Why Yes, People Are Born Gay or Straight

It is rare that I get the urge to deconstruct a political post that originates from the left, and yet I have run across one such post that essentially demands it. The issue of the biological origin of sexual orientation is, in my opinion, fairly settled, and I have never seen anything in recent years to call it into question. It was largely settled all the way back in the 1970s, and when we talk about it now, we specifically are looking for specific causes or triggers, not the underlying concept that it is biological.

No One is Born Gay (or Straight): Here Are 5 Reasons Why

I am going to skip the first reason, as I agree with it in broad strokes if not in the specific details. Simply because a particular concept is expedient or convenient does not determine its veracity. If that were true, Trickle Down Economics and Free Trade Deals would actually work. However, just because we should not accept a premise unquestioningly does not mean it is inherently invalid.

2. The science is wrong (Part 1): People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature. But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design.

 Okay...

Ward, Ingeborg L. "Prenatal Stress Feminizes and Demasculinizes the Behavior of Males." Science 7 January 1972: Vol. 175 no. 4017 pp. 82-84

As I said, settled since the 1970s. In fact, we have a pretty good idea of what specifically happens. Genetics isn't everything. Identical twins have the same genes but have different finger prints, and even when looking extremely similar do have distinct biological differences. The truth lies in epigenetics, which is the study of changes in the gene activity not caused by DNA. Genes require specific hormonal triggers to activate them. Give the gene a different trigger and you get a different result. Hence why identical twins are not perfectly identical, while in the womb they were subject to very small differences resulting in small changes throughout their biology. We think that stress during pregnancy causes hormonal changes in the uterus at a certain stage of fetal development which activates a series of genes resulting in sexual orientation.

But this study makes the same error that countless others have made: it does not properly distinguish between gender (whether one is masculine or feminine) and sexual orientation (heterosexuality or homosexuality).

Actually it did. It differentiated between traits that are commonly biologically associated with males and commonly biologically associated with females, and discovered that lesbians (as a group) have a specific biological trait more in common with males than with females. Now we can argue the validity of sex as a biological concept, but at this point we have to accept it.

We would only assume this if we had already accepted the heteronormative premise that masculine people (or men) are naturally attracted to femaleness and that normal (i.e., feminine) women are naturally attracted to men.

...We aren't assuming that. We are looking at traits broken down by biological sex and then examining them through the filter of sexual orientation.

Many “masculine” women who are heterosexual (have you been to the rural South?) would like you to know that their gender does not line up with their sexual desire in any predictable way. And many very feminine lesbians would like you to know this too.

This is stupendously misconstruing what is being studied. This is taking "masculine" to mean a set of preferences and tastes (for example: watching football, cutting wood, ect.). That is not the definition of masculine being used by the scientists. They are using it to refer to the general traits of males. The males in question can be highly manly or highly effeminate, but their biological sex is still male. This is also presuming that all the lesbians that were studied were very butch and not very femme, a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.

3. The science is wrong (Part II): An even greater problem with the science of sexual orientation is that it seeks to find the genetic causes of gayness, as if we all agree about what gayness is.

No, it doesn't. As far as I can tell, everyone is pretty much in agreement that there is no specific genetic cause of sexual orientation. The latter part of this statement is valid, as linguistic definitions are important and we strive to all be on the same page.

My point here is that a lot of people engage in homosexual behavior, but somehow we talk about the genetic origins of homosexuality as if we are clear about who is gay and who is not, and as if it’s also clear that “gay genes” are possessed only by people who are culturally and politically gay (you know, the people who are seriously gay). This is a bit arbitrary, don’t you think?

I do not think anyone has ever claimed that people were incapable of engaging in sex with the gender that is not their sexual orientation. Both male and female porn stars do it pretty consistently. Cultural expectations, economic conditions, and hundreds of other motivators can compel people to engage in sexual situations with people they are not normally sexually attracted to. They can even enjoy such sexual contact quite a lot (and we should never rule out bisexuality). But really this section is a misunderstanding of how genetics actually work. Let's go back to Gregor Mendel and his studies of pea plants. Mendel had very short pea plants and very tall pea plants, he discovered if he interbred them, in the next generation, the short plants would seemingly vanish. However one out of four members of the third generation would be short. This post assumes that a genetic sexual orientation would be like those pea plants, a perfect binary between two variations. But that's not how genetics tends to work. Look at the world around us, people aren't simply two heights. Instead we have a spectrum going from very short people to very tall people. So is likely the case with sexual orientation, we all fall somewhere on the Kinsey scale and our biology simply determines the broad swath where we land.

