Where this show is better than the New York Times (4-16-24)

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Luke Ford

The New York Times and the rest of the elite media consistently put out more compelling articles than I do, but in their abundance of production, they often create more confusion than clarity.

Why is this? Does it have something to do with our different incentives? Yes. I feel driven to write what I think is true without regard to profit or popularity. There are no sacred cows here. I don’t need to make money or garner praise for these essays. I just want to share things I notice. The New York Times and The New Yorker, on the other hand, publish to fulfill the desires of their subscribers (such as why Trump and conservatives are bad and Russia hacked the 2016 election).

As a bloke with right-wing tendencies, I have no problem admitting that there is much that is stupid and bad about Trump and conservatives. I would like to think that I am not driven by a partisan agenda.

I read The New Yorker today about misinformation regarding misinformation, and I thought, I’ve been saying this for years on my Youtube show. I felt full of myself. I wanted to yell to the world — Hey! My trad rules for life and principles for how the world works are sharper than the shiny new offerings of elite discourse. Tune into Fordy to get ahead of the curve!

I like the trajectory of my shows and essays over the past decade. To me, they keep getting better. When I read things I wrote five or more years ago, or listen to things I said on my podcast, they often make me wince because my commentary too often seems juvenile, crude, and cruel. I pushed out too much provocation and not enough nuance.

Covid was a dramatic turning point in my intellectual journey. I was convinced by the arguments in Zeynep Tufecki’s New York Times op-ed March 17, 2020: “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired – To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy.”

I was initially agnostic about the need for lockdowns, but in early April of 2020, I read Paul Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History and I became more open to the idea of lockdowns and social distancing as good things (though I was always opposed to the closing of parks and beaches and other outdoor spaces because in an influenza epidemic, you want to get people outside and exercising).

Because I was sympathetic to public health measures trying to slow the spread of Covid (though many went too far, such as Michigan’s ban on the sale of seeds and gardening supplies), I was aligned with intellects such as Steve Sailer but I parted ways with right-wingers such as Michael Fumento, Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Michael Anton, Dennis Prager and the other conservative pundits who I saw as dangerously wrong and irresponsible. This experience broke me away from any tendencies towards right-wing partisan attachment.

I made my first post about the epidemic Mar. 10, 2020: “Jews, Non-Jews & The Corona Virus”

Before that, it came up on my show with Kevin Michael Grace on Jan. 31, 2020’s #415 1-31-20 Corona Virus Update, Brexit Live, Debating JF Gariepy On Israel and on my solo show Corona Virus, JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, Doxxing vs Pseudonyms (2-7-20).

I like these signposts along the way of my intellectual journey:

* What Do We Mean When We Say A Person Has ‘Good Energy’? (4-12-24)
* ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel’ (4-7-23)
* What Distinguishes Winners From Losers? (1-15-24)
* NYT: Secret Synagogue Tunnel Sets Off Altercation That Leads to 9 Arrests (1-10-24)
* Populism, Neoconservatism & Lessons in the Application of Power (12-17-23)
* New Yorker: How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker: The upstart motivator Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession—while also rising to the top” (12-12-23)
* What Makes A Great Pundit? (10-5-23)
* Your Hero System Is Your Morality And You Get It From Your Tribe (8-21-23)
* Your brain on love (7-30-23)
* Decoding Dennis Prager (5-28-23)
* News is a stress test (3-15-23)
* What Should You Expect From The News? (1-21-23)
* How The News Differs From Reality (7-28-22)
* Rabbis & Rapists: A New Novel Exposes California Judaism (7-9-22)
* When Did Intellectuals Stop Supporting The Free Market Of Ideas? (5-29-22)
* Vouch Nationalism (5-28-22)
* Michael Anton Says He Does Not Know Who Truly Won The 2020 Election, But He’s ‘Moved On’ (2-27-21)
* Our Problems Are Not Our Problems, They’re Just Symptoms Of Deeper Problems (2-5-21)
* With or Without You (1-3-21)
* I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help (8-23-20)
* How To Bypass Your Self-Destructive Tendencies (7-9-20)
* A Life That Works (7-8-20)
* Bringing Souls Out Of Hiding (5-20-20)
* One man’s adventure beyond good & evil (5-15-20)
* Things I Didn’t Know 20 Years Ago (5-10-20)
* Will The Last Luke Ford Viewer Please Plug In The CPAP? (3-10-20)
* The Choice Between Life & Death On Social Media (3-9-20)
* It’s Never Too Late To Have A Good Relationship With Your Dad (5-6-19)
* Desmond Ford – 1929-2019 (3-10-19)
* The Politician’s Sex Life (11-10-17)
* Who Do You Love? (12-24-16)
* Gentile Nationalisms Are Sometimes Dangerous For Jews And Sometimes Good For Jews (9-25-16)
* What Forms Of Protest Are Allowed To The Palestinians? (9-19-16)
* Most Jews Don’t Have A Rabbi (8-16-17)
* How does the world work? (4-18-16)
* The Life Cycle Of The Blogger (3-14-16)
* Why am I here? (1-13-16)

I like my production since 2020.

I’ve said for years, amidst all the mania about misinformation, that we have great instincts for detecting when people are trying to manipulate us against our will. Schools and media and and Hollywood don’t turn Republicans into Democrats and religious people into atheists against their will. Propaganda doesn’t change minds. Why? Because we did not evolve to be gullible.

I got that phrase from Hugo Mercier’s 2020 book Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe, but I had the basic idea back in the 1980s when I fell in love with economics and its assumption that people make rational choices. While this sounds ridiculous, the mockable premise leads you to figure out why people act as they do, rather than dismiss choices you don’t like as irrational.

Many of the arguments by the right-wing media for a Donald Trump presidency in particular and Republican politics in general fall apart under examination (such as Democrats are the real racists, government can’t help poor people, vaccine hesitancy, a rigged election in 2020, the Biden crime family, lock her up, etc). The left-wing media such as The New Yorker and The New York Times are usually more intelligent than their right-wing counterparts (The Wall Street Journal comes closest to this role) and elites often have good reason to mock conservatives. But you don’t judge a hero system by its dumbest talking points.

