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Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

March 27, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path.  It went something like this:

  1. Go to public school
  2. Go to College
  3. Get a job
  4. Get married and buy a house
  5. Have kids
  6. Work until your kids have left home
  7. Work until you retire
  8. ????

I asked them, what’s the point of that?  They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us.  We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say.   I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate.  After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

But that’s the catch isn’t, it?  I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy.  Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy.  So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism.  How does meaning fit in?

After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning.  In particular:

 

Meaning in the Workplace

I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson.  You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs.  The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?)  To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job.  For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like.  What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself.  And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do.  What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy.  If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours.  That’s kind of a sad thought.  All those turn-key children.  Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters.  Here’s a compelling quote:

My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about?  Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

Sounds like managers also need to become teachers!  And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers!  So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be.  But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

What happens when we lose meaning?

 

The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit).  If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it.  If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis.  This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers.  I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful.  The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit.  The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit.  I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly).  When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s).  By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was.  I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression.  And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism.  If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us.  To quote Callinicos,

The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.  That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary.  Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system.  Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further.  Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me!  What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

 

Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone.  But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself.  People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well.  So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis.  We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change.  Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”.  So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”.  The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading.  Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”.  Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

My evidence for this?  Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis.  This one is personal.  While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy.  Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy.  What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles?  It’s worth quoting:

Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

But then we knew this already.  Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp.  His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive.  He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up.  And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning.  For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us.  Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way.  Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning.  Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $.  The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time.  And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty.  I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

So the takeaway?  If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day.  Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs.  I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe.  But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work.  This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering.  The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The main difference is that the world then was much bigger.  Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go.  We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence.  Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means.  Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table.  We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together.  I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory.   This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric.  Only one kind of meaningful metric exists:  MONEY.

One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined.  But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission?  Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network?  Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings.  This article:  Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

I am not familiar with the author of this article.  Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value.  That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment.  That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit.  Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way.  And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive.  What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing.  Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now.  Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility.  Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost.  Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff.  It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience.  Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination.  Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…

Meaning in Art: Beyond Sentience

March 14, 2011 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, universal nothing / No Comments

Don Hertzfeldt has an interesting video called “The Meaning of Life”

It’s a bit obscure, probably because it’s been taken down, but you can watch it here.

On wikipedia, it’s been compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odessey, a movie which I do like. Actually most of the movie is too slow for me, and it’s the beginning and ends that make it up for me.

You might find the ‘stories’ people tell interesting about it. And how he relates this against the narratives of evolution, death and universal chaos/order is particularly telling. One of the strengths of a visual and musical narrative is that you can’t quite argue with it. In effect he points at certain images, which are vaguely related to concepts. You can see what you want.

What I mean is that the visual and acoustic connections are the links. In order to relate one part to the next in words… that’s room for argument. In effect then, it’s not really saying anything. Except look how visually stunning this can be.

How people’s stories, the things they walk around with their heads full of, aliens or not, doesn’t seem to match up at all to anything that happens in the larger whole. That’s not to say that their stories are meaningless, it’s just meant for a more personable context, here.

Our pettiness is where we are. And for our everyday lives, that is what we are. Just like our pets are what they are, which is part of where they are.

Nonetheless, the 12 minute short is definitely worth watching. If the awe we get from us connects us to a larger whole, then I think the video has made it’s intended impact.

That is, the point I think, a point in art. At least the ‘great’ art which is meant to be ‘universal’ To make that larger impact, so that for a moment we are beyond where we are, beyond being me or you, beyond our every day attention, beyond being human… and beyond sentience.

Language is part of our every day negotiation with each other, and a natural extension of who we are where we are in the world. It’s one of the best tools that we have. Unfortunately, it’s not made very well to express something like the beyond…

Beyond Existentalism

March 1, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture, Theory / No Comments

it occurs to me two implications of the previous entry one existentialism:

http://sulphuroxide.com/2011/02/22/meaning-in-the-face-of-annihilation/

1) that if meaning only works for one’s self, there isn’t any reason to respect anyone else’s mental capacities or conclusions, except for purposes of “living together”. in cases where more authoritarian minded individuals would think things like ‘single mothers are bad for society’ ( http://www.npr.org/2011/02/24/134031175/For-Single-Mothers-Stigma-Difficult-To-Shake ) there’s really no reason to respect anyone else’s life choices, or life situations… the same goes for gay marriage and homosexual relationships wherein concerned individuals would deem others as being in ways that detrimentally affect them even while more libertarian or liberal proponents would claim that such adult relationships fall under rubric of ‘no one’s business but the parties involved’…

2) nonetheless, for these reasons, existentialism does not have any strong role in politics.

while i adhere strongly to the ‘meaning is ultimately meaningless’ camp — i’m not sure where else to go with this. in the past few weeks ive been sliding really close to vulgar marxism… where questions of beauty and aesthetics become less relevant… simply because of how these problems are defined (up in the air, too, vapid and ‘feel good’…). at the same time though, especially in practice with web development (as the most obvious case) beautiful code — aesthetically pleasing algorithms and presentation — remain at the forefront of my conditions for a project that is more ‘completed’. this is a definite issue, to put it bluntly, at the onset, a huge contradiction.

i think this ‘huge problem’ that i have is very similar to more traditional philosophies (of which i think i draw a large part from)… namely the differences between idealism and physicalism… the lines are badly drawn (imho) because it’s not so much the mentalists vs the physicalists… but really a difference between “ontology” and “ontic” or design and economics. zizek fielded this area strongly with this back in ticklish subject although I must say that by parallax gap, he may have resolved it enough in his head that the question is buried but never fully addressed anymore but as a more general debate… i don’t know i havent read any zizek recently…

a more pragmatic approach can be found within the debate between urban designers on the point of view of ‘good design’ vs ‘economic business plans’– neither of which by itself, are always what’s best for neighborhoods. the quote froms directly from this discussion, and it’s eloquently put by mariela alfonzo
you can catch the link here: http://www.publicprivatepassion.com/2011/02/can-cities-take-stand-on-good-urban.html

Ultimately, the bottom line is you cannot reach a compromise between urban design and economic development – that’s a losing battle. I firmly believe you need the former to achieve the latter, but you have to understand the latter when devising the former. We HAVE to stop looking at “design” as a line item within the “costs” section of a pro-forma.

