Spiritual Self-Reliance

                I took my dog, Jack, on a stroll to get coffee today. Coffee for me, not for Jack. It was a beautiful, bluebird morning, temperatures hovering around a mild 75 degrees and the humidity felt like it was nourishing your skin and not draining your soul as the heat of the past several weeks has felt. As we peacefully strolled down the streets lined with impeccable lawns and extravagant verdure, a rather frantic lady rolled down her window, looked at me, and asked for directions to get to Jadwin Gym.

                Well, “asked” is a polite way to put it. She did not say “excuse me, sir, may I ask you a question?” Nor did she say it with the inflection in her voice that in the old days one would use when asking questions but nowadays everybody uses to sound like they’re perpetually unsure of themselves. Instead, she demanded knowledge from me: “Tell me how to get to Jadwin Gym,” in a fast, frantic, Jersey accent. I felt like the only thing that would’ve made her statement a better fit with her tone of voice would be to end it with “you mothafuggin’ hippie I will cut your balls off.”

                Now, I’ve never been to Jadwin gym before. However, I have heard of it, and I am a Princeton student so I figured the least I can do is spend a second scrolling through my mental archives in hopes of finding “Jadwin Gym”. I asked her for a moment as I thought about it and displayed the interpersonal pinwheel of “ummmm…” “Kinkos…” no, farther… “Krispie Kreme…” no, farther still… “Jadwin gym” AHA! Here we are. All I could remember was the quadrant of campus where it could be found, a feat of amnesia I attribute to the pressure of her unforgiving gaze, which seemed to say that if I didn’t know where this place was, and if I didn’t hurry up and tell her, she would come to my house at night and cut off my balls while Jack watches.

                I told her “okay, take a right onto this side street right here,” I pointed to the side street 15 yards away.

“Murray?!” she asked, frantically.

                “Yup, Murray!” I replied cordially. Well, 'cordially' is a polite way to put it, since it's very likely that my face started to betray my feelings of amazement at her frantic presence and I started to look at her like she was the sideshow freak who could inhale a full cigarette in one breath and blow it out of her ears. “And then you’re going to follow Murray past Prospect to Western, which is right after Prospect. Take a right on Western, so you’ll be heading back this way,” I pointed the direction one goes after taking two right turns. “Then after just a few hundred yards, you’ll see the stadium on your left – you can’t miss it!” I smiled.

                “Okay.” she said driving off, with a tone of disappointment and anger that perhaps arose from the fact that this whole interaction took an entire minute or that I couldn’t just take her straight to Jadwin. Or perhaps she was furious that my directions were not as good as a GPS that she would’ve had if her iphone had been charged which she wasn’t able to do because her husband-she’s-contemplated-divorcing-because-he-never-helps-with-anything took up all the outlets with his stupid TV and his own cell phone charger and her kids wanted her to do a million other things over the past week and then this one lady cut her off on the turnpike and… what does the lady on the turnpike have to do with her iphone? Nothing, really, but the lady on the turnpike has everything to do with why the cut-off-your-balls lady wants to cut off your balls, and why something as little as an uncharged iphone can be amplified to a monstrous presence that ruins your day and emits the BO of bitterness that sprints into the nostrils of everybody within a 20 yard radius of you, leaving them with a twisted sneer and hateful eyes.

                This is nothing unusual for New Jersey, which I would bet is the angriest state in the nation (in fact, it made top-3 for "least happy"), but it’s all the more tragic when we consider that this contagiously stressed lady is packed into a state with 1188 other susecptible people per square mile, and so her chances of spreading this contagion are quite high. What’s even worse is that humans never build an immunity against stress or jerks, so the instant somebody is ‘healed’ and no longer infectious, they are right back in the pool of susceptibles just waiting to be infected by the dude who lost at poker or the lady who got a bad haircut or the guy whose baseball team suffered an ignominious loss and then drives like an asshole and cuts people off on the turnpike. It seems our adaptive immunity, often extolled as one of the most complex and beautiful systems created by evolution, which evolves within us over the course of our lives to recognize the most bizarre pathogens that we may have never encountered before, has not yet found a way to deal with people from Jersey.

