change your reality

The Century of the Self

One of the best documentaries I’ve seen the past years. It is the story of how one of Freud’s relatives, the founder of “Public Relations”, took psychoanalysis and applied it to business and politics. It then takes you on a journey of how businesses and politicians realized the power of psychology to control and direct the populations to their own aims. A truly fascinating, eye-opening-get-out-of-the-matrix documentary, created by non other than the BBC, now available in its entirety on Google Videos, in four parts, posted below in order:

For the end of automated call answering – Press 1.

“The commercial world, then, treats us like celebrities – “Because you’re worth it,” it says. It flatters and kowtows to us and keeps on doing so right up until the moment when we hand over our credit-card details. Then we are cast aside and condemned to a purgatory of being held in queue on a customer service line for all eternity. What fools we are.” – How To Be Free, Tom Hodgkinson.

I was reading this and couldn’t help thinking how true it was when it comes to the vast majority of businesses today. Perhaps the most notorious device that exemplifies the implicit belief that the customer’s time is worth less than the company’s time are the automated answering systems. We all know them: “For Sales, press 1…for Billing press 2…” and so on ad nauseum. Now, whoever claims that this system is primarily for the customer’s benefit is a scoundrel – it is nothing but an infernal contraption by which your patience is tested by the narration of numbers in exchange for some benefit to the companies that institute it. Having a viewing of Network fresh in my mind, I believe it is time we shout with one voice: “I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

So, everyone who is SICK AND TIRED of automated call answering systems, leave a comment that says: “Press 1″ followed by the company that you’d like to REMOVE their automated call answering systems.

We’ll then send those comments to the companies listed and demand they remove that infernal contraption and give its job to a human instead. That way we’ll create jobs for people as well as give an end to our telephonic woes.

I also propose we make a badge for all companies that satisfy two criteria:

1. They have Humans answering the phone.
2. They do not put you on hold for *more than 30 seconds*.

So to all designers out there send me your proposed badge in a small jpg, and I will post a blog with all the proposed designs and have people vote on which one would best represent our mission.

And a small piece of advice to companies with a big volume of calls:

1. Find out what the majority of callers want. Let’s say most people call for billing questions.
2. Direct ALL calls to the billing department. This way most callers will automatically find themselves where they want to be with zero hassle.
3. The callers that did not call for billing questions can easily be re-directed to the relevant departments by the touch of a button.
4. Perform the statistics as to what most callers want every month so that you change the direction of all calls accordingly. If your company launches a campaign for a new product and everybody is calling to find out about it, it would be stupid to have them directed to the billing department just because the stats showed that 6 months ago the volume of calls went to billing questions. In short, adapt to caller demand regularly.

The Dancers of Thought

My mind works aphoristically. It comes up with insights about a variety of particular things effortlessly, but it takes me a lot of effort to put those insights together into a coherent system. When I try to put them together, they seem to lose their life. It is the difference between an orderly military march and an improvised dance solo. Though the dancer’s movements are not following the movements of any other dancers, they seem to have an organic harmony of their own; they are spontaneous but not chaotic; they are like the music a master piano player creates while improvising. You cannot necessarily predict the next move by the previous, but the harmony is there. It is not accidental but rather flows from a mysterious creative necessity. It is unclear whether the master follows something or something follows him. It is not the mere novelty that fascinates us, but the leaps of improvement from one pattern to the next. Improvement usually presupposes fixed standards, but the dizziness that comes when reading the mental dances of great thinkers is not solely caused by the speed with which they move within those standards but by those extra steps that transcend them without transgressing them. The great thinkers embody the spirit of the standards; the footprints they leave after their dance make up their letters and their writings.