the company apple masters these principles with their slick ipod, and iphone designs… and while they do not have market dominance wen it comes to the cell phone industry, they are industry leaders.  if you apply this ‘solution’ analogously to philosophy then you get that meaning, in order to be more than an existential statement of how one navigates — in order to be ‘meaningful’, it must also be epistemologically sophisticated in how one interfaces with their situation, to put it in a smarmy but ‘duhh’ kind of way. so as far as politics go, we can’t be sophists… and we can’t be arrogantly totalitarian, but at the same time, we need to reify our problems. we must be sophisticated in the deleuze and guattari way via concepts — we must seek to address problems that are critically problems — in how those structural crises make a real impact. we can’t address all problems that we find — because many of them are not really meaningful problems.

how we separate this, between what is meaningful and what is not, throws us back quite a few steps. the ‘corporate’ response would be to define the problem in a tangible metric… so that we can attain that goal. which of course, would please stock holders, give us a strong sense of progress… but this ‘solution’ by itself also did cause the stock crises of our current day. we do also need to keep in the big picture as well. which is a problem, because tactically we have ‘solutions’ which cannot be ‘solutions’ in an open-ended undefined system.

you realize that philosophy as a whole works best when it abstracts/extracts meaning from complexity.  it reduces phenomenon the way language names things, the way we put new information, new items we encounter into old files.  so philosophy, and a systems approach can best work at giving us tools to handle past situations.  it can ‘predict’ previous events accurately because the relationships which were relevant at the time of philosophizing were — relevant.  things change, and sometimes those events don’t work no more — the indexes have been re-shuffled so a system may not predict anything much anymore.  i think this is where the quote above (from an urban planner on the relationship between ‘good’ urban design and ‘productive’ economic plans) applies.  the various ‘schools’ are great, because they have focused on their limited scope questions on real world situations.  we’ve gotten so in-depth!  but that depth is narrowly defined and runs the risk of becoming a kind of art-for-artists.  in order to make great statements that shake up those studies AND make them accessible for outsiders, we need genius,  we need something new and fresh to break out of old paradigms.

believe it or not, the bloggers from the havard business review all echo the same issues.  in a world of structured relations, structured cash flow, marketing plans and business plans… urban planning and a SYSTEMS approach, we need what they call ‘innovation’ — part of the key in many of their posts is a kind of ‘how to break out of our mold’.  if existentialism as a philosophy only works for one’s own meaning — how we connect with others, how we expressedly cross the gaps in this field becomes a matter of innovation and creativity.  after all, getting stuck in one’s head is like starting a college in academia. to use a classic example, do neurologists and cognitive psychologists talk to one another?

to use the quote above as an analogy, to use effective communication requires that we understand the mindset of the one we speak to and our own mindset.  both need to inform each other, which means of course, a transdisciplinary approach. (again, DUHH).  how descartes has problems with this, stems from how he defines the mind as a closed system.  well guess what, our minds ARE closed systems in so far as we think about them as such… they obviously still manage to create objects and process new information in astonishingly innovative ways.

where this happens at the subterranean level, is of course, what deleuze and guattari call rhizomes.

how we facilitate and actively push for those connections is what i call rhizomatic architecture. ITS NOT JUST ABOUT TREES (aborescence), BABY!

Meaning in the Face of Annihilation

February 22, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, note to self, universal nothing / No Comments

A few days ago, I was showing houses to an old friend who is now a client. It was raining and we had passed by a smaller duplex. The pictures on the MLS aren’t the same as seeing the context of the property with your own eyes. After seeing it, he decided he didn’t want to gos in and disturb the people in there. There are better deals around. We were talking about life in general — catching up as it were — since we hadn’t really talked in a long time. In showing houses, you inevitably turn towards the topic of the future. Let’s call this future-talk.

Future-talk is odd, it’s not often grounded in the present even though we talk about the future by way of the things we do during the present. But sometimes it is, and you can see that doesn’t just contain hopes and dreams that people have for the future. The future often also contains a justification of the present (current actions, current statuses &c). The present then, acts like a bridge that links the past and the future… even though it’s really disjunct (the present belongs to neither past nor future). And yet, looking for a home does this past-present-future connection quite well. People who want to buy a home, who have money are serious. It’s not chump change to drop close to half a million… It’s something to want a place to call your own, to START A FAMILY

What people want in a home is about as important as who they are, and what their priorities are. Buying a house, even as an investment, represents a whole-lotta-commitment, (in a Led Zeppelin kind of way) and as old friends we were genuinely interested in what the other was doing. This is the best kind of relationship building anyway, and the best sales people do it well. They are interested and understand their client — at least they can appear to be to the client. And that’s what’s important, to orient yourself. Not just what the inside of the house looks like (which is where most of us see the house anyway)… but also the outside, the kind of neighborhood, the people, the schools, the local businesses, if we can see our parents coming over (or not), or friends… in American Literature, the home is a very important character. It’s kind of like the over-shadow, even if the home is also the town… where someone runs from, or runs to… And in that way it acts much like how God acts for people’s lives. It orients them, it becomes an attractor (or repellent)…

So fast forward a bunch of particulars, when we got back into my car, he asked me if I believed in God.

Now I don’t know what he thinks, and I didn’t ask — but I told him, yes I believe I do. Although if most people ask me if I do, I usually say No because if I say Yes, then I appear to be very misleading. The fact is, what I am thinking of in my head probably in no way resembles what they are thinking of when they mention God..

This needs elaboration so I said very directly, I don’t really believe in the supremacy of a particular entity, per se, at least not one that is separate or dis-contiguous from everything else. I also don’t believe that I am (or that human beings are) central to the workings of the universe or that my actions (or that human actions) have any centrality to what’s actually going on. The universe is indifferent.

My friend then said, Yes, that’s really not in agreement with most people.

I also added I don’t believe that the meaning in my head has any bearing whatsoever on the universe at all. Meaning makes no difference to anyone except myself and vis versa.

A good short article on the uncentrality of Das Sein can be read by Paul Graham. He wrote an essay called See Randomness. I realize now, after I’ve put it in here, that the article itself exists in a vacuum much unlike future-talk and houses but very much like the present. In other words, this article does not attempt to bridge any kind of relationship with a point of view that we are in fact central to the universe, or that the meaning we take for granted is inscripted in the very core of the universe. Rather Graham argues for consideration of alternate understandings of events. He grounds his appeal for personal distance on an evolutionary foundation — that our ‘identity’ of a cohesive, rational self is an indeterminate fiction — that we should not take central our own needs and desires when orienting the ‘meaning’ of the things that happen around us. He would agree with me then, that meaning is the way each of us navigates what would otherwise be ‘randomness’. This meaning is not a universal principle in which our suffering or joy has any bearing in the cogs of the cosmic machine. Our suffering or joy is, rather neutral, much like how chemical reactions are neutral.

