"I don't want to say anything, I want to forget about it" he said, his face still red.
"That might be no problem, if it were true" she replied with complete indifference, occasioning a scowl of righteous indignation on his face.
Finally, some time having passed with no response to his scowl, he asked "What do you mean?", making sure to maintain his facial aspect, and moving slightly to the left in the unconscious hope that she would notice his gruesome expression, and acknowledge the effort he put into maintaining it.
"Well, it might be no problem if your boss was suddenly possessed to undertake a journey of self-discovery, to accept his humanity with humility, to begin looking deeper inwards and outwards, to consider the nature of his disposition, and to examine the utility of his every action.
"...
"Then he might be able to interact with you in a spirit of mutual respect and dignity. Of course that would also require you to place less weight on external validation, among other things.
"You make me tired. I just wanted to vent.
"Impossible.
"Apparently.
"Aimless venting is not healthy, it is not productive, and it is not harmless. I refuse to permit it. Every time one vents, they willingly move themselves farther away from logical thought and thus away from reality. Eventually they're so far removed from reality that they become ruled by emotion and find themselves lost in a vague apathy, unable to perform even the most basic of operations without experiencing a shapeless anxiety.
"My venting is not aimless. My boss was a jerk, and I need to talk about it.
"It's aimless because nothing is resolved. Your boss was a jerk, and you complain - but not to him. As a result, your boss will continue to be a jerk, and his attitude will worsen because his actions have been reinforced by your response. You passively listened as he berated you, you did nothing to stop him, and when he was done you left without asserting yourself and demanding that he treat you with respect. You allowed him to act as an uncontested jerk, and you are now wasting precious time by regurgitating his unresolved anger. Anger is incredibly time consuming. It wastes time that could be spent doing something productive. Wasted time can be avoided by addressing a problem when it occurs, calmly, head on, with no delay. Wouldn't you prefer to be happy right now? Reading a book perhaps? Without having to stop every few sentences to think about revenge?
"Right. So it's my fault that my boss yelled at me today.
"That's not what I've said. You are right to disapprove of your boss' anger. I know it's hard for you to think about this - let alone accept it - because you're angry right now, but you need to hear this before your anger dissipates, because it is precisely your anger that you need to recognize and learn to regulate. You are reacting out of anger in exactly the same way that your boss reacted out of anger earlier today. Right now anger is your calculus, and in this case it's making you believe that venting is the best solution. If left uncorrected, you'll become trapped in a self-perpetuating, self-defeating cycle of anger and venting. It's not right that your boss should yell at anyone, and he needs to learn to treat everyone with respect. But: anyone that allows your boss to get away with yelling is partly to blame if he continues to do so, and they are also to blame if they themselves become angry as a result of his yelling.
"HOW could this POSSIBLY be my fault at all.
"You're not the root cause of your boss' anger, but your reactions to his anger only multiply his condition. Consider a teenager who has become a junkie because of his friends. The parents of the junkie know what the junkie is going to do if given ten dollars, but the weak parents give their child ten dollars anyways. Consequently, both the parents and the child suffer as a result of the parent's weakness; the parents did not create the situation, but they enable the situation to continue. You know that your boss is going to continue to disrespect his employees, but you still let him get away with it, and you both suffer every time it happens; you did not create the situation, but you enable its continuation. In the same way that you should not enable your boss' anger, I will not enable yours. You work at that company by choice, and thus you work with your boss by choice. You have to take responsibility for the interactions you choose.
"So if my boss stabs me then I should go to jail.
"If your boss gives you even the remotest indication that he has such an inclination then you have to get away from him immediately. If he gives you no such indication, and he still does it, then there's nothing that you could have done to prevent it.
"Life isn't as easy as that.
"Life is exactly as easy as that. Logic is black and white. Venting is gray and shapeless.
"Life isn't just logic.
