MEMBER MONDAY

The central question posed in one the best book discussions we had many years ago i.e. over Night Train to Lisbon was: given that we can only live a small part of what there is in us -- what happens to the rest? The same question, posed slightly differently, is at the heart of our focus article, "What If You Could Do It All Over?".

Would you want to do so? And, if so, would there be any conditions imposed for the new hypothetical arrangement, say different genes, other parents, another time in history? If the answer is no, then what makes you think the result would be any different from your current reality? The answer, of course, is the topic we've discussed twice before, most recently in MM 4/9/18 The Role Of Luck In Life ( MM 4/9/18) as we beheld the power of the fortuitous -- the force that reminds us of our common vulnerability to this invisible, otherwise undetectable, force that can be known only by its works.

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The notion that trees, plants, fungi and microbes are so thoroughly interconnected within a forest that the entire system is regarded as a superorganism should grab the attention of a wide audience, from the scientist to the poet. The fact is scientists have confirmed, through isotope tracing, that trees do indeed share carbon by means of subterranean collections of fungal threads, called mycorrhizal networks.

Hard science then opens the way for some to behold old-growth forests as vast, ancient and intricate societies in which there is an ongoing process of negotiation, reciprocity, and perhaps even selflessness. These fungal threads are likewise seen to permeate prairies, grasslands, and even Arctic tundra as they enable vast living networks of symbiotic relationships. Trees, themselves, evidently even share alarm signals and defensive enzymes and, in doing so, exhibit a basic form of consciousness as they communicate amongst themselves to warn the others of danger, say insects, thereby triggering in them appropriate chemical defenses.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The Great Gatsby") knew something about wealth and the wealthy. In his novella "The Rich Boy" he writes, "They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."

But we shall try -- to understand, that is -- what's behind these millennial heirs as they aspire to "live their values" by getting rid of their money (click, The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism). It would be tempting to write off as simply being soft some of these self-described "anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, abolitionist" trust funders were it not for the fact they are part of a generation destined to inherit tens of trillions dollars. We might probe the mindset of those few who have won the inheritance lottery to determine the extent, if at all, an entire generation has been similarly afflicted.

In one sense they are seeking the right to never have existed in the first place and, by extension, others like them. Some of you may recall many years ago that self-canceling black box novelty toy called "Magic Hand Black Box." You'd drop a coin in the outside slot, the box made a whirring sound, a lid opened, a small plastic hand reached out, took the coin and the hand withdrew as the box lid closed, silence again, the slot awaiting the next coin. The cited millennials seek a similar self-cancellation, not only of themselves but of capitalism itself.

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Article and introduction courtesy of The Browser:

Is it possible that we fundamentally misrepresent our own feelings? When we talk about emotions, what we talk about is mainly behavior and physiology — reflexes, reactions, stylized body language. But what are we feeling at such times? "The universal components of human experience are not emotions, but changes on a continuum of arousal on the one hand, and pleasantness and unpleasantness on the other" (1,880 words).

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The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn't exist. We'll apply Baudelaire's take on the devil's finest trick to discuss the way media operate at a level even below our conscious awareness.

We might start out with the most flagrant example in which bias actually rises to the level of targeted manipulation i.e. social media. It's now trite to say but nonetheless true that products served up as "free" simply mean you are the product. View any of them -- facebook, google, instagram, etc. -- simply as attention extraction machines designed to peek into our very souls. No, not just to peek, but to shape. This particular devil behind the curtain may be motivated by anything from simple commercial exploitation to outright ideological manipulation.

Think that's all a cynical exaggeration? If so, the very best preparation for our session is a ninety minute viewing of that stunning recent documentary The Social Dilemma (available on Netflix). The human brain stem, its existence measured in terms of millennia, is no match against the power of technology, around for mere decades, to hack it. Now picture yourself as an appendage dangling from a node on the network.

