Crossing the Social Justice Chasm

Okay, so this post is going to be incredibly sensitive so I want to start off with one thing, and if you start to get angry and upset and righteous, come back to this one thing: I want nothing more than a world in which all people are endowed with the same liberty, the same opportunity, happiness, quality of life, protection under the law, you name it. The question is: how do we get there?

I ask "how do we get there?" because it feels like we're not getting there. Instead of getting to that "city upon a hill", we seem to be seeing a fragmentation of the city into warring tribes. This is a problem I've wrestled with for years as waves of feminism have lapped against the white-sand shores of patriarchal norms, as Muslims were persecuted following 9/11, as black kids were getting shot, as latinos were sprinting away from extreme poverty and violence straight into a white-brick wall of xenophobia. The discussion has bubbled and popped, bubbled again into new life, evolved, and tensions rose and the movements bled, torn apart by their own internal disagreements.

In a way, this post is one of those internal disagreements. However, read carefully, this post is an olive branch and my sincere effort to bring people together, because I know Muslims, blacks and Latinos, Native Americans and a large set of overlapping, un-recognized types of victims (for example - I have a profound hearing loss and there are all kinds of norms - speak quietly, indoor voices etc. - that run contrary to the needs of the hard of hearing), and I know a bunch of men who were victims of bullying (I was part of this cycle, a bully who was bullied), who were socialized around white men to say things that make women and non-whites uncomfortable, and whose instinctive drives for love and sex are parasitized by infinitely many mosquitos of porn and ads of unrealistically sexy women. I know black people who talk differently around black people than around white people (but when they find out you've got a good taste in R&B and aren't afraid to sing and dance, they open up), Latinos who don't want to speak Spanish with gringos (but when they find out you love Latin America, they open up), White men who are hardened by norms they never invented and unintentionally perpetuate (but when they find out you appreciate some things they do, maybe an Irish play writer, a German song, or a French pastry, they open up).

Having seen and known these people, I'm often torn by the contemporary discussions of social justice that, I feel, are creating chasms where we need to be building bridges. My first experience of this effect came from the seminal Mansplaining article, where a guy in Aspen talks to a respectable lady from New York about a book that, it turns out, she wrote. It happens time and again that women are subordinated by men who assume the women don't know what's going on, and so the lady in New York used the gentleman in Aspen as a special example of this general pattern of subordination in speech. It was termed "Mansplaining", and then suddenly women everywhere had a word to place on the action.

I totally empathize with the woman - I have had countless dudes tell me ridiculous things that I know much more about (one guy insisted there were only three bald eagles ever in the state of New Mexico, one guy told me New Mexico was never a part of Mexico) - and if this would happen to me more regularly than it does, especially if it happened in my professional life, I would be writing a blog post about this pattern of behavior and trying to find out how we can fix it. I would've called it "sex-splaining" to humbly admit that it could go both ways, but whatever - that woman and I have a lot in common.

However, when I read this article, I couldn't help but also empathize with the man, and I think that is why, not standing entirely on one side or the other, I so consistently fall in the chasm on these social justice debates. The guy was living in Colorado, a wild-western state with a large number of Christians and a relatively recent urbanization. What's more, he was an older gentleman, so it's not like he read "The Smurfette Principle" in college. Heck, he probably never even read that article and might not even know what the word "mansplaining" is. Maybe he did feel more confident talking down to the woman because of his socialization under antiquated norms... or maybe he thought she was attractive and was excited and overly eager to share his knowledge on this one thing they have in common. I don't know, but I thought it was important to know this guy's motivations before judging his behavior. When I finished reading the article, I was grateful to have learned more about this common and subordinating interaction and now I am more careful about it in my personal life. However, I felt very uneasy about the straw "man" made of this Aspen dude.

Why was the lady in New York sure that this particular guy was a sexist jerk? Or even a jerk? More information about the intentions of the man is needed to know just how malicious this mansplaining is, because people come from different cultures and part of living in a pluralistic society is learning, to the extent possible, how we can live our own lives with our own norms about male-female interactions while letting other people live theirs. Would we charge a cheif of an Amazonian tribe with mansplaining? Doing so feels very culturally imperialistic, borderline fascist - why should people living elsewhere subscribe to our own norms? There are clear cases of black and white - other people can eat whatever (non-endangered-animal) food they want, but no matter what their cultures we will not tolerate murder or genocide. However, the etiquette of a man talking to a woman, insofar as this guy in Aspen was motivated by patriarchal self-perpetuation, seems like it should be fair for people to... well.. choose. Feminism is about choice, right? not limiting the scope of acceptable choices to what is deemed acceptable by feminists, but that principle of choice that any human can agree to.

