Rational Philosophy

On Hillary Clinton’s unerring sense of footinmouthity.

Capitalizing on the tragedy of her inability to be sensitive, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated her supreme political aptitude for footinmouthity. Stricken with a malignant brain tumor she is not, but Hillary needs no excuse to usurp Teddy Kennedy’s tragedy and achieve her outrageous best. Is it her fault that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of the year of his foreshortened primary bid? Of course it isn’t. Then why are people so bent out of shape that she would attempt to make political capital out of it…?

Jeez. Anyone would think you’d never seen a man shot before.

And now, with rumors that her fellow liability, Bill, is agitating for her to be Obama’s VP, one wonders how she’ll outdo Dick Cheney (remember him?) who managed to shoot his old friend in the head with a shotgun…

Exploring the idea of rightness and wrongness in intent and deed.

NY Times Op-Ed contributers Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins serve up an interesting history of President JFK’s face-off with Nikita Khrushchev. If we accept their account, JFK fared poorly in the exchange because Khrushchev went on the offensive and handily routed the ill-prepared young president in their one-on-one meetings. Thrall and Wilkins indicate that it was during these meetings that Khrushchev formed a critical impression of JFK as an immature and weak leader, an impression that in part lead to his subsequent decisions to build the Berlin wall and establish a missile base in Cuba.

We’re being drawn to review this period of history because Obama has often quoted Kennedy’s view on negotiating with hostile powers, as expressed in his inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The question being asked — if Obama, also young and arguably less tested than Kennedy, is so taken with Kennedy’s philosophy, would he make the same mistake?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will testify in court during the hearing of the city’s lawsuit against a Georgia gun-shop. The city claims that guns sold in the south too easily make their way into the hands of bad actors (no pun intended) who then use them to inflict harm in New York City. It’s clear from the story that this particular gun shop owner — Jay Wallace — isn’t prepared to give up without a fight and has fashioned his case quite cleverly to present himself as David against Bloomberg’s Goliath.

And in the high stakes world of Internet search engines and on-line advertising (ten years ago, who would have thunk it?) Google is set to defend a proposed deal that would have Yahoo! license and use Google’s superior ad technology. (The backdrop being that Yahoo! has resisted Microsoft’s attempts to buy it — this deal with Google would add about $1 billion a year to Yahoo!’s coffers.) There are rumblings that Google’s deal with Yahoo! would be anti-competitive and fall foul of anti-trust legislation. Google claims to have found a way to fashion the deal so that it won’t. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not at all coincidentally, as a Google Ad Sense and Ad Words participant I just received an e-mail from Google telling me that they now place ads from qualified third-parties. Effectively, they’ve started to do for others what they propose that Yahoo! will do for them… Smart strategy for avoiding anti-trust accusations.)

These three stories present internal conflicts for me, and perhaps some intrinsic philosophical conflicts between ideals and reality.

I want to believe that John F. Kennedy was the better man, the better person, I believe he had more good intent that Khrushchev. But in the wiles and wills of international political maneuvering, Khrushchev had him beat hands down. I want to believe that Obama wouldn’t make the same mistake if he sat down with Kim Yung Il or Assad, but I realize that part of Obama’s charm is that he’s not cunning. (I do hope he’s smart enough and strong enough not to sit down until he’s sure that the right ground has been prepared.) I believe that Obama is a better person than Clinton or McCain; hence, my desire to believe he’s better able to run the country.
I want to believe that Bloomberg is fighting the right fight against those who sell guns. I like Bloomberg. He seems to have all around good intentions. But in this situation, maybe he’s misjudged. Maybe Jay Wallace isn’t the right guy to go after, or maybe Jay Wallace is just better at crafting a sympathetic image.

And even though Google has become such an all-dominant behemoth, I can’t help having a soft spot for a company that has the motto — “Do no evil…” I’m rooting for them against the anti-trust watchdogs.

Sadly, life isn’t fair. Bad people do win.

His fellow Greeks trumped up charges against Socrates and he went on his way with a draught of hemlock. His dying words? “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Now, show me a better man.

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

Bill Clinton and dumb ideas, memory loss and wisdom, and enhancing mental sharpness.

“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
Plato

Brain researchers should be studying Bill Clinton; Bill is a smart man, by all accounts. Why then does he sometimes say stupid things? As Hillary battles on against the odds, Bill, speaking off the cuff outside Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville Kentucky, said that not counting the votes in Michigan and Florida would be dumb, even though the states were disenfranchised prior to their primaries, and despite the fact that Obama didn’t campaign in either state and took himself off the ballot in one.

