Squandering America’s Greatest Asset: Legitimacy

Power is a complicated subject. Even if we ignore the many types of power based in some form of energy (electric, fossil, solar, wind, nuclear, etc.), that leaves the state of, forms of, nature of, and consequences of, power in other realms of society to a scope of discussion that can occupy many hours of debate (which scholars often do). These discussions can produce many delightful hours of intellectual masturbation. Regardless of which locus of focus one settles into in the many splendid taxonomies of power that have been produced by legions of graduate students and their mentor-professors, at the essence of all power is the issue of legitimacy. Legitimacy is what makes power powerful.

In legal discourse, legitimacy is generally granted by authority as agreed to in, and proclaimed by, law. We point to a (hopefully) well written and clear law to assess the legitimacy of an act—of the expression of power. At the state and local (domestic) level of our societies, power is made legitimate by norms and laws backed by authority and resources which flow to entities based on their legitimacy. We empower the legitimate and reject the illegitimate by withholding our recognition and compliance.

At the domestic level of analysis, these touchstones (of norms and laws) are generally acknowledged and honored. And while we do organize into groups like political parties to contend for legitimate power through political processes like elections, the state of power and its legitimacy are protected within the guardrails of systems we honor. This practice is at the core of civil society; it is what puts civil at the heart of civilization. In the human ascent from the cave to the stars, we have learned (often the hard way) that our welfare depends upon our capacity for cooperation, and while competition is also important to sort out best products and practices, we must also cooperate to apply those products and practices to achieve the highest possible state of our well-being, especially with the public goods that animate the common good. So far, pretty simple.

At the international level, the legitimacy of power is a much more precarious subject. The first thing taught in graduate school about the nature of the international system, before diving into philosophers like Thucydides, or Machiavelli, or Hobbes, or Rousseau, or Kant, is that it is anarchical: there exists no highest authority recognized by the states that make up the system. The international system is a semi-organized anarchy. Moreover, there is no touchstone—no document or court or tribunal—against which legitimacy may be staked. Although we do create many fora like the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to attempt international governance, no nation-state carries any obligation of compliance beyond their willingness to do so. Even treaties, which are the foundation of international law (along with norms) can be violated without recourse; there is no enforcement mechanism. In the international system, it is like rock climbing hoping that the next crag of rock you grasp holds and doesn’t send you spiraling to your death. In the domestic system, we install reliable handholds in the form of enforceable laws on the rock face to ensure our safety. Yet, sometimes they also fail.

This issue of legitimacy is at the heart of much, if not all, of the problems America is facing today.

Legitimacy in America is fundamentally founded in the truth, and with honor for virtues as expressed in the many provisions of our founding documents, and in the many laws and interpretations thereof provided by our courts over the years. At both the domestic level and the international level, our current president, in an attempt to consolidate power in his hands and his hands only, is deploying deceit and dishonor to destroy the legitimacy of our power at home and abroad. If one were to place Trump’s contemplation of power on an arc of maturity, it would be somewhere between late grade school and early middle school. His recent address to congress was the first such annual address I chose not to watch in five decades because I was certain it would be composed mostly of lies. Based on reporting, he did not disappoint; he is, unabashedly, our liar-in-chief.

Trump’s is the dumbest and crudest concept of power there is, which is coercive power (whether waged with guns or tariffs or insults). Coercive power, which is the use of force often without regard for law, is stupid because it results in lose-lose outcomes; rarely win-lose and never win-win. I recognize that death and destruction appeals to many—most often those who have never worn a uniform. But any clear-minded assessment conducted as a post-analysis that considers both short- and long-term effects, shows that the costs of coercive power far outweigh the benefits. This is not an idealistic or woke notion, it is founded in a realistic accounting of events.

The most obvious examples of coercive power are violent conflicts like wars that very rarely result in any side of a conflict being better off once the fighting ends. All sides lose blood and treasure and whatever bounty is claimed falls well short of the total costs incurred. In heritable conflicts like those in the Middle East, the costs compound for generations. Of course, dumb leaders also rarely care about the costs since they are endured by others; there is neither dust nor blood on their boots. Smart leaders behave otherwise; they understand that the measurement of stupidity begins when the first shot is fired.

At the domestic level, Trump’s attempts to destroy legitimacy is why so many are warning of a constitutional crisis. By his many unlawful acts, which are now being judged as such in many of our lower courts, the larger question is: who or what will stop him? Even if the Supreme Court rules against him, where is the enforcement mechanism? Historically, we have never had to be concerned about a president who would behave in such a reckless and selfish manner. Even when Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus (a fundamental civil right) during the Civil War, it was done in the interest of the union, not in his desire to grab power for his own benefit.

In this new alliterative Trump couplet of deceit and dishonor, the anarchical nature of the international system will now be visited upon the domestic system focused, for the moment, at the federal level of the domestic sphere. A chaos of conflict at the domestic level is a likely development. These destructive effects will eventually cascade down to the state and local level. Once the legitimacy of law is lost, chaos ensues and entropy begets anarchy. Once legitimacy is destroyed, everyone’s gloves come off.

As the historian Niall Ferguson recently characterized, what Trump is doing in America is essentially Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal in reverse.” In Roosevelt’s first month in office in 1933 there was also a flurry of executive orders similar to Trump’s in number. FDR’s intent was to save the country from the effects of the Great Depression by building up government to create safety nets to arrest the fall of Americans and lift them back up—to empower them to survive and prosper again. Trump’s flurry is, however, intended to tear government down principally to give the appearance of reducing spending to allow the extension and expansion of tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. As we have now all seen, this is hardly a smooth or well orchestrated process. Whether one sees merit or malice in his intent, this much is clear: his aim is chaos and destruction and, moreover, to keep himself in the spotlight.

At the international level, we watched the legitimacy of American power evaporate in the Oval Office as Trump-the-thug and Vance-the-punk channeled their best impersonation of the Sopranos to bully a vulnerable ally in Ukraine’s Zelensky. It was a classic protection-racket shakedown and was most certainly not how a superpower behaves, but we won’t have to concern ourselves with that designation much longer. As disgusting and disgraceful as their performance was, the larger issue for America is how it sacrifices the legitimacy of our power accumulated since the end of World War II and our victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Once you act against the truth and your own established values, you become unreliable as an actor in the anarchical international system where reliability and predictability are the only prophylactic to anarchy. Other states—both allies and adversaries—begin to discount and disregard your power. It starts with simple acts of disengagement with the United States, which is now occurring with allies across Europe. Then, adversaries, like Putin and Xi and Kim, and Khamenei move aggressively to seek advantage by attacking their adversaries and forming new bonds with our vulnerable and newly-skeptical allies. Former CIA director Bill Burns warned us that China would be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027. I expect that may now happen sooner. More immediately, expect Putin to increase the scope and magnitude of his attacks on Ukraine, and the Balkans could be next.

Therein lies the slippery slope to a worldwide conflict not, as Trump warned Zelensky, from his refusal to bend and bow to the shakedown in the Oval. A third world war will be on Trump’s head. Moreover, once American legitimacy is gone, no level of coercive power can fix it. Pax Americana—the assurance of peace and prosperity throughout the world led by America—goes poof! Such is the nature of empires: they collapse under their own stupid acts.

I pine for the days of enlightened leadership in our country. Leadership that understands that legitimacy is a paramount concern and that it most easily arises through the service to, and the empowerment of, others. Not by the coercion of others. But that’s not the MAGA world we are stuck with today. After the debacle in the Oval, they were the ones pounding their chests like schoolyard bullies with the occasional flexion of a faux Nazi salute. Lest we forget, it didn’t end well for the Nazis, but it cost the world some seventy-five million lives and destruction that spanned continents. It has taken decades of sacrifice and toil and innovation and creativity (and luck) founded in a deep sense of honor for the United States to become the world’s lone superpower, but it doesn’t take long to lose it. Legitimacy is something you either have, or you don’t. There is no such thing as ‘sort-of’ legitimate.

May God bless the souls of those who sacrificed so much for our country. May the suffering coming to so many Americans today be shallow and short. Today, I feel as many of you do: embarrassed and ashamed. As much as I miss my parents, I am grateful they did not have to see what they and their generation worked so hard to achieve being squandered by an egomaniac.

May we someday restore the legitimacy of what was the greatest nation in the modern era. Maybe our children will be able to rescue us from ourselves and turn our flag right side up, again.

By |2025-03-08T20:38:49+00:00March 8th, 2025|Current, General, Recent|0 Comments
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From GO! to F l o w

We have entered a period in the American experiment that might best be characterized as the era of whiplash. We are being yanked to and fro by our president in a manner that is disorienting and disturbing all while we are being asked to ignore norms and laws including many provisions of our Constitution. This is not creative destruction, which is a healthy organic response to changing realities. This is not reform that revitalizes our institutions. Virtue-free blundering is not a strategy, it is destruction for the sake of destruction guided by ego, vengeance, and greed. This is not conservatism; it is nihilism saturated with corruption.

Thus far, our economy and state and local social and political structures have shown the strength of resilience. However, it is just a matter of time before they will be affected by chaos-induced risk descending from above. The violent spring storms of 2025 may be seeded by buckets of gnawed KFC chicken bones raining down from Air Force One. Congress will not restrain the executive branch, they are, regrettably, the president’s handmaid. And it is far from certain the judicial branch will be the bulwark it is supposed to be. Trump believes his Sharpie pen is the law and the Supreme Court, which granted presidents blanket immunity for official acts in 2024, may agree—either by its further rulings or by its silence.

While we are largely powerless to curb the manic dysfunction emanating from the Oval Office until the next election, our central responsibility remains: to care for ourselves and our communities—the “you and yours” of my last post. We need to be America’s anchored ballast to retain the character of the greatest nation in the modern era. We need to respond with quiet resolve rather than frantic hysteria. Matching the derangement of the beast will only empower it; it thrives on the lumens of attention. Individually, we need to move from GO! to flow.

Have you ever worked hard—really hard—to get somewhere and upon arrival realized that you had gone nowhere, or at least nowhere new? Nowhere never becomes somewhere unless it has what you’re aiming for. We live in a society where tremendous amounts of energy are used to go nowhere, but we always get there fast! The boorish among us even believe destroying everything in their path without regard to those harmed is a requisite of success. Psychiatrists call them sociopaths. Today, we call him president.

Upon arrival at nowhere, the emptiness in the outcome is then usually ignored in favor of racing somewhere else. Chase, chase, chase. Surely, a new destination will turn nowhere into somewhere. We hope the grass will be greener over the next hill, or after the next deal, or in the next new relationship. Many of us are careening meteors destined for catastrophic collisions in the empty space of nowhere. If we are lucky, we don’t harm anything or anyone else. We simply fall apart in the silence of darkness and, if we survive the humiliation of devastation, are reborn as a new tangle of energetic promise.

Such is the condition of Americans today: a bundle of calcifying frayed nerves moving through space and time with reckless abandon. Calcification is meant to dull the exigent pain as our bodies cry out for wisdom, yet what it actually accomplishes is a systemic pathology that compromises our health and welfare. Growth for the sake of growth—go to GO!—is the ideology of cancer cells. At times, it feels as if we are all in a perpetual game of musical chairs. We live in a world infested with accelerants; the underlying premise of technological innovation is speed; cheaper speed is even better. Get it NOW, know it NOW, get thin NOW, find love NOW. Go, go, GO! Waiting is un-American and stress inducing; instant gratification is a patriotic entitlement. Speed is good, until it isn’t.

