Plato’s Parable: an essay on sickness, stupidity, & moral weakness

Posted on April 24, 2012 by AshB

I rail hard and often against corporatocracy; at competitive marketing instilling a complacency in the American people, who through the course of a couple generations have evolved into walking mush: more knowledgable about advertising gimmicks than about the democratic process which ultimately determines not just the quality of their lives by way of allowing or disallowing social mobility and private interests (which supremely matter–ask any 20th century black or female American about ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ when both have been institutionally denied), but the effect of which reverberates around the world, affecting the quality of life/cultural climate of foreign nations and individuals. The most superficial decisions you will make in just one day with your personal autonomy–just one day in your life in this country of weak moral fiber and commodified culture which enables and reinforces moral weakness–compounds with other thoughtless, kneejerk choices, disproportionately adding to ecological and cultural snafus. That’s where we fail. We don’t have sight of the Eternal and Unchangeable. And if we don’t have it on an individual basis, how does it factor into the quality of political policy we vote for?

This is where democracy fails. This is the generation that will witness the compounded effects of Capitalism: that it begets a sick, stupid, and morally weak populace which treats the rest of the world like the waste basket under the kitchen sink.

When your people are sick, stupid, and morally weak, they will elect stupid, sick, and morally weak people to office. And from there, sick, stupid, and morally weak policy follows. And that policy affects the free agency of every individual in the democratic nation. So with each passing generation, the veritably worst attributes of humanity become normalized, until when real solid change must occur, the Everyman is incapable of rising to the challenge.

Imagine a Catniss that let her sister leave off for the Hunger Games.
If District 12 had been the South Bay, would she have?

When you buy a Fiji water and chuck the bottle, it ends up in a plastic landfill floating in the Pacific Ocean. Now it’s the world’s problem. That’s the nasty of your American existence; how lucky we all are to be born in this great nation under the billowing banner of the Almighty Dollar, of commodity and material virtue, versus some godforsaken Asian territory where we would’ve keeled over and died from exhaustion on a manufacturing assembly-line for iPhones before celebrating our 10th birthday.

Before launching into a breakdown of what the ancient forefather of philosophical discourse, Socrates, argued comprised moral fiber in and of itself, and for virtuous political leadership, I’d like to interrupt the clever passive Millennials wont to argue, “I can get behind that American politics, and voter interest, are pretty fuckin’ bad in America, but really? Asian kids making iPhones, that’s irrelevant; it’s not right, but let’s focus on fixing our own country first.”

And that’s just how Americans were thinking when they voted against temporarily lifting an immigration quota which barred thousands and thousands of Jews from escaping Germany. However much you may have loved great Nanny and Pop-Pop, they were part of a decision which indirectly–BUT STILL EFFECTUALLY–killed nearly an entire generation of Jewish families.

Truth: your superficial consumer decisions, and the mentality thereof, reverberate around the world and throughout humanity. The passivity you demonstrate on a daily basis (In the age of DVR, how much broadcasted television do you watch a day? How many blocks do you walk? How many meals do you prepare, conversations your hold IRL, and how much time do you electively spend considering the better choices you could’ve made?), gleans a little more from the pool of possibly victory you could be winning for humanity. Just you; imagine! A hero! Then people would say, “It makes sense why s/he has an iPhone; s/he’s doing more than the rest of us.” Enough laying it on thick.

So, if you’re not participating in making a better world for the whole of human existence, you’re an accessory of oppression. In a global society, with all the amusement of Skyping Japanese penpals and the ability to peruse novelty shops with eBay storefronts for rare unicorn Tarot decks, the effect of our individual role as subjects in history, whether in America or Australia, is revealing an international rippling, a butterfly effect of every human being’s autonomy upon whole other human beings’ across the world. Without those little Asian kids, you wouldn’t have access to iPhones, and without you, they wouldn’t have to build them.

It’s not enough to just remember history. You must critically examine it, and recognize that your own agency in our free country has an imbued responsibility not printed at the bottom of the screen during commercials for shit you do not need.

This is half the battle: dismantling consumer hypnotism. American democracy has been undermined; you cannot have an effective democracy–a system of government created BY the people, FOR the people–if you have a sick, stupid, or distracted populace. We are American Tyrants. And we need to be better.

This furrows into many other issues, expounded upon within past/future posts, I personally have against the irrationality of privatized medicine and education (FUCK OFF, DEAD REAGAN), but here I’ll only break down what Socrates famously noted of what constitutes men of the greatest moral fiber most capable of positive sovereign, for yourself to draw comparisons to current political candidates (particularly the sad carnival of the GOP debate race), and in effect, constructively review your own moral fiber.

As most philosopher majors know, Plato/Socrates were dogmatic campaigners for philosopher-kings to rule politically; take that with a grain of salt. What Plato was arguing for was for political bodies to be comprised of elected officials who at their core were concerned with and able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable.