For the first time in decades, eligible voters who don’t vote are more likely to choose Republicans. ABC News noted April 10, 2024: “The less you vote, the more you back Trump – A new poll suggests it’s Republicans who should be rooting for higher turnout.”

Inchoate desires push us to make the choices that we do, and we then use our reason to defend and rationalize our inclinations, but our instincts don’t spring from reason, they spring from genetics, imprinting and social incentives. Our reason is weak when compared with the other forces that drive us.

The New Yorker reports in its 4-22-24 issue:

In January, the World Economic Forum released a report showing that fourteen hundred and ninety international experts rated “misinformation and disinformation” the leading global risk of the next two years, surpassing war, migration, and climatic catastrophe. A stack of new books echoes their concerns. In “Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It” (Columbia), Paul Thagard, a philosopher at the University of Waterloo, writes that “misinformation is threatening medicine, science, politics, social justice, and international relations, affecting problems such as vaccine hesitancy, climate change denial, conspiracy theories, claims of racial inferiority, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” In “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity” (Norton), Sander van der Linden, a social-psychology professor at Cambridge, warns that “viruses of the mind” disseminated by false tweets and misleading headlines pose “serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” Or, as the M.I.T. political scientist Adam J. Berinsky puts it in “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It” (Princeton), “a democracy where falsehoods run rampant can only result in dysfunction.”

Most Americans seem to agree with these theorists of human credulity…

In a masterly new book, “Religion as Make-Believe” (Harvard), Neil Van Leeuwen, a philosopher at Georgia State University, returns to Sperber’s ideas with notable rigor. He analyzes beliefs with a taxonomist’s care, classifying different types and identifying the properties that distinguish them. He proposes that humans represent and use factual beliefs differently from symbolic beliefs, which he terms “credences.” Factual beliefs are for modelling reality and behaving optimally within it. Because of their function in guiding action, they exhibit features like “involuntariness” (you can’t decide to adopt them) and “evidential vulnerability” (they respond to evidence). Symbolic beliefs, meanwhile, largely serve social ends, not epistemic ones, so we can hold them even in the face of contradictory evidence…

Van Leeuwen’s book complements a 2020 volume by Hugo Mercier, “Not Born Yesterday.” Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the École Normale Supérieure who studied under Sperber, argues that worries about human gullibility overlook how skilled we are at acquiring factual beliefs. Our understanding of reality matters, he notes. Get it wrong, and the consequences can be disastrous. On top of that, people have a selfish interest in manipulating one another. As a result, human beings have evolved a tool kit of psychological adaptations for evaluating information—what he calls “open vigilance mechanisms.” Where a credulity theorist like Thagard insists that humans tend to believe anything, Mercier shows that we are careful when adopting factual beliefs, and instinctively assess the quality of information, especially by tracking the reliability of sources.

Van Leeuwen and Mercier agree that many beliefs are not best interpreted as factual ones, although they lay out different reasons for why this might be. For Van Leeuwen, a major driver is group identity. Beliefs often function as badges: the stranger and more unsubstantiated the better. Religions, he notes, define membership on the basis of unverifiable or even unintelligible beliefs: that there is one God; that there is reincarnation; that this or that person was a prophet; that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are separate yet one. Mercier, in his work, has focused more on justification. He says that we have intuitions—that vaccination is bad, for example, or that certain politicians can’t be trusted—and then collect stories that defend our positions. Still, both authors treat symbolic beliefs as socially strategic expressions.

A key part of this article points out:

That’s why thoughtful scholars—including the philosopher Daniel Williams and the experimental psychologist Sacha Altay—encourage us to see misinformation more as a symptom than as a disease. Unless we address issues of polarization and institutional trust, they say, we’ll make little headway against an endless supply of alluring fabrications.

One of my favorite lines is that our problems are rarely our problems, they are just symptoms of deeper problems. We usually prefer to think about symptoms rather than the disease because symptoms seem so fixable while the disease seems too challenging for comfort. For example, I sometimes obsess about why I am not married and I blame it on bad luck and other external factors, but inside I know my bachelorhood is just a symptom of my deeper issue with connecting with others, which in turn is just a symptom of my ultimate disease – my troubled relationship with myself and with reality (religious people might call reality “God”).

The 2021 book All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists said:

Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”

In 2016, no major pundit or journalist or academic, to my knowledge, predicted a Donald Trump victory. When that happened, our elite felt anxious because they had been revealed as blind to a significant part of reality. When people feel anxious, they often try to off-load their feelings as quickly as possible, and so for many Democrats and members the MSM, the notion that Russia hacked our election became an irresistible story. That there was never any evidence that Russia put Trump in office didn’t get in the way of the story because when our desires collide with truth, we usually side with our desires.

The New Yorker published April 1, 2024:

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit: What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.

Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swelling with indignation on behalf of these gaslit children, taught to feel responsible for the pain their parents had caused them. But beneath that indignation lurked something else—a nagging anxiety coaxed into sharper visibility by the therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek analytic couch. I eventually told him that, as I worked on this piece, I had started to wonder about the ways I might be unintentionally gaslighting my daughter—telling her that she is “just fine” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a hard time for making us late for school by demanding to wear a different pair of tights, when it is clearly my own fault for not starting our morning routine ten minutes earlier. In these interactions, I can see the distinct mechanisms of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much milder form: taking a difficult feeling—my latent sense of culpability whenever she is unhappy, or my guilt for running behind schedule—and placing it onto her. Part of me hoped that Kafka would disagree with me, but instead he started nodding vehemently. “Yes!” he said. “Within a two-block range of any elementary school, just before the bell rings, you can find countless parents gaslighting their children, off-loading their anxiety.”

We both laughed. In the moment, this jolt of recognition seemed incidental, a brief diversion into daily life as we crawled through the darker trenches of human manipulation. But, after I’d left Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting is neither as exotic nor as categorically distinct as we’d like to believe….

Ben Kafka told me that he thinks one of the key insights of psychoanalysis is that people respond to anxiety by dividing the world into good and bad, a tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes me that some version of this splitting is at play not only in gaslighting itself—taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or quality and projecting it onto someone else, so that the self can remain “good”—but also in the widespread invocation of the term, the impulse to split the world into innocent and culpable parties. If the capacity to gaslight is more widely distributed than its most extreme iterations would lead us to believe, perhaps we’ve all done more of it than we care to admit. Each of us has been the one making our way back into bed, vulnerable and naked, and each of us has been the one saying, Come back into this bed I made for you.