The straw man in Aspen ticked me off, as did the gender biased term "mansplain" that arose from a straw man, and I argued about it with some people on facebook and finally shut up because it seemed impossible to explain that (1) we need to understand what the man is thinking if we want to fix it and (2) we shouldn't make a word that labels men as the only people who talk-down to women. However, many people saw my remarks as invalidating the NYC lady's experience and, while I wanted everyone to at least try to see the world through Aspen Dude's eyes, I didn't want my colleagues to think I'm a sexist ass (even if their opinions were, in my opinion, not fair). Ironically, when a woman named Lesley on xoJane made a (very well-written) argument to the same effect, it was embraced by many of those same people as "a good point" and proof that feminism marches along. We, the well-meaning social justice world, created a word that is gender-biased in an effort to eliminate gender biases, and it felt to me like that discussion was not open to input from men. In the process, that single article and that single word pushed the gender worlds farther apart by creating a culture that does not try to empathize with people different from them (in this case, men who were brought up with disagreeable social norms) - which is precisely the culture I think we need to fix.

The same thing happened when a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration. Right now, consider your initial reaction to that statement "I (you note: white man) am upset because a friend of mine was accused of unwanted sexual penetration". If you reacted strongly to that statement, the hairs on your back raised immediately because (1) you assumed the friend was male, (2) you assume he is more likely guilty than not and (3) I'm part of a counter-progressive culture standing in the way of women's rights. It's possible that some people will stop reading immediately after hearing that statement, because their minds are already made up.

Well, it turns out that, after a thorough investigation by the school, it was discovered that the girl was accusing the guy because she didn't want to admit to her best friend that she willingly slept with her ex-boyfriend. So, it was easier to claim that she was raped than to admit to her friend that she had done something wrong.

My friend is very likely a marginal case in the world of sexual assaults. Sexual assault is incredibly awful, most accusations of sexual assault probably have some legitimacy behind them, and sexual assault is more likely to be perpetrated by men than women. However, the culture in which we assume that he is guilty because he is a man is, in the blind eyes of justice, no different from the culture in which we assume someone is guilty because they are black. My friend was not innocent until proven guilty - he was a guy accused of rape, so he needed to prove his innocence with six months of digging up every text he could. That kind of social justice is anything but. Even if, statistically, black people are more likely to commit crimes, it is wrong to assume someone is guilty because they are black, it is wrong to be afraid of someone because they are black, to shoot them because they are black. These stereotypes reinforce the divide and don't provide room for people to be good, much less incentive. If you were black and always getting arrested, where's the motivation to be good if you get arrested anyways? My friend was innocent, yet people looked at him like a rapist. It is not the people, but the behaviors that we need to address, and the labels we give people, originally intended to identify the types of victims, become catalysts for stereotypes and cause us to lose our focus on what warrants punishment - a committed crime, not a perceived criminal. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

I listed two cases that differ from standard feminism and favor men - mansplaining and sexual assault on college campuses. In fairness, let me turn the tables a bit.

Men's rights activists have some legitimate positions (lower the hairs on your back to recall that, above, I started by saying that the woman's experiences in the mansplaining article were legitimate and that sexual assault is wrong and a real problem). For instance, our boys are doing terribly in public schools. What's more, men are far more likely to end up in prison than women. Whether due to an unhealthy socialization of men or due to a criminal law that disproportionately identifies and punishes crimes perpetrated by men, we have a serious inequality. When we see black people in prison, we rightfully think "criminal justice reform", but when we see more men than women in prison, we are remarkably silent. However, in my opinion, Men's Rights Activists are painfully ineffective at moving us towards men's rights; they are too busy being obstructionist to women's rights and wading in their own puddle of victims' tears while providing little of substance for how we can achieve greater equality. While women are blogging and engaging in substantive discussions - some even in line with men's rights concerns about labels like mansplaining, and many advocating for things like Planned Parenthood that help women without hurting men - the MRA is just throwing stones at feminism with no intention of building a bridge. Sure, men are going to jail - but lashing out against the "privileged" women is not the answer. Nowhere close.

