Month: October 2021

This captures beautifully what’s in my heart and mind every day on this Earth, and fills me with gratitude for the culture I feel so blessed to have been born into here in the USA. As we contemplate next places and head to new frontiers, I hope we’ll carry the spirit of this bold, hopeful declaration with us.

A sobering reflection on the catastrophe of the past many weeks.

I’ve listened to Jocko lots. He’s painstakingly reserved and professional and it’s exceedingly rare for him to cross over into criticizing policy in detail. This sobering talk was much needed. It grieves me to think how this disaster weighs on those who served and sacrificed and lost brothers in arms. Feels like we’re in a dangerous free fall whose cause was inexplicably self-inflicted.

The previous video Jocko refers to:

The notion that we are too nice rather than insufficiently kind as a culture is a counterintuitive conclusion. It runs contrary to a widely held belief that is easy to adopt if one does not look too deeply: that kindness begets only goodwill and produces only betterment and harmony. Such a belief is easy to hold, until greater experience with the world contradicts it. Eventually, we observe that some take undue advantage of our kindness. A close cousin to this is the notion that we could have peace if we were just nice enough to everyone – a notion that seems intuitive in theory, but falls down hard when faced with an enemy who is emboldened by displays of weakness. Such an approach may work well enough confined to the scope of the people we know, but is ill-equipped to deal with malevolent actors who don’t share the goodwill or reasonable nature of our familiar peer group.

Life has a way of challenging our easy theories born of first-stage analyses, if we’re honest with ourselves and keep our eyes open. I’ve arrived at where I am through years of observing and seeking to better understand, and I don’t doubt there’s more learning coming my way. The results have put me at odds with popular conclusions on issues and dominant and deeply held ways of thinking, and that has brought me an unhappy isolation at times, but I realize it should not surprise me that easier conclusions that require less introspection and life experience are going to be widely held. I hope, through writing and conversations, to show others bits of what I see that I believe have value, and I think that’s a largely worthwhile pursuit. But I also suspect there are things one must see candidly for oneself to be persuaded of.

This idea of counterintuitive conclusions and the need to move beyond first-stage analysis to get to more accurate models of the world has some value to offer, I think. It’s been on my mind to mine that vein further here and see where it goes. Stay tuned.

Academy of Ideas has produced some profoundly insightful content. I ran across and re-watched this video in particular recently, and find deep relevance in it for the time and troubling phenomena we’re living through. Especially striking is Jung’s assessment that “psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease]”.

Much to that point, the following sounds all too familiar:

When it is understood that a flood of negative emotions, in conjunction with a weak and insecure sense of self, can trigger a descent into madness, it becomes clear how a mass psychosis can occur. A population first needs to be induced into a state of intense fear or anxiety by threats real, imagined, or fabricated. And once in a state of panic, the door is opened for either the positive or negative reaction to unfold. If a society is composed of self-reliant, resilient, and inwardly strong individuals, a positive reaction can take place. But if it is composed of mainly weak, insecure, and helpless individuals, a descent into the delusions of a mass psychosis becomes a real possibility.

“The Mass Psychosis and the Demons of Dostoevsky” is the follow-up to this episode.