Rational Philosophy

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.

Last night I performed a show with no audience. Apart from myself and the bass player, the only people in the room for much of the gig were the sound engineer and the wait person. (Toward the end a few people showed up early for the next act.) And yet, I was aware of creating a performance, an event. This event lacked an object, and so could be said to be not a true performance. After all, what is a performance without an audience?

The reverse of this experience, I suppose, would be an object without an event.

Just now I read the New York Times piece about a woman called Tania Head who has claimed to be a 9/11 survivor, a claim which now seems unverifiable and possibly false. Her story of survival has moved people. She has acted as a survivor and engaged with others as a survivor. If she is not a survivor, if her stories have been fabricated, then what does that say about the truth of the responses she has evoked in others?

From reading the Times piece it seems that Ms. Head has not been trying to make anyone feel anything inappropriate about the events of 9/11 or its aftermath. She has not been attempting to misrepresent the tragedy, only her own part in it. And yet, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who has spoken to Ms. Head and responded to her story, I would feel that something had been taken away from me, that I had been cheated.

This reaction seems at once rational and irrational.

In communication and in representation, the truth is illusive. Any encoding of a story or feeling into words or signs must fail to perfectly convey the truth. Communication is at best an approximation of the truth. Likewise, the study of fundamental physics tells us that nothing can be exactly known about a physical measurement. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle indicates this with great force: The more accurately we measure the location of a thing (a particle) the less sure we can be about its momentum. We can never approach exactness in either one or the other, since the inexactness of the other will approach infinity.

In Ms. Head’s case, if we presume for the sake of argument that she is not a survivor, then her story is a fabrication. Then again, it is a fabrication in which many of the aspects of the story are approximately accurate, they just didn’t happen to her. Ms. Head didn’t survive, but some did. Ms. Head didn’t experience the emotion of that trauma, but some did. She has drawn on her fiction, one presumes, from reports of the actual experiences of others.

Rationally then, again presuming that Ms. Head’s tale is fabrication, what she has done is to label something as her experience when it is not her experience. To label it a best approximation of her truth, when it is not. We only have our lives, and in our lives the closer we can come to an honest and true awareness of the world around us, the more we can derive value and add value. This, I think, is why a report such as this, of possibly deliberate fabrication, so makes us recoil and wish it were other.

 

ÂÂ