                Such is life in an overpopulated developed world. People have everything they could ask for, things that the founders of New Jersey couldn’t even dream of – we have medicine that has boosted our life expectancy to over 4 times that of my dog (who has already packed in more adventures into his life than most people from Jersey ever will); we have shelters that keep us cool in the harsh summers, warm in the freezing winters, and protected from the deadly trees that crash down during the torrential summer thunderstorms; we have more varieties of food that takes almost no preparation whatsoever (how many people in Jersey have harvested their own fruit, or killed their own cow?) – so much food so easily accessible that people literally die from having too much;  We have ‘things’ – TV’s, iphones, computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, cars, airplanes, bowling alley, boob-jobs, hot tubs, jewelry, boutiques… the list goes on. People in Jersey have everything that humans thought they wanted, and yet one drive through New Jersey or one stroll to the coffee shop is all we need to see that Jersey seems to be missing something that matters more. A lot more.

                A sense of humor? Courtesy? Humility? Human connection? Love? Compassion? Now where can people from Jersey buy those? Can I get a discount on Love if I get a second boob job? Which of the uncountably infinite strip malls in New Jersey sells Compassion at a good price? Is it the one in Lawrenceville? They have everything in Lawrenceville.

                No, it’s not the one in Lawrenceville. It's not even in New Brunswick. In fact, it’s not in any strip mall anywhere because you can’t buy Love or Compassion, *you have to build it yourself*.  Our reliance on others to make things for us and do things for us – building our houses, manufacturing our cars and iphones, preparing our food, pumping our water, solving our family problems (shrinks) – has made us so reliant on others for material salvation that we expect to rely on others for spiritual salvation as well. There’s a lot to be said about self-reliance in the 21st century, and revisiting Emerson is something I always recommend, but the most crucial form of self-reliance I want to focus on today, which we should never abandon no matter how developed and interdependent and globalized and Jersey-like the world becomes, is spiritual self-reliance.

                By spiritual self-reliance I mean having the *endogenous* ability and the drive to cultivate compassion and connection with the world. To sit down - and want to sit down - and try to see the world through the eyes of the lady who wanted to cut off my balls, and think about how we can make her feel a bit happier next time. I’ve always been a righteous bastard when playing soccer, and one of my most lasting lessons from the sport is that you can’t control your God-given gifts, but you 100% can control your effort. We can’t control our innate ‘goodness’, our innate ability to make the world a more pleasant place for those around us, or our innate ability to turn those frowns upside down, but we  100% can control how hard we try. Thus, there’s a bit more to the story than simple self-reliance - there is also an implicit call for self-discipline, as we need to not only know that we can make ourselves contagiously happy, but we have to have the discipline to do it, and to keep doing it even after a lady looks at you like she wants to cut off your balls.

                So how do we become spiritually self-reliant? Well, the exact opposite of spiritual self-reliance would be to live like a spiritual ectotherm. If I were to simply morph my mood to the average mood of strangers around me, I would be the angriest guy the 505 has ever met. However, simply ignoring the angry people will not give me any lasting satisfaction any more than repressing my unpleasant thoughts will give me lasting peace. Nor can I use pity disguised as compassion – “oh, that poor person is so angry… their poor life must really suck. It must be because they're ugly or they're not as good as me... They must have failed at everything… oh, that poor person…” That simply leads to entitlement which we see in too many organized religions “oh, that poor person hasn’t found {insert_savior_ here}… how pitiful they will look as they {insert_form_of_eternal_ damnation_here}...{pat_yourself_on_back_for_being_compassionate}”. I can’t ignore the people, and I can’t pity them, nor can I take of the role of an Atlas or a savior to bear the world's burden and solve their problems… at least not until I have solved my own problems. The option that seems best to me, and what I believe to be spiritual self-reliance, is to work diligently at solving my own problems in hopes of becoming a more radiant presence, and encourage people I know to do the same.

                To be clear, by spiritual self-reliance I do not mean to propose that only in solitude can we find salvation. Nor do I believe we should not lean on our friends and family in a time of need and be there for them when they’re feeling down. In fact, I believe this sense of community is crucial and should be fostered whenever and wherever possible. I always think back to my times at the Christian Student Center at UNM. Despite not being a religious man by an Evangelical’s standard, I would find immense joy and sense of place in their presence, and it made me a contagiously happy person and would encourage me to invite others into the fold – to bring more people into the community so they could feel this love and appreciation that radiated from the community, love and appreciation that would later radiate from them as they walked out the doors of the CSC and into the world. By self-reliance, then, I mean that we should always work on our own (in addition to the help we get from others) to foster the DRIVE to be better, because even within these communities of light like the CSC there is a need for engines. The motion of love throughout the world is not perpetual, but depends on all of us to give it a push, and so by spiritual self-reliance I mean that we all cultivate our own desire to push.