Brain researchers have in fact been finding that, Bill Clinton’s apparent example to the contrary, older minds may well be wiser minds. Aging brains pay more attention to what may seem to be extraneous information, mulling over it and absorbing it much better than younger minds. This seems to indicate that younger minds tend to power through information happily dispensing with seemingly spurious data, sticking to the highways. Whereas older minds have learned that the journey itself can be as informative and valuable as the destination.

(I’m quite prepared to believe that Bill Clinton has as much fun with his illogical statements as he does with his logical ones. He doesn’t really expect anyone other than those blindly partisan to his wife’s cause to agree with him, but he doesn’t really care. Why he doesn’t really care is a much more interesting question, and I can only hazard guesses.)

Other scientific evidence points to the benefits of activities that improve brain function. Exercise, diet, mental stimulation, engaged and engaging social and family contacts — all can contribute to our ability to stay sharp. As the article points out, and as I’ve written about here before, the idea that the brain inevitably declines and can’t grow new cells or forge new pathways has been debunked and cast aside. A very exciting turn, and one that can give us some optimism in these times of dumbness in high places.
As Socrates said and as Plato reported, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” This seems in keeping with the concept that as the brain gets older it is less likely to discard seemingly irrelevant information. It understands better that wisdom comes through accepting fallibility, rejecting absolute knowledge.

Socrates was also saying that we can never know anything. We can only perceive and infer. To claim absolute knowledge is to posture, to attempt to overpower someone with the assertion of knowing.

Bill Clinton cannot know what the voters in Florida and Michigan would have done if the delegates from those primaries were to be seated and the candidates campaigned accordingly. He can only posture and infer. While it’s understandably frustrating for Hillary to have perhaps missed out on a couple of wins and some delegates from those states, it is far from fair for her to convert this frustration into a claim of victory.

Related posts from around the Internet:

Why Brain Fitness Training Works to Combat Cognitive Decline

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist And What We Must Do To Survive.

On broken escalators and varying sperm counts.

The New York Times, after “months examining the system,” has concluded that New York City Transit does a lousy job of installing, maintaining and repairing its elevators and escalators. I think that about 5 million people could have saved the poor Times reporters several months of trawling through financial records, trouble reports, maintenance chits, interviewing experts and the like. Any member of the regular subway ridership knows that the New York City Transit performance in this area sucks. (That’s the official technical term.)

Until recently I would make the round trip every weekday from my home in Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan. The escalators at the stations I traveled through regularly broke down, with sometimes just a few days between repairs. With a glance over the transom at the smudged and harried faces of the maintenance crew it was clear that their level of confidence in the repairs was no higher than anyone else’s.

Unlike the New York City Transit Authority, the New York Times, despite the redundancy of its efforts, does a bang up job of itemizing the extent of the problems and the underlying causes. To net it out, the system is mismanaged. Again, no great revelation. I myself once worked for the Transit Authority and witnessed first hand and unwittingly became a part of the hypertrophied organization that runs the city’s subway system. The level of unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy is staggering, and inevitably leads to crappy services. (Another official technical term.)

On a less depressing note, the ravishing Olivia Judson reports on findings that animals vary their sperm output according to the circumstances of the intercourse — more chance of rival sperm, more jizz (I apologize for using so much technical jargon in this post). Judson holds out the tantalizing hope that these findings may have practical application for couples who are undergoing IVF. If the man watches the appropriate explicit videos while he’s providing his sperm, he’s more likely to produce more active sperm. (The appropriate videos would depict a woman with more than one man — competition!)

New York City Transit Authority take note. In the absence of competition, we fall back on regulation, bureaucracy, checks and balances. But as anyone knows who has worked in such an organization, or read any Kafka, the regulation and bureaucracy rarely achieves what it’s supposed to achieve — transparency, fairness and efficiency, and instead creates a culture of indifference, ass-watching, megalomania, and ineptitude.

From a philosophical perspective, competition derives from the concepts of aims and pursuers. The aim or object exists or is perceived, and the pursuers go after it. Why do pursuers pursue, and out of what circumstances does competition arise or not arise?