The spiritual teacher Michael Singer is known to emphatically assert that “we have programmed ourselves to be miserable.” Not exactly encouraging except that the core of his claim, “we have programmed,” suggests we can also program ourselves otherwise—to be happy, content and fulfilled. Switching programming modalities depends a great deal on content management and decision-making acuity to achieve a calm sense of clarity that supports progress, stability, and tranquility. In other words, being miserable is largely a choice, but so is contentment.

If we are fortunate enough to listen to our lives with a measure of awareness we learn (often the hard way) that the answer to fulfillment is not elsewhere; rather, it is where it always has been: within us. Contentment—riding a wave of bliss—is found at home; the metaphysical home. This realization brings us to the next reality: home is where you are, wherever you may be. And here is the cherry on top: you are fine just the way you are. You are enough.

Give yourself a break. Get off of your own back. Less GO! and more flow.

In physics, flow generally has two dimensional characteristics besides speed and volume: amplitude and frequency. How high and low are the peaks and valleys (amplitude) and how often are those limits reached (frequency). Oscillation speaks to the repetitive nature of the flow that includes amplitude and frequency. High amplitude, high frequency, and disturbed oscillation combined with high speed and volume create noise, stress, and disease in humans. Collectively, the GO! Converting the GO! to healthy flow is akin to calming the waters of a river from a torrent of turbidity to a glass-smooth state of flow where movement is certain but produces no wake. Progress without collateral disturbance.

In his seminal book, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi examines how we manage our inner harmony to affect order in our consciousness as we encounter the world. “Control over psychic energy” is central to achieving a state of flow. This control requires both self-awareness and self-discipline. Ego and soul must find a happy equilibrium that neither distorts the world nor makes unrealistic demands on its host—you. Where all sources of disturbance are sequestered in suspended animation. This balance and control then allow energy to flow without physical or psychological disturbance creating a highly effective and efficient state of being.

As humans, who we are, what we are, and why we are is characterized by a constant state of renewal. Impermanence is permanent. We must, therefore, take care of our whole selves, the physical, mental, and spiritual. The benefits of flow are central to this standard of care and can be realized by attending to these functions: how we breathe, eat, move, speak, listen, and think.

GO! breathing is shallow and fast. Flow breathing is deep and slow. In James Nestor’s studies of breathing summarized in his book, Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art, he illustrates the benefits of attentive and intentional breath work. He argues that “No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we are breathing correctly.” In his many experiments and studies Nestor has found that “breathing allows us to hack into our own nervous system, control our immune response, and restore our health.” He offers many methods to bring the benefits of proper breathing into our lives, but simply put, use your nose not your mouth, and inhale for a count of five and exhale for another count of five. Our breath is the most influential tool we control to affect our well-being.

GO! eating is gobbling and gorging. Fast and big. Flow eating savors. GO! eating puts an extraordinary burden on our digestive system and metabolism to tame the assault. The slow food movement that began in 1986 in Italy is a new genre of nutritional discipleship. Its mission is to ensure “everyone has access to good, clean and fair food,” which is clearly in the interest of all humanity. But what we control more directly is how we consume our food. In Lee Holden’s book, Ready, Set, Slow: How to Improve Your Energy, Health, and Relationships Through the Power of Slow, he advocates for “32 chews per mouthful of food.” Honor the food by savoring it and it will honor your body. As Holden claims, “your digestive system will thank you for it.” Yes, eating slowly can be annoying to others who live in a perpetual state of hurry, but if they are slowed by your eating discipline they will benefit as well.

GO! movement is frenetic and chaotic. Flow movement is governed by intention and efficiency. We need look no further than our young children to assess the consequences of GO! movement. Often toddlers will become whirling dervishes of uncontrolled tantrum-energy just before they hit the wall and crash followed by a rejuvenating nap. With adults the consequences can be more severe—a nap may not repair the damage. The antithesis of whirling and spiraling are practices like Tai Chi and Qi Gong that reflect the wisdom of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching where he wrote, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” They combine flow-supporting breathing techniques and physical movement in the manner of meditation. Fast frenetic movement, while necessary at times (like averting physical threats) often wastes energy and conveys a sense of disturbed aggression completely inconsistent with flow. My mother’s favorite admonition of her children was “Slow WAY down.” She was hardly a Tai Chi master, but the message was the same.

GO! speaking is what anxious or malicious people do who confuse speed with persuasion, or simply wish to deceive. Flow speech offers a coherent cadence. Speech coaches often advise to speak no more than forty words per minute which is the speed at which humans can apply what’s said to their own particular mental maps. Faster speech means fewer words understood by an audience opening up the probability of both confusion and lower levels of understanding, or persuasion. And then there is the issue of volume/quantity. Loud and overwhelming (flood the zone) or quiet and succinct. The political fashion today is to flood the zone, which is intended to disorient people to avoid critical consumption of what is being said. It is the modality of manipulators. The authentic actor chooses words carefully and delivers them with the intent of increasing understanding.

GO! listening is hearing but not listening. Flow listening is founded in respect. Early in my business career I learned that the greatest compliment you can pay someone is to listen to them. The great interviewer, Larry King, once told me the key to interviewing is NOT thinking about what you are going to say while the other person is speaking. A pregnant pause before you respond conveys evidence to the speaker that they have been seen and heard; they have been understood. If your mouth moves faster than your brain, you can really get yourself in trouble. If your brain moves faster than your mouth you will be fine, as long as you employ that pregnant pause, which allows thoughts to find coherence and resonance before departing your mouth.

GO! thinking is linear, one-directional, and often makes the error of putting yourself, or humans more generally, as the focus of everything. The most obvious example of GO! thinking today is righteous certitude (RC). Traditionally, RC was prevalent in organized religion, but today is expressed the loudest in the political sphere by members of both political parties. RC creates the win/lose zero-sum mentality that limits the possibility of expanding awareness, knowledge, and welfare. Although righteousness can feel good in the moment, it proves toxic when applied to public policy because of its unique blend of ignorance and arrogance—what I call ignacity. RC must be called out and allowed to whither in the sunlight of truth and moral virtue.

The goal of flow thinking is the application of whole-mindedness that considers all perspectives and honors all of our natural senses. Unfortunately, our thinking too often is egocentric, which inspired the paleoanthropologist, Donald Johansson, to suggest that we should be called Homo Egocentricus rather than Homo Sapiens. The best argument I have seen recently about how to correct our thinking from GO! to flow is in Dan Barker’s book, Contraduction, that describes this problem of our propensity to assert linear, forward-only, human-centric claims that result in false conclusions and compromises decision making. Contraduction occurs when we flip cause and effect to produce fallacies. Simple examples are like the common claim that the sun rises, when in reality this effect is produced by the earth turning; or, when we hear that happy people are healthy people when the more likely reality is that it is our good health that makes us happy, not the other way around. What Barker is asking us to do is to look through both ends of the telescope in all directions to examine each situation with better clarity before deciding and acting.

GO! is dangerous, perhaps even ruinous. Achieving that calm sense of clarity that supports progress, stability, and tranquility is nurtured in a state of flow. To invoke Mahatma Gandhi’s (highly paraphrased) words, “be the change you want to see in the world,” perhaps we should alter them to: be the change calm you want to see in the world. At the very least, it will enhance our health and general welfare, and it might even provide enough time for the reality of impermanence to be visited upon those who are deploying cruel chaos to squander the greatness of America today.

By |2025-03-08T19:45:54+00:00February 22nd, 2025|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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You & Yours

Now is the time for writers and artists and musicians and chefs and teachers and ministers and philosophers to step out from the shadows and shine their light to illuminate the good and true. We need the subtle but durable power of aestheticism and depth of virtue to guide us as our nation is being overrun by ego-centric hucksters held captive by the grip of greed. Those who understand that neither beauty nor tranquility arise from the deposits of transactions may help deliver us from the cruelty of navel-gazing, wallet-clutching baron-barbarians whose see-through characters require the sword of deceit and the shield of darkness to survive. And while I expect those currently experiencing an orgasm of power will turn on each other soon enough to become the last baron-barbarian standing, we must prepare ourselves for the vast collateral damage they will leave in their wake.

The baron-barbarians (Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al.), while profoundly rich in monetary wealth, have impoverished souls that could all fit on the head of one pin. There is an inverse relationship between the size of ego and the size of soul. Their profound wealth has made them ghost vessels of the dark moral void; not even their rockets can save them. The scholar and journalist, Anne Applebaum, recently labeled them as members of the “New Obscurantism” movement determined to create “a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction.”  They have zero interest in our welfare, which is substantiated by mountains of evidence including the tread marks they have left on the backs of those who dared ask they conform with norms and laws designed for the common good. It is bizarre how Trumpland has managed to turn honesty and compassion and mercy into sins, but such is the corrupting nature of power. Among other things, the second coming of Trump may produce a very different and twisted kind of rapture theology. But, I digress.

The beauty of aestheticism and the plenitude of virtues offered by the artists and philosophers among us are our best source of kryptonite to slay the poet W.B. Yeats’ “rough beast[s] …slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem [Washington D.C.] to be born.” Although this collective of right-brain artisan liberators seldom practice assertion, preferring to let their creations and teachings speak for themselves, if we have any hope of restoring the soul of our society, we would be wise to pay more attention to them. They will not be able to stop the megalomaniacs, but they will provide the comfort of calm with glimpses of serenity, like well-placed rocks in a river allowing us to safely cross the torrent of bullshit cascading down from on high without being swept away.

As the philosopher Simon Critchley wrote recently in introducing his fine book, Mysticism,

The pact that I would like to make with the reader of this book is to see if we can transform our misery, woe, and doubt with a wealth of words and sounds that might permit us to push back against the violent pressure of reality and allow a richness of life and a possible transfiguration of self and world.

Nowhere in the book did he recommend we spend more time with our news feeds, or on social media. The liberation-through-mysticism Critchley offers may or may not be achieved but, at the very least, we can embrace the fact that how we see our world is, and always will be, up to us. We simply have to focus our intentions in the proper direction—intentions of clear-eyed energy aimed at, and captured in, the salutatory idiom, “you and yours.”

First, you.

As sentient human beings, we enjoy the great blessing of agency—of deciding how to deal with the past, present, and future. The first lesson of achieving a state of equanimity is to understand, however, that our agency only applies to the present. It is a simple and evident truth that it is impossible to affect the past (other than manipulating our memories or rewriting history), and while we strive to guide the outcomes of future events, it is also an evident truth that we cannot directly impact things that haven’t happened yet until, of course, the present arrives.

So, what can be done about the present in a world that looks more uncertain—more threatening—every day? Of a world that seems to scream at us every day?

The first thing to do is acknowledge and accept the gift inherent in the reality described above: we can let go of the past and largely suspend our efforts about the future to focus on just one of three, the present, reducing our workload by two-thirds. The second thing to do is to recognize that while we cannot control what happens, we will always have control over how we respond to what happens, which allows us to have determinative control of our mental and emotional states that impact our wellbeing. As an extreme example, the best illustration of this is Viktor Frankl’s contemplations drawn from his time in a Nazi concentration camp in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning.

