Believing & Belonging

There is a moment in time in each of our lives when our oneness is realized. For most, it arrives in our late teens or early twenties. It is that moment when you realize that no one knows where you are or what you are doing; not your parents, or teachers, or siblings, or anyone. You are not just alone; you are on your own—at least in that moment. We spend our young life being with, and trying to be like, others. Then, it is as if a new sun has risen that reveals something we have never seen before. It is our whole self, mind and body and spirit as one unique offering—as a fully differentiated being. A self that is just us.

For many, it is a moment of awe when freedom seems real and present rather than being an abstract idea that the adults in our lives revered in a manner we couldn’t grasp. For others, it can be uncomfortable, disturbing, maybe even terrifying. Our response to this realization—feeling liberation or fear—defines a fork in the road that sets the course for our lives. Our subsequent success/failure, fulfillment/discontent, stability/instability depend to a great extent on how we feel being alone: liberated or terrified. As the French intellectual, Blaise Pascal, argued, our ability to “sit in a room alone” is critical to the well-being of humanity writ large. In our youth, we seldom have this opportunity. As we age, being alone with a self we must love above all others is fundamental to our flourishing. This is not selfish, it is self-ful.

If our parents have instilled us with a sense of self-worth, we usually embrace this moment with quiet jubilation. We are ready to launch our lives as a whole human being—to paint the world with our choice of colors. To try, to fail, and to try again. Before this moment of realization, our ego has been only lightly crafted, but now it becomes our raison d’être that will occupy our efforts for years to come. While we may strive to be like others as we did in our youth, we only do so to augment our self with particular attractive or fashionable aspects of others. Our specialness, assured by nature, is as unique as the prints at the tips of our fingers. If we have not had our self-worth ticket punched in these early years, our destiny will be fraught with the pain of self-doubt resulting in a fragility of ego that becomes a trap of cyclic self-destruction and suffering; inevitably also visited upon those we purport to love.

This self, this ego, enables us to both belong to groups with whom we share traits as well as provide us with points of differentiation that make us special. It becomes our identity that shapes how we interact with the world. It offers others handholds to grasp when describing us and placing us in their own particular taxonomy of humanity. Beyond our bodies and appearance, the more interesting thing is how our mind develops as a tool to process the world before us. How we accumulate knowledge and subscribe to beliefs together creates a box of filters through which we consider the hundreds of decisions—both substantive and insignificant—we make each day. Through research I conducted on presidential decision making in foreign policy, I developed what I termed the “cognetic system” that explores this box of filters through the developmental channels of socialization, indoctrination, education, and experience; the first two illustrate the origins of beliefs, and the second two the origins of knowledge. The cognetic system attempts to illustrate how our curated identity affects our decision making.

Today, there is new and fascinating scholarship on how ideas as elements of our ideologies guide our lives. The brilliant young neuroscientist, Leor Zmigrod, of Cambridge, Stanford, and Harvard has placed her scope on the realm of belief systems—ideologies—in her study The Ideological Brain: the Radical Science of Flexible Thinking that brings “together neuroscience and politics and philosophy to challenge our understanding of what it means to exist as human beings” in a world that seems more rife than ever with conflicts based in trenchant beliefs that often defy any semblance of reality. She attempts to pick up where George Orwell left us when he observed that “political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Zmigrod’s quest is to observe belief structures as they permeate our bodies at the neurological level. A brain engaged in rigid, dogmatic, habitual thinking shows a “pattern of neurons firing … [that] is different from the pattern of neural activity when we are making a deliberate goal-oriented action” that considers multiple perspectives and options. And while her findings are at times disturbing, she shines a bright light on a new understanding of how apparently reasonable but rigid people can become so profoundly unreasonable, and how the appeal of simplicity and certainty are both comforting and dangerous. She makes the case for plasticity-of-mind that for centuries supported the liberalism and pluralism that made Western Civilization flourish, and is now in grave danger from the ideological zealots at both ends of the political spectrum. As Zmigrod found, the most cognitively flexible people are “nonpartisans who lean left” while the “extreme left and extreme right are ultimately similar in their intolerance and rigidity.”