The Eternal and Unchangeable are concerns which transcend current tides of popular opinion; such as Americans refusing Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, due to an existing social disposition to curb immigration (or xenophobia, for the more literate). A philosopher, or any individual, whether street musician or veterinarian, whom elevates rationale over personal interest, or makes a conscious effort to critically examine popular opinion, has the Eternal and Unchangeable in mind. They are less likely to make ugly decisions with their autonomy. And even less likely to abuse positions of power.

As a contemporary example of surrendering to the vox populi and overlooking the Eternal & Unchangeable, let’s examine Obama’s Bail-Out decision in ’09. Were the Bail-Outs appropriate for the overall scope of alleviating the unemployment rate? Two significant indications that they weren’t: they violated the function of Capitalism (when lack of consumer interest dictates the obsolescence of a product/business, you don’t pay the business to stay in existence just to keep filing paperwork where cost exceeds profit), and the businesses failed anyway in spite of the effort (tax-payers’ money funded executives’ severance packages versus sustaining the companies until they could somehow become economically viable again). We also dipped into an economic depression soon after the Bail-Outs were issued, which was what safeguarding these big companies while they failed was supposed to protect the economy from.

Are you reading this? We now have short-term AND long-term consequences of the failure of big, unregulated business given license to carry the whole of the American economy.

Although controversial the moment they hit the floor, the Bail-Outs were popular among communities dependent on corporations that were the major employers in the area. With good reason, these citizens wanted their employers bailed out. And they still lost their jobs, much of their pension benefits, and the gap between the well-off and well-to-do widened. Long- and short-term failure. Capitalism failure.

The Eternal and Unchangeable bear the long-term in mind over the short-term; if the rules of Capitalism could not be adhered to–GM et. al. were out of the game, essentially–but it meant partial destruction of the axis of power within society if they were to fail, what does that mean about the cultural solubility of Capitalism? Does it indicate a long-term viability of the system, if it allows for business to bloat to a point where their obsolescence means economic destruction?

What kind of economic system could you characterize as “auto-cannibalistic?”

So, what should Obama have done? Was he concerned with the Eternal & Unchangeable? Was he a friend of truth, was his decision noble and just? Where’s the justice?

But is justice really deserved in a nation of burned-out reality TV addicts?

And why didn’t we get involved? Where were all the rest of the voices in the vox populi?

Plato’s parable on the best men of the State:

“Imagine…a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarreling with one another about the steering–every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain’s senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such a manner as might be expected of them.

“Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of the sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not–the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer’s art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now, in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?” This is a description of a true philosopher, with the Eternal and Unchangeable in mind, in relation to his State.

“Tell him [the man surprised at the uselessness of philosophers to their State], to attribute their uselessness to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to the philosophers themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him–that is not the order of nature; neither are ‘the wise to go to the doors of the rich’–the ingenious author of this saying told a lie–but the truth is that, when a man is ill, whether he be rich or poor, to the physician he must go, and he who wants to be governed, to him who is able to govern. [Who is really wise enough to rule a nation? Especially a nation where the cultural policy is "Anything goes for whatever price the greediest can apply to it"?]

“The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him; although the present governors are of a different stamp; they may be justly compared to the mutinous sailors, and the true helmsmen to those who are called by them good-for-nothings and star-gazers.”

I hope to have provoked you to examine your own moral fiber. To make it easier, pretend you were to govern America. What good would you be? What characteristics, desires, interests, et. al. do you personally possess that you know are “normal,” or socially reinforced (through the media, through your traditions, school policies, your friends’ opinions, the friends you had in high school’s opinions), that you know would disqualify you from leading anybody–yourself, your eventual children, your family, your nation–towards the best for themselves? What aspects of your personality or lifestyle don’t make you a better person?

If you feel frustrated, pissed off, and powerless, you’re on the right track. We’re breaking through the hypnotism. When a change in you and me occurs, it reverberates.

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25 Things I Know For Sure

Posted on April 6, 2012 by AshB

The following is a documented catalog of personal wisdom, undertaken in commemoration of my 25th birthday. I hope to be sharing what I THINK is the fruitful wisdom of 25 years’ worth of experience within my personal trajectory through space and time. It was an endeavor which sucked up two and a half weeks and was one of the most intense, concentrated projects of introspection I’ve ever freely undertaken. My ambition is for its survival through the ages within the digital archives of the Internet, so that it ends up a hologram display in a futuristic museum purveying recovered artifacts of Millennial American life. (Compete with me for the New Millennium museum exhibit and do your own, because after the experience, I’m desperate to know what everyone else knows for sure.)

The project made me insecure about the nature of knowledge and of my own conviction; not everything you “know” as a feeling makes sense in words, and some things contradict each other given different circumstances. I’m surmising that this is the difference between superficial day-by-day life/choices and meaningful, eternal knowledge. a la Socrates: “I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance.”

 

 

1.) If God is a DJ, life is a dancefloor, love is a rhythm, and you are the music.

2.) Nothing is actually “important.” Live without voicemail.

