The Rudest Book Ever by Shwetabh Gangwar

A bit gimmicky, but then again, I probably would have never heard about it had it been titled, Thinking for Yourself and Disposing of Early Misguided Thought Patterns.  There’s a lot of f-words here, and it might work for some people and not so much for others.  For some, it may seem honest and refreshing.  People who write a book with a lot of f-words are trying to be raw and honest, they purposefully don’t want to sugarcoat the truth or make you feel comfortable.  You should feel uncomfortable.  This is why drill sergeants yell and scream at you.  When you feel uncomfortable, you are more alert and willing to change.  Unfortunately, for some people, cussing is associated with ‘low class’ and not being raw and honest but being perverted and shameless, kind of creepy too.  There’s a balance. 

The book starts out strong, basically telling you that the most important skill is learning to think for yourself and not just taking everything at face value.  There’s some common sense, self-help stuff that gets a little lost in the woods.  I had to skim the second half.  One is that you shouldn’t be a happiness junkie, but he says it’s because you are led by your emotions and not thoughts.  I don’t agree with this.  What he’s really talking about is short-term gratification and not happiness.  When we pursue short-term gratification like cheating on our significant others or over-eating, we are undermining long-term goals and life satisfaction in addition to our existing relationships.  This can also be driven by emotions, our fear of hurting our significant other can keep us from cheating on them.  Our desire for a better body and healthier state can drive us to avoid over-eating.  It’s motivation, and emotion drives motivation not logic.  In fact, logical thinking is pretty weak.  If I think to myself, I’ll get an MBA, get a better-paying job, and move to a more exciting city, chances are I’m just not going to do it.  I need the emotional factor which could be breaking up with a long-term relationship that makes me feel inadequate, or having a friend that gets an MBA and gets a better job and moves to a bigger city. 

One of the best things about this book is that the author makes it clear that the mind you have as a teenager or young adult is not reliable and mature.  So why use it to make decisions now?  It reminds me of the Einstein quote, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”  What he really emphasizes is that we need to work hard to change our perceptions, self-perception, and values and beliefs, because we were handicapped in our youth by a system that only taught us to memorize their facts and not think for ourselves, and an immature mind corrupted by hormones.  We can’t use that mind for the rest of our lives if we want to accomplish things in life and become a healthier, stronger, more resourceful, more capable, more resilient, and more kind and compassionate person.  We aren’t going to find either happiness or satisfaction in life if we maintain our immature teenage mentality and way of thinking and looking at the world.  What impressed us as a teenager shouldn’t impress us as an adult.  What scared us as a teenager shouldn’t scare us as an adult.  What we thought was cool and desirable should no longer seem as cool or desirable.  What seemed uncool and weird should no longer seem as uncool or weird.  Certainly, we like to fulfill promises we made to ourselves as a kid, but that kid no longer exists.  What exists now is an adult with a different more mature, more experienced, more balanced mind.

In our youth, we only socialized with people in our same grade and demographic.  If you were poor, you hung out with the poor kids, and if you were rich you hung out with the rich kids.  As an adult, you should abandon this rigid social policy.  You should befriend much older people as well as younger people as you get older.  You should befriend people regardless of their income, background, nationality, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.  In our youth, we were star struck by the glitz and glamor of trendy things, places, and people.  They sold sex, power, wealth, and fun times to us.  But as we get older, we should become wise to the fact that sophisticated ad people sold us these images to impress our immature, young minds.  We should learn that it was mostly a distraction to insert their brands into our minds and make us associate their brands with everything we might find desirable and popular. 

We used to think that owning an expensive sports car, wearing expensive suits, having sex with models, and drinking cool whiskies made us a man.  For women, they thought that having a rich husband, living in a big house, and having expensive clothes meant they made it, and they could have kids and hire people to raise them.  As adults, we should realize that it was all a lie.  To be a man really was about being mature, making wise choices, being trustworthy, being reliable and sticking to your commitments, and drinking beer.  For women, it meant not being defined by your husband or family or social status but rather also being mature, wise, trustworthy, and reliable.  Our young minds thought nothing of getting into debt believing wrongly that our future earnings could always pay off the debt and we should enjoy our youth.  Our adult minds should realize that debt accumulates and future earnings simply don’t grow to cover the rapid rate of inflation especially in healthcare and housing not to mention the compounding interest on our debt.  Our adult minds should realize that youth should not be about spending money to impress people but rather learning to live humbly within your means and enjoy life through friendships and relationships and not image, material possessions, and trying to impress strangers. 

Sometimes I lament the death of my childhood and teenage dreams, but I shouldn’t.  They were stupid, silly, shallow, and unrealistic.  I used to want to be a professional athlete.  I used to want to be a famous actor and writer.  I used to want to be a multi-millionaire.  Why should I keep pursuing dreams I concocted with an infantile, immature, and inexperienced mind living in poverty?  To what lengths should I go to fulfill a promise to a mind that was so naïve, impressionable, and delusional?  We should all expect our beliefs, values, dreams, priorities, and aspirations to change as we mature and age and gain real-life experience.  Advertisers focus on children and young people not only because they haven’t made up their minds as to shopping preferences but rather because they are naïve and gullible and highly impressionable.  If we want to think for ourselves and serve our own interests and the interests of those close to us that we care about, we should expect our minds to change.  When I was a kid, I loved corndogs and pizza, and while I still do appreciate those things, my palate has also matured to appreciate all sorts of things I was never exposed to like Indonesia cuisine, steak, and Mexican food. 

* * *

I liked the part about rejection.  It only takes people a split second to reject you, so you shouldn’t ever think they’re basing their kneejerk reaction on your substance, character, or personality.  And people who immediately judge others based on their appearance are shallow and they have small minds that are fearful of novelty and foreignness.  They are people of habit who are still running on their immature, childish minds, values, beliefs, and preferences.  Guys want super models and women want flawless, tall Prince Charming.  People with mature, adult minds that think for themselves are curious about novelty, because they naturally want to expand their mind and experiences, and what better way than to study and investigate something new.  And it’s not always for romantic interests.  Spending time with someone of the opposite sex doesn’t need to always be sexual.  There is much to learn from the opposite sex or people outside your romantic age range or people with different sexual orientations.  Small, immature minded people are only fixated on being with people of the opposite sex who are romantic potential, within their age range. 

* * *

The author is really on to something, but I don’t think he exploits it as much as he could have.  When you think of the immature, growing mind, you have to acknowledge that not only is it faulty and naïve, gullible and impressionable, but it’s also remarkably self-centered and projective.  When a child closes his eyes, he thinks the lights go out for everyone, including people across the globe.  What happens to me happens to everyone, he incorrectly thinks.  So naturally, if he’s self-obsessed, then he thinks everyone else is thinking about him and obsessing about him.  In reality, as the author notes, nobody cares.  Nobody cares about you as much as you do.  When you wake up at 5 AM remember an embarrassing episode, chances are, everyone that witnessed it no longer remembers it or cares about it.  When we’re teenagers, we suddenly think everyone is looking at us and judging us.  It makes us extremely paranoid, afraid of standing out, and obsessed with fitting in.  As we grow older, we realize that people spend most of their time thinking and worrying about themselves, and even if they do judge others, they do so based on very little information, and it doesn’t really matter anyway.  Gossip is just a form of bonding, and it doesn’t even have to be true.  Realizing that other people know little about us and care even less liberates us.  It allows us to be more unique, different, and more concerned with what we want to do and how we want to express ourselves than how we feel others will judge us.

* * *

The author talks about self-control, and it’s important to understand that self-control is not as easy as it seems.  Self-control is willing yourself to be mindful of social and long-term consequences and not rely on automatic reaction, what the book Thinking Fast and Slow would call System 1 thinking.  You need to be in a calm and alert aerobic state with oxygen flowing to your brain and a lot of glucose to fuel your brain.  It’s basically putting your brain on turbo charge.  We are certainly more capable of this than all the other animals, and this is supported by the fact that our brain represents 2% of our body weight yet consumes 20% of our energy.  For this reason, despite being experts at mindfulness, we try to avoid it as much as possible.  When we drive, we find our minds floating off into space.  When we shower, sometimes we forget if we washed our faces or not.  When we brush our teeth, sometimes we forget if we brushed a certain section.  However, if we obsess about a problem, we will overwork our frontal lobes, and they will eventually crash.  When people diet, sometimes they become so anal and obsessed with dieting that they count every single calorie, and this takes, ironically, a huge amount of mental energy which inevitably results in a crash where the dieter stops thinking and binges.  A better way to develop self-control is through controlling the input and not trying to control the output. 

When I wrote my first book, it took me years, because I was too controlling and disciplined and forced myself to write a few pages every weekend morning, and I hated every minute.  The book reflected my lack of passion.  It read like an encyclopedia.  I wrote several books within the span of several years later, and they all came naturally and took only a few weeks to write.  I changed my input.  I went out more, I read more, I experienced life more, and I wrote for fun more.  Certainly, if we want to achieve any substantial goal, we need self-control and self-discipline and force ourselves to do things we don’t feel like doing, but if we are to succeed, we need to also feed ourselves inputs.  We need to hang out with people who are also trying to achieve our goals or have already achieved them.  The greatest input is people.  We are mimicking apes.  We want to fit into social groups, and we will go to great extents to do so.  If you want to lose weight, hang around other people who work out a lot and eat healthy.  If you want to become an great actor, act, perform in local theatre, hang around other aspiring actors. 

* * *

As we get older, we should also develop a new mind that includes the interest and aptitude to teach, share, contribute, innovate, and lead.  None of this is taught to us during our 12-month indoctrination.  We are only taught to memorize, obey, conform, and follow.  We don’t even know how to teach.  We think of our teachers and believe that it’s all about a monologue, lecturing others in a condescending manner and not taking into consideration their ideas, perspectives, values, and beliefs.  Teaching is as much about learning as it is teaching.  You can’t teach someone effectively unless you know where they’re coming from, and they have established trust with you.  When a teacher knows nothing about us, we devalue everything they have to teach us.  We also don’t know how to share, contribute, innovate, and lead.  We share and post about it on social media making it virtue signaling.  We contribute forcibly and demand that everyone recognize and appreciate our contributions.  We innovate recklessly without considering the consequences.  We lead not by example but by force, coercion, bullying, or manipulation.  Unfortunately, we just have to learn to do all these things from scratch as adults, hopefully by finding mentors who know what they’re doing.  We have no idea the fulfillment in life that comes from teaching, sharing, contributing, innovating, and leading.  It’s like a whole part of us is never actualized and discovered.  For whatever reason, we’ve decided to pay others to teach, share, contribute, innovate, and lead.  We go through life eternal takers, entitled and privileged, never understanding why we feel empty, lonely, and unsatisfied with life.

* * *

The most important part of knowing how to think for yourself is to first disabuse yourself of the bad habits of group-thinking or trend-thinking or pop-thinking, etc.  The first thing you’ll note is a tendency of group-thinkers to use slogans, slang, over-generalizations, insults, and emotionally-charged arguments.  There are also the countless logical fallacies which everyone should be familiar with by now, the all-or-nothing one, us-versus-them, poisoning the well, straw man, appeal to authority, confusing correlation with causality, etc.  The second big thing is questioning and openness to questioning.  If anyone says stuff like, that’s no business of yours, you’re not qualified to question this, I have no answer for you, how dare you question this, you know you’re being deceived or misled.  Interestingly, this is what every teacher will tell you. 

Thinking independently is sort of a misnomer.  It doesn’t mean thinking only using your own thoughts, experiences, and feelings.  This is actually one of the worst, egotistical and immature ways of thinking.  Thinking independently actually means relying on and depending on a large body of diverse trustworthy, also independent, and reliable sources.  Notice how I did not say authoritative.  Certainly, when forming scientific opinions, one wants authoritative input, but at the same time, even in the scientific community, there are competing opinions and the most authoritative may also be a corrupted echo chamber that is self-serving. 

In order to be good at thinking independently, you need to control your inputs.  The better quality inputs the better quality outputs.  If you were to try to teach a computer how to think, would you feed it social media posts, mainstream news articles, history textbooks written by the winners, celebrity blogs, political podcasts, reality TV, and commercial ads?  Imagine what the computer would churn out?  It would be irrational, controversial, biased, unimaginative bullshit.  So what would you feed that computer?  You could start with the opinions and insights of people you knew who seemed wise and kind, independent voices using independent forums and media, books, etc.  Of course they’re hard to find, because they’re not so much about self-promotion and profiteering.  They often have an altruistic agenda, helping people know the truth or at least uncover the lies and myths.  Their opinions don’t have to conform to a corporate agenda, a political agenda, a PR agenda, or a government bureaucratic policy. 

We are taught from a young age to avoid really poor people or for that matter, anyone under our own income category.  We are taught that people deserve where they are in life.  Homeless deserve to be homeless.  Those living below the poverty level deserve to be there.  And on the other end of the spectrum, the 1% deserve to be the 1%.  However, when we open ourselves to interacting with the poorest of the poor or people below our income level, we would quickly learn about their hardships and also how they were disadvantaged to begin with.  We learn how their parents were discriminated against or how hard it was for their parents to get business loans.  We learn about how much the police patrol their neighborhoods and how easy it is to get caught up in traffic tickets, court fees, citations, etc.  We learn how hard it is to get out of poverty and how easy it is to get into crippling debt.  Certainly, we also learn that impoverished people have unhealthy coping mechanisms.  They are enticed to join gangs, commit crimes, indulge in drugs and alcoholism, gamble what little money they have, etc. 