The general theme I see as I straddle the chasm is that well-meaning people are more likely to see their own victimhood - and with every victim there is someone who is making out just fine - and less likely to recognize the legitimacy of the victimhood, with regard to other desirable liberties or equal protection, of those who are making out just fine. A key epiphany here is thta inequality is not a general statement but rather depends on the particular desirable good or state of being under consideration - there is different degrees and directions of inequality depending on what desirable good or state of being we're looking at. Men are getting paid more than women, and women are going to jail less than men. Women are more likely to get raped than men, and men are more likely to unknowingly raise a kid that's not their own. In all of these cases, it helps to be less general about "inequality" and more specific about the precise type of inequality we're trying to alleviate - income inequality, inequality in public school performance, inequality in crime and punishment, inequality in norms for acceptable dress in the officeplace, etc. Furthermore, comparing inequalities should be avoided at all costs - inequality in income is incomparable to inequality in rape or imprisonment - because different desirable goods are apples and oranges. We need to revolutionize our way of thinking about inequality so that we no longer attack labelled people "on the other side" of the inequality chasm, but instead see them as people, with their own kinds of suffering. To bring up the most loaded class of victims in history, consider Jewish people. Even if Jewish people are more likely to get into ivy leagues, possibly because of stereotypes or in-group favoritism or economic inequality, for example, they still suffer from extreme and atrocious acts of antisemitism around the world and while we fight for equality on college admissions we should also fight for equality in the treatment of Jewish people around the globe. Instead of trying to weigh apples and oranges to see if it a group's advantages and disadvantages "average out", we should recoil at the suffering of a fellow human and try to help. If someone gets paid more than other people, but is dying due to an inequality in access to healthcare - we should give her some healthcare.

In addition to the underlying definitions of inequality, it seems as if well-meaning people have forgotten the real reason for wanting to fix inequality - because it's virtuous (and much needed) to care about *other* people. It's as if social justice has marched to far ahead of its leaders and has evolved some behaviors that run contrary to the principles that drew me in to begin with. I will always fight for equality, but as both sides march away from each other, I find myself alone in the middle, where the discussion needs to be if we are ever to come together to fix these problems. Much of the eFeminism tweets and blogs that invalidate my experience as a male march away from Bell Hooks' memo that "feminism is for everyone" to the point where men can get fired (Tim Hunt) for voicing their experiences about gender interactions. The (disputably) well-meaning MRA sprints away from Gandhi's call to "be the change you wish to see in the world" as Men's rights groups shoot burning arrows to undermine women's rights. When privilege becomes so intimately tied to "white" that we create a term marching us farther from Dr. King's stern yet inclusive compassion calling on us to always "judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character".

I'm a white, deaf scottish, Irish, German, Mexican, Native-American guy who grew up in an upper-middle-class family going to some of the poorest and roughest public schools in one of the poorest states in the nation. Like every other human being, I'm a mutt - trace it back far enough, and your life was made possible by two people from different backgrounds falling in love with each other. I don't fit into the labels we have defining the two sides in the war for peace and equality. I try to be very sensitive in my treatment of some indisputably identified victims because, more than all of those labels, I'm a human being and so is every other person in the world. I'm not black, but you bet your ass #BlackLivesMatter - the disproportionate shooting of black people in this country is atrocious and we need to fix it. I'm not a woman, but you bet your ass I'll be calling out the cat-callers, people talking down to women (even if the talkers are women), and people discriminating against women in pay and hiring, and trying hard to alleviate all manners of other sufferings brought to my attention through the women in my life and online who report their suffering. I'm a man, but that should not affect your emotional reaction when I point out that there are so many men in prison, or men referred to as "creeps" or try to understand the motivations behind "man-splainers" and cat-callers in an effort to talk them into different behaviors.