Gilles Deleuze in Practical Philosophy wrote very elegantly on this topic. I read his book twice to understand how he dismantles notions of ontology and instead recombines (and yet includes them) from a ground floor up so that they retain their parts, their sums, essences, attributions and conjugations. The first reading only served to confuse me, as the orientation wasn’t around a metaphyics of presence even while he preserves ‘essence’ as a central mode of anchoring meaning. The difference lies in the supposition that essence is constructed as “a relation of reciprocity” even while “Essence — Necessarily constitutes the essence of a thing …, a thing can neither be nor be conceived without, and vise versa, what can neither be conceived without the thing” (64). See how Deleuze has his cake and eats it too? Essence is the thing and the thing, essence. Likewise, what overrides the interactions of what we would understand both in a physical and a mental way is abstracted as a neturality of the interplay of relations — the exposition of Spinozan Ethics — without consciousness as being at all primary. In fact, it’s closer to epiphenomenalism if anything, although what Deleuze does does not push a metaphysics of presence of anything, nor does it sustain that heavy mutuality of dualism…

When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. This is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we ever apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. [. . .] In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their real causes. That is why it is scarcely possible to think that little children are happy, or that the first man was perfect: ignorant of causes and natures, reduced to the consciousness of events, condemned to undergo effects, they are slaves of everything, anxious and unhappy, in proportion to their imperfection. (19)

I believe that to most people who would orient themselves (or at least humanity) in the universe, and understand that there is an intrinsic place for them, for an I to wait and stand in luxury, as the children of the universe — either in this life or the next. I suspect that many of us feel (even if we know otherwise) that we are some how important — or that we are somehow deserving of all good things. So many of us, after Deleuze’s reading may feel that this point of view is horrible burden. Without that grounding of I or even God, there is no reason for anyone to behave or be good. Without God, many would insist that we get ultimate freedom but you also get ultimate responsibility. The universe won’t take care to preserve you, or transmogrify you based on karma… It is as though, without a direct core to the center of the universe, we should all eat each other and be terrified that others can do to us as they will.

Many thinkers and writers have written that exposure to the Scared Other, Big Other, the Eagle are all terrifying experiences that would destroy small others like ourselves. To experience God, as it were, is to become annihilated. I don’t believe this to be the case though. Yitz Jacob who ponders the mystic musings in the Jewish tradition has a particularly applicable story here about one’s relation with the Sacred Other on Heaven and on Earth. The point of the story then, I think, has to do with being able to relate to HaShem, which is easy in Heaven but not so much on Earth. While being stifled on a “Heaven that sees all” makes much sense to me, the radical view that our essentiality is not at all cohesive (that we disintegrate) when faced with the Cohesion of the Almighty jumps too far. Now, Jacob does not claim we disintegrate in his blog post, but he does note that when in Heaven, everything is visible — by this, I took it to mean that HaShem is visible too. And if God is apparent then it also becomes very apparent what we should do. This doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t exist in Heaven, but it does mean that we lose our free will.

I am not so sure that is the case. After all, should not the Cohesion of the Almighty must in fact include the cohesion of all our little partial essentialities as well? So it’s not so much that without God we get everything. Rather, it’s with God that everything is allowed.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov explores this topic through Ivan Karamazov — this is related to Ivan’s struggle. The brunt of it is that only with God can we have anything — only with God is everything allowed. The naked weight is that God is necessary — He does define for us what is allowed, but only because without God we would be an indistinguishable mass from everything else. Ivan, ever so rational, insists on the sheer the perversity of human beings that the Devil is made from Man’s image even though a God may or may not exist. I don’t know who Dostoevsky found inspirational enough to create a character like Ivan from, but I do feel that Ivan is under-developed. Ivan’s main source of torture is that he isn’t sure if there is a God or not — he seems to think there isn’t actually a God because of the vast cruelties that people play on one another — because bad people get away with so much! Ivan is getting two things confused though. Ivan continues to serve in a religious institution, so not believing in God is a terrible burden for him. Nonetheless Ivan sees the reasoning for expressing a belief in God — unity and singularity in the physical sense, not withstanding, but also for human society. People need God. People need to be put into their place — his poem ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ uses the tools of the Devil to do the work of God. And it’s through the Devil that the goodness of God can become apparent… that we then can see that we do have a choice. God becomes then, a field that anchors it all, Devil, God, everything. This field contains everything actual and anything possible — while containing an inscripted navigation as to what is good and right for people.

So to go back to Deleuze, what is right and good for people as a society is what mutually increases their power — what allows them to coexist in harmony. It is of no small coincidence then, that this relationship is much like the Cohesion of the Almighty. On the one hand, the big picture is necessary — for us to be one, but to ride upon the Law and live it to its fullest extent would force us to lose our ability to have freedom. To use Jacob’s parable, the Earth is curved so we can’t tell what’s all around us — so we can do what we like, in a limited scope — even if it is to make mistakes. It’s only in the firmament where we can see all around, and experience the full blunt of it. Keeping the big picture in mind is difficult — as material creatures we are made to get what we can now, enjoy ourselves and satisfy immediate urges. Why wait? We don’t know what will happen to us next! So we end up with conflicting behavior that satisfies one aspect of our person but not another or we short ourselves in the long run for short term gain… and where does meaning fit into this?

Meaning fits into everything as the justifications, explanations, short-circuits in our daily lives that smoothen over the otherwise random assortment of information that would bombard us, distract us, vex us or otherwise provoke perhaps too much uncertainty in our lives. If we were terribly uncertain, it’s doubtful we would ever have children, or ever buy a house, or ever do anything. If we didn’t think we could finish what we wanted to do then most of us would probably never do it. I believe meaning is the tactical moves that assure us coherency in our personal internal lives.

In other words, meaning isn’t the inner workings of physics or math, or biology. The knowledge of science explores actual relations, insofar as we can test them. But that’s not meaningful. Rocks are not meaningful. Plants are not meaningful. Being alive is not meaningful. Being alive is biological. Evolution is not meaningful. The movie A Serious Man, one of my favorite movies, explores this issue. Larry Gopnik understands the math that he teaches in his class but he does not understand the story behind Schrödinger’s cat. He is always caught up in a series of diversions, wondering what the ‘truth’ behind any event is. Knowing or not knowing the truth is not important — the Coen brothers continually sink us into ambiguity, delay our reception of what anyone actually means or the actual intent of any character’s action. Gopnik then gets caught up in how that ‘truth’ of anything is both hidden and not at all meaningful. He can’t ever decide what he wants because he thinks he needs to know ‘what the intent of everything’ must be before he can figure out what he should want. It drives him to the brink, where he comes speechless, and only stares ahead.