The next thing is to take care in how we conceive of and define the “you.” The you is made up of competing interests we must manage: the ego and the soul. As I have illustrated in the past, we are born with a soul and no ego. The ego is then crafted and curated throughout our young lives until it dominates the soul which is, in the first three-fourths of our lives, both appropriate and beneficial. The ego allows us to both differentiate ourselves and find a basis to belonging to self-selected social groups. It functions as our principal vector of decision making. It escorts us through the life phases of preparation, achievement, and actualization, but is a liability when seeking transcendence in the fourth phase. As we age, if we hold tight to the demands of our egos, we will follow a path to certain suffering that will only be liberated by death. If, on the other hand, we switch seats—from the ego to the soul—the prospect of transcendence (liberation before death) is available.

Switching seats from the ego to the soul is like a snake shedding its skin. Letting go of the demands of ego, which are principally defined by our desires (both wants and not-wants) requires work. The snake generally achieves this while in hiding to protect itself from predators in its moment of vulnerability. Similarly, we humans need solitude occupied by meditation and contemplation to build our capacity to notice ego-driven thoughts and demands and to learn to let them go—to shed our own skin. Think of it as losing the self to gain a new life. Yes, losing to gain. Breaking lifelong habits isn’t easy, but the payday is heaven on earth. Learning to relax and release to rise—to hover above the mayhem with a curious and knowing grin. To create a sort of inside-out virtual cocoon of bliss where the cocoon is not shielding us from externalities; rather, it is shielding us from the self, or ego.

The unfortunate reality of the pursuit of transcendence is that it is made easier if one has endured devastation. For me, it was born from the necessity of transforming devastation into liberation due to a combination of divorce and cancer—a nasty duo. Properly considered, if one faces devastation with discipline, humility, and learning, it can become a fast lane to liberation. Whether or not you endure this dubious advantage, if you just recognize the opportunity and commit yourself sincerely (which many call, “doing the work”) you can succeed in transforming your life; in liberating yourself from suffering. Ridding yourself of desires, conflicts, dependencies, and obligations are all important steps. But the biggest step is the first one: simply becoming aware that the voice in your head needs to be tamed and redirected away from egoic ambitions in favor of simple awareness. That voice can be your best friend and your worst enemy. To bring your conscience back to the clean slate you were born with—to what many describe as childlike innocence. To enjoy the quietude. Evidence of success will arrive in glimpses of pure tranquility, which become metaphysical rungs on the ladder to enlightenment.

Now, yours.

“Yours” generally refers in the American colloquialism as family. Family in the modern era is, however, up to you. Bloodlines don’t rule; curation is both appropriate and recommended. Family is dynamic; as life progresses it starts out small, gets bigger, then gets smaller, again. First members are indeed granted through bloodlines, then we get to choose and we accumulate members, then in later life our choices naturally become more discerning. Once choice enters the picture things can get tricky. We inevitably make mistakes. If we learn, we get better about who occupies the circle as we age.

Our obligation to family (however defined) is simple: it is love. Familial love is a duty of care that is unaffected by contingencies. A sincere presence. Interacting and serving family also requires the suspension of ego. Your desires are not relevant. In fact, they are impediments to forming the secure and genuine bonds that affect cohesion. There should be nothing transactional about family relations although, as we have all experienced, some don’t honor this code. The truth is, some just can’t.

In my own experience, those who suffer from feelings of inadequacy and insecurity (in the extreme, self-loathing) cannot form secure contingency-free bonds. They generally present as those we might call a hot mess, or perhaps narcissistic. But some are worse. Some become masters of concealment—a stealthy mess—which is to say, traitors to family, but also more dangerously traitors to themselves. Their entire world is an artifice of deceit. They are the ones who, in later life, cling to their egos. Plastic surgery—a tuck here and lift there; new partners; faster cars; hair plugs; always chasing satisfaction that seldom, if ever, arrives. Most remain on a path to suffering. That doesn’t necessarily require that you discard them as members of the family, but you must take care to avoid being sucked into their wallow. Your duty of care does not extend to joining them in suffering.

Until the baron-barbarians turn on each other, wear themselves out, or get thrown out, “you and yours” are where we need to spend our time and effort to preserve ourselves and those we hold dear. Our comfort and inspirations may be aided by the artisans in our lives, but the responsibility for our wellbeing remains where it should be, with ourselves. We don’t have to stop the madness, but we must keep it from polluting our lives. The human spirit never responds well to oppression; it is meant to soar, not plummet. The strength of authoritarian regimes tends to be intense, but short-lived.  A sense of calm, compassion, and confidence for both you and yours goes a long way to affecting liberation. What matters is the real life right in front of us (not on a screen). It is at home, in nature, at school, the town park, and the corner cafe. It is where people know our names. All of that will remain long after the titans of noise fall mute.

By |2025-02-22T21:45:04+00:00February 2nd, 2025|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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Is Ochlocracy Next?

First, an apology. I failed to offer new year’s greetings in my first post of the year, “Flourishing Together.” Between the events in New Orleans and Las Vegas, and on the heels of the assassination of a CEO in midtown Manhattan, it seemed a gruesome and sad time incompatible with annual revelry even as most Americans—including in New Orleans and Las Vegas—partied on.

So, a belated Happy New Years!  Sort of? Hopefully!?

Whether 2025 proves to be a springboard to greatness, or a gradual slip-n-slide into madness, appears to be an even-odds proposition today. The early twentieth century Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, might characterize this interregnum between regimes of order as a “time of monsters.” As the history of humanity illustrates quite clearly, although we often speak of sudden changes, like the “fall of Rome,” the reality is more subtle; we rarely recognize what has happened until its full manifestation is complete. We humans have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. There are clear signs, however, that we might pay attention to—that suggest both monsters and madness are roosting on the rails of the front stoop.

It is becoming difficult to be shocked anymore. The outrage machine that has become our media, whether traditional or online, is having an increasingly difficult time creating any wide-eyed gasps from viewers and listeners which, of course, is their stock-in-trade for achieving their financial success. The psychological scar tissue we have built up over the last several years protects us, but also makes us susceptible to a slow degradation of social bonds that might just cause the collapse of civil society. We would be wise to realize that collapse in physical terms is when many little things give way until everything gives way at once. In social and political terms, it is characterized by institutional and systemic chaos (the little things) that precede the final fall.

None of what the rightwing media claimed about the attacker in New Orleans was true. Claims of “Middle Eastern national” that had “crossed the southern border” (FOX) prior to traveling to New Orleans to inflict evil were all false, as was Trump’s mimicking of same. Both of the events in New Orleans and Las Vegas were conducted by decorated American members of our military. Patriots who became terrorists apparently due to theological radicalization and mental illness. They were not others, they were us.

The fires in Los Angeles have, however, proven indeed shocking and offer a reprieve for news outlets that could only make so much of President Carter’s funeral or Trump’s musings over the invasion of Panama and Greenland as among his first conquests. The fires, which appear to have been both predictable and at least somewhat preventable, and which Trump and Governor Newsom have decided are best suited as an opportunity to extend their toddler bickering and blame game, are indeed horrific. Who knew that the emperor Nero strumming his lyre while Rome burned would be relevant again in 2025, or that the L.A. version would be a duet? But here we are. Ancient myths do occasionally mock current events. Our elected leadership and media are in a death-spiral clutching each other’s torsos as they fall symbiotically entwined, cascading into an abyss of sin, a la Dante.

The more important thing to understand is that each of these events—the assassination in Manhattan, death and destruction in New Orleans and Las Vegas, and the fires in L.A.—are evidence of social breach. Individually and collectively, they are screaming for our attention. They are like trees that define the forest that is under attack by pestilence. A few diseased trees don’t seem like a problem until the entire forest is destroyed. We need to pay attention to what is really going on: the destruction of the fabric that social contracts provide that make our societies, societies. Each breach becomes one tile in a mosaic depicting the final collapse; perhaps someday painted on the ceiling of the dome of a new society as a reminder and warning of what happens when you sleepwalk your way off of a cliff.

The concept of social contracts is hundreds of years old, written about extensively by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the seventeenth century, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth. Essentially, social contracts are the quid pro quo of reciprocity. If those who rule/govern are given the authority and resources to do so, they must agree to serve the interests of the grantors—the people. Societies operate on a set of mutual expectations, both explicit and implicit. It’s a dynamic process, like assembling a jigsaw puzzle as the pieces continually change their characteristics, which is both maddening and invigorating. These expectations-cum-contracts form the glue that holds us together. They are that sticky stuff that keeps our civil web, webbed.

The breach of social contracts requires recourse, which is normally available when the contract is between a government and its people. Recourse is usually achieved through judicial and/or electoral consequences. Things are made right in some manner such that the web of social cohesion is restored. However, when any breach persists and festers—when it remains unreconciled—it can propagate in a manner that weakens society to the point of collapse. This reality highlights the critical value of consequences that both restore our confidence in the proposition of order and increase our capacity to properly assess risk—playing both a restorative and educational role.

In the case of the assassination in Manhattan, we see yet another situation apparently brought on by a lack of consequence—of any prospect of recourse. In the unique (in the developed world) circumstances of U.S. healthcare, the authority and resources granted a government by the people have been delegated or otherwise transferred from the public to the private sector, making recourse-upon-breach less available, or not available, at all. In the U.S., healthcare is a private/public good, rather than purely a public good.

Luigi Mangione (or those he ostensibly represented) was no match for United Healthcare’s carefully crafted systems that prohibit their customers from achieving recourse. Mangione couldn’t oust the CEO, Brian Thompson, but he could shoot him. His apparent frustration and anger—his rage against the machine—drove him to kill Thompson, which is evidence not just of a heinous crime (which it most certainly was), but also evidence of a breach of social contract for which Mangione’s recourse was sought through a Glock-styled 3D printed ghost gun. Like the soldiers in New Orleans and Las Vegas, the Ivy League educated Mangione was not a foreign-born terrorist. He is us, too.

In the case of the fires in L.A., although the issue of recourse is between the people and their government (and not the private sector), the magnitude of the loss makes recourse impossible. There is no way the government can answer for the consequences the people have endured, and the property insurers will undoubtedly behave as health insurers do. The gross size of the breach is irremediable. The integrity of the relationship between those who govern and the governed has been shattered. As the author and podcaster, Sam Harris, who experienced the fires himself, wrote this week on Substack, “We must rebuild, but we must also create a culture of competence and social cohesion‚and transform our politics in the process.” Due to a lack of leadership, the fires in L.A. may create more Mangiones. They are us, too.

Once consequences are marginalized or eliminated altogether, the restoration of meaningful and enforceable social contracts is obliterated along with the prospect of cooperation and compliance. This is when the Greek historian, Polybius, would suggest the existing democracy will slide into chaos and be replaced by ochlocracy: mob rule. In today’s America, consequences are largely reserved for the powerless and forlorn. In the Age of Deceit, fairness has been so severely compromised as both a concept and an application of equitable recourse that we should fully expect more people acting in a manner unthought of just two decades ago. We must not fall victim (as we did preceding the attacks of 9/11) to a failure of imagination. Assassins, murderers, and arsonists may become normative. Burning a person alive on the subway, as happened recently in New York City, combined these offenses into a trifecta. The monsters are us, too.

