My last post on love inspired some additional follow-up questions and issues, which I would like to now take the time to briefly discuss and clarify.
I.
First of all, I may have caused some confusion when talking about the "factors" involved in forming the parent-child bond. Here's what I said about oxytocin:
Here I note that the love-as-evolution theory can handle this objection. It has been widely reported, for example, that hugging someone for merely 20 seconds is sufficient to release a rush of oxytocin (aka "the bonding chemical") in the brain. A full scientific treatment of oxytocin's relationship to parental and spousal bonding (and social affiliation more broadly) is far out-of-scope for this post, but you can read an excellent summary of the role oxytocin plays in mammals here.
Nurturing behaviors can result in a neuro-chemical response, namely one that is associated with the formation of human social bonds. This is exactly analogous to how I described situationism:
Being a parent is a highly significant psychological situation, one that includes stress, sleep deprivation, increased responsibility, increased scrutiny from family members, and so on. If situationism carries any scientific validity at all, it seems that the parental experience is the ultimate showpiece for it. Parents love their children unconditionally, perhaps in large part due to the mere fact that being a parent is a situation that demands that each parent take on that situational role. This isn't altogether different than accepting the role of a brutal prison guard or an obedient and hopeless prisoner, except that in this case the situation demands behaviors associated with unconditional love, rather than unconditional order.
Again, the key point here is mere participation. Simply "acting as if" there is a parent-child bond is sufficient to create a behavioral response consistent with a parent's love for a child.
Here's the clarification: I'm suggesting that one of two things must be the case: (1) both of these phenomenon prove that love is nothing more than a chemical response produced by our biology, hence entirely illusory; (2) the word "love" only applies to those feelings that cannot be attributed to chemical- or situation-based illusion.
In other words, my proposition is that "love," properly understood, only consists of those feelings that involve some choice we've made voluntarily. Love through habituation is, according to me, not love in the "philosophical" sense.
II.
Talking about "unconditional" love, I wrote, "What is the value of a love that carries with it no reference to the recipient's identity or personal character?" This met with some objection based on the idea that a parent's unconditional love for a child kept that child alive, and was thus valuable. Here I must reiterate the point I made above. Only if we call involuntary chemical reactions "love" can we say that the (initial) parent-child bond really is love, unconditional or otherwise. The point here is that such a bond does have an obvious value. Not only does it keep the child alive, but it fosters enough "togetherness" for a real, love-based relationship to emerge. So there is value in that sort of thing, but until there is some sort of choice beyond chemical or situational reactions, we cannot properly call it love. (I.e. love is not the only valuable thing in the universe.) Of course, this point is contingent on the idea that the relationship itself is worth nurturing. Between a parent and a child, that question is a no-brainer. But between two romantic partners, one of whom is being abused by the other, the whole dynamic changes. This is really what I was getting at from the beginning, and hence my repeated references to Jiah Khan as an example of what happens to a lot of young women who give themselves over to abusive relationships. The mere habit of behaving as though you love someone reinforces a non-love bond. That bond may be forged through chemistry, psychology, or both. But if it's not voluntary, then it's not love; instead, it's habit. This sort of relationship is not at all worth nurturing. Thus, "unconditional love" is not inherently valuable. III. Another objection I received was that unconditional love has been decreed by god. Anyone who reads my blog regularly already has an idea about how I might respond to that. (If you're new to the blog, you might want to start here and here.) It is difficult for me to respond to this objection fairly, given my pre-existing bias against theism. Difficult, but not impossible. Applying the ideas I have outlined across these blog posts about love means that we can only really call it love if there is some choice involved. The only other valid possibility is that love is thoroughly chemical, and that there is no choice involved beyond mere acquiescence to habit. This means that, if we accept that premise, then wemust necessarily reject the idea that we can be commanded by god to love each other. In short, it doesn't make a difference what god commands us to do: what matters is whether we are able to find merit in the actions and behaviors of others. If we can, then we love them; if we cannot, we do not. Similarly, your parents may have wanted to you to become a doctor, but their wishes do not count for college credit. In order to become a doctor, you have to actually study to be one, finish your exams, finish a residency, etc. One can argue that only those who succeed in loving all other human beings unconditionally are living lives that are consistent with a god's wishes, but one cannot argue that one can love another person just because a god told them to do it. It doesn't work that way. However, there is consistency in this objection if it is made along with all the others. That is, if you feel that your biology can force you to love someone, then why not also god? More to the point, if you believe that love can exist without your having made any personal choices in the matter, then it doesn't matter if the entity that is commanding you to love is an entity called "Oxytocin" or an entity called "God." In either case, it's deus ex machina. Conclusion I wrote this post because it enabled me to cite some specific examples of how my ideas can be applied in your life. First and foremost, it can help you "get out of the habit" of being in a bad or abusive relationship. It can help you understand that, since love is a choice, you should choose only the best kind of love. Nothing else is worth it. That's an important point. Second, it helps highlight the point that, whatever biological or psychological factors might be involved in the initial formation of the parent-child bond, what really matters is the relationship that develops between a parent and a child after the magic of oxytocin wears off. It simply doesn't suffice to love your child just because your child exists. That's not good enough. What should happen, ethically speaking, is that the parent work to develop a bond with that child out of a recognition of that child's own unique worth. Everyone has their own sense of humor, their own skill set, their own set of strengths. Forming a real, ever-lasting, and love-based bond with a child should, ideally, come down to more than their mere fact of existence. I would go so far as to say that such "unconditional love" puts you at risk of severely disappointing that child once he or she matures enough to recognize the difference.
For nearly twenty years (by my count, spanning from approximately 1974 to 1994), the musical genre known loosely as "hair metal" or "glam metal" or "80s hard rock" or whatever you want to call it constituted the music of choice for millions of people around the world. One day, an anti-80s-glam-metal marketing campaign was launched by the media, presumably at the bidding of record companies who were looking for a new way to market new artists and albums without getting lost in what had become an endless stream of neon guitars, elaborate guitar solos, screamy vocals, and basically predictable song structures.
That marketing campaign marked the dawn of the age of what we now refer to as "grunge," but which was at the time called "alternative rock," owing mostly to the frothing-at-the-mouth that would ensue of anyone dared to call these bands "metal." Again, the reason for this was mostly marketing. Every artist tries to shirk artistic labels from a desire to be judged on his or her own merits, of course. But in the early 90s, it became vital for artists to defy this particular label, and my best guess as to why is that the metal bands weren't getting the marketing support anymore.
This is all rational and predictable economic behavior:
Traditional marketing campaigns that focused on the guitar prowess and rock and roll excess of their artists having reached the point of diminishing returns, the record labels needed a "new brand," which they found in "grunge." (How much sweeter was the deal that by giving the whole genre a name that was vehemently disputed, it got people talking about "what to call this new music." Prince employed the same strategy when he changed his name to the Love Symbol, making himself millions despite rendering himself un-marketable by Warner Bros.)
Artists, hungry for record deals and a shot at the big time, quickly removed their spandex and straightened their hair in order to seek record label dollars. In many cases, the only differences between a 1992 "grunge band" and a 1992 "metal band" were clothing and production techniques. (If I need to supply evidence for this, I will.)
Meanwhile, the old metal bands found themselves in a catch-22: to evolve with the times and appeal to the grunge crowd meant alienating their millions of faithful fans, but to stick to their guns meant to lose record label support, perhaps losing their record contracts in the process, and basically winding up like all the has-been 80s rockers we see these days. They couldn't win. Different bands chose different strategies, to varying levels of success. For the most part, metal was eliminated from the playing field, at least until it regained popularity through its relative kitsch value.
Today, however, many of these bands tour highly successfully. The reason for this is that the core fan base never really went anywhere. These fans were alienated every bit as much as the artists who supplied them with music. And this brings me to today's point.
