BLATANT DISHONESTY

October 9th, 2020

Moods and trends come and go within culture.  Periods of hysteria appear to be cyclic across generations.  In the late 40’s and 50’s the United States was engulfed by a zeal known as McCarthyism to root out communists, and today supporters of communist thinking are some of the biggest proponents of cancel culture - a modern incarnation of a similar hysteria.  And 300 years before that the Salem Witch trials occurred due to a hysteria over people who were thought to be witches.

It’s clear the human mind, especially within a group can be host to some bizarre and nonsensical processes of thought.  Concepts can begin to seem like their opposite.  In a world of greed, corruption can begin to seem like a virtue, because it’s the way to move up in the world.

In a period of culture when concepts are turns upside down and sewn to their opposites, authenticity begins to shine among the inauthentic - which is to say, we start accepting contradictions as a way to view reality.  When this happens, we become vulnerable in ways that are completely at the whim and will of those who foster no qualms about using the channels of those contractions.

One example is when an individual is upfront and honest about how dishonest they can be.  While this is not and should not be respectable, the admission gains respect because it masquerades as a form of authenticity.  It’s a persona that say, don’t trust me, I’ll turn on you, but when it’s conveyed with confidence and self-assuredness, it becomes intoxicating - not because of the facts at hand and their real world consequences, but simply because confidence and shows of self-assuredness are intoxicating.  It’s as if you hand a child who has just learned to read the most beautiful chocolate cake you could ever imagine with icing on top arranged in an exquisite script that says ‘poison’.  

A strong and confident public commitment to dishonesty is a bit like email spam. Those emails are written poorly -by design- in order to filter out those who aren’t gullible and filter towards the most vulnerable, who can then be taken advantage of with efficient ease.  The strategy works, there are people, indeed perhaps sadly most, who don’t pause to think through the components of a situation, but simply follow blindly the whimsical direction of the emotions they feel.

It’s a mindful act of rebellion to question one’s own feelings on a subject, to challenge them and question deeply whether those feelings are helpful, meaningful, useful, and ultimately, valid.

Is it then any surprise that dishonesty can run so rampant and in the open during a time when every last feeling is prized, coveted and upheld like some sort of divine message?

The better angels of our nature show up, not when we are somehow in tune with the world, but when we constantly challenge the tune of our own hearts, tuning our own being with the tension between feeling and thoughtful consideration.

INTERPRETATION VS. MEANING

October 8th, 2020

The border between interpretation and meaning is non-existent because one is mistaken for the other.  An event occurs and it’s meaning seems obvious to the individual, but status of meaning has been transposed with a personal interpretation.

The word interpretation comes from translate, explain.  Our interpretation is our attempt to explain what we see, it’s an attempt to find meaning.  Certainly some interpretations are also the meaning, but this is not necessarily the case, and yet we behave as though it is always the case.  Some odd mutation of free speech has recently crept into the validity of perspective.  This is reflected by new uses of words, like truth.  Instead of truth or truths that are valid between and across all perspectives, there is now my truth and your truth. These aren’t truths of course, but perspectives, they are interpretations of reality.  Meaning and truth exist on an entirely different level - or at least they did.  But for what reason?

If truth and meaning collapse down to join the more common concepts of perspective, opinion and interpretation, then conversation as a whole loses something valuable.  With any evolving entity, there is growth, and there is a paring back.  Species may explode in numbers upon the discovery of a new resource, and then the herd is culled by other forces like new predators or environmental changes.  The ones that survive mark a small step in that evolution.

We can apply the same situation to meaning and truth within our conversation.  Meaning and Truth are the entities of sense-making that are supposed to endure across generations, first and foremost for our benefit.  If we can establish best practices for the largest possible set of circumstances, then our chances of enduring are higher.   But with the bloat of valid perspectives growing to overtake the status of truth and meaning as shared among many, then our ability to make proper sense of things grows lumbersome and clumsy.  Our ability to make sense of new circumstances becomes weak because we can no longer winnow down our many interpretations to something meaningful, something that might embody the truth of the situation, something that can help the greatest number of people because it’s valid across individual situations.