3.) re: newsstand displays of war-mongering and brutal political conditions that keep you awake at night: “Everyone wants their own atomic bomb so they will be invited into conversations about peace.” –Dr. Kain, Phil 155: Aesthetics

4.) When you have standards, you intimidate others who don’t.

5.) I know that vulnerability is good, and that kindness sometimes feels like weakness, as if you’re leaving yourself open for disappointment, misunderstanding, or misdirected retribution.
Story from the old Indian man in Natural Born Killers: A woman was walking outdoors in winter-time, and found a snake half-frozen in the snow. She brought him back to her home where she nursed him back to health. One day, the snake bit her. As she lay dying, she asked, “I rescued you, I nursed you, how could you do this to me?” And the snake replied, “Bitch, you knew I was a snake.”

6.) re: choosing people to spend time with:

…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww! –Jack Kerouac, On the Road

7.) Everyone you know is your teacher.

8.) STUFF is bad. Mixtapes are stories, scrapbooks, soundtracks, and therapy. Gift stories, scrapbooks, soundtracks, and therapy.

9.) Bureaucracy is the nouveau alienated labor. And corporatocracy is domestic imperialism. Honor the high expectations of your childhood self and be something great. Choose dignity. Choose ways of making a living where you aren’t persuaded by greed, status, or insecurity.

“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.” –Hunter S. Thompson

 “I freed a thousand slaves. I could’ve freed a thousand more if they only knew they were slaves.”
–Harriet Tubman

10.) re: anytime you are victimized, disempowered, demoralized, dehumanized, IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. –one of Oprah’s molestation-recovery episodes

11.) You teach people how to treat you.

12.) When you die, every hour of television you ever watched flashes before your eyes. Except you have to feel hungry and bored without satiation until you wither away and die again.

13.) Acceptance is beautiful, but like cake–for dessert, not the middle of progress. The hurdles towards tremendous self-growth are doubt, discomfort, and refusal. Lean into them.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
–Sartre

Aw, pretty boy, can’t you show me nothin’ but surrender? –Patti Smith, Horses

14.) The average stockyard hog has the intelligence of the average three-year old human child. You would be eating baby with your eggs and toast if some Howard-Schultzian marketer could just think of the right campaign for it. Enter enlightenment.

15.) After ~6 years in customer service, I know furious nags and jerk-offs are simply vying for special consideration. Whether you tender a refund/honor the raincheck/get the manager/spite them with decaf, the interaction isn’t really about getting their guaranteed customer satisfaction. Every complainer who pitches a bitch is pitching it against feelings of inconsequence and powerlessness.

To be furious is to be frightened out of fear.
–Shakespeare

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
–Plato

17.) DisneyLand is DisneyLand because life is not, and shouldn’t be. We’re smuggled against our will into a competitive world which doesn’t want us, filled with people who have something to gain by trumping our disadvantages. You will have a greater capacity for love, and be confident that you deserve it, when you attempt to understand the world’s meanness as having equal measure to its loveliness and amusement. Learn to be comfortable with refusal, but don’t deny the truth because of its hurt and nasty. You will be denying part of your’s and the world’s very nature. Often ponder the horrors of reality; justresist surrendering to them.

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

–Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

18.) Next to music and art, there is no therapy as powerfully cathartic and inspiring as volunteerism.

19.)

20.) Chance favors the prepared mind; preparing for far more than what’s expected is how you get to be a lucky person.

21.) You only need honesty and rationale. These qualities expand into integrity, intelligence, confidence, et al. Refuse what undermines you cultivating these traits. (Which always includes well-meaning relatives, society, and your own self.)

22.) “Conventional wisdom” is an oxymoron.

23.) Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of world you want to live in.

24.) re: the eternal inquiry, Do I matter in a relentlessly indifferent universe? (contingent with, Can I ever make a difference in the world?):

“Why study perception, reality, society, life, people? To acknowledge that everything you think you know about people/life/society/reality/perception can be just as easily false as it could be real. And to recognize that those intense, personal feelings–the leap of your heart, the knob in your throat, the white-hot firing and curling of your nerves, at a glimpse of wholeness–of Beauty, of Sublimity–at getting a peek at the total sphere of human experience, of the entirety of what is and what is only yet potentiality–those hot, cool, intense, all-consuming precious moments of authenticity which move you to thrash yourself against the universe in order to express this raw insight, are all assurance that Utopia is possible, and that you are integral to it. You are a passage. It is possible. Don’t think you have to save yourself from the world; live as if you alone are saving it. You matter and your life leaves a certain kind of world in your wake.” –paraphrased distillation of an entire body of reading on aesthetic transcendence

Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and dying a ‘natural’ death after a fulfilled life, may well be a difference worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization. They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise…Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death introduces an element of surrender into life from the beginning — surrender and submission. It stifles ‘utopian’ efforts.
–Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

Ernest Hemingway once said, “The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.” I agree with the second part.
–Detective Sommerset, Se7en

25.) Having vision is the next best thing to spirituality. Vision recollects your origins, gives guidance, and at times is only a prayer.

