The Hobbesian “state of nature”, as a war of all against all, and the social contract theory, which romanticizes the origins of state monopolies in a way utterly incongruent with logic and history.  These are the worst assumptions in the study of political economy.

I’m thrilled because I just pre-ordered two new books by two of the clearest thinkers that land big punches against these dumb assumptions.  Both released in the same week!  Something must be in the air.

The first is a new book by James Scott, whose work is a devastating blow to the social contract story of the origin of states.  States originate in conquest, subjugation, and slavery.  They require massive violence beyond the scale of any mere criminal, and propaganda and ideology to sustain.  No one holds hands and peacefully agrees to form a state for some notion of the greater good.

The second is a new book by Peter Leeson, whose work is a devastating blow to the Hobbesian idea that, absent a central monopoly on violence (“Leviathan”), humans would be in perpetual violent conflict.  Leeson “pokes Hobbes in the eye” over and over with his phenomenal examinations of the myriad ways humans have sought peace and harmony over violence in the absence of central control.  Hobbes is wrong.  Humans choose cooperation to violence whenever possible, and peaceful exchange is a more natural social behavior than armed conflict.  It requires a massive indoctrination effort to normalize mass violence as states do.

What makes this all so fun is that the mechanisms that emerge to reduce conflict are often bizarre and unlikely, which drives rationalist central planners nuts.

Once you scrap the assumption that humans would all murder each other absent a state (note: this doesn’t require humans to be naturally “good” or naturally “bad”, just self-interested), and that states emerged in some magical kumbaya contract that you signed before you were born, you realize institutions that monopolize violence are as unnecessary as they are evil.

This is a trip worth taking.  Check out these new books to dive in.

I’m on Steemit now, and I don’t get it.

After several years, I finally get Twitter.  Facebook took me a little while too (I thought Myspace was better, granted that was when you needed a .edu email address to get on Facebook, and I was no longer a student).  Instagram doesn’t do anything for me.  Reddit is great, but like scanning a fun newspaper in a foreign language.  Snapchat feels like the worst user experience I’ve ever seen and no plausible use case I can find for myself.

I love it when I don’t get it.  It means there are entire sections of society and culture in which others are fluent and I’ve yet to understand.  It means there are trends and changes I need to scramble to see.  It means the world is bigger and more interesting than what’s in my head.

Sometimes I eventually get it.  Other times I don’t.  Sometimes the things I don’t get end up being dumb anyway.  Other times they’re world-changing.

I’m always up to dabble, even if the result is total confusion.

In every single area of life dominated by market exchange and civil society, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

WiFi is better.  Smartphones.  Slack.  Uber.  More and better food options.  Podcasts.  Kindle paperwhite.  Nearly every daily activity, productivity tool, information, entertainment, work, exercise, and leisure experience is better.

The only things worse than ten years ago are those dominated by monopoly governments and their protectionist crony regulations.  Health care is worse.  Air travel is neutral.  Buying a car at a dealership is as awful as ever.  Banking is a joke.  Policing is more ominous.

Still, even though areas dominated by monopolized state violence are worse almost across the board, and even though a higher number of areas are touched by the tentacles of politics, the growth in all other areas of life still outpaced them.  The growth in the rest of the real, voluntary world was faster.  The influence of the state on my daily life is less, or at least I have more ability to make it less with physical and digital mobility.

Progress is not inevitable.  It’s ultimately determined by the dominant beliefs of the population.  But beliefs are shaped by more than argument.  They are shaped by experience more often than not.  Whether arguments for freedom and peace are winning, experiences of freedom and peace are.

That’s worth celebrating.  Let’s keep building the free world.  While the political clowns bloviate about dividing pies, making threats, and picking losers, we’ll bake new pies, create win-wins, and relegate them to the dustbin of history with serfdom and slavery.

“If you think, you’re dead.” — Maverick

Sometimes the best path to knowledge – especially self-knowledge – is just doing something.  The demand of producing something forces epiphanies from your depths.

