Culture as Play - from Shakespeare to "I Shot the Sheriff"

Baby boomers made Clapton's cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" #1 in 1974. Now they’re offended that millennials are protesting police brutality.

Culture makes for weird politics.

William James was one of the first Americans to argue for multiculturalism. Like his brother Henry in England, William was a bestselling author (William wrote the nation’s first psychology textbook and helped to invent pragmatism). At Harvard, he helped to define the university that granted various degrees, each offering a different way to look at the world, a different specialty. He also thought the term multiverse made more sense than universe.

Clark Kerr, who helped to define and lead the University of California system, argued that it was better to think of California’s college and university system as a multiversity rather than a university. Not only would it grant such a wide variety of degrees and guide people through a variety of ways to think, but Californians would use their college system for a wide variety of reasons. Many, not one; multi, not uni.

The one sustainable solution to the question of culture is, of course, multiculturalism. Everyone goes to China Town or Little Italy for the food and some come back with their gods or philosophy. There is no one way to be an American any more than there is one American food.

It is as absurd to argue for one culture as it is to argue for one personality. Culture is a fabulous invention and to evoke it is to manipulate an audience. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s plays so captured Elizabethan England is because people were coming into the city in unprecedented numbers and the stage gave them a place to study and learn the roles society might expect them to fill. 

Shakespeare had a huge influence on culture – something we take seriously – and yet he defined culture through a marvelous invention we call the play.

About 20 years after Clapton's #1 hit, Ice T wrote "Cop Killer." It was wildly controversial but it got people’s attention. The album went gold and made Ice T a star. Ice T’s biggest role, the source of most of his entertainment income, did not come from music, though. It came from television. For 20 years he has played a detective on ... Law & Order. Ice T isn't really a cop killer and he's not really a cop. 

Culture is defined by people at play and what politicians have learned is that the easiest audience to play are voters.

When Trump tweets LAW & ORDER he - like Ice T - could be mocking it as the outlaw he loves to play, the president who has had 7 advisers (including his personal lawyer) arrested for felony charges, the man who defends a 17 year old killer or could – again like Ice T –actually be calling for a calming of the turmoil that so worries his older supporters. (You remember them, the ones who sing along with Clapton.) Like Ice T who plays outlaw or cop depending on which one pays the most, Trump plays outlaw or peacekeeper depending on which one gets him the most attention or votes. While Ice T and Trump are playing roles, their audience takes them seriously.

Political Conventions, Culture, Economics, Legacy and Progress

Economics fascinates me and seems a terribly important consideration for politics. Even early people taught their children how to make a living and the task of preparing the next generation for economic success seems like the most important priority for any government. Meanwhile, we're between the Democratic and Republican conventions and they seemingly prefer to talk about culture.

Economics gives us progress; culture gives us legacy. Politicians, who tend to be old men, prefer the latter. Progress is the concern of children - or would be, if they knew how dependent their future was on it.

For nearly five centuries, Rome was a Republic. At that time, no one person ruled. Julius Caesar began - and his heir completed - the task of turning Rome into an empire, something it remained until its fall about four centuries later.

Julius Caesar's heir eventually took the name Caesar Augustus. He'd had popular senators like Cicero assassinated, putting an end to dissent and the republic in which power was shared and debated. He defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra, driving them to suicide after revealing that Antony - with whom he'd shared power - was no longer a "real" Roman, having fallen in love with an Egyptian and written a will stating his wish to be buried with Cleopatra.

Augustus ended a republic, but gained a legacy.

The ancient Greeks had Homer. The Romans had Virgil. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis points out, "The Aeneid, unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, is a commissioned work. Augustus encouraged its completion and subsidized its author." Virgil - unsurprisingly - made Augustus look good.

Augustus was the first to take the title, “Pontifex maximus,” which meant greatest priest. Every Roman emperor after did until that title was taken by the pope.

As Roman emperor when Christ was born, Augustus is also in the Bible.

Augustus was immortalized in Virgil’s Aeneid, the Bible, and the Catholic Church. Those legacies are almost minor, though.

The months September, October, November, and December indicated that they were the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months in the Roman calendar. Before September came Sextilla, the sixth month of the Roman year. During his reign, Augustus had this sixth month renamed after him. 2000 years after his death, you say his name every time you mention August. Now that’s a legacy.

Progress depends on old men more worried about how their grandchildren will live than how they will be remembered, showing a greater concern for economics than culture. The thought of being an inescapable part of every summer, though, must be incredibly alluring.

For all the remnant glory of past generations, though, there is little evidence that per capita income rose at all between the time of Homer and Shakespeare. Glorifying any one person doesn't drive progress. For that you need to change the life of ordinary people.

As these conventions play out here in Augustus's month, worry less about how much they say about how great is their candidate (spoiler alert: they are really great) and listen more for how they will make life great for your children and grandchildren.

The Future of Politics Might Be Culture, Not Policy

One of the things that neo-nationalism might signal is a hunger for common culture. We all listen to different music, read and watch different stories and worship at different holy sites.

We share an economy but not a culture. What is economics? A study of how we depend on strangers for our lifestyle. Some people find that unsettling. 

Peter Drucker supposedly said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." A variant on that is "Culture eats policy for breakfast." Culture excites people and policy makes their eyes glaze over. One of the more enduring elements of culture is music.

It takes less time to listen to a song than read a book or watch a movie. This might be why 4 of the top 5 people (counted by followers) on Twitter are musicians. (Obama tops the list, followed by Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.) Music might be the most effective cultural glue we have.

Prediction? Eventually politics will devolve into a people - bored with policy and disappointed by politicians - voting on what song will be the national anthem for the next couple of years. 

Then politics will really get ugly. 

The Most Important Development in the Evolution of Humans

First an excerpt from Thinking Big, a book about how our brains evolved to adapt to social realities. A key point here is this matter of thinking in terms of relationships and not just rationally.

Food was certainly of vital importance and obtaining it efficiently and securely must have dominated much of their [early hominins’] lives. The archaeologist Rhys Jones, who lived with Aborigines in Northern Australia, once said to us that these hunters and gatherers were always 24 hours away from hunger.But for us the keys to understanding food lie in the implications for social cooperation. This takes two forms. First are the tactical demands, of getting working parties together to hunt or gather safely and with greater chance of success. This covers defence against predators as well as obtaining those foods that were needed to fuel expanding brains. Second is the strategic matter of planning for bad times. This is achieved by looking for help beyond your immediate community. Instead of restricting access to resources by defending them against all-comers, it is better to allow other people in. By linking individuals and their communities over very large geographical areas a form of ecological insurance is produced. [highlighted added]Archaeologists refer to this as social storage: tokens exchanged for food in bad times, and vice versa in good. In other words, if conditions deteriorate where you happen to be ranging, then we will allow your community to come over to our range and use our resources for a while. Later, the reverse will be the case, and you can pay us back. Such a system works well, but it requires that the community has a territory large enough to cover a wide range of habitats. It won’t work so well if community territories are small and consist of essentially the same kind of habitat.
…..Rather than concentrating on what may be rational explanations of why they hunted bison rather than reindeer or chose not to eat fish, as the isolated Tasmanians famously did 6000 years ago, we need to shift the perspective and see the role of food and other materials in creating relationships rather than simply meeting calorific goals. Archaeological explanations for the human story need to be relational (being social) as well as rational (being economic). Social life is not based on calories alone but on the relationships that emerge when things are made, exchanged, used, and kept.pp. 86-7 of Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar’s Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind, Thames & Hudson, London, 2014, paperback version 2018.

