Being Stoic

Recently this book arrived at my house from the library.  A Guide to the Good Life is a book that talks about the ancient philosophy of Stoicism.  I read an article about Stoicism a little while ago and found it really intriguing and the book is even more so; I think I might have found a philosophy to call home.  A quote:

We normally characterize an optimist as someone who sees his glass as being half full rather than half empty.  For a Stoic, though, this degree of optimism would only be a starting point.  After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass.  It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.  And if he is atop his Stoic game, he might go on to comment about what an astonishing thing glass vessels are:  they are cheap and fairly durable, impart no taste to what we put in them, and -miracle of miracles!- allow us to see what they contain.  This might sound a bit silly, but to someone who has not lost his capacity for joy, the world is a wonderful place. To such a person, glasses are amazing; to everyone else, a glass is just a glass, and it is half empty to boot.






I love these guys!  Stoicism to most people today would mean a lack of emotion and the suppression of both joy and anger, love and hate.  Stoicism the philosophy is very different though as it is dedicated to the pursuit of positive emotions and the avoidance of negative emotions.  The basic goal is tranquility, being entirely happy with the way the world is and unworried about how it might be.  A Stoic, in theory, does not worry about how things might have gone or how things are but only about how things might be.  The past is done, there is no benefit to feeling bad about the way things were.  We cannot affect the present, so it is the same as the past, but the future is something we can affect so we concern ourselves with how we can make the future the best it can be.  In the same way a Stoic tries not to be concerned about the parts of life they cannot control.

I cannot control whether or not the economy will go badly, so I will not worry about it.

I can control whether or not I have a job to some extent, so I should concern myself with doing a good job and making sure my employer knows the value I bring.

I have control over myself so I make sure I bring a positive attitude and confidence to my job every day.

The Stoics also dedicate themselves to regularly reminding themselves of how much worse things could be.  They believe in sometimes wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather to better appreciate how good our proper clothes are, eating very simple food so that we can be happier about usual fare and dressing poorly so that we might be more joyful about wearing the clothes we normally can.  They even go so far as to regularly imagine how things could go wrong:  Imagine I was crippled in an accident, imagine my partner died, imagine my children ran away, imagine my greatest rival mocking me.  The idea is that if you remind yourself how much worse the world could be you will be very pleased in seeing how much better than that it is.

After reading about their ideas I was amazed at how much of Stoicism I already practice.  Some of the origins of their ideas are a bit too religion-esque for me, but that is unsurprising since they were thinking and practicing back in ancient Greek and Roman times.  I already practice their negative visualization, I strive to worry about that over which I have control and not concern myself with that which is beyond my control and I have tried for years to retain a childlike sense of joy at anything and everything.  Certainly much of what the Stoics believe is reflected in pop psychology and any other source of good advice - looking on the bright side and avoiding situations that might make you angry or sad isn't exactly unique to them.  That said, their philosophy as a whole feels very right to me and their ideal 'the sage' is the sort of person I want to be.

The world goes dark

Yesterday the internet in Egypt went away.  The government has been dealing with fairly extreme protests over the last short while, including rallies of multiple tens of thousands of people clashing with police wielding rubber bullets, water cannons and tear gas.  There have been 1000+ arrests and the place is becoming a real mess, but the government really stepped it up when they decided to completely remove the internet from Egypt.

It is hard for me to imagine being there on a bridge, getting blasted by military and police as they try to disperse a crowd disgusted with corruption, dictatorship and poverty.  What I wonder is how do the crimes compare, that of removing the access to information that people rely on and that of physical repression like in the picture above, which was taken very recently in Egypt.  I also wonder what the government is thinking with this move.  Clearly this will make it more difficult to organize mass riots like the ones that have been going on and prevent news from leaking out of the country as efficiently but it will also enrage and terrify the populace, goading them to further action.  Unilaterally removing things people have become entirely reliant on is a great way to encourage revolt and remove sympathy from those outside the country - it seems like it will make organizing riots more difficult but make the number of people wanting to riot drastically increase.  The economic chaos that will be a consequence is also extreme as the reliance on connectivity extends to nearly every facet of life now, including basic consumer interactions.

