The danger of the downward comparison

A downward comparison is a psychological/philosophical phenomenon in which a person evaluates the goodness of some object by contrasting it with an object he/she deems to be worse (or, in all technicality, “less good”). This is useful in ethics when evaluating “the lesser of two evils” or even in economics when trying to make a decision between different, unwanted, but ultimately necessary outcomes.

It is more dangerous when it occurs in a person’s self-appraisal. A downward comparison does not tell one how good he is, only whether or not there are others worse off. While occasionally useful, downward comparisons must be balanced with their counterpart, upward comparisons to give an idea of where you stand in terms of the things you care about.

For example, it might be very important to me that I am an ethical person. I put great personal value on making the right decision in ethically tempting situations (I wouldn’t, for example, steal money from a blind person not because I can’t but because I feel that I shouldn’t). I put such great value on this trait, in fact, that it is central to my self-concept – it’s very important that I see myself as an ethical person. I maintain my sense of self but constantly comparing myself to infamous historical dictators. After all, I am much more ethical than Idi Amin, or Stalin, or Pol Pot… the list can go on. Since, my reasoning goes, I have not committed the wholesale slaughter of thousands of innocent people (nor could I imagine myself doing so if given the opportunity), I must be an ethical person.

It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to see how quickly my reasoning can be picked apart – being better than Stalin simply means that I’m not one of the most brutal despots in the history of the world. This fact says absolutely nothing about my absolute standing as an ethical person. I could be cheating on my wife, victimizing my employees, or voting for the Conservative party. All of these are clearly unethical acts that are not in any way comparable to mass murder, but still pretty heartless. However, because I am relying on downward comparisons to inform my self-image, I don’t ever have to consider whether or not my self-opinion is justified (or at least not until I’ve murdered a few hundred people). All I have to do is make sure I am not the worst, and I can continue to believe anything I want about myself.

The same argument can be made about entirely upward comparisons – that you’d feel terrible about yourself for not being the best. I would argue that it is unlikely that someone would completely despair of ever being good enough when compared to the best, but that’s simply a belief statement, not a rational argument. The fact is that without making both upward and downward comparisons, it is not possible to have an accurate self-assessment.

Why am I talking about this? Two words:

Jersey Shore

Who watches this crap? Why on Earth would anyone want to give up valuable time watching orange monkeys parade around with behavior that is only matched in its ridiculousness by their haircuts? What possible benefit could one gain from viewing this show?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for the entertainment value of television. Not every show needs to educate its audience or deal with heavy, hard-hitting issues, but you should at the very least walk away having learned some sort of lesson – whether it be the resolution of some ethical situation or a new way of dealing with your friends more positively… even the Naked Man had some value!

When I asked this question to friends, the response I got was invariably “it’s just harmless fun” or “they’re so stupid it’s funny”, but what I heard most of all was “they are more stupid than I am, and that makes me feel better.” You want to know how I know this? Because I do it too. I used to watch Maury Povitch on days when I didn’t feel like going into the office on time. Almost without an exception, there would be an unemployed, illiterate, lazy moron who had, against all laws of nature, managed to spawn a child with some equally repulsive woman who now was “900% sure” that this particular waste of skin, and not the 4-5 other wastes of skin she’d slept with that month, was the sperm donor. Why did I watch this show? Aside from my deep-seated fear of accidentally fathering a child and cheering when DNA proved that the dude is not the father, it made me feel better about myself. Even though I was sitting on the couch in my bathrobe at 10:00 am on a weekday, surely I was better off than these throwbacks!

Again, it doesn’t take a lot of work to pick apart the gigantic holes in my logic. So what if I was better than they? So what if I wasn’t scraping the bottom of the barrel of humanity? I saw my smug self-satisfaction reflected on the faces of the audience members, whose lives were so incomplete as to attend a taping of the Maury Povitch show (unless they went for lulz). I switched my perspective, and realized that I was exactly the same as the audience, and there were a lot of people who were doing much more with their lives. So I got my ass off the couch, showered, and went to get some work done.

“Well that’s great”, you might be saying, “but it’s just a harmless television show”. I disagree with your use of the term “harmless”. There is harm in watching these kinds of shows, insofar as it encourages us to think of ourselves as superior. We become complacent in our search for excellence. We allow opportunities to improve slip through our fingers because ‘at least we’re not as bad as _____.’ My reply: so what?

