Perpetual Anger, Perpetual Grievance & Perpetual Need For Political Enemies

I have been writing about this for decades now... it started with talk radio and cable news. I observed friends, neighbors, and co-workers perpetually angry albeit most of them were better off than I was at that time. 

It was very weird to me since growing up in India, I lived around some of the poorest people on the planet but yet they weren't angry. They were content and most importantly were normal in perpetual penury. 

Around the same time, I started listening to talk radio and cable news, it was addictive to say the least. A simple pattern started emerging. They were angry all the goddamn time. 

How can someone live their life watching hours of spewing anger inside their living room. It was clearly unhealthy. I threw my TV away and the rest is history. 

The moron that I was, I started telling people that this stuff is not healthy and makes them sick. Of course, they didn't change but the right wing thought I was leftist looney and left wing that I was rightish madman. 

This was dangerous territory to embark on since what's lost to creative destruction never comes back. Plus add to this syndrome, the apt titles of some of Tyler Cowen books - average is over, stubborn attachments, and complacent class. Plus add to this a heavy dose of self delusion as if they are one step away from being millionaires or billionaires - a perpetual unattainable desire driven life.  

To make things even weirder, even people who attain an unattainable lifestyle are also angry! Go figure!

The younger generation with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex blissfully unaware of any of these; are sucked into their cell phones and waiting one day to join the perpetual angry force. 

One side offers a solution which is the exact reason a spark became a wild fire and the other side wants to be angry perpetually :-) 

It's a fucked up situation never seen in history and we are living now make an unique history. 

I have no idea where this is going to lead.. I have no goddamn idea. 

Ironically, there is so much more to learn, discover - knowledge we know now is minuscule and there is infinite knowledge out there for us to embrace with awe, wonder, and grow as living beings. 

We can create so many jobs, we already have enough shelter, food, water - all that is needed is masses to embrace this thirst for knowledge and drive.

But alas not many are addicted to perpetual need for awe and wonder.  

Paul Katsafanas's essay is the most important piece you will read this year and understanding this disease is crucial for humanity to survive this century. 

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.

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Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.

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As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action. Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values. And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’ But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake. Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point. That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations. Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better. Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.

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But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation? Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.

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With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.

But grievance politics operates differently. It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame. Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

Devotion is capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

Doomsaying Can Become A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Taleb once said: 

Ingratitude is the most potent information about someone's future. 

I've never see an ingrate who did'nt end up a bitter *loser*. 

Lack of gratitude, mindless individualism  plus insatiable appetite for pleasures (a.k.a pleasuring ourselves to death) are a deadly trio. These are some of the causal reasons for the mass neuroticism. 

In the last five years - I have seen three people die of this neuroticism and one bed ridden. The crazy thing is I predicted it was going to happen and even told those folks more than a decade ago. 

Those three causal reasons are eradicated from my life.

• I wake up kissing Max with a big gratitude for being in my life. I have immense gratitude for having hot / running water, tooth paste, coffee - all this within 10 minutes of waking up.

• Everything I have is because of so many other lives that crossed my path (some even before I was born) and helped me become who I am now.

• Yes, on Oct' 4th 2019 my desires ended but I don't follow that for the sake of following it. 
• Naughty Neo licking my face, Max's sister independent miss Fluffy completely trusting me and Garph's elegant nap on my chest - when these beautiful little actions help me melt into that moment, why the heck I would desire anything more?

I have been reading David Brooks for over 2 decades and learned a ton on human nature from his writings. He is one of the sane political voices. Reading his piece felt like he is reading my mind. 

Today’s communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, the venal elites are out to get us; we find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression together. Again, there is a right-wing version (Donald Trump’s “I am your retribution”) and a left-wing version (the intersectional community of oppressed groups), but what they share is an us-versus-them Manichaeism. The culture war gives life shape and meaning.

In this way, pessimism becomes a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

This culture has produced a succession of prophets of doom across the ideological spectrum, people who established their moral courage by portraying the situation as negatively as possible.

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The prevailing culture nurtures these attitudes. But there is a giant gap between many of these negative perceptions and actual reality. 