I remember one Saturday morning in 1983 or 1984, when my dad and I were running five minutes late for church. I stood in the driveway ready to go when my dad hastily backed the car out of the garage with his driver’s door open looking behind him. The car door then smashed into the garage door. My dad had done a stupid thing. He had the flu and he was not thinking straight. Rather than take responsibility for his mistake, my dad blamed me for the accident because I had made us late.

As The New Yorker notes, we all feel tempted to do this when our anxiety mounts and so we gaslight others about reality. Smart people in the media do this along with dumb people who dig ditches.

I started compiling in my head the principles of my worldview that I believe are superior to what is generally offered in the elite media:

* One way this show is better than elite discourse is that we recognize the hidden partisan nature of the dominant liberal-left ethos and reveal it to be just another hero system that is more adaptive in some circumstances than other hero systems and less adaptive in others. For example, the reaction by the liberal-left to the Corona Virus (have the government take away rights during the emergency to freedom of movement and worship and to gather together in large numbers and direct public policy to minimize the spread until we get vaccines, and then get people vaccinated as quickly as possible) was more effective than the herd immunity anti-government instincts of libertarians and the right. Public policy with regard to suppressing Covid is such a dramatic example of adaptive versus maladaptive responses to a challenge that I made a video January 1, 2024< titled "How Covid Explains My Worldview.” Sometimes a big government, expert-led left-wing approach enhances your odds for survival and reproduction and in other situations, a right-wing populist approach is superior (for example, imprisoning violent criminals for a long time and executing murderers deters crime more effectively than more liberal policies).

As Joel Kotkin, a scholar of urban America, wrote in 2014:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.
The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.
The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

Left and right politics are evolutionary adaptations that have different levels of reproductive success depending upon the situation. As the 2013 book Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences notes: “[T]he political left has been associated with support for equality and tolerance of departures from tradition, while the right is more supportive of authority, hierarchy, and order.”

* Democracy dominates our rhetoric, but almost all of life runs on hierarchy. Democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. All functioning democracies contains considerable elements of dictatorship, socialism, capitalism, and oligopoly. For example, the president of the United States has the same foreign policy powers as King George III. On the other hand, dictatorships such as Nikita Kruschev‘s Soviet Union often contain elements of democracy (witness the removal of Kruschev from power after the Cuban missile crisis). When dictator Joseph Stalin was fighting the second world war, he re-opened churches and allowed his people many things that they wanted in exchange for their efforts against the Germans.

Who’s the boss? The situation is the boss.

* We live in a post-modern world. There’s no one narrative that adequately explains reality.

* We’re all locked in an iron cage together and nobody is coming to save us. To survive, you want to become as strong as possible because you never know what might happen.

* We primarily know the world around us from the news, but this is a distorted prism directed not so much towards sharing important knowledge, but to meet the desires of viewers for excitement. It was exciting, for example, to create stories implying that Russia hacked our 2016 election, but there was never any evidence that Russia played a decisive role in this contest. It was exciting to portray American police as racist in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, but the boring reality is that police usually do the best they can in often difficult circumstances and many of those who die at police hands bear substantial responsibility.

* Personalities in politics are usually less powerful than situations. The news media focuses on personalities because that is a more compelling story than focusing on structure, but structure shapes the world more than individual whims. For example, as I write this in April of 2024, Bibi Netanyahu is Israel’s Prime Minister and his personality gets a lot of media coverage. If someone else were Israel’s prime minister at this time, Israel’s conduct toward its enemies wouldn’t change much. For example, if Bibi decided to support an independent Palestinian state, he would simply be removed from power because the majority of Israelis are not in a mood to give the Palestinians anything. If a Haredi Gadol came out in favor of Zionism, he would no longer be a Haredi Gadol. If Putin dies today, the next leader of Russia would follow similar policies toward Ukraine (because if the Monroe Doctrine is good for the United States, the equivalent is good for superpowers Russia and China).

A structuralist understands that what happens in Ukraine or Israel or Nigeria has nothing to do with America’s vital interests. To adopt a lesson from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, don’t confuse the urgent for the important.

What will usually determine the success of a political administration? Events, my dear boy, events.

Sometimes, however, individuals are more important than situations. If anyone but Hitler had led Germany during WWII, there would not have been a Holocaust.

Perhaps the most famous political scientist who tried to make predictions based on character was James David Barber, who wrote the book The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House. This work hasn’t aged well and is essentially ignored.

* Different people have different gifts. Different plants and animals have different gifts. Life evolves differently in different situations and those mutations that are adaptive promote survival and reproduction.

Posted in Corona Virus, New York Times, Religion | Comments Off on Where this show is better than the New York Times (4-16-24)

The coalition defeated Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel (4-15-24)

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Posted in America | Comments Off on The coalition defeated Iran’s Saturday attack on Israel (4-15-24)

Iran Escalates – Attacks Israel Directly For The First Time (4-14-24)

