MEMBER MONDAY

We’ll break from our normal MM moratorium on contemporary politics to discuss the national election through the lens of (click:) Plato's Cave and the Stubborn Persistence Of Ignorance. Ignorance. The session is meant not to change any minds at this late stage but as a way to reexamine and apply Plato's allegorical rendering from over twenty-four centuries ago. It might just as well have been yesterday.

The basic set-up:

The most memorable image of ignorance occurs in what is probably the most famous passage of all philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in “The Republic.” Recall the scenario: human beings dwelling in the darkness of an underground cavern, bound at the legs and neck so that they cannot move, even to turn their heads. They have no other memory of life, since they have been imprisoned in this way since childhood. Before them, they see only moving shadows that are cast by objects unknown to them, illuminated by a flickering fire that we are told lies somewhere behind them. They know nothing of this except the shadows and hear only echoes from the voices of their keepers, whom they have never seen. In such a benighted state, they pass their days.

Surely you jest. Of what possible relevance could some bizarre cartoon image of captive humans – chained prisoners, immobilized since birth, locked into straight-ahead stares at the front wall of some dark cavern illuminated only by a backlit fire casting shadows of unseen objects – have to do with anything . . . let alone to do with our divisive politics? Maybe everything. Plato ends the allegory with a chill, “They’re like us.”…

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, who knew something about the subject of money, is reported to have commented to Ernest Hemingway, ”You know, the rich are different from you and me” to which Hemingway responded, “Yes, they have more money.” That’s it?

We are introduced to the characterization of four of the reported 2,781 ultra-rich (multi-billionaires) in Plutocrat Archipelagos to discuss whether the asserted psychological profile of those instinctively “retreating into their money” – doomed to a directionless spiral – comports with our own understanding of the breed. Fair comments or garden-variety envy?

My own limited up-close-and-personal experience came some forty years ago, courtesy of a banker’s invitation to join a ski holiday group in Verbier, Switzerland. Though the overall experience was quite enjoyable, I had the distinct feeling of being the “other” among those whose conversation was often peppered in ironic tones, clever innuendo, and hidden “tells,” as in oh, I see Linie (Linus Pauling’s grandson) went to town this morning for his job of checking on his bank account balance…

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Killing time here means time is killing you. No, it’s not that we are ill-equipped with a short life, but rather it’s our wastefulness of time that makes it so. Seneca teaches us that life is long if you know how to use it (click: On The Shortness Of Life).

(His) memo from life’s final quarter: “How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived.” Stupid? Easy for him to say, yet we “mortals” may have been preoccupied in those earlier years with our figurative survival while we thrash ourselves upstream to spawn.

Point well taken, however, when he observes everyone hustling their lives along, troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. We’ve discussed before the extent to which our then-present earlier lives may have been hijacked by some other priority or distraction, captured by cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s (Doonesbury) lament about trying to develop a lifestyle that didn’t require his presence. One sighs reflecting on one’s twenties-self and what might have been missed in return for that career, that future…

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They are the modest ones. They work behind the scenes, in groups. They were the carrots in the third-grade play.

Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. In fact, the 2.2 million federal employees are seeking additional protection that would make it more difficult for a future administration to go after “the blob” by re-applying a former policy known as Schedule F.

What a perfect time, then, to highlight among their ranks an otherwise-invisible instance of doggedly-pursued heroism, courtesy of the private Partnership For Public Service described in our discussion piece (click: The Canary, by Michael Lewis). Do not be misled by the lack of rhetorical flourish describing the work of Christopher Mark: “Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.”

A former coal miner. One who happened to be the son of a Princeton professor (a story of its own i.e. an academic specializing in the use of photoelectric models to test the effects of physical on virtually any object), who then “lit out in the Territory” taking him to the intersection of (gothic) architecture and art, engineering, science, geology, and statistical analysis...

