Speaks 'n' Sneaks

I have recognized the value of tempered transparency in relationships of all types. We are all so similar and yet there is this great chasm between us. I wish we were more blunt with ourselves and with each other. I will admit, blunt has a rather inhumane connotation. Therefore, I feel the need to expound on the attribute of being blunt as tempered transparency. Tempered transparency, I contend, is the perfect expression of personal effectiveness and social appropriateness. It is the liberation of intrinsic communicative desires regulated by role taking - perceiving through another's perspective. I believe that all that is boring, stressful, underwhelming, overwhelming, daunting, frustrating, and mind-boggling in relationships stems from our inability to advantageously utilize this attribute. Where is this fear coming from? Why is our collective self-confidence so low? Why can we not become more mindful? Intimacy, a necessary condition in all types of relationships, is contingent upon our ability to achieve a higher stage of being.

What are your Metrics?

With the early state primaries approaching, I can't help but be completely disappointed with the American people. I can't help but be underwhelmed by the ease with which we are persuaded to disregard competent candidates; the ease with with which we are motivated to follow charismatic candidates; the trivial measures upon which we base our advocacies.

I ask all of you who are of age and who have not been so negligent in your citizenship as to remain unregistered: What are your metrics?

When I say metrics, I refer to the aforementioned measures upon which we base our advocacies. In other words, "What things, tangible or intangible, make you support a presidential candidate?"

After pondering that question, "What attributes, skill-sets, knowledge-bases, aggregates, experiences do you believe will make the best CEO of the States?" Now, "Do you vote accordingly?"

"What do you want the next President to accomplish?" Now, "Which of the candidates do you believe are most likely to accomplish that thing/those things?"

What are your metrics?

Three Types of Beef

For but a few minutes I would like to delineate three types of beef. More specifically, three types of people with whom I am almost entirely saturated: (1) Wishers, (2) Besters, and (3) Commentators. (FYI - I will refer to people as sneaks, which symbolizes the same species, as constituted in BarthEganese)

1. Wishers: Sneaks who are confused about their wants.

Wishers are the people you hear say things like unto the following commonplaces:

a. "I wish I read more."
b. "I wish I worked out more."
c. "I wish I was more organized."
d. "I have always wanted to know a lot of languages."
e. "I wish I was more into classical music."

These statements may seem harmless at initial glance, yet they are some of the most illogical utterances sneaks every let loose. If the shallow sneak really wished he read more, he would. If the slothful sneak really wished he worked out more, he would. If the careless sneak really wished he was more organized, he would be. If the talker sneak really wanted to know a lot of languages, he would learn them. If the poser sneak really wished he was more into classical music, he would be. Want is actualized, not verbalized.

2. Besters: Sneaks who are confused about their work.

Besters are the sneaks you hear submitting related, if not the exact following value claims:

a. "We did the best we could."
b. "I did all that I could do."
c. "I'll do what I can."
d. "Well, at least we can't say we didn't try."
e. "We'll see what happens."

These declarations are manifestations of weakness. They are unacceptable and pathetic. If one proclaims one of the aforementioned, and actually believes himself, then he is crippling himself. Sneaks cannot exceed their expectations, ambitions, goals, and ideals for themselves. Therefore, when the sneak accepts that his effort was sufficient even though the reality of it was ultimately worthless, he is constructing a self-ceiling through which he may never break.

3. Commentators: Sneaks who are confused about their worth.

Commentators are the sneaks you hear constantly radiating the following garbage:

a. "He is so..."
b. "She is going to..."
c. "Did you hear what she said about..."
d. "What do you think he will..."
e. "What's this about them doing..."

The frequency with which one affords colleagues similar opening words reflects the frequency with which their lives are becoming absolutely meaningless. Commentators find pleasure in talking about other people, whether it is gossip, hearsay, ratings, backbiting, whining, judging, appraisal, or whatever. I can't think of much that is publicly unleashed that is more distasteful and unbecoming as those who make the theme of their conversation the affairs of their neighbors.

I hope you enjoyed the beef.

Ambition

I spent my entire afternoon and my entire evening working on a project. I like extending my work beyond conventional demarcation for various motives - two in particular: (1) My ability to work is increased; (2) my ambition is more explicitly defined.

Concerning the latter motive, I am convinced that, as I defined my ambition by my work, I am defined by my ambition. The same principle applies to all intelligences: You define your ambition by your work; you define yourself by your ambition.

Without ambition, man is an awfully wasteful organism. I heard of a dialogue yesterday between Thomas Paine and a bystander. The bystander asked Paine of the difference between an educated man and an uneducated man. In response, Paine declared, "The educated man is to the uneducated man as the living are to the dead," or something to that effect. I submit that the same principle applies to man in relation to his ambition - the ambitious man is to the unambitious man as the living are to the dead.

It is my contention that all people, regardless of their current situation, should seek to enlighten themselves in two consecutive matters:

1. For what am I ambitious?
2. What must I subtract, modify, or add to my current program in order to more effectively and more efficiently pursue this object?

If our mental and physical faculties are not consistently expended toward this realm, then what in the name of Krylo Fesenko are we doing?

Politico

I am at the Marriott Library here on the U campus. Two of my teachers canceled class today, which frees me for the next little while, and I just read a swell op-ed. Therefore, I will now radiate my thoughts on the subject. David Brooks, in today's New York Times Op-Ed, authored The Republican Collapse, and spoke of epistemological modesty in the realm of politics as "the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan." He illustrated this principle with a comparative analysis of ideologies of the nature of societal change:

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism: that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation's unique network of moral and social restraints.