This is very much the serious philosopher’s problem is. We think that the universe should somehow have a place for us, that what we want should somehow be apparent to us, written for us in the stars, in our surroundings, in life. We may come some day to understand how life works, how to stop death, how to create beauty and art — these things may become possible through science. But that kind of knowledge isn’t meaningful because it won’t tell us how to live or deal with all things personal.

This means then, that meaning is not universal. Meaningfulness is for US… each of us… independent of one another. It makes sense then, that our mental worlds are coexistent but also incompossible — that a gull of incommensurable, indefinite and indeterminate difference separates one mind from another … and that we aren’t privy to one another’s minds… even if we are all ‘made the same way’. We aren’t made to read each other’s minds. It would be bad for us if everyone else could read our mind… because we would be manipulated and abused. Our individual survival would be uncertain… yet ironically, as humans we are incredibly social and we DO need each other. Together we are strong. Under an Almighty, we are all the more Mighty. As a society, we do need those ‘universal’ inscriptions that having a God would define for us. It’s just that, while there is always a Big Other in any human culture who judges each of us small others (even if it is a reciprocity such as the Asian notion of ‘face’) only the Judeo-Christian-Islam traditions so directly gave Him a Voice, or should I say, the Word. And it seems that traditions in this tradition, such as Protestants, so individuated this Word so that it wasn’t a complex system like Confucianism or the Hindi-castes, but rather it was tied to a single soul, for each of us, waiting for us to become ripe, to gain awareness of it.

And that’s where I can’t follow. Personally, that’s too much like a road written in the firmament (although to some it isn’t…). To project such a path seems to me to prompt a kind of Lacanian hysteria — much like Star Trek — we would zip around the universe looking for something but not knowing what. On the one hand then, Protestants, especially Puritans, have a very dour outlook. They are serious. And now, we get to the most deadly of future-talks. After all, everything, all responsibility for their own relationship with God rests on their shoulders. What about their past? Their present? Their future? It’s all written in the sky. Without that relationship with God, there can only be nothing. But now that I wrote this, I don’t think that responsibility rests only with Puritans… In any group, understanding how responsibility is divided is important; be it on an individual, a family or a collective of some sort, any group needs its members to be responsive in a way that is coherent. I suppose though, by separating any kind of Word from meaning means I am writing this entry as a philosophical dead-end. There is neither impetus nor universal appeal because this kind of meaning is too individual. (It is, after all, one philosopher can hardly talk to another!) Nonetheless, what I have put here works for me (at least now)… although it is written mostly as a universal statement about human kind.

Perhaps ironically, as such a ‘universal’ statement, it must encapsulate an unnavigable void and include other minds… even though this statement most likely, is not meaningful for you.

Yet at the same time, it becomes a very special thing, when a home speaks to you about your future.

on Testing Cheetos in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf

February 10, 2011 / posted in art, Business, images of being-human / No Comments

Economics and market behavior is a huge area of study — the best business minds are all interested in it — so rather than try and make an exhaustive account, I would like to point to one particular event.

A northern European group that started off making fictional zines and theorizing on ‘happenings’ called monochrom created a few years ago a last bastillion of Soviet culture called Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.  What started out as a village in the Austrian countryside ‘remade’ into the last Soviet Country (with tours available) became so widely popular that monochrom could not in good conscience continue to give tours.  Having three times the population of a 500 people village swamp the village for a weekend would be potentially devastating.  Eventually, in order to further the experience, monochrom created an ‘adventure style’ video game.  I won’t go into detail about the game here, what I am more interested in is how this experience interfaced with the economy.

It seems that with capitalism, we desire experiences, the novel experiences things can give us. There are plenty of Marxist thought about this — but what is interesting, although perhaps difficult to assess is how these novel experiences become translatable into other Cultures, of other peoples, and even of one’s past cultural experiences — which become commodified into a new kind of hybrid experience entirely, neither of the past nor of our ‘normal’ experience, but wholly of the present.

Monochrom went on to have various installations such as the Unterzoegersdorf computer (which ran on a coal furnace one had to shovel continuously in order for another person to be able to play Tetris) as well as various Unterzoegersdorf installations.  There was one especially interesting moment when they were kicked out of a computer convention as the Unterzoegersdorf representative with the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was borderline-trolling party-goers, perhaps offensive to Disney officials running the convention.  The Unterzoegersdorf representative also, for purposes of art, had the wild experience of eating a glob of wasabe ‘not knowing what wasabe is… and deciding that it was capitalist posion’.  Of course, one assumes the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was using a modern camera, something the Unterzoegersdorf representative did not even seem to notice as being astounding.

One particular event they did was particular applicable to this discussion.  The website boing boing hired Monochrom to do a viral video for Cheetos, paying them a sum of a few thousand dollars.  Monochrom saw a prime opportunity to further explore capitalist relationships with their very anti-capitalist characters.  The results are below.  I invite you to take the time to watch all 6 segments.  It is delightful.

Unterzoegersdorf/Cheetos Campaign

While amusing, one cannot help but think that the compete rage of the Soviet Unterzoegersdorf characters, in part jest, at being ‘tricked’ and ‘used’ to promote a very Capitalist-foodstuff but in part seriousness — for Unterzoegersdorf-ians to find their livelihood but a ‘colony’ of the Global Economy.  While Cheetos is featured heavily in the dialogue as the center of conflict, the nature of the Monochrom’s tension is more on the side of Unterzoegersdorf-ians trying to figure out what to make of the raw junk of Capitalism.  It may benefit Cheetos only to be repeatedly mentioned and pondered — we laugh because the weird orange coloring DOES smear all over our hands.  In fact, we are reminded of Cheetos and that may be enough to make our mouth water (or wince) in association.  Larger questions remain largely unexamined What should we make of our own economic proliferation?  How should we come to terms with ourselves?  In an exploration of Unterzoegersdorf we come to face ourselves as Other — perhaps in what only great works of Art do — reflected back to ourselves our own values in negativity, as dissymmetry and excess, the best non-linguistic analysis of all, something even Emmanuel Levinas refuses to see — when he preaches of the acceptance of the Other but cannot accept those ‘asiatic hordes’ which surround Israel… and refuses to deal with them as citizens of humanity…

I’d hate to think that if I were to continue on and on, I would end up swallowing myself into a Hegelian synthesis of some sort, negative and particular made universal, more or less.