One of the nuttiest things going is the way in which this is viewed by my giant southern neighbour.  The US currently has a bill going through the system that would give the government power to turn off the internet throughout the country completely, and to do so without any judicial oversight.  Much like the Patriot Act it is being sold as a way to combat cyber crime or cyber terrorism that is in fact just a way to exert more control over the regular populace.  I can hardly imagine what would happen if the government turned off the internet right now as I don't have a yellow pages, a dictionary, or many other basic things like that in my house.  My communication would be destroyed, my calendar wiped, and the world would be entirely reshaped.  I can clearly see why a government would want to control the internet as it makes suppression and control of information by those in charge nearly impossible.  What boggles me is that the people living in the USA, so vocally opposed to government power and so passionately dedicated to doing whatever they want, sit back and allow those in charge to take away their basic freedoms.  Fear is a powerful motivator it would seem.

Safe Schools

Elli's school is locked up tight.  I don't just mean during the night, when no one has any good reason to go there, but in fact all the time.  There is an obsession with protecting the school from raging lunatics that manages to be completely annoying to everyone who legitimately wants to use the school and simply doesn't accomplish what it is in theory supposed to do.  Imagine some lunatic wants to shoot up the place; lets go over what happens.  Lunatic walks up to the front door of the school and finds out it is locked.  Then lunatic goes home, utterly defeated by the locked doors.

Well, I suppose it could go another way.  Lunatic walks up to the front door of the school and finds out it is locked.  The door is a metal frame surrounding a giant plate of glass from floor to ceiling so the lunatic smashes the glass with a fist, a weapon, or anything else to hand and walks in and does whatever they want anyway.  Or lunatic walks to the other locked door, hits the buzzer, and walks in anyway.  Or they walk to the back door of the school, which is never locked, and walks in anyway.  Or they walk to the recycling room door, which is never locked, and walks in anyway.  So what exactly is locking the doors of the school doing?  The answer, quite simply, is that it annoys the hell out of parents and other people who want to get into the school for normal reasons and aren't willing to smash glass and don't want to walk around the school.  Other than that trivial annoyance to me and those like me it accomplishes nothing.

Another amusing safety mechanism is the prevention of children from leaving or arriving to the school unaccompanied.  In a book I read yesterday, What I Eat, it talked with people living in Brazil who sent their three children aged 10, 8 and 6 to school in a boat powered by an outboard motor that they drove themselves.  Here children aged 12 are forbidden from leaving the school to go home for lunch, even if they live in the apartment building adjacent to the school.  A parent would have to come to the school to pick them up, thus 'increasing safety'.  I think the greatest loss here is the sense of adventure, self reliance and confidence that children lack the opportunity to acquire.  Certainly it is an unnecessary burden on parents time and convenience but moreso I think we lose out on teaching children to take care of themselves and be responsible.  I know that it shaped me dramatically when I left home and had to begin to take care of myself and I think we do ourselves a tremendous disservice by denying children opportunities to learn a bit about responsibility and take care of themselves in small ways.  We know from the past that children of 6 are perfectly able to get home from school and even prepare food for themselves without parents being involved at all - they do not need the stifling level of protection we enforce in schools these days.

We also teach children the wrong things about the world when we enforce safety regulations like this.  We teach them that they cannot trust the people around them and that strangers are deadly.  We don't use those words directly of course, but the message is clear:  You cannot be trusted alone by yourself, someone will randomly come along and kidnap or kill you.  The fact is that they won't.  Just like we don't live in underground shelters to prevent accidental meteor deaths we don't need to surround our schools with webs of safety regulations to prevent stranger kidnappings.

I would make a scene at the school and try to convince them of their folly but I doubt they have anything to say in the matter.  Just like my barefoot experiment that the school crushed, it is brought down on them from above by ruling authorities desperate to avoid lawsuits.  Their logic seems to go,  "Better to make everybody unhappy than suffer the chance of one person being miserable", but I just don't buy it.

Specialization

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Robert Heinlein is a very interesting person and writes fascinating books.  He also has lots of patently silly ideas, and this is one of them.  Specialization is responsible for lifting humanity out of the small tribe hunter/gatherer stage to the modern age nearly by itself, and is one of the things that mostly strikingly separates us from all the other species that surround us.  Though insects certainly do specialize, they do so into a fairly limited number of roles, often something like 5.  Humans, by contrast, specialize into literally thousands or tens of thousands of roles in our modern society.  I cannot diagnose a disease, repair a car, run an MRI machine, operate a welding machine or write C++ code, just to name a tiny fraction of the essential skills that people in our society possess.  Certainly I could be trained to eventually do any of those things but the vast array of skills found within our society cannot be mastered by one, nor even a hundred individuals.

