A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia: Multiculturalism and Prosperity: The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers by Christopher Hale

Part 2 of 2

As you’re reading this book, it may hit you as rather odd and perplexing how the British just came along and decided to rule over the place using violence.  All the pomp, pageantry, parades, decorations, medals, bands, banners, crowns, robes, carriages, jewels are all incredible distractions from the plain and simple fact that the rulers of Britain were essentially organized criminals, thugs, mobsters who used violence throughout the world to bully their way into places, plant their flag and declare the place theirs.  They paid no taxes to the locals.  They didn’t even consult with them.  They didn’t even bother to help them out with charitable giving.  Westerners love to criticize China for investing in Africa, for building vital infrastructure, when the Europeans only built railroads and roads in Africa to transport slaves and stolen resources. 

Of course, another huge distraction is racism.  Europeans sold everyone on the bizarre notion of race and racial hierarchy with, conveniently, the thieves, rapists, and pillagers at the very top and all their victims on the very bottom.  It’s like going next door to your neighbor’s house and stealing all their valuables and raping the wife and going, well, you’re all an inferior lot of people, you kind of deserved it.  I mean how else are you going to justify your crimes?  No nation has ever told their people, hey, we just invaded, colonized, and pillaged this country, because we could, and we’re just awesome aren’t we?  Perhaps the Vikings or Mongols bragged about their criminal escapades and were proud of stealing and raping and pillaging. 

But most cultures would not be able to tell its citizens to behave morally at home and then at the same time openly admit to behaving immorally overseas.  The citizens would be confused and it would undermine the message of behaving morally at home.  The whole notion of the rest of the world being uncivilized, savage, barbarian, and subhuman is perhaps the greatest scam perpetrated.  Of course, if you actually read history, and not the lies of public schooling, you’d realize that the rest of the world was highly civilized and in many cases at many periods of time, more civilized than Europe.  If anything, the northern Europeans were the uncivilized barbarians that overtook the civilized Roman empire.  Some of them were literally called Barbarians.  In fact, being tall is not an indication of being civilized but rather of being uncivilized and being nomadic hunter-gathers with a diet rich in meat.  Light skin is not an indication of being civilized but rather of being uncivilized and unable to farm and settle in harsh northern climates where fair skin helps absorb fleeting sunlight and produce Vitamin D.  The incredible irony is lost on most people. 

At the same time, I wouldn’t expect or demand that Westerners apologize for their ancestors any more than I would expect or demand that Catholics apologize for pedophile priests or Muslims apologize for Muslim terrorists.  Perhaps a lot of backlash by white people against acknowledging their past crimes is the guilt.  In my opinion, the appropriate response is to dismantle the objects and ideas of the past that perpetuated and rationalized the crimes, yes, to take down the statues of so-called heroes of Western culture that participated in crimes against humanity.  Westerners can be proud of their arts, music, inventions, scientific discoveries, scientists, technology, poets.  I don’t think anyone is saying that we need to completely ignore and abandon Western culture altogether.  Likewise, the Japanese and Germans need not discard their cultural icons just because of their crimes and genocide, but it doesn’t make sense for them to keep statues of Hitler and the Japanese military flag associated with their carnage.  Nobody is telling the Germans to get rid of their bratwurst and the Japanese to get rid of their sushi.  Neither German nor Japanese culture has suffered much as a result of them publicly denouncing their crimes during World War II.

At the same time, the populations of victims also bear a responsibility to discard the vestiges of their past, the degradation, humiliation, anger, violence, criminality, inferiority complex, despair, negativity, blame, and scapegoating.  It is one thing to acknowledge past crimes and victimization, but it is another to perpetuate it and use it as justification for moral failures and mistreatment of others including your very own.  Of course, you can’t blame victims for their reactions to trauma.  Some respond with grace and virtue, but fact is, through natural selection, many who respond with criminality, deception, manipulation, negativity, and lack of accountability survived and passed on both their genes and proclivities.  In nature, animals under great distress resort to all kinds of antisocial and unhealthy habits but many of them survive as a result.  A distressed mother may attack, kill, and/or consume its children, and yet, it survives and perhaps reproduces when times are a bit better, and their genes are passed on.  It figured out a way to survive.  However, once the threat has passed, once times are better, we should abandon our past behavior, adaptations, and embrace healthier, more social behavior.  Perhaps Westerners fear that if they express too much regret and remorse, the non-Westerners will treat them like they treated the non-Westerners. 

Both conquerors and victims should respond to their past by understanding and acknowledging that unhealthy behavior happened and not use it as an excuse for further unhealthy, antisocial behavior.  Today, it seems as if those demanding too much reparations or those demanding to erase past crimes are both perpetuating unhealthy and antisocial behavior, blaming one another for the past and refusing to move forward and collaborate for a better future.  They are not changing for the better but simply using a different brand of unhealthy and antisocial behavior which only serves as a continuation of the past and not a different course from it. 

And truly, even the conquerors were victims.  The rulers exploited and abused their own citizens.  The British famously impressed the poor into their navies against their will.  Even the rulers were victims in that from childhood they were abused and exploited by their parents, many sent to cold and harsh boarding schools which presumably toughened them up for the job of exploiting and abusing people overseas.  They all grew up traumatized, unhappy, empty, unloved, and pressured to continue the criminal enterprise.  It reminds me of a biography of Donald Trump, how his older brother found happiness in friendships, a wife, and a social life, but his father’s demands for him to basically be his clone and continue the family business drove him to alcoholism and ruin.  Taking note, Donald followed closely in his father’s footstep and became the obedient, loyal son, terrified of antagonizing and defying his father.  Both Donald and his older brother were victimized by their father.  The answer is not punishment, revenge, or retaliation but rather understanding, forgiveness, but also the responsibility of changing for the better, abandoning, rejecting, and defying past criminal behavior. 

* * *

Punishing transgressions is a scam, because it is used to conflate immorality with disobedience.  So long as I can get you to agree to punish immorality, I can also get you to punish disobedience with equal if not greater fervor.  A slave that runs away or disobeys orders must be flogged with equal fervor and enthusiasm as a slave that kills another slave or rapes another slave.  And punishment never works anyway.  It is often trauma that causes people to discard morality and social behavior in despair.  Adding trauma on top of trauma simply makes them more prone not less prone to discarding morality and social behavior.  The fear of punishment is a distraction not a motivation. 

We don’t kill a detested boss or neighbor because we fear a life sentence or getting raped in prison.  We don’t kill them, because as much as we might fantasize about it, it is morally reprehensible to us.  If we were to pick up a gun and drive to work or walk over to our neighbors house, we would be seized with fear and distress.  We would sweat profusely.  Our mouth would become dry.  Our heart would race.  Our stomach would hurt.  We would know what we are going to do would be horribly wrong and harmful.  It would not be the fear of punishment but the fear of doing something wrong that would then cause immeasurable guilt, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation.  What would our family say?  What would our coworkers and friends say?  Our neighbor’s children would suffer.  Our boss’s children would suffer.  How could we live with ourselves.  To argue that the fear of a life sentence or being raped in prison stops us from killing our boss or neighbor is an utter absurdity.  The reason some people actually do go ahead and kill their boss or their neighbor is because they are already so traumatized and distressed that there is no room in their heads to consider the consequences, the harm to the victim and their family, the harm to our family, the shame, the humiliation, the embarrassment of your face and name being in the local paper, etc. 

It is then so strange and odd that in the name of punishing the disobedient that we are capable and willing to inflict so much harm and suffering on others and not consider the consequences, the harm, the victim’s family, our family, our friends, the guilt, the shame, the embarrassment.  The Milgram experiment was a powerful demonstration that punishing people for disobedience could bypass all our considerations of consequences and harm.  The disobedient must be punished, even at the risk of their own health and life.  Someone complaining of heart conditions and illness still needed to be inflicted with higher and higher shocks.  The person inflicting all this suffering and harm never thought once about the victim’s suffering, their family’s loss, their own family being ashamed of them, their friends worrying if they were mad, their face showing up in the local papers, because it’s so normalized in our culture that it is okay to punish the disobedient and obeying authority bypasses all considerations of harm, consequences, guilt, shame, and embarrassment.  It literally turns us into immoral monsters.  But wasn’t authority supposed to turn us into more kind, loving, moral beings?

Every human is born with an innate desire to be a good person and fearful of being viewed as a bad person.  How amazing is it that we’ve equated being good with being obedient and being bad with being disobedient.  In fact, so long as we are obedient, we can get away with all sorts of moral crimes, torture, rape, theft, lies, cheating, exploitation, slavery, oppression, incarceration, and murder.  We did it all in the name of obedience, so we are still good people right?  I’m sure most all of the Germans who killed innocent civilians and for that matter Allied pilots who knowingly dropped bombs on civilian targets would all consider themselves to be good people, because they obeyed their orders and were obedient to authority.  Very few would consider themselves to be immoral and bad people.  The authority to punish those who are either immoral or disobedient gives us the freedom to commit the most immoral and heinous crimes against humanity.  It’s an oddity.

So what do you do with someone who commits moral infractions?  Certainly, we are justified in isolating them from the rest of the population, but it would be in our best interest to at least attempt to heal them so that if they are returned to the general population, they are less likely to commit more moral infractions.  If anything, harming them while in captivity, we only ensure that they will continue to commit more moral infractions upon their release.  Again, the threat of punishment does not motive them or anyone else.  We are all born with internal mechanisms that prevent us from harming others.  It is distress and trauma that bypasses these internal mechanisms as well as obedience to authority.  In order to mitigate the distress and trauma, we heal them, we empower them, we endow them with the tools necessary to handle and cope with their distress and traumas, to forgive others, to forgive themselves, and not to seek to punish themselves or others.  We also might want to teach them to question, dissent with, and challenge authority, but of course, if you’re a criminal ruler of the world, that’s the last thing you want to teach the peasant masses.

* * *

During World War I, a German light cruiser SMS Emden terrorized the British around the Indian Ocean.  As a result, in the Strait of Malacca, the British interned all German and Austrian nationals.  Some people argue that the US internment of the Japanese was racist, but you could argue that it was about proximity.  The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and there were legitimate fears that they would attack the west coast of the US.  The US was not the only ones to intern nationals of an enemy, and the Japanese were not the only ones to be interned during war.

* * *

In Chapter 15, it’s noted, “Most European women dressed in long skirts and veils and usually avoided the downtown area that was dominated by Asian prostitutes and their very aggressive pimps.”  To this day, especially in Thailand, the legacy of European colonization remains.  If natives were not enslaved, they were provided extremely low wages, but at the same time, you can imagine throughout the colonized world, the women were prostituted.  It may have been the only means of making a living or avoiding starvation or perhaps dependence on an impoverished, abusive husband. 

Being half the population of a subjugated people, women suffered horribly and were especially prone to suffer sexual abuse and exploitation, a psychological burden that men often escaped.  It underlies the fundamentally criminal and exploitative nature of Western civilization.  Perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years, women were treated much better as hunter-gatherers.  It may not have been ideal, and they were perhaps the victims of violence and sexual assault as is evidenced with primates, but it was not the systematic and routine violence and sexual assault that they suffer both in civilizations that conquered others and civilizations being conquered.  We definitely live under a criminal patriarchy whereby the males have conspired to rule the world and subjugate women.  Just like the colonized collaborating with their oppressors, many women also support and defend the patriarchy, sort of a Stockholm Syndrome thing.

Again, it doesn’t do any favors to victims to turn around and seek retaliation, revenge, and to turn the tables on their oppressors.  I feel that a lot of women want to mistreat men the same way that men have mistreated them in the past.  Just like the dynamic of colonizers and the colonized, you can perpetuate the immoral and antisocial behaviors of the past by blaming one another and either ignoring the past or demanding retaliation.  Or you can simply forgive and change the behavior to one of true equality, justice, opportunity, and forgiveness.  Just like not all Westerners enslaved and stole from the rest of the world, not all men exploited and sexually assaulted women.  Many men were also victimized, exploited, and sexually assaulted as well.  In fact, many children were.  Yes, icons of patriarchy should be abandoned.  Masculine terms should not be equated with courage, strength, power, and bravery while feminine terms should not be equated with fear, weakness, and fragility. 

* * *

While there have been countless instances of European colonialists committing atrocities against natives, it’s truly shocking how brutal the Japanese were especially to the Chinese.  In Singapore, the Japanese left the Indians and Malays alone but went about killing the Chinese.  Like what the hell did they do wrong?  It’s remarkable how awful the Japanese treated the Chinese, as well as the Koreans.  While the Japanese learned about technology, weapons, military tactics and strategy from the Germans and other Europeans, where did they learn to be so brutal and murderous?  Certainly, they must have known about some of the atrocities the Europeans committed here and there, but who exactly was telling them to be especially brutal against the Chinese and Koreans, perhaps their closest genetic relatives. 

Perhaps it’s like the fox in the henhouse that encounters such little resistance they suddenly experience an urge to kill them all.  It doesn’t really make any sense in nature, because if they didn’t kill them all, they could come back routinely for an easy and reliable source of food.  By killing them all, what survival advantage does this have for you?  There’s an important term for this in evolution that escapes me, but it’s also called coincidental evolution or spandrel.  It’s when one trait becomes useful and hence thrives, but along with that trait, there are other attributes that have no advantage and are just accessories.  Perhaps the killing instinct is the trait that is useful and thrives, but it comes with the attribute of getting too excited and going overboard with killing.  This attribute would not be too costly for the organism, so it wouldn’t undermine the organism’s ability to reproduce.  Although, it would not benefit the organism, there is no need to remove it so we just have this weird tendency to overkill sometimes when there is little resistance.

* * *

Besides the obvious crimes against humanity, the story of European global supremacy has one glaring problem.  For all its ingenuity, advancements, military prowess, dominance, craftiness, and machinations, Europe lost their global empire because they couldn’t figure out a way to get along and share it.  Had they worked together in the 20^th century, they would still be colonizing the world and extracting trillions of dollars in natural resources and oil from the world.  There would be no wealthy Saudis.  There would be no dominant China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.  There would be no independent South or Central America.  Europe, as a more unified entity, could have dominated the world for centuries.  If the British were not so greedy, they may have loosened restrictions on colonial businesses and allowed them to compete more freely.

Instead, they bickered and battled it out in two horrendous and costly wars where much of their stolen wealth was transferred to the US making the US spectacularly wealthy and now the single dominant global power.  It’s like wolves fighting over a deer, and they start fighting so much the deer just gets up and walks away.  If there is anything endemic about Europe’s capacity to dominate and rule the world, there must also be something endemic about Europe’s capacity to lose it all because of internal bickering and greed.  It reminds me of the sad story of Darren Mack who was so incensed that he had to hand over so much of his wealth to his wife in a bitter divorce, he killed his wife and tried to shoot the divorce judge resulting in a life sentence in prison with the possibility of parole after 36 years.  If he had simply accepted the divorce terms, he would live 36 years of freedom enjoying great wealth, traveling, a new girlfriend or wife, the world was his oyster, but now he’s sitting in a prison cell with a smelly dude, listening to and smelling him piss, fart, and shit all day long. 

Of course, Europe has recovered, and held on to enough of its stolen wealth to rebuild while the US also helped it recover by giving some of its money back.  The US needed a strong Western Europe to counter the Soviets.  But today, the birth rate in Europe is declining, and it relies more and more on immigrant laborers.  Alas, there is really nothing endemically superior or inferior about Europeans.  Had China been more geographically difficult to unify under one kingdom, perhaps China would have ruled the world and then lost it all.  Had the Ottomans won in World War I, they might have figured out how to rule the world and developed the first atomic bomb.  All humans are so genetically similar that under similar circumstances, I believe all the ethnicities and regions of the world would have behaved similar to the Europeans.  In fact, the Japanese learned to behave exactly like them in the 20^th century from imperialists to innovative, high-tech capitalists. 

* * *

Although this is a book about Malaysia and Singapore, it reveals a dark historic episode in neighboring Indonesia.  “In 1965, Indonesian army general Suharto turned on Sukarno and, with American and British backing, purged the communists from every corner of the Indonesian Archipelago, from Sumatra to the island of Bali.  Army units killed at least half a million people suspected of being members of the KPI or supporters of the party.  Many thousands more were locked away on island prison camps.”

After World War II, the US had supported the disbanding of colonies by European powers, but this seemed to be half-hearted as both the British and French did their best to hang on to their colonial empires.  In fact, the US often would support the British and French in hanging on to their colonial empires for whatever bizarre and self-sabotaging reasons.  As a result of this, the countries trying to fight off the yoke of colonialism often looked to international Communism as the only plausible solution.  At least the Soviets and Chinese would help, supply, and support them in their fight against British and French colonialism.  It’s astonishing why the US decided that it was more important to fight Communism than British and French colonialism.  In supporting British and French colonialism, they actually empowered Communists throughout the world, and ultimately, they undermined their own war against Communism in Vietnam by forcing millions of US citizens to fight there.  They were so obsessed with fighting Communism that they would support British and French colonialism which helped restore British and French power and had the reverse effect of helping Communism grow. 