I also strikes me that this entry is applicable with the previous On Testing IRL although creating such a viral meme does not in fact have a control group of any sort. One is immediately hypnotized in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf our own image, as fascist as they are in our unthinking allegiance to our own ideology, something which accepts Cheetos as blindly as they reject it.

on Inscripting Meaning into the Universal Void

February 4, 2011 / posted in images of being-human, life as we know it, universal nothing / No Comments

This is why I would miss Dave if something ever happened to him.

I don’t get this level of conversation with anyone else.

In case you can’t tell from these first four lines, I’m going to try and write this out in a different way.

I was at the gym about two weeks ago with him. Immediately after checking in at the counter I picked a random topic of conversation I found interesting.

“Dave! You know that some astrologers up in Minnesota have decided that there are 13 astrology signs?” (link here 13 Astrology signs due to Alteration in Earths Rotation)

Dave did not say anything so I continued. (I know he does not care about astrology at all.)

“So, I told *** that according to the new astrology she’s not really a Scorpio — she’s really a Virgo. And that her kids were actually Sagittarians. She disagreed. I told her that this was a ‘typical virgo-trait’. She then told me that this new astrology sucked and that she could strangle me. Then I told **** that she that we weren’t really virgos but a leos. She said it was only for people born after 2009. Maybe that’s really true but I disagreed. Then I said it was retroactive and she called shenanigans. Then I told ***** that she wasn’t really a Capricorn, but actually a sag. And you know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said ‘ooh, so that’s why my horoscope never matched.’ Haha, it only didn’t work on *****. Astrological-trolling.”

By this time we were sitting at a chest weight machine. We put some weights on and without discussing it were starting to take turns.

Dave: “You know, Alex, this actually makes me really angry.”

“Why?”

Dave: “Because it’s so stupid. Astrology isn’t real. Why should they care about what astrological sign they have? It’s completely irrational.”

“What does it matter? It’s a filter, an arbitrary way of assigning meaning.”

“But it’s not true! Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

This is something we’ve discussed many times. “So? The meaning is what’s true, not the specificity of the actually sign-ology. You may not think that there is a God but you don’t know that. It’s what’s on South Park, that episode about Mormons. It may all be just untrue but it helps people live in a good and upstanding way.”

Dave: “You know, I used to work with a co-worker back at ********** and we would talk about this.” I got onto the machine. “I asked him once, what if you found irrefutable evidence that God was not real. No one knew you had this evidence and it was absolutely convincing. What would you do?”

“What did he say?”

Dave: “He said he would destroy the evidence. He said he would find some way to destroy it so it would be irretrievable and then he would hide the fact he ever found it.”

“He wouldn’t – He wouldn’t bring it out to other people to enlighten them? What if he was afraid of social unrest?” I got up and Dave sat in the machine.

Dave: “He said he would pretend he never found it. And I believed him. I really believed that’s what he would do.”

“Hm.” I watched Dave work the machine. While he was pumping at the machine: “But that’s what faith is.”

Dave: “But he’s being irrational. There’s no reason for him do that. Even if he didn’t want to tell anyone else, he could reform. Why believe in a myth, in an illusion?”

Dave seemed to be getting upset. I said: “There’s a fundamental flaw in what you are thinking — and it’s the opposite of what most people would think. Most people assume that there has to be a solid relationship between reality and meaning. That facts mean specific things and the presence of those items verifies a particular logic. Like everything is sensible like in CSI or in Sherlock Holmes. Most people don’t critically think either, they fit facts into a pre-ordained meaning they would like to see. For example racism as posited by Slavoj Zizek is pathological in the Kantian sense — meaning that perception and meaning tie regardless of the actuality of a situation.” I sat in the machine and in the process of pushing weights I continued to speak: “In Zizek’s example, assume that someone who was Anti-Semitic was faced with a Jew who was misery. That someone would declare, that ‘Jew is misery!’ (because he’s a Jew) and not because (he’s tight with money). You’re just taking it to the next level, that reality and meaning have to be tied together. If meaning doesn’t fit the facts then meaning should change too. The two really don’t coincide. It’s almost like saying, ‘Jews being misery is racist therefore we can never declare someone who is a Jew to also be misery… because that is also racist’.”

I was huffing when I got off and Dave sat in the seat: “There are laws to the universe. Things begin and things end.”

“Sure, so you would believe in the absent watch maker.”

Dave: “What?”

“The absent watch maker. It’s the idea from Deism in the 17th century that the universe is orderly, and that alone determines that there is a God… without religion. He set the watch rolling, disappeared and everything matched up. We all have a place in the universe, our lives have cosmological significance.”

Dave’s turn again. He increased the weights. He got back on. Dave: “This is a weighty subject matter.”

“Ha ha. Reality itself is not orderly. In fact, Lacan hit it on the head when he claimed that the Real is a miss-match of misshapen, disorderly partialities that coincide in an unrecognizable, irreconcilable manner. We each understand and attach meaning to these coincidences, create other from apparitions and claim that this has a cosmological significance that continues beyond our sight.”

Dave: “Sure reality is orderly. I like to think that the ball rolling away appears on the other side — and is the same ball.”

“Sure reality is orderly, that’s why [this gym] is playing ‘Already Gone’ by the Eagles — think that’s a coincidence? No it’s orderly! Because God is Already Gone! All we have left is a universal order WITHOUT the possibility of coincidences!

Our conversation kind of ended there because I forget what happened afterwards. But I think he got what I was saying. If you see order in some places, you might as well extend order into other areas. Without an objective measure that is universally real, there isn’t really any way of determining what should also be objective. Science is one way, but it’s based on our shared experiences, and what we can agree on as a bunch of humans.

Plus, science is out of the realm of philosophy, strictly speaking. When we start to deal with softer issues, like the indeterminateness of tribes in anthropology or ontology — items that we can’t test in an objective circumstance, we begin to lose our bearings. Never mind that science may structure technology which shapes our lives in countless fashions — for our every day human being, we exist in a personal constellation whose orientation is without any outside referents. No one knows what things mean to us, for instance. No one knows how these connections work — except for us, the subject. And so when it comes to culture we too as a society assume that certain items have a weightiness that members outside our culture would not readily attribute.

