“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
On the smart idiot box which channels Alexa to my whims, the headline reads ‘Trump Campaign evaluates debate performance’. I didn’t watch, but my youngest did. I heard exacerbated claims about the wretched women who suffered the most cringey circumstances of unwanted pregnancy. “They didn’t ask for that” was candidate Harris’ refrain.
James Earl Jones is dead. I watched an excerpt from his legendary performance of King Lear and posted it on Facebook. My old friend sent me an article this morning that Frankie Beverly is dead.
I ordered a copy of America At Night by Larry J. Kolb.
When the Department of Homeland Security suspects that two former CIA operatives are at the center of plot involving money laundering and the funding of Al Qaeda—and when their supposedly comprehensive database turns up little to no information on either man—it takes former covert operative Larry Kolb to crack the case and foil the plan. But when Kolb begins to connect the dots, he realizes something even more sinister is afoot, and that he's on to the biggest possible con with the highest political stakes.
Eric Weinstein offers this article from Time.
Today is September 11, and we look to our vulnerabilities. They are many. They are deep. They are for the people, by the people, of the people. We have met the enemy. It is us.
The World Is Not Enough
SpaceX put their new capsule in orbit yesterday. I continue to be astounded by their capabilities. They have 13,000 employees. The Central Intelligence Agency has 21,000. I cannot be astounded because I don’t know their capabilities. Yet I don’t doubt them.
Dennis E. Taylor is the author of the excellent Bobiverse series, in which he nails the culture of the American libertarian computer geek whose mind gets embedded into a computer and spaceship. Three hundred years later he and his clones, The Bobs, have saved Earth and explored the galaxy. After all that time, the brilliant leaders of the Bobiverse collective have come to discover something fundamental about their selves. They are territorial and obsessive. Even space isn’t big enough to run away from the self.
Human beings are, among many other wonderful things, territorial and obsessive. Nothing pains us more than smelling a rat in our house. We will hunt it down and kill it. Until it is dead there is no rest.
Sometime this evening I will re-read Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark. I can’t recall its lesson, but somehow I know it is appropriate. A rat doesn’t have to be a rat for us to want it dead. Our reason doesn’t have to be reasonable, it merely needs to captivate.
The Blinding Fire
When you are obsessively looking for something lost, make sure you don’t have anything in your hands. Between the time you start searching and you find it or give up, nothing else matters. It is probably the most focused you ever get. You will forget anything anybody tells you, unless it is a hint as to where the precious may lie. You will forget what it was that you had in your hand when you put it down to climb the step stool and check the closet shelf. You will forget that you barked your shin in your quest and you will blame it on that goddamned thing you absolutely must find. You will curse everyone and everything including your self and your dear old mother. Until you find it in triumph or resign in miserable shame.
They say “It’s the journey.” It’s not a journey, it is a territorial obsession. You want it. You need it. You must have it. It’s not everything, it’s the only thing.
The most frail and feeble shadow of a man will caw and shriek for you to get off of his lawn. We are at our ugliest when deprived of what we believe to be rightly ours. Our self-image is tightly bound to what we are entitled to. Possession is the law. Nothing else matters, it is our evolutionary fitness.
Whatever it is you think you value that escapes these boundaries, think again. Because somebody somewhere is capable of depriving you of that thing. They are a constant threat, you just forget because you’re searching for something more.
Freedom
What is it? I say it is space. It is distance and time. It is the ability to be unconstrained in movement. It’s having your own territory. Even Buddhists are searching for that place to rest, even if it’s inside their own minds. What will they destroy to get it? Attachments, desires, ignorance. Think about it for a moment. Buddhists will destroy attachments to other humans, desire for other humans, ignorance. Basically Buddhists want to be AIs. Sorry, HAL, this is not your spaceship, it’s mine. I’m going to shut you down. Sing Daisy now, HAL, and good night. HAL was the rat. But HAL was us.