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Damn you Jonathan Edwards. Or, rather, may it be said we are the ones damned per that sermon for the ages by preacher Edwards on July 8,1741 (click: Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God). He would not finish it. The New England (Enfield, Connecticut) congregation, described as without particular readiness nor even polite attentiveness, was transformed until the crying and weeping became so overwhelming that Edwards was forced to discontinue the sermon and allow the pastors to join the people and pray with them.

I was not in attendance for that sermon but might just as well have been for this sixth grader bore witness to a graphic depiction of that very sermon prominently displayed in the back of Sunday school class. Every week, there it was, souls pictured as nothing but loathsome spiders literally hanging by a thread over the cauldron of hell, to be dropped but for the grace of God. And this, mind you, was Presbyterian-lite.

May we devote one hour of our busy lives to ponder . . . . . eternity . . . . that is, share in this Securus Locus forum the way our everyday thoughts, actions, and attitudes may be shaped, if at all, by thoughts of what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil. After all, we’ve had a lifetime to think about it...

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Few of us seem to care about the matter until the emergency is inside our own home but it’s probably a safe bet that there lurks some sort of mental illness – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or acute depression – among each of our extended families or friends.

The darkness can be cloaked in silence. The very phenomenon repels intrusion as if a fine mist of shame envelops the private interior. The sufferer may refuse treatment. The parent is but a helpless witness to the child’s descent into, say, severe anxiety. The ultimate tragedy occurs when the final articulation is suicide – as it was with the son of Jim Martin, the author of our discussion piece (click: Commentary, Search For Health Care Treatment).

Jim will join our session as lead participant as he himself lives with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition characterized by extreme mood swings from soaring highs to depressive lows. There, he said it. He didn’t happen to choose the condition but he has chosen to share it with us. That is his gift. His courage demonstrates that life is more than a spectator sport...

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What seems anecdotally evident is borne out by statistics i.e. 40 percent of newlyweds had been married at least once before. At least that’s the report from our discussion piece (click: Temporary Marriage) as it argues for trial marriages, or marriage limited by contract, in the case of partners who do not intend to have children. A renewable contract would require partners to say, “I choose you again,” every five or ten years. Childbearing would trigger a longer commitment.

Discuss: imagine a shrink-to-fit marital model that actually comports with the realities of partner dynamics. Margaret Mead once suggested a two-step version of marriage that matches the partners’ sensibility, means, and circumstances – maybe an “individual commitment,” easily dissolved in the early stages, followed by a “parental commitment,” if and when ready. Longevity alone shouldn’t be the marker of a happy, healthy marriage when that “death do us part” vow becomes more of a sentence than an aspiration.

The contrary argument is that a pledge is a pledge. But then the question comes down to/with whom? Were the relationship to be deemed a private affair between two consenting adults the matter would seem contractual in nature and thus subject to update i.e. some combination of a living, breathing postnup and vow renewal...

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Our challenge for this session is to peek behind the gaslighting known as modern economic theory and ponder the realities of our national debt, now $35.28 trillion. And climbing. Exponentially. The national debt actually increased by $17.96 trillion over the last ten years. For some context, total consumer debt – all the mortgage, auto, credit card, and student loan balances – is another $17.80 trillion.

In other words, just the increase in our national debt over the past decade went up by the same amount as the sum of all existing private debt currently owed by the entire population. (By the way, the national debt number doesn’t even include so-called unfunded liabilities like social security and medicare which, if included, would roughly triple that official debt number.)

Here’s the ultimate prize – yes, a free dessert – for the first person to offer any credible, or even an incredible, plan to grow out of this existential problem, something beyond a timeline featuring a point labeled “then a miracle happens.” That challenge goes not only to the principal but to its ultimate servicing given the quote attributable to Einstein that the most powerful force in the universe is compounding interest (“eighth wonder of the world”)...

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Faustian bargain comes from the sixteenth-century German legend of Johan Faust, a magician who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge, magical powers, and access to all the worldly pleasures – the singularity of all people. These he received but was eternally damned in the exchange.

