I feel obligated to comment on the recent revelations of what our governments are doing to us, with either partial or full cooperation of major technology companies. That said, I am not sure my thoughts are terribly of value in this sphere. So, I'll start by stating the obvious and then move to predictions.
The Obvious
What we're reading in the news is a full-on, in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore siren calling our attention to exactly how much liberty we lost in the wake of 9/11, under the Patriot Act, and possibly before. That means that this isn't exactly news. Most liberty-minded folks of all ideological stripes have been crying out against these government abuses for at least ten years. (Ten years.) Those folks who have been really in tune with the industry have been warning of this sort of thing for much longer than that. For anecdotal evidence of this, I could point to movies like The Net or Enemy of the State, or even Sneakers. The even more obvious example would be Orwell, but "crying Orwell" has become a more greatly derided concept than crying wolf these days.
At any rate, this only feels like an ambush because the folks at The Guardian have been screaming it at us for a week. Truth is, those crazy conspiracy theorists who objected to giving out their Social Security numbers at department stores and stuff... turns out they were on the right side of history here, and they had a much further-reaching cognitive time-horizon than the rest of us.
So the first obvious lesson to learn here speaks to what I just wrote about Orwell and the conspiracy theorists: The fact that the worst fears of people typically dismissed as paranoid nutcases have actually turned into the reality in which we live is, to put it mildly, terrifying news.
My best gauge for public opinion is what people are saying on my Facebook news feed. It's not perfect, but it's not bad: most of my FB friends are normal people with mainstream political views, leaning slightly to the left, but also including a good number of conservatives and libertarians. Everyone is upset. Everyone dislikes the course our governments have taken. Everyone feels violated.
There are no disagreements about the abuse of government power in this case. Now that we see how much the government is spying on us, now that we see how the IRS has abused its power, now that we see the extent to which the government will bully the press in order to affect a given outcome, no one can raise any defense. There seems to be a general sense out there of just how wrong we've all been.
Finally!
Predictions
It's anyone's guess. Our government could easily go gestapo on us, fill the streets with tanks, and turn us into the next dictatorship. It's happened before. No society is immune.
But I don't think that's going to happen. For one thing, existing technology that the government does not fully control - and can never fully control - is sufficient to show to the world any abuse of power that occurs here. Already people use their cell phones to watchdog the police forces, and the momentum is growing. Any would-be American despot would first have to obliterate our access technology on a house-to-house level, and while they attempted this, the cameras would be rolling. The world would not stand for it, and neither would most Americans. There would be a mass refugee exodus to bordering nations, leaving the country totally decimated, while individuals would be enjoying better liberties elsewhere.
What this means is that human society has become more mobile, more independent, and more individualized over the past century. To despotize a country as large and diverse as the United States would require a level of wanton destruction that I don't think even the worst authoritarians are willing to wage on the country they wish to rule.
But the implication of this fact is that governments, despite being in a more powerful position than at any other previous time in history, are also needed by individuals less than ever before. We really are independent of governments today.
This is not "anarchy" by anyone's definition of the term, and I do think there will always be a place for some form of government. But what we are observing today is the dawn of mankind's transition from the post-Enlightenment nation-state to whatever the next phase is. People are willing to tolerate high levels of taxation and even rigged economic systems, so long as they have nice Xboxes to play with and plenty of booze and fast food. But when overreach happens, people reject it at the gut level, and that's what we're seeing now.
People of all ideological stripes are horrified by their government's willingness to shut down the entire city of Boston to catch a teenager, to demand call lists from the press, to subject the nation's internet behavior to peeping-tom algorithms, and so on. Whatever any one person might see as "the ideal government," everyone agrees that what we have is bad, wrong, undesirable, and generally inferior to even the supposed "bad" countries.
I can't remember - have I written about my experience with airport security in countries like China, where the government is supposed to be more oppressive, and yet where there are no body scanners, and basically nothing more than a metal detector, and a bureaucrat who reads your papers? It's a case in point. Many people would rather live in an oligarchic bureaucracy like communist China than live in a world where the mayor of Boston can decide to shut down one of our nation's largest cities while his jackbooted thugs gun down a couple of teenagers without a jury trial.
And there are a lot of countries out there that are even more pleasant than China.
Think about it: if the SS came for you tomorrow and you had to flee under cover of darkness, wouldn't you end up somewhere nice, like Toronto, or Rome, or Mumbai, or San Salvador? Of course you would.
So our preferences for enjoying a good, happy, pleasant life will result either in a US government that reforms itself, or a more stubborn one that folds its arms across its chest while we rational creatures leave to seek greener pastures.
And this is basically that competitive government anarcho-capitalism stuff that seems so spooky during times when the NSA isn't briefing the president on statistically significant changes to your porn-surfing habits. Welcome to the future, baby.
2013-06-07
2013-06-06
The Self-Esteem Cult
Having previously established that being more virtuous makes one a better person, I would now like to turn my attention to an alternative point of view. There are those who suggest that each of us is an inherently good person, no matter what the particulars of our actual lives. More to the point, according to this other take on the matter, the particulars of life are a direct function of our ability to understand our inherent goodness. That is to say, we are all good people, period, and the only difference between a person who feels good and one who doesn't is little piece of psycho-babble called self-esteem.
How The Self-Esteem Cult Works
The self-esteem cult, otherwise known as all those people who tell you that the magic key to happiness and being a good person is just having self-esteem and loving yourself, rests the substance of its doctrine on two rather shallow deceptions.
Deception #1: You Are Something Other Than Your Actions
The first deception is to sever the relationship between one's actions and one's self-worth. Thus, if a person fails on the job, screws up his relationships, gains a large amount of weight, etc., he is still a good person. None of his failings or shortcomings in any way diminish his actual value as a human being. Despite all the social cues he gets from his family, friends, and colleagues, whoever that person is is not a direct summation of his actions. His "self" rather consists of his best thoughts and feelings, the stuff inside his brain that makes him feel better, the stuff that only those who truly love him can see in full - not because he tells them, but because they somehow detect his self-worth, and thus true friends.
This is an alluring prospect, but it does not withstand much scrutiny. Let's examine why.
First, think of someone you love with all of your heart: a family member, a friend, a partner. (Sorry, no pets.) Next, ask yourself why you love that person. If your answer is, "Gah, I don't know... I just do!" then you haven't thought about it hard enough. Don't be vapid here, I'd like you to actually think about it. Why do you love this person? Why?
The answer to that question is almost certainly a laundry list of positive character traits. That much is obvious enough, but we must press further: How do you know that person possesses those positive characteristics? The answer to that question shows exactly why the self-esteem cult is selling snake oil.
The simple fact of the matter is that you love your loved ones because they demonstrate their positive character traits. Being lovable isn't simply a matter of sitting in an armchair and, uh... being lovable. No, what it actually means to be lovable is that you do lovable things to the people who love you; and maybe even to perfect strangers.
I'm not here to tell you what types of character traits you should love, but it is important to remember that you don't simply love people in a vacuum. You don't love them because they possess a brain that engages in self-affirmative navel-gazing. You love them because they do lovable things. Our thoughts are only valuable insofar as we translate them into actions. Those actions could be anything: smiling warmly, writing a book, giving someone a hug, doing good work at the office, telling funny jokes, being a good mentor... whatever. Whatever you, personally, find lovable (or atrocious, or pitiful, or hilarious, or valuable, or deplorable, or...) is a set of characteristics that have been evaluated based on specific, observed behavior.
You don't know someone is funny until they say something funny. You don't know someone is intelligent until you see her mind in action. You don't know someone is athletic until you see his athleticism firsthand. Any way you shake it, we humans are beings that exist in a tangible universe, acting out our thoughts and desires. We are what we do. Actions matter. Actions define who we are. If you think you're an inherently good person, but spend all your time on the couch, crying and lonely, then guess what one thing the universe knows about you: You spend all your time on the couch, crying and lonely.
Want to be inherently good? Then do inherently good things.
(By consistently applying Stationary Waves principles, then, what I am suggesting is that the lovable is the virtuous, and virtue is an action not a moral state. Seen from that perspective, it's clear that when I talk about judging and being judged, I'm not talking about the quality of a man's soul; I'm talking about the quality of a man's actions.)
Deception #2: What You Do All Comes Down To How You Feel About Yourself
Once the self-esteem cult has succeeded in divorcing action and self-worth, they glue it back together, upside-down. As soon as they convince you that you are a good person despite any actions you have made to the contrary, they finish scrambling your brain by telling you the exact opposite of what you need to hear: they tell you that the reason your actions are bad is that you have low self-esteem. Solve your self-esteem problem, they say, and your actions will follow suit.
Under this theory, an overweight person isn't overweight because he eats too much and exercises too little. An overweight person also isn't ashamed because he is overweight. The self-esteem cult alleges the exact opposite: A person is ashamed, therefore he eats too much and exercises too little, therefore he is overweight. Shame causes over-eating, as opposed to over-eating causing shame. The actions are a product of how a person feels about himself. Analogous explanations can be thus applied to any area of misbehavior: Whether one is a liar, or a coward, or lacks self-control, or is selfish, or jealous, or anything else, the explanation is always the same. Improve your self-esteem, and observe how your behaviors "automatically" trend toward honesty, bravery, self-mastery, generosity, and so on.
Again, the appeal is quite obvious. If all you need to do to lose weight and be a better person is engage in personal cheer-leading, then life gets a lot easier for everyone. The reason this concept is a clear deception is painfully obvious: there is no causal relationship between self-affirmation and appetite reduction, or honesty, or kindness, or etc.
The reason no such causality exists is because of what I said above: It is our actions that determine who we really are. Consider a man who, despite being terrified, dives into an icy river to save a drowning child. Ask yourself whether you think such a man is a coward, because he feels terrified, or a courageous hero, because he took action to save another human being. Isn't the answer obvious? It doesn't matter how he feels, it matters only what he does.
Despite our sensitivities, this same logic, if true, must also apply to someone who is dishonest. It doesn't matter how a liar feels about himself, it only matters whether he actually tells lies. It doesn't matter how a timid person feels, it only matters how timid he behaves. Actions are what define us, not feelings.
This second deception hinges on an unstated middle term. This middle term, included by assumption, is that the only reason anyone ever acts contrary to their personal values is because they have low self-esteem. That might sound plausible enough as a shotgun theory, but can you prove it? Isn't it at all likely that people engage in bad behavior for a wide variety of personal reasons that may or may not be mapped to their internal self-evaluations? Does an overweight person always overeat because he is ashamed? Does a coward always run away because he deems himself unworthy of the battle? Does a liar always lie because he thinks people will dislike him if the truth were revealed? Does an addict always go on benders because he doesn't feel good enough to be sober?
Who are we kidding?
Okay, You're Not Convinced. But How Has All This Self-Esteem Stuff Panned Out For You?
I have little doubt that sending oneself positive messages feels good. On that level, the self-esteem cult is always in the right. Of course, by the same argument, so are the hedonists. The relevant point of analysis is not a single, therapeutic point-in-time, but the long-run quality of a person's life. Do self-affirmations actually result in a long-term improvement?
Anecdotally, I have noticed that there tend to be two kinds of people out there: Those who feel that they must "work on" their self-esteem, and those who don't talk about it at all. Phrased another way, all of the people who talk about self-esteem don't seem to have enough of it. Coincidence?
The problem is not anecdotal, but rather methodological. If you needed, say, a new pair of pants, and I told you that all you really needed to do was love yourself more, and you would suddenly find yourself shopping for pants, you'd think I were stark-raving mad. So why do we so readily accept that same methodology when applied to weight loss or career success? If you want new pants, go out and shop for some pants. If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. If you want more career success, work harder and smarter than your competition.
Certainly having a high regard for yourself will make you feel more satisfied along the way, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the work that needs to get. Even worse, if you happen to feel bad about the fact that you're wearing old pants, or carrying some extra pounds, or going nowhere at the office, the self-esteem cult is telling you that your problem is not the work that needs to be done but the fact that you are dissatisfied at all!
One byproduct of this is that it creates an infinite loop in which people who fall short of their aspirations end up feeling bad about feeling bad about themselves. It turns a rational response into a sin. What I mean is, if you feel guilty about lying to someone, then congratulations: you have a conscience. That's a good thing. If you feel bad about being overweight or not getting good grades, congratulations: you're normal. Feeling down about things that would legitimately make anyone feel down is the very definition of having a normal, well-functioning human brain.
But the self-esteem cult turns this on its head by telling you that the reason you're not climbing the corporate ladder is that you don't love yourself adequately. So a person stuck in a dead-end job first feels rationally bad about her predicament, and then fires up the self-esteem mantras. When these mantras don't actually result in career success (after all, how could they??), the self-esteem cult advises the poor woman that she just doesn't see her true worth. So she doubles-down on the mantras, and again they don't work, and she realizes that her self-esteem problem must be far worse than she feared!
If someone told me that every time I failed, I'd feel worse, not better. Wouldn't you?
Conclusion
The cult of self-esteem wants you to believe that simply being born entitles you to a sense of self-worth. When we get out into the real world, many of us are shocked to find out that the rest of the human population is not exactly as tickled-pink by our wonderfulness as we thought they were supposed to be. We feel judged. We feel misunderstood. We feel maligned.
Listen, the world owes you no automatic esteem. Society is not obligated to think you are great. Self-esteem isn't something you get through birthright. Self-esteem is something that you earn by making yourself into a virtuous person.
To be a worthwhile person, you have to do something worthwhile. That doesn't mean you have to climb Everest or invent cold fusion. What it means is that you have engage in actual activities that produce tangible results. When those results are assessed by you and everyone you care about, you will quickly see their worth, and guess what - that's virtue! That's what's going to make you feel good about yourself.
You are not your thoughts. You are your actions.
How The Self-Esteem Cult Works
The self-esteem cult, otherwise known as all those people who tell you that the magic key to happiness and being a good person is just having self-esteem and loving yourself, rests the substance of its doctrine on two rather shallow deceptions.
Deception #1: You Are Something Other Than Your Actions
The first deception is to sever the relationship between one's actions and one's self-worth. Thus, if a person fails on the job, screws up his relationships, gains a large amount of weight, etc., he is still a good person. None of his failings or shortcomings in any way diminish his actual value as a human being. Despite all the social cues he gets from his family, friends, and colleagues, whoever that person is is not a direct summation of his actions. His "self" rather consists of his best thoughts and feelings, the stuff inside his brain that makes him feel better, the stuff that only those who truly love him can see in full - not because he tells them, but because they somehow detect his self-worth, and thus true friends.
