Ambition V. Contentment

This post is very much a work in progress, so my apologies for the inevitable incompleteness of the ideas presented below…

The question arises frequently – especially in a tough economy – that of love of one’s time versus the desire to accomplish.
Seems the bridge to resolve this seeming conflict lies at the intersection of loving what you do along with finding a purpose for this pursuit. To put it in a pseudo-algorithm form, the process would look like the following:
1) define what your purpose in life is. If this is too big, how about answering a few questions such as:
* I was put on this earth to________
* What would you like your tombstone to read?
* What would you like your grand kids to remember about you?
* Imagine laying on your death bed and reflecting back on your younger years. Meditate on two scenarios: one in which you look back with regret and longing; the other in which you are proud of the life you led. What principles can you distill from this exercise and implement in your life now? List them to make it concrete.

2) Define what you love to do and (if you’re feeling positive) what you think you might do better than your peers? Where are your aptitudes?
Ask:
* Will I find satisfaction in learning the fundamentals (overcoming ‘the learning curve’), despite the elementary nature of such pursuit?
* Will I take pride in the process, even when I’m not yet proficient? When I am proficient?

3) tbc…..

Notes on Ferguson’s ‘The War of the World’

Having just completed the excellent study of the past century in war, ‘The War of the World’ by Niall Ferguson, I though I’d jot down a few notes as much for my own recollection (of the 600+ pager) as well as for those interested.
Let me start with a few broad strokes to try and summarize some of the book’s findings:

Ferguson lists three ingredients as key predictive indicators of the descent of societies into genocide and brutal conflict of the type seen over and again throughout the past century (and more recently in Yugoslavia and Rwanda). These ingredients are the 3E’s: economic volatility, ethnic integration, the decline of an empire. This theory – that is, the confluence of the 3E’s – helps explain why certain regions at certain times experience such brutality.

Appeasement, as embodied by the policies of Chamberlain in Britain just before the war, is frequently regarded (rightfully) as disastrous. The book breaks down into a finer granularity than I’d seen in other books just why it was so bad. He cites five reasons: first, Chamberlain wholly failed to appreciate Hitler’s appeal to the ethnic Germans. Second, the assumption of moderate elements within the Nazi regime that could be strengthened. Third, it was assumed that Britain would gain some kind of military/strategic advantage by waiting. This assumption rested on two faulty ideas: that Hitler had a greater capacity to bomb civilian populations in England than indeed was the case (this should have been known false given the intelligence they had at the time); additionally, the British failed to consider that while prolonging the inevitable war might somewhat allow them to strengthen their military, proportionately they would weaken in comparison to Hitler’s quickly growing industrial capacity, particularly with the annexation of land and materials to the east. Fourth, it was thought that good relations with the Italian dictator, Mussolini, would somehow keep Hitler in check. Fifth, Ferguson lays blame squarely on Chamberlain for failing to:

attach a significant probability to the worst-case scenario that appeasement would fail, so that Britain’s position was unnecessarily exposed when, in due course, it did.

The book addresses some of the most perplexing questions of the war, specifically, how can it be explained that the most advanced societies (i.e. Germany, Japan) were responsible for the greatest brutality humanity has ever committed? The book raises the interesting point that rather than inoculate the population against the insane rantings of the messianic Hitler, their education and sophistication allowed them to more easily submit to his charisma.
Why?

Ferguson posits several reasons for this. For one, amidst the severe depression that Germany was experiencing, Hitler offered radical solutions – no doubt appealing to desperate elements within the society – but more interestingly,

Recent research based on the smallest electoral unit has revealed the extraordinary breadth of the Nazi vote. There is an almost fractal quality to the picture that emerges, with each electoral district somewhat resembling the national map, and hotspots of support scattered all over the country.

Hitler argued for default on reparations, attempting to cast the yolk of subservience (to other powers) in favor of invoking a mythological vision of German and Aryan supremacy. While Hitler was this vision incarnate, the wheels were no doubt greased by the marketing/branding acumen of Goebbels. But what is interesting is Hitler’s appeal to the numerous intellectual elites.

