A Few Insights on Institutions and Sports

One of the reasons I love sports is the opportunity they provide to see how formal and informal institutions and norms interact to create outcomes, often surprising.  When athletics and economic thinking intersect, I’m a happy man.

An excellent article on Grantland by Brian Phillips got me thinking again about the incentives in college basketball.  Small changes in formal rules and small changes in the informal enforcement of those rules can lead to pretty big consequences.  In the case of college basketball it’s resulted in a far more painful viewing experience.  Watch some of the tournament games this year and you’ll see what I mean.  Basketball is a game of runs and big emotional momentum swings over a series of plays.  Yet instead of fast paced scoring streaks I’ve mostly witnessed a baseball-like process of a play or two followed by long pauses for TV or coaches timeouts or free-throws, followed by another play or two.

There are several possible changes that could improve the experience.  Economists Ed Lopez and Wayne Leighton in their phenomenal book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers discuss the origin of the shot clock.  The game was in a similar place.  The best teams were known to get a small lead and then pass the ball for several minutes at a time to run out the clock.  A sensible strategy but a horrible spectator sport.  The introduction of the shot clock dramatically improved the experience.

The shot clock is an example of a new formal rule.  Mike Munger and Russ Roberts talk about not just formal but informal rules and norms in sports in one of my favorite EconTalk episodes.  We tend to assume the order around us, in the world as in sports, is the result of formal rules and enforcement, but more often there is a far more powerful substrate of informal norms and expectations with their own unique enforcement mechanisms.  Fights in hockey, or fake fights in baseball are great examples, as is the social approbation faced by teams who run up the score at the end of an inevitable victory in football, or those who continue to foul the opposing team when trailing by double-digits in the waning seconds of a basketball game.

What I like about the Grantland article is that it touches on formal and informal institutions in its analysis of what’s happening to college basketball.  It’s not only the number of timeouts allowed and the defensive rules (formal), it’s also the way refs choose to call fouls and coaches choose to reign in improvisation by players (informal).  The article went further than this.  It had some profound insight into something even more fundamental than formal and informal institutions.  It touched on the beliefs of fans, players, coaches, officials, and everyone involved.  It’s not only the rules written on paper, or the unwritten rules in our heads that create these outcomes.  The beliefs we have about the game and the rules create the context within which all these institutions must operate.  Beliefs are the ultimate binding constraint on what kind of institutions can exist.

In the case of college basketball, Phillips argues that we all know deep down it’s a professional affair the goal of which is entertainment, yet none of us wants to admit this to ourselves or publicly.  We wrap it in the cloak of character building, preparation for life, team-work, and a lot of old-timey notions about young men getting exercise for their bodies to compliment the mental exercise of a college education.  It’s not that sports don’t do these things or offer no life lessons.  Far from it.  It’s that the primary goal of sports is to make money like any other enterprise, and in our society the great lie we all pretend to believe is that self-interest is inferior to altruism as a motive (even though the beneficial outcomes of self-interested behavior far exceed all the altruism in human history).  We have to keep up the fiction that college athletics is not primarily a moneymaking entertainment enterprise.

Lots to think about on this topic, but I think the insights about the role of our beliefs (and the contradictory nature of our stated vs. revealed preferences) in shaping institutions which shape incentives which result in outcomes is powerful.  For the future of sports and society as a whole.

The Need for Structure

The most common argument for authoritarian schooling is the need for structure.  Structure is crucial to any kind of success and young people need to learn it.  I could not agree more.  Which is precisely why I find school so problematic.

If you cannot make and live by a schedule and learn to prioritize and execute on activities you will have a difficult time creating value and meaning.  If you want to learn how to create your own structure the sooner you exit environments where the structure is provided for you the better.

Schooling provides structure and the external stimulus to follow it.  The mental muscles and willpower to create one’s own structure atrophy.  I’ve seen young people enter amazing work experiences where they have tremendous amounts of autonomy with their hours, where they work, what kinds of work they want to do, and in what ways.  These are enviable jobs.  Yet these young people are stressed and unproductive.  They yearn for more externally imposed structure because they are incapable of creating their own.  They want to be told what to do because that is how they have always achieved; not by setting their own goals and exploring and testing their own means, but by jumping through hoops set up by self-proclaimed authorities.

Managing one’s own time, setting one’s own goals, and creating one’s own routines are so very important they cannot be left to schools.  They are impossible to learn by having someone else do it for you. F.A. Hayek said of the economy, “The more the state “plans”, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”  Schools make planning harder for the individual by doing it all for them.

