Bad Words

Monday, February 15, 2010

Kilroy Café #63: "Truth, Lies and Discretion"

Here is the latest Kilroy Café philosophy essay. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

Truth, Lies and Discretion
Honesty is not always the best policy.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

As children, we are taught not to lie. At first it is because we fear we will be punished, but eventually we realize that lies are expensive in themselves. When you tell a lie, you have to remember what you said so you don't trip yourself up later. This entails keeping two sets of mental books—the true one and the cooked version—which requires a lot of internal energy. It is usually easier to deal with only one reality because then you don't have to remember anything.

But this doesn't mean you should always tell the truth. Just because you know or believe something doesn't mean you should blurt it out. Society is built on a delicate web of withheld information. Speaking the truth in inappropriate circumstances disrupts this web and can be as destructive as any lie.

Between truth and lie is discretion. That's the wisdom to know when a truth should be held inside and not spoken. The fate of nations can ride on discretion, and your relationships as well.

Why is discretion necessary? Two things: strategy and ego.

Strategy is important in any kind of competition. You don't want to tell your opponent exactly what you plan to do before you do it. This applies in war, of course, but equally in love, business, politics, management, child rearing—in virtually any circumstance of leadership or competition where information given to an opponent can be used against you. Discretion involves withholding information until such time as it is safe and appropriate to release.

If a spy sells a list of his own agents to the other side, he can't defend himself by saying, "I merely told the truth," because that truth is going to kill people.

Likewise, if you are bidding in an sealed auction, you don't want to tell your fellow bidders how high you are willing to go, because they will beat you by bidding one dollar more. After the game, it may be okay to show your cards, but during the competition—in virtually any kind of negotiation—you can't tell your opponent the hand you hold.

Why must this be so? It is simply the way of the world. As long as people have differing agendas, there will be negotiation, and that requires discretion at least until an agreement is reached.

Discretion is a lynchpin of liberty. It lies behind our most cherished right: that government stay out of our lives unless specifically authorized. Whenever we empower a government to protect us, we also empower it to hurt us. The law, as written by detached legislators, is never suited to every real-world circumstance, and discretion is often our sole means of limiting its destructive power.

Should you lie to law enforcement? No. Should you report every violation of law no matter how minor and obey every law regardless of the circumstances? No, also. A quiet evasion of rules is sometimes the most moral action, and that requires discretion.

The second reason for discretion is ego. We all have one, and it is usually a hornet's nest of sensitivities and inconsistencies. Discretion is necessary to avoid tipping fragile people over the edge, offending them and starting wars where they aren't necessary. In this venue, it is unlikely that anyone will die if you are indiscreet, but it can sure muck up your social relations.

Each person is a product of his investments, and whether or not his investments are working out, he is going to believe in them simply because they have already cost him so much.

You don't tell a fat lady she's fat. Little children may blurt it out, but adults shouldn't, because you'll offend the fat lady without accomplishing anything. There is usually little merit in telling people their obvious flaws, because in all likelihood you'll get a defensive reaction, not change.

If people ask for the truth about themselves and are truly open to hearing it, you can tell them. Otherwise, you are only going to stir up the hornet's nest and disrupt the relationship. Exposing people's weaknesses sounds good in theory—"How else are they going to change?" we say.—but in practice it usually prompts a backlash that is counterproductive to change.

One of the great fears of modern life is that a private email message intended for one person gets mistakenly sent to others, especially to the person the message is critical of. It's embarrassing because we know instinctively that the subject shouldn't be told his own flaws. If the boss knows what you really think of him, you could be fired, whether you tell it to his face or email it to a colleague. The politics of the world and the sensitivities of personality require that we keep this information to ourselves.

People who are comfortable with themselves have a thicker skin and are better able to process any truth you throw at them. Unfortunately, such enlightened ones will always be in the minority.

We know the people we should tiptoe around, would can't handle any kind of uncensored truth. They are walking landmines and discretion is necessary to keep them from going off.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Pooler, Georgia.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Kilroy's Rules of Twitter Style

I have a theory that you can tell whether a Twitter feed is worth following by reading only the five latest tweets. Below are the features I am looking for. These are the style rules I am trying to follow on my own Twitter feed (@KilroyCafe) and that maybe you should follow in yours.

A stylistic avatar. The best feeds have an avatar (little profile picture) that someone has put some thought into and that reflect, in some simple way, the content of the feed. Less interesting feeds just have a bland picture of the author. To a certain extent you can judge a book by it's cover! Just by scanning through avatars, you can get an idea of what feeds might be worth following from how interesting the avatar is.