 

So I think these are all I could teach anybody about.

 

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For the Quenching Season: bucket lists

Posted on March 29, 2012 by AshB

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” –Susan Ertz

If you can, try using the rainy weather to undertake a misadventure where you end up standing on a bulldozer, wearing a trashbag and screaming into a sinkhole. On hatches-battened, snuggle-down days, take a second to revere those small, cozy moments of downtime in life; the battering weather that drives you back into your warm bed, erstwhile refreshing the scenery, also serves as a vacation from productivity. Welcome the intrusion to just think, and feel like a ticking car cooling off in the driveway post-commute. What else does Spring mean besides renewal?

Those refreshing rainfalls will eventually fall away and, for us in the Bay Area, with the sun blazing and the air sparkling clean, we’ll be hearing siren cries from every direction–from valleys, hills, trees, and ocean. What to fucking do with it all! How to prioritize! How to decide! What to wear and when to pack lunches!

Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is
Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids
Arcade Fire, Rebellion (Lies)

A “bucket list,” if you missed the movie, is an inventory of all the stuff you’re set on accomplishing and experiencing during your lifetime. There isn’t a wrong way to initiate a bucket list, except to concentrate on events, settings, journeys, feelings, or goals that would meaningfully exalt your existence; that you would feel blessed/accomplished/worthy of experiencing. The process towards fulfilling the list is more ambiguous; some bucket-listers meander through it intuitively, famous example being Elizabeth Gilbert. Others alter their entire lives, such as Timothy Ferriss, who’s built a small self-help empire instructing on a lifestyle design program which productively fulfills serious dreams and goals. Online is rich with published bucket lists and blogging along the way towards fulfillment. Sean Ogle‘s own bucket-list blog offers a meager but generous starting point.

Spend a rainy day writing out a list; even if you throw it out Spring cleaning, it’ll itch like a burr on your subconscious–a quasi-Law of Attraction, intuitive push towards realizing an acknowledged interest or wonder. It’s not planning your life, it’s considering how to experience the preciousness of it.

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Beyond White Man’s Burden: Kony 2012

Posted on March 8, 2012 by AshB

OH SHIT. 3 Things Invisible Children Inc’s viral campaign might accomplish:

1.) Stepping up as 2nd, possibly 3rd, to massive cultural, and subsequently, social/political post-Millennium revolutions attributed almost entirely to social media campaigning: #1 being the Arab Spring Movement, #2 encompassing the Occupy Movement, if you want to disagree that it isn’t a delineation of the Arab Spring Movement.

2.) As Jason Russell, producer of the movie, emphasizes, Kony 2012 is a SHAPING of human history; instead of a non-direct, quasi-academic witnessing of the civil travesties gripping Africa that have overtaken the narratives of hundreds of thousands lives. This is Millennium activism, the linking up of humanitarianism and technology, where reconciliations towards peace finally and rapidly become historical events. It is a campaign which invites the kind of participation where activists concede to adjust their consciousness regarding media commodities (i.e. celebrity endorsements); it is about prioritizing media towards the Ultimate Good, versus passively ingesting trivial personal events, celebrity gossip, and Farmville. (Which is what the top of Russell’s media period, encompassing Murdoch-ian figures, prefers.)

3.) Contingent with the above, the Kony 2012 campaign will restructure activism for the 21st century: participation will become a statement far bigger and badder than those pink- or yellow-ribbon magnets you stick on your mom’s Odyssey. Your digital presence will be reflexive of meaningful pursuits as opposed to auto-cannibalistic diddling of time and energy.

FURTHERING THE DISCUSSION:
Thoughts I had during the film that might be contrary, or totally aligned with, some other critical thinking regarding Kony 2012, the LRA, and efforts towards peace:

(1) The video estimates 30K children comprise Joseph Kony’s army; Russell introduces the worldwide Internet audience to his friend Jacob, a Ugandan and witness of the un-officiated power complex of Kony’s rebel regime, who recounts his brother’s execution in an escape attempt, and testifies to the terror and hardship of Ugandan children’s constant vigilance to avoid abduction. Is it too much to wonder–when all you know is hell and suffering (it’s god forsaken Africa), on top of constant pressure and worry, is there a relief to finally being apprehended by the boogeyman? Does Kony’s disgusting regime provide any form of meaning or stability to children with every odd stacked against their thriving? Like prostitutes that don’t run from pimps, like post-WWI devastated Germany catapulting Hitler into power, what does it mean when there is a place–a true locale in the world where perhaps the best thing that could happen to an orphaned or scared child is abduction, armory, and sexual slavery?