"It is if you accept reality. 'The book of nature is written in mathematics.' Everything you do is a choice. You may not understand the reasons you make a choice, but every choice you make is based on the state of your logical apparatus at that moment. I know this can be hard to accept, because we've been socialized to view life as an insoluble mystery, but I know you understand what I'm talking about. Society burdens us with an illogical sort of romanticism, and this diminishes our logical abilities, rendering our ideas and conclusions incongruous and indistinct. We become frustrated by our inability to define, and resort to counterproductive measures such as venting. The situation here is clear and definite: by allowing this to pass, by not talking to your boss about this, you're enabling him. What he needs is to be empowered, and to be shown that he has no need to suffer from low self-esteem. If you continue to work there, you need to discuss this with him openly, respectfully, and logically. Helping him to change will require effort and patience, but it is not an impossible task.
"... Or I can just ignore everything he says.
"I would never allow that.
"Why?
"Is that the kind of person you want to become? Willfully ignorant? Willful ignorance is the most profound form of intellectual treason that man can commit. Why have a mind, if you actively choose to ignore it? See now where this angry calculus has led. Your solution is the denial of existence itself!
We must not be concerned by "being right", whether this means having others accept our ideas, or being seen as a person who is able to disprove the ideas of others. Such a quest is infantile and intellectually debasing for all of those involved. What we must passionately be concerned with is discovering the truth. This is not to say that we will be the person to expose the truth, but rather that the truth will somehow be arrived at and made accessible for the benefit of everyone.
When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. 1
None of this means that we should mince words. Active and impartial thought is of the utmost importance, and in all cases we must attempt to construct our case in such a manner as to incite a state of excited - but logical - deliberation. Accordingly, we should not make an appeal to maintain social traditions or decorum if they interfere with the conservation or progression of liberty.
We must question all things at all times. We must respect all humans alike, regardless of vocation, location, or income. Many people are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with such an approach, not least because they perceive themselves as deserving of some specific social ranking, and expect others to respect their relative economic worth, or their efforts in the pursuit thereof. In evaluating the self, we must reflect on the life we have led and the path we are taking, and ask if our journey has been useful. I suggest that the most - perhaps the only - useful paths are those developed atop a foundation of egalitarianism, with the specific goal of universal empowerment.
We must accept the possibility that our efforts may at times have been misdirected, and thus may in some ways have been less than useful. It is a rare and humble person who is able to recognize that their actions and conceptions are contingent upon their own subjective perceptions and world view. Is human reasoning so pure and circumspect that it can not be questioned? Are we so perfect that we should abstain from questioning the motivations and consequences of our actions? Should the Allies have refrained from investigating the Nazis? Placing effort towards a goal does not purify it; the mere act of doing something for twenty years does not make it useful or meaningful.
Just because someone has been doing the same thing day in and day out doesn't mean that their way is the best way. 2
Examining our own beliefs skeptically is of paramount importance. There are many things which humanity need not experience, but exposure to other ideas is not one of them. We must never dismiss the argument of another person because it somehow makes us uncomfortable. The world would be much impoverished if we were to simply ignore ideas that we do not instantly agree with. I detest Idi Amin, but this does not mean that the stories surrounding the events of his life should be avoided, for if we choose to neglect any circumstance then we run the risk of repeating the same folly ad infinitum. Ideas and understanding must be advanced by our own willingness to discard vain and unprofitable conceptions, and by exposing our ideas to the test of debate.
We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. 3
An unbiased search for truth requires skeptical analysis of our own ideas, and brings forth the understanding that knowledge is objective, but perspectives are subject to experience. Apprehension and acceptance of our own subjectivity gives rise to the question of the specific conditioning of the mind as distinguished from general or universal experience 4. If knowledge is objective but perspectives are not general and universal, then what are their origin? Concomitantly, what is the nature of free will and free action? This question is philosophically challenging, and is not so simple as placing responsibility on the individual. Our perspectives and actions are limited by our abilities, and we are able only to work within the confines of the tools that we are permitted to develop. As with any environment, examination of our contemporary capitalist democracy must be performed in order to determine what mentality it engenders.
