Why We Do What We Do

People occupy their time with a vast array of activities. For most people, work consumes the majority of their day. Salesmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, housewives, plumbers, teachers, construction workers, accountants; the list is endless. Speak to someone who is a zealot about their profession and they'll regale you with stories of business trips, accomplishments, hilarious incidents, and the sheer satisfaction of the task that they perform.

Yet if you were to ask any of them if they would be happy if they had their job and were alone on planet Earth, you'd get a resounding "no". That's going to be true if you ask someone who is an enthusiast about their job, their hobby or any other activity into which they expend the majority of their time. It's going to be true because we are fundamentally enthusiasts about the people around us. Our profession or our hobby gives us a means - or an opportunity - to interact with those people.

The most vibrant people that you will ever meet have accomplished the seemingly simple feat of figuring out how to have a role in society that permits them to interact with the most people. They have no desire to step away from society. Rather, they step into society with gusto, savoring their interactions with the people that they know and always seeking interactions with those that they don't. There are no strangers for such people.

Note that the vibrant people have a role and they connect with the society. Some connect with society and some have a role, but only the connection of the two produces the most vibrant people. At the opposite end of the spectrum are people who have neither a role in society nor any connection with people. Hermits. They merely exist. More damaging than hermits are those who take up a role, but who have no desire for a connection with society. Their actions are not grounded in a desire for the well-being of the community that surrounds them, but rather in some other ethic. They pursue some ethic that is borne of themselves. It is a selfish ethic.

Consider men like Hitler and other brutally-minded men that are infamous in world history. These men have a limited sense of community. Hitler believed in the Arian community, but no other. Other influential men and women have had similarly warped and vacant notions of community, and invariably it has led to pain and suffering for those excluded from those notions.

Believe it or not, this is a segue to Christmas. Today is the eve of Christmas, when Christians celebrate the birth of Christ. Christ may be viewed as perhaps the first human being who declared that his sense of community encompassed everyone in the world. There were no exceptions. We might reject his willingness to include us, but he included us anyway. Today, we call that ethic "Being Christian".

Modern civilization simply would not exist if it were not for the altruistic sense that leads to the idea that everyone in the world is our neighbor. We started out such that the only people that we were willing to declare our friends were family members. Then it expanded to our clan. From there, we broadened our horizons to include village, city-state, and nation. Each such structure exists only because of the shared identity of its citizens. Without altruism to remind us that those we don't know can still be our friends and allies, we would revert to tribalism. If you doubt that, look around the world. Where you see tribalism, look for the absense of altrusim. And vice-versa.

Christ was the wake-up call for the world. Christ spoke about essentially one thing: altruism. He was the one who popularized the idea of helping everyone else. Treating our neighbor as we would want to be treated ourselves. That simple formula makes everything possible.

Whether you are a Christian or not, take a few moments tomorrow to remind yourself what Christmas really meant to the world. The birth of Christ was the birth of altruism. It gave us civilization. It gave us the society in which we prosper and for which we work so diligently. The only limitations in our society are the ones that come from our unwillingness to practice altrusm - to see our fellow man as our friend and neighbor. We all have our limits, after all. Ultimately, involvement with community is why we do what we do, and when all is said and done, that's just being Christian.

Merry Christmas.

Potential for Happiness

At conception we are a single cell. Nothing more. Yet that one cell has the potential to become anyone in the world, good, bad or indifferent. It's an extraordinary thing when you think about it. The process of life begins with that one cell and proceeds until the end of life, sometimes as much as 100 years later.

A bottle of wine can be manufactured in a single growing season, but certain wines take years to mature, to reach their full potential in flavor, aroma and color. A cheese similarly matures in a certain amount of time. Let's hope that nobody tries to mature cheeses for years on end.

Maturing a human being also takes time, but it's not something that we can accomplish by just sitting around like a bottle of wine or a wheel of cheese. We will certainly mature to a certain extent by simply going about our business, day after day, but that will only get us so far.

Consider yourself at conception. You were that single cell, full of potential. Potential to do what? That is the question that faces us when we consider the process of maturation. When we mature, we realize our potential, we become as complete as we can be. Grapes realize their potential in wine when they have been fermented, casked, bottled and processed with just the right ingredients and for the right times. The single cell of a human embryo realizes its potential in becoming the finest human being that they possibly can.

As you can tell from my articles, I'm very much the idealist. I'd like the entire world, or at least America, to become filled with what I call Philosopher Kings. People of such vast wisdom and power that they can only be referred to with that rather high-minded title. In America, however, there has been a sense of people being just fine the way they are. While I can accept that notion to the degree that everyone needs a sense of self-esteem, I reject it when it tells people to turn their backs on realizing their potential; to mature.

I believe that all our lives, we should be examining our philosophy of life and our manner of applying it in an effort to become the greatest people that the world has ever known. We have the opportunity to do that as no civilization ever has before us. I'm not suggesting this out of some ivory tower sense of idealism. My idealistic pursuit is firmly rooted in the idea that to pursue a world of philosopher kings is to pursue nirvana, or heaven, or paradise - whatever you want to call it.

This is the source of inspiration for Opinion Dump: to encourage others to see the world as I do, ever mindful of the goal of creating as heavenly a situation on Earth as we can. America is the best that the world has ever seen, and it serves as an example to the world of what is possible. But we're not perfect, and we know that. The imperfections are what we can be working on.

As you work your way through life on your path from embryo to centenarian, think of the process of maturation. How can you become a better man or woman, to realize your full potential here on planet Earth. It is my fervent hope that you can mature more completely than a humble bottle of wine.

Black and White

I was once discussing ethics with a man. I was proposing that there is an absolute sense of right and wrong, and he disagreed. It all depended on the situation. To illustrate his point, he posed the following dilemma to me:

"Your wife is deathly ill. There is a store around the corner that has the drugs to cure her, but you have no way of paying for them and the store owner won't just give them to you. Would you steal the drugs in order to save her life?"

After a few moments, I gave him the answer that he expected: I would steal the drugs to save my spouse's life. He was delighted, of course, because he held that theft was moral in that circumstance. That it was justifiable. It sat poorly with me, but I didn't have a way of explaining my problem with it all.

You may have run into similar situations, where someone threw you a curve in logic that you'd never explored, or never considered. It happens to me all the time because I don't think well on my feet. I have to figure things out well in advance. So when somebody throws something at me that they think is a surprise, I can easily respond to it because I've already worked through it.

In this case, I ultimately worked out the answer that I'd like to have given him. I present it here in an effort to expand your understanding of moral relativism and moral absolutism. Moral relativism is exactly what the man that posed the dilemma subscribed to, that the morality of an act is determined by the situation that you perform it in. A moral relativist would say that stealing was moral in the situation of it saving a life. A moral absolutist would say that stealing was immoral because it violates the inherent rule of law that governs society.

Yet I chose to steal. I'm pretty serious about doing the right thing, and I still chose to steal in order to save a life. The answer here is that I chose to steal in order to save a life, but that stealing was still an immoral act. The end does not justify the means.

The way to understand this particular dilemma is to think about the aftermath. When my spouse has survived and I get back on my feet financially, what is the morally correct thing to do? Should I ignore the store owner that I stole from because my theft saved a life? Or should I pay the store owner for the drugs that I took? Clearly, I should pay the owner. Why? Because stealing is wrong, and paying the owner for the drugs is a step in the direction of correcting an unethical act. It is an attempt at righting a wrong.

People aren't perfect. We live in an imperfect world that demands compromises and distasteful acts. If we lose track of the absolute sense of right and wrong, we can easily be drawn into believing things that are not true; such as the belief that theft is good in some circumstances. This happens because we have to live with our mistakes.

Suppose I never got on my feet financially. I've be living with the fact that I stole something. I'd never stolen anything before in my life, yet I went and stole from someone I might very well have known. I'd feel pretty bad about it. Temptation time. I'd feel bad about it until I thought about the good that I'd done. I'd saved my spouse's life! I could tell myself that it wasn't THAT bad to steal in that circumstance. I'd ultimately done good.

And so it goes. The process of cementing moral relativism as a truth can happen oh so easily. Consider more mild situations. Little white lies that we tell to soften the impact of bad news, or to dodge unpleasant outcomes. Everyone is happier as a result, so why not tell the lie? We get very practiced at lieing as a result. We no longer see lies as being unethical but rather as a tool. We use terms like "spin" instead of "lie". It is moral relativism in action; when the unethical becomes legitimate, we institutionalize unethical acts.

Of course, the choices that life hands us can often seem dominated by shades of moral grey, never entirely black nor entirely white. But if you look closely at those choices, you will see little flecks of black and white, not unlike a photograph as printed in a newspaper. A moral man or a moral woman will look closely at each choice in their life so that they can keep track of which part of any given choice is black and which part is white. They can then be content in the white and act to correct the black. With practice, it becomes second nature.

The key here is to figure out what is right and what is wrong. People have been looking at that particular problem for thousands of years. You would do well to review what they have passed down to us in written and oral form. It has survived the critical test of time. They are the philosophies and religions of great and inspired thinkers. Read what they have written. Trying to figure it out all on your own is a fool's errand. It's that black and white.

