Teenage Boys & Ayn Rand

The Russian terrorist Vera Figner, a leader of the group that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, recalled how she lost respect for her father when he replied to a serious question: “I do not know.” This answer filled the child with “burning shame.” All important questions, Figner knew, have clear answers, and all reasonable people accept them.

Figner didn’t weigh pros and cons. No sooner did she hear some indubitably correct answer than she adopted it. Regardless of counterevidence, she never questioned a belief, just as one never doubts a mathematical proof. Figner was by no means unusual. This way of thinking—this certainty about being absolutely certain—characterized both the prerevolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia and, after the Bolshevik coup, official Soviet thought.

Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

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When I became a scholar of Russian literature, I immediately recognized Rand’s debt to the Russian radical intelligentsia. One can divide prerevolutionary Russian thought into two strongly opposed traditions: that of the radicals and that of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and other great writers. The radical tradition featured ideologues and revolutionaries, including devoted terrorists like Figner and Sergey Nechaev; anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; populists Pyotr Lavrov, Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and the leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary Party; Marxists like Stalin, Trotsky, and Lenin; and a host of tendentious literary critics.

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Rand’s reasoning was, in fact, remarkably sloppy. She regarded Aristotle as the greatest philosopher because he formulated the law of identity “A is A,” from which she claimed to derive a proof of radical individualism and the morality of selfishness. If A is A, then Man is Man and I am I, which (for Ran d) means that I owe nothing to anyone else. If Man is Man, then man must choose to survive, which means that it is irrational to let oneself be “looted” by unproductive people. If one is to survive, she reasoned, one’s ultimate value must be one’s own life. “The fact that a living entity is determines what it ought to do. So much for Hume’s question of how to derive ‘is’ from ‘ought.’” It is hard to say which is worse, Rand’s failure to understand the positions she dismissed or the shoddy logic she deployed in the name of infallible “reason.”

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Rand utterly rejected the idea that some issues are ambiguous or call for compromise. “One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture,” she declared, “is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: ‘There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.’ . . . Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.”

Middle-of-the-road thinking is for Rand “the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. . . . Extremism has become a synonym of ‘evil.’”

Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

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I could not help recalling this famous phrase, which Rand must have known, when encountering her defense of essentially the same position. “Why must fiction represent things ‘as they might be and ought to be’?” she asked. Quoting from Atlas Shrugged—Rand had an annoying habit of quoting herself or her fictional heroes as authorities—she answered: “As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” In other words, she concluded, “Art is the technology of the soul.”

Both Rand and the Soviets believed that, without the aid of supernatural power, humanity will accomplish what had always been regarded as miraculous. There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm, declared Stalin, while Rand attributed the same power to unfettered capitalism. Enlightened by the right philosophy, human will can accomplish anything.

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Children require sacrifice: this obvious fact indicates that people are not, and can never be, fully independent. Rand’s heroes and heroines apparently arrive at adulthood without having gone through childhood, let alone infancy. It is as if she believed that, like Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head, people are created by sudden flashes of insight. My point is not just that infants are utterly dependent on another person and that children only gradually learn to take care of themselves. It is also that no one chooses when, where, and to whom to be born. Unlike Howard Roark, people always inherit something they did not choose.

Rand wrote as if poverty always resulted from failure of willpower, as if no one is born into it. She was right to reject the deterministic view that people are wholly the product of heredity and environment; choices that cannot be wholly explained by such factors help make us who we are. But it is no less mistaken to treat people as entirely self-made and utterly responsible for their condition.

- More Here

I was one of those "teenage boys"; although I was like 22 or so when I read Rand for the first time and hooked. 

Then as time passed, I grew up and I understood how deluded I was. There are some very good self-reliance messages in her book a.k.a “pep” talk - I took those few hundred words and flushed out everything else from my life. 

Ayn Rand gives a "certain" view of the world which is completely against reality. Reality is uncertain and to top it off - our biology doesn't even allow us to see much of reality in the world. 

The answer is to be humble, keep learning and change your mind as our understanding of reality changes. 

The Tibet Myth

Buddha once said, "If you see the Buddha, kill him". 

That was a wise warning about organized religion plus idol worship. 