Perhaps these personality traits are what are actually being observed under the microscope.

This is a fair point. You should never presume that correlation equals causation. However there are an astounding number of examples of physical variation being examined here.

At the end of the day, what we can count on is that the science of sexual orientation will produce data that simply mirror the most crass and sexist gender binarisms circulating in the popular imagination.

This is being projected upon the studies and not actually featured in them.

It will tell us that straight men simply cannot be aroused by men and that gay men are virtually hardwired to be repulsed by the thought of sex with women.

No, they won't. They will simply say either here are biological correlations or here is a potential cause. Any study making such sweeping, and easily refutable claims is not worth considering.

The fourth point is fairly accurate, but much like the first, it simply states we should never approach anything uncritically.

And now we get to the fifth point... Oy...

5. Secretly, you already know that people’s sexual desires are shaped by their social and cultural context.

Now where have I heard this line of thought before... oh right... this is the exact same line of argument that Evangelical Christians tend to use, claiming that everyone secretly knows Christianity right, Jesus is the messiah and are just "rejecting God" out of spite.

Lots of adults worry that if we allow little boys to wear princess dresses and paint their nails with polish, they might later be more inclined to be gay. Even some liberal parents (including gay and lesbian parents) worry that if they introduce their child to “too much” in the way of queer material, this could be a way of “pushing” homosexuality on them. Similarly, many people worry that if young women are introduced to feminism in college, and if they become too angry or independent, they may just decide to be lesbians. But if we all really believed that sexual orientation was congenital—or present at birth—then no one would ever worry that social influences could have an effect on our sexual orientation.

The author is presuming a lot in this section. First off, the people who think that dresses and college cause homosexuality are more likely to agree with the author that it is a choice. I have never met anyone who ascribed to the innate theory that believed that such minor environmental considerations mattered. But we do not all ascribe to the innate theory, plenty of people ascribe to the choice theory. Oh, and much of this has to do with gender and socialization, rather than with actual sexual orientation.

We know that if the world today were a different place, a place where homosexuality was culturally normative (like, say, Ancient Greece), we would see far more people embracing their homosexual desires. And if this were the case, it would have nothing to do with genetics.

I can agree with this statement, but not the logic behind it. If we lived in that world the closet would not exist and people would be far more likely to act on bisexual desires, neither of which outcomes have much to do with whether or not sexual orientation is biological.

Most of what feels so natural and unchangeable about our desires—including the bodies and personalities we are attracted to—is conditioned by our respective cultures.

This is walking very close to another line of argument used by the religious right, which is claiming fetishes are a sexual orientation. They are not. No one is claiming that sexual attraction of this nature is not shaped by socialization. However, sexual orientation is quite a different matter.

People like to use the failure of “gay conversion” therapies as evidence that homosexuality is innate. First of all, these conversions do not always fail; if you make someone feel disgusted enough by their desires, you can change their desires.

Well this is just false. Asserting they do not always fail does not make it a reality. Anecdotally many people involved in the gay conversion therapies have noted the failure of them to change sexual orientation. Behind closed doors those therapies have a very specific and not all together ambitious notion of what "change" means (hint, it isn't about switching from homosexual to heterosexual, it's more about becoming a good Christian). Furthermore all studies of conversion therapies, including those commissioned and funded by the religious right itself, point to change being an impossibility. Most of their successes are simply people forgoing sex all together. And, of the people who claim to achieve some degree of heterosexuality, it does not resemble heterosexuality as most people know it. Generally speaking, a heterosexual person does not struggle constantly with finding members of their own sex attractive, which is the experience of heterosexuality that these people have. Again no one is claiming that you can't have sex with someone who is the opposite gender of your sexual orientation, nor is anyone claiming bisexuality does not exist.

The rest of the essay is fairly personal and thus outside of my purview to criticise. But the foundational concepts of this post are horribly flawed.

TV is Better Than Movies, Just Accept It

Slate magazine has offered a polemic against this notion that TV has superseded movies on artistic merit. It is obviously hilariously bad, wildly uneducated, and is guilty of an incredibly narrow perspective reinforced by spending too much time talking to his own in-group. It shows a distinct lack of understanding of even the basics of the argument as presented.