The only logical explanation is that the US was more concerned with Communists not using the US dollar and not trading freely with the US than the restoration of their former competitors, England and France and in addition to this, their former enemies, Germany and Japan.  I’ve read somewhere that the Soviets were not even antagonistic toward the US and would have openly traded with them.  Apparently, the US defense industry also needed to perpetuate global conflict to justify the continuation of the bloated US defense budget.  While the Soviets were a larger force to contend with after World War II than England or France, England and France still retained a lot of their colonies and were still formidable competitors to the US. 

By pursuing better relations with the Soviets after World War II, they could have undermined English and French colonialism and become much more dominant.  Meanwhile, many colonized countries would have turned to the US and not Communism to fight for independence.  Their gratitude would have been converted into profits for US companies receiving favorable trade agreements with them.  The US also built up the Japanese and Germans after World War II which is the greatest oddity.  More Americans were killed by the Japanese and Germans while no Americans were killed by the Soviets in World War II. 

Can you imagine if instead of supporting the French in Vietnam, the US had negotiated for the French to leave and for Vietnam to become independent.  Even if Vietnam had turned Communist, the US could have continued to pursue friendly relations and trade with Communist Vietnam.  There would be no Vietnam War.  The US would still be able to project military power elsewhere in the world.  Instead, after the Vietnam War, the US military smarted from this grave wound for the next 15 years and avoided sending large numbers of troops overseas.  There would have been no Vietnam War protests and anti-war sentiment. 

With the Soviets declining in economic and military power, fewer poor nations would have looked toward Communism as their savior but rather the US.  The US could have been the world’s savior against both European colonialism and anti-democratic Communism.  Yet, the US chose to embrace and perpetuate European colonialism as well as deadly violence against poor people throughout the world who had turned to Communism to fight European colonialism.  The US not only picked the least moral option; they picked the least profitable one.  When Woodrow Wilson harped about sovereignty and the implied liberation from colonization, the US was viewed as a beacon of hope throughout the colonized world.  When the US failed to follow through and kept supporting European colonization, the world turned to Communism.  It was our fault.  It was our fault all along.  We had a golden opportunity to turn the world against both Europe and Communism, and we blew it, and blew it massively, and it blew up in our faces massively with the Vietnam War.  Communism may well have been a ridiculous and undesirable choice to so many poor people seeking freedom and democracy, but with the US supporting European colonialism, it became the only viable choice to gain freedom from Europe.  Just like greedy Europe, the US gave into greed instead of the morally and economically superior choice of helping the world fight the oppression of both European colonialism and its deranged stepchild, Communism.

A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia: Multiculturalism and Prosperity: The Shared History of Two Southeast Asian Tigers by Christopher Hale

Part 1 of 2

Not sure how 366 pages is considered brief.

According to Western society, that is, Europe and the US, and likely the European-dominated nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Argentina, before European conquest, the rest of the world was filled with sub-human savages beating their drums in the jungle and cannibalizing one another, wearing loincloths and bones through their nostrils.  It is a stunning injustice that most Westerners believe this and are deprived the incredible histories of so many people throughout the world, many of whom had rich, advanced, sophisticated civilizations.  In fact, because they existed in settled civilizations longer than northern Europeans, they became shorter.  The tallest people are hunter-gatherers with a diet rich in meat while the shortest live in crowded civilizations with a diet mostly lacking in meat and focused mostly on starchy grains.  Because farming is more difficult in northern climates, people from northern climates tend to be taller than their agrarian southern counterparts.  The exception is where hunting and gathering continued in southern climates in regions of Africa and the Pacific Islands. 

Both Singapore and Malaysia are located between China and India and became important resting stations for sailors traveling between the two and a place to store trading goods.  While today, they are multi-cultural centers, in the past, they must have been some of the most exciting, diverse, and rich places on the planet.  It is a crime that Westerners for the most part ignored this area of the world despite the fact that they benefitted tremendously from this trade center and would eventually colonize it.  Of course, it would make sense from the perspective of someone colonizing and exploiting a place to not sell it to the homeland and prompt curiosity and interest in it which would of course lead people to witness you abusing and exploiting the people there.  Better off just telling people back at home that the place is a smelly, backwards shithole filled with ooga-booga illiterate savages that deserve to be saved by the white man and Christianity.  Imagine if someday we figured out to travel through wormholes and visit planets across the galaxy filled with intelligent beings with advanced, sophisticated, and wonderful civilizations, but the explorers decide to steal from and exploit these people.  They wouldn’t want curious humans to visit these planets and discover their crimes.  Instead, they’d just tell humans that these planets are pretty disgusting and gross, and their inhabitants are ooga-booga illiterate savages that apparently don’t mind having all their natural resources taken and shipped back to Earth.  What a missed opportunity to travel to and enjoy all different kinds of cultures and people from different planets throughout the galaxy.

In 1025, the Chola kingdom of southern India conquered parts of Indonesia.  Many Americans will argue that while the Europeans conquered the Americas, many American tribes and empires went about conquering one another, raping and pillaging.  Does this somehow justify Europe raping and pillaging?  This is like saying that your neighbor is a criminal, a thief who goes about raping women, so does that excuse you from going next door and stealing his TV and raping his kids?  Of course, few people are truly innocent.  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they attacked the US colonizers of Hawaii.  Of course, that doesn’t justify their deeds any more than the US colonizing Hawaii.  The real argument is that the last one to colonize or conquer the place are not the saints they make themselves out to be, the white man’s burden of ‘liberating’ savages of their savage ways and ‘civilizing’ them and endowing them with the ‘gift’ and ‘blessings’ of Christianity. 

There are so many people and cultures that seem alien and invisible to Westerners.  For a while, I thought Africa was just filled with the stereotypical dark-skinned, wide-nosed African and had no idea that northern Africa had Arab influences and Africans there have taller, thinner noses.  Only when the US has military expeditions are we exposed to a whole new culture and people.  Few Americans know anything about the Caucasus, but with the success of Nurmagomedov in the UFC, Americans now know that it exists.  Few Americans would know about Malaysia and Singapore if it were not for Crazy, Rich Asians and Bling Empire.  I was first exposed to Malaysian cuisine in a shopping mall in New Zealand, after which, I became an absolute fan of Malaysian cuisine.  Unfortunately, you don’t encounter it in the US except sporadically in large cities, or you just have to settle on similar Indonesian cuisine.  Many northern Asians consider Southeast Asia as poor, dirty, too hot, and backwards.  However, Southeast Asia is a very popular, affordable destination for young Western backpackers from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the US, and Canada.  While I have visited Japan and South Korea and enjoyed their modern amenities and conveniences, it just never occurred to me to visit Southeast Asia until recently. 

* * *

Interesting to note where early humans settled.  “Even for resourceful hunter-gatherers, rainforests at low altitude offer few edible wild plants or game.  It is only in mountainous rainforests that cooler temperatures and a cycle of dry seasons provide an open forest pattern that can support larger mammals and bigger human communities.

It was in fertile, flatter riverine floodplains where rice could be grown that the monumental Asian kingdoms emerged.”

It’s interesting that you can get a lot of anthropological revelations from a history book.

“In many parts of Southeast Asia, these villagers engage in ‘swidden agriculture’: they cut and burn trees and plants to make space to grow crops.  Over time, soils become impoverished and people move on.  In the same way, hunters exhaust tracts of rainforest.  Regardless of how they lived, these early societies were highly mobile and accustomed to living in transitory settlements.  For the more ambitious village chieftains, this semi-nomadic way of life was hardly conducive to building power and holding onto it.” 

In one paragraph we learn that not all farmers were sedentary and that many would farm an area until the soil was depleted and then like nomads, move to another area.  Then we learn that this would not have encouraged building power, so only sedentary farming communities would be in a position to build kingdoms and empires. 

* * *

“For it was the Hindu and Buddhist faiths of Indic culture that proved to be most prized to Southeast Asian rulers.  For in Indic philosophy, rulers may become gods.”

Here you learn one of the major reasons rulers embraced religion.  It is one thing to tell a group of peasants to obey you and give you a portion of their wealth (in the form of taxes or land rent) because you are a special human, but it is another to tell them that you are godly and divine.  In the case of Christianity, because rulers couldn’t claim to be descended from Jesus or divine, they did the next best thing and have the Catholic Church claim that god favors such and such ruler, and if you want to go to heaven, you need to obey and pay taxes to such and such ruler.  Interestingly, after reading the book, The Invention of Power that claims that European success was based on an agreement between the Church and rulers, it appears that the division of religion and rulers in Europe did in fact contribute to Europe’s success (over the rest of the world), because not only did European nations compete against one another in a geographic region that precluded easy conquest, but they had to compete against the Church and embrace technology and economic advancement whereas in Southeast Asia, you could just claim to be god and rule over everything.

“It may surprise Western Buddhists to learn that Buddhism is a faith of power.  According to the doctrines of Theravada Buddhism, the world is imperfect and requires correction by a person of great comeliness, vision and wisdom, who brings harmony to chaos.  This ruler or king is referred to in classic texts as Mahasammata, because he is chosen by the people; he is a king or raja because he rules by the Dhamma, the sacred order of things, and Khattiya, lord of the fields.  Social order depends on the righteous ruler who is charged with upholding the peace, harmony and well-being of the people.”

The book also reveals why China did not become an imperial global power and why it likely embraced Communism over Capitalism.  The Chinese rulers embraced Confucianism which valued austerity and isolationism.  “While Buddhists encouraged money-making, Confucians believed trade was disreputable.  Confucian thinking infused the all-powerful imperial bureaucracy and merchants were regarded with disdain as parasites.”  Perhaps the Chinese Nationalists would have triumphed had the Chinese embraced Buddhism over Confucianism.  Perhaps China would have embraced technology and trade instead of thwarting it and may well have become global imperialists to either contend with or dominate Europe.  We’ll never know.  Perhaps you could write a book claiming that Europe dominated the world because of one single person, Confucious. 

The Chinese bypassed this problem by trading in tribute instead of wealth.  You gave some Chinese aristocrat precious commodities as a tribute, and they would reciprocate with their precious commodities.  Perhaps Western businesspeople can learn from this.  In the Western model, you negotiate a contract with others, and they are bound to the terms of the contract, and both parties should get wealthy.  In China, even under Communism, it’s not about making money but an exchange of goods that will make both parties look better. 

“The Song [Chinese] commercial revolution and the astonishing technological innovations of the period were driven by the dynasty’s desperate need for revenue.  The Song emperors invested heavily in grandiose new projects in Hangzhou, the southern capital, and had to fight off armies of the rival Jin Dynasty when they intruded across the Song frontier.”

Herein lies the secret to innovation and technology, competition.  This is one reason it’s so odd that the big tech companies keep buying up their competitors.  This does not stimulate innovation and technological advancement but hinders it.  Perhaps stricter and more enforced anti-trust laws would help the US become even more innovative and competitive.  If only the Jin and Song Dynasties continued their rivalry for centuries, the Chinese may well have conquered the world.

The Song forbid merchants from excursions over nine months so the sailors kept mainly to the Indian Ocean, but just imagine if they were given a longer leash.  Perhaps they would have sailed throughout the Pacific Islands and maybe even all the way to the Americas before Columbus.  Imagine Chinese merchants trading with the Aztecs or North American Indian tribes.

They say that when the Singularity occurs, when one super AI takes over all other AI, it will be the end of human inventions.  I would argue that it would also be the end of inventions.  Why would a single super AI need to innovate anymore if it controlled everything?  Perhaps it would help humans revert to a less technological lifestyle which would be healthier for us all.  Without any competition, why innovate?  Why risk change?  Why not just embrace what you already have? 

* * *

“But in the course of the eighteenth century, three powerful new players sailed into the Strait of Malacca in the wake of the Portuguese.  They arrived in the shape of corporations: the English East India company, the Dutch Vereenigde Nederlandsche Oost Indische Compagnie, the VOC, and the French Compagnie des Indes.  For over 200 years, the force and power of British, Dutch and French colonialism was imposed on Asians, not directly by the states or governments in London, Paris and Amsterdam but through competing private companies.” 

When I read a book about the East India Company in India basically running the country from corporate headquarters in London, it blew my mind.  As an English citizen, how did I not know this?  How did I not know that on top of this, three British, Dutch, and French companies ruled over Southeast Asia.  How does nobody know about this?

If our world were truly run by the government, wouldn’t they want you to know that part of the blame of colonialism and imperialism was the private sector?  Wouldn’t this further justify their regulation and controls over the private sector?  Why would they hide this from us?  According to US history books, the government reined in the robber barons of the late 19^th century justifying their bloated and expansive growth into all aspects of our lives and the erosion of our liberties and income.  Why wouldn’t they blame giant corporations for part of the exploitation of the world? 

It seems to me that governments are not in total control, and they are subject to the control and influence of big business.  After all, the American Revolution was not so much a revolution against the tyranny of King George or Parliament or taxation.  It was rather revolution against British monopolies that either restricted or excluded colonial businesses from competition.  Today, the US monopolies have simply taken over the British monopolies.  Statism does not mean that the government controls everything.  It could also mean that the government controls everything but the elite who then control government as well as all the banks and monopolies.  Why tell the world that in the past the elite who owned monopolies owned, ran, and oppressed entire countries.  Perhaps that would lead you believe that they own, run, and oppress our very own country, the US.

We like to think that London or perhaps New York invented all the financial instruments of modern finance and stock trading, but they were all rooted in the Dutch East India Company, the VOC.  “The VOC established the Amsterdam stock exchange, the Beurs, which was the first financial organization to trade continuously.  Its brokers invented short selling, option trading, debt equity swaps, unit trusts and many other all too familiar instruments of modern capitalism.”  In other words, they transformed simple joint stock ventures into a complex system of gambling.

“The [Dutch] States General of the Republic authorized the VOC to wage war, to take and execute prisoners, to coin money, to negotiate treaties and to establish colonies.”  Just imagine if today, the US federal government authorized private companies like Blackwater or for that matter Lockheed Martin or Amazon to wage war, take and execute prisoners, coin money, negotiate treaties with countries and establish colonies.

* * *

“The historian Peter Carey has revealed a very surprising facet of British rule in Java [part of modern Indonesia].  The East India Company was ruled by a secretive cabal of Freemasons.  There were numerous Masonic lodges in Calcutta and Lord Minto was a ‘brother’ of long standing.  Freemasonry had emerged in its modern form in England in the seventeenth century and spread to the American colonies and the Continent.  For all its arcane rituals and mystique, Masonry is just a system of elite networking.  The governors of the British East India Company and the Dutch VOC were all Masons.”

There’s been a lot of discussion about the powers of secretive organizations like the Freemasons, Skull and Bones, Knights Templar, Illuminati, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, etc.  I don’t believe that these organizations have any ulterior agenda than providing a safe, secret venue for the rich and powerful to collude and plot further consolidation and expansion of wealth and power.  They are like country clubs, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis, Lions Club, Elk, Soroptimists, Shriners, etc.  The two major differences is that first, those in groups like CFR just happen to be more rich and powerful.  Second, there are more initiation rituals to ensure that people aren’t just joining to leak secrets or expose the collusion going on.  Just like any criminal gang or criminal biker club, they have to make sure new candidates aren’t informants, journalists, or otherwise just curious looky-loo’s.  You need to have skin in the game to join, and that often means exposing your own dirty secrets that can be exposed if you decide to expose the group or turn against them. 

They also want to know if you’re willing to swear allegiance and obedience to the group instead of your own interests, and by group, I mean the leaders.  It’s nothing but a pyramid scheme whereby the lower-level members are exploited and used for the benefit of the higher-level members.  The rich and powerful could just about create or join any club and elevate it to a secretive, influential, powerful club.  If they decided to all join a knitting club where they would all gather to collude and pick which politicians to support and bribe with campaign money they would.  It doesn’t mean that the world is controlled by knitting.  It’s just a vehicle by which the rich and powerful meet in private.  Certainly, it’s not fair competition for outsiders, but social organization is endemic to human nature. 

I don’t think that if you joined the Freemasons and over 50 years rose to the very top you would uncover the fact that reptile-like aliens arrived on Earth 1000 years ago and gave a small group of people technological secrets in exchange for helping them and hiding them from other humans.  I think you would discover that the group is just a convenient and secret place where the rich and powerful can collude and plot to consolidate and expand their wealth and power.  You would have wasted 50 years to discover this rather vanilla fact.

Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre

Part 4 of 4

Fortunately, the book does question the hypothesis that the pursuit of happiness is the goal of life and will lead to happiness noting that obsessing over happiness can make you unhappy.  Social psychologist Philip Brickman addressed the pursuit of happiness, and in his obituary written by a fellow psychologists, it notes, “The best way off the hedonic treadmill, according to Phil’s writings, is commitment – the almost magical mechanism that converts the inevitable pain and dissatisfaction in life into purpose and meaningful-ness.” 