No one ever danced philosophy like Friedrich Nietzsche. Many philosophers, accustomed to military marches, give up on him and blame him for being contradictory, confused, crazy. But anyone who was fascinated by the dance, and kept trying to learn it like they used to teach music in the old days – by ear and imitation – slowly realized it’s intrinsic order and profundity. We are now living in the tertiary generation of Nietzsche scholarship, and after the clearing of many gross misinterpretations, his importance is now secured in the annals of intellectual history. Even in hard-nosed Anglo-American analytic universities, at least his Genealogy of Morality is seen as an important though eccentric contribution to moral philosophy.
Never had a philosopher stimulated my mind in such diverse ways as Nietzsche. His writings tried to reflect the spirit of the dance of philosophy, not its letter. When I was being tortured by the likes of Heidegger and Hegel on the one side, and Davidson and Wiggins on the other, I used to open a book of The Gay Science in order to escape the morgue of thought for a breath of fresh air. I am not denying that one cannot learn a great deal from dissecting the corpses of thought. But to mistake dissection for philosophy requires you to kill her in the process. And that is what most philosophers have been doing over the last century, killing philosophy and making a living by being the anatomists of thought. No wonder the number of philosophy departments has been shrinking over the years and lay people don’t see its use in everyday life.

I am still plagued by doubts as to whether I should dance or come up with a military formation. I’m trying my feet at both, always experimenting, like my mentor. In the end, they don’t send dancers to the front. Soldiers win the wars – but only dancers know how to celebrate victory.
Philosophy is not just about winning the good life, but celebrating it after you’ve won it. It is not only about dissecting problems, it is also about living the solutions. A philosopher who has remained in the dissecting room is only half a philosopher. He may know the steps, but he doesn’t know how to dance. I’ve been in and out of the dissecting room, but I always felt the difference. The ultimate gift of philosophy is a flourishing life. A life geared towards actualizing the conditions, both inner and outer, for your maturity and the subsequent natural inclination to share its fruits. This is what I’ve been living from the end of 2002. I don’t know exactly how it occurred, but I’ve been trying to find out – it’s not much fun dancing alone, though it’s damn better than not dancing at all.
I belong to those musicians of thought who learned by listening and imitating, till they learned the spirit behind the music, and started to dance to their own, novel music. But many people want to dance to their own music before they know how to play. They want to follow their own drummer before knowing how to follow. They believe learning from another constrains their own creativity. They are fools. They will never become great artists. Because Art requires humility and no child ever lost its creativity by learning a language it did not create.

Truth and Personal Opinion

If I am searching for a key and somebody tells me “Look behind the candle”, and I look behind the candle and find the key, shall I not take it because I didn’t find it myself? Should I disregard the theories of Newton and Einstein just because I’m not Newton or Einstein?

The truth is something common, and that is why it is distinguished from personal opinion. That something is common doesn’t mean it is in plain view, or that it is easy to find. It merely denotes that it can be found by anyone who looks for it properly.

Does it mean that a personal opinion can’t be true? – Of course not. That something is a personal opinion doesn’t mean it is ipso facto[1] untrue. That would unwittingly make truth rest on something outside the person: an authority, ‘nature’, God. This would in turn presuppose an impotence of the person, an inability to find truth in his personal opinions and a need for an outside source to guarantee truth for him[2]. Personal opinions can be true. But they are true not in virtue of being said by a specific person, an institution, an expert or authority. The truths of physics are not true because they are said by a physicist. That would shift truth back to the idea of authority, that the truth is based on nothing more than personal opinion.

The desire to have your own thoughts, ideas etc. usually stems from the desire to be unique and to be recognized and most importantly praised as such. Thus it can be nothing more than an expression of narcissism, or if one wants to look deeper, an expression of an insecurity[3]. It can also be an expression of possessiveness. If something is taken from somewhere, it means it can be taken. But if I create it myself, from myself, then it is solely my possession and difficult, and ideally impossible, to steal. That is why narcissistic and possessive people tend not to acknowledge sources or influences for their ideas unless they know of the radical differences they have with them. Thus somebody who came up with a theory of the psyche which is remarkably similar to Freud’s, claims as an influence Aristotle, so as to simultaneously not appear ungrateful (parthenogenesis arouses suspicion) and original. This insecurity also leads scientists and intellectuals to remain intentionally blind to ways their own theories integrate with larger or better theories which belong to colleagues of their own or of some other department.