We're all human. We're all socialized by an imperfect world and we identify clear imperfections. Women are being paid less and raped more. That's awful and we need to fix it. Black people are being shot and arrested. That's awful, and we need to fix it. Men are being thrown in jail. That's awful, and we need to fix it. We've come so far - instead of being complacent with these imperfections, we are using the internet to become well aware of so many kinds of suffering, and we are all burning to change them, or at least some of them thereby permitting compromise. There's so much positive energy in the push for a better world, we just need to find a way to channel it. We all see where we want to go, now we just need to figure out how to get there.

In the process of getting there, we have marched apart, thrown stones, and divided into warring camps that label each other almost as different species that can never understand each other, but, as we all intuitively know, that is not how we're going to get there. The story of the move for justice parallels the Tower of Babel - we are so close to working together to the point where anything is within our reach, but in the process of working together we've disagreed over the color of the bricks or the size of the stairs and been divided into camps that can never work together to accomplish anything. However, unlike the tower of Babel, there has been no God dividing people into camps, only people dividing each other into camps - that means there's a solution within the reach of us.

So how do we get there? In all humility, I don't know - I'm just one guy - but I can tell you my guess based on what's worked for me. In my political discussions with friends, I can tell you that the most unifying fuel is compassion and the most productive engine is pro-active thinking. We need to love everybody - definitely the victims but even the sinner - and try to understand why they're doing what they're doing. Then, and only then, can we start to think proactively about how to fix this. Why do guys commit crimes, rape among them? Why are guys doing so poorly in schools? Why are cops shooting black people - how much is due to racism (corrected by counseling on racial attitudes) and how much is due to their work environment (corrected by better mental health care for cops and serious, societal introspection on why we are so violent)? Why do people cheat on each other, leading one spouses to discover another baby is in the picture, and what can we do to promote more honesty in relationships?

None of these discussions can be solved by the victims alone, because victims are often suffering so greatly that they are scraping madly to breathe and arrive on the shores of justice that they may likely inflict harm on the beneficiaries of inequality (note: I did not call them the "perpetrators" of inequality, because sometimes the beneficiaries of inequality never intend to be unjust). Nor can these problems be solved by beneficiaries - the beneficiaries are doing fine, and are more focused on their own problems/victim hood/experienced injustices.

The infinite pile of overlapping labels and bias for personally experienced injustices motivates fewer labels and more common humanity. If there's anything we have in common, it's that we have a lot of labels in our social network, that in some ways we're a beneficiary, and in some ways we're a victim. Any human can sort through their personal labels and the labels of their loved ones, find which label has the greatest perceived inequality, and that is the problem they likely care most about. For me, it is environmental injustice and the treatment of people with special needs, because I grew up in the great outdoors, cultivating a love of the world's biodiversity, and because I have had a profound hearing loss. I also care about Gingers, but whatever - you can call me a daywalker and I'll laugh about it, because the Irish and Scottish immigrants are doing alright now. While these labels define our own lives, they do not preclude compassion for other people. In fact, often it's a simple analogy that leaps over the walls between labels and helps us see that we're really the same thing. Despite my initial white-guy reaction to #blacklivesmatter, my (unbelievably intelligent) girlfriend*, using my connection to nature, pointed out that somebody saying "save the rainforests" is not saying "f*** all other forests", and in an instant I was converted. The people who disagree with the victims' memes and are scratched by the victims' reaches for justice are often not hateful bigots but are limited by their experiences, and so the way to reach the beneficiaries of inequality is to talk with them about their experiences and find the connection.

Compassion is the key, because, to me, compassion is about seeing the similarities, not the differences; it's about feeling what it's like to be another person, walking a mile in their shoes, and appreciating them has humans bound by their circumstance, just like the rest of us. Our labels come from our environment and our ancestry, yet our on the small scale our environment is an artifact of our birth and, on the large scale, we're all inhabiting the same world. As for differences in ancestry, the story of our ancestors written in our DNA is 99.9% similar. The chasms that divide us are seams on rocks in the mountain of humanity that unites us.

So, to cross these chasms, I encourage all of us to find those people and groups that make the hairs on our back raise in defense, and, after a few deep breaths, earnestly try to understand what makes them tick. Walk a mile in their shoes, not trying to understand them out of pity or superiority, but rather to feel for yourself - what do they value? What would make them feel happy? How can we help?  How is that similar (not different) to my own experiences?

