Markets ’R’ Us

Free and open markets present a problem for people who vote on the left side of the aisle and follow progressive tendencies. And it’s not hard to see why. Markets do not respect individuals, do not guarantee any particular result, and often create personal disappointment and unhappiness. In a world that should be nice, with the best possible outcome for the greatest number of people, markets would seem to be cruel, unforgiving, and unfair.

In this way, the operation of a free market and unfettered economic choices most closely resembles the mechanism of chance and fitness for purpose that drives evolution. Evolution operates in the aggregate, on the species level, and cares nothing about the individual members of that species except when they survive and contributes their genetic makeup to a new generation. Genetic mutations are the mindless engine of variability that permits new generations to adapt to changing conditions—or not. If a bad mutation snuffs out an innocent life or dooms it to a permanently marginalized condition, evolution cares not. And if the mechanism of evolution operates too slowly and erratically to permit a promising species to survive rapid change in the environment—think of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, or any other species in a period of mass extinction—evolution sheds not a tear. The planet is always changing, and the biome always has more raw material, other developing species, waiting in the wings to exploit the new ecological balance.

Markets as an expression of economics operate in the aggregate, too. Individuals have meaning only as long as their behavior conforms with one or another force in the marketplace: producer or consumer, seller or buyer, investor or borrower. An exceptionally smart or skilled individual can try to stay on the right side of the market’s movements: being in a position to sell when the price is high, or buy when the price is low, or have cash to loan out when the economy is heating up, or hold reserves to draw upon when the economy is slowing. But no one’s insight is perfect, and everyone gets caught out of step occasionally. Every player eventually ends up holding an unsalable supply of product, or needing a scarce commodity, or having too much cash or not enough when the tide turns.

In this manner, like the impersonal forces of evolution, the market is an equal opportunity creator and destroyer. Nobody has a favored position. Nobody gets a free pass for life. Risk, reward, and retribution are distributed impartially—although, of course, that doesn’t keep people from trying to game the system.

Think of the U.S. Federal Reserve in today’s economy. For the past thirty years or so—approximately since the United States abandoned hard currency and the Bretton Woods agreement, adopting instead a fiat currency based on nothing more than our own productivity and international trade—the Fed has tried to manage the business cycle by manipulating the money supply and the cost of borrowing for banks, businesses, and individuals. In that time, we’ve seen successive economic bubbles—first in tax shelters, then in computer technology, next in internet schemes, and finally in housing stocks—each one followed by a bust in the market. The Fed keeps trying to suppress the waves and tame the business cycle, and each time it works for a while, and then the pricing system stagnates, then inflates, and then explodes. The Fed’s efforts are like trying to suppress the ocean’s waves and their effect upon the shore, turning the ocean into a safe millpond. In the end, you risk creating a tsunami.

People are just so pesky! In a time of easy money, they won’t be happy with their lot in life and live quietly while the nation slowly and gracefully booms without disruption. Instead, they borrow to the maximum allowed and put that excess cash into technology stocks, internet startups, rental housing … just as once the Dutch invested in coffee futures and tulip bulbs—whatever promises a higher return on their investment.

Think of the financial wizards at Long-Term Capital Management back in the ’90s. They tried to keep their market plays afloat indefinitely by hedging every downside with an upside—and vice versa—and then borrowing to leverage their positions. They had elaborate economic models to show how they could contain and overcome the risks inherent in the marketplace. As one observer noted, after their scheme had gone bust, instead of containing the risk and rolling with it when they lost ground—as every other investor must do—LTCM’s managers created “moving vans of risk” that swelled until those vehicles exploded and buried them alive.

In laymen’s terms, you can toss heads fifty times with a penny and count yourself lucky. You are playing as an amused spectator, and the most you risk is coming up tails on the fifty-first toss. But don’t try to iron out the natural rhythms of probability—or of commerce at an industrial or national scale—in order to avoid all risk of your occasionally buying a goat. That way lies a whole flock of goats.

Think of the Hunt family and their Arabs partners in the late ’70s. To shield themselves from the inflation created by the federal government’s printing of dollars, they tried to “corner the market” in precious metals, particularly silver. As they acquired more and more, limiting the supply of a metal that also has important industrial uses, the price per ounce went up. But a funny thing happens when you try to become the only supplier and at the same time the only buyer of a commodity: the price becomes irrelevant. People stop playing when there’s no action. They find alternatives to that commodity, and the market moves elsewhere.

In laymen’s terms, you can run a casino and attract gamblers only so long as they think they have a chance of winning. Yes, the house makes its two percent—or whatever the margin is on average over the variety of games the casino offers—but the individual gambler still sees the possibility of a jackpot, of coming out ahead. But if the house rigs all the games so that it never loses and ends up keeping all the chips, then the betting is over. Everyone goes home.

Markets are simply the expression of popular will when it is aggregated, averaged, and accounts for all the outliers. The activity in any market and in the economy as a whole represents what “the people”—in their purest form, the ultimate composite—desire, decide, and do. If you dislike the action of free and open markets, then you reveal yourself as distrusting the instincts and desires of people as a whole. In their place, you want to create an artificial set of winners and losers in order to promote some notion of market safety, or fairness, or everlasting upsides and bright skies.

Governments do this all the time. The Department of Agriculture—with everyone’s tacit blessing—attempts to manipulate crop yields and limit supplies brought to market in order to keep commodity prices high in times of bounty and keep supplies available in times of drought. As a society, we all agree to pay a little bit more for sugar beets or corn syrup in order to keep the farmers solvent through the lean years, and the farmers agree not to try making a killing on a bumper crop in the fat years. I’m not a purist about economics, and I see nothing terrible about all this. But it’s essential that we all understand as a society what’s going on and are able to judge when the manipulation becomes too steep and hurtful.

We have the recent example of the Chinese stock markets to show when that point is reached. This past June and July the Chinese government tried to maintain the value of stocks on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges through easy money at a time when people’s instincts said prices were too high and it was time to get out of their individual positions. Locking investors into a set of trades they don’t want is a sure way to destroy the market. And enticing them to buy even more heavily with excess money does nothing to allay their fear of holding an overvalued position.