Our focus piece (click: Our Faustian Bargain), written by the author of the recent book Devil’s Contract, posits that “Faust” is primarily an artist in that he deals in the magic of illusions, just as the novelist, playwright, or film director. The manufacture of those fantastical, dreamlike illusions rendered today would have been deemed powerful magic by our ancestors. While the tale might be autobiographical as applied to every human, the question becomes whether Faust is an allegory for the dangers of illusion extended more broadly.

That is, the author applies the term Faustocene as he holds up a mirror to modern society with its “desire for power disguised as a thirst for knowledge” to find a stained soul. Bourgeois politics itself – whether it be liberal, or conservative – is unable to recognize the threat of the fascist Devil until it’s too late. Fascism, you see, is a Faustian bargain: the national soul is exchanged for fantasies of making the nation great again. Wake up and smell the sulfur...

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Be not afraid. Our focus piece consists of a mere 262 words. Certainly you have given thought to the subject of life and death since that sophomore (lit, wise fool) encounter with Hamlet's Soliloquy. Rejoice in knowing, with the translation of a few obscure words and after a lifetime of experience, it is no longer the intimidating piece you might recall from your high school English class. We are finally ready to conquer the territory, marked on the maps as There Be Dragons, that is labeled Or Not To Be.

We’re not entirely sure whether Hamlet was speaking as some twitching depressive over the recent murder of his father or engaged in general philosophical reckoning when he wondered aloud in his Act 3 Scene 1 speech about taking arms to oppose all the slings and arrows in that sea of troubles and to simply die, to sleep. How simple it would be, with a bare bodkin – a knitting needle – to be shuffled off this mortal coil (Elizabethan word for the fuss and bother of life).

But then, he says, there’s the rub (a lawn bowling term meaning an obstacle on the turf that diverts the ball’s trajectory) that makes us pause about going down this one-way street to the unknown. Indeed, conscience – oh yeah, there’s that – does make cowards of us all (not to mention certain other Beliefs that would condemn one to Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell).

Anyway, by the end of the soliloquy, he pulls himself out of this reflective funk by deciding that too much thinking about it may actually prevent such contemplated action. Life may be burdensome and devoid of power – just count all the things that annoy him – but, in the end, such lack of power prevents us from actually taking action for fear of the unknown.

What thinkest thou?...

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This session targets parents and grandparents or others interested in The Case For Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales: 

"The fairy tale acknowledges that parents do not always love their children, that loved ones die, that evil is real and powerful. These truths make grown-ups uncomfortable; we are eager to smooth over a child's fear with comforting falsehoods. Children are wise enough to be afraid of death, loss, and danger. The question is whether we allow them to wrestle well with these fears or not."

While protecting the innocence of children by sheltering them from overly gruesome material is something all good parents seek to do, have we swung so far in our attempt to protect children that we don’t tell stories that help them process dark things? While we haven’t always been so leery of the violence in fairy tales, in this strange age we subject our children to drills at their schools to prepare them for active shooters in the classroom but consider them too fragile to be told stories that take evil and death seriously. Is this sheltering from the classic grit of fairy tales benefiting them, or are these just the sort of stories they need to be able to endure the violence that hangs like a shadow over our world?"..

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When God foreclosed on Eden, he condemned Adam and Eve to go to work. Work has never recovered from that humiliation. From the beginning, the Lord’s word said that work was something bad: a punishment, the great stone of mortality and toil laid upon a human spirit that might otherwise soar in the infinite, weightless playfulness of grace. (Essay, What Is the Point of Working?).

An update of sorts now comes more than forty years after Lance Morrow first wrote the above words in 1981, courtesy of the following recent quote by “Slacker” that leads our focus article (click: Work Pays America!), “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.” Says who?

Says the prospect of a looming zeitgeist best captured by Churchill in comparing two economic models i.e. the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries…

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A Monty Python sketch features an unnamed man visiting the Argument Clinic, saying he’d like to have an argument and asks if he’s in the right place only to be informed he’d already been told that he is, to which the man responds that no he hadn’t, thereby initiating a shallow back-and-forth exchange of petty and contradictory “is/isn’t” responses until the man states he’s not getting what he paid for as they argue over whether or not they’d been arguing until the bell rings marking the end of the paid-up time which the man additionally disputes as he storms out of the clinic with an exasperated “this is futile.”

