MEMBER MONDAY

Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: “Amidst assassination, massacre, and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society.”

Submitted for discussion: history has paraded past too many utopian dramas of transformation that ended by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that were swept away. The relevance of the topic today stems from a very palpable sense there’s something in the air these six months before the national election.

We might start with the very general backdrop of at least four versions of America: Freedom America (Madisonian, Reagan conservative); Smart America (elitist, globalists); Real America (“you betcha,” rural, guns, religion); Just America (Woke, DEI) click: MM 7/12/21 Four Americas, seeming ready to rumble.

While January 6 was hardly a Bastille moment (discuss?), it may have served as a tickling reminder that there are limits when it comes to an electorate’s perception of a hi-jacked representative government – the expression by an otherwise-muted constituency to economic inequities, corruption of officials, and (yes) looming inflation…

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“Your life is your career,” is the advice sometimes offered by Oak Thorne as he conducts regional interviews of Yale applicants. Your priority should be your life rather than your career. According to our focus piece, then, a problem arises when one’s passion becomes conflated with the latter over the former (click: The Trouble With Passion).

Such an orientation probably starts with the perennial question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” to which the child eventually applies the cultural spin and the “be” morphs into “do.” The passion principle suggests that culture elevates self-expression and fulfillment to become the central factors in career decision-making – two-thirds rank passion in importance above other considerations like good salary and job security.

At the societal level, if passion-seeking itself becomes a component of the compensation package, what does that mean within a capitalist structure as it relates to the possible monetary “exploitation” of passion? In one cited experiment, employers preferred job applicants who expressed passion for their work, in part because they believed those applicants would be willing to put more uncompensated work into their jobs. Other employers were perhaps more subtle about their appetite for this passion discount…

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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 wood coffin. Your children might need to use it." (Zen proverb)

So who exactly is that, making that "light tapping" sound? It's you. No, it's certainly not me -- I'm the guy out there working the farm. I'm the startup guy looking to score big, the guy bump-skiing the moguls, the guy raising two kids. No, no, it indeed is you, your future self -- a few decades means nothing within the vastness of time and space.

The stoics refer to it as memento mori i.e. the ancient practice of reflecting on your own mortality. Meditating on your mortality is depressing only if you miss the point. It is, in fact, a tool to create priority and meaning. It's a tool that generations have used to create real perspective and urgency, to treat our time as a gift and not waste it on the trivial and vain. Death doesn't make life pointless but rather purposeful.

Passage of time enables perspective. Perhaps read a few memoirs by the aged or departed (Frasier Meadows once housed a splendid library of these). Aside from offering a unique first-hand view of history, say WWII and the Great Depression, such memoirs often reveal a startling freshness to these accounts of lives as meaningful, urgent, and full (if not more so) than yours today. You might even catch a glimpse of the calmness possessed by that old man in his would-be coffin, depicting Faulkner's well-known quote, "The past is never dead. It isn't even past."

Otherwise: civilization is but one generation deep…

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Maybe it’s not you. We’ll discuss whether honest public discourse is more and more difficult with the increasingly impenetrable language served up in so many fields e.g. academia, economics, geo-politics, science, climate change, medical.

First off, we’d discussed years ago the way language has the power to create its own reality with reference to George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay “Politics And the English Language.” MM 2/13/17 Culture Of Spin then focused on the application of that Orwellian sentiment to the so-called postmodern world, particularly on the college campuses. We might now consider whether linguistic obfuscation has become a way of keeping the world off balance i.e. muddled thinking/writing has itself become the change agent.

The starting point might be the academic world where new ideas and concepts are discussed and considered within a closed laboratory. One personal recollection was an essay served up as part of a liberal arts elective – the subject having something to do with Africa art and colonialism – that, stripped down, made absolutely no sense, grammatically or otherwise. Even the instructor finally agreed. No harm done…

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The devil’s finest trick, per Charles Baudelaire, was (is) to persuade you that he doesn’t exist. America unwittingly took a Faustian bargain back around 2012 with Satan’s offer of the smartphone as his portal to an alternative universe. Well it’s foreclosure time for our youth in the form of a mental-health crisis. Congratulations, America, your children are no longer your own.

