MEMBER MONDAY

An audio essay by Jeff Goodell, author of “The Heat Will Kill You First,” argues that air-conditioning has lulled us into a false sense of security as we hurtle toward a warmer future and more blackouts (click: Air-Conditioning Gives A False Sense Of Security). The referenced sword of Damocles that hangs over us is more than some hyperbolic metaphor as he cites a five-day Phoenix blackout model that demonstrates 800,000 emergency room visits and 13,000 deaths.

Our discussion, however, is not about air conditioning or global warming per se, but about something larger i.e. the extent to which the realities of our interdependencies have laid waste to the myths of Self-Reliance that we studied way back in the eighth grade English class that featured those transcendental moonbeams, Emerson and Thoreau. You remember: build a small cabin in the woods, strip away superfluous luxuries, live a simple life and explore the sublime lightness of being.

Oh, grow up, you're not that kid in the treehouse anymore, and the culture has long been seduced by that Faustian pact with the devil: grant the unlimited knowledge, power, and efficiency afforded by technology and, in return, take our collective natural-born spirit. How far we have strayed from those formative myths of Self-Reliance in this hyper-connected world. Emerson might have labeled it a fragmented perspective, this material world featuring long supply chains…

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Author Anne Spencer Morrow (wife of Charles Lindbergh) put her finger on a fundamental truth when she observed, “Writing is more than living, as it is being conscious of living.” Even (maybe especially) the young diarist knows how the blank page can be a wonderful way to “work things out.” No audience is necessary, or even desired. The privacy, the very anonymity of it all, invites thought on fire. Some continue the therapeutic practice throughout their adult years.

Highland member and our session lead participant Lucy Flood knows all about this, having cofounded Write To Thrive, a reflective and creative writing-based enterprise that taps into the state-of-the-art research on the benefits of writing for mental, physical and emotional wellness (click: How Journaling Can Help You In Hard Times). Be open to a transformation that goes beyond the self, however, as the principles apply equally to the transformation of entire social and professional communities when people take time to reflect and write together.

Be also not afraid to at least explore what might open up with this kinder/gentler stream-of-consciousness writing technique – a far cry from the Hemingway-esque machismo description (“There's nothing to the act of writing, all you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed”) that we’d previously discussed in our MM 6/6/19 On Writing session…

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Let us first stipulate that virtually all of us are drug users – that is, by extending the definition of drugs to include caffeine (and perhaps alcohol) and to thereby capture us coffee drinkers. Now, with some of that stigma out of the way, perhaps it’s high time to parse the word drugs to open the way for a more thoughtful discussion about the role of drugs in our own lives and society in general.

We discussed eight years ago the politics and the exploding bureaucracies behind the criminalization of drugs in the first place (click: MM 9/26/16 War On Drugs). Some of you might remember how the satirical paranoia depicted in that Reefer Madness clip of the 50’s animated the Nixon White House’s just-say-no campaign, later confirmed by Erlichmman in his deathbed confession to have largely been a cynical backhanded way to neutralize the real targets i.e. hippies and blacks (citation contained in that above-referenced intro).

And, so, we are left with the residue of some ham-handed policy initiatives as we take on the way Americans, having demonized drugs for decades, are now doing them every day, at least according to our focus piece by the Guardian, as it introduces a series exploring America’s shifting relationship with mind-altering substances (click: Guardian, Drug Use In Modern Life)…

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You have two lives. We all do. One is reading this. It’s the real world, engagement with others, perhaps a walk in the woods.

The other emerges as you awaken in the wee darkened hours. There is no sound. Your thoughts wander unimpeded in that liminal sleep/wake state. They are yours and yours alone, the product of three pounds of wetware. You are lord of your skull-sized kingdom as you survey your universe. That universe is an imagined one, distinct from any real one.

That power of imagination may encroach on those daytime hours, even that walk in the woods, when you are lost in thought i.e. your attention is redirected from the present state, to some past, to some future, to some elsewhere altogether. The experience might serve as a pleasant escape or otherwise suggest engagement in some deep contemplation e.g. ruminating on the nature of existence.

Then there is the level of rumination characterized by excessive, repetitive thinking, a kind of brooding that signals some emotional distress (click: Ruminating). Each of us can probably cite instances of the way regrets of the past or anxiety about the future temporarily dominated our thoughts as we drifted away from the present moment…

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Iconic moments mark historic fault lines. Some are dramatic and themselves causal like an assassination. Others are important in retrospect as reflecting an otherwise-muted cultural transformation.

The tells might even come in the guise of entertainment, say the one from that classic 1967 scene in The Graduate where middle-age McGuire takes Ben aside at the party and says he has one word of advice for him, just one word and the word is “plastics,” thus heralding the age of the so-called cheap, fake, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition.

It’s not that big a step, then, to imagine that our current zeitgeist might later be captured through the lens of some Apple ad.

The ad in question, which flashed briefly before it was partially withdrawn, featured a giant hydraulic press as it literally crushes pretty much everything the art world holds sacred, from music, to paintings, to literature, to a child’s imagination. All this, you see, will be replaced by the latest technological flat-screen, to the soundtrack of Cher’s “all I need is you” (Apple "Crush" Commercial).

The immediate reaction to the ad was pretty much captured in our discussion piece (click: Dear Tim Cooke, an appeal for him to “be a decent human being and delete this revolting ad.” The question for us is whether it’s the ad or what the ad might say about us, where we are, and where we are going that is revolting…

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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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