One interpretation of this issue hinges on the idea that we don’t control language, but that it controls us.  Just wonder for a moment: can you willingly create a new word and get it adopted by everyone else with absolute certainty?  Absolutely not.  Such things happen by accident.  It’s the same as asking if you can create a viral meme at will - it’s just not possible.  It’s as though something other than ourselves is asking what shall propagate meaningfully across our many minds.  Perhaps language is it’s own entity, and human minds are its host, and language is bloating into a hysterical and nonsensical form in order to thin our herd.  Viruses evolve by killing off huge swathes of their hosts, and in turn the virus grows stronger by competing with the immune systems of the survivors.  This sort of arms race happens everywhere in nature, all the time, why would we be safeguarded from the wandering vicissitudes of evolution?  Who says that evolution is relegated only to organisms?  Certainly ideas and language bloat and compete and winnow and die against one another just as organisms do.  Perhaps the relationship goes beyond that and a symbiotic relationship between words and people creates sticky feedback loops where not all make it through the filter of evolution?  Perhaps it’s not so much that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks as it is the trick evolves and tricks the dog.

A CONFLUENCE OF HABIT

October 7th, 2020

Many of the habits that we wish to incorporate are in fact a small network of habits, and our chances of success rise as we break off pieces of this network and build a habit in parts.  A meditation practice works as a very simple example. 

Anyone with no experience in meditation has the sense that this is a practice of the mind, it has something to do with stillness and some sort of control over the frenetic hodgepodge of thoughts that inundate our waking lives.  But before anyone starts a formal session of meditation, something else has to occur: sitting still.

What coasts right over the heads of everyone talking about meditation as a habit is that we first do something with the body.  While meditation can become an integrated part of a person’s life, regardless of sitting, position or movement, when starting and when in formal practice, there’s an enormous benefit to keeping the body still.  In simplest form, the explanation is that there’s just less to keep track of.

It runs to reason that individuals who attempt to begin a meditation practice are actually trying to pull off two tricks at once: there is the habit we hope to create for the mind, and then there is the habit of sitting still, which is so obvious, few if any seem to comment on it.

It stands further to reason that these two habits can be cleaved to leave one for a later date while the first gets properly installed.  The natural order here is to create a habit of the body before tackling the habit that has to do with the mind.

How does this look in practice?  Say, for instance, the first target habit is to sit for 10 minutes, everyday, with good posture, and perhaps to help aid this, a podcast is thrown on, or some music, or maybe even a video.  Then, after a few weeks, once the body has found it’s groove and the sitting posture is actually enjoyable as opposed to being just another thing to think about, then the exercise of meditation is introduced.

What’s the point of breaking up a habit into smaller bits like this? Why not just dive in head and toe at the same time? 

Breaking up a habit into consistent parts decreases the barrier to entry, it reduces the friction and makes it more likely that we can succeed in the longterm.  Instead of: this is so hard, I have so many thoughts, and my back hurts, and I’m just uncomfortable, it becomes, well, I sit in this posture every morning anyway, might as well start figuring out what it means to meditate since I’ve already got this nailed.

This might seem inefficient, but over the long run it can be far more efficient than a dozen failed starts.  It can also relieve some pressure about what it means to practice: it can be good enough to just sit, because just sitting can peacefully lead to a practice without the large foreboding that always accompanies a bigger task.  Much procrastination and motivation simply boils down to being unable to start because the task is too big, too complex.  Being unable to start is simply a euphemism for not knowing where to start.  Once we’ve found the thin edge of the wedge, it’s always much easier to move forward to the next piece.  Breaking up habits, as with sitting and mental practice for a full-fledged meditation practice can make the process of forming that habit a bit simpler.

SETTING THE TRAP

October 6th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the individual who operates the twitter handle @IDreamOfYasmin who was curious about a particular idea and how it works.

Imagine for a moment being enmeshed in a mysterious puzzle.  Say for example, every few nights, a chicken is disappearing from the chicken coop.  The first time might be a surprise, and a disappointing one at that.  The second might cause even more frustration, but is perhaps likely to focus attention on what exactly might be going on.  To ignore the possibility that the theft might happen again is, naturally a mistake, but it’s this sort of mistake that many make very often.  We fail to set ourselves up for the future in a way that helps things most.  But even if we unconsciously fail to set ourselves up properly, we are still unconsciously settings ourselves up for potential misery.  To believe that chickens will stop disappearing might be fool hardy, though many problems do clear up if left alone.  What’s truly fool hardy is to get upset about it without doing anything.

