A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE PUPPETMASTER'S PAIN

September 8th, 2019

The crisp bread of a grilled cheese hummed with a smothered crackle just as Lucilius slid a spatula under it to flip.  The sandwich slapped down and crackled once more.  The giggle and talk of his two young Godsons rained in from down the hall.  And then the youngest screamed with real pain.  

Lucilius dropped the spatula and ran down the hall towards the suffocating hiccups of alarm that were ratcheting to a second scream of pain.

It was clear the eldest knew his act.

Lucilius scooped up the younger Godson and inspected the boy for any real damage.  He’d been pinched and the marks on his skin still showed perfect dents of fingernails, the blush of blood lighting up his whole arm.  The boy would be ok, but shock would keep him wailing for a while.  Lucilius held the boy and comforted him, sitting down on a couch to hold him closer and rock the boy.

He did not bother to look at the older one, now in a corner.  He didn’t want to split his attention and Lucilius knew, the older boy was building his own prison of torment by just watching, knowing, remembering.

The younger one finally came to his clearer senses, calmed and exhausted.  Lucilius lifted the boy and took him to his room where he quickly fell asleep.

Lucilius returned to the kitchen to find the grilled cheese smoking slightly on the low heat.  The hot side was a black crust.  Lucilius sighed and dumped the mess into a garbage can.  He took the one good sandwich and placed it on a plate.  After cutting it on a diagonal, he took it up and went to the room where the eldest still was.

His godson had retreated into a game on a tablet, still in the corner.  Lucilius sat on the opposite side of the room.  He lifted a triangle of the sandwich, brought it to his mouth and tore off a corner, staring at his Godson the whole time.  The boy glanced quickly at the sound of eating.

“Where’s mine?”  The boy said with blank eyes staring into his game.

“This one was supposed to be for your brother,” Lucilius said.  “Yours is in the trash.”

The boy looked at his Godfather.  Lucilius shrugged.  “It burned while I was with your brother.  You wouldn’t have eaten it anyway.”

The boy looked back to his game, scowling.  Lucilius put the oozing and ruined triangle of sandwich down next to the second untouched half .  He pushed the plate aside.

“Come here,” he announced.

The boy glanced at him.  He no longer tapped the screen, but sighed and slowly put down the tablet, the boy’s eyes rolling wide and white.

He trudged across the room and stood  with shoulders slumped in front of Lucilius.

“Well, what should I do?” Lucilius asked.

“He’ll be fine,” the boy said.

“And what about you?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed, suspicious.  “What do you mean?  I’m fine.”

“Are you?” Lucilius challenged.

The boy shrugged.  “Yea.”

Lucilius fished a marker out of his pocket.  “Give me your hands,” he said.

“Why?”

Lucilius looked at the boy, remembering the fear someone had put in him once many years ago, and that fear now came out in the boy’s face.  He slowly put out his hands.  On the back on one of the boy’s hands Lucilius wrote the boy’s name, and on the other hand he wrote the name of his brother.

The boy was confused, looking at the names.

“Now,” Lucilius said.  “Show me what you did.”

“What?”

Lucilius pointed at the boy’s hand that had his own name.  “That’s you, and that’s your brother,” he said pointing at the other hand. 

“Now, show me what you did.”

With a tentative look, the boy moved the hand with his own name and lightly pinched the back of his other hand.  Lucilius took the pinched hand and inspected it.

“I could see the mark of both fingernails on your brother,” he said, looking up from the pathetic reenactment.

“Fine!” the boy shouted, and he began to pinch his own hand with his brother’s name as hard as he could, instantly wincing at the pain.

“Whoah, whoah,” Lucilius took the boy’s hands in his own, separating them.  The boy was upset.

“It’s ok.”

A tear gathered at the side of the boy’s face as he held his Godfather’s gaze.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Lucilius said.

“But that’s what happens, every time you hurt someone else.  Every time you lie to someone else, you only deceive yourself.  Every time you lash out at someone, it’s you who is lashed.  Every time you get angry at someone, it’s you who suffers.”