The sooner you learn to create your own structure in environments where no one will provide it for you the better.  The sooner you learn how to operate where all that matters to others is the value of your outputs and no one cares how you produced it the better.  Get to know yourself.  Learn to be alone with yourself.  Learn to manage yourself.  If you don’t someone else will be happy to manage you.  Then you might find yourself wondering why your life doesn’t feel like your own and living feels only partly alive.

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The Myth of Misanthropy

It’s normal to hate people.  Everyone hates people.  Fortunately, there is no such thing as people.  There are only individual persons.

There are no classes, groups, nations, or any other collective capable of acting or believing.  Only individuals love, hate, lie, steal, give, create, think, and act.  Collectivism is a convention of language, but it is probably the most dangerous paradigm in human history.  Not just because it has led to massive violence in the hands of mobs and states, but because of what it does to the individual.  It let’s us get sloppy in our thinking.

We like to collectivize because it lets us avoid responsibility and accountability.  I can say I hate people and that people are guilty of all manner of crimes and deserve what’s coming to them.  But if I’m forced to point out a single, actual individual that I hate and believe ought get it, things get very uncomfortable.  I want to place blame on a fictitious entity and get the self-righteous satisfaction of setting myself above it (while simultaneously benefiting from the false humility of lumping myself in with it) without any sort of repercussion.

If you find yourself angry at humanity it’s instructive to dig a little deeper.  It’s often not the millions of individual actors pursuing their own ends that cause annoyance as much as certain phenomena and patterns that result from these interactions.  Those are the result of the norms, rules, institutions, and incentives faced by the actors, and those can often be altered or worked-around.  It’s not people that cause traffic jams or bad movies, but individual persons responding to incentives and seeking satisfaction.  Maybe you can change the incentives or introduce new ones?

De-collectivising doesn’t necessarily make you any happier, but it can focus your discomfort onto real entities that are changeable or avoidable.

Some Excellent Work on Education and Schooling

My friend and colleague Zak Slayback has had a wonderful series of blog posts about education, schooling, testing, unschooling, and many other fascinating and important topics in that area.  I cannot recommend them enough.

Ways to Think About Schooling Part 1

Ways to Think About Schooling Part 2

What is the Purpose of Childhood?

Let’s Abolish Childhood

Hayek and Camus Walk Into a School

Deschooling Myself

How “Below Average” Kills Dreams

“Would I Put Myself Through This?”

A Brief Defense of Playing as Learning

Zak is continuing to churn out some great stuff on these topics, so I encourage you to frequent his blog.  It’s been very interesting for me to see someone a decade my younger, with no kids of his own, and who by all measures was the apex of schooling success come to the same conclusions I have reached about schooling and childhood.  There is something very exciting about the synchronicity of someone else discovering similar books and ideas as you do the same, independent of each other.

What Liberal Arts Education Misses

I’m a big fan of liberal arts education.  Not in the classical sense of churning out dutiful citizen soldiers, but in the modern sense of a broad exploration into the humanities rather than a narrow vocational specialization.

The dichotomy between learning for “work” and learning “for its own sake” is ridiculous.  All meaningful learning has an end desired by the learner, whether to have fun or gain knowledge that helps earn money or both.  Liberal arts education is incredibly valuable as a tool to sharpen thinking and broaden the mind.  Despite all the names given to the disciplines therein, it all really boils down to the master discipline of philosophy.  Philosophy is valuable if for no other reason than that we all have a philosophy whether we want to or not.  It’s either examined or unexamined, and we are better at achieving our goals and ends if we examine our philosophy.

Still liberal arts education has a huge, gaping hole.  It’s not that it doesn’t teach enough hard skills or vocational specialization.  One could argue those are something that could be learned on top of a liberal arts foundation for those who want to master a particular skill.  Yet it is true that liberal arts education often makes it hard for individuals to bridge this gap between general critical thinking and particular ways they might apply it to create a meaningful life and career.  The missing piece is something a little more concrete than liberal arts but a little more abstract than vocational skill.  It’s an understanding of value creation.

Value creation is the only thing that matters when it comes to involvement in commercial life.  This is where philosophy meets action.  This is where theory meets practice.  An entirely pragmatic practitioner who only performs tasks may find herself flustered with limited career options just as easily as an abstract theorist who doesn’t know how to concretely practice his ideas.  The pragmatist misses the fact that it’s not just getting your hands dirty that brings career success, but creating value for others, which may or may not correlate to how many hours you work or how much you master a particular skill.  The theorist misses the fact that all the clear thinking in the world about the nature of people and the universe won’t put bread on the table unless they can translate it into something of value to others and exchange with them.