Talk about universal truths rather than what you are doing. Do I care that you are currently at Starbucks on Main Street? Give me something I can use! Unless you intend your feed for only your five closest joined-at-the-hip buddies, no one really cares what you are doing.

Personally, I believe your "what I'm doing" stuff should go on Facebook. Even then, you should limit your updates to things that are somehow useful to others.

Limit the use of "I" and "me". Again, what you are doing may be interesting to you, but the rest of us want information we can use in our own life. "I" and "me" should be used only sparingly in certain rhetorical situations or to distinguish your work from someone else's.

All links should be explained. Don't just tell me to "Look at this!" You have to give me a reason to look (because clicking on each link takes time, especially on a mobile device).

No wasted words. There should be not a single unnecessary word in any tweet. Even if you have extra space available in your 140-character allotment, the tweet should be as compact and efficient as possible. Before sending the tweet, read and re-read it to make sure you have cut it to the bone. Extra words just dilute your message.

Interesting language. Don't say something in a bland way if you can say it in an interesting and stylized way, with clever and precisely targeted language.

Only one idea per tweet. Don't try to insert multiple ideas into the same tweet. Know when to stop!

Every tweet should stand alone. Although two adjacent tweets can be on a related topic, they shouldn't depend on each other for their meaning.

Every tweet should be timeless. The best tweets should be just as meaningful when read ten years from now as they are today. If the tweet must comment on a current event, it should contain enough information about that event to allow the future reader to decode it (with some help from Google).

Avoid hash tags. I think they just clutter up the tweet and make it less timeless. I admit I don't have much experience with them, but I doubt they help anyone find your tweet. (What sense is there in commenting on #obama if a million people are using that hashtag too?) I suspect that most readers rarely do searches by hashtag but merely read the feeds they are subscribed to; in that case the hashtag is just noise.

Avoid abbreviations. I you have to use abbreviations to fit your tweet into 140 characters, your tweet is probably too long anyway. God gave us only 140 characters for a reason, and you shouldn't try to fudge His limit.

Use proper punctuation and capitalization. It makes you look like you care.

Low sexual content. Sex is the world's most overused topic. Tweets that consistently dwell on sex are a sign of weak imagination and are ultimately boring. Let it go!

No moping! Even if you're funny, your readers don't need to know how badly your life is going. If you have a problem, solve it. Otherwise, don't expect affirmation from us for your drinking, career problems or lack of sex lately. Honestly, tweeting something funny about is just an evasion mechanism. Do something!

Don't feel the need to be funny. Comedy can be a crutch and a prison, especially if your followers expect you to be funny in every tweet. It is more important to be observant and useful. Don't set up expectations for entertainment that you can't reasonably fulfill.

Know your focus! Every feed should have a central topic. This is your central core - your Twitter personality - that you are always returning to. Over time, people should be able to distinguish your tweets from everyone else's from both their content and their style. There are plenty of "general" Twitterers out there, commenting on the news and celebrity scandals of the day. Your feed should have a unique identity that doesn't depend on these topics.

This last item is the toughest. How do you define your Twitter identity? It's like finding your unique identity in the real world: There is no easy formula. If nothing else, your identity will be defined by the topics you often return to. If your topics are consistently interesting, your feed will be too.

Here is some information on my own Twitter feed including my tweet archives. My best tweets respect the rules above.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Kilroy Café #62: "Fundamentals of Mental Nutrition"

Fundamentals of Mental Nutrition

By GLENN CAMPBELL

When considering what to take into your body, there is "real food" and there is "junk food". Junk food consists of the tastes you crave but little else: sugar, fat, salt, carbohydrates, caffeine. Real food has complexity and substance and primarily serves your future health, not your impulsive tastes. If you care about your body, you'll eat real food, not junk.

The same principle applies to your mind: If you care about it, you'll feed it real, substantial input, not empty junk.

Unfortunately, junk input is what our culture mostly offers us: junk TV, junk video games, junk books, news, music and web content. Most of this sensory input doesn't advance our lives in any way, but we willingly ingest it because it tickles our nervous system in a certain way, just like junk food does.

One danger of too much junk food is obesity, partly because the junk is so available and appealing, and partly because it is so calorically dense and easy to digest that it goes straight to our waist. Likewise, when we ingest too much junk stimulation, we promote mental obesity. The brain doesn't become physically fat but it becomes more passive, chaotic and intellectually undisciplined.

When you have a stimulating mental experience, you need time to adequately digest it, to derive all the available nutrition from it. What just happened? Why did it happen? What does it teach me? You need time to think about the experience or most of its lessons are lost.

