I'm grateful for Terry Jones' Koran-burning intolerance. Right wing rhetoric has escalated to the point where more is better, crossing the line into detachment from reality that should still be recognizable to most Americans as proto-fascism, a self-confirming, untestable ideological faith that demands that reality goes along with it. Terry Jones is an embarrassment the movement that spawned him. So out of touch, he believed that burning Koran's would win over moderate Muslims, and yet his...

As I've mentioned I'm trying to put my finger on what makes me and others intuit that there are two different psychological sub-cultures of humans. Red vs. Blue, Conservative vs. Liberal, Right vs. Left, religious vs. secular--maybe these divisions are symptomatic of the underlying difference, but they don't seem to get to the bottom of it. I obviously believe I belong to one of these two psychological sub-cultures, and am naturally inclined to think my sub-culture is superior. To counter my...

"You believe them? Are you out of your mind?! How can you not see through their lies?! It's so obvious your leaders are manipulative. And you just don't get it, do you?" Conservative friends have said that to me about my respect for likes of Obama, Reid, and Boxer, and I've said that to them about their respect for Palin, Beck, and McCain. As America becomes increasingly partisan, I sometimes wonder if we’re not just two separate species.  What distinguishes species is an inability to make...

I still have it, the sign my father, an innovative CEO of a large corporation had printed for use at executive meetings. In a 1960s font on yellowed cardboard it reads: What are we talking about? He designed it out of frustration with agenda drift. As a meeting conversation would overheat, sidetracked on some trivial matter, my dad would silently lift the sign off his lap. What are we talking about? He was asking people to step out of their stances within a conversation to notice what the...

We all know what's meant by "can't see the forest for the trees." It's a great turn of phrase reminding us not to lose scope and to keep the big picture in mind. But what are scope and the big picture anyway? The phrase "forest for trees" is especially apt because it originates in forestry and therefore biology.  Within biology patterns of hierarchy from small picture to big picture are plainly in play.  It's not just a figment of our imaginations.  Atoms make up molecules, which make up...

Last week I launched but didn't complete an attack on moral principles, arguing that they tend to make us dumber, not smarter. I focused on words I've called "synantonyms" elsewhere. Synantonyms are two words that describe the same behavior, but prescribe opposite responses to the behavior. I used "clingy" and "committed" as examples. They both describe perseverance, and yet clingy makes it sound bad and committed makes it sound good. Descriptively they’re synonyms; prescriptively they're...

Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I'm deeply committed to morality but I've never met a moral principle I could trust. I can illustrate this best by example. Consider these two moral principles: Don’t cling. Show commitment. What's the difference between clinging and commitment? From what I can tell, they are indistinguishable except that clinging is...

"I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon." That's the subtext for all sorts of human endeavor from finishing that project that already has you underpaid, over-budget and behind schedule, to coming up with the best approach to addressing global warming: We need it right, and we need it right now. Just today, a friend said to me, "Yes, I would like your help thinking this project through, but on...

It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don't know exactly what. Now you're arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thinks you turned it into a power struggle over who's right and--well, frankly you think he did. What exactly happened? Simplifying a lot, try picturing thinking as travel through a maze comprised of...

Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a later article. Free-market capitalism is a system that generates win-wins until there are no more win-wins to be had, until a market reaches what's called Pareto-optimality, a state in which there is...

What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son's bed. Loaded. Our son--who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings). He traded a prized possession of mine for that gun. When I confiscated it, he got right up in my face and yelled, "Give it back. I paid good money for that!" That's when we decided to hire the private police escorts to climb through his...

He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say something impressively forgiving and dignified. Do you mean it? Maybe not, but it works. He, braced for a fight, is thrown off balance, and suddenly you feel less threatened, safer in who you are...

Conflict is like a high-strung game of hot potato in which what you're shoving back and forth at each other is self-doubt. In conflict, we don't agree about something and, whether by necessity or sheer doggedness, we can't simply agree to disagree. Something has got to give, preferably our opponent's insistence, and so we go at each other trying to erode each other's confidence, questioning each other's plans, interpretations, motives, character, and intelligence-anything to get that...

About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedness: What is wisdom? What is rationality? And the great existential question: Now that we are forced to admit that there are inescapable differences of opinion about what God or the universe...

Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist...

Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can...

An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing...

The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you too?" she asked. "Yes," said her Grandpa. She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?" A fundamental principle: In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived...

My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. People with stressful lives would tend to find the beginning more painful and the ending more compelling. When grieving the end of my marriage, I suddenly lost my appetite for bravely honest movies...

"Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status...

Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see...

The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or sped-read to you. My writing drives some people crazy because I make big jumps from one topic to another. One minute I'm talking romance, the next I'm talking the origins of life. I aim to edit for smooth transitions but there's a bigger problem than prose styling. I've invested decades in research that trains my mind to follow abstract patterns. I'm doing what the anthropologist Gregory Bateson described as solving...

The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or speedread to you. Meg, a single woman in San Francisco had her habits and routines. She did yoga after work pretty much every day. Some nights she got together with friends; other nights she stayed home and watched DVDs or read. Her friends introduced her to Mark, a single guy from Oakland about ten miles away. Like Meg he enjoyed spending some nights out, but he insisted on practicing guitar every night. They dated...

The podcast is back. Click the buttons above to have this article read or spedread to you. A Holiday gift for someone thoughtful in your life? Consider the New York Times Best-selling graphic novel Logicomix. It's a beautiful story about the death of the 2,400-year-old dream of creating a system of logic that wasn’t founded on the shaky ground of intuitive assumptions. The central character is Bertrand Russell. Though he failed, his Herculean effort did contribute to the invention of the...