Tears rolled down the boy’s face, and Lucilius pulled the boy into his arms and let the boy cry.  A long minute passed until the boy was settled. 

“You ok?” 

The boy nodded.

“We are all apart of this place kiddo.  No matter how big it seems or how different it looks we are from one another, we’re all here together and we a part of one another.  This space between you and me?  It’s a part of us too.” 

 Lucilius slide the boy next to himself and then reached for the plate with the sandwich.

“The only way we can take care of ourselves is to make sure we take care of each other.”

Lucilius took his mangled half and gave the plate a quick shuffle, sliding the other half to the edge, closer to the boy as Lucilius offered up the plate before him.

SENSIBLE NOISE

September 7th, 2019

Being informed is not the same as being knowledgeable.

Most information is noise.  And most people write off noise as nonsense.

But consider a different kind of noise for a moment:

You are in a quiet park full of trees.  A breeze comes along and the trees produce a noise, a sound of rustling.  It probably sounds enjoyable and relaxing.  Now two questions:

Do you write off that noise as meaningless and nonsensical?

Perhaps it’s meaningless, but it is not nonsensical, for one simple reason:

Do you understand why you are hearing the noise and what creates it?

Of course.  It’s fairly intuitive why a tree makes sound when a breeze sweeps through it.  It’s so intuitive, in fact, that we don’t think about it.  That noise and the reason why it happens is part of our mental model of the world.

Compare that to much of the noise of culture that we write off or purposely ignore because it’s somehow aggravating, or annoying or infuriating.  These emotional reactions are indications that we do not actually understand something that’s going on.  Can we be sure about this?  Well, let’s paint another situation that we’ve all experienced or seen.

You walk into a room and a friend or loved one is alert and looking around. 

“What’s going on?” you ask.

The friend looks at you tensely.  “Sssh,” they hiss at you.  “There’s this sound that keeps happening and it’s driving me crazy.  I’m trying to figure out what it is.”

As an analogy this has a fairly direct and straight forward fidelity to the entire news industry. 

Think about the sorts of questions that pop up when a discussion of news and current events is on the table:

Why do people do this?

Why did that happen?

Why are people so crazy?

I can’t believe this happened. . .

Are such questions not direct invocations of a lack of real understanding about how things work?  The most accessible and curable reason why understanding is so hard to come by has to do with the nature of institutions. 

The short prescription is:

Always be wary of the opinion of those who have a boss.  All of their thinking, opinion and analysis is skewed by their need to stay employed, which inevitably means saying things that will be approved and liked by one’s boss. 

This is perfectly human and understandable when we consider the individual in their situation, but that does not mean that it should be trusted.

Independent thinkers that have arranged their life so that their thoughts and the opinions they express are edited by no one, have the best material to investigate.  This is not a subjective opinion.  It is simply the condition that is most likely to produce clear thinking.  Not only are such people more likely to be honest from a straight forward point of view about what they think, but such people are free from any biases that are imposed via editing from a boss or self-imposed editing derived from their situation via the culture of the institution they work for….

much like the situation a salaried journalist is constrained by.

Case in point: the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and all other such establishments can be categorized and labelled on a spectrum of conservative, liberal, progressive and such and so forth.  The fact that, in general, their treatment of topics can be lumped into a category means that all of the information they come across and try to convey is filtered or arranged in accordance to this category.  If this weren’t true than such categorization would be impossible.

These categories are general frameworks for making sense of the noise of what’s going on.  The fact that there is so much discord, confusion, anger, rage and frustration should be taken as an indication that these frameworks don’t work very well.

It’s much like the problem that has befuddled the planet regarding one-god religions.  Which one’s right?  Each side thinks they are right and people have slaughtered each other over this topic since time immemorial.

Like political affiliations, religions too are frameworks for trying to understand reality.  They present a version, and again, if other people outside of this framework who affiliate with other ideas seem crazy to a frustrating and even infuriating degree, that should imply a problem with both the frameworks.