But that is how we like to fit things. We think that the role of a person in a culture is inscripted into tradition, inscripted into the universe, for time immemorial. When I got to bed in the morning, I will wake up in the same place I woke up at. And if not, then there has to be a reasonable continuity of experience that happens even if I do not directly experience it — that it is in fact experiential (by someone like me). That people are meant to be a certain way, to play certain roles. Each of us then objectively exist in universes that are incommensurably different. Descartes had this problem when he ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’med his way into two distinct substances… then was unable to not only meld the two substances of mental and physical together — but also unable to account for the fact that we while we share physical experiences with others, we don’t also share mental experiences with others in the same way as the physical realm.

If anything, what Lacan notes as being the Symbolic — that realm of meaning making — is itself the horizon of the Real, the bulwark that fends off the insecure unaccountable, ir-reasonableness of the Real. In much the same way this inability to think through facets of reality that deny cognitive metabolism can only be analogized by our continued trips to the gym… going through the pain of building up our the most ir-reasonable, silent, and unaccountable mass of dividuation1 — all for the purposes of assigning and assuring our place without the social continuity as being male, fit and buff… with all their attendant significations. — the other side of our dividuation being namely that other black mass which is our unknown inner portions of our consciousness. Our body is restless, our mind is restless. Each one prompt the other, — Act! much like the tension between personal and social determinations…

In this sense, the only universal available to us is the universal void — not the “out there” beyond the scope of our senses, but that Heideggerian “black box” of Das Sein, somewhere in the non-shape of our Cartesian soft axies of mind and body.

1 It is a split subject divided between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, a demand that makes it the subject that it is, but which it cannot entirely fulfill. From Simon Critchley

Reading Our Reflection: Self-help Requires Helping Your Self

January 16, 2011 / posted in images of being-human / No Comments

I used to travel alot.

I didn’t do it for very long. Less than two years, in fact. But I did it for work and it was an interesting, valuable if not just a lonely time of my life. I imagine that if I did it enough I would have been able to make friends in all the major cities of the US. But I didn’t and I tried to fill my time in a variety of ways. These were all solitary activities; eating out, eating in, drinking, visiting odd places and of course, reading. I won’t get into my history with reading right now, but I will say that I did get to visit a variety of book stores in a variety of cities.

One of the things I noticed was that even in corporate book stores like borders — you could get a real feel for an area by the kinds of books in a bookshelf. (Used book stores were particularly telling.) One of the things people don’t often get is that cities are really too big to be easily encapsulated by one or two visits. You need to immerse yourself there. So bookstores explain alot about the surrounding community. For instance, I never did find an adequate philosophy section in the South. I did see lots of book on military history and a variety of bibles and bible related sections.

Well, I live in Los Angeles. So you can imagine the kinds of hipster art books, the kinds of poetry, po-mo writing, and local ‘underground’ literary scene. I say ‘underground’ because Los Angeles has a kind of inferiority complex when it comes to publishing (partly from being so remote from the literary powerhouses in New York)… One thing that’s disturbed me recently though, is the onslaught of self-help books. It says something about a group of people when you see, over the course of a few years, the section on Love and Sex grow from a shelf to a rack and now, in some book stores, two or three. For example, the collection in the aging hipster community of Sherman Oaks has TWO RACKS dedicated to how to have great sex, or have the secrets to tantric sex, or how to be more intimate with your partner… And it’s not just Sherman Oaks (bless those well-to-do souls), it’s also prevalent at the borders on mainstreet in Glendale, CA. You get things like sex-trology… if you happen to be a male taurus you’re in there. Or if you’re with a gay pisces of some sort, then you can find out all about their bedroom likes or dislikes! And if you have a crush… well, apparently astrology doesn’t exactly predict one’s perdiliction for sexual orientation, but it can tell you if they like it fast, or slow or how to plan your seduction. (More too, later on the new astrology… with the 13th sign… maybe)

Perhaps it’s my generation. And also, maybe the aging baby boomers who, having lived through the sexual revolution, need something more to excite them nowdays that they are older and well, less active… maybe. But you’d think that anyone who might’ve had tons of experience would know what they like. Anyway, isn’t the number of books being read dropping? There are plenty of studies that say that. But how many studies aim at looking for what it is people are actually reading? I have issues with most ‘classic’ literature. For instance, we might claim that Jane Eyre is out of vogue now. Okay. And anything George Elliot is in. Okay! Sure. But who would trash Kierkegaard? I think Repetition is a horrible work; a work of terrible emotional indulgence and infantile obsession-ism. Maybe I missed the point. Lots of everything is there, of course, we all eat, sleep, fall in love and struggle with our own demons or with each other. But it’s irrelevant. So what about the romance novels, the pure escapism of some fantasy literature or books on how to be a better lover (or in one case, how to be a bitch to get a man, since men love bitches…)? How can we understand all these kinds of works?

I think it’s pretty well supported that our media is a reflection of who we are, of what our concerns are. While some people were concerned about what American Idol says about our obsession with celebrity-dom, success and failure (making a ‘spectacle’ out of common people…) I seriously doubt most gave it much thought. Trash tv is recognized by everyone as being trash tv. Who really cares, anyway?

It’s not hurting anyone. There’s moral lessons to be learned by much of it. The bad guy loses. The good guy wins. The struggle goes on. It’s entertaining. And who doesn’t deserved to be entertained when we’ve had a tough day at work? Who cares about thinking or trying to be come a better person through self discovery?

And wasn’t Henry David Thoreau an asshole anyway? Walden is an incredibly pretentious book. He laments that the ‘common man’ can’t feel… at least not like he can… Who cares about that kind of internal dramatification? That Egotism? So why not read a book on how to be a better fuck? Why not read about how to eat and become a ‘skinny bitch‘?

If we take social media as a mirror, it seems more and more to me that we are hypnotized by how awful we are and more and more hysterical about how wonderful we should be (but aren’t). The problem with common men has always been just that — commonness. Somehow we should all be above average. Which is impossible. Our junk email shows us the value judgement that men should have super large penises and be able to ejaculate many times in one ‘session’. Women should all be oh so sexy. All the time. Even when they are waking up in the morning… with make up on perfectly, already. Of course we would want to watch in-human super-people, and identify with them. That’s nothing new. Stories, fables, whatever — are always about what some fantastic thing someone does.

After all, why would anyone want to hear about someone common having a common day?