For example, since the mid-1970s the number of women who have earned college degrees and graduate degrees, and taken leadership positions in society, has risen dramatically; women’s wages are also much higher than in previous generations. Yet, as the psychologist Jean Twenge shows in her book Generations, teenage girls today are more likely than teenage girls in the ’70s to believe that women are discriminated against. Surely that’s partly because successive waves of feminism have raised women’s awareness of ongoing discrimination. But women are doing meaningfully better by these measures, and yet young women are feeling worse.

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Human relationships have come to be viewed through a prism of power and exploitation. Institutions are assumed to be fundamentally illegitimate, rigged. A friend who teaches at Stanford recently told me that many of his students would not assume he had gone into teaching to serve his students, or to seek their good; rather, they see him as a cog in the corrupt system holding them down.

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Our most recent previous period of apocalyptic collectivism was the McCarthy era. During that time, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noticed that his fellow anti-communists were constantly demanding “that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor.” It wasn’t enough to disapprove of communism; one had to engage in collective moments of group hate. Meanwhile, on the left, intellectuals warned of a looming age of American fascism. 

This mode of escalating indignation led to what Niebuhr called “apoplectic rigidity,” an inability to see the world as it is, but rather only those nightmarish elements that justify the hatred and rage that is the source of your self-worth.

Before long, apoplectic rigidity becomes the default mode of seeing things. This damages the ability to perceive reality accurately. One of the great mysteries of this political moment is why everyone feels so terrible about the economy when in fact it’s in good shape. GDP is growing, inflation is plummeting, income inequality seems to be dropping, real wages are rising, unemployment is low, the stock market is reaching new peaks. And yet many people are convinced that the economy is rotten. These are not just Republicans unwilling to admit that things are going well under a Democratic president.

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Believing in vicious conspiracy theories can also boost your self-esteem: You are the superior mind who sees beneath the surface into the hidden realms where evil cabals really run the world. You have true knowledge of how the world works, which the masses are too naive to see. Conspiracy theories put you in the role of the truth-telling hero. 

Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.

The problem is that if you mess around with negative emotions, negative emotions will mess around with you, eventually taking over your life. Focusing on the negative inflates negativity. 

As John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister note in their book The Power of Bad, if you interpret the world through the lens of collective trauma, you may become overwhelmed by self-perpetuating waves of fear, anger, and hate. You’re likely to fall into a neurotic spiral, in which you become more likely to perceive events as negative, which makes you feel terrible, which makes you more alert to threats, which makes you perceive even more negative events, and on and on. 

Moreover, negativity is extremely contagious. When people around us are pessimistic, indignant, and rageful, we’re soon likely to become that way too. This is how today’s culture has produced mass neuroticism.

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I am not saying that America doesn’t have real problems—Trump, climate change, racial injustice, persistent income inequality, a rising tide of authoritarianism around the globe. In our age, as in every age, there are things to protest and things to be grateful for. 

What I am saying is that the persistent gaps between how things are and how they are perceived are new, maybe even unprecedented.

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We have produced a culture that celebrates catastrophizing. This does not lend itself to effective strategies for achieving social change. The prevailing assumption seems to be that the more bitterly people denounce a situation, the more they will be motivated to change it. But history shows the exact opposite to be true. As the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman demonstrated in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, social reform tends to happen in moments of growth and prosperity. It happens when people are feeling secure and are inspired to share their good fortune. It happens when leaders can convey a plausible vision of the common good.

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The old late-20th-century culture of rampant individualism had to go. It liberated individuals but frayed the bonds that formerly united people. Somehow, our new communal culture needs to replace bonds of negative polarization and collective victimization with bonds of common loves and collective action. 

 

The Transformative Power of Nature on Children and Society

No democracy can long endure if its citizens are unable to tolerate different points of view, or to walk in another voter’s shoes. The political and cultural polarization of the United States can be blamed on universities, social media, Fox News, or the language police. But, for whatever reason, our society suffers from a severe empathy shortage.

How do we nurture empathy? Numerous studies have documented how relationships with pets and wildlife build empathy and compassion in children. Research suggests that nearby nature can reduce neighborhood and domestic violence. Greener communities and learning environments, including the presence of animals in schools, also build empathy and social capital — the glue that holds a society together.

For example, children in a natural play space are more likely to be inclusive and fair, as compared to a typical asphalt playground. They’re also more likely to invent their own games, which builds executive function: the ability to make one’s own decisions, to be entrepreneurial — still another economic benefit.