We discussed three years ago the way machine-learning algorithms subliminally insinuate themselves below the conscious level into our very souls via social media. View the whole lot of them – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram – in terms of extraction machines whether for commercial exploitation or ideological conditioning.

Consenting adults may be fair game. What’s new and the topic for our session is the dawning realization that the devil’s workshop actually rewires the brain during puberty. There is then no turning back. Consent has been programmed in….

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You are your life narrative. Your life narrative – embedded in your memory – is you. The failure of memory therefore represents the ultimate existential threat: the prospect of your nullity.

Per the philosophical reckonings of Rene’ “I think therefore I am” Descartes and Thomas Locke, it’s the mental that provides the grounds for knowing that our experience is real, supported by the mind as it records this ordered flow of sense otherwise known as the self. Our focus piece addresses what happens when dementia begins to destroy the temporal binding that sustains our identity If Your Memory Fails Are You Still The Same Person?

The matter of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, provides a crash course in the philosophy of the mind as it confronts the various philosophical and ethical assumptions about what makes up identity in the first place. The answers go right to the heart of best practices in dealing with patients and their caretakers as they address the question of what it means to be human…

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Once upon a time the word “awesome” carried special meaning, suggesting something so magnificent, so stirring, that time itself seemed to stop (as distinguished from its more emasculated usage in today's world, say, that of a waiter commenting on the diner’s menu choice). It is a state to which many, maybe most, people can only aspire — a vicarious thrill of the imagination. An engaging written account, however, can sometimes provide a glimpse.

A Water-Based Religion is about awe in that true sense. Read this angler's account as meditation, as a kind of prayer, “What I love almost best about fishing is another property it shares with reading and writing: it concentrates the mind, while at the same time liberating it. It is much less about catching a fish than releasing the fisherman. This ecstatic dreamtime lies within the reach of anyone able to bait a hook and is what many of us, really, are angling for – a settled but excited state of mind in a place of outstanding beauty.”..

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The deceptively simple five-minute focus article America Is Now A Zombie State provides one perspective on our body politic as the country eyes some sort of a finish line in this presidential election. In essence: the evocation of the bottom-up grassroots energy that Tocqueville had so admired in America’s politics has all but dried up. We’ve become anesthetized through a kind of cultural exhaustion. Politics has become reflex over reflection such that support for one candidate is principally due to said candidate not being the hated other.

Discuss: is the above a fair assessment, have our elections devolved into some loathsome theatrical farce and, if so, why is this the case? We might skip over the references to bad education and corruption and focus on the “We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.” That assessment brings to mind one of our previous philosophical examinations i.e. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people whose entire existence is one of being chained to the wall of a cave, facing an opposite blank wall, such that their entire worldly perception consists of shadows cast by the light of a fire against moving objects behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. The allegory continues as Socrates explains how one prisoner, the metaphorical philosopher, is freed from the cave whereupon he discovers the higher reality which he then seeks to describe to the remaining prisoners as encouragement for them to take a similar journey…

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The opening lines of a Yates poem The Second Coming (served up in Jeremy’s sister discussion group) somehow resonated in that recent State Of The Union delivery:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; . . .

One take on the annual address: the nation is turning and the gyre is widening. Say the quiet part out loud – the president, maybe the ruling political class, has become disconnected from the people's sense of a nation facing a certain paralysis and decline. The falcon can no longer hear the falconer. Or, worse, perhaps the presumptive falconer is no longer the electorate.

How else to explain Ukraine as the opening applause line? Mightn’t certain other up-close-and-personal matters – say inflation and crime – have merited top billing and some straight talk (though no disrespect intended to the importance of MM 10/13/23 Ukraine Who?).

Or, for heaven’s sake, how about our now-porous borders. How could any caring, independent-thinking citizen characterize what is (not) going on as anything other than an invasion? What an opportunity to shut down the growing cynicism the invasion serves to further certain parochial domestic interests. An honest question here – and if the mere asking is seen as somehow xenophobic, nativistic, and racist, so be it – but is a country little more than a country in name only without a defensible border?..