Put more simply, as humanity evolved it faced two choices.
1. Defend your limited resources from others.
2. Expand your limited resources by sharing with others.

Archaeologists think that Neanderthals adopted the first strategy and early humans adopted the second. Neanderthals went extinct. We've become the dominant species.

As it turns out, the second strategy of strengthening relationships rather than walls has a host of advantages. Not only do you have more insurance against bad times but this strategy requires you to cooperate with larger groups of others, which enables all sorts of advances. This means opportunities for wider array of mates, the exchange of ideas, and the "outsourcing" of or cooperation on explanations, research and development, and cultural and technological innovations that eventually dwarfed the diversification of food sources in importance.

The choice to cooperate to share more rather than compete to protect less may be the single most important choice early humans ever made.

The Terribly Boring Headline That Won't Generate Any Outrage or Clicks: Income Mobility in the US is Not So Bad

The economist Raj Chetty of Stanford was in San Diego 27 February talking about income mobility. He's exploring a really important topic with fascinating data.

He used two measures of income mobility. The first measured what percentage of children made more than their parents had at the same age. The other was a measure of what percentage of children born in the bottom 20% made it to the top 20%. Those seem to me like very different measures.

Doing Better Than Your Parents

 90% of the people born in 1940 were making more at age 30 than their parents had at age 30. That is a really clear measure of progress: the next generation is more affluent than the last. But as you can see in this graph, that percentage drops sharply until about 1960 and then continued to drop, albeit more slowly, up to the point of people born in the 1980s. Roughly 90% of 30 year olds in 1970 were doing better than their parents had at 30, but by 2010 only about 50% were. That seems alarming but I don't think it's as bad as this first graph looks.

First, there are adjustments that Chetty himself makes. 

Adjusting for inflation across generations is not trivial. How do you properly adjust for the price of a mid-sized sedan in 1970 and 2018? The first might reach 100,000 miles and the second might reach 200,000; the first has seat belts and the second has air bags. A TV in 1970 might have been 15" and offered 3 channels; a TV in 2018 might be 50" and offer 300 channels. We could contrast a list of products like this, nearly all of them showing a similar uptick in quality that makes price adjustments tough.

Even assuming that inflation adjustments let you accurately compare incomes from 1970 and 2010, families are smaller. If you make $28,000 with a family of four in 1970 or $27,000 with a family of three in 2010, is your family income really lower? In this example, family income has dropped by $1,000 but income per family member has actually gone up from $7,000 to $9,000.

If you adjust for inflation and family size, the downward trend is less severe. About 95% of 30 year olds in 1970 were making more than their parents at the same age and that dropped to roughly 70% by the 1980s (not a mere 50% as suggested before making these adjustments). 

A drop from 95% to 70% of the next generation doing better is not great but even that is arguable. The average person in 2010 had a library of on-demand articles, books, songs, movies and TV shows that dwarfed the choices of even the richest people of 1970. House prices have gone up but so has the average square footage of homes and the quality of appliances within them. We have a wealth of choices at the grocery store and in 1970 not only did you have just a couple of tomato sauces to choose from in the store but it was tough to find good sushi, ramen or falafales in most of the country. People in 2010 had more choices about how to live their lives than people in 1970 and not all of that can be properly captured in income statistics.

One last thing? The Great Recession was awful. Between 2000 and 2009, the economy destroyed a million jobs. In the 1980s (and 1990s and probably 2010s), the economy created roughly 20 million jobs. Any comparison of how people in 2010 are doing with people in 1990 has to account for the terrible shock that was the Great Recession. All else being equal, we would expect to see a downturn in the percentage of people in 2010 who are doing better than their parents did at 30. Millennials - like the rest of us - had to learn how to swim. Unlike us older folks, they had to learn how to swim in a tsunami and because of that careers were slower to take off and that could not help but be reflected in these numbers. I suspect that as we get further from the recession, this measure of what percentage of 30 or 40 year olds are doing better than their parents will rise.

Doing Better Than Your Peers

What about Chetty's other - very different - measure of income mobility? What percentage of people born in the bottom 20% make it to the top 20%? 

Let's explore this number a little. If parents made zero difference, we would expect that any kid born in any part of the distribution could land in any other part of the distribution by the time she's an adult. Maximum mobility means that there is no correlation between where you start and where you land. 20% of the kids born in the bottom 20% would make it to the top 20%. 20% of the kids born in the bottom would land in the middle. And 20% of the kids born in the bottom 20% would end in the bottom 20%.

This measure is zero sum, though. Every one percent of the kids who move out of the bottom 20% displace someone else. No matter how much your economy grows or stagnates, there will never be more (or less) than 20% in the top (or bottom) 20%. 

It is true that perfect income mobility by this measure means that a kid born in the bottom 20% is just as likely to end up in the top 20% (or middle 20%) as she is the bottom 20%. It is also true that any kid born in the top 20% of income distribution is just as likely to end up in the top (or middle) 20% as he is to end up in the bottom 20%. Perfect mobility means that parents make no difference. That's certainly not the case now. Chetty shared a remarkable statistic: kids born into the top 1% of households (those with incomes of $650,000 or more), were 80X more likely to be admitted to Stanford than kids born into median income households. 

What I find curious about this measure of income mobility is that if Chetty could convince CEOs, mayors, senators and tenured professors to pursue policies that would lead to perfect mobility, it means that the children of those policy makers would be just as likely to end up in the bottom 20% as in the top 20% where they started. I find it hard to imagine many of these leaders willing to adopt policies that allow for perfect income mobility by this measure. By both absolute and relative measures, affluent parents like the idea of their children doing well.

That said, it does seem like a healthy community would allow for children born in poverty to rise to the top and for children born rich to fall into the middle or bottom based on their own - and not their parents' - merit.

There are very real differences in a communities' ability to raise a child born in the bottom 20% up to the top 20%, from poor to affluent. Segregation is one big reason for this. Atlanta and Sacramento have the same percentage of blacks, whites, and Hispanics but Atlanta is much more segregated. (Whites live in one part of town, blacks another, etc.) A kid born in the bottom 20% has a 10% chance of reaching the top 20% in Sacramento; in Atlanta that kid's chances are just 4% and this seems illustrative of what Chetty sees across cities in the US. Segregating people by any grouping - education, race, income - seems to result in less income mobility. (And, as seen in other research, this ability of a community to expose its kids to a variety of other people seems to raise income and wealth for everyone.)