Only a wiser framework that can make sense of both such frameworks can give a person a sense of equanimity, but few seek out such expanded and nuanced understandings due mainly to constraints of time and the culture of an individual’s situation.

All the noise of media, news and the conflicts of the world are somewhat like the rustling of trees to someone with a framework that is nuanced enough to make sense of all of the sound.

This might sound like a hooty-tooty, holier-than-thou position that we feel inclined to call bullshit on, but consider this image:

A gardener plants a young tree.  A small breeze comes by and the leaves rustle.  The gardener understands the noise, and understands that nothing is wrong.  But say the breeze increases, and the sound of the rustling likewise increases.  The gardener gets nervous for the little tree because too much can damage the tree, and this is intuitively obvious because the gardener’s mental model of wind and the fragility of young trees conveys a dynamic understanding of what will happen given a certain threshold of wind.  Does the gardener simply sit placidly, listening to the increasing noise?  No, perhaps the gardener plants a larger tree next to the younger one to protect it.  Or perhaps the gardener wraps the young tree and secures it to the ground with ropes.

Much distinction is made between signal and noise, and Episode 396 attempts to link the two.  The distinction of signal and noise is not one of difference but one of perspective.  To a person who understands a situation, all noise constitutes signal, but not necessarily a signal that requires a course of action. 

We can illicit the link with another image:  Imagine a sailor on an old-school sailing ship.  The ship has hundreds of lines and for someone unaccustomed to the environment, it might seem like a garble of noise as the ship moves and sails.  However, the well-accustomed sailor is listening to everything with a different ear.  All the creaks and strains might sound alarming to the visitor, but to the sailor they constitute the normal, like the rustling of leaves for the gardener.  Because the sailor is so accustomed to each and every little noise, the sailor can quickly pick out when something is wrong because the noise is different, much like the change in rustling when the wind starts picking up and the rustling of a young tree changes to a different pitch.

The sailing ship and the tree form a good analogy in this case because everyone intuits the rustling of the tree, but the sailing ship –for most people- can only be understood from a conceptual standpoint.  And yet the two situations are identical in terms of noise, signal and the response or non-response that people or differing levels of understanding will undertake.

A visitor to a sailing ship that is heeling under a heavy gale will probably get freaked out. 

It’s easy to imagine the smile of an old and salty sailor looking upon the alarm of the passenger. 

Unlike the disgruntled millions of political affiliations, religions and purveyors of news outlets. . .

the sailor smiles because the sailor understands what’s going on.

This episode references Episode 396: Sign & Signal

SO WHAT?

September 6th, 2019

Kids aren’t born with this capacity: the ability to look at something new and in jaded fashion and full of doubt, respond: so, what?

Kids quickly learn this of course, because the attitude and emotional sharpness that it conveys is a method for gaining clout among peers.  Responding with ‘so what?’ conveys that one either has a quickness of mind that can work through all the ramifications on the spot, or that the issue has already been mentally digested at some prior time.

Compare this to a younger child who hasn’t developed this particular variety of conceded pain-in-the-assery.

The youngest children have a sort of lantern consciousness, as Alison Gopnik has termed.  In comparison most people as they get older narrow their focus and become more like a spotlight.  But the child is hoovering up information from all directions in order to get a handle on reality and make a useful model of how it generally works.

The so what? attitude is antithetical to the intake of information.  It may even be one step removed from a bullshit detector.

In theory, both ‘bullshit’ and things we respond to with so what? constitute matters that we’ve deemed useless to be concerned with.  They are a waste of time.

This process is one that we increasingly engage in as childhood recedes from our experience.  Children can find almost anything interesting, but as we get older, we start applying filters and barriers of entry for certain things that we’ve assumed no longer need our attention.  Or rather, we block out things that we have deemed would do us little benefit if we were to grant more attention. 

