Sects and Violence

I want to talk today about what "Islam" means. I am not a muslim and I am a complete outsider. I see danger in some ideas associated with Islam and beauty in some of the ideas. I see people saying Islam is peace. And I see mobs and violence associated with it. And so I think it's long overdue to ask whether we are all referring to the same thing when we refer to "Islam".

From what I can see, Islam means peace to most Muslims I know. And to some Muslims, it means violence visited upon other people for various different reasons: some political, some moral, always opportunistic, and always justified by some grandiose vision (a story). And the latter part is a bit sticky since the spectacle and tragedy creates a more vivid impression in the mind than the many Muslim neighbors we know and work with.

Let's Talk About Sects, Baby

Let me tell you about a trick of the human mind. It is a tendency for non-Muslims to think about Islam as one enormous monolith with complete homogeneity of belief and action. But Muslims are 1.6 Billion+ in number. And the idea of one great Islam doesn't withstand scrutiny.

Every religious or philosophical movement has within it a manifold of sects. People just can't seem to agree on things. Take any belief system and you can break it down to subgroups based on the disagreements.

To provide specific examples, I have collected here an accounting of the major religions I could think of and their sub-sects scraped from Wikipedia:

  • Chrisitanity: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical,...
  • Judaism: Rabinnic, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Humanistic,...
  • Hinduism: Vaishnavism, Shaivism, Shaktism, Smartism,...
  • Buddhism: Therevada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen,...

And as for Islam? Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Salafi, Wahhabi,...

There are no incidents of complete uniform belief within any belief system. Humans are messy, sloppy creatures subject to entropy. Our brains are meat-machines driven by huge variations in chemistry. Fuzzy logic? check. Non-logical leaps? check. Context-dropping? check. Mistakes of thinking? check. Hormone-driven teenagers? check.

You know why clear thinking is beautiful when you hear it? Because it is rare. Reason is slow and requires discipline and it is always impressive to hear an idea that is simple and clear and true.

Aside: Beware of Mob Think

There is a sort of situation worth mentioning where uniformity does arise... where an idea can become so loud that it drowns out other ideas. When human beings are in a mob driven by fear and anger whipped into a frenzy, we have shown ourselves to be capable of frighteningly uniform non-thinking. The Rwandan genocide comes to mind. Nazi Germany comes to mind.

People are capable of their ugliest actions when they blindly react rather than stepping back and thinking about things rationally, and acting accordingly. And, in the case of Rwanda and Nazi Germany, both resulted in the creation of cultures that slaughtered unimaginable numbers.

Labels Fail Us

Back to the main point. The labels: Islam. Muslim.

There is a visual that Sam Harris mentioned in his chat with Neil Tyson about what a Christian imagines when they find out that a person can be painted with the term "Atheist":

they think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you are an atheist... It's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk and you just walk up and lie down in it... that you just conform perfectly to their expectations of how clueless you must be of their context.

Don't we do this with "Islam"... just a little? We imagine Islam as one thing. We imagine Muslims as one people who conform perfectly to some expectation.

The labels fail Muslims and the labels fail non-Muslims alike. The labels expose non-Muslims to the mistake of thinking in "Us vs. Them" terms with Muslims as the other. And the labels expose Muslims to taking a defensive posture where "We are under attack" by an unjust world who will not accept them. The labels expose Muslims to having their fear and frustrations manipulated.

But these are just stories and they are divisive ones. These are the ones that deliver us into the hands of Neo-fascists. And we don't want those hands anywhere near us so it's time to abandon these stories, which divide us.

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Beyond Us Vs. Them

We need some new narratives to give us hope and something to strive for.

Instead of Us vs. Them... What if we just thought of this whole mess as a bunch of people with a bunch of mixed-up ideas and some of them are poison?

Rather than considering Islam as one set of ideas interpretable only one way, we can remember that ideas are subject to fashion trends. They are subject to trending upward or downward at any given point in time.

Here are ideas I would love to see trend upward:

  • Non-Muslims reflect and realize that Muslims are our neighbors and friends and co-workers. Most of them want to live their lives and raise their families. We act accordingly. We love our neighbors.
  • The world notices that Muslims have their versions of Goebbels and Hitler. And the world will need to put these tyrants down in exactly the same way: total war ending in unconditional surrender. This is the only way to defeat evil that has decided to wage war: Force met with overwhelming force.
  • Muslims embrace freedom of speech and dissent by all, especially other Muslims, and Non-Muslims unilaterally choose to stop disrespecting Muhammad because it's nearly always a gimmicky cheap shot that is not doing anybody any good.
  • Muslims come out in support of liberal values. We will support and encourage these people because they have right on their side. Further, we work to encourage the conservatives among Muslims to respect the rights of all human beings alike (male, female, gay, straight), just as we do with non-Muslim conservatives. Live and let live becomes the universal norm.
  • "Islam means peace" becomes a statement of intention... a movement and a mantra owned by Muslims: they are defiant, vocal, and visible movement of the majority.
  • Secularism: All people of all religions work to keep their religions separate from the state. There are no state religions. Just respect and protection of rights for all beliefs and creeds.