Somehow, written out of the musical history books dutifully kept by Rolling Stone Magazine and every other record label tool designed to define for you what you think is cool, are the millions and millions of regular people, non-musicians who happened to have grown up on a genre of music now deemed to be un-cool. I cannot help but think that there is something incredibly, morally wrong about this.
Think about it: there's nothing wrong with having a love of 80s hair metal. It's just music. If you don't like it, don't listen to it. But who cares how "lame" it is that other people really love it? Why should they be denied the ability to have their preferred music broadcast in retail stores and on radio stations? There is obviously money to be made in this, or else these fans wouldn't exist. Why instead are they force-fed a diet of the five industry-approved hard rock bands from the 70s and 80s that Rolling Stone somehow feels are acceptable? (If you're wondering, the current list appears to be Van Halen, Kiss, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and one rotational slot made available to whichever of the insiders needs money the most - currently Ozzy Osborne.)
People wonder why music is facing a critical low point in itslengthydecline. One important factor is that music scenes used to be the hotbeds of all the action. Music clubs is where you went to meet people. The best parties in town involved performances by the best local bands; those who weren't performing were invited as guests. These parties and performances featured all the decadence that earned the 1980s its infamous reputation. The really stunning part about the whole 80s rock world is that it really was like it is storied to have been. On the one hand, the bad behavior was an extremely unfortunate consequence of this, but on the other hand, modern music lacks something important that used to be far more commonplace.
Spend some time on YouTube perusing the dozens of 80s metal music videos in which tour footage is featured prominently. Observe the massive stage-shows that all really happened. Observe the crowd as they listen to the music playing. Men, women, everyone moving to the music. You can say what you want about how lame certain genres of music might be, but any music that can have that effect on people can't be all bad.
A return to that kind of passion for music is exactly what today's music world needs.
Comprehension of proper running form was understood as early as 1836 in Great Britain. To my surprise, people were running faster than five minutes per mile back then, or so the blurb implies.
For my money, Superman has always been one of the least interesting of all super-heroes. The basic conflict simply isn't interesting. This is a man who can pretty much do anything, and who is basically invincible. So, for the most part, he must simply spend his time rounding up bad guys and plopping them in jail. Ho-hum.
Then we have the matter of his one weakness: Kryptonite. Exposed to this mineral, he becomes weak and, I guess, potentially dies. So the basic plot of any episodic installment of the Superman franchise is going to come down to some variation of an evil criminal somehow acquiring Kryptonite and discovering its effect on Superman, and then using it to attempt to kill Superman and walk away with piles of money or something. Lucky for Superman, one of the few people who manages to figure out his secret identity somehow defies the odds and takes Superman away from the Kryptonite and its ill effects. Having thus been rehabilitated, Superman returns to capture and conquer the villain.
If you've seen one such episode, you've seen them all.
So, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the plot of the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, was a welcome departure from this over-worked storyline. Instead, Man of Steel tells the story of the final days of the planet Krypton, the motives of its long-dead inhabitants, the story of that race of people, and how it was that Superman ended up on Earth. For those of us more accustomed to beginning any Superman story with his mysterious crash-landing on a mid-western farm, this was a delicious slice of back-story that had the power to breath new life into the Superman legend.
Also surprising is that the chief antagonist of the story not Lex Luther, but rather General Zod. Of course, this would come as no real surprise to Superman aficionados, since Zod has long since been a mainstay of the actual comic books. But a Zod with no direct relationship to Lex Luther provides a new kind of Superman story to be told to the general movie-going public, and this under-utilized variation of the Superman oeuvre offers up yet another refreshing change for the franchise.
Man of Steel likewise provides some excellent script elements that add depth to Superman's character. Rather than painting him as bumbling idiot Clark Kent on the one hand, and stern-faced invincible god Superman on the other, Man of Steel tells the story of a young man who has grown comfortable in his own skin through years of patient study and ethical discipline. At one point in the movie, we see Superman as a boy, completely engrossed in a book about Plato. His sometimes torturous youth, rather than spawning the barely controlled temper that we usually find beneath the surface of superficial superheroes, spawns a serene and philosophical wisdom, a profound sense of morality that governs his every decision once he reaches adulthood.
Well, that kind of story-telling is rare for Hollywood these days, and in Man of Steel, it pays off in spades. This, we learn (although it is never stated outright, only subtly implied), is how Superman becomes the archon of "truth, justice, and the American way." The point is driven home throughout the movie as we see peripheral characters interacting with Superman and suddenly becoming inspired to rise to the trying circumstances that they face without Superman, and prevail. This was Jor-El's hope for Superman, and this is what the script writers give us. Bravo!
Speaking of peripheral characters, the supporting cast of this movie must surely be one of the most star-studded list of great performers to grace the non-starring roles on a single movie in recent memory. Russell Crowe stars as Jor-El, and performs wonderfully, lending the role a level of intelligence not typically associated with Crowe. That casting decision is further juxtaposed by the ordinarily-intelligent-role-playing Kevin Costner as Superman's adopted father on Earth. Costner's acting chops, too, are on great display as he delivers his lines with a genuineness and ease that we wouldn't expect from the man who played more wooden characters like The Postman. Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, and Amy Adams all play their roles perfectly, along with a long list of less-known but recognizeable actors like Christopher Meloni (of Law & Order: SVU fame), Harry Lennix (perhaps best remembered for his role on TV's E.R.), and the surprisingly awesome Michael Shannon, whose portrayal of General Zod is a real show-stealer.
Unfortunately, Man of Steel was not all good. There are a number of flaws in the movie that, for me, greatly compromised how good a film it could have been.
For one thing, starting a franchise re-boot by pitting Superman against his most powerful enemy creates a real dilemma for any future installment. Having now breathed new life into a very tired franchise that has major plot problems, the filmmakers are left with few new places to take the story. A plot involving Lex Luther would be the next logical step, but how do you tell that story without resorting to all the tired cliches of Superman stories in general? If this team reassembles to produce another Superman movie, we already know how that sequel will pan out: Lex Luther will appear; he will initially be popular and well-respected, and then we will discover that he has sinister motives and also a small but significant quantity of Kryptonite. He will lure Superman into a trap and then expose him to Kryptonite. Lois Lane or perhaps Jimmy will show up to save Superman from the Kyrptonite, and then Superman will save the world from Luther. Again. Boring!
A more reasonable way to approach the franchise would have been to introduce Lex Luther first, or perhaps both arch-villains at the same time, but unrelated. To gradually build a story of multiple worthy foes who each, for their own reasons, want to rid the world of Superman, but who each individually lack the means to do so could supply the movie franchise with enough parallel plot lines to generate a dozen Superman movies, and a stunning grand finale. But this was not the way the filmmakers chose to go.
Another problem with Man of Steel was its depiction of the Kryptonians. As is usually the case, Hollywood has once again proven itself to be incapable of depicting a logical, scientifically advanced society that is not somehow also a society of religious nuts. This is a common complaint I have about Hollywood in general: Genius can never be genius, it can only be the flip-side of insanity; reason can never be reason, it can only be the more stoic version of religious devotion. Hollywood is unable to conceive of intelligence except to call it lunacy, unable to conceive of logic except to say that it looks to them a lot like religion. So again and again we are bombarded by theocratic Kryptonians, mystical Klingons, drug-addled and psychotic Sherlock Holmeses, papal Jedis, and so on. Invincible aliens are not too much for Hollywood; a person who is both super-intelligent and perfectly sane is beyond the pale.
Finally, I found that the action sequences in Man of Steel were excessive to the point of caricature. I am all for violence and destruction in movies, but when one begins to wonder whether there is a single skyscraper left standing in New York City, a single satellite left in the sky, a single drop of water left in the ocean, then we have surely pushed the apocalyptic scenarios to their limit.