The Happy Peasant

Robert G. Ingersoll wrote a famous piece about his visit to the tomb of Napoleon. He waxed poetic over the dramatic and frequently tragic events of the man's life. Anyone who has the least passing knowledge of European history knows of Napoleon's conquests, his exile, triumphant return and his final play at Waterloo. Ingersoll reminds us of all these things and more; the countless orphans and widows he had made, and even the loss of the love of his life due to his ambition.

Then Ingersoll seems to turn his back on that cold marble tomb to perhaps look off into the countryside. This is what he writes:

And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky, with my children upon my knee and their arms about me. I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder known as Napoleon the Great.

It is a moving bit of prose that makes me think of the range of attitudes that people have today, and have always had, about how to approach life. The pursuit of the American dream was once that of the French peasant with his loving wife at his side, but it has become more Napoleonic as time has progressed.

This is nothing new. Men who dreamed of power have always existed. They were the clan leaders, the kings, the dictators, the industrialists and so on. They pushed all their lives for some vision of how the world could be, with them at the crest of the wave that was going to make the necessary changes. A very few have been benevolent, but all have consumed their lives to fulfill some vision of accomplishment, status and wealth.

Where I'm going with this is not a sociology lesson, nor a caution about the corrupting influence of power. Instead, this article is an invitation to examine your own life, to see if the dream that you hold in your mind's eye is something that will actually bring you happiness. Do you believe that the image of the happy peasant is even possible? For most married couples these days, it seems that there isn't any time to be a happy peasant. Both parents work, and the children are constantly occupied with television, school, sports, camps, hobbies and games. The demand to excel permeates the American experience, causing single people to look for spouses during various odd moments of their week and married people to try to relate to their spouse at similarly rare moments.

Napoleon was undoubtedly conducting his life at a feverish pitch, constantly working on this plan or that, dealing with this emergency or that, and so on. The happy peasant lives a much slower pace of life, savoring his interactions with the people around him. Do we no longer take the time to savor life because we are so compelled by a world running at a feverish pitch? Or do we conduct our lives at a feverish pitch because we no longer believe that there is anything left to savor?

When was the last time you thought about relaxing in a casual conversation with someone? Instead of enjoying your time in pleasant distraction, were you intent on some personal agenda, fulfilling some small vision of the day? Were you trying to find out the latest gossip? Proving a point? Winning the game?

A modern truism that applies here is to take time to stop and smell the roses. Roses are to be beheld as beautiful both in looks and in fragrant aroma. People can be beheld as beautiful in many ways as well. Physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, we have a great capacity for beauty. Part of our ability to savor our lives is rooted in simply understanding that other people hold that capacity for beauty, even when unrealized. Ultimately, it may take a little savoring by others for us to really develop our own beauty.

The happy peasant sees the beauty in his lot in life, and he drinks deeply from it. It is my fervent hope that you can do the same, avoiding the oft-wasted effort of constantly improving your lot without ever enjoying what you have.

Politics

John A. was recently nudging me for an article talking about our two main political parties. I demurred because when I write here I like to talk about philosophies and trends, not specifics - and I definitely want to stay away from gossipping about this or that politician. Such statements do you no good and they certainly do me no good. That said, I've discovered some philosophical points that relate to the two parties. Interestingly, I see that John A. has written on the same topic. Bon apetit.

As I see things,. the two parties are distinguished not by particular issues, but by the mindset of the people who populate those parties. There's an old saying that goes "If you're not a democrat when you're under 30, you have no heart. If you're not a republican when you're over 30, you have no brain." For those of you who read my Relationship PIES articles, you can imagine how greedily I eat up statements that talk about brains and hearts in one go; that's intellect and emotions to me.

I think that there's a lot of truth to that statement, but it's rather derogatory to our younger republicans and older democrats. I'll offer a slightly different notion about the two parties. It's not as catchy, but I think that it's probably more accurate. Republicans want tradition, while democrats want change.

Parties are far more than just a group that votes a certain way. There are reasons behind their desire to vote a certain way on issues and candidates, and I believe that republicans are trying to vote for stability and reinforcement of traditions, while democrats are trying to produce social change for the better, correcting the wrongs of the society.

When I look at the causes of democrats, I think of the environment, diversity, minority rights, peace, women's rights, AIDS, the poor. These are places where people saw inequities and injustices, and it motivates a certain group of people to act for change. Such people are strongly empathetic to the woes of others. It is the source of "If you're not a democrat when you're under 30, you have no heart". Young people are often dominated by their emotions. They have yet to master them, and they tend to lead the young to emotional causes. Older democrats are simply those who continue to know a strong sense of empathy.

When I look at the causes of the republicans, I think of family, religion and business. There really aren't that many issues for republicans because they tend to accept that the way things have been is the way that they should be. Republicans tend to be rather poor at being activists because they're more busily occupying themselves in operating within the status quo instead of fighting against it. They don't necessarily see their situation as perfection, but they do typically lack an empathetic reaction to those who refuse to accept the status quo.

I've always like the two parties that we have because the republicans give us stability and indeed a kind of lethargy in social change while the democrats give us a reminder that all is not well in Wonderland and that every now and again we need to have a few changes made. The system isn't perfect, but it's been leading us along. Having either party in dominant control of the nation is really just not a good idea because both parties have problems. Neither is inherently balanced.

A curious thing has been happening for the past decade or so. Remember that democrats are those that want social change. Well, if a society is in pretty good shape, what happens? Those who want social change are those who want changes that are fundamentally extremist. That's where we are today. The democratic party didn't have a cause that was clearly a rallying point for the membership. The democrats have succeeded in mainstreaming homosexuality, abortion and agnosticism, and they're just out of causes. There isn't a social change that really brings the party together. Well, until the Iraq war, which has served as a temporary touchpoint for those who are insensed over the situation.

Meanwhile, the republicans are starting to rally and act for change because of a sense of social injustice. Notice how the traditionally liberal media has been so solidly infused with conservate shows. It is a sign of the republican rally. Homosexuality, abortion and agnosticism have been fought hard by the republican party, causing the republicans to focus on traditional family and religion as the core values that they want in place. It is the status quo of thousands of years past. Yet because of the forces inherent in democracy that permit social change by popular vote, our society has been changed dramatically. To my mind, we've gone rather too far.

There is a healthy point at which a society should hover. Republicans always think that we're at that point, while democrats always believe that we're not, always pushing for ever more social freedoms and elimination of ever more social injustices. I think that while the democrats have served an invaluable purpose in getting us out of the dark ages and into a modern era, they've pushed far too hard and for far too long. Homosexuality, abortion and agnosticism are not social injustices to be rectified. They are distortions of healthy values, and that truth will only come clear in time. To a degree we can see how they are distortions because of the fragmentation of the democratic party. There isn't a clear social change on the agenda for the democrats, which is why they are turning to mainstream values. Democratic politicians know that they are losing the public with their extremism. Democratic politics are moderating.

It is my fervent hope that the social injustices that the democrats have pushed into the mainstream will be corrected in the coming decades. Further it is my hope that timeless wisdom, not extremist fervor nor lethargic complacency, will become the motive force in political decisionmaking.

Community Offices

Gas today is expensive and was recently approaching four dollars a gallon. Those who commute by bus, train, subway and car in metropolitan areas view their commute as a daily grind to be endured but never anticipated. Companies are spending billions of dollars in attempts to create cars that get more mileage on a gallon of gas, or that circumvent gasoline as a fuel and rely on hydrogen, biofuels or electricity. Billions more is being spent to discover new repositories of oil to sate our desires for energy.

As I ponder all the machinations of cars, fuels and the like, I think of the fact that commuting is doing nothing more than moving our physical bodies from our homes to an office, to a factory or to some other place of work. As a software engineer, I wonder about the possibilities of turning things around; of bringing work to our bodies.

Some people telecommute. That's entirely possible for people whose primary work is to sit at a computer, phone or some other machinery that can be used almost anywhere. It's rather less practical for a steel worker; a steel plant isn't something that can readily be put next to each steelworker's home. Steelworkers don't telecommute. Others don't telecommute because they really need to be able to be face-to-face to the people that they work with. Emails and phone calls are fine, but they only work so well.

The possibilities beyond telecommuting are somewhat in the realm of science fiction, but bear with me as I wonder "what if?".

Suppose there were office buildings in your community that served as your place of work. Instead of commuting to a building far away that is devoted to your company, you commute to a building close by that is devoted to your community. So when you walk into your place of work, you will be in a building populated by employees of hundreds of different companies. It would serve as a place where people could telecommute. In truth, it would serve as a place where their work could be made to be close by.

The internet is the "information superhighway", and that's exactly what we need if we want to bring our work closer to us. Instead of building wider and wider roads to handle the vast numbers of cars travelling to and fro, we can build wider and wider information pipes to let our work travel to and fro. It used to be that our work was the mountain and we were Mohammed; we went to our work. Today, we are the mountain and our work is Mohammed. These days, our work should be coming to us.

