X-Message-Number: 22485 Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 15:06:08 -0400 (EDT) From: Subject: Instability Tim Freeman asks good questions as always, but this is a rare occasion where I am reluctant to discuss specifics. Recently I had the distressing experience of seeing excerpts from a highly personal memo, which I had distributed among just 9 people, reproduced in a national-circulation magazine. Naturally I prefer not to make a mistake twice, and this is not a good time for public self-examination. However I can make some general observations. Based on my intermittent participation in cryonics, here's a list of possible reasons for a high turnover in personnel. No doubt others can add to this list or quibble with it. 1. Cryonics is stressful and unrewarding, and seldom pays well. It's stressful because it is still a relatively new endeavor in which there are countless traps for the unwary, whether you are doing field work, giving news interviews, negotiating with regulators, or trying to raise money. It's unrewarding because you can't really tell whether you have done a good job. The ultimate outcome of every case is unknown and will remain unknown for decades. 2. Most people working in cryonics organizations would prefer to be doing something else. Very few have chosen cryonics as a job or a career, and the ones who did have tended to be (how can I put this tactfully?) far from the center of the bell curve. Cryonics appeals only to a tiny fraction of humanity; cryonics activists are a subset of that tiny fraction; and cryonics careerists are a subset of that subset. 3. Because there has been a perpetual shortage of help, people have been assigned tasks for which they lacked experience or aptitude. Individualists who perform poorly in groups have been asked to serve as managers. People with no experience in book keeping have tried to handle corporate finances. Others with no formal medical training have gone out to rescue dying patients in hospitals. And so on. Really it's remarkable that so many gifted amateurs have done so well, but sometimes errors have occurred, or a person who is inappropriate for a job has realized his inadequacies or has been encouraged to quit. I had hoped that cryonics could avoid this kind of problem by employing professional help, but one of the most visible professional helpers turned out to be untrustworthy. 4. Now we get to the psychological factors, which I personally think are more important. Cryonicists obviously are driven by a strong desire to avoid mortality. This is an odd motivation for people to share in a business or even in a nonprofit organization. It creates an emotional environment. Moreover, since anger is a classic response to fear, people who are apprehensive about death tend to become contentious. 5. Statistically cryonics has tended to attract libertarians, contrarians, and others who rebel against the status-quo. Such people are usually elitist, argumentative, and reluctant to change their opinions on any topic. Also they have little respect for authority, even within their own group. It's hard to run an organization that consists of rule-breaking rebels. 6. Cryonics also tends to attract a minority who are deluded. By this I mean that they have unrealistic expectations, wacky ideas about science, impractical business plans, and personal ambitions based on wishful thinking. Deluded people often insist that there is a shortcut which everyone else is too dumb to see. Olga Visser, who thought she could resuscitate rat hearts and cure AIDS patients with the selfsame elixir, seemed deluded. Unfortunately deluded people can sometimes generate so much excitement, they tempt others to share the delusion. When the bubble bursts, the deluded instigators may be excommunicated. 7. Cryonics activists also tend to be narcissists, which is natural when you consider that you have to believe strongly in your own worth to feel that preserving yourself justifies a significant amount of time and effort. Narcissists are not team players. 8. Cryonics activists tend to be idealists. Only an idealist could proclaim, "Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable." (Alan Harrington's first line in his book, The Immortalist.) Unfortunately, cryonics is a bad place for idealists because its aims are so ambitious and its human and financial resources are so limited. Idealists become unhappy when they are forced repeatedly to compromise, and people tend to quit when they are unhappy in a job. Of course in cryonics, quitting itself is stressful, because *not* trying to make it work feels bad too. So, we have seen people who vacillate and seem unable to make a lasting decision. They disappear into obscurity and then return. I can think of at least a dozen who fit this profile. This does not please an organization's members, who just want a reliable service in exchange for an annual fee; but if they would recognize that cryonics is an experiment, not a validated service, and if they would respond by getting more involved, they might gain a better appreciation of the problems that I am describing. (To some extent cryonics organizations are at fault for having encouraged the idea that cryonics is a validated service.) 9. There are situational factors specific to the current phase of cryonics. The number of members has grown while the number of hardcore activists has diminished. Consumers are proliferating while an important class of service providers is shrinking. The early-early-early adopters (those who joined before 1980, say) joined when cryonics was even more speculative than it is now, and consequently they had to be very highly motivated. They would endure almost anything to try to make it work. But they have human limits, and they exhibited some or all of the traits I have listed above. So, many of them either burned out or made errors or were driven out by their socially maladjusted peers. We are thus in a transitional period where volunteers are relatively scarce but organizations cannot quite afford to pay market rates for professional help (and may be afraid to do so after the Larry Johnson fiasco). This again creates a stressful situation. Now for the upside: I have seen some highly productive people in cryonics who shared few of the personality traits listed above. They came into the field for very rational reasons, and have been patient, amiable, consistent, and willing to make compromises. As the concept of cryonics becomes more socially acceptable, I see no reason why we shouldn't find more people like this entering the field. I must also add that some of the problematic traits in cryonics activists have also been extremely valuable. The field would never have developed reliable storage and sophisticated standby procedures without selfless contributions from narcissistic, contentious, rebellious amateurs. One could also argue that most of the people who have worked hardest in cryonics have been deluded to some extent, because they believed that progress would be faster and mainstream recognition was just around the corner. An outsider would suggest that all cryonicists are deluded for believing that they have a chance to be resuscitated. Thus the same personality profile that leads to instability also sustained the field in its most difficult early years. --Charles Platt Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22485