But knowledge is not like candy. If somebody does steal it, I still remain in possession of it. If I discover some new theory of light and a fellow physicist reads my notes, I do not, by such behavior, lose knowledge of my new theory. It is just that now both my colleague and I have ‘possession’ of this knowledge. The one’s possession of it doesn’t deprive it from the other. That is the wonder of knowledge – it is not depleted by being shared. What bothers a pioneer is not sharing his knowledge, but being deprived of the recognition of being the one who initially discovered it.[4]

However, that is not the only motivation behind the desire to think your own thoughts. To think your own thoughts is also an expression of our deep need to be free, and to be the agents of our freedom. To think our own thoughts, independent of all others is to assert that power within ourselves and affirm it. It is experiencing the power we have to be the savior of ourselves.

But truth is a relationship, and a relationship presupposes something outside oneself. Even the relationship we have with ourselves subtly demonstrates what Kant, Schopenhauer, the Buddha and others have been telling us for years. That in observing ourselves we realize that the observing self is distinguished from the observed self. Kant and Schopenhauer assumed that this shows that there is a self that resides apart from the phenomena of experience and makes experience possible. The Buddha[5], subtler, realized that this is an illusion. There is no ‘Self’ behind the multiplicity of phenomena[6]. Without the phenomena, without an observed self, there can be no observing ‘Self’. Our idea of self is as much dependent on the phenomena as they are on the self. That was his idea of ‘dependent arising’. And in that idea, he discovered that unity of ourselves with the world. A unity which is not merely in thought but can be experienced in meditation. Thus the Buddha was one among a few persons in history who solved the ancient riddle of how the Many are One and the One Many both in theory and in practice. That is why ultimately, the truth is One, because in realizing that we are many, and that we are not only the poles of the relationship but the relationship itself, we transcend duality, and transcend ourselves.

[1] Elegant Latin expression for the convoluted English equivalent of “by that very fact”.

[2] Incidentally, the role that God had in the philosophy of Descartes.

[3] For all narcissists are insecure. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel the need to receive excessive praise either from themselves or from others.

[4] This however, doesn’t cancel the observation we made as to the motive of possessiveness. The possessiveness of a person is not due to the nature of the possessions but due to the nature of one’s character. Thus if a ‘possession’ (like knowledge) is by its nature impossible to ‘steal’ in the conventional sense of deprivation, that doesn’t alter the character of the possessive person who is engaged with such ‘possessions’.

[5] And others like Nietzsche for instance.

[6] To be fair to Kant and Schopenhauer we must mention that both of them entertained the idea that ultimately, there is no ‘Self’, because in the noumenal realm the categories of the understanding like individuation and causation do not apply, thus it makes no sense of talking about ‘a’ Self. In that realm everything is unindividuated, uncaused etc. But how can we understand unindividuation if we don’t refer to individuation? That is the problem of the ineffable, but yet nevertheless graspable, and according to the mystical traditions, experientially confirmable.

Life has no brakes

“Moral education” sounds like something contemporary teenagers would skip to go skateboarding. Why? Don’t they care about what is good for them? Of course they do. That is why they skipped class to go skateboarding! Contemporary teenagers are not corrupt! Corruption takes time – only old people are corrupted.

The teenager who is rebellious and does something different from what he is told is actually exercising his own judgment instead of obeying ours. That his judgment may be mistaken is the minor evil that should be allowed to avoid a bigger one: his enslavement to judgments other than his own.[1]

How can you encourage teenagers to trust their own judgment when we prescribe where and when it shall be used? How can teenagers trust something that they seldom use? How could they ever get better at it if they don’t use it? Would you drive a vehicle you don’t really know how to drive, especially if it has no brakes? Life has no brakes. When we allow people to drive on the highway of life, we are surprised by the number of crashes and casualties. Not to mention the insufferable traffic.

Then we think that the solution is to add rules and regulations. We think this way at least well avoid the casualties. But the crashes happened not because of the lack of rules but because people were never given the chance to exercise their judgment, thus improving it. Adding rules makes people worse. Road signs rob us of our judgment*. They are the sign that people are too stupid to trust. It is the same with laws. We do not trust each other. But the solution is not obedience to the law.