That's the thing most lacking in the modern world: thinking time. Because we are surrounded by junk input, easily available and actively peddled to us, our tendency is to ingest one entertainment after another, with little time between them for processing. Highly stimulating products are force-fed into our brain where they clutter up our mind-space. You don't learn much from these experiences; you merely stockpile them.

It's like binge eating. Most people wouldn't eat a whole carton of ice cream at a single sitting, but many will routinely watch 4-6 hours of television in one go. That's lost time that can't be used for one's own mental processes. If you string together enough of those daily input binges, eventually your life will be over, consumed by consumption.

Those 4-6 hours usually include some intense emotional traumas: murders, threats of violence, interpersonal conflicts of every kind. Because there's no time to process them, these intense pseudo-experiences collect in the brain like half-eaten meals, crowding out real experiences and diluting our emotional response to them.

Mental stimulation can be as addictive as any drug. You know you have an addiction when it's not the pleasure of the drug that keeps you using it but the anxiety you feel when you withdraw from it. Can you comfortably sit in a room with a television without the compulsion to turn it on? Can you drive a car without turning on the radio? Can you sit and think for an extended period without "boredom" or anxiety driving you to stimulation? If not, you're an addict.

With any addiction, there is always a cost. Input addicts don't usually rob convenience stores to support their habit, but they are still sad people. Input addiction is marked by passivity, shallowness of feeling and a short attention span. Addicts may be emotionally moved by what happens to them, but just like what they see on the screen, the feeling is fleeting, and they are unlikely to address it in any meaningful way.

If you have one intensely emotional real-world experience in the course of a week, you can deal with it. If you add a hundred intense pseudo-experiences, this has to degrade your response to the real experience. Instead of a measured, thoughtful response to the real conflict, the addict's response is more likely to be impulsive, stereotypical and ineffective, mainly because he hasn't had enough time to think things through.

Mental bandwidth is a precious resource. You only get so much of it in a lifetime. If you value your own mind, you have to take care what you feed it. Above all, you have to limit the quantity of your input to what you can reasonably digest.

Even if the input isn't "junk", you still have to control its quantity and pacing. There may be a lot of high-quality movies, songs and TV shows available, but that's not reason enough to string them together in a binge. You wouldn't go into a fine restaurant and order everything on the menu. One high-quality meal a day is enough, and if the experience is really extraordinary maybe you should go even longer.

A healthy diet of mental input is one carefully-selected, high-quality sensory experience followed by a long empty period of digestion. This empty space is probably the most critical time for growth and learning. If you don't have time for it or can't tolerate emptiness, then you're not living a full life. The input is controlling you and stealing everything you have.

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Charlotte, North Carolina.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Kilroy Café #61: "The Dilemma of the Public Restroom"

The Dilemma of the Public Restroom
A Microcosm of Social Policy

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Sounds like good public health policy: Give people a place to do their excretory business so they don't have to do it in the street. In civilized societies, there are public restrooms in train stations, highway rest stops, shopping malls, restaurants, etc. Unfortunately, the condition of them is often deplorable. Without active and expensive maintenance throughout the day, things go bad very quickly.

Why? Because people abuse public restrooms horribly! They fail to flush the toilet. They urinate and defecate on the seats and don't clean it up. Drug addicts use the stalls to shoot up. Homeless people bathe there. Obsessive-compulsives and germaphobes use far more toilet paper than they need, layering the seat or clogging the toilet and leaving their mess behind.

The chief dilemma of the public restroom is that most people who use it have no stake in its cleanliness. It isn't "their" restroom but someone else's. They probably won't be back, so they won't have to suffer any direct consequences. Security cameras aren't allowed, so everyone is anonymous and no one can be held accountable.

It's nice to say we should all work together for the common good, respecting public spaces and cleaning up after ourselves. Most people probably behave this way, but it takes only a few dysfunctionals to ruin it for everyone else. Their behavior draws down the standards for everyone else, until even the good people stop caring.

The end result is that no organization is eager to provide restrooms to the public unless they are required to by law or profit. Business owners put up signs saying, "Restrooms for Patrons Only." They simply have no choice.

You could say that this problem illustrates conservative principles: If you give people something for free, they are bound to abuse it. The solution, the conservatives might say, is to not provide these public services. If you make people fend for themselves, they'll feel more responsible for their actions. (Unfortunately, it also means they'll start pooping in stairwells.)

But at another level, it could also illustrate liberal theories. If you give a corporation unrestricted access to a "public restroom"—that is, publically shared resources—then the corporation will abuse the privilege just like individuals do. If there is profit in it and only shared consequences, no self-serving entity would refrain from polluting the river that all of us drink from. Government has to set boundaries.

