MEMBER MONDAY

“A Republic . . . if you can keep it” was the well-known quip by Benjamin Franklin, soon after the Constitutional Convention of 1787, in response to a woman asking whether such marked the beginning of a Republic or a Monarchy.

Far less known was this exchange between Franklin and Edward Gibbon, the then-recent author of Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire, during their chance encounter at a Paris tavern roughly a decade before that convention and soon after the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had sent a note to Gibbon inviting him over for a drink. Gibbon reportedly sent back a note declining the invitation saying he could never break bread with a man in open insurrection against the king, to which Franklin cheekily replied that it was too bad as Gibbon might have picked up some good pointers for his next work i.e. Decline and Fall Of The British Empire.

So many declines, so little time. Next up might be the application right here of history’s inevitable workings marked by what Gibbon referred to as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” He might have added hubris. For those without the time to read the entire six-volume Gibbon treatise you may default here to this compact five-page overview to frame our discussion, tempting the more cynical among us to regard as the first draft of the Decline and Fall Of The American Empire (click: The Chronicler of Decline)…

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Cartoonist Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) once said he wanted to develop a lifestyle that didn’t require his presence. Enter the means to do just that. The smartphone era heralds the uncoupling of physical presence from the virtual universe’s offering of perpetual on-line attention.

You might witness the phenomenon of the one on a phone walking and talking next to you, the one with that tell-tale faraway look and the hands gesticulating as if the body were from the village of the damned – physically there but inhabiting an elsewhere life.

We’d addressed before the smartphone’s capacity to hijack one’s attention by means of social media, essentially an attention-extraction vehicle (MM 11/30/20) as chronicled in the documentary The Social Dilemma. Resistance is futile. Especially vulnerable to these attention hijacking techniques are the youth with their still-developing neocortex. It brings to mind Charles Baudelaire’s take that the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

But now, whether it’s labeled as an addiction or habituation, we have essentially become hostage to this virtual universe at the same time that attention itself has become the ultimate and increasingly scarce resource (from MM 3/9/26 Mattering). Consider the cited example of that eight-year-old who tells his dad, “Yeah, you’re always on your phone, and it makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me,” as he names his own truth more out of resignation than resentment…

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An old man with a guitar sings his lament about a daughter who no longer reaches out to him in his final years and wonders how she’ll remember him after he’s gone. Even as a tear might well up in the eye something seems off in the clip. Refrain from further reading this intro until after you’ve watched (at least a part of) After I'm Gone.

The punch line, of course, is that the entire piece was AI generated. Everything: the old man, the guitar, the story line, the overwrought audience viewing the America’s Got Talent segment. Welcome to the awesome power that’s unfolding before our very eyes. Now imagine how this very magic can be applied to such things as mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems to kill people without human input.

These are the concerns that animate the tortured conscience of Dario Amodei. We know he certainly has one. He is the CEO of Anthropic, the artificial-intelligence company known for its devotion to safety. In fact, Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving his previous company Open AI over what he perceived as their lack of focus on these concerns. He lays out his warnings in this extended stream of consciousness, our discussion piece, The Adolescence Of Technology, subtitled “Confronting And Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI.”

The tortured-conscience reference comes by way of the temptations to “rise above principle” faced by even the most resolute among us. One must address the reality of the competitive pressures with other AI labs, namely OpenAI, (Musk’s) xAI, and Google, not to mention China. While he addresses the point in the essay, there is a big difference between philosophical purity and the bottom-line realities…

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Why bother.

Why bother to cook when you can simply beckon and food is delivered. Why bother learning how to drive in the coming era of the robotaxi. When TikTok parades a pageant of ordinary-looking women with the same crazy eyes bemoaning the lack of desirable men i.e. meaning the 5% at least six feet tall and a seven-figure income, someone deep in the heap of the other 95% might reasonably wonder why a man would even bother to enter the dating pool when a certain primal itch may soon be scratched on demand by a plastic, fantastic model. Why, indeed, bother to pump out these damn weekly intros when they surely will be composed in short order by AI.