I’m tempted to go off on how marketing needs to address their audience’s narcissism, or self-imagine. Or maybe talk about Victorian novels, which focused on the rich or becoming-rich. I don’t think most of us believe we will become famous or are upset because we all can’t be rockstars. I think most of us realize that we can’t realistically achieve those things — and most of us decide eventually that we want to settle for something achievable, like having a family or paying one’s bills on time. “There’s nothing special about me!” “I’m not upset that I can’t be rich.” I think it is safe to say that adult maturity comes with accepting one’s position in life… although part of me goes ‘Blah! Slave mentality! — Being an ‘adult’ means accepting your lot in life!’

But how many of us actually grow up? I don’t think it’s really that strange that kids who played video games for fun also play video games for fun as adults. And while we have a conception of adults (ie, sexual consent, as well as the right to drive, vote, drink, access pornography and the duty to serve in the military) as being responsible and mature, we might be surprised (somewhat) to be introduced to the concept that maturation and adulthood as contemporary concepts are only as new as 200 years old. Pretty much all traditions have rites for adulthood — but it’s only recently that we have the added baggage of autobiography, infant/childhood as a developmental period with the teenage years as being a period in our lives with all those expectations of awkwardness and… even more extended development. Becoming 13 didn’t necessary mean sexual maturation (many 13 year olds still have to ‘discover’ their sexual interest… although that number may be dipping lower and lower, who knows) — but being 13 today does come with the idea that one is still a child and can’t really decide what’s best for themself.  I don’t think it’s also a big surprise that teenage rebellion comes with sexual maturity… one has to cast off one’s parents and compete for resources if one wants to breed. But look, our world is complex, more so than before.  Our extended childhood means to teach us how to carry weight as an adult.  So, a dichotomy is formed:

Children = immature.
Adults = mature.

As youths we are told that we should behave and know our place. How do we get out of it? I’m not sure. When we enter the early 20s, we often get an explosion of experimentation and self discovery that comes with the removal of authority.  And we slowly learn that we really do have to take responsibility.  It’s generally a gradual process all the way into your late 20s and early 30s.  Now, to account for this oppression, I don’t think that American children are oppressed.  But I do think that our media hints about the desired life of an adult — party, sex, drugs, drinking and other kinds of behaviors that one should/could only do if one is an adult — and many kids trying to learn about themselves want that for themselves. They might watch a movie like Old School or Animal House and think that this is what college should be like. We see stories like this over and over — and we might assume it’s just a movie or just a story. But there also lacks a subtle distinction that this is a story, and that this kind of behavior may not be what we should strive for in our every day life…

Many of us learn that life shouldn’t be like what’s in a film, later on. At least not 24/7. There’s more to life than bar-hopping (or dodging bullets). But we still have to find that out, gradually or tragically. I think many of us stop doing these things because we get married and want to have a family. (And yes, bar-hopping can be fun, especially if we feel that there isn’t any other better use for our money, even if it was to give to charity). And in case you don’t know, seeking promiscuous sex and/or getting drunk isn’t bad in itself (really it’s not!), but it’s still quite selfish behavior. I just wanna feel good. Nothing’s wrong with that kind of attitude, but is that really what we should be looking for? Many of the self-help books (most of which I have not read) don’t really try to tell us how to live or give us guidance on what it is we should want or value.

If books did that, who would buy it? A litany of Christian morality comes to mind.

But instead, many self-help books focus on more specific tasks. Some of those tasks maybe value-based, like how to be happier in life, or how to find and keep a good woman, how to transform into a motivated person — but many of them are on specific things like how to tie someone up, how to write and think critically, how to be a better professional, how to code in Perl, how to cook for yourself now that you’re living alone in college… With each of these, we are getting the big picture taken for granted. For instance, take something as run of the mill as a programming language. Think it would be hard to tease out values from a book like that? Consider that each programming language was created with a specific problem in mind. C++ was created as a middle level language with speed and software application in mind. Java was created to do all the things C++ did, with internal dynamic memory management AND a smaller footprint so as to work on mobile devices. And what about the values of someone who buys a book on programming? What do they think is of value? Just by the type of task someone values, you can be you know something about them, given our shared world. So how does one jump from being a child (general) to being an adult (general)?

Being an adult isn’t just about being accountable or responsible (many adults are not), but also about knowing why and what you are doing. So for example, while binge drinking is probably not be responsible, but getting a designated driver is more responsible. In an ironic way then, Tucker Max may in fact be one of the most responsible people around. He’s got to be, unless someone else writes his blog for him. Keeping an online presence, writing books and finding time to keep his life in line and his online presence going is a difficult thing to learn, especially if he’s going to parties all the time.

All the same though, even if many of us want to live lives like Tucker Max, can we do it? Probably. Maybe. For a time. Many of my friends have already started to complain that they fall asleep around 1am. They can’t party like they are 23. And… Maybe Tucker Max doesn’t have a day job? I don’t think so, he doesn’t need one if he makes money writing and throwing parties. I don’t read his blog or his books. But I know many of my friends do. If anything, he is giving mixed messages, especially for those few of us who would love to live like him. But if we accept that most of us can’t be expending that much energy (to get laid), then we might be able to accept that it’s only okay for a few celebrities to live outrageously (the rest of us must settle for living vicariously, through them). After all, if we are busy getting laid, or distracted from hang-overs we cannot do the best we can. We can’t give to others with the best of intentions if we are sloppy and not together. Muhammad Ali has said “There are a lot of boys that are stronger than me that could be great champions, but they can’t fight temptation. Temptation is all around us ! Pretty girls with their chests big and ripe.” (Ali Rap, Page 25). If we have aspirations or goals, we should be focused on that and not get so distracted.

For example, if we, as a people, are concerned with the Earth, and pollution, over-population, war, and famine then we should strive to give better attention to these issues. I had an xgf who was very concerned about the Earth, about animal rights and water conservation. She would complain about people having lawns throughout the south-western United States, where we have droughts for years on end, to the point that it affects arable farm lands. And yet she became resistant to my insistence that she not use the washing machine for so few items (since they were separated by fabric, she might have only six things in the washing machine at one time). I’m not saying that we can’t be contradictory but we should not be. Likewise, we may have big ideas about a novel we would write (some day) and this might be an excuse for us to feel better about ourself, when we work hard come home tired and only want to goof off until bedtime. If having dreams and ‘goals’ is only to get us through the day with higher self-esteem then perhaps that’s really useful and I shouldn’t take your dreams or goals seriously. But if they aren’t just self-esteem bullshit then you’re gonna have to get your life focused and in order to achieve them, otherwise you’re not being honest with yourself. And if you believe your own bullshit, it’s probably going to bite you on the ass when you realize one day that you’re 40 and you’ve achieved none of the things you wanted to do when you had more freedom to choose.

