N A R R A T I V E

MEMBER MONDAY ARCHIVE NARRATIVE:

Member Monday grew out of Highland's book club which began in May  2006 and ran sporadically through 2013. We certainly had some fine  evening discussions though it became clear participants were drawn more  to the respective topics than they necessarily were to the underlying books.  Some were put off by the time commitment these books demanded,  especially in the earlier days, when we ran one session per month. 

A new format was thus instituted in mid-2016, stepping up the frequency to change it from the previous monthly evening session format into a weekly lunch discussion and to replace a full book as the discussion catalyst into a  more approachable article (or two) with an introduction to help set the  stage. 

Member Monday held its first session on Monday July 5, 2016. The topic  for that inaugural session was, in fact, a spillover from the very last session  of the previous book club, centered around A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn. Instead of an article, though, a more extensive  introduction was prepared to capture the essence of Zinn's book and to  frame the discussion. There had been some thought given to breaking  down his lengthy work into bite-size chapters as the basis for a series of  future Member Monday discussions but, in the end, we decided to stick  with the original plan and serve up a new topic each week.   

As we now close in on one hundred and eighty sessions over the past  almost five years, it has become apparent that an archive merely listing all previous sessions is way too cumbersome and unwieldy to be useful. The  purpose of this archive narrative is to cull and organize by subject matter  the previous introductions and to further provide a brief overview of those respective discussions. 

The subjects, in order: history; philosophy; religion, environment, America,  racism, pandemic, money, "isms", technology, being human, connection,  manipulation, self-help, drugs, politics, and evolution. 

History:

Some expressed a new-found interest in history as they looked, perhaps for the first time, at the subject in terms of big patterns rather than as the  mere jumble of discrete facts and dates they'd recalled from their  secondary school years. One such session, then, was MM 7/30/18 The  Rise and fall of Empires centered around the article titled "The Fate of  Empires and Search For Survival" by Sir John Glubb (also the subject of  MM 12/4/17). It provides a wide-angle lens to the dynamics underlying the rise and fall of ten western empires. We used the occasion to roll out onto  the Highland library table a ten-foot timeline in order to follow the birth,  integration, and decline of empires -- each once perhaps viewed at the time to be everlasting as many regard ours to be today. 

Another favorite was the MM 3/20/17 The Fourth Turning, highlighting the  cyclical nature of five hundred years of Anglo-American history. This work  has received much attention of late as the current "turning" of the cycle in  which we find ourselves is seen by many as less than auspicious. The club was immensely privileged to discuss a real-life example of this phenomenon featuring two representatives from different secula (eighty years apart) – nonagenarians Oak Thorne and Bob Davis and eleven-year-old twins Gabriela and Charlie Minnis – as we discussed the way generations create history even as history creates generations MM 8/14/23 Passing The Torch.

Why we continue to make the same mistakes often comes down to the  same reason i.e. a certain hubris, the belief we have nothing to learn from  history, a theme we addressed most recently in MM 11/23/20 Big Lessons  From History, including the themes: calm plants the seeds of crazy; there's a time and place for optimism/pessimism; people believe/see/hear what they project; avoid the temptation of the easy story/explanation for the good/bad; and risk is what you don't see. That session had been preceded by MM 11/28/16 Generation Hand-Off with its particular reference to the handoff from the Boomer to the Gen X to the Gen Y Millennial generation as they now face the challenges chronicled in member Aaron  Perry's book "Y On Earth."  

We contemplated that poignant line describing history as "just one damn thing after another" while, at the same time, recognized that civilization is but one generation deep, the subject of MM 11/19/18 Intergenerational  Embrace. The need to nurture the power and the promise of the future  generation at the local (state) level was the topic of MM 5/21/18 New Era  Colorado. Such embrace, though, may not always be as smooth or elegant as we'd like to imagine as we discussed in MM 11/25/19 OK,  Boomer.

In any event, we engaged in a wide retrospective look at America's  signature phases and the underlying dynamics, from the Eisenhower days featuring "the bland leading the bland" through the hyper kinetics that characterize our world today, in our MM 1/7/19 All In Our Lifetime session,  with the focus article "How It All Happened." Be careful what we wish for was the theme of MM 10/14/19 Embracing Chaos with the focus article "A  Need For Chaos and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced  Democracies." One lesson from history is reflected in the well-known quote that "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Lest we despair, though, we imagined in our session MM 5/18/20 Power Of  Perspective the unfolding of the entire twentieth century from the  perspective of one who had just embarked on it, having been born in the  year 1900. 

It may be a stretch but, assuming the psychological time lock on Vietnam has finally expired, we'll now place that "conflict" into the category of history. We took a hard look at that dark adventure in our MM  9/25/17: Vietnam Comes Home session, featuring the article "Merely An Empire," which, in turn, was a remarkable overview of that comprehensive ten-part PBS series by Ken Burns. With reference to the preceding  paragraph, one would like to think we'd have learned some important  lessons -- although our subsequent foreign policy recklessness might  suggest otherwise. Another harsh reckoning of America as being “Exceptional” was put to the test in the aftermath of her botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was the subject of MM 9/13/21 The Myth of American Exceptionalism.

History being made as it is playing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the subject of two back-to-back sessions with the first MM 3/14/22 An Englishman In Russia, an expatriate's account of his utter despondency and confusion about what this unfolding war meant to his then-adopted Russia, its countrymen, and himself as he prepared to depart and forever leaving his child and her mother and the second MM 3/28/22 Call Me Ishmael, an account expressed by a previous editor of a major newspaper in Moscow about the dynamics leading to Putin’s actions which somehow brought forth an image of Putin’s driving obsession to be similar to that of Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale.

And, finally, in the category of history, comes that previously-referenced  inaugural session MM 7/5/16 A People's History of the United  States. Note this session, which chronicled much of the white man's often brutal subjugation of the "other," was held four years before Black Lives Matter erupted into the national consciousness. 

Philosophy: 

Discussion topics under the category of philosophy had to pass a threshold  test i.e. do they bear directly on practical guidance for a life well lived as  opposed to mere abstract intellectual pondering. The subject of Stoicism -- a philosophy for minimizing the negative emotions in one's life and maximizing one's gratitude and well-being -- would seem to meet that  standard, as we discussed on MM 2/24/20 Stoicism. 

Another philosophical discussion touching on the same theme was MM  10/2/17 Chasing Epicurus which took on that most approachable, yet  misunderstood and mischaracterized Greek philosopher. We discussed his philosophy which, contrary to what the eponymous term epicurean delight that might be misinterpreted to suggest hedonism, is centered  around the notion that pleasure is actually one of an internal mindset. Take,  for example, his injunction furthering inner tranquility: to make a man happy, add not to his riches but take away from his desires (And, further, when it comes to expanding the notion of hedonism to include the experience of inner tranquility, perhaps some artificial means to establish such a state was the subject of MM 3/4/24 The Experience Machine). His dismissiveness of the anxiety tied to gods and the fear of death was also addressed elsewhere. 

And, speaking to the fear of death, could there be any philosopher more  exemplary than the subject of MM 10/1/18 David Hume, the one who faced his end, "quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passing  (his) time very well with the assistance of amusing books?" This eighteenth century Scottish philosopher busied himself with the "higher pursuits," perhaps serving as the timely inspiration we need in this chaotically charged world. 

If there were ever a philosopher bent on bringing down to earth  philosophers/indeed philosophy it would surely be Diogenes Laertius, the  subject of MM 8/13/18 Applied Philosophy and the one who saw these figures, not in terms of Greek marble statues, but more as characters in a People magazine e.g. "Plato is weak-voiced but mocked for his long windedness; Aristotle had thin calves and small eyes and spoke with a lisp." No sacred cows are allowed here in our Member Monday sessions. 

Speaking of Plato, however, we had an enjoyable time discussing the  meaning of reality from the vantage point of MM 5/4/20 View From Plato's  Cave counseling those whose belief and knowledge come by way of what  they see and hear in the world -- empirical evidence -- are thereby trapped in a "cave" of misunderstanding. Such evidence, according to Plato, is often but a shadow representation of the real truth, in the same way that one residing in a cave featuring but a single light source will perceive one’s reality from the shadow cast by an object rather than from the object itself. Many of us are philosophical cave dwellers. We also discussed Plato in reference to the hostility he felt towards straight democracy (i.e. direct voting, rather than representative) in MM 10/5/20 Psychopaths and The Republic as he called for wise "guardians" as the only protection against the rise of the psychopath as dictator. 

In a round-about way, we looped back to the stoics in taking on the question raised in MM 3/4/19 State vs Socrates whether one would choose to die for the sake of principle and, if so, which one(s)? After all, Socrates willingly accepted the verdict of death by suicide (rather than the easy choice of simply skipping town) for the charge of corrupting youth by asking inappropriate questions along with his alleged belief in unauthorized gods. Socrates and Plato took center stage in our MM 8/16/2 Ignorant? Let’s Discuss. session featuring the power of the Socratic method in the achievement of knowledge through engaging others in dialogue seeking clarification and challenging their views.

