MEMBER MONDAY

The blog site BigLawSucks once provided a window into the soul-crushing world of the big-city law firms. The anonymity of the site invited rather vivid accounts by both associates and junior partners of lives being sucked dry not only by the killer hours but by the cumulative emotional, physical, and mental stresses. One could at times even follow and chronicle certain individuals as they struggled to keep up with the incessant demands until – poof! – they disappeared. Burnout.

Perhaps burnout is better seen as a metaphor than a medical diagnosis i.e. an exhaustion, a loss of self, so deep that it bumps against one's capacity -- intellectual, experience, and willpower -- to function. It also differs from mere stress in that stress generally connotes something more acute, more transitory, to which some may actually be addicted, even regarded as a mark of distinction, a sort of modern-day Descarte: "I’m stressed; therefore I am."

My own attraction to the BigLawSucks site arose, not out of some sort of schadenfreude, but because the sense of psychological wiring on fire became evident in my own years as in-house counsel for a multinational corporation undergoing a major and complicated Chapter 11 "Reorganization." In that exercise, a reorganization involving a multinational and its dozen foreign subsidiaries, the sun became the enemy as it shone perpetually somewhere, and so did the issues. The feeling was that of a zombie.

Quit whining.

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Two men were walking down the street when one, having spotted in the distance a newly-minted billionaire, said to the other, “You know, we have something he’ll never have” . . . . “What’s that?” asked the other . . . . “Enough.”

The Vanderbilt story is a slight twist on the quintessential inter-generational rags-to-riches-to-rags dynastic plot line: first-generation founder, a visionary, ruthless perhaps, forges financial empire out of nothing but cunning, luck and single-minded passion; energy dissipates as heirs shift focus from offense to defense marked by the consolidation of riches and self-indulgent excess; fortune eventually exhausts itself among the squabbling trust-funders of the unfolding lineage.

Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt built an empire front-running the railroad promise of 1800s America. He and his son William left a legacy that would make the Sun God blink, an amount said at the time to be in excess of all the money in the U.S. Treasury. That fortune, becoming largely depleted by wretched excess, was left to grandson Reggie on his 21st birthday who expressed his gratitude by devoting his life to “brandy and gambling”, thereby blowing much of the remaining riches and dying by choking in a pool of blood from the consequences of an enlarged liver at age 45 (The Rich And The Wealthy).

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From dark, medieval Prague, Kafka imagined his Amerika where everyone there always, invariably, was smiling.

The underbelly of that imagination is offered up in our discussion piece as it critiques society's enforced bias towards positivity (The Art Of Negativity). Resist the temptation to write off the observations as simply the reflex of Gloomy Gus or Debbie Downer. You may see here a kind of toxic positivity that has inculcated so much of our contemporary everyday interactions.

At its heart is the notion of responsible negative thinking in the sense of it being the seed of the critical thinking that we all need as we face life's inevitable difficulties, uncertainties, and setbacks. The label of negative, rather than connoting some destructive mentality, is better seen as part of the process to work things through.

Seeing it in that context reveals the comparative shallowness of the trite affirmations we often see and hear today e.g. some decades ago, having been diagnosed with a world-class though non-terminal illness, I was invited to just look at the bright side knowing that it probably wouldn't kill me. Have a nice day.

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“In a perfectly efficient society man is redundant”

There’s that word, efficiency. The word is implicit elsewhere in this current edition of the Weekly with Sina’s introduction that features the central role played by technology in driving the very success of our species.

To state the obvious, human evolution has developed, indeed accelerated, due in large part to the efficiencies garnered by the compounding technological innovations, from the wheel to the printing press to quantum computing. The article cited in the introduction reckons that in just the 120-year period since 1900 the world output has grown thirty-three times even as the population has increased by five times.

So, no, there is no debate here about the role of technology in driving economic productivity.

Our discussion, however, will center around progress measured by a different metric i.e. the degree to which technology-enabled efficiencies affect the very nature of the human experience itself. We’ll leave for now the big macro-questions such as the virtue of growth for growth’s sake in a world of increasingly-limited resources or those matters addressing the climate change implications to instead zero in on one small illustrative example much closer to home – the advent of Bossware in the workplace (Bossware).

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The injunction to be "open-minded" is often uttered at tense moments, but what does that really mean? A definition is offered here: it is "the willingness to think in ways that are deeply counterintuitive, to loosen our preconceived ideas about how the world works and open our minds to ways of seeing reality" (Open-Mindedness). This requires humility and courage, as well as constant resistance to easy patterns.