Entrepreneurship and innovation also seems to matter. If your community is creating new jobs and wealth, your kids have a better chance to rise. San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle are among the best communities for giving kids a chance to rise to the top; Cleveland, Detroit and Atlanta among the worst. (See one comparison of communities here.)

Finally, one of the most fascinating points Chetty made was merely implied. Some communities do a much better job of creating opportunities than others. A poor kid growing up in such an area has double or triple the odds of becoming affluent. I don't know enough about the data to conclude this but the impression I was left with is that spending money to get your kid into an innovative, integrated, affluent neighborhood will do more for her prospects than using those same dollars to get her into a better university. Geography is culture, and culture matters.

I'd be fascinated to know more about the differences in communities that are more effective at letting you do better than your parents but curiously, most of Chetty's research focused instead on the differences in communities that raised the probability of poor kids becoming rich. Given there will only ever be 20% of the population in the top 20% but 100% of us could be doing better than our parents, the latter seems like a goal that is easier to align around and more effective.

Where Guns are Easier to Find Than Libraries and Museums

Baseball Player Salaries vs. American Presidents'

When a reporter asked Babe Ruth to justify making more money than the president (this at the dawn of the Great Depression), Babe replied, "Well, I had a better year than him."

Today, even an average baseball player is 8X as valuable as the president.

Once Upon Time (1998), Republicans and Democrats Had Nearly Identical Views on Climate Change. Then it Became Political

Up until 1998, Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to believe that climate change resulted from human activity and was already having an impact.

And then it became political. A decade later, Democrats were almost twice as likely to believe that climate change was real.

As it turns out, Democrats aren't smarter or better educated than Republicans. Nor are Republicans more scientifically inclined than Democrats. Randomly select a member from either party and you're about as likely to get someone who couldn't explain their way out of a rain storm. Or for that matter, about as likely to give you a cogent argument based on science. (Note that actual scientific experts, however, are not divided on climate change. I'm making a point about the average layman, the voter who can swing an election.)

Once climate change became political, though, it became a matter of identity, of being in the club. If you have lots of Republican friends, it becomes increasingly awkward to argue for climate change. By contrast, if you hang out with Democrats, it is hard to argue that climate change is not such a big deal.

I think its true that - outside of scientists, philosophers, and prophets - very people seek truth at the expense of alienating friends and family. Most folks would rather hang out with actual people than be alone with ideas or facts. It's peer pressure that seems as likely to shape our beliefs as an objective look at the facts. And now the argument is not scientific: it's an attack on you and your group. To change your belief might mean alienating you from your peer group. That's tough to ask of anyone, unless your peer group is fellow scientists, philosophers, and prophets.

[Last note: the Gallup numbers since 2008 haven't changed much. It's now 79% probable that a Democrat will belief in climate change. Republicans are unchanged at 41%.]

Brain Wired by Culture

Some parts of a woman's brain change up to 25% through the course of a month. "When I started taking a woman's hormonal state into account as I evaluated her psychiatrically, I discovered the massive neurological effects her hormones have during different stages of life in shaping her desires, her values, and the very way she perceives reality," writes Dr. Louann Brizendine in The Female Brain.

I mention this because I want to make a bold claim. One that I think will be proven in the next decade or two but is not - to the best of my knowledge - yet proven or even claimed by any serious professionals.

It is not just that people in different cultures and points of developmental history have different opinions and beliefs: their brains are wired differently.

To take a simple example, in schools were children don't feel as safe and violence and bullying is common, test scores are lower to reflect, I believe, more time spent in the fight or flight portion of their brain and less time in the frontal lobes.

The brain of a villager living in a rural area of Afghanistan who suffers from hunger, is regularly coerced by threats of violence, and feels as though he has little control over his life will be bathed in a very different set of hormones and chemicals than the brain of a Greenwich villager living in New York who worries about overeating, is regularly persuaded by advertising, and feels like he has no purpose in his life. It is not just that these two people have different beliefs about the world. I would argue that these two have very different brains.

My personal opinion is that a sense of control is the biggest determinant of how the brain is wired and world view formed.

And this matters for policy. Imagine going into Mississippi to "help" the locals to give up on their curious religious beliefs and odd superstitions in order to become more developed and prosperous. It probably would not be long before they had taken up arms to chase you and your BMW-driving friends out of town. It is not as though you can simply offer some new information to change how they think. You would likely have to change the way their brain is wired, the way they make sense of the world. You cannot simply bring new policies into old brains, put new wine into old bottles.

It might just be that the answer is to change conditions for the next generation as much as possible. Alleviating hunger. Adding control and order to the point that people feel less intimidated in their daily lives. Offering choices to the young. These actions might plant the seeds for then introducing policies that will be welcomed rather than repulsed.

I love the idea of psychology, cognitive science, and therapy. I think that happiness and peace of mind is more important than we allow. But as I get older, I am more inclined to believe that social systems do as much to define psychology and cognition as anything we could do with an individual in a particular social milieu. To change the individual, you have to change the social system. Change the world he lives in and you change the individual. I predict that we'll even find that if you change the world he lives in, you change the very composition of his brain.

From Self Absorbed to Self Aware - the Return of the Novel?

The novel’s great era didn’t just coincide with the rise of the university and the specialist because of rising levels of literacy – it helped to ameliorate the feelings of anomie and isolation of the specialist. Suddenly, a growing number of workers found themselves busy in tasks that required focus that excluded others and unique skills that made it difficult to relate to friends and families. The novel made us feel less alone.

But the novel did more than provide access to the inner life of others, giving us access to the psychic space of the woman in the apartment across the hall or the guy in the next office. It reassured us that our own insecurities, lusts, petty grievances, and imaginings did not make us freaks but, instead, made us part of the human race. Everyone, as it turns out, has some kind of struggle.

And yet today, the world of reality TV and Internet confessionals – media like blogs and YouTube – now provides us with ample reassurance that our petty neuroses and animal instincts are not unique. And maybe celebrity stories and powerful video has eroded reading.

But I think that this comes with a cost. Novels force reflection that video and quick articles or posts do not. In a novel, we’re forced to project ourselves into the lives of the character. A good novel will actually kick start our own process of reflection. A novel makes our own thoughts more articulate, providing us with not just vocabulary but vocabulary of the inner life. Through a great novel, we discover some portion of ourselves.

Gaining access to the inner life by video and celebrity scrutiny, by contrast, seems to confuse self absorption and self awareness. We lose ourselves in the characters we see but we are never really forced to consider our own lives, never made to reflect.