Living things have an urge to persist and to pursue the persistence of their genes. Given time and causality, competition between living things is inevitable. But in circumstances when cooperation promises greater success, competition can take a back seat. This is why we have IVF and novel ideas about how to produce a higher sperm count. It’s also why we live in societies with division of labor and, for the most part, respect one another’s right to live.

But in circumstances where competition is thwarted without sufficient incentive for success — i.e., New York City Transit’s monopoly on the subway system — we end up with incompetence and failure.

And here is the great challenge: When society wants to have services like subways that may not be profitable if privately operated how do we make them work well? How do we inculcate a sense of competitiveness, of aiming for an objective, into the organizations that operate those services?

I have an idea: Run them like a company — reduce the bureaucracy, operate them with targets and incentives, weed out the freeloaders and crappy managers, hire bright, motivated employees, challenge them to succeed or face the consequences. Bloomberg, put your thinking cap on!

(When I worked at the Transit Authority, you could have fired half the workforce and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference; well, it actually might have meant that more got done.)

If this seems impossible, just think about how efficiently and effectively the city runs the parking violations unit. One minute after your meter expires, the transit cop is there writing the ticket…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.

On George Bush in Israel, video game workouts, and predictions of neural Buddhism.

In a bold and boldly quirky opinion, David Brooks predicts that current research into the workings of the mind will lead toward more widespread acceptance of the spiritual concepts of Buddhism, and away from adherence to the textual “patina of different religions.”

This research has shown, says Brooks, that the mind “does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.”

I can’t help but quote his pivotal paragraph whole:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”

I think that Brooks may have gone a little loopy. Not because what he’s saying is nutty, but he’s saying it without any seeming objectivity or pause for reflection.

To parse and unpack adequate individual responses to each of Brooks statements in his opinion would take many posts. So I’ll focus on the aspect of his opinion that represents a common thread: Conviction. Brooks writes as if he is convinced of his opinion. He writes as if others will be convinced of the research findings. And he writes as if a person who has a sense of the interrelated self, or inherent morality, or the sacred, or God, will necessarily have a belief in those same things in spite of or despite a more nuanced understanding or wherefrom and why those senses derive.

Sure, we operate less like machines than people once thought, but that doesn’t mean that life in all its rich emotion and subjectivity is inevitably mysterious and unknowable, sacred and spiritual. Just because life has evolved to include psychological and physiological responses that evoke transcendent sensory experiences, doesn’t prove that our perception of those transcendent experiences is evidence of something inexplicable.

Video games provide a case in point. Nintendo’s Wii and Wii Fitness take new steps into the realm of virtual reality. As reviewed, Wii Fitness does a good enough job of simulating a fitness regime that people found it winningly good at doing what it set out to do. The human mind nimbly assimilates virtual or perceived realities into its overall perception of the real world. This isn’t surprising. The mind needs to be able to do this in order for us to imagine different scenarios, to predict and plan.

George Bush, still president, still persisting in his perception of himself as a leader, and a leader of some weight, has said this week in Israel that talking to Iran and Syria would be like talking to Hitler.

Again, I feel I should quote him in full:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

I was left wondering on what level Bush believes this. Surely he can’t believe that anyone who would seek to talk to hostile and dangerous leaders would expect to convince them they were wrong with some “ingenious argument.” Does he believe that’s what they would try to do? Surely not. No. Not even someone as apparently ignorant and deluded as Bush.

(One would of course expect to try to convince them that they have more to gain by peaceable coexistence than by continued hostility. This is not ingenious, it’s just common sense.)

Bush’s difficulties in perceiving accurate versions of reality reveal something about what makes the human mind successful or unsuccessful in guiding us through our lives. As we’ve discussed, we need to be able to use our imagination to conceive of different versions of current and future reality, to assess possibilities and outcomes. But we also need to be able to accept as more concrete the versions that carry more rational weight. This won’t always yield truth, but it will more often than not yield truth.

Bush seems to be able to conjure up a version of reality and attach his belief to it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This is perhaps his greatest deficiency. He wanted to believe in the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so badly that he ignored all the signs that it was a fiction. He wanted to believe in rapid and easy success in Iraq so passionately that he failed to plan for the more likely scenario that it would be a long, hard, bloody war. He wanted to believe that Hurricane Katrina was a local disaster and required a local response, despite evidence to the contrary, with deadly and horrific results.

Bush is not alone; many leaders delude themselves, as do many of us less prominent citizens. The trouble is that Bush has deluded many others, too, and continues to do just that.