(2) Cannibal Tours, anyone?
JOSEPH Kony and the LORD’S Resistance Army. Sounds like we’ve got a conflict borne from missionaries’ attempt to civilize “primitive” cultures through the Word and first world interference; potentially the very solution we would need as a global society to implement in a post-Kony Uganda was the problem which created a war criminal in the first place. Missionary work continually proves that teaching indiginous peoples the English alphabet and building plumbing facilities which require engineering maintenance beyond the means of the tribes they serve induces a disparity between “Westernized” indigenous peoples and their heritage/cultural evolution–evolution which stacked upon more accurate perceptions of the needs/resources/methodologies that work for thriving within their that particular socio-cultural and regional context.
And it’s all torn asunder by well-meaning people who trample in and set up a badminton court on the Serengeti.
In other words: Kony is a product of awareness–awareness beget from a comparison between the unfair advantages of a society loaded with commodity, confident enough to inform him of his inherent indignation.
Kony became aware of his own indignity because foreigners told him the basis of his life and heritage was inferior. Does anybody else want to talk about Nietzsche’s Void?

(3) Kant talks about eventual world peace, of the height of human conflict and competition being the antecedent to ultimate world authorities that will regimentally maintain global peace. To Kant, these 25 years of Ugandan childhood suffering would be magnificently useful, and are indicative of a brighter, better tomorrow. Does that make tragedy any easier to swallow? More valid? Make Joseph Kony useful?

 

 

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Requiem for the Dissident

Posted on January 30, 2012 by AshB

“In May 1968, the Situationist-inspired Paris riots set off ‘a chain reaction of refusal’ against consumer capitalism. First students, then workers, then professors, nurses, doctors, bus drivers and a piecemeal league of artists, anarchists, and Enrages took to the streets, erected barricades, fought with police, occupied offices, factories, dockyards, railway depots, theaters and university campuses, sang songs, issued manifestos, sprayed slogans like ‘Live Without Dead Time’ and ‘Down with the Spectacular-Commodity Culture’ all over Paris, and challenged the established order of their time in the most visceral way. The breadth of the dissent was remarkable. ‘Art students demanded the realization of art; music students called for “wild and ephemeral music”; footballers kicked out managers with the slogan “football to the football players”; gravediggers occupied cemeteries; doctors, nurses, and the interns at a psychiatric hospital organized in solidarity with the inmates.’ For a few weeks, millions of people who had worked their whole lives in offices and factories broke from their daily routines and… lived.”

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Manifesto for the 21st Century

Posted on January 28, 2012 by AshB

“You can’t fight city hall.” “Death and taxes.” “Don’t talk about politics or religion.”
This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda, rolling across the picket line–“Lay down, GI! Lay down, GI!” We saw it all through the 20th Century, and now in the 21st Century, it’s time to stand up and realize that we should NOT allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not SUBMIT to dehumanization. I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned with what’s happening in this world. I’m concerned with the structure. I’m concerned with the systems of control. Those that control my life, and those that seek to control it EVEN MORE. I want FREEDOM! That’s what I want, and that’s what YOU should want! It’s up to each and every one of us to turn loose of just some of the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that is the central mode of control: make us feel pathetic, small, so we’ll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have GOT to realize we’re being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century’s gonna be a new century! Not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance, of classism and statism, and all the rest of the modes of control… it’s gonna be the age of humankind, standing up for something PURE and something RIGHT! What a bunch of garbage–liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it’s all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated! The TRUTH is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of LIES! I’m SICK of it, and I’M NOT GONNA TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT! DO YA GOT ME? Resistance is NOT futile, we’re gonna win this thing, humankind is too good, WE’RE NOT A BUNCH OF UNDERACHIEVERS, WE’RE GONNA STAND UP, AND WE’RE GONNA BE HUMAN BEINGS! WE’RE GONNA GET FIRED UP ABOUT THE REAL THINGS, THE THINGS THAT MATTER – CREATIVITY, AND THE *DYNAMIC* *HUMAN* *SPIRIT* THAT REFUSES TO *SUBMIT*. Well that’s it, that’s all I’ve got to say. It’s in your court now.”

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Stay optimistic.

Posted on January 26, 2012 by AshB

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“E is for Elimination”: efficient vs. effective time-management for the new year

Posted on January 3, 2012 by AshB

In the flurry of people-pleasing, food cravings, and impromptu to-do lists, we get conditioned to shlepping through our work and personal lives. Then the routine-smashing mayhem of the holidays drags us out of normal day-to-day ruts and we finally realize (and feel) the neglect our bodies, households, and relationships.  With the onset of a fresh year, abandon the inevitable embarrassment for publicly declared, bold, and vague resolutions (“I’m finally going to drop the weight!” “This is the year I quit smoking pot and move out of my mom’s garage!”), and instead, commit to developing helpful new habits tried and proven to curate the motivation and discipline prerequisite to abolishing the old behaviors which perpetrated the undesirable pounds, vices, and relationships you want ended. For 2012, reset yourself.

Below is a digest-version of the “E is for Elimination” chapter from Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, for disciplining your time and finally squelching the unconscious habits and distractions that had you saying Ugh, wtf? by the end of 2011.


Learning to Manage Time Effectively
First, in order to eliminate time-management which devours versus utilizes time, commit two principles to mind:

“1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. 
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.”