- More Here

Tranquility Tricks From Keanu Reeves!

Sometime around my 30's, I started following these simple tricks. 

1. Don't argue with people who don't listen. 

2. Listen more, talk less. 

3. This is the most important thing which had profound change in my life - Rating the open-mindedness of the other person: 

There are many writers I’ve stopped reading in the last few months. Their level of open-mindedness just isn’t there. They believe they are right based on their own experience, and to question them is an act of war. So, I simply mute their voice and move on to more open-minded voices.

Open-mindedness is sexiness — not because it makes your biceps appear bigger — but because open-mindedness is the gateway to understanding the world we live in.

- Read the whole piece here

This means avoiding some of the "famous" columnists, journalists, authors (past and present), some books, completing avoid news and sometimes avoiding an entire discipline such as "study" of consciousness. 

It is much easier to remove things/habits we have in life rather than adding new ones to bring tranquility. 

Human Evil: The Mythical and the True Causes of Violence - Roy F. Baumeister

Most people who commit evil acts do not themselves regard their actions as evil. Therefore, to understand their perspective is to understand the actions in a way that somehow diminishes their evilness. To be sure, as researchers and scientists our primary goal is to understand. Hence we must perhaps accept that our approach will carry the moral risk of mitigating our condemnation of some of the worst things that human beings do.

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The third root cause of evil is idealism. In some ways this is the most disturbing and tragic, because the perpetrators are motivated by the belief that they are doing something good. Idealists of both the left and the right have sometimes believed that their noble goals justify violent means. The worst body counts of the twentieth century were perpetrated by people who believed that they were doing what was necessary to create a utopian society, whether this reflected a left-wing vision (as in the communist slaughters in China and the Soviet Union) or a right-wing one (as in the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany). Earlier centuries witnessed slaughters perpetrated in the name of religion, as people killed to serve their gods.

To be sure, sometimes the idealism was a cover for baser motives, including instrumental ones. Some people used religious wars or persecutions to enrich themselves. Yet it is not reasonable to dismiss the sincere idealism of many of the perpetrators. In a large expedition such as the Crusades, there were some along for the adventure and others hoping to get rich. But many honestly believed that they were doing God’s work by fighting the infidels in order to reclaim sacred ground for what they thought was the true faith. 

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From the victim’s perspective, these different root causes do make a difference. The instrumentally violent person can be bought off. If he wants your money, you can give it to him, and that in most cases reduces, ends, or avoids the harm that comes to you. Threatened egotism likewise produces violence that is a means to an end, and so victims can sometimes satisfy the perpetrator and terminate their suffering. If and when the perpetrator’s egotism is satisfied, the attack may stop. In contrast, the victims of the idealists have fewer options, because in many cases they believe that their sacred goals require the victim’s death. It is harder to compromise with an idealist than with an opportunist. And, last, if the perpetrator is a sadist, the victim’s lot is clearly the worst. There is not much chance to buy him off or appease him to reduce your suffering, especially if your suffering is precisely what is rewarding to him. 

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Many causes of aggression and violence operate by interfering with self-regulation. Alcohol has been shown to impair self-regulation in almost every sphere that has been studied (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994), for example, and alcohol is well established as a cause of violence (Bushman & Cooper, 1990). (Alcohol is neither a necessary nor sufficient cause, to be sure. It is just a moderator; though it is a rather powerful moderator.) Intense emotion impairs self-regulation, and it too can undermine restraints against violent impulses. Media violence may likewise increase aggression by weakening inner restraints.

In my view, the role of self-regulation in restraining violence has more than theoretical importance. If one considers the four root causes of evil, it is easy to become pessimistic. Those four will not be eradicated any time soon, and so the problem of evil may appear intractable. But preventing evil and reducing violence do not depend on eliminating the root causes. We can simply strengthen the restraints. If we improve self-control, we can indeed make the world a better place and reduce the quantity of evil. In other words, it may be overly optimistic to hope that violent impulses can be eliminated from human social life.

- Read the full paper here.

What this paper doesn't include are the modern-day cable news channels that are the genesis of a perpetually angry mob from our supposedly safe living rooms. This is a phenomenon never seen in history and this is already causing a lot of ripples in our civilized life. 

