MEMBER MONDAY

Think of your life in terms of performance art, the stage set from your earliest days. You don't see it as a game but it is. The rules of the game are defined from beyond -- your schooling, your religion, your profession. You fixate on the future. Oh, what a good boy am I, or will be.

And then, perhaps, comes the day when you realize no one is really watching your performance, judging you. This notion, far from dispiriting (nothing personal, those audience members are simply preoccupied with their own worlds), is actually liberating. It's the day you can finally, perhaps, claim your own agency, the day you can become more present, the day you can stop performing.

This proposition plays out in our discussion pieces, starting with a six-minute segment by the late English, self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts (Alan Watts/Playing The Game of Life), and as further rounded out by David Brooks in a recent Opinion Piece (NYT: Is Life a Story or a Game?). Life is a series of games, you see, all played in the pursuit of what is truly sought -- the insatiable quest for status.

In so doing, Brooks builds on his previous thesis that one’s life can be thought of in terms of two mountains: the first, an ego-based pursuit of worldly success reflected one’s resume; the second, an ego-lessened focus better captured in one’s eulogy (as we discussed in our MM10/7/19) Second Mountain session)….

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We could barely wrap our heads around the pandemic two years ago. The virus, fresh out of the bottle, simply didn't belong to these post-industrial times, not here, not now. There was a kind of stunned incomprehension as if a cannibal had joined the family picnic and calmly started eating the children.

We engaged with this uninvited guest through a series of MM sessions centered around imagining what a post-pandemic world might look like. The overarching question was how the world might be shaped, not only by the pandemic itself but, more so, by the manner in which we chose to respond.

The answer back then was inconclusive, too many unknowns. A somewhat clearer picture may now be emerging with more data points and a somewhat greater familiarity. A hint of this comes from a keyword in the title to this week’s discussion piece (NYT: Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal). That key word would be "endemic," connoting some sort of an established baseline, even if it be of an unknown duration.

Of course, the word "brutal," also in the title, gets our attention. Yes, this bug still has ambitions: the domestic infection rate year-to-date already represents half of all infections since inception. Another estimate calls for five percent of the country to become infected each month…

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The country’s Treasury Secretary reportedly expressed her surprise at the inflation number. Consider. The purported job of this one-time Fed Chair was to monitor the integrity of the nation's monetary system.

She, with her stable of 400 Phd economists – steeped in such esoteric language as measuring the velocity of the ding-dong times the second derivative of the dooh-dah – was somehow taken aback by what a bright Fourth Grader could grasp i.e. the more money you print the less value each unit would have.

Yes, print. Cut to the current Chair of the Central Bank (Fed) and spend literally thirty seconds to see through years of obfuscating terms like quantitative easing for a peek at a fundamental truth (Jerome Powell - we print money - 60 minutes interview). The current inflation story may indeed be quite serious but perhaps really not all that complicated. The Beginner’s Mind might behold it in terms of simply market place distortion.

After all, inflation showed up long before we could even spell CPI. It started in the form of asset-price inflation. The soaring nominal price of things like stocks, bonds, and real estate largely reflected the unnatural growth in money supply. Together with the artificial suppression of interest rates, the so-called asset bubble exploded, serving to enrich a certain subset of the population, i.e. the asset owners. It added little to real economic growth…

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A farmer got so old that he couldn't work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there.

“He's of no use any more," the son thought to himself, "he doesn't do anything!" One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wooden coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in. Without saying anything, the father climbed inside.

After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff. As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. "I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?"

"What is it?" replied the son. "Throw me over the cliff, if you like," said the father, "but save this good wooden coffin. Your children might need to use it."

Zen Buddhist (Wooden Coffin) story.

People fall into two groups: the already-old and/or the future-old. No exceptions other than, perhaps, Paul McCartney (age 80!), though even he reportedly reassured an intimidated fan by saying, yeah, “I’ve really done very well but, believe me, I’m just some geezer.”

Perhaps you’ve indulged in a comparative then/now picture of a fantasy character from your youth. Oh, my God, you think, not only is the bloom off the rose but that fantasy is now almost unrecognizable, perhaps even distorted by the botched plastic surgery undertaken in pursuit of some imagined previous essence. That essence of youth may run the gamut from sexual allure, to intellect, to power, to wealth, to athleticism (MM 2/5/18 Glory Days). All in vain, though, as each disappears to be swallowed up to join the ranks of “the Other.”

So here’s the puzzle raised in our focus discussion piece: why do we neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we all eventually will join (Old Not Other)? Our answers may reveal more about us than we realize…

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"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

There's that word -- indivisible -- the one we as elementary school children invariably stumbled over as we pledged our allegiance to the Republic every single morning at the start of the school day. We continue to stumble over that word today, though not in terms of its awkward pronunciation but in terms of its meaning.

That's because our nation was established as a confederation of individual states, in that sense divisible, bound together as a constitutional republic. The respective interests, rights, and powers of those separate states versus those of the binding central government were established under the Constitution in an arrangement called federalism, subject to interpretation.

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Long before the monthly book group morphed into today's weekly Member Monday we discussed (in 2006!) Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. Powerful stuff, that was, diving into Frankl's WWII concentration camp experience with its unimaginable privation, total dehumanization, and no expectation of the next heartbeat only to -- surprise! -- soar from this existential underbelly to the very expression of life itself.

Frankl not only emerged, but flourished, to become M.D, Phd., world-renowned neurologist and psychiatrist, author of thirty books and world-wide speaker with another 29 honorary degrees. What was this enabling life source? Frankl credits the philosophy he founded -- Logotherapy -- which includes, among its tenets, the assertion that our main motivation for living is the will to find meaning in life.

Given that our weekly sessions are designed more for bite-sized backgrounders (rather than full books), the link above will take you to the three-page Wikipedia summary of Frankl's work. Accompanying that will be a movie.

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“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Make the inferred hangman in Samuel Johnson quote a terminal diagnosis and the mind in question that of a neuroscientist and it might just present the ultimate in existential thinking (A Neuroscientist Prepares For Death).

The writer has “heart cancer”, a rare sarcoma that has caused no symptoms but gives him only 6-12 months of remaining life. His initial reaction was, indeed, quite human, “I was so mad, I could barely see,” he says of the diagnosis.

Only then does he apply his “inner-nerd” neuroscientific curiosity to investigate what the contemplation of death might reveal about the workings of the human mind. He begins his introspection with an attempted reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory mental states – fury at that which has befallen him; gratitude for having had a wonderful life – as he confronts the ultimate test of a first-rate intelligence, per F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum, to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

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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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