If you're pro-choice, try to imagine how much it hurts to think of babies being killed in our democracy because of a supreme court ruling, and how happy you'd feel if that could stop, someway, somehow. If you're pro-life, try to see that, in the ambiguity of defining the onset of human life, especially in light of modern biology's ability to make clones from skin cells, liberals' definitions based on sentience have some merit. If you're a dude who doesn't really prioritize street harassment, try to imagine a giant guy with overwhelming physical dominance harassing you on the street, calling you out on your tiny biceps, or maybe grabbing your junk and humiliating you in front of the world... and then imagine how that experience would shape your feelings when walking through a world of predatory eyes looking at your chest and ass, and how that is amplified by knowing the history of women's rights. Imagine if your greatest fear on a first date was not "looking bad" or "saying something stupid", but "getting raped and/or killed". If you're a woman, try to imagine being socialized as a simple-minded jock and trying to navigate the landmines of sexism in your profession, landmines that can label anything you do - talking to a girl you like, being somewhat awkward because you like her, can result in being called a "creep" (which, in the mind of a well-meaning dude, is a species of offense in the same family as rape), explaining things to a colleague can become "mansplaining", sharing your feelings about a "distracting" sex drive in a conference in South Korea can get you fired, and sleeping with the wrong girl in college can become rape. If you're white, imagine seeing someone who looks like your kid get shot by a police force that is overwhelmingly not white - imagine if all cops were Muslims and Mexicans and white kids were getting shot - imagine not being able to ask people for directions without them defensively gathering closely or, sometimes, lashing out in straight-up racism, imagine walking down the street with white boys leaning out the window shouting a word that conjures up generations of suffering written in your DNA and still present today in your environment. If you're deaf, imagine how annoying it is for people who can hear well to have some loud-mouthed person hogging the verbal space in a room.

I'm convinced that if enough people sought out this universal compassion on their own volition, the people around them would see, hear and read this kind of compassion, be drawn to it, emulate it, and that tower of Babel can be built.



* My girlfriend is the better half of the brains behind the core content of this article. She and I have had many intense discussions about these topics and she has displayed the patience of a saint as I've tried to wrap my head around things she understands so easily, but in the process of our discussions, some lasting until 3am, we have arrived at some remarkable revelations that I just had to share with the world.

Preventing the Cannibalism of Liberty

“the circumstances of justice obtain whenever persons put forward conflicting claims to the division of social advantages under conditions of moderate scarcity.” - John Rawls, The Theory of Justice

Human Control over the Circumstances of Justice

In his book, "A Theory of Justice", Rawls claims that people in the Original Position are aware of the circumstances of justice - the more or less equivalence of people, the scarcity of resources, and the potential for cooperation among people to yield a more utilitarian (or maximin) distribution of resources.

Rawls' contribution to contemporary political philosophy cannot be understated, and his book has motivated some excellent counter-points (my favorite being Sandel's "Liberalism and the limits of justice"). However, one quirk about this forum of modern philosophy of justice that has always monkey-wrenched by biological gears is the assumption that "conditions of moderate scarcity" exist outside of human control. In reality, we consume the resources on which we depend and we or our cultural memes (from attitudes on consumption and travel to the material objects such as computers and iphones themselves) reproduce and consume resources, and that consumption of resources leads to scarcity. You don't have to be Malthus to know that we live in a finite world, and consequently our growth becomes limited by the scarcity of resources; as living things, we engineer the circumstances of justice, and so much of this modern political philosophy falls short by failing to inspect the dynamics of resource consumption and, consequently, the human socio-political control over the circumstances of justice. Incorporating ecological and economic realities into our discussion of political philosophy can help us better understand how to maintain a high quality of life in human society by, at times, preventing the scarcity of resources that leads to intense, conflicting claims over the division of what few resources remain.