This is an alluring prospect, but it does not withstand much scrutiny. Let's examine why.
First, think of someone you love with all of your heart: a family member, a friend, a partner. (Sorry, no pets.) Next, ask yourself why you love that person. If your answer is, "Gah, I don't know... I just do!" then you haven't thought about it hard enough. Don't be vapid here, I'd like you to actually think about it. Why do you love this person? Why?
The answer to that question is almost certainly a laundry list of positive character traits. That much is obvious enough, but we must press further: How do you know that person possesses those positive characteristics? The answer to that question shows exactly why the self-esteem cult is selling snake oil.
The simple fact of the matter is that you love your loved ones because they demonstrate their positive character traits. Being lovable isn't simply a matter of sitting in an armchair and, uh... being lovable. No, what it actually means to be lovable is that you do lovable things to the people who love you; and maybe even to perfect strangers.
I'm not here to tell you what types of character traits you should love, but it is important to remember that you don't simply love people in a vacuum. You don't love them because they possess a brain that engages in self-affirmative navel-gazing. You love them because they do lovable things. Our thoughts are only valuable insofar as we translate them into actions. Those actions could be anything: smiling warmly, writing a book, giving someone a hug, doing good work at the office, telling funny jokes, being a good mentor... whatever. Whatever you, personally, find lovable (or atrocious, or pitiful, or hilarious, or valuable, or deplorable, or...) is a set of characteristics that have been evaluated based on specific, observed behavior.
You don't know someone is funny until they say something funny. You don't know someone is intelligent until you see her mind in action. You don't know someone is athletic until you see his athleticism firsthand. Any way you shake it, we humans are beings that exist in a tangible universe, acting out our thoughts and desires. We are what we do. Actions matter. Actions define who we are. If you think you're an inherently good person, but spend all your time on the couch, crying and lonely, then guess what one thing the universe knows about you: You spend all your time on the couch, crying and lonely.
Want to be inherently good? Then do inherently good things.
(By consistently applying Stationary Waves principles, then, what I am suggesting is that the lovable is the virtuous, and virtue is an action not a moral state. Seen from that perspective, it's clear that when I talk about judging and being judged, I'm not talking about the quality of a man's soul; I'm talking about the quality of a man's actions.)
Deception #2: What You Do All Comes Down To How You Feel About Yourself
Once the self-esteem cult has succeeded in divorcing action and self-worth, they glue it back together, upside-down. As soon as they convince you that you are a good person despite any actions you have made to the contrary, they finish scrambling your brain by telling you the exact opposite of what you need to hear: they tell you that the reason your actions are bad is that you have low self-esteem. Solve your self-esteem problem, they say, and your actions will follow suit.
Under this theory, an overweight person isn't overweight because he eats too much and exercises too little. An overweight person also isn't ashamed because he is overweight. The self-esteem cult alleges the exact opposite: A person is ashamed, therefore he eats too much and exercises too little, therefore he is overweight. Shame causes over-eating, as opposed to over-eating causing shame. The actions are a product of how a person feels about himself. Analogous explanations can be thus applied to any area of misbehavior: Whether one is a liar, or a coward, or lacks self-control, or is selfish, or jealous, or anything else, the explanation is always the same. Improve your self-esteem, and observe how your behaviors "automatically" trend toward honesty, bravery, self-mastery, generosity, and so on.
Again, the appeal is quite obvious. If all you need to do to lose weight and be a better person is engage in personal cheer-leading, then life gets a lot easier for everyone. The reason this concept is a clear deception is painfully obvious: there is no causal relationship between self-affirmation and appetite reduction, or honesty, or kindness, or etc.
The reason no such causality exists is because of what I said above: It is our actions that determine who we really are. Consider a man who, despite being terrified, dives into an icy river to save a drowning child. Ask yourself whether you think such a man is a coward, because he feels terrified, or a courageous hero, because he took action to save another human being. Isn't the answer obvious? It doesn't matter how he feels, it matters only what he does.
Despite our sensitivities, this same logic, if true, must also apply to someone who is dishonest. It doesn't matter how a liar feels about himself, it only matters whether he actually tells lies. It doesn't matter how a timid person feels, it only matters how timid he behaves. Actions are what define us, not feelings.
This second deception hinges on an unstated middle term. This middle term, included by assumption, is that the only reason anyone ever acts contrary to their personal values is because they have low self-esteem. That might sound plausible enough as a shotgun theory, but can you prove it? Isn't it at all likely that people engage in bad behavior for a wide variety of personal reasons that may or may not be mapped to their internal self-evaluations? Does an overweight person always overeat because he is ashamed? Does a coward always run away because he deems himself unworthy of the battle? Does a liar always lie because he thinks people will dislike him if the truth were revealed? Does an addict always go on benders because he doesn't feel good enough to be sober?
Who are we kidding?
Okay, You're Not Convinced. But How Has All This Self-Esteem Stuff Panned Out For You?
I have little doubt that sending oneself positive messages feels good. On that level, the self-esteem cult is always in the right. Of course, by the same argument, so are the hedonists. The relevant point of analysis is not a single, therapeutic point-in-time, but the long-run quality of a person's life. Do self-affirmations actually result in a long-term improvement?
Anecdotally, I have noticed that there tend to be two kinds of people out there: Those who feel that they must "work on" their self-esteem, and those who don't talk about it at all. Phrased another way, all of the people who talk about self-esteem don't seem to have enough of it. Coincidence?
The problem is not anecdotal, but rather methodological. If you needed, say, a new pair of pants, and I told you that all you really needed to do was love yourself more, and you would suddenly find yourself shopping for pants, you'd think I were stark-raving mad. So why do we so readily accept that same methodology when applied to weight loss or career success? If you want new pants, go out and shop for some pants. If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. If you want more career success, work harder and smarter than your competition.
Certainly having a high regard for yourself will make you feel more satisfied along the way, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the work that needs to get. Even worse, if you happen to feel bad about the fact that you're wearing old pants, or carrying some extra pounds, or going nowhere at the office, the self-esteem cult is telling you that your problem is not the work that needs to be done but the fact that you are dissatisfied at all!
One byproduct of this is that it creates an infinite loop in which people who fall short of their aspirations end up feeling bad about feeling bad about themselves. It turns a rational response into a sin. What I mean is, if you feel guilty about lying to someone, then congratulations: you have a conscience. That's a good thing. If you feel bad about being overweight or not getting good grades, congratulations: you're normal. Feeling down about things that would legitimately make anyone feel down is the very definition of having a normal, well-functioning human brain.
But the self-esteem cult turns this on its head by telling you that the reason you're not climbing the corporate ladder is that you don't love yourself adequately. So a person stuck in a dead-end job first feels rationally bad about her predicament, and then fires up the self-esteem mantras. When these mantras don't actually result in career success (after all, how could they??), the self-esteem cult advises the poor woman that she just doesn't see her true worth. So she doubles-down on the mantras, and again they don't work, and she realizes that her self-esteem problem must be far worse than she feared!
If someone told me that every time I failed, I'd feel worse, not better. Wouldn't you?
Another byproduct of this is that it replaces genuinely virtuous behaviors - you know, the things that actually make you feel like a good person - with introspective navel-gazing and self-actualization diatribing. Think about it: While you're spending all your time giving yourself little internal pep-talks, what is the one thing you're not doing? If you guessed, "Any of the things that will actually make you feel better," you're absolutely right.
When you feel down about yourself, telling yourself "I think I can, I think I can" sounds like the ideal prescription. It might even be the right prescription, if the problem you're trying to address is the fact that you keep telling yourself that you can't. But note well: just because you can't do something doesn't mean that you have been secretly telling yourself that you cannot. The difference between the gold and silver medals was not a matter of self-esteem, it was a matter of training, and training consists of more than just daily affirmations. It consists of hard work.
Okay, Smart Guy, Then What's Your Suggestion?
There are two distinct possibilities here: Either a person genuinely has a self-esteem problem, or they don't.
In the latter case, reframing your shortcomings as being some sort of underlying self-evaluative problem is not going to help you reach any of your objectives. You won't be a better person by falsely accusing yourself of having low self-esteem. It's a lie, a ruse, a deception, snake oil, false diagnosis, etc. Many people who are accustomed to self-help language default to a pantomime of the low-self-esteem narrative any time their fail to meet their highest aspirations. As I've described above, this is counter-productive. If you don't have a self-esteem problem, then forget about constructing a false self-help narrative and start applying yourself to engaging in more virtuous activity.
That means: If you want to be more successful, work harder; if you want to lose weight, eat better and exercise more; if you want to be more attractive to the opposite sex, give yourself a make-over and start acting more like a sexy potential suitor; if you want more friends, be more friendly; if you want to be braver, confront your fears one-at-a-time; and so on. Whatever virtues are required to achieve your goals, those are the ones to which you should be applying yourself. And if you never really "get there" because your goal is a little pie-in-the-sky, then work on those virtues anyway, and just enjoy the ride.
In the other case, you might genuinely have a self-esteem problem. If this is the case, then what good is it to give yourself daily, verbal affirmations? As I have described, that's not productive. At best, it's a waste of your time, and at worst it's a daily reminder of what little regard you hold for yourself.
Think of it this way: How does constant, melancholy navel-gazing differ from plain old narcissism? Both represent self-obsession. The traditional narcissist's life revolves around himself so completely that he is unable to perceive of the worth of other people. The insufferable low-self-esteem cultist is similarly imprisoned in a world at which they are the center; only they have such terrible luck or awful power to have poisoned their chance in the world. Low self-esteem is nothing more than narcissism applied to sadness.
How do you build self-esteem, except by pursuing virtue?
If you feel powerless, try engaging in a little charity work. Not only is this scientifically proven to make people feel better, it's also a perfect demonstration of how your own personal actions can transmit a direct, positive impact on other human beings. I defy anyone to think of themselves as "powerless" while they're volunteering at a soup kitchen.
If you feel like no one likes you, do something nice for somebody. This isn't bribery: people respond to what you do, not what you think. You can't wish appreciation onto yourself, you have to go out there and earn it. Buy someone you love some flowers, or a coffee, or a book, or whatever. Mow their lawn or wash their car. Do something nice for someone, and observe how quickly you will see that people like you.
If you feel unaccomplished, go accomplish something. You don't have to gain a promotion at work to accomplish something in life. Go bungee jumping or sky diving. Raise $1500 for charity. Solve a logic puzzle. Start learning a new language. Doing something that you haven't done until today is always an accomplishment. Seven consecutive days of such things will constitute the most productive week you've had in years. (Hell, I sure haven't tried seven new things in a week before!)
The point here is that in order to build self-esteem, you have to engage in virtuous activities. Virtue and action, not navel-gazing and introspection, are how people end up feeling better about themselves. So stop thinking about building your self-esteem and start thinking about building virtue.
And note well: The advice for those with high self-esteem is the same for those with low self-esteem. Virtue is for everyone.
Conclusion
The cult of self-esteem wants you to believe that simply being born entitles you to a sense of self-worth. When we get out into the real world, many of us are shocked to find out that the rest of the human population is not exactly as tickled-pink by our wonderfulness as we thought they were supposed to be. We feel judged. We feel misunderstood. We feel maligned.
Listen, the world owes you no automatic esteem. Society is not obligated to think you are great. Self-esteem isn't something you get through birthright. Self-esteem is something that you earn by making yourself into a virtuous person.
To be a worthwhile person, you have to do something worthwhile. That doesn't mean you have to climb Everest or invent cold fusion. What it means is that you have engage in actual activities that produce tangible results. When those results are assessed by you and everyone you care about, you will quickly see their worth, and guess what - that's virtue! That's what's going to make you feel good about yourself.
You are not your thoughts. You are your actions.
2013-06-05
Adding Distance
Yesterday, I received a question from a runner who wanted to know how to increase his daily running mileage. The issue was not simply, "Run more miles, duh! lolzy-face!" The issue was that he has already tried the usual ways of adding mileage, but none of these methods were resulting in his being able to handle an increase in mileage, despite his best efforts.
So the real question is, What do you do to increase mileage, when nothing seems to work?
I admittedly fumbled with the question, because I've been adding and subtracting miles to my weekly regimen for over twenty years. This blog post is my attempt to supply a good answer to his question.
Why Can't A Person Run Farther?
The first line of attack with regard to answering his question is to list out all the reasons why anyone might not be able to handle an increase in mileage. Here is the most exhaustive list I am able to supply, phrased in the first-person [Note: although this list has been worded comically, it is not intended to be humorous]:
Having listed the possibilities, I am going to go through them one-by-one and address how each one should be overcome. Some of the items on the list have multiple interpretations, and other items on the list mean roughly the same thing as other list items. I'll try to keep them straight.
I Will Injure / Have Already Injured Myself: Stop Running
This one is easy to fix. Stop running. It is always the safest bet to stop running if you feel you are at real risk of injury; and obviously this applies tenfold if you are already struggling with an injury.
Running with an injury doesn't merely aggravate your existing condition (although that is an obvious risk), it also changes your running form in many imperceptible ways, the sum total of which results in further injury of related or complimentary muscle groups. Whenever you feel you might be injuring yourself, that is your cue to stop running, take a few rest days, and possibly reduce your mileage as opposed to increasing it.
Lungs Burning / Muscles Burning: Run Faster, But Do Not Increase Mileage
Both of these feelings are telltale signs of insufficient cardiovascular training. Here's how it works (covered more in-depth here):
You start to run, and your body must engage in some anaerobic respiration; you use up your muscular energy stores fairly quickly. As you continue to run, your body switches over to aerobic respiration for the majority of its energy requirements, but you are unable to do so with kind of efficiency that a marathon runner might be able to. Every runner "hits the wall," but you hit it much earlier than someone with a higher VO2-max.
The end result of this is that, however fit your leg muscles happen to be, your lungs and heart are incapable of supplying them with sufficient oxygen to enable aerobic respiration for any distance greater than your current maximum. Your muscles start to burn as they are filled with the acidic byproducts of anaerobic respiration; you gasp for air, and no amount of gasping seems to do the trick; your heart pounds and pounds, to no avail. You stagger to a halt.
The one and only way out of this trap is to increase your VO2-max. There are several ways to do this (see for example, here and here), and none of them are particularly fun. The simplest advice I can give you is to just start running faster from now on. Forget about adding miles to your training regimen until you are capable of running your current mileage at a much faster pace.