Both views are valid. Public restrooms have to exist and be actively regulated (liberal), but access can't be too easy (conservative). There are reasons it's hard to find a restroom in Manhattan. The natural restroom shortage provides "pushback" that encourages people use private facilities whenever possible. Public facilities in train and bus stations may have to be nasty to drive patrons to other options.

In a broader sense, whenever you provide a public service, it has to be costly for those who use it to discourage overuse. For example, if you impose long lines on people to obtain welfare payments or food stamps, a good portion will give up and get jobs instead. You can't make public services seem too easy or attractive, or people will take them for granted and start abusing them.

There is no technological solution to the restroom dilemma. Automatic pay toilets in New York were a failure because addicts and prostitutes treated them as rental units. Automatic toilet flushers seem like a good idea until you realize their long-term effects: training people not to flush toilets and making them even more detached from their own bodily processes.

The best of all possible worlds is probably what we have now. Public restrooms have to be unpleasant! They have to exist (to prevent disintegration of public health) but they can't be too available. There have to be regulations in place to prevent wide-scale abuse, and the police have to come by occasionally and sweep out the human garbage.

There is only one business with reliably pristine restrooms: casinos! Turns out, the obsessives, impulsives and socially irresponsibles—i.e. the cretins who mess up public restrooms—are the same irrational people who keep the gaming industry going! Along with buffets and flashing lights, ultra-clean toilet facilities apparently help draw them in.

So now you know where to go for a nice restroom!

—G .C.

©2010, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
First draft written at a rest area on Interstate 65 in Indiana.
Released from Providence, R.I.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Kilroy Café #60: "The Burden of Choice"

The Burden of Choice
More options aren't necessarily a good thing.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Choice is good-or so we are told. 500 channels are better than five. 30 flavors are better than three. In theory, the more choices you have, the more ways you can solve your problems.

In practice, though, too much choice can be a burden and often leads to bad results. The more choices people have, the more opportunity they have to screw themselves up, especially with choices they are not qualified to make.

"Get out and vote!" the public is urged, but this advice only draws uninformed voters to the polls who don't have a clue who they are voting for, so we end up with inept public officials. Likewise, when people have too much choice about their investments, health or nutrition, they are likely to make poor choices that are statistically worse than making no choice at all.

The healthiest diet is usually one where someone sets a meal down in front of you and says, "Eat this!", but that's not the way most of us do it. In the commercial world, we are bombarded by choices-a glorious buffet of them!-and the more we have, the more likely we are to eat poorly and far too much.

In general, it is best to preserve your future options whenever possible. You shouldn't choose for a whole lifetime if you have the option to choose for a year then choose again later. On the other hand, every choice is stressful and uses up resources in itself.

If you have 500 channels to choose from, then you have to take time to go through all those options and evaluate them. This wasn't the case when there were only a handful channels: You always knew what was on, and your relative lack of control was a natural limit on how much you watched.

Unlimited choice is a delusion. Instead of 5 channels of crap, you now have 500, so the healthy choices, if any, are buried in the noise.

It is the natural aim of marketers to create new choices based on increasing trivial criteria. Why buy an ordinary laundry detergent when you can get one with blue freshness crystals? Modern commerce gives you endless choices, but it also extenuates and deadens your ability to choose. If you are spending too much energy on the trivial choices like laundry detergent, then you can't be paying enough attention to the big and important ones.

But choice isn't necessarily a panacea for the big decisions either. At every crossroads, it is good to dwell on your future direction. Huge amounts of energy can be saved by choosing a wise path at an early stage rather than enduring the long-term defects of a badly chosen route. Yet, at some point you have to accept the path you are on and work with it.

For better or worse, each of us has already made a number of choices that are difficult to change. While it is a fallacy to say you have "no choice", you are probably going to stick with your current path unless there's a reason to alter it. Breaking an established route takes courage and effort, and it may not always be wise.

Choosing the right path is only part of the journey. The other part is traveling the path you have chosen. You aren't going to get anywhere unless you actually start walking, committing yourself to resolving whatever obstacles you encounter along the way.

It is a mistake to call it an absolute commitment, one you will never break, but it is okay to turn choice off for a while. You can say to yourself, "I'm going to climb this mountain," and once you have made a route selection, you don't have to revisit it every hour. You just accept the path and get on with it.

The balance here is between freedom and structure. If you have too much freedom, you won't know what to do with yourself, and you'll make uninformed decisions based on superficial criteria. If you have too much structure, then you won't have the ability to change paths should a better one come up.

Choice is expensive! It soaks up your time and energy, and the lure of it is often irresistible. How many of us can go into a sumptuous buffet and choose only the healthy items and portions? Most of us will gorge ourselves because we aren't truly qualified to handle all that choice.

