MEMBER MONDAY

I am a promiscuous tree hugger! 

Literally, I will wrap my arms around any type of tree in any type of forest.

My unusual love affair with forests and trees began during the lonely summers of my teenage years in the 1970’s.

Our family has a summer place on a 18th century abandoned farm that nestles up against Stokes State Forest in Sussex County New Jersey, and I would spend countless days and hours hiking and exploring in the woods.

Stokes State Forest is filled a wide array of different tree species including white and red oaks, pitch pine, bear oaks, black cherry, Eastern hemlocks, white pines, American beech, tulip poplars, shagbark hickory, and many other types of trees.

The forest showed me what it means to have nature hold you. Offering much-needed peace, to be sure. But beyond peace, a feeling of being sheltered – a sense that even when the world is dark, there are places you can go to feel some measure of belonging.

My passion also helped me academically, since for my freshman biology term paper, I scrapped book the leaves from different trees, outlined their genus, family, and origin and shared what the different trees meant to me personally…

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A simple Buddhist reflection goes something like “Today, my body is free from tooth pain, and I notice this gift with gratitude.” Gratitude indeed. One in five U.S. adults is affected by some sort of ongoing physical pain. Add to that the incidence of “psychical pain” and we have an estimated twelve million chronic sufferers out there. That doesn’t even include transitory pain incident to birth, end-of-life, and everything in between, including, yes, that toothache.

What does it all mean ? The armchair philosopher might hold that pain is the path to deep insight, strength, and clarity that emerges when we face suffering without avoiding it. Both ancient philosophy and modern psychology confirm that pain can be a powerful teacher – but only when we reflect on it rather than numb it. Uh huh. Tell that to the woman in labor eyeing the epidural drip.

Our focus piece The Darkness From The Darkness is a review of a book about physical pain that draws on a wealth of cultural references as well as different faith traditions with mentions of Heinrich Heine, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Kurt Cobain . . . .

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More philosophical wisdom has been rendered by the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) than by a decade of MMs.

Each of the biggies – stoicism, free will, existentialism, paradox, materialistic hedonism, human ethics, our place in the universe – have all showed up among the frames featuring the musings of six-year-old Calvin (so-named after that 16th-century theologian) and his tiger Hobbes (so-named after that political philosopher – whether he is “real” or “imaginary” simply amounts to two versions of reality, like life itself).

For the many (of us), the strip has been the bridge between the imagination of childhood and whatever it is that comes thereafter. The cartoon genius of Bill Watterson is in his framing of 2000-year-old philosophical questions through that sense of wonder often lost with the hardening of the arteries. The heady questions become fresh and delicious once again…

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Few would deny Bob Dylan’s cultural influence and the way it has spanned music, literature, and politics. Out of the 1960s counterculture and beyond came that familiar refrain about “there’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is do you Mr. Jones?” What was happening there in that folk-rock era was the inability of even (maybe especially) the well-read man to comprehend the rapid changes about to engulf the, ahem, status quo. After some fifty years the culture remains seasick.

And, so, it might be useful for us to discuss the various influences that inspired that influencer Dylan himself as he expanded folk and pop lyrics by importing techniques from classic literature, modern poetry, and surrealism, making dense, allusive writing part of mainstream music as it seeped into culture itself. Well, as it turns out, we’re in luck in that it was flushed out somewhat ten years ago when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The award itself is kind of beside the point. He seemed to view the award as a kind of intrusion, letting three weeks pass before even acknowledging the honor, thereby dissing the Royal Majesties, the King and Queen of Sweden as they awaited his answer. He eventually responded to their invitation to come to Stockholm to accept the coveted Prize, though he did by sending a proxy rather than in person. Classic Dylan, part of that persona featured in Bob Dylan's Superpower Is That He Doesn't Get Embarrassed.

But that’s all secondary to the main point that he finally did accept the prize (in absentia) and submitted that required essay about those literary inspirations, the focus of our discussion (click: Bob Dylan – Nobel Lecture - Essay)…

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“How can Phoenix have so many farms, golf courses and pools when they have no water?”

 A question I heard repeatedly from friends who visited me when I lived in Scottsdale from 1996 until 2025.

 Candidly, I thought the same thing, and I sought out the answer prior to embarking on buying land in the Sonoran Desert where rainfall is less than 7 inches annually.

 The answer was a marvel of 20th Century engineering, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 336-mile system of aqueducts, tunnels and pumping plants that divert water from the Colorado River was what allowed the metropolitan population of Phoenix to double from 1996 to 2025, growing from approximately 2.53 million residents to over 5.22 million residents.