All this to report some potentially good news. By one measure, reading is still lower than it was in the early 1980s or 90s but rose over the last 12 months for the first time since 1982. If our mindless living –invasions, spending, and eating of the last few decades - has done anything, it has certainly provided us with material enough to think about. It might provoke us to become more contemplative, more reflective. Crazy optimist that I am, I love the notion of this possibility.

2008 Year in Review - A Look Back (1 of 3)

What follows are excerpts of posts from 2008. It was a busy year.

George Bush and Karl Rove were masters of politics and the two stooges of policy, a frightening reminder that voters can be easier to seduce than reality.

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Why not build the Escher Expressway – build all roads to slope downhill as a means to improve gas mileage?

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The wild success of the iPod: is it just a coincidence that the first generation to be discovered by sonogram would so eager to embrace a product that envelopes them in sound?

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"Violence is down in the city of Fallujah. So is freedom. Entry into the city is like entry into an airport – residents wait in line to pass by guards and scanners. This is how we bring democracy into the Middle East?

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Our need for narrative is stronger than our need for facts. We can’t take reality in its naked form – it is shapeless and void. ‘In the beginning was a great void, and then God spoke,’ Bernard said, loosely quoting Genesis. “Narrative made reality – before that it was a buzz of noise and confusion and temporality. We don’t want facts – we want a story. So people prefer to believe that their lives are controlled by conspiratorial cabals rather than dare to think that we live near the abyss of "things just happen," of random events that even the experts can’t predict or properly explain.

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New Year's Resolutions can too easily be attempts to be like someone we admire rather than self actualize. It takes a great deal of effort just to be good at what we're good at.

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A stimulus package seems like such an expensive and vague way to address real and specific problems.

And besides, it's not as though no one in Washington has already thought to cut taxes and increase spending in the last 7 years. If that is really what we needed, it's hard to explain how we got here.

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In early January, The New York Stock Exchange bought the American Stock Exchange in exchange for stock. Is it any wonder that stock prices have fallen since?

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To put his stimulus plan in perspective, Bush is spending $100 billion a year in Iraq - a country whose economy is about $90 billion. He wants to pump about $150 billion into the US, where annual GDP is about $13 trillion. His annual "stimulus" in Iraq is more than 100%. To avert a recession, he wants a stimulus of about 1% for the US. If this sounds inadequate to you, don't feel alone. It failed to impress thousands of investors.

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Instead of having the candidates answer questions in debates, put them into simulations. They sit at a laptop or with a joy stick in hand, and are fed scenarios: dollar in free fall, terrorist attack in Miami, find the balance between environmental sustainability and economic prosperity, president of France marries your sister ...

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Decoding Bush’s state of the union:

“The budget that I'll submit will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012.”
This is the presidential equivalent of assuring your heirs that once you’ve been dead for 4 years, your finances should be in order.

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Bad governments come in at least two forms: they put up bureaucratic obstacles to those who are pushing beyond the current norms and / or they ignore the plight of those who are failing.

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10 percent of Americans say they are willing to have an Internet-access device implanted in their brains.

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We've turned our media into the modern coliseum, a place where celebrities can be made and then destroyed.

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I've heard more than a few folks express shock at the fact that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. "Just like Saddam's last name!" they exclaim.

And that matters. Almost as much as it matters that once we had gained our independence from King George we turned around and elected George Washington.

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We can call 411 for information. We can call 911 for emergencies. Why not a 711 number that people can call when they spot aberrant behavior - something they find odd or outrageous? Wives could report their husbands, children their parents, and anyone could call to report on those in public.

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Motherhood is a confusing performance, like painting for the legally blind, the preoccupied audience of husband and children caught up in their own drama or anomie and chronically unaware of the great effort expended on their behalf.
While philosophers love the idea of humanity, it is mothers who navigate the real mess of it, the humanity of little people who leave in their wake lost shoes and scuffed walls. A woman whose charm, beauty, and intelligence has given her a variety of romantic options suddenly finds herself confined to home with a big-headed creature who, if he could talk, would go on at length about the flavor of the couch.

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5 Feb
I think I may have just watched Barack Obama win the presidency.

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Bernard: “How else are you going to define yourself? By sitcoms and bowling leagues? Gucci shoes? Pursuing your gift is how you rescue you from anonymity.”

“But if it doesn’t make you famous, you’re still anonymous.”

“Not from yourself, you twit. This is about learning who you are. Follow your gift and when you get to where it leads you, you’ll find you. Right there. At the end of the trail.”


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Stendhal's Cures for Love was at turns amusing and provocative. (And really, there is, of course, no cure for love. It simply has to run its course.)

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You can't tell voters that religion matters and then tell them that your religion doesn't matter. Romney’s failed bid might have been just that simple.

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In simpler land based economies, dogmatic assertions structure life. In more complex information and entrepreneurial economies, dogma merely obstructs the deal making, problem solving, and creativity necessary to creating wealth.


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Ann Coulter has done well for herself. She doesn't have the looks to be a model, the wit to be a shock jock, or the intelligence to be a political pundit, but she's somehow turned these 3 short comings into a successful career.

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Bernard: You fall in love in hours and then spend years negotiating what it was you fell into.

Relationships – love in particular – are projections. We project something on to someone else. If they feel like indulging us, they play that role. If not, they rebuff us. Love is an act of playing a role that matches their inevitably misguided notion of us.

Love puts life at a level we can comprehend.

Maddie: Do you know why men are so fascinated by sports? A guy can plop down into a chair in front of the TV and in 15 seconds know the score, know who is winning and who is doing well. He can sit in a relationship for 15 years and never once have a clue about any of that. He’s not even sure he’s shooting into the right basket.

Love is the certainty that fills you with doubt.

Unreasonable is what we want, Bernie. When a woman tells a man to be reasonable, it is just her way of saying that she wants him to love her differently or better. We don’t want reasonable. We want someone who goes straight to the heart.

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We make food producers disclose contents and list nutritional information. Why not do it with pundits?

Let's say that Bill Kristol is earnestly arguing that Iran is a threat and that we should take military action against them. Whether in print or on screen, there should be a little scorecard below his name or face that indicates his track record. (e.g., Predictions Made: 308. Predictions Right: 11. "Facts" asserted: 1,052. "Facts" that could be verified: 104.)

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Bernard: Accept some coaching. You either change feedback or it changes you.

You look up the meaning of a word and what do you find? Other words. Meaning comes out of the interaction of one word with other words. Meaning comes out of relationships. This is just like life.

You don't love because deserve to be loved. You love because it gives your life meaning. No philosophy can save you from a failure to love.”


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I think it would be interesting to have a ventriloquist at my funeral. It is true that I deserve accolades - everyone does, particularly once one is dead. It's also true that I am not all that. So, my vague and fuzzy plan is to have someone deliver a wonderful and glowing eulogy while hosting a dummy (with a face like mine) on his knee - a dummy less reverent than the average funeral speaker and less inclined to spin my life in a positive direction.