There is no one, correct pace that indicates it's time to increase mileage. If you're bonking like this, though, my advice is to consider an arbitrary 10-point scale, where 10 is the fastest running pace you can imagine, and 1 is slowest.
Do you have that scale in your head? Good. Now start telling yourself that your daily run has been about a 3, and you shouldn't increase your mileage until you reach at least 5 on the scale. Don't do too much math here, it's supposed to be a subjective scale.
Vertigo / Decreased Mobility Or Mobility Control / Passing Out: Eat More Food
If, by the end of your run, you feel dizzy, your vision is somewhat white-washed or perhaps you are experiencing some mild optical illusions, you feel chilled or trembling, and perhaps frantic, and you almost feel as though you are going to pass out, you may be experiencing hypoglycemia, i.e. low blood-sugar.
If you run long distances, and particularly if you run them extremely quickly, you may experience exercise-induced hypoglycemia from time-to-time. A "perfect" body should not normally do this, but it can happen. You need not worry about it unless it happens with some regularity.
If you find it happening quite often, though, your first response should be to start eating a light snack before you run. The snack should be easily digestible and of moderate carbohydrate content. A glass of Gatorade is always a safe bet, but you should stick to what works for you. Perhaps you could try a slice of bread-and-butter, a serving of fruit, a glass of chocolate milk, or the like.
While we're talking about it, if you aren't ending your workout with a snack comprised of both carbohydrate and protein, then you should certainly start. Doing so will aid in muscle recovery, help smooth out your blood sugar levels, and may slightly decrease the amount of post-workout cortisol released by your endocrine system.
Lower Back Pain / Decreased Mobility / Mild Muscle Burning: Hit The Gym
Runners can sometimes neglect strength training. I have been very guilty of this, myself. When a person does a great deal of running without maintaining their overall muscle mass, a funny thing starts to happen: the unused muscles start to deteriorate from lack of regular use. This will change your physical posture and potentially weaken a number of important running-related muscles.
For example, decreased shoulder and back strength has an extremely adverse impact on overall running form. If this applies to you, you will end up running inefficiently, spending a lot more energy than you would otherwise need to. These muscle groups will tire early, making your body feel clumsly and slow despite the fact that your leg muscles basically feel fine.
Decreased abdominal strength will result in greatly diminished running capacity. Many people underestimate the role abdominal muscles play in the basic running motion, but if you think about it, you will notice their role right away. The body's trunk naturally twists back and forth while running, and the oblique muscles are also involved in the movement of a person's arms while running. Weak abdominals will strain your posture, particularly when running downhill, and you will find that you will suffer some manageable, but noticeable, lower-back pain.
The solution here is a relatively easy one: Hit the gym. If you are dedicating most of your time to running, then all you'll need is 2-3 strength training days per week. During that time, you should focus on abdominal muscles (a lot), shoulder muscles (to a great degree), and back and arm muscles (a fair amount). This could be as simple as doing some crunches, pull-ups, and push-ups twice a week. Start with three sets of ten, and see how it goes. Add to taste.
Getting Slower At The Same Speed / General Fatigue: Take Rest, Then Increase Variety
Over-training can be a real problem for any runner, even if you don't run very many miles. The most common way people engage in over-training is by doing exactly the same workout, every day. This is no different than doing exactly the same weight training exercises every day. That is to say, if you never give your muscles a chance to rest, you will slowly wear them down until you're just tired all the time. It happens to everyone.
To overcome over-training, start by taking two days of complete rest. No yard work, no cross-training, no spending all day at the mall... Nothing. Spend a couple of days at home, reading, instead of exercising or being active. Your body needs rest.
Once you've taken adequate rest, you'll need to start adding more variety to your workouts. You might consider replacing one day of running during the week with a day of biking or swimming. Or, you might consider splitting your days up into speed days, recovery run days, long run days, and race days. Doing different kinds of runs during the week will ensure that your muscles will get a full workout, but not the same workout day in, day out.
Everything Hurts! Time To Increase Those Miles!!!
I've saved the best for last. If your general problem is that you go running and, by the end of it you simply cannot go any further because you feel like everything is a big struggle and the misery of it all will not subside, I have some bad news for you: Your problem is all in your head.
Think about it: Once we've ruled out all the physical constraints you're facing, the only remaining constraints are the psychological ones. Running takes a tremendous amount of will power. In fact, that's one of my favorite things about it; it has the wonderful ability to train people how to overcome adverse physical sensations with the power of the human mind.
Something I noticed early on in my running career is that, when you start to get in shape, many of the "pains" we experience while running never really go away. If you're running at a good pace, it won't really matter if you run two miles, three times per week, or ten miles, seven times per week. The underlying discomfort never really goes away. What changes? Eventually, you grow accustomed to it.
Believe it or not, your mind is capable of over-coming much of this physical discomfort. Competitive runners do it during races all the time. When a person runs any faster than, say, 7:00/mile, the body simply starts to throwing up resistance messages like a stubborn mule. Few can even imagine what it might be like to run a 5K in under 5:00/mile pace, but take it from me: the body absolutely and relentlessly screams. The only way to overcome this is to push through it.
The tool for this is will power. A competitive athlete needs sufficient will power to endure 15 minutes of hell, knowing that it is something that will only last 15 minutes. Of course, marathon runners experience a similar sensation, but it lasts for hours. The only trick involved is that there is no trick. It's just a matter of will-power.
This becomes all the more obvious the first time you see a person push themselves to literal exhaustion. Most people have pushed their muscles to exhaustion at the gym. If you haven't, you should really give it a try some time: Do sets of pull-ups until your arms literally won't work anymore. Feel free to take as much rest as you need. Within 30 minutes, your body will feel fine, except that your arms won't work.
Few of us, however, have experience pushing our cardiovascular system to the exhaustion point, the point at which you can't take a single step because your body simply won't take another step. I've seen people run so hard for so long that they pass out right on the track.
When someone says they can't run any further because they just can't, I have to wonder if they're being completely honest with themselves. If you're still standing - if you're still capable of stopping, catching your breath, and then walking home - then you're not actually incapable of increasing your mileage. In fact, you can probably handle a few more miles than you think you can.
It's important to remember that the nature of exercise is that we're going to run into plateaus from time to time. Pushing through them is really the only way to reach the next level. The only way to do this is to use your will power. I realize that's an anti-climax, but it's the truth.
So the real question is, What do you do to increase mileage, when nothing seems to work?
I admittedly fumbled with the question, because I've been adding and subtracting miles to my weekly regimen for over twenty years. This blog post is my attempt to supply a good answer to his question.
Why Can't A Person Run Farther?
The first line of attack with regard to answering his question is to list out all the reasons why anyone might not be able to handle an increase in mileage. Here is the most exhaustive list I am able to supply, phrased in the first-person [Note: although this list has been worded comically, it is not intended to be humorous]:
- If I run any farther, I feel as though I will seriously injure my muscles, joints, or tendons.
- I cannot run any farther, because I already injured myself.
- If I run any farther, I feel as though my lungs will burst out of my throat.
- If I run any farther, I feel as though my legs will catch on fire and burn me alive.
- I cannot run any farther, because everything hurts.
- If I run any farther, I feel as though I will get vertigo and possibly pass out.
- If I run any farther, I feel I will lose control of my own mobility, stumble, and fall on my face.
- I believe I can run farther, but my lower back is starting to hurt.
- I cannot run any farther, I keep running the same distance slower, and I feel tired all the time, even when I'm not running.
Having listed the possibilities, I am going to go through them one-by-one and address how each one should be overcome. Some of the items on the list have multiple interpretations, and other items on the list mean roughly the same thing as other list items. I'll try to keep them straight.
I Will Injure / Have Already Injured Myself: Stop Running
This one is easy to fix. Stop running. It is always the safest bet to stop running if you feel you are at real risk of injury; and obviously this applies tenfold if you are already struggling with an injury.
Running with an injury doesn't merely aggravate your existing condition (although that is an obvious risk), it also changes your running form in many imperceptible ways, the sum total of which results in further injury of related or complimentary muscle groups. Whenever you feel you might be injuring yourself, that is your cue to stop running, take a few rest days, and possibly reduce your mileage as opposed to increasing it.
Lungs Burning / Muscles Burning: Run Faster, But Do Not Increase Mileage
Both of these feelings are telltale signs of insufficient cardiovascular training. Here's how it works (covered more in-depth here):
You start to run, and your body must engage in some anaerobic respiration; you use up your muscular energy stores fairly quickly. As you continue to run, your body switches over to aerobic respiration for the majority of its energy requirements, but you are unable to do so with kind of efficiency that a marathon runner might be able to. Every runner "hits the wall," but you hit it much earlier than someone with a higher VO2-max.
The end result of this is that, however fit your leg muscles happen to be, your lungs and heart are incapable of supplying them with sufficient oxygen to enable aerobic respiration for any distance greater than your current maximum. Your muscles start to burn as they are filled with the acidic byproducts of anaerobic respiration; you gasp for air, and no amount of gasping seems to do the trick; your heart pounds and pounds, to no avail. You stagger to a halt.
The one and only way out of this trap is to increase your VO2-max. There are several ways to do this (see for example, here and here), and none of them are particularly fun. The simplest advice I can give you is to just start running faster from now on. Forget about adding miles to your training regimen until you are capable of running your current mileage at a much faster pace.
There is no one, correct pace that indicates it's time to increase mileage. If you're bonking like this, though, my advice is to consider an arbitrary 10-point scale, where 10 is the fastest running pace you can imagine, and 1 is slowest.
Do you have that scale in your head? Good. Now start telling yourself that your daily run has been about a 3, and you shouldn't increase your mileage until you reach at least 5 on the scale. Don't do too much math here, it's supposed to be a subjective scale.
Vertigo / Decreased Mobility Or Mobility Control / Passing Out: Eat More Food
If, by the end of your run, you feel dizzy, your vision is somewhat white-washed or perhaps you are experiencing some mild optical illusions, you feel chilled or trembling, and perhaps frantic, and you almost feel as though you are going to pass out, you may be experiencing hypoglycemia, i.e. low blood-sugar.
If you run long distances, and particularly if you run them extremely quickly, you may experience exercise-induced hypoglycemia from time-to-time. A "perfect" body should not normally do this, but it can happen. You need not worry about it unless it happens with some regularity.
If you find it happening quite often, though, your first response should be to start eating a light snack before you run. The snack should be easily digestible and of moderate carbohydrate content. A glass of Gatorade is always a safe bet, but you should stick to what works for you. Perhaps you could try a slice of bread-and-butter, a serving of fruit, a glass of chocolate milk, or the like.
While we're talking about it, if you aren't ending your workout with a snack comprised of both carbohydrate and protein, then you should certainly start. Doing so will aid in muscle recovery, help smooth out your blood sugar levels, and may slightly decrease the amount of post-workout cortisol released by your endocrine system.
Lower Back Pain / Decreased Mobility / Mild Muscle Burning: Hit The Gym
Runners can sometimes neglect strength training. I have been very guilty of this, myself. When a person does a great deal of running without maintaining their overall muscle mass, a funny thing starts to happen: the unused muscles start to deteriorate from lack of regular use. This will change your physical posture and potentially weaken a number of important running-related muscles.
For example, decreased shoulder and back strength has an extremely adverse impact on overall running form. If this applies to you, you will end up running inefficiently, spending a lot more energy than you would otherwise need to. These muscle groups will tire early, making your body feel clumsly and slow despite the fact that your leg muscles basically feel fine.
Decreased abdominal strength will result in greatly diminished running capacity. Many people underestimate the role abdominal muscles play in the basic running motion, but if you think about it, you will notice their role right away. The body's trunk naturally twists back and forth while running, and the oblique muscles are also involved in the movement of a person's arms while running. Weak abdominals will strain your posture, particularly when running downhill, and you will find that you will suffer some manageable, but noticeable, lower-back pain.
The solution here is a relatively easy one: Hit the gym. If you are dedicating most of your time to running, then all you'll need is 2-3 strength training days per week. During that time, you should focus on abdominal muscles (a lot), shoulder muscles (to a great degree), and back and arm muscles (a fair amount). This could be as simple as doing some crunches, pull-ups, and push-ups twice a week. Start with three sets of ten, and see how it goes. Add to taste.
Getting Slower At The Same Speed / General Fatigue: Take Rest, Then Increase Variety
Over-training can be a real problem for any runner, even if you don't run very many miles. The most common way people engage in over-training is by doing exactly the same workout, every day. This is no different than doing exactly the same weight training exercises every day. That is to say, if you never give your muscles a chance to rest, you will slowly wear them down until you're just tired all the time. It happens to everyone.
To overcome over-training, start by taking two days of complete rest. No yard work, no cross-training, no spending all day at the mall... Nothing. Spend a couple of days at home, reading, instead of exercising or being active. Your body needs rest.
Once you've taken adequate rest, you'll need to start adding more variety to your workouts. You might consider replacing one day of running during the week with a day of biking or swimming. Or, you might consider splitting your days up into speed days, recovery run days, long run days, and race days. Doing different kinds of runs during the week will ensure that your muscles will get a full workout, but not the same workout day in, day out.
Everything Hurts! Time To Increase Those Miles!!!
I've saved the best for last. If your general problem is that you go running and, by the end of it you simply cannot go any further because you feel like everything is a big struggle and the misery of it all will not subside, I have some bad news for you: Your problem is all in your head.
Think about it: Once we've ruled out all the physical constraints you're facing, the only remaining constraints are the psychological ones. Running takes a tremendous amount of will power. In fact, that's one of my favorite things about it; it has the wonderful ability to train people how to overcome adverse physical sensations with the power of the human mind.
Something I noticed early on in my running career is that, when you start to get in shape, many of the "pains" we experience while running never really go away. If you're running at a good pace, it won't really matter if you run two miles, three times per week, or ten miles, seven times per week. The underlying discomfort never really goes away. What changes? Eventually, you grow accustomed to it.
Believe it or not, your mind is capable of over-coming much of this physical discomfort. Competitive runners do it during races all the time. When a person runs any faster than, say, 7:00/mile, the body simply starts to throwing up resistance messages like a stubborn mule. Few can even imagine what it might be like to run a 5K in under 5:00/mile pace, but take it from me: the body absolutely and relentlessly screams. The only way to overcome this is to push through it.
The tool for this is will power. A competitive athlete needs sufficient will power to endure 15 minutes of hell, knowing that it is something that will only last 15 minutes. Of course, marathon runners experience a similar sensation, but it lasts for hours. The only trick involved is that there is no trick. It's just a matter of will-power.