We are interfered with and accustomed to control and dictation from the cradle to the grave in thought, speech and act, in work and play, in morals and manners, in habits and costumes. If in anything we seem free, it is only because our despot is indifferent and has not yet chosen to dictate. Always there was that much freedom to the most servile peoples. 5
the totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one, since the overt official doctrine parroted by the intellectuals at the service of the State is readily identifiable as pure propoganda, and this helps to free the mind. In contrast to the totalitarian system, the democratic system seeks to determine and limit the entire spectrum of thought by leaving the fundamental assumptions unexpressed. They are presupposed, but not asserted. The situation is, therefore, considerably more complex under capitalist democracy 6
There are strong forces in society that push us in the direction of our marketable competencies, rather than our interests and our strengths 7
capitalism is based on a constant process of alienated consumption, as workers try to find the happiness associated within productive, creative, self-managed activity in a place it does not exist - on the shop shelves. This can partly explain the rise of both mindless consumerism and of religions, as individuals try to find meaning for their lives and happiness, a meaning and happiness frustrated in wage labour and hierarchy. 8
the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them. 9
Question my statements and positions. Question all statements and positions. Do not however stop once you have arrived at your own conclusions, continue by examining your own statements and positions.
The way to develop our own intelligence is by changing every question into a statement. If you change your question into a statement, the background out of which the question arose opens up, and the possibilities are found by the questioner himself. 10
If you are unable to perceive connections, do not presume it is because they do not exist.
1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Page 949, 1957
2. http://www.bradpattison.com/about-brad-pattison.html
3. Christopher Lasch, Media & Public Life, Page 77, 1995
4. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/subjective
5. Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Too Much Government, Page 266, 1931
6. Carlos P. Otero, Noam Chomsky: Radical Priorities / 3rd Edition, Page 10, 2003
7. David Bornstein, Hart House Lecture, 2005
8. An Anarchist FAQ, § I.4.2
9. Oscar Wilde, The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, 1891
10. Frederick S. Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Page 38, 1971
This past Sunday was the third meeting of the Meta Book Club, and the book of the month was The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. None of us had completed reading the book, and in fact two of us hadn't even broached the table of contents. Sean however had made his way to the end of the third chapter, and so he was tasked with leading the discussion.
As Sean described the hypotheses and conclusions presented in the book, he made use of the question and answer segments to be found at the end of each chapter, and as he read these segments aloud I briefly experienced a curious mental state and suddenly remembered an all but forgotten event that took place last June. As I read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking I entered an altered state of consciousness, or what might be called a psychedelic condition. It's incredibly hard for me to describe this condition, and to borrow a description from another blog post of mine: words can never portray a psychedelic vision ... [the] mind journeys into a reality that is completely separate from physical, self-conscious existence, and while a person is reading words that attempt to communicate a psychedelic experience, the reader that has had a psychedelic experience will be able to attain a level of comprehension beyond that of the person who has not had a psychedelic experience 1. I'm unsure how it came about that I entered this psychedelic condition, and the only commonality appears to be that my mind was in a state of active cogitation while being otherwise at ease, that is to say I was unburdened by the mundane but mentally oppressive concerns of daily life and thus able to focus intently on the subject at hand.