And finally, we have the current desire in this country to create a “living wage” by setting a fixed, entry-level price for all workers despite their individual knowledge, experience, and skills. Like propping up the stock market with easy money, it will work for a while. But eventually the manipulation is doomed to failure. For one thing, it simply ratchets up the entire wage scale over time. Consider the store manager who is making $15 an hour in a fast-food restaurant where the register clerk or fry cook makes the current minimum of $7.15. With a federally mandated jump to $15, the manager is no longer happy doing the extra work and taking on the extra responsibility of his or her position while being paid no more than entry-level subordinates. So the wage scale goes up. The price of hamburgers and other goods goes up. And the economy simply settles in a higher groove where $15 an hour is now considered poverty wages. Declare a minimum wage of $100 an hour, and that will be the new poverty level in a vastly inflated economy.

Advocates of the living wage counter by declaring that the store owner or franchising corporation is rich enough to pay the higher wages without raising prices. But those pesky people just won’t stand still while you try to do the economic equivalent of nailing their feet to the floor. Yes, the owners and investors will pay the higher wage and hold the line on prices for a while in the interests of selling burgers, but eventually they will stop building new stores under the changed conditions or they will invest instead in robot systems to cook the burgers and take the customer’s money without human intervention.

The more strictures, regulations, and controls the government puts on the marketplace to resist these natural tendencies, the more the effort resembles trying to flatten the ocean or corner the market in wages. It will work for a time, then kablooey.

Now I am not such a Pollyanna about economics that I don’t see flaws in the system of open markets. My faith in the direction and corrective action of the marketplace is not absolute. One of the biggest problems with an open economic system is the issue of transparency and market intelligence. The seller may know things about his products that the buyer does not and cannot perceive—that, for instance, this Gucci handbag is actually a knockoff, or that lot of grain is contaminated, or this computer was assembled with bootleg chips that failed during quality control testing—and so the flow of energy in the market turns out not to be fair and impartial. Similarly, the buyer may know things about the transaction of which the seller is unaware—that the government is shortly going to ban the product, or that flooding in the next state will likely destroy half the crop, or that the company is about to report high earnings and the stock take off—and so the individual with inside knowledge will profit unfairly. Governments need to set rules and regulate products and transactions in order to prevent unfair advantage on both sides of the deal.

But a government that attempts to manipulate prices and supplies in order to favor some group or achieve some vision of utopia is simply subverting the largest expression of popular will, cheating and fooling people, and creating conditions the individual participants ultimately do not want. And that’s no more honest than the butcher putting his thumb on the scale or the baker using flour after the weevils have gotten to it.

Fantasies of the Apocalypse

Judging from the crop of action movies that make it into release every summer, and the television series that emulate and support them, humanity—or at least the American variety—hungers for the apocalypse. We routinely celebrate stories about the end of the world as we know it, perhaps just the collapse of western civilization, but better the near-extinction of the human race—although not total extinction, because the story line will always need a handful of human survivors with whom the audience can identify.

This has been going on for as long as I can remember. As a child I saw the Gregory Peck-Ava Gardner movie On the Beach, about a huge atomic cloud, aftermath of nuclear war, that was slowly enveloping the Earth. The death cloud wiped out life everywhere it touched, until only a handful of human beings remained alive in Australia. The story was about how they each had to make their peace with death. For me, that movie gave “Waltzing Matilda” an eternally eerie and sad ring. And then as a young adult I finally read the Nevil Shute novel from which the movie was made—same story, only worse.

You can almost chart the 20th century by its public attitudes towards war. Before World War I, the Europeans were almost eager for the war to start and practiced their belligerence in international politics. The meat grinder of trench warfare on the Western Front sobered everybody, but they took away a bright thought: war and its machinery had become so terrible that humankind was done with it; this was “the war to end all wars.” But then reparations and hurt feelings, a sense of national exuberance, and the strangulation of Depression combined to give us World War II. People endured it as a terrible ordeal—in fact, that was the title of another Nevil Shute book, about a family driven from their home in southern England during the Battle of Britain and who took refuge on their sailboat. People endured great personal hardship during the war, but they were sure it would eventually end, good times return, and life go on.

The atomic bomb erased all that, both intellectually and emotionally. War on a global scale—not the brushfire, third-party wars we’ve been having in Southeast Asia and the Middle East—is now destined to become the final act of humankind, with mutually assured destruction and a descending cloud of radiation. We’ve played that story over and over again. Causes and details of the catastrophe change the story line from decade to decade: we’ve progressed from nuclear war to human-caused global climate change, in both New Ice Age and Searing Desert themes, to the eventual alien invasion, to a viral plague, usually as the result of a bio-warfare accident, which either kills everyone except a genetically resistant handful of survivors, or changes everyone except those survivors into flesh-eating zombies.

Personally, I blame the apocalyptic movie phenomenon on a generation or more of book editors and movie producers, who have responded to pitches for manuscripts and new projects with: “Yeah, but what are the stakes? Why should the reader or audience care about this story?” And on a generation of novelists and screenwriters, pushed to the limit, who responded: “It’s the end of the world, man! The end of life as we know it!”¹

That explains why the stories get written and the films made—but what explains the audience response of buying the book or the movie ticket, sitting down, and actually engaging with the story over and over again? Shouldn’t we all be tired of global catastrophe by now?

I think the attraction is that we all—or at least those of us who are inheritors of western civilization, the fruits of the scientific method and modern technology, and the bounties of free-market capitalism—live fairly boring and dependable lives. Most of us have jobs that are safe, unexciting, and predictable. Most of us get three meals a day and as many snack opportunities as we desire. Most of us enjoy the benefits of security systems, surveillance cameras, and the cop on the corner or in the patrol car. Most of us in the rich, capitalistic, democratic, egalitarian West have never been in serious danger, never been mugged or beaten, never gone hungry for longer than an afternoon, and never had to search for potable water or even a clean restroom.²

When life is predictable, safe, and tame, you can afford to dream a little bit about living on the wild side, with no boundaries, no limits, and no rules you need to respect. The lure of these apocalyptic fantasies—of whatever stripe: war aftermath, environmental accident, zombie plague—is that the daily routine becomes irrelevant both for the characters and for the audience identifying with them.