This follows roughly the same model as supermarkets. Our food comes to a place in our community where we can easily go and get it. That, instead of everyone driving to farms and ranches to get our food supplies. It's true of material goods, services and even gasoline. All of the things that we need are efficiently brought to our communities - except our work.

If our work was as close to our homes as are all the goods and services that we use, then we would no longer need cars, trains, busses and the like to move us quite so far. Highways and railways would be reserved for those moving goods about, and for those who are travelling for the sheer joy of it. People who want to commute could always commute to a community office building in another community.

The first people to be able to use community offices would be those who telecommute today. They are the people who work entirely with information. Writers, artists, programmers, accountants and a number of other professionals could begin today. Because most people need to coordinate with other people, some of the latest and greatest technologies would have to be brought to each office. Things like quality teleconferencing would have to become commonplace.

Community offices can be used today by some professions that you might not expect. How about pilots? Today, the military uses a form of telecommuting to permit their people to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) all around the world from central locations in the United States. While I wouldn't lump the military in with community offices for reasons of security, the fact is that telecommuting isn't just for office workers.

Today, there is the highly experimental technique called telesurgery, where doctors in one location operate on a patient in another location by using robotic tools. The doctor is performing the surgery, only his hands are manipulating controls HERE to control surgical instruments THERE, relying on cameras to see what needs to be done. You might imagine how invaluable this could be if the surgical tools could be placed in remote locations to permit skilled doctors around the world to help people anywhere at any time. Imagine if the surgical tools could be brought to your home to permit a doctor in another state to perform the surgery.

Telesurgery is part of a broader capability called telepresence. In telepresence, an operator has controls HERE to control tools and machinery that are THERE. The information superhighway makes sure that the two remain connected to each other. Community offices would take advantage of telepresence to permit almost anyone to accomplish their work from the safety, comfort and convenience of location near to their home. Imagine all the steelworkers for a steelmill in Pennsylvania living throughout the country (or even the world), networked together by voice and video, handling their respective tasks through telepresence techniques. For one thing, that mill that has to operate 24 hours a day wouldn't need a night shift anymore. People in another part of the world where it's day could operate the machinery.

Does everyone end up working in community offices? Do we ever physically interact with anyone at work ever again? Well, even if everyone worked in community offices, we would still physically interact with the people that we live near, because they'd go to the same community offices that we do. Those are the people we'd go to lunch with, chat with by the coffee maker and in the copy room.

If you're a believer in globalization of trade, then you're a believer in community offices because they make the employee's physical location inconsequential to the job that they can perform. Telepresence lets everyone in the world work together more effectively, and lets those most qualified for individual jobs be able to access those jobs. It does nothing for cultural and language barriers, of course. Those are things that we have to address as human beings, which is where technology always ends up.

Examination of Blessings

The Catholic Church has an important, though seemingly little-used technique called an Examination of Conscience. The booklet that I have dates from the 1950s, when religion was still a key component of everyday life. It is invaluable because it permits the reader to take a hard look at their behavior in an effort to understand what mistakes they have made, a bit like having someone else scrutizing their life. Thanksgiving is a time when we try to remember the myriad blessings, gifts, opportunities and privileges that have come to us, usually through no act of our own. Having an Examination of Blessings booklet would do wonders to help each of us appreciate what we have.

I can suggest two ways to examine the blessings in your life.

The first is to study history to learn what life was like for the generations that have come before us. Try century by century, working back in time. You know what life was like in 2000. One way to get a sense of life in the year 1900 is to watch the PBS show "1900 House", which lets a family live life in 1900 London. A way to get a sense of life in the year 1800 is to visit colonial Williamsburg or an equivalent restored site. Living historical museums exist around the country. Visit one. It's a great way to develop a sense of the blessings that you have.

The second way to examine blessings in your life is to review your personal life as it is today in terms of the PIES Relationship. That means considering your situation physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.

Physically, are you healthy? Do you have use of all of your senses? Consider how amazing each sense is, and how much you'd be impacted by the loss of any of them. Or even being impaired in any of them. You can walk and talk. Many people cannot. Those are blessings that have been granted to you that you take for granted every day. How about breathing? You're alive; perhaps the most amazing gift of all.

Emotionally, you have moments of happiness and sadness, frustration and triumph, love and hate. These are affirmations of being alive, of having relationships with other people. You may not be absolutely in love with everyone you know, but imagine life without your emotions, and without your ability to be emotionally moved by others.

Intellectually, you can enjoy vast storehouses of wisdom and knowledge, not the least of which is the world wide web itself. You can access the information, add to it and appreciate it. You can hone your knowledge of the world around you and pursue ways to apply that knowledge for your betterment and the bettermend of others. Imagine a world without libraries, museums, teachers, schools and books.

Spiritually, you live in a society where the rule of law, ethical behavior and freedom of religion are guiding principles. Imagine living in a society where behavior that you know to be unethical is the established norm, where those who hold your beliefs are persecuted or where lawlessness reigns supreme.

That is a basic Examination of Blessings. Having discovered the remarkable ways in which modern Americans are blessed far more than most who have ever lived, think about how your actions, attitudes and choices constitute blessings for others. You are a powerful force, and a blessing in your own right. Each day you have the opportunity to give the gift of yourself to those around you, ensuring that you appear at the top of many other people's list of things that they are thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Anarchy is Best

Laws exist because the people who control the lawbooks see people doing something that they don't want happening. Blammo - new law. Throughout history the people who have controlled the lawbooks have ranged from theocrats to autocrats to democrats to dictators. Each is characterized by a particular modes of operation, politics and so on, but when the governing bodies have said "no" to a particular behavior, a law was created to declare that behavior as being out of bounds.

The first laws on the books are usually things like "Don't kill anyone." Most societies aren't interested in having a dwindling population. People are the most important component of a society. After all, no people, no society. And the law gets on the books right away because we all know that people commit murder for any of a number of reasons. Other laws address things like personal property, rights and obligations, etc. Pretty much all the stuff that ensures that a society doesn't collapse into anarchy.

Whoops. But anarchy is best! Anarchy is a society that has no government. That means no laws, no rules. Surely that equates to chaos and disorder. Unfortunately, it does. People remain people, all too often driven by animal passions that they simply cannot master. Those passions drive us to behaviors that are not helpful to the health of the society. As a result, the lawbooks get loaded up.

So how is anarchy best? Anarchy as a form of government can only be viable when all of the citizens of the society implicitly agree on behaviors that really are healthy for the society. If no citizen was ever tempted by their animal passions nor even reasoned desires to kill, then no law would be on the books about murder. Continue with that to cover every manner of behavior and you can eliminate all laws on the books. Everyone would instinctively behave in ways that reinforce the health of the society. That's why anarchy is a wonderful, though unachievable, goal.

In America, we're very keen on technological advances, yet those advances that give us such wonderful gains are also tempting us in new ways to do things that are unhealthy for our society. There are no laws on the books for painlessly desintigrating someone's skin. Yet if somebody comes up with a device that quickly and accurately removes the surface layer of any object (valuable in the world of materials processing), it could be misused for that very purpose. Is it an assault? Is it a theft? Nobody ever thought about the very notion of modifying someone else's body in such a way. Existing laws are going to have to be changed, or new ones will have to be formulated.

I wonder what could be done by starting from the base of anarchy (no laws), and then writing as few laws as possible that covers every possible temptation that a man can have that acts against the health of the society. Such an experiment would require that we understand two important things: what are the instincts of men, and what is a healthy society. When we focus on those two things and thoroughly understand them, we will have as few laws as possible. In time, we may be able to get down to one law: In all ways, act for the betterment of the society. It's not anarchy, but it's pretty close.

Canyon Carving

We're all good at something. Maybe it's our work. Maybe it's a hobby. Whatever it is, it's usually something that we've worked at; something that we've been practicing in an effort to hone our abilities. Usually we have a goal to be good at something and then work to achieve that goal. Sometimes it works the other way, and we find ourselves good at something because we've been working at it.

Think about what you're good at today, apart from the obvious things that you're proud of and that served as your life goals. What things are you good at now that you really didn't plan on being good at? Sometimes these things sneak up on us, and we've gotten good at them so gradually that we never even noticed it happening.

I can casually spin a television remote control on one finger. At first, I could only do half a turn. Then a full. Then two. Now, I'm working on three and more. I can't even count the turns because they happen so fast. It's a skill that I've developed. Unfortunately, it's a skill that means that I've had a television remote control in my hand so much that I've accumulated an odd skill related to it. I have the skill because I've been practicing it.

I just wrote an article on learning about someone just by dancing with them. That's another skill. Not the dancing so much as the ability to learn from the dancing. It's a skill that I'm rather happier about, but it came to me as a result of my personality and my frequent dancing. I have the skill because I've been practicing it.