Now, let me illustrate what I believe may become the grand irony of the days to come. First, by acknowledging the substantial victory of the Republicans last November. Notwithstanding Democratic Party apologists who like to argue the defeat wasn’t so bad, what actually really matters is who Americans believe will serve their interests and who have the strength/power to do so. On these two dimensions—trust and commitment—the Democrats were routed. When asked which party was “on my side” “to fight for people like me,” working class Americans said Republicans over Democrats by 14 points (50/36). When it comes to strength, the Republicans increase their margin to 40 points (63/23). This, among folks who were once the foundation of the Democratic Party. And while many describe the next administration as a kakistocracy (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of the state), through our uniquely American version of democracy corrupted unintentionally by the electoral college, and intentionally by gerrymandering congressional districts, Republicans have won the right to govern.

The grand irony will unfold once the Trump administration is sworn in. Trump is the biggest, most prolific, and most powerful example of shattering social contracts—of violating norms and laws—to come along in the history of our nation. For many who celebrate his swagger as an avatar of their own disruptive and amoral ambitions, he is a (nearly) religious icon. For those same folks, who number in the millions, he has given them permission to behave in the same manner as he, as a morally-exempt and hyper self-interested lout.

But here is the rub—the anvil upon which irony will be hewn from the timber of corruption. Once you are in power your effectiveness is dependent upon the compliance and cooperation of the other side of the contract: the people must behave. Notwithstanding the other millions who will never bow to Trump, what happens when his toadies continue to follow his lawless lead acting in whatever way they please, right when he needs them to support, and comply with, his policies? Will he be willing to swallow his own medicine? Will he come to appreciate the value of social cohesion-by-contract? Of civil society? Does he even have the intellectual and moral capacity to do so? Will monsters and madness leave the stoop and breach the threshold of social and political order causing their collapse?

In next month’s issue of The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes about this disintegration of social cohesion noting we have entered the “anti-social century.” Among other things, technology has allowed us to detach from each other and the real world. He illustrates that due to screens—first TVs and now smartphones—many of us have become “secular monks.” I wrote my own piece on this in December 2022 titled, “Digital Dementia.” We have replaced humans as a source of enrichment with technological artifice, even including AI-generated intimate partners. Instead of focusing on improving social cohesion, and the many social contracts that codify interhuman expectations, we are shoving off from the shore of society. The implications point to the prospect of ochlocracy (per Polybius) where order may no longer be possible. The techno-optimists would argue that in a perfect world driven by technologies like AI, such traditional regimes of order are no longer necessary. Until, of course, their own home burns down and they need help.

So, Happy New Year, indeed. 2025 may just prove to be a pivotal year when our destiny takes a sudden turn—one way or another.

By |2025-02-01T23:58:41+00:00January 19th, 2025|General, Recent|0 Comments
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Flourishing Together

Although Tonto did all the real work, the Lone Ranger is etched into American mythology as the white-hatted self-reliant epitome of how we independent do-it-all-ourselves Americans should model our lives—as highly idealized rugged and righteous cowboys. Especially those of us raised in the western states grew up with the ethos of pursuing a self-directed life tethered to as few others—whether people or institutions—as we could possibly manage. While we were taught to lend a hand, we were also taught to never ask for one. Go-it-alone was always preferred to go-together. Power and success were simply a matter of will. Joining others in a common cause was a last, not a first, choice.

As attractive and romanticized as this myth of the independent muscular and virtuous American is, it is as true as the claim that the Lone Ranger was lone. Without Tonto, or his horse, Silver, the Lone Ranger would have just been a guy who might have been a better fit for the Village People. The fact that Tonto was a Native American just added a little slice of poetic racism. The reality is that the American frontier was settled by people traveling together in wagon trains and working together to defend forts and raise barns. Cooperation and teamwork have been intrinsic characteristics of human culture since the hunter-gatherers during the Paleolithic Age.

In the modern (post-Middle Ages) era, specialization and division of labor where we each contribute to a greater whole is a fundamental trait of capitalism’s model of economic efficiency. All economic systems require a high degree of cooperation. As for our political system, democracies are “of the people” as a collective voice, not of a person or deity (notwithstanding the delusions of our next president). The reality is that in America we employ different systems depending on which best suits our welfare. Every public good we enjoy—from security to education to transportation systems to insurance—are socialist schemes. Private goods are quite appropriately created through capitalist schemes, but our daily lives require both public and private goods. To advocate otherwise is just ignorant. Ayn Rand was only half right.

In our hyper-divided and increasingly isolated society in America today, with national leaders who unfortunately and inappropriately thrive on these conditions, it is more important than ever that we set a new course to affect our well-being—both individually and collectively. We need to embrace a new model of flourishing together. We need to write a new story—a new myth appropriate to an age of abundance where technology has shifted from enabling our well-being to replacing us as purposeful actors with algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI). We need to reinvigorate both our sense of personal and communal responsibility while asserting our agency as relevant members of society. It isn’t easy, but what is good seldom is.

In the uber-capitalist industrial era of the twentieth century, we Americans were trained toward objective-driven lives. Life was about striving, not thriving. Both the costs and benefits were high, although the benefits often preceded the costs and naturally received much more attention. Climate change is the most obvious evidence-based case of this reality. The costs eventually do arrive, regardless of our stubborn denials. Fundamentally, we Americans need to shift from an ethos of achievement to one of flourishing that assesses the totality of our endeavors including both the results of our actions and the intent with which we take them. The successful organization achieves objectives; the flourishing organization honors values. The trick, of course, is to be the organization that does both.

Balancing objectives and values isn’t easy. Conflicts between the two are a certainty. Most organizations structure acknowledgement and compensation schemes around objectives because they are more easily quantified and measured, which is both understandable and problematic. Many businesses view their nature as one of transactions that produce desirable financial outcomes. Some businesses and many other mission-driven organizations, however, see their nature as deploying resources in a manner to affect the fulfillment of a values-based proposition. The latter organizations often prove to be much more durable.

Values introduce a moral dimension into our endeavors, which is how the now-critical elements of responsibility and agency gain purchase. Values introduce the prospect of holism for the organization which recognizes the interdependence of its people and the role it plays in the marketplace and in society. Without values the organization is simply a mercenary vessel that is destined for premature dissolution. They skip from one sugar high to the next rather than operating from a healthy nutritional foundation.

So, what are some new shifts in values to consider for integration into our organizations to move from achievement toward flourishing in the next quarter of this twenty-first century? Here are six to consider; perhaps even to pin to your mirror, write on the conference room whiteboard, or engrave on a boardroom plaque.

  1. From certitude to curiosity. Healthy organizations know that having the correct answers depends on asking the right questions. Certitude is, however, a more common modality today for both people and their organizations. Divisiveness and isolation have produced this condition as much as any other cause. Zero-sum mentalities arise as a parallel scheme to righteousness. The underlying value of curiosity is based in the truth that every single person has something to offer that no one else does, that each person knows something you don’t know and can do something better than you can do it. Winning organizations that enjoy both success in achievement of objectives and the flourishing of values demand high levels of inquiry combined with a culture of listeners.
  2. From hubris to humility. In America, we are damn lucky. Yes, we are generally better educated and work more hours than most other societies, but we are also damn lucky. Among other things, we are blessed with extraordinary natural resources and a history founded in honorable virtues that has supported the development of institutions of governance and law found in few other places in the world. As I illustrated recently, in “America’s Arc of Moral Madness (and Hope),” we have, however, slipped from our tradition of humility to hubris and now teeter on sliding further into nihilism as our principal cultural identity. If we want to truly make America great again, we need to hoist humility back up onto its pedestal where it belongs. In our organizations, the best way to support humility is by recognizing and rewarding those who know how to say, “I don’t know,” and then endeavor to find better answers to perplexing issues. To moderate confidence with a sincere sense of authenticity that acknowledges that the best answers are seldom held by any one person; rather, that the best answers arise out of humble inquiry and inclusion of varied disciplines and points of view.
  3. From compliance and conformity to creativity. We need to widen the aperture with which we view the world and be willing to throw around ideas with reckless abandon. Further, every legacy convention and rule must be questioned, again. The great paradox of our embrace of new technologies (principally in the digital realm) that we have employed in the last thirty years has acted, over time, to narrow our minds rather than expand them. We are suffering from intellectual sclerosis: a hardening of our neural receptors and synapses. The promise of unbounded creativity due to new innovations in technology have instead resulted in the compression and regression of thought rather than the acceleration of our enlightenment. Current trends in the application of algorithms and AI may enhance productivity and speed decision making, but they do so by marginalizing the role of humans rather than expanding and empowering them. Yes, on the surface our lives may seem better (at least superficially), but a narrower more limited role in our destiny is not in the interest of humanity. Technology should empower us, not marginalize us; this is the fundamental flaw in the value proposition of AI. The creative realm of the human mind should never be sacrificed for the expediency benefits of technology. Organizationally, we must question the givens—all of them. Guardrails and limits must be pushed again to see if their boundaries remain valid. Those among us with wild ideas must be elevated rather than ridiculed.
  4. From delusion to clear knowing—clarity. Seeing things as they are rather than the way we might like them to be is perhaps the most valuable executive skill there is. Over the last twenty years or so—during America’s Age of Deceit—our capacity to live in a fact-based reality has been severely compromised. Gaslighting has become a basic modality in American discourse in all aspects of society. Deceit is the cancer on the soul of America. There may be nothing we can do to affect this condition among our politicians and media, but we still have agency for ourselves and within our organizations. So, vote for someone else and tune out the media sewer pipe, and in the meantime let us all commit to change the ways we deal with each other and our various constituents. We must reject grand complications often meant to support illusion in favor of the sublimity of simplicity. The power of honest simplicity—of aesthetic elegance—is the most durable construct in the history of humankind. Leonardo da Vinci illustrated this centuries ago. We would be wise to exalt the obvious, the honest, and the pure.
  5. From competition to coopetition. In an age of scarcity, which was the state of civilization until the late twentieth century, competition based in the predominant conditions of zero-sum, win/lose thinking, was an essential and appropriate modality of human interaction. In an age of abundance, when there are enough wealth and resources to provide for the welfare of all, coopetition—competing to cooperate—is a more appropriate and sustainable modality. Our current course allows for the continued concentration of wealth, resources, and power which inevitably causes collapse of the existing regimes of civilization. The Greek historian and philosopher, Polybius, mapped out these cycles showing that what follows democracy is ochlocracy: mob rule. Most historians (including Polybius) see catastrophic collapse as inevitable and many of the world’s religions (especially Christianity) claim redemption and rebirth are impossible without a severe reckoning. My hope is that we can be smarter than that; that we can preempt the need for redemption. That the Lone Ranger, Superman, and Batman might join forces to become the Three Musketeers, “all for one and one for all,” or as with the moto inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America, E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one.
  6. From contempt to compassion. Empathy and sympathy are not signs of weakness. Concern for the suffering of others and taking appropriate action to mitigate tragic consequences takes much more strength than the contempt and disdain we see spewed like venom today, especially from MAGA Republicans. Remember George W. Bush’s policies of compassionate conservatism? As a former Republican, I pine for those days when conservative meant, first and foremost, to conserve. Compassion conserves humanity. If that doesn’t resonate, how about the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians, “by the grace of God I am what I am …” Or how about Buddhism that has as its most basic aim to eliminate suffering in the world? Whether we like it or not, we are in this life and world together. In the organizations we participate in—regardless of their form or function—we must always endeavor to leave things better than we found them. Improving the spaces we inhabit and the lives of those we encounter leaves us all better off. Compassion is a win/win proposition.