We moved decidedly East with MM 11/11/19 Wisdom of Sun Tzu and the philosophy of the Chou dynasty some twenty-five centuries ago as applied to everything from military strategy to business negotiations to trial strategies to the world of sports to Tony Soprano ("balk the enemy's power, force him to reveal himself"). This philosophy may manifest big-time in the ongoing America/China struggle i.e. China's resolve to ultimately "win" be  accomplished without firing a shot.  

Sticking with the East, we discussed in MM 10/29/18 It's About Time the  perspective presented in the subject article, "About time: why western  philosophy can teach us only so much," one philosopher's quest to better  understand the human condition, not through the comfort of his own thirty year study of western philosophy, but through the philosophical reckoning  of others. While the topic of MM 11/18/19 Einstellung Effect may not fit  neatly into the category of philosophy, we discussed the way a fixed state  of mind can blind one, whether it be to a new philosophy or to solving a  problem through a fresh insight. 

Whether you are reading this narrative as an exercise of your own free will or as a result of a confluence of factors of which you're scarcely aware was at the heart of MM 5/13/19 Free Will and the various takes on it, ranging  from that of a humanist psychologist to the religious scholar. The role of luck and its intersection with Divine Providence, especially applied to the destructive Boulder county fire of December 2021, was the feature of MM 1/10/22 Fate and the Marshall Fire.

Religion:

The transition from philosophy to religion was facilitated by our MM 8/20/18  Religion as Philosophy session, though in a somewhat counter intuitive way, as the focus article featured a conversation with Graham Oppy, atheist  and philosopher of religion, as he cites the work of five atheists, one of  whom actually lived the kind of double life as a Catholic priest. Yet, as the argument goes, without the "burden" of these respective faith-based commitments, the analytical lens widens to encompass the world of cognitive anthropology, psychology, existential anxiety, and evolution. That  session was followed the following year with an open-ended discussion about our own search for truth with the help of our lead participant member Nick Urban, then attending the University of Chicago Divinity School, in our  session MM 7/8/19 Perennial Philosophy. 

The reconciliation of God and science in the context of the "Big Bang" was the focus of MM 9/12/16 God and Science featuring an essay by Lance  Morrow, which begins, "In the Beginning: God and Science: Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman's agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, manufactured things, medicines,  guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial." The essay continues by softening the hostile distinction as both science and religion became self-consciously aware of their excesses. 

Speaking of excesses, the MM 10/16/17 Religious Fundamentalism session featured the consequences of one fundamentalist sect -- that of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) -- with the "revelatory removal" (a/k/a murder) of Brenda Lafferty and her fifteen month old daughter as chronicled in "Under The Banner of Heaven," by Jon Krakauer. The  discussion focused on the danger that can arise out of overwrought literal interpretations of man presuming to speak for God. Per Joseph Campbell, regard religion in terms of poetry, rather than prose. 

What, then, might religion say about the puritanical hell-fire consequences for deemed breaches of imposed doctrine, the subject of MM 2/12/18 Hell  Revisited  with its focus article "Hell And The Mercy of God." According to many theologians, Biblical scholars and philosophers, there seems to be some wiggle room about the meaning and permanence of Hell. But don't just take my word for it. Do your own due diligence. 

Whether one regards it in terms of a softening or simply the desire for  greater relatability, a recent communication from the Pope himself  contained powerful messaging as we discussed in our MM 11/2/20  Encyclical Letter session. There are no "Thou shalts," no images  depicting Dante's "Circles of Hell" or abstract doctrinaire mumbo-jumbo,  just a heartfelt meditation on fraternity and social friendship as he speaks to, not at, people of all faiths or theistic traditions. That openness may then serve as a helpful response to the question of how can people live together in a democracy if they have fundamental, irreconcilable beliefs about the nature of the universe, the subject of our MM 1/16/17 Religion's Role In  Democracy session. 

The notion of a human-centered philosophy, rather than one based on some divine inspiration, was the topic of our MM 1/6/20 Humanism session. It's all right here. Don't bother invoking the supernatural or other world transcendence for your philosophical and ethical stance, say the Humanists, focus on doing good and living well in the here and now. Along the same lines, the distinction between religion and spirituality was on display in MM 1/22/18 Awesomeness with the focus article "A Water Based Religion," an angler's account as a meditation, as a form of prayer.  The account is simply beautiful. 

Then, of course, comes the existential question surrounding one's  contemplation of mortality that may be seen to arise out of man's  developed neocortex and its attendant ego structure, thereby inviting us into the world of metaphysics, the topic of MM 12/10/18 Spirit In The Sky. That session actually preceded another session with the same title but this one approached the matter from that which might be learned from the near-death experience in the separate MM 11/14/22 Spirit In The Sky session.

Environment: 

The stage was set for our various segments on nature/ecology in the MM  8/7/17 Nature Calls (Biophilia) discussion which referenced the allegory of Faust (culture) seeking a pact with the devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. Well, it seems as if nature might be facing foreclosure time. The biophilia hypothesis -- the imperative of Edward O. Wilson to maintain connection with nature -- underlies virtually every other segment in our environmental discussions. 

At its most fundamental level, the environmental threat comes down to the same issue applied to any limited resource i.e. the drive on the part of private parties, in furtherance of their respective self-interests, that together  serve to deplete or even exhaust said resource to the ultimate detriment of  all, the subject of our MM 6/11/18 Tragedy of the Commons discussion. One such tragedy arises from the collective pathology of our unquenchable consumerism with its roots in some psychological need to satisfy the ego structure, a phenomenon quite intentionally exploited by the likes of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays as we discussed in MM 6/5/23 I Consume, Therefor I Am.

That ultimate detriment may be, perhaps, to our very existence, the subject of our MM 7/17/17 The Uninhabitable Earth session which focused on the clear and present danger represented by our post-industrial abuse of the  earth. The discussion aspired to rise above mere apocalyptic doom porn as it referenced known scientific certainties that frame a timeline relevant to many alive today -- the hope being the discussion might serve to further inspire our third-floor Millennial club members. 

One such call to action was the subject of MM 10/8/18 Climate Change  Reckoning heralding the climate action federal lawsuit undertaken by twenty-five youths in Oregon alleging the federal government violates the constitutional rights of the youngest generation to life, liberty, and property  through its promotion of fossil fuels. Another bow to greater climate consciousness was the focus of MM 9/30/19 Deep Ecology/Tompkins Conservation, featuring the major private effort to leverage the private donation of a million acres into a ten million acre extensive park and wildlife recovery system throughout Chile and Argentina. Wildlife conservation as a cause, in this case the reintroduction of the Grauer gorillas in the Congo, took center stage in MM 8/15/22 Amazing GRACE.

As such, the wistfulness was palpable in our MM 4/1/19 Solitude (Nature) session as we time-traveled through Thoreau's essay "Solitude." This  metaphorical "walk in the woods" was greatly enhanced with the presence  of member Charlotte (Ripley) Sorenson who is on a first-name basis with the ghosts of those transcendental founders e.g. Emerson,Thoreau,  Whitman. We then applied the lessons learned from such solitude to the sublime condition of silence in general in MM 12/20/21 Tuning In To Silence.

America:

The notion of America being as much an idea as it is a place was the  theme of MM 5/14/18 Reimagining America where we paid tribute to the  ennobling principles and the unifying myths of the American experiment even as we discussed and compared such vision to our view of it today with the focus article "Rural Kansas Is Dying.” We then took a hard look in 2021 at the abiding myths that define America in the context of the country’s ungainly withdrawal from Afghanistan in MM 9/10/21 The Myth Of American Exceptionalism. Perhaps the ultimate challenge to the notion of the nation’s historical exceptionalism came in the form of her decision on August 6, 1945 to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima MM 8/7/23 American Prometheus.

Our MM 9/24/18 'Mourning' In America session expanded on the same theme through the perspective of a therapist whose article "America and Its Discontents" pronounced the country "unhappy" and diagnosed the issue as a malaise born of a special kind of grief being pathological in the sense the object of the grief can no longer even be identified. Three years after that session, we took a hard look at the extent of what seems to be America’s slow, steady, incremental social breakdown on MM 12/13/21 Defining Deviancy Down.

Actually, the best way to comprehend America might be to see her as not one, but four Americas -- Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America -- locked into a shared incomprehension of each other, the subject of MM 7/12/21 Four Americas. Just how these four Americas fit together with the care and feeding and growth of the Bourgeois and Bohemian class as described by David Brooks in his 2000 book “Bobos In Paradise” which later became nothing less than the brahmin elite class was the subject of MM 11/15/21 BoBo Bites Back.  Whether or not the country can reconcile these four Americas was the subject of MM 7/11/22 One Nation Divisible. The 2024 State Of The Union speech raised the discussion in our MM 3/18/24 The Center Cannot Hold session about whether the political leadership was attuned to the priorities of the citizens. Whether politics has devolved into emotional reflex over reflection was the topic of MM 3/25/24 Two Minutes Hate. While it’s often said that an upcoming presidential election will be the most important in history, there’s something about the dynamics in America before the 2024 face-off that smacks of fundamental upheaval as we addressed in MM 5/13/24 There's Something In The Air.

