MEMBER MONDAY

Some years ago, a half-baked dream, more of a thought really, was to better appreciate what might be deemed the largely hidden underclass community. The plan was simple. Seek out random local homeless souls with the goal to better understand their respective life stories. In exchange for a dinner, each would relate their background, the circumstances of their current condition, and their overall take on America. With their permission, of course, their stories would then be compiled into a book.

The project was abandoned for several reasons, the principal one being the effort would come across as rather intrusive and condescending. Maybe others would be able to pull off such a delicate undertaking, but not me. The “tell” was in my choice of the title for the would-be book – The Bums Of Boulder.

Now, as it turns out, the very term “bum” may be less of a pejorative and more of an honorific, even an aspiration of sorts. Enter this most interesting man named A.M. Hickman, the author of our focus piece, The Dying Art Of Being A Bum. What a unique individual he is, this combination of a distinct writing talent along with his unabashed desire to be a vagrant, a refugee from upstate New York and the “civilized” world beyond.

He hitchhiked for years in a “search for America” as he “slept out in the open, ate from dumpsters, and brushed elbows with provincials and rustics of every flavor in many of America’s boondocks and backvelds,” all captured in sparkling prose. The highlight of my New Year’s Eve was reading his piece and then reading it again after experiencing an epiphany of sorts after the first go-around…

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Just leave it to Winston Churchill to encapsulate the essence of two competing political and economic philosophies as he did before the House of Commons in 1945: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

While we’d previously taken a look at the so-called inherent vice of capitalism’s unequal shared blessings, what about the way capitalism has fostered individual liberty through the reward for hard work or the way it has stimulated competition and ingenuity to power America’s economic dynamism over the past couple of centuries?

Our next session, though, will focus on that Churchillian mirror image i.e. socialism’s inherent virtue as the equal sharing of its miseries. Miseries, says who? Not Kristin Ghodsee, author of our discussion piece What Socialism Got Right, as this historian of post-Communism, while acknowledging the enormous harms of the various twentieth-century regimes, enumerates the benefits by reverse engineering those that are now vanishing under capitalism. Those asserted lost benefits include a powerful sense of community, accessible and subsidized cultural life, improved workplace equality for women and planned neighborhoods with civic amenities. Point taken…

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Dissonance applied to the world of music is the use of certain notes or chords that sound harsh together in order to create a certain drama in a piece before it then moves into harmony. This pattern is like the introduction of conflict and resolution in a story that gives music a certain emotional contour The Beauty Of Dissonance.

A most prominent and familiar example might be that three-second opening chord to the Beatles' It’s A Hard Day's Night (click: Magical Mystery Chord). Play this overly-analyzed opening chord (linked in the article's fourth paragraph) and you will experience the yearning for melody after that discordant crashing sound.

And so it is beyond the world of music to the world of beliefs. Brain studies suggest the neural mechanism for musical and cognitive dissonance overlap in the regions that process conflict. These areas detect violations of expectations – auditory in music, cognitive in beliefs – triggering tension that motivates resolution (Cognitive Dissonance)…

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As parents and grandparents know, language acquisition by young children is nothing short of amazing. Infant babbling soon gives way to sounding out words and, with the child already able to decode what adults around them are saying, the two-year-old might, seemingly out of the blue, come out with, “Buffy ate my muffin in the car.” How all does this happen?

For decades, Noam Chomsky theorized that such remarkable advancement is due to the possession by humans of what he called the language instinct i.e. a DNA encoding of a universal grammar anchoring that transforms every cognitively-normal child into a linguistic genius by age four without any formal education. Our discussion piece maintains that such a simple, powerful idea of a language instinct, having dominated linguistic study, is completely wrong (click: Real Talk).

There is, we are told, no language instinct. Nor, probably, a universal grammar anchoring all human languages. Children learn language, as they do many other things, by trial and error. It suggests that children have far more sophisticated learning capabilities than Chomsky foresaw…

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We might start with the challenge put forth by Antoine de Saint-Exupery in The Little Prince, “All grown-ups were children once, but only a few of them remember it.” Do you remember it? Do you really? Do you recall the way you, as do most children, looked for a world without the prying eyes of adults?

We learn that, in most human societies, children have preferred to spend their time playing and exploring with peers in a world separate from adults and their scrutiny. The anthropological evidence for this pattern is rich and widespread. Deprived of this critical phase of unsupervised exploration, the internet has become the only place left where children today “can grow up without adults." (click: Where Do The Children Play?).