What they don’t want you to know is the simple fact that poverty is both unnecessary and unfair, and the impoverished people don’t deserve to be impoverished, nobody does.  Nobody deserves to be discriminated against and surrounded by so much despair, crime, police presence, bureaucracy, unhealthy living conditions, and indignities.  If you truly wanted to see where people deserved to be in life, you would start off giving everyone an equal opportunity in a middle-class neighborhood surrounded by middle-class opportunities and liberties with middle-class incomes and benefits.  Then if people fell below middle class, you could argue they deserved it, and if people elevated themselves to the 1% you could say they deserved that too.  But when you start off at the 1% and wind up there, you didn’t deserve it, and when you start out at the bottom 1% and wind up there, you don’t deserve the blame.  If you want the truth and the most objective perspective, you don’t ask 100 people at the top 1% or even the bottom 1%, you have to ask people at all different income ranges. 

* * *

It is also critical to be a humble thinker.  First, we are not aware of and will never be aware of all of our own thoughts, and this is a startingly and shocking revelation.  This is like having a stranger in your house who has influence on your behavior.  It doesn’t mean that you are not responsible for your thoughts and behavior, but fact is, there really is a stranger in your head who also has considerable sway and influence over your behavior.  This person was built up by genetics and all your social influences you were not aware of.  His behavior may come as a shock to you, but you really shouldn’t be too surprised, because you knew about all these social influences, you just didn’t know just how influential they were and under what circumstances they would arise. 

Second, we are constantly being proven wrong, and we should accept that we are rarely completely correct about anything.  People who believe in the certainty of what they know are the most ignorant people around.  All you need to do is talk for a few minutes with a stranger from a different background to realize you really don’t know anything about them and their group or culture.  Every scientific theory is revised or disproven.  Our grasp of reality and the truth is not as firm as we imagine, but it doesn’t mean that we should question everything and be uncertain about everything.  Our minds are fine with working with limited information.  We must simply be humble about how much we know, how little we know, and how often we will discover that we are wrong.  If we can do this, we are much more likely to adopt a more accurate perspective of reality.  It won’t be the absolute truth or perfect, but it will be significantly better than our previous, shallow preconception.  Of course, this means having a strong enough ego that won’t shatter when we are proven wrong.  This also means that we don’t derive our self-worth from being a know-it-all expert on everything and for someone to teach us something new doesn’t mean they are better than us or more authoritative.

As mentioned before, System 2 thinking consumes a lot of calories and our minds try to economize it.  We must therefore be selective about what we think about.  Learning new things consumes the most amount of attention and energy.  It’s also why people default to avoiding new and strange things.  But the wonderful thing that happens is that the more you know and the more accurate it is, the less you become confused, bewildered, and frustrated by thinking.  If you have only a small and limited perspective and it is often wrong, you will encounter countless instances where you just don’t get it and you are led to believe that you are completely wrong.  To avoid this frustration and confusion, you double down.  Everyone else must be crazy and stupid.  You become even more sheltered and solitary resulting in an even more limited and closed mind.  By exposing yourself to more perspectives and new ideas, your mind takes less energy and becomes less confused by different experiences.  It’s like exercising a muscle.  The more you exercise the muscle, the more efficient it becomes at using energy.  You can also carry heavier and heavier loads without fatigue and breakdown.  Likewise your mind is able to handle more and more complex and new ideas and experiences with less and less effort. 

There are a lot of people out there with fast and powerful processors, but they waste all that speed and power on rather stupid and pointless concerns, thoughts, worries, over-thinking and analysis paralysis.  Unlike other kinds of thoughts, worries and concerns carry a toxic burden, they fill your body with cortisol, the stress hormone.  Your mind starts to equate thinking with worrying so it starts to think less thinking means less worry.  The person often engages in mind-numbing activities like drinking, drugs, or thrill-seeking which demands their undivided attention.  If you know how to focus your thoughts on productive thinking and avoid worrying and over-analyzing everything, you free up your mind and learn to enjoy thinking. 

Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover FBI Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man by David Howard

After reading Smuggler a book about heroin smugglers, I’m now on the other end of the cat and mouse drama.  I didn’t review it.  There’s not much to be said of a dude who smuggles heroin. 

Surprisingly, in 1977, the FBI doesn’t do much of financial crimes as well as undercover work, so two FBI agents find themselves improvising and pioneering methods in both.  John (Jack) Brennan is a Southern legacy G-man who’s following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.  Jim J. Wedick, Jr. is a New York thrill-seeker who couldn’t stand the banality of being a Waffle House franchise owner.  Brennan is a bit of an impulsive go-getter while Wedick is a meticulous planner, an odd couple of sorts, both chasing down a charismatic, sophisticated global con-artist, Phil Kitzer, Jr. with the help of an informant, Norman Howard.  One of the things that surprised me about Smuggler and this book is just how much law enforcement relies on informants and perhaps surprisingly too, just how much informants rat out each other. 

I think only media glamorizes and proliferates the notion of noble thieves with honor codes, that snitches get stitches, etc.  Certainly, the mob and organized crime do go after snitches (especially in Mexico), the ones they know about, and there’s a reason the secret witness program exists, but I don’t think going after snitches is as pervasive as people may think.  Of course, there’s a risk to snitching, but it also sounds like snitching is far more common than you are led to believe.  I can also imagine that many criminals do hold out until they get into prison and spend a few months or years stewing in prison, and some may not adapt well to prison or get in trouble and then make the survival calculus of their chances of getting killed from snitching versus their chance of getting killed for inadvertently pissing off the wrong guy in prison.  And if they’ve arrested a dozen of your colleagues, you can’t be certain who snitched until sentencing, and if all of them get lenient sentencing, now you have to pay someone perhaps ten grand a piece to kill each one of them after they get out.  Is it worth it after your own legal fees and lost business revenue? 

The author notes that J. Edgar Hoover was against undercover work, worrying that it may tempt and corrupt agents, which has proven to be true in many cases.  If journalists, colonialists, and soldiers can go native, and they’re not even deeply imbedded with the ‘enemy,’ then it’s not a big leap for undercover law enforcement to go native when they actually join criminal organizations and undergo whatever hazing, bonding, and ritualizing goes on.  After all, Adolf Hitler was sent to investigate the German Workers’ Party, and he wound up becoming its leader.  You could also argue that undercover operatives encourage criminal behavior, especially larger, bigger scores for their own personal ambitions to get promoted for larger, bigger busts.  At what point can you say the target was going to do it anyway with or without the influence of the undercover operative?  In many cases, the undercover operative introduces funding, connections, and other logistical support the target would not have at their disposal otherwise.  Just recently, a couple ‘Boogaloo Bois’ were arrested for conspiring to sell firearm suppressors to Hamas.  Now you have to wonder, without the undercover operatives setting that supposed transaction up, how in hell would they ever have been able to set that up themselves with Hamas?  You can also only imagine the countless similar setups for drug trafficking.  A small-time trafficker only moving thousands of dollars of merchandise suddenly having an undercover operative set up a transaction worth millions. 

Regardless, the author points out, under J. Edgar Hoover, “G-men had used illegal bugs, wiretaps, and breaking and entering… on citizens deemed to be political dissidents…”

* * *

Just reading about all of Phil’s devious plans is mind-boggling and tiresome.  The author notes that Phil has amazing memory, and you would need it to keep track of all the concurrent scams and all the characters, the targets as well as the conspirators, or as the book calls them, promoters.  Back then, there was no computer that Phil could have used to keep track of everything, and it was probably for the best as that computer would have been subpoenaed as evidence.  Crossing state and national borders makes it all the more elaborate and confusing forcing states and nations to collaborate which is part of the plan knowing they don’t always collaborate so well.

The funny thing about reading this book is that I’ve read books on Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) that helped cause the 2008 Financial Crisis.  CDOs are basically mortgage debt that is divided into different tranches (levels) with solid debt on top and junk subprime debt on the bottom.  For whatever asinine, illegal reasons, the ratings agencies would rate them safe, because they had solid debt on top and just ignore all the garbage at the bottom.  They also involved basically parlay bets on interest rates and other market movements.  While they were not explicitly outlawed, the regulatory agencies allowed them to exist with growing evidence that they could wreck the entire economy.  In the end, nobody was investigated and sentenced, as this would probably expose and embarrass the collaboration at worst and incompetence at best of the regulatory agencies.  Americans also decided that the banks were too big to fail and bailed them out instead of calling upon them to be nationalized.  To this day, the banks can still gamble with money that is printed up out of nowhere, and should they fail, it is likely, they’ll just get bailed out like last time.  The only difference is that they’re not being as overtly greedy and extravagant with the CDOs this time around. 

* * *

After Part II at 180 pages, I got tired of reading this book.  The cons start all sounding the same, just different targets, accomplices, and cities.  The author should have shortened this.  Being a con-artist is just like any other job, after a while, it seems to get mundane, tedious, and repetitive.  Sure there are perks, and if you enjoy an endless stream of four-star hotels, hot women, fancy cars, and luxury crap everywhere, it may be the life for you, but what about the incessant anxiety of getting caught, not just by law enforcement but perhaps a mark who has violent tendencies?  What about the incessant feeling of crap, of guilt, of impoverishing people who didn’t deserve it?  Certainly, the high end cons target greedy, rich people, but in some cases, like the Kealoha couple, they were elderly and near bankruptcy.  They were feeding off their remaining savings like vultures. 

Unless you have absolutely no ability to keep a 40-hour job and accepting a modest income, the life of a con-artist seems like a horrible proposition where you’re really only attracting other leeches and shallow asses showing off your wealth.  Certainly, there are many orthodox jobs which suck, where you have a boss who nags and bullies you, but nothing is stopping you from looking for another job or even starting your own business.  The life of an entrepreneur is somewhat similar to a con-artist in that you’re your own boss, you make your own hours, sometimes you hit it really big, and sometimes you get wiped out (in the case of con-artists, you go to prison, blowing all your remaining wealth on expensive, often predatory lawyers).  Why not just be an entrepreneur, unless you’ve already destroyed your credit and have a criminal record? 

For whatever reason, grifters and financiers, in fact a lot of high-paying white-collar workers tend to push themselves too much.  I’ll never understand why a lawyer billing $1000 an hour just doesn’t work 40 hours a week, why they work 80 to 100 hours a week, burning themselves out.  Invariably, their careers are short-lived, and many just retire early.  Why didn’t you just pace yourself?  I guess the greed is too much, and if you don’t have a social life to begin with, why not put in 80 to 100 hours while you can?  At the same time, they invariably fail to take care of themselves, eating garbage, never working out, and the stress causes even more health problems, along with the guilt, shame, lack of sleep, etc.  Kitzer is a prime example of this is suffers ulcers.

In my opinion, you can just skip Part III and move to Part IV the ending.  I think the FBI agents went native with Phil, pulled into his charismatic bullshit, perhaps a bit of a father complex going on.  After he’s caught and gets out of prison, they continue to befriend him and help him stay straight.  There seems to be no regret or misgivings over all the people he scammed and impoverished.  He’s just out crazy buddy!  I wouldn’t be surprised if Phil rubbed off more on these guys and the FBI dudes wound up alcoholics.  It’s also amazing when you cooperate with the government, even being the guy who controls and organizes most everything, you get off easy.  It’s like, it doesn’t matter that you’re a criminal, a scammer, a lowlife, so long as you help the government out, the government will help you out.  And god forbid you refuse to cooperate, the government does everything within their powers to make you suffer, not only giving you the longest sentences but putting you in the worst prisons.  It’s like the crime itself and victims don’t really matter as much as whether you’re going to help government out or not.  Make government prosecutors look good, and you’re golden.  Make them look bad, make them actually work hard to prove a case, and you’re up shit creek without a paddle.

Overland by Ewen Levick

An Aussie dude decides to backpack all the way from Australia to Switzerland avoiding any air travel.  Along the way, he encounters many other backpackers as well as impoverished hustlers trying to take advantage of First Worlder’s and their relatively large fortunes.  Some offer to be his free tour guide only to lead him to a particular shop where they press him to buy a suit.  Another grabs his bag and loads it on to a train and then demands money.  Interestingly enough, I came across such a hustler in London.  As I arrived at Piccadilly Circus from the train station, a middle-aged yob approached me and started talking to me.  I could see that he didn’t have anything on him to try to sell me, and he didn’t outright ask for change, so I was game.  We chatted for a little.  I told him I was visiting from America and used to live in London.  Then he asked if he could take my photo with my phone for money.  I literally felt like punching him and looked around, but ultimately, my common sense got the better of me, and I just walked off hugely disappointed and annoyed. 

English people aren’t particularly friendly to strangers on the streets, and I was by myself meandering around London, so I honestly thought I had lucked out on some bored English bloke who just wanted some company for a bit.  But you have to be a lot more understanding of Southeast Asian hustlers who probably could feed their family for a week for a couple dollars.  Imagine if Swiss tourists came to America, and you could drive them around for the day and they would pay you $500.  There’d be a bunch of Americans waiting for them at every train station and port just like there are a bunch of Southeast Asians waiting at every station and port to drive around rich First World tourists.  I guess Third World folks have every right to try to hustler First World tourists since their countries have been hustled by the First World paying cents on the dollar for their valuable natural resources or cheap labor, inflating their currencies by fault of their stronger economies, etc.  Who’s hustling whom?

Funny, I mentioned this as I just read about the dude being scammed in Beijing.  A couple approach him and tell him they want to practice their English, so they take him to a café where the three of them are charged $120 for three coffees and biscuits.  Of course, he only had to pay $40, his share, but of course, it’s a scam.  I would have dropped $10 and walked out and punched anyone trying to stop me.  He paid up, but he later went back and got his money back, rather surprisingly.  But then he goes back to try to find the couple.  It’s such a horrible thing that scammers try to take advantage of people who are most vulnerable, foreigners who know nothing about the place or customs.  But this is nothing new.  Out west, there were countless scammers taking advantage of young men trying to get rich gold and silver mining.  The biggest scam of all were the gambling halls where savvy, skilled gamblers could easily lighten the burden of gold from naïve, young men either through legitimate play or cheating depending on their skill or lack thereof. 