The Consumption of Resources: From Unrecognized Liberty to Bitter Justice

Liberty reigns in the abundance of resources, and often we take those abundant resources for granted. You are free to breathe, because oxygen is so abundant, and so we don't even recognize a world in which breaths can be regulated to ensure a fair distribution of breaths. However, put a group of humans inside a biosphere on Mars, and one could envision a political agreement specifying the "fair use of energy and oxygen." Because we take for granted abundant resources, their consumption often goes unnoticed. During the westward expansion of the United States (into land controlled by Spanish and Native Americans), land was seen as so abundant that anyone could build a house just about anywhere. There was no need to be just in our allocation of land out West. Today, every square inch of land in the United States is owned, and its movement from one owner to another is often a matter of justice - transfer of land to the federal government can be unjust for cattle ranchers, transfer of an empty lot to a real-estate mogul can be unjust for poor people who liked to use those empty lots for recreation. The previous abundance of land led to homestead policies that rewarded the consumption of abundant land for economic growth (this is currently happening in Siberia).

In ecological systems, living things produce an abundance of babies. In economic systems, an abundance of a resource makes it cheap and thus more easily utilized for the production of other resources which are scarce. If the resources are non-renewable, or renewed more slowly than they are consumed, these ecological and economic forces deplete the supplies, yielding fewer resources per-capita. Slowly but surely, previously abundant resources become scarce and, barring an improbable equal distribution of resources, there will inevitably be some inequality in the ownership of coveted resources. When the resources improve the ability of an organism or company to acquire resources, the inequality can perpetuate itself (well-fed lions are more capable predators; rich humans are better able to get degrees, connections and jobs, big companies have more money to expand and buy up new resources). Thus, humans, given the liberty to do so, will reduce the abundance of desirable resources - land, animals, power - until we become limited by scarcity. Barring political agreements to limit liberty despite the perceived abundance of resources, human ecological/economic systems will drive resources to scarcity and perpetuate inequality, thereby engineering the circumstances of justice.

Political Dynamics in the conversion of Abundance to Scarcity

The arguments for continued liberty and depletion of resources are that the resources are abundant and we need them now. If we get the resources now, we make money, and if we don't, then the our competitors will and we will lose. This tragedy of the commons makes it very difficult to protect resources until they become scarce enough for us to feel the tragedy. We did not notice a tragedy of the commons in the use of wild game until the buffalo and elk were nearly driven to extinction, and now, for fairness, constituents must pay large prices and submit to a draw for the possibility of receiving a hunting permit. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the emission of CO2 until record droughts, floods, snowstorms, heat waves, and melting of polar ice caps caused major human and economic harm and now, for fairness, we are in the process of signing agreements to ensure a just distribution of CO2 emissions across nations. We did not notice the tragedy of the commons in the world's fisheries until whales or other fish begin to make precipitous declines. The same stories played out for the use of lumber, land, fresh water, ores, and more: Resources abound, they are consumed until their scarcity is felt, and then by mutual coercion we agree to limit our consumption.

While it is reassuring that human political systems often limit the use of resources to ensure their preservation when they hit the wall of apocalyptic scarcity and the threat of revolt, it does not always worked because some resources that might be limiting or invaluable in future economies are currently non-limiting and, consequently, their preciousness is not felt. An example could be the species that are going extinct - they may contain medical clues that enable us to solve pressing global epidemics or food shortages later. Another example is space - the more people we have per-capita, the greater the risk and intensity of pandemics, and currently, we are filling space on the planet without any regulations on human reproduction motivated by epidemiological risk. Our political systems react to some resources - those whose combined contemporary importance and scarcity currently motivate a more just allocation - but are apathetic to resources that may be important in the future.

Furthermore, our political systems are apathetic as to whether or not the quality of life would be better with more resources. What if all of the world's 7 billion people would be happier in a world with 1 billion people - each person could have seven times the amount of personal space, seven times the probability of being drawn for a hunt, seven times the allowable catch from a fishery, and seven times the amount of water, not to mention less pollution in the air and water... or, if the same amount of pollution, then it comes with greater liberty to pollute without repercussion.

Temperance

These facts - the human-engineered scarcity of resources and the potential for a higher quality of life with more resources per-capita - motivate a precautionary temperance. Temperance - moderation, self-restraint - is the oft forgotten virtue in American political discourse. Temperance involves a restriction of liberty to preserve an abundance of resources and, with it, a quality of life that does not necessitate a bitter and emotional struggle for a just division of scarce resources. Temperance, in many cases, requires voluntarily restricting our liberty to prevent the circumstances of justice. Temperance is motivated by a desire to preserve a life of moderate liberty, made possible by an abundance of resources, by restricting only our ability to use the resources in excess. We do this because we know that the self-imposed limitations on our liberty now, when resources abound, will be far preferable to the bitter restrictions of liberty imposed by the struggle for a just division of those resources.