We all know monolithic religions and eastern religions are riddled with "God Men" who promote self interest. Buddhism is no different. 

In my life, I learnt a ton from Buddha and that reflects in this blog. 

Organized religion is a bane, Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth:

A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.” [6] In the thirteenth century, Emperor Kublai Khan created the first Grand Lama, who was to preside over all the other lamas as might a pope over his bishops. Several centuries later, the Emperor of China sent an army into Tibet to support the Grand Lama, an ambitious 25-year-old man, who then gave himself the title of Dalai (Ocean) Lama, ruler of all Tibet.

His two previous lama “incarnations” were then retroactively recognized as his predecessors, thereby transforming the 1st Dalai Lama into the 3rd Dalai Lama. This 1st (or 3rd) Dalai Lama seized monasteries that did not belong to his sect, and is believed to have destroyed Buddhist writings that conflicted with his claim to divinity. The Dalai Lama who succeeded him pursued a sybaritic life, enjoying many mistresses, partying with friends, and acting in other ways deemed unfitting for an incarnate deity. For these transgressions he was murdered by his priests. Within 170 years, despite their recognized divine status, five Dalai Lamas were killed by their high priests or other courtiers. 

For hundreds of years competing Tibetan Buddhist sects engaged in bitterly violent clashes and summary executions. In 1660, the 5th Dalai Lama was faced with a rebellion in Tsang province, the stronghold of the rival Kagyu sect with its high lama known as the Karmapa. The 5th Dalai Lama called for harsh retribution against the rebels, directing the Mongol army to obliterate the male and female lines, and the offspring too “like eggs smashed against rocks… In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their names.”

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Young Tibetan boys were regularly taken from their peasant families and brought into the monasteries to be trained as monks. Once there, they were bonded for life. Tashì-Tsering, a monk, reports that it was common for peasant children to be sexually mistreated in the monasteries. He himself was a victim of repeated rape, beginning at age nine. The monastic estates also conscripted children for lifelong servitude as domestics, dance performers, and soldiers.

In old Tibet there were small numbers of farmers who subsisted as a kind of free peasantry, and perhaps an additional 10,000 people who composed the “middle-class” families of merchants, shopkeepers, and small traders. Thousands of others were beggars. There also were slaves, usually domestic servants, who owned nothing. Their offspring were born into slavery. The majority of the rural population were serfs. Treated little better than slaves, the serfs went without schooling or medical care. They were under a lifetime bond to work the lord’s land — or the monastery’s land — without pay, to repair the lord’s houses, transport his crops, and collect his firewood. They were also expected to provide carrying animals and transportation on demand. Their masters told them what crops to grow and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of their lord or lama. And they might easily be separated from their families should their owners lease them out to work in a distant location.

As in a free labor system and unlike slavery, the overlords had no responsibility for the serf’s maintenance and no direct interest in his or her survival as an expensive piece of property. The serfs had to support themselves. Yet as in a slave system, they were bound to their masters, guaranteeing a fixed and permanent workforce that could neither organize nor strike nor freely depart as might laborers in a market context. The overlords had the best of both worlds.

One 22-year old woman, herself a runaway serf, reports: “Pretty serf girls were usually taken by the owner as house servants and used as he wished”; they “were just slaves without rights.”  Serfs needed permission to go anywhere. Landowners had legal authority to capture those who tried to flee. One 24-year old runaway welcomed the Chinese intervention as a “liberation.” He testified that under serfdom he was subjected to incessant toil, hunger, and cold. After his third failed escape, he was merciless beaten by the landlord’s men until blood poured from his nose and mouth. They then poured alcohol and caustic soda on his wounds to increase the pain, he claimed.

The serfs were taxed upon getting married, taxed for the birth of each child and for every death in the family. They were taxed for planting a tree in their yard and for keeping animals. They were taxed for religious festivals and for public dancing and drumming, for being sent to prison and upon being released. Those who could not find work were taxed for being unemployed, and if they traveled to another village in search of work, they paid a passage tax. When people could not pay, the monasteries lent them money at 20 to 50 percent interest. Some debts were handed down from father to son to grandson. Debtors who could not meet their obligations risked being cast into slavery. 