                I can’t fix New Jersey. In fact, I can’t even fix the life of that one lady who wanted to cut off my balls.  Nor can I fix the life of the lady in the coffee shop just minutes later who became horribly upset when I accidentally stepped in quickly to grab my coffee from the counter (as she was moving in to grab her bagel)… it was a crowded room, and I couldn’t see her moving in… it’s a crowded state… it’s becoming a crowded world. We have a span of control that is far less than the number of people whose emotions we inadvertently influence over the course of our day. I can’t even fix the lives of 1/10th the number of people I bump into in my day… However, I can fix myself. By focusing my attention on my own self, my own thoughts, feelings and actions, I can cultivate a glowing compassion in hopes that, of all the interactions in my day that happen so quickly and are so far beyond my control, a respectable fraction of them can lead to the other person walking away feeling happier than they were moments before. Not happy that they got to cut off my balls, but happy that they got directions from a smiling man who would’ve helped them fix a flat despite almost certainly never seeing them again. Not happy that they splashed coffee all over my face, but happy that the gentleman said "pardon me" with a smile, and stepped back to let them get their bagel.

                I wasn’t so lucky with the lady asking for directions, or the lady in the coffee shop for that matter, but no worries, I’ll bump into 100 more people today. Probably around 70 of them would answer “yes” if you asked them if they’re stressed out. If I’m lucky, by the end of my day I’ll be able to make some of them happy, and look back fondly on those smiles and thank-you’s I got from 2/5 people who I held the door for, the sincere laughs I brought out of a guy standing in line with me, and the giggles of delight I heard from the little girl who asked if she could pet Jack, only to have Jack walk up and kiss her on the cheek.

                That is what happiness looks like in the overpopulated, developed world… it doesn’t come as an explosive force, an orgasm of joy that leaves people bed-ridden with goofy smiles on their faces… it comes slowly, in little trickles, seeping imperceptibly out of the crowds. You can’t notice from the droplets themselves, but you can see from stepping back and looking at the spring as a whole that it’s been seeping less and less as people have gotten more and more, making some people worry that the spring is running dry… But we know better. The spring happiness is not some reservoir that will eventually run dry, but instead will flow forever and we are the ones who control how much it flows, and its flow around us is determined not by how much stuff we have, but how much Love we have. We are the grains of sand out of which this spring flows, but no single grain of sand can single-handedly make the spring flow. The best we can do is focus on ourselves to ensure that our personality permits happiness to flow around us, hopefully helping those close to us do the same, causing those close to them to do the same, and so on… and always, no matter what, avoid becoming the impenetrable cement of someone who has lost the drive to love everyone and forgotten that compassion is not an act but a way of life.

Symphony for the Sun

There was no darkness before the light.

I was just a stone and she a lonely star in the sky.
But one day she walked across the courtyard into my sight
like a shooting star scorching the fabric of night!
We talked, we laughed with distant orbits
but slowly our worlds came together as we got to know
our hobbies, hopes & fears, hands, and hugs.
Then one night love caught us by surprise
and she was no longer a star,
she was the Sun that made my sky.

We hugged, we kissed and we swirled
The forces beyond our control kept us in each others orbit
She left for the night, but the next day she was back again
smiling, kissing, burning in a sea of blue!
My world of stone blossomed into Life!!

With her heat, the still air swirled into cirrus sunsets
cumulus titans released floods
the water froze & thawed, shattering rock into soil
and those titans dropped a gentle drop of rain
where a seed could sprout and,

like me, grow towards her light.

Day after day after day, she was there.

The darkness of loneliness I never knew existed before her

became the defining feature of the hours without her.

