The Faults of Meat - Geoffrey Barstow

In his review of Geoffrey Barstow’s The Faults of Meat: Tibetan Buddhist Writings on Vegetarianism, Rory Lindsay examines the little-known teachings around vegetarianism in Tibetan Buddhism.

Eating other beings may not seem like the most intuitive choice for those following the Mahayana Buddhist path, but that is exactly what many Buddhists have done for centuries. In Tibetan culture, the consumption of meat has been the norm, yet given the basic Buddhist prohibition against killing, meat-eating has always posed significant ethical problems. How, then, have Tibetan meat eaters justified their actions? And how have vegetarians in Tibet argued their case? In The Faults of Meat, edited by Geoffrey Barstow, we find a rich amalgam of translated works by major Tibetan authors on the topic of meat-eating, from those who vigorously argue for vegetarianism to those who carefully defend meat’s ingestion.

A basic starting point for Tibetan scholars has been the canonical record of the Buddha’s teachings. Those arguing in support of vegetarianism frequently cite works such as the Lankavatara Sutra, in which the Buddha rejects the idea that eating meat is distinct from the act of killing. Barstow notes in his introduction that one of the most common Buddhist defenses of meat-eating hinges on the idea that the consumer is not at fault if the meat is purchased in the marketplace; this centers on an oft-cited monastic rule concerning meat’s “threefold purity” that holds that if the consumer didn’t personally kill the animal, didn’t ask someone else to kill it for them, and/or didn’t even suspect that the animal might have been killed for them, then they are absolved of any wrongdoing. As Barstow’s translated excerpt shows, the Lankavatara Sutra rejects this reasoning: “If someone gives up meat, then animals will not be killed. This is because innocent beings are usually killed for money; other reasons are rare.” The Buddha then explains that while he had previously permitted less advanced disciples to eat meat that was not killed for them, he now forbids everyone from eating meat due to its wide-ranging karmic consequences.

Modeling the Human Trajectory

I do not know whether most of the history of technological advance on Earth lies behind or ahead of us. I do know that it is far easier to imagine what has happened than what hasn’t. I think it would be a mistake to laugh off or dismiss the predictions of infinity emerging from good models of the past. Better to take them as stimulants to our imaginations. I believe the predictions of infinity tell us two key things. First, if the patterns of history continue, then some sort of economic explosion will take place again, the most plausible channel being AI. It wouldn’t reach infinity, but it could be big. Second, and more generally, I take the propensity for explosion as a sign of instability in the human trajectory. Gross world product, as a rough proxy for the scale of the human enterprise, might someday spike or plunge or follow a complicated path in between. The projections of explosion should be taken as indicators of the long-run tendency of the human system to diverge. They are hinting that realistic models of long-term development are unstable, and stable models of long-term development unrealistic. The credible range of future paths is indeed wide.

- More Here

B-12 And Other Bullshit Reasons For Eating Meat Debunked

Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid 

A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs, and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.

However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.

So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.

Guardian debunks more bullshit reasons people makeup for killing animals.

Think for a minute - Billions of Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus (leave alone rest of East Asia) have not only lived a healthy life for thousands of years (yes, thousands) but also have some of the greatest insights on living a good and healthy life which overlaps so much with current science and reality.

Now looks this most horrific sentences ever written in human history:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you, it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

That's from King James Bible

Does it get better? No! it makes it even clearer to go ahead with animal brutality

And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.

The point it even for atheists living in this country, this virus of man's dominion has infected their brains via centuries of proselytizing. And of course, East blindly occupies everything west and that is not good news for animals even though the lessons from their Mahabharath teaches them the pinnacle of Dharam when heavens say:

"Great king, you weep with all creatures".

One book is saying every animal is for meat and another is saying you should weep with all animals. And I am not even bringing Buddha here.

I am not religious neither are many people but that becomes irrelevant unless one is aware of the virus in each one of our heads that has passed down for centuries. 

This B-12 bullshit has become so common these days that it's nothing but another sneaky proselytizing way to rationalize and convince to feed their kids meat.

Timeless Lessons From Mahabharta

I re-rewatched Gurcharan Das's talk on his book The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma,  he covers everything that was going wrong in India of the early 2000s. But Mahabharta has timeless lessons from which one could easily draw parallels to the current events in the US.

• Black lives matter (caste system which affected Karna) 
• Arjun (go-getter CEO but flawed) 
• Karna (The quintessential Adam Smith's man of virtue and wisdom and refuses everything under the sun for doing the right thing) 
• Yudistira (the greatest king but flawed with a gambling problem) 
• All characters including God, Krishna (who manipulated Karna to win the war) are flawed  
• The hollowness in Pandvas lives even after winning the "just" war since it killed most people (the unbelievable ideology of markets and the made-up importance of economic growth with no respect nor regard for lives now)
• Uncle Sakuni (fake news, fox news, manipulating media)
• and finally around @25 minutes, Bhisma who is a great-grandfather figure of multiple generations sitting silently while they strip Draupadi is exactly what all respected senior GOP senators are doing while this psychopath at White House is ruining the civilization and basic sense of decency. 

These stories expose situations and dilemma's with minimal "magic" and how we humans act under those situations. Every bullshit we humans unleash more or less has been covered by these stories.

These stories pose questions without giving answers (no simple answers, no ten commandments, no free ticket to heaven nor forgiveness inside a cozy booth). They teach about complexity and complex systems - it's a life long learning process to live in complexity. Even the doors of heaven wouldn't open if you don't treat all creatures equally.

The story unfolds as it did because a generation(s) ago, forefathers abused a puppy and that curse unleashes into 18 books of Mahabhartha and ends only when Yudistra refuses to enter heaven without his dog, Svana.

My grandmother's bedtime stories had planted the seeds for understanding the difficulty of being good and Mr. Das has taught me more nuanced lessons. Thank you, sir.

Happy Birthday Augie!

Augie the dog celebrated her 20th birthday this week, making her the oldest golden retriever in history

The Book I Need To Re-Read Soon

"The Mahabharata still speaks to rural peasants and is still being transmitted by wandering, illiterate bards in remote Indian villages. Yet its deeply sophisticated philosophical interludes also represent some of the most profound thinking on morals, ethics and duty ever written, and are among the deepest expressions of Hindu thought. Indeed it is the contention of Gurcharan Das, the celebrated Indian writer on economics and enthusiastic amateur Sanskritist, that its teachings represent just as valuable a guide on how to live a moral and ethical life in the world today as it did in the early centuries BC when it was first written, tackling the eternal questions of Everyman: “Who am I?” “What should I do?” “What is right?”

After taking early retirement from a career as the chief executive of Proctor & Gamble India, Gurcharan Das went to Chicago to study Sanskrit under the two great American scholars of the “language of the gods”, Sheldon Pollock and Wendy Doniger, and The Difficulty of Being Good represents an attempt by Das to bring together the two sides of his life, the literary and the practical. The result is a highly personal and idiosyncratic, yet richly insightful meditation on the application of ancient philosophy to issues of modern moral conduct and right and wrong. Das is especially focused on his native India, which today is mired in corruption, with one out of every five members of parliament having had criminal charges levelled against him: “Moral failure pervades our public life and hangs over it like Delhi’s smog.”

At the centre of the book is Das’s quest to understand the elusive term dharma, a word which means at once duty and religion, justice and righteousness, law and goodness. Dharma lies at the heart of the ethical questions explored in The Mahabharata, and as Das puts it: “The conceptual difficulty is part of the point. Indeed The Mahabharata is in many ways an extended attempt to clarify what dharma is – that is, what exactly should we do, when we are trying to be good in the world.”

