ALLEGORY

February 12th, 2019

One of the most dangerous and powerful aspects of language is that at it’s core, it is representative.  It is a composite system and network of symbols that stand in the place of the things we communicate about.

This is totally obvious for anyone who has ever stopped and thought about it.  When any of us say or think the word ‘storm’, we are not suddenly whipped with the wind and rain of an actual storm.  Phrased bluntly, the word storm is not a storm.  And yet there is great utility in pretending that the word storm is closer to an actual storm than any one thing that we can reference.

If, for example, someone is running into a building while yelling ‘tornado’, we are safer to believe that ‘tornado’ is not simply a word in this case, but evidence of an actual physical phenomenon that risks our safety. 

If we juxtapose this scenario with a classroom setting where meteorological phenomena are being discussed, the word ‘tornado’ if brought up for description and discussion is somehow further away from the real thing than the first situation.

This is an easy example of how important context is for understanding just about anything, particularly when it comes to language.

One of the more infamous examples of this has to be Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the fictional radio drama ‘War of the Worlds’ which caused some degree of panic among the public who thought it was real.  These people lacked the context of the program as a drama as opposed to an actual news broadcast.

What is striking about the nature of the concept of an allegory or symbol, is that they exist in nature in extremely overt forms.

The spider-tailed horned viper is an interesting example.  This snake has evolved in a way that makes the tip of it’s tail look very much like a spider.  The viper has even developed a way of moving the end of this tail so that the spider-like portion looks like a moving spider.  Doing this fools a bird into thinking that the snake’s tail is actually a spider that it can eat.  The bird swoops down to pluck up the snack and finds itself in the jaws of a snake.

This is not too different from the people who tuned into the War of the Worlds broadcast and mistook the fictional story for real events.  One might even wonder if there was a dark and curious streak in Orson Welles who saw this sly use of fiction as a way to gain notoriety.  Indeed it was the War of the Worlds episode that secured Welles’ fame as a dramatist.  Would it be inaccurate to perhaps cast Orson Welles as the snake?  He created a life-like lure for the unsuspecting bird-like-public, utilizing a medium in a way they’d never heard before, taking them off guard and in the end making them all aware of who he was and what his artistic power could yield.  Regardless of his intent, the allegory seems fairly accurate. 

Then again, it’s perhaps doubly accurate if we note that the Spider-Tailed Horned Viper never consciously attempted to make the end of it’s tail into a spider.  So too, Orson Wells could have been without the intent to cause panic, but both the Viper and Welles benefit from the lure.

Virtually all creatures that employ some kind of camouflage are engaging in a kind of bio-allegory-defense.  By becoming very much like a thing that their predators have no interest in, they themselves evade the interest of hungry jaws.

Despite being composed of mostly real pictures, we might ask:  how much of the content on Instagram is a faithful representation of what we are being shown?  How many are camouflaging their life from themselves and others with a manufactured highlight reel?

Instagram aside, we can take the cue directly from nature.  Things are not always what they seem.  In fact, it may be safer to assume that things are very rarely what they seem.

Anyone who has achieved an iota of growth in their life can even deduce this fact from their own experience: how many of us would love to have a few words with a former version of ourselves in order to more efficiently steer that person towards the realizations we’ve since had?

The double-edged nature of allegory, in nature and particularly in language is that there can be great deal of benefit when we pretend something is what it’s not.  The down side occurs when we forget to temper our awareness and our experience with this knowledge. 

When we forget that things can exit inside or behind some allegorical nature, we present ourselves to great risk, like the bird who carelessly assumes a snake’s tail is lunch, or Orson’s audience who assumes that fiction is reality.

George Orwell perhaps explored this most deeply in his book 1984 which examines how totalitarian regimes can assume great power and erode the healthy fabric of society by toggling the allegorical power of language and skewing everyone’s idea of reality in a way that makes the government’s systemic trap look inviting. 

Our first and most powerful defense against such machinations is to simply Pause

Perhaps then we might make a habit of constructing the best possible question that explores the depth of any situation.  Regardless of the media, medium or platform through which we perceive things – including life outside of the digital world – we must ask, is anything being represented inaccurately?

The answer is most likely: Yes.