While I laud her contribution, I also fear her work and the work of so many other scientists, which we need now more than ever, will undoubtedly face the wrath of Trump’s vitriol for people smarter than he, or be the target of Elon Musk’s chainsaw of destruction. Sidelining and/or banishing our best and brightest is a dumb way to secure our future, but that is exactly what Trump and Musk are doing. As my good friend, Roger Cohen, and his colleague, Catherine Porter, reported recently from Paris in the New York Times, the European Union just announced more than half-a-billion dollars will be invested to “make Europe a magnet for researchers” from the United States due to what the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, called a “gigantic miscalculation.”

We might find hope, however, in the one notable weakness in Trump’s MAGA world that suggests his tenure as America’s president and commander of chaos and cruelty may end sooner rather than later: Trump has no coherent ideology to affect a durable bond with his followers.

The value of ideologies to authoritarian leaders and regimes is to provide people a handhold on a set of beliefs that allow them a sense of belonging to an in-group that will (hopefully) fortify and sustain their welfare. The most successful totalitarian regimes throughout history, including Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, possessed an organizing premise that justified their actions regardless of norms, laws, and even morality. As Zmigrod points out, “Nazi totalitarianism emerged from a fixation on life as a fight between races, and Stalinist totalitarianism was built on life as a fight between economic classes.” Our own wannabe fascist, Donald Trump, has, as his Achilles heel of vulnerability, no clear organizing principle to affect a secure attachment of people to his MAGA brigade. Red hats and a leader whose fundamental principle is serving himself is a malevolent cult, not a durable regime. Once the benefits of subscribing to his many promises and claims ring hollow to those who, like him, are loyal only to their expected rewards, his fall from political power may be sudden and swift. Cults always appear invincible until they suddenly collapse, with or without a final gulp of Kool-Aid.

Humans must be able to make decisions to conduct their lives and also to reconcile dissonance to keep themselves mentally and emotionally stable. Belief systems enable both. Whether my “cognetic system” or Zmigrod’s political neuroscience, or the many philosophers throughout human history who have wrestled with the role of ideas and beliefs on our lives, we must recognize this: we should take great care in what we allow to populate our systems of thought. They are, after all, the backbone of our personal operating systems that allow us the enjoyment of the oneness we discovered in our late teens and its inherent sense of freedom.

Regardless of the carefully curated egos and belief systems we serve and employ, above all else we should take care to express certainty judiciously, perhaps even infrequently. Certitude, especially when dispatched with righteousness, is a danger to both ourselves and others. Like simplicity, certainty shares the structural nature of narrowing rather than broadening the mind; both attractive, yet too often, limiting. As Zmigrod found, “Rituals performed in the service of an ideology are viewed as righteous regardless of how hurtful or ridiculous they may be.” Indeed, “the more passionately we repeat a ritual, the more radical we become.” Religion has understood this since the beginning of faith-based belief, and politics has adopted this practice in the contemporary era.

Curiosity—even doubt—should therefore be practiced with much greater energy than certitude. Curiosity opens us while certitude closes off alternatives that may prove much more effective and meaningful. As humans, we fail our way to success. We must widen the aperture of consciousness to serve the best interests of ourselves, our communities, and the many organizations and institutions upon which we rely to achieve our well-being.

We should subscribe to the credo that every person we meet knows something we do not know, and can do something better than we can do it. With deference to our founders, all men are not created equal, notwithstanding the aim of being treated as having equal rights under the law. Each of us has something someone else can benefit from; it is our inequality—our differences— that provides the strongest argument for both diversity and unity. Wisdom, therefore, finds its best host in those who find value, rather than disdain, in people unlike themselves. Wisdom thrives in love and dies in hatred.

By |2025-05-11T12:46:32+00:00May 11th, 2025|Current, General, Recent|0 Comments
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Stop the Stupid

“Never again” happens over and over, again.

