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An Endangered Species of One

8/10/2020

    The most striking aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA is the blatant selfishness it brings out in people. If a face mask won’t protect me why wear one? The hell with all those old and sick people. It is not heartlessness. It is ignorance. Think for a moment before setting out for the next party or the beach. Would you be as cavalier in your attitude if you realized that each of those people you endanger, and you yourself, is the last of its kind. A once only experiment of Nature never to be repeated again?

    Recent DNA research suggests that for two people selected at random, there will be approximately 20,000 single base pair differences in just the protein coding sequences[1]. Assuming a random distribution of those differences the chance of two genomes being identical is 1 in 210,000, a number many orders of magnitude larger than all the protons, neutrons, and electrons in the entire universe.

    It seems that the entire history of the universe has waited for you and for your possible victim, to be born, and once you are gone you will never happen again. Ever. Neither will any of the other 7 billion unique human experiments of nature that currently inhabit this little planet. Think about a unique treasure, the Mona Lisa, the great pyramid of Giza, a Dead-Sea scroll. There is only one of each, and they are irreplaceable. You are a Mona Lisa, a pyramid, a scroll.

    Or think of the last of an endangered species, the last Condor. Think how precious, how fragile, and how important it is. It does not matter whether the last Condor is young or old, sick or healthy or particularly smart. It does not need a resumé. Its significance lies strictly in its uniqueness, in the fact that once it dies there will be no more of its kind. You are just as unique. You are an endangered species of one.

    How would you treat the last of a species? Would you harm it, torment or insult it? The next time you mutter to yourself: "There you go again you fat ugly moron", or the next time you abuse your body to gain a bit more respect or a bit more money, think of that Condor. Once you learn not to harm yourself, how could you then go out and harm any other such unique treasure as yourself?

    I am not talking about love here. You don't need to love that last Condor. What you need is to treasure, respect, and protect it from harm. Love is an easy word to hide behind since it can mean anything you want it to mean. You can "love thy neighbor" in the name of Christ and then go slaughter that neighbor because he is a Jew, or you can pray five times a day to "Allah the Loving Merciful" and then blow up the twin towers. Given the choice I'd take "treasuring, respecting and protecting" any day over "love".

    The Buddhists teach that peace starts within us. If you are peaceful inside you will generate peace around you. It doesn't work the other way around. Do you know why the injunction "Thou shalt not kill" has never worked? Precisely because it deals with what’s outside, not inside, you. The seventh commandment would have been far more effective as "Thou shalt respect thyself". Every killing has its root in disrespect.

    You may have a hard time remembering your uniqueness because ever since you were born it has been drilled into you are part of greater whole, a small cog in a larger and much more significant whole. You are part of “humanity”. You are one small girl amongst all the females of the species, one white or black among all the other members of your race, an American or a German, gay or straight. You are a Liberal or a Conservative, a Christian or an atheist. Whatever you are, so they told you, there are millions of others just like you. But are there? Saying that there are millions like you is like saying that the last Condor is just a bird.

    In your heart of hearts you once knew that no one was like you, yet your parents, your school, your church taught you otherwise, and gradually you forgot who you really were. The story of why you agreed to trade your singular personhood for a fabricated group identity is the sad story of human misery. The trade off was supposed to make you bigger, more powerful. “There is power in numbers” they said. Joe Shmoe is a nobody, they told you in school, but Joe Shmoe who is a proud American is the greatest in the world. So much so that Joe has the right, even the duty, to go half around the world and kill a whole bunch of non-Americans who have done him no harm nor posed any direct threat to him.

    That's power? That's greatness?

    Mathematically speaking Joe Shmoe got a bum deal. As a unique individual he was far bigger than Joe the American. There can be nothing bigger than one-of-a-kind. It is beyond comparison. Sometimes you need numbers to get your story right. And the numbers should tell you the right way to treat yourself and all the other unique specimen like you.

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[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/full/nature09534.html#/putative-functional-variants

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Mega-Wealth as Mental Illness

