Another Florida primary election, another opportunity for Republicans to pander to anti-Castro sentiment among bitter Cuban Americans. Mitt Romney and Newt Gringrich are chasing the votes of Miami hardliners who are still angry about losing their assets to the Castro regime 50 years ago. These people generally favour of a continued trade embargo, in spite of its well-documented failure, in the illusory hope of exacting some sense of revenge. Only Ron Paul has had to courage to state the obvious and to call for renewing diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Other leading Republican candidates have failed to show any leadership on this matter and Ron Paul has an opportunity to attack their fundamentalist position and to ask the following questions:

1. Why do US companies have to suffer from the embargo while others don’t?
While US companies are barred from doing business in Cuba, foreigh companies from all over the World are winning contracts and market share. Melia Hotels from Spain operates 7 hotels in Cuba, government officials are buying their cars from French and German car manufacturers and Singapore has sent a brand new platform to support deepsea offshore drilling in Cuba last year. Meanwhile American companies, the most natural trading partners in the region, are watching by the sidelines.

2. Why does agriculture get an exception?
Indeed, while the embargo lives on, lobbyists from the (already highly subsidized) agriculture and pharma industries have succeeded in opening up trade with Cuba in 2000. A decade later, Cuba gets most of its chicken and rice from the US. Why this exception? It’s not like Cubans are starving or suffering from lack of resources. In fact, Cubans have a longer average life expectancy than Americans and witnessing a worrying increase in obesity. Agribusiness lobbyists have managed to get that lift the embargo on their products by arguing that the embargo would otherwise cost American jobs. The exact same argument could be used by other industries. Ford and GM (whose beautiful cars from the 50s are still being used all over Cuba) could start selling there again and maybe save a few of those precious Detroit jobs in the process.

3. Why don’t we apply the lessons learned elsewhere?
In the 90s, Clinton lifted the embargo and restored diplomatic relations with Vietnam, angering in the process some Veteran’s organizations in the US. It was a small political price to pay which yielded huge economic dividends for both countries with trade and foreign direct investment continuously growing since, lead by such companies as Intel and Nike. Increased trade also opened the dialogue on other matters such as human rights or military collaboration. While a shift to democracy is not yet in sight for Vietnam or China, communism, at least in the economic sense of the term, has been vanquished by opening up the trade embargos. It’s obvious the same would happen in Cuba.

Mitt and Newt should stop pandering to the whims of a handful of bitter Cuban Americans who want us to stick to old failed policies. The embargo is hurting American companies against foreign competition, costing jobs at home, and allowing the Cuban government to leverage its martyr status in domestic and foreign policy, effectively helping to keep it in power.

Cuban Americans must come to terms with the fact they will never be able to exact any revenge via an embargo policy. They should instead cherish the opportunity to visit a country which has remained miraculously unscathed by capitalism, where the streets are not covered by plastic bags and billboards (there is no advertising in Cuba), where pollution is almost non-existent (because of the lack of cars and heavy industry), and where people are well fed and healthy. Beats a trip to Tijuana no?

I wanted to share with you my favorite excerpts from the excellent new book by Matt Ridley, which debunks a number of toxic memes popular in the press these days. Many people call me cynical or pessimistic, but this book made me feel like an chirpy cheerleader in a crowd of academic doomsayers. See how he applies his rational thinking on the hot topics of precautionary principles, consumer society, innovation, trust, organic farming, the rise and fall of empires, the Malthusian crisis, pessimistic thinking, and many more…

On the precautionary principle….

To prevent change, innovation and growth is to stand in the way of potential compassion. Let it never be forgotten that, by propagating excessive caution about genetically modified food aid, some pressure groups may have exacerbated real hunger in Zambia in the early 2000s. The precautionary principle -better safe than sorry– condems itself: in a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.

On why we consume…

So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet, though you have no slaves, today when you got out of bed you knew that somebody would provide you with food, fibre and fuel in a most convenient form. (…) So it is time to earn something more interesting: the satellite television subscription, the mobile phone bill, the holiday deposit, the cost of new toys for the children, the income tax. ‘To produce implies that the producer desires to consume’ said John Stuart Mill; ‘why else should he give himself useless labour?’

On innovation…

According to the anthropologist Joe Henrich, human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements – that is how culture evolves. The bigger the connected population, the more skilled the teacher, and the bigger the probability of a productive mistake.

On trusting others…

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, an trust growth seems to precede income growth. This can be measured by a combination of questionnaires and experiments (…) By these measures, Norway is heaving with trust (65 % trust each other) and wealthy, while Peru is wallowing in mistrust (5% trust each other) and poor.’A 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy’, says Paul Zak, ‘raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter.’

On organic farming….

