Category: Commentary

Are All Governments the Same?

Here’s a radical proposition: The US government is no better or worse than any system of government in history.  In fact, all government systems are the same.  Governments do not differ in quality based on the rules, structures, or procedures they employ.

To support this proposition one would have to demonstrate that there is something besides the system of government that determines how oppressive a state is, since there are obvious and dramatic differences in levels of tyranny and quality of life under different governments.  The correlation between certain forms of government and lower levels of oppression causes many to believe the former cause the latter, and that if you just get the structure right you can avoid bad rules and limit extortion.  I don’t think the form of government matters much.

Any kind of state can be brutally oppressive.  Monarchy, democracy, and all forms of republicanism in between are capable of and have engaged in massive acts of violence and oppression.  All these forms also have examples of far less oppression than the historical norm.  It’s not the structure or the ways rulers are chosen or laws are passed and enforced.  So what is it?  What determines how oppressive a government is?

Belief.  That’s it.  It’s not that people get the government they want or believe in, it’s that they get the government they are willing to put up with without resistance.  It’s not just explicit, stated belief, it’s belief as demonstrated by action or lack of it.  How governable are the people?  That will determine how much government they get.  Not how much they want or claim to want.  Not what they idealize as right.  What they give in to.

It is obvious that all governments are run by small minorities who cannot command great populations unless a great number are willing to carry out and enforce their orders and a great number are willing to obey the enforcers.  Etienne de La Boetie described this phenomenon beautifully in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude .  David Hume shared the same understanding of the origin of state power, as did Ludwig von Mises.  Yet most scholars and laypeople ignore this fundamental fact.

We get distracted in debates about procedure or arguments about the form of government or particular rulers or parties.  These are all just particular manifestations; the outgrowth of our own willingness to submit.  The US has been one of the freest countries in history not because of the Constitution but because the people happened to be some of the hardest to govern.  The Revolt against relatively benign British rule is evidence of a low tolerance for being governed by the early European inhabitants of the continent.

The great tragedy, as Boetie points out, is that once subjugated by whatever means (and it is always a means that involves convincing people they have to put up with it for some emergency or expediency), each successive generation tends to tolerate more oppression.  The existence of the oppressors is not an affront when you’ve never lived in a world without it.  The steady churn of propaganda and normalization of deprivation take hold.  This is why famous abolitionist Harriet Tubman said she could have freed twice as many slaves, if only they knew they were slaves.

Add to the propaganda and acceptance the fact that a great and growing number of people work directly for the state and make their living and gain their social status as its operatives.  An army of self-interested bureaucrats and their loved ones are in the long term more powerful than an army of soldiers.

It is not the rule of law that will save us from tyranny.  It is not a new parliamentary procedure or Constitutional amendment.  It is not an election.

The insight of scholars like Boetie reveal that the ultimate freedom from oppression is when we, “Resolve to serve no more.”  Be ungovernable.  Camus said, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”  Walk away from the bread and circuses.  Ignore the patriotic pomp.  Don’t work for the rulers.  Build the kind of life and society you want to live in.

Frank Chodorov, a libertarian activist and thinker, put it this way:

“If a prominent politician hires a hall to make a speech, stay away; the absent audience will bring him to a realization of his nothingness. The speeches and the written statements of a political figure are designed to impress you with his importance, and if you do not listen to the one or read the other you will not be influenced and he will give up the effort. It is the applause, the adulation we accord political personages that registers our regard for the power they wield; the deflation of that power is in proportion to our disregard of these personages. Without a cheering crowd there is no parade.”

It doesn’t require revolution by force.  That is only replacing one tyranny with another.  Imagine a law the proposal of which would be so deeply offensive that no political figure would dare bring it forward.  That is the mindset.  Now ask about why the constraints placed on politicians in this case, and the fear they have for acting, aren’t the same for every law they propose?  When they are, full freedom will reign, no matter what formal pieces of paper say.

Joy and the Other

Yesterday I posted about hedonism as life purpose.  One of the key elements mentioned in living a life of joy (not mere happiness) was the idea of a kind of reciprocity of delight.  Fulfillment seems to require more than delight for one self, but some other in which to delight and be delighted.  To become your true self as an individual it requires some other to be differentiated from, to collaborate with, and to enjoy.

That Other need not be only human.  There is a sense in which the ultimate Other is something far broader and greater than any one person.  When you feel like the world itself is collaborating with you, that is when you feel true joy.  Seeing reality as something not in opposition to you, but working with you.  The religious might call it divine will.  The non-religious might consider it living in line with the laws of the universe.  Astrologer Rob Brezsny calls it pronoia, “The suspicion that the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.”

That all sounds a bit too over-the-top, so let’s bring it home to a less sweeping context.  Consider acts of creation.  Painting, storytelling, songwriting, and the like.  There is a meaningful sense in which, in a state of flow, more is going on than just the creator producing.  The page gives back.  You develop a theme and play it and the music doesn’t just come from you, it gets right back in you and inspires you even as it is inspired by you.  If you give yourself to the art fully it gives something back to you.  In a romantic relationship the same effect is at work.  Being in love requires more than just admiration of another.  Your feelings are enhanced by the knowledge and evidence that you are adored in return.

This need for an Other in order to experience joy is radically individualistic.  It’s the opposite of an absorption of unique individuals into a universal blob.  In order to experience this reciprocal relationship with reality we have to get to know our unique selves.  We must be so differentiated that we cannot mistake anything or anyone else’s purposes for our own.  Then we can fully experience the joy of our own purpose by interacting harmoniously with others.

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Hedonism as Life Purpose

“Christian Hedonism”.  I encountered this phrase when I was about 16 and studying theology.  The concept had a big impact and stuck with me.  Whether or not you are religious there’s something powerful in it.