This episode piggybacks off of Episode 250: Language.  If you found this episode interesting, you’ll be sure to enjoy that one.

THE HUNT

February 11th, 2019

Regardless of one’s opinions or stance on the activity of hunting, few can argue against a good walk in the woods.  After enough years, this seems to be what hunters talk about the most.  Hunts are not always successful and if there’s too much focus on that lack of success, it’s easy to have the time in the natural elements seem ruined.

We might imagine the best of all possible trips.  This has far less to do with what is being hunted and it has everything to do with the hunter, for if we cannot figure out how to enjoy and relish the time while we chase our dreams, not only is the goal less fulfilling if we make it happen, but we’ve also simply wasted time.  The moment of achievement with this or that goal is not long lasting.  There is the time before such goals are realized and then there comes the moment when reality is different because of our efforts, our perseverance and our ingenuity.  Then that moment passes, and while it makes for a good memory to smile about when reflecting on such efforts and potential success, this is not a way forward into the future.

The good hunter is not out for blood and gore in the way the largest detractors of such practice make it out to be.  At it’s most basic, hunting is a way to engage with the natural world, not in the killing, but more in the emersion in the environment.  It says a great deal that many conservation efforts with regards to environmental health were initiated by hunters.  Theodore Roosevelt is perhaps the best example of this.  Not only a President of the United States, but a life-long hunter who established America’s National Forests, bird Reserves, game preserves and the National parks as protected National entities.  Such circumspection does not mesh well with the laser-focused character who thirsts after one gory goal like Captain Ahab. 

What is at hand is the appreciation of a complete experience.  A hunter with the perspective embodied by Roosevelt harks more of a gardener who is concerned with a larger picture, as opposed to our kamikaze whaling Captain who thinks about nothing but the end.

This dichotomy is potentially our most important.  So often we are just waiting for something to be over.  Whether we be waiting in line at the bank or counting down the minutes until work is over for the day, or even waiting for someone to finish talking.  Much of our mindset is characterized by that Captain Ahab.  We are focused on getting to the end.  This is often true even when it comes to beautiful moments. 

It’s as though our restless and relentless anxiety around certain ideas of success has an inertia and momentum that carries such feelings and tints of perspective into the most important and enjoyable instances of life.

Here our analogy of the hunter as conservationist becomes particularly poignant.  What exactly created the need and impetus for Roosevelt to declare National Parks and National Forests?  Corporate interests are traditionally relentless and ruthless in their pursuit of a particular brand of success and this often requires the consumption of natural resources for conversion into consumer products.  Such a description certainly invokes an eerie reminiscence of our blood thirsty whaling captain who trudges on in the name of the kill.  Ironically, it was a hunter who sought to protect these natural landscapes from such single-minded entities.

To be fair, many corporate entities do not invoke this model of business, and increasingly today, companies are popping into existence that are attempting to do the more difficult work of succeeding with the conversationalist mindset.  Tesla is perhaps a good if potentially controversial example.  It’s stated mission is to speed up the worlds transition from fossil fuels to solar energy.  It’s certainly not too much of a stretch to draw parallels between Elon Musk and Theodore Roosevelt.  In each sense they are both hunters.  Roosevelt was actually a hunter and certainly had the capacity for single-minded drive.  And Musk perhaps epitomizes the single-minded focus of a hunter, an innovator who generates his own gravity for goals lined up like dominoes.  And yet each both held in mind the larger picture, and sought to make their single-minded efforts honor the revelations of that larger picture.

Whether we analyze the perspective from a business standpoint, or an environmental one or even a personal one, a single concept emerges as a key ingredient.  This is the Well-Oiled Zoom, as described in Episode 54 of Tinkered Thinking.

Both Elon Musk and Roosevelt exercised such a zoom.  Looking at the bigger picture and then zooming into the here-and-now to figure out which actions best honor the bigger picture.

On an individual level we are best served by Pausing and doing something similar.  When we feel restless in a circumstance that is supposed to be pleasant, we might pause and ask: why?  Often such emotions, like nagging children, just need a little bit of attention, and when noticed and acknowledged, they melt away, leaving us free to enjoy the hunt.