Laws were made for specific people, under specific circumstances. They become obsolete if the people and the circumstances change. I am at a crossroad around 4 a.m. Most people are asleep in their homes, their cars in their garages. I am not drunk or too tired. I am a competent driver. There is ample visibility towards all directions. It is a quiet night. I do not see or hear a car for miles. Yet the light is red. According to the traffic light, I shouldn’t drive forward. But the light does not know it is 4 a.m.; it does not know that most drivers are sleeping, their cars in their garages; it does not know I am not drunk or too tired. It cannot see or hear there isn’t a damn car coming for miles; it doesn’t know all these things. For if it did, it would have been green. And because it doesn’t know these things and I do, I drive on as if it was green.

Policemen or judges who charge you for crossing a red light under such circumstances have dehumanized themselves into ignorant traffic lights. They make those who embody the spirit of the law into criminals, while sometimes giving the green light to the bodies of criminals who only obey its letter.

Notes:

[1] Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims.

* For those of you who are pedantic, I obviously don’t mean all signs, rules and regulations rob us of our judgment, nor I am implying that all of them are useless.

Philosophy is not boring!

Philosophy is not boring. It talks about the most important issues in life – and it doesn’t tell you which those are. It is not an order, it is a question. You are supposed to find the answer.

Philosophers who are boring are failing in life. A boring life cannot be a good one. “So what if a philosopher is boring? He may still be a good philosopher.” Yes – only if you subtract one of the main aims of philosophy: Living the good life. That contemporary philosophy is filled with boring professors of philosophy only accentuates Thoreau’s remark:

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not
kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men. (from Walden)

Someone who has been a philosopher for years should be discernibly different in the things that matter from most people. He has supposedly made it his life’s task to live the good life. If he isn’t living better than most who haven’t set such a conscious goal for themselves, he is evidently not a good philosopher. Philosophy is not just another profession. It is a calling. You cannot be a philosopher from 9 to 5 and be a layman at night. Being a philosopher means being an example of your own philosophy. Walking the talk and talking the walk.
Of course, being a philosopher is a process, as most things are. If someone has just created the ideal to which he wants to strive, it is unfair to expect that he’s going to match it overnight. Because the ideals of philosophy entail the whole way of life. Changing your whole way of life overnight is highly improbable if not completely impossible. But being only a shadow of the ideal you still believe yet have sketched 20 years ago, should raise doubts about your sincerity or your strength of will. Doubts that you should at least have personally raised and examined. That is why philosophies have been called confessions. They are the sublimated confessions of personal struggles to live out ideals; the triumphs and tragedies of human actualization.

To restrict yourself to offering a little nugget of truth (which seems to be the rule among philosophers these days) while living in a fortress of falsehood can hardly be called noble. Will noble remain an honorific term for people who don’t deserve it? Why don’t people aspire to greatness anymore? And why should greatness always be equated with arrogance and conceitedness? Isn’t it time to believe that there is something more than a nihilistic humility? Have philosophers forgotten Kant’s motto? Sapere Aude damn it!

The Point of Education

The point of education should not be the memorization of true sentences or beliefs. Because what we thought was true may prove false, and we are now stuck with memories of falsehoods. The point of education should be good judgment. If you have good judgment you do not need to remember the good judgments of others because you have one yourself. Your knowledge is not a passive retrieval of memories, but an active judgment for what is true, good and beautiful. It is the difference between being given a fish and fishing for yourself. The former makes you dependent on the fish giver; the latter makes you free.