So what's the solution? You don't go into the buffet! Likewise, you can avoid the burden of 500 channels by simply not subscribing to the service. If you treat small choices as a package, you can be more detached about the decision and whether it is good for your health. Then you are less burdened with the micro-choices within the big one.

Instead of choosing all the time, you can manage yourself as you would a child, presenting to him only the choices he can handle. It sounds silly, but it works! If unhealthy choices aren't available, then they aren't a temptation.

Sometimes, the greatest wisdom is knowing when you are unqualified to choose and limiting yourself accordingly.

—G .C.

©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Birchim, Indiana.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Kilroy Café #59: "The Limits of Charity"

The Limits of Charity

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Your only real meaning on this planet lies in somehow making it a better place. The problem is how to go about it. Giving selflessly to others may seem noble, but that's not the issue. Simply giving away what you have isn't necessarily going to improve anything.

Each of us has limited resources. You have only a certain amount of time on Earth, and that's all you've got to work with. Some of this time can be turned into money, power or knowledge, but no matter how rich, connected or skilled you may become, that influence is limited, too. Even the wealthiest philanthropist can't make a dent in the world's problems if his resources are used indiscriminately.

If a beggar asks you for money, do you give it to him? Your emotions may say so. It feels good to be generous, but generosity alone doesn't guarantee a positive outcome. Is the money going to be used for drugs? Will the ease of his getting it discourage him from getting a job? In those cases, giving to the beggar may actually hurt him, not help.

An extreme response is to not give anything to anybody, but what's the point in that? So you accumulate resources all your life and then die. Your skills will be lost forever, while your money will be passed to your heirs who will either use it wisely or they won't. You're essentially dumping your own problem onto them!

The solution lies in "strategic" giving. You apply your resources in clever ways that multiply their effect. Just feeding the hungry doesn't necessarily help. You want to attack the real sources of hunger, like war or overpopulation. You want to see the problem at the highest level possible and look for solutions there.

But there is futility in trying to attack all the world's problems at once. It isn't clear that by giving to any global cause you are improving things any more than by giving to a beggar. The amount you can donate is usually trivial, and no worldwide movement is without its potential feedback flaws—i.e. the risk of unintentionally making things worse. If you place your resources in the hands of others in the blind faith that they know what to do, there is never a guarantee of the results you intend.

No matter how you intervene, there is potential for both good and bad. It isn't enough to have a theory about what works, you have to see how the object of your charity actually responds. To get the most from your resources, you have to be able to monitor the results. Then you can adjust your intervention accordingly.

This implies a balance between global and local. It is unproductive to dwell on the whole galaxy but also to devote too much attention to a single person or local cause. You want to focus on areas you understand well, viewing them from a distance but without losing your connection to real people.

Simply the fact that someone is in desperate need does not mean you should help them, because there may be other places where your resources are more effective. In almost every charitable venue, need will far exceed your resources, so you have to be cagy about how you use them. You will say "yes" in the right circumstances, but more often you will have to say "no". You have to conserve your gifts for their most productive use, and this means turning away most applications.

You also have to preserve your own ability to give. Your life is a tool, and you can give to others only to the extent that your tool is well-fueled, well-maintained and growing in and of itself. If your selfless charity begins to intrude into your own self-maintenance, then you won't be helping anyone in the end, because your own system will collapse.

If your life is a machine to help others, you shouldn't be running it at full capacity. From time to time, you have to shut it down for scheduled maintenance. You have to upgrade the technology. You have to confirm, on a daily basis, that the machine is really doing what it is supposed to. While you attend to these matters, people may die, but the long-term productivity of your machine depends on this seemingly self-absorbed behavior.

Most importantly, you can't let people become dependent on your machine, because eventually they are going to have to live without it. Ultimately, people have to help themselves. They will have to come up with their own solutions that don't involve you. These may not be solutions you approve of, but you have to let them be.

The world is a hard and desperate place, and your hopes for changing it must be modest. You intervene where you realistically can and step aside otherwise. Much suffering will go on because you failed to help, but you can't save everyone.

In the end, you are but a visitor here. The problems of the world were here before you came and will continue after you leave. Your task is mostly an academic exercise: to see how much you can accomplish during your brief assignment here. If you apply your resources wisely, without obsession, delusion or waste, you can step away satisfied.

—G .C.

©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Lexington, Kentucky.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Recession is Over! (So Says I)

The Recession is over! That's my assessment. I'm no economist, just an amateur soothsayer who happens to have lived through several of these things.

Upon what do I base my analysis? A single statistic: In November, the US economy lost almost no jobs. (Just a statistically insignificant 11,000 jobs instead of a predicted 130,000. See news story.)