Every day that cold loneliness of night inside of me
disintegrated when I saw her laying beside me,
the heat of her love burning a sunrise,
igniting the sky like a sea of gasoline!
With her reliable light,
life arose, developed & evolved,

tropical forests grew
their fractal complexity the form of my love for her,
their symphony of life was the content,
the birds were my poems to her,
the trees were my love letters,
the vines bound my heart, mind and soul
and the rivers were my blood, how they flood!
as she the battery for my beating heart
that pulls my blood into the sky
I pull it down to me
and from this tug of war
came the symphony.

Life evolved around her habits,
Waking up when she was here,
sleeping when she was not,
growing when she was here to stay
dying when she was gone...
In the winter, annual plants would die
Perennial trees would shed their leaves
crying tears the color of the burning sunsets
and, when she returned, bursting into tears again
tears the color of the sunrise.
When she was here to stay,
the trees' green eyes,
like me, could not but live for her light.
The animals would forage the annuals,
migrate to the tempo of the tears of perennials,
and explore the space of form as evolutionary artists,
Jackson Pollocks splashing traits onto the canvas of Life's infinite possibilities

The dawn chorus of tropical birds reverberating, shaking the leaves
like Beethoven's Ode to Joy, making even a deaf man cry!
The Amazon was the Louvre with the greatest works
Yosemite the Sistine Chapel where God created Adam
The Serengeti the Globe Theatre with megafaunal Romeos & Juliets

The Yukon was the Hajj, the caribou pilgrims,
and the floodplains forests of Loreto are Kärntnertor,
where those joyful birds forever sing.

How could you not believe in God
after hearing the symphony of symphonies called Life?
After seeing the bromeliads blooming on the branches
as the joyful birds disperse the seeds of the canopy tree,
as pollinators play Cupid with the flowers
and the wind is Hermes delivering love letters for coniferous trees.
All of this came to be because the Sun, she came to me.
Two lovers' synergy has the energy to bring our worlds to Life.

Piss Free or Die

Liberty: "The state of being free within a society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views." (www.oxforddictionaries.com)

Liberty: "Being free from the contrary preferences or other people." (yours truly).

A sea of blooming alpine tundra was visited and parted by Moses, I presume, or one of his progenitors, because the day I walked that stretch of the Wind River Range there was a trail parting the sea of tundra. The dirt shuffled under my every step and in this manner each step pulled the trail away from the Nature's entropic overgrowth and towards the order of society that makes one feel compelled, by the obligation we have to others' preference for pristine Nature, to "stay on trail", to not go tramping just anywhere, because if everybody trampled just everywhere then the precious, remote alpine tundra would look less and less like "the path less traveled by".

One has to be remarkably empathetic - or embarrassingly brainwashed - to obey the tug of society and other people's contrary preferences when 20 miles from the nearest trailhead, especially once you've felt the glory of wanderlust that comes from walking wherever you please. To leave no trace, or to wish there were no people to notice a trace? Dithering between my confining empathy and my liberating wanderlust, I farted out loud, and then laughed about it.

And then I urinated on the tundra.

I had to walk a little ways to urinate, occasionally letting a foot touch the preciously soft mat of tundra as I tried to hop from rock to rock. I didn't cower behind a tree, hide behind a door, force it out quickly in an alley to avoid getting arrested (for public indecency and, knowing myself, evading arrest), and I didn't lift a toilet seat with concerns about how many women would be pissed if I either didn't lift it beforehand or un-lift it when I was done.

No fuss. I just pissed, right there, not having to worry about what other people think about pissing. I've answered nature's call more times than I can count, but this time was special. This piss was special... in the context of my musings about trails and the formal and informal tugs of society that coerce you into obedience, and in my position in the heart of nature where one should feel most free to define oneself as one sees fit, this piss was the defining moment when I realized that my liberty depends on the abundance of people in my vicinity who would take offense to what I did, stomping on all that alpine tundra, farting and laughing about it, and spinning 360 degrees while pissing shamelessly with my hands akimbo, thinking and laughing aloud about Liberty.

The absence of people made that piss a hallmark moment. That piss was true Liberty.

Throughout the remainder of the trip, other acts of public indecency include wiping my butt with a pine cone, singing country songs loud & out of tune, and talking to myself out loud.

I went to the Wind River Range because I felt claustrophobic in New Jersey. I felt claustrophobic in New Jersey because it is the most densely populated state in the nation, and I set my baseline for how populated a place ought to be by growing up in one of the least densely populated states, a place with about 1/100th the population density of Jersey.