In summary, there is a great deal to love about this movie, but also a great deal to hate. If I had to guess, I'd say that Christopher Nolan fans will call it amazing, while those who are not Nolan fans will ultimately find it as anti-climactic as I did. A running criticism I have of Nolan is that his stories are "all wind-up, no follow-through," and that criticism applies equally to Man of Steel. The wind-up was good enough, however, to make the movie basically worthwhile.
I have seen news reports that have lead me to believe that the skills taught in schools in many countries are very badly matched to what people need to know in those countries. In those countries education becomes like a very costly lottery. If you are at the very top of the class it might enable you to get visa to work in a developed country or to get one the few high level jobs available domestically but if you are not at the top of your class you get very little that is useful in your life. There was a News report that focused on a girl in India and one of the comments by her family was that her older sister went to school for what they considered a long time and she was still a goat herder.
Of course, this is heresy. In the modern world, we are supposed to accept the dictum that education is the most important way to improve one's lot in life without any follow up questions. Questioning education is a holy taboo, which explains why Bryan Caplan gets so much guff for arguing that education is all about signalling, not human capital.
But if education were really about building "human capital," then the necessary condition for this is that it teach students skills that they really do need in their real lives. Less social studies, and more basic mechanics. Never mind goatherds in India, few college graduates right here in America can give you the full list of simple machines. If a solar storm wiped out all electrical machines tomorrow, our population would be (if not decimated) wiped out completely.
Yet, the fact that that education systems all over the world teach a particularly useless blend of algorithmic-arithmetic-problem-resolution (rather than geometrically founded mathematical reasoning), nationalistic narrative formation (rather than history), weights-and-measurements (rather than science and physics), spelling and book reading (rather than literature), and organized social play (rather than health and physical education) suggests to me that education ignores the real needs of real human beings by design.
This fact may wound your ego if you were particularly awesome in school, but it's true. The only really useful skills we learn in school are things we happen to pick up along the way. For example, someone whose educational experience with numbers inspires her to learn real mathematics is better off having had exposure to numbers in the first place - but that need not have happened in a classroom. Someone who learns to enjoy books thanks to homework might end up picking up a book from which he learns something incredibly important; but again, school is not a direct cause.
That many of us learn these peripheral lessons while growing up might obfuscate the fact that it's not school that is doing the trick. We might incorrectly ascribe a power to the modern education system that it does not actually possess. Knowledge is power, but education is not knowledge.
The only explanation for the state of modern education is lobbying. Teachers are a powerful lobby whose livelihood is almost fully funded by the government in nearly every county. In those countries (such as India) that have both a robust private and public education system, the public system is large enough to basically set the private system's curriculum through oligopoly power, as well as through the influence of the publicly funded universities that both systems feed.
To describe the whole system in a single paragraph: Modern education seems to be a union/subsidy scheme in which children are forced to clear iterative hoops in order to gain the privilege of joining the workforce. The curriculum is nominal-only, and established through the influence of sub-groups within the education lobbies. No really useful skills are provided, but that was never the point. The point was to establish the cultural rule that "we value education." Once that rule is established, it becomes unthinkable to go through life without a culturally accepted level of schooling, despite the fact that sticking it out all those years delivers no discernible addition to one's set of life-skills.
One caveat: I am not a conspiracy theorist who believes government schools are designed to control us. I just think the education system is a product of the influence and lobbying of the people who run it. We get the education system we deserve, and apparently we deserve one takes up a third of our lifetime and delivers few real skills.
Closed Shops And Seniority
The reason I keep using the language of labor unions to describe schooling is that there is a clear parallel between them, and I mean a parallel that goes beyond the fact that teachers' unions are some of the most powerful labor unions in the modern world.
In a union shop, seniority rules. You are not allowed to move up the food chain until you've both literally and figuratively "paid your dues." (That's where the phrase "paid your dues" comes from, anyway.) If it all came down to paying money, though, then we wouldn't be talking about a labor union, we'd be talking about an oligarchy. The key to running a union shop is seniority. Seniority ensures that, no matter how meritorious the work of a young innovator might be, he'll never surpass the senior member on staff, not ever. His only hope is to stick it out long enough to be the senior staff member. After all, every employee has a starting date on the job, so every employee will eventually be the senior staff member.
Along the way, members of a union shop have to clear certain hurdles before they are entitled to certain benefits. A five-year employment anniversary, for example, might correspond to certain additional voting rights, or a higher wage, or more overtime, or whatever benefits the union may deem appropriate for that particular hurdle's having been cleared.
Now back to education: You can't get a lousy job without a high school diploma. You can't get a good job without some sort of post-high-school certificate. You can't get a mid-level job without a college degree, and you can't get into management without something better than a bachelor's degree. Now do you see the connection? Here we are, clearing hurdles based on putting in the right amount of time.
In terms of actual knowledge, there's nothing important that studying two years' of "general education requirements" plus another two years of studying business administration classes will get you that you can't get from an associate's degree in business studies at the local junior college. Not in terms of knowledge, but remember: that isn't the point of education. If it were, then we'd all have learned some very important life skills over our 12-18 years of education, when all we really came out with was basic reading comprehension and algorithmic, arithmetic problem-resolution skills.
So, it simply must be that education is more about clearing hurdles and demonstrating seniority. I stuck it out for a full sixteen years, so I get a cubicle, while you're stuck working on cars. But that guy over there stuck it out for eighteen years, and so he gets an office window, and he gets to tell me what to do despite the fact that he knows less than I do and has less actual work experience. (The really funny thing is that the guy working on cars has all the skills he needs to start his own business and beat the rest of us in the rat race. But assuming the education lobby is powerful enough, he'll never be able to raise enough money to get his business off the ground.)
Outside The Traditional Workforce
I've long believed that the art and music worlds are hopelessly corrupt. Success is by-invitation-only. Why else do you think that Taylor Swift is a superstar at the exact moment in history when any genius with a laptop webcam can upload his genius to YouTube and entertain millions upon millions of people at the touch of a button?
No, this isn't just sour grapes. I'm not talking about me. I know I'm an amateur. The point is not about me, it's about why this is more popular than this. Let's not be idiots here, there is no comparison. It's not a matter of "taste." No matter what you personally want to listen to this morning, in a world in which the most artistically skilled rose to the top, that kid who runs the StringsOfPassion YouTube channel would be in the band "Fun" and the music would be a lot more interesting. And you'd still love it, because guess what: The only reason you've even heard of Fun is because they have the marketing machine behind them.
There are thousands of bands that sounded like Fun before Fun got radio airplay. The reason Fun got on the air rather than all those other bands is because someone at the record company got together with someone at the radio programming corporation and they decided that Fun was the band they were going to use to extract art funding from consumers. At least Bieber earned his stripes on YouTube!
Of course, in art, the game runs a little differently. Newcomers are welcomed into the fold without having to adhere to a seniority scheme. But this is mainly because music and art scenes in general are most attractive to younger markets, so they need fresh faces to come along and make you forget about the fact that Bono and Sting are a bit too old to make you want to remove your bra and throw it at them. Hence: Fun.
Anyway, instead of running a seniority game, the art world runs its own sort of internal popularity contest. You get to be on top if you convince enough of your fellow artists that you're "cool." Suck-up to the right people, and you get to have your art displayed in the local gallery, as opposed to just on DeviantArt. Suck-up to the right people and you get to play Friday at the House of Blues instead of Saturday nights at the Fusion Bar & Grill. That's really how it works - I've seen awesome bands playing in dive bars. They only get the good gigs if they (1) join the local musicians' union, and (2) "have connections."
Those aren't scare-quotes, they're real quotes. Musicians really talk about this.