Easier said than done, of course, contemplating the notion of the mind's awareness of itself. A threshold question is how much importance we might attach to the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge, especially applied to the Self. No judgment here as some effort is required and one may certainly remain sunnily confident even while trapped within one's own conceptual simulation. Objectivity, almost by definition, comes more easily when the object is the "other."

But let's take advantage of the club's Securus Locus to challenge the limits of our own open-mindedness. Some may already be acutely aware of the source of our cognitive or emotional biases. Perhaps one has only to hear a recording of oneself to catch, in the case of the son, the distinctive sound of the father's cough or in the case of the daughter the unmistakable echoes of the mother's laugh to wonder what else has been subliminally passed down.

May we be open-minded enough to share or otherwise tease out examples of our own close-mindedness, whether related to politics, religion, philosophy, or perhaps love. The exercise may not only test our genuine appetite for truth but also invite us to practice humility.

We may be surprised in the way we have been afflicted by those so-called "privileged conclusions" i.e. decisions emotionally made and only then intellectually justified or, perhaps, engagements with the world from the comfort of deep patterns. From that position, then, we might then cite an epiphany that lifted us out of a rut and opened the way to some new open-mindedness.

No judgments here as we address our own blend of nature and nurture.

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Have you ever had a trusted guide or a mentor who you later discovered had feet of clay? Do the rumors about Martin Luther King’s infidelities diminish his moral value? Must a person be spotless to be a teacher?

Our focus article, It's Possible to Learn the Right Thing From the Wrong Person, is a personal meditation on this problem.

Personally, I reject the idea that we are all inherently good or inherently evil. I like the Rumi poem “On Tending Two Shops.”

…you see things in two ways.
Sometimes you look at a person
and see a cynical snake.

Someone else sees a joyful lover,
and you are both right!

Everyone is half and half,
like the black and white ox.

Joseph looked ugly to his brothers,
and most handsome to his father...

Please read the focus article and come to the meeting with some personal examples of “ Learning the Right Thing From the Wrong Person”

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The U.N. -- like War -- What is it good for? . . . absolutely nuthin' (huh, say it again). Zelensky certainly said it again at least when it comes to the Security Council's inability to act in the face of an aggressor's absolute veto power. Is he right?

John Bolton, one-time U.S. ambassador to the U.N., would seem to agree, given his (in)famous quote that if the United Nations Secretariat building in New York, "lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." An opinion piece in the NYT, of all places, then doubled down four years ago calling that body a never-ending scandal disguised as an everlasting hope (NYT/ U.N. Opinion Piece). It cited a former assistant secretary general saying, "If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddingly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result."

This might be a good time, with Russia seeming to act with impunity, to discuss where the United Nations is in all of this and what, if anything, might we reasonably expect of this body with its mandate to maintain international peace and security…

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Let the conversation begin here. The nation’s healthcare system has become so impenetrable that people tend to ignore the topic so long as they believe someone else is paying. The truth is we all are paying. Our discussion will be centered around one doctor’s vision of fundamental transformation. Let’s discuss. If not here, where? If not now, when?

What we call a healthcare system is actually a financial system dressed up as healthcare. The business of healthcare today has less to do with healthcare than it has to do with the business of . . . . business.

This became clear a few years ago as many pursued an alternative (Colorado Care): the current medical industrial complex consists largely of high-overhead providers feeding off of redirected third-party payers (e.g. Medicare, Medicaid) along with a similarly bloated insurance industry. No wonder so much of the industry is run by those from the financial, rather than the medical, sector. This is not, however, a story about bad people. It’s about mangled priorities…

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Memory of what passed for art education in my early years comes back in snippets . . . . dark museums, large framed paintings of fat women, storm clouds, and angels . . . . words like Rubenesque . . . . “Hey, you, listen up, this is important.” Oh, great, more homework and a quiz.

Maybe we were invited to not overthink but to just feel art. I recall being drawn to the story told by, say, a Noman Rockwell cover of the Saturday Evening Post or maybe to the serenity of “Summer’s Heritage,” only to be told that Robert Kinkade’s work was kitschy. It was then I wrote myself off as some sort of a lowbrow philistine.