Curiosity, humility, creativity, clarity, coopetition, and compassion. These are the values we need to focus on today. This is how we reboot the current trajectory of American culture to avoid slipping from hubris into nihilism. This is how we avoid catastrophe. This is the ethos we must celebrate with new heroes of the good; those who see the best in each other and realize that together we are much more powerful than we are alone. It is highly unlikely these heroes will come from our national leaders given the current roster of those now, or soon to be, in office. Of course, that would not have stopped the Lone Ranger from doing the right thing (if Tonto suggested it). Nor should it stop you. It is up to us, both individually and collectively, to make decisions and take action according to these values. We can allow nihilism to manifest as reality, or we can move aggressively to prevent it.

The Greeks had a word that illustrates the fundamental aim here: eudaimonia, which simply means a positive and divine state of human flourishing. Humans have sought eudaimonia for centuries. At times succeeding and at other times, failing. (We humans do have a perplexing propensity for self-destruction.) The good news today, however, is that for the first time in the history of humankind, we have the knowledge and the means to save ourselves. We simply have to take responsibility for ourselves and each other and protect our agency to act according to our objectives as informed by our values.

By |2025-01-19T02:27:18+00:00January 5th, 2025|General, Recent, The New Realities|0 Comments
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The Divinity Within

Stopping the clock

To let the world hang

Disturbed and fragile

Too toxic to touch

 

To your whims and wants

You bid adieu

Your weight of worries

Cast into the wind

 

No more reaching

No more seeking

No more retreats

No more journeys

 

Settling into your center

A pilgrimage within

Doubts dispersed

You are fine as you are

 

Eternal wisdom

Is not ‘out there’

It arrived at your birth

Eager to serve

 

Ego’s patient sibling

The soul awaits

You will awaken someday

When ‘out there’ fails

 

Peace seems elusive

Yet always within

Permission granted

Compassion for you

 

Slowing to savor

The world is a whisper

Clarity in purity

Calm is your new joy

 

Laugh at the loathsome

Their levers unhinged

Here but not here

You are tethered to grace

 

Moving onward

In the moment of now

The horizon beckons

Without a destination

 

No more noise

No more anxiety

No more fear

No more pain

 

Divinity arrives

As conceits are released

Every dawn smiles

In sweet liberation

 

Restart the clock

A new cadence revealed

Flowing in rhythm

Without leaving a trace

As this year comes to a close, I reflect on the words of the 13th century Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi, who affirmed the reflective nature of looking within when he said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” Perhaps we ought to follow Rumi’s long-ago lead into our own new year in support of what seems to be so lacking in our world today: simple dignity. First, as realized through humble introspection and self-compassion, and then for each and every person we encounter as we pursue our best lives.

As always, my wish for you: May you wake in glory, enjoy your day with grace, and spend your night in peace. Glory, grace, and peace.

As the darkness now yields to the light, Happy Solstice & cheers.

By |2025-01-05T00:17:32+00:00December 22nd, 2024|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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America’s Arc of Moral Madness (and Hope)

The path of human progress is random, chaotic, and often maddening. Taming humanity—organizing ourselves for the common good—has been a fool’s errand since antiquity; cajoling and coping with humanity are perhaps the best we can do. Yet there is also a spirit in each of us that never surrenders. That in the face of what seems insane and insurmountable in the moment, we find a sliver of light through which we squeeze ourselves and dare to meet the challenge; through which we emerge again to restore ourselves and renew hope. Most Americans rise each day with the expectation that the day is theirs; that they will be left to their own desires and devices, as long as they treat others as they wish to be treated.

This fundamental right of self-determination governed by the norm of reciprocity has been with us since our nation’s inception that we are, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, “endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Life, liberty, and happiness. Throughout our history, we Americans have respected and protected—often with our lives—these freedoms fostered within the norm of reciprocity. At its essence, this is the magic of America—of an experiment that has (thus far) prevailed regardless of the enemy (external or internal) who might wish to shatter the persistent dreams and aspirations of Americans who are inherently in charge of their destiny. Today, we are facing one of those daunting moments when those we have chosen to represent our interests have, at best, a dubious commitment to our interests over their own.

The last seventy-five-or-so years have produced incredible gains in human welfare as The United States ascended to its throne as the world’s lone superpower. Compared to our parents and grandparents, our lives are a cakewalk. The affluence we enjoy is unprecedented in human history. The question today is are better-off humans better humans? Moreover, is what it means to be human due for a major overhaul? The late French philosopher, Michel Foucault argued humans are a curated composition of intellectual and moral architecture that if revised or discarded “would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Foucault was suggesting we humans are a constellation of cognitive illusions which durability relies on our collective subscription—of our willingness to play along. That what it means to be human is dynamic and impermanent, which is as the Buddha further argued, the nature of everything.

On the last day of March, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. during which he sought to assure us that justice was always on the horizon, that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For those who remember 1968, or have studied that period in American history, our society was as fraught with division (if not more so) than it is today. The Viet Nam War, racial conflict, generational animus, severe air and water pollution, and a stagnant inflationary economy made us feel as if we had entered a dark tunnel that was sure to collapse before we ever got to any light at the other end. And, like today, there was plenty of violence in our streets, more often waged with bombs than with guns.

Our victorious euphoria that ended the long period of crisis that began with the stock market crash in 1929 and ran through Word War II, and which subsequently gave rise to large American families living in tidy idyllic suburban neighborhoods in the 1950s, would reach its climax in 1969 when we landed a man on the moon. During this period, “America is good” was our moral mantra. Four days after King’s assurance of justice at the National Cathedral, he was gunned down on the balcony of The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. As the tumultuous decade of the 1960s ended, the future suddenly looked bleak. The paint was peeling off the post-World War II America. Unbeknownst to any of us at the time, King’s “arc of the moral universe” had achieved its apex. It would prove to be a bridge to moral peril more than an arc—maybe even a bridge to moral collapse.

We then entered what became the malaise decade of the 1970s with double-digit inflation, a dishonest law-breaking president in Richard Nixon, and an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation posed by the Soviet Union. With the Viet Nam War winding down in the shame of defeat, and the mess of Nixon’s Watergate scandal destroying what had been a stellar run for our federal government through the 1950s and much of the 1960s, the best President Carter could do was offer us redemption; if we would only turn down the thermostat, put on a cardigan sweater, and sacrifice more, Carter’s evangelical sensibilities believed we would be born again into greatness. He came to epitomize the decade with what presidential historians still refer to as the “malaise presidency.”

Then, a sunny smiling actor-turned-politician from California, Ronald Reagan, arrived on the scene to offer Americans absolution. We weren’t the problem; government was the problem. Our civil religion flipped from Carter’s jeremiads to a re-inspired version of the late 19th century prosperity gospel. Reagan was here to liberate us—to lift the cloud of malaise. In 1980, Reagan beat Carter in a landslide with 489 electoral college votes to Carter’s 49; a 10X drubbing. Then, suddenly, we embraced an ethos of entrepreneurial zealotry in pursuit of prosperity. Among other shifts, the best and brightest no longer sought a role in our federal government as they had after World War II. They became lawyers, investment bankers, and technologists who embraced investor Carl Icahn’s new ‘morality’ conveyed by the character, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie Wall Street that “Greed is good!” The nouveau riche were back in style for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. Heavily starched shirts, suspenders, and mousse-laden hair for men, and leg warmers for women who swarmed the new Jane Fonda-fueled craze of aerobics became uniform staples of the 1980s. (I still have my suspenders by Hermes and my hair eventually recovered.)

In the period’s cultural observer, George Gilder’s, 1984 book The Spirit of Enterprise, he romanticized this new spirit of America in the 1980s as reflected in its newly-minted entrepreneurs.

Some are scientists, some are artists, some are craftsmen; most are in business. Although they act as individual men and women, they are nearly always driven by familial roles and obligations. They are not always temperate. Rarely elegant or tall, only occasionally glib or manifestly leaders of men. By fleeing their homes and families to go to far-off lands, may inflict and suffer a trauma of loss—and fight to justify and overcome it. As immigrants, many seek an orphan’s fate, and toil to launch a dynasty. Ugly, they wreak beauty; rude and ruthless they redeem the good and true. Mostly outcasts, exiles, mother’s boys, rejects, warriors, they early learn the lessons of life, the knowledge of pain, the ecstasy of struggle.

This spirit of enterprise, as Gilder called it, was accompanied by a new spirit of victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Christmas holiday in 1991. The subsequent peace dividend was characterized by a sudden increase in both political and economic power for America. The United States was now the world’s lone superpower. The thesis of American exceptionalism that began with John Winthrop’s (1630) “A Model of Christian Charity” in which he suggested “we shall be as a city upon a hill [and] the eyes of the world are upon us” to settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and later invoked by many politicians including Kennedy and Reagan, made its transition from setting the humble example for the world to the neocon dream of reshaping the world in the image of America. We had won the Cold War and quickly dispensed with humility in favor of hubris. Winning is its own intoxicant.

An era of politics as blood sport was ushered in by the congressman and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich from Georgia in 1994 whose “Contract with America” began our precipitous descent into the dysfunction we see in Washington D.C., today. Gekko’s “greed is good” became Gingrich’s “gridlock is good.” Destroying the institutions of our democracy was picked up by the Tea Party in the early 2000s and is the core of the MAGA movement thirty years after Gingrich’s so-called contract. The late 1990s caught another huge tailwind after the end of the Cold War with the coming of the Digital Age. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs completely transformed the economy from bricks and mortar to 1s and 0s. We survived the fearful doomsday transition we imagined in “Y2K” as we rang in the new millennium and our moral orientation shifted again. “Digital is good” as the next moral mantra was born.

Americans were entranced with digital technologies in all aspects of their lives: work, play, and love. Meanwhile, in a cultural fit of delusions of grandeur, we lost sight of the virtues and values that created the greatest empire in the history of the world. Initially and dramatically, following the attacks of 9/11, with the lies of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda in Iraq to justify the Bush/Cheney aspirations of an American exceptionalism on steroids. We had been poked with a painful stick and it was time America showed the world what it meant to be a superpower, or at least how we could spend trillions of dollars, kill tens of thousands of people, and destabilize an entire region of the world.

However, our greatest delusion may have been believing that linking human beings on a filter-free platform through Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook would somehow propel humanity forward. Social media promised to be an elixir for everything from the proliferation of democracy (remember the Arab Spring of 2010?) to solving all our issues related to human connection by friending and liking at the click of a button rather than a handshake or a hug. But like a toxic solvent, the ether of the Internet dissolved America’s social fabric. Within ten years, sharing cute pictures of grandma’s cats morphed into a laboratory of disinformation including an incubator of suicide for our youth. Contrary to what initially seemed to improve our lives, social media made us vulnerable, narrow-minded, depressed, and dangerous.

The Age of Deceit that began with Bush/Cheney has subsequently achieved its pinnacle of expression with the second election of Donald Trump. We experienced a moment of potential moral reset during the period of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” but alas, a black man in our White House was more than too many Americans could tolerate. “Deceit is good” is today’s perverted moral mantra. If nothing else, Trump has demonstrated that lies have no consequences, at least no negative consequences for him. It is hard to find King’s “moral universe” anywhere in American life, today.