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.

Wisdom Of The Week

This correlation of populism and profit in fact marks a worrisome historical shift. At the end of the 19th century, when populism first emerged as a coherent political force in the United States, it acted in large part as a check on the dominant capitalist forces of the day. The People’s Party platform of 1892 attacked monopolies, championed workers’ rights, and declared that “the fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind.” Populists campaigned for government regulation, not against it. Today, populist furies constitute a direct source of profit for some of the most dynamic and economically important companies on the planet. The Koch brothers do not even bother to squirm away from this obvious fact. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg do squirm, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they do not control the forces they have unleashed.

Faced with this very real crisis, what should we do? At the end of her book, Rosenfeld quickly runs through a number of worthwhile initiatives: working to preserve judicial independence and the integrity of elections, fostering and protecting investigative journalism and higher education, and so forth. She also argues that, to counter the unruly economic forces that have helped to generate the current crisis, the most important answer lies in political action and government regulation. “We in the United States and elsewhere need to think long and hard,” she writes, “about the pitfalls of allowing a fully free-market approach, where money is unlimited,” to dominate the mechanisms by which we arrive at political truths. “Enhanced rules and regulations for communication are required if truth is to be either the starting point of our political process or the aim.”

This is, admittedly, a project fraught with peril. The line between enhanced rules and regulations for communication and the repressive abridgment of free speech can all too easily be transgressed, especially when the power to regulate falls into the wrong hands. In addition, such projects can easily backfire, as increasing regulation feeds conspiracy theories about government control and makes it easier than ever for populist firebrands to depict mainstream reporting and opinion as “fake news.” In the end, the most effective way to address the problem is to restrain the economic power of the companies and interests that profit most directly from populist attacks on epistemological authority, as well as the underlying distributions of power that have led to the current popular discontent.

But even as progressive forces work toward this long-term goal, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are not about to start moderating their opinions, and Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to do much to regulate themselves, no matter how much earnest criticism they receive in The New York Times. It is also time to start serious discussions about how to keep the immensely powerful communications forces unleashed in the past generation from immeasurably harming the public good. These are discussions to be entered into carefully, judiciously, moderately. But they are important to have.

- Where does truth fit into democracy?

What I've Been Reading

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life by Charles Murray. Murray has written this book for early twenty year olds who are on the verge of stepping into the wild wild world but his wisdom timeless and apt for every age.

Come to grips with the difference between being nice and being good

Nice and good are different. Being nice involves immediate actions and immediate consequences— you give water to the thirsty and comfort to the afflicted right here, right now. Being good involves living in the world so that you contribute to the welfare of your fellow human beings. Sometimes the immediate and long-term consequences are consistent with being nice; sometimes they are in conflict. That’s where the importance of the cardinal virtues comes in.

The four cardinal virtues were originated by the Greeks. They subsequently got their label from the Latin cardo, meaning “hinge,” because they are pivotal: All the other virtues, and the living of a virtuous life, depend on them. If you took an introductory philosophy course in college, they were probably translated from the Greek as courage, justice, temperance, and prudence.

Lacking the cardinal virtues, you can act in those other virtuous ways haphazardly, and occasionally have the effect you wish, but you cannot consistently have the effect you wish, nor will you be able to bring yourself to behave in those other virtuous ways when the going gets tough. You will still mean well. You will still be nice. You won’t be good.

Whether you find inspiration in the Western or the Eastern tradition is a minor issue. What is unacceptable is to go through life thinking that being nice is enough. You must come to grips with the requirements for being good.

On Proper Usage of English Language:

Issues. You can have issues with your spouse about your political views, but not about your infidelities. In the latter case, you don’t have a position to defend. You can’t have issues with alcohol or bipolar disorder. They aren’t arguing back. Stop using issues as a euphemism for a problem.

On Writing:

Writing well won’t necessarily push you up the ladder, but writing badly can keep you from rising. It’s no use being a clear thinker if you cannot communicate those thoughts. More important: Unless you’re in the hard sciences, the process of writing is your most valuable single tool for developing better ideas. The process of writing is the dominant source of intellectual creativity.