This becomes all the more obvious the first time you see a person push themselves to literal exhaustion. Most people have pushed their muscles to exhaustion at the gym. If you haven't, you should really give it a try some time: Do sets of pull-ups until your arms literally won't work anymore. Feel free to take as much rest as you need. Within 30 minutes, your body will feel fine, except that your arms won't work.
Few of us, however, have experience pushing our cardiovascular system to the exhaustion point, the point at which you can't take a single step because your body simply won't take another step. I've seen people run so hard for so long that they pass out right on the track.
When someone says they can't run any further because they just can't, I have to wonder if they're being completely honest with themselves. If you're still standing - if you're still capable of stopping, catching your breath, and then walking home - then you're not actually incapable of increasing your mileage. In fact, you can probably handle a few more miles than you think you can.
It's important to remember that the nature of exercise is that we're going to run into plateaus from time to time. Pushing through them is really the only way to reach the next level. The only way to do this is to use your will power. I realize that's an anti-climax, but it's the truth.
Some Links
If you're in the market for a new guitar, I think today's offering over at Musician's Friend's Stupid Deal of the Day is the best deal I've ever seen. B.C. Rich Pro X Mockingbird. Top-of-the-line EMG pickups, mahogany body, neck-through design, maple neck, ebony fretboard, burled maple cap, 24 jumbo frets... All for $500. Jeez, you can't get a better guitar for this price-point. This is insane. Offer is valid only for today, and no, I do not have any connection to Musician's Friend or B.C. Rich or any other music company.
A series of new studies cast many doubts on the supposed superiority of barefoot running. (Hat tip to Jeffrey Tucker.)
This is a long read, but an important one. An Australian physician and obesity specialist does a complete take-down of the fat-is-a-disease scam, discusses the many reasons people should lose weight, and talks about the challenges society faces as it slowly becomes fatter and fatter. I was able to enjoy it, even despite its occasional anti-market bent.
I know this news is already a couple of days old, but Reason.com just got around to it today. Google bans pornography from its Google Glass technology. I understand Google's reasoning here, but according to the Reason.com blog, it sounds like the company making the app had some really cool plans, from a purely technological standpoint. It's funny that pornographers are always early adopters of new technology, and it's also funny the extent to which they advance innovation within that new technology. The question becomes whether Google's pursuit of civility is worth more than its pursuit of innovation. That's a question of subjective value, but I think it's worth stopping and thinking twice about the ban. The adult market is still a lucrative place to be, and if it helps you develop your products, that's hard to say no to. Then again, it's kind of like selling your soul.
Mises Daily seems to be getting their act together. Today's article on the rise of entitlement spending and its adverse impact on the economy is truly fantastic.
With signature wit and flair, Robert Murphy responds to the claim that libertarianism has never been attempted throughout all of human history.
A series of new studies cast many doubts on the supposed superiority of barefoot running. (Hat tip to Jeffrey Tucker.)
This is a long read, but an important one. An Australian physician and obesity specialist does a complete take-down of the fat-is-a-disease scam, discusses the many reasons people should lose weight, and talks about the challenges society faces as it slowly becomes fatter and fatter. I was able to enjoy it, even despite its occasional anti-market bent.
I know this news is already a couple of days old, but Reason.com just got around to it today. Google bans pornography from its Google Glass technology. I understand Google's reasoning here, but according to the Reason.com blog, it sounds like the company making the app had some really cool plans, from a purely technological standpoint. It's funny that pornographers are always early adopters of new technology, and it's also funny the extent to which they advance innovation within that new technology. The question becomes whether Google's pursuit of civility is worth more than its pursuit of innovation. That's a question of subjective value, but I think it's worth stopping and thinking twice about the ban. The adult market is still a lucrative place to be, and if it helps you develop your products, that's hard to say no to. Then again, it's kind of like selling your soul.
Mises Daily seems to be getting their act together. Today's article on the rise of entitlement spending and its adverse impact on the economy is truly fantastic.
With signature wit and flair, Robert Murphy responds to the claim that libertarianism has never been attempted throughout all of human history.
2013-06-04
If
One of the primary problems with political movements is that they are idealistic to the point of naivete. Sure, if people were more inclined toward my [read: anyone's] political beliefs, society would improve dramatically. There's just one, small problem with that viewpoint: it's contingent on a large "if" that will never be satisfied.
We talk about this in politics, and it seems obvious. Any time we find ourselves promoting a set of policies that rely on the vast majority of the population completely changing their ideological core, we are engaged in a fool's errand. Forget the diatribes, impassioned articles and speeches, poignant Facebook info graphics, and all the rest of it. Facts don't matter when ideology is at stake. One thing you can bank on about human nature is that people will entertain any illusion so long as it lets them off the hook. This is why all the internet political arguing out there doesn't actually succeed in changing anyone's mind.
But that's politics, a relatively small slice of the daily lives of most. The rest of our lives consist of spending time at home, at work, commuting, going out on weekends, shopping, pursuing hobbies, and so on. We display a faulty tendency when discussing politics, so isn't it highly probable that we suffer the same illusions during the rest of the day?
One fairly common application of this same principle to apolitical life is the case of a difficult coworker. We all have coworkers who we find irritating, for all kinds of reasons. Either the person's workplace behavior is inappropriate in our own opinions, or the person appears to be a sycophant, or perhaps the person has been given undeserved recognition. Perhaps a million things, but whatever the case may be, we find that person irritating and wish he or she would just be different. In fact, if that person adjusted his or her behavior, then your workplace would be perfect!
There is again, if. Your total satisfaction hinges on an if that will never be realized. My mother would say, "tough cookies!" You cannot have a perfect life. Your best chance is to modify whatever it is you can control about your life to make it as pleasant as possible. You may have already noticed that the passive-aggressive sticky notes and huffing and puffing during meetings (or whatever) has not made a major impact on how you feel about the irritating person in question, nor has it successfully changed that person's behavior.
To close the loop, you may have also noticed that no matter how annoying our political situation is, your dissatisfaction hasn't managed to make an impact on it.
Let's consider another apolitical example: Traffic. Boy, does that one get my goat. There are so many selfish people on the road, driving dangerously and adversely impacting my arrival time! If they only drove more like me, everyone's commute would be faster, safer, more efficient, and more relaxing. Yep, if. I happened to notice during my morning drive today (and on many other occasions, to boot) that I am only in control of one car on the road. The other cars are controlled by other people. I also happened to notice that no matter how badly the other motorists drive, no amount of complaining on my part has resulted in a noticeable improvement in the quality of their driving.
...and, again, I notice that my complaints have had similar impact on bad coworkers and political conditions.
One final example: All of us have had to deal with difficult personal relationships. Whether your particular case was a close friend with whom you had a falling out, or whether it was a failed romantic relationship, or perhaps a bad feud with an important family member, that particular detail is irrelevant. What holds true in all such cases is that, no matter how much you pushed, prodded, advocated, argued, nagged, reminded, begged, or otherwise took it upon yourself to change another person... it didn't work.
It's not that you were wrong. After all, if that person had been able to see your point of view, everything would have been better! The whole problem would have been solved. If.
The question you ought to ask yourself at this point is how long and how desperately you clung to if before finally figuring out that the only things we can meaningfully change or impact are the ones directly under our control.
You cannot change a person's ideology. You cannot change a person's politics. You can't change how they drive, how they behave at work, and to what degree they are willing to satisfy your own personal feelings and needs. Even if you're right about the conditions of a parallel universe in which you always get your own way, you still exist in this, our one and only universe. The conditions of that universe are exactly what they are. Within your circle of influence lie your immediate surroundings, your body, your words, your mind... All of these things you can control.
Beyond those things, however, you have no control. To be happy, to change your life for the better, you might want to consider developing greater skill in changing the things you actually can change, while simultaneously devoting less time to changing the things that are by their very nature outside of your control.
It's part of growing up.
We talk about this in politics, and it seems obvious. Any time we find ourselves promoting a set of policies that rely on the vast majority of the population completely changing their ideological core, we are engaged in a fool's errand. Forget the diatribes, impassioned articles and speeches, poignant Facebook info graphics, and all the rest of it. Facts don't matter when ideology is at stake. One thing you can bank on about human nature is that people will entertain any illusion so long as it lets them off the hook. This is why all the internet political arguing out there doesn't actually succeed in changing anyone's mind.
But that's politics, a relatively small slice of the daily lives of most. The rest of our lives consist of spending time at home, at work, commuting, going out on weekends, shopping, pursuing hobbies, and so on. We display a faulty tendency when discussing politics, so isn't it highly probable that we suffer the same illusions during the rest of the day?
One fairly common application of this same principle to apolitical life is the case of a difficult coworker. We all have coworkers who we find irritating, for all kinds of reasons. Either the person's workplace behavior is inappropriate in our own opinions, or the person appears to be a sycophant, or perhaps the person has been given undeserved recognition. Perhaps a million things, but whatever the case may be, we find that person irritating and wish he or she would just be different. In fact, if that person adjusted his or her behavior, then your workplace would be perfect!
There is again, if. Your total satisfaction hinges on an if that will never be realized. My mother would say, "tough cookies!" You cannot have a perfect life. Your best chance is to modify whatever it is you can control about your life to make it as pleasant as possible. You may have already noticed that the passive-aggressive sticky notes and huffing and puffing during meetings (or whatever) has not made a major impact on how you feel about the irritating person in question, nor has it successfully changed that person's behavior.
To close the loop, you may have also noticed that no matter how annoying our political situation is, your dissatisfaction hasn't managed to make an impact on it.
Let's consider another apolitical example: Traffic. Boy, does that one get my goat. There are so many selfish people on the road, driving dangerously and adversely impacting my arrival time! If they only drove more like me, everyone's commute would be faster, safer, more efficient, and more relaxing. Yep, if. I happened to notice during my morning drive today (and on many other occasions, to boot) that I am only in control of one car on the road. The other cars are controlled by other people. I also happened to notice that no matter how badly the other motorists drive, no amount of complaining on my part has resulted in a noticeable improvement in the quality of their driving.
...and, again, I notice that my complaints have had similar impact on bad coworkers and political conditions.
One final example: All of us have had to deal with difficult personal relationships. Whether your particular case was a close friend with whom you had a falling out, or whether it was a failed romantic relationship, or perhaps a bad feud with an important family member, that particular detail is irrelevant. What holds true in all such cases is that, no matter how much you pushed, prodded, advocated, argued, nagged, reminded, begged, or otherwise took it upon yourself to change another person... it didn't work.
It's not that you were wrong. After all, if that person had been able to see your point of view, everything would have been better! The whole problem would have been solved. If.
The question you ought to ask yourself at this point is how long and how desperately you clung to if before finally figuring out that the only things we can meaningfully change or impact are the ones directly under our control.
You cannot change a person's ideology. You cannot change a person's politics. You can't change how they drive, how they behave at work, and to what degree they are willing to satisfy your own personal feelings and needs. Even if you're right about the conditions of a parallel universe in which you always get your own way, you still exist in this, our one and only universe. The conditions of that universe are exactly what they are. Within your circle of influence lie your immediate surroundings, your body, your words, your mind... All of these things you can control.
Beyond those things, however, you have no control. To be happy, to change your life for the better, you might want to consider developing greater skill in changing the things you actually can change, while simultaneously devoting less time to changing the things that are by their very nature outside of your control.
It's part of growing up.
2013-06-03
More Motlian Epistemology
At least once a year, Czech physicist Lubos Motl publishes an item on his blog that qualifies as one of the best essays of the year on epistemology. These are always excellent blog posts, and today's essay is no exception.
The matter at hand is whether there is any such thing as a "stupid question," and you can bet that - despite tired aphorisms to the contrary - there are, in fact, stupid questions. Motl supplies a non-exhaustive list:
He then makes a great point about the unbalanced nature of asking a question. To wit, it is far more often the case that people who ask questions expect the respondent to do all the work, and that the person asking the question has no further responsibility toward acquiring that knowledge. As Motl puts it:
His next great point is so well-articulated that I will just let him do the talking:
I think one feature of ambiguous language that many social scientists find attractive is the tendency of fuzzy language to accommodate what I call shotgun theories. Much like religious reasoning, ambiguous theories in the social sciences enable the individual to apply his or her own precise definitions to the terms being used, and hence "fill in the holes" of any theory to which they are already attracted. An argument for a gold-backed currency, for example, is therefore seen as being more valid because (1) the economist making the argument rejects a supposedly flawed mathematical model, (2) the economist making the argument replaces mathematical precision with linguistic vagary, and (3) any theoretical holes left open by this vagary get explained-away, not by the economist, but by those members of his/her audience who are already inclined to distrust "fiat" currency.
The better approach would be to ask: Is a gold-backed currency empirically superior to a fiat currency, and if so why? Answering such a question will almost certainly require mathematics, either via logic or quantitative analysis. The answer is also far more likely to reveal an array of costs and benefits, rather than a hard-faced ideological call-to-arms. Such is quite often the case when science tackles problems that involve a great deal of nuance.
Next, Motl makes the point that knowledge requires truth. This may feel "obvious" to you, but it really isn't obvious to everyone. Being able to know something is contingent on the existence of the object known. If we are permitted to question literally everything, then it is permissible to forget the answer to Question 1 as soon as we ask Question 2. If Question 2 requires information first established by the answer to Question 1, then we can simply ask Question 1 again and repeat ourselves ad infinitum. Here's how Motl puts it:
I will leave you with one last delicious excerpt, on the state of modern humanities education.
The matter at hand is whether there is any such thing as a "stupid question," and you can bet that - despite tired aphorisms to the contrary - there are, in fact, stupid questions. Motl supplies a non-exhaustive list:
- The words used in the question are ill-defined.
- The words used in the question are ambiguous.
- There are no settled rigorous enough definitions of the words or phrases in the question although the answer depends on them; only the formulation in terms of rigorous enough mathematical concepts would make the question meaningful.
- The question wants to reduce one of the most fundamental concepts to even more fundamental ones, not realizing that the efforts are counterproductive verbal exercises if we're not guaranteed that this process stops at some point.
- The question implicitly makes some invalid assumptions about the insights that are already known.
- The question implicitly makes some probably invalid assumptions about the format of a future explanation of something.
- The axiomatic system i.e. the set of possible true propositions that may be used in an answer is completely unclear – the context or target audience for the answer isn't specified. Even the author of the question has no idea how a satisfactory answer could look like; he must know that the question won't lead to anything sensible.