The greatest contribution of specialization, to my mind, is the increased capacity for development and innovation.  While I could be trained to do simple engine repairs it would take a much of a lifetime for me to have enough experience to be able to give real, informed opinions on designing a better engine.  If I need to master a dozen skills I simply cannot understand each well enough to make much contribution towards improving them, while someone who spends their whole life doing one thing can easily see the places that need improving.  Not only that, but they have the capacity to understand how even very small effects will change complex systems.  This understanding is mostly not obtained by real knowledge of how everything works at a physics level but rather just a manifestation of experience over many repeated trials.  The best forward in hockey doesn't know exactly what he does to make the puck move a particular way but he knows the precise way he must move his body in order to maximize his chance of scoring - even if he couldn't possibly describe that process usefully to someone else.

Of course much of our specialization comes in seemingly useless things like scoring in hockey.  Half a century ago there were great players who dominated professional sports, just like there is today, but those great players would be mediocre if placed directly into a modern game.  They usually had to work other jobs to pay their way and did not have the practice time, training and equipment to maximize their specialty.  As our society grows richer and richer we can support more and more specialists who produce virtually nothing of value beyond being even better at their specialty than people were in the past.  I don't see any way in which hockey players generally being better actually helps anything - the old games were perfectly entertaining even though the players simply weren't as good.  However, it is inevitable that as we become capable of supporting such specialists we *will* support such specialists as anyone who does hyper specialize quickly outstrips the generalists in skill and innovation.

The number of roles that people can specialist into and still be supported and useful is growing year by year, much faster than the population of the planet is increasing.  It is to be expected that we will become even more divorced from nearly everything that everyone else does over time simply because there are so many different things to do.  I wonder how long it will be until the number of roles and skills required becomes even greater than what the population and communication of our society can support.

Go for it

I hate cheese.  This has been a longstanding thing with me, ever since I was two.  I talked about it before at some point, though I cannot find the post.  Basically when I was young I had a terrible experience with getting very sick after eating a lot of cheese and have found it repugnant ever since.  However, I was not aware of why I disliked it for years and only very recently found out that my dislike of cheese is not something I was born with but rather something I acquired.  Given that it is an acquired thing I have decided that I can divest myself of it and learn to tolerate cheese when necessary.  Whether I will love it is another thing entirely but I want to train myself such that I can eat things with cheese in them without complaint when necessary, just like I do for eggplant or cauliflower now.  Wendy has been regularly hassling me about doing a cheese project where I eat new cheese on a regular basis, starting with the most bland and working my way up as my tolerance increases.  I think now is the time to start this new project and see if I can shape myself to be the person I want to be.

To begin I think I will start eating a small bit of cheese 3 times a day, once with each meal.  I figure I will let Wendy choose what I start with and slowly try more things as puking (or not) allows.  I suspect it will be easier than I had thought in the past because I am slowly adapting to the idea that my dislike is a mutable thing, something that can be dealt with, instead of an absolute.  I had some cheese by accident at New Year's and liked the dish it was in very well and my response was much less vitriolic than it would have been in the past so I think my brain is slowly coming to terms with the fact that my hatred for spoiled milk is irrational, unnecessary and ultimately subject to change.

Thus it begins - my project to do something I dislike to train myself to do more things I dislike in the future for the dual purposes of enlightenment and making other people's lives easier when they cook.  Also, perhaps for the purposes of entertaining those who read my blog.

A measure of evil

Take a little stroll down to your local grocery store to buy bread and milk and you will find almost without exception that you are required to go to both the back left and back right corners of the store to acquire them.  It is standard retail practice to set up the store in such a way that customers have to walk as far as possible to get their basic necessities to maximize their chances of making impulse buys and grocery stores are no exception.  I was wondering a little while ago just how much evil these places are capable of.  Specifically I was trying to sort out if they deliberately took cashiers off duty when the lines got fairly low to make sure customers always had to wait.  A significant chunk of the store's profit comes from people buying items at the checkout counters like chocolate bars and magazines because those items have such huge margins, but does the store deliberately inconvenience customers in an attempt to sell more of those?  I know that they will never call extra cashiers until the lines are completely blocking the aisles and people simply can't move about the store reasonably at all, so I know they are not trying to avoid congestion.  I know they immediately remove cashiers as soon as the lines stop being a congested mess and never leave cashiers working long enough to get the lines down to 1-2 people.  Do they deliberately set it up such that customers must wait in line just to sell more magazines?  I don't know, but it since their system seems like the optimal one if their only desire is to sell addons I suspect this is exactly what they do.  Unfortunately I don't think they consider how many sales they lose when customers get disgusted with the congestion and wait times and go elsewhere for their purchases, which hurts them as well as the people standing in line.