On Summer Jobs:
What’s so great about waiting tables in Montana or helping children bait hooks in Minnesota? Partly, they’re the jobs that are available. Ordinary jobs are hard to get for just three months, because employers know you’re not going to stay. But jobs at summer resorts also have a specific advantage: They are service jobs. Many of you have been waited upon constantly until this point in your life and you will be waited upon constantly as a successful adult. It is essential that you know what it’s like to do the waiting upon. Once you have been a server in a restaurant, you will never again look at dining in a restaurant as you did before you were a server. If you have ever had to attend to customers in a busy store, you are less likely to be an obnoxious customer thereafter.  You’ve got to spend serious time coping with situations that stress you psychologically and with people from alien backgrounds who stretch your understanding of life. Better to exercise your elastic limit now, when the penalties for errors are low, instead of fifteen years from now, when lack of experience in coping with adversity could be catastrophic.

On Happiness:
In ordinary life, lasting and justified satisfactions arise from only a few sources. I argue that they come from just four: family, vocation (which includes passionately pursued avocations and causes), community, and faith. If that sounds too dogmatic, try to think of a source of lasting and justified satisfactions that doesn’t fit into one of those four domains. It’s hard. It is not necessary for you to tap all four of these domains to be happy. There are happy atheists and happy single people. But the more of the four you are engaged in, the better your odds are.

On Marriage:
Marry someone with similar tastes and preferences. Which tastes and preferences? The ones that will affect life almost every day. It’s okay if you like the ballet and your spouse doesn’t. Reasonable people can accommodate each other on such differences. But if you dislike each other’s friends, or don’t get each other’s sense of humor, or— especially— if you have different ethical impulses, break it off and find someone else. Personal habits that you find objectionable in each other might be deal-breakers. Jacques Barzun identified the top three as punctuality, orderliness, and thriftiness. It doesn’t make any difference which point of the spectrum you’re on, he observed observed—“ Some couples are very happy living always in debt, always being late, and finding leftover pizza under a sofa cushion.” You just have to be at the same point on the spectrum. Intractable differences on any one of the three will, over time, become a fingernail dragged across the blackboard of a marriage.

What the Fox Knows

Nate Silver today launches the "new" FiveThirtyEight - good luck Nate; give them hell!!

I would never have launched FiveThirtyEight in 2008, and I would not have chosen to broaden its coverage so extensively now, unless I thought there were some need for it in the marketplace. Conventional news organizations on the whole are lacking in data journalism skills, in my view. Some of this is a matter of self-selection. Students who enter college with the intent to major in journalism or communications have above-average test scores in reading and writing, but below-average scores in mathematics. Furthermore, young people with strong math skills will normally have more alternatives to journalism when they embark upon their careers and may enter other fields.

This is problematic. The news media, as much as it’s been maligned, still plays a central a role in disseminating knowledge. More than 80 percent of American adults spend at least some time with the news each day. (By comparison, about 25 percent of Americans of all ages are enrolled in educational programs.)

There are some handicaps that conventional journalism faces when it seeks to move beyond reporting on the news to explaining it. One problem is the notion of “objectivity” as it’s applied in traditional newsrooms, where it’s often taken to be synonymous with neutrality or nonpartisanship. I prefer the scientific definition of objectivity, where it means something closer to the truth beyond our (inherently subjective) perceptions. Leave that aside for now, however. The journalistic notion of objectivity, however flawed, at least creates some standard by which facts are introduced and presented to readers.

But while individual facts are rigorously scrutinized and checked for accuracy in traditional newsrooms, attempts to infer causality sometimes are not, even when they are eminently falsifiable. (The increased speed of the news-gathering process no doubt makes this problem worse.7) Instead, while the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes placed in the category of “opinion journalism.” My disdain for opinion journalism (such as in the form of op-ed columns) is well established, but my chief problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to abide by the standards of either journalistic or scientific objectivity. Sometimes it doesn’t seem to abide by any standard at all.

And he will be sharing the data and code on Github:

Our team also has a broad set of skills and experience in methods that fall under the rubric of data journalism. These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features. Within a couple of months we’ll launch a podcast, and we’ll be collaborating with ESPN Films and Grantland to produce original documentary films. You’ll find us on television and radio, and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We’ll share data and code on Github.

Wet Streets Cause Rain

- via Rory Surtherland Tweet

Does the News Do Us Any Good?