A truly powerful liberal arts education would include learning value creation.  What it is, and more importantly, how to do it.  The thing about value creation that differs from other things learned studying liberal arts is that it cannot be learned by intellectual examination alone.  You have to do it.  You have to enter the messy marketplace and bump into other humans with unique goals and desires and find a way to bring something of value to exchange.  If philosophy begins with ‘know thyself’ then working for pay is one of the most philosophical activities possible.  Getting others to voluntarily part with their resources because you can create something they value more will reveal more than you can imagine about yourself, your desires, habits, and unknown abilities you never would have guessed are valued by others.

It shouldn’t stop with merely performing the action.  Reflection and dissection of what’s happening will take you to the next level.  All the best entrepreneurs are deeply philosophical people.  They don’t merely work and try stuff and suddenly get lucky when people value something they created.  The analyze why, how it might be made better, what fundamental causes brought about success, etc.  They get to know whether their key value was the big idea, the management and execution, the network of talent, the sales job, or some combination.  This allows them to replicate success by focusing on the areas with highest return.

Philosophy is known for thought experiments, but the market is where its field experiments take place.  The most powerful liberal arts education is one that includes the study and practice of value creation.  This could mean digging into ideas in the humanities while simultaneously working at a company and trying to make it and yourself more money, not just as a practical but a philosophical exercise.  I’ve never understood people who’ve studied for decades but never entered the marketplace to exchange.  Perhaps it’s a carry-over from the Greek’s high-minded condescension towards merchants, but an attitude that treats value creation as beneath contemplation is impractical and illogical.

This passion for theory and big ideas and liberal arts combined with the thrill of value creation in the marketplace is what animates Praxis and what gets me up and working every day.  I’ve gotten to the point where I do not have any way to distinguish work from study.  In the office I’m as likely to be reading Seneca as going over an expense report.  I see both as equally important for my long term success and happiness.

We don’t need Plato’s philosopher kings.  The worst thing is to confer the use of force upon smart people who leave the production to others.  We could use more philosopher merchants who constantly examine themselves and seek to understand the world while testing their ideas in the voluntary marketplace of goods and services; who imagine a better world and then go out and create it themselves.

What if it Was You?

What would you do if the US economy hit rock bottom?  I mean real rock bottom.  Not like the dot-com or housing bust.  More like perpetual, long-term, no end in sight economic stagnation where grinding poverty was the norm.  If the average wage dropped below half of what it is today.  If you were only able to earn 12, 10, or 8 thousand a year no matter how hard you worked.  If there was no upward mobility and no prospect for a better life.  If your family lived in a house built mostly from pallets and scrap sheet metal and you had to pirate your electricity.  If sickness was frequent and medical care unreliable at best.  Try to imagine a US like that.

Meanwhile a nearby developed country is doing great.  They can’t hire enough workers.  Just moving there and doing the same thing you’re doing now will double your income immediately, improve your family housing and health, and provide ample opportunity for moving up over time for both you and your kids.  Your good friend did it.  Your brother did it.  They are living in paradise compared to what your family lives in.  Businesses there want to hire you, landlords want to rent to you, your kids want to go there.

Would you stay or would you go?

Would going make you heroic or criminal?

There is no room in a humane society for immigration restrictions.

It’s Not About You

The other day I saw a post on Facebook about the need to rethink the practice of men holding open the door for women, as it carries some implications that might be demeaning to women.  An interesting discussion that could be illuminating.  I scrolled through the comments to see people’s take and instead of arguments for or against the practice it was primarily posts like, “Well I hold the door for people and they thank me”, or, “I do (or do not) like it when people hold the door for me”.

This is not an uncommon scene on social media.  A broad argument or discussion topic is raised and everyone immediately refers to his or her own situation as proof for or against.  I’ve done it.  You probably have too.  There can be value in your perspective and your experiences may play a part in shaping the discussion, but when the first thing someone says in reply to a general argument is the word “I”, it’s really hard to get much further with a fruitful discussion.  It’s no longer about whether the practice of holding doors has more pros than cons, now it’s about whether the commenter is right or wrong, good or bad.  It’s too personal, too sensitive, and there’s no room for mental expansion or transformation.

I’ve tried to adopt the practice in any kind of debate or discussion of no self-references.  Even if I have a unique perspective or have experienced something related to the topic strongly, I don’t let myself use it.  I try to think about what my core idea is and lay out a clear case for it without any appeal to my own authority.  It’s a huge challenge, but when I stick to it I become a clearer thinker and it has the added bonus of making me less emotionally involved in the discussion.  (I don’t always stick to it!)