[T]he physiological intelligence controlling the body was ... on it's own. For the moment that interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way. 2
This past Sunday the psychedelic condition lasted less than a second, providing a momentary glimpse into the world I had perceived before, but acting only as an indicator of its existence, while last June the condition spanned a few seconds, thus affording me the opportunity to explore the resulting mental condition, and to reflect on the world around me. I remember very little about A Brief History of Time, and do not pretend to fathom even the simplest of its propositions, but something I do recall quite clearly is that while in this psychedelic condition I was able to apprehend postulations of special relativity that I had previously found unintelligible (or at least, while my mind was in this state, I was convinced that I understood them). In particular, my altered state of consciousness occurred while reading about light cones. This is not to say that I was suddenly able to perform complex calculations or make great scientific breakthroughs, or that an extraordinary state of consciousness is required in order to understand special relativity, but rather that I experienced an unusual mental state accompanied by a fleeting spark of comprehension. Indeed, looking back at special relativity now, I find no distinction between myself and someone who has never heard of it, in other words I'm unable to discuss it at even a surface level. This however is no surprise, as my colleagues and I often lament the protracted disappearance of former capacities (I've seen it suggested that as much as 80% of the information that we are taught during our primary, secondary, and post-secondary education simply vanishes from our minds - are you smarter than a fifth grader?). As the popular adage observes: use it or lose it; and special relativity is something that I never use.
I'm unable to classify the exact nature of this experience, and I am hesitant to say that it was the result of any intellectual faculty, though it occurred twice during active scientific deliberation. I'm left wondering if there is a connection between higher thinking and higher consciousness, and if so, could this in any way be related to the mental states that occur during meditation.
scans taken at the peak of ... meditative state ... show the orientation area to be bathed in dark blotches of cool greens and blues - colors that indicate a sharp reduction in activity levels ... What would happen if the OAA (Orientation Association Area) had no information upon which to work? Would it continue to search for the limits of the self? With no information flowing in from the senses, the OAA wouldn't be able to find any boundaries. 3
If our conception of reality can be altered when the brain is under stimulated during meditation, then what would happen if the brain was stimulated in some other atypical manner?
A separate but perhaps interdependent phenomenon that I'm more familiar with is that of "ramping-up": when working on large and complex systems, be they philosophical or technical, I've found that there is a goldilocks zone of comprehension that occurs after being immersed in the system for some time, and a level of perception is reached at which the dependency and interconnection of all elements is crystallized, and it is at this point that the mind has been "ramped-up". When a person is in this goldilocks zone they are immediately able to apprehend the impact of a change on all parts of the system, and to articulate in precise detail what must be done in order to effect a particular outcome without causing unexpected side effects. To the outside observer it can almost appear that the ramped-up person has a sixth sense. This is not to be confused with a highly experienced and circumspect person who has been working with a system for a very long time, as what I'm talking about is a transitory state of intellectual penetration that occurs only after continuous extended exposure to the system, and lasting only while a person is focused on the system and able to maintain serious mental effort. Once focus is interrupted this mental state fades. I've witnessed and experienced ramp-up a number of times during extended and uninterrupted periods of discussion, reading, writing, and programming. A vivid and practical description of ramp-up is given by a mountain climber, in describing his ascent of the Devil's Thumb, a sheer rock face of six thousand feet:
By and by your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream.
Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence - the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes - all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand. 4
At this time there is no explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness, and it's all well and good for me to float my unfounded and untested ideas, but at the end of the day one wonders if perhaps this might all be explained by EM fields, or the combination of insufficient sleep with low blood sugar.
1. Risto Juola, Mind At Large, 2007
2. Aldous Huxley, The Doors Of Perception, Page 52, 1954
3. Andrew Newberg, Why God Won't Go Away, Page 6, 2002
4. Jon Krakauer, Into The Wild, Page 142, 1996
During high school, the notion of charity outside of helping friends was not on my radar. During university, I began to contemplate donations of time and zakat, but I was still trying to figure out what was going on in the specific study of computer science and in the general arena of life. In every professional position I've held after university I've had the intention of performing charitable service, but I've repeatedly come up against the same two obstacles: 1) I needed to spend after hours recovering from work hours, and 2) predatory capitalist technocrats are not amenable to anything they perceive as a threat to profit. Note that I'm specifically not talking about things that constitute an actual threat to profit, I'm talking about things that people senselessly view as a threat to profit. In three separate jobs, I've presented the idea of incorporating charitable service into the work week with no expense to the employer in the hope of engendering a charitable mindset into the office culture, for example by shifting my lunch hour to act as a recess monitor or crossing guard at a nearby public school. In all cases my first obligation has been to honour the contract between myself and my employer, and in this particular case shifting my lunch hour presented no conflict, as I was in an engineering role and the time of day at which I programmed had no bearing on my output (meetings and on-call were also not a concern), but in each case the employer stood rigid and disregarded such ideas. Not acceptable.