The Point
These all may seem like disparate topics to you, but recall what I wrote the other day about rules versus merit.
A world in which the path to success is not good work but staying in school is a world in which following the rules is a greater contributor to your success than doing something meritorious. It doesn't matter what you do to innovate in the workplace. In fact, the more meritorious your work, the more of a threat you are seen to be to those who closely adhere to the rules-based path to success. Imagine sticking it out through twenty years of schooling in order to earn your place as middle-manager, and along comes some high school graduate who figured out how to improve the performance of your entire team by replacing one employee with a line of computer code. You'd be shaking in your boots. He's a threat.
But if he lacks your credentials and seniority - if your credentials and seniority matter more than his hard work - then you're invincible. By keeping him down, you maintain a wage and status that you don't deserve, at least not according to the merits of your work.
If musicians were forced to compete only on their ability to entertain a crowd of people, then Taylor Swift would not be a musician. She's pretty, so she might have ended up a model or an actress, or possibly a paralegal. But not a singer, not a musician.
In every facet of our lives, once we have attained a comfortable level of success, we quickly establish rules that bar others from attaining the same success through different means. We reason that, since this is the way we did it, this is the way that everyone should have to do it. Anything less than these rules becomes a cutthroat competition based solely on the merits of the enterprise.
Now, when we restrict the analysis to a microcosm - your own workplace, for example - you might not see anything wrong with this per se. After all, why shouldn't we make people with advanced degrees managers? They have MBAs for chrissakes!
Conclusion
But when the whole world operates this way, then what we end up with a social system based on upholding a particular social order at the expense of innovation, increased efficiency, meritorious performance, and new ideas. Is it any surprise, then, that so many people complain about the fact that social class has become entrenched in our political systems? The poor cannot innovate their way out of being poor, nor can the middle class innovate their way into the elite.
In this sort social order, one's own personal efforts have no impact on the life that results. That's bad.
Thankfully, in many places throughout the world, merit does matter, even if only a little bit. It matters enough to enough people that we human beings still have some control over our lives.
What I'm advocating for here is that we resist the urge to put up barriers to other people's success. If a poor person wants to start a business, why make him jump through regulatory hurdles that only the rich have the time and resources to clear? If a Bangladeshi wants to become a surgeon, why should he have to spend sixteen years in the Bangladeshi education system, followed by another eight-to-ten years at a fancy western medical school just to be able to practice medicine?
These sorts of barriers are insane. We must try to eliminate them. I warn you: It may cost you something. You just might wind up in a cubicle instead of a corner office. On the other hand, you'll have a clear path to that corner office, and it will be fully within your control, through hard work rather than through seniority.
That is to say, through merit as opposed to rules.
Faithful Stationary Waves reader AK notes that Jiah Khan's suicide letter was "highly disturbing." Of course, when I wrote about it, it was making the separate point that giving love without having any evidence of receiving it is utterly foolish. In my mind, it goes without saying that a woman who would kill herself over this sort of love affair was a bit disturbed. So AK and I are in agreement on all fronts (as is typically the case).
Meanwhile, another faithful reader, SU, raises a problem with my recent post on the self-esteem cult. Sure, she says, people love each other based on actions attesting to their worthiness. But what about a parent's (unconditional) love for child?
I must admit that I did not really have the Jiah Khan issue in mind when I wrote about the self-esteem cult, but perhaps my subconscious was deep at work. After all, both posts are closely tied together: both discuss the topic of being loved without doing anything to deserve it. With SU's permission, I will be quoting her throughout the missive. Let's take a closer look at love.
The Parent-Child Bond
What follows here is admittedly a little silly on my part: I don't have children. How can I possibly discuss the love a parent has for a child? Let me cede the point in advance and acknowledge that this sort of discourse is necessarily a little speculative. On the other hand, I do happen to be somebody else's child, so I know something about the parent-child bond from the other side. So there's that.
Anyway, let's get to it. Here is SU, objecting to the self-esteem cult's Deception #1 in her own words:
First, to (most) parents, the children they raise do have inherent value completely separate from any positive character traits the kids may show. You don't love your baby because he/she does anything special; you don't even love them just because they're tiny and cute (I don't love other people's tiny and cute children). You love them because they...are. For the first 3 months of their lives, they do absolutely nothing that merits anything, yet you love them like crazy.
She's right: parents love their infants long before those children have a chance to demonstrate any worthiness of love. What gives? Well, here are some possibilities:
Biological Factors
It is intuitive enough to state without proof that parents are emotionally attached to their children for purely biological reasons. If some evidence for this is required, then let me submit the following.
Yet love is generally regarded as a uniquely human emotion. Here we reach the first epistemological choice in today's article about love: Either love is not unique to humans, or the biological attachment between a parent and child is not love.
The reason we have to make this choice is because it is relevant to what I have already claimed about love. Either love is a rational choice that we make based on merit, or it is something other than rational (I'll get to exactly what a little later). To elaborate even further, animals cannot reason. Some highly intelligent animals can get close. Border collies, for example, are intelligent enough to know that you're holding a treat behind your back, whereas less intelligent dogs literally think the treat is gone if they can't see it. (Playing peekaboo with infants is one way human beings teach our children about abstract reasoning. Did you know that?) Elephants can paint pictures and apes can learn sign language. All of this implies that animals are capable of abstraction, but today there is little evidence that any animals other than human beings can engage in the kind of deductive logic that even very young children can perform.
Therefore, if animals that cannot reason nonetheless feel love, this would mean that love is not at all a rational choice. What might it be instead? Evolutionary happenstance. Certainly a species that evolves with a chemical inclination toward caring for other members of its own species - and especially its own offspring - possesses a distinct reproductive advantage over, say, turtles and spiders, who merely lay their eggs en masse and let nature run its course in absentia.
If this is your belief, then for you the missive ends here. No sense subjecting something with a purely neurological explanation to excessive philosophical discourse.
...Not so fast, though. SU isn't satisfied with that explanation:
But what about adoption? Haven't you heard adoptive parents say they love their kid the moment they hold them? Where's the biology in that? Adoptive parents love their kid just for being in existence, without the kid doing anything good, and without the help of primal chemicals triggering love.
Here I note that the love-as-evolution theory can handle this objection. It has been widely reported, for example, that hugging someone for merely 20 seconds is sufficient to release a rush of oxytocin (aka "the bonding chemical") in the brain. A full scientific treatment of oxytocin's relationship to parental and spousal bonding (and social affiliation more broadly) is far out-of-scope for this post, but you can read an excellent summary of the role oxytocin plays in mammals here.
Insofar as this post is concerned, though, there are biological impulses that apply to adoptive parents. (Perhaps they apply to a lesser degree - Lee, et al note that oxytocin response increases during childbirth, for example - but they nonetheless do apply.)
When I initially responded to SU, I suggested that love is either fully rational, or fully irrational. In the latter case, the bio-neuro-evolutionary explanation provides almost a complete account for love. If you subscribe to this theory, which I might add has an incredible amount of scientific evidence supporting it, then the explanation is fully self-contained. I readily concede that this is a possibility.
But, personally, I'm not convinced.
Psychological Factors
Alternatively, we can accept the premise that love as humans understand it is an act of reason. If this is the case, then there are some additional factors to consider, which might help explain the seemingly "irrational" bond between a parent and a child.
The first one is what I have called The Bunny Effect. This is our natural tendency to be drawn toward things that are cute. Babies are certainly cute. If you'd like to see The Bunny Effect in action, take an infant into a roomful of adults who are otherwise minding their own business. If you don't succeed in drawing a crowd, some wide smiles, and some healthy pro-baby interaction, then I'll eat my proverbial hat.