If someone were to say pet funerals are silly and you had a pet funeral as a child that meant a great deal to you, could you help someone see merit in the idea without immediately letting them know it helped you?  The minute you make it about you learning stops, because no one wants to offend.  Discussion becomes personal attack by default.  The chance for broadening horizons essentially ends, even though you may earn some sympathy and get someone to shut up.

Imagine every article, post, and argument you see not being about you, even if it’s about a topic very close to home.  Think about its premises and conclusion and what it fails to account for.  See if you can lay out your own ideas and agreement or objection without appeal to your experience or emotion.  If you can there’s a chance all parties will learn new things.  An added bonus, if someone in the discussion discovers that you have personal experience to draw from that makes you particularly passionate about a position, but chose not to build your argument around it, they will gain a tremendous amount of respect for you and your idea.

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The Danger of “I’m the Exception”

Everybody thinks public schools are in horrible shape.  But everyone also thinks their particular school or district is really good.  Congress has ridiculously low approval ratings and everyone thinks they’re a bunch of crooks and liars.  But everyone thinks the individual congressperson they voted for isn’t that bad, certainly better than the rest.  Everybody knows they house always wins in the long run, but how many people have told you they always break even or come out ahead at the casino?

When you clearly identify institutional and social problems for the public at large, but find yourself always somehow the exception, perhaps you aren’t looking closely or honestly enough.  Perhaps you have applied blinders in order to normalize your own past and present.  Perhaps the conclusion if applied consistently would be too much to deal with because it would leave you culpable in an admittedly bad system, process, behavior, or norm.

There really are exceptions to general rules and observations.  Just be careful if you find yourself in the exceptional position often.  You might be the dupe.

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(What) I Think, Therefore I Am (Able to Do)

This is an excellent article that provides a synopsis of the work of Carol Dweck.  I highly recommend it.  The core insight is simple: those who believe their intelligence and personality are malleable and something they have the power to shape and alter are able to sustain success, rise to challenges, and recover from failure.

It doesn’t really matter whether personality and intelligence are changeable.  Believing that they are creates a better mindset for dealing with the real world.  If you believe you can change yourself you won’t search for validation of what you are, you’ll try ti improve what you are.  You won’t feel defeated by failure because you can get better and try again.  You won’t feel threatened by the success of others but inspired by their example.

You can consciously cultivate a growth mindset.  There are practices and disciplines and slight alterations in your habits and use of language that can begin to chip away at the fixed mindset.  (I’ve found Martin Seligman to have some excellent resources for this.)  It’s the opposite of the silly self-esteem stuff like telling yourself you can do anything.  It’s more about taking on small challenges and overcoming them as a way to train your brain in how to succeed.

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Failure Does Not Make You a Failure

“I can’t afford to fail.”  A young person recently told me this.  He was deciding whether to try something he was really excited about, but that was new and different (not even particularly risky).  He meant it.  It was clear that he saw this as a make or break moment in his life, and it broke my heart.  You can afford to fail.  In fact, you can’t afford to avoid failure.

I’m not sure all the causes, though I believe schooling is a very deep part of the root system, but young people are terrified of failure.  It’s completely backwards.  Never in human history has there been such a soft landing.  Never has it been easier to recover.  When a business or an event or a project fails it doesn’t mean you fail.  In fact, a failed business can be the surest path to personal success.  If you don’t let it ruin you.

Failure is not catastrophic.  It’s just a part of the process of success.  You try to ride a bike and you fall down.  You try to play video games and you lose.  Kids seem able to recover from failure at these pretty easily.  Maybe because their parents don’t care and don’t show anxiety and anger and send them into remedial video game classes and summer camps.  Whatever the reason, there’s something to be taken from these failures.  Apply that same nonchalance to life.  Life is nothing but a series of games.

The desire to succeed and frustration at failure is normal and can be productive and motivating, but only when you’re doing something you know you want to be doing.  The real killer is crippling fear of failing at some arbitrary standard set by someone else, or fear of what other people will think even when you don’t really care about the end goal itself.  When exploring and learning something new, failure is to be expected.  Don’t internalize it.  Learn from it, laugh at it, and move on.

One you’ve gained some level of mastery, then competitive pressure and desire to be perfect can be helpful.  I read about a study where pool players were observed.  When they were told they were being observed and judged the amateur pool players started playing a lot worse.  The really good players started playing better.  We need a lot of judgement free space to explore and learn and decide what we like and get better at it.  Self-judgement needs to be the first to go.  After you’ve mastered something you can choose to take failure personally if it helps you and motivates you, but not before.