Many believe that the institutions we have built over two-and-one-half centuries will survive the wrecking ball of Trump and the MAGAs. As one scholar recently suggested to me in a retort to my concern that we now have a virtue-free president, while our founders believed wholeheartedly in the importance of virtues, our institutions are strong enough to survive regardless of who might occupy the Oval. In other words, virtues-in-leadership no longer matters. This seems like a specious—plausible but wrong—argument to me. I suspect it may even prove to be the ultimate expression of American exceptionalist hubris. At the very least, it is an extremely risky proposition. Alas, such is the life and inevitable death of empires; on this point history speaks with great clarity. Our city upon a hill may be reduced to rubble sooner, rather than later.

Recently, I attended the new Broadway show, McNeal, at Lincoln Center in New York City. It stars Robert Downey, Jr. as an aging Nobel prize winning writer faced with the many dilemmas of artificial intelligence (AI). Downey’s natural irascible nature was a perfect fit for his character, Jacob McNeal, who is a near-perfect writ-large reflection of the American character in 2024. Often intoxicated, but never wrong, never apologetic, and never in doubt. “AI is good” as our next moral mantra appears to be a certainty. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is our new Gekko, Gingrich, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Trump.

To be clear, I am not advocating for the end of the development of new technologies. Technology has been essential to advancing human welfare. I am simply asking that we heed our mistakes—like those we have experienced with social media—and consider carefully how we apply technology in our lives. To pick our moral compass up off the floor and put it back on the table. Today, the arc King idealized in 1968 is a nearly unfathomable, random, chaotic, and maddening black hole into which algorithmic equations and quantum computing are sucking humanity into the abyss at astonishing speed. Notwithstanding the promise of improving human welfare, we risk allowing AI to extinguish the human spirit; to suppress volition and homogenize our lives. To prove Foucault’s thesis.

As creativity advocate, Kirby Ferguson has illustrated, we are experiencing a crisis of sameness produced by technology. AI doesn’t create thought; it flattens it into an average of everything. It wrenches the spirit out of the human. It turns both poor writers and great ones into mediocre writers. But, as Ferguson points out, conformity and repression often lead to rebellion and rebirth. Anyone up for the next Renaissance? Are you, or your child, the next Leonardo da Vinci?

Unfortunately, the endgame of AI may be to replace American exceptionalism-on-steroids with nihilism-on-steroids.  From humility to hubris to nihilism may be the signposts which tomorrow’s historians use to define America’s final descent. Taming humanity—let alone assuring justice—is becoming a quaint notion, indeed. Humanity itself may be an irrelevant locus of focus. But, no, it doesn’t have to be that way.

What comes next in the cycles of American history is anyone’s guess. Rebirth, or a descent into an entropic collapse are both possibilities, as are other variations between the two. Our task remains, however, the same: look for that sliver of light to squeeze through to fortify and restore our humanity—to bring hope back into our lives. We made our history what it was: a messy and inelegant march into the future. But, march we did and we remain (mostly) upright today. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued during another period of great uncertainty in America, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

For many, Trump is a blessing: a savior who will restore them to what they view as their historic and rightful place in social, political, and economic order. To produce a sort of retrotopia. Others view him as a curse whose deceitful, cruel, and sleazy manner is not just an existential threat to American democracy, but also to their own lives. Either way, our best hope—however perversely accomplished—is to get Americans back on track to moral goodness where truth, self-determination, and reciprocity snap America back to its potential as that city upon a hill. At our essence is something no technology or demagogue can defeat: a flame of resilience and ingenuity that resides deep within our souls. Not even a Blackwell chip from Nvidia can generate this spirit.

Our founder Thomas Paine wrote at the time of our nation’s birth, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He also acknowledged, however, that

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

In other words, we need look no further than into a mirror to point the finger of blame for the government we endure.

In my lifetime, the four most inspirational leaders were Kennedy, King, Reagan, and Obama. Theirs are the faces that should be on our Mt. Rushmore of today. They each had very different political perspectives and extraordinarily different personal backgrounds. However, they had one thing absolutely in common: they all made Americans feel good about being Americans. They believed in the American experiment that began in 1776. They lifted us up and made us reach for what Abraham Lincoln called our “better angels.” Like Lincoln, the first two were assassinated; the third nearly assassinated; and the fourth, spared. (The optimism of unity is threatening to those who seek power through animus.) Their courage resided deeply in the core of their being and their belief in the unlimited capacity of the human spirit. They personified hope. In their honor, it is our duty to stand in opposition to divisive forces and to avert America’s moral collapse.

We are better off today, but are we better humans? The Latin-based word nihilism in its literal translation means nothing-ism: the rejection of moral principles where cynicism reigns and life is meaningless. Based on America’s current trajectory, we need to face the possibility that nihilism may become the defining character of the next America. Although our institutions may hold, they remain the object of human leadership. As columnist David Brooks observed, MAGA is perhaps most accurately considered as an inversion of morality made up of “performative arsonists.”

Destroying things is easy, building things is hard. I think we all believe (and expect) that soon-to-be empowered MAGA loyalists can destroy, but can they build? As we learned with our attempt at regime change in Iraq, being able to do the first and not the second can result in long term instability and expanded regional conflicts with no end in sight. Is that really what we want for America?

For the moment, as Americans we still enjoy most of our rights of self-determination. Being human still matters. All of these developments over the last seven-plus decades have been, as they always have been: up to us. Individually and collectively, we need to act to direct the future of our lives, our communities, country, and world. Notwithstanding the headwinds of Trump’s authoritarian nationalism devoid of any subscription to virtues, in America the people still decide. We have the power.

It is an evident truth that without darkness there can be no light. The spiritual parallel is that without suffering there can be no enlightenment; without despair transcendence is unachievable. That the only way out is through. Therein lies the path forward. It is time to stand again; to honor our voices; to move on from this moment with humility and determination. To make our presence known and, moreover, felt. To open, to release, and to rise.

 

By |2024-12-22T13:41:03+00:00December 7th, 2024|American Identity, General, The New Realities|0 Comments
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A Conceit of Contempt

In the human journey to create the most peaceful, stable, and perfect society, the ancients considered many issues, conditions, and regimes to govern themselves. In Book IV of The Republic of Plato, Socrates, while brainstorming a perfect society with his students, suggests that if virtues like wisdom, moderation, and courage were established in a city there would be no need for laws. Further, that if each man pursued his particular and unique skills to the best of his ability to affect what economists later termed “division of labor” and “economic specialization” while taking care to manage his appetites by his commitments to reason and goodness, that a natural harmony—a state of justice—would prevail.

More than two thousand years later, our founders had a more skeptical view and laid down a Declaration and Constitution to provide a framework within which laws would be made to guide and guard our pursuit of living in peace and harmony. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both maintained lists of virtues they frequently reviewed to assess their compliance and self-govern their characters. These lists and the founding documents of our nation were strongly influenced by the ancients (in particular Cicero) as well as English and Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Franklin suggested the founders had given us a “republic if you can keep it” at the time of our nation’s birth. In our nearly two-and-a-half centuries of the American experiment we have kept it. In the election of 2024, a majority of us selected a leader who, unlike the ancients and our founders, has no apparent subscription to any virtues (let alone a discernible conscience) and believes norms and laws—in addition to serving in our military—are for “suckers and losers.” My, how far we have fallen.

Trump’s conceit of contempt targets virtues and laws in the nature of elitist arrogance that holds he is above following any rules meant for people lesser than he, what the Greeks called the hoi poloi, meaning the masses. As a result, whether or not our republic makes it to a third century is now a serious concern. A rogue virtue-free leader may appeal to America’s maverick mythology, but also risks all we have built as the exemplar of freedom in the world. In the next four years, we may look more like Victor Orban’s Hungary than the United States of America. One might feel that our founders would be extremely disappointed, but I expect they would also be surprised the republic lasted this long; late-life correspondence between Jefferson and John Adams shows that founders didn’t believe the republic would make it out of the 19th century.

However, in the election of 2024, this conceit of contempt was not only expressed by Trump. It was at the core of the losing campaign by Harris and the Democrats, albeit of a different nature with different targets. Their conceit of contempt was an elitist form of judgment deployed with the blame ‘n shame game, which can be an effective form of manipulation (commonly deployed by organized religions), but not a successful method of persuasion. Their targets were not virtues and laws, they were voters. Trump certainly also aims his contempt at people—his enemies—but not at his supporters. He brings his supporters alongside his own (baseless) victimhood as their protector. He forms a duplicitous yet sturdy bond with them. His contempt acted to attract voters, while Harris’s acted to repel voters.

In my last post, the Sunday before the election, I suggested that “Trump could win—maybe even by a large electoral margin” due in no small part to Harris’s mistakes. Many of my Democrat readers let me know how much they did not like my prediction. Fair enough, but I am compelled by my own center of gravity to write things as I see them—as they are, rather than the way I might wish them to be. I also suggested that “Four more years of Trump will be devastating for our country and the world.” If we consider ourselves proper guardians of our republic, we must understand how to appeal to people in a persuasive manner. Understanding this is really fairly simple; it is based in the nature of how humans support and curate their egos. Then we have to give them a reason to identify (in a healthy way) with better candidates.

At the essence of human flourishing is a healthy sense of self-worth. If this essential element of personhood is not established early in life, destructive behaviors to one’s self and others are inevitable; all in a twisted and nearly-always futile attempt to fill the void where worthiness belongs. In relationships, those lacking a strong sense of self have little hope of ever forming an intimate, authentic, and strong bond with another human. Those so afflicted are like human wrecking balls in social structures, especially families.

Among Americans today, who we are and why we are—our sense of worth—is in abject jeopardy. It is a borderline epidemic and insidious human tragedy; especially tragic (and perplexing) considering that we live in an age of abundance. From anxious to angry to chronically depressed, many Americans feel like victims; they feel unworthy. “Woe is me” is not conducive to a healthy mindset. These people are always looking for external affirmation inasmuch as self-affirmation is difficult to impossible. Incidentally, this condition frames the fundamental appeal of cults, which a number of sociologists have suggested fits the MAGA movement, referring to it as a “cult of personality.”

All humans strive to feel good about themselves. Those with fragile egos often seek psychic nourishment beyond their immediate social support system by a referent. Referents come in many forms through the processes of self-identification that shape and continually curate the ego. They are those things—usually persons or ideas or beliefs—that without acknowledging and understanding make it impossible to completely consider who someone is, or at least who they would like us to believe they are.

Trump (who himself struggles with a fragile ego) has become a referent for many Americans who are fed up with the conceit of contempt many political movements and campaigns—including too often Harris’s—used to target them. Trump identified with voter’s sense of victimhood and offered them absolution through him in much the same manner Jesus Christ offered absolution to his followers. It was a slick con. His supporters will learn soon enough that, unlike Christ, he couldn’t care less about them. He is, and always will be, concerned only with himself. Disgruntled Americans (most bizarrely many evangelicals) might have chosen a deity with a durable track record, like Christ, but opted for a con-man from Queens.