That is the sad state of humanity. We learn, then we forget.  We are painfully reminded, then we forget once again. Meanwhile, we admonish each other for bringing history to today’s table when we draw historical comparisons. How dare we compare what is happening today to Nazi Germany?! Those were different times! Indeed, they were. But were they different enough?

We are intoxicated by our specialness, of our arrogance that we are immune from the mistakes of history. Of course, we are smarter than our ancestors, except we are not smarter—not even close. Bigger, stronger, wealthier? Yes. But smarter, no. Our arrogance, addled further by our indifference, assures our stupidity. Our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, are screaming at us from their graves. Screaming at us to save what they built for us. To save America.

Our nation is in great peril. Weirdly, our president is the central threat to our country and our freedoms. He is the existential threat to our republic. He is destroying American power. He is the existential threat to the global economy and world order. He is working against America and for our historical adversaries. Most of all, he is working for himself and explicitly not for us. For those of you who believe I am catastrophizing, just take a moment and weigh the balance of Trump’s benevolence against his malevolence; that is, if you can even identify a scintilla of his actions that can be considered benevolent. He is a profoundly cruel, reckless, and narcissistic person. He is the epitome of the dark triad.

Further, if you are among those who believe he has some magical strategy that will somehow flip the many destructive consequences he has created in his first one hundred days to our sudden advantage, you are courting disaster. You should schedule your fitting for a jester’s costume soon. I will endeavor to remain kind to you—even compassionate—and honor your right to your own opinion, even while I find your naïveté profoundly disturbing. I will leave your conscience in your own hands. Mine is clear.

America is filled with wonderful people. But sadly today, most of us are bystanders. Many hope the nightmare of the current administration will somehow be resolved without our having to speak up, let alone stand up. That our institutions of norms and laws will somehow prevail without our active support. This comfortable convenient complacency is certainly not unprecedented. Many adopted the same behaviors before us. 1936 Germany: Maybe Hitler doesn’t mean what he says. 1994 Rwanda: Surely the Hutu extremists will not kill a million of their Tutsi rivals in just one hundred days. 1995 Bosnia: Genocide in Europe can’t happen again. Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, the list goes on and on. For those who believe yes, but it can’t/won’t happen in America, please reflect on the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Kent State shootings, and the many mass murders we endure in the United States on a weekly basis. All of the victims thought they were smarter than their ancestors, too. They believed what in fact did happen would not happen to them, either. “Blindsided” is the characterization many survivors used, after the fact. Too often in history, “it can’t happen here” has been followed by “thoughts and prayers” and, eventually, “never again, never again.”

The things we can see happening in America today are, unfortunately, probably just the tip of the iceberg. Trump ignoring our courts and rule of law, destroying essential public goods and institutions, pouring tariff fuel on the inflation fire, wrecking critical relationships with allies while green-lighting the exploits of adversaries, will all imperil America and Americans for decades to come. Project 2025 has exceeded my worst fears. While this is all deeply troubling, however, my eye is on the president’s attempt to make our military his own.

Watch what is happening that is being largely ignored by the media. Former Fox News weekender and now Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is a useful idiot. He is useful as a sideshow—a shiny object—to distract our attention away from what is going on beneath him at the Pentagon. While the media is focused on Hegseth, Trump is replacing our military brass with sycophants designed to achieve complete fealty to himself, and it is nearly complete. His replacements will follow and enforce his orders without consideration of our Constitution and rule of law, let alone the many treaties the United States has throughout the world. For Trump’s bootlickers, he is the law; his orders are their commandments. His pursuit of a military parade to celebrate his birthday in June should not be easily dismissed as a point of egoic amusement. It, too, is a part of the authoritarian process.

Machiavelli would cheer Trump’s understanding of his principal thesis of power: command and control the tools of cruelty and violence. Routinely dispense cruelty with impunity to keep your boot gently but firmly on the neck of the American psyche. As Machiavelli instructed the prince, if you accomplish this, you may do as you wish, including, in Trump’s fantasy, becoming president for life.