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And yet today’s economy is global. We live in a post-national economy. Many Americans are about to receive checks as part of a stimulus package that gained broad support among all parties in DC. This package will be financed by loans from China and will be used to buy goods from China. Keynesian economics might not work as planned.

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The Bush Administration initially estimated that the Iraq invasion and occupation would cost $50 to $60 billion. White House economist Larry Lindsay said it would cost $100 to $200 billion and was fired for his effrontery. The total cost of the invasion and occupation is now estimated to exceed $3,000,000,000,000 - $3 trillion.

To put it in perspective, this would be equivalent to a car mechanic estimating a repair at $739 and then charging you $44,340 when you came to pick up the car. (“$3 trillion! For that much I could have bought a NEW country!”) To miss an estimate this badly is ludicrous; to miss it on such an astronomically huge amount is insane.

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Rather than dumb down their message, Buckley and Galbriath expected their audience to smarten up.
Historians will likely use the deaths of Buckley and Galbraith to signal the death of a particular kind of punditry. The voice of the right now sounds more like Rush Limbaugh than William F. Buckley; the voice of the left now sounds more like James Carville than John Kenneth Galbraith. This new media seems more designed to appeal to entrenched feelings than to challenge conventional thinking. Such a pity.

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It’s hard to imagine that women will have a better shot at the presidency than Hillary’s candidacy any time soon, and after 200+ years, they apparently still have not come up with a candidate worthy of the job. One wonders how long it’ll be before we join the 40+ countries that have already had female heads of state. (Among them Muslim countries like Indonesia and Pakistan

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Like an angry diner on a bad date cursing the waiter ("I did not order this heart break!"), the political machinery in Washington continues to try sending back the recession it did not order. But reality has its sense of humor, insisting that a prolonged recession is the perfect "cherry on top" for Bush's 8 years as leader of the free (for all) world.

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Crude oil prices continued their rise past $100 a barrel; sophisticated oil prices, by contrast, had already slipped past $150 a barrel months ago.

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Of course, the whole idea of voting is based on some fallacious notion about probability. You have better odds of buying a winning lottery ticket than you do of casting the deciding vote and I can pretty much guarantee that you are not going to win the lottery. Given that it is simply not rational to think that your vote will make a difference, only irrational people actually vote.

Wait. That seems to explain so much, doesn't it?

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I suspect that returns to capital will drop considerably over the next few decades. As returns drop, it'll be easier for entrepreneurs to get money. Companies that expect to compete on the basis of returns to capital can expect to lag an already poor performing market. By contrast, companies able to foster a culture more like that of an incubator will prosper. For them, the cheap capital will be a boon, enabling them to seed even more ventures. These companies - and the investors who hold stocks in them - will be the big winners in this coming period of cheaper capital.

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Facebook's 23 year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
With all that money, it is probably no wonder that Zuckerberg would need to create a social network site like Facebook. Many friends can be had for considerably less than a billion and someone with this much money would need some way to keep track of them all.

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Mike Huckabee bowed out of the Republican primary contest. This has nonetheless been a boon to his career. He'll be starring in a new Broadway Musical: Gomer Pyle, New Mayor of Mayberry. The drama revolves around the mayor's move to outlaw evolution in the town; that Gomer Pyle is mayor seems evidence that he has succeeded.

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Spitzer's political career may be over. It seems that the reformer met up with a high-priced prostitute when in DC. (No word yet about how aspiring politicians are supposed to tell the difference between high-priced prostitutes and cheap politicians.)
In the last couple of decades, there has been a surge in the percentage of households that own stock (whether directly or through mutual and pension funds). To leave this money sloshing around without some regulatory oversight is to invite a series of ENRON-like fiascoes in which senior executives and financial representatives easily manipulate the average investor. Imagine how ugly any sport would get after decades without a referee and you get an idea of what Wall Street could become – has at times become.

Spitzer was one of the few politicians who seemed able and wiling to go after the Wall Street’s coarser elements, protecting the average investor.

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Bernard: “The defining thing about life is that it ends. You have to keep that in mind. Most everything bad you do – from sloth to cruelty – seems to stem from forgetting this simple fact.

You take away the social constructs and what you are left with is ingenuity and love.

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Regarding CIA director George Tenet's advice to George Bush about invading Iraq: When an aging, short, overweight, bureaucrat in a suit tells you that something is "a slam dunk," what he really means is that it cannot be done.

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We should try a new kind of stimulus program. Random ATM withdrawals enhancement program (RAWEP) sounds like it would be a hit with a polity that has made gambling a multi-billion dollar industry. You go to the ATM to withdraw $100 and you just might get $1,000. Tell me that wouldn’t stimulate consumption.

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My six word meme for my life: As if I had a clue.

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All education is prediction about the future. If you teach a child about spelling, you are predicting that he'll be writing and not live in a world of massively available voice recognition systems.

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Trying to impress working class voters in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama bowled a 37. On a related note, trying to appeal to college-aged voters, McCain ran the 200 meter hurdles in just under an hour.

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Reality is a swirl of possibilities at any time – we’re always at a place of near infinite possibility that is open, to varying levels, to our influence. It is not that we create reality, at some level – we just tune in to particular channels. The channels are always there: our choices might determine whether we get horror or drama or dread or chortles. We don't so much create our own reality as choose the dimension of it we live in.

But of course, I could be way off on this. My notion that our lives are works of fiction might, itself, be a work of fiction. (And if so, have I just proved my point?)

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McCain has basically embraced Bush's record. If that is not an indictment of the man, I don't know of one. 81% of the country thinks that we're on the wrong track. 81% makes up everyone but the illiterate, those recovering from traumatic head wounds, and people who still think that all-you-can-eat buffets represent the pinnacle of progress.

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The only effective way to change a piece of a system is to change the whole system it is part of.

If Barack Obama can offer a compelling vision of the world and America's role in it, he can deliver the change he promises. If he shrinks from that - if he limits himself to defining the presidency and government only - he'll fail to change the very piece on which he focuses.

Whole system change always sweeps up the pieces with it. Piece-meal change always gets overwhelmed by un-moving, un-responsive, and larger systems. To effect change, you have to speak over the head of the what you want to change. We need a conversation about the society we want to create.

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The value of financial derivatives is estimated to be about $500 trillion. To put this in perspective, the total, global GDP is about $70 trillion. So, a swing in derivatives of just 15% will equal GDP for the entire planet.

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One can easily tell who the head of the Catholic Church is. The Pope has the tallest hat. I like the idea of using such a simple signal to indicate who is in charge and think that all organizations – from pre-schools to corporations and nation-states - should use the “taller the hat, the more authority” system.

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Last week, airlines stranded about 3.7 million travelers. (Okay, perhaps I exaggerate, but does the actual number really matter?) And yet they persist in scheduling flights for 8:07 PM arrivals, even as they miss scheduled times by a matter of days. There ought to be a rule: an airline has to be exactly on time on at least two consecutive days before they can pretend to be so accurate. Meanwhile, why not just say, “We’ll arrive sometime after 8 PM. We hope.”