Suddenly, the group of human survivors must put off the social distance that always separates civilized, urban-dwelling men and women from the strangers they encounter every day on the street. The catastrophe pulls together disparate people and forces them to bond as a team and work for each other’s survival. If you doubt me, think of that Hitchcock classic, Lifeboat.

The catastrophe blows away the mind-fuzz that floats through modern life. The survivors no longer must remember to pay the mortgage or the rent on the first of each month. They don’t have to figure out how to work all the buttons on the new phone, coffeemaker, microwave, car dashboard, ATM machine, or the other near- but not-near-enough-intelligent devices of the modern world—although they do have to learn how to operate their cache of modern weapons. And they no longer must play the subtle and sophisticated political games, with kabuki email exchanges and endlessly polite meetings, that exist in every overstaffed but underachieving work environment. None of these mundane tasks, worries, or obligations is life threatening or even daunting, but they do drain you.

The catastrophe also blows away the sedimentary weight of modern law, too. We all carry at the back of our minds the thought that the Code of Federal Regulations, last reported at some 42,000 pages long, is growing every year. And IRS regulations add some 9,000 pages to that. Somewhere in all that miasmic verbiage is a felony waiting to catch each one of us. And the notion has occurred to everyone that—while we can all go free for now, because of the benign neglect of federal, state, and local governments—computer systems and electronic recordkeeping are becoming more sophisticated all the time. One day soon enough, the Feds, the IRS, and the cop on the corner will be able to access and track what you eat for breakfast and what you’ve got in your pockets. And not long after that … house arrest, ankle bracelet, and gulag!

The catastrophe blows away social conventions, too. Even if our modern law did not prescribe a dozen definitions and degrees of homicide, and hundreds or thousands more liabilities that can get you jailed, bankrupted, and stripped of your possessions, we all know that certain things are just not right. For example, shooting someone without fair warning or explanation. Or commandeering a parked car, an empty house, or an unwatched Hostess Ding Dong®. But when the world is coming to an end, Ferraris are just lying around waiting to be gassed up with a siphon hose and driven to destruction, with no thought of eventually finding the right tires for it or paying the mechanic’s bills. Mansions wait for you to move in, with no thought about whether the taps run with hot and cold water, the toilet flushes, and the light switches work. And if anyone bothers you—or shows the marks of the zombie plague—you are free to blast them with the available shotgun or assault rifle, for which you can always find the right ammo.

Apocalyptic movies are about life in the raw, about adventure and danger, about a future time when men will be free to become savage again, and women will be compliant—unless they’re armed-to-the-teeth Amazon queens—but still scantily dressed and with access to all the modern cosmetics. Apocalyptic movies are fantasies of a world where modern rules, modern comforts, and modern frustrations fade away, and the happy survivors can live as noble savages—which means fighting for their lives in desperate circumstances.

I should despise such stories—and yet they give me a kind of comfort and hope. For as long as people respond to them, we know that life in a society that spawns such books and movies is still pretty good. The fear factor is way below the historic human average. People are mostly eating regularly and able to ruin their appetites with popcorn and candy. The quotients of personal safety and comfort are high. And the future holds no real or imminent terrors. Long may civilization reign!

1. This has always seemed to me like the desperation of a small imagination. A skilled writer can make you adopt the viewpoint of, sense the drama in, and respond to even the most mundane characters in the smallest conflicts in the least contentious parts of the world. The trick is to make your characters believable, their situations familiar and absorbing, and the stakes important—to them. “The end of the world as we know it” is a theme too large and complex for anyone to consider seriously without inviting brain freeze and emotional meltdown. Some of the best stories are small and intimate.

2. We all know about exceptions, of course. Soldiers on deployment, wives experiencing domestic violence, children in broken and violent homes, and people in marginalized communities all know fear and danger, occasional hunger, and eternal, gnawing desperation. And that experience, even if it only occurs once or it happened long ago, has a tendency to mark a person and change his or her attitudes about life. But, again, these are exceptions to what the majority of the modern, western-oriented population experiences. Not so long ago—perhaps half a millennium or less—violence, hunger, and imminent death were the common lot of the average human being.

Your Buddha Nature

Recently I wrote about the concept of a person’s “Buddha nature.”¹ I defined this as “the core person, the undefiled person, the being that lives deep in our consciousness, beneath our changing opinions, random ideas, and restless seeking after advantage. This deep being is naturally attuned to the universe and its ways. It is receptive to ideas of reciprocity, balance, acceptance, peace, loving kindness, and other elements of ‘the good.’ This is the person we were meant to be before we became enmeshed in the chaotic disturbances and passions of life and went off to pursue vain and fanciful things. Buddha nature allows any human being to reach enlightenment.”

But now, given what I wrote more recently about personal honesty,² I wonder if it’s even possible for any human being to find, let alone acknowledge and identify with, this deeper nature.

It would be nice if, buried deep within our minds, our brain’s circuitry, and our everyday interactions, each of us were to harbor an innocent soul. This would be a child of unblinking objectivity, looking out on the world without favor or fear, living in undaunted expectation of balance and harmony, ready to take things and people as they come, having no preconceptions, and passing no judgments. This child would be practically selfless in its approach to the world, giving and taking easily and effortlessly, and not bothering to count its change.

But what am I saying? That’s not a child! As anyone knows who has raised a baby, socialized a toddler, or attempted to correct a teenager, the child is all about itself. The fresh-born human is at the focus of its own universe. Its hungers and needs are paramount. Its disappointments are earth-shattering. Its likes and dislikes are finite and final. Yes, the baby can be distracted long enough to smile at a rainbow or a butterfly—once it has learned to focus its eyes, of course, and to recognize anything beyond its mother’s face—but as soon as the baby’s stomach rumbles or its diaper becomes wet, the center of attention returns to the child’s own life and needs.