I would like you to consider, however, that Trump may well be a gift from God. Certainly not as promoted by fraudulent-Christian White Christian Nationalists; rather, as the agent of destruction we need as a wayward empire to find our way back to the goodness of our basic humanity. Trump may be God’s way of telling us that we suck. Evil can be a gift if we address it with calm resolve in a relentless pursuit of rebirth. As the spiritual teacher Ekhart Tolle suggests, “suffering is a wonderful teacher.” We Americans have squandered the great gifts of our success by engaging the sins of greed, sloth, and pride; especially in the last twenty-five years. Of these charges, the evidence is overwhelming. Perhaps Trump is our way out—our evil savior.

Renewal and redemption—saving ourselves—is a process. I call it the path to hallelujah. It begins in fear and anger, then sadness, then compassion, then hope and, if we do the work, renewal and redemption. The path to hallelujah is the most human of our endeavors; we Americans love a redemption story. In America’s recent collapse from order to disorder, we are in the early stages of fear and anger. The faster we get past this, and then let our sadness dissipate, we can get back on track to a new world. I have no doubt our current administration has zero interest in allowing us to get past our fears, let alone anger. That is their trap in which they would like us to remain ensnared. They incite us daily to keep us disoriented, fearful, and angry. That doesn’t mean we can smile our way out of this mess, but neither does it mean that destructive anger or violence will emancipate us. I am not advocating for weak and woke, I am advocating for clever and whole-hearted.

In the centuries preceding Jesus Christ, Jewish prophets like Moses, Amos, and Ezekiel endeavored to keep society aware of the power of truth and the pitfalls of delusion. Truth is hard, while delusion is easy, which makes delusion much more popular. That reality is why so many prophets throughout human history met their end through exile and/or assassination. From Socrates, to Christ, to Martin Luther King, Jr. their otherwise peaceful and prophetic lives ended prematurely and tragically. As the Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher, Richard Rohr, illustrates in his new book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, “The prophet’s job was always spotting where the problem really lies: in the accusing ones themselves and in the delusions of the collective.” Like anger, righteousness is a trap as well. It provides an elaborate costume under which we may conceal our own many deceits and conceits while we rot from the inside, out.

My own prophetic charge is thus: it is time to wake up and, with attendant humility, restore the virtues that form a strong character based in both compassion and courage. We must respond wisely to God’s gift of Trump. We must view him as an unfortunate but necessary source of suffering around which to organize and affect our redemption and renewal. Standing idly by will only prolong our misery.

Thank you, God, and President Trump. Now, please Donald, go play lots of golf (if you can find any balls made in America).

By |2025-05-11T12:37:46+00:00April 27th, 2025|General, Recent|0 Comments
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Riding the Rainbow

Last summer, I shared two posts on resilience and reverence. The first, “Three Steps to Resilience” was a how-to narrative. Then, I re-wrote that piece as a poem in “Reverence for Me.” Over the last few years, I have used this technique as a challenge to improve my writing; prose to poem, or poem to prose. Unlike analytical narrative, which does not encourage interpretation, poetry demands it. This is poetry’s power: interpretation prompts engagement that creates a relationship between the writer and reader. It encourages discourse as opposed to the terminus of persuasion that is the aim of analytical narrative. Recently, I learned that this approach is not new, none other than Benjamin Franklin also used this process to improve his own writing. Following in his footsteps—even unwittingly—seems a good practice. It makes my mind do flips and cartwheels that, while challenging, always reveals new perspectives and insights while helping avoid the onset of intellectual sclerosis that seems to afflict many of my aging peers.

Today, I offer a poem that attempts to capture the life-process I outlined in “The Identity Trap: Suffering or Transcendence,” (August 2, 2022) that illustrates the four phases of life: preparation, achievement, actualization, and transcendence. Two stanzas are meant to reflect each phase, in order, for a total of eight, punctuated by a final line of deliverance. Toggling between the essay and the poem allows two forms of interrogation on these most important questions of identity and the meaning of a good life. The essay is 2,096 words while the poem is 110 words; in essence, the same message. I hope one or the other, or both, resonate with you.