Though it might seem particularly apt in recent time, it’s likely a perennial flaw of people that we get bent out of shape over things that we consistently fail to change.  We take passionate action feeling certain that something will change, but this is nearly always due to the experience of being passionate: it feels sure, it feels impactful, but, it is only a feeling. 

Imagine a different sort of individual who sits down and has a talk with themselves.  This person decides to take an action to fix a problem, say by reinforcing the chicken coop, but also decides that the likelihood that this solution will actually fix the problem is small, and that it should be no surprise if another chicken goes missing.  Most people don’t think this way.  Most people reinforce the chicken coop and smile in self-satisfied glory that they’ve done something, and that something solves the problem.  Often, such misperceived efforts only add fuel to the next emotional fire that erupts when yet again, another chicken goes missing.

But the individual who doubts the curative powers of their own solution will be unsurprised.  We might call this person pessimistic, but when the time comes and another chicken is missing and this person is calm and ready to further contemplate what the issue might be, does this still smack of pessimism?  Or does this hark of a subtle middle road?  Most pessimists are hard pressed to even take action in the first place, because action is inherently optimistic: it encases a faith that something new might work.  Most, however, take the hope involved in action a bit too far and twist it into a faith that something new will work.  But of course, this hope and faith sets up an expectation, and expectation is both mother and father of disappointment.  Without expectation, we sidestep disappointment, and without the emotional experience of both, we see things through a lens of calm and peace.

Whether we do a good job or a piss poor mindless one, we set ourselves up for the way we react to the future.

Setting ourselves up in a way that’ll not just be more pleasant but also allow for faster progress through a more tempered demeanour, requires having an incisive understanding of one’s emotions.  It’s the ability to forecast answers to the question:  how will I react if this or that happens? And then further prompting one’s self with the subtle follow-up: how do I want to react regardless of whether this or that happens?  With this second question we cast ourselves into an active role as opposed to a merely passive one that is forever at the whim and will of fate.  By asking how we’d like to react to all manner of situation, we can begin to explore the wide field of possible answers.

One answer is simple pessimism:  it won’t work and it’ll be bad.

Another is jubilant optimism:  this’ll surely do the trick!

And then there is a middle way - a form of optimism that seems as though it’s tempered by pessimism but in fact derives it’s even keel from a deeper insight:  problems rarely concede to the first solution we throw at them, and so what will help the hopscotch from attempt to attempt to solution be as unencumbered and effortless as possible?

Surely boisterous emotions don’t do much to clear our minds in order to see the details we need to notice to piece together what’s really going on?

We are best to think of ourselves as traps that we set to be sprung by future circumstance.  Some carelessly leave this trap set on a razor’s edge, ready to snap at the slightest disturbance.  Others, however, recognize who this trap is set for.  We are a trap set for ourselves.  We become caught by our own sprung trap.  Those who see this, start looking for ways to dismantle the trap as opposed to setting it.  But of course, such individuals are quick to find that their initial efforts to dismantle their own trap have not succeeded, and again, anger wells up with surprise, and this is when anger can suddenly collapse into laughter.  An individual who is mindful of their mind’s state can never feed anger for very long, and having decided long before to watch out for such things, can only smile at the predicament of being caught in their own trap.  It’s that smile, that subtle laugh that eases the trap’s jaws, and after enough run ins and attempts, slowly, the trap is dismantled, and it’s pieces used to assemble the calm smile of an even temperament. 

COGNITIVE FEUDALISM

October 5th, 2020

For about 6 centuries, Medieval Europe was organized in a system that is often referred to as feudalism.  Not only was the term coined long after the age of feudalism, but as with many terms, there remains the usual debacle of debate and nitpicked nuance about what it is, what it means, and if it even refers to the thing it was invented to define.  Roughly speaking, the most common use and understanding of feudalism becomes useful when we think of the current age of cognitive feudalism.