The only way we can do this is to see the bigger "Us". We, as humans, need to see Universal principles describing fundamental rights. In other words: the conditions under which we are able to live with one another.

We don't need to be innovators who must define fundamental rights for the first time. We have the shoulders of giants to stand on. But as I said, ideas are subject to fashion and we do have to keep these ideas trending upward. It's constant upkeep... yes. There is no magic bullet to make humans respect rights for all time.

But it's good work if you can get it. And as always... Discipline Equals Freedom.

Speaking Softly About Rape

A woman has been raped. Everyone knows the name of the assailant: Brock Turner. And the discussion following has been touching and shocking all at the same time.

What follows are my thoughts about what I have seen online.

In case anything I write below creates a doubt, and I wouldn't write that unless I have seen some serious grandstanding and moralizing (and un-friendings) going on, lets establish some of my positions:

  • Brock Turner is a rapist and he should be going to prison for as long as the law permits.
  • The fact that the victim got so drunk that she became unconscious doesn't justify any part of his despicable action, no matter how many minutes were involved.
  • The Victim deserves no shame at all for what happened.

Okay... let's talk about this.

A Measured Voice

One voice that is measured is the voice of the victim, who has elected not to have her name splattered all over the media. I respect that decision. I'll humanize her by calling her "Victoria".

I have read the full text of Victoria's statement to the court and to her assailant. I was moved by its graphic visuals of the scene in the hospital following her shocking awakening to discover that her head was strapped to a gurney and she had no idea where she was or why she had pine needles in her hair. What followed was the alienating indignity of having her body further probed for documentation.

And as if all of that isn't enough, she has to deal with the aftermath of all of this in her head. And she has to figure out how to continue living her life without breaking down and without flying into a rage. And she and her boyfriend have to deal with an alien new reality.

When it comes down to it, there is no price that can be paid to settle this debt by the rapist, Brock Turner. There's no way to get square again. And frankly, he owes her a serious apology and one that is not diluted by the long filibuster that is in his full statement.

What You Are Not Permitted to Mention

I read the Victoria's statement and I think I "get it". I think she used every bit of her will to summon love in her heart to have written so patiently. I am moved and inspired to the full possibilities of the best version of myself.

But then I open the BookFace and I find I am assaulted repeatedly by reposts and words from people I know which seek to impose constraints upon what we are allowed to say aloud and what certain words mean. It's feels like I am being shouted down when I haven't even said anything.

And the conclusion I am left with is that I am someone who doesn't "get it".

We are apparently not allowed to talk about how it is inadvisable to get drunk. Don't even think about it, the assailant named it as the primary contributing factor for him. The fact of a woman being drunk, even to the point of passing out, is not justification for rape, says practically everyone knowing fully that they have the truth on their side.

I don't disagree but that doesn't mean we aren't talking past one another here. If we consider the many factors that are ingredients in this terrible, horrible, unspeakable incident there are two that things that specific people could have done differently that would have changed the situation:

  • Brock Turner could have acted like a gentleman
  • Victoria could have consumed less (or no) inebriating substance

One might be tempted to make the case that I am a heartless and cruel human being who is giving moral shelter to the assailant and re-victimizing the victim if I mention the second point.

But if there are multiple factors that could have been changed to nudge the situation, why not permit ourselves to reconsider them all? After all, any incident is a function of its contributing factors.

This is an idea that is hammered in motorcycle safety class. They present to you multiple scenarios where a crash occurs, and in each one you are required to identify the reasons a crash occurred. The object lesson is that most crashes happen because of a complex of reasons and rarely because of one single cause.

I think we are doing a disservice to Victoria and to this entire discussion if we choose to ignore that "opportunity" is a contributing factor to crime. And the rapist Brock Turner would have had much less opportunity when faced with a sober woman with her full wits about her, resisting with everything she had.

I wish so much for her that she could have resisted. And for this reason, I wish that people didn't drink when they party.

I don't think it justifies Brock Turner's act of rape to say that. I don't think it has to mean that we hold him with any less blame.

AN EDUCATION CAMPAIGN!!!!!

But as you can see, I have to speak very carefully in order to say that.

There is something going on in the broader culture around rape. I would call it a campaign to educate except for the sensation of being SHOUTED DOWN BY PEOPLE YELLING AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS!!!

From what I can gather, the shouting is way of reacting meaningfully in the aftermath of a senseless tragedy that we do not wish to compound by minimizing the victim's choices as well. The shouting is a ham-fisted attempt at unequivocal expression of solidarity with Victoria and vocal opposition to the tendency to blame the victim and to show them less support than they deserve.

I think the motivation is noble but the methods are off-putting.