The Arc of Life

Your life is yours

The lovely and gnarly

White space beckons

Inviting a masterpiece

 

Welcomed with joy

Stumbling, climbing

From abstract to real

Striving to shine

 

The pain of wounds

Bathed by pure light

Cleansing then healing

Scars become honor

 

Cheers and sneers

Certainty and chaos

Ardor conquers all

Vicissitudes vanish

 

Beliefs and knowledge

Give way to wisdom

Beatitudes cascading

A gift from the Mount

 

Ignoring fools

Left to goad others

Desires dwindle as

Calm becomes armor

 

The loud fall quiet

Disturbances wane

Silence blossoms

So the soul can speak

 

A whisper of goodbye

Gracefully now

From glory to peace

A sweet liberation

 

Tendered to eternity

By |2025-04-27T13:06:16+00:00April 13th, 2025|General, Recent, Spiritual|0 Comments
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Fear is NOT Us

The America I grew up in was strong, confident, and open-minded. Every new generation expected their lives would be better than the ones their parents had. It was what we set out to accomplish every day. Yes, we were far from perfect and committed our own range of transgressions, but at our core we believed in our country and ourselves. We were unafraid.

America today is afraid of the world, its neighbors, and each other. Fear is at the essence of everything our MAGA-infected leaders dispatch, from deportations to tariffs. Reagan’s shining city on a hill that opened its arms to the world is now a walled-off and crumbling empire at war with itself. The spirit of America—our greatest power—has been hollowed out and is facing collapse. Trump’s imbecilic tariffs will only accelerate the collapse. His thirst for destruction appears to be insatiable. The great tragedy is that all of this is entirely self-inflicted. The great hope is that we can self-correct.

The fears we have are false; they are manufactured by those who wish to control us. They are not founded whatsoever in credible threats either from outside or from within. The steady flow of what Kellyanne Conway described as Trump’s “alternative facts” deployed with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy are very much alive in Trump’s second term and are taking their toll; the constant gaslighting is acutely distorting reality. The Trump/MAGA mantra is, “Be afraid, be very afraid!” often followed by a claim that only he/they can save us.  All of it is an attempt to destroy our confidence and courage such that we will accept whatever Trump wants to do to us. It is all a con.

If we allow this to continue, the shame is on us.

Cowardice is not a strategy when dealing with the hyper-isolationist, illiberal, fascist Trump/MAGA agenda. As many of our elected Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer cower, together with universities, corporations, law firms, the Supreme Court, and government and non-government agencies, the things that made America truly great and the envy of the world like our capacity for creativity, invention and innovation, as well as our embrace of liberalism and pluralism are being squandered in favor of fear-based entropy. I give Senator Booker credit for not needing to go to the bathroom for twenty-five hours, but we will need much more courage from our opposition leaders than that.

If Alexis de Tocqueville were alive today, he would be appalled at what has become of us. The Americans he observed in the nineteenth century would never have behaved in the manner we do, today. Ironically, our founders would likely not be surprised; they were deeply concerned about the prospect of demagogues like Trump even while they had an idyllic leader in George Washington.

There is nothing patriotic about supporting those whose aim is to destroy our spirit and isolate us from the world. On the contrary, supporting this twisted and toxic plague of fear is about as un-American as one can be. If you are one of these MAGA lapdogs, slap yourself around in a cold shower and wake the f*ck up. You are not making America great again, you are destroying it. Trump, Vance, Musk, et al, are not patriots, they are scoundrels as in Samuel Johnson’s 1775 admonition, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” aimed at those who use patriotism as a shield for their nefarious behaviors.

Fear is not healthy. It is a mental, emotional, and/or physical disturbance that generates dis-ease that manifests ultimately into disease. It its simple and primitive form it results in a fight or flight response that, while consistent with survival, is inconsistent with thriving. Fear’s most insidious effects are, however, an abdication of the self that produces complacency and complicity. In this manifestation, it produces a pessimistic ambivalence where life has no meaning, which we call nihilism. Moreover, it grants leaders the most destructive power of all: to define the truth without respect to objective reality—without regard for the facts.