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It's been said that the best cure for seasickness is to sit under a large tree. Might that remedy apply to an entire culture? America today is so chaotically hyped, its air so thick with kinetic information, that it seems what we really need to combat our cultural motion sickness is a time-out. Good luck with that. History teaches us the future offers no off-ramp.

Yet history also provides enduring lessons that we ignore to our detriment. Our very uprootedness now reflects the hubris that we are somehow a unique people, not like those of generations past, you know like the ones back in the 1930s as that generation pinwheeled onto the rocks of the Great Depression, or the 1970s scarred by the imperial overreach called Vietnam, or even just back to what already seems to be that Pleistocene epoch before the advent of our god-given iPhones.

Perhaps our time-out might best be spent by tapping into what they have to teach us. View our upcoming session as a handshake with those past generations, perhaps moving us towards the more steady gaze we need in order to catch our collective breath. We'll avail ourselves of five such tried and true lessons that are so easily overlooked amidst the crap du jour of the social media that sometimes passes for wisdom today.

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Out of the ashes of this blistering attack on Donald Trump, the man, Sam Harris in this eight-minute segment hits on something of far, far greater significance -- an insight, bordering on epiphany, of what animates "Trumpland" (click, The Key to Trump's Appeal).

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One childhood hobby, an obsession really, was my coin collection. Pennies were a particular focus. The hunt for the great white whale was the search for the elusive 1909 S-VDB, the "S" designating this very first Lincoln penny had been struck by the San Francisco mint and the "VDB" reflecting the initials of the Lincoln cent designer, Victor David Brenner. Some initial controversy arose such that the mint ceased its production after fewer than half a million had been struck. This relative scarcity eventually drove its price in the collectors' market into the thousands of dollars.

Such was my first life lesson in scarcity value i.e. price dependency of an item being largely a function of its scarcity, real or imagined, rather than any reference to its cost of production or real utility value. While a ratio in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand to one might sound outlandish many other examples, perhaps more modest, have arisen over the ages. Think Beanie Babies, probably each costing a dollar or two to produce yet some eventually fetching hundreds of dollars due to their perceived "limited production" run. Think fine art. Think certain vintage wines.

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The inspiration for our next Member Monday session comes from an email sent by a fellow member under the subject heading "I can't stop reading this stuff." "This stuff" is nothing other than Pope Francis' just-released encyclical letter. By using this encyclical format, Francis is announcing he has something important to say and he wants people to pay attention.

Indeed we might. What's astounding about the letter is its sheer readability. There are no "Thou shalts," no images depicting Dante's "Circles of Hell," no abstract doctrinaire mumbo-jumbo; rather, regard this as a message from a spiritual leader, both very much in and of the world, delivering a heartfelt meditation on fraternity and social friendship as he speaks with, not at, people of all faiths (Fratelli tutti (3 October 2020) | Francis). The messages are universal in that they could be applied to a broad range of theistic traditions or even, for that matter, ascribed to Humanism (see, MM 1/6/20 Humanism).

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The upcoming election has been framed by each major party as nothing less than a battle for the soul of the nation. May that prove to be more than some cheap bumper sticker sentiment as we close in on next week's election.

Reference to the country's soul suggests something far deeper than policy prescriptions or even ideology. It goes to America's very imagination of itself. We've been at this reckoning for over two hundred years, or at least since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 called America a blank page upon which history waited to be written. Let's back off from the news cycle of the day and see this as an opportunity to take a hard look at ourselves. This time may we approach the subject with a touch of humility given the stale air of foreclosure that seems to be in the offing.

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There's a word. There's a word that describes our current healthcare system, dominated by private insurance, regional groups of private hospitals, and other powerful interests that look more like a numbers racket. We would like to think we have health care that incidentally involves some wealth transfer; what we actually have is wealth transfer that incidentally involves some health care. The above-referenced word is amoral.