Babies and small children have no “Buddha nature” in the sense of being ready to receive enlightenment. If by “enlightenment” we mean gaining a profound sense of the interrelationship of every object in the universe of things and of every perception and intention in the sphere of conscious beings, if we mean seeing past the illusions and misconceptions of the mind and finding peace, harmony, and reciprocity, then the childlike state is the polar opposite of enlightenment. It takes a dozen years filled with either gentle or harsh parental correction, followed by many bruising playground collisions, jarring disappointments, and unanswered cries for attention before a child learns that he or she is not the center of the universe. It takes a dozen more years of braggadocio and ridicule, blunders and embarrassment, unrequited loves and jealousies, and similar social abrasions before the teenager learns that his or her enthusiasms and opinions are not shared by the entire world—sometimes not even by one’s closest friends—and that the way things were done by his family, in her school and church, and in his hometown or state are not the standard of reason, comportment, and commerce for the rest of humanity. And some people, despite all the knocking about they get, never learn this.

Perhaps we have no “Buddha nature” at all. Perhaps the naked human has no enlightenable “deep core” being. I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw while working at the engineering firm, where the deadlines came quick and fast, orders and opinions often clashed, and crisis was always imminent. The cartoon depicted a man in profile with a frenzied look on his face. The side of his skull had been cut away, showing his brain and the rest of his head held down by coil springs that were near the breaking point. And the caption read: “Don’t be silly! Tension is the only thing holding me together!”

Perhaps the only forces driving some people are their passions and fancies. Or their seeking after personal, social, political, or economic advantage. Or their sense of duty, instilled in them by a demanding parent, an impressive teacher, or an intimidating drill sergeant. Or they are impelled by their fears and angers. Or their sense of moral or ethnic superiority. Perhaps we are all just surface, and what we are thinking, feeling, wanting, and imagining right now is all that is real or meaningful in our world.

As a sidelight … I have done battle with two great addictions in my life: one to tobacco, the other to alcohol.³ I was finally able to kick both habits—although some dozen years apart, and after many false starts in either case—and in the process I learned a powerful lesson. Until the drug of choice had fully left my system and I had developed other habits that did not depend upon its consolations, I would find myself making random, offhand propositions to myself in order to get the smoke or booze back into my mouth. Out of the blue, perhaps from the subconscious, maybe from the limbic system—the brain’s seat of emotions, motivations, and behaviors—would come a preverbal suggestion. “You’ve had a rough day. You deserve a drink to make you feel better!” Or, “You’ve had a great day. You deserve a drink to celebrate!” Or, “You’re stressed out now. You need a smoke to relax!” Or, “You’ve got some time on your hands. Wouldn’t a smoke taste wonderful now?”

What finally occurred to me—and so saved my resolve—was that, no matter the situation, consuming the drug of choice always appeared to be the right answer. Luckily, I had enough logic and sense of proportion left in my mind to realize that these random notions—“You need a drink!” “You need a smoke!”—were foreign and inimical to my decision not to drink and smoke. From this reasoning, I understood a basic truth: the mind is a monkey when the body wants its candy.

We have long been taught that logic, reason, and our perceptions of the truth are things external to human ideas and emotions. We believe these patterns stand alone and represent something solid and reliable as an expression of some kind of absolute reality. But I learned in fighting my addictions that it is the body itself and its hungers which represent the deeper truth. The baby still lurks down there, wanting its candy and awaiting the execution of its imperious will. And logic and truth are simply a form of camouflage, sand to dash in your mind’s eye, shiny objects to distract your intelligence and determination, while the hand reaches for the pipe and tobacco pouch—I was a pipe rather than cigarette smoker—or for the corkscrew and wine glass. The mind is a monkey when the baby is not getting what it wants.⁴

If we have a “Buddha nature,” then it is not some integral part of the human body, or the central nervous system, or the natural, undeveloped mind. It does not exist from before we were born, representing some undiluted or pure state of being. It is not a sweet child waiting deep in our minds, wanting to look out on the world with charity and compassion. Instead, Buddha nature is a mental construct. Like most good habits and desirable states of mind, it must be perceived, nurtured, and adopted through careful practice.

Like everything else that is aspirational in the human condition, “Buddha nature” is a conscious desire and a learned response.

1. See A God I Can Believe In from October 19, 2014.

2. See The Truth About Personal Honesty from July 5, 2015.

3. Which leaves Snickers^® bars and caffeine as the fights of my old age. Eventually, I will probably give up the candy—but the coffee, never!

4. Conversely, one might argue that the resolve not to give in to addiction was an aspect of my “Buddha nature.” If so, it was a part of me that had to be manufactured decision by decision, in real time, and with constant vigilance. This resolve was an act of conscious will and not something natural to any deeper being.

Victimology

When did it become chic in our society to claim the status of a victim? I know this has happened, because various groups now routinely use words like “oppressed” and “deprived” to describe their general condition.

This instance of victimology is not applied to just one phase of a person’s life or to a particular period in his or her personal history. It has become fashionable to claim that you and your tribe were, are, and always have been victims of great and ignoble forces active in society, history, human psychology, sexual relationships, or some other sphere of interaction, where it has become impossible to name your individual enemies, call them out, and thrash them. Conversely, it becomes all too possible to point toward the nearest representative of some designated über-class and blame him for all your woes.

To my mind, this is a dead end. Going deeper into victimhood just doesn’t work. Good stories and happy outcomes don’t follow from reveling in the state of oppression, deprivation, loss of opportunity, loss of dignity, and impairment of selfhood that the victim mantle bestows. My first question to such a person would be, “Well, what are you going to do to get your own back?” That is, how are you going to repair the damage, reclaim your life, rebuild your fortune, regain your self-respect, punish your enemies, and defend yourself against future attacks and depredations? To me, these would seem to be the next steps in returning to the status of an independent, resourceful, courageous, and fully functioning human being.

