Heal Yourself Heal the World

 Google Gemini tells me this about the philosopher Eric Hoffer, 

"American philosopher and social critic Eric Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan. The award recognized his life of hard work, his significant contributions as the "longshoreman philosopher," and his embodiment of the American spirit of self-reliance and achievement."

The following statement comes from the ceremony where Ronald Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Eric Hoffer,

"The son of immigrant parents, Eric Hoffer is an example of both the opportunity and the vitality of the American way of life. After overcoming his loss of sight as a child, Eric Hoffer educated himself in our public libraries. As an adult he has relished hard work and believed in its dignity, spending 23 years in jobs ranging from lumberjack to dockworker. As America's longshoreman philosopher, his books on philosophy have become classics. Mr. Hoffer's spirit, self-reliance and great accomplishments remind us all that the United States remains a land where each of us is free to achieve the best that lies within us."

I've been interested in his work for over fifty years. I liked the fact that he was self-educated and a member of the working class. His work that I am most familiar with, having read it maybe 5 times or so, is the book "The True Believer - Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements". It's a short book, about 160 pages, but full of uncommon wisdom.

The part I wanted to share today is from the section on unifying agents for a mass movement. The specific unifying agent in question is hatred. The following is from the book,

"We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate. It is understandable that we should look to others to side with us when we have a just grievance and crave to retaliate against those who wronged us. The puzzling thing is that when our hatred does not spring from a visible grievance and does not seem justified, the desire for allies becomes more pressing. It is chiefly the unreasonable hatreds that drive us to merge with those who hate as we do, and it is this kind of hatred that serves as one of the most effective cementing agents."

"Whence come these unreasonable hatreds, and why there unifying effect? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others - and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. Obviously the most effective way of doing this is to find others, as many as possible, who hate as we do. Here more than anywhere else we need general consent, and much of our proselytizing consists perhaps in infecting others not with our brand of faith but with our particular brand of unreasonable hatred."

"Even in the case of just grievances, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than a consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice - in other words from self-contempt."

Hoffer closes out this section with a quote from Pascal's Pensées,

"Self-contempt produces in man the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth that blames him and convinces him of his faults."

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Eric Hoffer's ideas appeal to people who come from many places on the political/socio-economic spectrum. I ran across this Eric Hoffer quote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from November 2017 explaining why Donald Trump won the 2016 election -

"Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of the common folk" 

For some, maybe all, who champion(ed) his ideas I can't help but think of the old Pogo cartoon, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." 

Of course, it's much easier and much more human to want to believe - it's not me - it's them. Carl Schmitt the Nazi philosopher, and his successors today, understood this human trait in their distillation of the political to a war between friend and enemy. The only way to make that distinction is by refusing to see your own human frailties - making yourself something more and your enemy something less...than human.

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The world is. What we make of it is our choice. Asking forgiveness for the harm we have done others and forgiving those who have harmed us seems like it might be a place to start. Most definitely easier said than done - but the most precious and valuable things take the most effort. Treat yourself as you would your own child - a being here in this place at this time - precious, utterly unique and dearly loved. 

Imagine

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Eric Hoffer 1898-1983

The Good Liars - Immigration

Matthew 25:35-40 NIV

"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me."

"Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

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For those of you, like me, who are not too familiar with the Christian Bible this is from the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. Christ is called king in the New Testament because He is the divine, universal ruler with eternal dominion over all creation, not a worldly ruler. 

The New Testament carries the good news of Christ telling us to love God and one another and supersedes the Old Testament teachings of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. If you are interested in the topic of non-resistance to evil as taught by Gandi, MLK and Jesus the book "The Kingdom of God is Within You" written by Leo Tolstoy in 1884 is a good resource.

Mr.Tangerine Man

It's All About That Prompt

I've been tinkering around with various AI bots for a while now. I've found that if you already know the answer to a question AI works great. If you are asking questions blindly not so much - your mileage may vary or YMMV as they say in the motorcycle forums, I used to hang out in.