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Behold our descent into collective madness – this sense of a rights-mongering, entitlement-oriented, politically-dysfunctional, militarily-overextended, environmental-despoiling, anxiety-ridden, bankrupt era of societal Unraveling – and rejoice. It sets us free

It opens the mind to the very possibility of renewal as a corrective to our civilizational ills as foretold by various indigenous cosmologies (click: No Better Time To Wake Up). Beware of hubris. The paradox of modernity is the reflexive eye-rolling dismissal of insights from outside thinking. Maybe there is, after all, some collective wisdom tuned into the rhythms of civilization and culture that is relevant to the madness we are addressing in the secular world today. Only in the depths of our perceived madness do we have the freedom to entertain perspectives beyond that which brought us here in the first place.

Take spirituality. One of our earliest sessions addressed the softening of the hostile distinction between religion and science as two different conceptions of the universe, the subject of MM 12/12/16 God And Science with the embedded Lance Morrow essay. We discussed the way each became self-consciously aware of their excesses, even of their capacity for evil, as they found themselves “jostled into a strange metaphysical intimacy.”..

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Not meant to be a trick question: Is the attainment of pleasure a priority for you? If the answer is yes, what is the nature of it and where is it found? If the answer is no, why not?

We are now up close and personal to the question of prudential hedonism – the philosophical position which states that, when it comes to personal wellbeing, pleasure is the only (measurement of) intrinsic good and pain is the only bad. Our focus article (The Experience Machine) introduces a thought experiment as a way to test the meaning of, the capacity for, and attainment of happiness, defined therein as the preponderance of pleasure over pain.

You may recall the last time you pondered such questions was at 2:00 a.m. in your college dorm room as a sophomore (lit: wise fool). Two things might prompt us to freshly entertain the matter. First, you have had enough life experience to now frame the question in terms of your own more mature “reality” and, second, the below-described thought experiment is far less unimaginably fanciful given the speed of our unfolding technological world (reference MM 5/8/17 Neuralink; MM 1/29/24 AI Shared Consciousness).

That thought experiment revolves around the offer of a so-called Experience Machine – the means to stimulate the brain to deliver any desired life experience e.g. looks; talent; achievement…

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Our own (member) Eddie Zapata has just published an engaging novel that addresses the challenge put forward by Joseph Campbell in his The Hero With a Thousand Faces i.e. “If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boonbringer, the culture hero of the day – a personage of not only local but world historical moment.”

Eddie’s recently-published The West is The Light is our focus piece as we “dredge up” what we, our entire civilization, may have forgotten. That exercise demands an historical perspective, almost by definition necessitating an outsider’s frame of reference. The strength of the novel is the choice of its messenger – the protagonist is a bright, young American boy (Clark) transported across the European centuries by way of a history book with magical properties.

Do not, however, confuse child-like with childish for this work provides a timeless objectivity that reconnects the reader with the certain lost truths of luminaries, both legendary and historical e.g. Socrates, Dante, Stoics, Greek gods innumerable. Fear not, though, you will not be weighed down by the ambition of this book as the manner and delivery of the underlying narrative is one of a kinder, gentler Scottish mentor introducing his young charge to what may have been lost in some hyper-kinetic culture unable to catch its breath…

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The optimist, as they say, thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Any self-respecting pessimist, however, would reframe the whole matter to be one of “realist,” thereby taking the literal high ground in parsing the distinction. It’s a short step from there to conclude that pessimism confers the one final unmistakable advantage in that it purports to make people sound smarter i.e. those who so soberly, wisely, and prudently stick to the known and the proven must inevitably be pessimistic (Why Pessimism Sounds Smart, though not our focus piece).

Or, as Woody Allen famously quipped: “More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” To that point, the offer of a free dessert still stands for the first person to describe a “realistic” way for us to extricate ourselves from this living, breathing, exponentially compounding national debt (something beyond “then a miracle happens”).

Our focus piece talks us off the ledge with a certain ironic detachment (click: The Seven Laws of Pessimism) with the suggestion that, while there may be no known solutions to solve our hardest problems – that’s why they’re the hardest – the way forward is powered with a mindset that can see through those cognitive fallacies he labels the seven Seven Laws of Societal Pessimism. After all, people throughout history had taken such leaps of faith where progress was not inevitable. Something beyond mere luck must be in play…

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You armchair historians undoubtedly know that on April 21, 1836 the Texan Army under Sam Houston attacked Santa Anna's army on the banks of the San Jacinto River with cries of "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad! God and Texas!" The battle, which lasted a mere eighteen minutes, marked a resounding victory for the avenging Texans.