In a perfectly efficient society that renders man redundant, might it be that humans would suffer from ennui and loss of purpose (click: The Problem With Utopia)? Struggle gives life meaning – or does it? What happens regarding man’s hierarchy of needs where a post-scarcity utopia bumps up against a dystopia marked by a frictionless world without real challenge?

Overcoming the big challenges is what for many defines a life well lived. Then, as to those everyday challenges experienced in most ordinary lives, that friction itself is a kind of meaning. At the very least, it serves as a good distraction from dwelling on those bigger questions about what even matters. Take away that friction rendered by that perfectly efficient society and what are we left with? The self in a sensory deprivation tank. What then?..

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French poet Charles Baudelaire knew something about hatred and revenge which he regarded as futile, insatiable forces. He likened them to a bottomless barrel into which Vengeance pours endless blood and tears only to be drained by secret holes. The “red strong arms” of those bitter, destructive impulses doom the afflicted, be it an individual or a society, to a “universal bestiality” which inevitably leads to exhaustion without resolution. Maybe so, but still . . .

. . . . the urge for lurid, annihilating retaliation – vindication, satisfaction, the no-good bastard’s head upon a plate – must have come from somewhere, perhaps from some animal reflex of self-protection. How this atavistic impulse can turn into savage brooding is the subject of tragic theater (Hamlet?), generational blood feuds, and tribal dynamics throughout the millennia.

We’d like to think this old brutal arrangement might be tamed or at least mitigated by the laws of the state as it dispassionately metes out justice uncomplicated by private passions. There’s some irony, then, when it’s the very application of the law (think lawfare in politics) that itself becomes the vehicle of choice in such vendettas.

In any event, we will move from the land of the poets to the world of the psychologists to get behind the vengeance impulse with the somewhat surprising observation that the desire for revenge can actually be a form of addiction (click: Revenge Is The New Addiction). The science behind “grievance-triggered revenge craving” is described in terms of the real pain being activated in the anterior insula part of the brain throws it out of balance to such an extent that the brain seeks a rebalance by activating its pleasure and reward circuits which triggers the release of dopamine. ..

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An American tourist flies halfway around the world to experience a different culture. There must be so much to appreciate by visiting such an exotic place like Japan – the language, the customs, the bullet trains, the ancient temples in Tokyo, the neon lights in Osaka, the free-roaming deer in Nara. Yes, indeed, there was all that, and more. The more, in her case, was the Japanese outpost of Costco that “ranks right up there with the temples,” reported this 58-year-old retiree from Brownsville, Minnesota. Ah, there’s no place like home.

So why leave? To penetrate mysteries? The earth does not withhold many secrets anymore. VR travel opens up the stationary tourists via the simulated interactive 360-vistas of most any destination to become electronic cosmopolites as they can experience a walker’s view of cities, the interior of museums, or even an invitation into the virtual intimacy of a home. The only thing missing is the smell of the cooking but surely that is coming.

So, again, why travel? It’s probably a narcissistic fallacy to imagine that one’s mere passing through sets up a charmed understanding between the traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension. Or worse there might be an implicit kind of colonial condescension chronicled by Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven, recording this account of his family’s 1869 grand tour including the way the Roosevelts tossed small pieces of cake to a crowd of Italian beggars: “We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it.” Like chickens, like pigeons in the park…

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Perhaps the fine art of inauthenticity is but a learned cultural trait instilled in those earliest years as a way for young souls to navigate life beyond. J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye repeatedly condemns “phonies” as people who fake it to fit into adult society as he criticizes teachers, peers, actors, and even magazines for superficiality and conformity. His fixation as the “catcher” is to save kids from phony cliff-edge adulthood.

That plunge to adulthood might end for some with the so-called imposter syndrome, the feeling of being a fake or a phony despite all of one’s accomplishments. It can show up in the context of work, relationships, or whatever else that holds one back from the self-confidence one objectively deserves.