Both the strength and weakness of The Difficulty of Being Good lies in the sheer complexity of looking for clear moral teachings in the profoundly ambiguous teachings of an epic that is “about our incomplete lives, about good people acting badly, about how difficult it is to be good in this world”. It is true that the Pandavas’ gentle leader, King Yudhishthira, is admired for his unbreakable commitment to satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence) and anrishamsya (compassion)."

That's from the book The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma by Gurcharan Das which I read in 2010.

I have been thinking a lot about this book,  the reason being Max. Not many Indians nor "Hindus' know that the epic Mahabharath starts and ends with a dog.

Story of King Yudistra and his stray dog, Svana sums up the definition Dharma:

Long ago in India, there were five princes who left their kingdom to search for the kingdom of heaven. They took food and drink for their journey, and Prince Yudistira brought his dog, Svana. Yudistira was the eldest. His brothers were Sahadeva, the all-wise, who was learned beyond all men; Nakula, the all-handsome, famed for his grace and beauty; Arjuna, the all-powerful, who had never been defeated in any contest of arms; and Bhima, the all-joyful, known for his good humor and love of pleasure. After many days' journey, the brothers came to a fair where music was playing and people were feasting and dancing. Bhima, the all-joyful said to his brothers, "I will rest here today and be happy and seek the kingdom of heaven tomorrow."

Yudistira, his brothers, and the dog Svana went on without him. Several days later, the travelers arrived at a large plain where a great army was drawn up in ranks facing the enemy. When Arjuna, the all-powerful, saw this, he said to his brothers, "I will fight for my country today and seek the kingdom of heaven tomorrow."

Yudistira, his brothers, and the dog Svana continued without him. Many days and nights passed. The travelers came to a magnificent palace surrounded by a garden full of flowers and fountains. In this garden, a beautiful princess was walking with her attendants. When she saw Nakula, the all-handsome, she was seized with love and longing. Nakula, too, was struck with love. He said to his brothers, "I will stay with the princess today and seek the kingdom of heaven tomorrow." Nakula went into the garden and Yudistira, his brother Sahadeva, and the dog Svana continued without him.

Many weary days and nights later, the travelers came to a great temple where the holy men lived. Sahadeva, the all-wise desired to join them in prayer and study. He told his brother Yudistira, " I will stay here today and seek the kingdom of heaven tomorrow." Sahadeva went into the temple, and Yudistira and Svana continued without him.

At last, Yudistira reached Mount Meru, the doorway to heaven. Indra, the Lord of Past and Present, appeared before him and invited him to ascend. Yudistira bowed low and replied, "Very willingly I will do so if I may bring my dog, Svana. "That may not be," said Indra. "There is no place in heaven for dogs. Leave him and enter into eternal happiness.""I cannot do that," said Yudistira. "I do not wish for any happiness for which I must leave so dear a companion."

"You traveled on without your four brothers," said Indra. "Why will you not ascend to heaven without your dog?"

"My lord," replied Yudistira, "my brothers left me to follow the desires of their hearts. Svana has given his heart to me. Rather than renounce him, I must renounce heaven."

"You have spoken well," said Indra. "Come in, and bring your dog with you." So Yudistira and Svana ascended into paradise. In recognition of their devotion to one another, Indra set in the sky the constellation of the Great Dog whose star Sirius is the brightest of them all

And the gates of heavens open with these words for King Yudistira:

"Great king, you weep with all creatures".

It's so sad that all of the monolithic religions look down on non-human animals since those texts don't contain any lessons like the one above where the symbiosis between humans and non-animals is not an accident but a necessity to live a good life and to even live on this planet.

This brings us to the factors which might have influenced me to bring Max home on 21st, May 2006,

What Did Lincoln Know About Language That We Don't?

No kidding! Timing cannot be better after my ranting early this week on the misuse of language. 

Here's a new book Farnsworth's Classical English Style by Ward Farnsworth calling for the importance of the right and a small choice of words and sentences with examples from Lincoln, Churchill, and other masters of the language.

The review of the book here:

The new book's general claim is that our culture of advice about good writing doesn't explain the power that Lincoln achieved with his words. The usual story is that the best writing is the most efficient—that clarity and concision are everything. It's hard to argue with this; who doesn't want to be clear? But writing can be clear and powerful, clear and memorable, clear and full of fire, or clear without any of those things. The book argues that rhetorical force isn't created by efficiency alone. It's created by the use of contrasts.

Consciously or not, Lincoln understood this. It's how he wrote. Here I will talk about one example: contrast in the kinds of words you use.

[---]

The point: Lincoln is well-known for his love of simple language, but he was also at home with Latinate words and mixed the two types to strong effect.  He especially liked to circle with larger words early in a sentence and then finish it simply. This pattern let him offer intellectual or idealistic substance and then tie it to a stake in the ground.

If you want to experiment with this idea, try finishing your arguments with words that are simpler and shorter than the ones you've recently been using—in other words, with a Saxon clincher.

COVAD-19 Deaths & Highest Meat Consuming Countries

This is the list of countries and their 2009 meat consumption (in kgs) per year per person. It's mindboggling!

Sapiens in the USA consume a staggering 120.2 kgs per year while Sapiens in India consume only 4.4kg per year.

This list captures the top 13 countries with the highest COVAD-19 death based on their population per million.

All of these 13 countries consume more than 75 kg of meat per year per person. 

Brazil which is the home of "world largest" meat producer JSB, now faces the phenomenal rise in COVAD-19 cases. 

Believe it or not, Bangladesh is the world's most vegetarian country consuming only 4kg per year per person. 

And how does Bangladesh look with COVAD-19 in the above list? Only 9.07 when compared to 366.19 in the USA and 10.13 in India. 

I am a data scientist. On purpose,  I didn't want to spend any time doing even simple statistics.  I tried to approach it through the eyes of the common man. I did a quick search of numbers and presented it here in less than 5 minutes. 

Obviously, this is not a statistically validated result nor does it includes a myriad of other factors like "reactance" to lockdown. Nevertheless,  the basic numbers with almost no visible outliers that everyone can see are telling a fundamental problem with our diet and how were are messing with complex systems. 

I posted this powerful talk by Michael Gregory (a Buddhist monk) on April 6th, 2020. He was also talking about the cost we have to pay for messing with complex systems and animal sufferings. 

Many of you wish things go back to normal. If normal involves doing the same things again and again, why do you want to be normal? If normal is the best idea, I wish all of you to be abnormal because this is NOT normal - what we have done to this planet and what we have done to the animals.

We have turned into no big deal to walk into a grocery store and pick your killing.  

How can you contribute to suffering and expect not to suffer in return?

If you don't like the effect then don't commit the cause. This is Buddhism. 

We blame to Chinese for having these markets. Look at your own market. What is it filled with? Do you have a mountain of food which is a mountain of death? 

I am not convincing you to become a vegetarian but I am convincing you to accept responsibility to your world.

The First Cell - Current Treatment Options and A Call for Anti-Metaphor Language (Part 2 of 3)

Years ago after reading Metaphors We Live By, I started looking at our language-driven biased world with skepticism.

Later, Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature made a much better concrete case for that bias. For the past two decades, neuroscience and anthropology made me completely irritated with our use of language without any understanding of how it not only has the highest impact on our thought process but also affects the entire civilization and causes so much unwarranted sufferings.

One of my all-time favorite movies is Arrival; if you haven't watched it, please watch it. If you already watched it, please re-watch with a new mindset. The aliens in the movie are fictitious but the rest of the science is true.