Professionals, too, proved exceptionally susceptible to Hitler’s appeal. Lawyers and doctors were substantially over-represented within the NSDAP…to fat middle-aged lawyers, he was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome…others found economic rationales for the Nazis’ policies of ‘racial hygiene. Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche had published their Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life in 1920, which sought to extrapolate from the annual cost of maintaining one ‘idiot’ ‘the massive capital…being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes’

One calculation from 1951 asserted that,

The economic benefit of killing 70,273 mental patients – assuming an average daily outlay of 3.50 marks and a life expectancy of ten years – would be 885,439,800 marks.

Such calculations lay bare the chilling juxtaposition of rational analysis against what is a fundamentally unanswerable concept (to us in the West) of the worth or meaning of life, let alone the ‘damaged’ life of those divergent from the norm.
Further, it does seem possible to positively correlate religious fervor with economic difficulty. Indeed, Hitler was a quasi-religious persona putting forth what Ferguson convincingly asserts was a political religion, with lines cited by new SS initiates including,

We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created…and in the Fuhrer…whom he has sent us.

Of crucial importance to properly understanding the situation is that Jews were intimately integrated into German society, with levels of intermarriage spiking between roughly 1912 – 1920. Indeed, many of the most fervent Nazi leaders had at one point had relationships with Jews, including Hitler, Goebbels and even the academic elites such as the towering philosopher, Martin Heidegger.
Ferguson,

One of the great puzzles of the twentieth century, then, is that the most extreme racial violence in all history had its origins in a soceity where assimilation was progressing with exceptional rapidity…perhaps the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is best understood as a reaction to the very success of German-Jewish assimilation.

As is noted in the book,

Goebbels’s first references in his diary to the Jews as ‘filthy pigs’, ‘traitors’, and ‘vampires’ date from the breakdown of his relationship with Janke (a Jew).

Such accounts lead one to imagine a collective and insatiable urge on the part of the Nazi elite to replace a self-loathing past with a fantasy of grandeur.

Germans had a distaste for the messy compromise exemplified by Democratic systems. Perhaps the intellectual nature of the German population lent itself to visions of utopia, with it’s clean logic and racial purity as a cornerstone (favoring skyhooks rather than cranes, to borrow Daniel Dennett’s term). The idea of racial purity contained within it the seeming state-of-the-art science of genetics, certainly something to appeal to more intellectual sensibilities. This is not as anachronistic an idea as it sounds; Hitler in a speech is said to have thanked the (Southern) Americans with their negative policies toward miscegnation and other forms of integration as providing a framework for some of his own racial policies.

It is fascinating to think how much of the 20th centuries brutality was thinly veiled in ideology: look no further than Hitler’s cries for Lebenstraum, ‘living space’ and eugenic ideas of racial purity that virtually obliterated Judaism – certainly in Europe; incessant Japanese fabrication of pretexts in Manchuria and China toward their own expansionist ends; Pol Pot’s absurd ideas on a peasant revolution in Cambodia; Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ in which tens of millions of Chinese were killed in the largest famine in world history as well as the estimated death of around a million Chinese in the ‘Cultural Revolution’; Stalin’s purges and five year plans in which tens of millions of Russians starved or were outright killed toward industrializing the nation; The Cold War theory of mutually assured destruction (along with the US’s domino theory) which quite nearly ended the world with nuclear standoff with the Russians in Cuba. The shear breadth of ideologies with which destructive ends could be attained makes one wonder if ideology is merely an excuse for the inevitable.

Another theme to emerge is the fuzzy logic of equating Jews with Communists as well as the widely held belief, propagated by Hitler, that Jews aimed to ‘pollute the blood’ of the Aryan race. To what extent these and other similar ideas about Jews were fully integrated into the consciousness of the average German, rather than existing unconnected, is not discussed. Nevertheless, these ideas were not started by Hitler. One of the best selling books of the decade was Arthur Dinter’s Sin Against the Blood (1918) – in abridged form – a Jewish man impregnates an Aryan woman. She then gives birth to a scarcely human creature. And because she once slept with a Jew she cannot, even with her new Nordic honey, birth a respectable Aryan. The woman has lost her Aryan purity at the hands of a Jew. Apparently this was only one of many such best-selling books that helped set an intellectual foundation upon which Hitler could build his brief empire, not despite the wishes of his constituency, but rather with their zealous support.