I believe it was a theologian named John Piper who coined the phrase, which made it especially intriguing because Piper was on the opposite side in many debates over free-will and other theological matters I was interested in when I first read it.  I won’t pretend to recall all the details but what I took away from the idea was that, in Piper’s mind, the Christian’s purpose in life is to take delight in existence, and take delight in God delighting in them for being delighted.  God created humans so that he could take pleasure in them, and seeing man take pleasure in life is what most pleased God.

I always associated the idea with a line from the movie Chariots of Fire, where the deeply religious Eric Liddell is chastised by his sister for missing church because he was running.  He said, “When I run I feel His pleasure.”  Not merely that Liddell was having a pleasurable experience himself, but that he felt the pleasure of God as he ran.

C.S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves describes the deep love that occurs when people are not only delighting in each other, but delighting that the other is delighting in them.

The word hedonism evokes excess, even destructive excess.  That’s a very shallow understanding of the idea.  It is true, if one merely indulges in short-run highs they may be called (and even call themselves) a hedonist.  But I think genuine hedonism, as the satisfaction of desires, is in fact life’s purpose.  The trick is discovering what those desires are and what it takes to satisfy them.  Running is not easy the way drinking a beer is easy.  Running is hard and at least a bit painful.  Yet Liddell (and he is not alone) described a kind of pleasure that far exceeds a mere exciting of the taste buds.

The deepest, truest human desires are not satisfied with temporary titillation alone.  Those can be a delightful part of existence, but cannot satisfy the soul’s most powerful longings.  Being fully alive requires some degree of challenge.  It requires some degree of pushing oneself, if even only to fight distraction and carve out time to marvel or think.  That is not to say it is only found in quiet contemplation.  Many of life’s most fulfilling moments are busy, bustling, social affairs.  But it seems true delight is best derived when some effort is required to obtain it.  It requires both connection to self and connection to something outside of oneself.  Simply taking what the stream of life floats us can be a decent indulgence, but it slowly erodes or numbs a deeper sense of meaning.

Hedonism as a conscious pursuit isn’t easy.  The self-knowledge and self-honesty required to take genuine delight in existence, and feel a kind of reciprocal delight being taken in you (whether by another, or by God, or by the universe, or whatever you may call it) is hard won.  It’s easier to let life happen to you and play the critic or the martyr.

With or without a religious narrative, the notion of finding your highest pleasure and pursuing it is powerful.  That seemingly paradoxical combination of the words, “Christian”, and, “Hedonist” has wisdom in it.  The former carries connotations of discipline, devotion, and the eschewing of worldly distractions.  The latter connotes joy, pleasure, and seizing every moment for pure delight.  That combination seems to be where the best life is found.  Perhaps the pursuit of pleasure is in fact a serious affair; as serious as life itself.

In Loving Memory of KJ Herr

(From the Praxis blog)

KJ

There is a GoFundMe campaign to help KJ’s family with funeral costs.  You can support them financially here: http://www.gofundme.com/KJHerr

I first met KJ Herr at a conference in Atlanta.  He enthusiastically approached me after my talk and said, “I started a business and it failed.  How do I overcome that and start again?”

His sincerity and earnestness stuck out.  He was admitting it was hard.  He hadn’t yet let the sting of the failure go, but he also knew he wanted to do more.  He had the spark.  His tenacity and the number of exciting projects he couldn’t stop talking about and working on make it incredibly difficult to deal with what has happened.  KJ is not with us any more, and it hurts.

I will never forget the interview and application process for KJ and working with him to find a business partner.  He wanted to get the most out of the program.  He was less concerned about challenges than he was about what he could gain.  He told me there was no point in doing something halfway, and he wanted to learn from the best how to create, innovate, and make the world a better, freer place.

KJ lived and breathed freedom.  He was actively involved with Students for Liberty and always engaging in intellectual and social pursuits revolving around themes of human liberty and flourishing.

I cannot begin to describe the difficulty in dealing with his passing.  We consider KJ family.  We miss him.  He was an irreplaceable part of the Praxis program and broader mission to inspire, educate, and encourage entrepreneurs.  He represented and exemplified our mission.  But he was so much more than that.  I only knew him through social media for a few years, and in person for less than a year.  I do not wish to speak for all that he was, only that which I knew him to be in my all too short time with him.  Words cannot express how much he is missed.

A few thoughts from our team and fellow participants:

“I had known KJ for a number of years. I remember when he opted-out of college and started “Robin Socks”, a company he had formed. Just before that I recall grabbing a beer with him in DC, talking about various ideas and ventures. That same night he had the gumption to ask John Mackey of Whole Foods a question about a business plan in front of a thousand people or so! Recently we were working on a little business plan that was gaining traction. KJ was a great guy and one of the few people who was willing to create something without looking for an exit, which is uncommon to see in the entrepreneurial space. I hope to further the business plan he had started in some shape or another over time. KJ was a bright and humble individual who didn’t waste time.” – Zac Corbett

“I’d known KJ for a few years through SFL and then working with him as he started Praxis. KJ and I shared a love of the San Antonio Spurs, which I always appreciated as it’s hard to find too many sports fans in the circles we were both part of. While I had not known KJ too well through our SFL work, his kindness did leave a mark on me, as it did with everyone he interacted with. It’s obvious why he was such good friends with Andrew Kaluza.

The time I was able to work with him through Praxis was a true pleasure. He gave a memorable speech at the opening seminar on his experience starting his own company, Robin Socks, and he was determined to gain as much experience as possible through the program so he could start his own company once again. I feel privileged to have been able to interact with him, particularly getting to discuss his ideas for new business ventures. KJ’s passion for entrepreneurship was infectious. I was very much looking forward to watching KJ create his own success through Praxis and beyond. It was clear he had the determination and ability to do so.