Someone once argued that the point of life is achieving ‘flow’ the state of achieving unconsciousness, a sudden unawareness of time as you engage in an activity that consumes your focus and attention.  I disagree with that, because you can achieve flow by being a compulsive gambler or addict of any type.  In my opinion, the goal of life is growth and proliferation as it is also the goal of nature.  It is complex, because sometimes an organism or species must go backwards or not grow when the environment dictates.  It’s not always linear and progressive, but in totality, nature does grow, become more complex, and proliferates.  The fact that mammals went back into the ocean proves that sometimes species go backwards and acquire traits that they long ago discarded like flippers. 

One of the most shocking things I came across was the hypothesis that modern primates may have actually been intelligent and lost their higher intelligence in order to return to the trees or something.  The movie Idiocracy makes the incredibly funny yet possibly accurate argument that we are losing our intelligence as a species.  Certainly, when hunter and gatherers turned into farmers, they became shorter, less healthy, and their brains shrunk.  There may be countless false starts with intelligence as perhaps countless intelligent beings offed themselves with nuclear war or by destroying their planets.  None-the-less, intelligence has proven a possible advantage in helping living organisms get off one planet and colonizing other planets, moons, or simply traveling through the galaxy or universe in artificial superstructures.  Escaping our universe and colonizing other universes may be the ultimate achievement that requires significant intelligence.

What we have to accept is the miserable fact that there is a whole lot of suffering, death, disease, deformity, mutations, and struggle in nature, and the goal is not to eliminate suffering, death, disease, etc.  These are all critical elements in helping nature grow and proliferate.  The idea that humans ought to pursue perpetual happiness and life devoid of suffering, death, disease, deformity, aging, etc., is perhaps a great con that is designed to make us work our butts off to acquire money that will pay for this luxury.  Another lie is that our suffering today will be all worth it, because in the afterlife in heaven, we will not have any suffering, death, disease, deformity, etc., and I would imagine that in heaven, we would be perpetually happy.  Once science threw so much water on this irrational idea, people then began embracing the idea that we could achieve heaven on Earth if only we had enough money to pay for it and biohack ourselves with anti-aging treatments and whatever expensive mechanisms to ensure our perpetual happiness that now requires a subscription.

* * *

One of the takeaways from this book is social isolation and its negative impacts on mental health.  Perhaps Tony Hsieh was able to defer his mental health problems by always focusing on others and surrounding himself with people where his attention could be shifted from his own thoughts to other people.  It seems as if his thoughts were not always about planning and improving things but perhaps he hid some of the more sinister and negative thoughts that haunted him.  When COVID happened, and this is corroborated by then director of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s boss, Dr. Francis Collins, perhaps the government focused too much on preventing the spread of COVID at all costs and downplayed the costs of a lockdown on both the economy and public health.  It appears that Tony Hsieh’s mental health deteriorated during the COVID lockdowns when he was cut off from a lot of his social networks and was more isolated in Park City, Utah. 

The lockdowns also imprisoned many abuse victims with their abusers who were probably much more abusive as a result of dealing with the frightening pandemic in addition to losing their source of income from work.  There was no cost-benefit analysis done, and anyone even suggesting that lockdowns might have negative consequences much less consequences more severe than the disease itself were immediately shut down, censored, and often characterized as anti-science, selfish, and incompetent. 

* * *

One of the most dangerous things Tony Hsieh tried to hack was sleep.  If there’s one common factor correlated and contributory to mental illness, that is lack of sleep.  It is also a powerful tool for cults and any sort of indoctrination and obedience training system.  This is perhaps why public schools still refuse to change school hours that cause teenagers to suffer from sleep deprivation.  Sleep deprivation causes the frontal lobes to operate inefficiently and sometimes not at all.  Those frontal lobes are crucial for making complex decisions and considering and weighing multiple things like social and long-term consequences.  People who are sleep deprived tend to be more impulsive, reckless, antisocial, short-term minded, and prone to serious mental illness.  They are also less likely to take into consideration their own health, long-term interests, and social connections.  It’s easier for someone to come along and indoctrinate them and get them to do all sorts of things that are harmful to their health, their long-term goals, and relationships in their lives.  They become codependent with those immediately around them and tend to form a borg or hive mind which helps them economize on independent and analytical thinking and considerations of complex things including social and long-term repercussions. 

In the military, it turns otherwise independent-minded, friendly young people into killing machines devoid of compassion.  In the military, in addition to limiting your sleeping hours, they also provide stimulants to keep soldiers awake for days at a time which is effective in battle for blitzkrieg-type operations but ultimately wears the soldiers down and demoralizes them over the long-term.  It also makes soldiers vulnerable to trauma as they there is no room, time, or capacity to process traumatic events and find some way of gaining control over them. 

On top of all this, the negative side-effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative.  If you sleep four hours one night and 12 hours the next, you are not as restored as someone who sleeps eight hours for two nights.  You remain in a deficit, and it may take weeks, months, and sometimes years to recover from not sleeping for days on end.  Sleep deprivation also disrupts your sleep patterns, so even if you can find eight hours a night to sleep, you won’t sleep for eight hours, and it may take months or years to be able to sleep for eight hours consistently.  For those who want to hack sleeping to become more productive and powerful, consider the fact that LeBron James is an advocate for long hours of sleep, upwards of 12 hours a day including naps. 

People often only see things they can witness consciously.  They don’t see the vast majority of work that goes on in our brains beyond our conscious perception, and they don’t see the vast majority of work that goes on in our bodies either.  Rest and sleep are critical for our minds and bodies to grow, heal, develop, and learn.  When our bodies are sore, it is reminding us that our bodies are healing and growing.  When our brain is tired, it is reminding us that our brain is healing and growing.  You can’t just stuff yourself with stimulants and avoiding sleep and expect your brain to heal properly and grow and become more potent and effective.  Instead, your brain becomes more and more damaged.

On top of sleep deprivation, Tony Hsieh was also using Red Bull, Adderall, Xanax, and alcohol.  Later, he would use psychedelic mushrooms, ketamine, and nitrous oxide.  He also ate junk food and never exercised until near the end.  He essentially had a very unhealthy lifestyle poisoning his body (and mind) with artificial, processed substances (except the mushrooms).  If Tony Hsieh was battling mental illness, it definitely would not have helped to put his body and mind through so much toxic garbage.  Exercising is often considered a natural antidepressant.  It’s like tech bros want to hack life in every possible way except doing what has been proven effective all along and that is eating healthy, exercising, getting sufficient sleep, and surrounding yourself with a dependable and trustworthy social support network.  Somehow, tech bros can hack life to avoid eating healthy, exercising, getting sufficient sleep, and surrounding themselves with a social support network, and they want to tell us how to live our lives in a digital hellscape!

* * *

While there were people taking advantage of Tony Hsieh, it is notable that one person, Tyler Williams, tried to help him in June 2020 by discouraging his drug dealer and was banished for it.  This would have been a warning to all the people around him not to try to help him or else they may be banished from his life as well.  It would have been a hard choice considering that Tony Hsieh liked to endow the people around him with money and expensive dinners and parties.  According to the book, when Tony Hsieh moved to Park City during the pandemic, he isolated himself but as the economy opened up again, he started to surround himself with new people and his brother Andy.  The new people didn’t know him as well as his Vegas friends and were much less capable and willing to question him or say no. 

* * *

The one thing you notice about Tony Hsieh is that he is highly impressionable.  He reads a book, and all the sudden, he wants to implement its advice and flies the author to his company to speak to everyone.  There doesn’t seem to be, at least on the surface, any type of caution, skepticism, cynicism, etc.  This is one reason why letting go of your ego can be dangerous.  To have no ego, you absorb everything around you, and this includes garbage and toxic influences.  I’ve known many people like this who just accept everyone and don’t criticize them or question their behavior or thinking.  It may sound very generous and gracious of them, and it’s nice to always see the best in people and try to bring out the best in people, but sometimes they get ‘rose-colored glasses’.  They overlook the instances when the person may be abusive, exploitative, cruel, selfish, greedy, even violent and malicious. 

We have egos to protect ourselves, what I call a geofence around us.  We don’t live in a world devoid of predators, and in nature, predation is a key to survival.  You can’t just go around pretending that everyone is not a predator and won’t harm you.  This is naïve and wishful thinking, even immature.  In children, their sense of ego is undeveloped, and while they can suffer bouts of selfishness and self-importance, they can also be unreasonably trusting of others, because essentially they have to be.  They rely on others to protect them, because they are small and weak.  Unfortunately, if the person they rely on to protect them is a predator and harms them, they can develop an overabundance of ego and become especially withdrawn and untrusting of everyone.  Of course, when this happens, they become desperate for intimacy, and instead of moderating their ego, they go the opposite direction and become overly trusting of people in a desperate attempt to connect and become intimate.  This is pretty much what happened with Tony Hsieh. 

Being highly impressionable is also a trait of people who get straight A’s and do everything they’re told as a kid.  One of the reason some people find it difficult to get straight A’s besides the sheer monotony and difficulty of memorizing everything they come across, interesting or not, is the fact that people want to understand the person talking to them.  When people talk to you, you don’t just accept everything they say.  You need to question, challenge, investigate, and screen them.  Are they trustworthy?  Do they have your interests in mind too?  Are they just trying to exploit you and feed you lies?  Why are they telling you this? 

When you just accept whatever a textbook tells you, you have ignorant faith in the author(s).  You assume they have your best interests in mind.  To get straight A’s, you can’t sit there and wonder if they’re not being totally genuine and honest or whether they’re just trying to indoctrinate you and bias your mind toward their agenda.  In the case of history textbooks, they do have an agenda, and that is portraying the government as benevolent and kind despite a long history of crimes and corruption.  We are taught that government is a work in progress, and the past crimes were just growing pains.  It’s just bullshit, and people who think independently and critically and have a healthy amount of skepticism don’t buy everything they read in a history textbook and don’t get straight A’s.  In fact, when your parents or guardians turn out to be abusive and untrustworthy, you are less likely to trust whatever you read in textbooks and have difficulty memorizing it all along with developing skepticism toward your teachers. 

For those who excel at school and ignorantly memorize and believe everything they read, they may go on to good colleges and careers, but they are not going to be happy or healthy in life, because they can’t filter and criticize everything they absorb.  In our modern society, everything we are exposed to includes a huge amount of toxic garbage and people with the best intentions filled with this toxic garbage are giving us bad advice.  It reminds me of a book that was recommended to me about this religious person who believed that by randomly sending people small amounts of money, you would eventually receive huge amounts of money.  I think this author completely missed the point of religion or spirituality.  Their minds were filled with the toxic garbage that is thrown at us everyday equating wealth with happiness and healthiness. 

Tony Hsieh received an A after reading every book, because he absorbed it completely without filter and implemented its advice to a T without hesitation.  But life is not about getting A’s and absorbing and accepting everything you’re exposed to.  In fact, the whole academic system not only creates mindless automatons incapable of independent and critical thought, it also sets everyone up to be highly impressionable to the onslaught of commercial advertising and marketing in addition to political propaganda.  Perhaps 95% of everyone you know goes through life not really questioning and thinking much about all the things people tell them online, on TV, and through ads.  They repeat soundbites like parrots without truly understanding their meaning.  In the end, they don’t serve themselves or their health. 

Rather, they become what advertisers and the government wants them to become, obedient, consumerist, materialist, superficial, unthinking, unquestioning, docile, two-party system simpletons.  If one political party wants them to condemn immigrants, women, gay people, trans people, people of color, they obey without hesitation.  If one political party wants them to condemn rural white people, ‘anti-vaxxers’, gun right advocates, school voucher advocates, illegal drugs, they obey without hesitation.  There is no nuance or dissent in their political opinions or views.  You can pretty much go down the party platform list, and they agree with everything.  You can’t really blame them, because that is what they were taught to do in school for 12 years, agree with everything the teacher and textbooks say without question or dissent, and you’ll get A’s and you will be rewarded in life.  It’s all a scam. 

* * *

As Tony Hsieh’s mental health deteriorated, his family attempted to have a judge award them conservatorship which would give them control of Tony and his assets.  Unfortunately, this is one reason why people avoid formal mental health evaluations where a psychologist can place you on temporary psychiatric hold or have you committed to an institution.  We know about conservatorship abuse from the famed case of Britney Spears and also the frightening movie, I Care a Lot where a con-artist becomes legal guardian of vulnerable old people and commits them to institutions where they cannot escape while she liquidates their assets.  One of the problems of wealth is that any sign of mental instability and your family can try to wrest away your fortune by having you declared mentally unfit to manage your own affairs.  It would also enable them to totally control your life, managing all the people who have access to you, whether you can drive, etc.  If you are truly mentally ill and a threat to your own life, this drastic control may help you, but if you were only struggling with mental illness and capable of living a healthy life, a conservatorship would be a prison sentence.  For this reason, you would never want to admit any kind of mental problems to your family for fear they might try to impose a conservatorship on you, but in many cases, it would be your family that would have your best interest at heart as opposed to the unrelated people around you.  Of course, there are also many cases your own family would be your biggest threat while some people around you would be your biggest advocates.

“At least some of the people around Tony seemed to realize how sick he had become.  At one point, the group, at the direction of Justin Weniger, had tried hiring an in-house doctor for Tony.  But, much as Jewel had, the doctor hard warned that if Tony didn’t stop taking drugs and improve his physical condition, he would die within months.”

Tony Hsieh’s new Park City entourage, including his brother Andy, faced a complex moral conundrum.  So long as Tony Hsieh was alive, they could keep making money off him.  Surely they knew that if Tony Hsieh died, his family would disband the group and take all his wealth.  The group was making hundreds of thousands of dollars off him in both salary and commission, 10% of every deal made.  Even arranging to have a bus retrofitted, they would get 10% of the bill.  You can just imagine them trying to do more and more projects to make more and more money for themselves. 

Meanwhile, Tony Hsieh’s mental and physical health are deteriorating, but if you keep badgering him about getting help, he might throw you out of the group, and you risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.  What do you do?  Obviously, the answer is leaving, but that’s easier said than done when you’re taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars of easy money.  And you could also rationalize that if you left, someone would just step into your place, and they may be even more predatory than you.  People are capable of doing incredible mental gymnastics to rationalize immoral behavior. 

This is why interventions are done.  Not only does the ultimatum of leaving the person act as a motive for that person to clean themselves up, but if the person doesn’t clean themselves up, you are no longer an accessory to their continued demise.  Even being a friend and not supplying them with drugs or taking money from them, providing them with moral encouragement and support while they are obviously doing the wrong thing and harming themselves is being an accessory to the crime.  An intervention effectively allows you to claim due diligence and then wash your hands of being an accessory to someone ruining their lives and possibly killing themselves.  The Park City group, had they been courageous, would have given Tony Hsieh an ultimatum.  Stop doing drugs, sleep, eat properly, and get mental counseling or else we all leave.  It may not have convinced Tony Hsieh to turn his life around, but it would have been better than nothing, and it would have provided the group with the necessary due diligence to walk away with a clean conscience knowing that they are no longer accessories to a crime or at least the financial exploitation of someone who is clearly mentally ill.

“Tony used a rating system, tallied on sticky notes around the Ranch under each individual’s name, to show who was in favor at the moment.  No one wanted to fall short.  There were scores for consistency, authority, and stress.  “Job offer on hold for any new people until Mimi gives a score of 100,” one sticky note read.”

This makes it clear that Tony was not entirely a victim, and his Park City entourage was not entirely exploiting him.  This group did not know Tony Hsieh from Las Vegas, so they would not have noticed his dramatic weight loss, his peculiar habits, his meandering conversations.  They could well have assumed that he was like this in Vegas, an eccentric, brilliant entrepreneur.  Tony Hsieh’s rating system would have them all on edge, trying their best to be in his good graces.  (It also reminds me of how bosses use performance evaluations to manipulate and punish employees.)  Confronting Tony Hsieh about his mental health would definitely put your score under 100. 

In any vague, uncertain situation when there are two perspectives, one will reward you and one will punish you, people obviously take the perspective that rewards them, and the reward itself rewards and strengthens this perspective.  The Park City group would have chosen to take a perspective that allowed them to continue serving Tony Hsieh and dismiss indications of his deteriorating health.  We like to criticize people from the outside, but time and time again, people fail, because they deceive themselves as much as they deceive others.  You can’t say for sure what you would have done in the same situation.  I’ve hung out with chronic drug and alcohol abusers in the past, and I can’t say I always took the responsible path and cut them out of my life.  You rationalize to yourself that so long as you’re not the one selling them drugs or buying them booze, you’re not responsible for them harming themselves with drugs and booze, but just by hanging out with them and pretending that nothing is wrong, you encourage them to continue harming themselves.  You rationalize to yourself that you can help them by being a better role model that uses moderation, but then you’re more influenced by them than they are of you, because their main influence is their addiction which trumps your influence.  Meanwhile, you may start using drugs or abusing alcohol.  The influence of dopamine and addiction are far greater than the influence of a friend’s companionship and mentoring or role modeling.  You’re just kidding yourself.  Not only is this book a cautionary tale about Tony Hsieh and drug addicts but this book is also a cautionary tale about those who enable them, and in this case, profit from them.