8/9/2020

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    No one has ever freely admitted to be greedy. You’d never put greed as one of your winning attributes on your resumé. Other people, perhaps, are greedy and ruthless and rapacious but never you. What you are is successful, smart and lucky, and immensely rich through hard work (of course), preferably richer than anyone else, but never greedy. The word has negative connotations even as we all celebrate the unbridled ambition that fuels it.
    At its core, greed is an obsessive craving for what we lack, or think we lack. It is a kind of unrestrained hunger or thirst that cannot be sated. A power-hungry person who thirsts for wealth and power doesn’t have a natural reflex to tell him or her when they had enough. They can never feel full-filled, literally filled to capacity. As long as there is more to be had out there the craving persists. It’s a pathology.
    There is a medical term for this kind of disorder, usually applied to a similar inability to exercise self-restraint in eating. It is called Bulimia. A Bulimic will continue shoveling food into their mouth long after they have stopped being hungry. We don’t think of the obsessive wealth accumulator as someone sick who requires intervention, much less feel empathy for their plight. What we do is elevate them in our collective ethos to be objects of envy, models to be emulated, our billionaire entrepreneurs and great nation builders and leaders.
    Capitalism as it is preached in America is a fiction. It is a religion of greed, white-washed to masquerade as a benevolent boon to everyone. It has been the justification for deregulation, trickle-down economics, tax-cuts for the 1%, and the rest of the conservative claptrap. Is there anyone left who sincerely believes that letting the rich get richer benefits those honestly toiling for their bread?
    Aside from being disingenuous, this propaganda debases the very principles that should make capitalism work. By obfuscating the crucial difference between wealth as a fair reward for your labors and ingenuity and the orgy of greed we see all around us, justified only by what you can get away with, greed has been enshrined in our culture as an acceptable, even desirable, trait.
I find nothing wrong with the ambition to succeed financially, of vying to become rich enough to never have to worry about money, able to satisfy every need and luxury you desire, within the bounds of decency. The crucial question is, “when is enough enough?” At what point does the attainment of your dream become a disease?
    The question is, can ambition ever be unbridled? Can excess be subject to some limiting code that would make the very rich stay within it? Of course you could legislate the code. Administer it from the outside. I don’t mean by the dictatorial methods of Communism. A democratic government has the power to limit the wealth of its citizens by levying such taxes that would ensure a ceiling that no one could exceed no matter how much they made. Norway is such a country. It is far from being Communist. It has a similar free market system to the United States, but its wealthiest citizens cannot be richer than a given amount (which by the way is extremely high, enough for them to earn many times more than the average citizen). Do the rich mind? Not a bit. In an interview on NPR, the head of the largest cell phone provider explained that the difference between what he could theoretically take home in the US and what he gets to keep in Norway is just a small price to pay for the kind of generous society he wants to live in. His “sacrifice” pays for social services that ensure that fewer citizens will turn to crime. “I pay for my daughter to be able to walk the streets safely. The average person in Norway feels fairly treated by society. My taxes contribute to that. And let me tell you by the way” he said with a chuckle, “I live very well”.
    That could never happen in the United States. It just goes against the grain.
But legislating mega-wealth out of existence is not a real solution anyway. As great as the damage of income disparity is to the spirit of a nation the damage of setting up the mega-rich as the object of envy and an ideal to strive for is far greater. Unless the accumulation of obscene unnecessary wealth is seen for the grotesque behavior that it is the practice will continue to poison every aspect of our personal and social intercourse.
    Unlimited unbridled accumulation of wealth by an individual is a mental disorder like Bulimia. The reason we know when someone has crossed that line is because we have identified that transgression as an illness. Being obese or bulimic is not something to criticize but something to treat. We have not always been as broad minded. Until recently “fat people” were blamed for their lack of restraint. Alcoholics were mere drunkards. It took much education for practically everyone to accept the view that these behaviors are fundamentally self-destructive expressions of an illness. The recognition that an eating disorder, just like Kleptomania, is something that the perpetrator is powerless to change on his or her own, ushered in interventions that though not always successful at the very least have changed our way of seeing them.
    A person who already has a private jet who then goes out and buys three more (so as not to fall behind the competition) is likewise not a criminal to be heckled but a sick person who needs medical help. Consider a wealthy woman living in a 20 million dollar home in Montecito California, with a 2,600 square foot bedroom, who decides that she needs a second shoe closet because the one next door to her bedroom (the size of a bachelor apartment) is too full. This is not luxury. This is gorging on money. Anyone envying (or aspiring to) such wealth is like someone envying a Bulimic who gorges herself on three tubs of ice cream at one sitting and then throws it all up. If this is enviable to you, you too need to see shrink.
    In fact the same principle is at play in both people suffering from an eating disorder and those suffering from an acquisition disorder. Neither the food nor the private jet have much intrinsic value. The behavior in both cases is compulsive. The person acquiring companies is like the person stuffing themselves and then throwing up. Both are sick.
    The transformation of excessive wealth and conspicuous consumption from an object of envy and anger to an object of pity would have an inevitable effect on the sufferers themselves. A sense of shame associated with all mental illnesses would descend on the mega-rich as they try to get a grip on their obsession of earning and spending, or perhaps. like alcoholics, they would just pretend to do so. What a boon to an entire new self-help industry, a new branch of psychotherapy, “How to be less rich in seven easy steps”. Who knows, a new model for success may even arise from this, the modest movie star who lives in an apartment and drives a Toyota.