I read a book once where they said any large upheaval results in people being scammed, as nobody knows the new rules and customs of the upheaval.  There were a lot of scammers at the advent of the Industrial Age with all the naïve, illiterate farm boys and girls moving to big cities where they knew nobody.  In China, the same thing is playing out with hundreds of millions of farm boys and girls moving to the big cities for factory jobs.  Many girls being unwitting victims of sex trafficking.  Imagine a young Aussie or American woman visiting China for the first time and having some couple approach her at a train station and taking her to a café where she’s charged $40 for coffee and biscuits.  I can certainly understand how women are much more cautious and untrusting than men.  This dude got his money back, probably because his beard made him look like he could do some damage to the café and their owners or workers. 

* * *

Perhaps the most shocking thing to me about travel books is just how racist travelers can be, those who just visit for a few days and even those who visit for years.  One would think that someone willing to visit or live in a foreign nation would be a little openminded.  I mean, if they hated Chinese people or Africans or Arabs, why on Earth would they go to China, Africa, or the Middle East?  There are a lot of racists who never step foot out of their countries, because they don’t want to.  They think their culture is superior, and they have no interest whatsoever in meeting anyone of any other culture much more going to their countries and being surrounded by them.  So why on earth would a racist go travel to a country where they think they’re superior to everyone else? 

One answer is that they want to feel more superior.  There is nothing to make you feel more superior than visiting or living in a poor culture.  Coming from a First World country, having more money, being taller and in many cases having fairer skin which is considered superior in many cultures (surprisingly and unfortunately), you are treated like royalty.  And of course, you have to justify in your mind why you are being treated so well, so naturally, you look down upon everyone around you as inferior, poorer, lowly, undeserving of better or equal treatment, etc.  It’s an ego trip.  A lot of short Americans, Europeans, and Australians go to Pacific Asia to get dates whereas in their native lands, they get passed over for taller guys.  I honestly can’t blame them.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean they respect the Pacific Asian women.  Many won’t admit it, but it’s shocking when they do and how much they look down upon the poorer natives.   I can’t stand the old bigoted concept of uncivilized savages.  During the Spanish Inquisition, so-called civilized Spaniards committee far greater atrocities against humans than so-called savages in the New World or Africa.  World War II proved that the civilized were the greatest savages by committing genocide in the millions and murdering millions of civilians. 

Certainly, many travelers start off open-minded but then are overwhelmed by the culture shock and eventually convert all their frustrations into a hatred or antipathy toward the locals.  Perhaps they have no idea just how much they would stick out and be treated differently, and instead of immersing themselves in the culture, they are reminded everyday that they do not belong, that they’re outsiders, so they just get fed up and turn against the locals, over-generalizing and treating them exactly the way they are treated. 

When I visited Korea, I was rather surprised at how much the foreigners hung out with each other and seemed to bond with each other, but it really wasn’t of their own doing.  I’m sure many of them wanted to mingle with the locals and have local friends, but in Korean society, you it’s not easy to make friends outside of school and work.  You just don’t go up to strangers and start talking and then agree to go hang out.  This is a rarity.  Their karaoke reflects much of their nightlife.  You go out with people you already know and spend time with them and not mingling with strangers.  Local bars are actually quite rare in Korea.  There is no neighborhood bar with a Norm, regular character.  Koreans don’t even hang out at bars.  They go drinking with people they already know at restaurants and hang out at tables.  I went to a restaurant once with a bar, and I was the only one at the bar. 

The only place where you go to hang out at a bar with strangers is, naturally called a ‘Western bar.’  There, it’s not odd to sit at the bar by yourself and start up a conversation with another loner at the bar.  It’s also not odd to hit on women at the bar whereas in a Korean restaurant, you couldn’t even hit on a woman, because they’d all be sitting down at a table with people they already know.  It’s only natural then that the foreigners wind up hanging out with foreigners and the locals only hang out with locals, unless, somehow you actually end up dating one.  It is easy then to see how your time in Korea would be spent viewing the world as an us (foreigner) vs them mentality.  It would then be easy to form stereotypes and negative views about them while ignoring stereotypes and having positive views about us.  

By the same token, in America, you always see foreigners hanging out at bars with other foreigners.  They must think that they’re at home.  If only they would have the courage to go out by themselves, they’d realize that in America, everyone at bars are friendly and willing to talk to strangers and form spontaneous friendships and hangout groups, especially out west.  I have to think the reason for this is that out west, people move there and leave their social support networks, so they need to quickly form new groups and friendships.  Bars out west were probably the most convenient place to do this, so it’s an expectation that at least out west, you go to a bar alone but you leave with many new friends and numbers. 

I guess, one of the cool things you learn by not properly preparing and not having a lot of money is that there are so many people willing to help you out for free or for little reimbursement.  It’s sad to think that at one time, we were more of a mutual benefit society and mentality that has been replaced in large part by the religion of government and believing that we no longer have to help or even be kind to our fellow humans, because we pay taxes, and government should help them out.  Surprisingly, in many poor countries, government isn’t the bloated nanny state it is in First World countries, so people do actually subscribe to the old-fashioned idea of mutual benefit society and mentality.  While certainly, the First World has its better healthcare, air conditioning, sanitation, and luxury amenities, it lacks perhaps what matters more, human connection and interdependence.  I really think a lot of people travel to poorer countries and discover a world where they are materially impoverished but so much more socially enriched.  They realize the big lie.  They’ve been told to study and work hard so they become materially enriched, but in the process, become socially impoverished and find life to be empty and meaningless, visited upon occasionally by brief serotonin bumps from shopping, drinking, doing drugs, and eating.

A Pine Tree in a Bamboo Forest: Five Years in Japan & South Korea by Brendan Magone

I just read English Toss on Planet Andong, and these books are like night and day.  This book covers an English-language teacher in Kyoto, Japan and Korea, but unlike Paul the English tosser, the author, Brendan, is more nuanced, intelligent, understanding, polite, friendly, and compassionate.  He also has the ability to keep his mouth shut and listen, especially since people who don’t speak English as a first language need time to compose their sentences and thoughts.  It’s amazing just how different these two are.  Brendan reaches out to understand others.  In fact, he adapts quickly and in the book, in Italics, he almost apologizes for some of his criticisms of Japan and Japanese culture. 

One of the more intriguing parts of the short book is his relationship with a 64-year-old student.  Brendan is 30 at the time.  She is wealthy and pays him $250 for five-hours of casual English lessons while touring Osaka and enjoying 4 or 5-star dinners all covered by the student.  It’s quite obvious, Brandon is conflicted and has ‘mommy issues.’  His own mother was an alcoholic who went through four marriages and then joined a cultish religious group.  She doesn’t seem all that attached to reality.  His time with the old lady borders on being an escort service.  They say many women would pay for men’s company and not necessarily for sex. 

It’s funny how I like to read these stories of fish-out-of-water English language teachers, but their lives never quite live up to my expectations.  They usually don’t talk much about going out partying, and this is pretty much all I’d be doing.  Of course, there’s only so much you can say about a drunken night of revelry and mayhem, but I’d argue there’s also so much you can say about dating a 64-year-old lady or hanging out with your annoying, loner roommate.  Then again, I’m also barking up the wrong tree.  Most people who wind up writing aren’t the adventurous type with the extraordinary exception of Ernest Hemmingway.  They’re usually mousy characters who feel uncomfortable in a big party or bar or club and tend to be wallflowers with the exception of meeting an extrovert and then tagging along and acquiring tales to spin into a novel or simply relay in a memoir. 

Although only being early 30ish, the author suffers a quarter-life crisis in Korea and despite having a girlfriend, what most men would be happy with, he falls into an addiction with online gambling and blows more money than he can afford.  I guess there’s a normal and point-of-reference for everyone, and he probably takes for granted that he’s 6’3” and finds it easy to get girlfriends.  Everyone thinks from their point-of-reference, so if you can already get women, you think about a career, fame, or settling down.  If you can’t get a women, you obsess about getting women and don’t worry as much about anything else except as a ploy to get a woman. 

Sure, I’d like to be 6’3” or really rich, but as soon as I become that, I’d wind up right back where I started, worrying about not having something else, wanting more, looking for even higher goals (excuse the pun).  No matter where you find yourself in life, you’re always going to be wanting more.  There are exceptions of course.  It truly does suck to be dirt poor, suffer from a disease, or feel guilty about something horrible you did.  There is such a thing as better.  It’s better to make $100K/year than minimum wage, but I guess what I’m saying is that you’ll never be totally happy, totally fulfilled, or totally satisfied.  People seek happiness, and think it’s some end-point when in fact, our DNA has us on this horrible journey where we can’t just sit down and enjoy our gains and blessings.  We’re constantly seeking out more, which makes us eternally ungrateful and unhappy when in fact, we should be mostly happy and grateful with what we have, especially if we’re middle-class Americans.

* * *

Perhaps one of the most profound things I’ve heard about Korea as well as people in general is, “…like someone who has had something stolen from them or something terrible happen to them in their youth, Koreans often think the world owes them something.”  He notes that people who have grown up extremely poor tend to driver harder bargains, because they feel they’re owed something.  They don’t even have to be poor, in fact, perhaps if they were abused or bullied, they don’t seem to mind exploiting or stealing from others as they feel life owes them a break.  I also believe they’re mimicking the way they’ve been treated.  There should be no surprise that after what happened to the Jews in Germany, many Jews turned around and did similar things to the Palestinians.  Of course, some people rise above their treatment while others turn around and mimic it, inflicting upon others what was inflicted upon them.  I’m even led to believe that the author may have felt bad about taking money from the 64-year-old who fell in love with him and in a sense cleansed himself by losing all that money he had earned dishonestly.  Strippers, prostitutes, thieves, drug dealers are renown for blowing their money on luxury items that depreciate rapidly.  They often lose their money, often gambling.  Strippers and prostitutes often just give their money to their boyfriends.  Unconsciously, they just want nothing to do with it, likes it’s a mark of shame, evidence of their infractions.

For all the generosity and semi-apologizing he does for Japan, it’s somewhat interesting how he’s a lot more candid and critical of Korea, perhaps a reflection of his experiences there.  He also notes the rampant domestic abuse that happens in Korea as opposed to Japan.  One of the sad things that happened with all oppressed people, while certainly, many of them rise above and become highly ambitious and achieve great things.  A lot of people think Jews have it easy, because they know about all the famous Jewish actors, the rich Jewish bankers, the rich Jewish entrepreneurs, the rich Jewish tech kids, but they forget about the fact that most all actors never succeed to the point where they can work full-time as an actor.  Many early bankers lost their money because borrowers failed to pay, and banking once was considered a lousy job.  Countless entrepreneurs fail and wind up bankrupt and doing low-skilled labor the rest of their lives. 

The Koreans have achieved tremendously with one of the largest economies of the world and a high standard-of-living.  Many Korean singers and actors have gone on to become global stars.  But of course, there are countless Koreans who suffer, get burned out, wind up poor, fortunately, the Oscar-winning movie, Parasite points this out.  There are big winners in the new Korea, but also big losers, and unfortunately, frustrated, angry men take their frustrations out on their spouse and children.  For many oppressed groups, this is one of the hidden and unfortunate consequences of impoverishing and oppressing a group of people.  The author mentions ornery, old Japanese ladies who push and poke people in crowds, but doesn’t mention the ornery, middle-aged Korean sales ladies who never crack a smile and look at you with suspicion.  They’re probably victims of untold domestic violence or other traumas.  People who suffer traumas often give up on communication.  They’re too ashamed to talk about their trauma or reach out to others, so they often adopt a quiet and introverted disposition.  They also don’t want to burden others with their own problems and ‘shame.’  Perhaps there should be a new term called, ‘oppression tourism.’  If you’ve suffered something awful in your life, perhaps an alcoholic mother who has gone through four marriages and belongs to a cult, you are drawn to countries that have also been through great trauma and tragedy.  You can commiserate with the locals, enjoy life in that odd way that people who suffer trauma do, huge, wild, mindless celebration interspersed with great sober suffering, quiet reflection, suppressed anger, and solitude.  Perhaps the pine tree is not so different than the bamboo tree.

English Toss on Planet Andong: A Dark Teaching Comedy

I debated reviewing this horrible book.  It’s called a ‘dark’ comedy, because the protagonist is a racist douchebag.  There’s a double-edged sword to the unreliable, unlikeable, annoying protagonist.  Just as one might learn or be entertained by a reliable, likeable, and entertaining protagonist, one could also learn from the opposite.  This is how most dark comedies work.  There’s also a certain spiciness to people behaving badly.  Much of our intense feelings toward something offensive or disgusting also brings with it a sense of relief or excitement.  It’s like eating a spicy pepper.  It burns, but that burning sensation also releases endorphins or other analgesics, and this is what we really feel and associate with the pain.  But I’m a victim of the shock 90’s where it just went overboard.  There are only so many car crashes you can witness before the shock value dies off.  It’s the law of diminishing returns.  There’s also a lot to be said for the toxicity of enjoying shocking and disturbing things.  You are your social influences, so when you witness someone behaving shockingly bad, you inevitably wind up behaving like them.  What really did it for me was not so much the blatant bigotry but the sheer immaturity of both Paul, the protagonist and his incel, loser sidekick Billy.  At one point, Billy introduces himself to foreign women as Vlad the Impaler, and he goes on to do a Borat impersonation thinking he’s so witty and cavalier.  It comes across as incredibly immature.  Why would I want to hang out with such a dork much less read about his life? 

* * *

This is probably my fourth, maybe fifth book about a foreigner teaching English in Korea.  I guess I like the idea of fish-out-of-water and no other country spends so much money teaching their children English than Korea and Japan, thinking that knowing English is social status or at least opens up the possibility of having their kids migrate to America and making it richer than if they had stayed in Korea.  Of course, Korea is fast catching up to America and Western Europe.  It makes sense that Korea doesn’t teach English to kids in school.  What makes no sense at all is that in America, children are taught foreign languages in middle school and high school when their ability to pick up foreign languages falls off dramatically. 