Grocery stores obviously aren't the only places that are guilty of shenanigans.  Back in the summer when I was in the local health food / herbal medicine store I listened to a conversation between a staff member and a customer about buying herbal supplements for the health problems the customer had.  The customer related how his doctor had been unable to solve his problem to his satisfaction and asked what supplements the store would recommend.  The staffer answered "Some people find this works" while pointing to a particular bottle, but when the customer asked about other solutions the staffer gave precisely the same answer about everything that came up.  The customer got more and more agitated, seeking answers and information instead of platitudes, but came up empty handed.  I wanted to jump in and say "Those random herbs are all equally good for your problem - they will all help exactly as much as you would expect from a placebo." but decided that the customer was probably headed to that conclusion on his own.  It makes me crazy to see these stores set up sections with racks and racks of 'cures' organized by the problems they are supposed to assist with.  If the damn things worked you would have confidence intervals and descriptions and information for the customer; instead they only offer the plausible deniability of not being dangerous.  My favourite quote on the subject is one from Tim Minchin "You know what they call alternative medicine that works?  MEDICINE!"

I am certainly not innocent in the realm of fleecing customers.  A 5 year stint in retail selling mattresses is not the place to hone your sense of justice but it is a great learning experience if you want to understand exactly how and when people lie, obfuscate and misdirect.  The only thing I really want to know is whether the people involved in selling all these fictions and directing customers to their will really know exactly what they are doing or simply manage to be evil and dastardly by accident.

God Hates America

Check this out:  http://godhatesamerica.com/

This site is amazing.  When reading the Bible I got the questionable priviledge of reading about how God becomes angry with his people and massacres 24,000 of them with a pestilence.  I have firsthand knowledge of the ways in which God targets specific people for punishment and hands out Smitings willy nilly with little regard for smiting those who actually broke the rules.  The website above is dedicated to a bunch of people who actually buy into that stuff.  Obviously the vast majority of religious folk don't buy into the random massacres and arbitrary violence that permeate the Old Testament and believe in a much gentler, more reasonable and more distant sort of deity, but these folks are really into the 'Big strong man in the sky who gets angry and blows stuff up!' version.  They are known as WBC, Westboro Baptist Church.

The crazy doesn't stop with their stated beliefs which are completely bonkers by any virtually anybody's measure.  These people seem to like flying around the country attending funerals so that they can wave placards and chant slogans talking about how the dead deserved their deaths and that those deaths were righteous and deserved punishments from God.  WBC contends that homosexuality, abortion, sodomy, adultery, divorce, and all kinds of other things are prohibited and that because the children of the USA are not being educated in God's will that God is deliberately *tricking* American leaders into wars and then causing them to take hideous casualties as a form of punishment.  They further claim that the swine flu was a direct action by God to kill and punish the world for its sins.  As usual though they froth with anger at the 'crimes' committed that happen to offend them personally they ignore the ones that are equally prohibited by the Bible but don't bother them on a personal level.

In some small way I have to admire these folks.  They read the Old Testament, claim they believe it, and actually go and act as if it is true.  They really believe that God sends plagues to decimate populations that defy him, that God spends his time tricking individual mortal leaders into making bad decisions and massacres soldiers in order to send messages.  This is straight up what is said in the Old Testament - that is God as he was/is written.  Of course in all the other ways they are the scum of the earth.  Showing up at funerals for people who are killed randomly to chant that the person deserved it is unbelievably despicable.  Free speech is something that is important just as much here in Canada as in the USA but there very much need to be limits; it is critical that we have the opportunity to say and think what we want and equally critical that we don't have the idea that that extends to saying those things any time, any place.  Apparently the USA government is trying to ban protests at funerals specifically because of these maniacs which does mean that their goal of getting publicity and being noticed despite their fringe status is working.

The Bible literalists really do exist.  It is a good thing to keep in mind when debating the merits or lack thereof of laid-back religion; when you say that a book is the Word of God you have to accept that sometimes people will actually believe you and act accordingly.