Should the world decide to go organic – that is, should farming get its nitrogen from plants and fish rather than direct from the air using factories and fossil fuels – then many of the nine billions will starve and all rainforests will be cut down. Yes, I wrote ‘all’. Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not. The reason for this is simple chemistry. Since organic farming eschews all synthetic fertiliser, it exhausts the mineral nutrients in the soil – especially phosphorous and potassium, but eventually also sulphur, calcium and manganese. It gets round this problem by adding crushed ro to ck and squashed fish to the soil. These have to be mined or netted. Its main problem, though, is itrogen deficiency, which it can reverse by growing legumes (clover, alfalfa or beans), which fix nitrogen from the air, and either ploughing them into the soil or feeding them to cattle whose manure is then ploughed into the soil. With such help a particular organic plot can match non-organic yields, but only by using extra land elsewhere to grow the legumes and feed the cattle, effectively doubling the area under the plough. Conventional farming, by contrast, gets its nitrogen from what are in effect point sources – factories, which fix it from the air.

On the rise and fall of empires…

Emperors, with their ziggurats and pyramids, were often made possible by trade. Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without. The urban revolution was an extension of the division of labour.

On Malthus…

The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation. Increasing self-sufficiency is the very signature of a civilisation under stress, the definition of a falling standard of living. Until 1800 this was how every economic boom ended: with a partial return to self0sufficiency driven by predation by elites, or diminishing returns from agriculture.
(…)
The modern transition began without any government family-planning policies in many countries, especially Latin America. China’s highly coerced (‘one-child’) birth-rate decline since 1955 (from 5.59 to 1.73 children, or 69%) is almost exactly mirrored by Sri Lanka’s largely voluntary one over the same time period (5.70 to 1.88, or 67%).
(…)
Human beings are a species that stops its own population expansions once the division of labout reaches the point at which individuals are all trading goods and services with each other, rather than trying to be self-sufficient. The more interdependent and well-off we all become, the more population will stabilise well within the resources of the planet. As Ron Bailey puts it, in complete contradiction of Garret Hardin: “there is no need to impose coercive population control measures; economic freedom actually generates a benign invisible hand of population control.’

On pessimists…

The craze for eugenics that swept the world, embraced by left and right with equal fervour, after 1900 and caused the passage of illiberal and cruel laws in democracies like America as well as autocracies like Germanu, took as its premise the deteriotration of the blood lines caused by the overbreeding of the poor and the less intelligent. A huge intellectual consensus gathered around the idea that a distant catastrophe must be averted by harsh measures today (sound familiar?). ‘The multiplication of the feeble-minded’ said Winston Churchil in a memo to the prime minister in 1910, ‘is a very terrible dangerto the race’. Theodore Roosevelt was even more explicit: ‘I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding: and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbiddent to leave offspring behind them.’ In the end, eugenics, did far more harm to members of the human race than the evil it was intended to combat could ever have done. Or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has been a common cause of misery for people throughout the ages.’

My painless travel existence takes a wrong turn when a lunch appointment calls me to Girona, an airport only served by Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline. In fact, things turn ugly as soon as I log on to their website. Flashy colors, ugly fonts, squalid layout, flaunting discounts like a starving stripper. I can’t stomach it. Distraught, I call my friend (the one who always says yes), give her my credit card details, and beg her to complete the booking for me.

I pour myself a long one trying to cleanse my head from that vulgar website when the phone rings. It’s my considerate friend, she’s telling me I can bypass the queue, and sign up for Speedy Boarding. “Speedy boarding?”, I mutter in horror, “Get me the basic ticket and sign out. No speedy, no quickie, no one-time special offers, please!”. Devolution completed.

Enter the airport. Once again, democracy’s ugly face is glaring at me. Now, everybody can fly. The words take on a new meaning with this crowd: chubby girls with protruding gums who feign orgasm as they stroke their fresh copy of Look At Me magazine, the face-bookers using their iphone (2!) camera to capture the moment that wasn’t, the pierced grannies in their hooker grand-daughter hand me ups, and those selfish bastards we call children, constantly celebrating everything I detest. Stop fellating that Cadbury’s Creme Egg and write your schoolmasters a postcard, damned creatures!

At the boarding gate, I try to escape this purgatory with my iTunes(tm) but reality calls me back with intrigue: there is a subgroup within those primates which has a certain swagger, a sense of entitlement that sets them apart. The way their stomachs protrude and their noses turn up; the way they smirk, almost against their will… I soon find out they have something on all of us. Yes, say hello to the ‘Speedy’ elite.

This low cost brahmanical caste have the rare privilege of being called in before the rest of us. Seats are not assigned on Ryanair so they will be called in first and will be able to choose seats ahead of us. Some of them appear almost embarrassed by such honorific treatment. Modestly, they look at their ticket and feign a little bewilderment “Oh dahlin’, look, I didn’t realize we ‘ad speedy boardin’, fancy that!”. They knew all along, and for 15 whole Euros they were shaking their booties to a different tune, one that goes “Ooh… Jet set!”