Now, a "natural tendency" may very well also be the incarnation of a biological factor, but it also might not be. People differ in what they consider to be cute. Some of us love cats, for example, while others hate them. There is no real evolutionary reason to feel an affinity toward cats, unless it is the product of a random genetic variation that neither facilitates species success nor inhibits it. At any rate, it seems to be a matter of personal opinion, and opinion is as psychological as anything can be.
Regarding The Bunny Effect, SU counters that a newborn is "a squished, red-faced swollen mess for a few weeks. This... serves to ruin the cuteness idea[.]" She further adds: "[M]ore compelling is the fact that we don't love other people's tiny and/or cute children."
Well, my own experience being around crowds of adults when an infant happens to be present runs contrary to SU's second claim here. Furthermore, history is replete with examples of noble people who put their own lives on the line to save the babies of pure strangers. There seems to be evidence that at least some people appear to love other people's tiny and/or cute children.
She's right, however, that not everyone does, and I can own up to this myself. (But remember, in my case, I'm suggesting that love is a rational choice based on worthiness, rather than an innate, non-rational, biological phenomenon.) Thus, The Bunny Effect should be regarded as a psychological factor that facilitates the parent-child bond, not the factor.
Next up is a series of factors we might call "egotistical" factors. I put that term in scare-quotes because I think these factors pertain to the human ego, but do not really have the negative connotation that the word "egotism" usually carries.
These egotistical factors are things such as: The desire to leave a legacy; The desire to be responsible for the well-being of another human being; The desire to watch innocence run its course; The desire to "see oneself" in one's child; The desire to live certain life experiences a second time, vicariously through one's offspring, and so on.
Such factors are very real, and different people experience them to different degrees. SU correctly remarks that adoptive parents certainly wouldn't "see themselves" in their adopted children, but that would not preclude them from feeling some of these other "egotistical" factors. Once again, none of these factors individually constitute the source of a parent-child bond, but certainly many of them experienced to various degrees and in summation help facilitate this bond.
There is one last, perhaps most-important, psychological factor that I think applies here, but I want to give it its own sub-heading because it seems particularly important.
This body of research [situationist research in social psychology - ed.] demonstrates the under-recognized power of social situations to alter the mental representations and behavior of individuals, groups and nations.
Naturally, Zimbardo has focused much of his professional life on evil, where it comes from, and how it can be prevented. However, any situationist theory of evil, if true, must certainly also hold true for love.
I neither have the credentials, nor the research, to be able to argue this point scientifically. Instead, I'll rest it on the contingency that if you agree with Zimbardo, as I do, then a logical conclusion to draw is that love can also be a situational response to a set of environmental conditions.
Being a parent is a highly significant psychological situation, one that includes stress, sleep deprivation, increased responsibility, increased scrutiny from family members, and so on. If situationism carries any scientific validity at all, it seems that the parental experience is the ultimate showpiece for it. Parents love their children unconditionally, perhaps in large part due to the mere fact that being a parent is a situation that demands that each parent take on that situational role. This isn't altogether different than accepting the role of a brutal prison guard or an obedient and hopeless prisoner, except that in this case the situation demands behaviors associated with unconditional love, rather than unconditional order.
True, this is not a particularly romantic way of viewing the parent-child bond (and happy Father's Day to you, too, by the way, ha ha ha), but if we lend any credence to situationist theory, then it's a hard set of evidence to ignore.
Unconditional Love
I had a college roommate, Mike (Mike! Where are you now?), who liked to joke: "They say that money can't buy you love, but money can buy you unconditional love at the local pet store!" If you accept the bio-neuro-evolutionary explanation of love outlined above, then Mike was absolutely - and hilariously - correct. (Even funnier is the fact that Mike was studying to be a veterinarian.)
Of course, if you're a dog, you have a very good reason to love unconditionally: Your master will give you food and throw the occasional tennis ball at you. So long as that's all you want out of life, you're good to go. Humans, though, require more.
I've done my best to counter some of SU's arguments, but the truth of the matter is that she makes some excellent points. All things considered, most of what we're debating is a matter of personal opinion. You decide what you believe, and go with it. At the end of the day, that's all that really matters. If you feel loved, then what does it matter whether it is a chemical phenomenon, or a situational one, a rational choice, or a haplessly irrational dictum of the human experience?
However, SU did say one thing with which I strongly disagree:
So when you're feeling like trash and then perk up a bit because you feel you have value just for being an entity in the universe, know that at least one person agrees with you: MOM!
I don't doubt SU's maternal sincerity here, nor the meaningfulness of her being loved by her own mother. But I do have a question: What is the value of a love that carries with it no reference to the recipient's identity or personal character?
Put another way, why should I be happy about the fact that someone else has decided to love me without any regard to any of my own redeeming qualities? What is such unconditional love worth to me?
I am certainly happy that I have loving parents; but I'm not happy because they agree that I have value just for being an entity in the universe. No, I'm happy specifically because my parents seem to understand me, to know what I need when I need it, to appreciate the very things about myself that I value most. In short, I am happy with the love my parents give me because it seems to reflect a genuine appreciation for who I am and what my best qualities are.
Receiving this kind of love is extremely important during those moments of life when we feel we have failed or come up short, i.e. when we're "feeling like trash." In those moments, we temporarily forget or set aside our best qualities and focus on our shortcomings. Having loved ones nearby who can remind you of your best qualities and help you understand that those good qualities far outweigh the bad ones with respect to their love for you is extremely therapeutic.
But what is the consolation in knowing that someone just loves you, just because, when you're feeling down? How does it help a person feel better, knowing that someone doesn't much care how much you fail, because after all, you are a pile of flesh who happens to be included in the family unit? Wouldn't it be better to know that they love you for specific reasons with which you happen to agree?
More importantly, what would this imply about Jiah Khan's situation? Despite all her boyfriend's bad behavior, she loved him unconditionally. He didn't respond. The relationship was one-sided. What Ms. Khan gained from the unconditional love she gave was the ability to live in a mental fantasy in which she was a Great Giver Of Love. Her final act of life on Earth was, at least in her mind and according to her concept of love, an act of tremendous love: She claimed to have loved him so much that she could no longer bear living in a world in which he did not return the same kind of devotion. Her final words were a terrible, dire warning that "No other woman will... love you as much as I do." And her suicide was submitted as evidence of that fact. By denying her boyfriend a lifetime of happiness with her, she enacted her final revenge on the man who was unmoved by her unconditional love for him.
Love without evidence, love without reason, love without cause... This is where it leads. Did Ms. Khan's ex-boyfriend benefit in the slightest from knowing that she loved him unconditionally? Should he have?
My answer is no.
Love And Not-Love
All of the above factors being considered, I think I can now make a few comments about what love is, at least in the philosophical sense.
First, as I said before, if you subscribe to the belief that love is merely a biological fact of evolution, then you have a full, self-contained and valid story. No other issue need be considered, other than a semantic one. To wit, if by "love" you mean the biological processes that result in human emotional bonds, then love is neither rational nor irrational, but simply non-rational. Call it exogenous, if you like.
But note: the statement "the biological processes that result in... bonds" implies that the process is different than the bond. Therefore, if by "love" you mean the bond itself, then what we are discussing is indeed a rational thing.
Even if certain natural processes create a bond, those processes will be rationalized in the human mind and justified with logic. If the natural processes make you feel that your child is your legacy, and therefore lovable, then the bond is fully rational even if the source of the rationale is chemical. If the natural processes make you aware of your partner's high degree of genetic variation from your own, your mind will reason that your partner possesses a compelling beauty, and is therefore lovable; the resulting bond is rational, even if its source is chemical. And so on...
Thus, it could be argued that these natural processes are not really love as the human mind understands it, even if they are the chemical source of it.