- The question doesn't have a sensible level of difficulty that could produce a meaningful answer: it's either too primitive (something that the author of the question should have known) or too ambitious and it's asking about a point that shouldn't need an explanation at all or, on the contrary, a topic that needs hundreds of pages to be properly covered (which seems to expose the disrespectful assumption that the person who is answering may be "demanded" to spend much more time than the author of the question).
- The question isn't meant to be a real question – a sentence designed to find some information – but rather as a rhetorical question to spread a certain way of thinking or emotion, usually a misconception.
- The question is just an attempt of its author to pretend that he or she is smart but he or she isn't really interested in the answer.
He then makes a great point about the unbalanced nature of asking a question. To wit, it is far more often the case that people who ask questions expect the respondent to do all the work, and that the person asking the question has no further responsibility toward acquiring that knowledge. As Motl puts it:
The authors of the questions are "us", the losers who know nothing and who have no duties and responsibilities and who have the right to demand anything, everything, and any entitlement they can think of; the people who are expected to answer are "they", the evil powerful people, the old white men or the Jews or the Big Oil interests (fascism, environmentalism, or feminism may use different words but in all cases, it's still the hated "they" and the logic behind all these pernicious ideologies is structurally the same), those who should be tortured.It is important to remember that, if we care about intellectual integrity at all, we who ask questions do face some responsibility. We are required to understand the subject matter sufficiently well to ask a question that isn't better-answered by referring back to the source material. Let's be honest with ourselves: We've all been in class and asked this sort of "stupid question" from time to time, and our motivation is obvious. Sometimes we feel too lazy to look it up ourselves. Motl correctly points out that this is a disrespectful waste of a knowledgeable person's time.
His next great point is so well-articulated that I will just let him do the talking:
An essential fact for a scientist to realize is that there's no reason why a syntactically or grammatically legitimate sentence should be valuable or should deserve a well-defined answer or truth value (if it is a Yes/No answer). The language is a tool by which humans (or others) exchange some information. But if one uses it incorrectly, no information is being communicated, the sentences are meaningless, and it makes no sense to spend hours by trying to find answers. Some hard work and "assurances" are needed for a language or a more general framework of communication to be useful. If these conditions aren't met, the sentences won't be useful – they won't be useful for practical lives of the people; but they will be useless in the plan to learn the truth about Nature, too.And later:
It's sometimes very important for the well-definedness of the answer to decide which exact meaning of a word is meant in the question. Such a fine dependence of the answer on the detailed adjustments of the question automatically makes the question "less rigid" and therefore "less important" (it's obviously not the only aspect that can make a question less important, however). In some cases, only a rigorous enough reformulation in terms of nearly mathematically, rigorously defined concepts becomes the only way to make the question meaningful. Needless to say, the "philosophers" and other humanities-worshiping invaders into science often hate mathematics and they just don't like the self-evident fact that the language of mathematics is the only language that can turn many vague sequences of words into well-defined questions.I find it ironic that many economists (particularly Austrian-school adherents) reject mathematical logic under the belief that mathematical theories lack sufficient depth to provide explanatory insight into the economy. It would be counter-productive, however, to inject more ambiguity into the social sciences when they are already vague to the point of near-meaninglessness.
I think one feature of ambiguous language that many social scientists find attractive is the tendency of fuzzy language to accommodate what I call shotgun theories. Much like religious reasoning, ambiguous theories in the social sciences enable the individual to apply his or her own precise definitions to the terms being used, and hence "fill in the holes" of any theory to which they are already attracted. An argument for a gold-backed currency, for example, is therefore seen as being more valid because (1) the economist making the argument rejects a supposedly flawed mathematical model, (2) the economist making the argument replaces mathematical precision with linguistic vagary, and (3) any theoretical holes left open by this vagary get explained-away, not by the economist, but by those members of his/her audience who are already inclined to distrust "fiat" currency.
The better approach would be to ask: Is a gold-backed currency empirically superior to a fiat currency, and if so why? Answering such a question will almost certainly require mathematics, either via logic or quantitative analysis. The answer is also far more likely to reveal an array of costs and benefits, rather than a hard-faced ideological call-to-arms. Such is quite often the case when science tackles problems that involve a great deal of nuance.
Next, Motl makes the point that knowledge requires truth. This may feel "obvious" to you, but it really isn't obvious to everyone. Being able to know something is contingent on the existence of the object known. If we are permitted to question literally everything, then it is permissible to forget the answer to Question 1 as soon as we ask Question 2. If Question 2 requires information first established by the answer to Question 1, then we can simply ask Question 1 again and repeat ourselves ad infinitum. Here's how Motl puts it:
If we don't have any propositions that we accept to be true or concepts that can be used without further questioning, it simply means that we have no knowledge and there can't possibly exist a legitimate way to answer our question, whatever the question is! This utterly simple and logically self-evident point is clearly misunderstood or underestimated by many authors of various "why" questions who seem to believe that one may answer questions so that the answer depends on no assumptions whatsoever. If we respect the validity of no facts, we may always ask "why" after any sentence that the person who is answering adds. We may "question" every statement he makes, whatever the statement is. In such a situation, it is totally clear that such a conversation can't possibly lead to any meaningful outcome. We're caught in an infinite loop (a smart enough girl from the kindergarten should be able to see the proof why the loop is infinite!) and we're clearly wasting our time (and sometimes also the time of another person who is not as stupid as we are and who really didn't want to waste his time!).There is a great deal of excellent information contained in Motl's post, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. More than that, I encourage you to read it and then think about it in the context of your own daily life, and how you might benefit from considering Motl's underlying point. As usual, he writes rather colorfully, and some highly sensitive people may be inclined to take offense. But truth is truth, even when it appears to be offensive.
I will leave you with one last delicious excerpt, on the state of modern humanities education.
Needless to say, the humanities-oriented education encourages people to know no hard facts like that (they prefer the superficial form, they prefer to train folks to master the tools to pretend that they're smart even if they are completely uneducated imbeciles) – and, which is even worse, to be proud about this complete ignorance of theirs. Their brains' being an example of the vacuum still doesn't prevent them from writing their "opinions" about many things. That's, for example, why most science journalists are writing about topics they don't know anything about, except for two or three (usually invalid) slogans and clichés.
Ethics And Rules
When I was a teenager, my parents offered me a great deal of freedom with respect to things like curfew, taking the car, dating, and so on. Over the years, I have heard my parents give various accounts of their underlying rationale behind the amount of liberty I was afforded, and the explanation most consistently given is this one: Basically, they knew I was a good kid who wanted to stay out of trouble, so they had little to fear by offering me a lot of latitude.
True to the trust and responsibility they had given me, I never got into any real trouble. I had a couple of close-calls in the car, but everyone has those. I skipped class a couple of times to go home and play my guitar, but I was getting straight-As and my grades didn't suffer. I think the maybe the worst "trouble" I ever got into was staying in a public park, chatting with my friends, after the park's municipal ten o'clock curfew. Somebody called the police, or perhaps the police noticed our flashlights as they were driving by, and they told us to go home. We did.
Of course, plenty of other students got into more trouble than I ever did. Some experienced teenage pregnancy, some experienced drug abuse, legal trouble, and so on, and so forth. I knew enough of such people that I was able to determine at least this much: Some of them had extremely strict parents, some of them had extremely liberal parents, and some of them had parents who fell somewhere in between. That is to say, I observed no consistent relationship between parental strictness and juvenile delinquency.
It must rather be the case that good kids tend to be good kids, and trouble-makers tend to be trouble-makers. Certainly some good kids are just unlucky in that everyone fools around a bit with young love, and only a small subset of those who do end up pregnant; everyone has a drink or something as a kid, but only a small subset falls into a pattern or social group involving heavy drug use; etc. Setting aside random chance, though, it seems as though kids who are more ethical tend to engage in the most ethical behavior.
This is hardly surprising, but there's a point here.
The point is that what makes the difference between good people and bad people are not the rules to which they are held, but rather the values they hold. This was eloquently expressed by James Madison in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." That statement is typically cited as justification for central government, but there is another way to look at it, too: Madison is also saying that government is unnecessary for good (virtuous) people.
Good people have little reason to steal from each other. Genuine property disputes can arise between good people, but if those people are truly good, then they will be able to settle the matter through some formal or informal arbitration process. Why? Because good people don't like to propagate conflict when peaceful solutions are available.
What we should keep in mind is that it is not "good laws" or "good government" that makes a society good. At best, a law is nothing more than an enforced statement that attempts to express a good ethical principle. The true object of reference is not the law, but the ethical principle. A community full of good people will probably function extremely well regardless of what laws are on the books or how that community is officially organized. A community full of bad people will deteriorate and eventually fail entirely, and no system of government will ever change that.
To make the world a better place, it would be more effective to persuade others toward better ethics and more virtuous behavior than to persuade others to adopt a particular stance on public policy.
True to the trust and responsibility they had given me, I never got into any real trouble. I had a couple of close-calls in the car, but everyone has those. I skipped class a couple of times to go home and play my guitar, but I was getting straight-As and my grades didn't suffer. I think the maybe the worst "trouble" I ever got into was staying in a public park, chatting with my friends, after the park's municipal ten o'clock curfew. Somebody called the police, or perhaps the police noticed our flashlights as they were driving by, and they told us to go home. We did.
Of course, plenty of other students got into more trouble than I ever did. Some experienced teenage pregnancy, some experienced drug abuse, legal trouble, and so on, and so forth. I knew enough of such people that I was able to determine at least this much: Some of them had extremely strict parents, some of them had extremely liberal parents, and some of them had parents who fell somewhere in between. That is to say, I observed no consistent relationship between parental strictness and juvenile delinquency.
It must rather be the case that good kids tend to be good kids, and trouble-makers tend to be trouble-makers. Certainly some good kids are just unlucky in that everyone fools around a bit with young love, and only a small subset of those who do end up pregnant; everyone has a drink or something as a kid, but only a small subset falls into a pattern or social group involving heavy drug use; etc. Setting aside random chance, though, it seems as though kids who are more ethical tend to engage in the most ethical behavior.
This is hardly surprising, but there's a point here.
The point is that what makes the difference between good people and bad people are not the rules to which they are held, but rather the values they hold. This was eloquently expressed by James Madison in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." That statement is typically cited as justification for central government, but there is another way to look at it, too: Madison is also saying that government is unnecessary for good (virtuous) people.
Good people have little reason to steal from each other. Genuine property disputes can arise between good people, but if those people are truly good, then they will be able to settle the matter through some formal or informal arbitration process. Why? Because good people don't like to propagate conflict when peaceful solutions are available.
What we should keep in mind is that it is not "good laws" or "good government" that makes a society good. At best, a law is nothing more than an enforced statement that attempts to express a good ethical principle. The true object of reference is not the law, but the ethical principle. A community full of good people will probably function extremely well regardless of what laws are on the books or how that community is officially organized. A community full of bad people will deteriorate and eventually fail entirely, and no system of government will ever change that.
To make the world a better place, it would be more effective to persuade others toward better ethics and more virtuous behavior than to persuade others to adopt a particular stance on public policy.
Some Links
Hat tip to Donald Boudreaux, I was pleased to discover that the University of Chicago Press is offering a free Dierdre McCloskey ebook. I have been meaning to add her books to my library, so this is a highly fortuitous opportunity.
Joseph Salerno and George Selgin are at it again. On the one hand, they are getting deep into the economic minutia. On the other hand, it has been so long since the Ludwig von Mises Institute put anything worthwhile on their blog that I am happy that at least some of the discussion doesn't suck.
I am always amazed by how many books Tyler Cowen claims to read. I was relieved to note that he once admitted to not finishing many of these books. I'm not going to dig up the blog post on which he acknowledged that, but still, it's nice to know. I am acquainted with many people who appear to be far more prolific readers than they actually are. I'm lucky if I can read five books a year, but I typically select from big-boy shelf. (If you're curious, I'm currently working my way through the last four books of Aristotle's Ethics.)
Any report that combines Ancient Egypt with paleo-astronomy is bound to make the imagination explode. For that reason, I enjoyed reading this article this morning.
My latest contribution to the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada's blog rather idiosyncratically recounts a recent experience I had at the airport.
Joseph Salerno and George Selgin are at it again. On the one hand, they are getting deep into the economic minutia. On the other hand, it has been so long since the Ludwig von Mises Institute put anything worthwhile on their blog that I am happy that at least some of the discussion doesn't suck.
I am always amazed by how many books Tyler Cowen claims to read. I was relieved to note that he once admitted to not finishing many of these books. I'm not going to dig up the blog post on which he acknowledged that, but still, it's nice to know. I am acquainted with many people who appear to be far more prolific readers than they actually are. I'm lucky if I can read five books a year, but I typically select from big-boy shelf. (If you're curious, I'm currently working my way through the last four books of Aristotle's Ethics.)
Any report that combines Ancient Egypt with paleo-astronomy is bound to make the imagination explode. For that reason, I enjoyed reading this article this morning.
My latest contribution to the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada's blog rather idiosyncratically recounts a recent experience I had at the airport.
2013-06-02
Rhesus 17
It's been far too long since I posted a music video, and this one certainly isn't my best work. But so much time has elapsed that I simply couldn't go on without posting something new, so here you go. I call it Bunny Jail Break. Enjoy.
2013-05-31
Pathological Morality, Part Two
Yesterday, I discussed how our inability to be happy about the achievements of the truly exceptional - because we are too busy feeling inadequate of our own accomplishments - creates a perverse false morality in which we must all pretend that we really are amazing, even when we're not. There is another side to this pathological morality, though, and this other side is truly the uglier of the two.
If exceptional people deserve special credit for doing amazing things, while average people are just average and deserve no special credit, but also no special detraction, then there must also exist additional points on the continuum. That is to say, some people are good enough at basketball to win the community intramural competition, but not good enough to have ever won a basketball scholarship or a career in the NBA. It's certainly fair enough to say that these folks are good basketball players, but it would be utter lunacy to suggest that they are the same kind of good at basketball as NBA players.
Developing Virtue
When it comes a skill like basketball, few would argue with that point. But what about skills like kindness, judiciousness, conscienciousness, etc.? What about those skills that are actually morals?
Being moral, virtuous, ethical, is a skill in a certain sense. It requires a mix of courage - the courage to adhere to principle even in the face of widespread criticism - and a sufficiently long cognitive time-horizon such that one can foresee the long-run benefits of moral behavior over the short-run benefits of ducking one's responsibilities. We might simply call this blend of courage and foresight honor.