I think of others who are really good at "talking trash": the skill of countering one insult with another. Those who are good at it have been practicing it. They've spent a certain amount of time exchanging mock insults with others. They've refined the skill, picked up 'better' insults and honed their reaction times. Another skill that many accumulate today is that of gossip. So many in our society are really accomplished at finding out what's going on in other people's lives, and then repeating every dirty little detail to others as a means of making casual conversation.

There is so much little stuff in our lives that we blithely experience and react to without considering what it is doing to us. We're training ourselves, just a tiny bit at a time, only we're not even aware that we're doing it because the little stuff is so incredibly little.

If you don't believe in the power of the little stuff, consider the Grand Canyon. It was carved by the power of moving water. Wind and water are little things, but if they're patient, they can turn mountains into plains, and plains into canyons. All it takes is time.

Take a hard look at your life and think of what you're good at. Then consider what it is that you practiced in order to become so accomplished at that thing. If you don't like your skill, pick a new one. All you need is to start doing 'this little thing' instead of 'that little thing' and then let time take care of the rest. You'll have a canyon in no time.

The Four Minute Date

A classic way to find out how you get along with someone is to take a trip together. In fact, trying to accomplish any task with another person is a great way to learn about how the two of you interact. Experiencing something at the same time as another person is dramatically less valuable when trying to understand your relationship. That's because your ability to learn about them is predicated on observing them as they interact with other people or other things, when you're really trying to figure out if they interact well with YOU.

I'm an avid country dancer. I've been two-stepping at least once a week for the past decade. I've danced with hundreds of different women, and each one dances differently. Being the observant sort that I am, I've found that I can learn volumes about a woman by dancing with her. One dance, and I feel like I've been on a date with her. One that lasts for the duration of one song. It's a bit like a four minute date.

I approach her and ask her for a dance. I walk her to the dance floor. I take her in my arms and start us off on the dance. I may dance quickly or slowly, depending on the beat of the misic, but I'm leading us around the dance floor. I'm making discussion and trying to entertain my dance partner as we move. I protect my dance partner from possible collisions or the occasional hazard that might appear on the dance floor. When the song ends, I walk my partner back to where I found her and thank her for the dance.

That's the four minute date. It has the exact same pattern as a classic date. The man picks the woman up at her home. He travels with her to the place that they're going to spend their time together. He leads her through the entertainment, and ensures that she is able to enjoy it safely. When the date is finished, he drives her back to her home and thanks her for joining him.

I learn plenty about a woman during the course of that one dance. Does she ever look at me? Is she moving the same way that I do? I'm known for being a smooth dancer, and that lets me sense every little movement in my partner. I've danced with very few women who move smoothly who don't have a similarly mellow disposition. In the same way, I've met few women who move abruptly who don't have a similarly abrupt disposition. The way that a woman moves when she dances is an indication of how she likes to interact in a relationship.

Think I'm overdoing it a bit here? I've tested this out a few times with women that I dance with regularly. I've described to them how they are in a relationship, and I've been on target each time. If you look, listen and feel, you'll be able to learn volumes about your dance partner.

Consider some other types of dancing. Freestyle, for example. At best, it's two people dancing near each other. As a result, they're not working together in any significant way. It's two people who are unsure how to relate to each other. If they ARE in contact with each other, it's in an immodest way, to the point of scandal. You can well imagine what kind of a date that corresponds to.

I've probably learned most from two-stepping because it very strongly requires the couple to work together. If we don't, then we bump into each other, fail to complete turns, twist in uncomfortable ways, etc. The first time I ever took a dance lesson, the instructor said to the men, "Your partner is a paint brush, the dance floor is a canvas, now paint a beautiful picture." It is yet another distillation of the idea that the two people are working towards more than just grabbing someone of the opposite sex, or of being seen with someone of the opposite sex. The two of you are working to paint that beautiful picture.

That's the goal of your dance. That's what you're working together to do. That's how you find out so much about your dance partner. Are you painting a beautiful picture or some kind of pop art that is little more than splashes of color? Or is it even just some simple straight lines that aren't much to look at? Is the painting that you're after the same one that your dance partner is after? Is your dance partner even on the same canvas that you are?

If you have the opportunity, go dancing with your boyfriend or your girlfriend. I know that most men dread dancing. Most men also dread opening up in relationships as well. Give it a shot. Something simple. No, not slow dancing. If you like action, try taking a swing dancing lesson. It's a very simple dance that anyone can learn. If you're more formally minded, try waltz. It's a beautiful dance, also quite simple to learn.

Regardless of the dance you choose, pay attention to how the two of you interact during the dance. Does she try to lead? Is that what you want? Does he lead hesitatingly? Is that what you want? Is he willing to make mistakes? Is she willing to ignore his mistakes? Does a normally aggressive women become rather submissive when you show that you can dance well? All of these things correspond to relationships because dancing is relating. Ultimately, the longest dance is marriage - the lifelong dance. I hope that the two of you stay in step the whole way through.

Life Bulimia

When I try to explain something to someone, I usually start at a point that the person I'm talking to can relate to, and then work back in logical steps to the point I'm trying to make. It's a bit like going for a walk. This particular walk is rather unpleasant because I'm discussing two unpleasant topics: birth control and bulimia.

Many will immediately think "Bulimia is unpleasant, but what's the big deal with birth control? That's just taking a pill or using a condom." The unpleasantness is found at the destination as I attempt to walk you from "bulimia is unpleasant" to an understanding that "birth control is just like bulimia".

Bulimia is characterized by binge eating, followed by a purging. The purging can be accomplished by vomiting, fasting and the use of chemicals to pass the food quickly, among other techniques. The idea is that somebody takes in a lot of food in a desperate grab for comfort, only to need to get that food out of their body because they don't want the calories.

Some of you may have already made the logical leap to birth control. Sex is the binge, while birth control is the purge. People comfort themselves with acts of sex, while believing that any pregnancy is too much pregnancy. The use of a condom in sex is a perfect analogue to vomiting. I told you this would be unpleasant. The seed of creation enters the woman's body during sex, only to be taken out again because the consequences of the action are unacceptable. This is the same as life's sustenance entering someone's body during eating, only to be taken out again because the consequences of the action are unacceptable.

Bulimia is the result of taking the ordered action of eating, using it in a disordered way, and then attempting to deal with the situation by employing another disordered act. Recreational sex is the result of taking the ordered action of sex, using it in a disordered way, and then attempting to deal with the situation by employing another disordered act.

The ordered version of eating is to consume food that sustains a healthy body and mind. The ordered version of sex is to engage in sex to demonstrate committed love for one's spouse. That means sex that remains open to the creation of new life. Birth control is a statement that the two people want to swallow their food for the flavor, but not absorb the calories that are part and parcel of the act of eating. They want to feel the bliss of sexuality, but not accept the creation that is part and parcel of the act of sex.

Bulimia and similar conditions are rightly termed disorders, yet our society views all forms of birth control (including abortion) as relatively normal. Where did we lose our notion of doing things that were natural, complete and sincere? If you don't need sustenance, don't eat. If you don't want to create a new life, don't have sex.

Eating is ordered. Eating that rejects digestion is a disordered use of eating. Sex is ordered. Sex that rejects life is a disordered use of sex. The food bulimic believes that they are somehow worthless, which drives them to seek comfort in the consumption of food that they then reject. The life bulimic believes that the life that they might create is somehow worthless, which drives them to reject the possibility of creating that new life. Each is walking down an ordered path for the wrong reasons, resulting in a desire to reject the very thing that they sought.

Food bulimia and life bulimia. They are the same. Each is a disorder. I can understand people suffering from each and I hope for their successful treatment, but I cannot understand claims that they are not both disorders. Recognize your illness and you're halfway to your cure.

Blogging

There was a time when we had only three television channels, and city newspapers were the primary means of finding out what was going on in our communities. Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson became news and entertainment icons the like of which we will not see again. That's because they were the focus of the few companies that held the reins of American media. In the same way, there were iconic journalists in print, and their readers knew them well, whether they agreed with them or not. These were the mountains of media, whose snow-capped peaks were truly the pinnacles of journalism, backed by money, influence and power.

Enter the world wide web. Slowly but surely, people began to realize that the web is a publishing medium, just as paper or broadcasting is. Not only was it a medium, but it was an accessible medium. Almost anyone could publish to it. There were the usual challenges associated with coming up with the content to publish, but the actual task of getting the content out to the readers was effortless. That's because the readers came to the creators instead of the other way around.

In settings where publishing costs are high, the published content must be able to pay those costs. With costs so low on the internet, the published content can be focused on topical niches or fanciful distractions and yet remain financially tenable. This is why it seems that every topic is discussed on the web, no matter how obscure. We are an affluent society, and we publish because we can.

This brings us to blogging, which is a rather difficult concept to nail down. A blog is perhaps best described as a train of thought in print and images. "Opinion Dump" is on the fringe of that description, as it is actually a series of articles in the style of an opinion/editorial column. John A, who suggested that I do this article, has a blog of his own that is clearly in the mainstream of blogging, covering topics that occur to him either in brief or at length. Other blogs read more like a personal diary, outlining the events of the author's life.