The case is even better if you don't buy the evolutionary explanation. The many psychological motivating factors that would convince a person to love another might include those "egotistical" factors, and many situational ones. If so, such factors merely facilitate the formation of a bond that is otherwise justified by the human mind. At any rate, those factors are not love. The bond, however, is.
Conclusion
What I'm suggesting is that any time one finds that one loves "irrationally," or "innately," or otherwise "just because," then one of two possibilities exists: (1) You are unable to explain the logical reasons for that love, despite the fact that they do exist; (2) What you are experiencing is not really love.
Back to Jiah Khan. Hers was not love, but obsession. She had no specific logical reason to love her boyfriend. Contributing factors may have been situational (South Asian culture tends to place a higher significance on sexual relationships than Western culture, for example), or perhaps Ms. Khan was, as AK notes, deeply disturbed. Whatever it was, it wasn't love.
Such "love" certainly did not benefit the recipient; unconditional love never really does. Who cares if someone loves you for no reason at all? Such love is wholly unattractive, and his behavior attests well to this fact.
But love based on specific reasons is validated beyond the mere firing of brain synapses or familial happenstance. Love that acknowledges a person's character, values, and actions is a bond unbreakable. When you choose to love a person because that person reflects the things you value, then and only then are we talking about love in the philosophical sense of the word.
Anything short of that could well be a biochemical, psychological, or situational illusion.
Facebook is the 3rd-best source of traffic for me. Interestingly, however, the number two slot belongs to none other than Sonic Charmer/The Crimson Reach. Looks like I owe him a big thank-you for the web traffic!
Most of my traffic, though, comes directly from Google, which is encouraging. Setting aside web searches specifically targeted to the name of my blog, I get a lot of hits through web searches for the word "title." Not really sure why, but I'll take it. I do get an awful lot of hits from searches for the Windsor Clockwork bicycle, thanks to my as-yet-unfinished series of reviews of my Clockwork bike. (If you're jonesing for an update, yep, it's still awesome.) Hilariously, I get an extremely large amount of web traffic through web searches for "tom morello hypocrite." No further comment required there, I suppose.
Most of you are using a Mozilla Firefox browser. Those who aren't are most likely using Internet Explorer. (WTF is wrong with you???) But a good, solid number of you are using Chrome.
The top ten countries reading my blog are as follows:
United States
China
Canada
United Kingdom
Ukraine
Poland
Brazil
Germany
France
Russia
Well, I've had a good run, and have no plans to stop any time soon, so let's get back to business, shall we?
I have been trying to distance myself somewhat from the traditional "capitalism versus socialism" divide, since those terms are no longer as descriptive as they were when they were originated. Today, I'd like to discuss the shortcomings of the old terms and introduce some new terms of my own.
Capitalism And Socialism As They Were Originally Conceived
Originally, capitalism was meant as a contrast to mercantilism. The point of "capitalism" in those days was to highlight the fact that a society that produces more, but possesses less gold, enjoys a higher standard of living than a society that possesses a great deal of gold, but produces very little. European kings were obsessed with increasing their wealth in gold, when along came the economists, pointing out that the difference between the Aztecs and the Spaniards was neither gold nor Christ, but production. A dozen pyramids and a pile of gold were insufficient to match the technological advancements of the European conquistadors.
A logical conclusion from this point was that those kings who preferred to engage in free trade in order to facilitate domestic production made their countries better off than those kings who preferred to wage war in order to acquire the gold of foreign kingdoms and/or bar foreigners from trading with locals out of fear that "local gold" would escape into the clutches of foreign kings.
Note that socialism had nothing to do with this. At that point, socialism was not really viewed as an "economic system," and thus there was no conflict between "socialism and capitalism." It wasn't until Karl Marx appeared that socialism started gaining traction as an economic system. Marx wrote books that criticized "the capitalists," but he was not actually promoting mercantilism. Rather, he was criticizing free trade, which as aforesaid is the logical conclusion of capitalism, but not its synonym.
Once you understand this aspect of economic history, the "capitalism versus socialism" framework seems silly. Capitalism and free trade are different, but the former requires the latter in order to operate efficiently. Similarly, socialism results in mercantilism, due only to the fact that the trade barriers required to establish socialism have the effect of creating de facto mercantilist conditions in the country.
There is certainly an issue here, but it is obfuscated by the terminology. The issue is not "capitalism versus socialism," but rather free trade versus trade restrictions.
Capitalism And Socialism As They Are Today
Both "capitalists" and "socialists" oppose monarchism. Capitalists came first, and their objection was that the kings' pursuit of gold was interfering with the people's ability to freely pursue their own interests. Socialists, at least "scientific socialists," i.e. Marxists, came second, and their objection was that the interests of the wealthy were interfering with the people's ability to enjoy a higher standard of living.
Pause for a moment and consider an alternative, non-economic way of understanding the difference here. The "capitalists" were angling for a social system that enabled people to seek out their own interests. The "socialists" were angling for a social system that resulted in a particular set of standards. Thus, one way of viewing this conflict that escapes the "capitalism versus socialism" language is to see it as a conflict between interests and standards.
One of the main problems with modern use of the term "capitalism" is that those who use it critically tend to conflate a series of social outcomes with free trade. What I mean is that many modern critics of "capitalism" object to the entrenchment of corporations and oligarch in the political social order. Their argument is that "capitalism" creates an environment in which "the rich" penetrate the government and enact institutional barriers against "the poor." A simple logical assessment of this claim reveals that no arrangement could ever be called "free trade" if one group of people employs the mechanisms of government against the economic interests of another group of people. This confusion is not limited to critics of "capitalism." Even advocates of the so-called "American system" believe that the US government should do anything in its power to improve the lives of American businesses.
We are no longer really talking about "free trade" anymore. We're back to talking about mercantilism! Advocates of US-style "capitalism" want the government to enact mercantilist policies to protect the "gold" held by US companies; critics object that such measures disproportionately favor the wealthy elite.
Thus, an avowed (or closeted) "socialist" in present-day America is one who believes that systemic corruption unfairly favors the rich, and that new rules should be put in place to protect the poor and guarantee them certain standards of living. The supposed "capitalist" today is not much different than the traditional European monarch, arguing that the best way to ensure prosperity is to fill the vaults of American lords with gold.
An important note here is that free trade capitalists are not included in this discussion at all, and that "socialists" are only socialists insofar as they support state counter-measures to provide for the poor. This likely explains why today's socialists don't like being called socialists, and why today's capitalists are so quick to insist that they don't want to get rid of "the safety net."
At any rate, fully excluded from this discussion is any treatment of the interests I alluded to above. That exclusion has been fatal to our modern understanding of comparative economic systems.
Rules Versus Merit
The shortcomings of the existing terminology having thus been fully highlighted, I would like to propose a new way of looking at the same issues. As indicated above, I think there might be something worthwhile in the term "interests" as contrasted to "standards." The major problem with those words is that they mean different things in different contexts. For example, there is a big difference between "being free to pursue one's interests" and "being subjected to the lobbying of special interests." Likewise, there is a difference between "holding oneself to a higher standard" and "subjecting others to a set of standards."
We gain a great deal of clarity by posing the issue in terms of rules versus merits.
A rule is an unwavering condition of some kind. We most often use rules to drive some kind of a decision downstream. "Eat your vegetables or you can't have any dessert" is reflective of this concept, because the decision to provide dessert must meet the condition of the recipient having first eaten her vegetables. That's obviously a very simple example. Rules can be highly complex, conditional on and interrelated to other rules, and so on. But the decision is always binary: either the condition is met, or it isn't. The decision rests on which is the case.
Thus, a framework of rules is one in which decisions are based on conditions assessed in a binary way.