When enough is enough that might lead to a sudden, seemingly unanticipated non-linear triggering event was the subject of MM 1/22/21 Oh Mama/I Am Done. The specter of a grievance-based narrative like what gave rise to the Lost Cause mythology which festered in the post-Civil War South as a kind of religion was somewhat evident after Trump’s election defeat and the ensuing capitol breach of 1/6/21, the subject of our MM 1/29/21 New Civil Religion discussion. We explored the ever-widening fault lines and the resulting strife that have developed even after the Trump era, first the one defined by the growing disparity of income and wealth and income in MM 1/29/22 E Pluribus Bellum and the second in MM 2/7/22 E Pluribus Wokeism. May God save the Republic.

One possible object of the above-referenced discontent is the sense that an America without defensible borders becomes a country in name only, thereby fueling the phenomenon discussed in MM 11/5/18 The Immigration Challenge. The subject invited much discussion about the way fear possibly manifests a lack of confidence about who we are and what we stand for and that our made-for-television stand-off against the "invasion" from the south may have been essentially a cynical pre-election stunt. To that point, we asked in MM 11/22/21 Reimagining The Nation-State what does it even mean to say a country, such as America, is a nation-state without well-defined and defended borders when the whole notion of a nation-state is regarded as a Western fictive construct seen through Asian eyes with their notion of civilization-states. 

We took a harder look at the reality of the pervasive uncertainty  surrounding the very classification of such (non)legal status among the roughly eleven million immigrants in MM 4/30/18 "Illegal"  Immigrants, with its focus piece "Here's The Reality About Illegal Immigrants in the United States" -- the lucky become naturalized, some  disappear as a "guest" in a sanctuary city or otherwise, others blend in as hyper-productive members of society, doing work we "legals" do not and  whose loss would be to our detriment. The issue of immigration became real enough at the Texas border to be deemed by many as a national crisis and a major 2024 presidential campaign topic as we discussed in MM 2/5/24 Alamo 2.0.

The very meaning of family and how it has changed in America was the  subject of MM 3/2/20 Reimagining Family starting with the somewhat  surprising notion that the whole idea of a nuclear family might have been a mistake, or at least an aberration. The focus article traced the history and the ever-changing definition of family, separating fact from myth, and, together with our re-review of Harari's book Sapiens, were the basis of our discussion about whether the whole idea of human bonding need be based on biological relationships.

The phenomenon may not be uniquely American but what we discussed in MM 3/27/17 Kludgeocracy In America, as raised in our focus article (with the same title), tells us more about our government today than all the civics classes, political speeches, or even a close reading of the Constitution  might reveal -- and further takes us away from anything the founding fathers could ever have imagined for this great American experiment. That  phenomenon is tagged kludgeocracy (a reference to software patches over patches that can result in a hopelessly tangled kludge) that drives opacity and incoherence in our system of government, the effects of which  are seen in everything from tax compliance to what's often referred to as  the education “blob." 

Speaking of education, a common refrain in our sessions is that the answer to all our problems is the need for "more education." Really?, if so, what does that even mean in terms of our system today, the topic of MM 6/18/18  Don't Need ‘No’ Education with the focus article, a broadside "The Case  Against Education" by Bryan Caplan (btw, an academic himself) with its central thesis that formal education has little to do with expanding intelligence or imparting knowledge and mostly to do with signaling conscientiousness and conformity. It further argues that the system has driven the burgeoning number of “elites" that has vastly outstripped the society’s demand for corresponding jobs (not to mention assigning the student to debt servitude). The question whether education is necessarily confined to the hallowed halls of legacy institutions in this age of rapid change was the focus of MM 11/27/23 Rethinking Academia.

On the other hand, could there be a more heart-warming story than this account of James Hatch, a decorated Navy Seal veteran with his high school diploma now two decades old, entering Yale as a freshman? The  power of his piece which we discussed in MM 3/26/20 Second Acts is less about the daunting intellectual challenges he faces after this "gap years" than his account of the respect, the awe, with which he holds for his fellow students, some thirty years his junior, as chronicled in his "My Semester With the Snowflakes.” 

The sorry state of the business of medicine was the topic of MM 10/19/20  Addressing the Medical Industry Complex in which we saw the industry in terms of sick care rather than healthcare, as an amoral system meaning one which is the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, is now the third  leading cause of death, is characterized by conflicts of interests and perverse incentives, disempowers the patient, denies the capacity for innate healing, operates with little regard to risk/benefit and cost/benefit ratios, lacks transparency, and is overly beholden to special interests. Oh, yes, and the insurance industry has become an extraction machine bringing to mind the old poker saying that if after half an hour at the table you don't know who the patsy is, then that patsy is you. We later connected with the (arguably) dysfunctional healthcare system in terms of a specific proposal to reorient the entire approach from the bottom up in MM 4/11/22 Radical Common Sense Healthcare.

Can there be any subject that strikes the heart and the sweat glands of us mortals more than the visceral memory of taking those damn SATs, the results of which largely defined one’s future prospects? But really what exactly do they measure other than one's ability to take the test?, the subject of  MM 1/14/19 Standardized Testing Revisited which included as our lead  participant one who was involved with such test designs. 

That America's love affair with guns might be seen as a kind of a national  pathology was the subject of MM 10/23/17 Our Gun Culture featuring Peggy Noonan's post-Las Vegas essay, "The Culture of Death -- And of Disdain" inviting us to discuss, not shout about, why the term bump stock is even in our vocabulary. 

No discussion of America is complete without some reference to 9/11, the  topic of MM 4/27/20 Critical Thinking Re: 9/11 which centered around the question whether there might be some reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the official findings. Some pointedly refused to take part in the discussion, suggesting it to be more properly filed under the category of conspiracy theory but, among those who did participate and review the actual material, many felt there indeed was some reasonable doubt. 

Our MM 12/16/19 Suicide discussion was centered around a doctor's account of the subject after his twenty years of practice which had given him exposure to hundreds of suicidal patients, trained therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists that afforded him a front-row seat from which to engage, oversee, and otherwise observe these "lives of quiet  desperation," all of which he described in his "What I Have Learned From My Suicidal Patients.” 

We've also taken on some of the more local Boulder topics, including the issue of homelessness here and elsewhere in MM 10/9/17 Close To Home and MM 8/26/19 No way Home, as well as our local emergency resources in MM 3/19/18 Boulder Fire &Rescue, and the police department with its new chief in MM 9/28/20 Local Policing. 

Racism: 

The subject of racism, broadly defined to include discrimination and  prejudices of all kinds, was the topic of MM 11/4/19 Anti-Semitism with the focus article from Tablet Magazine positing the root cause of anti-semitism over the last two millennia may have stemmed from historical gentile envy. This, in turn, led to a discussion of the ways in which Jews have not only survived, but thrived, in the face of such adversity by shaping its culture, thereby perhaps contributing to this very achievement. 

The pits of hell, of course, opened up on 10/7/23 with the massacre raid by Hamas leading to the ultimate moral dilemma i.e. MM 10/23/23 Israel's Moral Nightmare. Lest there be any question we pondered in one session whether and what is the meaning of evil in MM 11/6/23 Evil.

Well before the Black Lives Matter movement, we addressed this very subject in our session MM 4/22/19 Now Listen, Whitey  

(Racism) dedicated to the proposition that failure to openly and honestly discuss the topic of racism only drives it further underground where it continues to fester. That very human story of Kyle Korver, NBA shooting guard for the Utah Jazz, provided the most tender, personal, and affecting commentary on the subject. We additionally invoked the Howard Zinn book by way of posing the question whether racism is the result of some natural antipathy on the part of whites towards blacks or whether it is the residue of some long-ingrained social system. 

The discomfort on the part of whites to even discuss the subject was the subject of MM 3/9/20 Confronting The "R" Word and the focus article "Race To Dinner" describing a program in which groups of eight affluent white women pay $2500 for a dinner during which two interrogators "of  color" call them out for their underlying racial biases. 

Might the entire phenomenon of racism be the holdover from early papal doctrines starting in 1494 with the Doctrine Of Discovery authorizing the conquest by European white Christians of any and all other faiths in all foreign lands MM 9/25/23 Fear Sells: Hammer Of Witches, carrying over to this day?

Pandemic: 

The theme of our first pandemic session MM 3/16/20 Plague Mentality  I, conducted about the time we first truly realized this bug had ambitions, was the need for a better understanding of plague psychology. Our focus piece was Lance Morrow's essay of 1985 describing the yellow fever epidemic that struck Philadelphia in 1793. Among the club's defensive measures was the conversion of our Member Monday sessions from a  physical forum to virtual Zoom sessions, discussed in MM  3/23/20 Plague Mentality II. The issues surrounding the forced quarantine was the subject of MM 4/6/20 The Quarantined Self which included another peek at the Stoics (see MM 2/24/20) and included a delightful account by Bob Davis coming to terms with the quarantine challenge. 

We then moved from pandemic defense to offense with a two-part series  MM 4/13/20 A Post-Pandemic World and MM 4/20/20 and Post Pandemic/Economics, with the first session focused on this new world order in terms of the opportunities (yes, there are some) and the challenges presented, as outlined in the focus piece "The Coronation" while the second session featured a more detailed look at the economic implications. 