That’s the fundamental insight of the discussion piece. The example of the Bayaka tribe (Congo) merely serves as but one illustration in the several hundred thousand years of childhood evolution of a peer culture i.e. one featuring a strong component of child-centric learning. No one is suggesting we “go native” but before we complain about a child’s screen time or lament the “anxious generation,” consider how we may have been undone by a mix of shifting parental attitudes, car-dependency, and urbanization…

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There may come a point, maybe in your later years, when curiosity and the desire to develop a worldview become more important than some concern about what other people think about you. Without some framework all that gratuitous life input is but noise in search of a pattern.

Take politics. Good people, smart people, have voiced opinions or taken actions over the years that just seem to smack of nihilism. Does anyone, for example, seriously believe we could remain a nation other than in name only without effectively managing our borders? Defund the police? And now in some corners comes this slow dance with socialism. Such an embrace, some might say, amounts to a wanton ignorance of history (MM 3/11/19 The Socialist Seduction). What’s going on?

Enter Yuri Bezmenov who gave a remarkable interview that shined a light on and provided a framework for some of the otherwise inexplicable events and movements over the past few decades (Yuri Bezmenov Interview). (Okay, cue conspiracy theory, but judge for yourself (after watching the thirteen-minute interview, linked at the bottom of the piece) and ask what possible motivation would he have to shade the truth?)…

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The guest of a member sat at the community table for lunch recently. “Dave” was quiet and unassuming but looked vaguely familiar. Near the end of the meal someone (not Dave) let it drop that he was none other than the “zip code guy.” Of course he looked familiar. Dave Rosdeitcher has been performing on the Pearl Street mall for decades. Give him any zip code (in U.S. or the overseas equivalent) and he will cite not only the place but describe it in greater detail than could the native who put it out there in the first place.

We are gathered to share and discuss and honor extraordinary feats of memory or other types of highly advanced cognitive skills. Dave attributed his ability to a life-long fascination with geography. Maybe. But as one who is fascinated by lunch I’d be hard pressed to recall what was on the menu two days ago.

To that point, the next level might be the Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), the ability to recall virtually every personal detail and the exact date of events of decades ago. This ability can’t be faked. Some of you might have watched the 60 Minutes segment featuring the actress Marilu Henner and equally gifted savants absolutely nail every detail, including the weather, of any otherwise-ordinary day in their lives…

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The first realization from the article is the degree to which we'd taken for granted the confluence of factors that gave rise to America’s post-WWII extraordinary economic boom (click: Manufacturing's Last Boom). It just seemed at the time to have been . . . ordained.

Only in retrospect do we appreciate that so-called golden age which featured a privileged middle class with those union wages that afforded the worker a home, weekends off, a two-week vacation, and one of those defined-benefit pensions. Okay, perhaps that’s an oversimplification (even nostalgia, as they say, isn't what it used to be).

But events, both external and self-inflicted, marked the slide e.g. the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard (worthy of its own discussion), or perhaps Vietnam and the domestic dual mandate overreach called the Great Society, or the 1973 oil embargo, or most likely the way those countries we reduced to stunned fish in WWII woke up and proved to be formidable competitors. In any event, that world monopoly franchise we’d enjoyed is pretty much in the rear view mirror…

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Some will scoff at the focus piece and add that it’s high time anyway we had an honest discussion about white patriarchy. Others will cite the article’s central Great Feminization Thesis as a root cause of America's decline, nodding Whud I tell you?

The thesis: we are in the midst of a cultural revolution marked by the rise of women in virtually every sector of society and which has been a large factor in the rise of wokeism, cancel culture, and the primacy of emotion over logic (click: The Great Feminization).

Discuss.

The numbers are just the beginning of the story. While there may have been many societies that have been feminist to one degree or another, there has never been one in which women hold as much political power as they do today. No parliament, no legislature in any country in any century has reached the level of one-third female, as has ours (the numbers throughout are sourced from the article, all subject to fact checking)…

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Let us share the power of language to refresh the soul. Perhaps some long-forgotten essence of your own was rekindled through a passage in a speech, a ballad, or a poem.

When it comes to poetry, look beyond those that may have been assigned in your English classes. Has something moved you to a time before the “real” world intervened to extinguish the very mystery and magic of being alive?

Consider “The Two-Headed Calf”:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there

are twice as many stars as usual.

That poem (1977) by Laura Gilpin is sublime in the true sense, joining the terrible (yes, such “freaks of nature” do exist though often stillborn or live only days) and the beautiful (perfect evening, with his mother, twice the stars) with astonishing economy. How better to express the ephemeral nature of life as the essence of meaning, indeed the transitory nature of beauty itself. Laura Gilpin died of glioblastoma in 2007, at age 57…

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There’s that joke about graduate school where one learns more and more about less and less until eventually the student knows everything about nothing.

