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Front Stage And Back Stage Behavior

Another concept Conley talks about is "front stage and back stage" behavior, a term invented by mid-century sociologist Erving Goffman that describes how we behave when we're with different social groups. Front stage being how we act in public, and backstage being our more "authentic self" and how we act when we're with our more intimate social groups.

Conley says he allows his kids to vent and curse at him in private as long as they're doing their homework, for instance. But in public, of course, they need to be totally respectful. He says the idea is to give them an outlet.

"Kids, especially as they hit adolescence, need certain outlets," he says. "If you are an authoritarian parent that demands total respect and don't have that connection to allow your kids, not necessarily to curse you, but to vent their frustration, and to talk intimately with you, then it's going to come out in the public sphere where you really don't want it to come out."

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Japan has agreed to hand over to the U.S. a decades-old stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium that is said to be large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons.

The 700-pound cache, which had been maintained by Japan for research purposes, would be turned over to the U.S. for safe-keeping, according to an agreement finalized at the G7 nuclear summit in The Hague. It's part of an administration push to secure such prevent the nuclear material from being stolen by potential terrorists.

"This is a very significant nuclear security pledge and activity," U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told reporters at the summit in the Netherlands. "The material will be transferred to the United States for transformation into proliferation-resistant forms."

Yosuke Isozaki, a senior national security adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said through a translator that: "Japan shares a vision of a world without nuclear weapons."

The New York Times reports:

"The Japanese agreement to transfer the material has both practical and political significance. For years these stores of weapons-grade material were not a secret, but they were lightly guarded at best; a reporter for The New York Times who visited the main storage site at Tokaimura in the early 1990s found unarmed guards and a site less-well protected than many banks. While security has improved, the stores have long been considered vulnerable.

"Iran has cited Japan's large stockpiles of bomb-ready material as evidence of a double standard about which nations can be trusted. And last month China began publicly denouncing Japan's supply, in an apparent warning that a rightward, nationalistic turn in Japanese politics could result in the country seeking its own weapons.

"At various moments right-wing politicians in Japan have referred to the stockpile as a deterrent, suggesting that it was useful to have material so that the world knows Japan, with its advanced technological acumen, could easily fashion it into weapons."

Democrats have had great success in recent presidential elections registering, targeting and turning out their core voters. Now they're hoping to use that sophisticated field operation to to stave off defeat in this year's midterm elections.

They'll need all the help they can get because the Democratic hold on the Senate is looking increasingly shaky. The president is unpopular. So is Obamacare, and the number of vulnerable Democratic Senate seats is growing by the day. Several independent handicappers have recently moved several more Democratic seats into the "toss up" category.

Republicans only need a net of six pickups to take control of the Senate. And Democrats know that would make the last two years of President Obama's term pretty miserable. Obama himself has been sounding the alarm at every fundraiser and party meeting.

Last month at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, he said, "When Democrats have everybody on the field, we cannot lose. That's just a fact."

That's certainly been true in presidential years, where Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the last six elections. But in midterms, it's a different story altogether.

"A lot of Democrats don't vote during midterms," Obama said. "We just don't. Young people, African-Americans, Latinos — we just, often times, don't vote during midterms."

And earlier this month, in a special election for a congressional seat in Florida, that's exactly what happened — or didn't happen. Geoff Garin, the pollster for Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate who lost, says the problem was a drop in turnout.

"The cold, hard facts are that 49,000 fewer people voted in that special election than in the Nov. 2010 election for Congress," he said, "and about 160,000 fewer people voted than in the presidential election in 2012. That dropoff is occurring disproportionally among Democratic voters and creates a pretty substantial head wind for Democratic candidates."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is planning a massive investment to address that problem. It plans to spend $60 million to hire 4,000 staffers in the most competitive Senate race states. The goal is ambitious: to make the midterm electorate — which tends to skew older, whiter and more Republican — look more like a presidential year electorate: younger, browner, and with more single women. In short: more Democratic.

The executive director at the DSCC, Guy Cecil, is in charge of deploying this large army of paid field organizers who will focus on registration, canvassing and phone banking.

"We are going to do everything we can to make sure that folks are motivated and energized to get to the polls in our targeted states," he said. "It's going to be a test to see whether or not we can do that."

According to Sasha Issenberg, the author of The Victory Lab, a good ground operation can add a point or two to the vote — tipping the balance in an otherwise tight race.

"Everything we know from basically 15 years of field experiments shows that high-quality, face-to-face contacts for a volunteer living in the same community as the voter is the best way to turn somebody out," Issenberg said. "So there is a road map to doing this. But it is expensive and it takes a lot of staff, and a lot offices and infrastructures to recruit and train those volunteers."

Democrats insist it can be done. They point to last year's Virginia governor's race, where Democrat Terry McAuliffe won by turning out more Democratic voters than in the 2009 Virginia governor's race. But political analyst Larry Sabato doubts whether Democrats can repeat that feat in other states.

"They have not cracked that code," Sabato said. "A lot of Democrats don't think midterm elections are sexy and they don't vote. What they might be able to do is what McAuliffe did — to marginally increase the relative turnout of minorities and young people who vote Democratic. So if, for example, North Carolina turns out to be a 1 or 2 percent race, that could make the difference."

North Carolina, like Virginia, is a state that President Obama carried. So a good field operation might help there. It also might help in Michigan, a blue state with a competitive Senate race this year. And Democrats are hopeful that their candidate in Georgia, a state with a large and growing minority population, might benefit from a beefed-up turnout effort.

But what about red states — where so many Democratic Senate incumbents are on the defensive this year?

"A state like Arkansas," Issenberg said, "where Democrats haven't run a very competitive presidential campaign in decades, where you don't have a strong Democratic state party, you don't have a culture of volunteering, the question is: who is going to knock on those doors for [Sen.] Mark Pryor? That's something that isn't easily solved just by throwing money or staff from Washington out there."

The problem for Democrats is that this year's Senate map is full of red states like Arkansas. And that's why Republicans — who are very good at getting their voters out in midterm elections — doubt the Democrats can succeed. Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus happily ticked off the long list of places where Democratic Senate candidates are vulnerable.

"They're running in states where the president in 2012 didn't receive 41 percent of the vote," Priebus said, "whether its Alaska, Montana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia. Now we're extending the map to Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, and Michigan. And now potentially New Hampshire. It goes on and on and on."

A game to cover that much ground would cost a lot more than $60 million and would quickly exhaust the party's resources. The Democrats don't have the equivalent of the Koch brothers, who are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to help GOP candidates.

Republicans are betting the map of vulnerable Democrats is too big for even the best field operation to cover. But Democrats are hoping they can change the electorate — just enough — and in just enough places — to minimize their losses in November.

[Been contacted by a campaign before? Try our quiz below.]

So as you can imagine, a few people given that kind of setting are able to change their behavior at least temporarily, maybe permanently. But most people can't deal with their addiction, which is deeply driven, by just being in a brotherhood.

On a psychological approach to addiction

When people are confronted with a feeling of being trapped, of being overwhelmingly helpless, they have to do something. It isn't necessarily the "something" that actually deals with the problem ... Why addiction, though, why drink? Well, that's the "something" that they do. In psychology we call it a displacement, you could call it a substitute ...

When people can understand their addiction and what drives it, not only are they able to manage it but they can predict the next time the addictive urge will come up, because they know the kind of things that will make them feel overwhelmingly helpless. Given that forewarning, they can manage it much better.

But unlike AA, I would never claim that what I've suggested is right for everybody. But ... let's say I had nothing better to offer: It wouldn't matter — we still need to change the system as it is because we are harming 90 percent of the people.