Month: September 2023

For most of human history up to this point, everything made was custom. The Singer Sewing machine at that time was perhaps the most complicated item mass-produced. Every part of the Singer Sewing Machine, every bolt, every nut, every gear, was all custom-made. This meant if it broke, you had to recreate that nut used from that particular machine. There was no such thing as interchangeable parts. Screws were not universal. Nothing could be mass-produced until there was standardization in place. This all changed in the mid-eighteenth century when a French artillerist named Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval was experimenting with ways to make artillery parts interchangeable. By standardizing how cannons and shells were produced, The Gribeauval System changed the course of history by assisting French armies in the French Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars. Honoré Blanc, a French gunsmith, saw what Gribeauval was doing and applied the same techniques to muskets. When Blanc tried to convince the craftsman to try standardizing production, he was met with resistance. Craftsmen and manufacturers were skeptical about the process and even more worried that if standardization could work their jobs and future would be in jeopardy. 

So Blanc eventually meets none other than Thomas Jefferson who immediately sees the potential of this process. Jefferson tries to recruit and relocate Blanc to the U.S. who turns him down. Instead, Jefferson eventually came back to the United States, lobbied for the idea, and secured the funding with George Washington’s stamp of approval. Before you know it, in 1798 a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for 12,000 muskets to be built under the new system of standardization. Interchangeable parts were born. 

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings survived as hunter-gatherers. Small tribes roam the land to forage and kill their prey to survive. Then about 12,000 years ago, dubbed the Neolithic Revolution, was the first time agriculture began to pop up. Arguably, the first massive demonstration of human being’s existence investing in a future not yet realized. The phenomenon of agriculture has been argued up and down about why humans began to farm. In fact, discoveries in this field have shown that farming made human life much more difficult than hunting and gathering. One of the leading ideas of why humans would do this is simply that they didn’t make a choice. After a few generations, the choice had already been made. You were born into farming and so you became a farmer. This is the power of lock-in. That once we have established an order of doing things around here, we fall in line to reinforce the status quo. The friction to change is too great and so you stay with what you know and what you got. It is what our biology has programmed us to do. To fit in with the culture and the people around us, to seek approval from your parents and peers. This worked for a long time and, as author Jared Diamond has famously pointed out, human history looked something like this:

• Humans invent a new technology such as farming.
• Which leads to an increase in food supply.
• Which then leads to a spike in population.
• Which then leaves some humans to live a more comfortable life.
• Which would lead to exploration, technology, or trade.
• Which would increase the spread of viruses and bacteria.
• Which would increase immunity.
• Which would lead to a spike in population.
• Which would lead to more guns, germs, and steel.

This is obviously oversimplified but you get the point. As technology grew, so did food supplies, and as food supplies grew so did populations which would lead to more of all these things.

Deregulation and the financialization of capital since the 1980s have run their course for 40 years and now we continue to see one financial crisis after another. This is nothing new throughout human history. We have seen this play out over and over again. The difference was that we saw these play out over 500-year cycles and now we are seeing multiple collapses in less than a couple decades. Money, like most concepts, is just an invention of our imagination. A promise that we can all agree upon. It is no different than these symbols on this page. When we put them on paper, it means something because we all agree it does. We can imagine different things. But the power lies not in just those that maintain the illusion of control but with the power of lock-in. The longer we hold on to the systems of old, we harder it will be to change things. This is why we continue our reliance on things such as oil and gas products, even though we know they pollute the planet. 

This is the heart of the contradiction of being human. There are things that are totally true and cannot be proven. The paradoxical nature of our existence. We can show with equations what and how things work that directly contradicts how we perceive the world around us. In 1955, Einstein had written a letter addressed to Michael Besso’s family, a dear friend of his, after his death. In it, Einstein wrote:

“Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present, and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.” —Albert Einstein, Condolence Letter, 1955

I take comfort in the fact that what we don’t know far outweighs what we do. So much so, we don’t even know the right questions to ask. The answers to our greatest questions will forever be out of reach. It doesn’t mean that humans should stop exploring. We just need to accept that the tension of knowing the secrets of the universe will never be fully understood and to focus on what we do know and what we can understand to achieve a life of meaning. 

Author, James Carse, wrote an important book in 1986 called Finite and Infinite Games. In it, Carse points out that there are two types of games that human beings like to play. There are finite games and infinite games.

We play finite games all the time. For example, when the car next to you is racing through the intersection to beat the red light. Soccer is a finite game. And so is a presidential election. These would all be an example of a finite game. There are three distinct characteristics of finite games. You play finite games to win, they are made to end, and they have boundaries.

On the flip side, you have the infinite game. The purpose of the infinite game is to keep playing. You don’t play to win. When you throw a ball to your four-year-old, you don’t throw it as hard as you can so they will quit. No, you throw the ball to them so that they will throw it back.