Ironically, we can now observe that nihilism is a natural descendent of abundance. One might think abundance would provide a springboard to greater accomplishments, but what is happening today in America is just the opposite. As I wrote in a post last December, “America’s Arc of Moral Madness (and Hope),” “From humility to hubris to nihilism may be the signposts which tomorrow’s historians use to define America’s final descent.” That which humankind struggled to achieve for millennia—to move from a condition of scarcity to one of abundance—has now produced a meek and weak society that believes meaning is found in comfort rather than struggle and achievement. The shocking thing is how fast American society has lost its strength. What took more than two centuries to develop is being squandered in just two decades.

Nihilism is spreading throughout American society, but no more so than with young men. For the first time in our history, women outnumber men at our colleges and universities. In American universities, 42.7% of enrolled undergraduate students are male; 57.3% are female. For black men, the numbers are much worse. Just 19% of Howard University students are black men. While this is good for women, it is certainly not for men. A healthy society needs healthy enrollment, which should match the general population, roughly 50/50. Education has always been America’s secret sauce of success. Although our primary and secondary schools have languished in the past few decades, our institutions of higher learning remain the envy of the world—for now.

Fear of failure and displacement in society from their traditional dominant position in social order has left young men bereft and depressed. Seven out of ten preventable opioid overdose deaths in America are males. Their fear and depression have also left them susceptible to bro-casters like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson who stoke the anger of young men to fill their own pockets with wealth and promote a kind of misogynistic defiance similar to Trump’s ethos of “grab ‘em by the pussy.” In short, our young men’s fears are being exploited for financial and political gain that compromises a whole generation of Americans. The emerging bro-MAGA-sphere is highly unlikely to produce the kind of leaders our country needs in the future unless we desire a reptilian dystopia.

The nihilism that is afflicting young men in America is also affecting all of us to a lesser, but meaningful, extent.  It is the pre-condition to nihilism that we should focus on if we have any hope of correcting course. That pre-condition is the abdication of agency; of giving up on the idea that we can and should make our own decisions and take our own actions with confidence to affect our destiny. The maxim in William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul” has been lost in the fog of fear and deceit. We know what is true, in spite of the many lies being told by our leaders. We know what is right, which is a skill we learned in kindergarten. We must simply summon the courage to act appropriately, with respect to what is true and right.

Although it is an evident truth that in the long run we are all dead, making impermanence a noble truth, it does not suggest we should be indifferent while we are here. The circumstances of our lives are our responsibility. My fellow Americans, we need to get our act together, and fast. Get off the couch and get in the game. Realize that meaning comes not from the comfort of abundance, but from the struggle of scarcity. Stand up for what we know is right. Or, as Rosa Parks did, sit down for what is right. Defend and restore our heritage as the greatest nation in history; one that believes in the principles of liberty, equality, and inclusion. We must reactivate that old exemplar exceptionalism that aims to set the example for the world, rather than to be the world’s biggest threat. Neither cowardice nor abdication will serve us well. Our ancestors fought for freedom; our nearer ancestors—our parents and grandparents—fought for an abundance of wealth and opportunity. All that is being asked of us is that we fight for the objective truth.

In two weeks, on Easter Sunday, my Christian friends will proclaim, “He is Risen!” Perhaps we should take a page out of Christ’s resurrection playbook and rise as well, before both freedom and abundance are lost.

By |2025-04-13T12:43:44+00:00April 6th, 2025|American Identity, General, Recent|0 Comments
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The Sanctity of Dignity

The amniotic sac that protects a fetus in its most vulnerable state of being is very similar to dignity. Once we are born, dignity’s job is to provide a protective barrier that surrounds our character where the good stuff—our virtues and values—reside. Dignity is the guardian of the soul; it keeps us whole and uncompromised. It reminds us as often as necessary that we are worthy while communicating a sense of resilience to those who might wish us harm. Our dignity is hallowed ground upon which no one should be allowed to tread. Those who either willingly discard their dignity, or otherwise sacrifice it in the face of adversity, expose the essence of who they are—their character—to manipulation and destruction. Without a dignity-emboldened character, we become pawns to be used and abused by others.

