rant

for the last six or eight months, i’ve carried around a quote in the signature of my emails:

“once you can see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”

growing up, it’s easy to believe that there is a limit to understanding; that, when you finally achieve adulthood, you will have experienced all things and will make educated, verifiably correct decisions accordingly.  and then you have that wondeful, despair-inducing realization that the set of things is actually unfathomably, inexperienceably large.  throw in a ferrari or a new wife and this is also called a midlife crisis.

our boundaries are in place to try to shield us from this uncomfortable realization.  they provide the rules, structures, and limits to our worlds, and in doing so help us to differentiate between what we believe to be comparably easy and what we believe to be comparably hard.  in truth, the only difference between the easy and the hard is psychological.  we understand this implicitly, but somehow remain so easily shocked when olympians like usain bolt and michael phelps shatter our notion of what is possible.

the impact of travel is similarly monumental.  deep, honest immersion in another society makes us aware of the unspoken limitations of our own.  hiding behind the western rhetoric about the pursuit of happiness is the fear that we’re not really happy, and that all this work might not actually be worth the promised reward of Truth that keeps elusively escaping us.  we chase a utopian ideal, consistently ignoring what we know to be true.  and we live within our walls, rarely summoning the strength to peep over and see what might be hidden just outside.

it’s both unfair and insulting to suggest that the pastoral - and often poverty-stricken - life in a place like India inspires a nobility that is preferable to our world of Plasma and LCD.  but it’s similarly one-dimensional to believe that the nature of that life is so much worse.  hidden behind the marble countertops over here is a feeling of sadness that overwhelmed my return almost as oppressively as the sweltering humidity that marked my departure.  this place resonates with the drone of perfection that permeates every family photo and each carefully selected keffiyah.  that drive for perfection, in its intensity of pain, seems to challenge the authentic realities of a totally separate world overcome with disease and poverty.  the biggest affliction affecting the world, i’ve come to believe, is our own attachment to our idea of the importance of our Selves, and the very sad irony is that we’re too self-involved to see it, much less stop the rate at which we’re helping the disease of Self-Importance propagate around the planet.

i’m not smart enough to understand how we got ourselves into this pickle or how to get ourselves out.  but i do think it’s a conversation that’s worth having together, which is why i’m always trying to push you to see past your own limits.  as i keep learning, the most difficult part in reconfiguring your boundaries is finding your new ones.

“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to.”

-the controller, mustapha mond. from aldous huxley’s brave new world

i read a recent essay called ‘lies we tell kids‘ that astutely pointed out that there is nothing remarkable about our universal acceptance of telling lies. we may not like it, but we all know it, which is why any childish and otherwise curious probe into sex/drugs/religion/politics/anthropological differences is best handled with a curt “ask your parents”. parents are the resource to handle tough or uncomfortable questions, which means that parents are like the wikipedia for children, which must mean that wikipedia is so popular either because there are so many parents or so many children.

the problem with both parents and wikipedia is that most lies are so pervasive that they become buried in otherwise useless information and accordingly impossible to find. society tries to address this issue by constructing that uncomfortable mid-teens scenario between dad and jonny when we learn that little jonny has actually been watching hard core porn for 5 years and that dad is horrendously out of step with current slang. and so, with a brief few words on love, responsibility, drug abuse, and birth control, dad slaps jonny on the shoulder, discretely ignores the odd-coloured, misshaped sock half hidden under the bed, and exits the room, having finally off-loaded his final parental responsibility. jonny is now a man.

if only it were so simple. as children grow up, they become liars themselves, and the resulting self-analysis and guilt allows for an examination of what is and isn’t a lie. here is an example list that i recently created:

lies

history

baseball records

4 out of 5 dentists recommend trident

tom cruise is a good actor

being successful requires formal education

you can do anything if you set your mind to it

rich people don’t need god

carbs are bad for you

not lies

climate change

while vibrant debate could help explain the reasons behind the need to tell these lies, it seems obvious that lying is a widespread social pathos. in this line of thinking, that condescending sneer “you can’t change the world” seems to prove that awareness of these lies is so universal that even talking about their existence has become banal.

that’s another lie:

lies

it’s ok to knowingly accept a lie because everyone else does

not lies

it’s not.