It feels to me like we are trying so hard to control the thoughts of the people around us. We are telling the others around us what to think, and in what exact words. And more importantly, we are making decisions about what must NEVER be thought or said following a rape incident and that we will bring shame down upon anyone who dares to use the forbidden words.

Well, I have to be honest: I shut down when I read words that come on too strong with the thought policing and shaming. And I don't feel good about these interactions. I think that online discussion has the capacity to make us better when we are able to put our ideas together. But it's not the case when faced with this ugly feeling of being shouted down. It isn't the online experience I want to have and it's probably not what you're after either.

Well... Part of the beauty of our age is that we each have our own space to write what we notice. We all have the chance to write the Internet we would like to read. And, hopefully I have written this without shouting and without giving moral cover to Turner.

Speaking Softly

Please take this to heart: When we say things softly and with a heart full of love, we can trust that we will be heard.

We have a term for the experience of reading or hearing something that makes sense: it "resonates". I like to visualize the words echoing softly in the heart and mind of the reader/listener.

We can choose unilateral disarmament. We can choose to speak softly and trust the echoes to make sensible new ideas a part of the way we think and live. And maybe if we do this consistently, we will finally get to have the online experience we desire: sharing ideas, connecting people, and changing things for the better.

Think Bigger

To Victoria

I hear you. I am so sorry for what has happened to you. And, I hope you know that you have touched me with your strength and your compassion.

You are connecting people and changing things for the better. Thank you.

You CAN Choose Your Family

In a recent conversation with friends I heard that you can't choose your family. Strange thing is... I have chosen them.

In my typical know-it-all manner, I shared this thought. My own peculiar history has allowed me the privilege of choosing them: I am the prodigal son in my family. I un-chose them and barely showed up for years and years. I pretty much missed out on the infant years for my niece, Chloe.

I regret missing that time but I am pretty sure it was something that had to happen. In my post-college days, I had a lot of blame for my dad, and I didn't like pressure from my family. I had bad boundaries until I took responsibility for my life and shed any notion that anyone was to blame for anything from here on out.

Taking responsibility for yourself means caring more about what you have chosen than what others think of it. It means acting based on your choice rather than pressure from others. It means recognizing that when others speak up to share their opinions out of concern, that you can listen without having to do anything about it.

You never need to decide or do anything right away. Urgency is often an illusion. So is authority.

There is freedom in knowing that you do not have to do anything and that you don't have to be concerned with what others think of you. Ironically, one of the freedoms is that you can choose to care what they think of you and to enjoy it. Also, you can choose to care about them and put the focus on all of the things that you admire of them and forgive the areas where they might need to grow. This is what I mean when I say I have chosen my family.

Most people don't make an active choice in regards to their family. They act out of resentment that they didn't have a choice in the matter of which people they grew up with and, if the disagreement is acrimonious, they opt-out. In America, it's your right to do so.

What we may not realize is that we can also opt-in any time we want to whatever extent we want. Contrary to conventional wisdom, We are not our brother's keeper, but we have the option to be if we choose. Or we can choose merely to be our brother's fellow traveler. If we're lucky, we will get to be our brother's friend.

I recognize now that we don't have to go through all of the estrangement of becoming a prodigal son to choose our families. I did so because I had some growing to do and it was easier to take responsibility when I thought no one would be there to catch me if I fell. I had to learn to stand on my own by doing it.

I am grateful that my brothers and sisters didn't hold it against me that I was a stranger for so long. Being persistent but not pushy, they welcomed me back whenever I saw them and I eventually I started showing up consistently and I am so much the richer for it.

They are part of nearly every week of my life now. I get to visit with them every Sunday. I get to sing with my nieces and chase the nephews around. We eat great food, usually cooked by one of my brothers. We tell stories and laugh.

We have all chosen one another, even though we grew up together and it was someone else's choice to unite us.

We have chosen to unite ourselves.

Neil Tyson on Not Fighting in the Trenches on Sam Harris Podcast

Theme

I try to take the high road. I'm not interested in fighting in the trenches.

My notes from a fascinating chat between Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sam Harris. I was struck with Tyson's extreme discipline for focusing on his fundamentals of education and finding playful ways to talk about science in the context of things people already care about (pop culture).

He's a man who has decided what he wants his contribution to be and seems really skilled at avoiding the rest of the BS. Following are notes that I took from a second listen to the podcast.

Notes

  • Tyson: People care about science when it is playfully folded into things they already care about
  • Harris: The boundary between communicating science to the public and doing science in the act of thinking out loud about data is very thin, if it exists at all

Tyson

  • Scientific discoveries become public interest. Examples: "Big Bang", "Black Hole" - official terms that are strings of single syllable words to describe complex phenomena that become part of the lexicon. Fun for the public to follow. The idea is graspable because the words don't get in the way.
  • I was struck with how Tyson cuts through the bull and avoids controversy. "Call a climate expert. Don't call me.". I don't occupy any platform.
  • Skeptic vs. Denier defined: Skeptic: doubts claim and convinced by evidence. Denier: doubts claim and doubts evidence.
  • You don't see me debating people. I'd rather just educate them in the first place so that the debate isn't even necessary.