The reality is that we in the West live under the direct rule of capitalist democracy (while those elsewhere live at best under its indirect rule), and we must respect the influence of this structure on our lives. Often we must work as an apparatchik in an unsatisfying job in order to live. However, it is also incumbent upon us to determine at what point we can say that our wealth exceeds the limit of our material needs, and thus determine the point at which we can begin to look out for someone else's needs - towards the end of empowerment, not mere entertainment or increase of wealth for the already over-privileged. It's tough to be objective about this in an autocratic materialistic society, and to break the cycle of perform-mind-numbing-task-buy-ostentatious-amusement. This problem must not be understated, and the issue at hand is not merely whether or not one has amassed enough capital to venture beyond the confines of day labour while continuing to operate as a capitalist. The significance of charity does not lie solely in its application, but also in the recognition that the contemporary needs of charity furnish us with evidence of the human crisis born of totalitarian capitalism. Charitable service is indispensable, however we must understand that it is but a step in the march towards balance, and not a permanent solution in its current form. Social equality in the context of capitalist democracy works by extending acceptance and support to one social group at a time, and thus presupposes that the problem is how best to integrate social groups within our perfectible administrative systems. This however is not a deep solution; social groups continue to be isolated by resource competition, and there always remain groups outside of the support systemΨ. As a result there is no economic or moral transformation, whether inside or outside of the system.
Certainly the corporatists believe in a kind of freedom, but it is not liberty: it is license. License to do broadly as they please while catering to shibboleths like diversity, sensitivity and affirmative action. 1
The altruistic very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. 2. The extension of liberty must work towards the goal of universal freedom, empowerment, and mutual aid, not economic detente and dependency between competing social groups. [M]utual aid, while sharing many properties of altruism, differs from the latter since altruism implies ... surrender of self in an egotistical milieu 3. Many social activists are operating within a myopic understanding about what the actual problem is. Just like all other elements of society, the "Truth Movement" has created factions, which, out of ego, serve to compete rather than unify ... Religion, Race, Class, Patriotism and all other arrogant notions of dominance and separatism [are] the actual problem. We must understand as human beings that our religions, races, classes, nationalities, and even fear, greed and arrogance itself are learned associations. They are no more a part of you than the clothes you have on, and you are free to take them off at anytime and discover who and what you actually are.4
Our lives are not disconnected. Every action that every person takes resonates interminably across the entire planet. The ocean is made up of molecules of water; what you do, where you are, matters 5. Genuine, effective altruism seeks to develop individual productive capacity, and is thus incompatible with parasitic forms of capitalism. The contemporary altruist capitalist is a mildly enlightened version of homo economicus who remains frustrated because their ideas are encumbered by artificial social classifications. We must shed all egoistic afflictions in order to reveal the only objectives in possession of any value. It may be simple, but it's not going to be easy.6.
Ψ - Further discussion of the fallacious idea that Liberal altruism empowers its recipients can be found in Walter Benn Michaels' lecture The Trouble with Diversity (podcast download from BIG Ideas), and Andrew Mwenda's lecture Let's take a new look at African aid (online video from TED).
1. Richard Wall, The Radical Individualism of Paul Goodman, 2003
2. Oscar Wilde, The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, 1891
3. Irving Horowitz, The Anarchists, Page 20, 1964
4. Peter Joseph, http://zeitgeistmovie.com/activism.htm, 2007
5. Desmond Tutu, Nobelity, 80 minutes, 2006
6. Turk Pipkin, Nobelity, 85 minutes, 2006