A subsequent series of two sessions looked at the appropriate role of the state, the theme of the first discussion MM 5/25/20 The Pandemic and the State being America's ambivalence when it comes to the government's proper (and legal) role in this unfolding crisis with the focus article, "Pandemic Brings Out Both the Authoritarian and Libertarian In Us," with  the second session, MM 6/1/20 Lockdown: Governors Playing God, addressing the very real conflicting factors at play when it comes to matters of mandatory masks and lockdowns. If nothing else, that second session -- centered around what, precisely, would you do were you the governor and thereby empowered to make these life and death, economically consequential decisions in real time -- engendered an appreciation for those entrusted to make these decisions. The fact remains that the decision dynamics are extremely complicated and there are no  easy answers, the subject of MM 8/31/20 Post-Pandemic (Perspective).  And, in fact, these so-called answers may change over the course of time as we refreshed our look on MM 8/1/22 Endemic Downshift until finally we dared to peek at its possible “post-mortem” in our MM 12/5/22 Pandemic Unmasked session.

One year before the pandemic we held a MM 4/15/19 Drug Resistant Superbugs session, directed at the public health concerns  about the threat posed by a fungus called Candida auris. Though that pandemic was different from the Covid-19 virus, the warnings were eerily similar in that these threats are essentially a numbers game and become a question not if but when. 

Money: 

The subject of money started off easily enough with a look at the underlying  belief system displayed right there on that dollar bill, you know, with its  designation as a Note suggesting it to be some sort of a debt instrument, meaning . . . what, exactly?, the subject of MM 2/4/19 Full Faith and  Credit as we pondered what that might actually mean. Who/ what is the obligor? Full faith and credit in what? It’s listed as a Federal  Reserve note, that’s not even the U.S. Government. What is this instrument, then, beyond a reference to some stand-alone balance sheet?  What happens if push comes to shove? What's the obligation other than to, say, swap two fives for one ten -- itself, just another vague instrument?  How many angels dance on the head of a Bernanke, or a Yellen, or a Powell? 

Dumb questions, perhaps, but if philosophy is but pondering the  imponderables, we attempt to do so by integrating a later session MM  9/23/19 Sapiens for possible answers. Harari's book (of the same name)  describes how the trust inherent in a tribe's barter-based system must ultimately be replaced by what he calls a "fictive construct" of a monetary system as the tribe grows beyond the numbers accommodating the necessary trust intimacy. 

It is that fictive construct -- the shared story -- that was at the center of MM  6/8/20 WTF: What The Fed. What began in1913 as a consortium of banks  to backstop lending to companies facing liquidity (not insolvency) issues  has now morphed into (again) . . . . what, exactly? It is indeed a puzzle of  sorts which happens to be at the center of how we think of money today.  Bottom line: money derives its value based, not so much on anything  fundamental, but on the faith that the next guy buys into the same story  — the same fictive construct. The result might be that the free market has devolved into a politburo-like centralized fiction MM 7/25/22 Slouching To Central Planning. Meanwhile, the subject of the dollar in the international arena was the subject of MM 10/15/21 Shadow Banking and Eurodollar. How this might all play out as the financial Politburo now embarks on a new interest-rate hike environment was the topic of MM 11/21/22 The Great Unwind.

Nowhere has this circular truth been more revealed than with the advent of bitcoin, the subject of MM 11/9/20 Bitcoin And Value Illusion in which the "value" is derived by nothing other than a made-up computer algorithm, thereby presenting an ultimate paradox of "manufactured scarcity." At least  bitcoin features the advantage of a guaranteed limit (of twenty-one million units) which sets it apart from the dollar's theoretical limit of infinity ever since it was cut loose from gold conversion in 1971. Yes, one can see even the perceived value of gold to be yet another fictive construct but that construct has held up at least for some five thousand years while bitcoin's  goes back a relative five seconds. So the question remains what accounts for its large and growing valuation (now having more than doubled from the $13,000 at the time of the discussion) that is ascribed to what is essentially "nothing" -- one answer: now that most everything else is also overpriced, cryptocurrency has become just the latest place where excess fed liquidity  goes to die. 

Our Bitcoin discussion led us to the investigation of the fascinating world of blockchain in MM 4/19/21 Blockchain and the New World Order (NWO) which had been preceded by our focus on Non Fungible Tokens in MM 3/29/21 NFTs and the Metaverse.

Also falling under the category of money and value illusion we probed the extent to which finance, and more specifically the stock market, has become the plaything of the insiders, revealed to some extent by the Wall Street turmoil unleashed by the epic takedown by some coordinated retail investors managing to turn the tables on a large hedge fund as we discussed on MM 2/8/21GameStopping Wall Street.

Finally, we discussed the prospect and implications of a central bank's introduction of its own digital currency in MM 9/11/20 Looming Monetary  Reset. Whatever form money might take the issue of how we individually handle it comes down to the intersection of intellect and emotion as we  discussed in MM 12/3/18 The Psychology of Money. The focus article describes the twenty flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior when  people deal with it. Conspiracy alert: the potential puncture of the illusion of money and wealth by means of the mother of all orchestrated foreclosures was the subject of MM 1/8/24 The Great Taking. We discussed the current state of the U.S. economy in the context of historical examples of a back-handed default in MM 9/9/24 Debt Jubilee.

The distinction between wealth and money was the focus of MM 8/23/21 You Bet Your Life highlighting the features of what is referred to as multi-dimensional wealth i.e financial, health, time, relationships, and wisdom, all of which came into play in the featured short story, The Bet, by Anton Chekhov and then directly addressed in MM 6/6/22 Rich Versus Wealthy. When it comes to wretched excess, what must be the ultimate irony is that exhibited by those at the top of the pyramid applying their immense wealth to buy up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive some societal collapse that they themselves helped to cause MM 9/12/22 Apocalypse Porn.

“Isms": 

We started this segment by taking a look at Objectivism, essentially that bare-knuckled Darwinistic version of capitalism, in MM 5/22/17 Capitalism:  Ayn Rand/Atlas Shrugged. On the one hand, we acknowledged its central role in powering this country's prosperity and growth through the twentieth century. By the same token (on the obverse side), we questioned the entire underlying "virtue of selfishness" principle given today's reality of resource constraints (see tragedy of the commons), global interdependence, deepening income/wealth disparity, regulatory capture, and a distorted  monetary system. 

Speaking of capitalism, we bandied about an extremely interesting thought piece in MM 11/26/18 Capitalism, Meaning of Life that goes something like: What's striking about capitalism is that we're all trying to escape it because it makes us so miserable, mean, and foolish. We all want the freedom to live lives with meaning, purpose, instead of being crushed with anxiety, bruised by competitiveness, and suffused with fear, so here is the real question -- if these are the things we're really after, why don't we just give them to one another? Resist the temptation to simply blow off the question. 

We then devoted two sessions to address the role of the Federal Reserve in a capitalist system, the first MM 7/26/21 Redefining Capitalism (I) centered around the documentary “The Power Of The Fed” with the follow-on MM 8/9/21 Redefining Capitalism (II) with the thesis that when the creation, cost, and distribution of money, the very lifeblood of a free market, is controlled, the illusion of capitalism is fundamentally distorted. That thesis was tested in the context of its antithesis wherein Modern Monetary Theory allows for unfettered monetary expansion when dealing with a reserve currency and modest inflation.

The term socialism, particularly it’s variant democratic socialism, has been thrown around more and more frequently over the years, particularly as it led up to the last election. We discussed this subject with the view to more precisely define what the term even means in our MM 3/11/19 The  Socialist Seduction with a particular focus on the "third way" blending the best of the market and the state per the focus article authored by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The clear and present threat to capitalism posed by none other than the Federal Reserve with what seems reckless interference with the money supply and interest rates was the focus of MM 7/26/21 Redefining Capitalism.

There is, however, no appetite to blend or otherwise compromise economic systems on the part of certain rich millennials, as we discussed in our MM  12/14/20 The Rich Kids Who Want To Tear Down Capitalism session. Consider this contingent to be the polar opposite of the proponents of Objectivism (MM 5/22/17). What might be regarded as the tear-down of the “isms” altogether was the focus of our MM 9/27/21 A Is For Anarchy session.

Technology: 

The segment on the promise and perils of technology started with the MM  7/25/16 The Perils Of Artificial Intelligence discussion centered around the warning by the transhumanist Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in his article "Children Playing With A Bomb" suggesting artificial intelligence can and possibly will push humans into second place because humans always want more technology The Perils of Artificial Intelligence that exact point driven home as exhibited in the Faustian bargain known as MM 12/19/22 Chat GPT. The march of AI from the realm of the specific into the realm of general intelligence was the subject of MM 3/27/23 Rethinking Intelligence.

The subject of AI, in fact, opened up entire new paths of speculation, including the its application to widening communication from one limited to linear words to be mediated by a kind if universal language incorporating the totality of information including images – an “ur-language” – then tailored for a “last mile” connection to the individual MM 5/22/23 Life After Language. Who/what we are may become a matter of context, especially as AI presumes a wider range of once-human qualities as we addressed in MM 6/12/23 Who Are You? From there we wandered even beyond life after language to explore the possible role of AI to enable a literal shared consciousness in MM 1/29/24 AI Shared Consciousness.