Tyson: Platforms and Training the Electorate

  • Tyson's fundamental position: There are objective truths out there that you ought to know about and I as an educator have a duty to alert you to those objective truths. What you do politically in the face of those truths is your business.
  • Defines someone with a "platform" as: trying to get people to see the world that they do. Including politically.
  • I never say anything against a politician. Why? Because they have electorates that support them.
  • My target is the population that are following statements that are objectively false. I see it as my duty to train the electorate how think about this information and once they are trained they can do what they want.
  • As an educator, it is a task to educate people so that they can judge what is true and what is not.
  • Harris: You're preserving your effectiveness as a communicator and educator. (Tyson: yes, that's an accurate statement)

Tyson on Religion/Politics

  • Your religion is a belief system and does not cue off of objective truths. Otherwise we would call it science. It's your right to hold religious beliefs.
  • However... Governmental Decision... Laws need to be secular in a country that preserves religious freedom.

Harris: Problem with Atheism

  • Atheism defines itself in opposition: We don't call ourselves "non-astrologers". And if it became ascendant, we would talk about reason, evidence, common sense, and science to neutralize those claims without ever defining ourselves in opposition to astrology
  • Atheism as a term has no philosophical content

Tyson on Label Atheist

  • I don't do anything to dodge the term
  • if you require that I give myself a label... closest is "agnostic".
  • would rather have no label at all
  • label is an intellectually lazy way to assert you know more about someone than you actually know and therefore don't have to engage them in conversation.
  • Oh you're an atheist? And bam, in comes a whole portfolio of expectations on what you will say, what your behaviors and attitudes are...
  • dictionary definition is irrelevant... dictionary does not define words, but rather describes them as they have come into meaning
  • there is conduct that [outspoken atheists] exhibit that I do not... this captures the sense of what atheist is defined by those most visible
  • interesting: "Goodbye" an historical abbreviation of "God be with you.".
  • Uses AD/BC vs. CE/BCE.

  • Until he no longer hears, "I thought you were an atheist"... no labels.

  • Harris interjects with this insightful and humorous assessment: Atheist given meaning mostly in circles of religious dogmatists... they think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you are an atheist... It's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk and you just walk up and lie down in it... that you just conform perfectly to their expectations of how clueless you must be of their context.

References

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) | Twitter

The Impossibility of Saying Goodbye To The Dying (and Shrine Focus, and Soul Searching)

On Friday evening, I got home from a short road trip to New York and Liz needed to talk about Canobeans, her 20-year old cat. Canobeans had pretty much stopped eating, was getting dehydrated, and was having trouble with using the litter box. We made the decision to schedule with Lap of Love to have her euthanized because her health was accelerating downhill.

Saturday wasn't a blur for me but it still went much too quickly. The Vet from Lap of Love was scheduled for 1pm. I doted on Canobeans with nearly every free moment before 1pm taking breaks here and there. I brushed her. I talked to her. I fed her water. I told her how much we loved her and what a gift she was to us.

I didn't say goodbye. It's just too hard and too sad. I'd fall to pieces. Maybe that would have been appropriate.

What Do You Do In the Final Moments?

Rest well, Canobeans.

What the heck can you do you make final moments in life feel like they are enough? I'm not sure that it can be achieved.

In the final moments, when you are trying your best to say and show the depth of your love and loss, nearly everything you do is symbolic. Everything you do feels totally futile. Your gestures can never make up for the fact that there will never again on this earth be what we had together. It's like trying to pay a sort of life-debt that can never be repaid.

But you do it anyway. You stop assessing and stay in the moment. You laugh when you can. You remember to breathe when your body forgets to do it for you.

While Canobeans was still alive, I focused on doing things she enjoyed so that she could know that we loved her.

Now that she is gone, it helps for me to do small gestures to express my gratitude for how much richer my life was because I had this other being to care for and to enjoy.

A Shrine as A Focus

A Shrine

Liz and I setup this shrine. It started with just flowers... an impulse buy at the store. And we put them in a vase in the bedroom, where Canobeans spent the last year. I added candles, and a cat toy. Liz put her paw print mold next to everything. And then we picked some photos to print and stuck them in frames. And we arranged it all on a very small table.

We light candles when they go out. They are wonderful to look at, day or night. A small fire that requires some care to keep it burning from time to time. This is good catharsis for us. Candle light is a wonderful focus for just sitting and being. For just accepting that what is, is.

A struggle that is particular to me in grieving is that the feeling of the person/cat I just lost slips away from me. It's not that I want to hold on and never let go. But I don't want to just "get on with my life" either. I want to keep a space for pondering and remembering. This is a good time for soul-searching and thinking about life. I am not looking to rush it along.