There’s a much more drastic example of the dangers of downward comparisons – Canada’s health care system. Compared to other OECD countries, health care in Canada costs far more per capita and delivers, at best, equal-quality care. However, instead of taking dramatic steps to improve the state of our system, we sit back on our laurels and say “at least we’re not as bad as the USA.” The American system sucks; nobody’s denying that. But to compare ourselves to the worst and think that somehow that justifies our near-total inaction for wholesale change is the same logic that kept me unshowered and on the couch.

Here’s my point. While it’s important to feel good about yourself, that kind of reassurance is best for all when it comes from positive identification with those we wish to emulate, not from distancing ourselves from those we hate. Simple downward comparison will never move us out of the status quo of mediocrity. While not everyone can be the best, that’s not an excuse for not trying our best. The more positive examples we surround ourselves with, the more motivation we have to improve (and the more models of improvement we have at our disposal). The more we soothe ourselves by allowing ourselves to be lulled by downward comparisons, the more likely we are to stay exactly where we are, and the less likely we are to make life better for ourselves or for others.

Nova Scotia Cross Burning – Why Indeed?


From the article:










The Placebo Effect

This post originally appeared on Facebook on January 27th, 2010.

Those of you who are not scientists may not be familiar with the term “placebo.” It is often equated in common language with “sugar pills”, or some sort of fake drug that doesn’t do anything. This is a reasonable proxy for what a placebo actually is. In a nutshell, a placebo is something that mimics the outward characteristic of an actual entity while having no real effect. This definition is imprecise, as placebos do have an effect, which is the whole point. The so-called “placebo effect” occurs when someone, believing that the placebo is actually the entity it is mimicking, undergoes some change that is attributed to the placebo, but is actually no more than their own psychosomatism (or naturally-occurring events). The key to this effect is that the person believes that what they are receiving is genuine.
Placebos are most commonly associated with clinical trials for medicines. One group, the experimental group, is given a new drug while the other, the control group, is given a placebo (often either a sugar pill, aspirin, or in the case of intravenous drugs, a saline solution). Once again, it is important to note that the patients (and in high-quality studies, the physicians) are not aware whether they are receiving the medicine or the placebo. Nowadays, placebo trials are less common, since medical ethics require that all patients receive at least the standard treatment that would be available if they weren’t in the trial.

There is a very good reason for doing this. The human mind is incredibly powerful. Sometimes merely the act of believing you’ve been given something that will help causes you to feel better. Indeed, there is marked symptom improvement even in some cases of terminal or chronic painful disease simply due to believing that the “treatment” you’re getting is fixing the problem. Thus, in order to determine concretely what effect, if any, a new treatment has, it is necessary to control for the placebo effect – make sure all patients are experiencing it. Any significant difference seen after the placebo effect has been accounted for is, therefore, a result of the real effects of the treatment.

(I’ve used the word “real” a couple of times here, and I anticipate that the more new-agey of you reading this will object to my co-opting that word for science. When I say “real”, I am using it the metaphysical sense – the real/non-real dichotomy – which states that those things which can be directly observed, measured, etc. are “real” while all other things are non-real. Please note that, although linguistically similar in English, non-real is not the same as “not real”. “Not real” means fictional, imaginary, having no basis in reality; whereas “Non-real” simply means that the concept is not a measurable, physically-based. Admittedly, a lot of things that are “non-real” are also “not real”, but that’s the subject of a different discussion. Think of it this way: unicorn farts are “real” in a metaphysical sense, but “not real” in a “WTF, UNICORNS?” sense.)

What all this means is that the simple act of believing something to be true causes our minds to behave as though it is true, even in those cases when the object of belief has no actual effect. Belief is absolutely essential to this process – if I tell you “hey, eat this sugar pill”, you’re not going to feel any better (unless you had low blood sugar, but then it’s no longer a placebo, init?).

Anyway, I said all of this as a preamble to the statement that’s been rattling around in my brain for a couple of months. It seemed particularly important to me. Maybe I am vastly overestimating the impact that my ideas have on people – maybe nobody cares about my inane ramblings and will just say “c’mon Ian, get to the swearing!” Anyway, here’s my fucking thesis:

If you have to believe in it for it to work, it’s a placebo.