KJ, thank you for allowing me to be part of your life. You will be missed, friend.” – Cameron Sorsby

“I did not know KJ personally (to my great loss), but I interacted with him a few times in online Praxis discussions. He was so clearly everything that those who knew him better made him out to be – personable, creative, and dynamic.” – James Walpole

“From the day I met KJ, it was clear that he had not just a professional drive to accomplish things, but a deep, existential drive to see his plans to fruition in the world. He was an astonishing human being who had that rare capacity.” – Zak Slayback

“A couple of weeks before his passing, K.J. shared this on his Facebook page:

“Funny story/confession: This morning I decided I was going to stream a movie while eating breakfast instead of getting to work. As I get ready to load the movie, this captcha showed up to make sure I was a real person.”
stop wasting time
This funny little anecdote captures the spirit of K.J. perfectly for me: It shows him to be the kind of guy who could push himself and laugh at himself at the same time. While many people see the events around them as random, neutral, or boring, K.J. reacted to things as if they were both silly and serious, as if his everyday experiences were a series of invitations from the universe to laugh a little more and dream a little bigger. For the time he was with us, he did both of those things very very well.

On February 11 at 10:14pm 2015, K.J. wrote this on Facebook:

“At no time in my college career did I ever want to stay up and continue reading instead of going to bed. I only did it because I had to. Shout out to T.k. Coleman and the rest of the team at Praxis for putting together a curriculum that has me wanting to evade sleep and keep learning.”

A major part of my job is to challenge people to push themselves to study harder. Of all the bright young minds I’ve had the honor of coaching, K.J. is the literally the first person I’ve ever had to check up on for studying too much. “Go to sleep,” I would say, but his passion for knowledge would not be quenched. His love for learning kept him awake at night and it gave him the energy to make it through the next day.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.” I’ll have to live with my many unanswered questions concerning what K.J.’s future would have been like, but there is one thing I have no doubt about whatsoever: K.J. gave his all. He didn’t hold back. I feel like I owe it to him to allow that same spirit of zeal and determination to live in me. Thank you for being my teacher, K.J. The lessons you exemplified through the inspiring life you lived were not imparted to us in vain.” – T.K. Coleman

There is a GoFundMe campaign to help KJ’s family with funeral costs.  You can support them financially here: http://www.gofundme.com/KJHerr

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Tide

I have always been moved by the imagery of the tide.  There is something cleansing and freeing about it, yet powerful and dangerous at once.  The feeling of water steadily pulling can seem threatening, but I’ve never felt that way about it.  It feels liberating to me.  I can rest and it will do its work.  There is a sense of letting go connected with the push and pull of the tide.

Tides are relentless.  They don’t care what’s on the beach, or what the weather is like, or if it’s a convenient time for me.  They have no indecision, no waffling.  Its not like the rain that sometimes wants to fall but won’t make up its mind.  They proceed on their predictable pattern.  Sea creatures know this and let the tide bring them sustenance.  They naturally, gracefully navigate it with minimum resistance and find harmony in its rhythm.

Tides don’t affect small pools, only great lakes, seas, and oceans.

Tides reveal the connectedness of the universe.  A gray rock floating two hundred thousand miles away raises and lowers the water just down the beach.  Tides are tirelessly creative.  They play with grains of sand in and endless dance and make new beaches and shorelines every moment.

Tides are revealing.  When it goes out you can see previously obscured rocks, shoals, reefs, islands, and wrecks.

I don’t like to share my music, but today it felt right.  The quality is low because it was recorded on an iPhone and because I am a decidedly amateur musician.  Still, perhaps it can convey something that I am struggling to convey as I deal with the loss of a friend.

(If you are so inclined, you can support his family here.)

 

5 Reasons to Rethink College

Originally published on Thought Catalog.

Everyone knows you have to go to college to be successful.  Sometimes everyone is wrong.  Here are five reasons to rethink college as the best path to a fulfilling career and life.

1) It’s expensive.

Here’s a chart showing college debt and earnings for degree holders.

Guess what?  It doesn’t matter.  Charts and graphs and studies like this can’t help you make your decision about college for two reasons:  Because data can never show causality and aggregates are not individuals.

When it comes to causality, it’s pretty unclear college is doing the work.  Yes, degree holders on average earn more money than those without degrees.  People in Florida on average are older than people in the rest of the country.  Does Florida magically speed the aging process?  Degrees don’t magically make people more productive workers either.

College is a sorting mechanism more than it is a forming mechanism.  The types of people who get into and complete college are the kind who would command higher salaries anyway.  Some studies have followed people who attended Ivy League schools and others accepted to those schools but who chose lower ranked schools instead.  There wasn’t a difference in lifetime earnings.  In other words, Ivy League caliber people don’t need an Ivy League education to have high earnings.

As for aggregates and individuals, consider the following question: Are pickup trucks a good idea for 18-25 year olds?  Are they worth the cost?  How many studies would it take to prove it?  It’s obviously a dumb question.  There is no one answer for all 18-25 year olds.  Aggregate cost/benefit analyses for all 18-25 year olds buying pickup trucks won’t mean much to you in your highly personalized experience.  It’s just as ridiculous to come up with a single answer to questions about whether college is worth it for young people.

Data can’t do the work of deciding.  The only answer that matters is whether a particular path is worth it for you.  What do you want to get?  What are the possible ways of getting it?  What do they cost?  The cost is not just money but time, foregone opportunities, etc.  Whatever your decision, know why you’re doing it.  Which brings me to…

2) Most people don’t know why they’re doing it.

I ask high school students if they plan to go to college.  They all say yes.  When I ask “why” I have never heard anything but some variation on,

“Because I have to”, or, “To get a job”.

Then I ask what kind of job they want.  Crickets.  They don’t have any idea.

That’s perfectly fine – most teenagers don’t know and probably can’t know what they’ll be doing in ten or twenty years – but it’s pretty odd considering their entire reason for going to college is to get something about which they know nothing, including whether or not a degree will help them.

So the formula is, “I want X.  I have no idea what X is or what’s required to get it.  Therefore I’ll spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars on college.”  Maybe logic classes aren’t taught in high schools.