No matter the style or the content, blogs have the trait of being part of a rising din of published content that is coming from the masses. Instead of the forces of capitalism and politics controlling what is considered the cream that rises to the top of the publishing world, the web uses the brain-dead-simple shotgun technique; everyone writes, and the readership chooses its preferences. It's an extremely egalitarian system. Very democratic.

Ah, democracy. Note that in America, we use representative democracy. We elect specialists, known as politicians, to spend all their time trying to figure out how to deal with the day to day operation of our nation, our states and our cities. We do that in an effort to ensure that we have the highest quality specialists administering the process. Yes, you laugh. But that's really the idea behind it.

The same could be said of the publishing world as it was before the web. Only the highest quality authors were permitted to speak using the precious commodities of newspaper page space or broadcast time. Again, so goes the theory. If you're a believer in pure democracy, you'll love the web because it lets everyone publish whatever they want to say, and what people like, they'll read.

It's an impressive experiment, because we're going to find out some things about human nature as a result of blogging. With anyone who can type, take a picture or shoot video becoming a journalist, we're going to find out if letting people read the opinions that they want to read is a good thing or not. Paid journalists are usually very diligent in validating the information that they publish because their paycheck hangs in the balance and they are accountable to a company for their content. Bloggers on the other hand can say pretty much whatever they want. If people like what they say, then they have a readership base. Accountability becomes purely an issue of retaining a group that originally agreed with the author. Remember: blogs tend to have niche followings.

On the other hand, there are some remarkably talented people out there. They have insights as well as literary and graphical skills that boggle the imagination. The web permits them to directly show the world what they've got, and hopefully the cream rises to the top and gets recognized. For example, there was a pilot for a television program that was panned by a media executive, but which was proven to be very popular among viewers who saw it on the web. The media executive reconsidered because the egalitarian web sidestepped him, permitting the customers to decide instead of him speculating what the customers wanted.

One thing about blogs that I really like is that more people are writing. In order to write well, an author must understand what they are writing about. Just try explaining something to a child. I you don't know what you're talking about, you're going to get into trouble. So when I think about people writing blogs, I'm inspired to believe that people are spending a little more time mulling over the topics that they are blogging on, even if they're only blogging about what happened during their day. They may see something in their writings that will inspire them to make a change for the better.

Another really good thing about blogging is that people around the world are blogging. A diary-style blog from Slovakia could well provide remarkable insights to people around the world. Reading a blog a day from a random person in a foreign country might show us that our view of the world is terribly myopic. Or that there are many people in the world who need our help.

One thing about blogs that makes me nervous is the fact that people with unhealthy attitudes can write at length about those attitudes and have their beliefs reinforced by others on the web who share those attitudes. People don't like to break up social circles, and once a number of people who agree with your views are drawn to you, you are less likely to risk damage to that circle if you should ever be inspired to make a change for the better.

Another dangerous aspect of blogs is journalistic integrity. Bloggers say whatever they care to. Truth is not necessarily the focus of a blog. In fact, I'd say that the most important thing about a blog to the author is the insistence that what they write is worth writing. A diary blog validates the author's actions. An opinion blog validates the author's opinions. And so on. Even worse, consider the use of blogs as intentional propaganda. That diary blog in Slovakia could be written by an oppressive government representative who paints a thoroughly innacurate view of the country. When can we trust a blog?

If you've never considered writing a blog, I encourage you to start one. Maybe all you need is a document on your computer that you update from time to time. Maybe your blog will be the next thing to go viral on the web. Either way, take some time to write down your thoughts. You'll find that you have to get them organized first, and then you have to figure out how to explain them all. It's a great exercise for the mind, and you may well learn something significant about yourself. In any case, your readers certainly will.

Man in Space. Or not.

Whether we evolved to be this way or God simply decided that we were going to be this way, we operate best in environments that have air, food, water, gravity and a certain amount of light and heat. Put a man in space and he dies. Fans of science fiction know that one of the most horrible ends for anyone is to be "spaced" or "sent out an airlock". It's an ugly way to die.

In order not to die, space-faring people must duplicate many of the conditions as found on Earth. Air, food, water, light and heat are manufactured in a little bubble around the people who go into space. The size of that bubble may vary from a special suit of clothes wrapped around the person, to a considerably larger bubble the size of the International Space Station.

Manufacturing gravity is a bit more difficult and nobody does that just yet. As a result, lots of effort is being expended to understand how to keep people healthy in weightless environments. You see, if you just float along inside your bubble and don't do the right things, you'll turn very fragile and eventually die. We were designed for life on Earth. We weren't at all designed to go into space. We have to take steps to ensure that we don't die "out there".

Why bother talking about this? Well, I like the idea of exploring the universe, and of making discoveries that will help us here on our home bubble - the Earth. Unfortunately, everything that explores the universe in person has to either orbit the Earth or just plain leave the Earth behind. To stay in orbit, stuff has to be moving at 17,500 MPH. To leave the Earth, stuff has to be moving at over 20,000 mph. That's like travelling from New York to Los Angeles in about 10 minutes. It's really fast.

EVERYTHING that is going to leave has to be accelerated to that speed. It doesn't matter if it's water, people, toilet paper or computers, it still qualifies as "stuff" and has to get up to that speed in order to go exploring. That takes a lot of power in a very short time. It's one of the reasons we have NASA. If you don't have "a collection of inventive and smart people" you don't get "stuff accelerating to 20,000 MPH".

NASA figures out how to get stuff to go fast, and they also spend a lot of work on figuring out how to ensure that people can survive in space. The lethality of problems is illustrated by the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia disasters. Getting to and from orbit is a tough problem to solve and it can and has resulted in disaster.

My question is this: why do we put people into space? I've just outlined the basic problem of getting stuff into space, how homo sapiens is ill-suited to be in space, and how we have to accelerate all the stuff that we need to survive up to really high speeds. What are the returns for all this?

Advocates of putting people into space will perhaps speak of the gut-level need for mankind to explore. It was that very sense of exploration that led to the discovery of, and ultimate settling of America by Europeans. There is also the more practical argument of having somebody at the problem site in order to use every facility of humanity to do the exploration. Having a human being on the Moon or on Mars is far more effective than just putting a rover there. People can improvise to solve problems and discover things that robots and science instruments simply cannot.

I don't buy either argument because of the current NASA program of the mars rovers. Spirit and Opportunity are a pair of robotic explorers that have been on Mars for almost three years now, driving across the surface of the planet, doing science and making discoveries. Unlike us, those rovers were designed to operate on Mars. They have limited senses, but their senses are good enough to provide science data for hundreds of engineers and scientists back here on Earth. They're on Mars now, for a combined cost of less than one billion dollars. In contrast, the manned program to Mars is looking to cost well over 100 billion dollars and won't be on Mars for at least another 14 years. When the robots develop a problem or encounter something new, a whole mess of engineers and scientists can combine their smarts to use whatever capabilities the rovers DO have to solve the problem. Humanity doesn't drop out of the loop just because we put a robot on Mars instead of a human being. We remain the explorers that we have always been.

Ultimately, I say that for now people should remain in the bubble that we were created for until we can figure out how to make new bubbles that will permit many people to go exploring. In the meantime, we should be creating robotic explorers for the environments that we are ill-suited for. This may smack of "If man was intended to fly, he would have been given wings." In response, I'd say that "If man was intended to go everywhere in person, the endoscope would never have been invented". Robots and sensors are needed to go where man is ill-suited to go. Let's push the envelope and create robots and sensors that will let everyone on Earth experience other worlds instead of moving the senses and abilities of just a few of us to those other worlds. However we improve robotics and sensors for other worlds, we will be improving them for our own world.

Look at computers. They've been reduced from the size of a room to the size of a paperback book with massive improvements in capacities and capabilities. Sensors are going the same route. Remember that problem of getting stuff up to speed so that we can go exploring? Our electronics are getting ever smaller, lighter and more capable, while our bodies remain unchanging with the same need for the bubble that we were designed for. When computers and sensors are down to the nanometer scale, we may find that we'll only have to get a couple pounds of electronics up to those really high speeds - instead of the tens of thousands of pounds required to have a bubble for a small crew of people. It just doesn't make sense to me to send people into space.

Digital Identification

There are many ways to identify yourself to another person. They can range from just showing your face to perhaps showing a pass to someone. When we show our face to a friend, they know many things about us and they will let us do a variety of things, according to our status with them. We might be able to borrow their lawnmower, but not their fancy car. When we show a pass to someone that we don't even know, they don't recognize us, but they recognize the pass. Because of that, they will let us do whatever specific things that holders of that pass are permitted to do.

That pattern carries through to many facets of our lives. We use our voice to identify ourselves to others over the phone, we use account numbers or signatures to identify ourselves to companies, we use our driver's license or our social security number to identify ourselves to government agencies, and so on. All of these forms of identification have been established to ensure that the people who should be permitted access to various services are able to do so - and that those who shouldn't be permitted to access them to be prevented from doing so.