The Alamo reference was captured in that classic “documentary” Davy Crockett: King Of the Wild Frontier which highlighted the back story. Accept no substitutes for that 1955 account as it captured the important details of how that that coonskin-capped, bear out-grinning frontiersman and his trusty sidekick, James “Jim” Bowie, made their last stand along with those other 180 selfless patriots as they faced Santa Anna's 6,000 troops marching north near the Rio Grande. It is with the deepest gratitude, of course, that we mark how they sacrificed their very lives for the sake of a noble ending: a revolution was won; a Republic was born.

Okay, we might skip over the next 188 years – how this slave-holding Republic was finally annexed by the U.S. in 1845 which triggered the Mexican-American War – and get to the good part, itself worthy of a Disney epilogue: Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his state militia up against a different set of federales, our U.S. Government…

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Even our own weekly MM forum might be too infrequent to keep up with fast-moving subjects like AI that we first addressed during our inaugural year seven years ago. It was back then we featured Nick Bostrom the Oxford philosopher who maintained that artificial intelligence could take over the universe and push humans into second place if they have any place at all.

Nonsense, sniffed Noam Chomsky, as we discussed less than a year ago MM 3/27/23 Rethinking Intelligence where he maintained AI, by its very nature, would remain relegated to relatively narrow domains. So maybe it’s time to place our bets. Perhaps the difference in views comes down to parsing the difference between human intelligence and its replication. That difference had become vanishingly small in certain areas such as language as we discussed last May in MM 5/22/23 Life After Language.

And, now, that difference seems to be going, going gone: just take a look now at the jaw-dropping demonstration last week of an AI-powered simultaneous translation of Javier Milei’s address in Davos. His words, delivered in Spanish, were flawlessly translated into English in real time using voice cloning technology that dubbed his actual voice with perfectly synced mouth movements (https://twitter.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1747953722943033455).

If “heygen” and “ez dubs” can make child’s play out of simultaneous translation – typically one of the most challenging tasks faced by the human interpreter – where might be the stopping point for AI’s potential to “push humans into second place?” Let’s hear the argument against the proposition that anything currently in digital form i.e. any task mediated through the internet and/or by the computer is fair game for human replacement…

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Back when the term was first coined, “nostalgia” (pseudo-Greek, literally meaning longing for home) was considered a kind of sickness, perhaps curable with opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps. Per the hypothesis presented in our discussion piece (Nostalgia and Its Discontents), nostalgia features a kind of romance with one’s own fantasy, a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images: the overlay of one’s dream life, whether it be of place or time or some other fantasy, onto one’s everyday who-let-the-dogs-out existence.

Take, for example, the refrain sometimes spoken in tones of wistfulness about the state of excellence in modern America, imagining that our present reality as squalid and diminished compared to the good old days when household appliances lasted, and workers worked, and manners were exquisite, and mariages endured, and wars were just, and honor mattered, and you could buys a decent tomato.

Reconciliation of the two versions may be a corollary of what F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the mark of first-rate intelligence i.e. the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Yes, but the fantasy version often beckons…

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Maybe just start with the national debt, nearing $34 trillion. You’re tired of hearing about it. It comes across as somehow abstract – after all, million, billion, and trillion all sound alike – making it hard to get your head around the enormity of the number until you realize the cost of just servicing it rivals the entire military budget. Triple that number to account for the country’s additional but uncounted financial commitments e.g. Social Security and Medicare.

Then, of course, it’s subject to what Einstein described as the most powerful force in the universe i.e. compounding interest. Anyone with a pocket calculator can readily see there is absolutely no chance of our growing out of this black hole. Free dessert to anyone who can come up with a credible scenario outside of outright default, whether it be literally or in some other guise e.g. reset (CBDC), debt jubilee, or hyperinflation.