 In the spring of 1997, I wanted to know how long this was sustainable and consulted an environmental expert from Arizona State University.  He explained that the Colorado River has been the foundation for growth of the modern American West, supplying water to homes, farms, industry, and our beloved golf courses.  He educated me on the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided up the Colorado among seven basin states divided into the Upper and Lower Basins along with 30 Native American tribes and Mexico…

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The book group (forerunner to Member Monday) once took on Catch-22, that disorienting collection of character introductions, sleight-of-hand logic, tricks and paradoxes all mixed together and flushed down the rabbit hole.

I can still recall, upon my initial reading of the book some sixty years ago, the way it was such an assault on my own painfully linear background – born and bred linear, at a linear time, in a linear location, with a linear education, and (later) a linear profession – that I wanted to throw the book across the room, the reflex of a linear sole beholding a mobius world.

But somehow those mythic tricks coalesced over the years to reveal a larger truth about the limits of rigid thought. It’s equivalent to the first time one totally immersed in the self-defining internal logic of mathematics is suddenly confronted with the square root of negative-one.

Our focus piece (click: The Great Paradoxes That Shape Our Lives introduces various timeless paradoxes that continue to shape how we think and live e.g. the social media tolerance dilemma wherein unlimited tolerance leads to expressions of intolerance with ultimate consequences to tolerance itself, or the paradox of democracy wherein the people democratically decide not to govern themselves but to be governed by a tyrant (imagine that), or perhaps such uncited cases as that of the French high court’s ruling that disabled children were entitled to be compensated when their mothers were not given a chance to abort the defective fetus i.e. themselves…

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What is the soul, What is consciousness? The word that comes to mind is ineffable i.e. questions that go beyond the scope of language itself. Yet we will attempt to do just that. The two linked philosophical renderings are provided as mere catalysts to trigger thoughts. The discussion is ours. Just as every other MM session, the ultimate goal is to deepen mutual understanding.

The first piece, The Invention Of The Soul, addresses the question: What is the soul? Does the soul even exist or is it merely a potent invention to account for human evolution by “transforming human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and others’ lives.” How does one account for the vague notion of the “felt self"?

We might set the stage by referencing our MM 9/12/16 God And Science discussion invoking the words of Lance Morrow:…

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The question now confronting most every knowledge worker and student: how does one position oneself in the looming world of AI? Given that AI can now outperform most everyone on any standard education assessment, it would seem the effort to teach that which AI already does better to be a waste of time. Perhaps the alternative is to reorient education to focus on the discipline of thinking itself.

Such is the goal of dialogic education. The fruit of dialogic education is dialogic intelligence: the capacity to participate meaningfully in shared thinking, driven by real questions that matter. It may seem paradoxical but our focus article suggests AI itself might represent the best vehicle to achieve this goal, click: AI Can Teach Our Students the Art of Dialogue.

Yes, this same technology, arguably ruining essay writing as one’s natural skills atrophy, may now be applied via challenging conversations to help students sharpen their reasoning capability. At its core, the large language models offer something far more than merely answering one-off questions – they provide pedagogical partners at scale…

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What is the age at which one is old enough to die? The military says eighteen qualifies someone to be put in harm's way. At what age do obituaries simply fall back on “Natural Causes” as sufficient enough explanation? At what stage, if ever, does one viscerally accept the Stoic’s injunction of Memento Mori, the reminder that no one gets out of here alive?

Though the term Memento Mori never appears in our focus piece, the sentiment echoes throughout, as the author makes the case against excessive medical screenings and tests (click: Giving Up On Preventive Care). She explains why, at age 76, she decided to give up on screenings and tests for medical conditions common to old age and instead let Nature take its course. “I reject the torment of a medicalized death, I refuse to accept a medicalized life. As the time that remains to me shrinks, each day becomes too precious to spend in windowless rooms under the cold scrutiny of machines.”

So one might ask who made her God to decide she was “old enough to die”? A deeper reading reveals a more nuanced take as she weighs the relative costs and benefits. She allows that medical care is still the preferred option for some urgent problem, by which she presumably means having clear symptoms, but draws the line at problems that otherwise remain undetectable to her…

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MM 4/27/26 The Technate might prove to be one of the most intriguing subjects in MM’s ten-year history as so many vectors in those previous sessions align with what might be deemed fanciful speculation.