Now consider the principles of Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, as he attributes much of his career success to the development of a “talent stack” i.e. the strategic layering of skills that may not be world-class individually, but together create a rare and marketable combination e.g. someone with moderate coding, public speaking, and design skills might be far more effective in product management than any expert in one field alone.

In essence, the benefits of talent stack integration include enhanced career flexibility and development of a unique personal brand that allow for broader problem-solving and creative solutions. It may also be the key to making one generally more interesting.

No one needs to have told that to Leonardo da Vinci, probably history’s ultimate renaissance man and the focus of our discussion piece (click: Renaissance Worker). Da Vinci mastered the synthesis between unrelated domains: he studied optics to paint better eyes; dissected hearts to understand emotional expression; watched birds to design machines. The very qualities that might today deem him to have been suffering from an ADHD affliction – his reported failure to complete most projects, easy distraction by some new field of study, and even his vast smorgasbord of interests – may now be seen as the genius of compound knowledge…

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Start with a passage from Catch-22:

Dunbar was lying motionless on his back again with his eyes staring up at the ceiling like a doll’s. He was working hard at increasing his life span. He did it by cultivating boredom. Dunbar was working so hard at increasing his life span that Yossarian thought he was dead.

Let us now imagine that mid-twentieth century German philosopher Heidegger’s has been invited onto the pages of Joseph Heller’s satirical novel. The Heidegger of our imagination is now nudging Yossarian aside to observe that Dunbar, far from being dead, is actually closer to “being” than ever before. It is within this state of profound boredom that Dunbar becomes intimately exposed to the structure of existence.

By this means Dunbar now discovers meaningful ways to project himself into the world. Heidegger sees boredom as the means to discover the freedom to choose how we want to act within our world – a reset, if you will, an existence based on thoughtful intentionality, rather than some contrived illusion (click: Heidegger's "Profound Boredom": Cultivating the Soul)…

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This is for all you “suits” and ex-suits – suits here a metaphor for those having been caught in a corporate-type structure, the larger the “better.” For some corporate workers, the illusion of job security is no longer a fair trade for days spent shuffling papers. One says: "I manage a team of twelve who create documents for other teams who create documents for senior leadership who don't read documents (click: The Death Of The Corporate Job.)

For some, the structure serves as a kind of community, a pseudo family if you will. Like any family, however, some are more functional than others. Oh, no, not another mission statement. Or that spaghetti org chart. Or death by PowerPoint. Life in a Dilbert’s cartoon that only Kafka could love.

We might share the stories among you refugees from that world. A number of member bios suggest having managed the great escape. What were the circumstances and where did it lead? ..

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Somebody finally said it. “Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality,” Carlos Carvalho, president of University of Austin (click: In Defense Of Inequality). Discuss: is the very democratic ideal of equality somehow at odds with the pursuit of excellence, even freedom?

Maybe we should start by first putting into some historical context that Jeffersonian all-men-are-created-equal clause in the Declaration Of Independence. A quick romp through ChatGPT reveals the phrase was heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideals of human dignity and liberty. It reflected a philosophical aspiration for equality as to the rights of “man” (others would follow) in societal self-government rather than some assertion about individual equivalence in terms of talents, intellect, or social standing.

Enter Carlos Carvalho. From his academic perch he asserts that pretty much every university seems to have abandoned the cultivation of excellence as their core mission, choosing rather to lower standards in the name of equality. Is he right and, if he is, how might this tyranny of low expectations play out to suffocate the very people whose uncommon talent, courage, and vision might otherwise pull us forward?..

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Balanced leadership is the call for a healthier, more sustainable future by more fully embracing a sometimes-unheralded resource, the feminine energy. So maintains club member and our lead participant, Maria Brinck, executive coach as founder of Zynergy International and author of the just-published, The Leadership We Need: A New Mindset for a Brighter Future.

Our focus piece is a distillation of her thoughts by way of a recent interview she conducted with Authority Magazine (click: The New Portrait Of Leadership) and Fast Company (click: 3 Management Styles) with reference to her book (https://a.co/d/fqLpUN2). Regard the points raised as catalysts for a meaningful discussion. Maria is seeking an honest assessment. We shall oblige.

Note, first, that feminine energy means something different than matriarchy which often evokes visions of ancient, women-led societies where mothers or female leaders held primary authority. Even some examples e.g. The Iroquois Confederacy, with its matrilineal kinship system, featured a gender-balanced governance dynamic…

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What a lucky man. He felt fully awake, perhaps more than he’d ever felt before. Time, no longer an abstraction, felt as real as a second skin as the future dissolved and the past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment tethered to everything, to an aliveness of simply Being (click: What Brain Surgery Taught Me). Oh, what a lucky man he was.

