Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

The Invisible Committee:

The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where "becoming self-sufficient" is a euphemism for "finding a boss." They want to use the "familiarity" of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

Doris Lessing, from her 1985 Massey Lectures :

Imagine us saying to children:

"In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these roles calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions."

Well, there it is.

What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.

No, I cannot imagine any nation -- or not for long -- teaching its citizens to become individuals able to resist group pressures.

We cannot expect a government to say to children:

"You are going to have to live in a world full of mass movements, both religious and political, mass ideas, mass cultures. Every hour of every day you will be deluged with ideas and opinions that are mass produced, and regurgitated, whose only real vitality comes from the power of the mob, slogans, pattern thinking. You are going to be pressured all through your life to join mass movements, and if you can resist this, you will be, every day, under pressure from various types of groups, often of your closest friends, to conform to them."

"It will seem to you many times in your life that there is no... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

John Maynard Keynes:

We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Richard Holbrooke:

In Washington smart men tend to put down people whom they regard as less smart with little regard for the substance of those people's views. The way the government works, speed gets rewarded more than deliberation, brilliance more than depth.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Bridget Riley:

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out -- the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance -- with the unknown -- is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one's naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort 'to clarify' that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!

Malcom Gladwell:

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

At the end of the day, you have your reputation.

How strange. How simple.

But getting the cash incentives right is a complex and uncharted business.

There is the capacity to get a very perverse outcome.

These issues are only going to get thornier.

Are we near the bottom? No.

Amitai Etzioni:

Much of the debate over how to address the economic crisis has focused on a single word: regulation. But the truth is quite a bit more complicated.

The upshot is that regulation cannot be the linchpin of attempts to reform our economy. What is needed instead is something far more sweeping: for people to internalize a different sense of how one ought to behave, and act on it because they believe it is right.

In short, the normative values of a culture matter. Regulation is needed when culture fails, but it cannot alone serve as the mainstay of good conduct.

So what kind of transformation in our normative culture is called for? What needs to be eradicated, or at least greatly tempered, is consumerism: the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life. This is not the same thing as capitalism, nor is it the same thing as consumption.

But consumerism will not just magically disappear from its central place in our culture. It needs to be supplanted by something.

What should replace the worship of consumer goods?

The main challenge is not to pass some laws, but, rather, to ask people to reconsider what a good life entails.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

David Lynch:

Trillions and Zillions of Ideas.

Consciousness is a Ball.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Louis CK:

When I read things like, "The foundations of capitalism are shattering," I'm like, "Maybe we need that." Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

From the archive, Amitai Etzioni:

I presume that many a psychiatrist and New Age minister would point out that by keeping busy we avoid “healthy” grieving. To hell with that; the void left by our loss is just too deep. For now, focusing on what we do for one another is the only consolation we can find.

Spent

Susan Hill:

We have betrayed several generations of children in many ways — by giving the teaching of skills priority over that of knowledge, by making exams easier out of a false egalitarianism, by letting them choose their own morality from a soup of political correctness, by over-emphasising the importance of the computer as if it were anything more than a useful tool, and of the internet as if it were more content-rich than books. But we have also betrayed them by confiscating their silence and failing to reveal the richness that may be found within the context of "a great quiet".

So difficult has it become to find such oases of silence, that many children never experience it. In adapting to constant noise, we seem to have become afraid of silence. Why? Are we afraid of what we will discover when we come face to face with ourselves there? Perhaps there will be nothing but a great void, nothing within us, and nothing outside of us either. Terrifying. Let's drown our fears out with some noise, quickly.

Have you seen Into Great Silence?

Douglas Coupland:

People would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed.

William Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

At a recent screening of "Up!", during a beautiful, wordless-but-not-silent extended montage sequence in which the almost-entire life of the protagonist and his wife unfolds on the screen, children in the audience can be heard squirming antsily, intermittently compelled to quietly express their discomfort at the verbal vacuum of the soundtrack. Even as these kids disrupt the proceedings with their untimely comments, one feels a certain sadness for them, not unlike the feelings evoked by major events in the protagonist's life story. These kids are so unfamiliar with the pleasures of silence that even a few minutes of wordlessness feels like punishment.

Silence, Please

Benjamin Kunkel:

Never mind losing your virginity -- what is it like to live with someone? Proust seems to have recognized that domestication, as the technologists call it, was harder to describe than initiation.

Most internet users in wealthy countries now pay for web access at a flat monthly rate, and many popular mobile phone subscriptions allow you talk yourself hoarse without incurring surcharges. And if flat rates allow us to be always on, every day more "content" piles on with us.