Check out of this Wikipedia link on the stereotype of animals based on our language which has become a reality because of one simple reason. We use these stereotypes in everyday language and in turn, we look down on animals to convenience ourselves to make them suffer for our selfishness.

PETA in 2018 made a thoughtful and right case by comparing 'Anti-Animal Language' to Hate Speech and called to eliminate them from our lingo.

Most people I know have smirked at me when I make a case for the careful use of language when referring to animals. Some of them used the fucking worst ineffective word of all time  - "interesting".

Imagine if you are calling your kid an idiot and stupid for years and decades and then check out what happens. I am not even talking to about what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what the kid thinks of you.

I am talking about irrespective of what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what kid thinks of you - what you "feel" and "believe" about that kid after decades of using the words idiot and stupid.

You can never escape the self-imposed prison you built where your kid will always be an idiot and stupid. That is the power of language.

When it comes to eating animals and other morality related stuff, I always use reality with no place for sugar-coated words or metaphors. Bacon and Pork are nothing but a dead body of an intelligent pig and Veal is nothing but a baby cow murdered while still in their innocence without giving them any chance to experience and cherish this planet. I will say now what future generation will look back at us and will say - "Fuck you, morons. You don't have a heart nor brain because you refuse to self reflect outside of yourself and your super cuddly family."

Rebecca Solnit this week even proposed a need for change language in politics:

It is an ongoing mistake to refer to politicians as leaders. Almost all are followers, and they should be if they are to be representatives.

Finally, Siddharth Mukerjee popularized the aversion for "war on cancer" metaphor in his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and thankful, most oncologists feel the same way.

While oncologists are questioning the use of "war" metaphor, Anya Plutynski went even further in her book Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder by questioning why we are classifying everything into one simple word called "cancer"? Is that even right? She is calling bullshit on scientists who are also prone to these language biases and using one-word "cancer" for multitudes.

The question "Is cancer one kind or many?" presupposes that there must be one way in which cancer kinds can be classified in virtue of their "natural" properties or features. But there are many "natural" features or relevance of the classification of cancer, and they do not yield a unified classification schema. Perhaps ironically, to be a good naturalist and realist about natural kinds requires granting that the "natural kind" category is itself not very natural. 

There must be some empirical warrant for categorizing kinds in the ways we do. But the case of cancer suggests that which empirical facts and which features or properties are appropriate for classifying kinds in one domain may or may not be appropriate for all contexts or other domains.  

It is surely true that cancer(s) have shared features, in virtue of (very broadly speaking) shared properties, causes, and mechanisms. But it is also true that there are many ways of picking out kinds of cancer. Depending on the scale of analysis and the type of feature one chooses, cancers cluster in different ways. Indeed, a similar point has been made regarding classification of biodiversity.         

I was halfway through her book when Max passed away and I still haven't finished it yet.

The day he was cremated, I was quoting her stating we should even stop stating cancer as one holistic disease and ranted about all of the above issues with sapiens and their language, how we refuse to even change a simple thing like spoken lingo even if it created so much pain and suffering. Finally, I said that's why I prefer to live with animals and that's one of the reasons why I lived with Max for 14 years.

The uni-emotions creatures refuse to get it and gave a sarcastic reply something along the lines of I prefer animals because they don't speak back to me.

Yes, this comment was made on the day my Max became ashes. Remember, I didn't ask them to quit killing animals but just be conscious and aware of the language we use and correct it.  Uni-emotional creatures are driven by ideology. Beware of them. Flush them out of your lives.

This is part 2 of my lessons from Russ's latest episode with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.

Part 1 of my lessons are here and you can listen to the full interview here:

Russ Roberts: Now, you summarize our current approach to cancer as a 'slash, poison, and burn.' What do you mean by that? What does each of those mean?

Azra Raza: Slash means surgery. Poison means chemotherapy. And burn means radiation therapy.

Russ Roberts: And what would you say is the mix of those three in our current--that's our arsenal of weapons. Has that arsenal shifted over time? Or has it changed much? Or are we still doing a lot of each?

Azra Raza: This is one of the main reasons for me to become an author suddenly, because I'm not a writer. I really am an oncologist and a scientist and I've dedicated my whole life to treating patients and trying to study their disease in the laboratory.

But, I was forced to take the pen on, because--while it is very true that we are killing 68% of cancers we see today, the reason we are curing them is mostly because of early detection.

And, the treatments we are giving them are, by and large, the same treatments that we have been giving for 50 years--which is the slash, poison, burn.

[---]

Russ Roberts: We should probably explain. People who have had experience with cancer or loved ones with cancer understand this, but you should explain why you use the word 'poison.' The technique of chemotherapy, which is the poison part of your trio, why do you call it poison? What is its modus operandi? How does it work?

Azra Raza: It's literally, somebody described it taking a baseball bat and hitting a dog with it to get rid of its fleas. That's what giving chemotherapy is. Chemotherapy cannot distinguish between a normal cell and a cancer cell. But, it kills rapidly-dividing cells. That's why side effects of chemotherapy affect rapidly-dividing normal cells the most.

For example, hair fall-out, because hair follicles grow very fast. Or we have severe nausea and vomiting because GI [gastro-intestinal] tract is sloughing cells and diving very rapidly.

So, chemotherapy basically is a sledge hammer that goes in and starts killing cells, and because cancer cells are dividing faster than normal cells in an organ, we kill more of the cancer cells and less of the normal cells. But, still normal cells die.

After years of understanding about the power of language and using anti-metaphors, not even for once I correlated surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to slash, poison, and burn. I failed.

Yes, Max had to go through all three of them. He was slashed, he was poisoned and he was burned. I can go on and on debating if what I did to treat Max was right or wrong. Dr. Raza does answer that question:

Many times I am asked this question, Russ: 'If you have acute myeloid leukemia, Dr. Raza, you are being so critical about the treatments,' and they will say, 'Would you take the treatment?' My answer is, 'Of course I'll take the treatment, because every human wants to have hope. I want to be that one unicorn who's going to be the exception. And, 30% patients with acute myeloid leukemia will survive five years even today.' So, I'll take that chance. Sure.

My answer is simple. I am a smoker. I am healthy now, maybe much healthier than average American or Indian. But my probability of getting cancer is very high. The probability of most of us getting cancer goes high as we age. I do eat a very healthy diet, workout regularly, walk miles a day, and take a lot of well-researched non-animal-based supplements. But everything has a shelf-life. There is also that beautiful truth of the impermanence of everything.

If I get cancer, no matter how radical the cancer treatment options have progressed and I will not use it. I will use only slash, poison, and burn. I will use the same cocktails of chemo poison that Max was given. I have to go through what my Max went through for two years to have more time with me. This not for some poetic beauty or some abstract subjective justice. I really want to experience what my Max experienced.

I have seen Max go from one of the most beautiful and strongest dogs to weak and fragile within a matter of weeks. The same will be true for me. No matter how strong I feel now, I will fade, I will be become weak and perish. It is the beauty and truth of life.

Taleb said it eloquently in the closing lines of his book Antifragile:

"The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components— and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books— my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres— make room for others."

What if I don't get cancer? That decision was made pretty much when Max's initial cancer diagnosis came positive. I had made a decision to not take any medicines that are tested on animals no matter what my health situation is.

I think the last time I had my physical done was in 2012 or 2013 and I haven't taken any medicines even before that. It's been almost roughly 10 years since I took any medicines, except cough or cold pills which I stopped since 2018.

I will amend my decision to take medicines only if six people close to my life quit eating meat. The choice I put on their table is stopping killing animals for your gastro-intestinal pleasures or see me die even with some simple illness. I am sure they will never give up killing animals for my life but that is the point. Time will expose these demons inside even ordinary people. Trust me, better angles of human nature are rare. Very rare, indeed. 