When we work with computers, we frequently supply a user name combined with a Personal Identification Number (PIN) or a password as a means of identifying ourselves to the software that runs on the computers. As many people have learned, it is entirely possible for someone else to learn that information and then to masquerade as them, accessing services that are supposed to be reserved to them. Services such as withdrawing money from an ATM.

Just about everything that we use to identify ourselves has been stolen at one time or another. Our signatures are stolen by forgers. Our voices are stolen by impersonators. Our usernames and passwors are stolen by phishers. Our passes are stolen by yet more forgers.

Whenever someone steals identifying information, it constitutes a form of identify theft. By obtaining the information that identifies you to a computer, a thief has effectively stolen your identity as far as that computer is concerned. If that thief obtains enough information about you, they can do everything that you can do with computers.

These days, that a lot of stuff. Customer service employees don't know you at all, so if that thief has your username, password, date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc, they can answer all those security questions over the phone and the company employees won't hesitate to help the thief to all the services that you normally use. Computers are even less personal, and if the thief has your identifying information, they get to use the electronic services that you normally use. The computer believes that the thief is you.

Many companies and researchers are working on this problem. The solution has been to take a page from the olden days, when we identified ourselves by the way we look. Computers can be programmed to remember lots of things about our appearance and other things about our bodies. If we then approach a computer that has ever seen us before, it will recognize us in much the same way that our friends recognize us. The solution to the problem has been to recognize something about our bodies instead of recognizing something that we know, such as a password. This is the field of biometrics.

Biometrics is the study of measuring our bodies in a variety of ways. A promising biometric is the appearance of the eye. A computer uses a camera to look at your eye, and it remembers a variety of information about it. When the computer sees the same eye, it assumes that it is you. Because eyes are as individual as fingerprints, it's a good way to recognize people.

For a thief to steal your identity, they'd either have to steal your eye or figure out a way to show the computer a fake eye that matches your own. Neither is particularly practical for the typical thief. Combine the eye scan with other types of biometrics, such as fingerprint scanning or voice recognition, and you've made it even harder for someone to steal the information that identifies you. Someday we may include DNA scanning, requiring even more exotic techniques for thieves to steal your identity.

Now that you've got a way to reliably identify people to computers (and that means identification to strangers as well), what does Fort Data permit us to do? If Fort Data is really locked up tight and it can trust us to be us when we claim we're us, then Fort Data can be relied upon to provide all those delicate services that we were talking about. Services like tracking our health care information. Or our financial information. If you know that nobody is going to be able to get into your financial data unless you say so, you're going to be pretty happy to have that data stored in Fort Data. Without effective identification schemes, you're just assembling all your precious personal information in one place. That provides a greater incentive for thieves to be as sneaky as possible to steal your identifying information. If that identifying information is biometric data, they're going to have a very hard time indeed.

Digital Privacy

Most people are concerned about privacy in the digital age, where everything and anything that we do will be recorded by a computer somewhere. I heard a radio ad where a man was ordering a pizza, and the pizza company knew everything about the man's life, including some pretty personal stuff. That's not what's going to happen.

The way privacy will work in the future is that there will be a place where your data is stored. It will be a Fort Knox of data, with as much security as can possibly be put in place, both physical and electronic. Let's call it Fort Data.

Fort Data is set up such that you can let certain people record data about you. You'll let medical records be updated by your doctor. You'll let the phone company put phone call information into Fort Data. The pizza guys can even put a description of your favorite pie in there.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, huh? Now the pizza guys can go in and look at your medical records, right? Nope. Just as you control who can put what data INTO the records, you also control who can pull what data OUT of the records. Not only that, but you can have very close control over what they have access to.

For example, your medical records can be put into Fort Data with nauseating detail. When you want to fly on an airline, they may be legally required or just demand that you not have any communicable diseases. Instead of their screening software looking at all of your medical records, finding out that you have a bad heart or incontinence, all they can ask of Fort Knox is: Does this person have any communicable diseases? That's it. They can't find out what they are, how many there might be, or anything else. Just whether or not you have at least one.

So too, when you order your pizza, you decide what information the pizza company can find out about you. When you go to their web site, it may have a button to click to let them know your favorite pizza (taken from Fort Data), and there may be another button to let them know your home address when you say you want the pizza delivered. Of course, there will be a button to pay, but the pizza company doesn't need to know who the funds are coming from. All that needs to happen is that money has to appear in the pizza company's accounts. That happens because Fort Data does the transfer from your accounts to their accounts. If you pick up the pizza, all they get to see is you showing up to say that you get pizza #8816. It needn't be so sterile, but if you're worried about your privacy, you can avoid letting the pizza guys know anything about you, except what pizza you want.

Remember here that Fort Data did the transfer of funds so you could have your pizza. Fort Data remembers that. It remembers everything that you do. When you want to find out how much you've spent on pizza over the last year, you just ask. It knows that. When you want to see a chart of your cholesterol over time, it can show that to you because you've been visiting the doctor regularly and he's been updating your cholesterol level after each visit.

This all means that you have access to whatever data you want, that other people can put information into Fort Data when you say they can, and other people can pull information out when you say they can - and what they pull out can be really limited.

Another simple example is that you are a student at the local university and you want to go into the library. The library is only for use by university students. You wave your Fort Data identity card at the reader on the building to try to get in. The reader asks Fort Data if you are a university student. Fort Data says that you are, and the reader unlocks the door for you.

The reader only learned that you were a university student. It didn't learn your name, your address, your dorm, your grade point average, nothing. Just if you were a student, because that's all it needed to know.

Now comes the touchy part: law enforcement. Because people are not always good citizens, somebody has to be able to spot the bad ones. The information in Fort Data can be an invaluable resource to be able to do that. When an agent of law enforcement goes to poke around in Fort Data, realize that their actions are being recorded by Fort Data just like anyone else's would be. And law enforcement doesn't get free access. What they can do will be limited by law, just as they are limited now. Search warrants would be needed in order to poke around in an individual's information. Sometimes, searches would be limited to vague requests such as "Did they ever call Bob Jones?". So instead of looking at every phone call made, they would have to stick to questions that they can justify to a judge.

Or to us. Everything that a member of the law enforcement agencies looks at is going to be recorded by Fort Data. If I am being investigated by anyone, I will know it - unless the courts decide that the investigation warrants secrecy. The investigation will be recorded by Fort Data so that ultimately nothing is being done on the sly, but I won't be told that somebody is looking at my data.

So what we end up with is a vast repository of everything that we do, but we are the ultimate controller over our portion of that repository. Others can look at our data in a highly-regulated way, where the only exception is that law enforcement can look at the data subject to the checks and balances of the legal system which is obligated to watch over the members of the law enforcement world.

Oh, by the way, this means that we never fill out another form. If somebody needs information about us and we're okay with it, we permit them to go to Fort Data to get it. And Fort Data records the fact that they got it.

Perhaps the greatest danger will be that we will be asked if we want to let someone know some obscure score that is calculated from our Fort Data information. For example, today we have FICA scores. They tell banks and other lenders how we've been doing on paying our bills and whether we can be trusted with a loan. That's a pretty obscure bit of information, but who can we safely share that number with? We control the decision, but how can we know the implications of sharing it with a real estate agent or our employer?

As more and more stuff is collected in Fort data, we're undoubtedly going to start to see all sorts of calculations and tabulations that companies are going to want to run. A bank that wants to loan you money might want to make some calculation within Fort Data on your data to come up with a number that tells them whether or not to loan you money and at what interest rate. The calculations can all be done by Fort Data itself, such that the bank never sees your financial data. But once that number is calculated, won't other organizations and businesses be interested in it? If they ask to see your Bank of America Financial Score, is it a good idea to let them see it?

Next time, Digital Identification

Bill of Duties Revisited

Fellow blogger John A invited me to respond to the Bill of Rights with a corresponding Bill of Duties. I started to write up some legaleze-sounding gibberish that directly responded to the first two ammendments to the Constitution. As I was explaining the verbage, I quickly realized that I was trying to write something that told people to just behave themselves, for crying out loud.

But what qualifies as good behavior? As a Catholic, the answer popped into my head immediately: the ten Judeo-Christian commandments. A quick check on the web tells me that Islam also adheres to the essential points of the ten commandments. I was happy to see mention of things in the Qur'an such as "Keep one's promises" and "Be honest and fair". Those sorts of things are described in the Judeo-Christian Bible as well, just not as part of the ten commandments. These are our duties as citizens of a community.

If I had responded to the Bill of Rights point by point, I would have established limits on freedoms with the intent of avoiding social damage produced by excessive use of those freedoms. Such statements would originate in a desire to have citizens do no harm. That's known as the Silver Rule: Commit No Harm. A nation with the potential of America must rely on a finer, more demanding metric, the Golden Rule: Do Good Works.

It's not enough to say that what you're doing isn't hurting anyone. You must do things that help the community. A community only operates while its members are committed to the community above themselves. Look to anyone in your community who builds that community and you'll find someone who acts for the improvement of the community. They spend their time on the well-being of the community instead of spending it on themselves. Alas, we were given the Bill of Rights, which emphasized self without an equal or greater emphasis on the health of the community. That encouraged Americans to think in terms of personal freedoms and liberties without a commensurate consideration of the needs of the community.