We need to remember that not everything that makes it into the news is important and not everything that is important makes it into the news. We have this trusting and an obidence sense that what is in the news must be important. We need to step back and realize that there are many many important things out there that don't make it into the headlines for all sorts of reasons.

We have this vision that everything that are important happened in the last 24 hours but there is enormous amount of knowledge, wisdom, example from way back. We are such a future centric society that we have to remind ourselves of the importance of looking back for mining unfamiliar areas in order to keep our  lives, societies intact. We need people borrowing from unfamiliar areas but news is a monoculture despite the unbelievable proliferation of news outlets. 

In Defense of Malthus

Malthus' study of preventive checks, which covered regions around the globe and in various stages in mankind's history, was a study of human agents making conscious, rational decisions calculated to maximize their own self-interest and the interest of their potential offspring. It was the examination of how individuals check their own behavior for their own benefit that elevated Malthus' Essay beyond a simple mathematical description of population growth, and into a work of economic theory and practice that was remarkably innovative for its day and well-respected by contemporary economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. However, this aspect of the Essay was ignored, misunderstood, or derided in much of the rest of society.

It is the interplay of both positive and preventive checks that, according to Malthus, keep human population from actually growing at a geometric rate. Although at some times and places when the means of subsistence suddenly expands greatly, as was the case when North American settlers were spreading across a continent of largely uncultivated land, populations could grow unimpeded by significant checks, eventually that growth would be met by a limitation on the amount of food that the land could produce. The impending food scarcity would, without a preventive check, generate positive checks in the form of food shortages, hunger, and poverty. However, thanks to mankind's cognitive abilities, people would see these dire consequences and, before they arose, impose on themselves a preventive check in the form of having fewer children. In this way, population would usually hover close to, but not go beyond, the means of subsistence.

- Read the whole fascinating piece of history here ; a different version of cable television a.k.a character assignation did exists in 1800's as well.

Headlines From a Mathematically Literate World

Our World: Rates of Cancer Approach Historic High
Mathematically Literate World: Rates of Surviving Long Enough to Develop Cancer Approach Historic High

Our World: Politician Promises to Fund Math Education
Mathematically Literate World: Politician Promises to Fund, Meddle in Math Education

Our World: Economist: “Eliminate Minimum Wage to Create Jobs, Improve Economy”
Mathematically Literate World: Economist: “Eliminate Minimum Wage, then Pray Our Model Has Some Basis in Reality”

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James.  A funny philosophical book with very interesting thoughts on the cascading effects of (spreading and culling asshol-ism) some of our personal, cultural and social preferences which always seems mundane.

Definition of an asshole:

• The asshole allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically
• The asshole does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement
• The asshole is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people

Bottom line - If one is special on one's birthday. the assholes birthday comes everyday.

Thinking like an asshole:
The man takes it as given(perhaps subconsciously or inchoately) that he is justified in allowing himself special advantages in social relations, in light of his special entitlement to them. That is, his sense of special entitlement tells him that he has no reason or insufficient reason to abide by the expectations of conduct that normally apply among moral equals. 

Asshole Management:

• Don't try to change an asshole and corporate only on your terms
• Take a stand at the right time. 

Three essential features of asshole capitalism:

• Incentives - it affirms expansive entitlement (e.g., to unbound personal enrichment, even at the social cost) that create powerful incentives for thinking like an asshole.
• Under-management - It lacks a reliable system for dampening asshole profusion (e.g., the family or the rule of law is overpowered by the entitlement-based incentives)
• Destabilization - The resulting profusion of asshole undermines the cooperation needed for a capitalist systems healthy functioning, according to its own founding values (of freedom, opportunity, and general prosperity). The system, in that sense, deteriorates or degrade. 

How to co-exists in a world with assholes:
Assholes are a given fact of life. They are fact of life we must somehow make peace with if we are to be at peace with life itself. 

Aaron rejects the complete resignation of Stoics and embraces the "reasonable hope" of John Rawls.

If humanity had a body, it would have an asshole - namely, the asshole himself. Life invariably has a certain foulness, and he embodies it. All too often, fair is foul and foul is fair. Yet the witches of social life cannot foretell our fates. Social life can be fairer and less foul, if, but only if, cooperators of the world unite. 