To my ear, the status of a victim sounds too much like an excuse … and like whining. “I can’t be a complete person, I can’t be strong, can’t do my job, can’t improve my life, care for my family, learn and grow, because I have been abused, robbed of opportunity, looted of identity, denied good role models, hampered with social pressures, and oppressed by the economic system, by the banks, the patriarchy, the upper class, the one-percent, the middle class, or simply by the majority in society.”

When my generation was growing up, my parents and my various aunts and uncles were not people to suffer complaints and whining from me and my brother and our various cousins. I routinely heard the elders say, “Knock it off!” along with “Go do something! Get busy!” My father’s favorite aphorism was “Those who feel sorry for themselves, should!” And I don’t think we youngsters were ill-used. Their world had just survived a grueling and all-consuming world war, second of two in as many decades, separated by a worldwide financial collapse, and the end of that war had brought horrifying stories of brutality, torture, and genocide. Their generation considered strength, self-reliance, and preparedness in the face of such adversity a cardinal virtue. And no one has told me since then that the world has gotten any kinder or less dangerous.

If you attack me and my family, if you rob us or try to bend us to your will, you will not make us victims—combatants, perhaps, and certainly enemies, but not victims. The only person who can turn me into a victim is me, through my own attitudes about myself. And as I’ve said before, that’s a dead end.

Adopting the mantle of a victim is not a survival tactic. Instead, it is an admission of general weakness and lack of purpose. Moreover, it inspires not pity but, among those without compassion or charity, the urge to attack and finish the job. Why would anyone want to make him- or herself a target of unsympathetic scoundrels? If you know your condition or situation to be weak, the best course is not to advertise that fact but rather to conceal it—and then work hard on improving your condition and situation.

Perhaps those who openly adopt the mantle of victimhood are trying to take on a protective coloration against potential criticism. “I’m not an oppressor! I’m not a scoundrel! Look! I’ve been deprived and oppressed myself!” Of course, this argument leads too easily to comparing and contrasting your hurts and degradations with those of the people you are trying to convince. And that’s another dead end.

Adopting a pose of weakness, of oppressed status and a deprived condition, might seem like an expression of humility. But it’s the false kind. The truly humble person does not deny his or her strengths, skills, opportunities, and achievements. The magnanimous person accepts these things calmly, does not flaunt them before others, but uses them to achieve good ends. He or she also wishes to build a future, to grow and learn in order to achieve a better life, more opportunities, more instances of kindness, and an easier passage for his or her family, community, and society. The person who glories in perceived losses, hurts, and damages is actually exercising a kind of pride, focusing on him- or herself and what others may owe to satisfy his or her hurts. The truly strong person puts aside losses and hurts, attempts to take them in stride, and focuses on building for the future.

I’ve always been a fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.¹ One element that has stuck with me is a reference in relation to the Bene Gesserit, which is one of the Great Schools, whose adepts and mother superiors are the interstellar empire’s genetic preservationists and political manipulators. They operate under the axiom “Support strength.” On the face of it, this would seem to be backwards. After all, our human compassion tells us the poor and weak need our support, and the meek need our protection. Our human paranoia would suggest that the strong are more likely to be predators and users, and their prey is the poor and meek.

But I think that in the long view, in taking care of the entire human race and building for its future, the Bene Gesserit have it right. The goal is not to encourage the ruthless and predaceous, nor to increase the number of the weak and helpless. The greater good is to help those who are still learning, growing, acquiring skills and purpose, becoming self-reliant and able to cope, and teaching others by their example. Preserving, encouraging, and teaching poverty and weakness are a dead end for society and slow suicide for those who accept the status of victim.

Those who would live, prosper, and move forward into the future must be strong and resourceful. These are the people with the good stories and happy outcomes.

1. See my blog The Dune Ethos from October 30, 2011.

The Risk-Transfer Society

I’ve written before about why I don’t believe this country is actually headed for a Marxist-style socialist government, with aggressive nationalization of various industries, such as the British undertook in the post-war period.¹ Basically, it is much more difficult, time-consuming, and risky for government agencies to try running complex businesses like steelmaking, farming, and banking themselves. We in the U.S. find it far easier to impose complicated, interlocking sets of regulations on shareholder-owned and professionally managed businesses in order to achieve the policy goals we want.

You see this every day. The government would like to run any unit of the business sector—manufacturing, retail, financial, or service—as both a productive enterprise and as an instrument of social engineering, employment policy, and wealth distribution. But the government would soon run that factory, bank, or business into the ground—or into bankruptcy. Instead, bureaucrats can more easily impose regulations governing hiring and firing policies, payment and benefit policies, work and safety conditions, and environmental impacts without regard to their actual effects on production or the economics of the business. Sure, these regulations start out as a means of correcting obvious abuses and societal harm: banning child labor, eliminating overt discrimination against women and minorities, or keeping toxic wastes out of nearby rivers. But soon the scope of the perceived harm broadens and the scale of impact diminishes to the point that government regulation is used to favor and reward certain groups and activities while discouraging others.

But this is not just the action of a “laissez-majesté” government. Our entire society has become a game of risk transfer and rent seeking.

Take, for example, the differences between a property owner and a renter. Traditionally, the person who owned his or her home has enjoyed certain benefits. The cost of ownership in terms of mortgage payments are generally known within specific limits, so that the only unknowns are the costs of unexpected damage and loss—which can be insured against—and of routine maintenance—which can be forecast and budgeted—as well as changes in property valuation and assessed taxes. On the contrary, the renter of an apartment or house has usually been subject to unpredictable changes in cost and conditions, such as rising rents, unexpected evictions, and deteriorating maintenance, with only a short-term lease contract—typically of six months or a year duration—as protection.