The phenomenon is probably more pervasive than it appears. As a very young attorney, just setting out in the corporate world, mid-way through a session with a senior executive, came a disquieting notion that the outward confidence I was projecting on the outside was at odds with a certain tentativeness I was feeling on the inside. He probably picked up on it when he smiled and said, “Now, don’t go bullshitting a bullshitter.” Point taken. Perhaps it was an acknowledgement that the whole corporate world was itself a stage on which we’re all actors…

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This might get your attention. Scrounge around in your attic, basement, and closets in search of some old quarters. If you find any, congratulations. You can drive across town and sell them for more than eighteen dollars apiece (dimes over seven dollars).

Or, for an even more dramatic example, a one thousand dollar face of dimes, quarters, and half-dollars dated prior to 1965 (when coins last contained real silver) are now worth $75,000. That is the melt value of those coins, deemed “junk silver,” representing 715 ounces of silver (click here for current value Pre-1965 $1,000 Face Value).

Tell that to someone who crows about their big real estate score on that property they bought in the Sixties for $50,000. Had they simply put the same amount in rolls of silver coins at the time they would now be looking at $3.75 million, a 75x return for simply taking a sixty-year nap.

Of course, the inverse is also true i.e. that thousand dollars in paper money today would purchase fewer than ten ounces of that same silver (trading now around $107/oz), representing a greater than 98.5% decline. What happened to those now-missing 705 missing ounces from the original 715? ..

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Some years ago, a half-baked dream, more of a thought really, was to better appreciate what might be deemed the largely hidden underclass community. The plan was simple. Seek out random local homeless souls with the goal to better understand their respective life stories. In exchange for a dinner, each would relate their background, the circumstances of their current condition, and their overall take on America. With their permission, of course, their stories would then be compiled into a book.

The project was abandoned for several reasons, the principal one being the effort would come across as rather intrusive and condescending. Maybe others would be able to pull off such a delicate undertaking, but not me. The “tell” was in my choice of the title for the would-be book – The Bums Of Boulder.

Now, as it turns out, the very term “bum” may be less of a pejorative and more of an honorific, even an aspiration of sorts. Enter this most interesting man named A.M. Hickman, the author of our focus piece, The Dying Art Of Being A Bum. What a unique individual he is, this combination of a distinct writing talent along with his unabashed desire to be a vagrant, a refugee from upstate New York and the “civilized” world beyond.

He hitchhiked for years in a “search for America” as he “slept out in the open, ate from dumpsters, and brushed elbows with provincials and rustics of every flavor in many of America’s boondocks and backvelds,” all captured in sparkling prose. The highlight of my New Year’s Eve was reading his piece and then reading it again after experiencing an epiphany of sorts after the first go-around…

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Just leave it to Winston Churchill to encapsulate the essence of two competing political and economic philosophies as he did before the House of Commons in 1945: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

While we’d previously taken a look at the so-called inherent vice of capitalism’s unequal shared blessings, what about the way capitalism has fostered individual liberty through the reward for hard work or the way it has stimulated competition and ingenuity to power America’s economic dynamism over the past couple of centuries?

Our next session, though, will focus on that Churchillian mirror image i.e. socialism’s inherent virtue as the equal sharing of its miseries. Miseries, says who? Not Kristin Ghodsee, author of our discussion piece What Socialism Got Right, as this historian of post-Communism, while acknowledging the enormous harms of the various twentieth-century regimes, enumerates the benefits by reverse engineering those that are now vanishing under capitalism. Those asserted lost benefits include a powerful sense of community, accessible and subsidized cultural life, improved workplace equality for women and planned neighborhoods with civic amenities. Point taken…

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Dissonance applied to the world of music is the use of certain notes or chords that sound harsh together in order to create a certain drama in a piece before it then moves into harmony. This pattern is like the introduction of conflict and resolution in a story that gives music a certain emotional contour The Beauty Of Dissonance.

A most prominent and familiar example might be that three-second opening chord to the Beatles' It’s A Hard Day's Night (click: Magical Mystery Chord). Play this overly-analyzed opening chord (linked in the article's fourth paragraph) and you will experience the yearning for melody after that discordant crashing sound.

