The Butt

No, not Salmon.

The last few days I’ve been thinking about mental blocks – why people have them, where they come from, and, most interestingly, why it is so hard for someone who recognizes that s/he has one to do anything about it. My head’s been resonating with Grace Slick’s call, dying to scream it out

Tear down the wa-hall, dah-dah-duhduh
Tear down the wa-hall.

And then last night I saw it happen again. Those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about (Hello, America!) need to pop over to my friend sudo phish’s to check out the vid. One moment there was a game on, another pregnant attack pricked by the astuteness of the Azzurri back five. The ball was sent upfield, and the camera wandered behind it. The next moment, it was a blur of confusion with an unidentified blue defender collapsed on the turf and the goalkeeper Buffon charging like a crazed Italian from the referee to the linesman and back.

A peripheral camera was called into action, and we all now know the sequence of events as it appeared. Zidane on the right wing, embraced maternally by Materazzi. Attack thwarted. Zidane and Materazzi trot back. Zidane’s wry look at yet another half-foul going unnoticed. Materazzi drops out of the frame, just at the crucial moment. Zidane abruptly stops, turns, and gores the matador to the ground.

Why did he do it? Driblets of gossip will doubtless ooze forth during the days to come. The French have already condemned the Italian, guilty until proven otherwise. The French team has a history of having to face racial taunts. Zizou has a history of irascibility. And although, in my analysis, the sending-off may not have made that much of a difference to the final outcome of the game, the question remains – why did such a man, such an experienced player, at such a critical time, not know better?

The psychologist John Bargh claims that over 99% of every person’s actions are “automatic”. (He also claims that that’s an understatement.) Bargh talks about “the four horsemen” of automaticity – automatic acts are involuntary, unintentional, uncontrolled, and effortless. Automatic reactions are adaptive, in the sense that they have been honed to the point where every person knows exactly what to do in response to practically each and every one of the millions of stimuli that impinge upon their senses every passing moment. If we started actually thinking about every step required to answer the phone, our voicemail would brim over very soon. Such procedural knowledge comes of learning – the first time we heard the phone ring, we hadn’t a clue what to do with it. Watching someone answer the thing, once, twice, multiple times, then mimicking their actions, eventually leads us to that ultimate joy gained of conversing with telemarketers (in Cantonese). Very similar sequences of operations take place for most learned activities; and as each one gets learned, it moves from being conscious and effortful, think about driving, to what we call automatic pilot.

Such processes of learning also happen when we try to unlearn existing responses, hoping to introduce new dominant responses in their place. The ‘thank you’ that springs to ones lips when addressing waiters in New York must be supplanted with a ‘merci’ in Paris, or else you get extra cheese on your croissant (or so I’ve been told). So we train ourselves to say the merci, steel ourselves for the crucial moment, and spring it self-consciously when the time comes. And congratulate ourselves on having done so, then hoover off to do it again, and again, and again, until the day we smoothly impress the friend who visits us a few months down the line.

Yet that is no guarantee that some day, in a hurry, or in the middle of a conversation, the pagan thank you will not slip from our merciless lips again.

Because the learned response is not always the dominant one, especially in times of stress.

Which is why I feel sorry for Zizou. He fought his demons, but couldn’t tear down the wall when it mattered.

Update: Buddy bandafbab presents the most magnificent alternative explanation.