Posted on April 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Iran’s attack on Israel, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154451
03:00 NYT: Iran’s Strikes on Israel Open a Dangerous New Chapter for Old Rivals, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/world/middleeast/israel-response-iran-attack.html
23:00 Sam Vaknin: Iran’s Miscalculation, Israel’s Opportunity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scAgY0CVxiQ
24:30 What your phone charge level signals
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/world/middleeast/israel-response-iran-attack.html
43:00 Prof. John Mearsheimer : Israel’s Dangerous Game., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZRB2EsG13A
45:00 NYT: ‘The Regional War No One Wanted Is Here. How Wide Will It Get?’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153948
50:00 The Case That Israel Is Doing A Great Job Minimizing Civilian Casualties In Gaza, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154305
53:00 Life usually runs by authority, not democracy
58:50 Has Israel killed 196 aid workers in Gaza? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qefxtT8SxI8
1:09:00 Russia’s military has retooled while Ukraine’s military is weaker
1:10:00 American troops stationed in Taiwan, USA will defend Taiwan against China
1:22:00 Do our beliefs drive our actions?
1:24:20 Stephen J James mocks me: G’day mate, Luke Ford here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjX0fM6Kvuw
1:35:40 Dr & Mrs K fight: https://youtu.be/keJPw9iX1kw?si=b6pf9O1zZjpMGhV7&t=4257
1:40:10 What Do We Mean When We Say A Person Has ‘Good Energy’?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154428
1:43:00 The myth of second chances: https://www.ft.com/content/fa1a5780-b8ca-45ae-a09e-46e95737bda7
1:44:00 My biggest mistakes
1:58:00 Stephen J. James joins the show
2:23:00 Curious Gazelle joins the show
2:27:00 Talmudic hermaneutics, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmudical_hermeneutics
2:33:00 Talmudic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Talmudic_principles
2:33:30 Koran Chapter 2 Verse 26
2:40:40 Mussar movement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musar_movement
2:41:00 The Mussar Dispute (Part 4) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3_ng29n0Vc
2:41:30 Chazon Ish, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avrohom_Yeshaya_Karelitz
2:46:00 When the majority of Gadolim appear wrong
2:51:00 The Mussar Dispute (Part 3) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muBIeMlDocU
3:12:30 I wanna be a rebbe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyjKCTZIbEk

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Iran Escalates – Attacks Israel Directly For The First Time (4-14-24)

Iran Escalates – Attacks Israel Directly For The First Time

Posted on April 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Yesterday Iran launched dozens of drones and missiles at the Jewish state that didn’t kill anyone (though 31 people were injured) because the weapons were slow and cheap and 99% of them were shot down.

Iran apparently provided 72-hours advanced notice to its neighbors and to the US and hence to Israel.

The attack looks more like a public relations exercise than a killing exercise.

Most of us want to contribute. If I didn’t think I had something to add to this story, I would do other things with my time. While I see nothing I can add on the moral dimension of this conflict, I do think I have some insights into the realpolitik.

Millions of Israelis sought shelter during the attack so Iran demonstrated its ability to disrupt the lives of its enemies. This was a warning more than an attack. If Iranian-backed Hezbollah unleashes its full missile arsenal on Israel, thousands of people would die and large parts of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa would be flattened.

Simultaneous with the attack on Saturday, Iran publicly announced that this was the end of its retaliation for Israel’s bombing of a building next to Iran’s embassy in Damascus on April 1st that killed a leading Iranian general.

Even if Israel hit Iran’s embassy, while a violation of international law, it was not attacking Iran proper. An embassy is not sovereign territory. Iran, on the other hand, has attacked Israel proper, and not just military targets, but also population centers such as Jerusalem.

If Israel fights back in an obvious way, the world may regard Israel as the provocateur.

An example of a country not fighting back after terrorism is India after the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Pakistanis. India rightly judged it was better served by not directly retaliating against its nuclear-armed neighbor.

On the other hand, what Israel experienced Saturday is different from the Mumbai attacks. Israel received a broad-based missile and drone attack, much of it aimed at its capital city — Jerusalem. Which countries would not publicly, explicitly and directly retaliate after such an assault? Would the US or France or Japan or Australia sit back and absorb such a drone and missile barrage, even if none of their citizens were killed? I doubt it. The only countries that would not explicitly fight back in these circumstances would be weak countries. Israel is not a weak country. Israel has the most formidable military in the Middle East. I can’t imagine any country with a formidable military not fighting back after such a strike. If I am wrong, please name that country.

Why should Israel be held to a different standard than other countries in similar circumstances with similar capability?

Why has Iran engaged in this blatant signaling exercise? On the face of it, Iran’s attack seems no more effective at achieving its aim of hurting Israel than wearing a mask while driving alone minimizes one’s chances of catching Covid.

We all signal because signaling works. Life signals. Animals signal. Dogs and cats and snakes and people constantly send signals. We often signal without knowing we’re signaling. It’s a basic instinct.

Philosopher Neil Levy noted in an April 16, 2020 paper:

The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond (if not by an admission of fault) by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is (inter alia) virtue signalling, because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide (higher-order) evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs…

Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake.

In human beings, hard to fake signals take a variety of forms. Some are costly, like the peacock’s tail. Many cognitive scientists argue that costly signalling is at the root of a variety of religious practises (Irons 2001; Sosis and Alcorta 2003; Sosis and Bressler 2003). Regular attendance at religious services is costly, insofar as it requires forgoing more immediately rewarding activities. More directly, tithing is costly and religious rituals often involve some kind of privation. Fasting is a common signal of religious commitment (Lent, Ramadan and Yom Kippur all involve fasting, of course), and particularly devout individuals may take vows of celibacy, of poverty or even enter small cells for life as anchorites. Some signals are not costly, but nevertheless are credibility enhancing (Henrich 2009). Crossing a bridge may not be costly for the person who crosses (she may benefit from doing so) but it is a reliable signal that she believes the bridge is safe.

We live in a world in which we cannot easily rely on others’ moral record, as conveyed by gossip, to identify those we can trust. Our societies are too large for reputation-tracking to be reliable: gossip may not reach us, and agents move relatively freely from community to community. Formal systems of regulation may help, but their effective development and enforcement depends on a sufficient level of trust to avoid systematic corruption. Costly and credibility enhancing signalling help fill the gap between reputation tracking and formal regulation. For example, because religious observance involves hard to fake signals of trustworthiness, co-religionists may seek one another out as business partners. The role of Quakers in the early years of British industry is, for instance, well-known (Prior et al. 2006). Moreover, trust is not limited to co-religionists. Religious and non-religious people express more trust in religious people, regardless of their religion, than in atheists (Gervais et al. 2011, 2017).

Credibility enhancing displays and costly signals of religious commitment are moral signals (at least for those individuals who belong to the High Gods religions (Norenzayan 2013), with their moralized gods, which have a near monopoly on the faithful today). They are signals of willingness to abide by certain, publicly proclaimed, norms. They are ways of signalling our virtue. Displays of religiosity continue to play this signalling function today, especially in highly religious societies like the United States.

But as societies secularise, such signals no longer have the same power. Small wonder we have turned to more secular virtue signalling.