Why does having people in New Jersey make me feel claustrophobic? Having grown up with a motley crew of Wild Western guys & gals and come to understand their love of literally and figuratively pissing in the woods, I've come to the opinion that one's sense of liberty has the same indeterminate growth of a crocodile: it fills the cage it grew up in, and putting it in a smaller cage once it's fully grown will stress it out. In New Mexico, when I was upset with people and all of their associated bullshit - contrary preferences for how to drive, how to treat women on the street, how to be a good teacher or a good colleague - I would leave the packed room of people and their contrary preferences. I would go into the mountains and pump my thighs hard enough up a hill high enough to pump enough endorphins into my head so that, upon arriving at the summit, I couldn't feel anything but good. Sitting at the summit, with a clear head and the dignifying solitude fit for a human being, I would contemplate my course of action - should I conform to the other people's preferences, should I avoid it, or should I fight back?

In New Jersey, there are 100 times as many people per square mile, but from my experience the perceived intensity of bullshit is an accelerating function of the population density because not only are there more people to bump into, but the people you bump into are bumping into more people and, consequently, more prone to being upset by feeling squeezed out of an authentic life.

For instance, consider the honk of a car horn, arguably the rudest means of telling another person that their driving actions don't fit your preferences, all while staying under the guise of anonymity that brings out the inner asshole in all of us. I rarely got honked at in New Mexico, and when I was honked at I took it VERY seriously, assuming that the honk came as I was a hair's width away from killing some poor, innocent family. My first time getting honked at in New Jersey was like my first time showing my parents an "F" on my report card. I went home and thought to myself... "Geez... I made someone feel bad today. I want to leave happiness in my wake, so I need to get my act together and start driving better. That person wanted me to drive faster, so I'll go faster than the speed limit and more the flow of traffic to accommodate them." I return to the streets, and within minutes someone is honking at me because I'm going too fast. I use my turn signal to exit Route 1 and nobody will let me in. Bullshit...

When in New Jersey and upset with people and their contrary preferences, I tried to leave... I went to the "Last Great Wilderness of New Jersey" and got my legs pumping... and after passing hordes of families and finding no place fitting to sit and get away from it all, I finished circumnavigating the place in 2 hours having never found this so-called "mountain" in Sourland nor anything like solitude that could help me figure out my place in society. I had to go farther to find solitude and freedom from bullshit.

I drove 7 hours to the prodigious peaks of New Hampshire, that state with "Live Free or Die" stamped on very license plate. Surely, this is the place where one can experience the pure, untrammeled liberty of solitude. I trucked it across the Presidential Range towards the summit of Mt. Washington... on one summit (Adams) some guy with a Boston accent had the nerve to ask me to be quiet so he could talk on his cell phone. Upset with that guy's contrary preference, I moved on to the main summit where I found an army of loud, morbidly obese monkeys in automobiles, buying bumper stickers that say "This Car Climbed Mt. Washington". It's bad enough having to buy health insurance with people whose main hobby is eating and subsequently shitting, but then having to share the summit with their cars and having someone honk at me because I'm walking in the road after 12 miles... Let's see, maybe this, too, is not the place for me to get my inner peace and contemplate what I ought to do, so I drive back to Jersey... Advertisements on the road parasitize my preference to be content with what I have by blocking trees with annoying signs telling me I'm not buying enough stuff I don't need... music on the radio tells me I'm not having sex with enough bullshit... Another advertisement of a hot girl trying to sell a mortgage so I can buy private property where nobody but me can be free, where my preferences are Law, but I can only buy the boob-jobbed woman's house if I slave away to make money, earning a confined freedom by becoming someone's servant...  GAH!!!!!

So I return to my rented house in New Jersey, run into my room and slam the doors shut, keeping out the rampaging brigade of bullshit by sitting in a 10x10x10 cube with my windows closed, door locked, and books open to contemplate things in the wisdom of those who seem to be a lot better than me at dealing with other people being contrary. Dalai Llama, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dr. King, Jesus, etc. have all saved me in the past, and they had delightful things to say, but no amount of their honeyed words could fit me into this cage. I felt like there was no escape from those obese monkeys with their bumper stickers and horns and... and... and... and now I have to take a piss, but can't go outside because there's so many people out there, all the time!!