Courage and foresight, like so many human attributes, can developed simply through habit. A person who regularly refuses to back down in the face of risk will eventually, upon his or her subsequent successes, grow more confident in doing so. This confidence is surely courage. Likewise, the more often one involves oneself in calculating further and more far-reaching impacts of a given action, the more one develops a habitual sense of strategy. This certainly involves some deductive logic, and the more you engage in deductive logic, the better at it you become. (There is a reason practicing chess makes one better at playing chess.)
Even if you believe that personality traits like courage, foresight, and honor are traits with which we are born, there is no question that the more risks one faces without backing down, the more courageous a person is. (And I have already dealt with foresight in my chess example.) Thus, almost by behaving as though one has positive moral attributes like honor, one meets the very conditions required of an honorable person. It's basically a tautology.
At any rate, both because some people are born with additional levels of moral fortitude, and because some people are better-habituated to moral integrity as described above, it stands to reason that there are various shades of moral character out there.
Here's The Point
What this all means is that, just as some of us are better basketball players, some of us are more courageous. Our egalitarian nature would suggest that being a better basketball player does not make one a better person. But would anyone suggest that being more courageous fails to make one a better person? No one in their right mind would say that brilliant computer programmers are "better people" than just-average computer programmers; but who on Earth would suggest that someone who is exceptionally honest is not a better person than someone who is also honest, but not exceptionally so.
We seem to be aware - at least on the gut level - that exceptional virtue is precisely that which makes the difference between a person and a "better person." The more virtues a person has to exceptional degree, the better a person is. On some level, we understand that if we were stuck on a desert island with a virtuous man and a knave, and there were only enough food for two, the knave would have to be sacrificed. Higher moral worth is more valuable than lesser moral worth, both intangibly and tangibly.
Exceptionally moral people are simply... better people than average people.
Does that statement make you feel funny? It shouldn't. On the one hand, exceptional virtue is something that anyone can achieve. Doing the right thing does not require a special level of genius, it does not require mountains of wealth, it does not require a special set of environmental circumstances. Every moment of your life is a chance to be virtuous. Virtue is exactly the best measure of a human being, the most meritocracy and entirely fair basis by which to size each other up.
One Final Bit Of Controversy
Sam is simply more honest and genuine than Steve, but on every other level, Sam and Steve are roughly equivalent. I assert that Sam is simply a better person than Steve. Steve can become as honest as Sam any time he wants to. Not being as honest as Sam is a choice that Steve makes. The moment he commits to being more honest, and actually lives out that commitment, Steve becomes Sam's moral equal.
Even so, Steve is not a particularly dishonest person. While Sam is a better person than Steve, Steve is not at all a bad person. This point relates back to yesterday's post. It is crucial that we have the ability to commend Sam's honesty without somehow "detracting from Steve."
Our egalitarian culture is averse to saying that "Sam is a better person than Steve," not because we're afraid of commending Sam, but because we are scared to make Steve mad. This is insane.
Why is it insane? Because I can pose the same problem in a different way and no one will object. Think I can't? Here I go:
Steve spent 20 years of his life living more or less as we all do. Then one day, Steve decided to commit to being exceptionally honest, and he did so for the rest of his life. While Steve was never really a bad guy, the new Steve is a much better person than the old Steve.
See what I did there?
This neurotic hyper-sensitivity to moral inequality and its implications on a person's true worth leads to stunningly bad moral conclusions.
One example is drug use: Mary smokes weed and Marion does not. Marion possesses more of the virtue of temperance than Mary does. Suddenly an army of egalitarians descends on Ryan for having the nerve to suggest that - while Mary may be a truly good person - Marion is simply a little better than Mary is. Mary could become just as good as Marion if she but gave up marijuana.
And of course, the alternate way to state this same ethical problem is as follows: Mary smoked weed for a few years when she was younger. Then one day, she decided it wasn't good for her body, because she was inhaling carcinogens; she decided it wasn't good for her mind because of the way it interacted with her brain's dopamine system; she decided it wasn't good for her reputation because it put her in regular contact with people who deal drugs; she decided it wasn't good for her career because if she were ever subjected to a random drug test, she'd fail; and, she decided it wasn't good for her long-run integrity because one day she plans on having children and doesn't want to light-up in front of them, and be forced to have an extremely difficult moral conversation with her kids. Considering all that - which can be summed-up in the virtue of Temperance - Mary decided to stop smoking marijuana. While Mary was never really a bad person, the new Mary is a better person than the old Mary.
Conclusion
The reason it's important to be comfortable saying that more virtuous behavior makes someone a better person is so that we can actually improve our moral character as our lives progress. If you're so neurotically hyper-sensitive to the suggestions like "doing drugs is intemperate," then you'll never be a better person.
This might not mean that you're a bad person, just as Mary and Steve weren't bad people. But it certainly means that you'll never be better. Achieving a state of moral integrity is its own reward. More ethical people are happier people. This much has been known for thousands of years. It need not really be proven, either, since all of us know that the happiest people in our lives are also the ones who have the best moral character.
Let's not be idiotic. Saying all this in no way implies that people who are less happy and less exceptionally moral are bad people who should go to hell or whatever else. That kind of attitude is utter lunacy.
But the fact remains, a moral life is a happy life, and a happy life is a good one. If you want to lead a better life, sooner or later you have to warm-up to the prospect that pursuing greater virtue simply makes you a better person. There's no escaping it.
If exceptional people deserve special credit for doing amazing things, while average people are just average and deserve no special credit, but also no special detraction, then there must also exist additional points on the continuum. That is to say, some people are good enough at basketball to win the community intramural competition, but not good enough to have ever won a basketball scholarship or a career in the NBA. It's certainly fair enough to say that these folks are good basketball players, but it would be utter lunacy to suggest that they are the same kind of good at basketball as NBA players.
Developing Virtue
When it comes a skill like basketball, few would argue with that point. But what about skills like kindness, judiciousness, conscienciousness, etc.? What about those skills that are actually morals?
Being moral, virtuous, ethical, is a skill in a certain sense. It requires a mix of courage - the courage to adhere to principle even in the face of widespread criticism - and a sufficiently long cognitive time-horizon such that one can foresee the long-run benefits of moral behavior over the short-run benefits of ducking one's responsibilities. We might simply call this blend of courage and foresight honor.
Courage and foresight, like so many human attributes, can developed simply through habit. A person who regularly refuses to back down in the face of risk will eventually, upon his or her subsequent successes, grow more confident in doing so. This confidence is surely courage. Likewise, the more often one involves oneself in calculating further and more far-reaching impacts of a given action, the more one develops a habitual sense of strategy. This certainly involves some deductive logic, and the more you engage in deductive logic, the better at it you become. (There is a reason practicing chess makes one better at playing chess.)
Even if you believe that personality traits like courage, foresight, and honor are traits with which we are born, there is no question that the more risks one faces without backing down, the more courageous a person is. (And I have already dealt with foresight in my chess example.) Thus, almost by behaving as though one has positive moral attributes like honor, one meets the very conditions required of an honorable person. It's basically a tautology.
At any rate, both because some people are born with additional levels of moral fortitude, and because some people are better-habituated to moral integrity as described above, it stands to reason that there are various shades of moral character out there.
Here's The Point
What this all means is that, just as some of us are better basketball players, some of us are more courageous. Our egalitarian nature would suggest that being a better basketball player does not make one a better person. But would anyone suggest that being more courageous fails to make one a better person? No one in their right mind would say that brilliant computer programmers are "better people" than just-average computer programmers; but who on Earth would suggest that someone who is exceptionally honest is not a better person than someone who is also honest, but not exceptionally so.
We seem to be aware - at least on the gut level - that exceptional virtue is precisely that which makes the difference between a person and a "better person." The more virtues a person has to exceptional degree, the better a person is. On some level, we understand that if we were stuck on a desert island with a virtuous man and a knave, and there were only enough food for two, the knave would have to be sacrificed. Higher moral worth is more valuable than lesser moral worth, both intangibly and tangibly.
Exceptionally moral people are simply... better people than average people.
Does that statement make you feel funny? It shouldn't. On the one hand, exceptional virtue is something that anyone can achieve. Doing the right thing does not require a special level of genius, it does not require mountains of wealth, it does not require a special set of environmental circumstances. Every moment of your life is a chance to be virtuous. Virtue is exactly the best measure of a human being, the most meritocracy and entirely fair basis by which to size each other up.
One Final Bit Of Controversy
Sam is simply more honest and genuine than Steve, but on every other level, Sam and Steve are roughly equivalent. I assert that Sam is simply a better person than Steve. Steve can become as honest as Sam any time he wants to. Not being as honest as Sam is a choice that Steve makes. The moment he commits to being more honest, and actually lives out that commitment, Steve becomes Sam's moral equal.
Even so, Steve is not a particularly dishonest person. While Sam is a better person than Steve, Steve is not at all a bad person. This point relates back to yesterday's post. It is crucial that we have the ability to commend Sam's honesty without somehow "detracting from Steve."
Our egalitarian culture is averse to saying that "Sam is a better person than Steve," not because we're afraid of commending Sam, but because we are scared to make Steve mad. This is insane.
Why is it insane? Because I can pose the same problem in a different way and no one will object. Think I can't? Here I go:
Steve spent 20 years of his life living more or less as we all do. Then one day, Steve decided to commit to being exceptionally honest, and he did so for the rest of his life. While Steve was never really a bad guy, the new Steve is a much better person than the old Steve.
See what I did there?
This neurotic hyper-sensitivity to moral inequality and its implications on a person's true worth leads to stunningly bad moral conclusions.
One example is drug use: Mary smokes weed and Marion does not. Marion possesses more of the virtue of temperance than Mary does. Suddenly an army of egalitarians descends on Ryan for having the nerve to suggest that - while Mary may be a truly good person - Marion is simply a little better than Mary is. Mary could become just as good as Marion if she but gave up marijuana.
And of course, the alternate way to state this same ethical problem is as follows: Mary smoked weed for a few years when she was younger. Then one day, she decided it wasn't good for her body, because she was inhaling carcinogens; she decided it wasn't good for her mind because of the way it interacted with her brain's dopamine system; she decided it wasn't good for her reputation because it put her in regular contact with people who deal drugs; she decided it wasn't good for her career because if she were ever subjected to a random drug test, she'd fail; and, she decided it wasn't good for her long-run integrity because one day she plans on having children and doesn't want to light-up in front of them, and be forced to have an extremely difficult moral conversation with her kids. Considering all that - which can be summed-up in the virtue of Temperance - Mary decided to stop smoking marijuana. While Mary was never really a bad person, the new Mary is a better person than the old Mary.
Conclusion
The reason it's important to be comfortable saying that more virtuous behavior makes someone a better person is so that we can actually improve our moral character as our lives progress. If you're so neurotically hyper-sensitive to the suggestions like "doing drugs is intemperate," then you'll never be a better person.
This might not mean that you're a bad person, just as Mary and Steve weren't bad people. But it certainly means that you'll never be better. Achieving a state of moral integrity is its own reward. More ethical people are happier people. This much has been known for thousands of years. It need not really be proven, either, since all of us know that the happiest people in our lives are also the ones who have the best moral character.
Let's not be idiotic. Saying all this in no way implies that people who are less happy and less exceptionally moral are bad people who should go to hell or whatever else. That kind of attitude is utter lunacy.
But the fact remains, a moral life is a happy life, and a happy life is a good one. If you want to lead a better life, sooner or later you have to warm-up to the prospect that pursuing greater virtue simply makes you a better person. There's no escaping it.
2013-05-30
Pathological Morality
Society has a strange and somewhat disgusting inability to recognize its own shortcomings. It is as though we wish to live in a bubble in which everything we do is right, in which nothing we do is wrong, and in which no one else can ever question anything we think, feel, do, or say.
This is insane.
Part of the problem is that people have become incapable of acknowledging the achievements of others without feeling awkwardly aware of their own "shortcomings." I have to put "shortcomings" in quotation marks because there is no shame in not being an Olympic gold medalist, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or an all-star pitcher, or the inventor of something life-changing. There is no shame in not changing the world forever. Realistically, these sorts of talents are extremely rare. That they are scarce is precisely what makes them so amazing, so awe-inspiring, so wonderful.
A man who can run a marathon in two hours and thirty minutes has accomplished something incredible, and he is not even in the uppermost tier of marathon runners. Even so, only a small fraction of men - and almost no women whatsoever - can ever hope to run that fast.
We must face this fact: it is a plain fact. It is the reality of life. Only a few of us can ever hope to be truly exceptional. The rest of us are still good people, still worth something, and can still live important, happy, and wonderful lives. But we will not be Olympic gold medalists or Nobel Laureates. And, I repeat, there is no shame in that.
Strangely - even hideously - modern society has an aversion to greatness because greatness underscores the averageness of the rest of us. The fact that the majority of us are simply average is no strike against us. One need not be amazing in order to be worth something. On the other hand, those who really are amazing deserve to be recognized for their greatness. This is only natural.
When I state it plainly, as a matter of fact, in the abstract, no one can disagree. But when we interact with others on a daily basis, we venomously lash out at those of us who are truly great. We retaliate against coworkers who prove themselves to be head-and-shoulders above the rest of the team. We act jealously and cowardly toward successful people that we come across. We feel somehow threatened by them.
But, I reiterate, this is insanity. A society that cannot properly congratulate its highest achievers is a society so jealous that it hates its own greatest achievements. Such perspectives are poisonous. They infect every aspect of life. They make professional life contentious and mean; they make leisure time a competition; they render us incapable of empathizing with anyone.
Discussions of ethics, for example, often become contentious because the one asserting the most ethical path is considered to be "judgmental" of those whose morality fail them. It is far easier, and by the way far more humble, to simply acknowledge that moral excellence is a kind of special achievement that not everyone is capable of. There are those among us for whom morality is essentially The Olympics. Where some of us choose to spend twelve hours a day practicing a talent, the exceedingly moral spend twelve hours a day engaging in moral behavior that is simply leaps and bounds superior to our own.
Not only is this okay, it is worthy of our praise and our admiration. But the modern mind is incapable of giving credit where credit is due. Instead, we consider it an accusation against us, an indictment of our own morality. This, again, is absolutely insane. That one man or woman can be of an extremely higher moral character than we are ourselves is not a source of shame for us. It should be a source of inspiration and praise.
But instead of praising society's greatest achievements, we have grown defensive and choose to engage in psychological leveling. I think this is such a terrible, terrible tragedy.
This is insane.