The ritual of keeping the candles going and pausing at this little shrine helps me to remember. It gives me a bit of space in my very-busy head. I think it's because I would have to do all of this remembering in my head if we didn't have the shrine but now that we have set it up it makes it easier for us because we don't have to keep it all in our heads and hearts. We can look upon our love and loss from the outside rather than only gazing inward.

In The Aftermath, Soul Searching Questions Abound

Getting space in my head is crucial right now also because another struggle I face are the manifold questions that arise in the aftermath of putting a pet to rest. Soul-searching questions are inevitable. Try as I might to trust our decisions, I find that I revisit the questions again and again and I have to justify that what I did was the right choice. All of the reasons are there, but getting to an alignment between feeling and reason isn't something I can force. It takes time. I have to trust that too.

I find myself thinking about everything that matters just before death and the things that matter in the aftermath. All that matters is that there was love. And all love is unique and beautiful and fleeting. Sometimes love is just brushing hair or fur. Sometimes love is cleaning poop off of something that shouldn't have poop on it. For certain, love is missing something/someone you are used to interacting with daily.

I find myself pondering eternity. The great unponderable. A sensation of being human is that our existence feels continuous and eternal: All I know is that I have always been and it feels like I shall always be. It is alien to imagine that I will not exist some day. I don't believe in an afterlife but sometimes it's a "pretty little lie". Either way there is good news: Either I am wrong and will continue on, or I am right that I will no longer exist and I probably won't know it anyway.

If I'm wrong I hope I get to see Canobeans and all of my loved ones again some day.

Unplugging All The Things Is Just The First Step

The things we used to be able to get away from by unplugging them now all have batteries so we will need to plan to run those down as well to get away from the din and the distractions.

Playing the Long Game: Attacking Liberty's Antagonists

One of the key takeaways from reading The Aristotle Adventure is that people tend to suppress ideas that they find threatening. And the forms that the threats take vary in subtlety and violence.

  • Direct physical threats to books are rare.
  • Physical threats to people by mobs, assassins, and inquisitors was much more common
  • Other forms of threats included: ostracism, ex-communication, denial of access to books (this is back before public libraries) and other scholars, loss of income, banishment, and intereference with careers.

In the 1800 years that the works of Aristotle had to survive, they had to be copied by hand again and again in order to do so. The printing press was not invented by Johannes Gutenberg until 1450. Before this, copying was a tedius, error-prone, and expensive process. As a result, the subtle challenges listed above present severe existential threats to a body of work.

Many of the tactics listed above are archaic. The Catholic church of current day doesn't have the pervasive influence on government that in the days of monarchy based on the "divine right of kings," following fall of the Roman empire through the Renaissance and the Scientific revolution.

Of the subtler tactics listed in the final bullet, many of these can still be employed in our current day and age in university settings, and government research institutions, and the think tanks funded by the government. (I'd say they could also be employed in corporations, but most corporations are pragmatic rather than ideological). Ostracism, loss of income, and intereference with career are all real threats that can be used against a person that a bully wants to silence. This helps to silence one speaker but The Internet has made it harder than ever to silence someone completely. Although I suspect that most of us feel pretty frustrated with how to make oneself heard in all of the noise.

In spite of how hard it is to be silenced completely, the work to maintain the current state of liberty is still crucial. We must fight to keep what we have attained by aggressively exposing and denouncing those who would hack at the support pillars of free speech.

We can also fight by choosing better stewards for the machinery which protects our liberty. The source of many attacks on freedom of speech come directly from government.

The administrators of government have unique privileges to arrest people, tax them, and drag them down with legal or regulatory procedures. They have many levers of intimidation. They can do so for seemingly arbitrary reasons. This is why we want the most long-sighted stewards that are willing to take the job making leadership decisions in our governments.

Government shouldn't just be a job with prestige. It should be a sacred trust.

This is also why we do not want anyone with a tactical ideological agenda in power. A tactical ideological agenda can come from religious sources but can also originate from any kind of pseudo-scientific notion that attempts to survive challenge by any means other than reason. For the latter, imagine a new economic order or social justice agenda.

(side note: I'm all for efforts to connect people and foster acts of kindness, but I prefer these to be organized independent of the government and without government funding)

What I'm saying in short is that to vote "on the issues", for a candidate whom will do whatever it takes to get some thing done is to play a dangerous game with a system of safeguards which is responsible for protecting us all from the ugliest and most opportunistic power mongers.

We should be voting on fundamentals. This will do the most to protect the foundation of our liberty: the freedom to hold an idea, to express it, and to act upon it so long as you do not violate the rights of another.

Here is the guidance from the founding fathers as I understand it in simple fundamentals: Limit the exercise of government power to ensure the maxiumum liberty of choice and action to each person.