While the Park City group (primarily Andy Hsieh, Rachael Brown, Elizabeth Pezzello, Brett Gorman, Don Calder, Anthony Hebert, Daniel Park, Suzie Baleson, and Justin Weniger) doesn’t look very good in this book, Mimi Pham from Vegas looks even worse.  “Pham, who had worked closely with Tony for much longer than Baleson had, told Tony that he would have to pay a “disloyalty penalty” of $30,000 for every day that Baleson remained on Tony’s properties.  She began invoicing Tony for the additional money in mid-September 2020.  After eight weeks, he owed her $1.8 million.

He ended up paying $420,000 for the right to keep Baleson involved in his plans.”

After his death, Pham sued Tony Hsieh’s estate for more than $90 million.  Many sued the estate for projects that never even transpired.  Even after his death, they were still trying to take from him.  Perhaps when all you do is give, you’re just teaching those around you to take.  It’s like the nuclear arms race.  You can’t just decide to get rid of your stockpile unilaterally, because others will keep their stockpile.  If you decide to become egoless, you need everyone else to become egoless, otherwise, they’ll just exploit you. 

At the same time, I would argue that ‘selfless’ givers are actually selfish, and people who claim to have abandoned their egos can be egotistical.  Tony Hsieh rated people for how much they were loyal to him, and only then would he fund their projects and make them rich.  That doesn’t sound like selfless giving to me.  It sounds more like manipulation.  In other words, he paid people not to make them happy but to make them like him, appreciate him, depend on him, and make him feel important and useful.  If he truly wanted to make a difference and make people happy, he could have just donated his wealth. 

Instead, he was very much like one of his friends who used to work as a property flipper by evicting families that defaulted on their mortgages.  His conscience got the better of him, so he took $200K and created an art project for Burning Man that Burners could enjoy.  If he felt so guilty, maybe he should have just bought a $200K house and given it to one of the families he had evicted.  Tony Hsieh gave, but he had strings attached, and people felt indebted to him.  And this backfired, because nobody wants to feel indebted to anyone.  When you give people things for free, they are not as appreciative as you may expect.  Rather, they complain about it and try to minimize its usefulness to them so they don’t feel indebted for the free gift.  They say don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but fact is, we do because we need to be able to relieve ourselves of the burden of indebtedness.  If the horse’s teeth are bad, we can at least say the gift is not as useful as you might think.

* * *

There are perhaps millions of nerdy kids who aspire to be tech moguls like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.  They won’t admit that they want to be megalomaniacs and exploit the world to get rich.  Rather, they invoke the tired platitude of wanting to make the world a better place for everyone.  But how they go about fixing the world is based on their very unique and specific experiences in life, and this usually involves being socially disconnected from everyone and spending over a hundred hours a week alone in front of a computer.  So what they truly desire is social connection, and not just normal physical social connection, but some distorted, deranged social connection that has lost all its meaning, gaining status through likes and ‘friend’ counts in the million, becoming a billionaire and being able to touch countless lives. 

This is nothing new; it just has a tech flavor to it.  It’s nothing but the old-fashioned desire to become rich and famous.  There really is no difference between Industrial Era moguls like Rockefeller, Rothschild, and J.P. Morgan and today’s tech stars.  The only difference is that today’s wannabe robber barons all know better and tell everyone their goal is to create a better world for everyone.  I wouldn’t count on them knowing the first step to achieving that goal.  In fact, I would argue they’re going in the wrong direction by making it easier and more rewarding for everyone to disconnect physically and lose themselves in an artificial, harmful digital world hellscape.  In the meantime, they’re pumping themselves up with drugs to help them further disconnect from the physical world.  At some point, you just don’t care about the physical world anymore, you don’t care about other people’s suffering, you just nonsensically dismiss them all as NPCs in a simulation.  You essentially become immoral and insane.

Perhaps in the ancient past, humans and primates with genetic mental health problems could not make social connections and paid the heavy price by being ostracized, thrown out of the tribe, or simply killed.  Social connections are so critical to humans that we fear embarrassment from public speaking more than death and countless teenagers kill themselves from social shame and humiliation.  We are constantly reminded of our cringeworthy social gaffes and errors.  Over time, the genes interfering with our ability to make social connections would disappear.  Today, however, we don’t need to make social connections as much as previously.  We can make do by spending all our time studying and working hard and making money to buy people’s acceptance and ‘respect’.  Over time, in fact, those more willing to spend all their time alone studying and working would eventually have their genes dominate over those who chose to spend their time with friends socializing.  In other words, we are evolving to become less social.  At the same time, our genetic mental illnesses that prevent us from making social connections could be hidden in this world as we get straight-A’s and work hard making everyone believe that we were fine.  Meanwhile, we struggle with mental illness.  Over time, genetic mental illness would flourish in our gene pool.  At the same time, we live in a world that makes it difficult to connect socially and a world where mental illness is frowned upon so nobody seeks professional help.  All in all, we live in a world where antisocial behavior and mental illness flourishes.

Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre

Part 3 of 4

“If happiness is everyone’s ultimate goal, wouldn’t it be great if we could change the world and get everyone and every business thinking in that context and that framework? – Tony Hsieh”

Who taught Tony Hsieh this?  Who taught anyone this?  Did we learn this in school?  Did we learn this in any religious scripture?  Did we learn this from self-help books?  I don’t recall anyone ever telling me this.  I think this is just an implied idea that we all ascertained by watching endless TV shows and commercials showing us happy people apparently enjoying the hell out of life and making us feel incredibly unhappy, inadequate, and sad.  I think this is the genius of Madison Avenue.  While Communists were telling people that the goal of life was to wrest away the means of production and capital from the bourgeoise, while the Bible was telling us to stone sinners and be deathly afraid of pissing off god, while schools taught us to get good grades to get into a good college and get a good career and make lots of money, Madison Avenue was telling us to be happy, don’t worry, and the only and obvious way to be happy was to buy whatever garbage they were selling.  Dave Ramsey said it best, “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” 

Madison Avenue and for that matter, Hollywood, was not only about selling consumerism to a new group of newly rich, middle-class suburbanites.  After World War II, the US had a huge conglomeration of military industry that needed to be transformed into commercial industry.  The rest of the world was poor.  It needed US consumers to buy all the commercial products.  It made sense to inundate Americans with the notion of consumerism and materialism and equate consumption with happiness.  This was not a time to be austere and meditate and get in touch with nature.  In the past, the US had a love affair with nature and health.  It is my belief that much of this was encouraged and supported by the US government to get people out of the cities and out into the wild frontiers of the Western territories and states to replace Native Americans.  It is perhaps one of the only times in history where civilizations actually encouraged people to abandon civilization and embrace a more independent, ‘libertarian’, self-sufficient mode of life.  It was now time for the US government to encourage and embrace a philosophy that would happen to be a huge benefit to big business that was now transitioning from military to commercial industry. 

So did the US government somehow encourage Madison Avenue and Hollywood to glamorize consumption, luxury, smoking, cars, and traveling?  What we do know for a fact is that the South Korean government funded and supported its entertainment industry to popularize its corporate brands throughout the world.  You should read, The Birth of Korean Cool.  It is not a conspiracy theory or secret that the US government worked closely with Hollywood to promote the sale of war bonds, to promote the US military, and to glorify war.  It is also no conspiracy theory or secret that the US government actively and generously helps Hollywood produce pro-military, pro-war movies and works closely with the sports industry to have national anthems before games where they walk out with a military color guard and have military planes fly over. 

The persecution of Colin Kaepernick and his veritable blacklisting from the NFL was probably, in large part, a result of him raining on the government’s parade and diverting attention to serious social issues instead.  To what extent the US government used Hollywood and Madison Avenue to glamorize the US and Capitalism is unknown, but throughout the world, many people saw an obvious choice when comparing US Capitalism with Soviet and Chinese Communism.  US Capitalism was just so much cooler with Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor.  Propaganda that nobody calls propaganda is the apex of propaganda.  While the Communists had their ridiculous choreographed marches and parades and corny posters with men and women looking up to the skies, obvious and ridiculous propaganda, the US had the amazing glamor of Hollywood.  If Hollywood were a propaganda machine, it would be an unrivaled, master expert at it.

Whole generations of both Americans and people throughout the world believed that by mimicking the glamor of Hollywood, they could become happy and carefree.  People all over the world dreamed of moving to the US and all the sudden all their problems would disappear, and they would find themselves in this nirvana, this utopia of perpetual happiness.  Of course, it’s all a scam.  Even if people decide to abandon the notions of wealth, fame, status, and prestige, they do not abandon the idea that the pursuit of happiness is the whole point of human existence.  They just try to find happiness through other channels like hobbies, hyper-fixation, drugs, alcohol, technology, social media clout, etc.  They’re still barking up the wrong tree. 

Happiness, like dopamine, serotonin, endocannabinoids, endorphins, oxytocin, they’re all just temporary states of bliss that reward us for behavior that we believe helps us acquire things that help us and avoid things that harm us.  It is meaningless to hack dopamine and give ourselves a continual drip of it for doing nothing but sitting on a couch.  The point is not be happy or have a continuous drip of dopamine or for that matter fentanyl or heroin in our system.  You don’t get it.  They’re temporary fixes and bumps to encourage us to do things that help us and avoid things that hurt us. 

The true goal is to perpetuate living organisms throughout the universe and beyond, and that requires a whole lot of struggle, confusion, mistakes, chaos, suffering, pain, setbacks, injuries, embarrassments, discomfort, death, disease, challenges, and hardships.  If we were to just pursue happiness, we would also deathly avoid struggle, confusion, mistakes, chaos, suffering, pain, etc.  In fact, the Boomers pretty much are the cautionary tale of what happens when you shelter kids and then all the sudden they get drafted into a war and face the horrors of life and death.  Buddha himself was the victim of a sheltered life and then he went overboard in the other direction and lived as a homeless hermit.  I wouldn’t recommend this, because there are countless other stories of princes being sheltered and then facing reality and either going mad or doing rather horrible things to avoid having to face reality.  When you’re sheltered and then face the horrors of life, as the Boomers did, you start to think that living in the moment is the only meaningful thing there is, because inevitably you will have to deal with getting old and dying.  So invest everything in the now and here and be damned with future generations having to pay for your excesses in the form of interest on debt and be damned about getting old and dying.  This is not how humans thrived for hundreds of thousands of years and how primates thrived for millions of years before that. 

Humans have always cared for their young and accepted their aging and ultimate death.  We had rituals, beliefs, tales, and eventually religious ideology that helped us deal with the process of aging and then dying.  We accepted it, and we cared about future generations by taking care of our young and preparing them for their futures and giving them the tools and resources to teach and care for future generations beyond them.  This is part of how we took over the world.  What happened with the 50s and consumerism and materialism is a transformation from caring and loving parents and grandparents to selfish, impulsive perpetual children trying to play and have fun and be happy for as long as possible while cannibalizing the future and welfare of their children and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren and on.  To think that life is all about attaining happiness at any cost, even the cost of the health and welfare of yourself and future generations, this is diseased and sick thinking.  It is a mental illness.

* * *

The description of Zappos, including their hiring process sounds like a cult, and one of the critical components of a cult is the lack of dissent, especially dissent with the leaders.  Without doubt, if your company is growing by leaps and bounds, making everyone rich, people inside the company would assume that their ideas, style, attitude, and traditions are superior to yours as an outsider.  This is a common fallacy with rich people.  We internalize success and externalize failure.  Rich people don’t brag about how they started out with a large endowment of cash from their rich parents, relatives, and friends and how banks never discriminated against them because they were white.  Rather, they internalize and claim that all their success was a matter of their hard work, ingenuity, and whatever random traits that appear most different than everyone else. 

In nature, this is called parallel evolution.  I really wished I remembered the other term for it.  In other words, a rich kid who gets a big lift through his wealthy parents and all their influential connections also happens to enjoy wearing red leather shoes and eats gelato.  He thinks wearing red leather shoes and eating gelato contributed to his success.  They didn’t.  It’s just ancillary.  Likewise, Tony Hsieh is different in that he enjoys raves, immersive socializing, networking, obsessively pursuing happiness, avoiding unhappy people, being positive, so he associates all these ancillary traits with his success.  It never occurs to him that he’s successful, because he happened upon great Internet ideas during a time when the Internet was taking over conventional businesses that sold products through mail-order catalogs and brick-and-mortar stores.  It had little to do with his obsessive pursuit of happiness and surrounding himself with unreasonably positive and happy people. 

It’s the same reason that Hitler believed that he could easily defeat Russia.  He had a string of remarkably easy military victories over the Sudetenland, the entire Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Belgium, northern France, etc.  Easy win after easy win after easy win convinced him that he knew everything, and anyone who dissented with him was a buffoon.  A general who may have cautioned him about invading Poland or France and now cautioned him about invading Russia would have been dismissed and laughed at.  He would have no credibility.  How do you tell Tony Hsieh who has experienced nothing but incredible success, fame, and fortune that he was ultimately wrong in obsessively pursuing happiness and doing ketamine and nitrous oxide and irresponsibly throwing his money around and surrounding himself with sycophants and yes-people.  What did they know? 

No matter how successful you are, you should always keep around a coterie of dissenters who can provide you with a different perspective.  Perhaps they’re wrong most of the time, but when it really counts, they may be right and may actually save your life or company.  Certainly, many dissenters may be congenital naysayers, argumentative, negative, disruptive, and cause dissent just for attention, but this should not overshadow the dissenters who are truly conscientious, balanced, and don’t use dissent for attention.  We all want to surround ourselves with people that make us feel good, but in order to grow and protect ourselves, we also need to have people who truly care about us and are willing to occasionally tell us things we don’t want to hear and challenge our habits and thinking.  This is growth.  You don’t want a fitness trainer who gradually lowers and lowers your weights and resistance and workout time to keep you happy.  You want one who will constantly challenge you and introduce all new sorts of pain, struggles, discomfort, and muscle confusion to help your body grow.  You’ll even get minor injuries, but it’s all a part of growth, and you can’t blame your instructor for injuring you just as you shouldn’t blame a close friend for embarrassing you by confronting you with one of your bad habits.

Tony Hsieh definitely fixed a lot of things that are wrong with corporate culture, but then he took it too far.  Just because Tony Hsieh succeeded, doesn’t mean he had all the right answers, and just because Tony Hsieh succumbed to his problems and people, doesn’t mean he had all the wrong answers.  Corporate culture is essentially based on military culture with a strict hierarchy where information flows down and not up and with command and control.  It is filled with impersonal, disciplinarian, authoritarianism that tolerates a lot of unhealthy office behavior like discrimination, bullying, harassment, retaliation, and petty vendettas.  To this day, the US military cannot properly deal with sexual harassment which is one of the major reasons women don’t want to join the military. 

Certainly, reforming this culture is a good thing.  However, Zappos, arguably goes too far the other way on the pendulum swing just like many revolutions.  You throw out the baby with the bathwater.  There are many positives that old-fashioned corporations also do.  Sometimes you don’t want work following you home, and you want a healthy boundary between work and home life.  With Zappos, there must be huge pressure to be involved in activities outside of work or else be labeled as an old corporate stooge who wants to keep a healthy work-home life balance.  When you look around and realize most of your friends are your coworkers, maybe that’s unhealthy. 

And whereas Zappos may have greater diversity as far as more youth in positions of authority, more ethnic diversity, more women, more LGBTQ+ people than corporations, there are other ways of being conformists.  Anyone who resisted dressing up in costumes, dying their hair, cutting their hair, not fitting in, not being positive all the time, not caring for pursuing happiness all the time, not laughing at all your jokes, and dissenting, they would have been sent packing.  If you’ve ever been exposed to San Francisco culture, there is a surprising amount of conservativism and conformity in a culture that is considered anything but conservative and conformist.  In fact, San Francisco would solve a lot of its social and housing problems if it were less conservative and embraced the elimination of single-home zoning, single-use zoning, and allowed for more residential skyscrapers all over the city.  Yes, people who have been social outcasts can also be extremely conservative and backwards.  In fact, some of the most diehard conservatives were social outcasts as children.

The book provides perhaps one of the greatest profound insights.  According to author, journalist, and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, “Happy, or positive, people – however that is measured – do seem to be more successful at work.”  “They are more likely to get a second interview while job hunting, get positive evaluations from superiors, resist burnout, and advance up the career ladder.  But this probably reflects little more than corporate bias in favor of a positive attitude and against ‘negative’ people.”

I’ve always noted how really homophobic people tend to really struggle with their own sexuality and how people who make a huge show of how tough, masculine, and macho they are by mocking those they perceive to be weak, effeminate, and shy.  It’s too much of a show.  Why are they so antagonized by either gay people or effeminate or weak men?  The answer is that they identify themselves in them, and they don’t like what they see.  They equate being gay or effeminate and weak as being a victim, and they are deathly afraid of being victimized further.  In order to avoid victimization, they go out of their way to try to prove to the whole world that they are straight, masculine, macho, ‘alpha’, strong, and tough.  I mentioned this in a previous review of how Sean Strickland does a podcast where he admits his urge to beat up a couple ‘weak’ looking podcast hosts and then in another podcasts he breaks down crying when asked about his childhood.  These are scared people. 