Part of the problem is that people have become incapable of acknowledging the achievements of others without feeling awkwardly aware of their own "shortcomings." I have to put "shortcomings" in quotation marks because there is no shame in not being an Olympic gold medalist, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or an all-star pitcher, or the inventor of something life-changing. There is no shame in not changing the world forever. Realistically, these sorts of talents are extremely rare. That they are scarce is precisely what makes them so amazing, so awe-inspiring, so wonderful.
A man who can run a marathon in two hours and thirty minutes has accomplished something incredible, and he is not even in the uppermost tier of marathon runners. Even so, only a small fraction of men - and almost no women whatsoever - can ever hope to run that fast.
We must face this fact: it is a plain fact. It is the reality of life. Only a few of us can ever hope to be truly exceptional. The rest of us are still good people, still worth something, and can still live important, happy, and wonderful lives. But we will not be Olympic gold medalists or Nobel Laureates. And, I repeat, there is no shame in that.
Strangely - even hideously - modern society has an aversion to greatness because greatness underscores the averageness of the rest of us. The fact that the majority of us are simply average is no strike against us. One need not be amazing in order to be worth something. On the other hand, those who really are amazing deserve to be recognized for their greatness. This is only natural.
When I state it plainly, as a matter of fact, in the abstract, no one can disagree. But when we interact with others on a daily basis, we venomously lash out at those of us who are truly great. We retaliate against coworkers who prove themselves to be head-and-shoulders above the rest of the team. We act jealously and cowardly toward successful people that we come across. We feel somehow threatened by them.
But, I reiterate, this is insanity. A society that cannot properly congratulate its highest achievers is a society so jealous that it hates its own greatest achievements. Such perspectives are poisonous. They infect every aspect of life. They make professional life contentious and mean; they make leisure time a competition; they render us incapable of empathizing with anyone.
Discussions of ethics, for example, often become contentious because the one asserting the most ethical path is considered to be "judgmental" of those whose morality fail them. It is far easier, and by the way far more humble, to simply acknowledge that moral excellence is a kind of special achievement that not everyone is capable of. There are those among us for whom morality is essentially The Olympics. Where some of us choose to spend twelve hours a day practicing a talent, the exceedingly moral spend twelve hours a day engaging in moral behavior that is simply leaps and bounds superior to our own.
Not only is this okay, it is worthy of our praise and our admiration. But the modern mind is incapable of giving credit where credit is due. Instead, we consider it an accusation against us, an indictment of our own morality. This, again, is absolutely insane. That one man or woman can be of an extremely higher moral character than we are ourselves is not a source of shame for us. It should be a source of inspiration and praise.
But instead of praising society's greatest achievements, we have grown defensive and choose to engage in psychological leveling. I think this is such a terrible, terrible tragedy.
2013-05-29
Social Justice
Even if the BHLs are all wrong when it comes to making and subsequently defending their weaker claims, it would be fallacious to conclude that because they can't defend their claims, the claims are thus false. If we temporarily suspend disbelief, can we make hay with any concept of social justice?
Defining The Terms
Justice is a highly contested concept in philosophy, and has been for thousands of years. A vague, but fairly acceptable definition for the term might be "each person getting exactly that which he or she deserves, erring on the side of excess when it comes to good things happening to good people."
That's for "justice," now what about "social?" That one is quite a bit easier: something is social if it involves a group of individuals who share a common attribute. This leaves the door wide open, but it is necessary to do so. After all, I can form a social group around any attribute I want, so long as the rest of the group agrees. Likewise, I can also create a social group for you, so long as I can convince sufficiently many other people that the grouping attribute I've chosen is applicable. It's not important that you agree, it only matters that other people do. This is how stereotypes are made, after all.
Having thus defined "social" and "justice" individually, the definition of the conjoint term "social justice" is obvious: Social justice is when each social group gets exactly what it deserves, erring on the side of excess when it comes to good things happening to good groups.
Applying The Terms - Part One
A key point here is that this definition is fully acceptable and intuitive when applied to groups to which we feel an affinity.
For example, social justice occurs when the poor as a social group gets more of what it deserves. That is, the poor consists of individuals of no less moral worth than any other social group, yet they possess less material wealth. Therefore, social justice occurs when we give more material wealth to worthy people in need, i.e. members of the poor as a social group.
Likewise, social justice occurs when women as a social group gets more of what it deserves. That is, women are individuals of no less moral worth than any other social group, yet they possess a relatively lower level of social credibility relative to men as a social group. Therefore, when we give more social credibility to women than they currently have, we are spreading social justice.
Applying The Terms - Part Two
Another key point is that, just as Plato and Socrates observed eons ago, justice is not merely providing good to those worthy of receiving good, but also bad to those worthy of receiving bad. Justice hasn't been served until a criminal, for example, has received fair punishment for his crimes.
Applied to social justice, however, we begin to sense a need to tread carefully. Which social groups deserve punishment? In some cases, it is easy to define, as in the case of umbrella-concept bogeymen: racists, criminals, the corrupt, the morally depraved, and so on. It is easy enough to conjure up terms that imply the existence of a group of knaves who warrant punishment.
But when called to actually specify social groups who ought to be punished in the real world, with a real legal policy of social justice, we are almost sure to fail. To use the two groups specified in the previous section, how many of us would go on record calling for social justice to be waged against the poor, or against women? Clearly, any such person would be deservedly run out of town. Even calls for social justice against the corresponding opposites - the rich, and men - make most people uncomfortable. Granted, there has been some success over the years demonizing "the rich," or "the one-percent," etc., but it is only the most extreme and vociferous socialists and feminists who would call for social justice against all rich people or all men. For the most part, such calls would make normal people very uncomfortable, and rightly so.
And it is obviously even worse to argue for social justice against other groups based on race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, and so on. Most of us are able to realize fairly quickly that this is unacceptable bigotry.
Concerns
Therefore, it might be that, while justice is a concept that involves both rewards and punishments, social justice is a concept that only involves rewards.
But if this is so, then shouldn't we instead call it "generosity" or "kindness" or perhaps "egalitarianism?" The reason we do not use these terms is because "justice" as applied to social justice is meant to imply that there are social groups who do not have things to which they are actually entitled. The key implication is that by further depriving these groups of what they do not have, things that the rest of us do indeed possess, we are perpetuating an injustice.
Social justice implies not that we should be kind and generous to all social groups, nor that we should treat them all equally. Social justice in fact goes a step further to suggest that whatever conditions are currently had by the poor, by women, by African-Americans, or whomever, are morally wrong and that failing to correct the problem - or at least to try - constitutes a black mark against our own personal morality.
To that point, I raise two objections:
1. Unless you believe in Original Sin, it is impossible to hold people morally responsible for the present conditions of the world, no matter how ill they are, unless you can draw clear causality between the actions of the accused and the suffering of the victims. Regarding the poor, for example, it is not at all clear that my getting up and going to work and going home and spending time with my family every day, etc., is contributing to the suffering of the poor. So, in what way am I morally responsible for the suffering of the poor? And if the answer is, "You are morally obligated to help the poor," then I ask again: Are you not merely talking about kindness and generosity, rather than justice?
2. As I noted above, I can assemble a social group consisting of any particular attribute I choose. All I require is an applicable attribute and a large enough number of other people who agree with me. Therefore, I can draw the "poverty line" at $15K per year, $50K per year, $150K per year, or any other number. I need not draw my racial groups around skin color alone, I can draw them around national borders. Therefore "Americans" should give more to "Africans" to correct social injustice. Or, perhaps I am more interested in the unique social injustice suffered by those of mixed racial origin versus the luckier members of pure race-based groups. Here I might pit a son against his own father.
Under the social justice framework, any group I can identify can be argued as having unique social justice concerns that ought to be corrected, but there is no framework for identifying which group should be focused on first or most passionately. There is also no discussion about the selfish motives of group insiders who argue for the social justice of their own group. Of course there are selfish individual motives for all of these things, but there is no room for that particular line of analysis in a social justice discussion.
Conclusion
David Friedman has quite adeptly poked holes in our ability to concretely define social justice. Here, I have attempted to define it and discuss it as broadly as possible. Even in as flattering terms as we can give it, the concept involves major problems that cannot be easily overcome.
So, I would argue that social justice is at best problematic, and at worst more of a rhetorical tool used to promote selfish political objectives. At any rate, it is a difficult thing to take seriously.
Defining The Terms
Justice is a highly contested concept in philosophy, and has been for thousands of years. A vague, but fairly acceptable definition for the term might be "each person getting exactly that which he or she deserves, erring on the side of excess when it comes to good things happening to good people."
That's for "justice," now what about "social?" That one is quite a bit easier: something is social if it involves a group of individuals who share a common attribute. This leaves the door wide open, but it is necessary to do so. After all, I can form a social group around any attribute I want, so long as the rest of the group agrees. Likewise, I can also create a social group for you, so long as I can convince sufficiently many other people that the grouping attribute I've chosen is applicable. It's not important that you agree, it only matters that other people do. This is how stereotypes are made, after all.
Having thus defined "social" and "justice" individually, the definition of the conjoint term "social justice" is obvious: Social justice is when each social group gets exactly what it deserves, erring on the side of excess when it comes to good things happening to good groups.
Applying The Terms - Part One
A key point here is that this definition is fully acceptable and intuitive when applied to groups to which we feel an affinity.
For example, social justice occurs when the poor as a social group gets more of what it deserves. That is, the poor consists of individuals of no less moral worth than any other social group, yet they possess less material wealth. Therefore, social justice occurs when we give more material wealth to worthy people in need, i.e. members of the poor as a social group.
Likewise, social justice occurs when women as a social group gets more of what it deserves. That is, women are individuals of no less moral worth than any other social group, yet they possess a relatively lower level of social credibility relative to men as a social group. Therefore, when we give more social credibility to women than they currently have, we are spreading social justice.
Applying The Terms - Part Two
Another key point is that, just as Plato and Socrates observed eons ago, justice is not merely providing good to those worthy of receiving good, but also bad to those worthy of receiving bad. Justice hasn't been served until a criminal, for example, has received fair punishment for his crimes.
Applied to social justice, however, we begin to sense a need to tread carefully. Which social groups deserve punishment? In some cases, it is easy to define, as in the case of umbrella-concept bogeymen: racists, criminals, the corrupt, the morally depraved, and so on. It is easy enough to conjure up terms that imply the existence of a group of knaves who warrant punishment.
But when called to actually specify social groups who ought to be punished in the real world, with a real legal policy of social justice, we are almost sure to fail. To use the two groups specified in the previous section, how many of us would go on record calling for social justice to be waged against the poor, or against women? Clearly, any such person would be deservedly run out of town. Even calls for social justice against the corresponding opposites - the rich, and men - make most people uncomfortable. Granted, there has been some success over the years demonizing "the rich," or "the one-percent," etc., but it is only the most extreme and vociferous socialists and feminists who would call for social justice against all rich people or all men. For the most part, such calls would make normal people very uncomfortable, and rightly so.
And it is obviously even worse to argue for social justice against other groups based on race, religion, creed, sexual orientation, and so on. Most of us are able to realize fairly quickly that this is unacceptable bigotry.
Concerns
Therefore, it might be that, while justice is a concept that involves both rewards and punishments, social justice is a concept that only involves rewards.
But if this is so, then shouldn't we instead call it "generosity" or "kindness" or perhaps "egalitarianism?" The reason we do not use these terms is because "justice" as applied to social justice is meant to imply that there are social groups who do not have things to which they are actually entitled. The key implication is that by further depriving these groups of what they do not have, things that the rest of us do indeed possess, we are perpetuating an injustice.
Social justice implies not that we should be kind and generous to all social groups, nor that we should treat them all equally. Social justice in fact goes a step further to suggest that whatever conditions are currently had by the poor, by women, by African-Americans, or whomever, are morally wrong and that failing to correct the problem - or at least to try - constitutes a black mark against our own personal morality.
To that point, I raise two objections:
1. Unless you believe in Original Sin, it is impossible to hold people morally responsible for the present conditions of the world, no matter how ill they are, unless you can draw clear causality between the actions of the accused and the suffering of the victims. Regarding the poor, for example, it is not at all clear that my getting up and going to work and going home and spending time with my family every day, etc., is contributing to the suffering of the poor. So, in what way am I morally responsible for the suffering of the poor? And if the answer is, "You are morally obligated to help the poor," then I ask again: Are you not merely talking about kindness and generosity, rather than justice?
2. As I noted above, I can assemble a social group consisting of any particular attribute I choose. All I require is an applicable attribute and a large enough number of other people who agree with me. Therefore, I can draw the "poverty line" at $15K per year, $50K per year, $150K per year, or any other number. I need not draw my racial groups around skin color alone, I can draw them around national borders. Therefore "Americans" should give more to "Africans" to correct social injustice. Or, perhaps I am more interested in the unique social injustice suffered by those of mixed racial origin versus the luckier members of pure race-based groups. Here I might pit a son against his own father.
Under the social justice framework, any group I can identify can be argued as having unique social justice concerns that ought to be corrected, but there is no framework for identifying which group should be focused on first or most passionately. There is also no discussion about the selfish motives of group insiders who argue for the social justice of their own group. Of course there are selfish individual motives for all of these things, but there is no room for that particular line of analysis in a social justice discussion.
Conclusion
David Friedman has quite adeptly poked holes in our ability to concretely define social justice. Here, I have attempted to define it and discuss it as broadly as possible. Even in as flattering terms as we can give it, the concept involves major problems that cannot be easily overcome.
So, I would argue that social justice is at best problematic, and at worst more of a rhetorical tool used to promote selfish political objectives. At any rate, it is a difficult thing to take seriously.
2013-05-28
Altitude Training
For the first time in perhaps three years, I went running "at altitude" today. What this means is that I ran in a location that happens to sit at a critically high level of altitude. In my case, this was Denver, Colorado, which sits at about 5,430 feet above sea level.
I grew up in an area that was about 4,500 feet above sea level, but have lived at much lower altitudes for the better part of the last ten years. Thus, I have not done much in the way of "altitude training" since I was in my early twenties. Being able to have this experience again brought back all kinds of memories: Memories of side aches, of dry-mouth, of burning lungs and burning muscles, and so on. It was a trip down memory lane.
Those who have only ever lived in places of high altitude have little-to-no insight into low altitude training. Those who have only ever lived in places of low altitude have little-to-no insight into high altitude training. It is only a small subset of us who have experienced both kinds of training in significant proportions. Hence, in the interest of sharing some lessons learned, and in hopes that this information will aide those of you who have trained in one set of conditions and suddenly find yourself in another, I would like to discuss how altitude affects running.