By contrast, a merit is nothing more than something that is deemed to be of value. Merits can also be used to drive decisions. Unlike rules, though, merits are not binary; they are informative. Returning to the vegetables/dessert example, we might consider giving a child dessert based on the merits of her behavior. Certainly the willingness to eat her vegetables can be a merit in her favor, but other factors might also apply. Did she finish her chores and homework? Did she wash up? Was she nice to her siblings and peers? Is today her birthday? At any rate, when making decisions based on merits, consideration is no longer binary. Rather, we take consideration of all the merits we find relevant to the decision and determine which way the evidence points.
Thus, a framework of merits is one in which decisions are based on conditions assessed according to personal values in a non-binary way.
Differentiating between these two frameworks can be complex business. For example, a framework of merits can be used to create a framework of rules, as in the case of when we create a set of conditions for providing dessert to a child. She must meet 3 of the 4 conditions: (a) eat her vegetables, (b) finish her chores and homework, (c) wash up, (d) be kind to siblings and peers. Our values help us come up with the list of conditions, but once we assess them as a yes/no decision point, we are now dealing with a framework of rules.
Discussion
There is no reason to believe one framework should be used exclusively.
The scientific method, for example, can only ever be a framework of rules. This is because deductive logic is rule-based decision making by definition. Introducing subjective values into the scientific process leads to flawed conclusions.
That said, I challenge anyone to use the scientific method in order to build a good romantic relationship. You just can't do it. Finding a good mate is more than a matter of applying a set of rules to a list of candidates. If it weren't, we'd never hear anyone lament that their relationship "is great on paper, but lacks chemistry." A mate who meets all your best criteria may, for example, greatly exceed a "provider" criterion, but only barely meet a "passionate" criterion. In such a case, your relationship to that person may indeed be very secure, but very often boring. Certainly deciding whether such a relationship is right for you is more than merely applying the rules, but assessing them on an individual basis.
Clearly, neither framework can be applied to every facet of life. The trick, predictably, is in knowing when to apply one framework and when to apply the other. As I have already implied, that is a question of understanding the scope of each framework.
Politics, Rules, And Merits
I could probably elaborate on the Rules versus Merits idea to great length, supplying additional examples and highlighting my full line of reasoning in knowing when one produces a better outcome than the other. But, I started this blog post with an endpoint in mind.
As you know, I am an advocate of free markets. Under the old terminology, that makes me a capitalist. Like the capitalists of the old days, I am in favor of leaving human beings free enough to pursue their own interests. This implies that critics of free markets prefer a world in which human beings live lives that meet certain standards. Well, standards imply rules, and interests imply merits.
Economic systems based on merits are those that require competition to determine which goods, services, methods, and resources have the highest merits according to society as a whole. Without this competition, there is no way to determine which of these things is meritorious and which is not. As this competition cannot take place in an environment of rules, it is clear that competition, free trade, and merit-based decision-making are all part of the same categorical framework.
By contrast, economic systems based on rules are those that require analysis to determine which goods, services, methods, and resources shall be chosen and distributed to society as a whole.
Which framework is superior depends entirely on one's opinion of how well rules and can be created and analysis conducted in advance. That is to say that no product can be distributed correctly (under a rule-based framework) until the rules exist. In order to establish these rules, we must first agree on what information is relevant to the formation of rules, then we must agree on which pattern of information is superior, then we must agree on how best to determine the pattern of the information, and only then can we apply these rules to society.
Conclusion
There is obviously much more to say on this matter, and I plan on revisiting these ideas a few times in order to fully clarify them, similar to how I have approached the moral/existential dichotomy. For now, let this serve as an introduction to the concept of rules versus merit. In future posts, I will try to better-highlight how free markets are meritorious and fettered markets are rule-based.
By now, anyone with any familiarity with Bollywood movies knows about the apparent suicide of once-rising starlet Jiah Khan. She was found hanged in her home. The rest of the Bollywood stars expressed total shock, at least publicly.
Today, The Times of India published a suicide letter allegedly having been written by Khan immediately prior to her suicide. While it is still far too early to say for certain whether or not the letter was indeed written by Khan, whether it is a legitimate and not a fake, the ideas expressed in that letter are not at all uncommon among young women who get themselves involved with the wrong kind of man.
I have known many such young women over the years. There is a certain mania with which they approach their destructive relationships, rendering the rest of us fully incapable of talking any sense into them. So, why bother, especially considering that Khan herself has expressed it so perfectly.
Now, I am going to do some editing for the benefit of young girls everywhere, who think that they are the only women in the world for whom love has burned so intensely. I would like my young female readers to understand how utterly ordinary this sort of situation is, so that they can think twice when they get involved with bad people, and perhaps pause long enough to improve their decision-making skills.
I would also like my male readers to understand the psychology of highly vulnerable women so that they, too, can make informed (and hopefully merciful) decisions when choosing to get involved with girls. Naturally, no one person is to blame when someone gets her heart broken, but that doesn't mean a man should take advantage of any vulnerable girl who thinks she is in love with him.
Regarding the love she felt for her boyfriend, Khan has much to say, most of which will sound extremely familiar to young women who have felt similar passions:
You may not have known this but you affected me deeply to a point where I lost myself in loving you.... I've never given so much of myself to someone or cared so much....
When I first met you I was driven, ambitious and disciplined. Then I fell for you, a love I thought would bring out the best in me. I don't know why destiny brought us together.... Your life was about partying and women. Mine was you and my work. If I stay here I will crave you and miss you... I never went out, I never went with anyone else. I am a loyal person. I never met anyone with Karthik I just wanted you to feel how you make me feel constantly. No other woman will give you as much as I did or love you as much as I did. I can write that in my blood... All I wanted was love. I did everything for you. I was working for us...
...I wish you had loved me like I loved you. I dreamt of our future. I dreamt of our success...
Sounds very intense. How did it work out for her?
...Yet you tortured me everyday. These days I see no light I wake up not wanting to wake up. There was a time I saw my life with you, a future with you. But you shattered my dreams. I feel dead inside...You returned my love with cheating and lies. It didn't matter how many gifts I gave you or how beautiful I looked for you. I was scared of getting pregnant but I gave myself completely the pain you have caused me everyday has destroyed every bit of me, destroyed my soul. I can't eat or sleep or think or function. I am running away from everything. The career is not even worth it anymore...
...After all the pain, the rape, the abuse, the torture I have seen previously I didn't deserve this. I didn't see any love or commitment from you. I just became increasingly scared that you would hurt me mentally or physically... So I am kissing my 10-year career and dreams goodbye. I never told you but I received a message about you. About you cheating on me. I chose to ignore it, decided to trust you. You embarrassed me. Things were looking up for me here, but is it worth it when you constantly feel the pain of heartbreak when the person you love wants to abuse you or threatens to hit you or cheats on you telling other girls they are beautiful or throws you out of their house when you have no where to go and you've come to them out of love or when they lie to your face or they make you chase after them in their car. Or disrespects their family. You never even met my sister. I bought your sister presents. You tore my soul. I have no reason to breathe anymore.... But you were never my partner. My future is destroyed my happiness snatched away from me. I always wished the best for you, was ready to invest what little money I had in your betterment. You never appreciated my love, Kicked me in the face. I have no confidence or self esteem left, whatever talent whatever ambition you took it all away. You destroyed my life. It hurt me so much that I waited for you for ten days and you didn't bother buying me something.
The Goa trip was my birthday present but even after you cheated I still spent on you. I aborted our baby when it hurt me deeply. You destroyed my Christmas and my birthday dinner when I came back. When I tried my hardest to make your birthday special. You chose to be away from me on Valentines Day. You promised me once we made it to one year we would get engaged. All you want in life is partying, your women and your selfish motives. All I wanted was you and my happiness you took both away from me. I spent money on you selflessly you would throw in my face. When I would cry for you. I have nothing left in this world to live for after this. I leave this place with nothing but broken dreams and empty promises. All I want now is to go to sleep and never wake up again. I am nothing. I had everything. I felt so alone even while with you. You made me feel alone and vulnerable. I am so much more than this.