On Beautiful Thinking

Thinking is divided in how one thinks and what one thinks. Thus two men may entertain the same idea yet express it in a different way. The way one thinks, is the province of art; what one thinks, is the province of philosophy very broadly conceived. It is the common distinction between form and content.
Just as thinking has form and content so does feeling. Though Goethe and Rilke might share the same emotion, they do not experience it the same way. The influence of the way one experiences emotions can be so great that it literally transforms the content of the emotion. Just as the same wine would acquire a different taste when it is aged in barrels of different kinds of wood.
Our mental and emotional life usually consists in a continuous alteration of thoughts and emotions. Thoughts and feelings appear and disappear in our awareness like people in train stations. Some stay more, others less; some make an impression on us even though their stay was brief; others are unnoticed even though they’ve been there for ages.
Just as it is possible for painters belonging to different movements in art to produce entirely different paintings of the same subject, so it is possible to shape the way we think and feel in such a way, that we become the Impressionists and Surrealists of our souls. And just as the choice of a way of expression doesn’t hinder the choice of content we choose to express, so it is possible we can become Realist Platos or Abstract Spinozas.
If you want to paint like Michelangelo, you do not study under Matisse. If you want to think like Descartes you do not study the Scholastics. Your mind and emotions are molded according to what you’ve been exposed. Thus, it is not an unwise suggestion that if you want to think correctly, you shouldn’t hang out with fools, and if you want think beautifully, you should befriend poets.

On the Meaning of Life

Some perspectives on the subject:

1

To look back to the circumstances under which a question arises helps us in understanding a question better thus making it easier to answer it. Moreover, it can even point to the dissolution of the question altogether and make the answer unecessary or generate different, perhaps more interesting questions. The question regarding the meaning (or purpose, which is not exactly the same[1]) of existence has a complicated origin, where many factors play a role and contribute to its emergence.
I will start with the simplest, and one that has been experienced by all. When we were children, we asked questions about everything. When children ask the question “What is that?” they do not merely want to know the name of something which captures their curiosity. They want to know what it does and what it is for. We categorize external objects not only by what they look like but also by what they do and what they are for. This mode of questioning is then transposed on whatever the child needs to know. When parents shout or beat their children, most of them make sure the child knows why this happens so the child won’t do it again. The child feels it was responsible for the parents reaction. So children associate certain behaviors and the subsequent pain or reward (be it physical or emotional) with a reason, and it doesn’t take much time to generalize (the tendency for children to generalize is well documented[2]) this to most internal states: anger, envy, jealousy, fear. Their experience with their parents being the most intimate and most frequent, their initial model for explaining their internal states is that an external agent causes internal states (e.g. Parent causing pain to the child or child making the parent angry). Thus, they mostly seek external causes for what happens within them.

Let us summarize the above insights in order to connect them with later ones. Children are heavily assisted in learning the meaning and purpose of things from an external authority figure. He/She symbolizes their source of knowledge. They are made to feel responsible for their parents reactions. They are punished and rewarded by the same persons and during those processes they associate external causes with internal states.

Having said the above, it is now not difficult to be in the position to understand the Freudian point[3] regarding Christianity. God, as the benevolent father with supreme authority, is the agent who teaches us the meaning and purpose of things. The Father who can answer what our father couldn’t because he’s omniscient. The Father who punishes and rewards and make us feel responsible for our sins. Where our sins explain the pain and evil in the world, like our bad behavior explained the punishment our parents inflicted on us.

Thus, unwanted internal states, are moralized from the beginning. Even if the child is not brought up in a Christian environment the punishment he receives is given a moral justification: “You did something wrong.” Thus, the moral interpretation of natural phenomena has haunted mankind for thousands of years. Earthquakes and floods were seen as punishments and good harvests and fertile wives as rewards.

Children, as well as adults, can withstand meaningful suffering because they can change it by their future behavior. The child can ‘behave’ and the adult can be a good Christian or a good citizen. But pointless suffering seems unendurable exactly because we cannot do something to change it.