Nature bought me close to Max and gave me a wonderful experience. He opened doors that I knew existed. There are billion more different versions of Max's in chickens, whales, and in every other living being. I will be one of the many tiniest forces to help those billion other Max's. 

I will close with the song Streets of Philadelphia. Looking back on the 1993 movie Philadephia, when gay marriage and HIV to say the least was looked down on in most parts of the world. Now, within a quarter-century, HIV treatment options are much better now plus intersex marriage and love are vastly accepted.

Can we try to do the same for cancer and eliminate animal sufferings in the next quarter-century? Maybe the former is harder but the later is your hands. You can change it starting from your next meal.

I was bruised and battered, I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
I saw my reflection in a window, I didn't know my own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away
On the Streets of Philadelphia

I walked the avenue, 'til my legs felt like stone
I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
At night I could hear the blood in my veins
Just as black and whispering as the rain
On the Streets of Philadelphia

Ain't no angel gonna greet me
It's just you and I my friend
And my clothes don't fit me no more
I walked a thousand miles
Just to slip this skin

The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the Streets of Philadelphia

Now, please take a few minutes to listen to these two of the most famous Oscar speeches; one from 1994 by Tom Hanks and another from 2020 by Joaquin Phoenix.

A simple and common trait between both these men is that they are emotional and that was the driving force to see the truth in cruel reality beyond themselves and their families. You might understand why I puke when I see a uni-emotion creature. 

A healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident, common sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago. 

I've been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively. And I think at times we feel, or were made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think, whether we're talking about gender inequality, or racism, or queer rights, or indigenous rights, or animal rights, we're talking about the fight against injustice. We're talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.

I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious, and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.

My Therapists Redux!

Part 1 of my therapists here. Neo is 7 plus months now and today was the first time - not once but twice he caught the frisbee mid-air like Max.

Patience wears my grandmother's filigree earrings. She bakes marvelous dark bread. She has beautiful hands. She carries great snacks of peace and purses filled with small treasures. You don't notice her right away in a crowd. But suddenly you see her all at once, and then she is so beautiful you wonder why you never saw her before.

-  The Book of Qualities by J.Ruth Gendler

The Illusion Of Self & The True Interconnectedness Of Life

A beautiful and humbling piece by Daisy Hildyard:

The ordinary life of my body stayed in its own world: that of a person who reads manuscripts, eats treacle tart, talks to pregnant doctors, and frequently drops her laptop – a person whose genes are all her own and who exists at a distance of some six thousand miles to the red earth passageways of the mines in south-eastern DRC. There is a significant if not ominous quiet in human narratives, which struggle to accommodate a real, breathing individual together with the story of her other lives, lived out on different scales, in the same story, in the same words. More-than-human scales are explained in reports, libraries, laboratories, theories – in places that have little room or concern for the daily experiences of real individuals. Meanwhile, stories about humans continue to go about their familiar business on the scale of the human body, a scale on which an individual character might talk or eat or eavesdrop.

When you draw these different kinds of story together, they disturb one another. The miner’s skin and the typing fingertip, indirectly, make physical contact over thousands of miles. The parasitic microbe has descendants in every human cell. These are small, local, real examples of how these conflicting stories get inside one another’s skin – they are mutual irritants – they bedevil one another.

Thinking about the Caesarian screen which is erected to protect a mother from the sight of her own internal organs, I had understood that this effort to separate the self from a new, extended understanding of life, is a form of self-protection. Your internal organs are you, just as your face is you – but that’s a headfuck you don’t need while you are busy giving birth. The screen is put in place. You are only trying to keep the sense of individuality undamaged, but the work of doing so becomes a growing strain the more you know about your body’s global reach, its microscopic symbionts, its evolutionary history, even the internal organs you think of as your own. If you want to witness your body in these wider contexts, you need to depart from the traditional unit of the person, which is the individual human body.

I had believed that it was dangerous to open up the individual in this way. To tear open the human self, I reasoned, would jeopardize those rights of self-possession, and this, in turn, would put the most vulnerable individuals at risk. In fact it is the other way round. A belief in self-containment is what corrodes human skin. Sealing the human body by removing or simply ignoring anything that complicates it, connects it, contaminates it: this is what exposes and contaminates human bodies in a simple and factual sense. And so it appears as a kind of contradiction: in order to protect yourself, you need to allow yourself to be broken open. This violation of the self is not an act of self-destruction – not an experience of death but an amplification of life.

Buddha was right about the illusion of self and the famous dictum of ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Buddha and many of his past and current disciples (without the Buddhist religious dogma, there are hordes of those creatures) were "somehow" aware of this interconnectedness of multitudes of other non-human lives with human life and the illusion of self. The delusion of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric views never even come under their radar.

I always wondered, how did they know this "microscopic fact?". It's still an open question.

I do have a hypothesis. I will talk about that another day but the clue is "Attentiveness" and Montaigne mantra of "Observe, Observe and Observe".

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses writes about why we miss what is right in front of our nose:

We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor’s gift of long-distance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision. However, with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknowledge there is much we can’t see, and so contrive remarkable ways to observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we’re seeing when we’ve only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

A New Book - How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

Releasing July 28, 2020. Preorder here

In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.

My bet - Within our lifetime if we don't address the root causes that enabled this dangerous man, we will be electing a worse specimen than this one. 

The Goose, the Fox and Addiction - A Story Of Mental Disorder In A Healthy Brain

I have been using the phrase  "nostalgia factor" for many mental disorders and human incapacity to change their minds. To put it bluntly, most people kill animals and eat their dead bodies because that's what their families and friends did while they were growing up.

My favorite Neuroskeptic whom I have been following for over a decade ponders along the similar lines on the new paper by Jerome C.Wakefield:

Once there was a newborn goose, fresh from the egg.

This young gosling, like all geese, was born with a biological mission: to imprint on something. Imprinting is an instinctive mechanism by which hatchlings learn to follow the first thing they set eyes on.

Normally, the first thing a newborn goose sees is its mother. But our hatchling is unlucky. At the very moment our gosling first opens her eyes, a fox happens to be walking past. Our young bird immediately imprints on the fox.

The rest of the brood did not see the fox. They all imprinted on the mother goose, and follow mother and live long and happy goose lives. But our unfortunate fox-imprinted hatchling is different. She ignores her mother, and instead heads straight for the next fox she sees ... which is great news for the fox.

Wakefield introduces the concept of the fox-imprinted gosling to shed light on questions about the nature of mental disorder (including addiction). So let us suppose that we were a goose psychiatrist, trying to make sense of the behavior of the wayward hatchling.

The first question we might ask is this: Does the gosling have a mental disorder?

One view would be that, yes, there is a disorder. The fox-imprinted goose has an abnormal pattern of behavior. Unlike most goslings, she ignores her mother and approaches foxes. This behavior is not just unusual, it’s clearly harmful (leads to being eaten).

However, one could also argue that the gosling has no disorder. The goose’s imprinting on the fox was, after all, a perfectly normal response. The goose’s brain was functioning exactly as evolution intended by imprinting on the first thing it saw. In this view, there is nothing wrong with our gosling at all. The problem is that a fox was present in the environment.

Wakefield’s key point is that these two perspectives are not incompatible.

In Wakefield’s view, the fox-imprinted goose does have a mental disorder, because once imprinted on a fox, its behaviour will continue to be abnormal even if the environment is perfectly normal after that. Even if the fox-imprinted gosling never saw another fox, she would still fail to follow her mother (and probably starve). As Wakefield puts it, the fox-fixation is internal to the gosling, even though it originated in the environment. So we can justly speak of a mental disorder.