Here's an example.

Use Google AI search feature for these 3 prompts:

1. "Donbas natural resources" 

2. "Donbas natural gas reserves"

3. "Donbas oil and natural gas reserves"

In the first case we are assuming that the bot will include all natural resources. If you happen to be a person who does not know that the Donbas contains significant oil and natural gas reserves, you'll be happy with the Google bot's summary -

"The Donbas region in eastern Ukraine is exceptionally rich in natural resources, particularly coal and other minerals. This wealth has made it a strategically important area, both economically and politically, especially given its role in Ukraine's energy sector and the ongoing conflict with Russia." 

However, if you know there are proven natural gas reserves in the Donbas you use prompt number 2 and get this summary -

"The Donbas region of Ukraine is significant for its natural gas reserves, particularly within the Dnieper-Donetsk Basin, also referred to as the Dnipro-Donetsk basin."

If you know there are proven natural gas and oil reserves, you will use prompt 3 and get this summary -

IThe Donbas region of Ukraine is rich in natural resources, particularly coal, but also holds significant oil and natural gas reserves

I suppose the point is if you are going to use AI, that is at this stage of development, it's best to know more than the machine.

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AI, or A1 (A one) as the United States Secretary of de-Education Linda Mcmahon calls it, is something. It's hard to say what sort of something AI is at this stage, On the other hand, unlike AI, human nature is old and well defined, so we end up with headlines like "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity"

Some examples -

An MIT study published in August 2025 found that 95% of corporate generative AI pilot programs failed to produce any measurable financial return, with companies seeing little or no increase in revenue or productivity. The laughable response of the AI cheerleaders is that it wasn't AI's fault - the puny humans are at fault for using AI incorrectly. Interestingly one of the profitable uses of AI involves people using AI to create viral AI slop on YouTube, Facebook etc.

AI data centers are power hungry monsters. Meta is constructing a data center in Louisiana that MIT Technology Review describes as follows, "The AI data center also promises to transform the state’s energy future. Stretching in length for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity, requiring two gigawatts for computation alone (the electricity for cooling and other building needs will add to that). When it’s up and running, it will be the equivalent of suddenly adding a decent-size city to the region’s grid—one that never sleeps and needs a steady, uninterrupted flow of electricity."

AI is attractive to people who are unwilling or unable to invest in education. Education gives us people capable of creating new things. China's focus on education means they will continue to outperform the U.S. Students from fundamentalist Christian-based educational systems are not particularly good at sciency things that are so important if we want to live in a post-enlightenment world. If we want to return to the dark ages, I suppose people capable of calligraphy and good penmanship are in demand. 

AI's large language models allow machines to parse and recombine existing knowledge. Sometimes in amazing and surprising ways. The idea that AI could solve humans most pressing problem - climate change, seems ludicrous given humans have become servants of some types of technology. So called free-market capitalistic systems implement technological changes based on profitability rather than any assessment of benefit to humankind.

Since I'm on the topic of human stupidity I have to mention the historical stupidity of crypto currencies mainly bitcoin. What will prevent people from surviving on this planet? If you said DEI, woke, or political correctness please turn off the right-wing media machine that has you hypnotized. Of course, we know the existential threat - the planet is burning up because of over a century of human created greenhouse gas emissions. We developed a culture dependent on fossil fuels, and it was profitable. We traded a livable planet for that profit. No blame here for regular people - they are stuck. We can blame power brokers who tell us lies and pay people to tell us more lies. What's the historically stupid thing about bitcoin you ask?

"In 2024 bitcoin's annual power consumption was about 130 TWh which is more than Norway or Ukraine annual power consumption."

It's hard to imagine anything much stupider than that. 

