I like to write essays. Sometimes I have ideas that can be covered in just one or a few sentences. Here is a bunch of those miniatures. ⬇️
When we act as if the world began this morning, or a few years ago, or even a few millennia ago, we end up making some very serious errors in judgment.
The best experts I know have a very sharp awareness of where the boundary of their knowledge lies. They are comfortable with those limitations and with saying:
“I don’t know”.
Palestinians are murdering Israelis.
Israelis are murdering Palestinians.
Most of the commentary about this grave state of affairs contains zero historical knowledge or perspective. It also contains little compassion for ‘both sides’ as serially traumatized victims of larger historical forces. And so the suffering and dying continue unabated.
Poetry used to be more than prose with weird line breaks (aka ‘carriage returns’). It used to be a disciplined practice that usually combines rhythm, rhyme and evoking emotion.
Below is a breathtaking example by Alan Seeger who wrote his elegy ‘I have a rendezvous with death’ while serving in WWI before his death at the Battle of the Somme (1916). It is the meditation of a soldier, but Seeger symbolically speaks to us all in our mortal condition.
I have a rendezvous with death by Alan Seeger I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air— I have a rendezvous with Death When Spring brings back blue days and fair. It may be he shall take my hand And lead me into his dark land And close my eyes and quench my breath— It may be I shall pass him still. I have a rendezvous with Death On some scarred slope of battered hill, When Spring comes round again this year And the first meadow-flowers appear. God knows 'twere better to be deep Pillowed in silk and scented down, Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep, Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, Where hushed awakenings are dear ... But I've a rendezvous with Death At midnight in some flaming town, When Spring trips north again this year, And I to my pledged word am true, I shall not fail that rendezvous.
There are three kinds of people:
Creators/builders
Destroyers
Bystanders
Most of us are Bystanders (that’s not a criticism) in the grand scheme of things. We should all be willing to invest a lot of our most precious societal resources (time, attention, money) in suppressing and containing the Destroyers, the sooner the better. The return on that investment in terms of public health and life would be greater than all our biomedical programs combined.
Throughout human history, most ‘treatments’ have had no beneficial biological effect or were harmful (read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s magnificent opus The emperor of all maladies for a chilling illustration).
Doctors have faith in their treatments. Patients want to believe that their doctor can protect them from suffering and death. And so a deal is made. For many doctors and patients, the harsh glare of science (and the ‘evidence-based treatment’ paradigm) is an irritant that disturbs easy faith on both sides.
When a person or group is transmitting propaganda (aka ‘lies’) to mislead and manipulate public opinion, every person and institution that cares about the truth should avoid echoing/reinforcing those weasel words. You can start making your list of big lies now, and even share it with your friends, so you/they can avoid rebroadcasting them.
And be sure to speak truth to lies.
The future is largely unknowable by our current methods.
So the best means of predicting the future is to build it with intention.
We are all capital-ists. Capitalism is merely a system of accounting for the value of the transactions between a willing buyer and a seller. The only question up for active debate is the relative distribution of that value as a return-on-labor versus a return-on-capital.
REFS: Thomas Piketty, The economics of inequality; Joseph Stiglitz, People, power and profits
Most of what most of us do is motivated mostly by self-interest (I. Me. Mine.).
If we work to keep our expectations of other people mostly in line with that reality, we will protect ourselves from a great deal of disappointment and unhappiness.
One of the best pieces of relationship/communication advice I’ve ever heard is that sometimes we have to choose between being ‘right’ and being effective. This points to the importance of actively seeking points of agreement to move any conversation in a positive direction.
According to the fossil record, humans were shorter, had smaller brains and more dental caries (cavities), and suffered a higher cumulative disease burden (TB, malaria, influenza etc.) AFTER they shifted from a migratory hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a stationary agriculture-based one.
Not all change is progress.
For me, the most useful “psychologies” (in terms of understanding the human condition and grappling effectively with it) are derived from
Buddhism
Stoicism
Psychoanalysis
Existentialism
Evolutionary biology
I discuss these theories of mind here and here.
Joseph Campbell’s meta-theory is that human stories (myths, sagas, tall tales etc.) are operating manuals for understanding and living our lives. They are deeply useful when interpreted symbolically rather than literally. For example, the Garden of Eden story is not about a place we left, but rather about the development of self-awareness and morality.
Campbell discovered that the most popular story across human history and geography is what he calls The Hero’s Journey. While the literal hero’s journey story is often about a big strong man battling various enemies, it is a symbolic representation of every person’s process of discovering who they are by leaving home and facing the challenges and dangers of the wider world. A friend of mine wrote a brilliant novel tracing the struggles and transformations of a young introverted woman, demonstrating that each person’s heroic journey has its own particular structure and vicissitudes.
Parenting is one of the most difficult and important of all human activities. It is a shame that we invest so little as a society in helping parents perform this vital task successfully.
I wrote about what I consider to be the best parenting practices. A friend wrote a beautiful poem about how parents can assist their children throughout their lives together. I had the pleasure of reading/recording that poem.
Your psychologies are spot on. The model of each of these schools have done me more good than all the “education” I’ve gotten in my entire life. Great wisdom here, Baird.
There are three kinds of people:
Creators/builders
Destroyers
Bystanders
We have a choice of which to be.