Once all these blessed beings have been pied pipered into their world of privilege, the rest of us mutts are summoned. As per my usual practice, I discreetly wait until the last minute, in order to be the last passenger funneled into the corridor. I enter, walk down the stairs, only to find that everyone, speedy nobility included, has been rammed into a large bus destined for our plane. As the bus takes off, I notice the fallen aristocracy has been pushed to the back of the bus (unlike Rosa Parks they paid extra for that right). Last one in, first one out, I jump off the bus, take my seat and watch as my speedy friends pile in behind. I’m back in my old childhood haunt, row 1 seat A. The cosmic order is reinstated. Thank you Ryanair.

As some of you may know, I’ve stolen the title from Peter Thiel. While Peter Thiel despairs in politics as he doesn’t believe democracy is compatiable with freedom while looking for escape in the utopian cyberspace. I am afraid he might be looking at the wrong (but no harm) place for cure – we don’t have “freedom” (extra-care needed in discussing this word as it can be philosphical/controversial) not mainly as a result of democracy-induced government intervention, the real culprit lies in human nature. We live in a real world, a world that faces constant threats of invasion and conquer, a world that high-decentralized, small-community-type, loosely-associated egalitarian societies will eventually pay hefty prices – being conquered by more efficient and less egalitarin societies (see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, Steel). I am NOT advocating for big governments or totalitarian rule, though I do believe highly-centralized/efficient government is needed in this stratified and strategized world. On the one hand, I do see problems facing kleptocracies overtime – because of the natural state of inequality in any stratified society, the natural tendency of any ruling elite is to deploy state’s coercive power for greater sel-benefit. The stability of power leads to overreach and overthrow. On the other hand, while individual liberty/freedom should be respected and protected, it’s naive to believe that we can peacefully live in a total free world. So neither extreme is desirable – we should aim to strike a balance.

My understanding of political philosophy has greatly changed over the course of last 1-2 years. Grew up in the communist/authoritarian China, I came out as a libertarian and used to abhor any kind of government intervention and advocate absolute individual freedom/right. I first cast my doubts on the “rational individual” concept/assumption after watching Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary series “The Century of the Self” – most human minds are after all, irrational, easily manipulated and subject to subconscious desires and primitive impulses.

No longer I am a subscriber of ideologies such as objectivism (Ayn Randian), free mkt capitalism, and pure democracy, etc. As I get older, things appear to be less bipolar to me — less black or white, less good or bad, and less right or wrong. I grew more tolerant of nuances and less needy of definitiveness. It’s relatively easy to argue against Ayn Randian, using her very own words and logic. Blinded by passion and biases, my energy and reasoning skills were served to justify my innate biases instead of searching for the truth. Ayn Rand considered government as main source of evil – but can she not see that govt is the scapegoat, and the real evil lies in our human nature? Government is just a group of people acting in their own self interests after all using her very own logic – consistent with her advocation and promotion of self-interest. Humans are social animals, and we are conscious of our social status – we play games, we have strategies, we collaborate/conspire, and we are never fully independent individuals (human society is a multi-layered complexity network). If there were no government, there will be other “coercive” forces imposed upon us – maybe oligarchs, large corporates, factions, community authorities, classes, and informal rules (such as lower ranked monkeys are obliged to clean fleas for the alpha males). So called rights, liberty, individuality are all relative/dynamic, NOT absolute/stable.

Sorry Miss Rand, the world will not be at peace if everyone is left free to pursue their so-called rational self interests. Human understanding of the world is mostly biased, at best limited. Can we really rely on the emotional, passionate populace to make “rational” decisions? Even when we assume a well-informed, well-educated crowd, our understanding of the world can never achieve perfect objectivity. Soros famously argued that human uncertainty principle bears a strong resemblance to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles (which holds that the position and momentum of quantum particles cannot be measured at the same time) – people’s understanding of the world in which we live cannot correspond to the facts and be complete and coherent at the same time. According to Soros “Insofar as people’s thinking is confined to the facts, it is not sufficient to reach decisions; and insofar as it serves as the basis of decisions, it cannot be confined to the facts. The human uncertainty principle applies to both thinking and reality. It ensures that our understanding is often incoherent and always incomplete and introduces an element of genuine uncertainty – as distinct from randomness – into the course of events.” If our understanding is doomed to be incomplete – from where we derive this so-called “objectivism” and how we can decide what are the best self-interests for ourselves?

Rand lets her philosophy, using her own words: “accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusion, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fear, thrown together by chance, but integrated by subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, sold weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where her mind’s wings should have grown”.

My faith towards unconstrained individual-liberty/freedom and pure democracy has shaken as well. let’s do not forget – it was democratic court of Athens that sentenced Socrates to death by drinking hemlock!