To begin with, he has a repeated problem of assuming the Emmys actually are a reflection of artistic and qualitative merit. They aren't and they never will be. Also, he seemingly has a rather intense bias against comedy, given that he never mentions a single one the entire article. In fact, the only genre he considers at all when making his argument is drama, even though TV is a rich with genres (including several that do not exist in movie form) as the movies.

On some level, of course, the whole argument is absurd. People will tell you that the dozens of hours TV shows devote to their characters make those characters richer than their cinematic counterparts—but dramatists have known for literally centuries that you only need one night to create a character people will never forget.

Oy vey. Talk about an irrelevant non-sequitur to cover up a flawed argument. Being memorable is not the same as being a rich character. The Room has plenty of memorable characters, I would never call them particularly rich though. Television allows long term development and transformation to occur. A movie could have Walter White go from sad-sack teacher to "I am the one who knocks" in two hours, but that would never be as satisfying or startling as seeing that play out over dozens of episodes.

But generally the TV-is-better argument is a way of saying, 'I don’t have to keep up with the movies anymore, and neither do you.'

First off, no one is making that argument. Secondly, no one has to keep up with the movies or TV outside of actual film and TV critics. The author has this weird through line that there is some sort of moral obligation to watch movies. The TV-is-better argument is a commentary on how television, in general, is more a more emotionally  and artistically satisfying experience than going to the movies.

"Ask nearly any professional critic—not to mention many amateur ones—for the best TV shows of the last decade or so, and you will get a very familiar list, starting with The Sopranos and ending, probably, with Breaking Bad, or maybe, say, Homeland or The Americans."

Seriously? Breaking Bad premiered six years ago, and in that time the author is willing to concede only two more recent shows might appear on a best-of list? That would be a really awful critic. Not to mention that is a good chance The Sopranos would not make the list (I certainly would never place it on a best-of list), along with any of the other given shows. They are not universally beloved.

You are not likely to encounter the sometimes bewildering variety that a collection of film critics is likely to present you with.

Again, the author is engaging in sloppy intellectual bias. He is comparing an actual survey of film critics to a singular, hypothetical TV critic. Get enough TV critics together and you will have exactly the same bewildering variety as appears on that over-100 movies long list. In fact, if someone wants to see bewildering variety, all they have to do is look at the annual AV Club's top 30 list. Everything from Childrens Hospital to RuPaul's Drag Race to Adventure Time to Comedy Bang Bang to Breaking Bad is on it.

And there are good reasons for that. For one thing, when we talk about television, we are almost always only talking about American television.

No, what the author means here is that when he talks about television, he almost always is talking about American television. Just because he does not participate in discussions about Japanese anime or Korean soap operas, does not mean that they do not exist. There is a bias, in the English speaking world, to discuss English language television, most of which is produced in America. But that is no different than the movies which are similarly biased.

So while the best movies come from an intimidating diversity of sources, and present a similarly wide range of aesthetic approaches and aims, the best TV shows tend to come from three or four American cable networks and frequently follow a familiar model.

 Again, rampant bias coupled with complete ignorance. In fact, this entire article is merely a stealth polemic against the male anti-hero. But the worst element of it is the author is seemingly completely unaware that is what he is writing, as he is seemingly unaware that other types of shows (critically beloved shows, in fact) do exist. Somehow he does not realize that Community or Enlightened or Girls or Spartacus all exist. And those massive, massive blindspots result in someone who is making a self-evidently ignorant argument.

Take today’s Emmy nominations, which, though there were, as always, a few surprises and snubs, generally rewarded the prestige dramas—House of Cards, American Horror Story, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland—that most people regard as the best stuff on TV.

Why no, people do not consider House of Cards or American Horror Story to be the best stuff on TV. House of Cards is essentially the definition of mediocre. American Horror Story managed to pull out a pretty great year, but its first season was atrocious. Not to mention there was a rather stiff backlash against both Homeland and Mad Men this year. But more importantly, this is only half the picture. What about the comedy Emmys? To include them would destroy the author's argument, so he conveniently pretends they don't exist.

Compare that to any year’s Oscar nominations, which encompass multiple filmmaking styles and span the studio and indie world and still rarely scratch the surface of what critics and serious moviegoers consider the best of the year.

