Thoughts: 5 November 2021

 

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The upshot [of Say's Law]: Depressions are impossible. The very act of producing forecloses the possibility that a society will be unable to afford the fruits of production. The overall standard of living might be high or low, but it depends on how efficiently the society makes use of its resources. Unemployment cannot be a significant factor. 

But depressions are real, and Say’s Law is wrong. People don’t spend all of their incomes, and what they save is not automatically converted into other spending by anyone, now or later. In the classical worldview, banking was supposed to ensure that savings aligned with investment through the establishment of interest rates ensuring that the money people wanted to save would be profitably invested in new projects. [Keynes's] A Treatise on Money had tasked central banks with handling this duty. By cutting interest rates, central banks could make it more attractive for firms to borrow the money needed to expand production and discourage people from putting money in the bank, where it would earn a lousy return. Keynes argued that although this might work—he remained to the end of his days an advocate of low interest rates and cheap money—it very well might not.

Carter, Zachary D..The Price of Peace (pp. 261-262). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Implicit here is the idea--or at least my idea--that depressions make no sense. They are creations of the system and not of Nature. In the Great Depression, the U.S. had not lost factories or suffered great crop failures, etc. It was a failure of the human-created system, not of some "law." My thought anyway, but I think Keynes was there way ahead of me. 

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

The North Vietnamese were not hooked on the idea of economic growth determination (which was one of the great hang-ups of Rostow), but were determined to extend their regime’s control to the entire country rather than maintain their industrialization. That was what motivated them, and that was what they considered their unfinished business. They had invested a great deal in it and they would continue to invest in it; no North Vietnamese government could afford to do less.

If you don't understand your adversary's incentives--or more fundamentally, your adversary's values--you don't understand your enemy & you'll surrender your ability to persuade, and even to coerce, your adversary.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.

A polarity? A dialectic? Being & Becoming? Many possibilities but a basic insight with any label.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.

We need more courage.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

Modern Medicine and Big Pharma remain caught in a vicious cycle: doctors need Big Pharma because they’re taught to treat rather than cure or prevent; but the reason they don’t know any better is because medical education has been co-opted by Big Pharma itself. And so the cycle repeats.

How to break the cycle?

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

The [G. K.] Chestertons and [Patrick] Deneens of the world, insisting that liberalism destroys values, tend to overlook the overwhelming liberal assertion of the primary human value of pluralism because to them pluralism is simply not a value.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

Another related speculation has even less evidence to support it but has a certain a priori likelihood. Nearly all writing about chance before modern times was in terms of fortune, fate, the goddess Fortuna, and the Wheel of Fortune.

And while numbers and quantification are useful, those metaphors and personifications are still of value. In a sense, we don't know (unknown unknowns) and can't know (known unknowns) some things.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

When we survey the biological worlds, we find only two groups of organisms that practice large-scale warfare: human beings and ants.

Ants aren't that bright; what's our excuse?

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The French Revolution, Tocqueville wrote, was like Islam in that it ‘flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs’.

In short, the modern ideology of the Revolution (and its successors) are function in some ways very much like a religion.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 18 September 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Commanding hope has three components— honest, astute, and powerful hope— that combine to help create this virtuous circle.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.

Decoding Jung's Metaphysics

Bernardo Kastrup

What does the world around me mean? What does its imagery symbolically represent? What is it saying?