Although NONE of the top 3 Presidential candidates are exponents of this kind of restraint, this is what we need to look for and support even if they belong to a third party. It's time to fire the two largest political parties in the USA. They do not care about liberty.

References

Many of these notes are from The Aristotle Adventure, by Burgess Laughlin.

News is Not Information And Liberty Needs Church/State Separation

It's easy to view #muslims as a monolithic other. But 1-billion plus others is a lot of people.

Agreement is Rare

I want to take us into a thought experiment in the lives we know best... our own. Consider any ism that you have ever been a part of. Libertarianism, Vegetarianism, Christianity-ism.

Now take a random sample set of yourself and any 1 or 2 other people whom you can think of that have self-identified under that label.

Then ask yourself the question: "did we agree on everything that fell under the principles of that ism? Did we agree on how those principles translate into action?"

No matter what ism, you will not find 100% agreement on principles and implications. The more people you add, the lower the overlapping level of agreement in the massive venn-diagram.

One Billion Ideological Carbon Copies?

How then does this apply to a billion such people? It becomes impossible to believe that they see exactly the same things as true and important and worthy of action. Except for the sorts of things that most human beings have in common:

  • we want to live our lives
  • we look out for the well-being of those we care about

We, as non-muslims, can take a moment to fully take in the heterogenity of the full body of muslims. Not all of them will be conservative or bigotted or sexist. Some of them may not even care about politics: live and let live.

Ideas come and go in perpetual motion and there is constant change on which ones are fashionable.

Our mainstream media do a bad job of representing reality in a statistically correct way. Anything that gets reported on seems to be statistically prevalent to our easily-fooled psyches. People who want to just live their lives are not news. People getting along with one another is not news.

We have this conception that "news" is information. And while this is true, as far as statistical impressions go, it is total misinformation.

Regardless, I'd like to take heart in the news story listed below under References (1), "Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion".

The separation of church and state is a fundamental principle with huge implications to liberty. Every innovation, including the ones made in the realm of liberty, begins as heresy against the mainstream fashion that came before. Heresy is attacked with prejudice by any state that is involved in policing your ideas.

We must support the freedom to express ideas and therefore we must support any effort no matter how small toward states and political movements that compose themselves as independent of religion. We must support secular politics and we must denounce and resist any effort to marry state with religion as an attack upon our lives and liberty.

So what can we do?

People in the mainstream media can certainly do something: stop putting forward the loud obnoxious conservative bigot muslims as their "authentic" voices. You are not an authority on one billion plus people.

People who are not media can stop watching CNN and Fox News. They are not in the business of informing you. You are not "learning" when you hear their interpretations. Remember: They are in the business of selling your eyes to advertisers.

References

1: Tunisian Islamists Ennahda move to separate politics, religion | Reuters
2: Maajid Nawaz

Adjust Your Perspective: Know Who The Enemy Is

"The enemy is out there," I said, pointing out the window to the world beyond. "The enemy is all other competing companies in your industry that are vying for your customers. The enemy is not in here, inside the walls of this corporation. The departments within and the subsidiary companies that all fall under the same leadership structure -- you are all on the same team. You have to overcome the 'us versus them' mentality and work together, mutually supporting one another."

"...It's about the bigger, strategic mission

From Chapter 5: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

Tactics for Reducing Stress and Solving Sticky Problems - A Grab Bag for Hard Times

  • add more time or money: they say time is money. can you add one or the other to reduce pressure?
  • visualize unknowns in detail to bring them into existence. don't worry if it feels arbitrary.
  • adjust your long-term perspective: what are the chances that anything about this situation will matter to you at the end of your life?
  • adjust your identity: the current situation and its outcome will not say anything important to you to the people that matter.
  • focus on contribution rather than achievement: did you make a change for the better? good. was it enough? who can say.
  • eliminate and prioritize: it may be that you have to aim to do less, but better.
  • get help and work it out together: are you effective in using your team members and partner teams as assets toward the larger strategic vision?
  • disentanglement/simplification: assess whether you are treating multiple problems/factors as single, unified, factors. Things that are complex when taken together may be much simpler when you understand that they are separate but related concepts.
  • focus your decision making on action selection and then execute. if no action is available, switch tasks to something where there is action available and revisit the current subject later.
  • talk. this is another form of giving form to the unknown. you were given this task by someone. ask this person questions until you understand the whats and the whys. ask people you trust about the things that concern you. you will convert unknowns into obstacles, which can be avoided or mitigated or incorporated into the solution.
  • don't follow too closely and you won't have to rely on your reflexes and attention. this is an expansion on time and money. on the highway you can choose your following distance. follow too closely and you end up having to react quickly to the driver ahead. a poverty mindset often keeps us from giving large following distance. know that no matter how many cars lane change into the space ahead of you, you will get where you are going.

Parents: Be Aware... You May Be Keeping Up With The Jones's Kids

How much money are we willing to spend on our kids? How much time? How much effort? And how much sacrifice?