Yet Wakefield emphasizes that the unfortunate gosling does not have a brain disorder. There was nothing wrong with her brain at any stage. In fact, if a newborn goose saw a fox and did not imprint on it, that would be evidence of a brain disorder. Imprinting is part of the goose brain's function.

Great insight, right?

Now coming back to the "nostalgia factor" and reflect on the problem the young gosling faced which was - that a fox was present in the environment.

When a kid is born and grows up in an environment where the parents and the rest of the super-cuddly family eat animal dead bodies. The kid develops a disorder of eating animal dead bodies even if it is the root cause of a pandemic, even if it isn't good for self, even if it is the highest moral wrong to make animals suffer, and even if it decimates the environment.


When a kid is born and grows up in an environment where the dad, mom, or some "savvy" uncle watches Fox news all the time and happily relishes the opinionated bullshit. In turn,  the kid learns this is "fun",  this is important and "grown-up" stuff that they also should "believe" in and so on.  People grossly underestimate the effect of bringing these "grown men with make-up" into their living rooms every day. If this idiot leaves the White House, they will bring someone worse.

One can state similar nostalgia propagated effects for religion and any other ideological blinded beliefs.

No amount of distribution of facts, knowledge, and evidence can break this nostalgia. 

Plato knew this "problem of the fox" existed and proposed an idea in The Republic  (for obvious reasons, I am not a fan of that):

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. Quite true. And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot. Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only.

"Authorized ones only" - Right! We see that every day in North Korea.

We need to think of a different way to cure this mental disorder.

The correct problem definition of a problem should be decoupled from defining a solution to that problem. 

People often avoid that and use sarcasm and smirk to defuse the correct problem definition phase. I have often been on the receiving end of it with comments such as - so smart guy what we do about that or something along the lines of go solve it.

The story of goose, fox, and addiction is to help us define the problem correctly. We are not looking at killing animals to the decimation of journalism problems at their root causes.

It is about time we define these problems correctly. The right solutions will come in time.

The First Cell - Absurdities and Warmth Amidst Grief and Pain (Part 1 of 3)

To state the obvious, I had learned so much over the years from Russ Roberts's podcast Econtalk. Thank you, sir.

What makes it even closer to my heart is that I used to listen to his long podcasts every time I took Max to his oncologist. The roundtrip was over five hours and I would have listened to 2 or 3 of his interviews while driving.

For the rest of my life, that starting music and Russ's announcement would bring back memories of driving with Max to give him more time and spontaneous eruption of a cocktail of emotions containing despair, hope, agony, pain, optimism, depression, anger, helplessness, happiness, fear, and courage. As a habit, while driving I still look in the back seat of the car, hoping to see Max laying down with his sparkling eyes looking at me.

One of Russ's latest episodes is with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.

I used to get surprised during my younger years but not anymore. When you are into books, there is always a timely and apt book somehow "knocks" at the door.

To set the tone - Dr.Azra Raza is a practicing oncologist. She is also a cancer researcher. She lost her husband to cancer. The title of the book has an ominous ring to it, the genesis of the first cancer cell in the body is an ominous signal with little to no hope of a cure. It has been this way for centuries and we are not doing anything about it.

She covers so much ground from cancer research, current treatments, future treatments, to personal pain. Those grounds, unfortunately, overlap so much with my life so before even reading the book, this podcast interview has given me a lot to ponder about.

In this first part, I want to cover the immediate pain and loss of losing someone close and how our society doesn't "get" it. Excerpts from the interview (you can listen to the full interview here):

Russ Roberts: In the aftermath of your loss of your husband, you write about the profusion of inappropriate things that people say in attempts of consolation. I think about this from time to time: I think people blunder badly. In Jewish practice, when you go to the home of a mourner, Jewish law says that you're not to speak until the mourner speaks. I think people find this very difficult and some of this makes us uncomfortable; and we tend to blurt out things that often are worse than being silent. You talk about that as an example in your own personal situation. What I've always thought about this, is--this is one of those rare examples where a black and white rule like that is actually quite helpful. Sometimes those rules are just the best we can do. But the idea to sit in silence with a person who's suffering and saying nothing--that silence is yelling at us often, 'Talk, talk, talk. Say something.' And, just to sit there and let the other person speak first.

And, I've always thought of that injunction is about allowing the--is to keep you from saying something inappropriate. But I think it also has a deeper meaning, which is it's to get you to listen. It's not just 'Don't talk.' It's, 'Listen.' I like that rule. I think it's a really helpful rule to start, but I'm curious what advice you give people in situations of tragedy for how to behave and how you--you don't have to go into the ones that didn't help you, but I'd be curious if you would talk about some of the ones that did help.

Azra Raza: I mean, there were some wildly absurd reactions from people. Like, somebody came after Harvey died and offered to take me out to singles bars. Another person wanted to console me in a way, but the manner in which he did it was quite outlandish. He said, 'Azra, I'm so sorry Harvey died. But, don't worry. You'll join him soon and you two can live happily after ever in heaven.' That was really breathtakingly strange to me.

Russ Roberts: And, then there was that one of, 'He's gone but you look great.'

Azra Raza: Oh yeah. That one.

Russ Roberts: 'Congratulations. Don't be sad. You look fabulous.' I think there's a terrible challenge in our culture these days that no one's allowed to be unhappy. Mourning is against the rules. So, if you look sad I've got to try to cheer you up. I can't ever just let you be sad. I've got to find something. 'Your food's delicious. Your house looks great. Lovely outfit.'

Azra Raza: But, it's actually the inability of people to communicate with each other. I mean, especially emotionally.
So, what you see around you are people who are unable, in fact, not just to communicate with each other but then to give sympathy and to receive sympathy, also. 

For the sake of humanity and non-human animals, I have to record some absurdities that I heard after Max passed away. Thanks to Dr. Azra Raza for nudging me to open up. I didn't talk about it until now thinking it might be that my pain and anger made me filter reality. I now realize, it is very important to talk about it since it was indeed an unfiltered reality.

For the record, these people were never my emotional friends, and to be fair to them, they were forced into my grief. They would have been happy and content sending a card or text.
Nevertheless, they were forced into my grief and I never wanted them to be part of grief. I knew for years that they never understood nor attempted to understand my bond with Max.

I wasn't sure I should come or not.
(I am thinking - Fuck... really? and I have seen you wired up emotionally when it comes to your relationships and subjective stuff like green papers)

I have heard so many deaths in the past few weeks.
(I am thinking - Fuck statistics. I have seen you fucking cry for stupid subjective bullshit)

"I am thinking" part forced me to look at the absurdity while I was in deep pain. That is not right. Please don't do that anyone and keep your fucking mouth shut. Please shove your intelligence, your self-centered busy lives, and whatever the fucking purpose on the earth into the ass at least for a few minutes. Or just don't show up and go away.

To top all this off, Max passed away on the first day of the holiday season. Some people had this sense of "accelerate impatience" for grief. God forbid if they miss the holiday season and Christmas, shit would come out their mouth instead of arse.

Note: Call it randomness or a window into complex systems - the impossible happened within 100 days of Max's passing away and within his first birthday without him. The simple, quiet, and ordinary life we lived and happily embraced for almost 14 years was forced unwillingly upon the entire world. The eerie similarities between our lifestyle for 14 years and the current lockdown protocols across the globe and the timing of all of it make me feel that this the Earth's way of grieving for Max. 

The worst part is the smile. Remember,  the current fad is all about being happy and society preaches smiling like a nutcase irrespective of the situation. I guess we are already in Hurley's Brave New World or maybe, this is a different recipe of sociopaths.