So if I were making ammendments that were needed to establish a bill of duties, it would include things like telling the truth, respecting others, taking care of one's own health, pursuing one's own maturation, participation in community, etc, etc, etc. All the things that we were taught in kindergarten, before we got so clever and decided to focus on pursuing our civil liberties to extremes.

Ultimately, the founding fathers missed the mark. They believed that people were fundamentally Christian in demeanor, and that liberties could be granted to them without fear of an erosion of the society. Ultimately, society has flexed and twisted so much over the past 200 years that our freedoms have burdened us as terribly as the overbearing rule of a monarch.

Dollar Voting

In the days of the big corporate trusts, such as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, men were concentrating so much power in their own hands that they were rivaling the power of the federal government. They could make decisions that affected the lives of so many people that they were the equivalent of elected representatives. Even to the point of influencing the laws of the land, whether through straight lobbying or through bribery and other illegal means.

The men who controlled those trusts were voted in by America by virtue of what products and services we bought. Those men were also very aggressive individuals who pushed hard to get the money and power that they wanted, but Americans were complicit in the whole affair. Innocently so, but we were part of it all.

These days, we still have problems with large corporations that hold immense power. We keep buying their products and services, and they keep getting more and more money. That money is used to impact society. Given that a company's claimed first responsibility is towards its shareholders, that suggests that being a financially successful company is the top priority. Therefore, the impact on society is going to be colored by that priority.

In contrast, companies that are dominated by a single individual tend to operate along the lines of the ethics of that individual. Ted Turner is liberally-minded, so his media company is liberally-minded. Warren Buffett is mid-western straightforward, so his conglomerate is straightforward.

No matter the formation of the company or its reason for its behavior, all companies have an agenda that they are pursuing, and that agenda will have an impact on the society in which they operate. As shown by the years of the corporate trusts, that impact can rival or exceed the impact of the elected officials. This is where dollar voting comes in.

Each time we spend money, we are empowering someone to pursue their agenda. In fact, when you get your paycheck, you are being empowered to pursue your agenda. The issue comes in when individuals hold so much power that their agenda can be realized. Yet nobody ever voted for that agenda. Except through their purchases.

Consider J.K. Rowling's wealth. She has around a billion dollars as a result of writing the extraordinarily successful Harry Potter series. She possesses enough personal power to effect significant change in society. She can give massive amounts of money to any number of companies, charities and organizations that can accomplish any number of things. But nobody voted for her. Except when they bought the books, saw the movies, etc. Her ability to write books has endowed her with the power to affect social change.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are taking the money that they accumulated from their businesses and they're starting social programs for education and the treatment of Aids. This isn't a couple million dollars of social programs. This is tens of billions of dollars of social programs. And we voted for those programs when we bought our toothpaste and our PCs. We voted in Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Bill of Duties

When our country was founded, some very smart men realized that an important thing needed to be written down: what are the rights that citizens of the new nation possess? The Bill of Rights was born. At the time of its composition, being an American was a very new phenomenon, the nation being only a few years old. The Revolutionary War was rooted in a dissatisfaction with the treatment of the colonists by the British government, and we can see that dissatisfaction reflected in the Bill of Rights, which has a lengthy list of things that a government can't do to its citizens. It's a fine list.

Unfortunately for America, it is a list that is rooted in a reaction to the problems of that time, and there is an implicit assumption that the prevailing social order would remain. That is, America was full of people who were working hard to develop the land, explore, engage in commerce and raise families. People worked for a living, and the gap between the richest and the poorest was fairly narrow, relative to today. Most everyone was still close to the land. The industrial revolution simply hadn't arrived yet. Family was a critical part of life. It was the way it had been for hundreds of years and as far as the founding fathers were concerned, it was going to continue that way.

As a result, the founding fathers felt safe in their metaphorical pushing-away of the known evils of their beloved British Empire. If life had continued close to the land and to family, everything would likely have worked out. Unfortunately, the industrial revolution was soon to arrive.

Most everything that changes causes challenges to the existing social order. Some revel in the changes, while other are terrified by them. Usually, the young embrace the new, because both the old way and the new way are equally 'new'. When the industrial revolution arrived, the world reeled with the changes. Cities expanded and become centers of production of goods. Efficiency of machinery meant that fewer farmers were needed in the fields, and so on. It was a lot of changes, and the existing social order flexed in response to the changes.

This is where the Bill of Rights comes back into the picture. When all those changes were taking place, whether originating in the industrial revolution or in any of a number of other ways, the prevailing social structures constituted the fences and borders that decided how the society would react. The Bill of Rights is one such fence. More accurately, it is the removal of some fences and borders that used to be in place. Governments used to tell people what they could and could not talk about, or what sorts of religious expression were permitted, etc. Those are some serious fences. The Bill of Rights knocked them down.

I know that I wouldn't want to live in a society where the government dictated what I could say in public. I likely couldn't write these articles in the free association style that I use. I'd probably have to have a lawyer look them over to make sure that I wasn't saying anything I shouldn't.

That said, there are limits to all things. It's not legal to threaten the President of the United States. You can't say stuff like that. You also can't slander people or commit libel. So there are at least SOME limits on freedom of speech, contrary to the claims of the Bill of Rights (it does say "no law" after all).

Why do we have these laws? Because it is in the best interest of the nation to have them. Said another way, there is no value to the community to let people threaten the President, nor to commit libel or to slander another person. Those are reflections of the duties of the citizens of the United States.

That brings me to the topic of the article: Bill of Duties. The Bill of Rights opened up new territory of freedom, but without any statement on how much is too much. A Bill of Duties would be a balancing statement to help us figure out where the limits are.

For example, what if the Bill of Duties said that we had a duty to use our skills for the betterment of the community? Smart people would then spend time trying to figure out what "betterment" boiled down to, making laws that were in support of that goal of betterment.

What if the Bill of Duties said that we had a duty to aid in the upbringing of children in our community? Laws would be passed to ensure that many more teachers, mentors and instructors would be available to our children. Those teachers would be mindful of their duties towards those children and would also instill that ethic in those children. They would be dutiful to the children who are younger still.

It would be an interesting experience to collect a bunch of our best and brightest minds, assemble a Bill of Duties, and see where that might lead this country - no matter the curveballs that were thrown at it. We need to be more than just the land of the free. We need to be the land of the dutiful.

Five Sigmas

Mainstream. Radical. Centrist. Extremist. These are the terms we use to talk about groups of people. The world of statistics uses another term: sigma. One sigma covers about 68% of a population. That's the most mainstream group. Two sigmas covers a bit more than 95% of the population, meaning that the second sigma included a new 33% of the population. That group isn't mainstream. They're more polarized in their thinking or their behavior or whatever it is that we're looking at.

Note that the 33% that are included by a second sigma are the people that are more extreme on both sides of the mainstream. If we're talking about messiness, then that 33% includes 16.5% who are more messy and 16.5% who are less messy than the mainstream.

What happens when we go to three or four sigmas? The third sigma group comprises only about 4% of the population - 2% on either side of the two sigma group. So those people are really messy or really neat. The fourth sigma group only has 0.26% of the population, and those people are just abominable slobs or neurotic neatnicks.

Statistics doesn't stop there. You can keep adding sigmas until you're blue in the face, although after a while you're talking about percentages that are really tiny. I'm interested in what happens when we get to five sigmas.

That next group, the five sigmas, make up 0.0063% of the population. That's one person in 16,000 or so. They're so messy or so neat that their life is severely impacted by their behavior. It's sad that they are so severely challenged, but there's another effect waiting in the wings for the six sigmas.

At this point, let's remember two things:

1. Populations don't actually fall into exact statistical curves like this. A bell curve is a general approximation. We're not doomed to always fill it out exactly. I'm using it for the purpose of illustrating a point about extremism.

2. The bell curve distribution can be roughly applied to many aspects of people (and other things besides). Height, weight, intelligence, run speed, introversion, aggression, you name it; measure it in a large population that is governed by biology and you're going to end up with a big mainstream element and smaller and smaller groups of extremists at either end of the spectrum that you've chosen.

What six sigmas face is having a feature about themselves which is very out of the ordinary. Most people don't have it and likely can't identify with it. Because we're social creatures, we like to relate to others. But if the mainstream can't identify with my extremism, I'm likely to seek out others who share it.

A couple hundred years ago, a man who was seven feet tall was a rarity. Just as rare today, but there were fewer people back then and they had a difficult time finding each other. In a collection of villages with a combined population of 16,000, there was perhaps one man that tall. If he wanted to interact with other people, he walked between villages. Worse, nothing about society was geared to support that man's height. The people in the mainstream didn't care to cater to his needs, nor to explore the advantages of his height. As far as the people in those villages were concerned, he was an oddity.