Raising your kids, and providing for them the best start you can is a sacred cow. Just try to question it out loud and you'd better be prepared for some judgment to be hurled your way.

Today's topic came up for me while reading the morning's blog posts in my RSS reader, which is an outdated way to subscribe to blogs.

RSS is antequated but democratic. Most important of all it is free of the crappy click-bait and post-modern one-liner meditation GIFs that abound on social media. Incidentally, it's the exact same medium I use for my podcast subscriptions, but podcast apps hide the RSS-ness of it all.

Keeping Up with The Jones's Kids

Back to the topic at hand... In an article (1) on the Mr. Money Moustache blog, I caught some insights that ring true. A section of it rails against the notion of a fancy education in which the author observes "a very common bias in US society":

...that spending an absolute sh**load of money on your children is a necessary and advantageous thing to do. You could sum up our generous but financially suicidal belief system in this quote from his story:

“I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children, because I knew how easily my girls could be marginalized in a society where nearly all the rewards go to a small, well-educated elite. (All right, I wanted them to be winners.)”

Parental FOMO

The article isn't primarily on this topic but it was the most interesting part. It sparked two very interesting insights for me:

  1. parents have to fight a bias toward unlimited and undisciplined spending on a fancy education for their kids to try to get them into "an educational elite".
  2. parents experience FOMO (fear of missing out) for their kids which drives them into a keeping up with the Jonses' kids behavior.

We're told nowadays to "check our privilege". (I hate this one, actually but it has been able to find cultural purchase for some very valid reasons). Jocko Willink and Leif Babin have an entire chapter in their book (3) about "checking your ego". These are things that blind you. They are sources of bias. That's why you need to find a way to escape their gravity.

We might have to add to this: "Check your FOMO". Parental or otherwise.

FOMO is subtle fear. It is sneaky and persistent. It keeps coming back around. And you will need conditioning to resist it.

"Discipline Equals Freedom"

I've been pondering these words a lot since I've been really enjoying the Jocko podcast (2). How can discipline mean freedom? Freedom from what?

Discipline frees you from being driven by emotion and limited by your biases.

Discipline means practicing checking ALL of your biases. (You don't want to work out this morning? Good! You're going to get after it anyway because we are doing this.)

Discipline frees YOUR MIND so that you can step back to assess a situation and make decisions from the better part of your nature.

References

  1. Article: The Cheap Ticket Into the Elite Class - Mr Money Moustache
  2. Jocko Podcast
  3. Book: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

I'm A Lazy Reader, Don't Send Me Away

Never to do: Do not start blog articles with links of required reading to set context. Links in a blog article are provided for people who want to dig a bit deeper but should be totally optional reading.

To See People In Their Glory, Entrust Them with Important Tasks

If you are frustrated that people around you are irresponsible, you should try giving them responsibility for something important. Give it to them with the trust that they will see it through and full freedom to solve the problem. See what happens.

Maybe they will surprise you with an approach you hadn't considered. Be sure to leave room for yourself to be persuaded if their way will achieve the goal. It's important not to be prescriptive about specific solutions.

Assess any solution in terms of characteristics and requirements. Is it reliable? Is it succint? Is it easy or hard to deploy? Can we tell if everything is configured correctly?

By talking about requirements and characteristics, we can avoid prescribing specific solutions. This gives the person leading a task more creative control.

You're probably thinking that it's a good idea to define what these are before handing a task out. I agree.

One possible outcome is that the person will prove that they are not to be trusted with responsibility. I don't actually think this is very likely if they really have creative control. I find that when I actually take the time to talk to people, that they seem much more thoughtful than I would have guessed. I suppose that's a good reason to talk to people more often.

There are things that look like irresponsibility on the outside that are other things when you look under the hood. Maybe they are busy and have bitten off more than they can handle for a time. Maybe you have clarity on something because you have developed a way of thinking about it but you haven't shared this with anyone else. Be open to what you hear and don't always demand to understand why.

To see people in their glory, entrust people with things that are important. There will be things that are so important that you feel tempted to do it yourself rather than entrusting them to someone else. But if you ask another person to take up a task and help the other person to see that it is important, you may observe a level of engagement from them that you haven't seen in the past. It's possible that the people who seem irresponsible and apathetic are the ones who care the most but don't feel like they have something worth caring about to do.

Don't judge them for not having found the right place to apply themselves. Maybe that's your role on the team: to expose opportunities for people to lead.

This is an experiment. Think of it as a long term one.

The easiest way to feel impoverished and bored with life is to think that you have everything and everyone figured out. It doesn't take much to dispel yourself of this notion. You just need to let yourself start seeing again.

See people as they are and see them for their potentials too. And let them surprise you as they surprise themselves. You may find that the extent to which people have themselves figured out is less than you had guessed. And if you see that, it will be easier to think of the game you are playing as more similar to Golf than Tennis. It isn't one-on-one with a winner and a loser.