I find it preposterous that, with the knowledge we have of the social sciences, there are still such polar disparities in regard to the nature of societal change. After all, isn't policy making all about catalyzing societal change? Shouldn't we be acting in accordance with what evolutionists, economists, social psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have clearly demonstrated to this point? These scholars understand how change happens. Organizational behaviorist Douglas McGregor articulated a feature motive for our current situation with this rebuke:

The knowledge in the social sciences is not sparse, but frequently it contradicts personal experience and threatens some cherished illusions.

How much legislation proves unprofitable and even detrimental by virtue of politicians ignorance of the nature of societal change? I can't imagine anyone passing a bill through which they assume certain societal responses and behavioral perpetuation without understanding what some of the great minds have revealed to us.

McGregor, in his book The Human Side of Enterprise, made compelling analogies of the physical sciences and management, which may convincingly be applied to policy making:

In engineering, control consists in adjustment to natural law. It does not mean making nature do our bidding. We do not, for example, dig channels in the expectation that water will flow uphill; we do not use kerosene to put out a fire. In designing an internal combustion engine we recognize and adjust to the fact that gases expand when heated; we do not attempt to make them behave otherwise. With respect to physical phenomena, control involves the selection of means which are appropriate to the nature of the phenomena with which we are concerned.

In the human field the situation is the same, but we often dig channels to make water flow uphill. Many of our attempts to control behavior, far from representing selective adaptations, are in direct violation of human nature. They consist in trying to make people behave as we wish without concern for natural law. Yet we can no more expect to achieve desired results through inappropriate action in this field than in engineering.

When we fail to achieve the results we desire, we tend to seek the cause everywhere but where it usually lies: in our choice of inappropriate methods of control. The engineer does not blame water for flowing downhill rather than up, nor gases for expanding rather than contracting when heated.

Effective prediction and control are as central to the task of [policy making] as they are to the task of engineering or of medicine. If we would improve our ability to organize and direct human effort toward [constitutional] ends, we must not only recognize that this is so, we must also recognize [that] human behavior is predictable, but, as in physical science, accurate prediction hinges on the correctness of underlying theoretical assumptions. There is, in fact, no prediction without theory; all [political] decisions and actions rest on assumptions about behavior…Only as we examine and test our theoretical assumptions can we hope to make them more adequate, to remove inconsistencies, and thus to improve our ability to predict.

We can improve our ability to control only if we recognize that control consists in selective adaptation to human nature rather than in attempting to make human nature conform to our wishes. If our attempts to control are unsuccessful, the cause generally lies in our choice of inappropriate means. We will be unlikely to improve our [political] competence by blaming people for failing to behave according to our predictions.

Management consultant Paul Gustavson summarized McGregor’s conclusion with the adage, “[Governments] are perfectly designed to get the results they get. If you don’t like your results, then you need to change your design.”

Viktor Frankl supported this assertion:

…Optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope. And what is true for hope is also true for the other two components of the triad inasmuch as faith and love cannot be commanded or ordered either.

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.

This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon – laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say “cheese,” only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.

Steven Levitt pointed out in Freakanomics that economics is "nothing more than the study of incentives and how they are pursued."

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchtower observed that change comes to pass by "gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process is simple, relative to its predecessor." In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the term "meme" to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. In his book, Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – that is, it has causal agency – and can propagate.

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species referred to change as a "process by which favorable traits become more common in successive generations of a population and unfavorable traits become less common." Darwin added that "it is far more satisfactory to look at [well-adapted societies] not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings - namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

What, therefore, is my proposition? Surely scientists, without knowledge of the law, should not be our nation's policy makers. Likewise, the status quo - attorneys who are not extensively trained in the physical or social sciences - should not be our nation's policy makers. I submit that policy making will not significantly improve until it becomes a collaborative effort of social scientists (change experts) and attorneys (legal experts).

Also, Trevor Quist just made fun of me for blogging at a time when I could justifiably be doing absolutely nothing.

Keep on rockin' in the free world.

Beef

1. I had the privilege of engaging in conversation with a fine young Canadian lad who was sent to the U campus to preach the born again gospel to the multitudinous hellbound Mormons in Salt Lake City. For the record, I have absolutely no problem with this. I am happy to see anyone in their early twenties who actually gives a crap about how things are, were, and are to come. I do, however, become unamused when people of particular faiths criticize other people for their respective faiths. I see no logic or merit to this endeavor. Furthermore, I find it quite ridiculous how people use the Bible to attack other faiths. I accused the fine aforementioned gentleman today of putting the Bible above God, and of putting the text of the Bible above the principles of the Bible. These folks do not consider the nature of the laws of justice, mercy, and so forth, but rather, point to obscure passages and proclaim debatable interpretations. I have witnessed this practice countless times and I find it unfortunate. When your religion is proving the demise of other religions, you pit the masses and poision Christianity.

Temptations

1. When singing hymns during a Church meeting or fireside, I am frequently tempted to use a Kermit the frog voice.
2. When I am about to make a left turn onto another road and a car stopped at its intersection waits for me in order to make a left turn onto my street, I feel morally inclined to pull a Puerto Rican Sneek on him.