Our discussion, though, is not even about the national debt per se. It’s something bigger – it’s about a mindset that’s been seduced by decades of magical thinking about debt in a hyper-financialized world. No one can even describe what money even means anymore. The financial system has long become detached from the real world. Start with that massive amount of money that’s “printed” by the central bank, far in excess of what’s needed to support normal economic activity.

That financial excess works its way through so many intellectual abstractions – derivatives, tranche packaging, off balance sheet financing, special purpose entities – that the very idea of risk is lost. It has given birth to perverse incentives. Those outside the money-creation system can only stare in blank incomprehension as debt levels have continued to pile up at every level, in every sector.

Our focus piece, a documentary well worth its roughly one hour duration (The Great Taking), punctures the illusion. We are invited to see the world through a different lens. View the piece as a working hypothesis delivered by someone who has served and survived the hardest edges of the financial world i.e. hedge funds, M&A, and private equity. He is now on the outside looking in, with nothing left to prove other than to deliver a message. Be aware…

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A signature element of Member Monday is the avoidance of cross-talk. There’s something about the flow that arises from the process of actively listening to a speaker’s uninterrupted point and, only then, offering a thoughtful response. The speaker, once confident of a secure platform, accepts greater responsibility for the forum and thus rarely lapses into filibuster mode. It is this flow that has distinguished the better sessions over the past eight years. They'd achieved a certain . . . rhythm.

Our focus article (The Extraordinary Ways Rhythm Shapes Our Lives) suggests the underlying scientific (neurolinguistic) explanation for the phenomenon. Speech, you see, consists of a temporal hierarchy of (four) different-sized rhythmic units, each unfolding at their own rate i.e. at one extreme are the so-called phonemes, measured in microseconds, reflecting the sounds of letters while those at the other extreme reflect full sentences/thoughts.

The rhythm of these respective entwined elements must be sorted out by the brain. The simultaneous focus on the entire spectrum of phonemes is nearly impossible and rarely desirable. That interference, reduced to its essence (refer to article for the critical expanded explanation), is the crux of this “speechus interruptus” problem…

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Snippets of snobbism are part and parcel of my memory growing up in the Main Line area of Philadelphia fifty years ago. Those recollections include the occasional wine snobs. You know the breed. Gazing upward, they’d ape and fawn and presume a gentility that was not native to them; looking downward, they’d snub and sniff and sneer at those who didn’t share their pretensions.

A similar feeling came back reading our focus article On Taste asking how do we know whether art is any good? The concept of taste in art, we are told, originates in an individual’s unique, physical sense of taste. Yet we still mediate the idea of “good taste” through collective filters: what is in vogue, what received opinion dictates, and what experts say. Maybe the answer is simply to privately admit that some encounters with art are more meaningful than others. “Either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.”

My standards back in the day were somewhat lacking at least as defined by the “tyranny of experts.” Perhaps it had been schooled out of me, as in “now look, that chiaroscuro is important” meant it would be on the test. Art to me is meaningful mainly to the extent it truly speaks to me, perhaps in the way that one painting, the one depicting an old man – hands together, eyes lowered, whether in prayer or contemplation, over a single loaf of bread and a bowl of soup on a wooden table – so powerfully evokes a sense of simplicity, humility, and gratitude…

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“Thanatopsis,” the title of William Cullen Bryant’s 1817 poem centered on a meditation on death, is applied in the focus article The Long Thanatopsis (and our discussion) as an invitation to reinvent the way a generation chooses to age as it faces that final curtain call.

That GenX author is looking – surprise! – to the baby boomer generation for inspiration and guidance on how to blunt the sharp edges of old age. Yes, those members of the original me-generation, have now been called upon to show the way to these youngsters. How do you, of any age, assess the situation in the nine years since this self-proclaimed futurist first published his predictions?

Among the many “challenges” of the elderly that we had discussed almost a year ago MM 1/30/23 Aged is the existential question: why do we (i.e. those not-yet-old) neglect and disdain the one vulnerable group we will all eventually join? After all, old age is not contagious. The shame of it all is that the already-olds become the “Other.”

If the answer is that it amounts to an attempt to flee our own aging and mortality, do you share the author’s optimism that American culture over the next thirty years will be less obsessed with youth or is it simply that the ideal “me” in the me-generation is itself aging?…

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