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The Tibetan serfs were something more than superstitious victims, blind to their own oppression. As we have seen, some ran away; others openly resisted, sometimes suffering dire consequences. In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation — including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation — were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. 

Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.” Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet. 

Let's ignore "ism" and organized religions. I cannot promise you the world will be a better world but I can promise that we got rid of some of the major badness in the world. 

What Has Travel Ever Done for Me?

Why should I feel this way about travel? What has it ever done to me? Travel is one of those things one generally doesn’t attack in polite company, the world of letters excepted. Its wholesomeness is assumed. It broadens the mind. It makes us empathetic and, by rewarding our curiosity, encourages it to develop further. It teaches people the just-right amount of relativism —the amount that makes them easygoing in company, perhaps usefully pliable in exigencies, but not nihilistic. Only a fool or a misanthrope would criticize travel.

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Given travel’s salutary reputation, it is no wonder that I am biased against the whole topic. A writer is someone who resents being told that something is good for him, and that this is therefore why he must do it. It’s no wonder, either, if such people repeatedly fling themselves against this broad, smiling enemy, hoping to smite it.

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Similarly, the well-worn complaint that travel banalizes places—that, if too many people start to go somewhere, the place reconfigures itself in order to please the almighty tourist’s gaze—doesn’t take the absolute otherness of human beings seriously enough. For example, in “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace writes that tourism is good for the soul, not because it broadens tourists, but precisely because it constricts them, in a painful yet educational way:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

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In fact, you can treat this performance as information in its own right. Before every place was spoiled, assuming that there was such a time, we could go observe what we took to be the unselfconscious manners and ancient customs of the people there. Today, we can observe self-conscious manners and generic customs—each with its own little flutters of imperfection and telling gaps in performance. And these, again, are information. You can learn as much about people from thinking about the way they act themselves out for you as you can from analyzing their less artful, less premeditated moments. So I agree with Wallace that there is no “unspoiledness” to experience, but the curious and attentive mind can do just fine with spoiledness. Wallace certainly did, in several of his classic essays.

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We love, as well, to mock the privileged Westerners who go somewhere far away and realize one or two momentous, banal things about themselves, especially if these same people then have the temerity to make art about their epiphanies. Consider, to name two much-discussed examples, Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, and Alanis Morrissette in “Thank U,” that song in which she thanks India. It happens that I, too, dislike that book, and that song. But to have an epiphany in Italy or India is no sillier than to have one in the woods or at work or on a walk around one’s neighborhood. Abroad, one is surrounded by billions of strangers who presumably have better things to do than serve as one’s backdrop, but that is also true at home, or even in the woods. (Look at all those trees! Do you, solipsistic walker, even know their species names?) Yet we dare to have interior lives anyway.

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Agnes Callard criticizes tourism as pointless “locomotion.” (She does so, tellingly, only after distinguishing tourism from several more benign forms of faraway-place-going.3)“The single most important fact about tourism is this: We already know what we will be like when we return,” she writes. This is a hell of an assumption. I don’t really know what I will be like next week, at least not in every important detail. To judge by her other writing, Callard is also, and not infrequently, a surprise to herself; her ability to describe these moments in fine, perhaps unintentionally comic detail provides her work with much of the insight and entertainment value it possesses.

In disconnecting us from the ongoing and sometimes nightmarish dailiness of our lives, travel allows us to “do nothing and be nobody.” For Callard, this makes it a preview of death, the nothingness that will put an end to our quotidian boredom forever. “Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death,” she concludes. “For everyone else, there’s travel.” This is funny because, like many of Nietzsche’s witticisms, it is a melodramatic overstatement of something that is, perhaps, five percent true. When we disrupt our routines, we do not do nothing, or become no one; we do different things, we try on other selves. This is why we frequently come back from even rather silly jaunts, pace Callard, a bit different.

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So the antitravel position, broadly conceived, doesn’t seem to work. Yet I feel a sour satisfaction, as I have said, whenever someone decides to take travel down a peg. Partly, this is because the cases for travel are often sillier than the cases against, and I think it’s important to question them. If, for example, travel broadens the mind, why are at least some of the best-traveled people the worst blockheads one has ever met? If travel increases tolerance, why did it not have exactly that effect on so many of history’s conquerors—monomaniacs who could not let stand any place that failed to give back their own image?