Something we all have to confront at some point in our lives is the definition of love. I would suggest to the suggestible reader that we must each define for ourselves what love is.
As you build that definition of love for yourself, please take the time to consider that love consists of more than just your own introspection. As I have written previously, we are defined not by our private thoughts, but by our actions. Actions are how we demonstrate our thoughts. Thoughts in absence of action can never amount to much more than conjecture or imagination; wishful thinking, perhaps.
Ms. Khan, or whoever wrote this letter, writes in detail about the love she felt, and provides examples. Those of us who have been lucky enough to live beyond our 20s understand that many of Ms. Khan's expressions of love are a little immature: buying your boyfriend a vacation to a resort town, spending lots of money on him, giving your body away to him without limit, being loyal despite concrete evidence of infidelity, etc. A more experienced woman would never make such mistakes without tangible evidence that he loved her in return.
Instead, Ms. Khan had all the real evidence she needed, staring her in the face: He spurned her affection, embarrassed her, made special occasions painful for her, refused to interact with her family, and (allegedly) subjected her to rape, torture, and abuse. This is not the behavior of man who loves a woman; it is the behavior of a man who detests her.
Note also that no amount of giving or loving on the part of Ms. Khan was sufficient to change his mind. Why not? Because love is a two-way street. Not only is Ms. Khan entitled to define love any way she sees fit, but so also is her boyfriend. If, then, he does not return her affection, then there is no real relationship, at least not a relationship of love.
We might leave open the possibility that her boyfriend was a very sick man who truly did think he loved her. Even so, what matters is not thoughts or feelings, but actions. Gauged only by the actions alleged to have taken place, he did not love her.
It is possible to spend many years - even a full lifetime - loving someone who does not love you back. All this requires is regular physical contact and will to shoulder the full burden of the relationship. It can go on like this forever. But human beings deserve to be happy; human beings deserve to be loved back.
Thus, I ask my young female readers to consider the quality of the relationships they pursue. Judge them not by your own private feelings, but rather on concrete, demonstrated actions. Not merely yours, but also his. Loving, two-way relationships are possible. Not only are they possible, they are quite common! There is no need to squander your youth and beauty - and possibly end your own life - over unrequited love.
Often times, our own obsession over these imaginary love thoughts are the very barrier that stands in your way of obtaining the kind of relationship that merits the burning passion described in Ms. Khan's letter. Please, don't let Jiah Khan die in vain. Learn from this letter; learn to embrace happiness in love.
When I think about the future of society and its relationship to government, I see a major barrier standing in the way of freedom.
According to multiple sources, the US Department of Defense is the single largest employer on the planet. And that's just one department of the US federal government. Taken in sum, the US government is the largest employer in America. This is true for many other, if not most, countries in the world, at least "advanced" nations in the G7 or G8 or G-whatever they're counting these days.
Setting aside any debate about how involved the government should actually be in our lives, we should consider the legal impact of having such a large public-sector economy.
The Current Environment
Bureaucrats have an impact on our daily lives, and I know this because I have been in the very rooms where policy has been created, at the very time policy was being created. These are not nefarious Koch brothers or corporate bigwigs. They are regular, middle-class folks like you and I. For all I know, you yourself might be one of them, and if so, you know that what I'm saying is true. Bureaucrats have the power to set up the regulations, bylaws, and general guidelines that define our relationship to the state.
If you work at the DMV, you get to decide how many hoops I have to jump through in order to renew my license. If you work at the IRS, you have the power to increase or decrease my odds of being audited. If you work at an office that regulates a particular sector of the economy, like rental housing or gas stations or whatever, you have the power to determine how many inspections I must pay for this year. You might not have the power to create a new law, but you certainly have the power to change my relationship to the law.
In contrast, I have no similar power over civil servants. I can impact a particular company's relationship with my own employer to some degree, but that's different for two reasons. First, my clients are not individuals, so if I chose to create an adverse relationship with one of my clients, no one individual would suffer beyond the normal issues that occur during a day at the office. Second, because my employer will cease to exist if its employees don't give our best work to our clients, any adverse relationship I create between my clients and my employer is an existential threat to myself: I might be fired.
Neither of these two facts applies to government employees. In the first case, bureaucrats can easily target specific individuals for increased regulatory burden, and they have done so many times. Spare me the burden of having to prove it: I've seen it, firsthand. In the second case, the government cannot be "fired," and statistically speaking, neither can most bureaucrats.
Therefore, civil servants and government employees of all varieties have a disproportionate share of power in any professional relationship, combined with what is essentially professional invincibility.
Note that none of my comments thus far are meant to carry any implication about what's "good" or "bad." These are the plain facts of the matter, uncolored by opinion. Public employees - even low-level employees - possess personal sway and are difficult to fire, that's all.
Where Is Their License?
If we suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that whatever government, bureaucracy, etc. we already have is necessary and useful (ha, ha... bear with me here), we nonetheless run into a significant problem that goes even beyond the fact that public sector employees can and do adversely impact the lives of ordinary citizens. The problem is this: there is no set of regulations to which the public sector is held.
Think about it. In order to live a normal life, we are all required to get driver's licenses and car registrations at the DMV, we must pay our taxes to multiple taxation offices, if we own special equipment, we must have it regularly registered and inspected by the proper authorities, we must notify various offices if we plan on digging holes, burning fires, and so on, and so forth. Forget the merits or demerits of any of these rules and simply as yourself the following question: What licenses and registrations are required to be a civil servant?
This is only a half-rhetorical question. I actually know the answer to this: none. To gain employment with a public office, one need only pass a drug test and an applicancy test, both of which are administered under the supervision of similar public servants.
The point here is that, while every facet of our lives as citizens is subject to license and regulation, no facet of anyone's life as a public employee is subject to license or regulation. Our role is to comply with the rules they set; their role is to interpret and execute their legislative mandate. If something goes awry, it gets settled in court.
The Point
What this all adds up to is a situation in which the regulators can regulate, but cannot be regulated. So long as we were only talking about a small number of mostly elected officials, as in the early days of the Republic, this was an acceptable compromise. If anyone screwed up, we could vote the bums out, and problem solved.
But as governments have grown to become the largest employers in the world, we have run into a situation in which a large segment of our nation's population lives a life very different from our own. Sure, they also have to get driver's licenses and so on, but while they have the ability to regulate specific individuals (and punish them into compliance where necessary), we have no such control over their lives as public employees.
This has created a significant legal moat between them and us. They get to audit us. They get to enforce city codes against us. They get to make us go to the back of the line. They get to make us come back tomorrow with proof-of-address. We hold no such impact over their lives.
Now, considering the various revelations of the past few weeks and months - the IRS scandal, the phone and internet surveillance scandal, the endless stream of criminals shot to death by police officers, the pepper spraying of peaceful protestors, and so on - I would argue that we have reached the required tipping point. We see the clear and incontestable fact that public employees are abusing their powers. There is no question about that.
So, would it really be controversial to require the bureaucrats to be licensed and regulated in the same way that ordinary citizens are? Let them feel the full force of their own regulations. Let them feel real responsibility and real accountability for their actions. Subject them to an equal level of regulation. And let those new licenses, rules, and regulations be enforced, not by yet another layer of bureaucracy, but by ordinary public citizens in their interaction with public sector employees.
Correct the imbalance of power in this way, and observe how justifications for the size and scope of government melt away in the fact of the ever-increasing number of public employees having to actually shoulder some of the burden themselves.