You have a lot of information, ideas, opinions, and insights inside that aren’t easy to access.  Retrospection is a useful tool, but your head can get in the way of your gut, where the best stuff lives.  Your gut kicks in when things move too fast for your conscious mind.  Your gut is what lets you shoot a basketball without thinking (playing “out of your mind” is a phrase for being fully in that zone).  It’s what comes to the surface in a crisis, when time and thought are too dangerous to risk.

I apply this often.  I blog every day, and so far, nothing beats the demand of a daily post for getting my own thoughts out of my head.  I rarely think before I write, because I don’t have time.  I open a new post in WordPress and start typing.  I write not just to say what I think, but to find out what I think.

Questions are a good way to spur action and learning.  An open ended assignment to share thoughts might cloud the mind.  A demand to tell me everything you think when I say “City planning” (or any other phrase) in 60 seconds will unearth something.  A good starting point at least.

Even physical action can produce results.  I take walks as a way to jostle my brain.  I build LEGO with my kids by grabbing the first piece I see and attaching it to the second.  The vision comes together as a result of building, then feeds it in a virtuous cycle (practice-practice-theory).

Action is often juxtaposed with analysis, but the relationship is more knotty than a simple dichotomy.  I don’t act to avoid thinking, I act in order to think.

You’ve heard of the logical fallacy appeal to authority.

There’s another bad way to approach arguments (if what you want is the truth) I call appeal to identity.  A great way to spot this approach is to look for two simple words: “As a…”

If a question begins with, “As a…”, it’s an appeal to identity rather than a direct inquiry into an argument.  You see this in Q&A sessions and internet comments all the time, and it does nothing but reduce the odds of a good answer.  Compare,

“Do you think your strategy would work for someone with ADD, or would that require a different approach?”

To,

“As a person with ADD, I’m wondering if you think your strategy would work for people like me?”

The question is the same, but the second is embedded in an identity framing that puts the responder on guard.  There’s an implied skepticism, or eagerness to be offended or have a “gotcha!” moment.  It smells of a subtle threat, that if you bullshit me, I’ll know it because of my identity.

There’s nothing unfair or out of bounds about that way of asking.  But it reduces the odds that you’ll hear and be able to glean from a clear answer.  It turns an argument about propositions into a game about status.

Most, “As a…” questions are much worse than the example above.  Most aren’t even questions.  How many Q&A’s have you been to where someone says something like,

“As a student of Greek history, I’m familiar with many epochs of conflict between cultures, and it seems perhaps your argument could be applied to the early wars between city states just as easily as modern nation states.”

It’d be merciful if they were all this short.  These non-question identity flexes are abhorrent.  They make the asker look like a fool and everyone else uncomfortable.  If they really want the speaker’s opinion on whether city states and nation states require different arguments, they could have asked.  Maybe a real curiosity is buried in there, but it’s clouded over by appeal to identity.

If you want to understand arguments and find logical validity and truth, leave your identity at the door.  Unique knowledge you have because of it is valuable, but where and how you got that knowledge are irrelevant distractions.

If you want truth or practical value, don’t approach arguments and ideas as anything but a seeker of answers.  Truth, like justice, is blind.

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from. — Seth Godin

This has been my goal for most of my life.  I never put it in such explicit terms, but my approach has been the negative version, Don’t Do Stuff You Hate, and what I’m left with is the same – a life I don’t want to escape from.

I thought about this when I awoke today and remembered the whole Praxis team is taking the day off.  I suggested the off day as more of a challenge than a holiday, because most of the team is like me and we live and breath our work.  I will certainly enjoy going to the pool with the kids, barbecue with friends, cigars and fireworks.  But it’s a little sad to think of not popping onto my phone every so often to check on Slack, Gmail, Voxer, etc.  When I deliberately take a day off of work, I’m reminded that the line between work and play is hard to find.  I love this stuff.

I’ll try not to do anything worky today, but it’s hard to distinguish so I might open a file in Google Drive in between beers once or twice.

What will you do today to make yourself more valuable than you were yesterday?

I can use Facebook as a powerful tool for connecting, learning, asking, answering, building social capital, and enhancing my personal and professional goals.

I can also use it as a mind-numbing, cynicism-inducing, never-ending scroll fest that saps productivity and dims my view of humanity and myself.

