MEMBER MONDAY

Some time ago we addressed the question, What is it like to be human? ( MM 9/10/18 What's It Like Being Human), even as we recognized the question itself suggested the human species walks around enveloped in the narcissistic certainty that our dominant intelligence allows us to dismiss all the other sentient creatures on the planet. How about what's it like to be a dolphin? What's it like to be a non-human primate?

Easy distinctions fell away in the ensuing discussion e.g. the self-awareness perception in dolphins begins around the age of one and a half years, just like in humans. Yet, we seem to have perfected the technique of physical and psychological dissociation when it comes to non-human animals, regarding them as having been placed on earth for our convenience, be it for our amusement or as mere foodstuff.

Or replacement parts.

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I am redundant. You are redundant. The president, the world leader, is redundant in that he is, at best, a middle manager operating in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls. Mainstream voters may at times want to burn the place down yet politicians are unable to deliver as they too are trapped metaphorically in a car accelerating at full throttle with no one driving.

Such is the thrust of our focus article ( Our Incomprehensible World). We often speak in fancy terms about individual agency, about how the meaning of life is defined by that which we bring to it, about lives lived deliberately ( MM (4/1/19)/Solitude (Nature)). But maybe ponder this: how much of our daily life is actually characterized by reflex over reflection -- time spent before a screen passively absorbing images or, perhaps, tethered to the net like some sort of input/output node. We're small-time versions of the sea captain cited in the article ostensibly in command of a giant container ship yet in reality blindly responding to signals driven by unseen factors.

There is nothing here to suggest anything evil. There are those who speak in terms of a Deep State in which some sort of secret centralized intelligence is pulling levers in the background. No, rather, the vast and complex systems to which we are subject are the product of distributed intelligence that has naturally evolved out of a desire for greater and greater efficiency. We thus loop back to the opening sentiment and ask ourselves whether man becomes redundant in a perfectly efficient society.

Perhaps we all are comfortable with the bargain. After all, technology and JIT supply chains enable us to mainline into third-world sweatshops. Consumer goods can be ordered at the speed of light and delivered before you can say the word algorithm. You can execute a financial transaction while still in your slippers. The system takes care of itself. What's not to like.

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"Allison, can you explain what the internet is?" asked Katie Couric in this one-minute clip from a 1994 segment of the Today Show (1994: "Today Show": "What is the Internet, Anyway?"). Hilarious. Yet, the questions we ponder today about blockchain will seem no less hilarious in less than ten years. A new world order is upon us.

Given the importance of the topic, future Member Monday sessions shall focus on the implications, the opportunities, and the promise of blockchain at three levels: 1. its role in a re-ordered post-pandemic world, a subject most aligned with our Member Monday philosophical tradition; 2. the associated financial opportunities -- whether they are deemed investment, speculation, or downright gambling -- rendered by this new frontier; and 3. some basic understanding of the underlying technical aspects, directed at that subset of participants whose interest includes its underlying technical infrastructure.

Our physical lunch meetings in the library will be scheduled (not necessarily restricted to Mondays) to allow for the possible participation of various outside experts in the field. The challenge of blockchain generally, and crypto specifically, lies not so much in any shortage of supporting material but rather in the marshaling of such information in the most digestible way. Please note that I, as your host, am starting at a relatively basic level as are many of you. Other related subjects, such as finance, may also be introduced and interspersed as we move on.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1936 essay "The Crack-Up," wrote "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Our intelligence will be sorely tested by our ability to function in a universe so fundamentally changing that it might just as well be considered an idea opposed to everything representing our past experience.

We begin with something called blockchain and what it means as to value determination. Our initial discussion of blockchain was in the context of its use as a parallel type of currency, Bitcoin ( MM 11/9/20/Bitcoin and Value Illusion). There's no real need as far as our next discussion to peek under the blockchain hood except to note (and to which we'll stipulate for our discussion purposes) that it is a totally decentralized (i.e. no central control) system with which to establish absolute ownership rights to something(s) that can be transferred in a failsafe manner without the need for any third-party custodial trust.

Those blockchain "somethings" can be fungible tokens (i.e. they're all the same) such as Bitcoin, which can readily be purchased, held, or sold at will. Value is derived from their mandated scarcity, unlike so-called fiat currency which can pretty much be created at the pleasure of the state. That is the reason Bitcoin has enjoyed an eye-popping price rise (in dollar terms) as the state has pleasured itself (via federal reserve) with overheated currency issuance, something called liquidity. Bitcoin is one measure of such liquidity excess -- a cheeky way to say this is that in a world where most other assets are massively overpriced Bitcoin is the ultimate place where liquidity goes to die.

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Humans could learn a lot from canines. So concludes this short piece concerning the social hierarchy and vocabulary of wolves and canines that run throughout our culture, incorporating terms like an alpha male, underdog, lone wolf, and pack mentality (click, Alpha Males). Animal instincts drive human dynamics far more than our neocortex might acknowledge.

We may start with political theater. Even with your television on mute, you would likely have subconsciously written off sweating, overly-smiling, water-guzzling Rubio as Dead Candidate Walking during that televised 2016 Republican primary, a point anchored by Trump as he belittled him as "little Marco." We then bore witness in the later presidential debate to the way Trump presumed top dog status by brazenly invading Hillary's personal space. No words needed.

