of the film's director, Jonah Hill. Which turned me off at first. Not because I don't like Jonah Hill, necessarily. It just made me assume it would be a silly comedy, which I really wasn’t in the right mood for.
But it actually turned out to be a documentary. It's Hill's attempt to profile his therapist, 74-year-old Dr. Phil Stutz, and to expose Stutz's psychiatric method, called "The Tools," to a wider audience.
And the film is not at all a chore to get through. It's funny, and touching. But mainly it's energizing. I tend to latch onto self-help catch phrases and concepts (as long as they don't seem too woo-woo) anyway. But Stutz's approach really hit home with me.
Some random examples of concepts covered in Stutz that resonated:
Your "Life Force" is the only thing capable of guiding you when you're lost. It can be represented by a pyramid with three levels.
BOTTOM LEVEL: Your relationship with your physical body
MIDDLE LEVEL: Your relationship with other people
TOP LEVEL: Your relationship with yourself
Once you get these three areas under control, everything else falls into place. Here's a clip about the Life Force pyramid.Stutz calls the judgmental, antisocial part of you "Part X." It's the invisible force inside human beings that wants to keep you from growing and evolving as a person. It exists to create a primal fear in you that insists what you want to achieve is impossible.
How to get rid of Part X? "You can't," Stutz says. You can only acknowledge he's there (or she's there, or it's there) and defeat him temporarily. Here's a clip exposing Part X."The Snapshot," or "The Realm of Illusion," provided maybe the biggest a-ha moment for me. It's a construct that's courtesy of our pal Part X. It's allowing oneself to be controlled by "the mind's image of a picture-perfect life experience." Which, of course, doesn't exist.
I am a perfectionist to the point of self-sabotage. And I have absolutely held a bogus Snapshot in my head of a magic life scenario that I would need to be happy. It’s no-doubt responsible for many a lost romantic opportunity, and likely a few missed job opportunities, as well.And a parallel concept to consider when struggling with the Snapshot is Stutz's "3 Aspects of Reality." These three things will never not be a part of real life: PAIN, UNCERTAINTY, and the need for CONSTANT WORK.
(Better to just link to the clip rather than clumsily try to further explain the Snapshot and the 3 Aspects of Reality myself.)
You can find a bunch more helpful clips from Stutz at https://www.netflix.com/tudum/stutz. I watched it late one night when I was feeling down, and it really helped. I watched it again with my mom the next night. Helped even more the second time around.
But what I REALLY wanted to talk about today, and recommend, is either this article on sustainable living in Uruguay, or since I think you need a New York Times subscription to read that article, there’s also this episode of the weekend version of the Daily podcast that presents the article in podcast form.
My objective, though, is not to push sustainable living as the key to extending human life on Earth beyond maybe one or two more generations. (Although, yeah, that too.)
The part of this article that really got me thinking is the idea that the entire population of a country (or most of the entire population, anyway) can still come together when something truly promotes their shared interests.
Granted, the population of Uruguay equates roughly to the population of Utah (3.5 million). So there’s fewer people who need to be convinced to come together. But it’s still fascinating to consider that a nation where…
humans are outnumbered by cows 4 to 1
those cows very much exist to become steaks and boost Uruguay’s economy
Uruguayan culture very much calls for Uruguayans to eat said steaks, and
turning cows into steaks is one of the worst things you can do for the environment
…how did people manage to rally together and come to the conclusion that, for all their best interests, they needed to about-face and live more sustainably?
And by the way, they didn’t stop cow farming, or steak eating.
I won’t try to explain the ins and outs of the article’s sustainability findings (because I definitely can’t! Certainly worth reading/listening for yourself, though). However, I will attempt to outline the parts of Uruguay’s sustainability story here that relate to why I started writing CeeGees: Ideas in the first place.
As I understand it, the country’s economy had been chaotic for many decades, with income inequality running rampant. In 2009, a man-of-the-people type named José Mujica won the Uruguayan presidency. He’d spent 13 years in jail for leading a guerrilla group called the Tupamaros. They were essentially resorting to robbing from the rich and giving to the poor as a response to near-catastrophic poverty. His is a much more complicated situation than just the above, of course, but for our purposes, that’s the light in which Uruguayans saw Mujica.
From the Times article: “Mujica’s image as a populist folk hero was only further burnished by his deep commitment to social welfare and simplicity. Forgoing the presidential palace, which he opened to the homeless, he chose to continue living on his chrysanthemum farm, donating 90 percent of his salary to charity and driving his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle to Parliament. Today he’s considered by many in Uruguay and throughout the world as the archetypal Uruguayan.”