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Random fictional excerpts:

* Love seemed like too strong a word to use, but it was not her idea. This was tennis. When you have nothing, they call it love. She shrugged, stretched to her full height and began her serve.

* It was not as though Oswald woke up that morning intending to start a fire in his French Literature class. But in retrospect, it seemed like the turning point in his life.

* His research into longevity was inspired by his love for Bjork. The thought of her dying – of her growing old, even – was more than he could bear. The Noble Prize seemed almost incidental.

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First of all, lowering taxes while increasing spending is a ruse. It is like paying less on your credit card while spending just as much each month. The ultimate cost is higher than "pay as you go" options.

It is worth remembering that Sweden's total tax rate is 50.5% and Mexico's is only 18%. Low taxes do not automatically translate into high incomes any more than high taxes automatically translate into low quality of life.

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Although it surprised her, Sylvia was oddly pleased by the stimulus package the Bush Administration sent out. She had not been expecting baby oil, erotica, and candles.

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There is a big brouhaha about the newest release of Grand Theft Auto. Like the earlier versions, it is violent, triggering concern among critics that this somehow degrades behavior. And nothing could be more obvious, really, than this: the history of mankind shows millennia of peace and prosperity and then, with the introduction of video games, a sudden spike in violence.

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I'm sitting somewhere the other day, noting how many people have iPods or variants on them. Why can't they double as credit cards / wallets? Why not use them for purchases? When will Apple essentially become a bank?

Your Blog Author Visits Japan

In early 2001, I made a couple of business trips to Japan. I flew through Osaka and stayed and worked in Kobe for a total of about 3 weeks. At the time, I tried to describe some of what I noticed. Here are a few excerpts.

Kobe gets larger every day. They continuously expand available land by dumping dirt from the mountains into the bay – regularly creating new islands. Eventually this small mountainous island may be a large flat continent.

If you live in Japan there is about a 99% chance that your race is Japanese. Even with odds that high, it still turns out that I’m not.

The Japanese have made more progress learning English than we have at learning Japanese. The drawback, of course, is that once you do something you risk doing it poorly. From a piece of stationary I took away a new mission statement that I wished I’d had when teaching for Covey: “I will be a gladdest thing under the sun. I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick off.” By contrast, I could feel superior because my Japanese was flawless: nonexistent, of course, but flawless. I was told about a sign over a toilet that said, “After using, please remember to flash.”

I was shopping in a department store in a mall and was a little surprised to hear American rap played as background music. I was even more surprised to hear lyrics like, "Where are my bitches? Where are my whores?" I looked around the store but the whores and bitches didn't seem to be there: I found myself surrounded by diminutive, older women, who were modestly dressed and seemingly unaware of the questions that had just been posed.

I learned that one ought not to check into a “Love Motel,” even though they are more common than regular motels. They charge by the hour and expect you to provide your own love. The use of such motels is reportedly quite common among co-workers, particularly boss and secretary. This kind of team building could explain the high levels of cooperation and teamwork evident in the Japanese work place. It might even result in more bonding than the ropes exercise.

My client figures that it costs 2.5 times as much to live in Kobe as it costs to live in Cincinnati. Housing is 7 to 8 times as much. Even electronics made by Japanese firms cost more in Japan. That might be why they feel obligated to give you more than 100 yen for every dollar: just think how bad it would be if they didn’t.

Reportedly, many Japanese rent and have little or no hope of owning a home: this in the second largest economy in the world. The average apartment is about 600 to 800 square feet and may well house three generations. It might be enough to drive you to seek refuge in a love motel.

Kobe is full of pachinko parlors. These are crammed with noisy machines, some of which look like electronic slot machines and others of which are designed to take ball bearings in one end and (if you win) send more ball bearings out the other. I guess that the really big winners set up a machine shop. These parlors are not just full of extremely loud machines; they pipe in even louder music in a vain attempt to drown out the loud machines. It is the audio equivalent of using far too much cheap perfume to cover up perfectly hideous body odor.

The Japanese are rarely fat. Apparently they consider obesity a specialty and expect sumo wrestlers obtain this state for them, the way we expect certain groups of people to take out our trash or issue stocks. There is none of this wandering around moaning about being 20 or 30 pounds overweight; one is either lean or able to break a bull’s back in a single sitting.

I wander through every experience confident of two things: I’ll do the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing is what they expect of me as an American. I find this to be such a calming belief that I’m thinking of adopting it in my daily living when I return to the States.

In the nicer restaurants the chopsticks are quite significantly tapered. This means that squeezing the middle together still leaves a significant gap at the end, making it quite difficult to actually grasp pieces of food smaller than a quarter-pound hamburger. They must do this for the amusement of the waitresses who stand discretely off to one side watching.

Stay in an American Marriott and you have by your bed a Bible and the Book of Mormon. Stay in Osaka and you have beside your bed a New Testament and the Teachings of Buddha. I wonder if you were to stay in the Galapagos Islands if you’d find a Bible and The Origin of Species.

Many Japanese practice Shinto. It is not a religion as we think of it, with rituals and regular times and days for services. Rather than believe in a God they believe that spirits from past lives are scattered throughout the living world and ought to be reverenced. This decentralization of spirit means that there is little conformity in worship. Such a religion contrasts rather starkly with the conformity in every day living. Compare this with our Christianity and a single God to worship in a society full of non-conformists and diversity. Perhaps the opposite of our daily living is what seems to us most heavenly. That might even explain the growing number of people in urban centers who have adopted environmentalism as their new religion.

While watching some older Japanese perform their rituals at a temple – a very open affair given that the temple was outdoors at a popular tourist location – I wondered what they thought of modern science. I turned from this temple to see a sign directing me to the “labatory.” Whether they’d misspelled lavatory or laboratory or simply seen the two as interchangeable, I took it as a clue as to their opinion of modern science.

The Japanese have a network throughout the country that allows one to purchase most anything. It’s not the Internet – it is vending machines. These vending machines sell hot and cold coffees and teas, and soft drinks (Calpiss and Sweat are a couple of the more popular brands – apparently they even drink with the end in mind, a very results-oriented country). I’ve been told that you can even buy such oddities as crickets and underwear through them. They also sell alcoholic beverages through vending machines. Imagine an unmanned machine dispensing beer only a block from a high school when the drinking age is 21. Imagine no students using the machine. Imagine it isn’t even imagined to be an issue. Either you have a very weird imagination or you live in Japan. The glasses and cups in which they serve drinks are enormously small – maybe 4 ounces or so. The apparent benefit to this is that, in a country with lines and congestion in even the hallways and elevators you can at least be alone at the urinal.

