Episodes
What is with him? How can he believe such garbage? It's so bad it's not even wrong. It's worse than wrong! Sometimes I think he's just clueless. He simply can't see the truth. But then other times I get this whiff of the devious and think he can see the truth just fine but refuses to. For selfish reasons. To get what he wants, he's pretending he can't see. It's all a con. He's manipulating me. But then I feel bad for assuming the worst. Maybe he’s neither clueless nor lying. He’s just...
Published 01/11/12
That's the fourth time she's done it and this time you're not going to let it pass. Carefully, diplomatically you tell her that she has got to stop insulting you in front of your friends. It's getting weird. If she has complaints and criticisms, you want her to talk with you about them frankly and privately, rather than attacking you indirectly and publicly. She listens and then pleasantly, earnestly, as if trying to reassure you, says, “It is not my intent to insult and attack you.  I would...
Published 11/10/11
"The secret to a stable relationship like ours," she said proudly," is give and take, a real 50/50 balance." I should look at her while she's talking to me, but I'm sneaking peeks at him, checking for a reaction. I know the couple well and you would have to cook the books pretty creatively to call their relationship 50/50. My guess is closer to 90/10. In our circles she's notorious for her demands and expectations. She takes up a lot of space which he supplies with nary a flinch. How does...
Published 11/02/11
Maybe they just didn't hear you. Or maybe they heard you just fine and have decided that you're an idiot, not even worth responding to. Maybe they got your message but are simply too busy to respond. Maybe they're just quietly thinking it over and still haven't decided. Maybe they're so apologetic that they don't know what to say.  Maybe they're just having fun leaving you dangling. Whatever it is, it has been longer than you expected.  The silence is deafening. What does it mean? Maybe...
Published 10/26/11
After I left the world's largest hippie commune but before I cut off my long hair, it occurred to me that the two central tenets of our hippie beliefs were on a collision course with each other. We were talking out both sides of our mouths, saying opposite, irreconcilable things. On the one hand we were saying, "We are all one on this spaceship earth and must act together to save it." On the other we were saying “If it feels good do it.” For the most part, we we’re oblivious to the clash....
Published 09/06/11
Do you watch movies and TV, read fiction, follow politics or like good gossip? If you do, then chances are you're a lifelong student of Villainology, the study of what makes bad guys bad and mean people suck. Criminology is something else, the study of people who break laws. A lot of the world's worst villains climb to positions of power without breaking the law. We start our children into Villainology young with easy detection tests, bad guys who look mean in their black hats and warty...
Published 08/31/11
If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make sociopaths out of large numbers of us. Robert Hare, psychology's most famous expert on psychopaths distinguishes psychopaths from sociopaths as follows. Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves … Sociopathy is not a formal...
Published 07/20/11
In economist Ha-Joon Chang's wonderful book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism," the first of the 23 things is that there are no absolutely free markets. Think about it. If freeing up markets were always the solution, then wouldn't we allow the purchase of slaves, hiring of eight year olds, and immigration of anyone who wanted to work here at any price? No free market purist can or would advocate these things. So where do they draw the line? Wherever they want. And then they...
Published 07/01/11
My ex-partner is a sociopath. No really. I hope you believe me. But then I also hope you doubt me too. A sociopath has little or no conscience, and "the little" in that definition is a very big problem. How little is little enough to warrant the diagnosis of sociopathy? Conscience is expensive. To be entirely conscientious would be impossible for any of us, manifesting as constant effort on behalf of others and constant guilt, shame, and remorse for not being able to do enough. We all...
Published 06/15/11
I'm entitled to do what you, in my same circumstances would not be entitled to do--that's a double standard. Being civilized means trying to constrain the natural human tendency toward such double standards. The tendency toward double standards doesn't originate with humans. It is as old as life itself. All organisms demonstrate autonomous agency. A bird, unlike a rock, looks out for herself and hers. A tree without even a nervous system competes for sunlight. We humans have got life’s...
Published 06/07/11
"The conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them; we get over them." John Dewey in The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy Tell me, are...
Published 05/27/11
Between optimism and pessimism, optimism has a better reputation. 'Tis better to be optimistic than pessimistic, or so says conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Buy into it at your own peril because, if you don't watch out people will manipulate and bully you with the supposed but fake virtue of optimism. It's not that it's better to be pessimistic but that optimism and pessimism are two sides of the same coin. To be optimistic about one alternative is to be relatively...
Published 05/18/11
All adages are seeds of wisdom, eggs we fertilize by bringing our attention to them, causing them to start subdividing into a range of complementary and conflicting perspectives about matters fundamental. We fertilize them by cracking through the shells that hold them together. Opened, their parts can be played with. We can slot alternative words in, find ways to make them say the opposite. Crack open a saying and reverse the pieces, you usually get something interesting. A save in time...