I think a lot of people are scared of entrepreneurship because they hear statistics about what percent of new businesses fail.  But notice what’s happening here.  You hear that a business failed, and in your mind you subtly converge the business with the founder and assume that the founder failed.  You assume if you start a business odds say it will fail, and therefore you will fail and you don’t want to fail.  But that’s not what happens.  When a business fails the people involved don’t fail.  They typically walk away with some great experience, knowledge, new connections, sometimes even money.

Stop being afraid of failure.  Stop worrying about being average or above average on some arbitrary scale created by someone besides yourself.  Freely explore and try things and learn things and get better at the stuff you love.  You’ve got to stop avoiding failure if you want to succeed.

Breaking the Once and Done Mentality

I hate to mow the lawn.  Still, I love few things more than a freshly cut and edged lawn.  I like the result, the problem is that only a few days later, it’s already visibly growing back.  That means it has to be cut again.  I want to be able to get it just right once and never have to deal with it again.  (I hate haircuts for the same reason.)

I want to do things once and move on.  I don’t like maintenance and repeated actions.  I try to carry all the grocery bags into the house in a single trip, even when it ends up taking longer and being ridiculously awkward.

I’m not going to pretend this mentality is all bad.  I think it’s a big strength much of the time.  But the main problem with it is that it creates all kinds of existential overhead.  I gets stressed just knowing something is in a constant state of limbo and not done for good.  This stress sucks, especially when you run a business.

I’ve never met a business owner who loves their current website.  It’s always, “Yeah, it’s not what it’s supposed to be.  We’re making some changes.”  Same goes for marketing copy, sales process, product, back office, etc.  Everything is a process.  You don’t just build it once.  That kind of dynamism is wonderful for customers and necessary for producers, but it can be frustrating for a build-it-once-and-move-on guy like myself.  I have to surround myself with people who enjoy the open-ended process (yet still have the ability to finish).

I can do it, and I do.  It’s necessary.  But I still haven’t learned how to do it happily.  It still stresses me out.  I guess I can start with my lawn.  If I can make my peace with the fact that grass just keeps growing back no matter how short I cut it, and embrace the rhythm and cycle, maybe I can apply that to larger things.

You’re Never Done Working Hard

Originally posted here.

One of my favorite stories is The Great Divorceby C.S. Lewis.  The plot involves residents of hell taking a day trip to heaven.  The interesting thing is that most of them don’t realize they were in hell, and don’t like it when they experience heaven.  Most choose to go back to hell.

It’s not a fire and brimstone hell, just a grey, bleak, lonely place where all the conversations and concerns are shallow.  Heaven is even less like the common vision of clouds and harps.  It is beautiful, but also terrifying, painful, and really, really hard.  The grass and trees and water are literally hard to the touch for the visitors.  Those who have been there for some time have become more substantial, and for them the blades of grass softly bend underfoot.  But the visitors are such shadowy, weak, ghost-like beings that they can hardly handle the hardness of the more realheavenly environs.  It takes time, effort, and struggle to be able to enjoy the wonders of this heaven.  In other words, heaven isn’t easy or safe, but it’s good.

We often strive to find some imagined heaven – some sort of stasis where no conflict or struggle or hard work exist – and in so doing become disillusioned by the fact that we never get there.  The thing is, I don’t think we’d actually want it if we found it.  It would look more like Lewis’s hell than heaven.  Safe, stagnant, dull.  A place where we become less real, and lose touch with what we want and who we are.

Think of the times when you are genuinely fulfilled, or in a state of flow.  Often they involve hard work and mental or physical challenges.  Even moments of apparent ease are only really enjoyable when they are earned, and when they are not indefinite, but part of a progression towards something greater still, like water stations in a marathon.

Without vision, people perish.  We need goals and challenges.  Not in order to get some reward or prize at the end, or to reach a state of rest, but to enjoy the challenges while we’re in them.  If we achieve them it’s not so we can finally be done, but so that we can set our sights still higher.  Those in the story who had been in heaven for some time were working to gain more strength to scale the mountain, and then the next thing beyond it.  Heaven was heaven – in full bloom and overpoweringly gorgeous – precisely because the growth never ceased.  Growth only happens with work.

Don’t put off enjoyment until you arrive at some imagined goal or end state.  If you arrive there, it won’t be that enjoyable.  If you don’t, you’ll have missed out on the opportunity to enjoy the process itself.  This doesn’t mean it’s just about the journey – a journey without a destination isn’t a journey.  It is about the destination, but because arrival means the ability to set out for the next, still greater destination as a new traveler who has grown through the trials of the previous leg.

Being fulfilled requires far more hard work than being dull, listless, or depressed.  But it’s worth it.

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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.