As easy as it was for the Germans to scapegoat the Jews, we should be careful of similarly dismissing the Third Reich Germans, sealed off spatially and temporally as they are from the rest of us. The Holocaust stands apart from other atrocities for many reasons, not least of which is how logic, thought usually to exist outside of the emotions, became so easily the slave of cruelty. It is the targeted and premeditated methodology employed by Hitler toward the Jews that stood in contrast to other murderous regimes that were far less discriminating in their meting of terror.

While the factors leading to WWII and the Holocaust include Ferguson’s 3E’s, surely another major ingredient is the attitudes and plasticity of ideas within the society. Goebbels (Hitler’s propaganda minister) proved himself a master of manipulation. His methods worked to mobilize the German electorate to previously unthinkable atrocities.

But these methods persist, useful as marketing tools to sell products. For example several cinematic techniques used today in commercials trace their origin to Triumph of the Will, the pioneering propaganda film by Riefenstahl that included moving cameras, aerial photography and distorted perspective including ‘hero’ shots from below (some of the recent commercials recruiting soldiers to the US Navy are prime examples of the use such ingredients). If these emotionally evocative techniques weren’t necessary and products judged by their merits alone, then companies would cease to use this ‘language’ to reach people.

It is fascinating to consider how the fanatical ideas held by a few men in power had the fecundity to penetrate the minds of others (call them strong memes). Like the nuclear bomb, that from a small bit of matter unleashes an enormous force, so too was it with many of the aforementioned populations. With minimal (but sufficient) energy these populations were catalyzed to report, rape and murder their neighbors and in many cases their childhood friends. It’s hard to escape concluding that these murderous tendencies are in all of us, like energy in an atom. Maybe a better analogy would be the kernel of information contained within a genome (or seed) that, given certain conditions, can express in many ways.

To borrow Richard Dawkins’s term ‘meme’ (a unit of cultural inheritance, an idea) we might think ourselves as existing within an ecology of memes (EOM), each competing for space in the minds of individuals. The EOM presents an interesting lens through which to examine the fractal nature of ideas – and the competition between them – as they struggle for survival by replication: from an ephemeral flicker inside the individual, to a circle of advocates, and up to the scale of virtually irrevocable truth at the social level.

Tyson

Just watched Tyson – the documentary about the great boxer. I was struck by how impressionable a personality he has. I was also amazed that the source of his ferocity was the fear of being bullied. As a child he once kept pigeons. Some bigger kids came by and snapped the neck of one of them, throwing the limp body by Tyson’s feet. Tyson fought him, won and found some level of respect.
Anyway, Tyson found strong guidance in the form of an old Irish boxer/mentor. This guy built up Tyson’s confidence. He was a lost youth – surely would have ended up dead or in prison if not for this man.
What was most impressive to me was how this guy knew how to mold raw human potential. Equipped with a very specific vision – the heavy weight championship of the world – he took the mush and through discipline, training, visualization and guidance, made it happen (If only his fragile character could keep up with his fame and physical power).

I was inspired at the power of a vision to manifest when accompanied by faith, steely commitment and a strategy. Beautiful stuff.

In Service of a Singular Vision

Ever wonder how some people get so far, product so much?
The trick is to find and serve that singluar vision that puts the fire in your belly: forecasting, teaching, determining the mechanisms of x,y,z physiological event, music, proving some theorem, whatever (bonus points for obscurity!).
With this orientation, the world conspires to assist us (Goethe, loosely). Whatever it is, we must be small and humble, servants toward the larger vision. When we are that end, when it’s all about us, our vision is too small. Time to Rethink it!
It’s a gift to find some piece of the world, no matter how small, that we can work on and make just a little better; that we can leave some evidence of our having lived. That is really what it’s about.