College may be a necessary or valuable way for you to get what you want out of life.  Then again maybe not.  The point is, you need to do some exploring and experimenting to find out.  You won’t know if your calling in life is marketing by sitting in a classroom and reading about it.  Spend some time around people who do it and see what it’s like.  If you love it, do you need a degree to do it?

The cultural narrative on college is, “Buy it!  Buy it!  No amount of cost or debt should factor into your decision, because it’s always worth it!”.  That’s a terrible way to make sound decisions about anything.  Remember the last time everyone was saying, “Buy! Buy! The price can only ever go up!”? (Housing bubble anyone…)

But maybe you’re going to college just for fun, which leads me to…

3) Most don’t enjoy it (and the parts they do enjoy can be had for free).

Parents and students tell me all the time that they’re unhappy with college.  Do you know what the number one complaint is?  Surprisingly, it’s not how much it costs.  It’s how much it sucks.

The number of young people who are bored in class and disappointed with the caliber of professors and students is staggering.  Students feel disengaged.  The part they like least about college is attending class and official duties.

If you sent a visitor from another planet to a typical college class and asked them to observe and report back to you what they thought they were witnessing they’d probably guess by the pained, dreary looks and lack of engagement it was some kind of penal colony or experiment where the students are being paid huge sums to endure fluorescently lit torment.  Nope, you tell them, these people are actually paying thousands to sit in the squeaky chairs and Snapchat their friends with a distracting TA in the background.

The things they love the most – parties, socialization, late night conversations, football games – can all be had without paying tuition.  Heck, if you really love a particular class or professor, I bet you can sneak into her class without registering and take it anyway.  I’ve never seen professors checking who’s current on tuition before the lecture.  They’d be thrilled to have someone in the class who was actually interested!

So why do people go?  Most don’t do it to stand out from the crowd, but to be normal; to blend in.  In that sense, it works.  But that might not be such a good thing…

4) It’s one size fits all in a world that demands customization.

Sure, there are lots of different majors and classes, but the approach is almost exactly the same in every case.  Follow rules, meet arbitrary deadlines with arbitrary assignments that will be glanced at by TA’s, passively listen to lectures and memorize answers you never need to know (because, you know, Google exists now).  

Chances are the job you’ll have in ten or twenty years doesn’t even exist yet.  That means the most valuable life and career skills are the very ones the classroom setting isn’t conducive for.  Adaptability, entrepreneurial thinking, creative problem solving, networking with people who can help you, etc.  In the classroom setting entrepreneurship is called cheating and networking is called missing class.

You can’t rely on your university to be your brand.  You are your own company, “Me, Inc.”, and you have to develop valuable skills and knowledge and find ways to communicate them to others.

The good news is, things you’ll really need to succeed are available in myriad forms, most much cheaper than the university.  Get a job.  Get a bunch of jobs.  Travel.  Talk to a lot of people.  Read.  Take online courses.  Write.  Figure out what you enjoy and practice it.  Work your butt off.  Anyone can graduate college.  It takes a lot more work to list what you want to gain and find the best way to get it.  Customize your life.  Don’t assume a degree can do this for you, because…

5) It doesn’t signal much anymore.

I overheard a classmate in college talking about how hard the test was (it wasn’t) and how many girls he wooed the previous night (he didn’t) and how hung-over he was (he was).  Right then and there I had an epiphany: He, like everyone else in the classroom, would probably graduate from this place.  Like me, they’d go on the job market and have the same degree.  Suddenly I felt the market value of my impending accomplishment plummet.

Let’s be real.  The only reason people keep paying so much for college is for the signal a degree sends to employers.  Sure, the other parts of the college bundle are great, but they can all be had in other, better and cheaper ways.  It’s the signal that keeps people buying.  But that signal is weakening and the value declining.

I talk to a lot of business owners.  They don’t care much about degrees anymore.  They want experience, proof of work ethic, and ability to quickly and coherently answer an email (only about seven people under the age of 25 have this ability).  College is the new high school.  Everyone does it, so it doesn’t make anyone stand out.  In fact, not going to college and having a damn good reason why might stand out a lot more.

Top venture capital firm Andreessen Horwitz specifically looks for entrepreneurs who were college dropouts, because it’s a good sign they are courageous and confident in their idea.  Google is one among many businesses to recently remove degrees from job requirements.

Get experience, gain confidence, learn what you like and don’t like, work hard, build skills, knowledge, and a network around your interests and goals.

College is one option among many.  Don’t do it just because everyone else does.  Those are the same people who bought a bunch of Beanie Babies as a retirement fund because everyone else was.

Keeping a Farm Team

I have  a farm team.  Actually it’s more of a list, mostly mental but I sometimes put it in a spreadsheet.  It’s names of the handful of individuals I would work with in a heartbeat.  It’s been indispensable on numerous occasions.

Even before I started Praxis I often recruited from my farm team for projects or to recommend great people to cool opportunities.  The farm team consists of that very small number of extraordinary people who have the spark.  They also have amazing work ethic to go with it.  Most of them don’t yet know how good they are and how great they can be.  When you meet people like that, stay connected to them.  Find ways to send them ideas, engage them in activities, and encourage and aid their development in any way you can while remaining hands off.  When you need a hand or need to start a company, they are far more valuable than investment capital or a logo.

Every one of the people I now work with were on my farm team at one point.  I am constantly on the look out for new members for the roster.  At any given time there are half a dozen or so people. I wish there were more, but these are rare individuals.  These are people that I would work with any time I had the chance, and rely on to succeed under almost any circumstance.  These are people you want in the trenches with you.  They’re not necessarily friends or even people I am in frequent contact with, though they sometimes are.  What matters is the “it” factor.  They either have it or they don’t.  I think it can be learned, but by around age 20 it’s pretty hard to gain if it’s not been cultivated yet.