Temperance is a tough sell. It's hard to tell people to stop cutting down trees when there is still a forest, especially (in the words of Daniel Pauly) when the lumberjack and hikers have a shifted baseline of what is a "good" size of the forest. While the shifting baselines and relativity of human happiness blurs the lines about what is an objectively "good" amount of abundance for a high quality of life, it does not invalidate the existence of an optimum (which, granted, may change with evolutionary time). Yes, a kid raised in New Delhi will, statistically, have a much greater tolerance of high population densities than will a person raised in Alaska. However, if we were in charge of being mankind's zookeeper, we would agree that there is an appropriate sized habitat for producing the most admirable and healthy specimens. Too sparse of a habitat and humans will be lonely, too dense of a habitat and humans will be angry and diseased. Somewhere in the middle is an optimal habitat for humans, where most humans will grow up content, with sufficient abundance to carve out their own lives - if they want cities, they can move together with other humans to cities, and if they want space, they can move to the wilderness where there is space. Sometimes, the resource wants and needs of a human vary depending on the stage of life, e.g. some mountaineers in their reckless youth want vast wilderness and remote mountains to climb... so they can talk about it in cities when they are older. So, our lumberjack at the forest may have a shifted baseline, as may the people in the discussion about whether or not to stop cutting down trees, and so they may not realize that that forest is small, only those who, by their nature, disposition, and stage of life, yearn for open space will feel the claustrophobia of a small enclosure. The lumberjack's daughter could grow up, read stories about vast forests of the past, shift her baseline back to a historical level, and feel saddened by the state of the world.

Many people in my generation feel like the lumberjack's daughter. There are no blank spots on the map, no unclaimed swaths of land, no giant herds of bison, no dodos, declining rainforests, depleted fisheries, polluted air, polluted streams, a changing climate and no place where you can, like the frontiersmen back in the day, horse-back ride with a gun and fishing rod, earning your food the old-fashioned way and camping by clean rivers as you travel the West or, like the Native Americans (who, for historical accuracy, fought each other for resources), had abundant herds of elk - ten times the number of elk available today. Our generation grows, as human specimens, on public lands set aside for recreation where we can horseback ride, set aside for conservation where we can chop down trees, and set aside for preservation where we can see species not yet extinct. These lands were major victories by forces of temperance like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who thrived as humans and wanted future generations to thrive with wild things and vast, majestic places. However, our use of these lands is not governed by the same liberty felt by Leopold, Muir and Roosevelt, but instead is regulated by agreements, necessitated by the scarcity of these resources. We can only chop down so many trees by our permit. We can only camp for so long before over-staying our welcome. We can't hunt species that are sufficiently rare because their habitat is scarce and their populations threatened. At its best, these agreements give us a sense of responsibility and an obligation to give a good world to the future generations, but, at its worst, these rules confine us to circumstances of justice that would not exist had our ancestors been more temperate.

It could be worse. We could've waited decades until imposing rules and regulations on land, water, air, and game management , leaving us with smaller habitats, fewer game, dirtier air and water, and more people. However, looking forward, we can see many cases where resources are declining and future generations would benefit from our temperance, and modern political philosophy can help us recognize these cases by pushing the discussion of politics in America away from a bimodal justice vs. liberty tug of war and instead incorporating what we know about resource consumption through ecology and economics. When we see how humans engineer our own circumstances, we see that liberty, justice, and temperance are all intertwined - to preserve some liberties for future generations, we must be just and impose rules and regulations to preserve abundant resources before they become critically scarce. The "circumstances of justice" as described by Hume and Rawls are not facts of life, but instead they are often engineered by unrestrained liberty. Hume notes that justice may come at the expense of "nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances" such as benevolence (Sandel gives the example of a friend who insists on paying back, and being paid back, every penny lent, causing one to wonder the terms of the friendship). In American discource, justice and liberty are often seen as at odds - requirements that people be fair to the poor infringes someone's liberty to be selfish - but in some cases where liberty consumes resources and engineers scarcity, justice can empower temperance and restrain those liberties of excess in favor of 'nobler virtues and more favorable circumstances'.

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.