I’ve read enough of these books to know that the children don’t take these classes seriously anymore than the foreign teachers who have very little experience teaching much less babysitting.  For them, these English classes appear like an opportunity to get away with everything precocious kids can’t get away with in their regular classes with perhaps more frightening, seasoned, and intimidating Korean teachers.  What matters most to them is getting the grades in their regular classes.  Failing an English class is not the end of the world, so the kids see it as possibly the only time they can be kids or in many cases catch up on much needed sleep and recreation.  Perhaps the naïve foreign English teachers would be less stressed if they realized this and didn’t try hard to instill too much discipline.  They could probably just speak to themselves in English for the entirety of the class and get equivalent results from their students as trying to get their students to follow instruction and repeat what they say.  In a funny way, you can see these classes as being the equivalent of workers going out to get drunk after work.  They get to release all their pent-up frustrations and feelings of powerlessness and act out. 

* * *

Right away we get a shocking encounter with the protagonist Paul sitting at lunch and being interrupted by a businessman.  The businessman is certainly imposing himself on Paul by grabbing a seat and trying to start a conversation with him, but then Paul takes his business card, crumples it up, and tells him, “Go.”  It makes me think that the author is playing some sort of fantasy where his protagonist has the audacity and bravado to say and do what he so desperately wanted to say or do in Korea, maybe he actually did.  I don’t think the author establishes the frustrations and hardships Paul suffers to justify turning him into a complete misanthropic asshole who is sympathetic.  He doesn’t relay stories of businessmen constantly harassing him and giving him their business cards for us to understand why Paul reacts in such a brusque and demeaning fashion. 

I’ve written about this before in other reviews of work abroad books.  People who travel or work abroad are not representative of their countries.  It’s not like you’re picking a totally random sample of 100,000 people from America and sending them overseas.  There is a popular tendency for short Americans and Europeans to live in Pacific Asia where their shortness is not noticed as much.  It’s funny, but I think a lot of Pacific Asians must have the faulty notion that Americans and Europeans aren’t so short or for that matter skinny.  There also seems to be an odd lack of overweight Americans working in Pacific Asia.  That could also be partly a function of the different diet or in many cases, the indigestion one gets when eating in Pacific Asia.  You may start out overweight and chubby when you get there, but after walking around so much to get anywhere and the new diet, you quickly lose weight. 

American tourists in Pacific Asia tend to be rather wealthy, but the younger ones who live in Pacific Asia tend to be poorer, many in the military or English teachers.  The most important feature is that many are also somewhat misanthropic.  They haven’t found happiness in their home countries, and it’s probably simply because they don’t have the greatest social skills, so they have a tendency to believe that the grass is greener on the other side.  I believe that many of them do wind up happier, because they have a different frame of reference in Pacific Asia.  In America or England, for example, they see other people going out and having fun and enjoying life, and this makes them feel miserable.  But in Korea and Japan, they see more people working hard and not going out socializing and having fun, so they don’t feel as much the loner, outcast. 

On top of this, the foreigners tend to hang out with one another and form sort of commiseration groups for support which doesn’t exist in their home countries.  It’s like working on a cruise ship.  You may start off lonely and misanthropic, but you quickly realize it’s easy to form friendships and hang out with fellow crew members, because you all identify with each other like some biker gang.  You’re in an us-versus-them world.  And of course, there are the misanthropes who won’t socialize no matter what, so they’re likely to be just as miserable overseas as they are at home, and in many cases, they just go home sooner.  Of course, the language barrier adds another barrier which can be used as an excuse or helper.  As a helper, it adds to the camaraderie of foreign workers who rely even more on one another if they can’t speak or understand the language.  Going overseas is a great experience for many loners and introverts, because it actually forces them to become more extroverted with other foreigners in order to survive.  That pressure doesn’t exist at home.

* * *

Poor Paul can’t adapt to Korea.  He calls the children he’s teaching, dogs, and he calls all the Koreans, ‘Dollies’ because like Dolly the Sheep, he thinks they’re all clones.  “Koreans pretty much look the same, eat the same stuff and do the same things.  As if cloned.”  “They’re all obsessed with work and study.  And when they’re not doing that, they climb mountains, play computer games and hang around with family.  That’s pretty much it.  They’re so insular they treat the rest of the universe like it’s a big of an urban myth.  This is a bland homogenous culture where they’ve all got the same three surnames.  There’s hardly any sub-cultures, no individuality.” 

The author could probably argue that Paul is supposed to be an annoying, racist, misogynistic ass.  Why can’t an author have a protagonist who is unlikeable in addition to being unreliable?  I get it.  Sometimes you want to fantasize about getting into the head of a serial killer, rapist, or some horribly racist bigot.  There’s something to be said for seeing the world through their eyes or at least how people think they’re seeing the world.  Absolutely.  However, there’s something to be said for not wanting to see the world through the eyes of someone who enjoys torturing animals, infants, killing innocent people, or being a flaming bigot. 

It’s one reason why I’d never read an autobiography of Donald Trump, but I would read a memoir about him by his more level-headed, likeable niece.  Certainly, once in a while, I could spare a few hours to read something from the point of view of a mad person, but it better be worth it, and this is not.  I get the point-of-view of a misanthrope bigot.  You don’t get any pleasure from hanging out with other people, perhaps at some point, they mocked, abused, and/or bullied you.  So instead of just saying, hey, I have these issues, it’s so difficult for me to get along with other people, it’s much more satisfying to go, hey, everyone is flawed, everyone is stupid, everyone is shallow, I’m better than everyone, everyone is underserving of my company, I am a victim, I feel much better now.  It’s a toxic, sickness.  Why should I jump inside that head for any amount of time?

The worst thing about books that have some character attacking people based on their gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, whatever, is that there are people who take it at face value and love it.  They finally have someone who appears to agree with them and thinks exactly like they do, and it emboldens them, just like Trump emboldens them to go around saying the n-word freely.  I’m not saying the author is responsible for bigots going around freely saying horrible things about Koreans or anyone based on their race or nationality, but you do have a certain responsibility for spreading toxicity just as an author who writes about a hero triumphing over hardship bears some responsibility for uplifting people and contributing to their own stories of triumphing over hardship. 

In the best possible scenario, this book would work for someone who has rarely encountered toxic people and act to shock them and make them realize that there really are horrible people in the world.  But most people are not that sheltered.  We’ve all run into toxic people, and there are a plethora of them on TV, especially ‘reality’ TV.  In fact, we are inundated by toxic people, because profit-seeking businesses find their shocking behavior more profitable in the short-run and government loves to convince us that people are horrible so we pay more taxes and allow government to have more power over all us horrible people. 

William S. Burroughs and Irvine Welsh worked, because their books came out during one of the most sheltered times in American history.  It was a wake-up call, and it was actually ludicrous how Pollyannish the world was portrayed in the 50’s and 60’s.  In the 90’s, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction, and sheltered middle-class white American youth were led to believe that they lived in a harsh, dangerous, gang-infested wasteland, so they behaved accordingly, and you could even argue that most ‘Karen’s’ today are a byproduct of that siege mentality.  There was a time when portraying black men as robbers and murderers was considered horribly racist, but then the 90’s were all about portraying them as dangerous gangsters, pimps, and thugs.  How as that not equally racist? 

Yes, I know there are racists in the world.  Yes, it’s a bit surprising that someone would travel to Korea and be so racist against Koreans, but it’s not so shocking.  The shock value isn’t there.  It’s more just annoying listening to this loner and his loner buddy go about acting elite and privileged.  That’s been going on since the beginning of European colonialization and imperialism.  Not worth reading about.  What this book will do is act as a soothing balm to other incel, loner, bigots who want to feel like they’re not alone.  Unfortunately, it won’t inspire them to transcend their self-imposed solitude and tendency to blame others for your own problems, to latch on to toxic attitudes like bigotry and victimhood.  There was actually a time when I was more like them.  I was already turning my life around when I watched American History X, but it seemed to convince me I was going in the right direction.  Dr. Bob Sweeney visits Derek Vinyard in prison.  “Has anything you’ve done made your life better.”  Or even better, has your anger made your life better?  No?  Then let go of it. 

I know where Paul and Billy are coming from, and that’s perhaps why I find them so repulsive.  They’re in world of pain, a world where they’re considered at the bottom or at least they think that.  They see other guys being happy, getting girlfriends, going out enjoying life, and they don’t understand why they can’t.  They’re consumed by anger.  They hate the women who reject them, they hate women in general and mock the ugly or fat ones who actually are in their same boat in a sense.  They actually identify with the ugly and fat ones.  They don’t understand a world in which seemingly good, nice people get treated so poorly.  Perhaps they have social anxiety and panic attacks, perhaps traumas keep them from relaxing in public and being friendly.  Something is keeping them back from making friends and being positive and social.  They feel trapped and powerless.  All they have is their anger, and the endorphins you get from feelings of rage and powerlessness actually become addictive.  You become addicted to the anger and rage and feelings of powerlessness and victimhood. 

I would hope, someone, someone reaches out to them and gets beyond the silly, insulting games they play to keep people away and not get hurt.  I would hope, someone would ask them the simple question, “Has your anger made your life better?”  It’s a quick analgesic that lasts as long as any drug, but it wears off and it takes more to get the same effect.  The only way to get off that addiction is to take responsibility for your situation.  There’s nothing you can do about superficial people or women who reject you because you’re short, fat, ugly, or poor.  You can’t also change the weather, but you can mitigate the harshness of the weather.  You can also choose to avoid people who judge you based on superficial and shallow cues.  Why even worry or care about those kinds of people?  What makes you attractive to people who are not superficial is your kindness, your honesty, your character, your humility and humor, and those are definitely things you can work on and change. 

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, Parts I & II

A long time ago, people thought the solar system revolved around Earth.  In Genesis 1:26-28, humans are given dominion over animals.  We are not even considered animals but above them.  White people used to think that they had larger brains than everyone else and were the superior race.  Scientists used to think that 99% of everything that could be known was known, and there was only 1% left over.  Physicists used to think that if you knew the position, direction, and speed of every atom in the universe, you could predict the future.  Economists used to think that everyone was a completely rational decision-maker with perfect information and pursued their own interests diligently.  We also used to think that most of our lives are spent being consciously aware of everything and the vast majority of our thoughts are available to us and even the idea that our conscious thoughts control our actions. 

Basically, humans are usually wrong and usually profoundly arrogant and stupid.  It is more accurate to say that humans make stupid decisions and think incorrectly than to say humans make wise, rational decisions and think logically.  The problem is not so much that intense emotions get in our way, in which case, our frontal lobes are oxygen-deprived, and we become more reactive and impulsive.  The problem is that even when we engage our frontal lobes and flood them with oxygen, we come up with really stupid ideas and our thinking is often fatally flawed and misguided.  In addition to this, our processing power is especially limited, and we can only hold a handful of different ideas and values in our minds at a given time.  This is why it helps us to write things down and use spreadsheets for complex calculations.  But fact is, most of our day-to-day decisions are not made with the aid of spreadsheets.  So what are we to do about this? 

The answer is to acknowledge our limitations and in the case of highly important life-and-death matters, we should think more logically and comprehensively, using multiple feedback from trusted people, while in the case of deciding where to eat for lunch, we can be as impulsive as we wish, so long as we are mindful of healthy options.  Fact is, our mind was evolved to handle rather simple social systems limited to about 150 people, and it can’t handle big numbers of people and systems like cities or entire nations.  Our mind was evolved to handle rather simple decisions that only impacted at most 150 people and not deal with the specter and consequences of $27 trillion in national debt and the Federal Reserve system which the vast majority of Americans still don’t understand. 

There are many pitfalls to our primitive minds including the boiling frog syndrome where we don’t feel the need for urgent action if we are slowly being boiled to death, i.e., gradually getting into more credit card debt or going out and gradually drinking more and more alcohol.  Our minds are not adapted for the modern world, not at all, and even worse, sophisticated profit-seeking companies are using advances in psychological research to uncover our mental weaknesses and exploit them without our knowing.  The level of sophistication of profit-seeking companies compared to the average human is growing exponentially and making these companies exceptionally good at turning us into unwitting, deranged, complacent, and pathetic consumers they can fleece.  The first step is to get rid of all notions of arrogance and individual capabilities in the face of incredibly sophisticated profit-seeking companies. 

When I hear of people succumbing to police investigators and admitting to things they never did, I like to think that I would have more mental resistance and powers.  This is the same error that novice gamblers make.  They think they can game the system and beat people who have dedicated their entire lives to manipulating and exploiting you and your idiot way of thinking.  Nobody can imagine what they would be going through if they were interrogated for several hours and bombarded with countless psychological tricks to get them to doubt their own minds and memory.  It is better to go into an interrogation humbly revering the powers of your interrogator than to go in thinking there is no way they could possibly bend or break you.  We need to be a lot more humble and vigilant against professionals who have studied and profited from taking advantage of us.  That’s a good starting point.

We also have to accept the reality that human-driven systems are fallible and unstable, that panic is a given and will create huge mob mentality trends that create huge inefficiencies.  We all are taught to buy low and sell high, but in reality, the majority of investors buy as stocks skyrocket and sell when they crash and become worthless.  Basically, the vast majority of investors are complete and utter idiots.  There is nothing we can do about it.  You can’t ban people from buying high and selling low.  However, you can stop pretending to believe that giving institutions greater oversight and powers will put an end to this silliness.  The Federal Reserve website claims that one of their core missions is to eliminate the volatility of markets, i.e., reduce the boom and bust cycles.  There is nothing more damning of their intelligence than this.  They can’t, and their attempts to do so will only backfire.  It is like our attempt to eradicate all wildfires thinking all wildfires are bad when in fact, most wildfires are good and completely healthy for the ecosystem.  Our attempt to eradicate all wildfires backfires when we allow excessive forest floor debris to accumulate resulting in ever greater and more damaging super-hot wildfires. 