I first went to public school in tenth grade in September of 1981. Because I wasn’t known at Placer High School in Auburn, CA, I was often mistaken for a freshman and people tried to haze me. One day a group of kids in my grade started bullying me, and I lost my temper, went up to one of them, and right in his face, I took a big bite of my apple. I don’t know why I did this, but I guess I was signaling.

It wasn’t such a great move. The kids then followed me up the campus mocking me but at least they didn’t beat me up. Nobody did.

A year later, I collaborated with the guy I crunched my apple at when he complained that football players got preferential treatment when compared to other athletes such as himself who rode bicycles. It was the article that put me on the map in my high school. Various football players got in my face afterward and one squeezed my neck and another, Jim Otto Jr (now a pastor) threw me in trash can. I was running on adrenaline for weeks. I saw myself as a brave truthteller.

I never discussed the bullying I received with the people who bullied me, nor did I talk to my best friend at Placer High School why he turned against me after my article came out on preferential treatment for football players (months prior to the publication, we collaborated on ways to do the article when we both worked on the school newspaper, but at crunch time my friend was no longer on the newspaper and he identified more strongly with his fellow athletes). We’re still friends and we’ve never discussed this, nor talked about the various ridiculous things I’ve said and done.

When I first got into Judaism circa 1992, I started cutting off people from my life who were not sufficiently righteous and deep in my estimation (it was one of my many maladaptive 1990s interpretations of Judaism’s and Dennis Prager’s teachings). Luckily, I didn’t do this to my high school friend, but for years afterward, I would distance myself from those who indicated they watched a lot of TV, even those who were only baiting me by saying they watched eight hours of TV a day.

Signaling is good, but like anything good, it can go awry.

Iran has yet to directly attack Americans on American or European soil. It certainly has that capability, but it has held back because it does not want to directly go to war with America (as opposed to war through proxies, which Iran has waged for decades against Israel and the US).

It is not clear yet whether this attack is better for Iran or for Israel. If Israel abstains from escalating with Iran, this might be a win for Israel.

My biggest disagreement with the latest news coverage is the idea that Israel does not want to escalate. Israel has many incentives to escalate, in large part because of American security guarantees. Israel would love to get American cooperation to bomb the hell out of Iranian nuclear facilities, which, ironically, would massively increase Iran’s incentives to build nuclear weapons.

When you subsidize something, you get more of it. America subsidizes Israel’s military, and backstops it with security guarantees, and this creates incentives for Israel to engage in risky behavior.

If an investor has a guaranteed limit to its losses, he is likely to make risky bets. If the bets pay off, the investor wins. If the bets fail, his losses are limited.

A common critique of American banking is that the losses are socialized while the profits are held in private hands.

Israel’s losses are similarly socialized — not in terms of lives, but in terms of arms. Israel’s gains, on the other hand, largely accrue to Israel, and not to American interests. A greater Israel, for example, freed from the presence of Palestinians, may well be in Israel’s best interests but not necessarily in America’s.

On January 11, 2024, I blogged:

Mearsheimer: ‘Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.’

Different groups have different interests. When you believe your enemy threatens your existence, as Israelis believe about Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, no cards are taken off the table.

What people are happy with the existence of enemies within them and beside them? I’m talking “enemy” in the Schmittian sense of one who is seeking your destruction.

The normal reaction of any living thing is to create an environment around it most conducive to its thriving.

John J. Mearsheimer says 45 minutes in: “The United States does not want escalation in the Middle East. The United States would like to see Israel win in Gaza, whatever that means, and end that war so that we have a stable Middle East. The Israelis are a different matter. I believe the Israelis wouldn’t mind a general conflagration because that would facilitate ethnic cleansing.”

If I lived in Gaza, I’d want to leave. If people I cared about lived in Gaza, I’d want them to leave. Gazans are suffering horribly. Given that Israel is not willing to live with Hamas dominating Gaza, I don’t see life improving in Gaza any time soon.

Ethnic cleansing is horrible, but there are degrees of awfulness in ethnic cleansing. Moving a people ten miles to a country with their same religion and language (which is what would happen if the residents of Gaza and the West Bank left for a neighboring Arab country) and adequate financial support (the Arabs have the money to take care of their Palestinian brothers) is not the same as moving people hundreds of miles through hostile territory to a place where they are alone and have few resources.

Most people would prefer to be ethnically cleansed to a place ten miles away rather than be murdered. Right now relations between Palestinians and Israelis are so bad, that many people on both sides want ethnic cleansing as the least of two evils.

John Mearsheimer: “I think the Israelis are interested in cleansing not only Gaza, but also the West Bank. A general conflagration would make it easier for them to do it. The other reason [Israelis] want escalation is that they have a huge problem on their northern border. About 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes… How do they move those people back to northern Israel until the conflict with Hezbollah is settled and Hezbollah stops firing rockets into northern Israel. As long as the war in Gaza goes on, I believe Hezbollah will continue to target northern Israel. The Israelis want to escalate because they think they have escalation dominance here. They’d like to inflict massive punishment on Hezbollah and Lebanon and reach some kind of modus vivendi with Hezbollah that allows them to move those 100,000 Israelis back into northern Israel.”

I find it easy to listen to realists such as John J. Mearsheimer even though he frequently makes, in my view, unfair criticisms of Israel. For example, he accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. From what I’ve read, Israel is doing a better job of minimizing civilian casualties than any other group has done in similar urban warfare (with a dead civilian to militant ratio of about 1.5 to 1 compared to the normal rate of 9:1).

I usually prefer talking to realists rather than moralists. With realists I can learn from them even if we have different hero systems, while with moralists, if I don’t share their foundations, I rarely learn anything. I can talk to somebody who hates Israel and it makes no difference to me, an Israel lover, as long as we are talking solely in terms of power and group interests.

Is Iran conducting a smart foreign policy? That depends on how other groups react to it. Sometimes it is smart to punch your enemy in the nose and other times it is smarter to ignore him. Yesterday Iran launched cheap missiles and thousand dollar drones at Israel that required expensive million-dollar weapons to shot down. This met several objectives simultaneously: Iran depletes the reserves of its enemies (America and Israel), and appeals to its own nationalists and to the Arab street, making it harder for Arab nations to have normal relations with Israel. Iran also makes American involvement in the Middle East increasingly expensive and dangerous. This latest escalation exemplifies the dangers of Biden’s foreign policy of over-extension into places such as Israel and Ukraine that don’t matter to vital US interests.