Those who spent time in the corporate world may have noted similar hierarchical jockeying -- from the raw power exhibited in boardroom positioning to the manager who gains dominance by most "looking and sounding" the part. Even the most subtle things can sometimes signal subordination like that annoying uptalk i.e. the habit, often unconscious, of ending simple declarative sentences with a rising inflection thereby making everything sound like a question.

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(Please note: given the latest CDC guidelines, we intend to resume our physical Member Monday sessions in the library starting with MM 3/29 for those who have received their final vaccination at least two weeks prior; MMs 3/15 and 3/22 mark our final remote Zoom sessions . . . . my special thanks to Bud W., Maria, Peter, and Oak for having stood in as guest hosts during my absence)

Riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very fact of letting it in risks toppling your sanity?

When it comes to a return to some sense of normal one usually thinks in terms of the pandemic. Time to get out and about, already. YOLO. Can't wait to meet up once again, maskless, at the club, take that deferred vacation, get married and have a child. We've deferred our lives enough already.

And, indeed, the background article (Goodbye To Normal) starts with a lament for our pre-Covid existence. But that's not its real point. Rather, the article's thrust is that the forced time-out afforded by the pandemic presents us with the opportunity, a unique chance, to really understand and internalize the fragility and transience of our collective existence. The insights thereby revealed about the meaning and consequences of "normal" allow us to pivot to our real subject: the radical shifts in behavior demanded in the face of climate change.

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An absolutely epic event occurred last week. A new class of activist investors harnessed the power of crowd-sourcing to crush short-sellers betting on the demise of an ailing company. This "new class" consisted of the little guy -- maybe the millennial with just a stimulus check -- and no "connections" other than the one on the computer. The ensuing personal stories bring tears of joy for "the people" -- some were able to pay off their car loan, or student debt, or even their mortgage. One trader managed to turn a $53,000 bet into a $48 million pay-date using the options market. That's what can happen when a stock moves in less than three weeks from $19.94 on January 11 to $325 on January 29.

But making the story even more delicious is the way in which this perfect storm unfolded and the hypocrisy it revealed about the workings of the financial industry. Our focus article ( Suck It, Wall Street) lays out the ways in which Wall Street, ever since (and before) that sordid 2008 bailout, has been able to fleece Main Street using obscure techniques and manipulation courtesy of the regulatory capture of the lawmakers.

First, though, many of you have undoubtedly heard the name GameStop (GME) -- forget anything about the company's fundamentals or even what it does for that's largely irrelevant for our purposes. Just know that a fairly common practice among "hedge funds" is to identify troubled companies and to engage in so-called short selling i.e. borrowing stock from a third party and selling it with the aim of then repurchasing the shares at a lower price, returning the borrowed shares to the lender, and pocketing the difference.

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Past Member Monday sessions have taken on the subjects of Reimagining America and Religion's Role In A Democracy. The two issues conflate as we now address a potentially malignant sort of creation myth arising out of Trump's ashes in the form of a new civil religion ( Trump's New Civil Religion).

The thrust of the threat harkens back to the experience of the post-Civil War days marked by the rise of the myths that helped define the South even in the face of its military defeat. A so-called Lost Cause mythology -- the nobility of the Confederacy and the moral vacancy of its enemies -- arose as rituals and symbols were inculcated and blossomed throughout the South's collective memory and, eventually, into its very consciousness. The facts be damned.

Trump's defeat likewise raises the specter of a grievance-based narrative rising to a Lost Cause mythology buttressed by evangelical narrative, ritual, symbols, and imagery and -- voila! -- the birth of a new religion, a new civil religion. Squint and see the January 6 movement by the stop-the-steal wing of the MAGA party as midwife at the birth of a permanently disaffected contingent. It becomes the beast that refuses to die.

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Scientists apply something called nonlinear dynamics to track how a system responds when it is prodded by an external disturbance. In the ordinary natural world it can be seen as a phase transition e.g. thirty-two degree water turns to ice with a further one degree drop or at two hundred twelve degrees into steam with a one degree rise. Then there is the extraordinary where, for example, two gargantuan subterranean tectonic plates slide by each other at a pace measured in terms of millimeters per century, unseen and unheard, until the dynamic suddenly erupts in an earthquake that wipes out cities.

Social systems can exhibit the same phenomenon. An aggregate of small, virtually undetectable, changes beneath the placid surface can likewise suddenly erupt in a spasm of nonlinear turmoil, whether it's referred to as cascading failure, chaos theory, domino effect, the straw that broke the camel's back, the hundredth monkey, or Gladwell's tipping point. Despite what you read in the history books, the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand was not the cause of the first world war, it was only its nonlinear trigger. The principle applies as well to the seeming suddenness of the BLM movement, the subject of an excellent background article, click: The Slow Road To Rapid Change. George Floyd was the Archduke Ferdinand of racial consciousness.

Yet, the focus article for our Member Monday (2/25/21) is about a different, simmering pre-spasm, phenomenon. Making the rounds is a guest post by OHMama titled "I Am Done" ( I Am Done), amounting to an Edvard Munch scream from another sort of disenfranchised group. Ignore at your peril this Gen X/Millennial white woman and her equivalent of "I can't breath." She represents a potential fault line of a different sort.

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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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