And likewise, someone who always comes across as happy, joyful, merry, outgoing, giving, kind, and positive is likely the complete opposite.  Why on Earth do you want someone working for you who is insincere and puts on a huge act about how happy and positive they are, how they never cause any friction or dissent, how they are always willing to be team-players and cheerleaders and go rah-rah, go team, go company, I’ll shave my head and balls and get a tattoo of the company logo on my shoulder?  What are they hiding?  Why are they so overboard? 

It reminds me of the confusion between aggression and passivity.  Some people think that if they act aggressive, people will not confuse them for being passive.  If they are trying to appease someone, they think, if I act passive, I will not be confused with being aggressive.  It never occurs to them that there is a third option, assertive.  Likewise, if I’m not smiling and being joyful at a meeting, this does not mean that I am unhappy and sad.  I know people that are incredibly uncomfortable with neutral-looking people at meetings, or what some may term, ‘resting bitch face’.  It makes them incredibly uncomfortable and triggers them, because they don’t believe in anyone being neutral or assertive.  People are either happy or if they’re not smiling and expressing exuberance, then they are angry or sad.  There is no in between.  These are the fakest people on the planet, because they will always make a big show of appearing happy and joyful when in fact they are chronically unhappy and sad.  Do you want these people in your organization?  People completely lacking any self-awareness?  I see Zappos as a company full of chronically unhappy people who are trying way too hard to convince themselves, Tony Hsieh, and the entire world of how happy and carefree they are, banishing and excommunicating those who don’t play along with the charade with the slightest lapses of expressions of unhappiness or even neutrality.  I doubt Zappos ever hired anyone with a resting bitch face.

Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre

Part 2

One of the reasons techies and many cult people are drawn to cults is that they grow up isolated.  They are deprived of the serotonin and oxytocin you get from social connections.  They are rather fueled by highly addictive dopamine when they spend countless hours mastering a skill, often a technical skill, and acquiring greater and greater levels of specialized expertise which is then further promoted with higher levels of status among the field’s particular community.  While most techies are happy to enjoy this addiction, for others, there is something huge missing in their lives, and they feel a need to seek it.  That huge something is called social connection, something they missed most all of their lives as they holed themselves up in their darkened rooms or offices mastering their technical skills. 

The problem is that when you’re deprived of social connection, you don’t want small doses of it or medium doses of it, you want gigantic doses of it that are all-encompassing and immersive.  You don’t want to just hang out with friends by a campfire or have deep, personal conversations with a close friend.  You either want one million followers on social media or you want to become part of some borg at a rave or with a cult where you can completely lose yourself and your identity.  The only problem here is that when you completely lose yourself and your identity, you become incredibly vulnerable to any con-artist or scammer comes along and realizes that you have no self-protective ego, that in pursuit of total, immersive social connection, you’re willing to do anything, to abandon your sense of self, identity, dignity, shame, self-consciousness, self-awareness, and importantly self-protection. 

While some go the opposite direction and become egomaniacs, some loners go the other direction and try to destroy their egos.  This is one reason why psychedelics are so attractive to them.  Psychedelics have a very dampening effect on one’s sense of self, ego, self-preservation, etc.  There is a reason that we have an ego and sense of self and self-preservation.  Perhaps it’s all an illusion and we are just one with nature and all, but the way nature works and has thrived for this long is that it supplies us with an ego, a geofence around ourselves, and a desire to protect what we consider to be ourselves within that fence while keeping strangers and dangers out.  Tony Hsieh is a cautionary tale of not only seeking happiness above healthiness but also seeking total social immersion and ego destruction.  When you abandon your ego and sense of self-preservation, unfortunately, you attract predators or even turn otherwise non-predatory people into predators.  They realize that they can take advantage of you, and you will always assume the best of intentions from them and even foolishly believe that they are egoless as well.  Meanwhile, like a harmful parasite, they will take bites out of you until you no longer exist. 

Tony Hsieh could have just simply hung out with close friends and had deep, personal conversations with intimate friends and been fulfilled, but if you’ve been deprived of this all your life, you just don’t know when enough is enough.  It’s like a child that grows up constantly hungry.  When they become an adult and make enough money and realize they can eat as much as they want, they don’t know when to stop.  They have never experienced eating adequately, and we are all told that you don’t eat until you’re full, you eat until you think you could be close to being full and stop.  However, if you’ve grown up starving as a child, you don’t know the feeling of being full or being almost full.  You just don’t know when to stop eating.  Your craving for food, developed all your life, tells you that any chance you get, eat, eat beyond being full, because you never know when your next meal is coming from. 

Likewise, when you grow up with friends, you know when enough is enough, and you start to desire privacy and downtime.  You don’t hang out with your friends 24 hours.  After a few sleepovers, you want some distance to balance things out.  You don’t hang out with your friends for two hours and then go, gee, let’s make this three hours, then four, then six, then ten, let’s meet up in the morning and hang out all day, let’s keep doing this over and over and over and over.  Just like someone who binge eats, people can also binge on social connectivity and become overly saturated by the ‘hive’ which becomes unhealthy.  I’ll never forget talking this attractive woman who told me that all her childhood everyone wanted to hang out with her, but now, she prefers to isolate herself and paint.  As someone who never had that problem, rather, the opposite, it was shocking.

Whenever you join a cult, the first thing they do is get rid of any privacy or downtime where you can be alone and reflect on things and ask yourself whether the group is helping you or not.  All your time is occupied, and it is occupied with the presence of others, whether it is basic training in the military or a cult.  You also lose your identity and are compelled to change your physical appearance and often your name.  You are no longer David Attenborough but Private Attenborough or just maggot, or you’re ‘Love Peace’ or ‘Soaring Eagle’ or some bullshit.  Zappos has all the markers of a cult.  They coerced people to shave their heads or dye their hair blue.  They humiliated people in front of the group as an initiation ritual to break down their egos and sense of shame or embarrassment or dignity.  They hid behind the ruse of doing everything to demonstrate they were hip to having fun and ‘laughing at themselves’ when in fact, it was Cult 101, destroying the ego, undermining self-preservation instincts, eliminating self-awareness and self-interest.  Certainly, you want to avoid people who are self-obsessed and selfish and narcissistic, but there’s a healthy balance.  It sounds like Zappos screened people in order to find those willing to surrender their ego and identity in pursuit of total immersion into the cult of Zappos. 

The problem with tech dictators and dictators in general is that they project their own personal and specific experiences and desires and fears on to the entire organization.  They don’t appreciate the simple fact that everyone has their own personal and specific experiences and desires and fears.  They think that everyone grew up alone and socially disconnected like them, or they seek employees who grew up alone and socially disconnected.  They think the answers they think are good for them are good for everyone.  They’re actually stupid.  And because everyone tells them that they’re so smart and brilliant, they never criticize themselves and question their thinking. 

Fact is, in job interviews, I would bet that you can more easily predict who gets hired not by their resume or qualifications but rather how similar their faces are to the people doing the interviewing.  We are drawn to people who are like us.  If you wanted to build a successful company, you would want to eliminate any kind of bias in hiring except qualifications and work history.  This is why there has been so much discrimination in hiring and laws to prevent it.  Throughout history, people of northern and western European heritage would not hire people of southern or eastern European heritage.  Fair-skinned Europeans discriminated against darker skinned Europeans.  They also discriminated against non-Europeans.  They also discriminated against women or ugly people or fat people or deformed people or old people or people with facial hair.  I’ll never forget a while ago being told that UPS doesn’t hire people with facial hair. 

What you don’t realize is that diversity is the key to a stronger team, especially when your customers are all diverse.  The more differences exist in your team, the more unique niches you can fill.  If everyone looks the same, has the same ethnicity, comes from the same elite pedigree, grew up in the same mid-Atlantic wealthy areas, all sound the same, and have the same tastes and preferences, how the hell are you ever going to understand your customers who are of different ethnicities, backgrounds, regions of the world, and have all sorts of different tastes and preferences.  Tech bros are selling products for tech bros and not the rest of the world, because they are not employing the rest of the world.  At the same time, because most all tech bros grew up isolated, socially disconnected, and planted in front of their computers for at least a hundred hours a week, they either underappreciate our need for physical social connection, or they think we all crave it desperately like they do. 

If there’s one common characteristic of tech bros, it is described with Tony Hsieh.  “Perhaps because his own strict upbringing had lacked wonder and fun, Tony was attracted to activities that allowed him to view the world from a more innocent, childlike perspective.  His friends likened him to Tom Hank’s character in the 1980s movie Big: a kid trapped in an adult’s body.”

Tech bros skip all the important maturational benchmarks of teenage and later adult life.  They say that you’re stuck at the period where you experienced trauma.  You can also be stuck at a period where you were not allowed to experience growth.  I experienced all the joys and wonder of childhood, but my teenage years were especially difficult and traumatic.  It’s no wonder I like to go out and party like a teenager, because I never did when I was a teenager or young adult.  Here you have an entire industry of adults who never enjoyed their childhood or teenage years telling the rest of the world how to live their lives like children or teenagers.  There’s a huge disconnect here. 

We don’t want to play, play, play.  We don’t want to fill our offices with stuffed animals, beanie bags, foosball, ping pong tables, and play silly games and dress up in costume like we’re in fucking kindergarten.  Grow the fuck up.  Many people have families and children to raise.  Many people are grown-ass adults.  We don’t need your tech gadgets and gizmos to feel like we’re children again and live carefree, joyful, happy lives without any consequences, with some authoritarian parent-figure controlling our lives behind the curtains.  We want choices.  We want to be treated as adults.  We want privacy.  We don’t want to play games.  We want to talk about adult fucking things.  We don’t want to be children for the rest of our lives or be treated like children by authoritarian figures. 

It is incredibly and extremely dangerous to want to live like a child and surrender all rights and liberties to an authority figure that is NOT our parents and does NOT have our best interests at heart and will ultimately take advantage of our stupid, stunted, arrested development childlike state and steal from us and allow us to harm ourselves and kill ourselves.  There’s a great book called Eternal Child by Clive Bromhall that argues that humans have been infantilized to better control and exploit them.  I don’t want a super AI to fix all my problems and give me fleeting and expensive moments of transformative awe.  I don’t want a god to treat me like a baby.  I want to grow the fuck up and make my own decisions and live with my own mistakes and choose my own path and face the harsh and miserable challenges of life, and then die when I need to die and encounter whatever the hell is beyond death. 

I don’t need heaven on Earth.  I don’t need perpetual happiness.  I don’t need heroin or Fentanyl or Ketamine.  I need to suffer and grow and face the harshness of reality and enjoy nature and hang out in person with friends and get old and weak and die.  In the meantime, I, as well as everyone else, should enjoy uncovering all the bullshit and scams that are perpetrated to take advantage of us and make us believe that wealth, fame, status, artificial substances, artificial lives, and digital content will fix all our problems and create heaven on Earth.  Just take a fucking walk through nature and chill the fuck out.

* * *

Like physical illness, mental illness is when there is an obstruction or blockage in your system.  In the case of the body, it’s arterial plaque or toxic and harmful bacteria in your gut that causes constipation or diarrhea, an unhealthy transportation system in either case, too slow or too fast.  In the case of the mind, instead of nutrients and oxygen, it’s a  transportation system of information, and either your mind processes information too slowly or too fast.  With blockages, the information enters a vortex if it cannot go anywhere.  This is where madness arises.  You obsess over the same thoughts over and over without resolution.  You can neither reject nor accept the thoughts.  They just interminably revolve around and around causing greater and greater damage like a washer that is out of balance.  It reminds me of a video of someone throwing a brick into a washing machine, and the washing machine literally is blown apart. 

Meanwhile, the vortices of blocked thoughts create all sorts of harmful side-effects that are damaging both to your body and mind.  You become frustrated, short-tempered, angry, hateful, resentful, closed-minded, petty, mistrusting, and paranoid.  You no longer see things as they are but rather, everything is lacquered in this distortion where everything simply reflects back what you project outward which is your anger, frustration, hatred, and paranoia.  Just like in a Rorschach test, anything vague, neutral, or obscure becomes a blank canvas upon which you paint your anger, fears, frustrations, resentments, hatred, and paranoia.  Someone at a bar who is just minding their business with a blank expression on their face, all the sudden you hate them, they’re mocking you, they’re plotting your downfall, they’re unfriendly, they’re hostile, they are the embodiment of everything you hate in life and fear. 

This is all the vortex in your mind desperately trying to be released and let go.  It is externalizing to get out of your mind, but in trying to externalize, it is contorting and distorting everything you encounter, especially people.  You retract from interacting with others and while you may physically interact with others, there is total blockage in how you relate to others.  You see them as labels, as caricatures, as reflections of yourself, as NPCs, as nonhumans, and you treat them as such.  You live in a world of delusions, trapped inside your own head, incapable of seeing the true world that exists and people for who they really are. 

The answer is the same answer for fixing your body.  A mental health counselor is like a fitness counselor.  What do they say?  Quit making excuses.  Quit sitting around and doing nothing.  Challenge yourself.  Get out of your comfort zone.  Accept the natural path of discomfort, physical hardship, and occasional physical injury and the persistent body aches and strains.  Don’t run away from pain or suffering.  The true path of mental growth also involves getting out of your comfort zone of stereotypical, overgeneralized thinking, of trying to assume you know everything and everyone, and place everyone into neat, tidy little categories and then dismiss them.  The path of mental growth involves a great deal of hard work and hardship and mistakes and setbacks and misunderstanding, but you embrace them. 

You can’t grow if you can’t admit mistakes.  Part of growth is making mistakes and uncovering them, admitting them, and seeing things more clearly and accurately.  Right now, much of the world we live in is a distortion and misrepresentation.  It doesn’t help that digital content makes us think that influencers are ideal people living idyllic lives.  It doesn’t help that advertising is an entire industry designed to contort and contrive reality and exploit our desires and fears.  It’s as if the world has released predators on all of us, including our children.  We can learn self-defense against physical assault, but nobody teaches us self-defense against mental assault. 

But the truth is there, and a lot of people are afraid to see the truth which can be at first very difficult to manage much less embrace.  It’s difficult because you have these vortices in your mind that can actually short circuit your mind and even lead to madness.  Of course, you don’t want that, but there is a way out, and that is removing the obstructions and finding clarity and grace and liberating the information like a river that wants to take its natural course but you’ve built this dam.  When information gets trapped, it becomes corrupted, sickened, diseased, and obviously, you don’t want that information so you avoid thinking, you avoid investigating, you avoid understanding, and you become negative and trapped in avoidant and oversimplified thinking. 

It’s like feng shui of the mind.  You have all this clutter and noise in your head that is obstructing the free flow of information.  So you declutter.  Where are you getting information?  You’re getting information everywhere.  Whenever you eat, you’re getting information from the food and the bacteria on the food.  When you’re watching TV or on social media, you’re inundated with information, but it’s all bad information.  When they put ads in TV shows and on social media, this is very bad information, just as bad as toxic junk food.  We should call TV and social media, junk media. 

It’s all about temptation, materialism, money, wealth, appearance, looks, glamor, really bad information that stimulates the growth of really bad ideas in your head, ideas of inadequacy, materialism, superficiality, unfulfilled needs, etc.  It makes you want to spend lots of money to fix problems you never thought you had.  It makes you believe that money can buy everything including health, happiness, friendship, love, romance, family, prestige, status, respect, etc.  It’s all really, really, really unhealthy.  It’s junk information like junk food, and it’s clogging up the arteries of your mind and obstructing the free movement of information.

So the first step is fasting and cleansing.  Turn off the TV.  Turn off your social media.  Tune out the garbage and junk information.  Tune into clarity and grace.  Tune into healthy information.  How do you get healthy information?  You interact with people in person.  The information from people is much healthier than the information from TV and social media and ads.  It’s qualitatively different.  And I’m not just talking about what people are saying to you, which is often contrived and corrupted anyway with the information we get from TV, social media, and ads.  The information you get from interacting with people physically includes body language, gestures, all sorts of things that stimulate healthy exchange of information and healthy responses.  We need to be physically in touch with other humans.  The information is also biochemical, the scents others give off, the bacteria that flows off their skin, their saliva, their breath.  We absorb all this information.  It’s organic and not digital or synthesized or artificial.  This is the information we crave and need that has nourished us for millions of years. 