On the other hand, Sam Vaknin argued early Sunday morning that Iran miscalculated.

Vaknin:

Israel bombed a structure that served the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Though not strictly within the compound of the Embassy, it was widely known as an outpost of Iranian diplomacy in Syria.

The language of articles 21-25 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) is clear: embassies and consulates are not sovereign territory and not extraterritorial. They just enjoy certain legal exemptions, that’s all.

So, why did Iran choose to escalate and retaliate by attacking Israel with a barrage of 300 UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones) as well as cruise missiles and ballistic missiles?

Because of the growing threat to its out-of-control proxies everywhere: Hamas, the Houthis, and Hizballah, first and foremost. Iran needed to reassert its authority over these terrorist organizations by being seen to fearlessly conflict directly with the “Little Devil”, Israel.

But the attack misfired in every conceivable way.

More than 97% of the weapons launched were intercepted long before they had reached the borders of Israel, exposing the inefficacy of drones and even missiles as decisive factors in modern warfare, set as they are against hi-tech defenses.

The onslaught on Israel diverted attention at least momentarily from the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the much heralded Israeli invasion of Rafah. It is a distractive window of opportunity that Israel might use to push on with its offensive.

The United States, France, the United Kingdom and even Jordan sided with Israel against Iran. It is a reminder that Suni countries are actually quite elated with the damage that Israel is inflicting on Shia Iran and its proxies, both Suni and Shia.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt regard Israel as a handy and welcome buffer against Iran’s expansionist dreams and in the face of the Iran-sponsored death cults that cloak themselves in Muslim Brotherhood religious-political ideology.

Finally, Iran’s buffoonish retribution is humiliating. It exposes the incompetence and corruption of the theocracy. Coupled with a tanking economy, it will lead to civil unrest within Iran and perhaps to the rise of a more reformist streak of political Islam.

All these positive outcomes depend on Israel’s next move.

Biden’s sage advice to Netanyahu was to “take the win” and gloat over Iran’s debacle. But far-right forces within Israel have been spoiling for a regional war with the arch-enemy Iran for many years now. Netanyahu himself may provoke a regional kerfuffle in order to divert attention from his legal woes and force the USA to commit to his agenda.

Such a course of action would amount to an unmitigated disaster for the Jewish state.

Israel cannot defeat Iran, especially when it is already fighting a war on multiple other fronts. The USA will not be dragged into Israeli adventurism. It will rather abandon Israel to its fate. Should it choose to confront Iran now, Israel will have completed its transformation into the second North Korea, a pariah state.

When you overstate your case, you lose credibility. A classic example of this is Donald Trump’s trajectory over the past year. Fourteen months ago, Trump appeared irrelevant. Then there were a plethora of Democrat-led criminal charges against him, and now Trump appears likely to be the next president of the United States.

When Trump was elected in 2016, his opponents did a better job of organizing than did his supporters, and Trump’s four years in office saw limited progress towards his goals. Trump consistently mobilized more opposition than support and voters turned against him in 2018 and 2020 (in particular, there was a 2% swing against him in the suburbs).

When you’re at war, you need to mobilize more support than opposition. This usually requires one to keep your instincts in check and to continually asks what will do good as opposed to what will feel good.

I’m sure that Iran’s attack on Israel felt good to Iran, and that Democrat-led criminal prosecutions of Trump over the past year felt good to Democrats. Did either of these attacks succeed in their purposes? I don’t think so, but situations change, and what looks like a bad decision today may well be vindicated by tomorrow.

Anglo countries such as the United States, Australia and England tend to be the most individualist in the world. In some cases, individualist strategies work well. Anglo countries have enjoyed more than their share of success, wealth and power. On the other hand, in some circumstances such as dealing with terrorism, corporate strategies may work better.

There are reports that in this latest battle with Hamas, Israel has skipped the opportunities to take out Hamas leaders individually and instead chosen to take them out with their families.

John J. Mearsheimer: “The article made it manifestly clear that the Israelis were inflicting massive punishment on the civilian population on purpose… What I found most shocking was… that the Israelis instead of killing someone in Hamas when that fighter is by himself or with other Hamas fighters, waits until the person goes home and is with his family so that they can kill not only him but also kill the family. This is horrible.”

If a corporate strategy of taking out terrorists with their families is more effective at discouraging terror than just taking out terrorists on their own, that’s important. Few questions are more important than — what works?

The world is not as individualist, in general, as Anglo norms. Individualist ideals sound beautiful, but how does the world work? Even in individualist countries such as the United States, when a person has repeated negative interactions with an out-group, that causes the person to take on increasingly negative views of not just that out-group, but of all individuals in that out-group that the person does not know well.

To economize on decision making, most people, even in individualist countries, are likely to have some general reactions to groups such as gays, Armenians, Jews, whites, blacks, Mexicans and the like. We are wired to be tribal and to have some negative feelings about out-groups. Negative experiences with members of out-groups exacerbate out negative feelings. When acted on with discretion, these reactions may be adaptive, but in a multi-cultural setting, explicitly betraying your feelings about out-groups usually won’t serve you. People in big cities, for example, know that it is usually a bad idea to share out loud your racial and religious stereotypes. Assuming that somebody named “Ahmed” or “Shaniqua” is in a low status position may serve you if you keep your assumption to yourself, but this might hurt you if you sat it out loud.

July 22, 2014, Haaretz reported:

Israeli Professor’s ‘Rape as Terror Deterrent’ Statement Draws Ire

‘The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,’ says Bar-Ilan University professor.

“The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” This assertion was made by Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University about three weeks ago on an Israel Radio program. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,”…

July 23, 2014, HuffPo reported:

Suicide Bombers ‘Only Deterred By Threat Of Rape Of Sisters And Wives’, Israeli Academic Says

An Israeli academic has been defended by his university after he implied would-be suicide bombers could only be stopped if their female relatives were threatened with rape.

Dr Mordechai Kedar said he was not suggesting such a tactic, but added “the knowledge that their sister of their mother will be raped” was “the only thing” that would stop terrorists from attacking Israel…

“We can’t take such steps, of course,” Kedar told the programme. “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts. The only thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped. That’s all. That’s the only thing that will bring him back home, in order to preserve his sister’s honour.”