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The majority of the executive positions would be held by non-Nazi conservatives, who would be in charge of foreign policy, finance, labor, and agriculture. “We’re boxing Hitler in,” said the leader of one right-wing party. “We’ve hired him for our act,” said Papen, who was slated to become vice chancellor. Such statements reveal not only an inane optimism in the light of what was to come but also a foolish arrogance that was blind to the way power functioned in a mass democracy.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

For Kant, God is an “Idea of reason” and as such for us: to think God and speculate about a hereafter is, according to Kant, inherent in human thought insofar as reason, man’s speculative capacity, necessarily transcends the cognitive faculties of his intellect: only what appears and, in the mode of it-seems-to-me, is given to experience can be known; but thoughts also “are,” and certain thought-things, which Kant calls “ideas,” though never given to experience and therefore unknowable, such as God, freedom, and immortality, are for us in the emphatic sense that reason cannot help thinking them and that they are of the greatest interest to men and the life of the mind.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“Brainwashing,” George Romney would call it [information from the Administration about the Vietnam War] in 1968, and be immediately jumped on by all sorts of people, like Robert Kennedy, who had been brainwashed themselves and never known it or admitted it.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 25 June 2021

 

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Critics of sociobiology, who are dogmatic Liberals, denounce this idea as monstrous. We will not attempt to decide that difficult question here, since any attempt to decide what aspects of behavior are genetic and what are learned after birth always descends into ideological metaphysics in the prevailing absence of real data.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Art is by its nature implicit and ambiguous. It is also embodied: it produces embodied creations which speak to us through the senses, even if their medium is language, and which have effects on us physically as embodied beings in the lived world.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

[A private report to JFK from his friend Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that was blunt and pessimistic about the future of Vietnam] showed that if this policy had not fooled anyone else, it had deceived the deceivers.

Connection

Randy Olson, Dorie Barton, Brian Palermo

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “Relate” as: “(v) - to bring into or establish association, connection or relation.” If you want to connect with your audience, get their attention, convey information and possibly move them to act, you must be relatable. It’s simple biology: People are animals. Animals are instinctually self-preserving. Animals learn the best self-preservation techniques by studying successful examples of others of their same species and copying those behaviors. (This is why dolphins tend to school with other dolphins and don’t generally hang out with oysters. At least not socially.) Animals respond to other animals that they relate to.

History Man

Fred Inglis

Collingwood makes a long detour through the history of the idea of ideas, agreeing with Hume that an idea is what consciousness makes of an impression.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 16 June 2021

 

This book becomes more important with each passing day

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

We are not yet ready to admit that the destruction of nature is the consequence not of policy errors that can be remedied by smarter management, better technology, and stricter regulation but rather of a catastrophic moral failure that demands a radical shift in consciousness.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Hitherto, the natural landscape and the human world took a backseat to the essentially spiritual and religious subjects of paintings. Prior to perspective, the mundane world was merely a reflection of the spiritual realms, a hieroglyphic backdrop to celestial events and figures. But with perspective, this changed. The represented world now became what was perceived from the point of view of a single human consciousness. The world was now what we saw.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

To be an elder, benefactor, conservator, and mentor calls for a learning about shadows, an instruction from the “dead” (that is, from what has gone before, become invisible, yet continues to vivify our lives with its influences). The “dead” come back as ancestors, especially in times of crisis, when we are at a loss.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

“Imaginal” is the world that lies between the purely intelligible—that is, conceptual—world of Plato’s Forms (the Intellect in Plotinus’s philosophy) and the purely material world of the senses. It is, as Corbin writes, “ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect.” It partakes of and informs both in the sense that in it, the pure abstract Ideas are clothed in symbols, and the brute objects of the physical world can become imbued with symbolic significance. We enter it every night when we dream, and some intrepid explorers have entered it while fully conscious. To jump ahead somewhat: C. G. Jung’s “descent into the unconscious,” Swedenborg’s journeys to heaven and hell, Rudolf Steiner’s “readings” of the “Akashic record,” to name perhaps the most well-known modern journeys into the interior, all took place within the Mundus Imaginalis.