But now in most big cities, and particularly in California, the government has stepped in on the side of the renter against the property owner. Rents are government-controlled to limit raises, despite increasing property taxes and maintenance costs due to inflation. State law severely restricts landlords from evicting tenants, and even the Ellis Act (Government Code Section 7060-7060.7), which allows landlords to take a rental property off the housing market without having to sell it, is under fire in San Francisco. These rules give the renter the kind of security that a homeowner has traditionally enjoyed while leaving the property owner on the hook with the risks of loss due to fire, earthquake, or other catastrophe, along with the responsibility and rising cost of paying for maintenance, upkeep, and taxes.

As another example, the Environmental Protection Agency is continually expanding the scope of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to encompass, respectively, more pollutants, more sources, and more resources. The government does not have to own the land to prescribe how the owner will manage its productive use, and it does not have to assume the costs and risks to productive use of meeting its own regulations. This is one thing when a property owner is banned from dumping raw sewage or toxic wastes into the river bordering his or her property. It’s quite another when federal law imposes development restrictions on a low-lying property that occasionally collects water after a rainstorm and so has been officially declared a precious wetland.

Or consider the grab bag of goodies that our court system and the practice of tort law has become. A plaintiff with any claim of injury can, usually with the support of a self-interested lawyer and a pending class-action suit, identify a “deep pocket” and profit from it. The take includes not only actual damages, if they can be proved, but damages for putative pain and suffering and sometimes punitive damages that are meant serve as a warning to future defendants. I’m not saying that a person does not have a right to seek recompense, have his or her damages due to malice or negligence made whole, and see wrongs corrected, but it’s become a commonplace in our society to envision six figures with every slip on an icy sidewalk or coffee spill by a harried waitress.

And then we have the case of Kelo v. City of New London, in which the Connecticut city forced a private property owner to sell under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment in order to promote private development by a third party and so boost local economic activity. It is one thing to take a piece of property under public domain in order to build a facility designed for public use, like a road or sewer system, but quite another to take the property because you think someone else can make more profit from it and thereby increase the tax base.

In California we have the Coastal Commission, established in the 1970s, which regulates land development and public use along the seashore. Its jurisdiction extends inland from the mean high tide line to a variable distance: some hundreds of feet in urban areas, or up to five miles in rural areas. The commission can establish public rights of way across your private property for beach access. It reviews land-use development plans and issues permits. However, it does not have the power to issue fines or prosecute violations through the courts.

Now, I believe in competition and creative tension. I understand that every disagreement has two sides, and that we can only determine what is right and true when we bring both sides into the open to examine cases, expose facts, and air differences. So the legal struggle between opposing interests such as buyer and seller, labor and management, owner and renter, and other fields of conflict can establish what is fair and equitable in the public view. It would be a sad world if one side or the other automatically took precedence and won every case without contest. That would be a monopoly on the power of justice equivalent to the ancient divine right of kings and their prerogatives.

But still, I sense a movement in this country away from the rights of property ownership, self-expression, and personal interest and accountability. We are drifting toward automatic, reflexive adherence to community interest, public access, and communal property rights. This would all seem to be proper and fair, favoring the little guy and the public interest over the private rights of the landed and wealthy. But I also believe you can take this notion too far.

Since the opening of private land for public grazing in rural 19th-century England, economists have recognized a principle known as the tragedy of the commons. The reasoning is simple: when a resource like open land, productive assets, ground water, the fish in the sea, or anything else that people might value is held as a public good rather than as private property, it tends to deteriorate, be exploited, or become depleted. That’s because people are still rational economic beings who tend to maximize their satisfactions and minimize their burdens. So we see the English commons overgrazed; the seas fished with huge drag nets; public buildings, facilities, and infrastructure left dirty, worn, and badly maintained; and untended property defaced with the impulses of graffiti artists and vandals. People cherish and take care of the things they own personally; they are less careful of property for which they believe others are responsible. It’s a commonplace that some of the greatest environmental disasters have occurred in Communist countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, where all property is theoretically owned in common by the state or “the people”—which means no one in particular owns or cares for it.

Transferring private property to public use through government regulation would seem to be a way around this problem. You simply leave the upkeep and maintenance, the cherishing and the associated risks, to the nominal owner while letting others take what they want or need from the property’s active use. The owner is left holding the basket while everyone else gets to extract the goodies.

The process will continue for a while. But like almost everything else in the universe—except perhaps for the gravitational pulse of a black hole—the situation is unstable. If the owner perceives too little value from trying to run the business, develop the land, maintain title to the property, hold the company’s shares, or otherwise participate in the game, he or she will drop out and become one of the public users. People are not stupid, and they will not go through the motions of playing a losing hand forever.

A society that does not value fairness and equity, and that has no appreciation of the essentials of human nature, will not last long. One can fail on the side of protecting and promoting the little guy and the public interest just as surely as you can fail on the side of preserving the rights of the landed and wealthy. In the long view, one can see the Western World in the 19th century as favoring the top tiers of society and vested interests, while the late 20th century and the start of the 21st now favor the dispossessed and the landless.

These are interesting time we live in, and which way the government and economy of this country and the Western world as a whole will go is now to open to question. I can only leave you with the Buddha’s blessing, which is also a curse: Nothing lasts forever. Not even black holes.

1. See Why Own When You Can Rent? from October 13, 2013.

Building Our World

Five years ago, in a meditation on the speed with which our technological base is expanding,¹ I wrote the following:

“In the 20th century we started another transformation, from mechanics to informatics. Consider that for 100,000 years of human history a tool was a physical object like a hammer or an axe blade. But in the last 40 years techniques like crossfoot accounting, computerized spreadsheets, scheduling programs, risk analysis, and datamining have spawned a generation that uses nonmaterial tools on a daily basis. For 20,000 years, animal husbandry meant taming and working with whole animals or crossbreeding whole crops of corn. In the last 20 years the manufacture and use of enzymes, proteins, plasmids, and antigens has created a biological industry that employs the barest parts of, rather than whole, organisms.”

But that’s not quite accurate, is it?