Red heads are more common than I would have guessed. Japanese women spend three to four times more on cosmetics than American women (measured as a percentage of income). Many of them highlight their hair, which results in a reddish tint. Add blue tinted contact lenses (and some of them do) to the blonde hair (and some do highlight it that much) and looking on you might almost think you were in California.

There is a lovely odor to this country. In a sit down restaurant they give you hot towels to wash your hands and face after you sit down. The aroma from them is subtle but quite lovely. The floors are cleaned before they even come close to getting dirty, as opposed the floors in public places in the States that are dirty before they ever get close to being clean.

Even in fast food restaurants (yes, I confess to eating at there partly for speed, partly for the sense of knowing just what to do with the food and partly to avoid paying more than $20 for a meal) they serve you with precision and grace. The napkins are neatly folded. The bags are neatly folded. The fish sandwich is neatly lined up – meat, lettuce and bun. I suspected that even the ice in my drink was floating in a neat row. These people pay more attention to a routine task than some American men pay to an entire marriage.

On the trains in Japan people face the age-old question of what to do with the eyes in such close quarters. Do you stare at strangers? Do you look beyond them through the windows to the scenery that flashes by every day? Do you look at the floor, paying more attention to your peripheral vision than to the center of your gaze? In the last few years the Japanese have solved this problem: they stare at their cell phones. At first I thought this a curious answer to the question of where to place one’s gaze. Then I learned that they were checking their email – even surfing the web. [A practice that has become common here since 2001.] Although they are repeatedly instructed to avoid using cell phones on the train, many of them do so rather compulsively. The cell phone has become the modern rosary beads of travel, worried by a motion similar to what little Italian women engaged in while traveling on horse-drawn carriages. Now, instead of receiving spiritual messages of dubious content and origin these modern travelers receive error-free transmissions of dubious value and relevance. They call it progress. And the reason that they are asked not to use their cell phones on the train is because in such close quarters the signals interfere with pace makers – occasionally causing an incident, triggering arrhythmia or even an attack. Changes in technology and culture do not take us beyond this simple truth: communication affects the heart.

Programming Self

I see it everywhere. Walking through public places, children, teenagers, and even adults are plugged in to iPods. Suddenly, I become suspicious of the term "programming."

Self is a narrative that the brain tells itself to create a coherent experience, says my daughter who is majoring in cognitive science. Does that mean that who I am is just the plastic thingy that holds together the six pack? I should be more offended, but I'm just a narrative so I let it slide.

Our culture is becoming more fragmented. In LA County, more than a 100 different languages are spoken in homes. Even people who all speak English talk about things I can't understand - esoteric is the new dialect, as religious, business, technical, and cultural groups all generate a slew of terms and concepts that require nothing less than years of immersion to understand and decode. We're becoming tribes of specialists doomed to feel alienated unless we show an interest in politics or sports or celebrities.

The media, then, becomes the narrative that holds culture together. Suddenly, the programming that is being distributed more incessantly than ever before - through iPods and Internet and TV and radio and magazines and newspapers - makes perfect sense. It feeds our need for cultural cohesion. Programming might shape young minds. Culture might be the default cult for which there is no de-programming. Or it may just be that individual lives need a narrative outside themselves that provides a sense of cohesion. In either case, those iPods seemed inevitable.

Updike on Modern America

John Updike is one of our most amazing writers. His new paperback, Terrorist, includes this brilliant little riff from one of the characters.

Bush complains about Putin turning into Stalin, but we’re worse than the poor old clunky Kremlin ever was. The Commies just wanted to brainwash you. The new powers that be, the international corporations, want to wash your brains away, period. They want to turn you into machines for consuming – the chicken-coop society. All this entertainment – Madam, it’s crap, the same crap that kept the masses zombified in the Depression, only then you stood in line and paid a quarter for the movie, where today they hand it to you free, with the advertisers paying a million a minute for the chance to mess with your heads.

...

[the TV programming – sports and comedies and talk shows] It’s slop. And Leno and Letterman, more slop. But the commercials, they are fantastic. They’re like Faberge eggs. When somebody in this country wants to sell you something, they really buckle down. They get intense. You watch the same commercial twenty times, you see how every second has been weighed out in gold. They’re full of what physicists call information.

BZZT - 21st Century Media

Concision has won.

If you are not concise, you can't be heard. There are 6 billion people on this planet and you can't expect to hold anyone's attention for more than about 30 seconds (oops - there goes another reader - already I've used too many words, taken too long to make my point).

BZZT

Couple the information age with globalization and suddenly we have so many sources to check for so many stories that we simply haven't the time to explore things in depth. We'd finish the book we're reading but we have a coffee date at Barnes & Noble and while we're there we'll likely pick up a new book or magazine.

BZZT

Even when we're stuck in traffic, we have this frenetic vibe that comes from too much caffeine and content. We're a nation of channel surfers, web surfers, replacing quiet Sufi wisdom with noisy surfer info, working our way down the food chain from wisdom to understanding to knowledge to information to data as we find ourselves less and less able to find patterns in the haystack, the do-it yourself worldview with easy-to-assemble instructions now in pieces in the floor, us with no instructions, and a sense that we'll never figure out how it all fits together.

BZZT

Something big is happening, likely, but we haven't time to sort it out. Instead we play an increasingly difficult game of keeping up with data streams, emails, instant messaging, phone calls, news feeds. We're living in an age where information has displaced understanding. We all speculate and when we're tired of listening to ourselves, we have hundreds and thousands of options from which to choose for professional speculation.

BZZT

Universities and think tanks and research labs are full of highly intelligent people who speak too slowly, who consider too many variables, who talk in careful and nuanced tones that make them undesirable for the ratings whores who've kidnapped our media. When a signal is pulled out of the noise, it all takes too long to explain.

BZZT

Our media was never designed to convey understanding anyway. It was designed to hold our attention between commercials, open up our minds to messages that look alluring before suddenly switching us from news about our finances to promises to cure erectile dysfunction, getting us just when we’re vulnerable and open to new information. The content is there just to soften us up, so to speak. It was never meant to be taken seriously.

BZZT

Already I've taken too long. Already I've said too much. Already, 83.2% of the readers who began this posting have clicked through to another site, one better geared to the mysterious impulses that Freud tried to explain, sites that explain conquest, competition, sex, social standing, and the celebrities who embody these and other impulses.

BZZT

Charlie surfs. Nowadays, everybody does.

Globalization Through the Lens of 2 Million Year-Old Genes

Q: Why do men have bigger brains than dogs?
A: So they won't hump women's legs at parties.

Jesus taught about the dangers of the world and flesh. Csikszentmihalyi, who I would judge to be an agnostic based on his writings and conversations with him, warns about how capitulation to social conformity (i.e., the world), or genetic impulse (the flesh) distracts from the engagement that characterizes our most productive, creative, and enjoyable moments. Doctors tell us that genetic impulse can be a misleading guide in a world of abundance - an environment with more sugars, fats, alluring foods, and drugs than at any time in evolution's long history.