The system is all about effective productivity–busyness that begets happy, continuous results you want by instructing you on how to (1) have focus, and (2) circumvent meaningless distractions.

Part of this instructional is about honing a personal aversion to daily minutiae that isn’t urgent and won’t accomplish anything within the next 48 hours. It’s a horse of a different color from zooming around with your index finger jutting in front of you and your forehead almost pressed against a touchscreen: “I’m staying on top of things, I’m checking email!” should be replaced with “I’m being productive, I only attend to email at a specific time of day, so I can focus on [another important task] when I first sit down to work, and [etc] during the afternoon.”

This is the lifestyle configuration for a results-oriented approach to productivity with real, immediate results (and satisfaction).

How to Prioritize: Pareto’s 80/20 Law
The Pareto Law is an economist’s conclusion that 80% of society’s wealth is produced and owned by 20% of the society’s population. The key to effective time use is (a) eliminating “which 20% of sources are causing 80% of [your] problems and unhappiness,” and (b) identifying “which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of [your] desired outcomes and happiness.”

Basically–which is where we’re trying to get–you want to reduce or eliminate the amount of housekeeping or causes of housekeeping (which includes chasing after potential leads, or whatever other means you expend time on what you only hope will suss out future dividends). Focus on what produces concrete results with little of your direct attention. This flows into the next second of The 4-Hour Workweek on Automation; key to paring your work-time to four hours while still accruing a decent, sustainable income. (Whether this actually works out is debatable, but the Elimination practice is still healthy and useful in principle.)

Aid the implementation of the 80/20 Law by asking useful, self-motivating questions like, “What would I do if I had a heart attack and could only work 2 hours a day?” How could you make that work?

Another useful principle is Parkinson’s Law: which translates to daily scheduling in that: to get a more manageable schedule, make the schedule itself smaller. Trim the amount of time you think you have, total; this forces you to carefully prioritize and effectively use a smaller amount of time to accomplish shit and move on to the next one. The typical day people usually think they have to use is the 9-5 workday, but how much of that is ultimately diddled? Reduce the size of schedule available and prioritization becomes easier.

How to Cultivate Selective Ignorance: stop multi-tasking and circumvent meaningless distractions
Part of prioritizing activities so you can effectively manage those activities is also learning about how to prioritize your ability to focus. Do things well (and effectively) in short and attentive timeframes by establishing boundaries–and also standards–for your personal attention.

Firstly: minimize availability. You probably don’t even realize how deluged you are in pointless data. Especially if you have a smart phone. Digital communication and social networking apps seem like worthwhile investments for the downtime waiting in line for the restroom, but in actuality, you’re not just using them for downtime. They suck up your prioritized-productivity time, so even if you pare down your 9-5 workday to 10-2, it’ll fatten back up to compensate for how many accumulative minutes you diddle on Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, and your gaming accounts.

What social media apps in particular do is make you too available. There are not as many emergencies, nor as much drama happening, as the emotionally codependent people want you to believe in their convincing of having immediate access to you; be forthright with people about the specific times of the day or week that you check email/voicemail or are generally available.

(Having implemented this method myself, I don’t encounter many of the “emergencies” that are recalled to me by chagrined grandmothers after the fact. “Well. I THOUGHT she was going into the hospital…I spent the whole night up watching the cat for more trouble, but after the diarrhea, she seemed to be fine.” There’s some room for debate about where useful, effective communication should take a backseat to emotional availability, but as you seen will be the theme of Ferriss’ lifestyle design, it’s more about the nature of the principle that’s useful versus using it as a turgid set of rules.)

The next advice for elimination is to scale down or totally banish media and news input. Our attention to media and “news,” if nothing else, is a saboteur to our inner-peace–unless you’re governing a small country or have some breadth of charge over political policy, you don’t necessarily need to know what’s going down every second. This is a very hard principle for adolescents and malingerers to accept. But ask yourself, are fulfilling your dreams and goals worth missing out on trending Twitter topics re: celebrity wardrobe malfunctions, or do you want to still be where you are now in one year (or two, or five), but having known the world had been up to meanwhile?

This isn’t Thoreau or McCandless; you’re just paring down chatter and making taboo the urge to squelch daylight on the iPhone App store. Disable “Push” notifications, set up a schedule for email response, and be forthright with people, including your chatterbox/clingy friends: “I have a schedule for those kinds of things.”

The Art of Refusal: discerning what to say no to
“For our purposes,” Ferriss says. “An interruption is anything that prevents the start-to-finish completion of a critical task, and there are three principle offenders:  (1) Time wasters, (2) Time consumers, and (3) Empowerment failures.”

Time wasters are obvious distractions that can be ignored. Ferriss defines them as meetings, discussions, and communication that does not require immediate action or input on your part. Email correspondence is the fattest interruption and easiest to curb; set up an email schedule–check email only a very limited amount of times per day (as in once every 3 or 4 working hours), and eliminate if from your morning/start of the day. Do shit first, talk about it later. Second, “train” your bosses, coworkers, friends, family, and other correspondents to anticipate responses at your established email schedule by setting up an automatic responder (like the ones you get from university bureaucrats when they’re away on vacation right when you deeply require their availability).