Published 04/21/11
A pinhead is a person so small-minded his shoulders taper up to either a pin's head or even narrower, a pinpoint. We apply the epithet like an X marking the spot, pinpointing anyone we think is an idiot. I'm on a never-ending quest for objective definitions of wisdom and conversely, stupidity. By objective, I mean something beyond thinking a butthead is just anyone I butt heads with. This quest has practical implications in that much of the misery humans impose on each other stems from...
Published 04/09/11
I both envy and loathe the self-certain. I envy them their peace of mind. I loathe their bullying. Increasingly, I see debate as doubting matches, opponents casting doubt on each other's opinions. The self-certain are master doubt-casters impervious to doubts cast their way. A mighty fortress is their opinion even when their opinion is dumb or ultimately deadly. I don’t just loathe their bullying. I loathe the peril they put us in, luring the weak-minded to their side in throngs, dominating...
Published 03/30/11
Qaddafi is a sociopath, a man impervious to any sense of self-doubt. His kind are all too common in positions of power. Sociopathocracy--government by sociopath is so common, the argument that the war in Iraq was a priority because it got rid of one such sociopath makes little sense. Yes the world is better off without Saddam, but for every deposed tyrant there are dozens more. Supposedly three percent of males and one percent of females are sociopaths. Among leaders the percentage is much...
Published 03/22/11
Let me tell you how spiritual paths should work from beginning to end. I know it's bold of me to claim to know, but I'm taking my cue from the many spiritual teachers out there who speak with just this kind of audacious authority. You ask the average Joe or Jo on the street, "Is it best to be invested in things, to really care, to really commit--or is it best to be divested, to let go, to be really detached?” and they’ll say, “Well, of course, it depends.” The average Joe and Jo know that...
Published 03/12/11
I've been concerned about climate crisis for decades, doubly concerned because I've been unable to find any action likely to make a big difference. Every little bit we can do, seems to add up to not nearly enough, because most of what we can do runs against political and economic currents and I haven't been able to find an art-of-the-possible way to align political and economic currents with what the climate requires. Recently I think I've found something that could align all currents. It is...
Published 03/04/11
What does confidence in our opinions indicate about the likelihood that our opinions are correct? Think of confidence as a delectable treat, a cookie rewarded when you have worked hard, or stolen from the cookie jar when you haven't. If you only reward yourself with the satisfying treat for doing careful investigation and interpretation, then the more confident you are, the more likely that you're correct. By this "confident-means-true" interpretation, when we say "I really believe that the...
Published 02/05/11
"Ok, from now on I won't be angry at you about that." "I swear from here on out, I'll be more appreciative." "Trust me, starting now I'll stop being irritated all the time." In my experience, an increase in such pledges to feel a certain way "from now on" is a sure sign that a partnership is on the rocks. Such pledges are attempts to manually override intuition, and there's only so much hope for overriding intuition. The problem with manual overrides is that they require chronic, 24/7...
Published 11/14/10
Friends and I gave a ride to a hitchhiking teen last week. The conversation was difficult because we couldn't hear her. Between our aging ears, the rumble of the car and her nearly inaudible mumbles, her ideas just weren't getting through. She had to say everything twice or more. I remember mumbling inaudibly at her age. It was how I coped with my fundamental uncertainty. I anticipated myself saying something stupid I'd want to retract. Once your foot is in your mouth though, there’s no...
Published 11/01/10
Life is like getting on a boat that is about to sink. D.T. Suzuki "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man." Ernest Becker. We are mirror mortals, the first known species with the capacity to imagine the full arc of life and to know in definitive detail that we die.  We get on the boat; we row...
Published 09/27/10
Folks, we face a problem I'm wondering if you're willing to think about with me. It's a real challenge, a challenge to morality posed by recent revelations in logic. It turns out we're living in a world that doesn't seem to offer a final logical authority, no highest possible perspective from which we can discriminate between right and wrong on all lower levels.  Regardless the standard we might claim is the most all encompassing and ultimate, someone can come along and claim an even more...
Published 09/23/10
IMHO: In my humble opinion--what's the deal with that? What do we ever say that isn't our humble opinion? And yet when we declare "It's raining" do we really mean "I think it's raining" or is raining a fact, and therefore not a matter of humble opinion? In the acronym IMHO, the H is redundant. IMO is already humbled, revealing awareness of one's role as an interpreter of evidence, as if to say, "The opinions expressed here are those of the expressor and may not be those of reality itself,...
Published 09/17/10