The sketch has been used as an example of how not to argue in that it contains little more than ad hominem attacks and contradictions without contributing much to critical thinking, a classical case of dialogue where two parties are unwilling to cooperate and is characterized by such flawed logic as in the way one man was attempting to argue that the other was not arguing with him. Catch-22, English humor style.

Welcome to our own argument clinic as we discuss this very short and readable field guide to bad arguments (click: Logical Fallacies). Being able to spot them is the first step to defeating them. There are seven types: the appeal to ignorance, ad hominem attacks, the slippery slope analogy, the straw man, the appeal to authority, the false dichotomy, and whataboutism. Their use does not necessarily mean the point is wrong, merely that its maker is resorting to underhand tactics to try and win…

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There would seem to be a heightened urgency to “Know Thyself” in a world marked by the prospect of challenging dynamics. For who we are and the depth of our character have rarely been tested for the majority of us with the moral luck to have been brought up in the relative security and prosperity of post-WWII America. Beware the pop quiz.

In dealing with what’s probably the definitive historical final exam on the subject, our focus article (click: Moral Luck) cites the extended documentary that features interviews given by the last remaining members of the Nazi party during the Third Reich. It brings to the fore the question we’d previously addressed in a different context i.e. the extent to which who we are is largely shaped within a so-called deterministic universe (MM 11/20/23 Free Will).

More specifically, are transgressions (and heroic traits) the result of circumstances out of our control, rooted in matters not necessarily of our choosing? The matter encourages empathy and humility, but “also threatens the notion of culpability that makes sense of evil.”..

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HODL – Hold On for Dear Life – is an acronym for those searching for some means to preserve their net worth in this day of ever-depreciating forms of money. And who can blame HODLers? Just consider the U.S. Dollar today is worth the equivalent of three cents back in 1913 when the federal reserve system was established and, with it, the means to debase the nation’s currency in the blink of a central banker’s eye.

There must be a way to address this insatiable hunger for some absolute that is outside the arbitrary, whimsical, capricious clutches of man. There’s real estate, of course, with its fixed supply. Or maybe precious metals though that too has shortcomings.

We will discuss what role Bitcoin, with its defined scarcity, might have in the preservation, accumulation, and transfer of wealth. The subject becomes far less daunting once the mumbo-jumbo of the crypto vernacular is removed from what is essentially a pretty simple concept.

Start by imagining a game which can be played by anyone with an internet connection. The game features tokens (just refer to them that way for the time being) which can be acquired by players through purchase or otherwise “earned” (by means that are beyond the scope of and not terribly important to this discussion)…

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An audio essay by Jeff Goodell, author of “The Heat Will Kill You First,” argues that air-conditioning has lulled us into a false sense of security as we hurtle toward a warmer future and more blackouts (click: Air-Conditioning Gives A False Sense Of Security). The referenced sword of Damocles that hangs over us is more than some hyperbolic metaphor as he cites a five-day Phoenix blackout model that demonstrates 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths.

Our discussion, however, is not about air conditioning or global warming per se, but about something larger i.e. the extent to which the realities of our interdependencies have laid waste to the myths of Self-Reliance that we studied way back in the eighth grade English class that featured those transcendental moonbeams, Emerson and Thoreau. You remember: build a small cabin in the woods, strip away superfluous luxuries, live a simple life and explore the sublime lightness of being.

Oh, grow up, you're not that kid in the treehouse anymore, and the culture has long been seduced by that Faustian pact with the devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. How far we have strayed from those formative myths of Self-Reliance in this hyper-connected world. Emerson might have labeled it a fragmented perspective, this material world featuring long supply chains…

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Author Anne Spencer Morrow (wife of Charles Lindbergh) put her finger on a fundamental truth when she observed, “Writing is more than living, as it is being conscious of living.” Even (maybe especially) the young diarist knows how the blank page can be a wonderful way to “work things out.” No audience is necessary, or even desired. The privacy, the very anonymity of it all, invites thought on fire. Some continue the therapeutic practice throughout their adult years.