This is in spite of the fact that that layoffs seem to be everywhere. Many local and state governments, for example, are only now laying off workers as their budgets reach the breaking point. I see these as lagging indicators, however. Government layoffs are a reflection of how the economy has been over the past year or two. Business layoffs, on the other hand, tend to be more pro-active, reflecting present and anticipated conditions.

If government layoffs are still happening, but the total job numbers remain steady, that implies that somebody out there is hiring enough workers to compensate. It can only be business doing the hiring, and it would do so only if sales are actually picking up.

Saying that the recession is over does not mean the pain is over. Big sectors of the economy are hurting and will continue to hurt for years. Governments continue to be in dire straits. New workers being hired now might be getting only a fraction of their former wage. Some industries will never recover, but this is mainly because their time has come and gone.

All that matters when defining the beginning and end of a recession is the current growth of the economy as a whole. Somebody out there is engaged in economic activity, and it's apparently enough to bring up the numbers. Maybe the good times we knew will never be back, but "recovery" is defined only by growth relative to the trough.

The world took a massive hit from the housing collapse, but the economy as a whole may have already discounted that. One should never underestimate the ability of U.S. Capitalism to roll with the punches. What emerges from the ashes is a new, different economy, based on different assumptions and probably much lower expectations. Some individuals, industries, cities and countries based on the old assumptions will continue to founder (Las Vegas, Dubai), but wily new operators will take their place as the leaders of growth.

Oh, in addition to the job numbers, I have one other indicator that the recession is over: Glenn Beck and others in conservative media are urging people to buy gold! I remember gold fever in the past, and every time it happens—every time the average sucker is talking about it at dinner parties—gold prices collapse. When stupid white people start buying gold, they're investing in the recession. It's the reverse hysteria of the boom years: Gold can't rise forever any more than housing prices can.

Sooner or later the economy is going to factor in all the excesses of the past, and growth is going to resume along a different track. Then everyone is going to want to be out of gold and into the market. Glenn Beck's groupies will take a bath, just like the conspiracy believers in every past recession.

Greed will be back, you'll see!

Glenn Campbell
Laramie, Wyoming

NOTE: I don't necessarily believe one aspect of the graph above: that the next peak in the economy will be bigger than the last. (That would be a big bubble to blow!) I only believe that the trough has been reached.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kilroy Café #58: "Russian Roulette: Childbirth..."

Russian Roulette

Childbirth is one of the world’s most dangerous and costly games of chance, but the gamblers keep playing.

By GLENN CAMPBELL

What would you think of an extraordinarily expensive recreational activity that had a 10% chance of resulting in death or lifelong disability for one of the participants? Is it wise or moral to take part?

People do it all the time. It's called childbirth.

Having a baby is spinning a genetic roulette wheel. Genes of mother and father are mixed up in random ways, and the result could be an Einstein or Mozart. It is far more likely, however, that the experiment will fail and the offspring will have a serious disability.

Birth defects occur in 3-5% of all live births. If you add mental disorders, diseases and accidents of childhood, 10% is a reasonable failure rate. No matter how you add it up, when you create a child there is a substantial chance he will die, suffer trauma or become profoundly disabled before he reaches adulthood.

Most people would engage in no other activity with such a horrible safety record. Why, then, do they choose to make children?

It's not like the human race is in any danger of dying out. There are plenty of children already here and never enough resources to care for them. Why, then, would anyone of conscience want to add still another needy child to the mix?

It is noble to address the needs of a neglected child. The net nobility vanishes, however, when you yourself created the need. It is like digging a hole only to fill it up again: Yes, you worked hard, but at the end of the day the world is the same as when you started.

Raising a child is monumentally expensive, not just in time and money but in the parents' loss of freedom and potential. Responsible parents cannot take risks; they have to follow a relatively safe and conventional path. Years of your life devoted to child rearing can't be used for other things. They might have been great things that helped many existing children, but you will never know.

Only in recent times have people have had the right to say "No." For most of human history, if you obeyed the sexual urge then babies followed. With birth control came the ability to disengage sex and mating from procreation. You could choose to procreate; it wasn't a requirement. At the same time, the world population exploded to unsustainable levels. The ethical response is to not further contribute to the agonies of Man but use your resources for better things.

When you create a child, you create a liability that didn't exist previously. If something goes wrong with this Frankenstein experiment, you will be responsible because you are the one who initiated it. Even if everything goes right, you are essentially deferring your problems to the next generation. You expect your children to do great things instead of you.

So why do people do it? Narcissism, mainly. It isn't done for the child, it is done for the parents, who are trying to fill some hunger or emotional void. It is an off-the-shelf solution to an absence of meaning in their lives.