Similarly, the genie notion in life is yet another idiot idea of humanity.  This is the notion that technology and progress can fix every personal and social problem, that we should invest heavily in technology and progress so that we can eliminate everything that inconveniences and annoys us.  Problem is, our investment in technology and progress is what often creates even more inconveniences and annoyances.  Our over-reliance on cars and urban sprawl is what contributed to our obesity problem in addition to making cooked food, especially fast and convenient to purchase and consume on the go.  Just like the genie stories, our wishes are granted, but there is always some unanticipated cost which is often worse than the problem we think we are solving. 

Another error we make is in over-relying on our analytical minds.  A good example is when we plan ahead for a vacation but plan a little too much and break out our vacation plans into 15-minute increments affording us, for example 1 hour for lunch and 15 minutes to get from our hotel to a show, etc.  First, anything can throw a monkey wrench into our plans including traffic or perhaps we run into a really interesting couple for lunch and we don’t want to cut it short.  Second, it eliminates all possibility of emergent opportunities and experiences that occur when we just meander through life or a city.  It makes our lives boring and too constricted.  Instead of thinking about experiencing the city and enjoying our holiday, we are consumed with worries about falling off schedule and missing out on something planned. 

We must also be mindful that we have two different reward systems for expectation and capture.  In planning out a vacation, we can actually get excited and feel pleasure from imagining the future, and this is often why many people plan ahead.  However, once we experience the vacation, we experience a whole other type of pleasure that comes from a whole different reward system.  Sometimes the pleasure of capture is not as great as the pleasure of expectation, so we feel sort of robbed.  In other words, we shouldn’t expect too much, because it can rob us of our enjoyment of actually experiencing something we anticipate.  Before I go on vacation, I always like to tell myself, don’t expect great things to happen, or else, you’ll just disappoint yourself or jinx yourself. 

Perhaps what hurts us most is the idea that we ought to control people through laws and institutions because a few people misbehave.  We are constantly creating a world for the lowest common denominator.  It’s like the teacher saying, because one kid abused his hall privilege and left campus to go home instead of use the restroom, all hall privileges are suspended.  We think punishing everyone will ensure that a few misbehaving people will be kept in line, but the opposite is true.  The misbehaving people continue to misbehave, but it backfires, because now the behaving people do everything they can to misbehave within the parameters of the system to assert their limited autonomy.  Most people who behave do so not because they are afraid of being punished but rather because it makes them feel good.  By creating more and more rules and laws, you don’t get more people to behave, quite the contrary, you turn well-behaving people into misbehaving people who feel constricted and oppressed by all the rules and laws.  People also then tend to rely on the rules and laws to define their behavior instead of relying on their common sense and intuition.

* * *

This book is a little confusing.  I thought it was going to tell us about how our notions of how people think and make decisions is mostly irrational and biased and the implications for Economics and other social studies, but instead, it seems more like a Psychology 101 overview of all the biases we have in how we perceive things, think, and make decisions.  In fact, I kept on thinking I had read the book before, but in actuality, it was just regurgitating countless studies that are often covered in Psyc 101 that are supposed to unsettle your assumptions about how reliable and rational the human mind is.  Instead of calling the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, perhaps it should have been called All the Ways We Think Fast When We Assume We Were Thinking Slow. 

There are some new things of course that I learned here.  One off the best was how ‘money-primed’ people become less social, more selfish,  more likely to try to solve very difficult problems on their own before asking for help, more self-reliant.  We live in a society that has decided to make money a motivator for industriousness, hard work, and productivity.  If you think of a worker in a factory, perhaps money would be a great incentive.  The worker would mind his own business, work alone, rarely pause to interrupt other workers with social banter, etc.  However, we now live in a totally different age.  In the service industry, you want workers to be a bit more outgoing, to engage customers, to help customers, to ask their supervisors for help immediately so they can learn and be of greater service to customers, etc.  In the tech industry, while you can image that a lot of workers do work alone and code by themselves, there is also demand for networking, for meeting other people with ideas or skills and creating multi-faceted work groups or companies, to share their knowledge, even to share their codes.  Money may not be the best way to motivate them. 

* * *

“The evidence on priming studies suggests that reminding people of their mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death.”

This is probably one big reason why the Aztecs and other civilizations had sacrificial killings, why wars persist to this day, and today, why the news media continue to obsess about murders, fatal accidents, and fatal terrorist attacks.  If you want to keep the peasants in check, just keep reminding them of death each day, and they’ll be so worried, they won’t mind the oppression and costs of authoritarianism.  It is without doubt that America became more authoritarian after World War I, after World War II, and after 9/11. 

* * *

This book is pretty tough to read, not as much because of the technicality of it but rather its very long way of making a rather simple point.  I honestly believe the book could be half the length without losing anything but in fact gaining from being concise and helping the reader get through it.  I imagine countless people gave up on this book.  I would not recommend reading Parts III, IV, and V.  You get the gist from Parts I and II, and trying to slog through the rest only undermines your appreciation for Parts I and II.

* * *

One of the most interesting points in the book (the money part, worth the entire cost of the boo) was when he tries to explain to an Israeli flight instructor that it’s incorrect to punish poor performance.  The flight instructor argues that whenever he praises a student on a performance, the next time almost always he performs worse, and whenever he screams at a student for poor performance, the next time almost always he performs better.  But the author explains that this is a misconception.  Instances where students perform well above average or well below average are rare and the next time, they almost always move back toward the mean.  It made me think about how we raise our kids.  Whenever they do something extremely awful, we jump down their throats, but whenever they do something extremely well, we praise them.  Ought we be doing this? 

I think the answer is nuanced.  If a kid does something truly outrageous like kill a bird or beat up a crippled kid, that kid needs serious mental evaluation and his behavior needs immediate attention.  I don’t think the parent should scream at the kid, but definitely give the kid sharp and harsh rebuke.  By the same token, if the kid saves another kid’s life, this shouldn’t be ignored or downplayed.  Let the kid enjoy his time in the sun and shower the kid with praise.  The difference is in milder cases.  If the kid does bad on a test, it’s likely a fluke.  It’s not because he’s suddenly decided to become a homeless vagrant and rebel.  He just had a bad test, and if you do nothing, chances are, the next time, he’ll do much better.  If you load up his burden with rebuke and criticism, this will only cause more stress and confusion.  He honestly may not know why he did so poorly.  He may in fact have studied just as much as before.  Everyone has a bad day.  Likewise, when he does very well on a test, it wouldn’t hurt to say ‘great job’ but don’t go overboard, because by the same token, he probably just lucked out and all the questions just happened to be the ones he studied most for.  If you give him too much credit, you may be pressuring him unnecessarily, so that if he does worse next time, he’ll feel confused and frustrated. 

I’ll never forget when I worked at a document storage facility where we were supposed to enter the file numbers into a computer database.  As usual, I was a bit too fast and reckless, and the boss happened to find three errors.  But instead of coming down hard on me, he said, you know, it’s probably just the luck of the draw, and I just came across the only three mistakes you made.  I’ll never forget that.  It made me feel bad, but it made me feel indebted to him to do a much better job.  If he had come down hard on me and yelled at me to pay attention and focus, I would have felt bad, but I also would have resented him and felt no debt to him.  If anything, I would feel a need to retaliate for him yelling at me.  A good leader, a good parent, a good teacher, will assume the best in you, and results well above or below average won’t bother them, because statistically, they’re outliers.  They’re more interested in the average than each event.  They’re wise, patient, and compassionate enough to understand that we all suffer outliers both good and bad and not to overreact to them, to trust the average, to trust one another. 

Of course, I also had the worst kind of role model where I was yelled at harshly for trivial things and things I wasn’t even responsible for, and when I really did mess up, like kick a ball and break a window, it was treated like it was not a big deal.  Way to really screw up a kid’s mind!  The lesson was, you’ll get yelled at for any or no reason just because the fuck is in a bad mood, and you can get away with a lot, just because the fuck is in a good mood.  It taught me to pay close attention to what mood people are in, and that’s it, oh, and also that authority is fallible.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Perhaps the most qualified person to assess Trump, not only a close relative but a clinical psychologist.  One wonders how could someone like Trump be allowed to lead the most powerful nation in the world, to have his finger on the nuclear button.  One could argue that the position of President isn’t really that powerful, that there are far more powerful people in the world, and they really run the show.  The position of President is much like the title of king or queen in England.  Others might argue that his reality TV show stardom gave him unprecedented popular support which (excuse the pun) trumped the establishment powers of Washington, that an uncouth, loudmouthed, hot-headed, unpredictable jerk could get enough popular support to irk the powers.  I think there’s truth to both.  Those who really do run the show would never have chosen Trump by themselves, not because he’s rude and crass, but rather because he’s his own boss.  He answers to nobody but himself.  Recent past Presidents have all been sycophants who are good at pleasing their bosses.  They’re spineless servants to the real power. 

The democratic process is largely a theater to give the masses the impression that they actually run the show, but those in power have so much sway with the news media that they get an outsized voice in who gets the most positive media attention.  It was supposed to be Jeb Bush, but none of the run-of-the-mill sycophants could stand up to the sheer charisma and independent-minded charisma of Trump.  Therein lies the problem.  People hate spineless sycophants, and if they don’t have a better choice, they’ll vote for them, but if someone like Trump comes along, the spineless sycophants don’t have a chance.  Trump also lucked out in that the 2016 pool of Republican candidates was perhaps the most shallow and mosquito-ridden in recent memory with the limp, impotent likes of Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and the remarkably diluted and uncharismatic version of Ron Paul, his son.  If any of these louts had walked into a casting office for the role of US President, they would have been laughed out of the room.

But someone like Trump can become President, because he is pretty much like everyone of those who truly rule the country and the world.  He acts like a petty, narcissistic, megalomaniac, sociopath who is obsessed with power, wealth, and status.  Unfortunately, the modern world has an unusual natural selection process for the richest, most powerful people on the planet.  Those who cannot bring themselves to cut the wages of their employees, to cut the costs of their operations by substituting quality for barely passable garbage, to spend all their time in the office, simply self-select themselves out of the race to the top of the wealth and power pyramid.  In other words, good people with good morals and values have little interest in accumulating huge wealth and power.  You can say, it’s not in their DNA.  So what is left? 

The ones who are left are people who have no problem cutting wages, substituting cheap garbage into their products and services, moving American jobs overseas, cheating on their taxes, hiding their wealth in trusts, and hiring lobbyists to rig the system in their favor.  Unfortunately, in our modern world, they rise to the top, and it is preposterous to think that there is anyone else at the very top of this corrupt and sick pyramid scheme.  However, while they identify with Trump, and he is cut from the same cloth, just like mob bosses, they know that the best subordinates are cowering, spineless sycophants and not people like themselves: ruthless, cunning, narcissistic, and cruel.  Trump got away with it, because of his surprising and not-so-surprising popular support.  While those in power breathed a sigh of relief when Trump took office and didn’t actually drain the swamp but refilled it with the same slime, they also breathed a sigh of relief when he was voted out of office and a true spineless, career sycophant will take his place. 

* * *

The book is more a story about Freddy, Donald’s older brother, than about Donald.  It’s an incredibly tragic story about a cold, narcissistic father who cruelly favors Donald over Freddy, because he views Freddy as weak, sensitive, and not completely interested in carrying on his business.  At one point, Freddy leaves his father’s business to pursue an airline pilot career, but tragically can’t seem to completely divorce himself from his father’s influence and bullying.  Instead of enjoying the freedom of independence and being his own man, doing what he loves to do for a living, he descends into drunkenness and undermines his flying career being forced to resign for his drinking.  He crawls back to his father who now relishes in a brutal game of revenge where he puts him up in one of his housing complexes and on the bottom of the repair list leaving his bedroom freezing in the winter.  This is remarkable and incredible cruelty. 

I remember a story about a couple of siblings.  A brother was spoiled by the parents and the sister was abused, and you would expect the brother to feel remorse and guilt, but quite the contrary, the brother blamed the sister for her poor treatment.  And you can’t really blame him.  How could you possibly reconcile in your mind that both your preferential treatment was undeserved and your sister’s maltreatment was undeserved?  It would drive you nuts.  To believe that the parents who showed you so much love and adoration were actually unjustifiably cruel and abusive to your sister is incomprehensible.  It’s like one day waking up to find out that the country you love and adore, the country that has allowed you to become a wealthy, successful person, is also the country that mass incarcerated black people and kills people overseas without trial.  You can’t come to terms with that, so inevitably, you blame black people for being in prison and foreign people for being probable terrorists. 

Perhaps in the back of Donald’s mind, he knows that his father unjustifiably mistreated his brother, but this would also be a great source of confusion and frustration.  It’s much easier to believe that he deserved his father’s positive attention and support and his brother was completely to blame for being weak, sensitive, and disobedient.  Of course, the weakness was not in defying his father but actually in Freddy’s incessant desire to please him.  So many idiots think of Donald as some alpha male who mocks the weak, but they simply don’t get it.  People who bully, mock the weak, and are tone deaf to their own emotions and ignore their own weaknesses are actually tremendously fragile and weak.  It’s all a show, theater.  Strong, robust people don’t need to put on a show.  They’re not afraid of sometimes appearing uncertain, weak, sensitive, etc.  Just like a straight person who supports gay rights.  They’re not afraid of being called gay for supporting gay rights, but someone who questions their sexuality would never dare support gay rights and in fact would attack gay people as some perverse theater to try to prove that they’re not gay. 

So often, when we grow up with passive-aggressive parents, we think that someone who is not aggressive is being passive and someone who is not passive is being aggressive.  We can’t wrap our minds around assertive people who are neither passive nor aggressive.  Often times, it is the father who adopts the aggressive posture while the mother adopts the passive posture, but in reality, the father is perhaps 60% aggressive and 40% passive while the mother is 60% passive and 40% aggressive. 