I’ve experienced both, and I have to consciously monitor myself and experiment with my usage habits and adjust to not get sucked in to the lowlight zone.

These two potential uses of a network aren’t exclusive to digital media.  Friends and acquaintances are the same.

Yes, the five people I spend the most time around and all that.  But it’s not just who.  Like Facebook, what I do and how I frame it matter more.  I can scroll through the same feed for the same amount of time and post the same number of characters in Facebook use pattern number one as number two.  But the experience is entirely different.  I can talk with the same five friends and walk away feeling like I indulged in mind-candy time-killing, or energized, upbeat, and focused.

It comes down to work.

First, I have to enter the interaction with a purpose.  I want to learn something, explore something, share something, ask something, and walk away with a specific outcome.  That’s work.  Then it’s more work to do it, still more to resist distraction, and more to cut if off when I’ve gotten what I need.  Oh, and it’s work to take away what I gained and use it.

This requires breaking from the warm, soft, easy, well-worn ruts.  It’s easy to mindlessly enter Facebook or a friend circle and wait to be entertained.  Take the information as it comes, whatever it is, react to it with the nearest emotion, slap a gut-level comment here and there, do something to make myself look good, and glaze over.

I try to ask myself, “Do I have a specific reason for going to Facebook?”, or, “Do I have a goal with this conversation?”  If not, wait until I do.

When I need a goal, I begin to realize that they’re all around me but I ignore them.  If I force myself to come up with a specific benefit I could gain from popping on Facebook, I can find ten.  There are questions and challenges lurking in the back of my head all the time, and a powerful network of people is one that can help work them out.

It’s not the overuse of Facebook or my circle of friends that’s a problem.  It’s underuse.  Both are networks too valuable to turn into shiny objects.  People used to have to travel or move across the world to be around top-notch people.  Now they’re everywhere.  If I relegate them to noise, it’s my fault, not theirs.

I try every day to demand more value out of my networks, personal and digital.  I won’t get sucked in, nor will I swear them off and retreat to hermitage.  I’ll be deliberate.

I’m a pretty casual guy.  Not because I have some deep philosophy of clothing.  Just because it usually suits my needs best.

My friend Jeff Tucker recently made the case to me for more formal style.  I didn’t agree with his case, but I didn’t disagree with it either.  I’m pretty agnostic on this stuff.

To me the way you dress is one of many social games.  You can choose to play the game, defy the game, opt out of the game, or fight to change the game.  Most of the time I play or opt out, with rare moments of playful semi-defiance (I sometimes joke that it’s fun to be the second most under-dressed person at a banquet, but never the first).  I have no interest in trying to change the game with regard to dress norms and expectation.

I don’t care how others dress and I’m not interested in starting a movement.  (I dislike movements in general, except the ones I get after morning coffee.  Too far?  Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)  If the cost of dressing down is too high and interferes with my other goals, I’ll dress up.  If not, I’ll wear what I’m most comfortable in, usually a T-shirt and jeans.

I spent many years early in my career wearing a suit every day, and many more wearing business casual.  Now I hardly have occasion for either and it feels great.  I like a nice T-shirt and feel more fresh, confident, and classy in one that fits well with some jeans and sandals than anything else.  But I wear appropriate attire to funerals, weddings, and meetings or other events that would be too disrupted if I wore jorts. (Sadly, I got rid of my jorts when they fell to pieces and my wife has seen fit to prevent me replacing them.)

I’m not going to fight for some set of values in clothing, because I don’t have one myself.  I try to have as few values as possible.  I have deeply held philosophies on the things core to my being and will never compromise without a change in that philosophy based on reason.  But the fewer those things, the better.  The more things about which I don’t have to pretend to have a position, the better.  Clothing is one.

I like the idea that all emotions can be reduced to two: love and fear.

This reduction suggests that love is good, fear bad.  That simple breakdown worked for me.  Until I read the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore.

I don’t pretend to know Moore’s intended moral, if he had one, but when I closed the cover and went for a walk to process what I’d read, an unexpected one smacked me in the face.

Love, not fear, is the cause of the most horrific acts in the world.