A Guide to the I Ching

Carol K. Anthony

The suspension of disbelief becomes a humble acceptance of whatever is going on as part of the zigzag workings of the Creative. These two attitudes combine in an unshakable modesty which exemplifies The Receptive. While they appear to be passive attitudes, they are not. The secret is that they perfectly arouse the powers of the Creative to work out all things correctly.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

“For there was no doubt in Bundy’s mind about his ability to handle... the world. The job was not just a happenstance thing; he had, literally and figuratively, been bred for it, or failing this, Secretary of State. He was the  brightest  light in that glittering constellation around the President [Kennedy], for if those years had any central theme, if there was anything that bound the men, their followers and their subordinates together, it was the belief that sheer intelligence and rationality could answer and solve anything.”

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 15 May 2021

 

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

[T]hinking leaves the world of appearances. Only because thinking implies withdrawal can it be used as an instrument of escape. Moreover, as has already been emphasized, thinking implies an unawareness of the body and of the self and puts in their place the experience of sheer activity, more gratifying, according to Aristotle, than the satisfaction of all the other desires, since for every other pleasure we depend on something or somebody else.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra[

[I]n Europe, the nineteenth-century’s certainties – primary among them Western universalism, the old Jewish-Christian claim to be able to create a life of universal validity now transposed into secular millenarianism – had been undermined by historical calamities. The First World War exposed liberal democracy as fragile; the Great Depression revealed the costs of unregulated capitalism. The Second World War dealt a serious blow to Britain’s capacity to export or implant its institutions. institutions. But, in a strange twist of history, the fantasy of disseminating Anglo-American ideals and institutions worldwide was revived after 1945 and made central to political and economic thinking by Britain’s successor, the United States.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

[John F. Kennedy] symbolized that entire era—post-Depression, postwar, post-McCarthy America. Ideology seemed finished, humanism was on the decline as a political force; rationality and intelligence and analysis were the answers. There was no limit to what brilliant men, untrammeled by ideology and prejudice and partisanship, could do with their minds in solving the world’s problems.

Pagans

James J. O'Donnell

Monarchs have a great weakness, however, for their own sons, no matter how feckless and inept. A statistical study should be done across cultures assessing the relative frequency of the bizarre outcomes to which monarchical succession is prone: failure to provide an heir or successor, provision of an heir completely inept, or division of rule among several incompatible ones. Orderly succession followed by a successful reign is the exception.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 26 April 2021

 

A book grounded in the classics but seasoned by plenty of contemporary insights, too. 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Rather than joust with contemporary specialists in environmental affairs, I therefore decided from the outset to rely on the time-tested classical authors who have eloquently and cogently grappled with the core issues of politics. I found Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the rest more illuminating and pertinent than other writers to achieving my aim—namely, encouraging readers to question our most basic social, economic, political, and even moral assumptions as the first step toward imagining a truly ecological future.

"The greats" do provide unparalleled insights.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

He [LBJ] would say to friends, talking about his dilemma, “If we get into this war [Vietnam] I know what’s going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.”

There is a sense of the tragic in LBJ's story.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Evolution has gifted humans (and vertebrates in general) two immune systems: the innate immune system and the adaptive one. The innate immune system is the front line of defense and has a standard set of responses—fevers, inflammation, mucus generation, attack cells—to biological threats that are quick and easy to deploy. The innate immune system is a blunt instrument that has a pretty dramatic effect on how you feel. It alters your internal environment to make it hostile to invaders. The adaptive immune system is more selective (this is the Special Forces rather than the regular Army); it identifies the specific threat to the body, learns its weaknesses, then deploys a very targeted response.

We should all have learned this now in the time of COVID, but it bears repeating.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.

Read Robert Anton Wilson & this book in particular for a wild (but nonetheless) convincing ride.

When to Rob a Bank

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.

And we could add vaccine risks.

Breath

James Nestor

The problem was that this smaller, vertically positioned nose [that homo sapiens developed] was less efficient at filtering air, and it exposed us to more airborne pathogens and bacteria. The smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.

Moral: everything involves a trade-off.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious , creative components of our hidden potential.

Waitzkin is talking chess here; but in life as a whole, I posit that a wide breadth of knowledge & skill is most desirable. Don't be a one-trick pony.