One of the most interesting things is how Donald is attracted to autocrats, namely Putin and Kim Jong-Un.  He probably sees his father in Putin, a cold, sinister tough guy who never shows his emotions.  He probably sees himself in Kim Jong-Un, a faithful son who has sacrificed his own interests and life to serve in his father’s footsteps.  He gets them.  He doesn’t get any single other person on this planet.  All the ‘soft’ democratic leaders of the world confuse him.  He doesn’t get consensus, collaboration, and cooperation.  In his small mind, it’s all about dominance, intimidation, and winner-take-all.  If you’re not being aggressive, you’re being passive, and in his mind, passive people get abused, exploited, bullied, and driven to alcoholism and death.

* * *

One thing a lot of people misunderstand about rich kids is that they think life is a bowl of cherries.  They live in a nice house in the nice part of town, they go to a nice school, they wear nice clothes, they get ridiculously outlandish presents, they have jobs lined up in their parent’s companies, etc.  First of all, they forget that when you’re born into wealth, your normal is not everyone else’s normal.  You take everything for granted, and everything below that is horrifying poverty.  Second, their parent(s) use money as a weapon.  When you’re obedient, you get nice things.  When you’re disobedient, you get to live like everyone else in squalor.  This is an incredibly horrible trap.  They don’t know what it’s like to live middle class much less in poverty.  To them, it’s a fate worse than death. 

For the rest of us, we know that while poverty sucks, it’s not a daily misery, and we adapt.  For them, it’s unimaginable punishment and their imagination is the worst part of it.  For us, we’ve lived in cockroach-infested, small shitholes, and we survived, so losing everything and going back to that isn’t the end of the world.  We can work our way back.  For them, it would be a death sentence.  Likewise, most Americans don’t know true poverty like Third World poverty.  They don’t know life without electricity, gas, plumbing, insulated walls, and being relatively free of serious crime and the possibility of rape and sex trafficking.  Imagine your father telling you, if you don’t do everything that I tell you to do, I’m sending you off to Somalia, and you’re going to live in a hut without plumbing, and every day, your neighbor, who’s a pimp, is going to try to pimp you out.

You also have the rich parents, like Warren Buffett, who feel that wealth is corrupting, so despite being a billionaire, he doesn’t gift his children much.  There are many stories of rich kids stealing things, because their parents like to think that growing up in poverty will toughen them up just as it did for them.  What they fail to appreciate is that when you send your kids to a school full of rich kids whose parents gift them expensive cars and trips to France, your kids will feel inadequate.  Yes, if you sent them to a public school in a poor neighborhood, they would fit right in, but you’re sending them to a school full of rich kids with very nice things, so inevitably, your kids will wind up feeling inadequate and steal things from their wealthier peers or just shoplift.

It’s also truly a dilemma for rich parents.  If you don’t gift your kids, they’ll feel inadequate compared to their peers, but if you do gift them, it’s probably conditional on them pleasing you, in which case, you have no idea if they’re behaving well because they love you and want to truly please you or because they want a new iPhone or videogame console.  Money cheapens everything.  One possible solution is to keep your wealth a secret from your kids, which means not sending them to a fancy private school but perhaps just living in a nice part of town with a good public school.  It would also mean not showing off your wealth with a nice car and too exotic or fancy a vacation. 

* * *

According to the author, the notion that Donald was a self-made Manhattan real estate mogul, perhaps with a little seed funding from his dad, was a fiction, a tale Fred manufactured to prop up his son as a self-made genius.  It is also quite probable that a federal lawsuit against them for discrimination against blacks gave Donald the requisite exposure to succeed in the Manhattan real estate market.  Undoubtedly, Donald had skills, and this is an oft argument for billionaires.  Nobody is saying they’re half-wits who could barely get through working a shift at McDonald’s.  What people are saying is that there are countless people smarter than them, harder worker and more skilled, who only make a few million in life.  Getting to the billion-dollar level takes both hard work and mostly luck as well as cheating the taxman.  As I learned in the book Super-hubs, one person inevitably gets ahead of the crowd, and often by chance, and once they get ahead of the crowd, everyone notices them, and that in-and-of itself adds to their notoriety which fuels interest in investing and helping them.  Gradually, they become a super-hub.  Just like an up-and-coming famous singer or actress, once they gain sufficient fame, everyone wants to work with them, and this is where they go from just successful to superstardom.  Fred had already made important connections in the political world to get favorable deals, but news about their federal discrimination lawsuit shot them into the stratosphere of fame in Manhattan needed to become a big player there. 

The author also reveals all the tax deals, interest-free loans, and FHA support they received which supports the idea that government is not in the business of helping the public as much as they are in the business of helping out the rich and creating the impression that they are helping out the poor.

* * *

It is shocking how horribly Fred treated his son Freddy.  It seems to make no sense.  Freddy is Fred’s blood, why on Earth would he treat him so horribly?  It reminds me of any cult or criminal group where you always need a scapegoat, an example.  A drill sergeant will always pick on one person to make an example of.  They will relentlessly mock and punish them or set them up to be punished by their peers.  The purpose of this is to instill fear in everyone else.  It reminds me of the videos of people using stuffed animals to scare their pets.  They take the stuffed animal and try to feed it, but they shake the stuffed animal’s head, so they punch and smack the stuffed animal around.  Then they try to feed their pet, and their pet gladly eats the food.  Likewise, when you see an authority figure mistreat and abuse someone, this is all theater to instill fear in you, to make you think, if you disobey, this might be you next.  Freddy served just this purpose.  There was a point where Freddy tried to return to the family business, but that wasn’t enough.  Imagine being Donald and watching your brother getting such horrific mistreatment.  There was no way Donald would ever disobey his father and risk winding up like poor, tormented Freddy. 

What Fred saw in Donald was not just an obedient son but rather someone with a serious character flaw.  Why is that important?  When you happen to be running a company that uses clandestine tactics and political favors and may often be conducting criminal activities, the last thing you want is an heir with a conscience.  Perhaps worse than just being independent-minded, he saw in Freddy a man with a conscience who didn’t want to hurt people and abuse the system, someone who saw the bigger picture in life, enjoying it, sharing, helping others.  Fred saw himself in Donald, someone who acted like a sociopath, someone who only cared about himself and winning, someone who was willing to bend, maybe break the rules to get the job done. 

Similarly, in the outlaw world of modern finance, what bosses are looking for is not necessarily merely a good salesman or skilled quant, but rather, someone with character flaws.  So you take them out to strip clubs, give them a line of coke, ply them with booze, and hire some escorts and see how they respond.  Are they shocked and repulsed or are they having the time of their lives?  If they are shocked and repulsed, you get rid of them.  Who needs these straight-lace nerds to go reporting your activities to the FTC?  This is one reason why there’s so much discrimination against women in finance.  How many women do you think you could take to a strip club and have them snort coke off hookers?  If they are partying it up and breaking the law happily, there you have a sociopath willing to sacrifice their morals for a good time.  Not to say that women aren’t willing to commit crimes to get ahead, but it seems they’re much more likely to blow the whistle and not identify with the whole fraternity, boy’s locker-room bullshit where women are often objectified as living sex toys.

* * *

Near the end, after Fred dies, we learn that the author’s family has been mostly left out of the will, although, they continue to receive the family healthcare and apparently shares from other family sources.  It appears that they bargain away those shares in exchange for some cash settlement contesting the will, but that is not made clear.  You can then assume that this entire book is the author’s way of getting even with the rest of the family, which it probably is.  The author has no reason to be nice to the rest of the family.  They were supposed to receive 20% of their grandfather’s estate, the author estimated at over a billion dollars, before the grandfather decided for whatever reasons to leave them out.  That 20% was for her father, Freddy, but after Freddy died, it should have gone to his wife and kids, but Fred decided otherwise.  It’s shocking that the author would ask the family attorney for advice in hiring a lawyer to contest the will.  It sounds like the family attorney suggested a dimwit who probably would have experienced a bizarre conflict of interest fighting the family lawyer after being recommended by that same family lawyer! 

It’s remarkable that someone who has been such a failure in business, someone who exhibits such an immature mentality can become leader of the most powerful nation in the world.  But then you think of all the other folks who have led countries, Adolf Hitler, notably, an Army corporal who suddenly finds himself telling generals how to run a war.  Obviously, no single person can do everything alone.  Hitler had just as many economic aids helping him reconstruct the German economy as he had logistics aids helping him get Jews to concentration camps.  What is shocking is how we allow a single, unstable person to have so much power over so many people and resources. 

Of course, fortunately, we live in a democracy where we can vote Trump out of office.  Keep in mind, of course, that Hitler came to power democratically and simply got rid of the democracy.  For all our checks and balances and background checks and media scrutiny, the people can still overrule that to put a truly dangerous person in a position of incredible power.  But when you think about it, there are no such checks and balances for billionaires, and they have an outsized influence on the economy and the nation.  Who voted for Bezos or Musk?  Why should they have so much power and wealth to change the world in their image?  You could argue that Steve Jobs was a narcissistic maniac.  Ought there be a check and balance on billionaires? 

* * *

If what the author conveys is true or even half true, it’s shocking.  Instead of a self-made billionaire expert dealmaker, Donald Trump comes across more as a brilliant actor, someone who played that part while actually it was his father Fred who was the expert dealmaker, mostly through using political connections, who made a billion dollars that was eventually eroded by subsidizing Donald’s huge business losses.  Fred had made Donald believe that he could do no wrong, and he sold the world on the idea that his son was the brains behind the operations and self-made.  Donald appears clueless as to how to actually make a profit.  He simply wants to make very big, very public deals in order to keep media attention on himself.  Whether they are designed to make a profit or not doesn’t seem anywhere as important as how big the deals are so he can perpetuate his popularity and fame.  Interestingly, this is corroborated in an interview I watched on Donald Trump in a documentary that is now playing on Netflix.  Donald admits that the bigger the deal, the more attention it gets, and he’s a whore for media attention.  He equates it with self-worth.

Media attention is intoxicating, perhaps as much or more so than wealth.  When you’re walking down the street and people are virtually worshipping you, you start to believe the hype.  You start to believe that you are truly special, truly valuable, and especially if you have low self-esteem, this is like a dream come true.  For the first time in your life, people are telling you that you are not worthless, that you are actually the best thing that ever happened to them that day, just taking a photo with you made their day, perhaps their year.  Like any drug, you want more and more of it, and like any drug, the high gets less and less.  Who cares if it’s positive or negative attention.  If you can’t get media attention through positive means, why not negative.  Trump had to put two and two together when he divorced Ivana and got perhaps the most media attention he’d ever gotten for a development project.  Dumping Marla was probably more about getting another bump of media attention than being tired of Marla. 

* * *

Not to apologize or diminish the terrible things Donald Trump has done while in office, but I would argue that at least he never got us into a new  war since Carter and he avoided war with Iran which seemed to be where everyone in Washington seemed to be headed.  But being a well-qualified bureaucrat and sycophant isn’t exactly the greatest thing either as a President, as they seem to be equally cornered into perpetuating policies that kill people and hurt our country in the long run.  While Obama did reduce the number of extrajudicial illegal drone assassinations, I would consider Trump’s administration considerably better than George W Bush who allowed Rumsfeld and Cheney free rein to run the country and invade Iraq.  At least Trump was smart enough not to have a Rumsfeld and Cheney telling him how to run the country and which countries to bomb. 

As bad as he was, it’s extraordinary how the left has vilified and satirized him so much more than they did with George W Bush, almost as if to say that while they hate the right, what they hate even more is a populist outsider on the right.  Their vitriol was just echo chamber preaching to the choir, but I feel it actually backfired as the right were in need of something, anything to piss off and annoy the coastal elite left, and they found it.  The worse the left squirmed, the more the right celebrated Trump who appeared to be the only one listening to the countless alienated, impoverished rural folk in flyover country.  Never mind that he looked down upon them and only used them for his own gains, they equally used him for their own gain in retaliating against the left and the leftist media which often mocked them as illiterate, inbred country bumpkins deserving of no voice in America.  And of course, the left and right media will never reconcile and propose uniting the country, because a divided country in turmoil keeps people tuned into the news more than a united one, constructively working together.  Whether you like it or not, there will be more Trumps to come.

Mina by Kim Sagwa

Mina is an adolescent tale of middle-class Korean high school students as they struggle with life and a society obsessed with ambition, career, and status.  When we look at other cultures, it’s natural to view them through our own, as we also judge others through our own life experiences.  Of course, this is extremely naïve and pointless.  Most Americans live in an exceptionally privileged bubble society that has benefitted from stealing labor and land that happens to be incredibly rich in all types of natural resources from trees, arable land, precious metals, to oil.  On top of all this, Europe, which had stolen most of the world’s resources had the intelligence to transfer much of it away in two ill-conceived world wars. 

Americans look at China, Japan, and Korea and wonder, why on Earth would they allow their children to throw away so much of their youth on studying?  I’ve discussed this before.  You need to juxtapose Thailand here where parents do not obsess anywhere as much about their children’s education.  Instead, many of their children wind up providing sexual services to rich Americans and Europeans and increasingly rich Chinese, Japanese, and Korean men.  Korea doesn’t have the choice between compelling it’s children to study hard and like America, allowing their children to aspire to be artists, rappers, professional athletes, actors, and musicians.  For Korea, the option is compel your children to study hard or wind up having your children provide sexual services to rich foreign men. 

Humanity has made itself a dog-eat-dog world, and the victors are the most diabolical, immoral, and predatory.  Of course, they would have you believe that the victors are free, democratic, collaborative, wonderful people whose mission is to bring up the rest of the world from their uncivilized savagery.  Sure Jan.  What Japan, Korea, and now China are learning, is that in order not to be eaten by the West, your economy has to be as big as theirs.  In order for that to happen, you need to push your children to study hard in the technical fields to play a ferocious game of economic catch-up.  This is why Japan is where it is and Thailand is where it is. 