Fasting and cleansing means cutting out the junk information and replacing it with organic, physical, biochemical information that nourishes us and fulfills us.  When you fast, you are depriving the unhealthy bacteria in your gut of nourishment which is mostly sugar.  They die.  Then you restore the microbiome with a healthy and diverse array of bacteria that is not nourished off sugar but off the healthy stuff like fruits, vegetables, whole and unprocessed foods, etc.  Likewise, when you digitally fast, you are depriving your mind of the unhealthy information which is mostly fear, anger, hatred, mistrust, paranoia, as well as unhealthy cravings for prestige, status, wealth, fame, etc.  Then you restore the mental microbiome with a healthy and diverse array of real, physical, biochemical information which gives you clarity, grace, balance, patience, understanding, love, and kindness.  Screw the tech bros.  They don’t have the answers.  They only have more junk information, more noise, more mental clutter, more distortions, more distractions.  They aren’t interested in your healing.  They want to construct grand monuments to their fragile egos while pretending not to have egos only to sucker you into abandoning your ego so that they can be the loving, kind authoritarian parent you always craved.  Grow the fuck up.  You have to be that parent to yourself and protect yourself from them.

Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh by Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre

Part 1

If I could have talked to Tony Hsieh, I would told him that his quest for happiness was gravely misconstrued.  If you could take a drug that would make you lose weight, stay in shape without exercising, become smarter, provide you with all your nutrition and calories, and put yourself in a perpetual state of happiness with no adverse side-effects, would you take it?  For that matter, would you genetically engineer yourself to never gain weight, always be in peak physical condition without exercising, be smarter, and be perpetually happy, would you?  For that matter, would you combine yourself with a machine or get an implant to communicate with a server that would make you lose weight, stay in shape without exercising, become smarter, and place you in a perpetual state of happiness?  It’s a genie in a bottle, and just like the many stories of genies in a bottle, it will backfire horribly. 

There is something called transhumanism, according to ScienceDirect, “Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints.”  Humans are always looking for an edge over competition, and it’s a part of nature.  We are not different from nature, although, we have created things that have never been created before, it is nature that has created them through us.  However, the perpetual pursuit of a competitive edge is not consistent with what makes us either happy or healthy. 

Many animals develop features and traits that are actually unhealthy and harmful, but they are critical in gaining a competitive edge in reproduction or some other area that contributes to a reproductive edge.  The peacock is a perfect example.  Ritalin is another example.  High school and college students hell bent on gaining an advantage and being able to stay up all night studying may well get better grades, but at what cost to their health and happiness.  Tony Hsieh is actually a real life cautionary tale that trying to ‘hack’ life, trying to biohack and gain an advantage in life, whether to become happier or more productive or richer or smarter, will backfire.  It is human hubris and arrogance that leads it down a path contrary to the billions of years of evolution that nature has spent with trial and error, pursuing more effective means of living, thriving, reproducing, and proliferating.  To think that a species less than a couple hundred thousands of years old knows better than all of the rest of nature, almost four billion years old, is asinine.

A good example is how science has entered sports, and how it has also ruined sports.  Science gives us steroids and growth hormones.  It takes athletes and quantifies everything from their diet to their fluid intake to every minute of practice.  The story of Todd Marinovich is a great example of how his parents created the ‘perfect’ robo quarterback by controlling everything in his life from his diets to his workouts to his downtime.  He never became a star quarterback.  There is a missing ingredient.  And creating robo-athletes turns what was formerly an enjoyable, relatable sport into a mesmerizing spreadsheet of boring stats with athletes that look nothing like us.  At some point, athletes will have mechanical implants to make them even stronger and faster.  There are already illegal motorized parts inside modern cycling.  It’s only a matter of time before there are undetectable mechanical enhancements inside athletes, many at the nanoscale.  Just as doping and hidden motors are destroying the sport of cycling, the plethora of stats and scientific training methods and drugs will ultimately kill our enjoyment of other sports.  The reason we enjoy watching sports is because we can relate.  How are we supposed to relate to a 350-pound, 6’6” monster full of roids, growth hormones, mechanical implants, and nanobots coursing through his veins?  For that matter, how are we supposed to relate when robots start playing sports?

What was missing from Todd Marinovich was enjoyment of the game.  You can’t enjoy something if you have a staff of engineers, nutritionists, training specialists, computer scientists, quantitative analysts, and sports psychologists hovering all around you trying to optimize your performance.  It totally sucks the soul and enjoyment out of the game.  What is missing is motivation, but perhaps they’ll try to hack that too by inserting a mechanism that releases high levels of artificial dopamine and endorphins every time you work out and go through all the mundane and boring drills. 

If we truly cared about seeing the best performances possible, then we might as well just watch a bunch of robots play football, basketball, tennis, soccer, and mixed martial arts.  Today, football is an absurd spectacle, but despite that, it succeeds because it gives people a sense of belonging and community when they’re all at a bar together cheering on the same team, wearing the same colors.  You don’t even really need the best athletes in the world to do this.  In fact, perhaps one day we’ll have rotating new sports to ensure that nobody figures out a way to hack it and ruin it and cause a technological progression war.  You just get a team of athletes together of all dimensions and proportions, just like our human hunting ancestors, representing your home city, and then you throw some surprise random sport at them, and everyone just cheers them on as they take on another city.  Maybe even throw in non-athletic competitions like card games or chess-like games.  The best team will have a wide assortment of talents and skills and physical and mental attributes.  It would be like the Squid Games, except they would be in teams, and there is a playoff and championships.

* * *

The pursuit of happiness is misconstrued, because happiness is only one motivator that directs us toward seeking things that help us and avoiding things that harm us.  Our true goal should be healthiness, and to optimize healthiness the best strategy is through natural and organic means.  Some might argue that some people already have a genetic advantage.  If you grow to 6’10” then you naturally have an advantage in basketball.  If you happen to have a super-fast-processing brain and incredible memory, you have an advantage in cognitive fields.  Why not allow people to choose which advantage they have and provide them with that advantage whether through machinery or genetic modification? 

The problem is that once someone mechanically or genetically modifies themselves, the race is on.  Someone genetically modifies their child to grow to 7-feet, and another parent modifies their child to grow to 7’2”.  Another parents decides, why not 7’6”.  Another goes, why not 8’.  Another goes, why not 9’.  As we genetically modify ourselves to maximize some physical or mental or even creative attribute, where does it end?  We no longer resemble humans in fact if people started to think it would be better to have four arms or seven fingers per hand to play more complex piano pieces or flippers for feet to swim faster or skulls the size and hardness of helmets for full contact sports. 

We’re all just missing the point here.  The point of life is not to constantly get an advantage over others, to maximize physical, mental, or creative attributes.  Why can’t we just be content to have what we have?  In a previous review, I mentioned that humans are naturally flawed, weak, and prone to sickness, because it helped humans become more social and rely on one another allowing us to form larger and larger groups that eventually took over the world.  What happens when we correct all our genetic defects and no longer need each other as much?  We stop being humans and start becoming these super-primates that are less social and moral beings.  We triumphed over such stocky, muscular primates in the past, because they could never work together in groups larger than a couple dozen, but now we are regressing to be more like them.

* * *

We live in a world that is increasingly hostile and harmful to us.  A lot of tech kids grow up feeling isolated, unhappy, lost, directionless, depressed, anxious, and bullied.  Their solution is to mechanically and genetically alter us so that we can thrive in a world that is increasingly hostile and harmful to us.  Perhaps genetically modify us so that we can absorb more pollutants and toxins.  We’re already genetically modifying crops to handle more pesticides.  The obvious question here is, why can’t we just change society instead?  What is making so many kids grow up feeling isolated, unhappy, depressed, and bullied is our school system, our suburbs, our lack of social connection, our lack of community, our lack of tolerance for diversity, our lack of accountability for bullies, our lack of freedom, and being inundated with advertising, commercial exploitation, political divisiveness, and a materialistic, hustle culture that promises us everything but makes us absolutely miserable.  Instead of hacking or bio-hacking ourselves to thrive in this horrible, deformed, grotesque society, why not change society instead?

* * *

Tony Hsieh would never find happiness or even healthiness, because he was handicapped by his wealth and fame.  People would be drawn to him for the wrong reasons, and throwing money at your problems would prove counterproductive and only attract or convert people around you into vultures and parasites.  If he truly wanted to find happiness, he should have donated most of all his wealth away and then moved somewhere nobody would recognize him and then just find a good circle of friends, exercise, eat healthy, keep reading books, and contribute to his community.  It’s really not that complicated.  You could argue that he wanted a larger stage to give the whole world an idea of how you could become happier, but I would argue, he failed miserably, and he would have made more of an impact by simply donating all his wealth and living a low-key life. 

Perhaps the best biohack is the anti-biohack, that is, not trying to biohack and just living naturally and avoiding exposure to modern technologies and the digital world.  In other words, watch less TV, watch less streaming, spend less time on social media, spend less time on your phone, and spend more time physically interacting with other people and around nature.  Exercise with other people outdoors as much as possible and around nature.  Eat unprocessed whole foods and a ton more fruits and vegetables and a ton less simple carbs and processed meats. 

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.

Part 2 of 2

It is interesting to note the adversarial relationship between the FBI and CIA.  “It did not help that most Bureau [FBI] agents considered CIA agents to be ivy league elitists who had no real world experience, much less calloused hands.  “They were mostly rich boys, trust fund snobs, who thought they were God’s answer to all the world’s ills, acting like a bunch of modern day self-appointed Knights Templar,” said one former FBI official.”

“Like Gottlieb, [CIA director Allen] Dulles had been born with a clubfoot and both men had been ridiculed as youngsters for ‘bearing the cloven hoof of the devil.’”  What a strange dynamic, the leader of a secretive organization of wealthy trust fund elites has a genetic deformity.  Classic tale of a powerless outsider becoming a powerful insider.

* * *

There’s an interesting side story about James Speyer Kronthal who was found dead at his Georgetown residence eight months before Olson’s death.  “In 1989, a book published by three respected intelligence community observers laid out the grim details of that dinner [with Allen Dulles] and Kronthal’s subsequent death.  The book revealed that Kronthal was a homosexual and pedophile who had been seriously compromised and blackmailed by the Nazis during World War II, and then later by the Russians.”  This made me immediately think of Jeffrey Epstein and his incredible links to so many powerful and influential people in the US including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and shockingly Stephen Hawking.

* * *

There’s a recent meme about how Medieval peasants had more time off than modern workers.  One really must wonder whether we are moving forward or backwards as far as how we treat the common person.  Certainly, in the US, we have a higher standard of living and more recreational options than a Medieval peasant, but one must wonder if they actually enjoyed their lives more than we do as we pump ourselves full of drugs just to enjoy a few moments of normalcy.  One of the problems of modern society is that our morals have been compromised to a much higher degree than the Medieval peasant.  While the peasant was often uneducated and illiterate, it also means that the peasant was not indoctrinated in 12 years of state schooling where the state would convince the peasant that the state is this wonderful, almost religious figure that loves and protects the peasant.  The peasant would be weary of his landlord and the king or queen, likely sharing derision and ridicule amongst other peasants.  Today, one must wonder whether the state is tracking people who are critical and dismissive of government using our smart phones.  Certainly, in China they are. 

It is actually quite remarkable how statism has taken over the world and is now controlling and manipulating people to a much greater degree than any king or landlord could with their peasants.  Our oppression is so much more comprehensive today than the oppression of peasants in the Middle Ages.  Even worse, unlike peasants who likely knew they were being oppressed and exploited by their landlords and monarchs, today’s commoners believe government exists to help them and protect them.  They happily vote for pro-government candidates who promise to expand government spending and power to further ‘help’ the commoners.  This is the sinister aspect of statism, how it has completely overhauled morality with this absolute compliance concept whereby the ends justify any means whatsoever including human experimentation, torture, incarceration, and murder.  While kings and queens may have plotted and committed crimes against enemies and other royals threatening their rule, I don’t think they really cared much for peasants and pretty much left them alone so long as they paid their rent and taxes.  Today, the state has a tight grip on all of us with total surveillance and a 12-year indoctrination camp and petty laws like drug laws designed to create any excuse to incarcerate us or impoverish us with exorbitant fines.  Are we truly better off than Medieval peasants?

* * *

What many people fail to appreciate is that tribes, kingdoms, and later nations are all involved in this life-or-death struggle against one another.  When we wonder why we can’t just be happy and take life easy and not be part of the hustle-culture or what was known back then as the rat race, I like to use the South Korea and Thailand analogy.  Sure, the South Koreans can pump the breaks and their children don’t have to study so hard and their fathers don’t have to work so hard, and they can spend more quality time after work in a park throwing a ball, and the kids would grow up to be so much more well-balanced and happy.  But then you look at Thailand.  Thousands of their sons and daughters are so impoverished, they go to sex districts and make a living by having sexual encounters with wealthier Europeans, Americans, and of all things, Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, and now Chinese men.  So the question really is not, do you want to waste your childhood studying or go out and play and be happy.  The question is, at least for most all developing and Third World countries is, do you want to waste your childhood studying or become a prostitute for First World men?  Because generations of South Korean kids wasted their youths studying, they were able to elevate their nation from Third World status to First World status in a few decades.  They may not be happy, but they’re not prostitutes for the rich.

You might argue, the US has such a huge military and economic advantage over the rest of the world, why do we have to keep hustling and working hard to keep on top?  Can’t we pump the breaks and enjoy life?  I think that during the 50’s, this was true.  Most all other First World nations were destroyed during World War II, and they posed little industrial competition with us.  Europe had transferred much of its stolen wealth to us, and our children did have the luxury of deciding not to study hard, not to work hard, and just go out and enjoy life, and many did.  Many went to college, but only to study non-technical areas like art, philosophy, literature, history, and psychology. 

However, the First World has recovered and now poses a significant challenge to the US in industry.  While we have a huge technological advantage, that advantage is also challenged constantly.  Taiwan and South Korea have the most advanced chip manufacturing companies.  Throughout history, nations that rested on their laurels were defeated or collapsed.  We have so much debt that we need to hustle in order to pay down that debt.  The global dollar hegemony is constantly being challenged.  When Libya challenged it, we had to use our multi-trillion-dollar military to regime change them into keeping the dollar as a trade currency.  And the US elite at the top don’t care about happiness for commoners much less the middle class.  They want profits, and the harder we work (along with less pay), the more they profit.  Certainly, you can find pockets of happiness in the US and other First World countries, but that happiness is constantly being challenged and undermined by our increasingly higher costs of living with nonexistent wage growth not to mention AI that will take over our jobs just as computers at work took over the jobs of countless admin assistants, clerks, and secretaries. 

The point of human existence is not just happiness.  Happiness is just one dimension of it, and it is used to motivate us.  Survival is a broader point of human existence, and that involves collaborating with other humans to get an advantage over others.  Whether we like it or not, humans will always organize and then try to invade and/or steal resources from one another.  We must organize to protect ourselves, but once we do that, it doesn’t take much for a charismatic leader to convince us to use our self-defense forces to invade and/or steal resources from weaker neighbors. 

But if life is nothing but studying hard, hustling, and working long hours to pay more taxes to build larger armies and navies, sooner or later, the people will become demoralized and drop out of the system.  This is what happened during the 60s when the US drafted all able-bodied men to fight some abstract war against Communism.  There must be a balance.  You can’t just force everyone to contribute to the collective all the time at breakneck speed.  Over in South Korea and Japan, I’m sure there are more and more people who question and challenge the idea of studying all their youth and working long hours all their adulthood, especially those who study in the US or Europe and encounter rich Americans and Europeans playing more than studying or working. 

Like a race horse that gets older and suddenly decides not to run fast, you can only coerce people into working hard for so long, especially as they get wealthier and can seek more fulfilling activities than just studying and working.  I once worked for a company that kept pushing us to go full tilt and shared books that kept pushing people to sharpen their saw and never rest, because their competition was cutthroat and never rested.  I was thinking to myself, this is crazy, what a horrible world to live in where you’re constantly fearful of some competitor working harder than you and stealing your customers and eating your lunch.  Fact is, this hypercompetitive disposition simply leads to burnout.  The question is, how do you find balance?  How can you get the most out of your workers without burning them out?  Certainly, you can enslave your people, or just pay them really low wages and because they have no other options, they must work long hours just to get by.  But ultimately, as the nation becomes more and more wealthy, their workers will demand higher and higher wages.  You can’t exploit them forever.

* * *

The largest pitfall of centralized authoritarianism and social engineering is that you can discard morality.  Morality is a system whereby individuals are held to a standard of behavior that is enforced by their peers.  For the most part, we can all agree that it’s wrong to kill an innocent person, to torture them, to incarcerate them, to deprive them of their rights and freedom, to spy on them, to experiment on them without their consent, and to steal things from them.  It’s a pretty good system, and it works.  With social engineering, people are asked to do some pretty horrible, immoral things in pursuit of a ‘greater good’, the so-called engineering of a superior genetic race.  So besides the abandonment of morality, who is likely to rise to the top of such a system?  It’s certainly not people who refuse to abandon their morals for the ‘greater good’.  It’s going to be sycophants who are motivated by nothing but selfish greed for status, rank, wealth, and power.  Furthermore, the less moral they are, the more likely they will embrace whatever immoral programs exist to cull the herd, to discriminate against, sterilize, and exterminate those with inferior genes (or in reality anyone who criticizes or threatens the system).  You’re basically creating a ruling class of sociopaths and psychopaths.  While this system may be able to lie to everyone and convince them to support it, the system is not sustainable for a number of reasons.

