Bet Ya Ten Bucks...

 I drove past a casino on a Sunday morning some years ago and noted that the parking lot was full of cars. “Why aren’t those people in church?” I wondered for a second, but only for a second because I knew why they were here and not there. The casino promises the chance of a reward for their presence, or at least a greater reward than the church does. We go to places that promise pleasure, avoid places that don’t.  

“Simple as that?” you ask.

          No, not really, but it’s enough of a factor to demand some serious exploration.

 

Dr. Brian Goldman on a podcast called “White coat, Black art” recently explored the implications of relaxed sports betting regulations on, particularly, those vulnerable to gambling addictions. Apparently, it’s not illegal anymore to bet on a specific game, even to bet on its details, like which hockey player will score the winning goal. You may have noticed the increased advertising by betting sites on your smart phone and computer.

 

I took a few Psychology courses at the University of Alberta long ago. The profs were either behaviourists or cognitive theory proponents, and this difference was reflected in how they accounted for influences that led us to behave in one way and not in another. Why did the chicken cross the road? The behaviourist assumed something on the other side promised a reward or that remaining on this side portended a punishment, but this reasoning dropped us right into the bailywick of the cognitive (thinking) theorist who would argue that the chicken weighed her options and chose to cross for whatever logic she was following.

 

Our chickens on the farm had very small heads; they showed no signs of behaving logically.  

A story was told of a behaviourist professor who taught that we humans are conditioned in the same manner as dogs are when being trained to sit. In discussions over beers, the class decided to test the theory by using and withholding the rewards of paying attention and taking notes. The details were that they would pay attention and write notes only when he spoke from the right corner of the classroom. It took only a few days before the goal was achieved; he lectured almost exclusively from the right-hand side of the room, jotted terms only on the extreme right-hand end of the blackboard.

When they divulged what they had done to the professor, he was furious; we want to be thought of as logical, not as unconsciously-trained creatures.  

A parent gets his/her/their son to wash his hands by giving him a jellybean whenever he does so. He washes his hands twenty times a day and his mouth becomes a mess of cavities.  

“Freedom” has become the noise de jour, it seems. “Restricting individual’s freedom to gamble however and wherever they choose is not the business of the government,” is the logic, the reasoning, the cognition. “We want to be free.” This makes perfect sense in a humanity where everyone is cognitively driven, but like the poor professor, we can be conditioned to behave in ways that are decidedly analogical and harmful to us and others, repeatedly betting against the house being one of them.                 

How much cognition does it take to end the behaviour of repeatedly buying lottery tickets where the chances of winning are in the millions to one? How much cognition does it take to figure out that casinos, lotteries, raffles are schemes with but one purpose: to condition as many as possible to cooperate with a plan for moving money from fellow citizens’ pockets into someone else’s.

Liberalizing gambling laws may feel like freedom, and for those who’ve already figured out that casinos’ promise of rewards is illusory, manipulative, the change means little. For those who can’t cognitively figure such things out, it’s an expansion of corporate opportunities to enslave, to advertise and coax as many as possible into habitual behaviour.

An irony: a woman* spends hours several times a week putting loonies into the one-armed bandit in the bar down the street. Occasionally, the machine coughs up a handful of coins and in her mind, she’s a winner. She doesn’t know that this payout is the jellybean that will rot her wallet; the occasional dopamine rush is enough to keep her dropping in the loonies and pulling the handle. If for every loonie she dropped in, the machine would spit out a loonie and a dime, it would become a job and she’d quit.

“Sit, Lassie, sit! Good girl.” 

I’ve been in a casino once. In Moose Jaw. I ate a meal there and left. I’ve been to church about 2,712 times or more. I’ve also eaten many a potluck meal there. I don’t remember conditioning or cognitive processing ever being discussed when “Why are our numbers falling?” comes up. Perhaps it’s time.