This episode references Episode 23: Pause and Episode 54: The Well-Oiled Zoom.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: WISDOM OF THE MASSES

February 10th, 2019

There came a time when Lucilius in a rare bout of introspection decided that he was too ostentatious and needed to make some changes. 

He quit all of his projects, handing them over to business partners and people of capability, and then gave all his wealth to charity.  Afterwards he applied for ten credit cards and received them all.  Then he maxed out every credit card buying food and clothing, warm accommodations and even educational programs for homeless people whom he interviewed in order to get a better idea of how such funds might be allocated.

When Lucilius had dug a financial hole about as deep as he could manage, he got a job cleaning at a movie theatre. 

Despite his reluctance with promotion, the continual exit of his superiors created a vacuum that he was forced into by people who were even higher on the hierarchy. 

The job was vapid and boring.  It took Lucilius years to notice how this aspect of the job was changing his mentality.  The stress of debt combined with an absolute scarcity of time to do anything about it  compounded to create a particularly toxic cocktail of brain chemistry.  In later years Lucilius would reflect on this nearly invisible phenomenon and marvel at the symmetry between a mindset of poverty and one of success.  They were the same shape, just pointed in different directions.  But at the time Lucilius was neurologically incapable of such a realization, nor any realization about how to effectively get out of it. 

As chance would have it, meditation as a practice was coming into vogue and it seemed to be broadcast everywhere, from magazine covers to the chatter of people in lines at the movie theatre. 

Having almost no money to do anything exciting, Lucilius decided to give the cheap activity a try.  For several years he bounced between different traditions and techniques.  This slowly sharpened his focus and when he was several months into an exploration of a basic mindfulness approach, something seemed to change in Lucilius’ brain and mind.  He started to interact with his own emotions differently, almost as though he were holding them like a curious child.  As though freed from some kind of bondage, his mind began to explore creative ideas almost spontaneously.

Each day at his job he started to tinker with the idea of the whole boxed situation being a kind of videogame, each day with a fresh input of people.

Lucilius was smiling at this idea of the video game one day while he was arranging the belt stanchions that are used to line people in order before a movie when an idea struck him.

He looked around at the wide space and chuckled.  There was a huge blockbuster that was coming out in a couple days and Lucilius knew what he had to do.

After work he went out and bought a remote camera, and the next day he had this camera attached to the ceiling right in the middle of the largest part of the movie theatre complex.  The camera was facing straight down at the floor, giving a bird’s eye view of the whole room.

On the day of the blockbuster’s release, Lucilius got to work extra early and took every last stanchion out of storage.  Then he got to work:

He spent the entire day building a maze with the stanchions, ensuring that many of the internal branches were winding and lead to dead ends.  He created only one entrance and one exit and roughly calculated that the size of the maze far exceeded what was needed for the number of people who were coming.

And just before the doors of the movie theatre opened, he turned on the camera and hit record.

People began filtering in and those with reserved tickets began making their way into the maze of stanchions.  The first couple found themselves confused at a turn, then looking around, they saw how much of an ordered mess they were in.  The couple laughed and had fun with it.

And then more people with reserved tickets began filtering in and the maze began to fill up.

Several days later, Lucilius created a Youtube channel, activated ads on his channel and then posted the video.

The footage went viral.  The money generated from ad clicks allowed Lucilius to pay off all of his credit card debt, and with the extra he had left over, he bought some time off in order to explore a new creative endeavor. 

NON-ZERO DEED

February 9th, 2019

Every word we utter and even every word we think is part of a story we are not only telling ourselves, but a story we are continually bringing to life.

As the old logic follows: thoughts give rise to words, and words give rise to actions.

Or deeds.

The optimist feels the implicit value of performing a good deed, while the pessimist will refrain, guarded by the reasoning that no good deed goes unpunished.  Like many quaint quotes, this sentence seems like a tidy package, one that we readily feel has ample evidence in experience, and if we do not come armed with a curious question to delve further into this thought, we risk it becoming a mantra. A repeating thought that will begin to shape our actions or lack of actions. 