Smith's wrote about this almost 300 years ago - On Acting for Others:

For Smith, good wishes don't count for very much unless they're followed by the hard work it takes to realize the object of our wishes. It's too easy for that kind of person to feel good about himself just because he feels bad for others. But Smith thinks there's nothing to admire in that. What really deserve our praise and admiration are not the warm feeling we can feel in private or in a passive state, but the "action" and "exertion" that take effort and energy.  And Smith leaves no doubt that the work will be hard, telling us in the line that follows that someone who wants to live up to this will have to "call forth the whole vigor of his soul" and "strain every nerve." Living this sort of life will not be for the faint of heart.

The craziest thing is that it is considered "impolite" to talk about these uni-emotion creatures chewing a poor animal's dead body in their mouth but it is polite to talk absurdities.

This was the worst day of my life and if someone cannot shut up and unable to communicate emotionally then all I can say is - see you in another life.

It is nauseating to see people who cannot even emote. In order to reason, to be intelligent, to be caring, to be kind and to have a sense of gratitude for life - we need to shed a tear when we - hear a piece of beautiful music, lose ourselves in nature, read a beautiful sentence, watch a movie scene and myriad of other things outside of our self-centered lives and families.

These uni-emotion creatures probably have rewired their brains to multi-emote only for themselves and their family. The irony is these people have, are, and will depend on other living beings for most of their lives.

The easiest way to identify and flush out these uni-emotion creatures during normal days is by simply observing them use sarcasm, pointless joke, or stupidest smile while discussing emotional and deeper topics. They will move away from such discussions as fast as a fart in the air. Some would "outsource" it to God. 

Once again, Smith brilliantly captured these uni-emotion creatures "thought process" in the little finger analogy:

When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.

On the brighter side, Max had touched so many lives and a majority of other reactions touched my heart.

Those reactions had limited words and the tears in their eyes were deafening to my eyes.

I have seen my dad cry only twice in my life. The third time, I heard him cry when Max passed away. He said to me that Max was your soulmate. Little did I know that my dad felt that way. I will never forget that sentence.

An old lady who knew us for more than a decade, I went to her house a couple of days later to tell her about Max. The moment she opened the door, she saw my eyes, she started crying and hugged me and said - "I know, I know." I didn't even have to tell her about Max passing away. I will cherish that moment until my last breath.

I have known my current boss for only 6 months and he never met Max. When I went back to work after the holidays, he asked me how were the holidays. I said, I lost Max and started crying. He came running to me and believe it not - he started crying.

Few weeks before the lockdown, I had a conversation with him about his crying spontaneously after I told him about Max. Let's just say that it was one of the important conversations of my life.

There were so many tears from others I hardly knew, handwritten long notes and cards from Max's numerous vets and nurses, our fellow dog-walking friends, and surprisingly touching emails from readers of this blog whom I never met. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You all have touched me so deeply. Thank you.

These were beautiful moments. Real emotional connection and deep intelligence. No fucking amount of money, fame, and mindless busy-ness can bring peace than these little ordinary emotional moments.

Years ago I wanted to end my life. But Max came into my life and made me look at the beauty of life. Then I lived for him and thought, maybe I will live until he does. These beautiful moments and numerous other ones taught me the importance of being alive, the importance of action, and acting with limited speech, and now, it has given me the courage to see through this life without Max until the end.

If you are suffering any absurdities, please speak up. It doesn't matter if you feel angry, sad, or maybe you have a big forgiving heart and can even smile it off. But please speak up. It is important to bring this to the surface and bring a change in society. These are basic and fundamental emotions that need to be emoted. Otherwise, we homo-sapiens will diverge and evolve into a different mutated version of sapiens.

Passing laws might change "protocols" of cannibalism to slavery to factory farms. But they don't change minds. Without changing minds, we are sitting on a ticking time bomb. What changes the mind is a deep emotional realization of how rare and precious life is in space and time. A loss of one life is a huge loss. All atrocities and unspeakable sufferings arise from this human inability to emote. 

If you have no one in your life and suffering in silence, reach out to me. Max inside me will help you in whatever way I can.

Maybe some of the absurdities I encountered weren't huge after all (thankfully), but many wouldn't be as lucky as I was. They need us.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. 

- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

Please don't be afraid of your emotions and please do emote when necessary. Please understand our emotions are the driving force behind our goodness. It is not easy. No one said life is easy. But as Annie said if you go inside the deeps where psychology has warned us and ride the monsters, you will find beauty. You will find peace. And you will find the importance of our complex and inexplicable caring for all creatures that we share this planet with. No laws can force you to do it. It's a personal journey that one has to embark on willingly. So, bon voyage from Max and me.

I will close, with this beautiful Tamil song from a movie titled "Language". It's a story of a deaf and dumb girl falling in love.

Is the language of the wind sound or music? 

Is the language of the flowers colors or fragrance?

Is the language of the ocean waves or surf?

Is the language of love the eyes or the lips?

If we understand the language of nature

we don't need the languages of humanity

If we understand the language of the heart

humanity wouldn't need any language

When the wind blows, there's no direction

When love talks, there's no language

Like you can understand spoken words, you can't understand the silence

The words that the eyes speak, God doesn't know

The wandering wind that defies direction, cannot be given a form

All the languages that speak love, cannot be constricted to the world of sound

The speech spoken by the sky will be shown through raindrops

The speech of the rainbow will be shown through colors

If the truth is silenced, tears become a language

If femininity is silenced, her shyness will become a language

When all sounds are asleep, little stars become the language

In the heart where desires lie, restlessness becomes a language

What I've Been Reading

I have a friend who likes to say that when he reads The Theory of Moral Sentiments it often feels like Smith "giveth on one page, and taketh away on another." That rings true, and in the end, I think a lot of the fun of reading Smith lies in patiently trying to figure out how all the moving parts build off of one another and ultimately hang together into one integrated system.

The genesis of "Das Adam Smith Problem" was because people failed (still failing) to look at his insights as an integrated system and started cherry-picking their favorite pet peeves to feed their confirmation bias.

Max's 2015 Card - Adam Smith in memory of his best friend David Hume. According to Smith, Hume was his perfect example of a wise and virtuous human being.  

Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life by Ryan Patrick Hanley.

Adam Smith's insights are like a never-ending Russian Doll sans any dimensionality reduction. It's been close two decades since I started reading him and every time, I learn so much from him.

Pretty much 99.99% of people have encountered in 45 years on this planet miss this key difference.

Smith's belief that living a good life requires bringing together action and reflection not only to his philosophy of living, but also distinguishes his project from other sorts of efforts in this vein.  

 [---]

Smith, to put it bluntly, knew that there is all the difference in the world between learning how to get ahead in life and learning how to live life well. 

Ryan Patrick weaves Smith's philosophy from one chapter to another beautifully based on one quote for each chapter which answers part of the question and remaining unanswered ones weaved into the next chapter and so on in a typical Smithian way.

I consider Smith, Montaigne, Hume, Buddha, and the Stoics as rare breeds - They were the original Data Scientists of Human Nature. John Gray is the only contemporary one that I can think of.

Smith's philosophy of living is shaped by his interest in this ancient question of what it means to have an "excellent and praise-worthy character." Yet his way of answering this ancient question is very modern. A member in good standing of the Enlightenment, Smith is committed to empirical methods: observation and study of real data. His vision, and indeed the vision of wise and virtuous man, of the prefect and the praiseworthy and the noble and the honorable, is grounded in his study of real people in the real world. Both Smith and his wise and virtuous man are always observers-spectators-describing details of what they've seen in different men and moments. This approach is part of what makes Smith's book readable, even today. In so doing, he trains us to become good spectators in our own right, better able to see and recognize good acts, good characters, and good lives when we come across them - in Smith's words, he aims "to make us know the original when we meet with it."