As the journalist Adam Serwer argued, for Trump and his lickspittle lieutenants, “cruelty is the point” of everything they do. Rather than giving much credit to Trump, however, Serwer illustrates how this appetite for cruelty has ebbed and flowed through human history and the Trump era is just a modern manifestation of the cruel-tool’s application. Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) illustrates the utility of cruelty well. Five-hundred years hence, in virtually every form of oppression, from racism to misogynism to religious persecution to all forms of bigotry, cruelty is used to bend and break people to the will of the tyrant, even those wannabe tyrants who veil themselves in patriotism and populism while claiming democratic virtues which, of course, is all a con.

I take Serwer’s point, but I believe he misses cruelty’s more fundamental objective: to strip people of their dignity so they succumb to feelings of worthlessness and submit to the tyrant’s wishes. In most, if not all, of Trump’s history, whether in business, personal, or political endeavors, his approach is the same: tear people down to wear them out and take advantage of them. Have you ever heard of Trump lifting someone up and empowering their life? Where are those testimonials? He strips people of their dignity by any means possible, rips their character out, and feasts on their souls. His admiration for Putin, Kim, Xi, and Netanyahu are all evidence of his desire to out-cruel the world’s most cruel actors. His life’s ambition appears to be to win the title of “World’s Biggest Bully.”

Trump’s infamous claim that he can just “grab ‘em by the pussy” seems somehow quaint today as he is now moving on to destroy the welfare and lives of everyone from federal workers and public servants to immigrants to scientists to professors and allies with complete disregard for the rule of law, let alone intelligence and basic common sense. Crush people’s spirits to do with them as he wishes. It is bizarre that he is the president of what once was the “land of the free and home of the brave.” While he bloviates, Lady Liberty weeps. It’s no wonder France has asked for her return.

If we believe Trump’s appetite will be sated by his immediate targets, like federal workers or federal judges, we are fools. If you are a woman, person of color, disabled, older, a veteran, or LBGTQ—which collectively is most of America—you are a potential target for his wrath. Someday soon, just writing this essay may subject me to being classified by Trump’s Department of Justice or State Department as a domestic terrorist; our First Amendment be damned. Trump is the biggest glutton for power to ever occupy our White House. He will stop at nothing to consume his many targets of vengeance and to feed his ego. This is not a cry of wokeism, it is simple realism.

Meanwhile, Democrats fiddle and diddle weeping over their victim’s soup like orphans in a Charles Dickens’ novel; hardly a source of inspiration or comfort. It may be too soon to invoke the post-Holocaust warning of the German pastor, Martin Niemöller, “then they came for me,” but we must also be clear-eyed about what is going on and realize we may slip into anarchy more easily than we can stop the slide.

What is very clear, having now watched Trump ignore the orders of our federal judges, is that there is no roadblock to stop him. He is doing as he wishes regardless of our laws, justice system, or our Constitution. Trump apologists and enablers beware: you are not immune either. Once your utility is gone, he will discard you, too. See: Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Kelly, Mike Pence, Mark Milley, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, and many more. As Machiavelli might warn Trump’s current cadre of sycophants like Musk, Vance, Rubio, et al, watch your backs—your throw-away date may be sooner than you think. For Trump enthusiasts still cheering him on, enjoy it while it lasts; he cares as much for you as he does your next vote, which he no longer needs.

It is jarring to realize that preserving our dignity must now be our priority. For most of our history in America, dignity has been considered inviolable—a right of being that needed no proclamation or law. It could certainly be lost, but usually by our own abdication. It was ours to lose rather than someone else’s to take. We must embrace new perspectives and practices to safeguard this essential armor of our character. The sanctity of our dignity must not be compromised.

Our most fundamental perspective must be resolute, reinforced with a simple mantra: we are worthy. As worthy (if not more worthy) than Trump, Musk, and his MAGA zealots. We can further preserve ourselves by the following practices.