I grew up howling on the mountaintops, trekking through pathless woods with bears and mountain lions, and now I'm cooped up in a box reading books by saps whose lunch money I would've stolen all because a bunch of other peoples' informal social control led me on a trail that led me to a Masshole on a Mountaintop and a bunch of other contrary people and now I'm trying to be happy and dignified sitting in a box...

The solitude found in a box is not fit for a human being. My church of solitude stripped away from me, I didn't have the liberty to sit by myself on a glorious perch in good weather and think about how I ought to be, how "they" ought to be, and how "we" can coexist in a pluralistic society without getting at each others' throats.

So I went to the Wind River Range. I hiked 100 miles with my dog, Jack. I pissed in open fields while twirling in circles with my hands akimbo and I sang Toby Keith and howled on the mountaintops. I had never felt so free in my life, because never before in my life had I known the opposite of Liberty - entrapment in a pool of contrary people. In New Jersey, I've seen how liberty in its purest form gets corroded by the masses of people in a densely populated world. The product of two factors measure the extent of your liberty: the number of people who can sense (see, hear, smell) you and your tracks on the world, and the probability that the people will disagree with something they sense in you (your car is too fast, your skin is too black, your horn is too loud, your body smells too bad, etc.).

Liberty, in its purest form, is corroded by the acid of other people's social control, telling you, explicitly or implicitly, what you should or should not do. For the exception of our innermost thoughts, anything we do in the world runs the risk of pissing someone off. Eating, the most essential thing for an animal to do, is not exempt - I just made that comment about fat people, remember? There, I did it again. That's me being contrary and imposing mybeliefs about an ideal human physique on other people, and it pertains to their liberty to EAT as they well please. I'll summon arguments and stand by my preferences on grounds of healthcare costs, preventative diseases killing >500,000 people a year, and the non-obese size of airplane seats, but, at the end of the day, I am being contrary. I am informally trying to change people to be more like my image of how people ought to be. This coercion happens with other essentially human behaviors like sex (slut), sleeping ("lazy"/"maniac"), drinking ('alcoholic'), and every other action that leaves the privacy of our innermost thoughts, including speaking about your innermost thoughts ("Man, that Al Washburne guy is such an asshole... did you hear what he wrote?").

The more people there are, and the more deeply different people's preferences are, the more likely it is that something you do will annoy or deeply offend someone else. Thus, the diversity of a pluralistic society can corrode liberty, but this corrosion can be prevented by keeping population densities low and/or keeping reserves where people can get away from each other.

Liberty pertains to more than the formally delegated liberties - those rights & liberties mentioned in the constitution or other official documents. Sometimes the mountain of liberties is eroded away by legislation that protects people from risk, and the risk of an action affecting other people depends on the density of other people. For example, guns are dangerous yet they are not the same risk to society everywhere; it's no surprise that Ak-47's are legal in New Mexico but illegal in New York City. Where would you even go to shoot an AK in NYC? Where can a kid even go to throw a rock in NYC without risking hitting someone or breaking a window?

However, Liberty can still be eroded while the law stays constant; it doesn't have to be a law saying "You can't do this" - just the presence of other people who think you "ought not do this" is enough to leave one feeling restrained from being themselves. Many liberties, like pissing in public and farting aloud (have you ever tried farting aloud in the subway?), are also determined by population density through the probability that someone nearby sees you & doesn't want you doing it. Another way that population density determines our liberties is in the arguments of justice - the golden rule - what if everybody else did that? What if everybody else walked off trail? What if everyone else tossed shit-stained pine cones on the ground? Well, if there weren't so many people, it really wouldn't be a problem, and we'd be free to live more dignifying lives.

The line between formal and informal social control is a gray one, but if, at the end of the day, you feel like you shouldn't do something either by fault of your empathy for others or sense of justice, or by fear formal punishment, then you do not have the same kind of liberty as someone in an area with nobody around to hear (or get hit in the head by) the tree they felled. Public indecency requires a public, and surely a family with kids would be offended by my 360-spiraling-piss in the Wind River Range. I'm glad there wasn't a ranger with authority to arrest me, because otherwise I wouldn't have felt free to piss the way I did.