And so we are gathered with all levels of sophistication to share how our relationship with the fine arts – certainly painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry; maybe dance, literature – has been shaped by our life experience. To what extent has art, in whatever form, tapped into our soul with something so moving that it actually bypasses the intellectual process and evokes in us a visceral response?

We might start by just looking at Van Gogh’s “Night Cafe’”. What, if anything, does the painting communicate to you? Perhaps it comes across as simply some dreary-looking place featuring a guy, without legs, dressed in white.

Only then take a look at this short readable essay (Gonzo Painting: Julian Bell on Van Gogh's "Night Cafe'" ). Did you then get a peek at the artist’s tortured imagination and the way the piece depicts “a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes” and experience “the terrible human passions with the red and the green”? Or maybe not. We are thereby invited to ask the question posed in the essay, whether art is primarily a vehicle for the artist's self-expression. Or, to flip the question, what is expected of the viewer to “get it”

Other forms of the fine arts may be more viscerally self-evident. Member Monday (10/30/17) Music’s Evocative Magic addressed the power of music to transcend time, place, and age by encoding emotion with its own universal language as it interacts directly with the limbic system (linked, here again, enjoy Toddler Reacts to Moonlight Sonata).

We have the talent pool right here within our group to help guide us in such questions applied throughout the fine art spectrum e.g. sculpture (Giuseppe), music (Oak), architecture (Dominique), painting (Shannon), dance (Marlena). With the club so immersed in fine art, maybe all we need to do at this stage in our lives is to simply learn how to relax into it and enjoy the experience. No quizzes.

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Try this. Ukraine is Putin's White Whale -- a mythic obsession borne of an entire career, an entire life, with a heart molded by some dynastic vision and a reflex forged by paranoia. With Russia as the Pequod and Ukraine as Ahab's lost leg, the harpooners straggle on deck to avenge an evil of Putin's own reckoning.

Such is one way to read this illuminating conversation with ex- Kommersant editor Alexander Gabuev about Putin's psychology and worldview (Putin In His Labyrinth). Putin's self-imposed isolation fed his broodiness, his obsession with Ukraine. Putin planned his war in secret, doubting his army. "If you tell any sane Russian military person that their mission is to bombard Kyiv to liberate it from Nazis, they'll know it's nuts, right?"

Much has been reported about Putin's profound miscalculations but at their center lies his fundamental confusion between a war with Ukraine and one with the West in Ukrainian lands i.e. "in Ukraine the West was clad in Polish dress." (NYT) Were he to recognize the distinction we can only hope it would not trigger "a scenario in which Russia detonates a low-yield nuclear weapon as an airburst over a Ukrainian mechanized brigade outside of Kyiv," the subject of a second piece (Would Russia Use A Tactical Nuclear Weapon In Ukraine?).

Then, of course, there is China back there strategizing how to best deal with this wild card, also the subject of that first piece.

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The world's shortest novel, which may or may not have been written by Hemingway, is all of six words, "For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn." No would-be parent could be unaffected by this.

Just as no father could remain untouched by this compact and beautifully-written cameo of an Englishman in Russia saying goodbye to his Russian daughter and her mother, who are fleeing to Italy, unable to live with their growing sense that Putin's Russia is a re-run of Hitler's Germany (An Englishman in Russia). While the particular circumstances might remain somewhat vague, like those of the baby shoes, the emerging background certainly is not.

Regard the account as a "Casablanca"-like act of ultimate selflessness in the context of war. While the unexpected loss, emptiness, and utter aimlessness experienced by this Englishman may be different in kind from the parade-of-horribles currently inflicted directly on Ukraine, this rendering could be a powerful metaphor for Russia as her people (and we) slowly come to grips with the loss that comes with a changing world order. This five-minute read will provide plenty of material for discussion on a range of subjects, from the personal elements of the story to the geopolitical implications.

One of the many possible tangents centers around Putin's very political survival. Do the Russian people not share the same sense of looming hopelessness that drove this Englishman's selfless act? The Western press would seem to suggest there is an undercurrent of Russian dissatisfaction with Putin that is held in check only through news blackouts, propaganda, and the conditioned passivity of the people. But, as they say, it can be dangerous when you start believing your own press releases.

Have we not seen this movie before?