Asking myself whether or not someone belongs on the farm team provides a lot of insight.  The answer it usually pretty quick and easy but it forces me to ask myself why the answer was a yes or no.  The more I do, the more I know what to look for, and the more I know what to look for the more likely I am to spot it.

Write down the handful of individuals you’d work with on anything.  If someone gave you a million dollars to start a company who would you call immediately?  Maintain that list, add to it, monitor it from time to time.  You might need it.

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Why Is It So Hard to Exit a Bad Situation?

The most common thing in the world is to hear someone complain about their job, their church, their school, or their neighborhood.  It’s almost a form of casual conversation.  In many cases people don’t actually dislike these things, but they just enjoy ripping on them for fun.  In many cases though there is a deep and genuine frustration, boredom, annoyance, anger, or pain.  Why don’t people leave?  Why not exit the situation for a better one?  It turns out this is one of the most difficult things to do.

I don’t think the primary difficulty in exiting a soul-sucking situation is for fear of the unknown.  In many cases even the unknown would be better than the known frustration.  I don’t think it’s primarily because society places a (too) high level of respect on loyalty.  I don’t think it’s primarily because of the illusion that we can “change it from the inside” or play the role of reformer.  I think these are rationalizations people give for why they stay.  There is a more fundamental reason people stay in bad situations.  Staying means you get to play the role of two cheap, easy archetypes with quick rewards: the critic and the martyr.

It’s incredibly easy to be a critic.  Hardly any effort is required to sit at the back of the room, arms crossed, and look indifferent while making an occasional sarcastic comment to the person next to you.  Critics get friends.  They get quick points and rally a small band around them in every setting.  Every company has the critic and his cadre of cronies who circle around to hear his latest jab.  Every church has the member who has meetings and conversations to discuss their concerns and troubles.  Critics enjoy a weak form of respect and they are never alone.  Even in a happy crowd as soon as one critic peels off and stands apart, too good for the activity, he attracts others who don’t want to be duped or fooled.

Being too cool is easy.  Actually making good on your critiques and leaving that which you claim to be above is hard.  The role of critic is not a bad one, but it’s dangerous.  It’s dangerous because it’s so easy.  The way caffeine is easier than getting more sleep.  Both have valuable and enjoyable uses in the short run or in certain situations as a kind of jolt into reality.  But in both cases the long run effect is incredibly deleterious to your health.  If you only ever play the role of the critic you lose the capacity to exit or create.  You are no longer the one in control of your life.  You are a victim of and a slave to that which you critique.  You need it because without it you have nothing.

It’s a little harder to be a martyr, but not much.  To play the martyr is to stay in a painful situation, which may sound hard but is much easier than doing things you love.  Unpleasant things naturally find their way to you upon waking in the morning.  Most disciplines are unpleasant at the outset.  Most jobs are.  Most new people are a lot of work to befriend at first.  The easy route is to give just enough of an effort to stay in a situation, but never fully engage and never simply exit.  Complaining about your boss or professor and how mind-numbing your day was is an easy way to get the attention of others.  If the critic gets cheap popularity, the martyr gets cheap sympathy.  Everyone feels bad for the sufferer.  When you feed off of that sympathy and choose it over the much more challenging work of finding situations that don’t make you suffer, you seek the same caffeine-like quick fix as the critic, and with equal danger.

I’ll use an example I’m very familiar with.  I’ve met many young people who hate college.  They’re bored, the classes are useless, the tuition is costly, the experience as a whole makes them feel dull and depressed if not openly angry.  Calculated as a purely economic decision it makes no sense for them to stay.  Four years, tens of thousands of dollars, and a very weak network and set of skills and knowledge gained at the end.  They can think of myriad ways to get more with less.  But that’s not the only cost.  To exit means to quit playing the role of critic and martyr.  Those come with a lot of easy points.

Worse still, once you exit you forgo the chance to play those roles again.  When you complain about your job or rip on your boss you won’t get laughs or sympathy.  You’ll get condemnation.  “Well it’s your own fault.  I told you not to drop out of school!”  It’s the same with churches, cities, and any other situation you can exit.  Exit means giving up the cheap benefits of the critic and the martyr and adding the cost of social approbation.

It’s easy to see why so many people stay in crappy situations they clearly hate.  It’s easier.  No one gets mad at you for staying.  You get cheap popularity and/or sympathy.  You are not accountable for your feelings.  It’s always the fault of the bad situation you’re in.  This is one of the most tragic traps a human can trip.

The power of exit is at the core of human freedom.  It is the first step on the road to genuine fulfillment and self-actualization.  Once you embrace it – and the only way to embrace it is to exercise it – you begin to find, paradoxically, that it needn’t be used as often as you thought.  Sometimes just knowing that you are in a situation by choice and could leave at any time is enough to re-orient your outlook to a more productive, positive one.

If you want to live a great life you have to create it.  Creating is learned.  It’s not free.  To become a creator you have to first let go of the critic and the martyr.  Yes, critique can be the eye-opener that leads to exit and creativity.  Yes, martyrdom can bring the pain that leads to the same.  It’s not that you’ll never play those roles, it’s just that you can’t live in them.

If you want to create a good life you have to first exit the bad one.  Exit alone is not sufficient.  Indeed some people get addicted to exit much the same way they can to critic or martyr.  Always leaving what’s not working but never building what will.  Still, exit is indispensable and far more powerful than attempts at reforming bad situations.  Reform is fundamentally submissive and reactive while exit is empowering and leads to the creative and proactive.

The martyr, the critic, and the coward belong together.  Leave them behind.

Problems with the Ideas/Action Dichotomy

It is possible to have ideas without action.  It is not possible to have action without ideas.