Seth Godin has asked whether or not we should say ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ to an AI like Siri or Alexa.  He extrapolates on the point about our thoughts and words being an auto-narrative that reinforces who we are.  Saying ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’ to a arguably inanimate object is a good idea because it reinforces an idea of who we think we are and who we would like to be.  Marie Kondo might fit in nicely here as the cultural force urging all of us to thank inanimate objects before tossing them out in order to tidy our living spaces.  Indeed we might even see a lovely empathy embedded deep within ourselves when it comes to our reluctance to part with some useless scrap of paper of item gifted long ago.  Seth Godin’s question turns this potential passive empathy into an active choice.  Saying thank you at any reasonable opportunity helps shape our being into one that has more gratitude.

This is somewhat like how the heart functions.  The heart’s main function is to provide fresh blood to the whole body by powering the entire circulatory system.  But this main function is not it’s first function.  The first thing the heart accomplishes with every single pump is to nourish itself with fresh blood.  Only by doing so can it be properly equipped to carry out it’s main function.  Here we have a perfect, systematic solution to The Selfish Paradox. (Discussed in Episode 28).  We can map Seth Godin’s question onto this allegorical image of the heart that shows itself some love before tending to the rest of the body.

When we say thank you, that good deed is first a good deed unto ourselves.  It reinforces the likelihood that we will say ‘please’ or ‘thankyou’ again.  The humility and gratitude generated by such actions are not without their self-serving benefits.  It’s a well-studied correlation that practicing gratitude increases our sense of well-being and happiness in life.  Humility, it might be argued may be instrumental in enabling our minds to have an increased flexibility and agility to pivot in order to persevere, but that is a topic to be more fully explored later.

What is left to explore about our deeds is their further ramifications beyond their immediate effect upon our own selves.  How we understand these ramifications coats much of how we approach life.

We can easily hear the pessimist seeing the economy as a kind of winner-take-all zero-sum game.  It’s a eat or get eaten kind of world and it’s best to keep out of the way because sticking one’s neck out only turns you into a target.

On the other hand, the optimist, who feels the implicit value of good deeds, might find the concept of a non-zero-sum game very attractive. A non-zero-sum game is essentially and simply a game where both players benefit.  One of Tinkered Thinking’s Lucilius Parables, Episode 161 explores this concept in the form of a story for those who want to explore this concept in a form that’s perhaps more pleasant to digest.

Presented with these two frameworks, we might ask: is the heart an optimist or a pessimist?  This might seem like a silly question, but there does seem to be an answer in the design of our vital organ.  The heart certainly isn’t without some selfishness, it tends to itself first, but the majority of it’s effort and ultimately it’s main function is to give to the rest of the body.  In this framework, the heart is playing a non-zero-sum game.  Another way of phrasing this is by saying: there’s an organ inside all of us that is working constantly, day in night in order to give us the opportunity to do… absolutely anything. 

This relatively simple concept extends to much larger entities.  For example Elon Musk has stated repeatedly that the whole point of Tesla is to speed up the advance of sustainable transport.  This is the main function of the company.  But just like the heart which has a main function of powering the body and an initial function of feeding itself.  Tesla’s first function is to make enough money to keep the whole enterprise going.

We might be able to see all businesses fitting into this simple framework.  The first function is just to stay alive and keep running, but the main function is a larger, loftier and long term goal: to provide some service or product. 

Perhaps it should be no surprise that successful business creators are generally labelled as optimists.

On a long enough timeline we might see that both perspectives pay in their own currency.  It’s important to try and imagine this on a large timeline because of two factors:  One is simply the limits of our own perspective.  We just don’t get to see every little effect each of our actions has.  The other is randomness.  We might think of reality as being filled with a good deal of noise, and if we take some of this noise as a signal without deeply investigating it’s nature, then we can easily mislead ourselves.  Chance can pile up a few failures and when this is combined with our blindness to any potential good our efforts have actually had, it starts to smell like a ripe recipe for pessimism. 

It’s in these difficult times when nothing seems to be working that any person must remember the bootstrapping value of the optimist.  In the same way that saying ‘thankyou’ to an inanimate object shapes us for the future, merely invoking any kind of optimism has the potential to reformat our thinking, by feeding our perspective.  What this boils down to in a literal and practical sense is quaintly framed by another maxim:

Where the pessimist sees and obstacle, the optimist sees an opportunity.