Almost on cue comes Elon Musk whose work powered two of our sessions,  MM 5/8/17 Neuralink and MM 5/15/17 The Brain in which we discussed a new DARPA program to develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world -- think augmented brain memory, compensation for deficits in sight or hearing, direct integration of artificial intelligence, inter-human communication of the senses, upload/ download to/from the cloud -- of so much we regard as our human experience.

We may need all the guidance we can muster as human societies incorporate technology, the essence of our MM 6/24/19 Philosophy Of Technology discussion, centered around the choices about which technologies to take on, how to regulate them, and how such decisions end up shaping societies themselves. The focus article was a compact survey covering five of the finest books on the subject. Oh, by the way, the work is more philosophical in nature as it predates (the earliest being 1934) the advent of the internet. 

A dystopian view was on full display in our MM 1/15/18 Social  Engineering (China) discussion featuring the quote, "in a perfectly efficient  society man is redundant" along with the focus article "Inside China's Vast New Experiment In Social Engineering." Bear witness to the consequences on display as man is slowly reduced to an algorithm and private data aggregators triangulate countless input streams to score the individual in a unified system. What then happens to "being human?” 

While America, itself, may be lagging the China example by three years or so, the reality is she appears to be catching up in the exact same manner as we discussed in MM 8/23/21 Panopticon. In any event, one need not necessarily invoke the state when it comes to technology's potential for dehumanization when we see such phenomena as discussed in MM 5/9/22 Bossware.

Being Human: 

The segment starts with the basic question posed in MM 9/10/18 What Is It Like To Be Human? i.e. what is it, exactly, that distinguishes the human species from any other type of animal, the question posed in the (NYT)  article titled "What Is It Like To Be Human? Don't Ask." The article is centered around man's slaughter of such "lesser" species, one being the annual Japanese dolphin killing fields (featured in the documentary "The  Cove," which happened to premiere here at the club), and raises the wider point about our superior narcissistic certainty. After all, dolphins exhibit consciousness in terms of self-awareness at age one and a half. Descartes regarded animals as mere machines, based on what? A somewhat related subject was the exploration of human-pet connection in MM 4/2/18 Animal  Spirits. 

In any event, there is so much that can be learned about behavior from the mere recognition that the human is simply another animal with a neocortex addressed in MM 3/19/21 Manpacks. That the human animal continuum could possibly lead to their literal biological fusion by means of the rapidly-developing technology known as CRISPR was the subject of MM 5/3/21 CRISPR Life Forms as we confronted the many attendant moral and ethical considerations.

Fundamental to the phenomenon of being human is the nature and extent of the fusion of mind and body, the subject of MM 10/10/16 Mindbody. Our discussion featured our personal life experiences wherein full body  engagement transcended simple cognition, a talk inspired by the previous week lunch discussion with Mark Williams, one-time F-15 pilot and his mastery of "total situational awareness." This was followed up a year later in our MM 9/11/17 Applied Mindfulness session in which we discussed  how only the trained mind can tame the "normal" human physiological  response. Another take on the subject was addressed on MM 8/2/21 Flow State with reference to a kind of profound absorption, which some refer to as "in the zone," where peak performance is experienced by athletes, musicians, writers, meditators, or just plain folks so focused on an activity that time itself seems to stop. The ultimate exaltation of mindfulness and flow state might best be captured by the term MM 4/1/24 Awesomeness. How all that might lead to extraordinary contributions to others was captured in our segment MM 10/7/24 Unsung Heroes.

The sense of self-centeredness, not only as it relates to an entire species  but to the individual, was the subject of MM 8/2718 Get Over Thyself centered around the powerful commencement speech "This Is Water" delivered by David Foster Wallace, along with the Sam Harris book  "Waking Up," as we pondered the illusion of the self. The entire notion of  "Thyself" comes down to three pounds of wetware through which we elevate ourselves to become lord within our own skull-sized kingdom. The follow-up some three years later applied those teachings to our discussion MM 12/6/21 Ego Is the Enemy. The ego is perhaps indeed the enemy when it comes to becoming open-minded in terms of one’s perception of “truth” whatever that means as we addressed in MM 5/2/22 Open-Mindedness. Such open-mindedness, in fact, might just be the way to MM 2/12/24 Faith-Based Optimism and, indeed, MM 4/24/23 Happiness.

Speaking of ego, who are we exactly without all the things that seem to define us?. One way to find out is to see how you relate to the world if/when you’ve lost all that traditionally defines us and one is thrust into a kind of personal witness protection program through the loss of one’s wallet, an experience shared in MM 10/17/22 Horse With No Name. The need to define oneself may be at the root of what we discussed in MM 7/10/23 The Perfectionist.

The power and the mechanics of psychotherapy as a way to understand the self was the topic of MM 8/22/22 Tell Me More. . . How it is that we project ourselves was the subject of MM 6/4/18 Masks as we contemplated the false face and saw it for what it is i.e. the real or perceived need for character armor during the formative years of our life journey. That cultivated persona -- our "stage mask" -- may have once served us pretty well. Until it didn't. The later life reconciliation of our guise with our essence can be a full-contact sport. When and why “thyself” might be self-perceived as a victim was the topic of MM 6/28/21 Victimhood as we explored whether it is a matter of an individual mental state, a cultural phenomenon, or even a cynical way to achieve power. When and why “thyself” might be self-perceived as a victim was the topic of MM 6/28/21 Victimhood as we explored whether it is a matter of an individual mental state, a cultural phenomenon, or even a cynical way to achieve power. Societal interactions, in fact, may further be characterized by a certain ironic detachment, especially in this internet age marked by more anonymous dealing MM 5/15/23 Oh-So Clever.

One such reckoning was captured in MM 10/15/18 The Midlife Unraveling as we discussed Brene' Brown's characterization of that life stage, as paraphrased: to call what happens at mid-life a "crisis" is bullshit; a crisis is  an intense, short-lived, acute, easily identifiable and defining moment that can be controlled and managed; mid-life is not a crisis but an unraveling; the mid-life unraveling is a series of painful nudges strung together by low-grade anxiety and depression, an insidious loss of control; enough to make you crazy, the dangerous kind of suffering -- the kind that allows you to pretend that everything is okay. Further to the theme we discussed the possible paradox of societal affectation towards false positivity as an avoidance for individuals to address true problem solving in MM 5/16/22 Toxic Positivity.

News flash: we humans are flawed. What makes us that way was the subject of MM 12/17/18 Flawed? Us? Me? and the focus article "The  Worst Of Human Nature," a very readable digest of the extensive research on the subject of flawed character, followed by the three philosophical views that have prevailed historically re: man and child development: Original Sin; John Locke (children born a blank slate); Jean-Jacques  Rousseau (children born pure, best left alone). And, further to Rousseau. We probed the matter of whether man corrupts society or society corrupts man by revisiting the fictional “Lord Of The Flies” as it applied to the real world in our session MM 6/14/21 Noble Savage. And, further to Rousseau, we probed the matter of whether man corrupts society or society corrupts man by revisiting the fictional “Lord Of The Flies” as it applied to the real world in our session MM 6/14/21 Noble Savage.

We addressed another dark side of being human in our MM 3/26/18 Mental Illness and Violence, parsing the term mental illness in order to separate truth from perception, especially as it relates to violence. There's probably no example of mental illness manifesting as violence more extreme than the Columbine shootings. Susan Klebold, mother of Eric, took us through the details of her son and his actions in our MM 4/17/17 Schizophrenia/A  System Gone Mad session which led to a very meaningful discussion of the challenges of mental illness -- be it schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, acute depression -- that lurks, often undiagnosed, in so many homes, as chronicled in the review of the focus article "No One Cares About Crazy  People." 

If your memory fails, are you still the same person? is the issue we pondered on MM 7/18/16 Dementia. Everyone touched by the disease "goes through a crash course in the philosophy of the mind.” The focus on whether the sense of meaning itself was rooted in the brain as “I think therefore I am” Descartes would suggest or in relation to the universe of relationships was the topic of MM 4/8/24 The Vanishing Self.

Any segment on Being Human must include the subject of death, partially covered elsewhere under religion or philosophy but most directly here in  MM 5/11/20 Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil where we surveyed most of the views of an afterlife (or none) through the focus piece "What Happens When You Die?" including the notions of an eternal soul, reincarnation, eternal return, simulated universe, universal consciousness, parallel universes, together with the tenets of the religious traditions. Indeed, it sometimes appears the entire subject remains impossible to broach but broach we did with the focus article a synthesis of seven books on America’s death culture as we addressed MM 8/6/18 Have We Forgotten How to Die? but, at the same time, citing the existential machismo of one five-year-old from Iowa who signed off with his own obituary entree, “See ya later, suckas!”

The subject of death from the perspective of a sonnet and a forensic pathologist was the topic of MM 6/26/23 Death Be Not Proud for when it comes down to it, no matter what we might have accomplished in life or how self-important we’ve been regarded, what comes up is the most we can hope for is to maybe be a faded generational picture, little more than MM 9/18/23 Specks On The Wall. This one member of the Gen X generation seeks to take notes on the way the Boomer generation will slowly be entering and exiting that final life stage, wondering whether the experience of old age and death might simply become another life-style choice in MM 12/4/23 The Long Thanatopsis.

