MEMBER MONDAY

It had been described as "a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity." The referenced "device" was an institutional building and system of control designed in the eighteenth century by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. The so-called panopticon, from the Greek word for "all seeing," was devilishly simple.

A prison consisted of individual cells arranged along the circumference of a multistory rotunda, each cell facing inward. An inspection house sat in the middle. The efficiency allowed a single unseen guard in the inspection house to watch over hundreds of inmates. The power lay in the fact no prisoner was ever aware at any particular time whether the prisoner was being watched. This asymmetric viewing system served as the model for fifty-four prisons in Victorian Britain.

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Our own Bob Davis led his response to last week's introduction with "we are all ignorant, just ignorant about different things." So well said and the perfect segue to our next session. Our discussion will be centered around Against Persuasion and its theme that the pursuit of knowledge requires a radical collaboration: the openness to being persuaded as much as an eagerness to persuade.

The genuine desire to know through honest inquiry, an aspiration of Member Monday, is certainly nothing new. Socrates sought to map out the terrain of his own ignorance through the dialogues with others, seeking clarification and refuting views, all in an attempt to acquire the knowledge he so desperately wanted. No interlocutor was off-limits as most people put forward claims. His ultimate high wire act must have been seeking to refute the proclamation by none other than the Oracle at Delphi that Socrates, himself, must be the wisest of men.

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"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so" (attributed to Mark Twain)

We conclude our look at Redefining Capitalism in the context of monetary policy. No one participating in the previous MM 7/26/21 Redefining Capitalism(I) session claimed to "know for sure" all about monetary policy, whether applied generally or with specific reference to the workings of the Federal Reserve. We shall continue to approach the subject with what the Buddhists refer to as a beginner's mind.

The Power Of The Fed documentary from the previous session raised as many questions as it answered about how the Fed operates and the resulting real-world effects. The Fed seems intent, despite its vow of transparency, to work in the shadows. Let us thus share our understandings and perspectives of the Fed as we attempt a further dive into the Rabbit Hole

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A few terms might pop up when discussing the Federal Reserve: opaque; unaccountable; conflicted; powerful. Perhaps it is all those things. Perhaps all those things are as they were intended.

Many of us certainly recall the opacity a couple of decades ago when then-Chairman Greenspan, using so-called FedSpeak, communicated largely via a word salad of insider terms. The cross-eyed audience largely dealt with the obfuscation by simply dubbing him some kind of oracle and moving on. Or, to paraphrase Mark Twain, it just seemed easier at the time to keep your mouth shut and appear clueless than open it and remove all doubt. The obfuscation continues.

We may discuss what few today even recognize: that the Fed, established by Congress in 1913, is actually a creature of the private banking sector and that its leadership ever since has been insulated from the indignity of a public vote. It proclaims transparency even as it vigorously rallies forces to thwart any attempt to peek under the covers. Just leave the conflicts of interest to your imagination.

The Fed's power, then, lies in its largely unfettered ability to create money and to regulate interest rates. Up for discussion:

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Some years ago, in our session on Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, we discussed the body's natural physiological response when life is on the line: the amygdala detects danger; the adrenal glands kick in; catecholamines constrict blood vessels and affect the firing of nerve cells; the adrenal cortex releases cortisol, invading the hippocampus, amping up fear and affecting the memory system; heart rate rises; breathing speeds up; sugar is dumped into the metabolic system; the oxygen and nutrients distribution shifts for immediate strength -- you're on afterburner and all this occurs before you can even “think.”

So many accidents, so little time: rafting; flying; climbing; adrift at sea; even a walk in the woods. The very term adventure, almost by definition, suggests danger, voluntarily faced. The activities cited in the book range in risk from the barely foreseeable to the patently suicidal. The threshold question, then, is what might even trigger the initial decision to undertake the risk in the first place e.g. the snowmobiler taking a run at the slope that any rational analysis would deem to be an invitation to an avalanche. Perhaps the answer lies in the Evel Knievel philosophy that life takes on meaning only in its relation to death.

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You find yourself trying to communicate with a stranger whose English is a second language. You know what you want to get across. You speak. Stranger's mute response is a look of complete bewilderment. But you know what to do. You just speak louder.

Our focus piece is the story of a splintered America locked in shared incomprehension (Four Americas). Each of the four Americas comes with its own history, its own narrative, its own language of sorts. The magic of this long yet very approachable article lies in the description of each constituent tribe along with the interplay among this dog's breakfast of life perspectives.

We've discussed these respective Americas before and, at the risk of vastly oversimplifying the comprehensive descriptions served up in the focus article, they are:

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In a country beset by identity politics it seems as though the common denominator among many such disparate identities is rooted in victimhood. In such a polarized nation, our focus article (Why People Feel Like Victims) would suggest, victimhood is "a badge of honor . . and gives people strength."

We will discuss the research behind the assertion that this form of claimed and/or exaggerated victimhood "has aggression inside it, a lack of empathy and rumination" and serves to elevate the moral status status of the claimant and becomes self-reinforcing such that "the more you feel like the victim, the more you extend those feelings to all your interpersonal relationships."