In my personal habits I am a very action biased person to the point of impatience and occasional recklessness.  Yet in the bigger scheme I place far more importance on the role of ideas over action, theory over practice.  Not because I think theory without practice is good, but because I know action without ideas is impossible.  Thinkers can not act.  That’s a tragedy.  But actors can never not think.  If they believe they are just acting and not philosophizing they’re simply doing bad philosophy.

All action is based on theory.  My friend Steve Patterson summed this up nicely:

“Human action is an expression of philosophy. Every decision we make is inescapably framed and guided by our ideas about the world. Sometimes these ideas are clearly communicated by our actions; we write a book or create meaningful art. Other times, our ideas are so silent we aren’t even aware of them; they become a kind of subconscious framework for our actions.”

When you act you do so because you have ideas about your present condition, beliefs about a preferable future state, and beliefs about how the action will bring it about.  Those who brag about acting over thinking are admitting to taking actions based on unexamined ideas.

There are two main ideas underlying all action, and both need to be examined.  The first is an idea about an end state one wants to reach.  The second is a theory of causality about what will bring that end state.  An end state that is actually bad, or that the actor wouldn’t actually enjoy if they reached is is troubling.  It’s the dog that catches the car.  Many activists or “doers” imagine they want what they are chasing but they have not put any difficult, disciplined philosophical work in to examine their desired end, and to get to know themselves and see if it’s truly a desirable state.

Theories of causality are even less examined.  So many well-intentioned people imagine a better world.  Even if they’re sure they’d want to get there, many lose patience with theorizing and want to just do something.  Doing something can be an integral and valuable part of forming a theory of how to get there the way experiments help shed light on physical phenomena.  But if the actor doesn’t regularly stop to theorize, incorporate experience as feedback, adjust causal assumptions, and repeat, the action is useless or worse.

In our society you get points for doing something.  If what you want is noble and you’re doing something, you’re applauded.  Never-mind that you may lack any understanding of physical, economic, or social realities that can cause your action to result in nothing or even the opposite of your goal.

It is for this reason that I cringe when I hear people praise either ideas or action at the expense of the other.  In fact, I think the only camp that really does this are the activists.  The thinkers talk about the importance of ideas, and many may be too fearful or lazy to do any real-world testing, but they don’t typically claim that action is worthless.  The self-proclaimed doers often vociferously vilify philosophizing  as a waste.  They do not realize that their denunciation is simultaneously an announcement that they are acting on unexamined and often bad ideas.  By decrying philosophers they don’t separate themselves from philosophy, they just become bad philosophers.

Practice without theory is not an option.  For this reason it is incumbent on all action-biased people to engage ideas with ferocious seriousness.  Ideas not acted upon may be sad, but action not contemplated can be utterly disastrous.

Think clearly; think boldly; think big and you can achieve big results.

Agere sequitur credere.

The Burden of Proof

Violence is the least civilized and most extreme reaction to any problem or situation.  Even if you believe it warranted in some cases, it is universally seen as a last resort when all other methods have failed.  Even then there had better be a really good reason to use violence.  A mere, “Because I wanted something and couldn’t think of a better way to get it”, or, “Because she wouldn’t do what I said”, or, “Because I’ve done it that way before” don’t pass moral muster.

The one distinguishing feature of all governments is the use of force.  Every other function and activity governments engage in are not unique to governments.  Only the formal monopoly on the initiation of violence sets governments apart.  There is nothing a government does that is not backed by force.  Government is force.  Whatever ones belief about the necessity or goodness of government, this definition is not controversial.

Given our two premises above, a very simple conclusion follows:  Any government action ought to be viewed with extreme caution, skepticism, and as a last resort for the most pressing and important problems.  The burden of proof should always be on advocates of government action to prove it superior to any and all other scenarios.  And that should be a weighty burden.

This burden of proof is important not only because is government action is at bottom violent action, but especially when we consider that government has worse incentives than other institutions to get and keep things right.  (See Public Choice Theory).  Everything we know about the history of government plans and programs and laws, and everything we know about politicians, bureaucrats, and the political process ought to add to our caution and skepticism.

Note that this is not an ideological argument.  I am making no claims about the number of things that warrant government action.  You may believe it is a great many things while I believe it is nothing at all.  The only case I’m making here is about where the burden of proof should be when discussing any government law, regulation, tax, expenditure, or action of any kind.

We see the opposite more often than not.  A new regulatory apparatus or war or program is proposed and who is placed immediately on the defensive?  Nine times in ten the burden of proof is placed on those who oppose the action.  Surely this is an illogical and dangerous default.

I’ve been particularly surprised to see this in the case of proposed ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations.  This is a special case indeed, because it is a solution for a mostly nonexistent problem.  It’s not a time of crisis where people are so scared and desperate for any action that they suspend skepticism and gobble up whatever is proposed.  Internet users aren’t experiencing some kind of widespread horrors that have them storming the gates demanding change.  The proposed body of regulation would do nothing for consumers in any way easy to identify, and doesn’t even pretend to solve any kind of major, commonly felt problem.  It’s inside baseball among tech companies jockeying for position and running to that state to do it.  It will without question make the internet less dynamic and slow innovation, but even if it only did what advocates claim it would still not be any wonderful change from the status quo.  Surely this is a case where the public at large would respond with, “What is this new set of government activities and regulations being proposed and why should we listen?”  Surely the burden of proof is on those proposing this vague and confusing web of regulations.  Apparently not.

The conversation seems to have taken on a decisive tone.  Everyone knows NN is needed and warranted.  Any objectors must make an airtight case and must be highly credible persons.  Only then, maybe, can we discuss it being tweaked or slowed, or possibly stopped.  There is an air of inevitability about it, as with many major government actions, and skepticism isn’t aimed at the policy, but of anyone who doubts it.  Be skeptical of the skeptics, not the proposed action.