There are so many lessons we can learn from Smith. I tried to condense as much I can to kick start those learnings to become wise and virtuous as perhaps the nature of human fragility will allow.

So, let's try for ourselves, for the sake of society, for the sake of all living beings and as an obligation for having given a chance to dwell this beautiful planet for an infinitesimal time.

On Self-Interest: 
I think this is the most misunderstood (probably on purpose) of all of Smith's insights. The context of self-interest pertains to bodily needs to take care of oneself. Even Bhagavata Gita and Buddhism talk about this - if one cannot take care of oneself then he/she cannot take care of his/her family nor society.

The difference between needs (bodily ones defined by nature) and wants (greed defined by sapiens).

Smith's position on the goodness of self-interest is more nuanced than Mr.Gekko's. Self-interest, he thinks, can be pursued in a moral way. But it can also be (and often is) pursued in an immoral way. A key part of the challenge of living life well consists of understanding the difference between these two ways. 

On Caring for Others: 
Nature not only inclined us towards self-interest but also we are wired to be naturally concerned about the well being of others (to state the oblivious - outside of one's family).

"It's simply not the case that I can be fully happy when I know that you are really miserable. And this he thinks is true of even the most self-centered people in the world. "How selfish soever" they might be, even they are happier when the people they live with are happier.

On Acting for Others:
There is so much of David Hume's influence on Smith's philosophy and in turn, Buddism was a big influence on Hume's philosophy. Action, Action, and Action - that is the core of Buddhist philosophy sans any magic and heaven syndrome.

I lost count of number many people I know who (still) say it's "bad" to treat animals cruelty and kill them for gastro-intestinal pleasures but they gluttonize without any sense of civic sense in less than a day or so of feeling bad.

The difference between feeling for others (benevolence) and acting for others (beneficence). Smith, as it turns out, has little good to say about the kind of people who merely feels for others - the kind who likes to profess (and often very loudly professes) his "good inclinations and kind wishes," and is prone to "fancy himself the friend of mankind, because in his heart he wishes well." For Smith, good wishes don't count for very much unless they're followed by the hard work it takes to realize the object of our wishes. It's too easy for that kind of person to feel good about himself just because he feels bad for others. But Smith thinks there's nothing to admire in that. What really deserve our praise and admiration are not the warm feeling we can feel in private or in a passive state, but the "action" and "exertion" that take effort and energy.  And Smith leaves no doubt that the work will be hard, telling us in the line that follows that someone who wants to live up to this will have to "call forth the whole vigor of his soul" and "strain every nerve." Living this sort of life will not be for the faint of heart.

On Imagination:
Smith covers our "subjective" needs. It has some of the deepest roots for most of our miseries (including religious magics to magics of markets to current silicon valley technological magic).

The body has its limits. The imagination, on the other hand, is essentially limitless. Among its other unique features, imagination can transcend physical limits, and can move about, as it were, without regard to the limits of time and space. This enables it to do certain things that no other part of our selves can do. But its limitlessness also means that there may be no limits to what it wants. 

On Bettering Our Condition: 
Smith lays out that wealth is one of the important elements in society and he believed in markets since it would help poor people who are "out of the sight of mankind". He was aware of wealth correlates to signaling stating that we love wealth since it enables us for our need for "love of distinction.".

But he cautions:

Wealth gets what our imaginations want. But it doesn't get us the "ease" our bodies want. Nor does it bring us the "tranquility" that our minds want. 

On Miseries and Disorders:
I laid out the importance of ordinary life using Smith's story of a poor man's son.

Unhappiness lies in over-valuing what we lack, and under-valuing what we have.

On the Healthy Mind:
Happiness is a thing of mind rather than the body isn't a revolutionary idea. After all; the Stoics argued this thousands of years ago, and mindfulness experts continue to emphasize it today. But what makes Smith's invocation of this idea so noteworthy is his understanding of its implications for our economic life.

On Tranquility and Pleasure: 
Smith by linking these two categories of tranquility and enjoyment together, suggests we can't have one without the other. It isn't the case then that we can renounce enjoyment and still find happiness. 
Instead, if we hope to do justice to the full range of our natures, we have to find a way of living that brings tranquility and enjoyment together - a way of living that strikes a middle path between the ascetic who deprives himself of enjoyment in search of tranquility and the poor man's son who deprives himself of tranquility in search of enjoyment. 

On Worshipping Wealth:
Living our lives well requires that we figure out a productive way to navigate the divide between what the world says is good and what is in fact genuinely good for us. 

On Friendship:
Smith was extremely lucky to have David Hume as his best friend. He has a very direct answer to the question of who makes the best friend:

The attachment which is founded upon the love of virtue, as it is certainly of all attachments, the most virtuous; so it is likewise the happiest, as well as most permanent and secure. 

Wow, that is one beautiful and best way to put it. Montaigne in fact started writing his essays after his best friend La Boetie passed away.

On Pleasure (& his differences with Aristotle): 
And of course, I am aligned with Smith.

Man is an anxious animal and must have care swept off by something that can exhilarate the spirits.

To say that "man is an anxious animal," as Smith does here, is to take a considerable step beyond what Aristotle famously said when he said that "man is a political animal." Almost all the difference between Smith and Aristotle, and between ancient and modern political thought, is encapsulated here. 

Aristotle and Smith had their differences but they agree on one major thing - moderation (of pleasures and other things).

On Hatred and Anger:

"Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind."

I think we all know that now and we don't need Adam Smith to state the obvious. But the genius of Smith lies in his exception to the above rule when he coined the phrase "sympathetic indignation" or "sympathetic resentment."

This is the hatred or anger that good people instinctively feel when they see the innocent and weak hurt by selfish and strong. A young man assaults an old woman to steal her purse: any person of ordinary decent who has the misfortune to see this can't help but feel visceral indignation toward the young, and desire that he pay the price for what he's so unjustly done. This instinctive desire for vengeance is what leads us to support those institutions of justice that bring order to society. So hatred or anger of this sort may be painful for a good person to experience, but it is clearly good for society. 

Carol Travi's book Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion is one of my favorite books and it covers a lot of ground on the importance of anger as part of our emotional toolkit.

On Being Loved & On Loving & On Being Lovely: 
I think Max's card above is based on brilliant insight from Smith. Thank you, sir.

Plus How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness by Russ Roberts covers more ground on this topic.

On Flourishing:
Here we see an idealist in Smith but within the limits of human nature (he never proposes any magic nor utopia).

I am not a big fan of predictions on abstract matters, I am going to bet on one now. If and if only things go "well", future generations, future AI algorithms, future genetics and a myriad of other "stuff" will incorporate lots of insights from Adam Smith.

When we imagine an ideal, and fix it in our minds, we have something to aim at. An ideal of this sort gives us a sense of where we want to go, and even gives us a way to measure whether or not the path that we've chosen to take is getting us closer to where we want to go. 

On Seeing Ourselves: 
I cannot stress enough on the importance of this insight. This one phrase, the "impartial spectator" had one of the greatest influences in my life.

Smith knows that we often willfully overlook certain aspects of ourselves that we don't like in order to focus on other things about ourselves that we do like. He calls this, memorably, the "mysterious veil of self-delusion,", and insists that most of us find it hard (even painful) when we're presented with the whole truth about ourselves.