According to Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Polybius (as well as America founding fathers James Madison and Alex Hamilton), balance within government is necessary to preserve liberty. The government that best reflects human nature, in this view, blends the elements of:

- Monarchy (a strong executive)
- Aristocracy (an independence judiciary that could and should overrule the “popular will” if it destroyed liberty) and
- Democracy (a strong legislature)

But they have to stay in balance, because an excess or corruption of any one of these elements will destroy liberty, by becoming, respectively:

- Tyranny
- Oligarchy or
- Mob rule

Quoting from a special report on the “Perils of Democracy” (from the Economist):

Thus Aristotle considered Rome balanced, but Athens during the time of Socrates to be too democratic to be stable. In Alexander Hamilton’s day, French Revolution might illustrate the point even better: tyranny and oligarchy gave way to mob rule, which gave way to another tyranny (Napoleon), without any intervening liberty in more than motto. Democracy was inherently unstable because it led to mob rule (in the same way that monarchy deteriorated into tyranny and aristocracy into oligarchy). Those three elements, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, thus had to be balanced for a state to remain free, they argued. Rome (before the emperors) became the prime example of such a mixture. It was a republic, a “public thing”, but not a democracy, a thing “ruled by the people”. It had executives (in the shape of two annually elected consuls), an elite in the senate, and outlets for the vox populi in the popular assemblies.

I was in awe by the bursting talents of Hamilton and Madison while reading Federalist Papers, which was about how indirect America democracy should be. Hamilton and Madison explained why they wanted a republic, not a democracy – they feared tyrannical minorities and majorities equally.

Hamilton put it brilliantly in the opening of Federalist Paper:

An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. on the other hand, it will be qually forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well informed judgement, their interest can never be separated; and that a danerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Expat “talent” fills the glass towers of Singapore. Ambitious foreigners that moved in from the other side of the planet to reap the rewards of a low-tax, no-trouble economy. Economic hit men on the run who only look back to make sure they’ve put enough distance between their past and their present. The past is where they store bothersome thoughts such as death, solitude or the bitter parents and fiancés they left back home.

Celebrated as the best of their professions, as the brains that carry the nation, the Singapore expats are generally impervious to doubt and comfortably self-indulgent. This comes in high contrast with Singaporeans, scared little Asians who are suppressed professionally, politically, grammatically, and in really every imaginable way. In a city where everybody treats everybody like objects, expats are the hot commodity.

On Fridays, after five days of monotonous obedience to the economic machine, expats lose their cool. The oppressive reality of their tedious, repetitive work fills them with a thirst for violence, anger so daunting, that only binge drinking can save the city from destruction (other drugs being strictly banned). Every Friday at 5pm, the question on all their lips is: where do we drink?

In Singapore, pubs, bars and clubs look like hotel lobbies and airport lounges. The crowd never surprises. It is composed of bankers, lawyers and marketers. Two or three minutes after arriving at a bar, once boredom sets in, the expats will inevitably turn to familiar narcissist grounds by engaging in competitive drinking and flirting. This usually results in three possible outcomes: (1) copulating, for the lucky bunch that still want to, and can pull it off, (2) violence, verbal and physical, for the majority or (3) misanthropic commiserating, occasionally followed by suicide, for the old souls.

Faced, with this lugubrious outlook, Singapore expats may find solace in knowing that, as they get older and more affluent, they can buy plane tickets to get out of town more often. With age, they will be able to spend more time alone. The wisest ones may even try sobriety and reconnecting with that painful place called reality.

———————————————–
For those who aren’t resolved to stay home yet, I’ve written a few tips on how to make the best of Friday nights in Singapore:

Can you imagine what dog hair stew tastes like? Expect something similar when you first try Baron’s Beer. However foul tasting, it is the unmatched companion for socializing and euphoria. You can buy this Singaporean brew at any 7-11 or cold Storage. One beer after work will jump-start the sottishness and practically guarantees pre-comatose stage before 2am.

Visualize failure. Remember the dread of past Friday nights and be prepared for more shit. But be careful not to sound too cynical and blasé though: nobody wants to hear it in Singabore. Over time, you’ll even find that setting low expectations occasionally delivers happy surprises: while you were anticipating total embarrassment and stupidity, some evenings turn out to be refreshingly mundane.

Go home fast. As soon as you’re feeling sleepy, go home. A good Friday night is a short Friday night. Don’t tell your friends you’re leaving. It’s cruel enough abandoning them to their misery, there’s no point in making a scene out of it. Leaving discreetly, you’ll also avoid being pulled back into yet another cock fight, in a crowd of all-too-familiar faces. At the taxi line, walk to the front and grab the first taxi. Don’t worry about etiquette: Singaporeans love queuing so you’re actually doing them a favour.

Have your laptop at home. Don’t leave it at the office or you’ll run out of distractions for the two days of hung-over solitude ahead. Women will need their social network connectivity. Men will need their porn. Both will also want to put in a little work to prepare the week ahead.