Once more comparing unlike things. That's because the Oscars do not differentiate by genre. With the Emmys, drama, comedy, reality, variety, ect. all get their own unique categories. That's simply the basic nature of the Emmys. Complaining that the all the nominations for Outstanding Achievement in Drama are dramas is startlingly stupid.

What bothers me most about the TV-is-better line, finally, is that TV could be better.

 It is, and the author has provided no evidence that it isn't. In fact, all he has provided is that he does not understand television, nor the critical conversations about it, at all.

there’s no reason, theoretically speaking, that the adventurous approaches to visual storytelling that we see in certain movies couldn’t come to TV, too.

 You mean like Hannibal?

Really this is a monument to one man's ignorance of his own subject matter. It is hard to take this article seriously when it makes so many sloppy arguments and has ever so many biases and blindspots. Simply put, there are movies that are great, there are TV shows that are great. If you are going to argue that the one is superior to the other, then you should at least possess a passing knowledge of the fields you are comparing.

I Know Who Killed Me

I Know Who Killed Me is what happens when the makers of a movie are so convinced they are making Great Art, that they completely overlook the fact that it is atrocious crap. Normally a movie this ambitious would be able to skate by on that ambition alone, but every cell of this movie is dripping in such smug pretension, such desperation to be edgy, that it just comes off as grating.

Lindsey Lohan plays Aubrey Fleming, a young woman who is abducted by the local serial killer. After her abduction, a second woman, Dakota Moss, who looks exactly like Aubrey is found lying on the side of the road with a missing hand and leg. Everyone is convinced Dakota is Aubrey suffering from some sort of delusion based on her trauma, however Dakota is determined to investigate exactly what happened to Aubrey and uncover their relationship.

Lohan, naturally, gives an atrocious performance. Incredibly dull, lifeless, and there's no difference in performance between Aubrey and Dakota. Watching this movie after watching episodes of Orphan Black really highlights just how lazy Lohan is as an actress (although the same can now be said for dozens of actors playing two roles in movies). While she is the most obvious failure in the movie, she isn't helped much by the direction.

Visually, I Know Who Killed Me was going for a cross between Sin City and Schindler's List. Yes, there is a scene in the movie that is a direct rip-off of the little girl in the red coat. The frames are bursting with visual symbolism, most obviously the use of the color blue. Everything is slathered in blues, from blue roses to the killer's blue glass weapons. But, of course, blue does not actually symbolize anything. The symbols are there because great movies utilize symbols, not as any key to reveal more about the movie, much less the human experience.

And stylistically, the movie loves over lapping shots, duo shots. Lots of shots to back up the whole "two women, one face" motif. But in order for all those trick shots to work, there needed to be an element of B-movie camp. Kill Bill was able to pull off similar effects by drawing directly on the grind-house, kung-fu movie aesthetic. I Know Who Killed Me takes itself far too seriously to make those shots, and even the basic plot, the kind of campy fun a movie like this should be.

And that's the primary fault of the movie. It takes itself deadly seriously. For a movie about a stripper who gets a robot hand, the movie has no sense of humor. It needed to be fun, and it just isn't. If you would like insight into just how pretentious this movie is, the original ending of the film was supposed to be the reveal that everything that happened was simply part of a short story Aubrey wrote. Worse than merely "it was all a dream" this would have been the ultimate example of smug satisfaction, straight up telling the audience how brilliant Aubrey (and by extension the movie) is. Despite this ending being removed, all the smug satisfaction leading up to it still sticks around. The movie is just not fun.

Black Rain

Black Rain is not a particularly good movie, however it is a deeply fascinating one. A Canadian, made-for-TV-movie released in 2009, it makes a whole series of story-telling choices that makes it stand out from the late-night, vaguely sci-fi, disaster genre which spawned it.

Dr. Jack Webster (Shawn Roberts) is a doctor of science-stuff (I do not believe they ever say what his doctorate is actually in, just that he is, somehow, famous for his sciencetasticness in every possible field) living in the middle of a forest by himself. As with his doctorate, it is never particularly established why he's hanging out alone in a forest like a crazy person for three years, he just sort of is. Enter three PhD students who decide to camp across the river from him.

