Effing the Ineffable Looking for the ultimate fool's errand? I've found it. Spent my life trying to get answers to the questions everyone believes are unanswerable. Why are we here? Who am I? Who are you? Is there really something we can call Human Nature? If so, what is it? Is there such a thing as justice? Do we already know what it is? Must one person's utopia always be another's dystopia? Is our consciousness evolving, or devolving? Is there any hope? The worst part of this quest is that those who bother to think about these things usually are sure they have answers. Philosophy, religion, science, all try to fill those blanks. Try passing on what you think and others either already agree or are not interested in someone else's conclusions. Proof? Logic fails, experience is not transferrable. For what it's worth, here are some of my personal conclusions. First, I never tell the truth, and that's the truth. But, there's no need to worry, because all generalizations are false, including this one. Remember Socrates? “I am a Cretan, and all Cretans are liars.” Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, wrote in Science and Sanity that English is an Aristotelian language, built around the verb “to be” that reduces reality to a simple equation in which everything is either this or that. Thus, it is impossible to tell the truth in English, because nothing is that simple. There are exceptions to every rule. That's the rule. You can see that I like paradoxes, which someone said are the Truth standing on its head, trying to get our attention. Without generalizations, it's impossible to have a useful discussion about serious matters. But there has to be an understanding that the existence of exceptions does not completely invalidate the usefulness of the generalization. Constantly repeating the mantra “more often than not” should not be necessary. Let's consider stereotypes, which are generalizations based on the collected experiences of a great many people over a very long time. They are not created out of whole cloth. Most are directly related to cultural values and standards, which vary widely from one culture to another. The definition of prejudice is “pre-judgement,” that is, to judge an individual based simply on a stereotype, without realizing that he or she may not fit the profile at all. While prejudice is a bad thing (and inherently unfair), it does not invalidate the generalization, even though, as I wrote earlier, like all generalizations, it is false. Isn't this fun? On to consciousness, the arbiter of our existence. As it happens, when Descartes announced that “I think, therefore I am,” he had it backwards, because he believed that our existence and our identity grew out of our minds. Actually, it is more accurate to say that “I am, therefore I think,” because our minds are just artifacts, tools in the service of our consciousness. If we practice the kind of meditation usually (inaccurately) called “Mindfulness,” we eventually learn that something is experiencing the mental activity. Some would call that experiencer the Soul. I just call it “that-which-experiences.” The mind moderates our experience with concepts and constructs that have accreted during our lives. In Eastern Philosophy/Psychology the mind has long been known as the “drunken, horny monkey.” Reading James Joyce's Ulysses gives one a good idea why. Ironically, even though DesCartes was wrong, he gave birth to the Enlightenment, which inspired our Founding Fathers, and the Scientific Revolution, which has improved our living standards while enabling us to despoil the planet and perhaps wipe out the human race. So, effing the ineffable. Care to join me?

Reflections on “Capital in the 21st Century” Some thoughts after slogging my way through Thomas Pickety's Capital in the 21st Century (577 pages), some of which have to be read three or four times in order to achieve even a modicum of comprehension. Despite this, the book is a best seller, and references to it keep showing up all over the place. His major premise is that as long as the rate of return on capital ( r ) is greater than the rate of growth ( g ) (economic and/or demographic) economic inequality will keep increasing (divergence) until a relative handful of people own 90% or more of all capital (Real Estate, financial assets, gold, diamonds and other natural resources – especially oil and gas, etc.). Disruptions in the 20th Century (wars and the confiscatory taxes to pay for them) temporarily reduced the divergence that had been typical for most of recorded history. As an aside, note that Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, wrote that complex societies always create a privileged minority. Pickety provides voluminous data as evidence that this divergence is rapidly increasing yet again. He correctly places much of the blame for this on what he calls Reaganism and Thatcherism (I call it the Reagan/Thatcher Devolution), which began a process of slashing the taxes on excess income that had limited outsized, income demands by the 1% and created a healthy middle class in most of the developed world (now rapidly disappearing!). The present levels of excess income are truly obscene. His preferred solution (which is politically unfeasible, to say the least) is a progressive tax on world-wide wealth. Of course, if it were not world-wide, the wealthy could simply continue to move their assets from country to country. Such a tax would necessarily require total International transparency, aka no cheating on taxes. Good luck with that, Mr. Pickety; but the following quote is worth repeating (if not shouting): “The most plausible reason why tax havens defend bank secrecy is that it allows their clients ot evade their fiscal obligations, thereby allowing the tax havens to share in their gains.Obviously, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the principles of the market economy. No one has the right to set his own tax rates. It is not right for individuals to grow wealthy from free trade and economic integration (globalization) only to take off the profits at the expense of their neighbors. THAT IS OUTRIGHT THEFT [my emphasis].”