For die we must, the stoics remind us, sometimes much sooner than we expect as we discussed in MM 7/19/21 Near-Death Experiences. Yet, still, there seems to be this hubristic notion that the aging process might be delayed, even suspended, with enough money, thereby replacing the transitory beauty of life as depicted in the three-day blooming of the Japanese cherry trees with something they call iki-nokori, literally life leftovers MM 5/1/23 Life Extensions. A deeper probe into what, if any, lessons might be learned from near-death experiences about the spiritual dimension was the subject of MM 10/24/22 Spirit In The Sky.

We wrapped up the entire subject with the ultimate existential question: Is there life after High School? in MM 6/13/22 Mind Your Mortality along with the attendant matter of the search for a kind of transcendent reason for our time on earth in MM 6/27/22 Man's Search For Meaning. So why is it that we treat with a sort of disdain the one category into which all of us (if we’re lucky) will be members i.e. the aged, was the subject of MM 7/18/22 Your Future Self. Perhaps, after all, we might be better off in the end by seeing our lives in terms of MM 8/8/22 Life As A Game. Game or not, the matter of deciding whether to continue it or not was central to MM 4/10/23 Existential Question.

Add to that, we might be trapped in a game handicapped by actually knowing far less than what we think we know MM 11/14/22 Things That Just Ain't So. The humility derived from that recognition may thus promote a more active curiosity going forward as we discussed in MM 1/2/23 In Praise Of Bewilderment. One mystery that has teased the imagination ever since the so-called Roswell incident in 1947 has been the existence of extraterrestrial life manifesting as UFOs discussed in MM 7/31/23 Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).

We engaged in a different sort of existential crisis, though perhaps "kinder gentler," in MM 10/12/20 What's The Point addressing the hypothetical wherein the replacement fertility level drops from the current (roughly) 2.1 to zero. Whence comes any sense of meaning knowing the current crop on this earth is also the last one? Enter the Humanist with the question: what is the intrinsic value of one's human experience given the absolute certainty that life, both one's own and that of humanity at large, will eventually end. Okay, back to faith. Or, then again, it may give greater urgency to the question posed in MM 5/20/19 Children . . Why? 

Connection:

The basic hunger for human connection and the consequences, if unsatisfied, was the topic of MM 4/23/18 Connection: Anybody Out  There? where we discussed the way in which loneliness poses serious physical risk and the way subjective loneliness -- the sense of emptiness, worthlessness, lack of control, and personal threat -- is something quite different from the condition of simply being alone. No group is exempt from its affliction and the very pervasiveness of the phenomenon serves to eliminate the stigma and allows us to more openly address it, which we did, referring to a whole range of supporting material from Epicurus to the NYT article, "The 26 Questions That Lead To Love.” The question of loneliness was later picked up as we explored it from the perspective of personality types and the transcendent joy of the simple walk in the woods MM 3/20/23 Loneliness.

We tapped into one contemporary technique to initiate a connection in MM  12/18/17 Social Media: Once Upon A Swipe with a relationship coach and author of "Once Upon A Swipe" who chronicled her personal experiences with a view to assist others in navigating their digital dating live. On the other hand, the internet has also been a vehicle of estrangement as we discussed in MM 10/3/16 Internet Addiction highlighting how this vehicle of hyper-connecting, hyper distracting, hyper-intruding, hyper-demanding has also meant many have been enslaved, even to the extent we've even lost connection to the self. The very attraction of social media itself might come down to one’s inherent need to be recognized which, falsely, drives an addiction for attention, thereby creating what we discussed in MM 10/25/21 Fame's Existential Trap to such an extent that the sense of self has been subject to MM 4/15/24 Brain Hacking.

In any event the fundamental drive to “fit in” can even drive a pathological fear of not being “normal” as we discussed in MM 9/11/23 Fitting In. At some point, though, a sense of estrangement might be experienced to the extent that life itself is seen to be MM 10/2/23 Kafkaesque. But what’s the meaning of connection without discussing how to argue which we did in MM 7/29/24 The Argument Clinic.

Always a Valentine's day favorite, we embarked on the subject of romantic love and all that suggests -- the pursuit, the projections, the fantasies, the candlelight cliches' -- in our MM 2/11/19 Sharing V-Day Sentiments with the help of relationship coach Michele Weiner-Davis (of Divorce Buster fame) and her TED talk "The Sex-starved Marriage" as well as the video link (and NYT article) to Alain de Botton's "Why You Will marry The Wrong  Person." There are, of course, so many types of love beyond this romantic  (eros) variety e.g. friendship (Philia), familial (Storge), universal (Agape),  playful (Ludus), practical (Pragma), or of self (Philautia) many of which we  addressed in MM 2/10/20 Love. None other than Nietzsche then took center stage as MM 2/3/23 Hope For Marriage? took a rather skeptical (cynical?) look at the role “Big Romance” as the basis of a successful marriage. That love is but a conscious choice was at  the center of MM10/21/19 Choose Love featuring member Heidi Piper and her response to the sucker punch she received within her nuclear family, by opening herself up to a new, wonderful dimension in her interaction with the world. 

Gender connection, itself, was the subject of MM 11/7/16 The Sexes as well as MM11/13/17 Gender Dynamics with the lead-off focus article "Men Are They Really That Bad?" as we then addressed such male/female topics as the role of feminism, campus culture, and the book "The Myth of Male Power.” 

We took a look at other human emotions, such as MM 2/3/20 Envy, along with that other emotion so closely tied to the sense of connection in MM  9/18/17 Empathy. A completely different way to see, characterize, and  think about emotions generally was the subject of MM 12/7/20 A  Psychologist Rethinks Human Emotion. Intergenerational connection might be one of the most overlooked societal needs for without meaningful shared experiences civilization, itself, is but one generation deep, the subject of MM 11/8/21 Age-ing, Sage-ing, Integrating and again, highlighting the extraordinary intergenerational connection between our own Oak Thorne and the twin children of Todd and Paula Minnis on MM 4/29/24. What had to be the ultimate relationship movie of 2023 has to be “Barbie” which was the subject of MM 8/28/23 Emasculating Ken.

What the natural world might have to teach us about human connection -- if we simply slow down and approach the topic with some humility -- was the subject of MM 1/4/21 The Wood-Wide Web/Trees, highlighting the ancient wisdom of the old-growth forests. Another stunning example of what nature, in this case animals, can teach us about human connection is the phenomenon exhibited by flocks of starlings, called murmuration, that we discussed in MM 2/28/22 Collective Consciousness. In the end, however, perhaps the ultimate connection is that within the Self as we discussed on MM 6/7/21 You Are A Network as well as imagining an existence (even if temporary) without the trappings of any conventional external identity in our MM 10/17/22 Horse With No Name.

The whole notion of what community means may be upended by virtue of replacing geographical proximity with virtual connection, courtesy of the internet, such that even the idea of nation-states may become an anachronism to be supplanted by the network-state, the subject of a double series MM 9/19/22 Network State and MM 9/26/22 Network State (II). Indeed, the application of a network connection at the more modest community level was the subject of MM 10/31/22 The Network Community. At the other end of the spectrum lies the desire to connect at a very human level whether it be with others and/or nature and escape from many societal, especially commercial, incursions that threaten one’s soul as we discussed in MM 5/8/23 Off The Grid.

An ill-advised commercial by Apple inadvertently demonstrated the questionable relationship between technology and human creativity by the depiction of a giant hydraulic press as it literally crushed all things sacred in the art world, from musical instruments to sculpture, only to retract and reveal the only thing needed in the future was its latest iPad, the subject of MM 5/20/24 Creative Destruction.

Manipulation: 

We discussed the most personal, direct and malignant sort of manipulation in our MM 11/6/17 Gaslighting session where gaslighting -- that somewhat clunky gerund form of gaslight, named after the 1940s movie depicting a man seeking to drive a woman insane through manipulation -- has now  seeped into the mainstream to describe any willfully-induced manipulation. At the loose, wholesale level it might be referred to as fake news. We explored a more subtle type of manipulation in our MM 6/21/21 Unsolicited Advice session where the underlying motive for unsought “suggestions” was control.

Trust, once gone, is difficult to regain, whether applied to a government, institution, an acquaintance, a friend, or a life partner as we discussed in our MM 9/19/19 Lying: Deceit, Deception, Dissimulation session. Whether the dark art of deception is labeled "spin" or "management of perception," it is still some derivation of a lie, sometimes with the most  tragic consequences e.g. leading a country into war. And, then, we  investigated more thoroughly the examples, extent and the long-term consequences of lost trust in MM 3/25/19 Collapse Of Trust, with the  focus article "Why We Stopped Trusting Elites.”  

A related subject was the consequence of the complexity and vagueness introduced by a legal system with its greater reliance on the letter, over the  spirit, of law. That point was central to MM 5/7/18 Land Of The Lawless with the recognition that the average American now unknowingly commits three felonies a day thanks to the proliferation of regulations that have been incorporated by reference into various federal statutes, themselves having been passed with little regard to their possible implications. 