There are tons of writings on the impartial spectator. To put it bluntly, Smith's whole idea was that each and every one of us should have an impartial spectator and that is a rudimentary necessity for "invisible hand" to operate effectively. We all know what happened - humans conveniently killed the impartial spectator and embraced some abstract "invisible hand" with phrases like "greed is good", "quant" and so on.

On Dignity:
If we do our job well and fully inhabit the perspective of an impartial spectator of ourselves, we'll come to realize that we have no claims to thinking ourselves better than others.

When we embrace our "real littleness" we not only allow ourselves to let go of ourselves, but we also open ourselves up to others in a way that allows us to see what matters to them, and indeed, ultimately, why they themselves matter.

On Equality: 
Smith aligns with American exceptionalism of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal by nature and they differ only from habit, custom, and education.

Smith's claim about the natural equality of human beings thus distances him from Plato and Socrates. But it also brings him closer to our world. 

On Choice:
This is one my favorite all times passages from Theory of Moral Sentiments - the two different roads in life that we can choose from:

We desire both to be respectable and to be respected. We dread both to be contemptible and to be contemned. But, upon coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. To deserve, to acquire, and to enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us, equally leading to the attainment of this so much desired object; the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness. Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity. the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour; the one more gaudy and glittering in its colouring; the other more correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline: the one forcing itself upon the notice of every wandering eye; the other, attracting the attention of scarce any body but the most studious and careful observer. They are the wise and the virtuous chiefly, a select, though, I am afraid, but a small party, who are the real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue. The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

On Self and Others: 
Smith again raises about Aristotle and other ancient philosophers (who were focused more on life and character skills).

Virtue isn't simply a skill or strength. It's more than that. "Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises above what is vulgar and ordinary." 

On Perfection:
This is a prefect cure for the current self-centered me, me, and more me world.

When we perfect our natures by adopting the virtues that enable us to feel so much for others and so little for ourselves, we also promote the perfection of society. This comes out in the claim that his particular type of individual produces in society a "harmony of sentiments and passions." Moreover, Smith insists not only that perfection of this sort fosters harmony among mankind, but that it "alone" can produce harmony. In any case, the key point here is that it is not just the individual who benefits from the pursuit of self-perfection, but "mankind". 

On Wisdom and Virtue: 
The Smith believes every man in his mind has the capacity to be wise and virtuous - the only difference between wise and virtuous people is the work they put into developing this idea in their life.

Now, this why I love Smith so much - departs from Christianity and other religious 'magic' and focuses on earthly actions.

Christianity has a different idea of perfection to be sure, but it too teaches that if we hope to see perfection we need revelation, a gift of grace bringing sight to the blind and enabling us to bear witness to a perfection transcending the things of this world. But Smith's wise and virtuous man takes a different route. The perfection he sees isn't one that is in some sense "out there", requiring a special revelation to see, but one that is in fact very much a thing of our own world "down here" - and indeed in two senses. 

On Humility and Beneficence: 
So one consequence of a wise and virtuous man's wisdom is that this wisdom serves to teach him "real modesty" and "humility." Wisdom thus leads to virtue by precluding pride and restraining egocentrism. In this sense, the wise and virtuous person's wisdom complements and completes the work of both the impartial spectator and the awful virtues. But the wisdom of such a person also shapes her relationship with others. 

On Praise and Praiseworthiness:
The wise and virtuous person doesn't care much about praise and to take it even further, he is also conscious of the fact that there will never be any praise bestowed upon him (reread the two different roads analogy).

Smith's paradox: by sacrificing our interests we realize a deeper self-interest. Or put it differently: only by forgoing familiar pleasures and doing painful work do we come in time to experience the highest pleasures. 

"Self-approbation" is the answer to why someone would put up with that.

Smith's answer is that such people do what they do because they care more for their approval than for the approval of others. "Self-approbation", that is "if not the only, is at least the principal object" with which a wise and virtuous person is concerned, of indeed "the love of it, is the love of virtue." 

On Socrates:
I often call Smith a master of human nature. He has the unique ability to flush out even hidden "agenda" behind some of the philosophical virtue seeking and pure self-interested bullshit.

So the natural question that arises is how do Socrates and Jesus live up to the Smith's paragon of a wise and virtuous person who transcends the ordinary boundaries of human excellence.

As admirable as Socrates's self-command (for example, lack of fear of death) maybe, something about Socrates' approach to philosophy troubles Smith. Put too simply:  Socrates' philosophy may have liberated him from a fear of death, but it failed to liberate him from other sorts of self-regarding concerns including especially the love of attention that has been such a focus of our inquiry to this point. In this vein, Smith goes so far as to lump Socrates in with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, invoking all three as cases of "excessive self-admiration."

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Smith thinks nature has made us for action. And thus however wise they may be, philosophers can't be considered both wise and virtuous if their sublime speculations draw them away from those "active duties" with which nature has charged us. 

On Jesus:
Unlike Socrates, who appears more than once in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Jesus isn't mentioned once in the text. That said, the religion founded in Jesus' name is, mentioned three times (and interestingly enough, all three times it was about love).

Smith eschews magic "out there" syndrome (we already know his philosophy is meant for action "out here" on earth). He uses religion only as a guide to morality and nothing else.

I agree with Smith here since of all the different moral tools available to humans, religion is one of them (and not the only one). But we all know that humans stopped practicing morality and follow mindless rituals from religion (Sunday am ritual, treating animals as products made for us, etc.)

On Hume:
At the end, who does Smith considers (if not Socrates and Jesus) the paragon of his vision of a wise and virtuous man?

Max's card above answers that question. It is none other than his best friend David Hume.

Upon the whole, I have always considered him both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit. 

As perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.. - what a beautiful phrase!! It's not that Smith is biased towards his best friend Hume but even Hume's doctor Joseph Black, described his patient in his final days as "quite free from anxiety and in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it."

Max was exactly (maybe even better) mindset during his final weeks and days. I wish, my body and mind would allow me to die the same way.

The key to all this was Hume was an atheist during Christian and religious fanaticism was at its peak and omnipresent. And Smith aligned with Hume at the risk of being a social pariah. This speaks volumes of their characters and their friendship.

I am wasn't gifted to have such a friendship with any human but nature gave something even better by sheer random luck of meeting Max. What a journey it has been and I couldn't have asked for more. I love you, Max, for everything you taught me and you became my impartial spectator with a face.

Hume and Smith's friendship is captured brilliantly in the book The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought by Dennis C. Rasmussen

On God: 
Smith agrees - "that a certain kind of idea of God can in fact promote our moral action." 

To remind everyone again, Smith uses God for love and moral action - and doesn't bring magic nor "out there" heaven syndrome. He wants us to use some good moral laws prescribed by God to act wisely and virtuously here on earth without any dreams of a ticket to heaven.

On Stoicism:
Lots of ink has been spilled on the question of Smith's Stoicism, but I cannot adjudicate the whole dispute here. Instead, I'll end this inquiry into Smith's philosophy of living by noting just one point of agreement with the Stoics. The Stoics, Smith says, taught that wisdom leads to an appreciation of one' s place in our good and providentially ordered world. It also leads us to want to contribute to the order and goodness of the world through our own actions. 


On the surface, a lot of Smith's unique insights about human nature might seem like falling into the "ought" bucket of his friend David Hume's famous "is vs ought" dictum. But in reality, the greatest insight that Smith offers us is that there so much still untapped in the "is" bucket of human nature.

A society driven by signaling traits has subsided (maybe almost eradicated) our better angles of some of the "is" traits so much we have deluded ourselves (including thyself) that this is the "normal" human condition. 

It's about time that we understand that a lot of the so-called utopian dreams are within our reach. Alas, If and only if we make an effort and try.