The subject starts off modestly enough with the focus article citing the long-forgotten Technology Incorporated movement from some ninety years ago (click: Welcome to the Technocracy). But stick with it. The gospel preached back then was that technology would be the ultimate revolutionary agent for the eventual collapse of liberal capitalism as it gives way to a new system called “technocracy.”

What was deemed back in 1933 as “the most discussed topic in America” then went dormant, written off as a delusional cult, given the state of technology at the time. That was then. But the core ideas that had been dismissed by the masses back then may now have found new life by today’s tech elite with plenty of capital to deploy. Oh, by the way, Elon Musk’s grandfather had been a leading member of the original movement.

Maybe start with the featured 1940 map, labeled “Technate of America,” and notice the lack of prominent borders as it covers a land mass including not only today’s America but Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Greenland, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. That recitation might ring a bell with some rumblings of moving away from our 77-year NATO pact in favor of a tighter Western Hemisphere alliance.

Our MM 9/19/22 The Network State session highlighted technology’s potential to reorder the very notion of statehood, once defined in terms of physical boundaries, into stand-alone aggregate network states with the capacity for collective action, even political power. Behold the recentralization of real-world communities into virtual alignment…

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While perhaps not classified in the diagnostic manuals as a formal “neurosis”, the fear of missing out can certainly feel like one. How else to label the constant rumination about others having better experiences that it distracts you from engaging in your own so-called life? So-called, that is, when such distractions themselves become a pseudo-life defined by compulsive social-media checking and chronic over commitments that ironically remove you from the very life you were worried about missing out on? Vicarious highlight reels indeed.

Though the FOMO term was only coined in 2004, the worry about one’s quieter life as lesser or that others are having richer, more exciting lives is the theme of classic literature, including some of the works we’d addressed in our earlier book club (forerunner to Member Mondays) e.g. The Great Gatsby, where FOMO was coded as class, glamour, and lost love. Our sister discussion group Notes From The Underground (led by Jeremy Ciampa) focused on Dostoevsky’s FOMO-like feelings that showed up as haunted regret, the fear of wasted life, and the torment of paths not taken.

We then have the delicious satire of H.L. Mencken who addresses the puritanical anxiety of those repressive elders or clergy in the 18th and 19th-century novels who police pleasure, dance, and drinking because they have the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time” – just as FOMO drives compulsive checking and social-media monitoring…

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Where to even begin given the false choice now offered up by today’s two-party political system: a Democratic party seen hijacked by a progressive wing; a Republican party commandeered by the neocons. Each party, it would appear, is taking us down the road to a reckoning.

With our Republic now on the eve of celebrating its 250th year anniversary, where might a sober citizen go to find a common sense platform to restore the founders’ original constitutional design of hard-wired limits on the size and scope of the administrative state?

Just imagine a platform that represents a much smaller government, fusing free-market economics and civil liberties. Consider the upcoming session as a thought experiment since the time for any sort of incipient third-party initiative has passed with our sclerotic system having been long held hostage by the entrenched interests of each current party.

Nonetheless, it’s worth discussing the following hypothetical platform. Let us start with a new piece of paper or perhaps dust off that very old one, the constitution. In no particular order:…

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See it for what it is. There’s often a hint of dopamine when we contemplate the hypocrisy in others. It may be the smug satisfaction knowing that Mr. all-men-are-created equal Thomas Jefferson was himself a slave owner. You see, my own moral standing is way superior to that of the founding fathers.

More contemporary politics can be a slugfest of mutually assured destruction gotchas. Those on the right have a field day with the hypocrisy of progressive virtue-signalling as they cite those save-the-planet ideologues on their private jets. Those on the left look to Trump and . . . well, where even to start.

Think of everyday scenes: a manager who preaches work‑life balance while sending late‑night emails; a colleague who posts about “honesty and integrity” while quietly bending the rules; friends who claim to hate hypocrisy yet judge others far more harshly than they judge themselves. These are not just isolated flaws as they mirror the kind of contradictions George Orwell dramatized in 1984, where ministries wage war in the name of peace and language is twisted so that “war is peace” sounds almost normal.

The point is many of us can be hypocritical machines. Look at the guy with the Be-The-Change bumper sticker flip off the car next to him. Besides, see, the jerk didn’t even use his turn signal, while I . . . whoops, did it again.

We’ll discuss hypocrisy—not just as a personal moral failing, but as something that shapes institutions, language, and even the way we think. Many of us feel deeply uncomfortable when people say one thing and do another, and yet, as Michael Hallsworth points out, our obsession with catching others out can backfire, breeding more hypocrisy and emptying the word of its real meaning (click: Hypocrisy)…

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“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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