First, The Basics
The general idea here is as follows: The higher the altitude, the less dense the atmosphere is. What this means is that those of us who live and train at higher altitudes must attempt to perform the same activities with less oxygen.
To compensate for life at higher altitudes, the human body develops a higher density of hemoglobin in the blood stream. Hemoglobin, roughly speaking, is a protein contained in red blood cells whose job is to transport oxygen to human cells for use in respiration, i.e. for aerobic energy. The more oxygen available in the air, the less hemoglobin is necessary. Oxygen is so plentiful that each breath brings in a large amount of oxygen, which can then be easily transported into the cells and respirated into energy. The less oxygen in the air, the more the body will attempt to transport oxygen as efficiently as possible. Every morsel counts, thus the body produces a great deal of hemoglobin to absorb every morsel of oxygen and transport it into the cells.
The truth is, it's not density of oxygen that matters so much as it is hemoglobin. As a result, many competitive endurance athletes will spend a large part of their training regimen exercising in places of high altitude so that their bodies will produce more hemoglobin. When they finally descend to sea level and compete in a race, their bodies will have an above-average level of hemoglobin and will therefore be capable of producing more cellular energy for the same number of "breaths."
A Brief Word On "Cheating"
Incidentally, this is also what "blood doping" is. Some athletes will train at high altitudes, and then donate blood to themselves. The high-hemoglobin blood is kept on ice until such time as the athlete is ready for sea-level competition. At that point, they receive a blood transfusion consisting of their own, high-hemoglobin blood. They receive all the benefits of their time at high altitude, even if they have not recently trained at altitude. Most sports governing bodies consider this cheating. I would remark, however, that it is only cheating if it involves a blood transfusion. There is nothing "illegal" about training at altitude two weeks before the competition, but the end result is the same as a blood transfusion. Same athlete, same workouts, same competition. The only difference is the time period between the initial descent and the race day.
Similarly, an athlete (Lance Armstrong, for example) may choose to inject himself with EPO, which is a synthetic hormone that enhances hemoglobin production. Its therapeutic use is to facilitate the healing process for those people who have neutropenia, i.e. low white blood cell levels. For the most part, this is chemotherapy patients. An added side-effect is that additional hemoglobin are also produced. The impact on an athlete is no different than spending a couple of weeks at a high altitude, which I reiterate is perfectly "legal." But taking an injection that results in exactly the same physiological response is considered cheating.
I will leave the ethical discussion to my readers.
Running At Different Altitudes
From the above discussion, it should be clear that training at high altitudes results in higher blood-hemoglobin levels. While this is the object "of interest" with respect to high-altitude training, it is far from being the whole story. What's interesting to me is the fact that running at higher and lower altitudes simply feels different and demands a different approach to training.
That is to say, a person's lungs have to do a lot more work at higher altitudes than they do at lower ones. While this may seem relatively straightforward, the physical sensations involved are remarkably different.
A hurried example would be as follows: When I was growing up and running regularly, I got a side-ache perhaps two or three times per week. In contrast, running at sea level for the past ten years, I may have developed a side-ache two or three times across the entire decade. That the lungs must do more work at higher altitudes is a bald fact, but the depth and length of a person's breathing has an enormous impact on the cadence of a person's running stride.
To push oneself into a sprint at high altitudes means to virtually deplete oneself of one's oxygen levels on a cellular basis. As soon as a person reaches the pace of a sprint, every muscle burns to a degree that many low-altitude runners have never experienced. On top of that, there is no use attempting to compensate with heavier breathing. Where one expects a breath to be, there is only an empty croak. It is an extremely odd sensation indeed to gasp for air, but to have nothing there to fill one's lungs. This is what it means to run at a high altitude.
Of course, if this is all you ever know about running, you will hardly notice it. I myself hardly noticed it for the first two decades of my life. There was nothing to which to compare. I had never run at lower altitudes.
Then, one day, I had the opportunity to run at sea level. I had heard many stories about how much easier it is to run at low altitudes. I expected to triumphantly glide at a mind-bogglingly fast pace, seemingly without effort. Imagine my shock when I discovered that my running pace was nearly identical to what I would have run at high altitudes! What went wrong?
This brings me to low-altitude running. As should be clear by now, running at various altitudes simply has a different feel. As aforementioned, high-altitude running feels as though one is constantly gasping for breath, almost as if the wind has been knocked out of you. Running at low altitudes does not magically become easy. One's muscles must still push equally as hard to reach the same pace. We would logically expect this to be the case, but due to the folklore surrounding altitudes, some runners - myself included - expect some sort of disproportionate ease at which sea-level running can take place.
It doesn't work that way. Running a 4:00 mile at sea level requires exactly the same muscular effort as a 4:00 mile at altitude. The difference is that, where a running acclimated to high altitudes would ordinarily expect that pace to result in a particular amount of "gasping for air," this does not occur at sea level. It takes an even higher level of "muscular effort" to result in the same amount of "gasping for air."
Thus, a high-altitude runner who finds himself at sea level can "afford" to push himself to a faster pace without that effort "costing" the accustomed level of "gasping."
I use quotation marks here because what I am describing is a physical sensation ill-suited to verbal description. Another way to look at it is to consider your own "normal running pace." You go out for a run at the usual pace, and you fall into a rhythm. Your breathing matches up with your strides at a given ratio. If you happen to be accustomed to sea-level running, then when you find yourself at a higher altitude, you will go running at the same speed, and your body will feel identical, but for one difference: You'll be gasping for air. Your muscles will not feel any different. Your awareness of your own pace will not feel any different. The difference will be centralized in your lungs.
Similarly, a runner accustomed to high altitude training will often forget how hard he can push himself during a sea-level outing, because his muscles and cadence will feel the same. The only difference is that his lungs will be taking smaller, shallower breaths. To achieve the same kind of workout he is used to, he must push himself toward a faster pace.
I will further add that his leg muscles might not necessarily be up for the challenge. The key point here is that there is no automatic "benefit" to running at sea-level, even if one is acclimatized to higher altitudes. Training at high altitudes will improve the shape your lungs are in. Training at low altitudes will improve the shape your other muscles are in. Ideally, an athlete will build up both sets of muscles, but of course that is easier said than done.
Conclusion
The point I have tried to make here is that both low-altitude and high-altitude training confers certain benefits.
It may surprise those of us who are accustomed to high altitudes how much harder we can push at sea level without feeling the same level of fatigue and muscle-burning; but in order to enjoy that benefit, we must actually push to that degree. Many don't realize that they have to push to see the difference.
Similarly, those of us who have been fully acclimated to lower altitudes will be shocked to discover how badly their lungs and muscles burn during a high-altitude run. Their muscles may be fully ready to undertake severe punishment, but if their lungs are not used to gasping for air the way high-altitude runners can, they will find high-altitude running extremely daunting.
Hopefully this verbal synopsis of the matter proves useful to you the next time you change altitude and go for a run.
I grew up in an area that was about 4,500 feet above sea level, but have lived at much lower altitudes for the better part of the last ten years. Thus, I have not done much in the way of "altitude training" since I was in my early twenties. Being able to have this experience again brought back all kinds of memories: Memories of side aches, of dry-mouth, of burning lungs and burning muscles, and so on. It was a trip down memory lane.
Those who have only ever lived in places of high altitude have little-to-no insight into low altitude training. Those who have only ever lived in places of low altitude have little-to-no insight into high altitude training. It is only a small subset of us who have experienced both kinds of training in significant proportions. Hence, in the interest of sharing some lessons learned, and in hopes that this information will aide those of you who have trained in one set of conditions and suddenly find yourself in another, I would like to discuss how altitude affects running.
First, The Basics
The general idea here is as follows: The higher the altitude, the less dense the atmosphere is. What this means is that those of us who live and train at higher altitudes must attempt to perform the same activities with less oxygen.
To compensate for life at higher altitudes, the human body develops a higher density of hemoglobin in the blood stream. Hemoglobin, roughly speaking, is a protein contained in red blood cells whose job is to transport oxygen to human cells for use in respiration, i.e. for aerobic energy. The more oxygen available in the air, the less hemoglobin is necessary. Oxygen is so plentiful that each breath brings in a large amount of oxygen, which can then be easily transported into the cells and respirated into energy. The less oxygen in the air, the more the body will attempt to transport oxygen as efficiently as possible. Every morsel counts, thus the body produces a great deal of hemoglobin to absorb every morsel of oxygen and transport it into the cells.
The truth is, it's not density of oxygen that matters so much as it is hemoglobin. As a result, many competitive endurance athletes will spend a large part of their training regimen exercising in places of high altitude so that their bodies will produce more hemoglobin. When they finally descend to sea level and compete in a race, their bodies will have an above-average level of hemoglobin and will therefore be capable of producing more cellular energy for the same number of "breaths."
A Brief Word On "Cheating"
Incidentally, this is also what "blood doping" is. Some athletes will train at high altitudes, and then donate blood to themselves. The high-hemoglobin blood is kept on ice until such time as the athlete is ready for sea-level competition. At that point, they receive a blood transfusion consisting of their own, high-hemoglobin blood. They receive all the benefits of their time at high altitude, even if they have not recently trained at altitude. Most sports governing bodies consider this cheating. I would remark, however, that it is only cheating if it involves a blood transfusion. There is nothing "illegal" about training at altitude two weeks before the competition, but the end result is the same as a blood transfusion. Same athlete, same workouts, same competition. The only difference is the time period between the initial descent and the race day.
Similarly, an athlete (Lance Armstrong, for example) may choose to inject himself with EPO, which is a synthetic hormone that enhances hemoglobin production. Its therapeutic use is to facilitate the healing process for those people who have neutropenia, i.e. low white blood cell levels. For the most part, this is chemotherapy patients. An added side-effect is that additional hemoglobin are also produced. The impact on an athlete is no different than spending a couple of weeks at a high altitude, which I reiterate is perfectly "legal." But taking an injection that results in exactly the same physiological response is considered cheating.
I will leave the ethical discussion to my readers.
Running At Different Altitudes
From the above discussion, it should be clear that training at high altitudes results in higher blood-hemoglobin levels. While this is the object "of interest" with respect to high-altitude training, it is far from being the whole story. What's interesting to me is the fact that running at higher and lower altitudes simply feels different and demands a different approach to training.
That is to say, a person's lungs have to do a lot more work at higher altitudes than they do at lower ones. While this may seem relatively straightforward, the physical sensations involved are remarkably different.
A hurried example would be as follows: When I was growing up and running regularly, I got a side-ache perhaps two or three times per week. In contrast, running at sea level for the past ten years, I may have developed a side-ache two or three times across the entire decade. That the lungs must do more work at higher altitudes is a bald fact, but the depth and length of a person's breathing has an enormous impact on the cadence of a person's running stride.
To push oneself into a sprint at high altitudes means to virtually deplete oneself of one's oxygen levels on a cellular basis. As soon as a person reaches the pace of a sprint, every muscle burns to a degree that many low-altitude runners have never experienced. On top of that, there is no use attempting to compensate with heavier breathing. Where one expects a breath to be, there is only an empty croak. It is an extremely odd sensation indeed to gasp for air, but to have nothing there to fill one's lungs. This is what it means to run at a high altitude.
Of course, if this is all you ever know about running, you will hardly notice it. I myself hardly noticed it for the first two decades of my life. There was nothing to which to compare. I had never run at lower altitudes.
Then, one day, I had the opportunity to run at sea level. I had heard many stories about how much easier it is to run at low altitudes. I expected to triumphantly glide at a mind-bogglingly fast pace, seemingly without effort. Imagine my shock when I discovered that my running pace was nearly identical to what I would have run at high altitudes! What went wrong?
This brings me to low-altitude running. As should be clear by now, running at various altitudes simply has a different feel. As aforementioned, high-altitude running feels as though one is constantly gasping for breath, almost as if the wind has been knocked out of you. Running at low altitudes does not magically become easy. One's muscles must still push equally as hard to reach the same pace. We would logically expect this to be the case, but due to the folklore surrounding altitudes, some runners - myself included - expect some sort of disproportionate ease at which sea-level running can take place.
It doesn't work that way. Running a 4:00 mile at sea level requires exactly the same muscular effort as a 4:00 mile at altitude. The difference is that, where a running acclimated to high altitudes would ordinarily expect that pace to result in a particular amount of "gasping for air," this does not occur at sea level. It takes an even higher level of "muscular effort" to result in the same amount of "gasping for air."
Thus, a high-altitude runner who finds himself at sea level can "afford" to push himself to a faster pace without that effort "costing" the accustomed level of "gasping."
I use quotation marks here because what I am describing is a physical sensation ill-suited to verbal description. Another way to look at it is to consider your own "normal running pace." You go out for a run at the usual pace, and you fall into a rhythm. Your breathing matches up with your strides at a given ratio. If you happen to be accustomed to sea-level running, then when you find yourself at a higher altitude, you will go running at the same speed, and your body will feel identical, but for one difference: You'll be gasping for air. Your muscles will not feel any different. Your awareness of your own pace will not feel any different. The difference will be centralized in your lungs.
Similarly, a runner accustomed to high altitude training will often forget how hard he can push himself during a sea-level outing, because his muscles and cadence will feel the same. The only difference is that his lungs will be taking smaller, shallower breaths. To achieve the same kind of workout he is used to, he must push himself toward a faster pace.
I will further add that his leg muscles might not necessarily be up for the challenge. The key point here is that there is no automatic "benefit" to running at sea-level, even if one is acclimatized to higher altitudes. Training at high altitudes will improve the shape your lungs are in. Training at low altitudes will improve the shape your other muscles are in. Ideally, an athlete will build up both sets of muscles, but of course that is easier said than done.
Conclusion
The point I have tried to make here is that both low-altitude and high-altitude training confers certain benefits.
It may surprise those of us who are accustomed to high altitudes how much harder we can push at sea level without feeling the same level of fatigue and muscle-burning; but in order to enjoy that benefit, we must actually push to that degree. Many don't realize that they have to push to see the difference.
Similarly, those of us who have been fully acclimated to lower altitudes will be shocked to discover how badly their lungs and muscles burn during a high-altitude run. Their muscles may be fully ready to undertake severe punishment, but if their lungs are not used to gasping for air the way high-altitude runners can, they will find high-altitude running extremely daunting.
Hopefully this verbal synopsis of the matter proves useful to you the next time you change altitude and go for a run.
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