However, there’s a unique element to the story of Korea that is unlike Japan or China’s story.  During the first half of the 20^th century, Korea suffered a horrendous fate, perhaps one of the worst fates of any nation except perhaps Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.  Korea was occupied and exploited by Japan and then suffered a horrific civil war that involved mass famine along with American carpet bombings of civilian targets both in the south and north.  You can’t experience over a century of devastation without some sort of ill side-effects. 

What you witness in North Korea is the direct result of this, people so traumatized by depravation and suffering that they’ve simply accepted their fates under a tyrannical autocratic regime as if nothing ever changed.  Meanwhile in the south, their trauma has been converted into an obsessive zeal for redemption and vindication, a deep desire to not only restore their image but to go further and exaggerate it through a highly stylized, hip rebranding via K-pop and K-drama culture.  Image is everything in a nation with the highest per capita cosmetic surgery in the world.  While Japanese and Chinese kids are pressured to do well in school, South Korean kids have the added burden of ridiculously unrealistic standards of beauty, affluence, and cool propagated by the K-pop entertainment-industrial complex.  Not only do South Korean kids suffer feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness if they don’t get good grades, but they also suffer feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness every time they look in the mirror.  Instead of thinking that without a good-paying career, they’ll never attract a worthy spouse and achieve high social status, they also think they’ll never be able to afford the necessary cosmetic surgery to attract a worthy spouse and achieve high social status. 

This is one reason why I liked Parasite winning the Oscars, why the world embraced “Gangnam Style” long before BTS.  The world is basically telling Korea that what they value in Korea is not their slick rebranding and glitzy, cool, cutesy, prefabricated K-pop, but rather their gritty social critique of it all.  Both “Gangnam Style” and Parasite were edgy, witty criticisms of modern Korean materialistic and status-obsessed culture.  Unfortunately, however, a lot of people missed that, including South Koreans. 

* * *

I would recommend that you never read this book.  I read a few chapters and became absolutely bored by the over-written style as well as the fact that none of the main characters are likeable, quite the opposite, Crystal is the most despicable and boring human in the universe, and she’s the main character. 

Spoiler alert.  I’m not giving away the entire book, god help you if you decide to read it.  I was really annoyed when an Amazon reviewer gave away one of the biggest parts of the book.  But the spoiler alert is to warn you that you can assume what in general the book is about when I discuss the following.

Someone commits a horrible crime.  You ask yourself, what caused it?  First, we have to determine whether you believe humans are born evil, born good, or born neutral and turned into good or evil.  If you believe humans are born evil, then you would say that someone committed a horrible crime, because society did not do its job of properly civilizing this savage and exorcising the animalistic demons from its blood.  You’d sound pretty fucking stupid.  If you assume all humans are born good, then you’d argue that someone is responsible for really fucking up this good kid’s head.  I believe in something different.  I believe the vast majority of humans are born good and capable of good or evil.  You can take a perfectly good kid and turn him into an apeshit crazy homicidal maniac through torture, trauma, depravation, and torment.  There are many instances of good kids being turned into monsters.  Countless African kids are recruited by warlords and turned into homicidal killing and torturing machines. 

But there is a certain percentage of humans that are born sociopaths.  I’m not saying this means, they all turn into monsters.  Many sociopaths, raised by loving parents, go on to become functional non-criminal adults and probably pursue careers in dentistry, surgery, auditing, journalism, poetry, or go work for the DMV.  However, sometimes, that kid just goes apeshit homicidal despite having loving parents.  The parents blame themselves, but if they loved the kid and provided the kid with fair discipline, they shouldn’t.  Some humans are born only a few triggers away from murdering people. 

While we all have the instinct to kill, not just for the hunt, but to fight for status and defend ourselves and loved ones from other humans, we also have an overwhelming social instinct to avoid hurting others and also we fear being outed and having our community ostracize us for acting antisocial.  How many times do you find yourself lying in bed remembering an embarrassing or hurtful thing you do several years ago and feel the heat of shame?  We also fear that community or the victim’s family killing us in retaliation.  There are a lot of things that keep us from killing one another.  The death penalty and a life sentence are actually not big deterrents.  Certainly, if you’ve ever entertained the idea of killing your boss, you think that being raped in prison is a good deterrent, but in reality, if you were to actually grab a weapon and show up at your boss’s front door, there would be other greater deterrents than the vision of being butt-raped in prison.  Your heartbeat would be going through your throat, and you would likely chicken out from fear and your conscience pounding on your brain. 

There are many triggers in South Korean history and culture that traumatizes and warps the mind, but despite that, there are also greater forces that keep you from becoming a murderer, and if you look at global homicide rates, South Korea is not up there.  Fact is, growing up in poverty in violent inner-cities in America is much more likely to turn you into a homicidal maniac than the relentless peer and status pressures of South Korea.  In fact, the relentless peer pressure is probably what keeps a lot of Koreans from killing one another.  They fear embarrassment and the shame it would bring upon their families and friends.  The author may be implying that the relentless academic and career standards of South Korea is what pushed Crystal over the edge, but I would argue this is silly melodrama.  I can see it making Crystal commit suicide or turn into a mindless, narcissist who undergoes dozens of cosmetic surgeries, but I don’t see it pushing her into being a sadistic homicidal maniac.  Some people are just born that way. 

You are your social influences, so I try to stay away from depressing books like this or say Jerry Springer and Dr. Phil episodes.  Don’t be arrogant enough to believe that they don’t influence you, your psyche, and your behavior and thoughts.  They do.  Be humble and fear negative social influences as toxic and harmful to you, your psyche, and your wellbeing.  I honestly wish someone had told me that in the 90’s when mainstream media was at the apex of discovering the uglier and more cynical side of human nature and society.  Without doubt, much of the negativity and toxicity in my psyche and mind comes from exposure to so much of that toxic garbage.  I get that it was important to counterbalance the insipid cheerfulness and Disney version of America portrayed from the 50’s to 80’s, but the 90’s just went overboard in the opposite direction.  Jerry Springer and Howard Stern were the new messiahs of this shock culture.  Now, grown up, a lot of the awful public behavior of middle-aged men and women can be traced back to their exposure to the toxic 90’s accelerated by their use of prescription psychotropic meds. 

Excuse me now as I go shower my brain and soul.

The Buddha and the Bee: Biking through America’s Forgotten Roadways on a Journey of Discovery by Cory Mortensen

After reading Cities of Gold, Douglas Preston’s rather naïve attempt to retrace the horse ride of Spanish adventurer Coronado through New Mexico and Arizona, I was drawn to yet another misadventure about a rather naïve long-distance explorer this time on a bicycle.  I would consider Douglas Preston’s journey more naïve, as there were times he and his companion could well have died of dehydration in the desert where on a bicycle, at least you can wave down a car and have them drive you to the closest gas station to buy bottled water or at least drink from their hose. 

Later on, you find out the author was 31 when he made the trip.  At first, I thought he was in his late teens or early 20’s.  Later on, you also learn that the author had run nine marathons, so you get the idea that while his long-distance cycling skills are not up to par, he definitely has the requisite endurance to quickly adapt.  Interestingly, as the book goes on and on, my impression of the author goes from unworldly, naïve, early 20-something to rich, privileged, worldly 30-year-old on a very expensive bike.  He also doesn’t bike the whole way from Minneapolis to Truckee, California, but rather takes a few rides in cars.  He also doesn’t exactly rough it.  He relays how he just sold a house and uses the other one for income, so he can stay at motels when he can and eat steaks when he can. 

* * *

There’s an obvious self-selection bias here.  Nobody likes to write about their failures, their attempt to cross some nation or continent that failed because they decided to quit the second day into the trip.  There’s not much fun in a very short book that ends with failure and disappointment, so you only hear about those who succeeded by some combination of determination and luck with skill or a tremendous amount of determination and luck without skill.  Of course, we all love to hear about the latter, some dickhead with a huge ego who thinks he can learn along the way and be graced by exceptional luck throughout.  Nobody hears about the hitchhikers who were picked up by murderers and disappeared, to have their bodies successfully buried and forgotten about.  FYI, most murderers get away with their crimes and most people who go missing are murdered.  Your story gets told if someone’s around to care about your ill-fated expedition as is the case of Chris McCandless who acquired post-mortem fame because someone decided to tell the world about his ill-conceived odyssey into the Alaskan wilderness with minimal preparation. 

I think as a city-dweller, there’s a great appeal to these adventure stories.  I think there’s a dormant part of us that wants to be nomadic or at least see what’s on the other side of the mountain or embark on a long, enduring trek somewhere, to spend more time closer to nature, to the smell of our sweat, and at the brink of possible danger and exhaustion.  When I went camping in high school, there’s a point where you just don’t care about sweating, not showering, and having slick, oily hair matted to your head.  There’s a certain liberation in that, whereas, you go out on a Friday night and start sweating a little and you think you’re ruining your night by appearing the slightest bit disheveled.  We’re built for endurance and adventures, engaging the unknown and the little adrenaline bumps that go along with it in addition to the endorphin bumps from exhaustion, sleep deprivation, hunger, and sleeping in the elements.  As hard and difficult as these moments are, we never look back in horror but rather in fondness and nostalgia.  This is part of why Burning Man is in the desert in relatively rough accommodations where camping out (i.e., not using an RV) is supposed to be the best way to experience it all.  We’ve been told since birth that we work hard to enjoy modern civilization’s infinite conveniences, that living in the wild is horrific and miserable, yet, rather the opposite, we get through life and start to wonder if modern civilization’s infinite conveniences are somehow ties to feeling miserable and unhuman. 

* * *

Along the way, he relays interesting trivia tidbits, American history along with a tale about his time working on Wake Island.  One of the most interesting tidbits, “During what became the largest migration of children in the world, orphan trains relocated almost a quarter of a million homeless and orphaned kids from the big cities in the Northeast to the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.”  Cynically, I believe much of them became farm or ranch hands.  I met an orphan in Nevada who told me that he went to a foster home for just that reason, extra (and free) hands on a ranch.  All you had to do was shelter, clothe, feed them and have them go to school and church.  It’s then amazing to imagine all the children they had, so many people in the Midwest being descendants of Northeast orphans. 

* * *

This book really makes me miss traveling, the whole wonder of going to new places, staying in new motels or hotels, hanging out at new restaurants, drinking at new bars, meeting new people.  I don’t know what it is about the whole novelty, but it’s almost like a dream, where you just don’t know what’s around the other corner or who you’ll run into.  At home, I know my coworkers, I know my job, I know my routine, I have my favorite restaurants and bars, and I usually wind up hanging out with my usual drinking buddies.  Everything’s pretty much predictable and normal, but it’s also boring and dull.  It’s not challenging except when I challenge myself to work out or get over a bad hangover to go out drinking again.  There’s just something in the air when I travel, the whole rigmarole, whether driving or flying, airports, airport bars, layovers, checking into a hotel, checking out your room, being disappointed usually but sometimes pleasantly surprised, checking out the nightlife, being totally new and strange in a new land, grilling willing bartenders for intelligence on what to do and where to go.  Usually, they’ll be like, oh, come back here on Friday or Saturday, this place will be crazy!  Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.  I miss all that.  Of course, since October, we’ve been forced back into the office.  I used to go in once-a-week, but now it’s four times-a-week, and the office routine has already gotten to me, the annoying fluorescent light, the annoying sitting in chair hours-on-hours, the incessant emails, the constant interruptions whether people in my door or a telephone call, and just the grind of getting up early.  I needed vacations to break up all that monotony and boredom. 

* * *

The author never does explain why the book is called the Buddha and the Bee.  I happened to read all 266 pages in one sitting.  When the author does reach the town where he spends the night, he doesn’t do much exploring, and I don’t blame him with the energy output earlier in the day.  He mostly grabs a whiskey or beer, grabs chow mein without vegetables or a spicy footlong from Subways, and passes out in his shitty motel room.  In my opinion, the best part of traveling is the evenings where you go out drinking and meeting locals and cavorting until the bars close.  Obviously, he can’t do that when he has to wake up early for the next day’s ride.  Perhaps it speaks to the generalization that endurance athletes are usually shy introverts who enjoy a lot of time spent alone with their thoughts and selves. 

The Social Singularity: How decentralization will allow us to transcend politics, create global prosperity, and avoid the robot apocalypse by Max Borders

About 30 years ago, my mother gave me a Harvard paper on decentralization.  I never read the paper, because I just thought it was one of those things parents do, give you some Harvard paper that they haven’t read, thinking it may make you smarter.  Fortunately, I kept it.  A few years later while working, I came across management books, and this made me read the Harvard paper in its entirety.  It was echoing what many of the management books were saying about the powers of decentralized decision-making, autonomy, and a break from the centuries of Industrial Age thinking, of Taylorism and the centralization and pyramid scheme of everything.  In Intro to Microeconomics we learned the powers of economies of scale but never the diseconomies of scale, and the economies of scale were extrapolated to Macroeconomies.  I learned that government subsidized, protected, and supported oligopolies in the form of Japan’s zaibatsu’s and Korea’s chaebols were necessary industrial steps that allowed both countries to become economic superpowers.  30 years ago, Harvard saw the writing on the wall and proposed the most revolutionary idea in centuries, we needed to decentralize.  Over time, I saw how decentralization was absolutely necessary in the Information Age, how China, Japan, and Korea were not advancing as quickly as America in the Information Age, because they were trapped in Industrialist, centralized thinking.  Only ideas from the top were accepted, and brilliant ideas from the bottom had to carefully seep through the cracks of bureaucracy without offending or embarrassing anyone to see the light-of-day. 