First, the entire system can be easily hijacked by someone who is not truly convinced of the whole superior genetics, social engineering, social Darwinism thing.  They will likely view the system as a convenient way to reward their family and friends and those who have helped them get ahead.  Meanwhile, they will use the system to simply destroy and eliminate rivals, whether they are genetically superior or not.  They can then get carried away with programs that ultimately undermine the whole social engineering program.  They can be like Hitler and embark on high risk endeavors like going to war against the Soviets and the US resulting in the total destruction of your own people, the so-called superior race.  They can be like Mao Zedong and embark on horrendously destructive programs like the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward doing nothing but impoverishing and weakening your people.  They don’t care about social engineering; they only care about the absolute power that is necessary to supposedly make social engineering work.

And despite 12 years of state indoctrination, you still can’t get the majority of people to agree with social engineering to the point of discriminating against the weak and ‘inferior’, sterilizing them, and exterminating them.  Certainly, you get the majority of the population to be obedient and not ask questions, but can you convince them to help round up the weak and genetically ‘inferior’ to be experimented on, incarcerated, sterilized, or exterminated?  You could argue that Hitler did a great job of doing just that, but he ruled a thoroughly authoritarian system.  You couldn’t do that as easily in a democracy with a somewhat functioning news media.  What you could do is soft social engineering without really telling anyone, but that would also mean softly discarding morality without telling anyone.  You cannot convince people to discard morality, because it’s woven into our DNA.  Small infants are capable of exhibiting distress when they see something that they feel is unjust, unfair, or wrong.  You have to pretend that you support morality, as you drop LSD into some unstable, questionably loyal colleague or as you sterilize or exterminate someone exhibiting genetic defects.

Perhaps one day we’ll be able to genetically engineer humans to have no functioning moral compass, and they would happily work for an authoritarian system that expunges the genetically ‘inferior’.  I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t sound like much of a utopia.  In fact, it sounds downright horrific and nightmarish.  And yet, this is the world social engineers believe in.  Genetic superiority at all costs, including morals, a world inhabited by beautiful, perfectly healthy, robust humans who would look at you with disgust and call the DNA police to take you into custody, experiment on you, sterilize you, and ultimately kill you. 

* * *

In a previous book review, I mentioned that for a group of German constables that were assigned to shoot dead Jewish men, women, and children, a third broke and became sadists relishing in their jobs.  A third bent and only did what they were told and must have felt tremendous guilt and remorse.  A third resisted, and many of them requested to be transferred to different assignments.  The higher up the ladder you go in a social engineering system, the more you will be exposed to their crimes, their horrible and immoral treatment of those they deem genetically inferior or simply those opposed to their system.  It is quite possible that a third would have no qualms and get promoted right to the top as eager social engineers, experimenting on and killing humans.  A third may simply become demoralized like Frank Olson and become unhinged and a security threat.  They would have to be dealt with.  A third would simply quit and walk away. 

That is another problem with social engineering and authoritarianism.  You’ll be asked to do things that are immoral and weigh heavily on your conscience.  While some sociopathic sycophants would be happy to help you cull the herd, many others would resist in some way or another up to and including outright rebellion, turning into whistleblowers like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning.  Until you can figure out a way of eliminating the genes responsible for giving us a sense of right and wrong, of moral disgust, of guilt and remorse, you’ll find resistance everywhere.  Perhaps this system is just defective?  Perhaps in trying to create a genetically superior race, you only wind up with the complete opposite of what you want, a group of immoral, horrible, narcissists incapable of sustaining the human race but rather leading to its total and utter self-destruction.  Ever think about that?

* * *

At 272 pages, most of them skimmed, I gave up.  You can pretty much read the last chapter to see what really happened to Frank Olsen or just search the Internet. 

The ending provides one haunting concept.  “The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the frightening anthrax mailings scare, had the effect of rallying the country and, at the same time, pushing aside, or totally burying, anything that ran counter to, or placed a black mark upon, the nation’s intelligence services and military.”

Therein lies the solution to the problem of social engineering.  To get people to comply, you would have to present them with a fear so great that they are freely willing to abandon their morals, their rights, their freedoms, their wealth, and their power.  Scare people enough, and they will gladly support your social engineering program and the authoritarian tools necessary to make it work. 

I’m sure you’ve been there.  You’re lying in bed or daydreaming in your car, and suddenly you remember a particularly embarrassing or mean thing you did.  You get a guilt pang and feel horrible.  You wonder why you keep having to relive these stupid little things that perhaps nobody else remembers.  Imagine having done something truly horrific like sterilizing someone against their will, experimenting on them without their knowledge or consent, incarcerating someone, killing someone, and even worse, you did it because they were considered genetically inferior.  Yet people do horrific things all the time.  How and why?  The answer is found in nature.  Mothers will abandon their offspring, at times even attack or eat them, when they are under a lot of distress.  And therein lies the answer.  If you want to make humans abandon their morals, short of genetically engineering it out of them, you simply cause them to suffer a lot of distress.  You traumatize them.  You break them.  You cause them to double down and embrace their immoral behavior, and become highly motivated, highly productive sadists obedient to the decrepit, disgusting, vile notion of social engineering and the authoritarianism that is required to make it work. 

We can have utopia right now and today and treat one another with great compassion and kindness.  I don’t know why anyone would want to put humanity through hell in order to concoct some possible utopia in the future where there is perfect human health and nobody ever gets sick, deformed, or disabled.  All you have to do is traumatize the hell out of everyone so that they abandon their morals, create hell on Earth, and hope, just hope that those in charge don’t resort to nepotism and simply abuse their total power simply for the benefit of their family and friends while the rest of humanity descends into the flames of hell.  I just don’t get it.  But I suppose when you have stupid and corrupt people with total power, nothing has to make sense except that you need to be obedient, don’t ask questions, and god forbid, don’t wonder if they’re plotting against us, because then, you’re just some schizophrenic nutcase in need of LSD and flight school out a 13-story window.

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olsen and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli, Jr.

Part 1 of 2

At 800 some pages, this book definitely needs an expurgated version.  This book not only tells the story of Frank Olson but also the story of biological and psychochemical warfare research in the US.  Not going to find any of this in a state-run public school textbook. 

Some people might argue that America lost its innocence in the 1960’s when JFK and MLK were assassinated and the US became embroiled in the Vietnam War.  Some would argue that in the 1940’s, the US was a hero, the savior of democracy and freedom in the world, triumphing over both Nazism and Japanese Imperialism.  Some people would say that the US federal government then took a dark turn and embarked on secretive, illegal programs whereby both foreign and US citizens were murdered and many were experimented upon without their knowledge.  In its fight against the ‘evils’ of Communism, the US embraced evil, a sort of necessary evil.  I would argue that this is all wrong. 

It’s as if the US never rounded up and forcibly removed Native Americans from their homelands and broke countless treaties with them.  It’s as if the US never had slavery.  It’s as if the US never stole northern Mexico.  It’s as if the US never illegally invaded and took over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, or Hawaii.  It’s as if the US never dropped bombs on civilian targets in Germany and Japan.  It’s as if the US never incarcerated US Japanese citizens and took away their property.  The US was never innocent.  In reality, the US involvement in world affairs was largely circumscribed and tempered by the powerful forces of Europe.  They were just waiting for Europe to collapse to take over the world, perhaps not in the overt, colonial manner of Europe but in a more covert military and economic manner.  They opposed colonialism only so far as it would undermine European global dominance.  If they truly opposed colonialism and imperialism, they would have left Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and returned California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona to Mexico.  Nah.

Once Europe had self-imploded after two horrendous wars transferring huge amounts of stolen global wealth to the US, the US was ready to take over the world, and it became a quick study in how the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets used deception, treachery, torture, and a whole assortment of criminal acts to achieve their goals.  They learned from the best I suppose.  All the while, the US claimed to be the shining example of freedom, transparency, and democracy.  This is the main difference between the Nazis, Soviets, and the US.  The Nazis and Soviets could simply control the narrative and hide their criminal enterprises from their populations.  In the US, at least in the past, the powerful news media acted as a check and balance to the federal government.  Unlike the Nazis and Soviets, the US had to become experts in deception, disinformation, misinformation, stagecraft, propaganda, gaslighting, doublespeak, and treachery. 

And their greatest achievement was isolating and ostracizing anyone who questioned or tried to reveal them as conspiracy theory nutjobs and extremists.  To talk about MKULTRA, secret human experiments, and CIA operations is to be labeled some outcast, borderline schizophrenic crackpot.  Which is odd, because there is a plethora of evidence that the US has, is, and will continue behaving in a criminal and unjust manner from stealing Native American lands and breaking treaties to slavery to dropping bombs on civilians.  Nobody calls people who talk about stealing Native American land and slavery as radical, schizophrenic, nutjobs.  It’s as if, all the sudden, with World War II, the US stopped being criminal and corrupt, and all the sudden became the most honest, reliable, trustworthy, angel and savior of the universe, a veritable superhero with a cape, albeit more of a Homelander than a Superman.  People who reveal the crimes committed by the US after World War II must all just be conspiracy theory nuts until, perhaps, in 100 years, it will be okay to reveal all the crimes the US committed in the second half of the 20^th century.  I can only imagine in the past when someone would bring up the US breaking treaties with the Native Americans or the hypocrisy of slavery, they would be marginalized as radical, anti-American nutcases.

US history books are basically the gaslighting of our dear Uncle Sam.  Sure, in his youth, Uncle Sam stole property from Native Americans and enslaved Africans, and sure, during World War II, he was ‘forced’ to bomb civilians in order to demoralize them and make them turn against their leaders.  Interestingly enough, that is exactly the rationale for the Nazis bombing civilian targets in London.  It’s called terrorism.  Look it up.  But then Uncle Sam turned a new leaf.  He began to fight for civil rights, justice, freedom and liberty throughout the world, liberating countries from European colonialism, and he fought the good fight against the global Communist menace.  It may not have been a nice, clean fight, but Communism was an existential threat, and no tactic or strategy was taken off the table except total global nuclear annihilation.  He’s clean now, and he’s our hero, Uncle Sam.  Yeah.  Uncle Homelander.

Because of the few accounts that have gotten out about the CIA and MKULTRA, a lot of truly schizophrenic people do often accuse the CIA of implanting things in their heads or spying on them.  This only creates a curtain of doubt over all the legitimate stories of CIA shenanigans.  If someone told you that they believe the CIA is experimenting on them, what would be your first reaction?  Of course, you would take a few steps back and assume they were a bit off. 

* * *

“Well before the CIA was conceived, at the height of World War II, Division 19, through the OSS, began the systematic recruitment of underworld figures that were most adept at “close-in killing methods.”

In addition to recruiting Mafia hit men, this OSS operated an “assassination and elimination” training program at Camp X near Oshawa, Ontario, in Canada.”

It seems to me that in order to take over the function of rulers of the world and catch up to the British, the Nazis, and the Soviets, they put morals aside and embraced any and all kinds of criminal and perverse elements in pursuit of global domination.  (Unfortunately, they took more notes from the Nazis than the British where at least the British split their intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 between domestic and foreign.  The CIA borrows more heavily from the SS and Gestapo working both domestically and overseas.  The US not only failed to go after the Nazis and Japanese who were involved in biological warfare experiments, they employed them and in some cases had them head programs.  I think people may wonder why the US embraced this perverse authoritarian ideology of simply discarding individual rights and experimenting on people without their knowledge or consent, but it was there all along.  The Tuskegee Syphilis experiments started in 1932 well before the Nazi and Japanese programs.  The US never did regard nonwhite populations as equals or deserving of any civil liberties.  They extracted Native American children from their tribes and raised them in abusive and in many cases, murderous indoctrination camps.  Perhaps something changed with World War II, and they decided after bombing German civilians, they decided it was time to also ignore the civil liberties of white people and started targeting them.  Equal opportunity violators.

I believe it all started with the Progressive movement.  A lot of people consider the Progressive movement as a populist uprising against robber barons.  This is only half the story.  The other half is the elevation of government from simply protecting the people in case of war and providing universal education to something much more grandiose and in my opinion sinister.  I would highly recommend the book, Illiberal Reformers about the origins of the Progressive Era which was heavily steeped in racism, eugenics, social engineering, and Social Darwinism. 

Social engineering is perhaps the most sinister of all ideologies.  It is the idea that you can collectively improve the human species through a highly invasive, coercive intervention in our lives, controlling our lives from before birth to death, matchmaking those with superior genes, altering genes, and culling the herd by sterilizing or outright killing the disabled, deformed, and diseased.  It is based on a complete and utter misunderstanding of evolution and humanity.  Evolution is not about the fittest individual.  Social animals can pool their resources and numbers to advance their genes in general.  Not all individuals will pass on their genes, but if the social unit thrives, there are sufficient individual genes to pass on that will perpetuate that social unit.  Therefore not all individuals are breeders.

 At the same time, not all individuals must be at the apex of health and capabilities.  In fact, the book Human Errors by Nathan H. Lents reveals that humans possess many genetic defects that undermine our individual fitness.  How could this possibly be?  The answer is that if individual humans are weaker and more prone to illness than other primates or large predators, they would be forced to rely on their numbers to survive.  This means, unlike other primates or large predators that cannot get along with more than a few dozen others, humans developed the genetic and cultural ability to cohabitate with hundreds of others.  Of course, in gathering hundreds of humans together, they discovered that they could assemble huge numbers to expand and push out competition.  With weaker muscles and lacking fangs and claws, humans were also forced to improvise with weapons which ultimately made them more lethal than any large cat or primate.  Making the healthiest reproduce and culling the herd of the weaker humans would be a complete reversal of this survival strategy.  As humans become individually stronger and less prone to disability, deformity, and disease, they would become less inclined to rely on one another, and over time, they would become less social and less willing to live in large groups.  We are oddly going back to a group of strong, robust, genetically superior primates that at one time, we destroyed with our superior numbers and weapons.

There is also something horrendously sinister about allowing a small group of people to completely control everyone’s lives in order to fulfill the mandate of social engineering.  This small group would then decide who gets to reproduce with whom, who gets sterilized, who gets exterminated, etc.  This is completely antithetical to the principles of the US Constitution which sought to garner public support for a revolution against British rule and monopoly.  And if you understand human nature, you understand nepotism and the near 100% probability that any group endowed with so much power would not use it to benefit all of humanity.  Rather, they would simply abuse their absolute power by endowing their families and friends with all the benefits while abusing their power to punish and ostracize their enemies and anyone questioning the system.  This is the society that the US has become.  There are fewer and fewer people at the top of the pyramid making more and more decisions that impact all of our lives.  And we’re stupid enough to worship them unlike the Americans of the late 19^th century who – spurred by independent journalists – thought the robber barons were basically selfish assholes.

There is also another thing to consider that completely undermines social engineering and that is the discarding of morality.  The social engineer will argue that the ultimate goal is the survivability and supremacy of humanity.  In the past, humanity thrived, because we developed a moral code that enabled us to live in larger and larger groups.  Before this, we lived by a nepotistic code whereby we only cared for and helped people in our family or those who grew up with us.  We literally felt kinship for them, and hence, we treated them with kindness and protected them from outsiders.  Moral codes taught us to extend this kindness and protectiveness to complete strangers, so long as our elders told us that these strangers were part of a larger group that we belonged to.  So these strangers were part of our tribe, so we helped them and fought alongside them against other tribes.  These strangers were part of our kingdom, then our nation, and some day, all humanity.  Today, Buddhists extend this moral code to all living beings. 

But social engineering turns this all upside down.  We don’t need a moral code anymore, because instead of treating insiders with kindness, all we have to do is obey the planners at the top.  It is their job to determine how we treat one another.  Those closest to the top are treated the best.  Those with superior genetics are treated next best.  Those with average genetics are discriminated against.  Those with inferior genetics are sterilized or exterminated.  We are trained to distance ourselves from or persecute those with inferior genetics.  In other words, we are taught the complete opposite of what we have learned as humans, and that is to care for and help the disabled, deformed, and diseased.  Instead, we are taught to abuse and exterminate the weakest and to worship and serve the strongest.  Based on our traditional moral code, this is absolutely and totally immoral.  We are being asked to adopt what we would otherwise consider heinous, despicable, evil, sick, disgusting, horrible behavior and become completely and totally obedient to a small group of planners at the very top who supposedly have the best interests of humanity in mind, when in fact, they are nothing but nepotists who only care about their family and friends.  It is the greatest and saddest scam in human history, and yet so many of us have fallen for it. 

The thing about social engineering is that you prioritize humans with categories, and there is nothing scientific about this.  A German social engineer will naturally place ‘purebred’ Germans at the top of the pile followed by people who look like Germans.  The Nazi regime kidnapped hundreds of Polish children with blue eyes and fair skin to raise as Germans.  Can you see how nepotism is creeping into this approach?  The Japanese of course would put ‘purebred’ Japanese at the top of the pile, ironically, followed by white people.  It is odd how they would consider Chinese and Koreans as lower than white people and hence justify their barbaric treatment of them.  It never occurred to the Nazis that African-Americans demonstrating superior physical talents at the Olympic games would indicate that perhaps they should include Africans at the top of the genetic food chain.  Again, the determination of who belongs at the top and who belongs at the bottom was not scientific at all but purely based on nepotistic instincts. 

