Month: June 2018

French author Marcel Proust is famous for his gentle remembrance of things past, his eponymous character-revealing questionnaire and his love of madeleine cookies.

Kent Monkman is a modern-day national treasure. He is an artist and advocate who packages a harsh social message about the treachery behind Canada’s national myths and the violation of Indigenous rights in the lush neo-classical style of David and Delacroix. He and his alter ego, the fabulous Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, are of Cree and Irish ancestry. They have gained an international reputation for the power and beauty of both the medium and the message.

What is your greatest fear?
To be irrelevant.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Impatience.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Impatience.

Which living person  do you most admire?
Alanis Obomsawin, for blazing a trial for all Indigenous artists to follow, and for making over 50 films (and counting).

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Temperance.

On what occasion do you lie?
To my smallest nieces and nephews about the missing and murdered Indigenous women and men. They are too young to know that their lives are considered by many in this country to be worthless.

Which living person do you most despise?
Donald Trump. He epitomizes the dangerous shift towards lack of empathy in our world today.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Kindness.

What is the quality you most like in a woman?
I love the warrior-like strength in all women.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?
My painting practice.

When and where were you happiest?
Any time I’m painting in my studio.

Which talent would you most like to have?
To be able to sing.

What is your most treasured possession?
My imagination.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
To be without friends and family.

What do you most value in your friends?
Loyalty.

Who is your hero of fiction?
Weesageechak (the Cree trickster).

Which historical figure do you most identify with?
Eugene Delacroix, because of his passion for painting, and his articulate challenges of the society he lived in through his art and his writing.

Who are your heroes in real life?
Murray Sinclair. His work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was ground-breaking, and with his wisdom continues to offer guidance to all Canadians that is wise, generous and essential in these turbulent times.

The race to judge others may be rooted in fear. But it increasingly poses a threat to the rules that underpin civil society.

Anger is the Russian nesting doll of emotions. A twist of its hard, glossy exterior reveals smaller versions of it: fury, violence, self-righteousness, judgment, prejudice, disdain and fear. Fear may be the smallest and most frequently overlooked of the dolls, but it is also the most powerful.

There are a number of reasons why anger is all the rage these days, manifesting itself in a collective rush to judgment.

At a time of pervasive uncertainty, socioeconomic fragmentation and weak leadership, individuals, organizations and communities are vulnerable and acutely aware of it. Familiar touchstones such as trust, integrity of information and the right to privacy have eroded. Foundational social values such as telling the truth, fair play and community service are bleeding in the ditch. Thanks to the force of social media, everyone is talking at high volume all at the same time and no one is listening much.

The pace of all this tumult has often been dizzying.

The more threatened and fearful people feel, the greater their need to impose order on the chaos they perceive around them by lashing out at others and judging them hard. Where the prevailing mindset was

once focused on due process and the right to a fair hearing, that’s no longer the case. From business to politics to personal conduct, public opinion has become harsh and swift, ready to overwhelm facts that may never be shared or corrected.

Whether it’s rooted in fear or not, widespread anger is having a material impact on how we interact as individuals within a society. For companies, stakeholder backlash

has become a real and constant danger that must be anticipated at every turn. The insistence on institutional accountability means it has never been harder to contain the damage caused by outrage.

Anger leads to a punitive mindset that has a direct bearing on how long-term decisions are made in public and political life, regardless of whether the anger is articulated, acknowledged or even related to the decision at hand. It’s all the more significant because anger, more than any other emotion, typically incites action—the more immediate the better. Given the mechanisms that exist to turn decisions into action, the potential consequences are formidable.

According to the Journal of Behavioral Decision-Making, the more anger one feels, the greater the drive to place the responsibility for negative outcomes on others and to hurt them in return. This inclination to quid pro quo is noteworthy at a time when free trade and protectionism are under attack in North America, Britain is in the process of withdrawing from the European Union, and the pent-up fury over male sexual misconduct has been transformed into an international movement of remarkable force.