So how do we secure such "low-density liberty" against infringement by a growing population? How does one who wants to preserve open space and its associated liberty to do whatever you want fight against other peoples' liberty to have 8 babies all of which grow up to be obese monkeys with car horns driving on Route 1? My hunch is that to keep ourselves free from the "oppression of the contrary", we need to be actively contrary (I know, it's hypocritical). On a mountaintop overlooking the Titcomb Basin, I resolved that I'm going to move to some place remote, encourage people to have few kids, educate everybody everywhere in the world - especially women - as that is most effective at lowering reproductive rates, vote and petition for zoning ordinances that preserve areas of public open space from unnecessary development (and I've got a very strict view of what constitutes a "necessary" development), and if anybody tries to develop open space, whether into an offensive strip mall or a less offensive but still rule-bound city park where one is not free to piss in the bushes, I'll start a contrary (and very messy) movement called "Piss Off".

Who am I?

I'm the guy who takes things too far, the right things. As a kid, I took the wrong things too far, but I learned my lessons. My dad told me there were three types of people in the world - people who learn from reading about it, people who learn from hearing about it, and people, like me, who actually had to piss on the electric fence.

My mom, on the other hand, told me that everyone's virtues are their faults. I've got a ganglion of misfiring neurons somewhere in my frontal lobe that compels me to do crazy things, but sometimes the world needs crazy. Sometimes the world needs people to take things too far, the right things.

Things like temperance. In America, we like to debate whether someone loves "justice" or "liberty" more, but neither of those political virtues is needed as desperately as temperance. We need to take temperance to a new extreme. We're a greedy mob of 7+ billion people living beyond our means, exhausting the planet's resources just so we can have houses that are too big and drive cars fat enough to fit our gluttonous fat asses on a drive to the store where we can buy a bunch of stuff we don't need. We tell people this is the "American Dream" and talk about how we're the leaders of the free world. Developing countries look up to us and say "damn... I want to be like (those materialistic bastards)".

And when they start to try to live beyond their means like us, the whole world goes to shit. The world goes to shit when there's a really, unbelievably simple solution: don't have so many babies and don't buy shit you don't need; define a better notion of "the good life" than this silly, materialistic "American Dream", one that values moderation, benevolence, and all the other virtues we seem to have forgotten about. I don't want the world to go to shit. I'm another eHuman with a dream of giving my kids a better world than we inherited, and I believe it's possible. It will require confronting some uncomfortable truths about our eHuman Nature - that we consume goods whose impacts we've never seen and that oppression, competition and human evolution will always be with us, with it problems of sexual selection, preserving "liberty" in a Just society, and more.

My name is "Alexander", which translates to "Defender of Mankind". This is hilarious when you learn about how infuriated I get when I think about mankind. But then you realize that my fury comes from a desire to see mankind do better, and you start to understand... I'm like Homer Simpson who strangles Bart for going down the wrong road. Some people might say that's taking things too far, but if they realize the intensity of love and hope that must be present for one to feel such pain and despair, they'll find it hard to hate the guy who took it too far.

I don't have the answers. I don't like strangling mankind, but I can't do nothing as mankind lets everything go to shit. This blog is an effort to voice my thoughts on we can do better. Why we should live in moderation, how we can live in a democracy with fundamentally different worldviews and notions of "the good life", what is nature - that place in which Homo sapiens arose, which puts our entire species' history in context - and why I love it... how we can balance human life with a love and gratitude for the world that gives us life, how we can engineer a socioeconomic and socioecological system that can put the world on sustainable footing, and how we can balance comedy with sincerity in this otherwise poo-pooey discussion about our fragile world being driven madly by an erratic yet fragile species of primate.

These are the kinds of thoughts I tell myself when I'm standing in front of the mirror, because they all require I ask myself whether or not I'm practicing what I preach. In all my rants about how the world should be and how we should be, there will be ample opportunities to call me out on being a raging hypocrite, and I'll thank you for that. I try not to be a hypocrite, and I always appreciate it when somebody challenges me with charges of hypocrisy - it's a great opportunity for self-improvement because clearly something is wrong with either what I've said, what I've done, or what I've left unsaid (usually, FYI, I leave unsaid my compassion and forgiveness for other people's deviations from the high road of virtue, as well as my intolerance for my own deviations). Such is the risk of rants - the risk of taking it too far.

But I'm okay risking a little piss on the electric fence, because in today's world, we need people to take things too far, the right things.