Even now, I guard my solitude jealously enough that I have never owned a mobile phone—a fact that may end up ensuring me more solitude than I like. When I am forced to admit to a fresh acquaintance that I have no mobile number to offer, suspicion of eccentricity or poverty is the most generous response I receive; sometimes I get a look of frank alarm. But it seems I would rather raise a few eyebrows, curse the occasional payphone, and miss out on some parties than to spoil my necessary concentration and even boredom with phone calls I know I couldn't resist fielding or placing.

Lee Siegel:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Kunkel:

It would be nice to feel that the gratifying shallowness and diversity of digital life can be balanced with fidelity to great and challenging writing and art, that our chatting won't get in the way of our attempted masterpieces. There is no giving up the internet now.

No one is stopping you from stopping yourself. It's just that many users of digital communications technology can't stop. An inability to log off is hardly the most destructive habit you could acquire, but it seems unlikely there is any more widespread compulsion among the professional middle-class and their children than lingering online.

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online—but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

Matt Knox:

It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

On Walter Benjamin:

Long before Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin saw that the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way a movie or pop song lodges in the soul.

William Fleisch:

"Comeuppance" uses game theory and evolutionary psychology to explain why people find pleasure in both the happy and tragic lives of fictional charact... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Lingering

Sam Anderson:

Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically.

Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.

Marcel Proust's famous tea-soaked madeleine is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

David Meyer:

People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes, in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.

The damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix.

Winifred Gallagher:

Even as a kid, I enjoyed focusing. I took a lot of pleasure in concentrating on things. You can’t be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

Molly Young on Adderall:

It is the Las Vegas of pills, an object that conforms so gleefully to every pill cliché that taking it feels cinematic.

Merlin Mann:

When I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of lifehacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit.

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Linda Stone:

Continuous partial attention is neither good nor bad, it just is.

The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Moral Animal) has a new book.

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking re-examination of the past, and a visionary look forward.

An extended excerpt was published in The Atlantic:

It’s increasingly apparent how analogous a globalizing world is to the environment in which Christianity took shape after Jesus’ death.

If you view Paul not just as a preacher but as an entrepreneur, as someone who is trying to build a religious organization that spans the Roman Empire, then his writings assume a new cast.

In the days before modern anesthesia, requiring men to have penis surgery before they could join a religion fell under the rubric of disincentive.

Paul grasped the importance of such barriers to entry.

In the Roman Empire, the century after the Crucifixion was a time of dislocation. The situation was somewhat like that at the turn of the 20th century in the United States, when industrialization drew Americans into turbulent cities, away from their extended families. Indeed, Roman cities saw a growth in voluntary associations. The familial services offered by these groups ranged from the material, like burying the dead, to the psychological, like giving people a sense that other people cared about them.

If some people find it dispiriting that moral good should emerge from self-interest, maybe they should think again.

Decius, from an earlier Robert Wright thread:

There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

From Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive:

I send you my greetings from beyond the swamps to... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Evolution of God

Jim Kunstler:

It's a curious symptom of the consensus trance zombifying the American public and its auditors in the media that something like a "recovery" is now deemed to be underway. And, as events compel me to repeat in this space, it begs the question: recovery to what?

What's "out there" is a panorama of mutually reinforcing critical problems pertaining to how we live on this continent. Like the obesity, heart disease, and diabetes that plague the public, these problems are disorders of lifestyle habits and the only possible "cure" is a comprehensive revision of lifestyle.

It will be interesting to see, for instance, if there is any uproar over the evolving story of Goldman Sachs's latest raid on the US Treasury.

As long as the stock markets seem to rally -- no matter what else is really going on in America -- nobody will pay much attention to the disgusting irregularities.

Since it is that time of year, and I am haunting the gardening shop, one can't fail to notice the many styles of pitchforks for sale.

From 2003, Scott Adams:

PHB, to Dogbert: We need to hire the best marketing expert we can find. Your résumé says you've won the Nobel prize in marketing, and five Olympic medals in the marketing biathlon. What's a marketing biathlon?

Dogbert: You ski up to people who won't buy your crap and you shoot them.

The Coming Siege of Austerity

Stewart Brand:

Job description: I design stuff; I start stuff; I found stuff. On the passport I put “writer.”

Current project: With the Long Now Foundation, I am helping to build a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain in Nevada. We are trying to get people to think long-term, because civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

From Brand's interview with Freeman Dyson:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed? For instance, if you want to see humanity move gracefully into space, you have to accept it's going to take a while.

On the Waterfront