 

* If you prefer, read the rest in the masculine. If there’s a gender difference, I’d suggest that men are at least as “trainable” as women, maybe more.  

 

To Jab or not to Jab

 

Danielle Smith has just become premier of Alberta and wants to enshrine non-disclosure of vaccination status as a human right. Meanwhile, hearings are being held to determine if the Government of Canada was justified in invoking the Emergency Measures Act in response to the Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Ottawa. It feels like two chapters of the same book, doesn’t it?  

It’s become apparent that ignorance about the content of the British North America Act, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the Constitution as it currently divides up federal, provincial and municipal jurisdictions is no deterrent to holding strong but illogical opinions on matters governed by law and tradition in Canada. To hear Premier Smith hold forth on human rights and provincial jurisdiction is a bit like listening to old Uncle Mike arguing the medical merits of WD40 and Windex.  

Democracies generally divide themselves into what is the nation as a whole, what is provincial or state responsibility based on differing regions, and what can be decided municipally. The use of rivers that cross regions can’t be finally left to provinces and states to regulate or Edmonton could dump raw waste into the North Saskatchewan to the detriment of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Same principle applies to airports, international borders and declarations of war. In a pandemic, best bets would be on world government to plan the response, national planning would be second best, provincial third, but only if citizens don’t cross boundaries. Involving Ottawa or Regina in a decision to fill potholes on Second Avenue North in Saskatoon would be absurd; Ontario declaring war on Michigan likewise.  

As regards human rights and the decision not to accept vaccines, nothing new is needed. Going to a place where vaccines are administered and rolling up a sleeve has been an adult’s choice; no one has been compelled. To forfeit a job because it requires that personnel be vaccinated belongs with this choice; all employers are charged with exercising what they deem to be best practice in safeguarding employee and client safety and health. As long as vaccination is scientifically shown to lessen the likelihood of transmitting a virus or bacteria, the right of an employee to overrule standards that include vaccines is no more a valid argument than making smoking in the staffroom a human right, an employee choice.

 

I’m fully aware that the fear of vaccines is a real motivator for many. That there can be adverse reactions (even though they’re rare) and that pharmaceutical companies are maximum-profit oriented are not hollow concerns, and the perception that there might be persons behind the promotion of vaccines who are conspiring to risk the lives of the gullible for profit is not a huge stretch. At the same time, the observation that people like Alex Jones are profiting financially from promoting misinformation and falsehood impales already frightened people on the horns of a dilemma. The agony must be especially acute for parents of young children for whom the care for their health and education represents an onerous responsibility.

 

But this dilemma is a shared burden. While individuals and families struggle with their response to vaccines, masking and distancing, the national government faces difficult choices of what to do, how to do it and how much action is enough and not too much. Canada’s national response has been exemplary, in my view. Guided by communicable disease science, masks, vaccines have been made available to provincial healthcare administrations in a timely manner. Border security could have been enacted quicker and arguably lightened quicker as well, but what was decreed clearly had citizen safety front and centre.

 

But how should a government act and react when citizens refusing the mandates band together to force a policy that removes all consequences of their non-compliant choice? Calling their primary action to date a “Freedom” Convoy gives a clue to the driving sentiment, and this thinking is echoed in Danielle Smith’s contention that no one should be asked about their vaccination status, and that it be enshrined as a human right alongside freedoms of religion, speech, etc. The implication is that a nurse working in a hospital, say, need no longer have the right to know what precautions a colleague is taking to prevent the spreading of a communicable disease. Her rights to a feeling of safety are trumped by my right to make my health choices without consequence or reference to my neighbour's well-being.  

Like I said, it’s a shared dilemma and none of us—no matter what our stand is on vaccines—has the moral right to demand privileges that supersede the rights of a neighbour. Whether better civic education would help us settle our differences on subjects like this is debatable, but we all should at least know that the ballot box is the sacred decision-making right in a democracy, and that the challenge to democratic governance with means that include coercion and force puts democracies at risk.