Animal Husbandry

Humans have been using parts of animals from the very beginning. Hunter-gatherer cultures represent an advanced technology in themselves, and they leave almost nothing to waste. Consider the uses to which the Native Americans put the buffalo—an animal that they neither domesticated nor herded but hunted—deriving meat for their bellies and skins for their clothing and lodges. They gathered other animal parts, from porcupine quills to eagle feathers, for personal decoration. And the Eskimos use every part of the seal and walrus: blubber and meat for food; bones for needles, knives, and harpoon points; skins for clothing; sinews and nerves for cord and thread.

In a cave called Divje Babe in Slovenia, paleontologists have found a 43,000-year-old fragment of a bear femur with holes drilled for a flute. Debate continues whether this was a Homo neanderthalensis or H. sapiens artifact, but it seems indisputable that the holes are artificial and their spacing represents a diatonic musical scale.

Humans in ancient times used bees—hardly domesticated as pets, although they lived in wicker and straw hives of human construction that people placed conveniently close to their planted fields—to obtain honey. Similarly, ancient societies harvested shellfish for a particular shade of purple dye and scraped tree sap for incense and perfumes.

All of these were uses of animal parts in advance of any coordinated effort at domestication, care, and feeding such as humans have given to their dogs, horses, cows, and pigs from prehistoric times. And even domesticated animals have yielded more than their meat, hide, and muscle power. Horse hooves have been boiled for glue from prehistoric times. Sausage casings have been made from layers of the small intestines of sheep, goats, and pigs, while modern edible casings are made of collagen processed from cattle hides or cellulose processed from plants. And various plants have yielded more than their seeds, stalks, and roots for food, too. Consider the antiquity of weaving reeds and grasses into baskets and hats, or flax and cotton fibers into cloth. So people have been using animal and plant parts in industrial processes for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Still, I will stand by the intention of that paragraph above. In the last twenty years or so, especially since we learned to read and manipulate the genotypes of various organisms, our use of animal and plant proteins, enzymes, and antibodies has flourished. We routinely insert fragments of human or animal DNA into yeasts and various cell types of the Muridae, or rodent family, to create targeted proteins used in medicine and research. And laboratories all over the world are now working on genetic modifications that will let green algae produce and release lipids—various fatty molecules—that can be processed in place of oil drilled from the ground. The goal, of course, is to move directly from sunlight to a fuel precursor in one step that can be repeated endlessly with no net addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

And I don’t think I was wrong about the speed with which this industrial adaptation has accelerated. Our chemistry and biology give us a power over the carbon molecule and other artifacts from fossil life of which an 18th-century charcoal burner, a 19th-century coal-tar chemist, or a 20th-century petroleum engineer could barely conceive, let alone envy.

Information Processing

If knowledge is power, then humans have been wielding it since at least the invention of writing.

Consider the ancient Chinese classic I Ching, or Book of Changes. As a system of divination, it was no more accurate than reading Tarot cards or flipping coins, but that’s not the point. The I Ching’s arrangement of 64 hexagrams represent a system of thought, a proposed relationship among human characteristics, everyday circumstances, and the workings of chance. People have been using it to order their thinking and inspire their imaginations and insights for more than two millennia.

Consider Sun Tzu’s Art of War, probably the world’s first and best military handbook. The text is a distillation of principles that, yes, any experienced war leader could probably work out for himself. Like Machiavelli’s The Prince, the teachings are logical and easy to understand and build upward from one concept to the next. Like knowing the rules of chess and studying the most common gambits, reading either of these books in advance of going to war or entering politics gives the practitioner an edge over his or her untutored opponents.

Consider the principles of accounting. Crossfooting—the method of verifying a result by adding the totals across columns of numbers—was always possible and useful when working on a paper ledger in pencil or ink. But the system really took off with the invention of first the computer and then the spreadsheet, where the process became automatic and could be programmed to raise warning flags if the totals didn’t match.

Actually, though, the greatest advance in accounting was probably double-entry bookkeeping, which originated in Venice in the late 15th century. This system simply balances assets against liabilities to track the money and activity in any business. So taking out a loan, for example, puts cash in the asset side of the business ledger and simultaneously enters a debt to be repaid on the liability side.

Another accounting advance was reckoning the “time value of money”—that is, the rate of return that an amount of cash or other asset could earn if it were lent at the current interest rate or converted into some other form of investment over a specified period of time. The time value of money drives businesses to put their excess cash to work and lets the owner compare investment and asset strategies on a reasonable basis. Although this is easier to figure with a computer or calculator, the principle has existed as long as banking and alternative investments have been around, and the formulas for figuring present value and future value can be worked with pencil and paper. The whole realm of accounting is an informational tool that guides the decision-making of alert businessmen and –women.

So, yes, previous cultures have developed and used raw information as a tool. And this tendency only increased when the printing press made paper copies of organized information caches like books, pamphlets, and scholarly treatises widely available. Then it increased again when the computer automated the processing of information.

Still, I stand by the premise in the paragraph above. We are moving from an analysis of simple data patterns—like the movements of armies in the field or the flow of cash through a business—to appreciation of and predictions based on much more complex situations. For example, IBM is now selling a service called Watson Analytics. This is clearly based on the associational algorithms that IBM’s computer scientists built into the brain box called “Watson,” which turned it into a Jeopardy champion that could blend knowledge of historical and cultural references, facility with linguistic and logic puzzles, and human-scale memory recall into an instrument for recognizing and using patterns to obtain answers. IBM calls this “cognitive computing”—which means that the computer can analyze strange data and answer questions about them without a human programmer having to code the questions and the search terms for each step of the analysis.

The future is still coming at us faster and faster, but it all builds logically and progressively on the patterns of human invention that have come before.

1. See Coming at You from October 24, 2010.

The Truth About Personal Honesty

We all believe in personal honesty. That is, we are honest with ourselves about what is real in our lives, about what we know, what we want, what our intentions are, and where we stand in the world. We may tell fibs and lies to the people around us—even to our nearest and dearest—but with ourselves, by ourselves, we are true.