Today, men who are seven feet tall are still a rarity, but because our population is so much larger and because we can all find each other so much more easily (cars, planes, phones, email, etc.), the social support structures come into being. Today, there are a number of organizations for tall people. There are also organizations for short people. There are organizations for all sorts of people, according to extreme traits that they have. There are also organizations for extreme experiences that people have encountered, including surviving an exit from an aircraft by ejection seat.

That's the simple, straightforward side of the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it has a darker side as well. Some number of anti-social people turn to crime or grief among their neighbors simply because it suits their desires. A smaller set of those anti-social people are interested in socializing with other like-minded people in order to commit grief upon the world. In this day and age, they can find each other, band together and create their own support structures.

So it is with every extremism that people can possess. As a population grows larger and makes communication between its members easier, there will be more and more cases of highly motivated extremists coming together, forming support groups, and reinforcing their own extremist views. Take any bad habit that you have and extend it out to an extreme. Now apply that extreme to a whole group of people who band together to reinforce that habit to the point where, to them, it becomes a good thing.

This is what has happened to a number of things in our society. The number of homosexuals in our society reached the tipping point. They have "come out of the closet" in sufficient numbers to establish a strong self-supporting structure. The word "gay" no longer means "happy", but "homosexual".

What about pedophiles? Without the stealth of the internet, their ability to interact would be severely diminished. Given enough pedophiles, we might begin to see pedophile zones spring up in remote areas of the country or of the world. If they're not already there.

The effect applies to the good as well, of course. The altruistic band together and do good works in our society. Huge numbers of volunteer and not-for-profit organizations exist in order to help others in our society. You hear about them all the time because they're always asking you for support.

Down the road, the question is one of how extreme the extremists will become? What about the people who are out at seven, eight and nine sigmas in their extremism? There are extremely few of them, but they feel very alienated from the rest of society. They might be geniuses beyond words who simply have no peers. When the five or six of them who are alive in the entire world find each other, something amazing might develop. Similarly, when the five or six socially-minded mass murderers come together, will they create an organization that will produce abominable results? Is that where Al Qaeda is today?

Extremist are motivated by the very fact that they are different from other people. They cannot find comfort in the everyday, commonplace events because they don't perceive those events the same way that the mainstream does. Motivated extremists can be a destabilizing effect on a society. The next time you casually toss aside an isolated, bizarre event or action by someone, consider what would happen if that person had a whole support structure behind their attitudes? With a large enough population, they'll have a club that they'll belong to for that very behavior.

Relationship PIES - Marriage

This is the seventh and final part in a multi-part series of articles.

A relationship that plumbs the depths of intimacy in the physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual requires a certain amount of commitment in order to be healthy. Imagine emotionally intertwining who you are with someone else, only to have that someone else decide that they want to jerk free of that entanglement. That is just a terribly damaging act, and divorces illustrate just how painful it can be. The greater the depth of intimacy, the greater the pain.

Not only do deep relationships require commitment, but they also seek balance. If I pursue depth of intimacy in the intellectual, I'm probably going to seek it in the other three aspects as well. That's just part of being human. We want the whole package. A common reason for people not pursuing the whole package is cynicism; the lack of belief that intimacy in a given aspect is even possible. It takes trust to accept the possibility that such depth of intimacy in so many areas can happen with another human being.

And all this brings us to the topic of marriage. Consider the notions that greater depth of intimacy implies greater commitment, and that we seek balance in all four aspects of relating. The greatest physical intimacy is procreative - sex. If a couple has chosen to be that physically intimate, then it suggests that they are equally intimate in the emotional, intellectual and spiritual. A relationship that involves sex without similar levels of intimacy in the other aspects will lead to discontent or even disaster.

A good marriage is one where the man and woman commit to each other completely. This means that they have permitted themselves to open up to each other physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Given such a setting, what are they committing to each other about? Buying and selling cars? Writing books? No, those aren't implicit in a deep, intimate relationship between human beings. What is implicit, then? Children.

Remember that the best marriage has great and balanced intimacy in all four areas. If you're being physically intimate and are committed to each other and your relationship, then you accept the healthy completion of that intimacy. Holding back will jeopardize the relationship. Refusing to say why you don't want to move to a new city is an intellectual withholding. Lying about why you're crying at a certain moment is an emotional withholding. Not wanting to have children is a physical withholding.

Holding back from commitment in a marriage is going to complicate matters and quite probably lead to disaster in the relationship. That's because of the desire for depth and balance. The whole picture is complicated by the fact that none of us has the complete and perfect understanding of how to have healthy relationships. But imagine a couple that has entered marriage with the agreement that they will have no children. A few years later, one or the other comes to understand that children would be a deeper intimacy between the two of them. One will want to pursue greater depth, while the other with withhold. Tension results, and possibly disaster. Nobody wants to hear "no" to a request for greater intimacy and commitment in a relationship.

A choice to bear and raise children is really the ultimate in relationships for people. We can pursue great depth of relationships that emphasize a particular aspect of relating, but because of a lack of balance in the other aspects, it will feel incomplete and we will be discontent whenever we have an opportunity to explore the depths of the unbalanced aspects. That is, if we have a relationship of great emotional depth and an opportunity comes to share a spiritual intimacy, there will be a disconnect between the two people. People usually work around such shortcomings by learning to avoid certain areas of their relationship, and that is terribly limiting. Many people learn to avoid areas of relating altogether because they are so practiced at it from prior relationships. Said another way, they dodge topics and issues because they've been burned in the past.

If you are of a mind to pursue a marriage with someone, remember that you are approaching the greatest intimacy that people can experience, and that you will find the greatest joy when you know how to both plumb the depths of the four aspects of relating as well as balance them. If you hold back, or if you choose to unbalance your relationship - or are faced with someone who does either - then the relationship will suffer. No relationship is perfectly deep and balanced, but you and your prospective spouse should surely be aware of the possibilities and the pitfalls. Study the task of loving. You will benefit and your children will benefit by your example.

This concludes the Relationship PIES series.

Relationship PIES - Dating

This is the sixth in a multi-part series of articles.

If you want to develop a relationship with someone, you've gotta pursue a balance of the four aspects of a PIES relationship. Start shallow and work to depth, intensifying in each of the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

How does a PIES date go? In truth, dating the way that you probably think about it is a bad idea from the very start. Extensive one-on-one time with a man or a woman that you are interested in is just not a good idea. That tends to quickly produce a little bubble world where the two people relate to each other in ways that they are most comfortable with, ignoring the need to relate in areas that they are less comfortable with.

We're shooting for a balance in the four areas, and a good way to do that is to involve other people in the relationship. Ideally, we want to avoid focusing our attention on a single person. Instead, we want to have a dozen relationships going all at one time, each at a level that works with that person. This isn't anything new, of course. You have a relationship with your family, with your coworkers, with each of your friends, and so on. Unfortunately, we're constantly faced with relationship that aren't going to build any depth, which is why we grasp at the least bit of depth - even when that depth is guaranteed to be in only one aspect. One aspect is better than none, right?

Unfortunately, not. So many people develop strong single-aspect relationships. The classic is the strongly physical relationship, where the two people do many things together, but they never share anything about themselves with each other, they never discuss what's going on in the world, and they just don't get into the nitty-gritties of what really motivates them, their dreams and hopes, etc. We turn our backs on the aspects that we don't want to explore, building a kind of fantasy relationship that will crumble as soon as it is put to the test.

The test comes about when other people are added to the mix, and when they throw curves at the relationship that the two people were diligently avoiding because of the "work" involved. They have no interest in possibly sabotaging their physical relationship because it's the best that they have going. It's better than nothing. Yet life does throw curves at relationships, and the relationship that survives the jostling and bumping is the strong one. It's the balanced one. It's the PIES one.

So which relationship is going to survive? Well, that takes us back to spirituality, which is really the cornerstone of any relationship. If two people are physically attracted to each other, emotionally compatible and intellectually challenged by each other, a disconnect on spirituality is just going to be a drain on anything else that they have. Remember that spirituality is about our basic motivations in life. What we believe at a fundamental level. If I believe that a loving family is important to my relationship with my girlfriend and she believes that family has no real role in our relationship, we're going to lock horns in a fundamental way.

To avoid locking horns over the big stuff, we need to be always looking for what's best for a relationship. For example, can a relationship operate without a loving family being involved? Sure. But it's going to be handicapped. And that brings us back to involving other people in a relationship. Those other people can be a reality check for the relationship. That's true only if those other people have a healthy understanding of relationships. Because we're the reality check for so many other people's relationships, we need to be studying relationships and understanding them.

Don't get me wrong about the non-spiritual aspects of relating. They're still critical, because those aspects are part of us. But without the spiritual, any relationship will lack fundamental resilience.

In summary, if you're trying to develop a relationship with someone, stop being insular and focus on getting your relationship out in the open where others can see it. Make your relationship something to be proud of, not something to sneak by others. As you work on your relationship, ensure that you develop it in a balanced way, avoiding the temptation of delving deeply into one area while letting other areas atrophy. Depth is very appealing to us, but depth without breadth produces a relationship that will eventually fall over.

Next time, marriage.