CAPRICORN [December 22–January 19] Has your social agenda felt uninspiring in the past few months? It may be because you have been unconsciously shunning those who happen to have more personality than you do. As the New Year begins, make a list of the people you like to criticize. The traits that offset you off about them may be exactly the ones you need to develop within you. For a change, wouldn’t you love to inspire fear in a crowd?

AQUARIUS [January 20–February 18] This is the year for you to find out whether ignorance is indeed bliss. Select friends for their shallowness, avoid difficult opinions and discussions, watch television profusely and act as would a complete dutz. Strive daily to stir away from thought, in the James Joyce definition of the term: Thought is the thought of though. Your exploratory journey, should you encounter bliss watching MTV, could stabilise the foundations of our great civilization, hurray.

PISCES [February 19–March 20] If you think you had to work at maintaining your relationship(s) in 2010, think about the other work you’d be doing otherwise: hitting the town, feigning interest at mindless chatter clumsily adapted from How To paperbacks and crossing out more items in the to-do list. In the narrative quest that is life, it’s time for you to have a painful, drawn-out, tormented relationship. Pick up a woman magazine, if you need help getting in character.

ARIES [March 21–April 19] While you may have spent a large part of 2010 wondering why we all spend so much energy trying to HAVE more stuff instead of BEING better, you are missing the big picture. Twat! You have control over what you own, but what you own also has control over you. Take any of the unexpected situations life may throw at you, and ask yourself how you would react to it if you had an extra million bucks in the bank. Now, go earn it.

TAURUS [April 20–May 20] Ever wonder why we prefer to have our liquids served in glass instead of plastic? Plastic is more durable, cheaper to produce, better at isolating temperature and avoiding condensation, and when it falls on the floor it doesn’t break into a thousand little pieces that can make your feet bleed. In 2011, let go of conventions and the porcelain in your life and go for plastic. Try spam, and 12% beer. Wear Crocs, and discount colas. Switch your almond latter for another mars bar. Be cheap and enjoy it.

GEMINI [May 21–June 20] You were never much of an athlete, an intellectual or a leader. Last year, you often felt like your career had been an assemblage of smoke screens. Maybe it’s time for you to turn to real professionals to find your purpose. In 2011, join a sect. They will help you assess your skills and build self-confidence. Just remember never to make big decisions when you’re feeling suicidal and you’ll get the best of them. With a little persistence, you might even become a guru yourself.

CANCER [June 21–July 22] Before you sign up for a gym membership for the New Year, ask yourself the type of strengthening you need: body or soul? Maybe toning your abs in front of the mirror is leading you astray. Last time you masturbated in the bathroom, did you look at your reflection in the mirror? Until cloning isn’t legalized, don’t expect egosexuals to populate the planet. In 2011, drop self-consciousness and go mate like your parents used to.

LEO [July 23–August 22] While you may think you’ve overcome your forefather’s antiquated religiosity, you are still carrying the burden of Christian guilt. It’s not posturing, it’s pathetically real. Next time you take a political or ideological stand, imagine the sacrifices your grand-grand-grand parents had to make to ensure you are alive today. Imagine the things they had to do to make sure you have a seat at the all you can eat buffet of life. Keep in mind: you can’t have your cake and let an African orphan eat it too.

VIRGO [August 23–September 22] While others take vows to quit tobacco, chocolate or methamphetamines at this time of year, you may want to pick up new habits instead of eliminating old ones. The etiquette columnist Judith Martin aka Miss Manners, says that if you write enough thank-you letters, you may actually feel a flicker of gratitude. This year, get addicted to proper etiquette and reap the gratitude, courtesy and respect that you always craved, but were too young and dumb to indulge in before.

LIBRA [September 23–October 22] “The idea of freedom is the most contagious idea of history, more contagious that the idea of submission to authority.” Your problem lies in your ability to ignore the impulses of the present moment in order to chase your foolish dreams of tomorrow. Stop indulging. If they lived today, Jesus would be heading a company build on compassionate libertarian ethics and the apostils would be forwarding feel-good notes on microfinancing for Facebook. Whether you think you are Jesus, an apostil or one of the other chosen few, this year you need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

SCORPIO [October 23–November 21] People only get lucky when they stick their necks out. When Scorpios take risks, when they walk on the edge, their pupils are dilated, their reaction times are shortened, and they develop a short temper for people who don’t respect their space. In other words: they are the man. You need to take more risks because in this day and age, risk takers either get rewarded or get bailed out. This year, you have carte blanche to bet the house and sell the kids to finance your gambling habit if it comes to that.

SAGITTARIUS [November 22–December 21] Remember that old love interest from high school? The one that was classic and gentle. The one that could absorb your long-lasting issues like only premium toilet paper can. Whether you are attached, semi-detached, or too fat to get out of the house, it’s time for you to time travel in 2011, and explore what could’ve been with that special someone that hasn’t been. Let that person know that you are interested in catching up because “life is too short” and “you were great together” and “I have terminal cancer and want to enjoy what time I have left”, or whatever gets you in the sack the fastest. But don’t get too attached and don’t let honesty seep into this relationship, or things will turn sour faster before you’ve even had time to say “should I call you a taxi?”