In Medieval Europe, people fell really into just two classes: those who worked the land, and those who owned the land.  There are, of course a smörgåsbord of terms to define nuanced relationships within and between these two classes, but for modern relevance, this one relationship is most important, and what’s most important to realize is that these two classes of people had no overlap: meaning, those who owned land didn’t work their own land, and those who worked the land never owned that land.  A more extreme version of this relationship between people as communicated through land and it’s products is slavery in the first century of United States history.  Those who worked the cotton fields never owned those cotton fields.  Outright slavery takes it one step further and makes the workers of that land property of the owner of the land, in addition to that land.  The economic relationship is one of predation.

Current within the theory of evolution is that rise of predation among early organisms lead to a biological arms race between species.  Eyes, and ears developed because they were useful, not just for predators looking and listening for prey, but also for those preyed upon looking out and listening for predators.  The general energy relationship between predator and prey is very similar to the energy economics of feudalism or slavery.  Prey generally consists of herbivores, and what do herbivores do?  They spend nearly all of their time eating and digesting because leafy greens are pretty skimp on the energy quotient, or rather, leaves aren’t very fat, so in order to get a fat cow, that cow has to eat a monumental amount of grass.  Put another way, the cow labors nearly constantly in order to become energy dense.  Then a predator comes along, whacks the cow, and gets all that juicy energy in a tiny fraction of the time, this excahcnge can also be referred to as gravity cost.  Unlike prey, a predator doesn’t have to spend all it’s time eating.  We can swap out the nouns and verbs here to show just how similar this energy exchange is to the economic exchange of feudal Europe: Unlike the peasant, a land owner doesn’t have to spend all their time working the land.  It’s the same relationship, and it’s trading in the same currency.  The predator eats up stored energy in the form of fat.  In the feudal relationship, this stored energy, in the form of farmed goods - which is quite literally what herbivores would eat to concentrate energy in fat - is sold in order to convert that energy into money and loyalty - a different form of stored energy.  Nobles in feudal Europe were supposedly entitled to their rank because they were called upon as a warrior class when danger threatened the overall state.  

Fast forward to the modern day and much of the physical labor of feudal days is now done by huge machines driven by single individuals: combine harvesters and seeders.  Much of the manual labor has transformed into things like truck driving and serving, manning cash registers and of course, pushing paper.  In short, there is an absolute cornucopia of occupations which fall into a feudal-like relationship.  A boss directs and benefits from the effort of a large group of underlings.  We might even liken the feudal lord to the modern CEO, and of course CEO’s are entitled to their rank because of their supposedly superior insight regarding how a company should be steered.  (As an aside, perhaps founders deserve more credit and trust by default: they gave birth to the original vision which has likely created a new way of creating value, or rather translating some meandering convoluted path of energy into money, i.e. we have time to scroll our feeds because we no longer have to spend out time feeding pigs and scrolling through rows of crops.)

People in such top positions gain in a similar way that feudal lords and predators do.  They gain very quickly and efficiently from an underclass of workers that spend all their time actually doing the work. This relationship is lately hyper charged by the explosion in salary for many top tier positions at the expense of employee salaries.  

As an individual enmeshed in this elaborate macramé patchwork of such cognitive feudalisms, that we call society, it does well to consider privately where one’s cognitive efforts are best directed.  To throw the entire feudal relationship out the window would result in a system collapse.  There is no such thing as a company without a founder, and there’s no such thing as a founder without people who are willing to help bring a vision to light.

You only have so much time to think about anything.  Is it perhaps a better use of the little free time we may have to try and think of ways to increase the amount of free time we have to think in our own directions, instead of dedicating our brain power to the implementation and realization of someone else’s vision outsourced?  In the modern world, the prey can’t think for themselves because their brains are busy trying to figure out how to make someone else’s vision become real.  If one’s job is unfulfilling, than thinking of the boss as a cognitive predator is likely apt, but there are grand things we can achieve that can’t be achieved without teamwork, and teamwork as directed by a thoughtful and visionary leader requires some cognitive feudalism.  One of the differences though is that given a grand vision of optimal complexity and difficulty, it’s more than possible and even inspiring to lend your abilities to the cause.  The mission becomes a form of feudalism when we don’t believe in it, and that’s when it’s perhaps time to dedicate that precious free time to think about how to increase how much time we have to think.