Thus, the usual emergence of the question regarding the meaning of life comes from the experience of pointless suffering. “Why?” is the incessant question of a suffering mankind. If only we knew why we suffered, we could do something about it, and hence avoid suffering. It is this quest that has given birth to all religions. The Buddhists answered it by claiming that the root of suffering is desire. Hence if I eliminate desire, I eliminate suffering. The Christians thought mankind was suffering because it had a sinful nature, inherited from its parents Adam and Eve. If you’re a Christian or a Muslim there is a meaning in suffering but there is no escape – at least not in this life. Virtually every philosophy addresses the issue of suffering and why it is present. The Stoics claimed that we suffer because we don’t live according to nature. The Epicureans because we do not prudently choose which pleasures to indulge in and which to avoid. Epictetus claimed we suffer because we care about things which are not in our power to change. Were we to concentrate on the ones that are truly within our power, then suffering would largely diminish and a happy, peaceful life would be possible. The list is endless but the point remains the same. We want to know why we suffer – in order to do something about it.

2

What is the meaning of life? Most people unwittingly subscribe to what in philosophy is called an “Augustinian” picture of language. That is, they take the meaning of words to be the objects for which they stand. Thus, for those persons (let’s call them Augustinians), the meaning of the word “apple” is the apple itself, and if someone were to ask them what they mean by apple, they would fetch or point an apple. The problem with this picture, famously diagnosed by Wittgenstein, is that you cannot point to an object for the meaning of some words. What object would you point, for example, for words like “No” or “Now”? There simply isn’t any object for such words, and this just reveals that the Augustinian picture of language is, if not mistaken, then at least limited, because it fails to explain how we understand words in which there is no object that we can point to.

Thus, when people ask, what is the meaning of life? They sometimes mistakenly search for an object, which simply confuses them and leads them nowhere.

Wittgenstein eventually came to the conclusion that the meaning of words and symbols comes from the way they are used. In short: Meaning is use. Think for example of the word “gay”. In the 19th century it meant: happy, cheerful. In the 20th century it means a homosexual man. The usage of the word has changed, and thus its meaning. This explains why it is so much easier to learn a foreign language while living in that foreign country, where the words and their uses are so vividly interconnected, instead of learning it from a book. Language is something you understand by practice, and practice is nothing other than use.

Thus, if we were to follow the developments in the philosophy of language and linguistics, we would say that the meaning of life, is not to be found in some object external to itself, like the apple in the case of “apple”. If you spend your life searching for it in the Augustinian way, you’re never going to find it, for the presuppositions of the question you are asking are leading you astray. Neither is it to be found in some value turned into a noun (so as to make it look like an object) like “the Good”, “the True”, “the Beautiful”, or even a conjunction of them. The meaning of life is found within the practice of life itself. It is is discovered in living it.

[1] See Appendix (not written yet)

[2] See A. Musgrave, Common Sense, Science and Scepticism, Cambridge University Press.

[3] In, Civilization and Its Discontents, and The Future of an Illusion.

Wisdom and Hydrodynamics

The good life is a correct balance between know-that and know-how. Knowing in an intellectual way is simply not enough for a full understanding and embodiment of wisdom. In fact, a good definition of wisdom is embodied knowledge. Or, in vernacular: knowledge in action. On the other hand, wise action is impossible with ignorance in theory.
That doesn’t mean that a man cannot swim in life unless he knows the laws of hydrodynamics. But someone proficient in hydrodynamics can do things no Olympic swimmer ever could. That however, is irrelevant when it comes to the good life, broadly conceived. When it comes to that, it is more important to know how to swim well than to know hydrodynamics. The problem we have today is that people know hydrodynamics and have forgotten how to swim – if they had ever learnt to do so.
And you can’t swim in life unless you get in the water. Contemporary philosophers are professors of hydrodynamics. That is why they cannot teach anybody how to swim well in the ocean of life. Poor students of philosophy, they enroll in philosophy hoping they will learn to swim and they are made to believe that hydrodynamics is all one needs to know. That is why contemporary philosophers can even seem incompetent when it comes to everyday life, whereas they should have been its graceful artists.
“Critics are to painters what ornithologists are to birds” Birds fly, painters paint. Critics criticize and ornithologists analyse and observe. Contemporary philosophy is in the same predicament. Instead of living life, they analyse and observe it. They cannot dance like the philosophers of the past. While true philosophy is learning how to fly, contemporary philosophy merely analyses what flight is.