“Hi, friends! [Or whatever] I will be responding to email at noon and again at 4PM PST [or whatever]. If you require urgent assistance, I am reachable at [digits]. Thanks and until we speak again! [Or whatever].” Develop a similar response-system with your voicemail message.

Ferriss has further insight for paring down interruptions which includes from altogether eliminating unnecessary, productivity-leeching meetings and discussions, with scripts for straight-to-cell urgent contact that in actuality becomes chitchat and useless to these special brackets of time you’ve established to be productive. If you want to be turgid about starting and completing that young adult novel, fully launching your website, or getting your max study-time in, refer to the scripts and further insight in The 4-Hour Workweek.

Time consumers are repetitive tasks, like errands, that aren’t necessarily unimportant–they’re daily life–but can devour an entire afternoon. Batch these activities and reduce their unnecessary impact. Like establishing a communication schedule to avert wasting time, limit the time you spend on those sorts of tasks by allotting days of the week/month when there is enough of this task to justify its urgency–like chores or sending out greeting cards or resetting high scores–and undertake those tasks ONLY in accordance with your schedule. Again, this could get creepy and extreme, but the moral of scheduling is about controlling your time. Bracket when you’ve got to be responsible and take care of business, and when you want to meet your friends at the park after hours to eat organic cookies and read aloud from The Vagina Monologues.

Empowerment failures are interruptions due to requisites–if your co-workers need you to sign off their completion on certain tasks, your credit cards are set up for a personalized call from bankers to authorize transactions, any situation where someone or something is entirely dependent upon you in the process of doing their own job. If you can empower someone else to handle it on their own, do it. Weigh what interruptions are worth being in the loop.

If you know the change you want to make, don’t expend finial amounts of time getting around to it, or plunking into be-all-end-all resolutions (like cold-turkey quitting cigarettes or brownies). Practice the lifestyle-design techniques and habits of the kinds of people who already have and maintain the low body-fat index and ideal job situations.

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A dupe is a dupe is a dupe.

Posted on December 10, 2011 by AshB

 

“People love advertising. They say they don’t, but they do. And I don’t mean that they like clever commercials or reading Lucky; I mean they like the idea of a Draper (a) whom they’ll never meet who (b) understands what they want and (c) views that wanting as important. It does not matter that this definition of import doesn’t extend beyond their ability to pay for things. A feeling is a feeling is a feeling.”

Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman

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Finding Pneumo: an anti-Objectivist re-awakening

Posted on November 27, 2011 by AshB

 

Last week, I got really sick.

Actually, two weeks ago, I got really sick. I missed a lot of work in order to suckle orange juice from a Scooby-Doo thermos and nap like a giant wheezy infant. In between naps, I read Chuck Klosterman essays and internally berated my lack of vigilance against viruses and immunity stressors, in between constantly re-imagining the financial bruising I was going to feel at the end of the month.

After a week with persistent fever, coughing so hard I’d sharted every single pair of Mudd boyshorts I own, of sleep-walking through work and dozing off in the middle of pop quizzes, I visited the SCU campus health center to see if I could score codeine cough syrup. Instead I got cut-down for being really sick:

“If you had kept treating this as the flu over the weekend, you would’ve drowned.”
“Okay. So, like, Theraflu isn’t helping?”
“You have pneumonia, and it’s advanced. If you’d put off a visit any longer, you’d have drowned in fluid.” This is the doctor speaking to her clipboard. “I’m going to write you a prescription, you need to fill it, and then you need to go home and not get out of bed for at least a week.”
“I can’t afford that.”
“If you had come in tomorrow instead of today, I would’ve directed you to a hospital. You are very sick.”

I had bacterial pneumonia. It’s not contagious like viral pneumonia, and that’s great, because it felt like a slowly filling balloon of boiling water just under my sternum was pushing all my air as soon as I breathed in. The back of my throat felt like asphalt in the sun. My skin was a slipcover encasing biblical Hell. The fever, cough, and lethargy grinding the gears of my daily by-and-by were actually run-off indicators of my lungs filling with sputum that was going to suffocate me. And I would’ve kept plugging away, internally chanting “Mind over matter” and “Drop some fucking nuts and suck it up.” I am vindictive, but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody else.
I fought for willpower to trump the inconvenience and expense of feeling under the weather.  I challenged the doctor’s diagnosis and prescription on the way home:
“Drowning people can’t drive themselves home on 87 in rush hour traffic.”
“People who are really sick can’t conduct conversations with the Sbux benefits hotline lady AND the Target pharmacist at the same time.”
“Women doctors are drama queens. People haven’t died of pneumonia since the turn of the century.”
“I deserve how shitty I feel. I have not been on top of my shit.”
“This is my fault, and when I can’t pay rent, it’ll be society punishing me.”