But the optimist can take a step beyond this framework that the pessimist cannot.  The optimist does not need to come across some object to interpret as obstacle or opportunity or even go looking for opportunity.  The optimist can generate opportunity from seemingly nothing, by tinkering with the situation they find themselves in and creating something of value.

This episode references Episode 28: The Selfish Paradox, Episode 72: Persevere Vs. Pivot, Episode 93: The Generator, and Episode 161: A Lucilius Parable: Infinite Game

THE OBVIOUS CHOICE

February 8th, 2019

The word obvious is defined as ‘easily perceived or understood; clear, self-evident, or apparent’

This is obvious to anyone familiar with the word.

What is more interesting are the implications of the etymology.  From the late 16^th century in the sense ‘frequently encountered,’ from the Latin phrase ‘ob viam’ meaning ‘in the way’.

We might spend a moment thinking of things that are frequently encountered.  But this category requires some tempering, due to the fact that our attention does not gravitate equally to all things. For example our attention is more efficient at detecting negative emotions or threats than it is with things that have positive association.  In this sense, ‘what is frequently encountered‘ is already skewed.  The way this might play out in the ‘real’ world is that when we scroll through some sort of social media feed, we are more likely to pick up on negative stories simply because our attention is more efficient at picking these out.  This creates a problem for our understanding of reality.  Negative items that we come across are automatically encountered more frequently, not because they actually are more frequent, but simply because our efficiency with detecting them makes it seem like they are more frequent.

Another example of this discussion of obvious as a function of what is frequently encountered is digital advertising.  Because of the addictive nature of screen technology, it provides an attention portal through which to bombard someone’s consciousness with ads for a particular product or service.  How many times do we see an ad before clicking on it?  If encountered enough times, the probability of clicking on that ad goes up and up.

Any person or company that can out-spend the competition on the battle front of digital advertising will win, simply because their product becomes –literally- the more obvious choice because it’s simply the most frequently encountered choice. 

It’s important to note the insidious connotation this phrase has.  The Obvious Choice, is not necessarily the best choice, though this is exactly what the phrase means in our current cultural parlance.  It goes to figure that if the obvious choice were always the best choice or the right choice, we would all be living much better lives.  Life is made of choices and making better choices leads to a better life.  Unfortunately, making the obvious choice clearly does not lead to a better life.  But this counter-intuitive approach to the concept is, appropriately enough, not too obvious. 

This is why the meme “common sense is not so common” evokes the ironic response of common agreement and general head-nodding from everyone.  The first conclusion one might draw from this rather humorous phenomenon is that some people who agree with this sentiment don’t know what they’re talking about -  in fact any agreement with such a sentiment carries this conclusion that some large set of other people are foolish to think as they do.  A conclusion that is perhaps more nuanced might examine the fact that no two people can possibly occupy the same perspective, and therefore the understanding that each person carries around is quite valid based on the totality of their experience, circumstance and atomic makeup.  The counter-intuitive extension of this second conclusion is that a healthy engagement with other people requires thinking more about the systems that exist between and around people instead of the perspective they may be attempting to assault us with. 

This is NOT the obvious choice when it comes to common conversation.  Today’s conversation is characterized more by an identification of what is wrong with other people or their views instead of an exploration of what might be contributing to the generation of such views.  Our idea of common sense is often likewise invoked by the seemingly dumb actions and decisions on the part of others. We witness some strange behavior and think or exclaim “don’t they have any common sense?”. 

Wisdom is perhaps appropriately and ironically defined as being able to simply follow one’s own advice.  Unfortunately, when it comes to our behaviors that we’d like to change, the wise choice is not the obvious choice, for the simple fact that we have not frequently encountered that version of ourselves that makes the better choice.  And here in lies the rub: to make that difficult and wiser choice enough times so that our new behavior begins to inhabit the category of ‘frequently encountered’.  Once we’ve sat and meditated enough days in a row, or gone to the gym enough days in a row, or reached for the healthier food options enough days in a row, these options start to become: the obvious choice.

This episode references Episode 163: What the Fool Believes.