After a bit of typical, gruff back and forth, the students and Webster become friends, just in time for a magical acid rain storm to attack them. Some sort of chemical plant explodes, sending huge puffs of chemicals into the sky, which then falls back down as incredibly potent acid in a storm cloud passing through. This all is supposed to be scientific, but the storm at certain points is literally chasing people, not to mention that the script attempts to handwave away the fact that the rain causes cars to explode and people to melt, while plants are completely unaffected. What follows is traditional disaster movie plotting where the characters attempt to stay one step ahead of the disaster.

If this movie seems a quite traditional, low-budget, late-night flick, that's because it is. What makes the movie weirdly compelling is the character of Webster. He's gay, but not for any real textual or meta-textual reasons. The movie contains no metaphors for homosexuality, there is no real gay-centric storyline (i.e. homophbia, coming out), it isn't produced for a gay film company. He's just gay because, seemingly, that's just an interesting character trait.

Coupled with that, Roberts is evidently playing Webster as somewhere on the autism spectrum. Roberts is most well known for playing affable bros who are slaughtered by zombies and psychopaths, a marked difference from his fussy, somewhat severe turn as Webster. All of which results in a rather interesting main character, anchoring a fairly traditional film.

Action is the genre which is most steeped in traditional characterization. The innovation traditionally occurs in the various action sequences, while the characters are normally little more than archetypes which fill specific story-telling conventions. Black Rain might be a silly, mostly forgotten movie, but the fact that it pushes the boundaries of what a leading man can be in this genre should be noted.

David Mamet's Babbling Incoherencey

It's rare that I run across something so astoundingly wrong on every level that it just sort of lays there, like a dead fish rotting in the sun. And yet David Mamet has written just such a rambling, incoherent column as a defense of current gun law.

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

...Actually he didn't. If you actually read the quote, in context, that is the end result of a very long series of other social actions. That's not summing up communism, but rather summing up what Marx viewed as the society that would naturally be created by communism. And that phrase predates Marx by over a century.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia.

Except it did. That's not even the whole sentence, that's just the last bit at the end where Marx literally says he is making a banner slogan. The effective agency are all the economic and social programs Marx listed in the first part of the sentence.

The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.”

No. Marx is very, very clear on this point. To quote the sentence itself, "...after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" There's some magical thinking here that leads Marx to conclude people will be helpful and generous and willing to fully develop themselves, but he is incredibly clear on the point that this motto is the result of individuals cooperating for mutual good out of their own innate desire to cooperate for mutual good.

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. ThThe government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences.ey are paid to follow orders.

 Which, of course, is no different from the private sector. It's actually better than the private sector, as the private sector adds "maintaining profit" on top of all those other things.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

Except it isn't. Mamet, in this piece, loves being vague because in being vague he could theoretically be talking about anything, therefore no one can fact check him. But let's just face the fact that he is talking about Affirmative Action. Most of the actual laws about Affirmative Action, are laws banning Affirmative Action. I'm not sure there actually are any Affirmative Action laws, virtually all Affirmative Action is merely institutional policy, policy designed to correct past injustices and disadvantages. And that's also why Mamet is wrong, Affirmative Action does not claim that black people have fewer abilities than white people, but rather that they have been systematically disadvantaged and redress to a level field.

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”?

It's all over the constitution. It's why there is a constitution. I don't understand how anyone could possibly read the enumerated powers clause in article I and actually ask "But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining 'needs'?" But then I don't suppose I should expect Mamet of reading the constitution any more closely than he read Marx.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

It is...

“One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

No, David Mamet. Slavery is an actual thing. Slavery is when one person owns another person, not when the government treats everyone equal under the law.

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians.

As usual, this is false. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate knows there were plenty of ideologues, and virtually all the founding fathers were career politicians.

Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

Again, no. They made the assumption that the masses were a mob to be protected against, and that's why they created the Electoral College and had the states elect Senators. But they trusted the elite political and social class so much that they handed control over half the legislature and the presidency to them. They set up a representative democracy with many, many checks against representative democracy. All of which pretty much proves the next extremely long section about how the founders intended for the people to control the government to guard against the consolidation of power, (which I won't repost since it is quite dull) is wrong

This next part is so astounding I have to replicate it as is...

On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms. 

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime...

No, seriously. He throws out that "2 million" and then complains about "phantom statistic." Seriously. Anywho, that "2 million" line actually seems to come from a report done by the Carter administration, and wasn't anything resembling an actual statistic, more like an inference made from interviewing prisoners. The fact that Mamet uses it here is just proof that he hangs out at Free Republic. As for the "accidental damage" (which is just a nice way of saying "unintentional shootings"), those aren't "phantom statistics"  but rather the results of actual police reports. Unlike many examples of social studies, these aren't even the result of sampling, but rather are every single incident that happened.