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1970 - Reina del Cid

Internet Comment Etiquette: "Hey Grok"

PSA

From Non-Things to Things to Perfect Days

"Perfect Days" is a movie about a Tokyo Toilet Cleaner who is able to find peace and joy in his simple enchanted existence It's a beautiful movie with a beautiful message, Living and being in the world, what Martin Heidegger called Dasein the essence of what makes us human.

The movie has an interesting soundtrack including the song Perfect Day by Lou Reed. At the time I wrote this post there was a copy of the movie on YouTube. 

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The book "Non-Things Upheaval in the Life World" by the philosopher Byung Chui Han explores similar themes of how to re-enchant an increasingly abstract, lonely and unfulfilling technologically mediated life.

This person named Davood Gozli on YouTube explains it better than I can.

The Good Old Days of 2008

I took this picture in Anaconda Montana on August 25th, 2008. This for rent sign was for an upstairs apartment in a nice old granite business building in downtown Anaconda. 

I could imagine working in Anaconda in 2008 and paying $200 dollars per month for an apartment plus heat, light and a damage deposit. You wouldn't need a car if you worked in one of the local businesses. Based on a quick perusal of Zillow it looks like rent in Anaconda for a one-bedroom apartment is about 5 times what it was in 2008. If you were working full time for Montana's minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, and paying today's $1000 monthly rent, you'd have about 500 dollars left over each month after rent for food, clothing, transportation and medical care. The moral of this story?

Warren Buffett said it best, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

 

Tom Waits - "Hold On"

Green Hell: The Ultimate Doom of Elon Musk

It's interesting to me that this video is age-restricted to people over 18 by YouTube. It's definitely worth watching if you are a fan of using art to critique social norms that excuse things like Apartheid or child labor in diamond mines. A couple of show notes - The weird looking older guy in the video is Elon Musk's father Errol and at the end of the video a guy is pissing on the grave of Cecil Rhodes the founder of De Beers diamond company. The YouTube channel this video comes from is called Elephant Graveyard. It's a good place for some absurd takes on the ruling ideas of this epoch.

Google AI tells me, ""The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" is from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The German Ideology, meaning that the dominant class in society, by controlling the means of both material and intellectual production, disseminates its worldview as the generally accepted and rational perspective for everyone.

Speaking of mining - I'm currently reading the book Germinal by Emile Zola written in 1884-1885. It's a story about the men, women and children working in an underground coal mine and the owners/shareholders of the mine. I just got to the part where the wealthy spoiled daughter of the mine owner gives a starving mother and her two young children (out of seven) a bag of used clothing rather than food or money. Her mine-owning Papa is sure that miners would only waste money on frivolous things which is in line with J.D. Vance's take on poor people in Appalachia, as outlined in his ruling-class-created book "Hillbilly Elegy". It's hard to imagine a new college graduate getting a book deal for telling a story about people on food stamps buying steak (a revival of Reagan's welfare queens from the 1980's) without the support of someone with money and power. The ruling class wants a particular story about poor people to be told; J.D. Vance is willing to do anything for money, including using his mother's problems with drugs as fodder for his book, so the billionaires in the leisure class found their boy.

It also reminds me of something Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley said about poor people, and the basic philosophy of the Heritage Foundation when it comes to poor people, which is a combination of either they aren't poor (they have TV's and cell phones for God's sake) or they are poor because they are lazy. The mine owner in Germinal can't understand how the miners could be starving since most of the family is working in the mine. Some things don't really change much no matter what century you are living in.

Books and Reading

I recently finished reading "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. I found it an easy book to read - clear plot, well-developed characters, short chapters, generally concise sentence structure. It's also a book you could read many times and get something new on each reading given the complexity and universal nature of the topics it touches on.

I just started reading "Middlemarch" by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). "Moby Dick" and "Middlemarch" were written in the mid to latter 19th century. "Moby Dick" in 1851 and "Middlemarch" in 1871. They also both cover topics that are complex and universal. Beyond that they are very different types of books.