In his story of the Dodo’s Tale, Richard Dawkins talks about how a species (and indirectly a gene pool) can go from prospering to extinction if kept in a closed ecosystem (e.g. in an island). The Dodo is the story of a bird that became the dominant one in its food chain on a small Pacific island when it flew from the ocean from a nearby continent. As this bird found plenty of food on the ground, and no predators to fly away from, it wasn’t making any use of its wings any longer. In fact, after a few generations, wings were completely out-of-fashion, and instead of wings, the Dodos invested most of their bodily resources making more eggs, and thus breeding more short-winged egg-producing Dodos. By the time the first humans arrived on this tiny island, none of the Dodos could fly anymore. And while the Dodo weren’t particularly good sandwich meat, they proved to be such easy targets that the entire species disappeared shortly thereafter. Apparently, there were so defenceless and goofy, that humans couldn’t resist the urge to kick them or use them for cricket practice. Nature didn’t wait for humans to be cruel, and there are countless cases of species extinguishing when their isolated ecosystems changes, for example the disappearance of Tasmanian devils after dingoes arrived in Australia 3000 years ago.

Let’s make an analogy to the world of memes. Just as the genes can be protected by physical barriers (sea or mountains), mental constructs can also be kept from external influencers: a person can just keep his own thoughts and shut his ears, physically or consciously. Alone with one’s thoughts and cementing one’s worldview, this person can sort out things out, much in the same way an ecosystem finds its own balance on an island. In solitude ideas/memes can grow and flourish just as the Dodo did on his island. Unchallenged, a value system can become far reaching and begin to entirely dictate one’s actions. This is the beauty of solitude, a place where our character becomes complete, where opinions can exist without external validation. Many philosophers across all cultures and epochs, from Tao to Rousseau to Montaigne, have advocated for solitude, saying confinement helps to avoid the traumas of social life. On the other hand, society/others are clearly a source of information, knowledge and wealth, so it’s difficult to find the ‘right dose’ of socializing – is there even such a thing?

Let’s turn to the Dodo to answer that question. Had the Dodo been exposed even on rare occasions to predators on his island, it’s likely the wing gene would have survived. The Dodos would’ve lost a few members to predators and they wouldn’t have been able to produce as many eggs as they did over the years but ultimately they would’ve likely survived man’s arrival on the island if they had kept their wings. Continuing my analogy, if we are open to conflicting views, we may face periods of doubt and anguish, we may feel worthless at times, but as a result, we stand a better choice of avoiding a complete meltdown (such as a suicide or a mid-life crisis).

In conclusion, when your ideas are growing bigger and more comfortable in your meme-depositary of a brain, study the opposition in earnest. Listen to your body when it screams at you: “leave the house, go meet people”, an urge as physical and real as hunger or thirst, but don’t waste your social time looking for signs reaffirming your existing value system: facebook groups, ‘likes’, and articles that support your investment strategy. Don’t mingle with like-minded geniuses; aim to hang out with (who you think are) stubborn idiots instead. Do what George Soros does instead and look for instances that disprove your theories. As Nassim Taleb points out: true self-confidence is “the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.” Next time you find peace within, remember the Dodo, and be wary that a cricket bat might be the next thing hitting your skull.

I once met a charming young American lady in Vietnam. Her family was originally Vietnamese and had emigrated to California before she was born; and they had prospered there, building a booming business in office furniture. Before joining Law School, she decided to take a break and to visit her parents’ homeland. She took the opportunity to donate her time as an English schoolteacher as she felt giving back was the only fair thing to do, because she had received so much in her childhood, and that the kids in Vietnam had received nothing. She felt it was her duty because while she had received a good education and tons of opportunities, most of the kids she taught would never even be able to purchase a plane ticket. She genuinely felt sorry and indebted to them.

As simply a passing tourist, my experience from seeing kids in the developing world (Vietnam, Mexico, Cambodia) felt quite different. I saw them laugh and run, and skip school and sell junk artefacts and postcards to tourists. I saw them play with dirt and sticks and do flips when they jumped in the water. I compared them to western kids, craving for toys and sugar and moaning in restaurants; and I knew which of those kids I’d rather be.

Part of the reason we feel so guilty when thinking about the developing world is the media’s continuous banter on its tragedy: hunger, illiteracy, dictatorships, wars, famine, disease, water shortage, dysentery, destruction of the habitat, slavery, prostitution, etc, etc. This appears to be the only angle from which every story about the developing world is being told. That’s to be expected because firstly, misery sells papers and secondly it makes advertisers happy when you promote an ideology where economic development is a moral imperative.