The blame ‘n shame game has been central to many political movements like the environmental/climate change movement, Occupy Wall Street, Me Too, calls for reparations, Black Lives Matter, and others. Mostly considered Liberal movements, or movements of the Democratic Party. Similarly, as we saw in the later stages of Harris’s campaign, the Obamas in particular were dispatched to shame men—particularly black men—to vote for her. Women were also targeted with a sense of gender-allegiant guilt (as they were in Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign) to vote for Harris. These movements and campaigns have another thing in common other than being somewhere between less-than-successful and outright failures: they each prove that a conceit of contempt is no way to affect persuasion in human beings.

This is the subtle yet deep and instructive lesson of the 2024 election. Notwithstanding the proclaimed brilliance of party loyalists, pundits, columnists, and pollsters who have been making their many and varied claims of election omniscience after the fact, none of them I have read have a clue when it comes to this lesson that actually produced the election results this year.  None recognize that this conceit of contempt in America is endemic and toxic—across both political parties and all segments of our society. They apparently are blind and/or numb to its pervasive rampancy.

If you have followed my posts over the last few years, you know I continually advocate for lifting people up to persuade them to follow a virtues-founded course in life. The ancients did get that part right, and while our founders worried about the prospect of divisive “factions,” they also recognized the extraordinary opportunity for a union in a free land characterized by abundant resources. In the political realm, I have recommended Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign of 1984 as a model for politicians to follow forty years later. Alas, what we face now is mourning for America.

In life, we often toggle between enjoy (to be in-joy) and endure (in this usage to be in-suffering). This conceit of contempt—regardless who deploys it—is responsible for much of the social, economic, and political destruction we must now endure. I would say shame on us, but I recognize blame ‘n shame does not put anyone on a path to en-joy.

America today is a sad society. The barbarians are at the gate, although they are not arriving from beyond our borders, they are from within the republic. Socrates would probably call us “feverish” and “unhealthy,” which are inherently unstable and ungovernable conditions. We seem locked-in to our preferences for contempt over respect, suspicion over trust, falsehood over truth, and delusion over reality. Further, we cannot deal with anything except very short-term issues, leaving the substantial but longer-term issues of our national debt and climate change beyond our capacity to consider.

A superpower must lead to maintain its relative power in the international system. In today’s America, we are stuck in a cycle of reactivity swinging our fists at each other and perceived boogeymen that are like ghosts lurking in the shadows. Not exactly enlightened or reliable leadership. We need to get our act together and soon. Our allies are deeply concerned and our adversaries can’t wait to see us fall.

The stakes are high and there is much work to do. We must work on ourselves first—we must heal our own dispositions—then work with each other. Above all else, we need to set aside our contempt for each other. There is no better time to begin repairing and restoring ourselves and our society than in the present moment—regardless of who is president. Waiting four more years may render our republic beyond any prospect of restoration.

By |2024-12-07T23:01:38+00:00November 17th, 2024|General, Recent, The New Realities|0 Comments
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It is Up to Women

There is one thing the vast majority of Americans agree on in an otherwise deeply divided nation: we all wish this election would end sooner rather than later. Politicians have discarded the art of persuasion for crass tools of manipulation that strain our democratic sensibilities to the breaking point. The new American machine of political outrage has turned discourse into a bloodsport while the now-banal deployment of deceit has produced a leaden blanket of exhaustion that smothers our better spirits.

Notwithstanding vote counting shenanigans that could leave the results in question for days and weeks to come, at least the ads designed to scare us into voting for one candidate or against another will end on Tuesday. The streaming will, hopefully, quit screaming. That said, regardless of who wins, or appears to win on November 5th, Trump and his team of sycophants will work to assure chaos through at least early January. Chaos is, after all, the fundamental modus operandi of the charlatan; it keeps the truth always just beyond our grasp, and the fraudster out of chains.

Pollsters have been pulling their hair out trying to predict how we will vote. Millions of dollars have been spent on research and consultants to design messages to move us towards one candidate or another.  In an imperfectly divided America few, if any, understand Americans because traditional identifiers like race, religion, party affiliation, age, etc. are no longer explanatory, nor predictive.

While educational achievement remains a somewhat reliable predictor across all age groups, gender is the only significant marker of voting preference, principally among the youngest voters. When you combine education and gender there is an astounding 43 point spread between voters for Harris and Trump; college educated women prefer Harris by 27 points while non-college men prefer Trump by 16 points. The age-old dictum still applies: “It’s all about turnout.” We should also expect split-ticket voting—where people vote for candidates without regard for party loyalty—to reach an all-time high this election. The impact of the independent voter will continue to rise.

Eventually, the candidates and their donors will realize the mistakes they have made. Frankly, nearly all have run strategically inept campaigns. Only one candidate, Donald Trump, got it more right than wrong, and he only got it half right. Despite his outrageous and despicable character, he has had his finger on the emotional pulse of Americans better than Biden or Harris. Biden never understood it while Harris had it right initially, then she got it all wrong. Emotions—not facts—drive feelings, and in 2024 we will vote based on our feelings. Regrettably, Trump understands this much better than Harris.

Allow me to explain.

In America, we are nearing the end of the fourth period of crisis in our history. Trump may extend this period of crisis, but it will end eventually, consistent with the universal rule of impermanence. For the last several years we have been enveloped by a fog of various anxieties leaving many depressed. As a fog, it is difficult to recognize in real time as it creeps in, and once we can’t see well it becomes challenging to find a road out. The War on Terror, the Great Recession, the pandemic, climate change, and political dysfunction have all affected us in different, but negative ways.

In the process, the social, political, and economic fabric of our union has been severely compromised. If you are under thirty-five years of age, it is unlikely you even recall the relentless and optimistic spirit that defined America in the last half of the twentieth century unless you watched it in an old movie. Today, we are looking for a way out. It’s what humans do. At first, we cope, then survive, then (hopefully) prosper.

The new reality is that traditional demographic identifiers that pollsters use to slice and dice voter responses are no longer relevant; what moves us to vote has little to do with them.  In an angst-addled state, we tend to suspend the rational for the emotional. Although when pressed by pollsters or friends to answer why we are voting one way or another, we can still muster a plaintive response like “economy’” or “immigration,” or “reproductive rights,” or “crime,” or something else. But the truth is we will vote based on who makes us feel better, or at least doesn’t make us feel worse. In a hyper-divided America, we no longer fall neatly into groups; we have become complex and highly individualized beings with our own specific tangle of desires and aversions.

The things that depress or inspire Americans are very different for each of us. Those who feel they are losing their position in American society—are being disenfranchised—may be white, black, Hispanic, Asian, male, female, straight, gay, old, or young. Those who feel the American Dream of self-determination is being threatened also include people of varied demographic backgrounds. Those who feel their personal security is at risk can be an old white man or a young trans woman. Those who feel their best years lie ahead of them can be the young Hispanic male graduate, or the recently divorced middle-aged woman. The tech-bro engaged in AI and quantum computing may feel he is going to change the world, while the septuagenarian woman engaged in teaching mindfulness to her cohorts at the assisted living facility may view her life as reaching its pinnacle of fulfillment. In 2024, our personal outlook has little to do with our respective demographic profiles; feelings are everything.

Three years ago, in November 2021, I wrote an essay called “MAFGA” which stands for Make Americans Feel Good Again. I argued that it was “a simple and powerfully persuasive proposition.” I railed against the use of shame and fear as tools of manipulation that are not only ineffective, they are injurious. I further argued that “lifting people up has always proven more powerful than putting them down,” in hopes that candidates in the 2022 and 2024 elections and other social and political movements would change their ways.

Then, last year and again this year I reminded those seeking public office of the great success of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 who, after another depressing period in America following the Viet Nam War, Watergate, super-high inflation, and the jeremiads of Jimmy Carter, simply offered Americans absolution while painting a bucolic picture of “Morning in America, Again.” Reagan’s absolution was, “You are not the problem, government is the problem.”

Harris initially had it right. At the Democrat convention and the immediate days that followed, she engaged in a MAFGA campaign. Not only did she aim at making Americans feel good about their lives, more fundamentally she was making Americans feel good about being Americans, again. It was about us, even as she introduced us to her own story. The Trump campaign was on its heels faced with a young optimistic new opponent. Trump, himself, slid into an apoplectic stupor. He had been erased from the headlines. Then, she took the bait.

She was goaded by her opponent and the media to get specific about policy after her mid-Summer meteoric rise in the polls following Biden’s abdication and the convention. She then relinquished her feel-good strategy and fell into the policy trap. Tax the billionaires! Everyone gets a down payment for an affordable home! Small businesses will get a tax break! And on. While it was certainly appropriate for her to articulate her policy proposals, she failed to connect them to the positive effects they would have on voter’s lives. She failed to answer the question, what does it mean to me?

Policies are features, and people don’t buy features, they buy benefits. Even a car salesperson understands the difference between features and benefits. Features are based in facts while benefits are based in meaning. How will this policy improve my life and my family’s future? How will it lift me up to make me feel proud of myself and my country? What does it mean to me? Features appeal to our rational state while benefits appeal to our emotional state. The latter will determine how we vote in this election. It is a distinction that makes a huge difference. One of my questions for Harris is, how can a campaign with a billion dollars not hire an advisor who understands this basic tenet of persuasion?

When her policy orientation caused her numbers to plateau, she shifted again, but in the wrong direction. She tried to out-fear the master of fear, Donald Trump. She ranted endlessly about how awful it would be if he were elected. It was as if she was channeling her inner Joe Biden.  Consequently, she committed the cardinal sin of campaigning: she put her opponent in the spotlight at the expense of her own campaign objectives. She made herself look like she was losing, and people at the margin—the undecideds—are unlikely to cast their vote for someone they think may lose. It’s not the way they want to feel. To modify James Carville’s old maxim, in the election of 2024, it’s how you make people feel, stupid!

The Harris campaign even dispatched Barack and Michelle Obama to shame men into voting for her even though shame seldom works—especially with men. As the columnist Maureen Dowd pointed out, Trump appeals to men who feel emasculated, who see Trump as the “antidote to shrinking male primacy.”  Trump pandered to enervated men while the Harris campaign shamed them. In effect, Trump invoked Reagan’s absolution: you are not the problem, Harris and the woke Dems are the problem. Which do you think would attract more voters—especially testosterone-loaded young men? Harris’s shame, or Trump’s absolution?

In short, Harris traded optimism and making Americans feel good again for mundane feature-based policies, fear-mongering, and shame. She abdicated the high road and cast herself as a struggling coming-from-behind candidate rather than the voice of a winner—of change and optimism—even while she was being supported by more than one billion dollars. Oops.

Meanwhile, in spite of his ugly disposition and complete lack of any semblance of policy credibility, Trump continued to do what he does best: tweak the fears—the emotional anxieties—of distressed Americans, especially men. In the late stages of crisis, those driven by anxiety outnumber those who are content. This, and Harris’s strategic mistakes, is why Trump could win—maybe even by a large electoral margin. Trump could never be optimistic—could never execute a MAFGA strategy—but he did engage with feelings even if they are our lesser feelings—our anxieties. He owns the market on fear and anger and he played on feelings much better than Harris down the stretch.

Obviously, I don’t know who will win any better than the pollsters, but I do understand how people will vote in 2024. It is both complicated and obvious. People don’t fit neatly into old categories and may never again. Welcome to our infinitely diverse world, pols and pollsters!