Fear is too cowardly an emotion to lead to really massive atrocities and deeply sickening deeds.  Fear is the root of all petty, passive aggressive, shady, slimy, duplicitous, and lazy acts.  But the really awful stuff – war, genocide, grotesque murderous plots – are motivated by love.

The idea that love could be behind evil unsettled me.  But it’s not love in general, not just any kind of love.  One kind of love is the root of all heroism, courage, innovation, exploration, progress, and growth.  Another is the root of the darkest acts.

Watchmen’s parallel plots all revealed the same kind of love as the foundation for the greatest evils.  Love of anything other than self.

Stick with me.  I didn’t say loving anything other than yourself always leads to bad things.  But if the most foundational love you have is not for yourself, your identity, your values, you can quickly become a monster.  Any love beyond love for your uncompromisable core must be built on top of it.  When love for something else supplants it, blindness and madness have an entry point.

Love for family, country, ideals of justice or fairness, the good opinion of others, fame, progress, or anything else are at bottom of the great crimes.  No one starts a war or ethnic cleansing campaign based on fear alone.  It’s not strong enough.  Unfettered devotion to some collective identity or ideal outside oneself is the only thing strong enough.

The doers of the really vile deeds in Watchmen were those most deeply motivated by a love for something noble, driven in singular pursuit of it to commit heinous things.  When love of self – a commitment to the values that make up that self – is supplanted by love of something else, the foundation is lost and there’s no telling how far you may stray.  You only break eggs if your love of omelets is greater than your love of being true to your belief that you ought not break eggs.

To truly give of yourself, you must first have a self to give.  A commitment first and foremost to love yourself and not compromise what you know you are at your core is a prerequisite to other kinds of love that won’t go bad.  Unrestricted sacrifice of the self to something else may lead you to commit things you’d never imagine.

At the end of the day, you are the only thing you can really control, hence the only fate you can be fully responsible for is your own.  If you weigh yourself down with the fate of other things, you may lose yourself in the process and be left with nothing but the Nuremberg defense.

For this reason, Rorschach emerges as the closest thing to a hero in Watchmen.

Importance is subjective.  Nothing is inherently important.  It’s important if you assign it importance.

I’ve heard that success is directly related to the number of tough conversations you’re willing to have (Tim Ferriss I think?).  It’s also related to the number of seemingly important things you’re willing to ignore.

It’s important to choose to make a great many things unimportant.

If you get really good at ignoring big, dramatic, energy-filled, time-consuming, mentally taxing, worrisome, exciting things that aren’t firmly within your zone, you’ll get really good at whatever you have in that zone.  What it is matters less than what it isn’t.

Every time you choose not to assign importance to something everyone else deems important, but that is outside your zone, you get a little stronger in your zone.  The effect compounds as you move up, because the level of importance for the unimportant things ratchets too, and the difficulty of ignoring them.  A lot of flattering or fearful things come up and vie for your attention.  Most of them are unimportant wolves, but it’s hard to see through the important sheep’s clothing.

It helps me to start from a default assumption that everything is unimportant.  It has to prove that it’s important to helping me achieve my narrow range of goals.  Few things pass the test.

I get more productive the more things I decide to make unimportant.  I get sharper on the few things to which I choose to assign importance.  Plus, I’m happier.

Here are two posts that go a little more in-depth on Importance Snares”

Drama is the enemy of progress.

Two ways people try to control you (insults and flattery…both unimportant).

There’s an old saying that you can’t be a little bit pregnant.  You’re pregnant or you aren’t.  Pregnant and not-pregnant are both great states – optimal states – depending on person, circumstance, and timing.  It’d be weird for someone to ape the tendencies and social status of both at the same time.  A person who pretends to be pregnant when they aren’t, or the reverse, to gain some kind of emotional edge in a given circumstance is unhealthy.

This happens with ideas.  Abstract and concrete ideas are both wonderful.  What’s weird is a muddled middle incapable of either raw pursuit of abstract truth or concrete application toward a specific end.

Many young people are capable of neither abstract nor concrete interaction with ideas.  The rule of the day is to have an opinion on every idea.  Not ignore it, be inspired by it, or act on it – all of which would be better – just have an opinion quickly knowable to the mainstream or contrarians, whatever group you’re gunning for.  Maybe the trend has grown, maybe I just notice it more.  It makes people intellectually impotent, uninteresting, and sometimes insufferable.