- More Here

VICT3R Project: What Are the Goals of Virtual Rabbits?

Animals used in laboratories are often treated as mere objects, enduring painful procedures like burns, poisoning, food deprivation, and skin, eye, and ear lacerations—all in the name of human safety. While many argue that these tests are necessary for ensuring product safety, ethical alternatives exist, and they should be explored. That’s where the Spanish university’s virtual rabbit initiative comes in.

The primary goal of the VICT3R project is to significantly reduce the number of animals used in safety testing for drugs and other chemicals by replacing them with computer-generated virtual models. This represents a crucial milestone in the quest for ethical and sustainable scientific research. If successful, the project could  prove that virtual models can yield reliable scientific results without harming living creatures.

Scientific advancements have provided more humane -and incredibly scientific- alternatives to animal testing, such as computer simulations and human tissue models. These methods can offer effective results without harming living creatures like rabbits. The VICT3R project introduces additional key objectives:

• Reducing Animal Use: The European VICT3R project aims to reduce the total number of animals used in experiments by up to 25%. This could lead to fewer animals being subjected to tests for medicine and chemical safety.
• Data Reuse and Sharing: The project promotes reusing and sharing data and applying new data science techniques to further implement the 3Rs—reduce, refine, and replace—in preclinical animal experimentation.
• Generative AI for Synthetic Animals: In cases where historical data on certain species or conditions is unavailable, generative AI could create fully synthetic virtual animals to fill the gaps.
• Expansion to Other Studies: The aspiration of the VICT3R project is to extend this concept of virtual control groups to other toxicological and pharmacological studies, both in academic and industrial settings, further reducing reliance on animal testing.

- More Here

Imagination vs. Creativity

I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.

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Imagination is an aptitude based on analysis, and is a variety of reasoning forwards from a current state marked by freedom from habituated patterns of seeing. Creativity is an aptitude is based on synthesis, and is a variety of reasoning backwards from desired outcomes marked by closing of realizability gaps. To some extent, the two behaviors exist on the same continuous spectrum, and in most situations we alternate between forwards and backwards reasoning modes. But in complex situations, there is also a discontinuity between the two modes, which is the same as the general discontinuity and qualitative difference that separates analysis from synthesis.

Forward and backward are not symmetric. Synthesis, since it works backwards from a desired state, is strictly more expressive, since it can start from desired states that are not realizable or reachable from the current state using known techniques and patterns of behavior. It can also fail in more ways, since it might attempt impossibilities.

A leap — a creative leap — may be required to connect the forward and backward regimes. Sometimes this might just manifest as a textbook technical problem that is easy to solve once you pose it correctly. You could even outsource that to an appropriate sort of technician to actually execute. Craftsmanship and skill are useful for creativity up to the point where you can see the leap that is needed, but once seen, others can often do it. The most creative people in a medium are rarely the master technicians.

I like the definition of genius as “talent hits the target others can’t hit, genius hits the target others can’t see.” Creative genius likes in seeing what others don’t see. But once you’ve actually seen it, you might be able to simply point it out to others to hit. They might even be better at hitting it than you, once you point it out.

At other times creativity might manifest as an “invention gap,” as I’ve taken to calling it, or even a “discovery” gap — uncovering a new principle or phenomenon to harness in nature. A problem that nobody knows how to solve, or a behavior of nature that nobody has noticed, modeled, or figured out how to harness.

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Imagination to some extent is relative to training data. What for you is a leap of imagination may be a straightforward inference for someone who has seen or experienced more cases. A sufficiently trained AI model may produce behaviors indistinguishable from highly imaginative human behaviors.

Creative behaviors require imagination, but also require more something more. Imagination is necessary but not sufficient for creativity.

Creative behaviors, I think, call for the equivalent of mutation or noise-injection into an evolutionary process. There is a non sequitur quality to creative leaps that strikes me as fundamentally non-analytical and serendipitous.