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Written and Hosted by: Bud Wonsiewicz

You know you’ve hit a nerve when a twenty minute meditation triggers a two week discussion. The meditation, Peeling the Onion by Tony D’Souza, asks us to imagine peeling off aspects of our personality that give us joy, happiness and security and examine what of ourselves remains when the onion is completely peeled. The exercise prompted consternation, moments of enlightenment and lots of interaction as we tried to figure it out.

At the same time, I was reading a new book Breakfast with Seneca by David Fideler about the writings of Seneca, a Roman Stoic philosopher. The similarities between the contemporary meditation and the 2000 year old writing of a Stoic sage were striking.

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The matter of individual human consciousness -- what it means, whence it comes, even how to define it -- is challenging enough. Expand the term consciousness, per Joseph Campbell, and apply it to an overall awareness and engagement with the world and the term would encompass, say, the way a flower turns its head to the sun, heliotropism, a plant consciousness.

It is in the broader meaning that we shall discuss the natural phenomenon called murmuration – a term describing the way in which a collective can reflect a behavior that mimics large-scale consciousness. Take but a few minutes to observe Starling murmuration 2020 #Geldermalsen and decide for yourself whether the complex and coordinated shifting flight patterns of the flock display a certain sort of consciousness.

What is the physiological mechanism that somehow provides the almost simultaneous signal between two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds i.e. each starling somehow connected to every other as if part of some superior collective mind? Research of the phenomenon reveals that animal groups often seem to react to environmental perturbations as if of one mind (Murmuration Research). In the case of starlings that may be part of an evolutionary design to thwart predators. If so, the question becomes how and to what degree does such consciousness emanate from within the flock?

That opens the way to contemplating whether the mystery of murmuration might come into play when it comes to the collection of other animals, say humans. After all, isn’t the marketplace, for example, the expression of collective minds? As Robert Prechter wrote in his book The Socionomic Theory Of Finance “the aggregate investor thought is not conscious reason but unconscious impulsion.”

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Member Monday has never shied away from difficult subjects and so it is here as we explore yet another looming fault line threatening the Unum called America. The very term Woke invites more heat than light, in part, due to the very vagueness of what it means, who is driving it, and what its goals are. This intro is meant to tee up the issue with a perspective that invites, indeed encourages, alternative views. The only qualifier, and it is a radical one: Think For Yourself.

At its root, the animating principle behind Wokeism – Critical Race Theory – is nothing new. A century ago a similar class conflict was defined in economic terms i.e. antagonism between the Proletariat – the working class – versus the Bourgeois – the oppressors, those with the capital who used it to exploit the Proletariat class which created economic value through their labor. The heart of the movement was essentially Marxist, dedicated to the violent overthrow of a capitalistic society and, along with it, the rejection of Bourgeois morality, religion, ideology, and nationalism (and in favor of international solidarity). It ultimately fizzled as effective labor laws, powerful trade unions, and overall economic prosperity largely dissipated the socio-economic stress needed to overthrow capitalistic society.

Something else was needed to drive the wedge. Enter Woke. We will discuss this ideology in terms of it being essentially a political movement. That said, no one could ever accuse Member Monday of minimizing what the movement purports to address – America’s sordid history when it comes to race – starting with our inaugural session six years ago focusing on Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. We shall stipulate such for purposes of our discussion. But maybe that’s not what the current movement is really about.

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Let’s start with the optimism captured in America’s informal motto – E Pluribus Unum – i.e. One from Many (as expanded from its original reference to the thirteen colonies). Some would argue, yes, but only if the Pluribus is somewhat aligned in vision.

They see a Pluribus beset by snarling parties who'd just as soon tear each other apart. Not since the Civil War of 1860, it seems, has the country been so divided. Some even regard the event of January 6 a year ago to have been a mere dress rehearsal for what might come. A dysfunctional Pluribus, they would say, portends, not Unum, but Bellum.

Talk of civil strife, even war, has now moved from backroom conspiratorial whispers to the edges of the mainstream as evidenced by the work of a member of the C.I.A. advisory committee called the Political Instability Task Force (The New Yorker: Is A Civil War Ahead?). The cited book takes pains to avoid fear-mongering but the message, while couched in clinical terms, is clear: we now hang in the balance between democracy and autocracy. The author foresees the real possibility of a future – while perhaps not one of the symmetrical conflict that played out on the battlefields of the Civil War – marked by acts of scattered violence including bombings, political assassinations, and other asymmetric types of warfare.