lying is so widespread that sometimes lies are told by the best of people, like our parents, doctors, and superman. medical professionals, for example, lie when they say “saving lives”, because what they really mean is “postponing death”, which are two vastly different things when you think about it. but because we’re a society that is intensely focused on the short term, as neatly summarized in a 30-minute episode (or, at best, an 8 week series), we actively reduce the individual to an abstraction: “heroic man heroically saves baby from near collision speeding bus” is an easier story to digest when compared to “depressive, lazy, moderately abusive and slightly overweight man who doesn’t go to church, calls his mother only annually, and occasionally entertains himself by furtively masturbating in the change room at jc penney heroically saves a baby who will go on to post pictures of himself passed out drunk at high school parties on facebook until his late 40s.” details are purposefully kept outside the lines lest they interfere with what would otherwise be a simple moral judgement. thus we learn omitting details is tantamount to lying:

lies

not telling

not lies

the whole story

that moral judgements are so complex is a real, practical concern. take a simplified look at two complex global issues: climate change and global poverty. alleviating poverty though improving the economic circumstances of the poor (using current technologies) will increase the likelihood of climate change, which - due to the irony of geography - will have its greatest effects in the countries that are currently the most poor. so are we saving lives or just postponing death? this is a question worth thinking about. unless you are jeff sachs, your issues are probably less global, but equally complex.

and is death even worth postponing, both in the figurative and the literal sense? while we might vigorously debate the humanity of trying to save a given societies, most of us would very viscerally agree that, yes, individual death postponement is one of the qualities that makes us human, and that any society that doesn’t overtly protect its citizens - especially the weakest ones - is inhuman, if not downright evil, lending some clarity to the question posed at the beginning of this sentence. but most of us would also probably agree that universal immortality is not in the best interest of the whole: we’d probably run out of space, for one, and we’d also run out of old people to get bored of and marginalize. this means there is some age at which society believes it’s appropriate to die, which could probably be established somewhere between 70 and 90 for most people besides angst-ridden teenagers and bryan adams, who concur that there is a direct path from 18 to dying. this is something else worth thinking about, but generally held from in polite conversation.

lies

bryan adams is out of touch with today’s angst-ridden teenagers

not lies

bryan adams is not a topic for polite conversation

just because everyone shares the same opinion doesn’t mean that it’s in the best interest of either the group or even the individual. saving a life is good, unless the saved life goes on to become a murderous dictator, in which case, it was bad. saving lots of lives is good, but saving so many lives that the world becomes horribly overcrowded is bad. empowering women is good, but empowering women by creating a microfinance funded group that enables them to operate a women-run factory that takes them away from time spent with family, meaning their children grow up with a sociopathic deficiency for love is bad. this applies to life, but also to liberty and the pursuit of happine$$.

you get the picture, but if you don’t, i’ll make it clearer:

lies

moral judgements are easy

no one can predict the future. because we can never understand the consequences of our actions we can never decide in advance whether an action will be good or bad. in fact, we can’t even decide if past actions were good or bad without being given sufficient time to consider its impact. even establishing an appropriate time scale is difficult, considering that the goodness and badness of people like muhammed and christ are still variously debated hundreds of years after their deaths (or whatever). in fact, one prominent author claims that the human race made its worst mistake with the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, which means that the christ/muhammed argument might still have some legs yet. that leads to this inexorable and delightfully unpalatable conclusion:

lies

everything

not lies

nothing

if you’re waiting impatiently for me to get to the point, that’s exactly my point. there is no point and i doubt that there can ever be a point; people far more self-involved than me have dedicated a lot of philosopher-angst into these questions for centuries, in most cases without bryan adams. but in case there can be a point, it’s going to take a lot more external debate and internal soul searching to get to. our society seems so focused on fast forwarding past the reasons behind the moral judgement to get to the juicy part, but my hunch is that when we get to the eventual conclusion, it will be less fun than just beginning the process of fucking self analysis already. it seems to me that there is a lot more merit in carefully considering why we do, what we should do, and who we are when we do than just doing what we always do.

in order to make better moral judgements, we need to stop lying about everything. and if everyone isn’t going to stop lying, we need to look harder, with our hearts, minds, and souls. looking hard isn’t fun, but neither is being lied to.