- More Here

Fragility Of Our Civilization

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

- Last lines of Reinhold Niebuhr's master piece The Irony of American History

Timothy Snyder's apt warning from 2015 is getting more relevant in 2024 - Hitler’s world may not be so far away:

Most of us would like to think that we possess a “moral instinct”. Perhaps we imagine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are ethically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vulnerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realised. A historian must be grateful to Wanda J for her courage and for the trace of herself that she left behind. But a historian must also consider why rescuers were so few. It is all too easy to fantasise that we, too, would have aided Wanda J. 

Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we can dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. It is our very forgetfulness of the circumstances of the Holocaust that convinces us that we are different from Nazis and shrouds the ways that we are the same. We share Hitler’s planet and some of his preoccupations; we have perhaps changed less than we think.

The Holocaust began with the idea that no human instinct was moral. Hitler described humans as members of races doomed to eternal and bloody struggle among themselves for finite resources. Hitler denied that any idea, be it religious, philosophical or political, justified seeing the other (or loving the other) as oneself. He claimed that conventional forms of ethics were Jewish inventions, and that conventional states would collapse during the racial struggle. Hitler specifically, and quite wrongly, denied that agricultural technology could alter the relationship between people and nourishment.

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The green revolution, perhaps the one development that most distinguishes our world from Hitler’s, might be reaching its limits. This is not so much because there are too many people on earth, but because more of the people on earth demand ever larger and more secure supplies of food. World grain production per capita peaked in the 1980s. In 2003, China, the world’s most populous country, became a net importer of grain. In the 21st century, world grain stocks have never exceeded more than a few months’ supply. During the hot summer of 2008, fires in fields led major food suppliers to cease exports altogether, and food riots broke out in Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. During the drought of 2010, the prices of agricultural commodities spiked again, leading to protests, revolution, ethnic cleansing and revolution in the Middle East. The civil war in Syria began after four consecutive years of drought drove farmers to overcrowded cities.

Though the world is not likely to run out of food as such, richer societies may again become concerned about future supplies. Their elites could find themselves once again facing choices about how to define the relationship between politics and science. As Hitler demonstrated, merging the two opens the way to ideology that can seem to both explain and resolve the sense of panic. In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident. There need not be any compelling reason for concern about life and death, as the Nazi example shows, only a momentary conviction that dramatic action is needed to preserve a way of life. 

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Perhaps the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can effect the conflations Hitler pioneered: between nature and politics, between ecosystem and household, between need and desire. A global problem that seems otherwise insoluble can be blamed upon a specific group of human beings.

Hitler was a child of the first globalisation, which arose under imperial auspices at the end of the 19th century. We are the children of the second, that of the late 20th century. Globalisation is neither a problem nor a solution; it is a condition with a history. It brings a specific intellectual danger. Since the world is more complex than a country or a city, the temptation is to seek some master key to understanding everything. When a global order collapses, as was the experience of many Europeans in the second, third and fourth decades of the 20th century, a simplistic diagnosis such as Hitler’s can seem to clarify the global by referring to the ecological, the supernatural or the conspiratorial. When the normal rules seem to have been broken and expectations have been shattered, a suspicion can be burnished that someone (the Jews, for example) has somehow diverted nature from its proper course. A problem that is truly planetary in scale, such as climate change, obviously demands global solutions – and one apparent solution is to define a global enemy. 

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Americans, when they think about the Holocaust at all, take for granted that they could never commit such a crime. The US army, after all, was on the right side of the second world war. The reality is somewhat more complicated. Franklin D Roosevelt sent racially segregated armed forces to liberate Europe. Antisemitism was prominent in the US at the time. The Holocaust was largely over by the time American soldiers landed in Normandy. Although they liberated some concentration camps, American troops reached none of the major killing sites of the Holocaust and saw none of the hundreds of death pits of the east. The American trial of guards at the Mauthausen concentration camp, like the British trial at Bergen-Belsen, reattributed prewar citizenship to the Jewish victims. This helped later generations to overlook the basic fact that denial of citizenship, usually by the destruction of states, permitted the mass murder of Jews.

A misunderstanding about the relationship between state authority and mass killing underlay an American myth of the Holocaust that prevailed in the early 21st century: that the US was a country that intentionally rescued people from the genocides caused by overweening states. Following this reasoning, the destruction of a state could be associated with rescue rather than risk. One of the errors of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the belief that regime change must be creative. The theory was that the destruction of a state and its ruling elite would bring freedom and justice. In fact, the succession of events precipitated by the illegal invasion of a sovereign state confirmed one of the unlearned lessons of the history of the second world war.