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This session is about a Norwegian photojournalist's compelling book, The Book Of Vales, though not for the reasons you may think. The book promises, in its introductory essay, to tell the truth about the source of so many fake news stories that have flooded Facebook and many other social media sites.

The book features dozens of first-hand reports from the most successful scammers. You get to read why they engage in such practice, what drives them, what their goals are.

Then there are the haunting images that provide the answer. You bear witness to operation ground zero, a small impoverished North Macedonian city. You see the dreary surroundings – the soldiers smoking behind a barbed-wire fence, the large apartment blocks, the bear drinking from a dirty stream. No wonder these young people resort to producing fake news stories. It’s clearly driven by the lack of alternative means of support.

But that’s not what our session is about. Nor is it about the fact this so-called Book Of Vales . . . wait for it! . . . was itself entirely fabricated, all the way from that introductory essay, to the made-up reports, to the doctored pictures.

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That arbitrary, capricious, whimsical force called luck visited Boulder County last week in the form of patchwork destruction. Up to a thousand homes and buildings in a single day were reduced to rubble, the result of some combination of a bone-dry prairie, a hurricane-force wind, and a spark from who-knows-what. Some homes managed to escape the fire's ravages even as neighboring houses were completely obliterated, the tell-tale mark of that invisible, otherwise undetectable, force known only by its works, luck.

One might plausibly argue that the enormous damage was actually a reflection of man's hubristic desire to domesticate nature. After all, grassland fires have visited the prairies somewhat regularly over the centuries such that the wanton construction of suburban housing therein quite literally "tempted fate." It is here where luck intersects with prudence.

Our focus, however, will be less on any lack of prudence at the wholesale level than on the role of chance at the individual level. For instance, what accounted for the micro-wind patterns that determined such a seemingly-random selection of targets.

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Four seconds. After that, Americans facing silence in a conversation tend to feel rattled, rejected, or insecure. Research suggests Japanese, in comparison, remain at peace in the stillness of the quiet for twice as long. In fact, silence itself is an integral part of their communication pattern (Being Comfortable With Silence Is a Superpower).

Such is its power. We once discussed Thoreau’s attainment of peace, even transcendence, by means of his escape from the chattering society into the refuge of that tiny cabin in 1845 Massachusetts (MM 4/1/19 Solitude (Nature). Behold the simple life in the trade of city convenience for the sublime lightness of being.

We shall experiment. The “trade” in our next session will simply be the offer of silence in exchange for even deeper reflection. Some may view the prospect as uncomfortable, a reaction which itself says something. The little downside would seem minimal compared to the potential upside of an “extra” ordinary experience, literally extraordinary.

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Daniel Patrick Moynihan knew something about deviancy. The U.S. Senator from New York some three decades ago wrote a classic essay “Defining Deviancy Down” (Pdf attached below) with its underlying thesis that America, as a society, has been “re-defining deviancy” i.e. exempting conduct previously stigmatized to such an extent that it risks obliterating standards altogether. Beware of the encroaching numbness associated with normalizing bad behavior.

One can only imagine how he might have reacted to the case of one Darrell Brooks who last week intentionally plowed his SUV into the Waukesha holiday parade killing six and injuring dozens. The “suspect” had been a repeat offender with his numerous felony convictions and had just been arrested for trying to run over his ex. But the point here is not even about Mr. Brooks. For the record, he feels “demonized.”

The real point is about the District Attorney for Milwaukee County who, in response to questions about his judgement in granting an essentially free pass after that days-prior arrest, told a reporter, “Is there going to be an individual I divert (i.e. release back into the street) or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”

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The session begins with the thought experiment we left off with some years ago (MM 8/27/18 Get Over Thyself):

It's a pre-dawn morning and you're lying quietly in bed. There's virtually no sensory input, no sound. The mind is clearer in that darkness than it ever is during the day as your thoughts survey your universe in the manner and scope of your choosing.

Then the perspective changes. You are now on the outside looking in and realize that this survey of infinite vastness is nothing more than an illusion produced by three pounds of wetware. Is there any doubt you are, at that point, lord of your skull-sized kingdom?

That illusion, for purposes of our discussion, is labeled the Ego. You still remain lord of your kingdom -- overseeing this deep, unconscious, and literal self-centeredness -- even after you then awake and add sensory input. There is no judgment here. Buddhist scholars might weigh in saying the ego -- this “sense of a different self” -- is a mental construct with which we need to navigate the world (The Illusion Of Self).

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