But goals aside, is hedonistic behavior all that bad? Even if you had no goals and what you do doesn’t harm others, then why not do it?

Look at it this way: the most liberal of us would claim that consensual activity between two adults is their own privilege. But is it okay for two adults to say, get drunk every weekend? (Or say, did heroin, or something — anything — which made them unable to function in everyday life…) Even if they made sure those days (and the following ones too) were cleared so that it wouldn’t effect their professional life? AND if they made sure they had enough booze and food so they wouldn’t be tempted to drive? Most of us might say… yes, if they covered their loose ends. But what if they got a call from their mom in an emergency in that time (like her car broke down 500 miles away in the middle of a desert)? What if their neighbor’s house caught on fire? We can’t live with all these ‘what ifs’ and I agree that we shouldn’t live exclusively for other people — but part of being mature, I think, is to strive to better ourselves and the environment we are in, to support those of us who need support. Putting energy into a hole for momentary fun is an extremely selfish thing to do. If anything, having free time to kill ourselves with drugs is only possible by the hard work and support the rest of society gives us. People may say ‘well, I’m not hurting anyone, so why can’t I…’ and perhaps so, but one isn’t giving back to society either. We didn’t build our own house. Most of our food comes from somewhere else. Most of the products we have, we can have because parts of it were made in the 3rd world where we don’t pay those 3rd world citizens enough for them to live like us. If we had to fend for ourselves, food, shelter, clothing, supplies, medicine — in the wild — we would probably be busy ALL THE TIME. We don’t live in the wild anymore. But our environment is still not complete. There’s plenty of good left out there, to be done.

And yes, it’s a hard world. Even if you want to help, businesses and institutions won’t accept you on your good will. You have to be able to actually contribute. To get paid AND make a difference. Sometimes it takes someone giving you a chance. We shouldn’t take that for granted. Even if we live in a ‘first world’ nation (and I assume you do if you have access to the internet and time to read all this lengthy stuff) — we shouldn’t just go about fucking everything up even more. After all, someone like, say, Britney Spears might think she’s earned her position (and yes, legally she has), but really, her life isn’t exactly her own… she’s made money on the dreams, ambitions and stardom of many young fans. She’s a public figure now, because that is the life she has led. Her celebrity status is her cage. She can turn her back on other people and trash her life (if she likes) but that’s just plain selfishness and narcissism. If she lived in a more upstanding way and made a difference to the world, to help others, I am sure her life would also be richer. It may not be what she wants, and of course the decision is hers and hers alone. I am sure she (and many others) would like to be good, upstanding people. But many of us are not.

I think the problem comes about when we fail to grasp the actual relationship of what we are doing. We want the fruits of our labor but we don’t understand what it takes to really achieve (and sustain) that. For example, in order to be accepted to a position where you can maximize your good you have to study, learn the shit other people have learned and CONTRIBUTE. Being a big shot isn’t supposed to be the goal. BEING A BIG-SHOT COMES ABOUT WHEN PEOPLE RECOGNIZE YOU HAVE SOMETHING OF VALUE TO CONTRIBUTE. Then they respect you, and come to you and look up to you.

I know it doesn’t always work that way. We hear about big shots in stories, leaders who are really shit heads, who cheat people. Leaders who screw the little guy. Who have been changed by the journey to success. (In stories such leaders almost always fail). Well, that topic is for another time. What I am talking about are the values which surround the life. In a way, success is much like love. Does a self-help book tell us that love isn’t something to be found on the street? Do self-help books tell us that love should not be the goal or the FIX-IT PATCH to a relationship? Love is what happens when two people work out a good situation. Love emerges from that. Love is a side effect of good, respectful and sustained effort on both sides. Love is not a goal. Love is not gotten like winning the lottery.

I suppose it’s possible that self-help books say that. I’m sure some do. But I haven’t read them. And I don’t think people get that about love, or success or money.

This sounds really boring, maybe. It may be kind of boring. It’s also hard, and involves sacrifice. Having a productive evening can be quite satisfying. I get home from work and I try to work on the program I am writing. This doesn’t often happen, many times I spend a few hours unwinding and my entire evening is done. Time for bed!

Long term gain most often involves sacrificing short term pleasure… a personality characteristic which many of us lack. Do we as a people value hard work? Do we have what it takes for a sustained effort? If we read a self-help book, do we in fact derive help from it? I am sure only some us actually read it — and even fewer put it into practice. But can we even find knowledge about life in general from a book? Therein lies a gap between knowledge and practice… Self-help books can be useful but they aren’t complete. Individuals who read a shit ton of them probably don’t get what they need. The answer for the soul isn’t in chicken soup. Therein lies irony, since what you buy is in a book and not a can.

Books are good. They are a good place to start learning. But they aren’t the answer. There also isn’t anyone to teach us how to be mature, contributing adults — just like there isn’t anyone to teach us how to stop being children. This decision is something people have to decide to do for themselves. Most people will decide at some point that they want to be mature, or an upstanding person. And then they try and reinvent themselves — but then inevitably they since they have no idea of how to do it. We want instant fixes to things, but that’s never going to be the case. Reading a book won’t change our lives — no matter how powerful the message — unless we also start to change our behavior… and changing our behavior in ways that affect the basis — not just the symptoms. Taking a pill to solve anxiety may work in the short term, but if it’s a long term goal, then you’re probably going to have to take that pill for a very long time. Likewise, looking for love qua love isn’t the way to go.

Now, it may be a bit of a tall order to stop buying diamonds because they are blood diamonds, or stop drinking coffee because coffee generally comes from exploited coffee bean pickers. Or stop driving gas powered cars because of the United State’s dirty dealings with other countries. It may be a choice, but like success, real change can only come with small steps. Doing massive, radical movements isn’t sustainable. Liberal guilt isn’t the answer either. Liberal guilt prompts people to alleviate their guilt by doing certain charitable things and then ‘allowing’ themselves reprieve in other ways. Like, I give to breast cancer, or I did my time in India, therefore I should be able to… or I drive a hybrid car, therefore I can feel superior and lecture to others who don’t… No one has the authority to balance things like that, and guilt of that sort is ridiculous. It’s like being ashamed of being born a certain race. No real change takes sustained effort. Ask anyone from Alcoholics Anonymous or anyone trying to wean themselves off meat. Meaningful change is a one day at a time thing.

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