A final plea - letter to an asshole: 
In their hearts even the most generous souls would be thankful for your demise. It pains to tell you that, just so many who know you will find your death relieving. There will be a quite a celebration. I imagine your do care about that. You would not like the epitaph that I would write for you, for example. Or maybe you aren't bothered. Either way, please accept my honest concern for your health and safety. One can easily pity your condition, and so I hope you change it. 

What I've Been Reading

Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga by Joseph Romm.

Romm is an editor and blogger at  climateprogess.org; being at the forefront of the most "debated" issue in the recent decades, it probably has become self-evident that language is as (actually more) important as facts.

Key rhetorical strategies used by the greatest persuaders:

• Use short, simple words.  
• Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition is the essential element of all persuasion.     Master irony and foreshadowing. They are central elements of popular culture, modern politics, and mass media for a reason— they help us make sense of the stories of our lives and other people’s lives.
• Use metaphors to paint a picture, to connect what your listeners already know to what you want them to know. Metaphors may be the most important figure as well as the most underused and misused.
• Create an extended metaphor when you have a big task at hand, like framing a picture-perfect speech or launching a major campaign.
• If you want to avoid being seduced, learn the figures of seduction. If you want to debunk a myth, do not repeat that myth.

News Is Bad For You & Giving Up Reading It Will Make You Happier

Take the following event borrowed from Nassim Taleb. A car drives over a bridge, and the bridge collapses. What does the news media focus on? The car. The person in the car. Where he came from. Where he planned to go. How he experienced the crash if he survived. But that is all irrelevant. What’s relevant? The structural stability of the bridge. That’s the underlying risk that has been lurking, and could lurk in other bridges. But the car is flashy, it’s dramatic, it’s a person non-abstract, and it’s news that’s cheap to produce. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated.We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

- More Here

Ten Conservative Principles - Russell Kirk

Essay adapted from adapted from the book The Politics of Prudence by Russel Kirk. Sadly, none of the ten principles are adhered in the current political climate...

The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.

• The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.
• The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
• Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.
• Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.
• Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. 
• Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.
• Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
• Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
• The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.
• Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. 

Quote of the Day

Ameritopia, like many po­lem­i­cal bad books in po­lit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, teems with mis­used ab­strac­tions and con­tains few em­piri­cal ex­am­ples. In chap­ters de­vot­ed to the Re­pub­lic, Le­vi­a­than, U­top­ia, and The Com­mun­ist Man­i­fes­to, Lev­in of­fers Cliff's Notes-like cap­sules of the works. His for­mu­la is to of­fer a brief phrase like, "as Locke ex­plains," fol­lowed by long quo­ta­tions that some­times go on for a page. (He also adores his own prose, as when he writes, "As I wrote in Liberty and Tyr­an­ny," then quotes him­self for near­ly half a page.) That's one way to pad a book.

- How can so bad a book, on so se­ri­ous a top­ic, sell so well?

Quote of the Day

[Political "gaffe" stories] are completely information-free news events, and they absolutely dominate political news coverage and analysis. It's like asking your doctor if the X-rays show a tumor, and all he'll talk about is how stupid the radiologist's haircut looks. . . . ["Blast"] stories are. . . just as content-free as the "gaffe" stories. But they are popular for the same reason: There's a petty, tribal satisfaction in seeing a member of our team really put the other team in their place. And there's a rush of outrage adrenaline when the other team says something mean about us. So, instead of covering pending legislation or the impact it could have on your life, the news media covers the dick-measuring contest.
- David Wong, 5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds

Good Bye Mike Wallace

I just happened to read the following lines last night...

American television news is increasingly driven by the hosts' celebrity rather than accurate reporting of important events. Media channels frequently feature outspoken blowhards, offering borderline offensive commentary that subscribes to a political platform. "Geraldo Rivera, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly [and Ed Schultz] are the middle-aged and male equivalent of Kim Kardashian, in that they became famous for being self-parodies and must continually up the ante of their own ridiculousness in order to maintain their fame." These commentators' reactions to the Trayvon Martin shooting, for example, became stories in themselves.

This isn't the legacy Mike Wallace dreamed of. May be technology will find an alternative this nonsense and bring us a new Mike Wallace. Check out his top then interviews here and if possible, please do this civilization a favor and stop watching cable news.