Footnote: As has been noted elsewhere, Bush’s reference to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the words of an American Senator (attributed by some to William Borah) are hardly new material. Rumsfeld was spouting the same fear-mongering rhetoric back in 2006.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Is freedom in the mind? Can we make ourselves feel more free? Why does it seem that freedom cannot be an inevitably relative concept?

As I’ve mentioned before I recently quit my job (after working in technology support for a law firm for almost twelve years,) and with it my career (of almost twenty-two years). This was a change I’d been planning for and working toward for some time. Already it has had a profound effect on my sense of self, and, in particular, on my sense of freedom. Since this change coincided with the birth of my second son, I’m not actually particularly more free — in terms of available time (which is why it’s after 9pm and I’m only just sitting down to write my blog!) but I now feel free, whereas I used to feel tethered.

In an interview with Alison Link the NY Times explores the concept of personal freedom. Link presents some fascinating concepts and relates experiences about freedom, leisure and our sense of self. In particular, I was struck by the following thoughts from Link:

- “I am most at leisure when I feel free, present and integrated.”

- “wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t define ourselves by our work? It should be just as valid to define ourselves by our leisure.”

- “Whenever I conduct workshops …, I ask people how free they feel … on a scale of 0 to 100. The responses are usually about the same whether I am talking to people in a correctional facility or at a workplace. I have learned firsthand that some people feel free while behind bars (and use their time in a positive way), yet others feel “locked up” while living in society.”

Link endorses the idea that leisure deserves to be prioritized. She counsels people to think about what they find most fulfilling and when they feel their best. Then she encourages them to find ways to increase the time spent on these things, even if the only time they have available is a few minutes here and there.

Link also recognizes that people have many reasons not to give themselves this freedom. She encourage people to avoid behaviors and patterns that will prevent them from indulging their sense of freedom.

The concept of restriction or “non-freedom” can correspond to real circumstances — being bound or confined, for instance. But in the sense of this post, and in the sense that interests Link, it corresponds to a state of mind. Link isn’t saying that people can’t ever be confined, and that any sense of non-freedom is artificial, she’s saying that even in the most restricted of circumstances our sense of freedom relates largely to our perception of freedom.

In Victor Frankl’s marvelous book — Man’s Search for Meaning — he relates how when he was in a Nazi concentration camp he and his fellow prisoners experienced moments of real joy (when being given a morsel more food or assigned to a marginally less arduous work detail). Despite the incomparable horrors of Nazi confinement, joy (the freedom of the spirit) was still possible.

Link gives the example of a woman working long stressful days in television production. She counseled the woman to plan and schedule even a few minutes of activity that she would find fulfilling (a cup of coffee, a short stroll) into her days. The woman reported an increased sense of freedom. Likewise, Link’s experiences with prisoners yielded examples of freedom despite confinement.

All of this can help us feel freer, I think, as we live our lives.

1. Freedom can be as much a matter of perspective as it is a matter of circumstance.

2. We can feel freer by taking small positive steps to do more things that feel fulfilling and to do fewer things that feel confining.

But here’s the catch: Circumstances really do have an effect on our sense of freedom. Link is preaching small change, mindset adjustment, as an effective technique no matter what. But, as Link recognizes, this can be just the first step toward more profound changes. (It’s not as though Link wouldn’t recommend to an inmate that he or she will feel freer by staying out of jail in future.)

Yes, we need to first understand that our sense of freedom is to a large degree determined by our perspective on it, and that no matter what the circumstances we can make small adjustments that contribute to our sense of freedom. But in keeping with this perspective we can also make large adjustments that will have a profound effect on our sense of freedom.

It is never too late and our situations are never too desperate to make small and large changes that will make us feel freer.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Following on from yesterday’s post, Craig Newmark (the Craig of Craigslist) graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the phenomenon of a new philanthropy created in part by the boom in the technology economy. Here is the interview:

Q. Is the philanthropy of the likes of Bill Gates, Larry Page, Jimmy Wales and yourself a truly new force in society?

A. I think it’s novel in two senses:

– greater focus on investment in self-sustaining good, where good efforts can sustain themselves or maybe get others to do even more good. example: microfinance

– involve many others in their efforts, creating mass movements. examples: wikipedia, microfinance

Q. Has the rapidity of your success (you’re just 55, I think) made you better able to effect positive change in the world?