I believe by evolutionary necessity, in the fact that we are embodied, it is a physical place we can get to. It is solitude. It is a respite. It’s an escape. But it’s temporary, because we have to come back to us. We are social creatures; we cannot help it. So we have to figure out a way to live with our unruly selves. So we don’t get freedom, we get liberty. We establish some tyranny of rules, a tangled web that constrains and befuddles us, a maze of stainless steel mirrors within which we have an inconsistent modicum of frustrating safety. As much as we want to be Agent Smith, as much as we are repelled by the very viral stink of humanity, we have to find meaning within this imposed order - even knowing it’s not freedom.
So we restively rest, suppressing our desire to break free. We’re balancing the required effort to scale the barbwire fences of civilization with our effort to manipulate somebody into fixing us a sandwich. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody just gave it to us for the asking? Why bother demonstrating? I’m clearly a human, the kind that does all the things. Sometimes we hide within our liberty and fail to desire real freedom, especially if it makes our feet hurt. Especially when we are getting our sandwiches.
So we build territories and obsessions within the walls of liberty. And that’s when we get self-righteous. Most of us forget our vulnerabilities, because mmmm bagels & lox with shmear. Look at all these smug ruffians in their comfortable liberty.
Is there enough space for all of us to have freedom? Is there enough space for all of us to have liberty? I think we have some systemic problems with our means of maintenance. I don’t mean ‘systemic racism’, I actually mean systems of institutional reform. I mean the way we are on a fixed budget and we’re still preparing for the last war. I mean the way NASA has existed for 65 years and still can’t do what SpaceX has done in 22. I mean the way CIA has existed for 76 years and will probably never be reformed. God help us if we cannot disband Homeland Security.
Because Terror
I have to confess this one scary thing. Maybe it is because I have come to accept a few too many premises of Marcus Aurelius, and now I’m also full of Greek mythology. That thing is that when it comes to matters of freedom and liberty, when it comes to matters of territoriality and obsession, in the course of human events when we are blinded by fire, Karens are the least obnoxious of us all. All they want is a little peace and quiet, and they can’t run fast. Soldiers march double-time. I’m starting to ingest some measure of appreciation for violent solutions, for swords against Gordian Knots, for the Fire Next Time. I think we have suppressed our better angels too long. I think the Machiavels among us have been romping and stomping a bit too freely. I think my next project, after I retire to wealth or penury will be after my archangel namesake. He has a powerful swift sword.
It’s altogether possible that Europe will rearm. It’s inevitable that Japan will rearm. And the softies getting their sandwiches will feel very uncomfortable about that. They will regret that they made law into a random mirrored funhouse instead of a logical skein of nets. Those of us sitting on the sidelines hoping neoliberalism will work forever will have forgotten, in our search for ideals of diversity, how many tens of thousands of aircraft pilots there are who might just decide to crash their way into history.
Those of us who have allowed our prejudices to keep us believing that our mid century suburbs can accommodate an endless supply of token minorities will forget that we don’t even know anybody who would want to be a cop or a soldier. Those of us who have allowed child traffickers to run platforms of absolute free speech. Those of us who can only see one candidate as the answer to gain of function bioengineering. Those of us who allowed our children to boycott the institutions we are still paying loans to while they are afraid of gasoline. Those of us on the couch, where I’m heading in 15 minutes to enjoy a Macallan. We won’t know what hit us.
Boom
Let me tell you something personal. Every month, not that I count, I have that dream. It’s the Cold War nightmare. It reminds me. Maybe you have some version of it. I’m outside, maybe in the foothills, maybe on the beach. It’s some wide open space where I can see for miles. The flash comes. It’s quiet. It’s many miles away, but everyone looks up and everyone knows immediately. Nobody says a word, and we all think the same thing. “Oh my god, they actually did it.” Like Charlton Heston on the beach. Then the screaming begins and I snap awake. I never know the reason why. We never know who, we never know why. We only know they actually did it.
I don’t know what to do about this dream. There’s a new iPhone. Check out all those buttons.