Nobody intelligent denies the existence of the placebo effect. It’s been observed countless times in many different guises. However, we seem to be happy with confining it to the field of pharmaceuticals, even though it’s much bigger than that. It’s not a scientific thing, present only in beakers and pills, it’s a psychological phenomenon that occurs in the larger world around us, not only in terms of health but in the way we see the world. We carry good-luck charms, we have little personal rituals and idiosyncrasies, we talk about “fate” and “destiny”, we read horoscopes, the list goes on. This is stuff we all do, not just the crazy superstitious bunch. Remember that Seinfeld episode where George eats the éclair from the garbage? It was sitting right on top, only one bite out of it. It’s not as though coming in contact with the garbage can infused the food with virulent disease, but we all identified with the idea. That’s just a modified version of the placebo effect – we believe it’s dirty even though, rationally, we know it’s not.

So why am I talking about this? Why is this important? A placebo is given in a clinical trial as a kind of benign deception on the part of the experimenters. However, a patient in a hospital would never be given a placebo instead of real medicine in a treatment setting – we wouldn’t accept allowing someone to suffer when we have the ability to help. Why, then, are we completely willing to accept placebos in other forms – in some cases clamoring for them? Faith healing, homeopathy, crystals, reiki, tarot cards, psychics, chakras, qi, “The Secret”, placebos, placebos, placebos all. These are all examples of things that don’t work unless you believe they work.

I have, many times, heard the argument that there are other “ways of knowing” or “ways of measuring” that “Western science” can’t account for. This little fallacy will perhaps be discussed in another post, as this one is already getting really long. I’ll boil down my argument as concisely as possible here. There’s no such thing as “Western science”, there’s just “science”. Science is the act of observing the causal chain of a phenomenon to identify the “real”. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing science. While we can argue metaphysics, ontology, theology, and all those good things from an East/West perspective, there’s only one kind of science. Everything else is slight-of-hand and superstition, washed down with a big handful of placebos.

This is the part where I provide my full-throated defence of all of the things I just attacked. It may come across in the previous paragraphs as though I think that placebos are bad, or that the only stuff that matters is the “real”. Some might believe this to be true, but I don’t. As I said, the mind is incredibly powerful. Sometimes when you’re faced with an incredibly-difficult situation (such as terminal illness, a big speech, an first date), you need to believe that you can get through it. Belief in ourselves is crucial, as otherwise we’d be far too realistic about our limitations and never try anything new or difficult. However, when we throw ourselves into the brink, come out alive, and then give all the credit to our luck rabbit’s foot, we’re doing ourselves a great disservice. When you do something good, take a victory lap! You overcame the odds and prevailed!

And, if you try something and you fail, well you can always blame immigrants, I guess.

Gluten-free Jesus discs



The response?







  3. God hates people with celiac disease, or



The foundations of the manifesto

After many years of absence, I am returning to the “blogosphere”. Those of you who have known me for a while may remember that for a couple of years, I collaborated with a friend of mine named Poromenos to create “Porocrom’s Crappaper”, a mostly humour-based blog that lasted for about 2.5 years. Sadly, Porocrom ran out of steam as Poro and I shifted gears and started doing different things with our lives.

I have come back because I have a bone to pick with the world, and things seem to be getting worse. I’ve had the name “Crommunist” since I was 12 years old, and have enjoyed the shit out of it. That being said, it puts me in a linguistically advantageous position, as now I get to rail against a contrary sociopolitical system: Crapitalism.

Crapitalism (n): a social and political system centred around the exchange of intellectual currency for worthless crap.

Far too often I see the great minds of our age turned towards meaninglessness as a substitute for depth. Far too often I see the commoditization of the human condition, where people are treated as market segments and herd animals rather than rational, thinking agents. Far too often I see people living up to this. NO MORE, I say! I say again NO MORE!

In writing here, I hope to challenge you, and myself, to reach for a higher level of functioning rather than performing downward comparisons ad nauseam until our brains become little more than vestigial organs. There will be no punches pulled, there will be no compromises between right and wrong, and not even the sainted narrator will be above scrutiny. If I say something you disagree with, I hereby challenge you to call me on it and discuss it like human adults, rather than cowering behind thin excuses and fear of confrontation.



  1. That people will actually read the thing, and

So here goes The Crommunist Manifesto