Whether it is drawn from religion thousands of years old or research only days old, the advice seems to be the same: distrust the genetic impulse that would turn us into rotund, chemically-dependent, serial adulterers or serial killers, leaving behind us a trail of broken promises, broken relationships, and broken zippers.

Yet the genetic impulse need not trumpet its influence. It can be subtle. We're wired for relationships, not abstractions. We're wired to respond to the individual rather than the statistical norm. Research has indicated that we're more likely to respond to the plight of an individual ("This little girl is an orphan. You can feed her for only $2 a day.)") than to a group ("This people has been through a devastating catastrophe. It has left thousands orphaned. Please help with a donation of $2 a day.") This genetic impulse can be at least as harmful as the impulse for excess food or drugs.

What this means in practical terms is that Princess Di still gets more news coverage than 8 million dying each year because of extreme poverty. Paris Hilton's ... well, you get the point. We're absorbed in personalities and their dramas, the resolution of which will have no impact, and ignore issues that might actually make a difference to real lives, lives that appear to us in more abstract form.

We do make some attempt to warn - even legislate against - the genetic impulse when it comes to issues like rape, obesity, alcoholism, drugs, and violence. We seem less generally interested in warning against genetic impulses when they have to do with the alpha male impulse for place, or the tribal instincts that disregard the abstract issues that define our fate in a world of global interconnections and dominoes that fall over the horizon of time and space. Yet it is likely that history will show these genetic impulses to have robbed us of more years and more quality of life than those against which we've placed prohibitions.

The Opiate of the Masses

Marx only said that religion is the opiate of the masses because he died before the invention of television.

This week I found myself playing pop culture catch up, sitting in a hotel room channel surfing. What I again found most dismaying is that the most inane shows are the so called news shows. In depth coverage of Paris Hilton's battle with depression and spirituality dominated. On news shows.

I realize that this drives ratings, but it rather reminds me of what has become quaint advice from mothers to daughters. "Sure, all the boys like to date girls who are easy, but when it comes time to marry, they won't be interested in you." One can almost hear the editors telling the business executives, "Sure, the audiences will all tune in if we cover inane topics that titillate but are of no consequence. But when it comes time to choose politicians or policy, they won't be interested in our station. When they want something serious, they'll go elsewhere." But what if all the news stations have become tabloids? What happens to democracy then?

Dysfunctional Cultures & The Leader Nerd

Too often, we trust only members of our own culture. This is particularly problematic when we're stuck in a dysfunctional culture in need of change. At such times we might do better to follow someone outside of the culture, even someone who seems like a nerd.

One well-deserved reason that corporations have become the dominant institution is their approach to culture. Within the world of political speeches, culture is revered as something to preserve. Within the world of business speeches, it is more often criticized as something to change.

To me, the most important element of culture is the “cult” portion. Often, a particular culture is defined by a shared notion of the world, shared rituals, shared values. These notions and values don’t need to help the group succeed in the world. In fact, the dismal failure resulting from adherence to such cultures may actually lead to a bonding as the group discusses the ways in which the world is unfair or unreasonable in its demands.

What intrigues me about candidates like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich and, most notably, Ralph Nader is that they have the potential to be real leaders. They aren’t pandering to the culture, telling people things like “You deserve your big SUV” or “You deserve to be a single parent.” Typically less savvy about the power of popular culture than the demands of reality, such candidates are interesting because they point to the inherent flaws in our culture.

Too often, we confuse leadership with popularity. Leadership suggests two things: you’re taking a group somewhere they’ve not yet been and people are following. Most often, candidates pledge allegiance to our cultish practices, whether it is burning witches or burning carbon-based fuels. Less often do candidates show potential for leadership by actually going somewhere new, by challenging our cultish practices. Too often we don’t really want leaders who stretch us to move to new places. Rather, we’re looking for someone cool to hangout with at the local diner.

Sadly, too few candidates have the courage to speak out against dysfunctional cultures like the inner-city black culture, the culture of consumption as entertainment, or the culture of entitlement. Of course, to do so would be to be critical of, and therefore alienate, the poor, the rich, and the middle-class. I guess in that sense, politics is just like high school: it’s never cool to point out that what the rest of the gang thinks of as cool isn’t actually all that cool. In fact, I think that they call the people who do that nerds, a group groups generally avoid.

But nerds have made marvelous leaders in other domains, like science and technology. Perhaps once politics is taken more seriously, when people begin to realize that the consequences of good or bad policy are actually a matter of life or death, nerds will get the audience they deserve. Until then, we'll be stuck here in the diner, hanging out with the cool kids who pretend to be leaders as we spin on our bar stool, confusing motion with progress.

Force vs. Power

The less power a person feels he has, the more likely he is to use force. This seems to me a constant within communities and across time.

Kids in ghettoes who feel like they have no options, no power to actually create a life that looks desirable are more likely to engage in violence, to use force. Primitive cultures that have little power to overcome the elements are more likely to engage in war. In some earlier cultures, men had a 60% chance of dying in warfare. Communities with less developed economies are more violent places.

We see this to a far lesser extent with frustrated managers. Lacking the power to achieve particular objectives, they resort to threats.

There is, of course, more to violence than just this variable. Cultural momentum, genetic tendency, greed, and anger all contribute to violence. But the variable that seems to me most defining is this matter of power. As people become more able to effect the changes they want, to live the life they value, they are less inclined to use force.

Sex & Violence

I saw that Saw III was the top grossing film over the weekend. From what I've read, it falls into the category of the “can't be too graphic" horror movies that sound about as appealing to me as a trip to a dentist who doesn't budget for anesthetic. Putting aside personal preferences, it again brings up the question of movie ratings.

We expect our children will eventually engage in graphic sex and hope that they're never involved in graphic violence - either as thug or victim. Even in very violent cultures, on average there are more acts of sex than acts of violence. A sane community will do what it can to eradicate violence and regulate sex. But only a crazed community would work to eradicate sex and merely regulate violence. Such a community would soon disappear. So how is one to make sense of our movie ratings?

Graphic sex is rated X while graphic violence is rated R, suggesting that we're actually less squeamish about killing than procreation. This odd priority impacts policy.

California has a proposition on the ballot (Prop 83?) that will regulate sex offenders, limiting them from living within a certain distance of parks and strapping them with an electronic bracelet. Oddly, such measures are not first taken against those with a violent streak, but sex offenders - a loosely defined group that includes 18 year-old men who've had sex with a 17 year-old girlfriend. Yet someone who is out after serving time for second or third-degree murder, or someone who has a history of repeatedly violent acts, escapes these odd provisions.

Molestation is not a trivial thing, but it is certainly easier to recover from than murder. So why the special provision against the prospect of molestation but no corresponding provision against the prospect of other violent crimes, crimes that leave physical as well as emotional scars? Could it be that years of accepting the values implied in our movie rating system has distorted our perception of threats?