It’s common to project one’s own desires and ambitions on to others and to think: “Poor Vietnamese kid can’t even go to school every day. Poor African family can’t afford an automobile. Poor Arabic woman married into polygamy in order to have a roof over her head.” But on the flip side, mandatory schools, highway-covered landscapes and monogamy are not universal desires. (Our obsession with sending every kid to schools reminds me of a comic where one mother asking another “Don’t you just let your kid go around and do nothing?” and the other to answer: “I couldn’t find a class for it.”)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t subscribe to a philosophy of total tolerance: I don’t believe that any culture shall be defended unconditionally, even in the name of pluralism or diversity. Some cultures definitely need to be fought and eradicated. I understand why the UN wants to promote education for all children, why we wish for better working conditions in poor countries, why we should support research to end epidemic diseases, and why militants should stand up against oppressive regimes and dogmas.

On the other hand, I don’t approve of the contradictions in our policies. You cannot on one hand wish for a world where we live in harmony with nature, a world without pollution and where men work just enough to sustain themselves and at the same time think that you can attain that world by buying more crap. Today, we are concurrently promoting a return to a more sedentary “natural” lifestyle and pushing for high-pace economic growth.

Surprisingly, that’s the entire premise of the now famous label “Fairtrade”. That label, which is now being slapped on everything from high-speed trains to chocolate bars, indicates to the consumer in no ambiguous terms that buying this [INSERT STUFF] will make the world better. This is pure genius on the psychological level, but I trust consumers will wise up soon and realize that there is no zero-impact-consumerism. Capitalism and consumerism don’t stop with Fairtrade, instead that label is a vehicule for them; if you don’t want Vietnam to become a factory for cheap crap, the best is still to stop buying it.
Here’s another “sustainable spinoff” I saw on the back on a London cab seat. It reads:

THE (RED)TM IDEA.
(RED) is not a charity.
(RED) is not a cause.
(RED) is not a theory.
(RED) is an ingenious idea that unites our incredible collective power as consumers with our innate urge to help others.
(RED) is where virtue meets desire.
Each time you buy a (RED) product or service, at no extra cost to you, the company who makes that product will give up to fifty percent of its profit to buy and distribute life-saving antiretroviral medicine to fight AIDS in Africa. Every pound goes straight in to Africa. Straight to the people who need it. Straight to keeping them alive so that they can go on taking care of their families and contribute socially and economically to their communities.
(RED) is an answer to an emergency. Buy (RED) SAVE LIVES.
It’s as simple as that.
(RED). Desire and virtue. Together at last.

Absolutely brilliant. Complete genius. Desire and virtue…. love it. RED even manages to get the buy-in from the anti-charity, anti-preachy and anti-economist consumers. Buy shit and save lives? It’s a no-brainer! Let’s sign up for RED labelled credit cards, drive our RED labelled electric car to the store, buy some RED labelled corned beef and organize a house party to save Africa…. What’s there to think about?

Unfortunately, there’s a lot. Whether your corned beef is RED labelled or not, its production will consume considerably more potable water than eating vegetables and nuts for instance. Electric cars cost double the price of regular cars because it takes double the resources to manufacture them. That doesn’t faze advertisers, as a recent TV commercial from Volkswagen illustrates: “You are worried about nature? What if your first citizen act was to buy a car?” So… We buy cars and that saves the planet?

Every purchased item, whether it has a nice label on it or not, has a considerable impact on the world we live in. When you purchase RED or Fairtrade products, you indirectly impose your western view on how businesses should be run and you also help to finance a marketing campaign alleviating the consumers’ guilt. Instead of buying “fair junk”, shouldn’t we simply buy less junk? Instead of taking Prozac, shouldn’t we take a break from work?

As a capitalist and an entrepreneur myself, I don’t want to go back to the Stone Age, and do not subscribe to the absolute anti-growth solution, but I wouldn’t mind living in a world where the economy was in recession for a few years if it means we spend less on junk and more on the ideas/aestheticism/knowledge. This begins by defining our values, such as Mr. Williams Morris does in the abstract below taken from a speech he gave in 1884. Mr. Morris was an English textile designer, a writer, and a socialist and he wanted to revolt against a society that was being absorbed by useless toil instead of useful work. After ranting against the ruling class, and the middle class, he describes the producing class in those terms:

Next there is a mass of people employed in making all those articles of folly and luxury, the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of the rich non-producing classes; things which people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; it means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most of a man, most aspiring and thoughtful – all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Not can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes – and sells?

Now further there is even a sadder industry yet, which is forced on many, very many, of our workers – the making of wares which are necessary to them and their brethren, because they are an inferior class. For is many men live without producing, nay, must live lives so empty and foolish that they force a great part of their workers to produce wares which no one needs, not even the rich, it follows that most men must be poor. And living as they do on wages from those whom they support, cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with coarse food that does not nourish, with rotten raiment which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of the nomad tribe, or the cave of the prehistoric savage.