This week the university faced calls from feminist groups for Kedar to resign from his post, but Bar-Ilan defended the comments, saying Kedar did not intend be taken literally…

Kedar originally made the comments on July 1, after three Israeli teens – Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrah – were kidnapped and found murdered in the West Bank, before Israel’s offensive, which has killed 630 Palestinians and 29 Israelis so far, began on July 8.

Dr Kedar has also served as chairman of the Israel Academia Monitor organization, which is involved in “exposing extremist Israeli academics who exploit academic freedom in order to take steps to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” according to Haaretz.

Every rabbi I’ve asked about this said the type of retaliation Kedar described would be forbidden by Jewish law.

Legal systems describe how the world should work, but how does the world actually work?

When you rip off serious criminals, they may not only hurt you but they may also go after your family and everyone you love. Why? Because this tactic works to deter people from messing with you.

Democracy sounds great, but most of life runs along authoritarian lines. When you go to work or school or church, you’re not usually going to a democracy in action.

Individualism is often great, but most of life operates corporately.

Posted in Iran, Israel | Comments Off on Iran Escalates – Attacks Israel Directly For The First Time

What Do We Mean When We Say A Person Has ‘Good Energy’?

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Luke Ford

I just found a new Heidi Priebe video — “Perfectionism: Why It’s A Vicious Cycle Of Self-Defeat (And How To Break It)” — that explains “good energy” better than anything else I’ve seen.

Priebe, an attachment expert, says: “Perfectionist tendencies create a self-fulfilling prophecy where you tell yourself the story that people will only accept me or like me or want to be close to me if I am showing up perfectly.”

In other words, people who are in touch with reality are more likely to give off good energy. When you know and accept your own strengths and weaknesses, you more likely accept the strengths and weaknesses of others and you accept the reality of your situation and this makes spending time with you easier.

Sometimes, for example, your strengths combined with a particular situation mean that you should lead. At other times, your abilities combined with the situation mean that you should follow directions as closely as possible.

Someone who’s good at math and earning millions of dollars a year in an upstanding fashion does not need to play down his good qualities to emit good energy. This same person might take his Mercedes to a trusted mechanic and trust that man’s judgment that he needs a new car. When he gets home to his wife and kids after a hard day, he might disappear into his man cave for an hour to decompress. On other days, he might put his work on hold for a few hours to take his kids to the batting cage. On a Sunday, however, he might need to put his family commitments on hold to deal with a work emergency.

As he deals effectively with the different situations that come up, he builds confidence and self-respect, and other people sense that he feels good about himself, and that emits good energy.

We don’t warm to people who constantly belittle themselves because we know that they will soon turn that cruel gaze on us.

When we live in the reality of the situation and of our own and others’ fallibility, “we end up not just perceiving reality more accurately. We actually end up living in a different reality than we did before.” (David Gorman)

When we talk to each other and touch each other, we connect jumper cables to each other’s psyches. Whatever is going on with me will transmit to you and vice versa. Tense people will make us tense, and happy people will make us happier. Good people make us feel good and bad people make us feel bad.

Forced happiness disconnected from reality, such as what you often get from people in cults, won’t inspire us. It’s odd. Weirdness is disturbing. It increases the cost of interaction. People who don’t read social cues are exhausting. When I meet a woman who’s worse at reading social cues than me, I keep my distance. Women are supposed to be better than men at coloring within the lines because they’ve survived for thousands of years dealing with creatures (men) who are bigger and stronger than them.

A couple of times I tried to date a diva. That didn’t last long. When she’d walk through groups of people paying no mind to the disturbance she caused, and when she expected me, after our first make-out, to shovel out the crap in her life that disturbed her, that was too much work for me.

Upon hearing the Heidi Priebe video on perfection and its discontents, I immediately thought about Babe Paley‘s portrayal in the second season of the TV show Feud.

Wikipedia notes for “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”: “Acclaimed writer Truman Capote ruins his friendships with the Swans, a socialite group of New York City high society, by writing a thinly veiled fictionalized account of their scandalous and hedonistic lives in his (ultimately unfinished) novel, Answered Prayers. When Esquire publishes the chapter “La Côte Basque 1965″, after the restaurant of the same name frequented by the Swans,[3][4] several vow to ruin his life in revenge.”

Wikipedia notes about Babe Paley:

Her personal, unconventional style was enormously influential. A photograph of Paley with a scarf tied to her handbag, for example, created a trendy tidal wave that millions of women emulated. She often mixed extravagant jewelry by Fulco di Verdura and Jean Schlumberger with costume pieces and embraced letting her hair go gray instead of using dye.

Paley’s distinctive style earned her a place on the best-dressed list a remarkable fourteen times before her induction into the Fashion Hall of Fame in 1958. Her ability to command attention, with her impeccable hair, makeup, and overall crispness, was legendary. As fashion designer Bill Blass once remarked, ‘I never saw her fail to capture anyone’s attention. You noticed Babe and nothing else.'”

Retrospectives have suggested that Barbara neglected her children while pursuing social status and relied on her husbands’ wealth to support her extravagant lifestyle. Her daughter Amanda has acknowledged that their relationship was “virtually nonexistent” and that the distance “was her choice, not mine”.

According to several biographers, Barbara experienced loneliness and frustration as William Paley engaged in extramarital affairs. This emotional toll affected her and her family. Moreover, she faced public and media scrutiny, expected to maintain an unrealistic standard of beauty and social grace.

Barbara was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974, attributed to her heavy smoking. Preparing for her impending death, she meticulously planned her own funeral, including the selection of food and wine to be served at the funeral luncheon. She allocated her jewelry collection and personal belongings to friends and family, wrapping them in colorful paper and creating a comprehensive file system with instructions for their distribution after her death.

Feud portrays Paley as so dedicated to perfection in her life that she’s unable to connect normally with other people, including her own children.

Heidi Priebe: “When we are relaxed, we give off an easeful and congruent energy because we are not freaking out and trying to hide ourselves. We are going into a situation wanting to be seen. We show up with presence and dignity and we are naturally giving off an energy that makes others comfortable because we are communicating to others that we are ok, you don’t have to worry about me or provide me with self-esteem, I’m not trying to get anything from you, I’ll just be me and you will be you, and that puts others at ease. When people are at ease, they respond favorably.”