A. It’s been thirteen years, not so rapid, probably not a factor.

on the other hand, I’m a nerd, the whole plastic pocket protector cliche. In school, a nerd gets excluded from a lot, and I remember that, and choose to use the Net as a tool for the inclusion of everyone. So it’s not age that’s relevant, but inner reflection followed by action.

Q. You’ve said that you believe in keeping the Internet free. Are there other things you think should be free to everyone (like higher education and healthcare)?

A. I think education and healthcare should be freely available to everyone, but how to make that happen adequately, no one’s quite solved that.

Q. It often seems that governments aren’t able to meet critical social challenges. Is the work of the new philanthropists filling a void or allowing government off the hook?

A. I think that work is about finding ways to make public/private partnerships solve problems.

Q. With Craigslist you have stayed connected to your users by handling customer service. In your philanthropic work, how do you field-test your ideas and convictions?

A. The work’s just started, will be decades long in many cases, and I just don’t know how to measure success now.

Related posts from around the web…

Craigslist Founder Looking For New Causes To Support - Craiglist founder Craig Newmark says he’s discovered he’s not much of a manager. That’s why he leaves the managing to others and concentrates on customer service. This gives him the time and freedom to support different causes. …

Craigslist Founder Buys into Citizen Journalism - Craig Newmark pursues politics and citizen journalism Muckety, May 12, 2008 http://news.muckety.com/2008/05/12/craig-newmark- pursues-politics-and-citizen-journalism/2731 Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, participates in …

Craigslist founder moving forward with own agenda - While Craigslist expands to smaller cities and tries to sort out a current dispute with minority shareholder eBay…

For-profit philanthropy - how new billionaires want to make money … - In addition to putting $4 million into Grameen’s nonprofit arm, the Grameen Foundation, Omidyar Network has supported nonprofit groups like Unitus, which works to develop microfinance institutions and the International Development Law …

Philanthrocapitalism - “We get stakeholders on the ground visiting communities where they have business and philanthropic interests. Combining business opportunities with NGO project/community visits with cultural immersion and empathetic insight is essential …

On the disjunct between power and wisdom.

I keep coming back to Plato’s words, not because they are perfectly rendered, but because they capture the essence of the idea that power and wisdom seldom coincide:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” - Plato

And then there’s Thomas Jefferson, not generally recognized as a philosopher, but clearly a man who lived and breathed the search for truth:

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” - Thomas Jefferson

As we watch the candidates campaign for the presidency I’m most saddened and depressed by how far we remain from Plato’s ideal of power coupled with wisdom. The deeper into the race we get, the more conniving and unwise the rhetoric becomes. (Clinton’s racial politics and her unwise and insincere politics of pandering on the gas tax; McCain’s hard swerve to the right.) The competitive, beauty pageant, micro-focused format of modern politics works against the ideal, of course. Obama seems to be sincere in his desire to break the mold, but he has a long hard road ahead of him and he’s already begun to falter with snipes against Hillary and rash policy promises.

I keep being drawn to stories of good being done by those who’ve quickly made a lot of money and therefore accrued a lot of power while still remembering what it’s like to be one of the have-nots. The Times has a piece on Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, who is one such newly moneyed philanthropist. Newmark, who’s been slow to capitalize on the extraordinary success of his Craigslist idea, even says this about relative wealth: “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys, and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”

The purist in me reviles against the idea that people who’ve been successful in business should be holding sway with social and philanthropic programs. But why not? Presumably, we’d be able to intervene if one of them turned out to be a nut-job who was out to achieve dubious ends.

Philosophically speaking, if someone has made a lot of money and chooses to spend his or her time and money dedicated to things other than making himself or herself wealthier, it’s more than likely that they’ll be aimed at making positive impact. The concept of philanthropy requires a focus on others over self. A persistent focus on self will tend to have a much less expansive outlook.

Whereas the desire for political power involves a composite desire to achieve sway over others and to be seen to effect change. The desire for political power doesn’t intrinsically have anything to do with effecting positive social change. It should, but it doesn’t.

This points to an intriguing development in the tensions between power and wisdom. Perhaps we will see a period in which politicians are shamed into behaving more responsibly and sincerely by the wealthy philanthropists. Why shouldn’t social improvement occur outside the mainstream political spectrum? And if they do, why shouldn’t this result in more pressure on politicians to focus on doing a job that serves the people rather than serving themselves?

Power rests where it lands. Wisdom, too.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.