Democracy, Capitalism, Nuclear Arms Races, and Climate Change are all games based on scarcity. They have played as a zero-sum game meaning if I win someone else has to lose. It has been played like a finite game for centuries. Not because we have to but because of the rules we decided to play with. Finite players will seek power while infinite are mastering self-sufficiency. Finite games in nature also “theatrical, necessitating an audience” while infinite games are “dramatic, involving participants.”

Carse wrote, “The infinite game—there is only one—includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries, and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.“ Some rules in our culture are important in the sense that they enable humans to be human. Speeding through a school zone is against the law because of culture we decided that it is worth slowing down in areas where children tend to congregate. We don’t want dead kids. At the same time, we can bring our humanity into the system, the rules don’t need to be spelled out for every situation that arises—only when we understand which game we are playing. 

For thousands of years, time was perceived as something we had. With the invention of clocks, humans began to “spend” their time. It became a finite commodity, something that you can now give away to an employer in exchange for a piece of paper that promised you something in return. However, we can’t buy more time. Once it is up, it’s done. Sometimes that time is cut short and it really is the catalyst of so much of our decision making. 

The human experience is the same for all of us. We interact with the present, right here and now. We learn cause and effect. I pick up a glass cup, I drop the glass cup, and the glass cup shatters. What the glass shards don’t do, however, is form back together into a cup and the cup doesn’t defy the laws of gravity and back into my hand. We can’t manipulate the past no matter how we try. The present is gone from us the moment it passes into the past where we can no longer interact with it. The future is not something we can interact with. However, oddly enough, we can access memories about the past and imagine a future that hasn’t yet. This is called presentism where everything occurs in the present. Think of it as the arrow of time pointed in one direction. 

However, the most accepted view of scientists and philosophers is that time is eternal. Externalism is stating that things are happening in the past, present, and future at the same time. Human beings perceive three dimensions—height, length, and width. We move through space by moving forwards or backward, up or down, left or right. This is the 3D world that evolutionary speaking we constructed, in other words, our perception of reality. Scientists have created mathematical models that fuses these three dimension while adding a fourth dimension called space-time to construct what is known as, “The Block Universe.” In this model of the Block Universe, it assumes that space-time is constant and that all three forms of time—the past, present, and future—are all equally real. That there is no objective form of time. No arrow pointing in one direction. Another way to think of this is “Here is to space, as now is to time.” Meaning that if space is infinite and time is infinite then where we are and when we are is all arbitrary. It’s paradoxical in nature since human beings perceive time that we can act on and affect the future or what we call “Cause and effect.” It is one of the fundamental building blocks that humans at a very young age realize that they can act upon the world to change it. It’s just weird to think about another version of me in the past and future. There are other versions of this theory and model such as the Growing Block Universe that assumes the future is not yet determined but that the past and present are assumed. Different types of scientific models are constantly being tested trying to better understand time and our perception of it. In fact, evolutionary biologists are even involved as to why humans perceive time the way they do. Is there some sort of advantage? 

Regardless, externalism is the most accepted view of what time is in the scientific community. The reason is that scientists can use the laws of physics and run equations in the future or the past with the same results and in addition these same equations show there is nothing special about the present. Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking work on the Theory of Relativity demonstrates this. It assumes that the present isn’t special at all. 12:00 pm here on Earth is nothing on another planet. In fact, the General Theory of Relativity equations demonstrates that the past, present, and future all have equal footing and that time travel is theoretically possible and supports externalism. 

This is the heart of the contradiction of being human. There are things that are totally true and cannot be proven. The paradoxical nature of our existence. We can show with equations what and how things work that directly contradicts how we perceive the world around us.

When I crush every value, “I” ceases to exist. 

When I have values, I am.

The finite nature of our existence begs the reach for significance. But in that pursuit, we scroll past a life of meaning that is right in front of us. We distract ourselves by saying what we are doing is important. When, in fact, most of what we do is insignificant. Is really sending another tweet really going to be the peak of your work? Instead, we can do things we think actually matter instead of doing the things we are told we are supposed to care about.

Colloquialism is the linguistic style we use for casual conversation. We do this because it requires less brain power and shows the invisible power of how things are done around here.

The problem is, that our left brain is so literal, it can understand the subtle art of language. It doesn’t understand that when someone is laughing hysterically and says, “This is killing me.” That it isn’t actually killing the person.

And so, when our boss sends a text saying, “We need to talk.” Our alarm bells can’t help but go off.

What we say effects how people react. When the conversations are more crucial we are careful in the words we use. And when we are casual with our language, people will in return perhaps not understand what it is you are actually saying.

This now-famous phrase first appeared in George Eliot’s 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss. The protagonist, Mr. Tulliver uses the phrase in discussing Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil, saying how the book was beautifully bound.

Ironic. A concept so easily understood and yet so difficult to master. Because humans are all wired to make snap judgments in assessing the danger to keep us alive. However, ideas are not harmful and are not actual real threats of danger like a swinging bat to the head. Yet, we struggle to listen, and in fact, turn off when hearing something different from our worldview. In fact, we actually experience pain, and as a result, choose to ignore such information.

We rather not go through such forms of transformation because of the amount of change it would require.