Lucky, that is, considering that the portal to his exalted consciousness was a pending operation for a lesion nestled deep inside his cerebellum. He pondered the paradox of being so awake while at the edge of an unconsciousness – a nothingness that is stripped of ego, schedule, and ambition. Neither anxious about the past nor hungry for the future, he felt more himself than ever before.

The surgery was successful. Against all odds, the pathology report for the cerebral abscess came back benign, a freak infection they said. He would live to experience the “survivor’s euphoria” that comes with the revelation of a second birth. Beyond the daunting post-op treatment was his immense gratitude for having experienced that “shimmering veil of presence.” How is it that the price for acute awareness is the prospect of its loss?..

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Betrayal can take on Shakespearean dimensions, as in “Et tu, Brute?,” the phrase uttered by Julius Caesar as he is being assassinated, upon realizing that his friend Marcus Brutus is among the conspirators.

Et tu, the long-trusted business partner who absconded with the embezzled funds. Et tu, the friend who breached our confidentiality. Et tu, the one who once pledged faithfulness until death do us part.

So, suddenly, you’re out there in the cold, rudderless, in the throes of an anger directed at yourself with an intensity second only towards the betrayer. You self-flagellate about all the missing signs, your possible role in the deception, and your initial judgment of character, all in an effort to regain a sense of self.

The discussion piece (click: Love To Deceit)is but one of many articles meant to offer helpful advice but take it for what it’s worth. One size does not fit all for the truth is that the degree of the afterburn is largely a function of the depth of the trust that was originally bestowed. We may find certain common elements in the whole spectrum of betrayals but the experience is profoundly personal and can range from a mere bump in the road to full-blown PTSD…

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Whence comes laughter? At one end is the low-level patter of chuckles that serves as a conversation lubricant, more of a tic to maintain engagement than a response to something truly funny. Then there’s the de-escalation laughter, that nervous giggle used to relieve tension, reduce stress, or otherwise break awkwardness.

Next is the power laughter, a way to subtly demonstrate dominance or superiority at another’s expense. Such is the staple of late-night or staged comedy, applied to promote a cause or otherwise push an agenda, humor employed as a smart bomb to penetrate the psyche – delivered with the smile of a dog about ready to bite.

Beyond those somewhat cynical applications of humor is the type cited in the discussion piece (click, What's This, A Door?) where “the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter.” The humor is genuine and has no agenda beyond revealing otherwise-hidden truths…

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A question we once pondered as a thought experiment is now moving beyond the realm of the purely hypothetical. Our focus piece (click: Encounters With Reality) makes reference to that famous “experience machine” thought experiment we addressed in an earlier session (MM 3/4/24 The (Pleasure) Experience Machine) as it frames the issue in terms of whether and, if so, why we prefer real-life experience over that served up by means of “mediating technologies.”

The matter becomes more and more relevant as underlying technology becomes advanced to the point that reality and its simulation becomes increasingly indistinguishable. While we are not (yet) at the stage of that direct neuralink brain implant to shortcut experiential input, the technology is rapidly advancing to the point it can augment, enhance, or otherwise replicate the sensory perception e.g. the Google Art Project can now serves as an art gallery that is now far and away superior to anything available to the everyday humanoid.

The time is nearing that the attainment of pleasure may be had as a virtual experience. If so, would you avail yourself of it? Enter the so-called Experience Machine, a means by which you could enter a world of your absolute choosing — think in terms of your looks, your talents, your achievements, your loving partner. Anything. Best of all, you wouldn’t even comprehend that it was a simulation…

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Soon after O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 in the so-called trial of the century, he wrote a book titled If I Did It that all but confirmed his guilt, if only in the public’s imagination.

Spot another mea culpa as we take on the subject of A.I. generally and Chat GPT particularly as it swallows human consciousness itself. No, you luddite, A.I. is just a tool, another advance in the march of civilization, like Gutenberg's printing press. Some had actually dismissed it as a novelty when we first took on the subject a couple of years ago, just a month after Chat GPT’s introduction (click: MM 12/19/22 Chat GPT).

Shame on anyone who knowingly takes credit for what is essentially mechanical plagiarism, as authentic as one of those anthropomorphic sex dolls (though not speaking from personal experience, mind you). Life curdles into irony when writing, once described as thought on fire, is produced via algorithms with simple bare prompts e.g. “context, tonal goals, even persona.”

Our focus article is a report from ground zero with this account by a Yale professor of creative writing about the way such tools are reshaping how we think, learn, and write (click: This Is What AI Is Doing To Students). Creative writing, for crying out loud…

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