lies

you can think too much

you waste your time trying to understand

you can never be better than you are right now

not lies

climate change

is it trendier these days to be an environmentalist or an atheist? there’s probably more evidence to convince the undecided to go green, but if i really thought about it, it’s probably more compelling to be an atheist because the day to day doesn’t change too much and because it eliminates the need for the vast majority of early morning wake-ups.

maybe this should be called the ‘what’s in it for me’ generation?

some people argue that the answer to ‘what’s not in it for me?’ is child molestation and genocide. i suppose it’s a fair observation that religion has been linked to these acts, but any suggestion that the relationship is somehow causal is a gross overexaggeration. people have been doing bad things to each other for 100,000 years and likely will continue to do so far into the future, unless something goes wrong with the large hadron collider.

(by the way, the large hadron collider is the new particle accelerator at CERN. this particular device, you should know, has a chance to create a black hole and wipe out the existence of our planet, but scientists conclude that it is - wait for it - “beyond reasonable doubt”.)

this argument i can buy. but does atheism hold some sort of intellectual superiority over theistic belief? many atheists feel this way. have you ever heard an atheist choke on their milk when someone in the room mentions they are a creationist? (try it! it’s a fun experiment.)

it’s not that i believe any particular god story is better than the scientific version. my issue is that belief in atheism is often related to an unshakeable confidence in the ideas of material realism: that things exist out there in the world and that science has the ability to measure them. these days, in this part of the world, any position that questions the implied superiority of science somehow suggests a lack of education or a brainwashed mind.

here’s my problem. this type of belief is predicated on four assumptions:

1) a material world exists external to us;

2) this material world is measurable by human instruments;

3) this material world is comprehensible by human consciousness;

4) humans will be confident in the true nature of this material world when they find it.

insofar as we will never be able to accurately answer these things, shouldn’t the unshakeability of an atheist’s convictions call the entire belief set into doubt?  besides, believing that humans - of all species in the universe, let alone the earth - are somehow endowed with an unparalleled power to comprehend the true nature of things suggests some sort of implied superiority; superiority of specific groups being, of course, one of the atheist’s critiques of organized religion.

i wonder, how would we regard the world if we were capable of removing ourselves from a conception of superiority. how would the nature of things have been written by history’s losers - those cultures that have been wiped away through conquest?

maybe it’s time to reconsider the notion that we are moving on a path towards absolute truth. is there actually such a thing as progress? if there is, what are we progressing towards?

this is a great read, from mcgill prof henry mintzberg.  henry steps back to look at the absurdity of the situation we’ve created for ourselves.  sometimes it’s hard to see when your nose is pressed up against the window.

http://www.henrymintzberg.com/pdf/productivity2008.pdf 

here’s the profound thought of the day:  “no decision is logical.  conclusions are logical;  decisions are never logical.”

this evening, i spoke extensively with a friend’s father, a design professor at the emily carr school of design in vancouver.  we talked about sustainability and consumerism and all those other things that i rant about daily.  i asked him, “are you optimistic about the future?”  “well, let’s put it this way: when i bought a cabin 20 years ago, i made sure to buy it high on the mountainside.”

the canary isn’t just dead: its carcass has been sold to the highest bidder.

i never really got the christmas thing when i was growing up. for one thing, my family wasn’t the type to exchange presents, however non-denominational they might seem. accordingly, i’ve also never bought my dad a tie or a pair of socks, which makes me decidedly uncommon - or so popular culture would have me believe.

there are plenty of people who will argue extensively that rampant gift giving has nothing to do with the true ideals espoused by jesus, but i don’t want to talk about that because i believe that there’s nothing wrong with designated days to show our gratitude and love to our family and friends; even the best of us needs a reminder from time to time. but what really boggles my mind about christmas is learning how bad we are at gift giving, and the associated economic and social waste that results.

yesterday i stumbled on this year-old article from the new yorker. in it, the author discusses something called ‘the deadweight loss of christmas’:

A deadweight loss is created when you spend eighty dollars to give me a sweater that I would spend only sixty-five dollars to buy myself. [the study] estimates that somewhere between ten and eighteen per cent of seasonal spending becomes deadweight loss, which means that billions of dollars a year is now going to waste.