Concrete radicals care about everything only insofar as it contributes directly to their goals.  I know successful people like this, shrewd as vipers at eliminating chaff and demanding value from every idea they entertain.  They are practical philosophers.  They have a massive appetite for learning new things, but a laser-like focus keeps them out of the clouds.  They know who they are and so does everyone else.  They don’t pretend to know what’s true, just what works for them.  There is a beautiful and transparent logic to their approach.

Abstract radicals care about everything only insofar as it leads them closer to truth.  I know successful people like this, gentle as doves, openly exploring every idea for that spark of insight that might open their mind to new aspects of reality.  Their head is in the clouds, they know it, they own it, they love it.  They get the basics of life handled however they can so they can focus on their pursuit of ideas, unconcerned with potential applications.  There is a beautiful and transparent logic to their approach.

Some people can switch between both extremes based on their preference and circumstances.  I know successful people like this.  In some areas at some times, they are concrete as it comes.  In others, they throw practicality to the wind and get lost in abstraction.

It’s that flabby, flimsy, floppy middle ground that’s useless.  Those incapable of dealing with big abstract ideas playfully or fruitfully, and incapable of putting ideas to use for them to achieve concrete goals.  Equally afraid of discussions of truth claims and environments with accountability to specific outcomes.  It’ a mode of thought geared at social signalling and desire to appear cool or normal, rather than attain an intrinsic goal, abstract or concrete.  Those might end in failure, terror of terrors, while moderation between abstract and concrete is too slippery to win or lose.

One manifestation of this inability to take either extreme is the perpetual critic who never creates.  Raising a hand to object to an author’s presentation of an idea scores quick points as a thinker, while not demanding original thought or accountability for the value of your opinion.  This proof-of-paying-attention-while-playing-too-cool-to-be-inspired is common in classrooms.

A manifestation in the work setting is the meeting lover.  If you hold a meeting with lofty sounding objectives and trendy buzzwords, you toe the line between abstract vision and concrete production, but accomplish neither.  In almost every case, sitting at your desk entering data into a spreadsheet or going for a walk to contemplate your target market would be better than a muddled meeting to pontificate about both.  To paraphrase Ron Swanson, better to whole-ass one thing than half-ass two.

One more example, popular in the last decade or so, is the non-profiteer who tries to mimic the culture and incentives of a for-profit startup.  Rather than seizing their unique advantage of not needing market demand for their mission, this middle-of-the-roader wants to be both shielded from the accountability of profit and loss and enjoy the innovation, fast pace, and coolness factor of a hip tech company.  It ends up a parody of both.

I don’t know if this inability to be extremely abstract or extremely concrete is really on the rise, but I see more of it every day with young people.  I sometimes think they read every popular book while reading none of them.  They post a quick, tepid endorsement, or glib dismissal on the abstract ideas or concrete application, but don’t seem to radically embrace or reject anything as either a tool for their advancement or a morsel on their quest for truth.

It’s hard to look beyond the simulated half-world of school as explanation.  This is he most schooled generation in human history.  I can’t think of another place where the lack of concrete and abstract is so prominent.  Students must engage abstract ideas just enough to prove it on a test.  Tests are a phony foam concrete, like a bad Star Trek prop.  They have tangible enough outcomes, but grades are an end product utterly disconnected from the real world or any intrinsic student goals.

Contrast the way you have to engage a book in order to pass a test with the way you to do either, a) stay awake all night contemplating its claims because you must know, or, b) get someone to pay you to do something you don’t yet know how to do.

Learning to the task is infinitely superior to learning to the test.  Problems, your problems, whether the need to know how the world works or the need to feed yourself, are the best thing to drive learning.  They enable both extremes depending on time, preference, and circumstance.

The school-test-grade system is a sloppy mess you’d expect to generate a bunch of people with knowledge tuned for sending a minimum acceptable social signal.  It saps the real interest and drive that accompany a radical abstract or radical concrete thinker.

But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth! — Revelation 3:16