This is a politically sensitive topic, because all of us our products of childbirth! You can't argue against it without insulting your forebears and a fair number of your friends. When talking to someone who has already invested in this belief system, you have to carefully watch your words, because they are now imprisoned in their choice and have to believe in it.

Furthermore, it is next to impossible to talk anyone out of having a baby. Childbirth is a religious practice, and like all forms of religion, it is immune to logic. By the time you learn about it, the decision has probably been made, so you can only offer the usual congratulations.

Creating a life requires a huge and delusional ego. Like other gamblers, parents think they're special. They inflate the odds of success and discount the possibility of failure. They believe God will protect them. Even if they are not religious, their explanations are invariably filled with self-serving sentiment and circular logic.

Why do they really do it? People hit a blank wall and don't know what to do with themselves. Their romance is running down and going nowhere. They want to buy a ticket on some train that promises to give their life purpose.

If you try it, yes, you'll have purpose! You've just dug yourself a big hole you are obligated to fill over the next few decades. Now you have to believe!

Parenthood can be joyful and will certainly to keep you busy. But that's not the same as knowing who you are, having real creative direction and doing something positive for the world.

—G .C.

©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Belfast, Northern Ireland. (Photos)
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Thursday, November 19, 2009

Kilroy Café #16: "Mindless Entertainment Wasting Our Planet"

Here is a re-post of a Kilroy Café philosophy essay from July 2008. You can click on the image above for a larger version or print it out on a single page via the pdf file. The full text is also below. Also see other Kilroy Café newsletters and the KilroyCafe Twitter Feed.

Mindless Entertainment Wasting Our Planet

By GLENN CAMPBELL

There is an evil upon this land. It is a parasitic force draining our society of life. It seduces our young people into slavery. It clouds the mind and prevents the individual from accomplishing anything near what he is capable of. It takes whatever it can get from us and gives back nothing.

Entertainment. It's the scourge of humanity.

It's a lot like cocaine. When entertainment is available, most people will ingest as much of it as they can. They may not feel good afterwards, but they keep coming back for more because they're addicted. Withdraw the entertainment, and there are terrible symptoms: tremors, anxiety, profuse sweating. When locked up alone with his own thoughts, the subject claims to be "bored" and makes desperate attempts to fill the void with something, anything to displace his own identity and occupy his mind.

The content of the entertainment isn't important. Video games, romance novels, re-runs of American Idol—it's all the same. It's 99.9% meaningless. You sit there for an hour, two hours, eight hours, 16 hours, and nothing at all is accomplished. Soon, half your life is wasted on entertainment, then the other half. You're dead, and all they can say at your funeral is, "He watched a lot of TV."

Nonetheless, entertainment remains legal in most jurisdictions. It is even glorified. Who are the most visible heroes of our society? Are they teachers, humanitarian workers, great thinkers and activists? No, they are actors and performers. We worship poseurs whose only claim to fame is pretending to be someone else.

Their job is to promote the addiction, to keep the illusion going so the corporate sponsors can continue to feed off it. It's a huge conspiracy—the entertainment-industrial complex. Its purpose is to sell the public candy-coated garbage, because that's what makes the most profit. It peddles empty calories instead of real food.

The opposite of entertainment is "function." That's when people have a genuine need that a product quietly and efficiently serves. When a doctor saves a patient's life, that's not entertainment; it's a legitimate service. When you provide people with information that somehow improves their existence, that's not entertainment either. It's education.

Entertainment is certainly capable of such enlightenment, but it rarely happens. Hardly one product out of a thousand is in any way useful or illuminating. The remainder is drivel and dross that people lap up because it engages their emotional circuitry and seems to be meaningful on the surface.

News and documentaries are like that. They seem to be illuminating but really aren't as long as people "watch" instead of "do." Even things you "do" can be entertainment in disguise: surfing, mountain climbing, expeditions to Machu Picchu. The main criteria to distinguish entertainment from function is whether anything is really accomplished.

Entertainment exists because the channels for it exist and someone with a profit motive is willing to pay for access. If you've got 200 TV channels available, they have to be filled with something, and a huge pimping and whoring industry has arisen to feed this machine.

An endless stream of naive virgins are sacrificed in the volcano of entertainment. Young people are seduced by the apparent glamor of it, the promise of fame and the tiny sliver of hope that the product they generate might be meaningful.

Most are sucked dry by the beast and discarded, realizing only then that they'll have to get a real job.

—G .C.