Can a system be amoral? One tries to find a better word to describe a system which: has become the number one cause of personal bankruptcy; is now the third leading cause of death; is characterized by conflicts of interest and perverse incentives; disempowers the patient; denies the capacity for innate healing; operates with little regard to risk/benefit and cost/benefit ratios; lacks any real transparency; imposes erratic patient privacy laws; is overly beholden to special interests; and has even driven some doctors and other "healers" to the point of such despair that they have abandoned the profession altogether.

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The replacement fertility level -- the average number of children needed to be born per woman in order to maintain ongoing generational levels -- is roughly 2.1. Fewer than that translates to a shrinking population, absent immigration. This Member Monday we'll address the philosophical questions that arise by means of a thought experiment in which the actual rate were to drop to zero.

As far as existential crises go, this one is kinder, gentler. No doom porn here. View this exercise simply as a way to tease out one's sense of life and its meaning. We may start out at the more surface level e.g the climate change anxieties now become somewhat secondary, the on-going threat of wars and the attendant mass destruction likewise fade in context. This so-called infertility scenario in many ways suggests a refreshingly different perspective on the traditional parade-of-horribles. One may even embrace a world where our day-to-day existence is (perceived to be) less burdened by those conventional existential threats.

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You've solemnly made the exact same pledge more than a thousand times. All the way from the age of five through at least middle school you'd start the school day by pledging your allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands -- to the Republic, mind you. Our discussion will center around what that means in the context of what passes for politics today,

Francis Bellamy's choice in 1892 of the word Republic in the Pledge most certainly reflected Plato's philosophical devotion to the basic ideals of good government. For our purposes, however, we will avoid an extensive discussion about America's current system, sometimes also referred to as a representative democracy, and the way it bridges the sometimes tricky distinction between a pure Republic (sovereignty vested in the people themselves) versus a pure democracy (sovereignty vested in the whole body). Rather, we'll focus on certain observations and concerns on the part of Plato, author of The Republic (focus article, Why the West Needs Plato).

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By some reckonings, the election of 2016 was by and large theater acting out that darkest and most dangerous human impulse i.e. revenge. And, as implied by our focus article ( Who Can Win America's Politics of Humiliation?), failure to truly appreciate that underlying dynamic may set the stage for the next play. The essence of Friedman's column is encapsulated in his paragraph four which reads in its entirety, "It has been obvious ever 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."

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It has been called the grandmother test i.e. your understanding of a concept is best demonstrated by your ability to successfully explain it to your grandmother. I am pleased to serve as both your facilitator and grandmother as we gather to discuss a subject that is both vitally important and (to some) devilishly obscure: monetary policy and its role in a divided America.

This introduction may come across as cheeky, overwrought, and irreverent but it stems from the sincere desire to better understand monetary policy through a substantive discussion of the following thesis: yet another devolution in our monetary system looms (furthering the move from a free-market to a nationalized economy) should the Federal Reserve successfully implement its central bank digital currency (CBDC) initiative.

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It just doesn't belong, not here, not now. The spring pandemic was simply not meant for these post-industrial times -- maybe something more appropriate to the Middle Ages. But here we are. A cannibal joined the family picnic and calmly started eating the children.

The overarching question as we address this uninvited guest is the extent to which the world has been and will be shaped not only by the pandemic itself but, perhaps even more so, by the manner in which we choose to respond.

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Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass features this telling exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty over the meaning of a word in which Alice says, "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" to which Humpty Dumpty answers "Of course you don't -- till I tell you . . . when I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less" to which Alice responds, "The question is whether you can make words mean different things -- that's all" to which Humpty Dumpty closes down the exchange with, "The question is which is to be master -- that's all"

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Viewed some sixty years later, my middle school educational experience seemed grey, tedious, and flat-out uninspiring. Just one single factoid survived all these intervening years i.e. the three styles of the ancient Greek pillars, you know, the Doric, Ionic and the other one. Yet, for some reason, what sticks to this day are the assigned short stories e.g. The Tell-Tale Heart, Leiningen Versus the Ants, The Most Dangerous Game, The Gift of the Magi.

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