This is inevitably necessary because time is a finite resource of unknown size and we do not want to squander our short breath of existence.  Not to mention the energy and attention required to fulfill the needs and obligations of just getting on in the world.  Money, food, shelter, family, etc.

So what? is like the chain on the door.  We open the door to see who is there, but hold in reserve this extra measure of security to keep our mind from being suddenly and totally occupied from something that might be a waste of time.

Imagine for a moment the complete opposite, if we had no ability to filter or block things out: if every little thing caught and completely took over your attention.  Presumably there are people who suffer from some kind of condition that sounds like this, and by all accounts it makes getting on in the world quite a bit more difficult.

However, for those who do not suffer from such aimless attention, it would do well to meditate on all the lost goods that potentially slip by our experience by writing things off too early with a quick and summary so what?

The great irony is that most people have not optimized their life around their most important resource: that of time.  Most people have the huge majority of their attention, and certainly the portion of the day when attention is most powerful, devoted to a job.  Often a job of little dynamic value that becomes routine after a short interval.  A person’s neural frameworks grow habituated and soon enough the whole behavior is self-perpetuating.  The reaction of so what? becomes, not a defense against potential bullshit, but a defense of habitual behavior patterns that are entrenched by years of routine. 

To actually be open to knew information constantly poses a threat to this habitual behavior, because if we take in new information, it may quite possibly change our model of the world and subsequently give rise to an important question, namely:

what are you going to do now because of this new information?

This question is a direct threat to routine behavior.

The idiom Set in their ways comes to mind.  There is a certain degree of ossification that occurs with people’s thought patterns and behavior, particularly if an individual has not created a personal directive to seek out destabilizing information -in the name of self-education.

So what? should constitute a phase in an individual’s development – an experiment with ways to filter information.  Unfortunately it too can become part of the ossification that occurs with people’s thought patterns.  So what? can become a default response…

 And in this way,

a person enters a prison of their own construction.

THE NOVELTY OF NUANCE

September 5th, 2019

This sentence, and even each word in this sentence presents two radically different things depending on who you are.

If you have never visited nor heard of Tinkered Thinking, then this constitutes a complete novelty in your experience of the world and the media that we fill it with. 

However, if you know of Tinkered Thinking and you are coming back for more, than this episode, this post, this very sentence functions as a nuance of your experience with this platform.  This episode is a subtle shift and addition to all the other hundreds of concepts explored and developed.

Regardless of which camp you fall into, you might get bored and wander off to some other source of stimulation.  But if you are intrigued, you might delve in a littler further, stay in wonderland, and let me show you how deep this rabbit hole goes.

The tension between nuance and novelty pops up everywhere.  We get bored with jobs, with chores, even hobbies that we’ve maybe gained great proficiency in.  As Esther Perel explores, our compulsive search for novelty plagues the health of romantic relationships.  She has a fantastic question that encapsulates the issue:

“Can we want what we already have?”

However, such a question extends far beyond romantic relationships.  We can apply this question to the material life of consumerism, and even to our own selves, and the very thoughts that we have.

The default assumption is that there is something better out there.  Someone better to date, some item that we can buy, some state of mind that we can arrive at, if only all the other factors have been toggled just right to make us happy.

Of course, this sort of process constitutes a Bad Infinite Game, as explored in Episode 503.  These hop-the-fence-for-greener-pasture games can be played forever with no end, making them less than ideal, as opposed to Good Infinite Games that can continually grant us hard-earned satisfaction. 

As Marcel Proust once wrote: “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

This means looking at the same thing, but with a slightly different perspective.  And how exactly can we change the way we see something?  This sounds like a question that could yield an untold number of answers, but let’s make it even more literal.  Let’s say you are looking at something through camera that is fixed in one place.  You can’t move the camera, but you can work it’s controls.   What could you do to make the image different?  We could sharpen the focus, brining it into a slightly higher resolution.  But there’s something even more drastic that we can do:

We can zoom in.

Zooming in blows the subject up, exaggerating everything, and allows us to study and learn the details. This zoomed-in state constitutes the ‘new eyes’ that Marcel is talking about.