Worse, the skeptics themselves seem to accept the burden of proof as rightly belonging to them.  Those who best understand problems with government and are most skeptical of it are busy policing each other, trying to ensure everyone makes the best possible case.  They have to be sure not to offend.  They have to be sure to address every possible angle.  They can’t have a single weakness in their argument or thinking.  They can’t afford lazy logic.  But if we stop and consider what’s being proposed – an increase in government action (by definition violent action) – why should skeptics have to prove themselves?  The burden of proof ought to be entirely, squarely on advocates of the action.

Notice that I am not advocating for status quo bias.  I don’t think anything new or different in society ought to be treated more skeptically than the status quo.  It’s not about the newness of ideas or actions.  It’s about the type of action proposed.  When a raw exercise of force is the solution those advocating it ought to have the burden of proof.  This goes for existing instances of force-backed solutions as well as new ones proposed.

What reasonable person would say that force should be the first resort, or that action backed by it needn’t be considered or scrutinized more than any other?

The Expedition of Our Age

unnamedNothing is guaranteed.  There is no plan or path that can ensure the kind of life you want.  There are only opportunities with varying degrees of risk.  And sometimes the least risky opportunities are also those least likely to result in fulfillment.  The great success stories are the result of daring expedition and pursuit of unique goals.

There was a time when a college education was something of an adventure.  It was exclusive, not easy to get, and signaled something special.  Leaving your home town for a university was a big deal, a great expedition.  This is no longer true.  Going to college is not difficult today.  It’s not elite or rare.  Most young people can easily travel and live away from their home towns and many have even before college.  Today, college isn’t much of an adventure.  In fact, it attracts some of the most risk averse individuals, and perhaps paradoxically the higher ranked the school often the more risk averse its students.

There is a small but growing number of young people who see this and they’ve got the itch.  They go to college only to realize it’s a warmed over version of all the years of safe, institutional schooling they’ve just completed.  No one will question their decision to go.  No one will call them crazy.  The risk of flunking out is as minuscule as the risk of standing out.  The sense of adventure is gone, replaced with a sense of perpetual adolescence and paternalistic planning.

Those with the itch for real adventure realize that no one is going to give it to them.  The prefabricated social life and conveyor-belt career track isn’t enough.  If they want to embark on a daring expedition, they’ll have to do it themselves.  The great secret is that it’s far easier than anyone imagines.  All the resources exist already within arms reach.  Anything in the world you want to learn or do, anyone you want to meet, any personal challenge you want to give yourself, any skill you want to devote yourself to: they’re all doable, without anyone’s permission.

The world is waiting.  It won’t be found on dorm room couches.  It won’t be found in cinder block classrooms.  It won’t be given to those who simply follow the rules and don’t upset the apple cart.  It will be discovered – it will be created – by those daring enough to seek adventure and live life on their own terms.

The geographical territory of the earth has been largely discovered.  But we’re only on the borderlands of human potential.  It lies before us vast, untamed, full of mystery and possibility.  It will be explored by those brave enough.  No special qualifications are needed beyond courage, self-honesty, a hunger for self-knowledge, and willingness to break the mold.

The great expedition of our age is the self-created journey; the self-directed life.

You Have to Pick Two

I wrote recently about how you can’t have a growing business, a robust social life, and a great family life all at once.  You only get to pick two.  The implication is that, though everyone wants all three, you get a maximum of two if you want to succeed.  I’m beginning to think the heuristic is not just a maximum, but a minimum as well.  You don’t just get to pick two, you have to pick two.

If you pour yourself fully in to any one of these at the expense of the others, you’re unlikely to find long term success and fulfillment.  If you’re a passionate, single-minded entrepreneur, you need to create space for some kind of social life or family/significant other.  You won’t be your best if you don’t.

Many people accept this notion but mistakenly assume all that’s needed is a balance of time spent on the activities.  As long as I carve out 30% of my time to not work I’ll be balanced because I’ll be with friends or family.  This is far from the truth.  You need time with an interest or hobby around which friends congregate, or family time, but you can’t expect it to happen simply because you set aside time to not work.  You have to be just as intentional with your non-work time as you are with time spent working.  You have to be definite and deliberate in the creation of a social or family life.

Again, it’s not about the number of hours spent on each.  Maybe you’re able to pour yourself into a job with only a four hour workweek.  Maybe you can have a meaningful social life with nothing more than one kite-boarding session a week.  The point is to ensure you have more than one thing on which to put your energy and attention.  One needs to serve as an outlet for things left unexpressed in the other.

I don’t believe it’s really about creating a stark divide or work/life balance either.  Depending on your personality and habits, you may need that in order to do your two things.  Or you may need a seamless synthesis.  I tend to have a much better family and work life when I have fuzzier lines between them.  I love working from home. I’m writing this at the breakfast table with noisy kids all around.  I like taking my kids with me on work trips when I can.  I enjoy responding to emails at all hours, and I feel less stressed and more in the moment with family when I don’t have to put work completely on hold.  You may be the opposite.  Neither is better or worse.  The important thing is to have something outside of work to devote yourself to.

Are People Who Don’t Smile Unhappy?

Kids are rarely more happy then when they get candy.  Second might be hanging out with friends.  Somewhere near the top would be dressing up.  This explains why Halloween is so fun for them.  They’ve got endless sugar, lots of activity, costumes, friends, and plenty of running and yelling.  All while parents seem uncharacteristically relaxed (at least if they’re smart and brought a flask).

My kids love it.  You can tell immediately by looking at my oldest and youngest.  But my middle daughter might stump you.  She does not smile on Halloween.  She doesn’t giggle or chat about the candy she got or the decorations she sees.  She stares cold-blooded and steel-hearted and proceeds to the next house with ruthless efficiency.  There are severed heads, knife-wielding creepies, witches, ghosts, and reapers galore on October 31, but perhaps nothing is more frightening than my daughter as she mechanistically says the magic words, “Trick or treat”, and, “Thank you”.  Watching her can be a deeply unsettling affair.  She is on a mission and will not be denied.  I fear for any who impede her progress.