It's each person trying to do meaningful work just a bit better each time we do it. It's just us learning and growing and practicing... always.

Choose Ownership When The World Feels Grim

What happens when we own the bad things that happen rather than trying to understand who is to blame and who is right and wrong? When we own them, sometimes it will hurt. But when we own them, we also ask what is within our sphere of influence that we can change in order to reduce the chance of a bad thing happening.

We reach out to people to get ideas. We search within ourselves. And we start to experiment with different ways of getting things done that may be less fragile than what we do today.

Any situation where we accept blame and take responsibility is an opportunity and a privilege. These are THE BEST opportunities because we know one version of something that is possible and has happened, and it wasn't good.

We can devote our energy to improving our processes and systems against a real scenario. This is how progress is made. Making a difference in the world is nothing more than investing your emotional energy to think and act to make some thing, person, or system better.

What happens to our emotional experience and self esteem when we take ownership?

Ownership is facing the messy world and taking it on to impose order over one small bit of it. The act of taking ownership means transitioning from the states of apathy, victimhood, and blame toward thought and action. You will never be more fully yourself than when thinking and acting.

Ownership means that this time, whether it works or not, we are doing this. We are not helpless. We've got this. (How do these words make you feel?)

Take ownership enough times and you may come to realize something that has been true all along: We don't need to run to go get help. We are the help. We just have to show up.

With enough practice under our belt, we show up consistently. We show up sooner. We tactically deploy our emotional detachment so that we don't act blindly. This lets us take a step back and take in the broader view and make sure we are aren't missing some crucial data.

But we never detach 100%. We show up because we care.

Choose to Care and Choose Ownership

Choose ownership and lean into it and I promise you, the situation will feel less grim. When faced with darkness all around, you have chosen to be the light. And the morale boost your teammates get may help them to fight harder and run faster as well. And it will probably turn out that they are a light for you, to help you to keep your morale going.

When your actions are a positive impact on morale, you know you are making a difference. This is the meaningful work you've been looking for. You have become the sort of impact you have always wanted for everyone around you. Soak it up!

An Article About Interview Dysfunction, The Myth of The Next Job, and Choosing Yourself

Interview Dysfunction

This morning I read interesting article about dysfunction in software developer interview practices via Pointer.io. I haven't actually been asked to do silly whiteboarding during interviews. But I have a friend who has definitely has had some bad experiences with this.

I have had experiences that have made me suspicious of any "famous" (household name) company. Though I am open to being surprised.

The article laments the lack of clear reasons for rejection. But the act of rejecting someone is one of those prototypical situations where being honest is difficult and rare. People struggle with honesty in rejection because it often conflicts directly with the confines of their self-conception. (I often refer to this as "identity issues").

If you can expect bad data even if you are given a reason for rejection, best to ignore it. Better to work on no data than bad data.

The Myth of the Next Job

If you've been working for a place for nearly a decade, a job change may be the right thing for you. But if not, it is worth taking a step back and considering whether a lateral move to a similar job at another outfit is actually going to fix anything for you.

It's not likely that the next job is the answer... whatever the question. It may not be the meaningful work you seek. It may not be your perfect opportunity for growth. And these may be available to you right now in ways that you are not seeing because you already have a story that these are not available where you are.

Choosing Yourself

Or it may be that the things you seek are not available in a job. It may be that instead of waiting to be chosen to do something, you have to choose yourself and just start doing it, no matter whether you get paid or not, because it's worth doing. And choosing yourself is a scary thing. But it may be the only way to get from here to meaningful work.

These are ideas cribbed directly from Seth Godin. If you want to light a fire under yourself check out his talk on Thinking Backwards.

References

Link: F* You, I Quit — Hiring Is Broken

Keep Your Gaming Mindset While You Work

There is a lot that occurs in online gaming that carries over to the way we go about leading our teams and developing strategy to achieve key goals.

This morning I read an article, Halo can make you a Better Teammate at Work
Or: A Maturity Model for Halo Teams , in which Teague Hopkins describes a ladder of evolution for the maturity of online gaming teams. The lowest levels consist of the random group in which individual players are likely to be more focused on individual stats. The higher rungs move toward the focused group which has practiced and each member can anticipate moves, and reposition to support coordinated action, and can make concise calls and report on the situation using operational language.

The analogy isn't exact to most work environments, which feel a lot more like an open-ended game than Halo. Halo provides clear objectives and time-limits which are well understood by the time yiu have played a fee rounds. Whereas in the work environment, objectives and timeframes have to be decided and updated periodically based on an assessment of what is urgent and important.

The inexactness of the analogy represents an opportunity to talk about ways a team or a business can approach breaking down their long goals into clear objectives with time-limits. Being able to envision the goal will bring the target closer to the mind of the team members pursuing the goal, which makes it more likely that the team will be able to achieve its objective.