The threshold question is whether this phenomenon, with its very own label, “Tendency toward Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV),” is best described as a personality disorder, a mere cultural tendency exhibited by “normal” people, or a cynical device to further political agendas.

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“To meet complaint with unrequested council earns for the advisor a fortune of hidden contempt" -- Greek proverb

Here's some unsolicited advice: check your own ego at the door before presuming to offer counsel to someone else. Telltale signs of a compromised ego on the part of the advice-giver include an increased feeling of power, disguised criticism, masked control, or grandiose self-perception. Heal thyself.

Even assuming the purity of the giver's intention, one needs to be conscious how the receiver might hear these "well-meaning" words i.e. I think you're inadequate and incompetent, and you require my superior knowledge and wisdom to move forward and, without my help and intervention, you are a helpless victim incapable of dealing with your own problems and, furthermore, I'm making it my mission to change you so that you fit into my ideal of who I think you should be instead of accepting you as you are.

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The natural state of man is one of utter depravity such that without societal structure the young would descend into savagery. Such is the imprint left on those of us who'd been exposed to William Golding's 1954 allegorical novel Lord Of The Flies. For those who might have missed this middle school rite of passage, the subsequent 1963 film adaptation depicts these young castaways in warpaint drag brandishing primitive weapons. Lest there be any confusion about the "end of innocence" message, there's the naval officer as he first confronts this band and expresses disappointment in seeing British boys exhibiting such feral and warlike behavior -- just as he stares awkwardly at his own warship.

But, wait. The novel is a piece of fiction. Might there be something empirically-based to support the thesis? That's the subject of our focus article (Lord of the Flies Revisited), a real-life account of what occurred when six boys were shipwrecked for fifteen months. Their reported positive experience -- including assigned duties, self-imposed time-outs, daily song and prayer -- would seem to undercut Golding's cynical view of mankind. Let those opposing views frame our discussion.

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We'd taken a stab in previous Member Monday sessions at defining this complex animal we call a human being. Perspectives on the self ranged from the philosophical (self-knowledge as hard-won achievement) to the biological (man as organism) to the psychological (a mind-body combination featuring consciousness, self-awareness, and memories). The selves as seen in those contexts are essentially containers anchoring an essence.

The focus article (click, You Are A Network) invites an expanded view of the self and what it means to be human. The self here is seen in terms of networks, one serving to connect one's internal traits while the other, the focus of the piece, serving to present the self more as a function of ongoing relations. The networked self is regarded as a process such that you are the product of an ever-changing accumulation of sequentially mapped life experiences. It is those relations themselves that matter, just as much as your conscious memory of them.

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A discussion about ranting might start with a peek into our own respective lives. Perhaps we'll share, in the coolness of the moment, those things that have triggered some overheated harangue, something that overpowered the mind only to later blow away like sudden, violent weather.

Ground zero might be phone-tree hell, "Your call is important to us so just press one for more options . . . . and then . . . . . and then . . . and then (finally) now please press six to drop dead." Or, perhaps, the trigger is some shouting head opinion piece eliciting a shoe thrown at the screen. The trigger may be trivial, the effect transitory, and the result harmless unless, of course, potentially more consequential if experienced behind the wheel.
The Stoics saw such anger as temporary madness. Seneca, in his essay on anger, counseled resistance to its very beginning lest it betrays us and our capacity for reason. Without the ability to recognize and direct our emotions, we become a slave to them. Not for nothing were they labeled stoic. And, yet, perhaps this very spasm of outrage represents some animal force that is most scalding if held inside (A Philosophy Of Anger).

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The very first thing taught to the student in a property law class is that what the buyer of real estate is really getting with title transfer is essentially a "bundle of rights" i.e. a set of legal privileges with respect to the property, including the right of possession, the right of control, the right of exclusion, the right of enjoyment, and the right of disposition, among others.

These rights (and sometimes obligations) can be isolated, sliced, diced and studied in ways that are not always understood and appreciated when the purchaser simply states "I own this place." Control may be subject to the rules of a governing HOA or local ordinance. The right of exclusion may be subject to easement. Even aside from the obvious title priority of the mortgage lender, the right of disposition may be conditioned by liens. Just notice what happens should you fail to keep up with your property taxes.

And so it may also apply to your personal property in that what you actually own becomes more defined, refined, and limited in the context of our increasingly digital world. Take the easy example of music. Back in the day, the adolescent Boomer might have "invested" in The White Album and, with it, title interest bestowing something of an "extended self." All an illusion, of course, as albums eventually morphed into streaming, reducing the album to all it really was in the first place i.e. the means for an intangible ephemeral listening experience. The fact that such an experience is now so readily available at a nominal rent would suggest the value of such title interest -- representing the associated bundle of rights -- is virtually nothing (now compare that to our MM 3/29/21 NFTs and the Metaverse discussion where $69 million was paid to acquire the bare title in a non-fungible token for something essentially already in the public domain).

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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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