I ask her if she’s having a good time and she immediately, stoically replies a single syllable.  “Yes.”  I believe her.  I’ve known her since day one and this type A girl is intense when she’s loving life.  She can be as goofy as the next kid, but her form of pure bliss is very different from visions of cherubic tots bouncing about with constant smiles.  She is solemn about fun.  She has goals.

It’s no surprise that by the end of the night her candy bucket is 2 or 3 time as full as the others – even though her older brother has five years on her and can run faster and farther ahead and hit more houses.  She doesn’t break the rules.  If she’s told one piece she takes one piece.  If nothing is stated she takes a handful.  If she’s told no walking on the grass she doesn’t.  If it’s unclear she takes the shortest distance between two candy sources.

It took me a while to appreciate this manifestation of joy.  She’s not happy in the simpler, cheaper, more common sense of the word, but she seems to be experiencing a deeper delight than the others.  She anticipates and mentally prepares for it in advance.  She pursues it with intention.  She revels in it longer (in no small part because her candy buckets lasts a lot longer afterwards).  She’s more deeply upset if she’s stymied.  It’s been good for me to learn that, though she’s not always smiling, it doesn’t mean she’s unhappy.

She’s now the stuff of legend in my mind.  My favorite part of events like Halloween has become watching her intensity and single-minded pursuit of the prize.  I love her matter-of-fact affirmative response when I ask if she’s having a good time.  It’s less immediately rewarding as a parent when your kids don’t wear their jollies on their sleeve, but it’s fulfilling in a different way to see them take pleasure seriously.

The big challenge, now that I know lack of a smile doesn’t mean anything’s wrong, is figuring out when something is wrong.  It’s easy with visibly happy people.  With the more stoic, focused types you can’t always tell.  I’m still learning.

Why I Hate Citations

There was a time when citations were almost nonexistent even in academic work.  Today the word academic is not applied to anything that’s not full of citations.  It drives me nuts.

In my teens I remember writing a paper where the teacher required a minimum of five citations.  It seemed arbitrary and irritating to me so as a small act of rebellion I made the first citation something like, “My own mind”.  A childish and arrogant move to be sure, but I stand by the protest at the heart of it.  We were asked to write a paper making an argument on a topic.  Yet we were graded in large part by how many citations we had, regardless of the weight and cogency.  If I made a compelling case based on the internal logic of my argument, I could not get an ‘A’ unless I also had five citations, no matter how disconnected and useless the citations.  The academic world isn’t as bad as that class, but sometimes it’s not far off.

I understand the point of citations.  You want to maintain intellectual honesty and respectfully acknowledge those upon whose ideas you’ve built your own.  Unless you are doing a survey of literature or a study on a specific text, all of this seems possible in simple sentence form within the body of your work rather than via formal citation.  When formalized, a subtle citation seduction can sweep in and impresses readers, clouding their judgement of the content itself.  The appeal to authority or the demonstration of how common an idea is often becomes an argument for it’s validity.  I’ve even heard academics mock papers simply because they lack a sufficient number of citations, without addressing any of the ideas.

You might argue that all of those problems are problems with the way readers and writers use citations, not the system itself.  There is some truth to that, but I also think the formalization of the system has much to do with it.  When you are trained to rigorously cite everything and stop mid-sentence for footnotes*, the power of the argument suffers, and the readability definitely declines.  It also carries traces of the false and dangerous notion that ideas are scarce like physical property, having but one owner.  Citing someone implies they were the originator of the idea, which is almost never the case.  A great comedy sketch would be a scene in which a thinker was forced to cite everything, including the sources for the citations, and the sources of the sources, etc.  Tying an argument to a single source can be just as misleading as not tying it to anyone.

Prior to the formalization of citations thinkers still got credit for their work.  It’s not difficult to mention in the body of a text inspirations or sources.  It’s not difficult to add a “Further Reading” list at the end.  Both of these better reflect the truth of the situation, that all thinkers through time and space are engaged in a kind of great conversation, responding to and building on one another.  We all know that none of us is spinning original ideas absent outside inspiration.  We are part of a lineage.  If you read C.S. Lewis, for example, you have no trouble seeing the influences and ideas of Milton.  Sometimes Lewis mentions him by name, often he does not.  There aren’t citations to speak of (one of the reasons Lewis is considered popular instead of academic), but there is no lack of respect or pretension to originating ideas that came from elsewhere.

Citations sometimes seem more, not less arrogant to me than their absence.  They imply that anything not cited was perfectly original.  They imply a neat and tidy set of ideas, disciplines, and intellectual evolution.  If we’re honest, we can’t even remember our own intellectual development enough to source and cite the origin of many of our ideas.

This is not about not giving credit.  It’s not about being lazy.  In fact, it’s about pushing oneself to give credit in the much more difficult way.  To work it into the writing in a way that’s not awkward or disruptive or overly formal.  It’s about forming excellent and clear arguments that bring something new to the table, but that any intelligent person can see emerge from a larger tradition or body of knowledge.  It’s about intriguing and leading people to that body of knowledge rather than just listing it by publication date and publisher next to a tiny number.

I try not to cite as a discipline.  Most of my writing is in blogs and articles so there isn’t much need to cite anyway, or much cost to me for not citing, but after my initial youthful distaste for the undue respect given to citations qua citations, I gave myself this rule to see what would happen.  Everything I write comes from some other set of ideas or thinkers I’ve encountered.  My goal is to give credit and respect generously, and it almost feels demeaning to stick a great work into a little footnote.  If I can’t work their ideas into my own and, when I’m doing it more directly, communicate that I’m doing it, I think I’m missing something.

This is not a wholesale protest against the practice of citation.  It has uses, and probably many that I’m ignorant of since I’m not an academic.  My claim is simply that it’s over-used and that writing – especially academic writing – and thinking often suffer for it.

 

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*I also hate footnotes