Lies, Lies, and Damnable Lies

The following statement is a lie. It comes from a blog post, but you will hear it repeated over and over.  It is a particularly pernicious lie, and one that leads into an ever deepening spiral of lies and articles, and articles about lies.

Stop blaming anybody but yourself. You are responsible for your own misery; you’re responsible for your own happiness, too.

No. You are not responsible for your own misery. You are not responsible for your own happiness. You might deserve some of the blame for your station in life, but for the most part you are blameless. These statements are designed to make you think you have control over your own life. You don't. No one does. That might be fatalistic, but it is no less true.

Your brain is a mass of tissue, chemicals, and electricity. Your body is a mass of organic compounds. You have little to no control over either. If you are depressed, it's because you have a chemical imbalance, if you are happy its because the chemicals are telling you that you are. That's simple neurology. You have no control over that, any more than you have control over being born with all your limbs. With a lot of education and a lot of excessive work, you can figure out partial control over your own brain. But if you ever actually experience depression, you'll quickly learn just how little control you really have over what your brain is doing. You might be autistic, you might be schizophrenic. You might be something that has no name yet, you might be something that no one has even thought to look for. You can try better living through chemistry, which is an abject admission of defeat to lack of control. In that case, doctors and pills and insurance companies and the government are now all in charge of your happiness and misery. Add to that complications and side effects, and suddenly your body reasserts its own control over your happiness and your misery.

You can claim that you are not autistic or in any way abnormal. But that's just the point. You had no control over if you were abnormal or not. You have no more control over your brain than anyone else. If you have no control over being autistic, then why would anyone ever believe that you have control over happiness or misery?

Now that we've already established that you are not responsible for your misery or your happiness, you really aren't responsible for your life either. In addition to all those chemicals and genes and electricity, you were also born temporally and geographically and economically and politically to particular parents with the entire weight of the history of the world crushing down upon you. You have, for your entire life, been buffeted around by large scale social pressures, some of which are incomprehensible, and all of which are out of your control. If you want the most stark indicator of just how out of your control the world is, here is an article on The National Review's post election cruise. These are the wealthiest and most powerful people in America. These are the legendary mega-financiers of SuperPACs. And the article is a eulogy of their hopes and dreams and illusion of control. These people are buffed around by large scale social pressures which they find incomprehensible and out of their control. If they aren't in control, with all the power and wealth imaginable, then you certainly aren't.

Which brings me to another quote...

That’s the thing: It’s easier to say that the system is aligned against you, or say that everything would work out if X were different, or say that you’ll just get around to whatever it is tomorrow. Change is hard. Personal growth is hard. Accepting that you are the only one who can do these things for yourself is hard.

No, it's not. That's just a lie. It's, in fact, vastly more more easy to say that everything is either your fault or your success, than it is to say the system is aligned against you. It's easier to believe that we live in a world where we have some sort of personal control, than that we live in a world that is horrible and fucked up and everything is random, meaningless noise. You can hope for a better tomorrow if you believe everything that happens to you is your fault.  You can believe that if you just did something, your tomorrow would be better. That's a comforting thought. What's not a comforting thought is the idea that your tomorrow might be better or worse, but you had nothing to do with it. Dumb luck had to do with it. A series of pointless, random circumstances stretching from the present to the dawn of time. People need to believe they have some sort of control, they have some sort of agency. But they just don't. Everyone is constantly being hammered by pressures both seen and unseen, and you can not untangle yourself from them.

Which brings us to another lie...

The thing that spoke to me in that Cracked piece is the idea that you only get out of the universe what you put into it.