I felt guilty and wrong for haphazardly stopping into the health center and exasperating the physician. I felt embarrassed and irresponsible for rapidly texting/dialing/Facebooking every coworker/person I vaguely knew worked for Starbucks to cover my shifts last minute. Every launched SOS made me more tired and numb, as if my whole persona of being capable and in control was committing public suicide. (Is this weird?)

Idk, maybe not for anybody that read a lot of Ayn Rand instead of going to parties in high school. For many years I’ve been a steely Objectivist, for still being too young to rent a car, and that experience of trying to cover a shift less than 10 hours before I was supposed to be at work was intensely disillusioning. It pummeled who I am and what I believed about being a good, effective agent in the world. The things I probably should feel like a failure for–never graduating high school, credit card debt, shredding the side of my car by driving into my friend’s carport–never hurt me the way asking for help did. Amidst hunting for barista-substitutes, a coworker reminded me of a story she’d told at a bar about her parents sacrificing a lamb: “Yeah, it was because I went into surgery for pneumonia; everyone thought I was going to die.”

This new information about pneumonia scared me more than the doctor; my cheeks were so hot from the fever, I didn’t realize I’d cried a little and the tears had evaporated. Thinking about pneumonia’s mortal impact was more realistic picturing it happening to someone else. For me, the prescription of “rest and recuperation” felt luxurious and unnecessary, but envisioning someone else I know deathly sick validated the prescription–it wasn’t until I could picture my life voided of that particular coworker, picturing the void in her family’s life that I wouldn’t have even met or heard anecdotes about if she’d kept avoiding medical attention, not wanting to put anybody out with her not being able to breathe deeply.
Nobody wants to be sick. Nobody wants to be freezing in a paper shirt in a doctor’s exam room. Nobody wants to try plugging through work, running errands, studying Boethius, and trying to sympathize with a friend’s story about their obnoxious roommate when they feel like a heavy wet towel about to seep bloody mucus through its seems.

Worse, nobody wants to feel sick and also scared, worried, and burdensome.

I used to be a staunch vegan that never got sick, tired, or had a breakout. I’d get pissed off on behalf of my managers when coworkers called in sick, put down my friends if they complained about feeling fat or bloated, avoid sitting next to or partnering up with classmates if I noticed coughing or sniffling. Illness is something that happens when you’re lazy about taking care of yourself, when you let how “good” you feel dictate your life. Being trapped in bed for five days without Internet or TV, after feeling inadvertently cut down by a cheerful coworker who had her lungs pumped and a lamb sacrificed for her, I did an excess of retrospection. I re-read Ayn Rand on Objectivism and re-tooled a lot of the philosophy I’d co-opted from Rand’s Individualism vs. Altruism ethic; I basked in it for the first time from the standpoint of feeling like a crumpled snot-pile of weakness, as opposed to the standpoint of being young, healthy, driven, and capable, with the chip on my shoulder I’ve always had because going at it mostly alone was the only option ever presented. Nothing ever felt so offensive to me as the idea of needing other people or of being needed; not until I was trapped in my studio apartment and needed someone to show up to work for me so I’d still have a job, not until I needed soup and throat lozenges delivered.

There were some people that were forthrightly rude when I said I was sick. Their first comments were to mention how hard a total of seven days without pay–plus medical expenses–was going to put me out, after I’d just borrowed money to finish paying tuition. They moved to wash their hands and took care to remind me about the irresponsibility of working in food and service when I was sick. As if customer service is the most fulfilling thing I could be doing while feeling like something between the underside of a reptile and a ball-sack. As if I live to call out “Triple-grande-skinny vanilla latte,” in spite of a 102 degree fever. I realized I was that kind of person though, believing illness happened because someone was consciously irresponsible with their health. And suspecting sick people were always trying to take me down with them. That mentality is a social malignancy, and doesn’t have a payoff.

In a democracy, your political infrastructure is shot when your people are sick and ignorant, and nothing else really characterizes the American people as a whole except that we are sick and ignorant. We are obese, diabetic, perforated with cancer. We are lower than 24th in the world on the scale of academic aptitudes. We run through life with blinders strapped on, picking and choosing what personally matters, with marketing warriors having convinced us that personalization and customizability are actual activities as well as desirable attributes, all the while with the GOP characterizing the American Dream as a journey that strives for you and your own to be protectively ensconced in assets which shield you from the afflictions of the larger populace. We’re throwing up “it’s all relative” and “you should do what makes you happy” and “what about me? I’ve got bills/kids/a wife/goals of my own!” But it’s not about you. It’s not about how secure or happy you personally feel.

2011 has been a year where a lot of my Ayn-Rand ideas have been shot the fuck down. Your life, mine, every American’s, is not a “to each his own” kind of situation. Our only choice is in how we’re going to be.

Quickie advice for caring for a sick person, rounded with a little perspective about how neediness–when it inevitably happens–can make you feel like a fatty burden on the rest of the world.

Some further advice from the Live Strong foundation on caring for sick and needful people; let’s get familiarized with it.

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