Mujica’s energy secretary, Ramón Méndez, had been installed before Mujica took office, but they turned out to be like-minded. They weren’t really environmentalists, per se. For them, it was a practical matter: they recognized that the country’s dirty energy consumption could not continue, for myriad reasons.
Méndez is also a physics professor. He came up with an ambitious program that would shift Uruguay to mostly renewable energy by 2020. Meanwhile, Mujica preached to the public that “blind obsession to achieve growth [via] consumption” was the real scourge causing not just ecological damage but economic insecurity and social decay for the country.
Don’t let Uruguay become growth- and profit-obsessed like the West, essentially.
By and large, Uruguayans could relate to Mujica’s message. Nationwide traditions like simplicity and humility were still a thing down there, believe it or not! And their middle class had all but fully evaporated, leaving them in a desperate state.
The culture of never-ending accumulation of material things was something only the rich could enjoy. And even if unfettered consumption were affordable for them, most Uruguayans agreed with Mujica when he said things like, “We can’t pretend that the whole world can [consume unendingly]. We would need two or three more planets.”
So by the time the Uruguayan government was to vote on Méndez’s renewables plan, the public had adopted a “shared national narrative.” Greed, profit, growth, consumption, and accumulation at all costs? Un-Uruguayan. The status quo would no longer be tolerated. The people’s demand for change was so great, and their outlook so unified, that it was untenable for the government not to act. And the renewables plan was enacted far quicker than expected.
Says the Times piece, “By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.”
I know, I know. America ain’t Uruguay.
It’s just that, I’m sick of writing off hopeful stuff as hopelessly idealistic. And unrealistic. And impossible. (Part X, at it again!)
And here’s a country that did something unrealistic that changed its path. A country with only 3.5 million people, sure. And it’s true that Uruguayans weren’t as divided culturally as America seems to be. But still, they rallied around a concept, brought to them by a leader who was the “archetypal Uruguayan,” and made the impossible possible.
I still look at this quote as the defining rallying cry for CeeGees: Ideas, as much as I don’t 100% agree with all of Roger Waters’s viewpoints:
What would it take to make that happen?
A helluva lot, for Americans to really come together like that. But somehow I still think it’s possible. Just when it seems ridiculous, something unexpected happens and suddenly it happens after all. It’s like the overused-but-true Nelson Mandela quote:
“It always seems impossible until it is done.”
Here’s something I wrote a few years ago as an intro for an unfinished project that just came to mind as being relevant:
The game of baseball brought together the seventh-largest assemblage of human beings in history on November 4, 2016. The Chicago Cubs’ long championship drought was over, and 5 million Windy City revelers lined the streets to pack Grant Park.
They were brought together literally, but also figuratively.
Do you suppose, somewhere in that jumble of flesh and bones, two opposing single-issue voters—say, one vehement pro-lifer and one adamant pro-choicer—high-fived in states of drunken, tearful bliss while the double-decker buses of Theo Epstein, Joe Maddon, Anthony Rizzo, Kerry Wood, Ryne Sandberg, and Billy Williams drove by?
I’m just asking: is it really that crazy to think that an American version of Mujica might appear someday? Someone whose intentions weren’t skewed, someone who appealed to everybody, someone who inspired hope like 2008 Obama and cut through the governmental B.S. like 2016 Trump? A true non-politician who didn’t care about money and had some idea that almost everyone could rally behind? An endeavor that somehow (I don’t know how, but somehow!) couldn’t be claimed, or lambasted, by any one side—it was just an “American” pursuit? So much so that citizens from all walks of life got behind it, and the powers that be had no choice but to take action?
And, like Mr. Waters dream in the above quote, we all would be fine with falling in as one collaborative outfit working side by side—because it’s the best thing for us, for our families and friends, and for our country.
I’d just like to think it wouldn’t take a desperate situation on the scale of another Great Depression to make everybody snap out of it and start concentrating, together, on the important stuff.
I mean, can’t Tom Hanks just lead us out of this, already?? And get everybody on the same page? And refuse to play government-sanctioned games on the way to getting some Big Idea done that would change the trajectory of the country, and the world? Is that too much to ask?
No offense, Tom, but we don’t need any more Greyhounds or Finches. We need you, or someone universally loved like you, to step forward and go be Forrest Gump for the country. Except a little smarter…and at least as wise.
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. Podcast versions of these articles will be back in 2023, and available everywhere.