No. That's the just world fallacy. Most people get far, far, far less from the universe than they put into. American's live in a capitalist society. The basic premise of capitalism is that most people get far less from the universe than they put into it. If people were not getting less from the universe (here represented by an economic system), then there would be no profit. The author can make that claim because he achieved,  from his own perspective, success. But the overwhelming majority do not achieve success. For every major success, there are thousands of unsuccessful people. No one pays attention to them because, to quote Strangers With Candy, "No one makes friends with a failure." The overwhelming majority can't achieve success. That is another basic premise of capitalism. Capitalism demands inequalities, and inequalities demand that the unsuccessful out number the successful. Capitalism also demands that some people be successful. A quirk of fate is all the divides the unsuccessful from the successful. There will always be unsuccessful people who worked harder and were more deserving than the successful. It all boils down to luck. And luck of all different kinds. Being born into the right family. Having a good day. Someone else having a good day. As Warren Buffet succinctly put it, "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I have earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling 30 years later." You can work as hard as you like, but in the end, luck is everything. All of which is why it is immensely comforting for the successful to believe they deserved everything they got, and for the unsuccessful people to believe they failed for lack of trying, rather than that the universe is weird, random and fucked up and decided to be against them.

And it really is all about luck. You can lie to yourself and claim you have some measure of control, but you don't. From social studies we know that proximity is still the leading cause of marriage. Even now, with the internet in full force, most people still marry someone who happens to live near them. That's purely weird, random, fucked up universe that we have no control over. We also know that most jobs are gotten by networking. Once again, purely weird, random, fucked up universe that we have no control over. Our lives are dictated by complete chance, that we retroactively add choice and purpose to.

Which brings us back to the lie, "It’s easier to say that the system is aligned against you." This is begging the question. We must first ask, "is the system aligned against you?" And the fact is the system is aligned against a great many people. The system is both designed, and loose chaos. Certainly there are powerful political and economic interests that arrange the system to benefit themselves. But there's also quite a lot of moving parts that aren't designed in any meaningful way but operate in order to align against people. We will always need more janitors than CEOs, so the system is aligned to produce more janitors than CEOs. The system is aligned against janitors in favor of CEOs. Any tracking of economic data shows that the system is aligned against the great majority of people. The common way this lie is told is by looking at the individual and not the society. An individual can become a CEO. And you can hold that individual up and say success is possible. But if you did that, you would be missing the larger context. First off, someone was going to be that CEO, the system demanded it. Secondly in order for that CEO to exist, there has to be a large number of janitors (or employees of any stripe). In order to create that singular success, there has to be vastly larger number of unsuccessful people. The system is aligned against those people. Those people have to exist or the system ceases to exist. This has been elegantly demonstrated in our ongoing recession. Since it began, there have been more people unemployed than there have been open jobs. At one point there were over ten people per job opening. Which meant that no matter what happened, there would always be nine people who failed and one person who succeeded. That's the way the system works. It is aligned against people, and it is aligned against most people.

That's also the way social interactions work. Social interactions are a complex dance requiring massive amounts of luck in order to come to fruition. You have interacted with thousands of people, and of those people only an incredibly small number actually developed into anything. Think about all the people that could have been your friend. You probably don't remember any significant portion of them, because, obviously, they were not important to you. For whatever reason events just did not align to allow anything to develop. But the potential of friendship existed. But you did make some friends, you could talk about a subject they found interesting, or you made a joke that they found funny, or you just saw they were lonely. It is the same thing with networking and relationships. The potentials out number the actual, and luck is what creates opportunity. And then we look backwards and claim luck was really skill.

So, when we obviously and overtly have no control over our lives, why do we spend so much time lying to ourselves by telling us we do? The answer is incredibly obvious. If we are focusing on ourselves, we aren't focusing on our weird, stupid, random, fucked up world. We aren't asking why it is weird, why it is stupid, why it is random, and why it is fucked up. And we aren't asking the forbidden question, "Does the world have to be like this?" The world is not just aligned against people, it is also aligned for people. And the people who it is aligned for are desperate to prevent it from changing. Remember the National Review Cruise? That is the perfect example of people the system is aligned in favor of, and how badly they want to prevent it from changing. The goal of the system is for it to become invisible. That is why the Democrats and the Republicans have no systemic disagreements, (it's also why things that are by definition not-socialism are now labeled "socialist," to give the appearance of systemic disagreement where there is none). When everyone focuses on the individual, no one focuses on the society the individual occurs in. No one notices that it is impossible to opt out of society. The system can't be threatened when everyone focuses just on themselves. And the system can't be overthrown when everyone thinks they are actually in control of their own lives, and that it is possible for anyone to be a success. The system can't be destroyed when people just accept the premises that the system is built upon.

If you only have yourself to blame for your fate, then you can be filled with hope. But the blackest despair is realizing that you control nothing, you are just a pawn of a weird, random system.

So do what you have to do, but don't lie about it.