“When we show up with incongruent energy, people pick up on that. When we have that incongruent mismatched energy, it tends to make people uncomfortable in our presence. When people are uncomfortable in our presence, it is harder to connect with them because when we are being inauthentic, it is hard to authentically connect with someone else. That can reinforce the belief that I have to be perfect to be accepted by others.”

“People are not attracted to other people’s perfection. If people are attracted to other people’s perfection, it is because they are wounded and they believe that they need to be perfect and to be with other people who are perfect. People with more secure patterning understand that all humans are imperfect. People who can display their vulnerabilities and the things they’re struggling with and can signal where they need help as well as can stand strong where they do have natural aptitudes, that combination of traits is attractive because it signals that I am human and so I am not going to expect you to not be human and we can co-regulate around our strengths and weaknesses.”

“When we are attuned to our ideal, we are not attuned to reality, to where we actually are in life, what skills we have, what opportunities are available to us now within the life we are living, we are not taking the realistic chances for growth and development available to us at the level we are currently at. It is the art of being attuned to our environment and realistic in our self appraisal and figuring out which skills we can build based on where we are starting from that lay the groundwork for excellence later on.”

I’ve always had a keen sense of my own fallibility and my own ridiculousness, and I think that puts other people at ease. I accept my flaws and that relaxes others and they call this “good energy.”

My father said I changed my mind more often than anyone else he knew.

If I am not stuck on a grandiose picture of myself, I have less ego getting in the way of change.

Alexander Technique teacher David Gorman wrote:

Have you ever had one (or more) of those moments when you feel totally whole and totally free? When everything seems to be doing itself with utmost ease? When you are totally present and at one with the moment? When amazing skill and coordination is just flowing out of you?

Recall those moments and you’ll note that most or all of the following things are happening, and they are happening all together all at once:

— You experience a wholeness and unity such that you have no parts;

— You experience ease and freedom such that there is no effort and everything seems to do itself;

— Your performance is high quality and your ability to express your skill is up there with the best you have done

— You are present in the moment, so much so that often things seem brighter, more colourful, more 3D;

— You experience an expansion out into the space around you, an openness to, and a oneness with, your environment, the others on stage, indeed, the world; and…

— You feel joy and delight, a sort of yummy appreciation that this is really good stuff…

It is a challenge, for sure, in the face of the habit, in the face of your feelings, in the face of what you’ve been taught, but it is possible to inhibit your reaction to the moment and follow the means-whereby which your very own highly-evolved system keeps showing you — which is to open up to the present moment, to your wholeness, and to give your system a little bit of faith that it seems to know what it is doing, and that it can do it really well without your “help”.

Babette Lightner writes:

You feel the meaning you’ve made; you feel your understanding. Responses tell you about your interpretation of the world, not about the world. Another person’s response to something tells you about how she interprets the experience. It tells you about her life, her way of seeing, her perspective, her point of view, her values. Her feeling is true for her. Her current construct is true for her, even if it isn’t true for you. Responses/feelings are part of an internal compass designed to help each individual navigate their own particular life.

Sometimes the meaning made at a particular time of life is no longer useful. It might have been perfect to survive a particular situation. But, now the interpretation is no longer accurate and is getting in the way of living life.

David Gorman has a free ebook “On the Virtues”:

One of the individuals in the book was discoursing on the ‘virtues’ that form the moral foundation to a good person and a good society — patience, honesty, courage, temperance, humility, and so on. She was suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that most of society’s ills were to be accounted for by the sad lack of these virtues in most people. Their baser natures tempted them into vices or sent them into blind loss of control. But (she said), if any right-thinking person took the time and the trouble to practise these virtues, well… he or she would be a better person and the world would be a better place….

Just what are these virtues that we can have them or be lacking them? And if we don’t naturally have them, just what sort of practice does one do to get them? Are they some sort of skilled activity we learn, like golfing or playing a violin, through practice and study? Or perhaps it is more a repetitive kind of practice, like tying our shoelaces, that will turn the virtues into automatically incorporated habits by doing them often enough?

…this standard was reachable through some direct process, though it seems that not many succeed.

Which, of course, raises the further question, if these virtues are so ‘good’, why do so few manage to achieve them?

…If we were patient all the time, would we be aware of being virtuous? Would we even be aware of being patient? Probably not.

…the virtues seem most obvious when we are not being virtuous. In other words, they appear to be most noticeable by their absence.

… So if patience is the absence of impatience, perhaps we need to look more at the nature of impatience than the nature of patience. What is it about impatience that seems so hard to get out of?

…when we have an expectation of the speed at which things should be happening (but they are not), is it not our impatience that spurs us on to try to hurry things up and make them happen as fast as we want? …all this hurrying up results in a lot of struggling and pushing ourselves to do things faster, creating a lot of stress and tensing up which results in further mounting ‘feelings’ of impatience.

…We often get impatient because we have not fully appreciated what is involved in the process and all the steps necessary to complete the task. …the wake – up call of impatience alerts us to an essential level of knowledge — knowing what we don’t know. This acknowledgement of our lack of knowledge invites us to open ourselves up willingly to a learning process to gain that knowledge.

…it makes no sense to practise patience, if by patience we mean trying not to be impatient or trying to slow down and calm down.

…After we have learned and our expectations are more in accord with reality, will we end up experiencing something we would call patience ? Or will we simply be living our lives better — without impatience?

As a result of this learning we end up not just perceiving reality more accurately. We actually end up living in a different reality than we did before — one that includes a changed understanding of the meaning of the experience of impatience and how to use it to learn. With this changed understanding we can then take a completely different pathway than we would have before.
Normally we would take the experience of impatience to be the vice and try to change it to the virtue of patience. Now we can see that there is indeed something wrong, but it is not the impatience. It is the underlying concept of how long things take which is wrong. The fact is that the experience of impatience appears naturally at just the moment when the information of how long things really take is available to correct our ideas. Does this not suggest strongly that we have a wonderful kind of learning ability built right into our very nature?

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on What Do We Mean When We Say A Person Has ‘Good Energy’?