Highland member and our session lead participant Lucy Flood knows all about this, having cofounded Write To Thrive, a reflective and creative writing-based enterprise that taps into the state-of-the-art research on the benefits of writing for mental, physical and emotional wellness (click: How Journaling Can Help You In Hard Times). Be open to a transformation that goes beyond the self, however, as the principles apply equally to the transformation of entire social and professional communities when people take time to reflect and write together.

Be also not afraid to at least explore what might open up with this kinder/gentler stream-of-consciousness writing technique – a far cry from the Hemingway-esque machismo description (“There's nothing to the act of writing, all you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed”) that we’d previously discussed in our MM 6/6/19 On Writing session…

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Let us first stipulate that virtually all of us are drug users – that is, by extending the definition of drugs to include caffeine (and perhaps alcohol) and to thereby capture us coffee drinkers. Now, with some of that stigma out of the way, perhaps it’s high time to parse the word drugs to open the way for a more thoughtful discussion about the role of drugs in our own lives and society in general.

We discussed eight years ago the politics and the exploding bureaucracies behind the criminalization of drugs in the first place (click: MM 9/26/16 War On Drugs). Some of you might remember how the satirical paranoia depicted in that Reefer Madness clip of the 50’s animated the Nixon White House’s just-say-no campaign, later confirmed by Erlichmman in his deathbed confession to have largely been a cynical backhanded way to neutralize the real targets i.e. hippies and blacks (citation contained in that above-referenced intro).

And, so, we are left with the residue of some ham-handed policy initiatives as we take on the way Americans, having demonized drugs for decades, are now doing them every day, at least according to our focus piece by the Guardian, as it introduces a series exploring America’s shifting relationship with mind-altering substances (click: Guardian, Drug Use In Modern Life)…

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You have two lives. We all do. One is reading this. It’s the real world, engagement with others, perhaps a walk in the woods.

The other emerges as you awaken in the wee darkened hours. There is no sound. Your thoughts wander unimpeded in that liminal sleep/wake state. They are yours and yours alone, the product of three pounds of wetware. You are lord of your skull-sized kingdom as you survey your universe. That universe is an imagined one, distinct from any real one.

That power of imagination may encroach on those daytime hours, even that walk in the woods, when you are lost in thought i.e. your attention is redirected from the present state, to some past, to some future, to some elsewhere altogether. The experience might serve as a pleasant escape or otherwise suggest engagement in some deep contemplation e.g. ruminating on the nature of existence.

Then there is the level of rumination characterized by excessive, repetitive thinking, a kind of brooding that signals some emotional distress (click: Ruminating). Each of us can probably cite instances of the way regrets of the past or anxiety about the future temporarily dominated our thoughts as we drifted away from the present moment…

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Iconic moments mark historic fault lines. Some are dramatic and themselves causal like an assassination. Others are important in retrospect as reflecting an otherwise-muted cultural transformation.

The tells might even come in the guise of entertainment, say the one from that classic 1967 scene in The Graduate where middle-age McGuire takes Ben aside at the party and says he has one word of advice for him, just one word and the word is “plastics,” thus heralding the age of the so-called cheap, fake, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition.

It’s not that big a step, then, to imagine that our current zeitgeist might later be captured through the lens of some Apple ad.

The ad in question, which flashed briefly before it was partially withdrawn, featured a giant hydraulic press as it literally crushes pretty much everything the art world holds sacred, from music, to paintings, to literature, to a child’s imagination. All this, you see, will be replaced by the latest technological flat-screen, to the soundtrack of Cher’s “all I need is you” (Apple "Crush" Commercial).

The immediate reaction to the ad was pretty much captured in our discussion piece (click: Dear Tim Cooke, an appeal for him to “be a decent human being and delete this revolting ad.” The question for us is whether it’s the ad or what the ad might say about us, where we are, and where we are going that is revolting…

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