So why the fuck has our economy centralized more than ever before?  Huge tech corporations are eating up smaller one at an astonishing rate, and so much so that tech entrepreneurs have a new business plan, get a load of investments, go deep into debt without ever turning a profit, sell your company to a tech giant, and make billions.  Our news media is no longer hundreds of powerful independent companies but rather the subsidiaries of a few major corporations.  After the 2008 Financial Crisis we are left with even fewer, larger banks whose failures would be even more catastrophic today!  Too big to fail?  Well, we made them even bigger!  Walmart has destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and Amazon is sweeping up the rest of independent retailers.  Most major brand consumer product from wine to laundry detergent is now owned by a few oligopolies.  Over the last 30 years, the world has centralized like nothing before.  It was all a lie! 

One of the mistakes we make is in believing that revolutions will happen overnight, when in fact, especially when they confront systemic resistance, it either takes a monumental catastrophic failure or it just meanders along like a shallow creek, constantly finding dead-end ponds to wither away in scum.  It was World War II that really sealed the deal for economic and political centralization and collusion in America.  Perhaps it was nothing more than the socialist and progressive revolution of the time.  They wanted bigger government and this inevitably meant bigger militaries looking for wars.  Market liberalization had spread from Western Europe to America and made both incredibly rich during the Industrial Age, but there was nothing to stop the robber barons from buying up competition and then lowering costs and wages, increasing prices, and reaping gargantuan profits, destroying free markets. 

The world reacted with collectivist ideologies in the form of socialism, progressivism, and Communism.  You can’t really blame them.  Market liberalization, however, doesn’t mean no rules.  That’s the greatest myth in history.  It actually means rules to ensure that no single player gets an unfair advantage.  The collectivists never got that.  They believed that the market needed rules governed by a central committee to ensure that nobody could operate their businesses freely.  They actually gave some players remarkable advantages in the form of tax breaks, tariffs, competitive restrictions, subsidies, protection, and lucrative government contracts.  If you thought the Chinese government was aiding and abetting their private companies, just wait until you uncover the American system. 

So instead of protecting the public from shady big business that gamed the system to their advantage, we now have predatory big business protected by and subsidized by government, and we call this ‘collectivism’ aka progressivism, socialism, and Chinese-style Communism.  In my opinion, it’s a whole lot worse than the robber barons who did not have government protection and subsidies and were only left to their own devices to loot and exploit their employees.  As much as you can complain about Carnegie Steel, Morgan Stanley, Ford Motors, and Rockefeller, they were not aided and abetted by government anywhere near as today’s tech giants and financial institutions are.  As much as Harvard can argue that we need to decentralize, the momentum of this new collectivist ideology is far too powerful to change overnight.  The rich have gamed the system irreversibly.  Flaccid attempts to reign them in like repealing Citizens United or reinstituting Glass-Steagall are doomed to fail.  Perhaps one day, they’ll repeal anti-trust laws altogether (although that’s not necessary if they don’t even bother enforcing them).  Campaign financing reform and banking reform will never happen unless a catastrophe greater than 2008 occurs, something similar to the Great Depression.  This is not altogether unrealistic as the federal government continues to paint itself into a corner unleashing every monetary and fiscal expansionary, debt-fueled scam to prop up their bloated, fragile, diseased existence. 

Reading this book is much like dreaming as a kid.  You think that one day people will wise up, unshackle themselves, reform everything and liberate everyone.  You dream of growing up to be financially well off, live in a nice house, drive a nice car, marry a beautiful person, etc.  As you pass age milestones, as you encounter your mid-life crisis, as you basically get old, you start to realize, first, you’ll never be a professional athlete, and then all the other dreams die.  You’ll never be a rock star, a world-renown novelist, rich, perhaps even married.  This book is a kid’s dream, but I’m so cynical by now.  I’ve seen the reverse happen in the last 30 years.  Harvard may have been right, but nobody wanted to listen to them, not 30 years ago, especially not now.  Perhaps even now, Harvard would never publish such a paper and threaten their lucrative deals with the centralized private sector that funds their research. 

Short of another Great Depression, which is very likely, I don’t see the world (led by America) decentralizing in the next 30 years.  In fact, without a Great Depression, I believe it will centralize even further.  And even more skeptically, just like the 2008 Financial Crisis, Americans will be sold on the idea that the solution is not decentralization of financial institutions and the decoupling of government and banking but rather the greater centralization of financial institutions and an even more unholy union of government and banking.  Call me an old cynic, but I see the world becoming a much more dark and ugly and centralized place before we ever even start to see the glimmer of hope of decentralization and true liberalization of markets and individual rights.

* * *

A wonderful, albeit convoluted, over-intellectualized quote by James Buchanan, “Much of the growth of the bureaucratic or regulatory sector of government can best be explained in terms of the competition between political agents for constituency support through the use of promises of discriminatory transfers of wealth.”  In other words, government has grown to rig the system in favor of wealthy campaign contributors. 

Interesting to note that the author quotes four of my favorite thinkers, Friedrich Hayek, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jane Jacobs, and Noam Chomsky.

The author argues that your vote doesn’t count because there is a two-party system, but this is cynical.  In 1992, Ross Perot, an independent candidate, won 19.7 million votes compared to 44.9 for Clinton and 39.1 for HW Bush.  19.7 million Americans made their voices heard loud and clear about how unhappy they were with the two-party system.  No, you won’t change an election by yourself, but along with 19.7 million other Americans, you can prove to other Americans that there is another option to the two-party system.  I’m also watching the news now where a few thousand votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania could decide the election.

* * *

One thing that the author misses is the fact that the larger the hierarchy, the worse off everyone becomes.  Larger hierarchies have larger gaps between the decision-makers and those who suffer from the decisions, and it has a much larger pool of lackeys than leaders, exponentially so.  While many are ‘leaders’ themselves, they are more lackeys more concerned with appeasing those above them than helping out those below them.  Larger hierarchies are also fundamentally immoral and basically pyramid schemes where those on top are always looking out for themselves and maximizing their benefits while exploiting and essentially looting from those below.  Their profit-sharing and bonuses are created by paying lower and lower wages to those below them, basically stealing money from them. 

They can also coerce those below them to commit immoral acts for the ‘greater good.’  Larger hierarchies are fundamentally dehumanizing and undermine basic human potential including creativity, compassion, and intelligence.  They are often breeding grounds for unhealthy people with no moral compass.  People in large hierarchies lack personal responsibility and instead rely on leadership to define and interpret responsibility. 

It is also a fear-based system which causes continual stress and anxiety leading to unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol abuse, domestic violence, drug abuse, and mindless consumerism.  The incentives are also weak and empty including status, recognition, authority, and money.  It goes without saying that the scum rises to the top, because all they have in life are empty desires for status, recognition, authority, and money.  You can even go as far to say that people in large hierarchies are subhuman.  They don’t exercise or eat healthy.  They don’t enrich their lives.  They don’t read to learn more.  After work, much of their free time goes into pathetically mending the stress and anxiety caused by their work and committing endless moral offenses in their frazzled attempt to cover their asses, blame others, and please their superiors.  Their colleagues and staff consider them assholes, and they know it.  They rely on heavy doses of caffeine to get through the day and then heavy doses of sedatives to go to sleep.  Perhaps the most deluded ones are those who convince themselves that they are not playing politics and resisting the bureaucratic bullshit with subtle subterfuge and cynicism.  They’re considered impotent troublemakers and rabblerousers but in reality, they are equally cowards for continuing to work for and create profits for a fundamentally corrupt and abominable system. 

If we agree that large hierarchies are fundamentally corrupt and for all intents and purposes, pyramid schemes, then why do we allow them to exist.  The answer is quite obvious if you think about it.  Anyone who is at the bottom of the pyramid scheme, and by bottom, I mean the 99%, has very little power by definition of the pyramid scheme.  They’re the suckers, the hosts of the parasitic 1%.  If you’re at the top 1%, and you read this book and go, gee whiz, large hierarchies are fundamentally corrupt and dehumanizing, the very next thing you’ll say is, ‘so what?’  Why change a system that enriches you?  You’d have to be the most altruistic motherf**ker in the universe to let go of all your advantages in life and allow free competition to rule where you probably wouldn’t do all that well.  In any system where the top 1% control half the known resources and wealth and most all the authority and power, nobody at the top 1% is going to promote change.  The only way for this system to fail is either for it to collapse or for a more egalitarian system to beat it.  Both of these possibilities are undermined when the government thinks you’re too big to fail and hence uses taxpayers to subsidize your losses and also when government makes it difficult for free competition, when the only way for a company to beat an existing monopoly or oligopoly is for it to bribe politicians with more money, as was the case with Uber.

* * *

While the author points out the problems with modern science, he fails to point out some of the more glaring problems.  The first is with this idea that some scientific principle can be applied broadly to humanity with a lot of misunderstanding and pure stupidity.  Take Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and social engineering.  Believers all pretended that science was on their side and used it to perpetuate and justify their own stupid racist, elitist world views.  Of course today, Social Darwinism and Eugenics are largely discredited, but not social engineering.  The Progressive movement along with many socialist and Communist ideologues believed that since science had helped advance technology, why not use this same paradigm to advance society?  It seemed like a no-brainer at the time and hence it was thoroughly embraced.  The social ‘sciences’ were created, one of the greatest scams in human history, the belief that through rigorous scientific or at least sciency study, many social problems could be solved.  Yes, rigorous study and research can give you insights, but the social ‘sciences’ pretend that they are the real sciences and can actually prove things when overwhelming evidence indicates, they can’t prove shit. 

Once you earned a Ph.D. in the social ‘sciences’ you could then enter the elite field of governmental or government-funded scientific management of society.  Only you could intelligently make social policy, and through coercion and violence, only you could improve society.  Only you could promote policies that resulted in the mass incarceration of blacks, urban sprawl, demographic segregation, and the utter dumbing down of America.  Only you, because you had that scam doctoral degree in the social ‘sciences’ which have never and will never be real science. 

In case you weren’t paying attention, today City Managers run the City and not the Mayor or City Council.  The City Manager is considered the expert at running the City and not the Mayor or City Council whom are viewed as unsophisticated amateur civic leaders who just won a popularity contest and are often just lackeys of private developers.  The federal government acts in a similar way with federal bureaucracies and secretaries running the show with occasional input or direction from the President. 

This is how social engineering works.  People don’t make their own decisions.  Left to their own devices, people would resort to cannibalism and rape.  Instead, the world should be run by an elite cadre of social ‘science’ experts who bloviate about sciency studies that prove that they must coerce the population into doing things against their will in order to benefit society in general, and to one extreme, this means giving prisoners, the mentally ill, and minorities diseases to study the effects of diseases and potential cures.  Unfortunately, with social engineering, there are big winners and big losers.  The big losers are eradicated, incarcerated, perform virtual slave labor as prisoners, or simply wallow in poverty.  Anyone who argues with these sciency elites are considered unsophisticated, unscientific amateurs over-relying on prosaic, provincial, folksy, selfish, emotional sentiments.

* * *

The book is more of a compilation of other people’s ideas and books on the subject, somewhat jumbled but organized into similar-themed chapters. 

* * *

The author doesn’t address the 800-lbs gorilla/elephant in the room, perhaps because this book would never get published if he had.  What do you do about the existing rulers who have gamed the system and benefit from it.  Besides getting an invite to Davos, how do you convince them to reform a system that is specifically engineered to enable their looting and hoarding of all the world’s resources?  You could appeal to their conscience, but one would argue, they’ve long jettisoned that as deadweight.  Yes, the world would be a better place with a less authoritarian, more decentralized political and financial system where the abundance of resources on this planet would be more fairly distributed eliminating mass poverty and creating this wonderful burgeoning middle class full of happy people who have the financial security to live healthy, independent lives.  Yeah, they don’t give a shit, sorry.  You could appeal to their fear.  Authoritarian, centralized systems worked in the Industrial Age, but in the Information Age, decentralized networked systems will rule supreme, eat your lunch, and create a new class of rulers leaving you behind, impoverished to mingle with the grotesque middle class you abhor so much.  That may do it.  But they’ll want proof, and until that proof comes along, they’ll be happy with the status quo, one in which the top 1% has never been as happy and privileged and wealthy in the last 100 years. 

* * *

The social singularity as far as I can tell is a multi-faceted moment where we are all better connected and can make greater contributions and have greater freedoms in our interactions.  I’m not entirely sure the author meant that we would all be part of a greater social hive and completely lose our individual identities as the ‘singularity’ may imply.  Certainly, we would exist in a much greater collaborative, cooperative, conscious coexistence with each other instead of insulated, atomized, individualized, and alienated.  We may certainly feel more connected and united with others, but I would imagine we would still embrace our own individuality albeit not as frenetically and obsessively as we do today, especially on social media where our lives seemed to depend on the approval of others and we are narcissists instead of collectivists.  We are only collectivists so far as we aggregate with others to approve or disapprove of someone’s post.

* * *

I’ve waited 30 years for Harvard’s paper on decentralization to manifest, and besides a few scarce exceptions, the world has centralized more than ever, and I’m not holding my breath another 30 years.  The one caveat is that fewer supervisors and managers are Vietnam War vets who were inculcated in an abusive, authoritarian military system via the draft.  More and more supervisors and managers are Gen-X growing up with better social skills and a greater appreciation for dialogue than command and control.  So you may lucky enough to work with a cooler boss, but none-the-less, one unwilling to dismantle the existing authoritarian workplace system.  He’ll use that stupid performance evaluation to keep you in line, but he just won’t yell and scream at you like a drill sergeant.  Also, there are more female supervisors and managers now, most of whom have not been exposed to military training.

I’ll keep reading books espousing decentralization and anti-authoritarianism, preaching to the choir, solidifying my convictions, but I won’t expect it anytime soon just as I won’t expect everyone to have flying autonomous cars in 30 years despite the fact that this will eventually be the case.  In perhaps a dark and cynical possibility, the criminal con-artist parasites on top will monopolize AI and use it for deception and conquest, spouting off about egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, peace, love, happiness, and all while behind the scenes stealing your privacy, selling your identity, undermining your individual rights, and creating an even more centralized authoritarian system under their command.  Being a billion times more intelligent than you, you won’t even see it coming.