For years now at my blog, and in my 2020 book, Saving America in the Age of Deceit, I have characterized Trump as a wannabe fascist. Many suggested that I was guilty of hyperbole. It is now clear that if anything I should have dropped the adjective, “wannabe.” Even the venerable ninety-two-year-old historian, Robert Paxton, who first resisted the label for Trump, calling it a “toxic label” in 2017, believes Trumpism is fascism today drawing comparisons to his studies of how fascism swallowed France in the early 1940s.

Four more years of Trump will be devastating for our country and the world. If Trump gets his way on tax cuts and tariffs, and allows Elon Musk and the Project 25 bros to run wild destroying government agencies, it could produce an American economic tragedy that could rival the Great Depression; similar to what President Hoover and Treasury Secretary Mellon did that preceded the crash of 1929. Politically, what could happen may mirror the rise of fascist tyranny in the late 1930s that we were warned of by Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

Alas, Harris had her shot. Had she stayed on the MAFGA path (where Trump could never compete), I expect she would have won in a landslide. Instead, she decided to try to compete on Trump’s platform of fear. It is as if Taco Bell, whose core competency is cheap tacos, decided to abandon tacos to compete with McDonalds in selling hamburgers and fries. I imagine the taco giant’s next decision would be made in bankruptcy court: chapter 7 (liquidation) or 11 (reorganization).

I do truly hope Harris eeks out a victory. I hold out hope for an upside surprise—that the pollsters have it wrong (as they most certainly will), but in her favor rather than his, this time.

Let me be clear, it is up to women—especially Gen Z women—who can pull it out for Harris. My late mother would be so pleased that her granddaughter, Corsica Steding, and her peers, might have the power to swing a presidential election. In 2010, President Obama penned a letter to my mother on her 87th birthday stating, in part, that “You have witnessed great milestones in our Nation’s history, and your life represents an important part of the American narrative. I hope you are filled with tremendous pride and joy.” At the time, not many 87-year-old white women supported Barack Obama, but my mother did. She had hoped a woman would become president in her lifetime, but was nearly as pleased when a black man did; she recognized his wisdom and grace as her own. My plea to women across the country this Sunday is that my mother’s narrative does not die on this coming Tuesday, and that my daughter can live the life my mother worked so hard for her to have.

Like many Americans in the center, I am not as much for Harris as I am against Trump. I struggle with several of her policy positions and her inability to answer questions clearly and succinctly, but for those of us for whom character is paramount and who care about the founding principles of our nation, it is an easy call. She has certainly won the dollar-donation polls, so perhaps that proves to be a better indicator. However, if Trump wins (as the bond market and gamblers at Polymarket and Predictit expect), I will certainly understand why.

I expect most of us will escape Trump’s tyrannical wrath, but we will all know some of his victims—some may even be friends and family. His tariff proposals alone will severely harm the American consumer (mostly middle class) and our economy will endure yet higher inflation and an exploding deficit—even economists at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute concur with this assessment. As for our democracy, as Harvard’s Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have argued, our last pathway to save the republic may be “societal mobilization.” In sum, if Trump wins, the decline of the American empire that many international relations scholars suggest peaked in its power in 2001, will accelerate. And, it will have been our choice—our doing.

If there is any good news, it is that there is life after empire. Good people will still lead good lives. The pendulum will swing again from darkness to light as it did in the late 1940s. World order will be remade; as multipolar rather than unipolar. In the process, the United States will lose its stature as sole superpower. Perhaps the indomitable spirit of earlier Americans will be reborn in our next Americans. Our spine of character is being tested as it was during Crisis I: the American Revolution; Crisis II: the Civil War; and Crisis III: the Great Depression and World War II. So far, our character has stood the test of time.

Whatever the outcome of this election, hopefully we will shed the many bad behaviors we have accumulated over the last couple of decades and our narcissism will be replaced by a new order of personal responsibility founded in the stewardship of our communities and of our fragile environment. We may even begin to respect each other, again. Perhaps also set aside manipulation in favor of persuasion. I won’t hold my breath, but I will certainly use it to find a sense of calm.

Please don’t hold your breath either; breathe my friends, breathe.

By |2024-11-17T13:37:34+00:00November 3rd, 2024|General, Leadership|0 Comments
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From Resilience to Transcendence

What do we live for?

We arrive screaming pulled from the comfort of our mother’s womb. Whether we leave this world with someone at our side, or alone, we all hope someone remembers us—at least for a while. In the years between our beginning and end, we forge a life we call our own. Failures and victories mark our path which, full of transgressions and glory, defines who we are, then once were.

Soon, we are forgotten. Which is as it should be. But the contribution we’ve made to the soul that offered us its eternal wisdom upon our first inhalation has been made even wiser at its departure upon our last exhalation. Our primary job is to be the vessel and steward of our soul. Although we give our ego much more playing time during our lives, we should revere our soul with a sense of respectful awe—especially in the last quarter of life. Upon our death, our soul moves on to possess another being in their first breath as an older and wiser soul. That is our everlasting contribution—the one true legacy that is ours, alone.

That’s it. That is why we are/were here. That’s all there is. And, it’s grand.

In August, I wrote about how to achieve resilience in your life that included three steps: Know Thyself, Honor Thyself, and Steel Thyself. That if you successfully pursued these steps it would result in a “constitution that is unassailable.” That you might even become “that person that in the face of adversity has a curious grin on their face.” If you missed that essay, or want to review it, go here.

I need to admit now that I was holding out on you; that there is a fourth step that takes you beyond resilience to transcendence. In order to move from resilience to transcendence (what others may call enlightenment), there is another step that is important to enjoy a thriving last quarter of life and to leave this world in peace: Liberate Thyself.

In some cultures, folks in their last quarter of life are revered. They are cared for, respected and, moreover, listened to. I suspect these people have an easier time finding peace, equanimity, and transcendence before they pass as compared to those of us who are more often ignored and discarded in American culture.

Our culture is fast: fast food, fast fashion, fast cars, fast relationships, and fast opinions. We dismiss the rule, “speed kills,” with cheerful ignorance. The wisdom of living more slowly is borderline unpatriotic. As a consequence, liberating thyself is arguably more difficult in America, and also more important to those of us who want to make our exit in peace rather than in a state of suffering.

We can, however, achieve a state of transcendence that assures sweet peace. In America, we may just have to work a bit harder to get there. Among other things, we have to recognize the delicate and often contentious relationship between our ego and our soul.

If you are a long-time reader of these essays, I actually haven’t been holding out on you about liberating thyself as I have written about this before. However, in the face of disturbing unknowns that seem to increase dramatically as our country faces national elections today, and since many more readers have recently joined ameritecture.com, I thought it might be time to pull things together again in one essay with links for you to conduct a deeper dive to suit your own particular needs or concerns. To give you all the steps to understand the path to transcendence.

In “The Identity Trap: Suffering or Transcendence” (click here), I argue that while we arrive in the world as a clean slate—egoless—we should also leave the world as a clean, or relatively clean, slate. That in the first three phases of life, preparation (0-25 years); achievement (26-45 years); and actualization (46-65 years), during which we are creating and refining our egos, our identity serves to both differentiate us as uniquely valuable as well as provide a basis for belonging to places, organizations, and groups. Our egos and attendant identities act to locate us within society. But then there is a fork in the road.

In the fourth quarter of life (65+ years), if we cling to that ego that has defined us, we may spend our final days suffering. That the key to achieving sweet peace and transcendence is to let go of our ego. It is a very challenging process, but like anything else you have accomplished in life, with diligence and discipline it can be achieved. Fair warning: your ego will fight like hell to preserve itself. It has been the alpha actor in your life since a few days after birth. But it is time for the other actor—your soul—to become the touchstone to govern the balance of your life. The desires and aversions and delusions that occupy that ego-driven voice in your head must be expelled to take the path to transcendence—to avoid suffering. This is what some spiritual teachers refer to as living in the seat of the soul.

As I summarized in this essay,

The disturbances and discontents that inflicted others no longer afflict me. FOMO (fear of missing out) has been replaced by the equanimity of missing out. Let the rabble roar. If you have triggers, they are yours, not mine. My awareness is elsewhere. My mind is sucking up knowledge like a kindergartner. It is a very different me than the one I left behind. No burdensome expectations or obligations, no doubts, or fears, or anger. Moreover, no hurry. Death will come when it will and I will welcome it in the same manner I welcomed life: with a sense of optimistic curiosity. Whether it is a door or a wall doesn’t matter, because I have my sweet peace in this world and it is simply magnificent.

In a later essay, I hung ornaments on the tree; I offered “Twelve Contemplations for a Better Tomorrow” (click here) that included practical tools and steps to free yourself from your ego based on my learnings from Buddhism and Stoicism. In this essay, I cover fun things like getting naked, dying to live, discarding regrets and desires, and leaving things better than you found them, as well as eight other contemplations. I’ll add Christ to the mix today including his teaching in John 17: 14-15 which (in my interpretation) suggests that being in the world, but not of the world is what happens when you forsake your ego for your soul. You transcend the world in favor of sweet peace. You live in a spiritual realm that enables what I have been pursuing for the last several years now: heaven on earth, which I suggest is the true Holy Grail of life. (My poem, “Heaven on Earth,” is included at this post.)

Finally, in “Curating Sweet Peace” (click here), which I published in the transition month of November—between autumn and winter—I wrote about “coming to terms with one’s life and inevitable death” and offered the mental gymnastics exercise of considering that “if we knew we would live forever—a deathless existence—what meaning would our lives have?” to embrace, rather than resist, death’s inevitability. Further, I suggested that we recognize the challenges the world keeps throwing in our face and the role of good practices:

Dastardly dissonances come and go with high frequency. This is why we must find a rhythm of practices that support our desire for sweet peace. This is where the process of curation comes in. In your constellation of practices that involve different tools (principal among them meditation) you will, over time, land on elements that prove effective in producing that sense of harmony that literally resonates in a manner to shield your sweet peace from a world that seems determined to disrupt, if not destroy, it. This is what is meant by ‘doing the work.’ There are many so-called spiritual teachers out there. And, as with your formal education, you will experience ones that work for you and ones that don’t. In my experience, it is a highly idiosyncratic process. Sometimes, just an irritating voice can eliminate a teacher, at others you will find more substantive points of attraction or dismissal. The point is (as with any regimen aimed at improving your life) to get started and stick with it.

As we face the coming chaos of our elections while we search for handholds of sanity, take comfort in your capacity to achieve your own sense of peace, regardless of your current age and station in life. The Stoics used the practice of negative visualization to steel themselves in advance of undesirable outcomes. It may be time to deploy this practice before what may be disturbing events over the next few months. I will conclude here with the same ending to “Curating Sweet Peace.”

Be patient with and attentive to others, but be selfish, too. Our country and world have many challenges, but I am a big believer in the power of one, which is to say making the world a better place starts with making a better, more peaceful, you. If your practice only yields glimpses of sweet peace, as mine has, trust me when I say it is well worth the effort. Tranquility is its own reward.

Once you pursue your own liberation, you may add a calm sense of knowing to your “curious grin” of resilience. No more navigating, or calculating, or striving, or becoming. Just thriving in the flow of whatever is in the moment. Whomever inhales your soul next will be a very fortunate being.

My blessing for you (and me) is always: “May you wake in glory, enjoy your day with grace, and spend your night in peace. Glory, grace, and peace.”

By |2024-11-03T13:11:03+00:00October 20th, 2024|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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