I'm finding "Middlemarch" difficult to read partly because of the sentence structure, voice, punctuation and plethora of characters introduced at a fast pace. It seems to be a book about what we expect from life versus what life provides and how different people deal with that dichotomy. It's also pointing to all the unsung heroes throughout time who make the best of it. The people we don't see on TV or read about in books - the everyday people - mothers, fathers, doctors, nurses, workers, teachers who make a positive difference in the world.

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One of the reasons I wanted to read "Middlemarch" is this quote from the book...

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

I don't know what that might mean to anyone else. For myself it brings to mind times when I was losing contact with reality. Genius often borders on insanity. I'm familiar with the latter. I suppose that's true of most of us if we are at all interesting or honest. The people you might want to be leery of are the perfectly sane. If nothing else, they may bore you to death.

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That idea that sanity isn't all it's cracked up to be comes across in this quote from "On the Road" by one of my all-time favorite authors and characters Jack Kerouac -

"the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

I'm sort of hoping the beat generation ethos comes back in some form to popular culture. We are certainly living in a time where there is no shortage of beat down people. This video about the beat generation is one of the best and most concise summaries of that era I've run across. If you are at all interested in that time in U.S. history, I'd highly recommend spending half an hour watching it.

Tax Policy Impact on Charitable Giving

If you happen to be a Rip Van Winkle sort, and have spent decades asleep in the woods, it may come as a surprise that the U.S. Tax Code is highly skewed towards favorable treatment for the wealthiest members of the leisure class. For the rest of us the idea that we aren't playing on a level field is anything but news.

Two simple examples are (a) the IRS depreciation rules for racehorses which are giveaways to those tippy-top members of the horsey set. and (b) the detailed and onerous IRS rules for tipped workers to ensure every nickel and dime is extracted from these hard-working poor Americans.

As Warren Buffett, whose current net worth is 140.8 billion dollars, said, 

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." - Warren Buffett

To begin to understand what happened to the U.S. to give working people the shaft you could start with the infamous Powell Memo of the 1970's or at the Reagan/Thatcher regimes of the 1980's or the WTO/Clinton era of the 1990's or go back to the anti-New Dealers that came on the scene in the 1930's to oppose FDR's programs. Playing the game of Monopoly may illustrate the point - once all the wealth has been distributed the game becomes boring, pointless and not enjoyable for those without capital.

You could also gain a broad understanding of what happened by considering the history of humankind from any era.  You will conclude that absent any moral sentiment the strong will exploit the weak. With power as the only determining factor man becomes more beastlike red in tooth and claw participating in a war of all against all where life is solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.

In other words, since money is power, the rich will exploit the poor unless checked by law, or a moral code adhered to voluntarily. In case you hadn't noticed we don't have either of those checks in our current society.

Back to tax policy...

The 2017 Tax act passed by the Republican-controlled Congress nearly doubled the amount of the standard deduction. What this did was to make itemization of deductibles an exercise that only makes sense for the wealthy. As this July 2024 report from the AEI, a right-wing corporate-captured think tank, says - the 2017 Tax law has made itemized charitable giving a luxury of the rich.

Crucially this law caused charitable giving to decrease by 20 billion dollars annually according to this study by a Notre Dame economist.

I don't know what the Republican (or Democratic) parties of today stand for or who they represent. Maybe they represent the 1% and the 10% respectively? The idea that a party would remove an incentive for working class people to donate to non-profits seems perverse and pointless. 

Living in a plutocracy means our political and economic policies and structures are subject to the whims of the .1% of rich people in accord with the old golden rule - those that got the gold - rule. Or as Karl Marx put it less succinctly,

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."

We are left to hope that those who fate has been kind to and endowed with great wealth and power would have a sense of noblesse oblige. 

Unfortunately for us little people - the big money people have been overrun by immoral, self-interested twits - possibly and probably dangerous but twits just the same. 

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