Many spiritual paths such as Zen and self-help programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous require their followers to practice personal honesty. The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, seat of the ancient world’s most famous oracle, had “Know thyself” (gnōthi seauton) inscribed above the doorway. And that should be an obvious hint: when the most rigorous forms of self-knowledge and the voice of a god supposedly telling you the truths of the universe must urge you to be honest with yourself, perhaps personal honesty is not so commonly practiced as we assume.

You would think this was the easiest thing in the world, to know and understand yourself and your aims. After all, we live inside our own heads. Everything that passes through the human mind at some point must, we think, come before our conscious awareness to be recognized, evaluated, and either accepted or rejected. We can pick over our own thoughts and decide for ourselves what is true. So all of us should—at some point of reflection, confession, or intense personal struggle—be able to realize and state the truth about ourselves.

And yet, too often we don’t. Without the help of a Zen master, an AA sponsor, or the oracle of a god, we are capable of living in an almost complete state of denial, delusion, or personal amnesia—usually for years at a time. We can be cruel to people and call ourselves caring and helpful. We can indulge our senses and call it self-awareness. We can hobble our daily lives with nonproductive obligations and thoughtless debts, our bodies with excess pounds and neglected muscles, and our minds with useless habits and unexamined compulsions … and call it a state of freedom.

Why is this possible? I would contend such denials and delusions are a product of the human mind’s function as a story-making and myth-projecting machine. We all tend to make stuff up. We embellish the known facts. We redirect our minds from what we see to what we think we see. And we fill in the gaps when what we see is not a clear or complete picture.¹

In part, this is a survival trait of the human brain and its sensory apparatus, and it operates on many levels. For example, our eyes evolved during generations in which we were both hunter and prey. We use close focus to examine the shapes of things that attract our attention and interest—for example the type composing the words you are reading right now—and then we study the images in that focus for their possible meaning and importance. But we also use the periphery of our visual awareness—by far the greater span—to detect movements, shadows, and hints of anomaly. These may either give us warning of threats, if we are operating in prey mode, or clues to concealed possibilities, if we are reacting as hunters and gatherers. The vulnerable naked human who does not sense and react to a sudden movement in the bushes can be surprised and killed. The hungry human who does not perceive the spots of a faun among the sun-dappled shadows of the underbrush, or react to the flash of color indicating ripe berries among the swaying leaves of the bramble, will eventually starve. In the same way, our ears react to the rustle of tree branches, the rhythmic pattern of footfalls, or the sound of our name in the babble of a crowd. Our skin senses the breeze as a touch, and interprets a touch as either potential caress or imminent attack.

Our brains were shaped to work from partial data, to flesh out vague perceptions, to make interpretations and decisions based on less than full knowledge. Sometimes, this processing goes haywire. A chemical imbalance, arising from illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, can cause a person to misinterpret the waterfall of sensory impressions that pour in continually from the sense organs and are categorized, sorted, and interpreted in certain parts of the brain. Scrambled auditory signals present themselves as coherent voices, and their speech and suggestions are directed by the memories and fears active in the person’s current thinking. Scrambled visual inputs become hallucinations and visions.

Most of the time, though, this processing from partial inputs works to our advantage. A shadow at the edge of our vision, or a sudden movement in the air against our cheek, causes us to duck and thereby avoid a blow.

By extension, we use the brain’s facility in working from partial data and incomplete analysis to make leaps of intuition and understanding when dealing with puzzles and problems, and in trying to understand the world around us. We work from clues to fill in the complete pattern and arrive at actionable decisions. We are all so good at this that we must be constantly reminded to use standards of evidence, rules of logic, and tests of our assumptions when trying to establish the truth about historical, scientific, or legal facts. We imagine and assume so much in our daily lives that we must be restrained when representing “the truth” in more formal circumstances.

One proof that our minds are, at the most basic level, story-making machines can be found in our dreams. In the deepest stages of sleep, the brain begins sorting the day’s impressions, turning short-term experience into long-term memory, salvaging some of the day’s thoughts and ideas, and discarding the rest. During this period, we are not aware of the memory sorting process.² Instead, the brain entertains our dozing mind with made-up experiences, fictitious personal histories, adventures, fantasies, harrowing escapes, and other real-seeming sequences that bear only a distant relationship to our everyday life. Our brains tell us stories while we sleep.

Even when we are awake, our memories are not perfect reflections of actual experience, taking a faithful image like a piece of carbon paper³ or a mirror. Instead, our memories are associational systems. We tend to join together similar things in our memories—which is why mnemonics and other memory tricks work so well. We also edit our memories slightly every time we recall and think about them.⁴ That’s why techniques to induce a “false memory”—perhaps an interpretation of some childhood trauma, or the fact of trauma itself—succeed so well, because a skilled practitioner can lead us to modify our memories to fit a preconceived notion.

With all of this processing and massaging of facts and memories going on inside our brains, is it even possible to be honest with ourselves? Can we separate delusion and imagination from truth? I believe so … I hope so. If not, then life is a dream, meaning is fragmentary, and nothing much is more important than anything else.

But the snares of memory and delusion mean that finding and keeping the truth about ourselves is going to be hard work. It requires effort, self-examination, and a willingness to be stern with the weaker side of our natures and fearless in the face of dangers and strong temptations. But as the Zen masters, the AA sponsors, and the Oracle of Apollo all suggest, our lives are worth that effort.

1. Such is the nature of conspiracy theories.

2. See, for example, Memory Consolidation and REM Sleep at Serendip Studio, Bryn Mawr College, from January 9, 2008.

3. A relic of the typewriting age, “carbon paper” was used to transfer the impression of a striking key from one sheet of typing paper onto a second or third sheet behind it. A typist sandwiched the carbon-dusted paper between the sheets, where it acted like a supplemental typewriter ribbon. Of course, these days we just press Control-C and Control-V to copy and move pieces of digital text from one place to another. I suppose that, in another twenty years, I will also have to explain for the next generation what a typewriter and paper were.

4. See, for example, When Memories are Remembered, They Can Be Rewritten at National Geographic from May 20, 2013, or Your Memory Isn’t What You think It Is at Psychology Today from July 16, 2013.