(…)

For understand once for all that the ‘manufacturer’ aims primarily at producing, by all means of the labour he has stolen from others, not goods but profits, that is, the ‘wealth’ that is produced over and above the livelihood of his workmen, and the wear and tear of his machinery. Whether that ‘wealth’ us real or sham matters nothing to him. If it sells and yields him a ‘profit’ it is all right. I have said that, owing to there being rich people who have more money than they can spend reasonably, and that who therefore buy sham wealth, there is waste on that side; and also that, owing to there being poor people who cannot afford to buy things which are worth making, there is waste on that side.

Should Mr. William Morris be alive today, what would he think of what the world has become? A world where the concept of wealth is still corrupted, where a booming GDP per capita is considered an absolute success, a world where a surge in obesity and heart conditions is compensated if there’s a Fairtrade sticker on your pot of Nutella/Starbucks/Bio Spiruline Phyco+?

An idea/meme tends to be more popular/viral if it is useful. However, many memes are -or have become- useless but are nevertheless still widespread and thriving. How can some ideas be both irrelevant and popular? Firstly, the timing of an idea is crucial: an idea can capture mindshare when the time is right, much in the same way a company captures marketshare when people are ready for a new product or service; and once an idea captured this mindshare, it will be hard to dislodge it with new competing ideas. Secondly, an idea/meme can also appeal to our lazy brains by offering a simple explanation for a complex world.

How useful a meme is to the carrier of the meme (us) is generally correlated to its level of contagiousness, i.e. the better the meme serves us, the more we tend to spread it (applicable to countless memes, for example: boiling scalpels before an operation, drinking bloody marys after a hangover, or coughing to cover the sound of farts). But some memes manage to become immensely popular without offering much in return. What other attributes do they have going for them?

1. First mover’s advantage: just as Amazon won a decisive battle by being one of the first in e-commerce websites, many ideas survive largely because of the initial support they garnered. Galileo’s research wasn’t the first to demonstrate that the Earth wasn’t at the centre of the universe, nor was Darwin’s Origin of Species the first book to refute creationism. Others had spotted and exposed the errors in those theories before, but reversing the tide of a popular idea can take centuries. In fact, we can confidently predict many other misconceptions will likely never be turned around by homo sapiens. As a general rule, new ideas are considered guilty until proven innocent.

Furthermore, today’s ideas are the construction blocks for tomorrow’s. When having any point/counterpoint discussion, academics often refer to the original author who was first quoted by an academic on this very topic, often without even bothering to read it. Consequentially, you can expect that a theory which is transmitted by the right apostoples at the right time can become the ultimate reference for the ages. Nassim Taleb makes this point in The Black Swan: “I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”

2. Story telling quality: there seems to be an unlimited amount of literature on how “telling a story” can make an idea more viral. You don’t need to talk to an ad guru to figure this one out: we’ve all experienced how setting someone’s name in a contextual framework or finding a pattern in a number sequence helps us remember them better. Similarly when an idea can be visualized –if only symbolically-, it stands a much greater chance of being remembered and passed on. French anthropologist Dan Sperber argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects. In other words, keep it simple.

Many stories flourish simply because they help us make sense out of things that don’t otherwise (see conspiracy theories). Economists are still making a living from offering predictions even though they have systematically failed to anticipate events correctly in the past. Or in the words of Taleb: “They’re no more reliable than astrologers, and they do more damage.” He goes on to explain how the ludic fallacy makes us ready to accept easy (and often wrong) explanations:

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (bullshitt), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.

A year of commuting, eating cabbage soup and inhaling urban dust. 230 days of cubicle aggravation. This followed by a post-Armageddon airport experience, standing in line for the train, for the check-in, for the security, for customs, for a seat on the plane. It’s the old nightclub trick: you think it MUST be worth it, based on the amount of queuing required. You’ve packed the anti-mosquito spray, the sunscreen lotion, and the clothes that will expose your burgeoning belly/skin plaque/rashes/third nipple. You’ve even remembered to bring the diarrhoea medicine after losing half of your small intestine in a Phuket toilet last year. You’ve carried all that crap all the way with you, like Jesus bearing his cross.

Stop bouncing around like Molly Ringwald on prom night, contain your pathetic excitement, and be honest with yourself for once: just as it was a drag getting there, it’s a drag being here. Whose brilliant idea/meme was it in the first place that hanging out in skimpy acrylic outfits, flip flopping our way through beach supermarkets where prices were trebled the day we arrived was the escape from work we deserved? What fucking pervert convinced us all that rolling around in the sand surrounded by obese fugglies and screaming brats was the bee’s knees?

Admit it, all of this is only bearable because you need the change of scene from your mundane work/family life. Some argue that it’s not about the destination, but about the journey. Hey, Paulo Coelho, can I pass on both?*

Toxic Max, wishing you all a lovely summer break!

* Though I could see how having millions of aimless morons in beach towns with only one bookstore could work out for him.