ok, but it’s the thought that counts, right? well, not so fast:

according to a survey by the National Retail Federation, forty per cent of America expects to return at least one holiday gift this year, and an American Express survey found that roughly a third of respondents had “re-gifted” presents.

so we’re out there spending all this time earning money to buy gifts, then spending all of our saturdays and sundays from thanskgiving until christmas eve considering, planning, shopping for, and eventually purchasing gifts, and the result is that we’re overpaying for gifts that people don’t actually want.

weird.

this has led, of course, to the boon in gift cards. while it’s apparently unacceptable to give money as a gift - a thought that never occurred to either jewish grandmothers or italian relatives of relatives - we’ve become socialized to the idea that exchanging stored value on gift cards somehow falls into the ‘gift’ camp instead of the ‘cash’ camp.

that’s probably because cash is an order of magnitude more valuable than a gift card. gift cards make us arbitrarily deciding which stores the receiver should shop at: a bookstore gift card, for example, doesn’t do any good for anyone with a library membership (and if you don’t have a library membership and live in a major city AND still buy books for full price from a big box bookstore, i have a simple question: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?). gift cards also represent a fundamental mismanagement of our money: we’re forgoing any interest we could be earning on the cash and giving an interest free loan to the store of choice, some of whom actually have the audacity to charge us for the service of lending them our money for free! and then, of course, there is the issue of upselling: because nothing ever comes to $50 exactly, when you give a gift card you’re generally obligating your recipient to spend more money to ‘unlock’ your gift.

but the worst part of giving a gift card is that, according to a reference in this article, 19% of people who receive one never use it. even if the card gets used, it rarely gets used completely; how exactly do you spend the leftover $4.72 in a clothing store? what’s worse, according to research referenced in the same article, 10% of stored-value on gift cards never gets redeemed, which, in the us, amounted to $8 billion dollars in 2006! i will emphasize that again: consumers in 2006 gave $8 billion dollars worth of real, hard-earned, after-tax money in gifts that effectively disappeared. actually, that’s not true: the $8 billion dollars was actually transferred to the shareholders of major retailers: a great modern day example of the rich profiting on the stupidity of the consuming class.

there is another pertinent point here: according to the storyofstuff.com, a mindboggling 99% of stuff isn’t being used a mere 6 months after it’s purchased. all of that stuff creates waste: either as a part of the manufacturing, transportation, packaging, or retailing processes; when the stuff actually becomes waste once you decide that you want faster, newer, prettier, more in fashion other stuff; or through the resulting environmental degradation, poverty, or war in the third world countries where the stuff actually comes from. (for example, did you know that 80% of the world’s reserves of coltan, an essential resource used in cellphones, computers, video game consoles, and other consumer electronics, is found in the not-so-democratic republic of congo where, incidentally, almost 4 million people have died in a horrible conflict over the past decade? if you didn’t, you should, but apparently these celebrities don’t.)

so, to summarize, in our mad rush to find ‘the perfect gift’, it turns out that we’re ignoring the fact that we’re doing a really shitty job. we are ‘wasting’ our hard-earned money by overspending on gifts that our recipients don’t want, we are wasting (without the air quotes) our hard-earned money by spending on gift cards that don’t actually get used, and we are wasting our fading relationship with other societies and our exceptionally fragile environment. forget thinking about what jesus would do: isn’t it time for us to take a hard look in the mirror and think about what we should do?

a conclusion, from the original new yorker article:

if most of the presents we buy are going to be less valuable in monetary terms than in sentimental ones, then there’s no reason to believe that the more expensive gift is a better gift. In fact, the more we spend at Christmas, the more we waste. We might actually be happier—and we’d certainly be wealthier—if we exchanged small, well-considered gifts rather than haunting the malls. Calculating the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts is a coldhearted project, but it leads to a paradoxically warmhearted conclusion: the fact of giving may be more important than what you give. Start with “Bah, humbug” and you somehow end up with “God bless us, every one.”

make this the christmas where we give handmade, thoughtful gifts that come from the heart. share happiness and joy and love and stories and ideas and experiences and memories and dreams. share by donating to a great cause in a loved one’s name. share a favourite book or a favourite piece of clothing. share a hug. or a kiss. or a brisk mid-winter walk in an inner city park.

why not make this the christmas when we finally learn to say no?