The most flagrant example of mass targeted manipulation today is via  social media, the subject of MM 11/30/20 (Social) Media Bias with the focus documentary video "The Social Dilemma." These media have become little more than attention extraction machines designed to not only  peek into, but to shape, the souls of its audience for whatever purpose, from  commercial exploitation to ideological manipulation. The point where machine-driven algorithms insinuate themselves into our very subconscious and know us better than we know ourselves was the topic of  MM 1/27/20 Eaten Inside Out. We looked at the logical extension of the way we can be manipulated by means of a totally invented world even outside social media, in this case, by means of a totally photo-journalist’s rendering of the origin of (ironically) fake news was the subject of MM 1/24/22 Brave New (Fake) World.

The power of manipulation, though, is as old as language itself, as we  discussed in MM 11/14/16 On Language featuring George Orwell's  dystopian novel 1984 which, of course, reflects how language itself can be  commandeered and weaponized, thereby threatening the proper  functioning of democracy itself. His 1946 essay "Politics And the English  Language" is a classic on the subject as we discussed in MM 2/13/17  Culture of Spin.Perhaps our very culture has largely been a matter of a MM 4/17/23 Media Driven Narrative.

The degree to which all this has (some would say) devolved into political correctness, particularly on college campuses, was  the topic of MM 3/18/19 Political Correctness which featured the focus  article "Get Ready For The Struggle Session," and then expanded in the  second article "Shall We Defend Our Common History?" 

In fact, the title to our MM 2/26/18 Postmodernism session, itself, might be an example of spin at work, for the term is just a fancy way to dress up what is essentially a lie within this "postmodern" world through sabotaging the entire notion of truth itself by characterizing it, and everything else, as nothing more than mere perception. The degree to which language has been abused by this postmodern nonsense starting with the academic world was the focus of MM 4/22/24 Say, What?. How all this contamination has found its way into print media was the subject of MM  3/5/18 Truth In Media, featuring the Boulder Weekly's article "Democracy  Destroyer." The entire matter of how the now-provisional nature of language has, in a sense, become weaponized was the topic of MM  8/17/20 Woke(ness) and, in a sense, might be considered an appropriate epitaph marking the end of the Trump administration as we discussed in MM 12/18/20 How To Tell Facts From Truth At The End Of The Trump Era.

Self-Help: 

A core human need must surely be the basic desire for pleasure, a topic we first addressed in MM 10/31/16 Pleasure spearheaded by member Jia Gottlieb with the first chapter of his (then pending) book on the subject. That session was then followed up by MM 1/13/20 Pleasure, Suffering, and Meaning on the eve of that book’s publication (titled "aah . . The  Pleasure Book") where we discussed the "Pleasure Prism" incorporating the elements of the physical, emotional, and spiritual. Another member, Marty Kaegel, was our lead participant for MM 2/27/17 Masters and  Johnson Revisited as she was "up close and personal" in her training with that very couple on her way to an early career centered around her specialty in Human Sexuality. Might there be any pleasure in life greater than that of proper nourishment of one's body?, the theme of MM 10/28/19  Food Sanctuary featuring our beloved executive chef Maria Cooper as she bid us farewell after years of serving out her daily dose of love. 

The subject of cults is listed in the category of self-help due to the ease and  danger such represent to the unsuspecting, including three of the most powerful and accomplished members of the club. They shared their common experience in MM 5/1/17 Cults having their souls psychologically hi-jacked in Ubud, Bali, freely answering the common questions of How did you get in? and How did you get out? One big takeaway from this  extremely popular session was that most anyone could be a target. 

Many will identify with the issue discussed in MM 1/30/17 Sleep, Insomnia, and Dreaming, that being what it means to be "Staring Into The Soundless  Dark," the title of the focus essay. Both scientists and poets, contemporary and historic, have lots to say on the topic. The conversation then took a wide turn into the imagination and whimsy as we shared our experiences with  dreaming. 

Lest we forget, both MM 8/9/16 The Role Of Luck (Chance) In Life and  the later session MM 4/9/18 The Role Of Luck In Life serve as a reminder that this metaphysical uncertainty is up there with nature and nurture (each of which represent their own form of luck) in terms of life outcomes and applies not just to individuals but to companies and countries alike. We explored the extent to which luck can be "made" beyond creating the space in which it can operate on its own terms. In the end, may we be open to the Stoic principle of Amor Fati i.e. love of fate. One form of luck in life must certainly lie in one’s genes that define physical beauty, opening up, whether acknowledged or not, MM 7/10/23 The Halo Effect. And then comes the question how the personal need for perfectionism affects one’s life quality as we discussed in MM 7/24/23 The Perfectionist.

The notion that any life event being judged good or bad was the topic of MM 6/10/19 Good/ Bad . . . We'll See invoking that famous Chinese parable about a farmer, his son, and a horse experiencing events not knowing at the time whether each was a blow or a blessing -- we can only judge them in the fullness of time (if then). And, as to imagining different life paths, we indulged ourselves on MM 1/8/21 The Anti Self with the fantasy of that half-secret old ambition to perhaps leap out of the interminable self into another skin, another life, a temporary release from the monotony of what we are -- from the life sentence of the mirror into a sort of anti self. Of course there are those who, whether by circumstance or nature, view life through the lens of a heavy MM 10/30/23 Melancholia.

So how is it that you come to make decisions in your life, the subject of MM 10/16/23 Decisions: Blink, Think, or Sleep On It? But one would think the determination of pessimism or optimism were a matter of our free will “to create our own reality”?, as we discussed in MM 2/12/24 Faith-Based Optimism. The role of passion, good or bad, in one’s career path was the topic of MM 5/6/24 The Trouble With Passion.

With David Brooks, always a favorite when it comes to the subject of social commentary, we devoted MM 10/7/19 Second Mountain to his piece (with the same name) in describing the life journey in terms of the first phase (Mountain) -- the period marked by this culture-driven need for success, comparative achievement, reputation and judgement -- and then, having  found that to be somewhat wanting, then embarking on the second phase  (Mountain) marked by a certain spiritual awakening and ego dissolution to discover something along the lines of spirit, soul, religion, grace, a purer joy. We incorporated this Second Mountain concept as part of a self-examination exercise in MM 12/12/22 Advice To Your Younger Self. Advice to one’s younger self is applicable as well on a generational basis as we discussed the potential for the otherwise-estranged elderly contingent in MM 1/30/23 Aged. That connection with the younger self might actually translate to a nostalgic impulse, the longing for a time that was simpler, slower, at least in retrospect as we discussed in MM 1/22/24 Nostalgia.

As a personal communicator, you are always on stage. So is everyone  else. More than half of your message is communicated through your body language alone (much greater than your voice or your actual words), the  subject of MM 8/5/19 Watch Your (Body) Language! Our lead participant for the session was our own Maria Brinck, founder of Zynergy Coaching, offering leadership and executive coaching to Fortune 500 executives. The  power of active listening was the topic of our MM 9/16/19 Power Of  Listening session in which we hosted two representatives of Boulder County Health and their BCH Listens initiative featuring empathic communication as it relates to healthcare providers but with universal application. The elements and techniques of high-performance team building were the subject of MM 11/1/21 "Applying" Good To Great.

This session might just as well have been categorized under the  technology segment but, seen as an element of conscious living, the topic of MM 6/17/19 Reclaim Your Attention also fits here as a generalized self help aspiration, particularly as framed in the focus article, "Attention is not a  resource but a way of being alive to the world." Not only social media but all sorts of other "bright shiny things" distractions may serve to cloud any real engagement with the world. Some of the brightest minds in psychology and brain science have (mis)applied the miracle drug dopamine, the "fun"  transmitter, to hijack our attention. 

There's nothing to the act of writing, per Hemingway, "All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." Joining us for MM 5/6/19 On Writing was Dr. Olivier (Kaur) Chadha Miller, instructor of rhetoric and writing at C.U. to  discuss her craft as a novelist (realistic fiction) and to offer encouragement to those who might be interested in sitting down at the typewriter to just  bleed. Speaking of fiction, we had a session defending this genre in MM  12/2/19 Long Live Fiction challenging the assertion of Bashevis Singer in his article "Reading Fiction Is A Waste Of Time (Who needs Literature?)" suggesting nothing invented by the mind can compare with the factual  accounts and the psychological surprises that play out in the real world.  While the foregoing may be "true" there is also an important truth in that a  compelling narrative, a good story, is often as important, if not more so, than raw facts and thus how we may be led astray by the strength of the narrative was the subject of MM 7/15/19 The Narrative Fallacy. The short  story genre and a tribute to brevity in general was then the subject of MM  8/10/20 Behold Brevity. 

An appreciation of beauty may start with an understanding of what makes it possible in the first place, the subject of MM 6/3/19 Birthing Beauty in  which our own Dominique Getliffe, founder of Boulder-based Getliffe  Architecture was our lead participant helping us to understand how beauty requires the synthesis of strong intent, extensive know-how, finely tuned subtle techniques, and a focused mind. That's all. Even with all that, "art is  the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never  succeeding." (Menotti). The subject of the fine arts, more specifically the visual arts with Van Ghoh’s “Night Cafe”, was the subject of MM 4/4/22 Are You Not Moved? wherein the question was whether art of any form should be judged primarily in terms of the impact on the viewer or more in terms of its expression by the artist.