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Soccer

10/22/2013

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American football is war. Heavy armored strategic war. What the rest of the world calls football, and we call soccer, is life.

To the uninitiated it’s a boring pointless game. For 90 minutes 22 grownups chase a ball, covering the same turf over and over, clashing and kicking and jumping and falling, unprotected by gear. Their elusive goal, to thread the ball past all hurdles to its destination, yields frustration more often than success. Imagine our football or basketball games routinely ending in a Nil-Nil tie, or if lucky a One-Nil win. No one would come. Yet to billions of non-Americans football is akin to a religious pageant, a grand metaphor.

Out on the playing field, in their shorts and jerseys, the players enact an unfounded hope, common to all humans, to score an arbitrary goal they have set for themselves through perseverance, skill, and luck, hopefully unharmed. And, should their enterprise fail, to remember that they played fair, got a kick out of playing, and that it may go better the next time.

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Mega-wealth as a mental disorder

9/23/2012

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The recent fracas surrounding the disparaging remarks of Mitt Romney about half the citizens of his country is just another chapter in the ongoing harping on his extreme wealth. It’s not news that a mega-wealthy politician leads a sheltered life immune from contact with people who work for their living (except of course during voting season). That is the chief perk of being rich. Although I am not a supporter of Mr. Romney, I find the attacks on him both disingenuous and misdirected.

In a materialistic society like ours it strikes me as hypocritical to lambaste a man merely for being obscenely rich and out of touch. It is safe to assume that each and every one of his critics would gladly switch bank accounts with Mr. Romney, and undoubtedly become just as detached from real life as he seems to be. In America avarice has never been a deadly sin. Quite the contrary. Mega-wealth is upheld by most people as proof of one’s smarts, luck, and having pleased God. Isn’t the private jet, the numerous posh residences around the world the dream that motivates parents to dress up their 4-year old in obscenely provocative outfits for a contest that could launch her on a path to stardom and becoming the next Béyonce?

The rage against the 1% misses a crucial point. There is a fundamental difference between being wealthy as a just reward for one’s accomplishments or good fortune and the kind of rapacious accumulation of wealth fueled by unbridled greed that is now practiced by the mega-rich. This is an obsessive behavior that knows neither self-restraint nor financial limits and as such is neither a social nor a moral issue but a health issue, a mental disorder requiring medical or psychiatric intervention.

Let me illustrate my point with a culinary analogy. I love gourmet food and fine wines. Sometimes, I indulge and overdo it but know instinctively when I have crossed the line. And should I not notice, I have no doubt that those around me will point it out to me. We have no laws against overeating but we all know that not knowing when enough is enough is not OK. It is less the quantity consumed that turns us off but the perception that the eater is out of control.

Today we all accept that such a transgression is an illness. An obese person or an alcoholic are no longer targets for derision or loathing. We recognize that an eating disorder, just like kleptomania, is something that the perpetrator is powerless to change on his or her own, and therefore needs to first recognize that he is sick, and then seek help.

A person who already has a private jet who then goes out and buys three more (ostensibly so as not to fall behind other CEOs) is likewise not a criminal to be heckled by mobs but a person suffering from a medical condition, whether aware of it or not. The criticism of a mega-rich person running for office therefore should not center on the unfairness of being so much richer than the people whose votes he seeks, but rather on the fact that he exhibits an obsessive behavior when it comes to accumulating excessive wealth. Perhaps Mr. Romney and his exclusive set could start a Dollarholic Anonymous 12-step program, or some other form of therapy.

Last winter I heard about a wealthy woman living in a 20 million dollar home in Montecito California, with a 2,600 square foot bedroom, who decided that she needed a second shoe closet because the one next door to her bedroom (the size of a studio apartment) was too full. This is not luxury. This is gorging on money. Anyone envying or aspiring to such wealth is like someone envying a Bulimic who gorges herself on three tubs of ice cream at one sitting and then throws it all up. If this is enviable to you, you too need to see a shrink.

The same principle is at play in both people suffering from an eating disorder and those suffering from an acquisition disorder. Neither the food nor the newly added billion dollars have much intrinsic value. The behavior in both cases is compulsive. The person acquiring companies is like the person stuffing themselves and then throwing up. A mega-billionaire may disgorge huge gobs of money in the form of charities after an acquisition binge, but there is little doubt that the next morning he will back binging again.

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