  1. See things as they are, not as you might wish them to be. Accepting things as they are is essential to our mental well-being. It also assures we don’t waste time and energy chasing false, or manufactured realities. We must suspend the many filters our ego places before our eyes to fool us into believing things are other than the way they are. In the case of Trump, our mistakes in the past have been disbelieving that he would actually do what he threatens, what some have called a “failure of imagination.” In his first term there were guardrails; now there are none. It is time we saw him for what he is and what he does rather than hoping it is not so. At this point, giving him the benefit of the doubt is not shame on him, it is shame on us.
  2. Be highly selective with your engagements. One of the great skills in life is knowing what not to pay attention to. The old 80/20 rule holds that 80% of what we tend to has no bearing whatsoever on those outcomes we desire to realize. Whether people, organizations, and especially the deluge of media we encounter, we must be stingy with our engagement. Ignore the clowns. The test I have used throughout my life to gauge my willingness to engage with anything or anyone is, does the thing (person, organization, investment opportunity, or whatever) respond to intelligence? If it doesn’t, discard and move on.
  3. Nurture the balance inherent in equanimity. Avoid the highs and lows. Live in a state of balance—of equilibrium. Being solid in your physical, mental, and emotional states produces a strength that is difficult to assail. Many years ago, during a wilderness skills course I attended through the National Outdoor Leadership School, I learned the value of the ABCs of backpacking. Your backpack must be packed with consideration of A for access, B for balance, and C for compression to affect a comfortable journey. In our current challenges, we should move through the world with a disposition of C for clarity, E for empathy, and F for fortitude with our shoulders back and our eyes on the horizon (or higher). Do not wallow or whine.
  4. Support, defend, and protect others as you would wish to be supported, defended, and protected by others. This is an extension of the Golden Rule and the lesson offered in Matthew 25 regarding doing for the “least of these” as an act of service to God. Christ’s lesson was that the truly worthy of blessings act to serve others as a fundamental responsibility of a life well lived. Kindness cost nothing; the return on that investment is infinite. Making eye contact with a smile on your face to offer your support may change that person’s day, week, or life. Being seen and appreciated is the most basic form of love.
  5. Focus on intent first, and results second (if at all). Although we may not be able to control outcomes, we can control our intentions, particularly with regard to the intention that guides our responses to outcomes. All we can do is to assure our intentions are pure and true. An elemental difference between western and eastern philosophy is that in the West we focus on results while in the East they focus on intentions. This difference is based in the importance in eastern philosophy of the present moment (as opposed to the future or past) where our intentions can be expressed with certainty. Of course, good intentions also often produce good outcomes, but what we do control—and should take care to form—is the intention with which we act.

If you happened to catch the show 60 Minutes last Sunday, March 16th, you would have seen the story about many young musicians of color who had been selected to come to Washington D.C. to play in an orchestra with members of the United States Marine Corp Band. It was organized by the non-profit organization Equity Arc in an effort to expose these young musicians to other master musicians to inspire them to continue their love of music and performing as they went on to graduate from high school. In Trump’s DEI hysteria, he cancelled the event since these students were of color. But Equity Arc and CBS decided to make it happen with Marine Corp Band alumni who were not prohibited from participating by Trump’s proclamation eliminating anything that smells of DEI. In the end, many came together to protect the dignity of the students and make the meeting happen even while our president did what he could to wound the students and destroy the event. Listening to the kids and the mentor-musicians is indeed inspiring. I recommend watching the segment here. This is what is meant by protecting the sanctity of dignity in the face of a wannabe tyrant’s wrath, which leads to my final, sixth, recommendation.

  1. Celebrate the victories. Like the story on 60 Minutes, we must all rally around those who, in the face of Trump’s wrath, defy his attempts to destroy our dignity. We must stand strong alone and together to get to the other side of this era of pointless cruelty. We must hold fast to what America was before the Age of Deceit that Trump has now fully co-opted as his own. We must prevail one day at a time and applaud those who rise above the madness. We must summon our best selves.

At this point, the only way out is through.

By |2025-04-06T13:04:47+00:00March 23rd, 2025|General, Recent|0 Comments
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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 |2025-03-23T13:16:10+00:00March 8th, 2025|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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