And so it is beyond the world of music to the world of beliefs. Brain studies suggest the neural mechanism for musical and cognitive dissonance overlap in the regions that process conflict. These areas detect violations of expectations – auditory in music, cognitive in beliefs – triggering tension that motivates resolution (Cognitive Dissonance)…

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As parents and grandparents know, language acquisition by young children is nothing short of amazing. Infant babbling soon gives way to sounding out words and, with the child already able to decode what adults around them are saying, the two-year-old might, seemingly out of the blue, come out with, “Buffy ate my muffin in the car.” How all does this happen?

For decades, Noam Chomsky theorized that such remarkable advancement is due to the possession by humans of what he called the language instinct i.e. a DNA encoding of a universal grammar anchoring that transforms every cognitively-normal child into a linguistic genius by age four without any formal education. Our discussion piece maintains that such a simple, powerful idea of a language instinct, having dominated linguistic study, is completely wrong (click: Real Talk).

There is, we are told, no language instinct. Nor, probably, a universal grammar anchoring all human languages. Children learn language, as they do many other things, by trial and error. It suggests that children have far more sophisticated learning capabilities than Chomsky foresaw…

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We might start with the challenge put forth by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The Little Prince, “All grown-ups were children once, but only a few of them remember it.” Do you remember it? Do you really? Do you recall the way you, as do most children, looked for a world without the prying eyes of adults?

We learn that, in most human societies, children have preferred to spend their time playing and exploring with peers in a world separate from adults and their scrutiny. The anthropological evidence for this pattern is rich and widespread. Deprived of this critical phase of unsupervised exploration, the internet has become the only place left where children today “can grow up without adults." (click: Where Do The Children Play?).

That’s the fundamental insight of the discussion piece. The example of the Bayaka tribe (Congo) merely serves as but one illustration in the several hundred thousand years of childhood evolution of a peer culture i.e. one featuring a strong component of child-centric learning. No one is suggesting we “go native” but before we complain about a child’s screen time or lament the “anxious generation,” consider how we may have been undone by a mix of shifting parental attitudes, car-dependency, and urbanization…

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There may come a point, maybe in your later years, when curiosity and the desire to develop a worldview become more important than some concern about what other people think about you. Without some framework all that gratuitous life input is but noise in search of a pattern.

Take politics. Good people, smart people, have voiced opinions or taken actions over the years that just seem to smack of nihilism. Does anyone, for example, seriously believe we could remain a nation other than in name only without effectively managing our borders? Defund the police? And now in some corners comes this slow dance with socialism. Such an embrace, some might say, amounts to a wanton ignorance of history (MM 3/11/19 The Socialist Seduction). What’s going on?

Enter Yuri Bezmenov who gave a remarkable interview that shined a light on and provided a framework for some of the otherwise inexplicable events and movements over the past few decades (Yuri Bezmenov Interview). (Okay, cue conspiracy theory, but judge for yourself (after watching the thirteen-minute interview, linked at the bottom of the piece) and ask what possible motivation would he have to shade the truth?)…

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The guest of a member sat at the community table for lunch recently. “Dave” was quiet and unassuming but looked vaguely familiar. Near the end of the meal someone (not Dave) let it drop that he was none other than the “zip code guy.” Of course he looked familiar. Dave Rosdeitcher has been performing on the Pearl Street mall for decades. Give him any zip code (in U.S. or the overseas equivalent) and he will cite not only the place but describe it in greater detail than could the native who put it out there in the first place.

We are gathered to share and discuss and honor extraordinary feats of memory or other types of highly advanced cognitive skills. Dave attributed his ability to a life-long fascination with geography. Maybe. But as one who is fascinated by lunch I’d be hard pressed to recall what was on the menu two days ago.

To that point, the next level might be the Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), the ability to recall virtually every personal detail and the exact date of events of decades ago. This ability can’t be faked. Some of you might have watched the 60 Minutes segment featuring the actress Marilu Henner and equally gifted savants absolutely nail every detail, including the weather, of any otherwise-ordinary day in their lives…

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The first realization from the article is the degree to which we'd taken for granted the confluence of factors that gave rise to America’s post-WWII extraordinary economic boom (click: Manufacturing's Last Boom). It just seemed at the time to have been . . . ordained.