Zooming-in is what experts do.

Angela Duckworth, the author of the book Grit offers a simple but deceptive description of how experts become experts, she writes “substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.”

But Angela, along with Esther make once crucial oversight.  Both intuit and maybe consciously understand this oversight, but neither come out and say it explicitly:

That is…

Nuance is novel.

The caveat to this statement is that not all novelty is nuance.  Much of novelty is just hopping the fence for a different and presumably brighter shade of green as opposed to staying where you are, getting on your hands and knees and investigating the beauty of a single blade of grass.

The inability to delve into the novelty of nuance is the absence of a certain class of question that zooms our focus into the details of a subject.

New details that emerge due to a higher resolution of the subject is the novelty of nuance.  Such details were unknown, and effectively nonexistent while zoomed out. 

Zooming in makes the same thing new again.

Similarly, we can examine the situation when we merely lack motivation.  A lack of motivation is ultimately due to the absence of a question a person hasn’t asked themselves.  This question is almost always a variant of ‘what am I going to do about this?’

What is really going on in this  context?

and

What is possible in this context?

The inability to take advantage of nuance in this way is the inability to zoom into a subject, and ultimately, this inability stems from the lack of a good question that we have not yet asked ourselves.

Questions themselves often require this same exercise of nuance in order to be effectively activated.

For example, there’s the perennially useless question: what are you going to do with your life?

Perhaps a valid question, but it doesn’t really spur anyone to do anything.  It’s too big.  What’s needed is a nuanced version.

Let’s zoom in and effectively chop off a lot of the picture.

We can rephrase and ask: What are you going to do about your health?

This is a subset of the question: What are you going to do with your life?  It’s more nuanced and because of that higher resolution, it gets us closer to a space where an actionable plan can pop up in our imagination.

We can zoom in even further and ask: What are you going to do about your nutrition? or What are you going to do about the issue of exercise?

These are both further subsets which are further zoomed in and both begin to approach the high-resolution and granularity needed for a sensible plan to emerge in the imagination.

What the novelty of nuance teaches us is that we often fail to ask a better question about what’s in front of us and since no ready answer or plan or action emerges in response to large vague questions –or even no question at all -

we simply assume we want something different.

This episode references Episode 503: Infinite Games and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom

This episode was also greatly influenced by the work of Angela Duckworth, and Esther Perel whose books you can purchase through the links below.

IN QUESTION

September 4th, 2019

We know what it means when something is out of the Question.  Episode 478 examined that.  But what about the flip.

What does it mean when something is in question?

The most common place where we run across this phrase is in detective movies, when a suspect is in question.

According to the googles, the phrase in question is to indicate that something is being considered, discussed or in doubt.

Notice the lack of conclusion and certainty in this definition.  Consideration, discussion and doubt are all open-ended concepts. 

The definition of the word ‘question’ developed by Tinkered Thinking is very similar:

A question is an open-ended concept that creates forward momentum.

It is an exploration tool.  Discussion, consideration and doubt are also tools of exploration.  We use these to suss out possibilities in order to narrow in on some sort of truth or specific detail of reality.

If we bring in some other Tinkered developments about question, we can remember that simple shorthand for thinking about the concept of a question a little differently: just lop off the last three letters, what do you get?

quest.

That open-ended concept is a mental quest to gain some sort of treasure through a process of adventure and exploration through the unknown.

For something to be in question, is inevitably much like seeing a warning sign lit up on a door that says “session in progress”

Something dynamic and important is going on.  Some new territory is being explored.

Whether it be the rote-human training that has arisen from the industrial revolution or if it’s simply a fear of chaos, or some amalgam of the two, many people fear the kind of uncertainty, doubt and open-endedness that is at the core of adventure and the only tool we really have to navigate life: the question.

The question becomes: is your life planned to the ‘T’ out of fear, or do you constantly keep your own existence in question?

This episode extends Episode 478: Out of the Question and Episode 30: The Only Tool