Beauty of a different sort was the subject of MM  10/30/17 Music's Evocative Magic about the power of music in and of itself to encode emotion and thereby interact directly with the limbic system. We find that that integral part of music, rhythm, is also an essential part of nature itself all the way from speech, to the cycles of history, to planetary motions MM 12/18/23 Rhythm. We addressed the subject of another form of beauty in MM 8/29/22 Calligraphy. All the above is captured by the notion that beauty itself is an absolute value in and of itself, separate even from moral value, the topic of MM 1/16/23 Attuned To The Aesthetic as we probed the distinction whether “good art” really comes down to the highly individual and subjective question whether it is emotionally moving MM 12/11/23 On The Arts. The power and the beauty of minimalism and pure space applied to most everything, from writing to sculpture to painting to photography captured in the Japanese concept of Senru in MM 4/3/23 Senryu.

A unique sort of beauty was the subject of MM 8/12/19 Wabi-Sabi featuring Robyn Gibbs Lawrence, author of "Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi Sabi House" centered around the confluence of a life spent in nature and the beauty or serenity that comes with age. Wabi-sabi is more than a Japanese aesthetic but a mindset of finding beauty in things as they are. Its philosophical bedrock, that of Zen Buddhism and life impermanence, was  at the core of other Member Monday sessions. 

We began with Blaise Pascal's, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room" and moved into MM  11/21/16 Is the Going Still Good? raising its own question being compared to what? We exchanged personal stories and reflected on how, if  at all, we may have been somehow transformed by our respective travel  experiences in a way that made the mind alive, the  possibilities excited, and the self discovered. If memory serves, Bob Davis  won the prize with his account of the camper trip back he took to reclaim the Ohio of his youth. We circled back seven years later to that same question with totally new participants and experiences with a very palpable pushback to the proposition in the intro to MM 7/17/23 On Travel that physical travel has lost much of its significance in the world of virtual hyper-connection. 

Drugs: 

No discussion of drugs would be complete without some comment on the history of its illegality which we did on MM 9/26/16 War On Drugs leading off with the stunning death-bed confession of John Erlichman (as cited in "Legalize It All," the focus article ) "You want to know what this was really  all about? . . . the Nixon White House had two enemies: the anti-war left and the black people . . we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either  against the war or blacks . . . . but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news . . did we know we were lying about the drugs? . . . of course  we did.” 

From there, we might then have an adult discussions of the subject, an example of which was MM 7/24/17 Hallucinogens with our focus on the Scientific American article "A Journey Beyond The Fear of Death" on the  application of psilocybin to reduce the anxiety and depression that often accompanies a terminal patient's impending demise. We've certainly come far since the days referred to in MM 1/28/19 Reefer Madness with the current movement towards legalization of marijuana. Nonetheless, any adult conversation must include a thoughtful cautionary look at any drug, which we had with our focus article "Is Marijuana As Safe As We  Think?" (The New Yorker). Our MM 10/4/21 Psilocybin: Postcard From the Edge session, then, was focused on the very up-close-and-personal reported Psilocybin experience.

Politics: 

Why politics often seems to attract more heat than light might be answered by the paradox of bipartisanship i.e. if everything is handled through compromise and conciliation then why would the country change and make us (either party) the majority, the subject of MM 4/1/19 Fight Club Politics.  Nevertheless, here are some of the more substantive sessions we’ve had when the actors on the stage weren't shouting at those of us in the cheap seats. 

In a session held well before the election of Donald Trump but was so prescient about the havoc about to be unleashed only months later, was MM 7/11/16 How American Politics Went Insane with the focus article from The Atlantic with the same title. These words written way back in June of 2016 could apply equally well in retrospect, "Political parties are collapsing into chaos. 'Trump, however, didn't cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.' “ 

Details flowed from there and one month after his election we speculated  about his upcoming administration in MM 12/12/16 Looming Trump Era and wondered about a future with some guy who enters the room and starts to throw all the furniture around. David Brooks authored our focus  piece which looked to the bright side where caucuses essentially would become free agents, ready to realign in a vast space between the alt-right and alt-left to form an ideological "New Center." Well, now, how did all that  work out? 

An enlightening take on the underbelly of Trump's appeal was the subject of MM 9/21/20/Politics Of Humiliation in which the focus piece by Tom Friedman posited the fundamental dynamic behind his support can be  encapsulated in its paragraph four which reads "It has been obvious since Trump first ran for president that many of his core supporters actually hate the people who hate Trump, more than they care about Trump or any  particular action he takes no matter how awful.” A powerful articulation of the burning frustration that (seems to) have powered the pro-Trump contingent was the focus article of MM 1/22/21 OH Mama/I Am Done where we distinguished the catalyst for rapid change from the underlying dynamics behind such nonlinear events e.g. assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and WW I. The entire subject of nonlinear thinking had originally been the subject of MM 7/22/19 Going Non-Linear.

Writ large, the election really came down to nothing less than the MM  10/26/20 Battle For America's Soul. A litmus test, of sorts, was presented by the action and reaction surrounding the Portland unrest prior to the 2020  election, the subject of MM 8/3/20 A Republic . . . Ours to Lose. Particularly dangerous is the intrusion of the web, accounting for the surge  in anger that has thrust the private world of emotions into the public sphere, the subject of MM 7/27/20 Cult Politics with the focus article "Looking Glass Politics" warning that the digital world offers a "big stage" on which rage and despair is displayed in furtherance of its propagation.

The power of myth, rising to the status of a quasi-religion, as an animating force behind political consciousness was the subject of MM 1/29/21 New Civil Religion. We looked back on the “Lost Cause” mindset of the South after its defeat in the Civil War, and wondered whether such a consciousness, which has survived to this day as reflected in the Confederate flag carried through the capitol building on January 6, 2021, may again be seen in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat.

We took a look elsewhere at the parade-of-horribles when politics run off the rails in our two-part series MM 7/16/18 Could It Happen Here? Part  I and its focus article "It Can Happen Here," that depict Germany's rise into  an authoritarian state through the lens of its citizens and MM 7/23/18 Part  II centered around the triangulation of three sources -- They Thought They  Were Free and Defying Hitler and Broken Lives -- about the seduction of a  whole country as it embraces authoritarianism. It's easy to be cynical about such matters but these up close and personal accounts are terribly compelling and provide due warning. 

The role of the United Nations in all of this and with particular reference to what appears to be its pronounced impotence in the face of the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, one of the five permanent representatives with absolute veto power, was the subject of MM 4/18/22 United Nations, What Is It Good For?

The ease with which a society, indeed a country, can slip into tyranny does not necessarily suggest the jack-boots variety of 1930's Germany but  rather the willing surrender, even if unconsciously, of individual agency to  the lure of big data, the subject of MM 9/17/18 Artificial Intelligence/ Tyranny of the Drones. As we'd also discussed within our Technology  segment, look to China for a model for big data dystopia as served up in the focus article, "China's Vast New Experiment In Social Engineering"  referencing our MM 1/15/18 Social Engineering (China). 

We then took on politics at the local level with a series of three  sessions following the campaign of Mark Williams in his run for the  Congressional seat that includes Boulder. We profiled this remarkable man in MM 1/8/18 The Making Of A Congressman I and followed his trajectory in MM 4/16/18 Part II and MM 6/25/18 Part III which resulted in his ultimate loss to Joe Neguse, whom we have hosted a number of times at the club. The local political flashpoint related to the proposed annexation of the plot owned by the University of Colorado on which to build a new campus was the subject of MM 9/20/21 CU South Annexation.

Geopolitics:

The subject of politics on the world stage started with our discussion of liberal democracy’s future in light of Russia’s control use of its energy supply as possible leverage to further its position against Ukraine (MM 10/3/22 Putin's Power Play?), the matter further widening into possible war game scenarios given Russia’s increasingly tenuous position and Ukraine’s focused defense of early 2023 as we discussed in MM 1/23/23 Ukraine.

Evolution: 

We took a look at the evolutionary implications of the advances in human genome decoding over the past ten years that update the widely-accepted theories of natural selection set forth in Darwin's 1859 Origin of the Species in MM 2/6/17 What Science Says About Race And Genetics, with a specific focus on the fact 14% of the genome changes have taken place in modern times, signaling that evolution is most likely an ongoing process. 

Our own Roger Briggs, author of Journey To Civilization, introduced his proposed Global Dialogue Project in MM 12/19/16 Global Dialogue  Project, the establishment and nurturing of a virtual and physical network housed at Highland. This was followed by the MM 3/13/17  Evolutionary Dialogues discussion about a future seven-part series to be named the Evolutionary Dialogue Project centered around the notion that a new consciousness is struggling to be born. His works have percolated  throughout the years and will further manifest here in 2021 as The Planet Project which we discussed in The Planet Project with particular reference to the opportunities that might be afforded by application of the Network Community.

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