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Though no American would deny that tanks work in the desert, some Americans do deny that deserts are growing larger. Though no American would deny ballistics, some Americans do deny climate science. Hitler denied that science could solve the basic problem of nutrition, but assumed that technology could win territory. It seemed to follow that waiting for research was pointless and that immediate military action was necessary. In the case of climate change, the denial of science likewise legitimates military action rather than investment in technology. If people do not take responsibility for the climate themselves, they will shift responsibility for the associated calamities to other people. Insofar as climate denial hinders technical progress, it might hasten real disasters, which in their turn can make catastrophic thinking still more credible. A vicious circle can begin in which politics collapses into ecological panic. The direct consequences of climate change will reach America long after Africa, the Near East and China have been transformed. By then, it will be too late to act.

The market is not nature; it depends upon nature. The climate is not a commodity that can be traded but rather a precondition to economic activity as such. The claim of a right to destroy the world in the name of profits for a few people reveals an important conceptual problem. Rights mean restraint. Each person is an end in himself or herself; the significance of a person is not exhausted by what someone else wants from him or her. Individuals have the right not to be defined as parts of a planetary conspiracy or a doomed race. They have the right not to have their homelands defined as habitat. They have the right not to have their polities destroyed.

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In the case of climate change, we know what the state can do to tame panic. We know that it is easier and less costly to draw nourishment from plants than animals. We know that improvements in agricultural productivity continue and that the desalination of seawater is possible. We know that efficiency of energy use is the simplest way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. We know that governments can assign prices to carbon pollution and can pledge reductions of future emissions to one another and review one another’s pledges. We also know that governments can stimulate the development of appropriate energy technologies. Solar and wind energy are ever cheaper. Fusion, advanced fission, tidal stream power and non-crop-based biofuels offer real hope for a new energy economy. In the long run, we will need techniques to capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. All of this is not only thinkable but attainable.

States should invest in science so that the future can be calmly contemplated. The study of the past suggests why this would be a wise course. Time supports thought, thought supports time; structure supports plurality, and plurality, structure. This line of reasoning is less glamorous than waiting for general disaster and dreaming of personal redemption. Effective prevention of mass killings is incremental and its heroes are invisible. No conception of a durable state can compete with visions of totality. No green politics will ever be as exciting as red blood on black earth.

But opposing evil requires inspiration by what is sound rather than by what is resonant. The pluralities of nature and politics, order and freedom, past and future, are not as intoxicating as the totalitarian utopias of the last century. Every unity is beautiful as image but circular as logic and tyrannical as politics. The answer to those who seek totality is not anarchy, which is not totality’s enemy but its handmaiden. The answer is thoughtful, plural institutions: an unending labour of differentiated creation. This is a matter of imagination, maturity and survival.

And one of favorite lines I remember often when I get complacent: 

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

-  Robbery Under Law by Evelyn Waugh

Meta Values - 32

Living a modest human life in any part of the world, we destroy non-human lives just with our modernity. 

Hence, I am mindful of not destroying anything on this planet, instead focus on the easier task of protecting everything and anything and the much harder task of creating without destroying. 

Meta Values - 31

It is much easier to ignore irrelevant stuff than to seek wisdom. 

List of some high level stuff I learned to ignore over the decades: 

1. Sports

2. News

3. Most of politics

4. Stock Tickers

5. Talks about good old days a.k.a nostalgia

6. Talks about future

7. Most of small talk

8. Learning human languages 

9. People who add no value to life

10. External validation 

11. Unnecessary luxuries and most luxuries

12. Arguing  

13. Signalling

All of the above and more, I have embraced in the past and suffered immensely. Now, I have taught myself to ignore. 

On Wisdom

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which are now often considered his greatest works. He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light. He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time. He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions. “I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”

“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends. They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.

Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.

- David Brooks, You Might Be a Late Bloomer: The life secrets of those who flailed early but succeeded by old age

Happy Birthday Fluffy!

Max's little gal turned 8! 

She brings Max mannerisms to my life daily; what else I can ask for?

Happy birthday my love.