Only in retrospect do we appreciate that so-called golden age which featured a privileged middle class with those union wages that afforded the worker a home, weekends off, a two-week vacation, and one of those defined-benefit pensions. Okay, perhaps that’s an oversimplification (even nostalgia, as they say, isn't what it used to be).

But events, both external and self-inflicted, marked the slide e.g. the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard (worthy of its own discussion), or perhaps Vietnam and the domestic dual mandate overreach called the Great Society, or the 1973 oil embargo, or most likely the way those countries we reduced to stunned fish in WWII woke up and proved to be formidable competitors. In any event, that world monopoly franchise we’d enjoyed is pretty much in the rear view mirror…

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Some will scoff at the focus piece and add that it’s high time anyway we had an honest discussion about white patriarchy. Others will cite the article’s central Great Feminization Thesis as a root cause of America's decline, nodding Whud I tell you?

The thesis: we are in the midst of a cultural revolution marked by the rise of women in virtually every sector of society and which has been a large factor in the rise of wokeism, cancel culture, and the primacy of emotion over logic (click: The Great Feminization).

Discuss.

The numbers are just the beginning of the story. While there may have been many societies that have been feminist to one degree or another, there has never been one in which women hold as much political power as they do today. No parliament, no legislature in any country in any century has reached the level of one-third female, as has ours (the numbers throughout are sourced from the article, all subject to fact checking)…

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Let us share the power of language to refresh the soul. Perhaps some long-forgotten essence of your own was rekindled through a passage in a speech, a ballad, or a poem.

When it comes to poetry, look beyond those that may have been assigned in your English classes. Has something moved you to a time before the “real” world intervened to extinguish the very mystery and magic of being alive?

Consider “The Two-Headed Calf”:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there

are twice as many stars as usual.

That poem (1977) by Laura Gilpin is sublime in the true sense, joining the terrible (yes, such “freaks of nature” do exist though often stillborn or live only days) and the beautiful (perfect evening, with his mother, twice the stars) with astonishing economy. How better to express the ephemeral nature of life as the essence of meaning, indeed the transitory nature of beauty itself. Laura Gilpin died of glioblastoma in 2007, at age 57…

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There’s that joke about graduate school where one learns more and more about less and less until eventually the student knows everything about nothing.

Now consider the principles of Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, as he attributes much of his career success to the development of a “talent stack” i.e. the strategic layering of skills that may not be world-class individually, but together create a rare and marketable combination e.g. someone with moderate coding, public speaking, and design skills might be far more effective in product management than any expert in one field alone.

In essence, the benefits of talent stack integration include enhanced career flexibility and development of a unique personal brand that allow for broader problem-solving and creative solutions. It may also be the key to making one generally more interesting.

No one needs to have told that to Leonardo da Vinci, probably history’s ultimate renaissance man and the focus of our discussion piece (click: Renaissance Worker). Da Vinci mastered the synthesis between unrelated domains: he studied optics to paint better eyes; dissected hearts to understand emotional expression; watched birds to design machines. The very qualities that might today deem him to have been suffering from an ADHD affliction – his reported failure to complete most projects, easy distraction by some new field of study, and even his vast smorgasbord of interests – may now be seen as the genius of compound knowledge…

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Start with a passage from Catch-22:

Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.

Let us now imagine that mid-twentieth century German philosopher Heidegger’s has been invited onto the pages of Joseph Heller’s satirical novel. The Heidegger of our imagination is now nudging Yossarian aside to observe that Dunbar, far from being dead, is actually closer to “being” than ever before. It is within this state of profound boredom that Dunbar becomes intimately exposed to the structure of existence.

By this means Dunbar now discovers meaningful ways to project himself into the world. Heidegger sees boredom as the means to discover the freedom to choose how we want to act within our world – a reset, if you will, an existence based on thoughtful intentionality, rather than some contrived illusion (click: Heidegger's "Profound Boredom": Cultivating the Soul)…

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