©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
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You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Kilroy Café #57: "The Tragic Burden of Stuff"

The Tragic Burden of Stuff

By GLENN CAMPBELL

Humans are natural packrats. Back in our prehistory it was logical to horde food and tools in case they might be needed in lean times. Naked animals that we were—without fur or claws—we couldn't live without possessions. When your survival depended on a spear or piece of clothing, you didn't lose track of it and were loathe to abandon it even when you had more than you needed. To stay alive, you always knew where your stuff was and you guarded it jealously.

In modern conditions of plenty, that impulse has become dysfunctional. We have way more stuff than we need while our urge to collect it is unimpeded. It's like our lust for sugar and fat even when we have had enough to eat. Today, we suffer not just obesity of the body, but obesity of ownership, to the point where we are crippled by our stuff and our true quality of life is sacrificed.

Some possessions, no doubt, are valuable tools. Take, for example, the fork: unquestionably a useful eating utensil. The personal ownership of a fork is not unreasonable. You use it, wash it and use it again. Owning twenty forks, however, does not add any utility to your life, only obligation and complication, yet few people would divest themselves of extra forks if they weren't forced to. The first fork is useful, but the others are programmed by our packrat genes and are justified only by excuses.

If you own multiple forks, then you can employ a mechanical dishwasher to clean them—a supposedly labor-saving device that has to be fed, serviced and housed. Soon you're buried in such ancillary obligations when a simple fork was all you really needed. Multiply this complicating process by the thousands of objects in one's life, and you can see how people imprison themselves in their stuff as soon as they have the means to do so. Whatever resources one has, they are quickly absorbed by possessions and their maintenance.

Businesses, honed by the pressures of the marketplace, are relatively lean in their use of stuff. A machine has to prove itself in stark monetary terms or it's out the door. The same cannot be said of individuals, who will acquire tools and supplies they use only rarely and decline to get rid of them. They will also accumulate vanity objects of no practical value, seeing these possessions as a measure of their own worth.

At the same time, business is utterly relentless in its attempts to sell us stuff we don't need, because that's where the greatest profit lies. You don't just need a fork, they say, but a jewel-encrusted fork. You need a fork with special qualities you never knew you needed until advertising told you about them. Since advertising is the dominant voice in our culture, it's hard to resist the commercial message: Buy more stuff! There's no money to be made in encouraging thrift, only in promoting obesity, so that's what most of us are: big fat possession hogs!

And "stuff" isn't limited to physical objects. There's also mental stuff congealed around us—accumulated habits, projects and activities of little practical value that tie up our time like possessions monopolize our space. If Tuesday nights are dedicated to a certain activity and Sundays are occupied by another and every year a certain holiday must be celebrated in a certain way, soon your whole life is preprogrammed and there is no opportunity left for growth or change. Mental stuff is having prior commitments and perceived necessities occupy all your future time, so your opportunity for creativity is low. The world changes but you can't, because you are already committed to certain entrenched ways.

It's easy enough to take on new habits or obligations but often painfully difficult to withdraw. If you volunteer for a worthy cause, they soon depend on you. If you start growing a plant that needs your attention every day, how can you let it wither and die? Things like this may occupy your time, but they aren't necessarily the best use of it. You could be doing something more meaningful, but your calendar is already filled.

The accumulation of stuff—both physical and mental—is the primary burden of old age. It isn't the deterioration of the body that makes us old but the accumulation of possessions and preconceptions. Even if our lifespan was 500 years, the problem would be the same: After a few years of prosperity, we become ensnared in a web of our own stuff. We can't move because we can't bear to part with the objects and habits that no longer serve us.

Thankfully, we don't live 500 years. We'll die soon enough, and when we do our stuff will be quickly dispersed in some undignified garage sale. Our heirs will shake their heads at all the crap we accumulated as they crudely perform our downsizing for us.

It would have been better had we controlled our stuff on our own. If we had held the line on acquisitions and conducted our own garage sales before they were necessary we might have remained young forever. Sure, the body would have given out eventually, but there's no physical reason you can't be productive and adaptive until the very end.

Only your stuff holds you down.

—G .C.

©2009, Glenn Campbell, Glenn-Campbell.com.
See my other philosophy newsletters at www.KilroyCafe.com.
Released from Bedford, Massachusetts.
You can distribute this newsletter on your own blog or website under the conditions given at the main page for it.
You are welcome to comment on this newsletter below.

BLOG MISSION

A blog by Glenn Campbell

From 2008 to 2019, this was my blog for general philosophy essays and creative work.

Starting in 2020, it was repurposed as the support blog for my Demographic Doom project. Here you will find scripts/transcripts for my two podcasts, as well as random essays and reference words that won't fit into tweets.

The current focus of my activity is the @DemographicDoom on Twitter (a complex work of art) and the Demographic Doom Podcast. Secondary focus is @BadDalaiLama on Twitter and the Kilroy Café Podcast.