You take care of people who look like you, act like you, and speak the same language.  If they used science, they would realize that humans are all pretty much genetically similar, in fact, the entire human race is more similar genetically than a group of chimpanzees.  Our differences are largely superficial.  But of course, German or Japanese social engineers are not going to go around the world and find out the smartest and most physically gifted Arabs, Jews, Africans, American natives, and Southeast Asians and elevate them and provide them with all the wealth and power.  Social engineering is essentially a con, a scam, an excuse for Germans to elevate themselves and then treat everyone else like genetic inferiors despite no scientific evidence to support this.  In fact, because of continued inbreeding and lack of physical challenges in life, the ruling class of Germans and Japanese tend to be genetically inferior to their peers.  Of course, they wouldn’t sterilize and exterminate themselves and their entire genetically inferior families, right?

In other words, using our traditional lens of morality, social engineering would not only be a departure from social and moral norms; it would be the epitome of what we would consider to be evil, what I would describe as mental illness.  Social engineers would have no qualms about experimenting on humans and animals, because in their minds, their only allegiance is to the superior human genes.  Of course, as mentioned above, they would not experiment on their family and friends.  They would have no qualms about committing the most horrific moral atrocities on anyone they considered genetically inferior or defective.  They would infect them with all types of nasty poisons and diseases, cut them open without anesthetics, blow off their limbs, surgically attach someone else’s limbs to them, pull out babies from pregnant women, cut open those babies without anesthetics, you name it.  This is nothing short of a nightmare, but somehow, humans are capable of doing this, because they believe in social engineering and the classification system of humans and animals.  Inferior beings get inferior treatment, superior beings get superior treatment. 

It is not surprising that when the US embraced social engineering, they committed many moral atrocities, perhaps not as bad as the Nazis and Japanese, but the fact that the US government continues to hold on to secrets despite the Freedom of Information Act, who knows?  Is it possible that the US allowed Nazi and Japanese scientists to continue horrific experiments on humans on US soil?  I’m sure they could justify keeping this secret for US national security interests, because if this were ever leaked, the world community would push for punishment against the US for this.  Perhaps that’s what they mean by protecting US national security.  If you ever run into a schoolyard bully who likes to beat up weak and small kids, imagine if he just pleaded, “It was in the interest of playground security!”  And then they let him off the hook.

The big problem with social engineering is that you can’t convince everyone that it’s a good idea along with the obvious implications that government would be authorized to commit heinous moral infractions in pursuit of a genetically superior race including human experimentation, sterilization, and possibly extermination of those with genetic defects.  If you were not part of the genetic elite, your best shot at survival would be to resist social engineering.  In the US, at least, the so-called genetically inferior would include nonwhites, the disabled, the deformed, the diseased, and pretty much anyone who was not at their peak physically or mentally.  Can you imagine? 

So social engineers would have to deceive in order to cull the herd without the herd getting wise and resisting.  They would have to also dismantle centuries of laws, including the US Constitution, that protect civil liberties and freedoms.  While they may have acquired significant wealth and power at the top, it’s been a bit more difficult changing all our laws and discarding the US Constitution for what would have to be a truly authoritarian regime authorized to sterilize and exterminate large portions of our population.  Then again, some might argue, the government could embark on soft social engineering as opposed to hard social engineering.  Hard social engineering would be sterilization and extermination programs including human experimentation.  Soft social engineering would be simply discriminating against those deemed genetically inferior and providing perks and assistance to the genetically superior.  Of course, soft would be preferable to hard, but none-the-less, it would involve a lot of discrimination, injustice, immorality, and unethical behavior in addition to loads of coverups, crimes, propaganda, and deception.  I mean today, people who would not be considered genetically superior, those with some forms of disability, deformity, disease, or simply ugliness or being overweight, they support authoritarianism and its underlying social engineering premise, so I suppose the US has done a pretty good job of coverups, propaganda, and deception.  That’s what happens when you control 12 years of public indoctrination while the corporations control news media.

In the final analysis, social engineering is impossible because any human given control and power over all of humanity to pick and choose the superior genes and reward them while picking and choosing the inferior genes and punishing them, would ultimately become nepotistic and instead reward family and friends and punish enemies and dissenters.  In the end, humanity would not have superior genes but rather inferior genes that are protected and rewarded by relatives and friends in places of power.  Our rulers have literally diluted the robustness of their genes through inbreeding.  Why on Earth would they support social engineering in the first place, except as a cover for giving them even more power and wealth, even more ability to silence and exterminate anyone who threatens their rule. 

On top of all this, even if we were able to scientifically create a genetically superior race of humans, they would not be so concerned about morals and helping the weak.  They would in fact be a race of narcissists who don’t see any need to live in harmony with strangers.  They would all descend into infighting and intrigue, collectively undermining the human species and its ability to protect itself from outsiders.  Our capacity to adopt moral codes, to be kind and protective of complete strangers, to care for the weak transformed humans from struggling primates in Africa to the most potent and widespread species on the planet.  Perhaps we shouldn’t abandon our moral codes and our inclination to care for strangers and the weak.  Perhaps we should celebrate this as our genetic and cultural secret to success, a supposed individual genetic weakness that makes us collectively powerful?

The Battle of Mogadishu: First Hand Accounts From the Men of Task Force Ranger by Dan Schilling

Part 2 of 2

In the movie Malbatt, there is a convoy led out by two Pakistani tanks and Malaysian APCs.  In the movie, the two tanks turn around and retreat.  According to one Ranger, the Pakistani tanks did not retreat.  They made it to the middle of the two crash sites and fired at the enemy. 

Also, the movie Black Hawk Down doesn’t fully capture the entire battle.  The battle was a multi-faceted battle that lasted all night long with varying levels of firefights.  The book successfully provides a diverse set of different angles to the battle whereas in Black Hawk Down, you only see fragments of the battle from a few points of view.  People will go away from the movie thinking that was all there was to the battle when in fact there was so much more.

* * *

One of the stories makes you wonder. 

“Evidently, several of Aidid’s top lieutenants had been spotted.  They were in a building across the street from the Olympic Hotel, in the middle of Bakara Market.

We had all heard about the Bakara Market before.  It was dead in the center of Aidid’s territory – which meant that everyone who lived in that area supported Aidid.  On all of our previous missions we had dealt with only a few bad guys at a time.  We’d gone in and done our jobs in the midst of a lot of curious onlookers…  This was going to be a lot different.  We all knew it without talking about it.  Everyone in the Bakara Market would either have a weapon or the ability to get a weapon.”

So why in hell were they fast jumping straight down into the heart of the enemy’s bastion?  This would be like the Somalis dumping a few dozen soldiers straight into the middle of the US military camp.  If things went haywire, which they did, they would be sitting right in the middle of the enemy’s hornet nest with all their soldiers and firepower.  If you want to take someone out, wouldn’t you want them to be in transit or someplace other than their very own headquarters surrounded by all their soldiers?  Let’s say you’re trying to take out the head of the Crips gang or a mafia head.  Wouldn’t you want him to be in some neutral place or on the road?  Why would you go after him in the middle of his gang turf surrounded by all his soldiers?  It sounds like a mission made to fail.  As the narrator mentioned, in previous missions, they were surrounded by onlookers and not the militia’s entire forces. 

* * *

In the movie Malbatt, the Malaysian rescue APC convoy takes out the casualties and a lot of US soldiers had to jog beside them.  After a while, the APCs stop and they load the US soldiers on top of the APCs.  According to one of the narrators, this never happened, at least with him.  The APCs took off once they rolled out of the fire zone and ditched them behind.  Even in the movie Black Hawk Down, while they depicted the APCs leaving the foot soldiers, they didn’t depict the continued fighting in the morning between the soldiers on foot and the Somalis. 

* * *

There are small details in this book that speak mountains.  One of them is the interesting observation that for the mission of capturing Aidid’s top lieutenants on October 3, 1993, they loaded 2.75-inch rockets on board both the Black Hawks and the Little Birds.  They had not used them on any other mission.  It almost sounds to me as if they were looking for a major battle with Aidid’s forces.  It wasn’t just a normal extraction of Aidid’s lieutenants.  They were preparing for a massive battle.  Again, I can only think of the relatively small number of Special Forces and Rangers used as bait to expose Aidid’s fighters so that the helicopters would rain down hell upon them from the air.  It’s almost as if the small ground forces and arresting Aidid’s lieutenants was a pretext for starting an all-out slaughter of Aidid’s forces.  What better way to get them to expose themselves by the thousands on rooftops to be picked apart from the air? 

US Ranger Sergeant John Belman states, “With hindsight, our tactics were inappropriate for the environment we were in, given the amount of fire that the enemy could bring to bear and the level of coordination that they were capable of.  Using Black Hawks to provide sniper cover was a bad tactic.  The risk of these birds being shot down was simply too great.”  In addition to this, as I mentioned earlier, they were going straight into the hornet’s nest with a relatively small ground force.  The fact that they loaded up their helicopters with rockets, implies to me that they knew there would be a full-out battle instead of a simple, quick extraction. 

This reminds me of the movie, The Outpost about a ‘firebase’ surrounded by mountains.  The idea of having the high ground is not just a Star Wars meme.  You just don’t build a fortress at the base of surrounding hills or mountains.  Just like in Vietnam, and why I call this a ‘firebase’ it’s bait to get the enemy to expose their ground forces so you can come along with superior airpower and annihilate them as they think they’re achieving a tactical win by taking over a lightly-defended, tactically meaningless outpost.  You almost have to call them ‘draw firebases’. 

The problem with guerilla or insurgent warfare is that the enemy likes to hide, especially amongst the civilian population, so you can’t just bomb cities and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.  You have to draw them out somehow.  One way is to establish a nearby outpost that is lightly defended with terrible terrain that gives a huge advantage to an attacker.  This is like a lure, too good to be true, because that’s exactly what it is, a lure.  You bring all your ground forces out in the open to attack this base, and at first, you don’t bring out air support, because you want to give them a false sense of security.  When they realize there is no air support, they expose themselves and descend upon the outpost en masse, but just as they are about to take over the outpost, along comes the air support, miraculously, and obliterates them all.  It doesn’t take a military general to figure this out.

Although they may teach Rangers and Special Forces to think more independently and creatively than the run-of-the-mill grunt, I don’t think they teach them enough, and so they may think that something is odd or off, but they can’t connect the dots.  I also think that it would threaten their careers as well as threaten to have this book censored or have some lawyer threatening to sue the publisher if you did openly connect the dots and allege that the US military brass purposefully put US ground forces in jeopardy just to lure out and expose the enemy and slaughter them.  I mean, how can you convince a Ranger to go out on a mission where they’re being used like the goat that is used to lure the T Rex in Jurassic Park.  If I was that Ranger, at least I’d bring along so much firepower and grenades and night vision to give myself a fighting chance.  These Rangers didn’t know what they were walking into, and multiple previous missions that were simple extractions that lasted less than an hour likely made them complacent.  The fact that so many of them didn’t bring extra water, extra ammo, and night vision is proof that they were not expecting an all-out, protracted battle.

According to Belman, “The problem was not that we didn’t know what we would be facing.  The problem was that we didn’t have sufficient force to deal with it.  We should have had tanks and armored personnel carriers.  We should have been prepared to use the right force at the right time, and our country should have made sure that the target was worth it.”

* * *

The Air Force pararescue airman stated that he can carry 80 pounds of gear, and a Ranger noted the bulk and weight of his gear as well.  In addition to wearing heavy ceramic plates and bulletproof vests, they carry 200-300 rounds of ammo, sometimes backup ammo for the squad automatic weapon, grenades, flash-bangs, and their own weapon.  When you think about special forces, you think they just go in and come out quickly without needing extra gear for sleeping and eating, but they can carry 80 pounds of gear which is insane.  Imagine having to run a mile with an 80-pound backpack.  Imagine having to constantly dive for cover, get up, run, reposition yourself, dive for cover again, get up, run, etc.  Forget about the Hollywood movies where you see people rolling on the ground.  These guys are more like the Michelin man, waddling around with all their gear.  It’s also remarkable that the Delta Force operators wear light helmets.  In some cases, they just wear their berets.  They’re really not supposed to expect much heavy fire, RPGs, mortars, and artillery, but when things go sideways, they will run into heavy fire, RPGs, and mortars.

* * *

It hits me as interesting how there were three distinct ethnicities, Somali, Pakistani, and Malaysian, involved here that shared the same religion, Islam.  Learning ‘world’ history through the European and US lens is so filled with holes.  I don’t think the Western world really does appreciate how successful Islam is.  It spans all the way from the northwestern tip of Africa to Southeast Asia.  Not even Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Napoleon, or Hitler could conquer an area that wide.  Not even the Mongols could travel that far west.  And none of these empires had any lasting effects on the conquered populations.  Both Christianity and Islam have been gigantically successful religions taking over the world.  It’s an oddity that so many people don’t know their history and think somehow Christianity spurs technology and ‘advancement’ while Islam spurs poverty and regression when in fact, Christianity once caused Europeans to be backwards and there many scientific advancements in Muslim communities and in many Muslim cities, there was religious tolerance.

It’s actually astonishing how little Americans know about the rest of the world and how pretty much ‘world’ history is the history of Europe colonizing the rest of the world and fighting one another.  Even in today’s colleges, is there a course where you can learn about other countries and their cultures and a brief history?  There are history classes involving other regions of the world, but their focus is on the past and not the present.  If you were going to work overseas, wouldn’t it behoove you to take an entire class on a nation, and it would cover how to say basic things in their language. 

It always amazes me when I see photos of Central Asians.  Who are they?  Why don’t they look like anyone else?  They don’t look East Asian or Arab or European or even Slavic.  It’s as if they’re just some alien race that landed on Earth from another planet, or rather, some would argue they’re a combination of their neighbors, but aren’t we all a combination of our neighbors?  Many Northern Africans are a combination of European, African, and Arab.  Most Latin Americans are a combination of Europeans and native Americans.  There is such a big hole in our understanding of our species.  I suppose there is a long, rich tradition in Europe of not caring about and studying the culture, traditions, people, and history of those we are colonizing and exploiting.  They are just generically viewed as dark-skinned, sub-human savages.  We never learn that nonwhites have long histories of civilizations and technological advances.  Native American agricultural technology is often still more advanced and healthy than modern industrial agriculture.

* * *

According to an Air Force Combat Controller, the two Pakistani tanks and a few Malaysian APCs and US Humvees stopped one block east of the Olympic Hotel “to serve as a central choke point for the other rescue troops to pass through on exfil.”  The two Pakistani tanks hung around, contrary to the movie Malbott, but as it started to get light, the two tanks did turn tail and run. 

Movies like Malbott and Black Hawk Down reveal the gross limitations of movies in covering something that involved numerous groups and convoys all coming from different directions and experiencing different experiences.  When you see movies like those two, you don’t realize just how complex and multi-faceted the battle was, and you only get a very narrow viewpoint that may be missing things.  Perhaps in one APC the Malaysian gunner was doing a great job targeting the enemy while in another APC he was hiding and shooting blind into the air.  It’s hard to tell exactly the Malaysian story from the US point-of-view where they didn’t really go into much detail about their performance, and the movie made in Malaysia would obviously portray them in a heroic, albeit emotionally tone deaf light. 

The Battle of Mogadishu: First Hand Accounts From the Men of Task Force Ranger by Dan Schilling

Part 1 of 2

I got this book after watching Malbatt: Misi Bakara, a Malaysian film covering the Malaysian combat units in Mogadishu including their participation in the famous Black Hawk Down battle.  I don’t recall that they were involved operating Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) carrying US Army Rangers that came to rescue or recover bodies from the helicopter crashes as well as the subsequent rescue attempts of them by special forces.  It’s always interesting seeing the US from another country’s point of view.  There are scenes where the US Rangers are condescending to the Malaysians and a Malaysian and US Ranger get into a heated argument when the APCs are trapped and not moving.  The US Rangers dismount and then come to the rescue of the crew that ultimately abandons their damaged APCs.  I never heard about that story as well as the story of two APCs taking a wrong turn and getting lost with US Rangers inside. 

The most absurd moment on the entire movie comes at the end when a Malaysian soldier uses a local Somali for refuge and then winds up taking their entire family with them, because supposedly if they remained, the entire family would be killed.  During firefighting, the Somali’s wife and child die, and a Malaysian soldier convinces him to leave them and join their group escaping.  In the absurd scene back at the stadium, he consoles the Somali man who just watched his wife and child get killed, and then he stands up and smiles when he sees some American female reporter he knew previously.  It’s a bizarre scene that is completely tone deaf.  You used this man to shield your soldiers from attack and in the process his wife and child is killed because of you, and you pat him on the back and then walk off smiling.  It’s just bizarre.

“By late 1992 there were two warlords vying for power in Mogadishu’s political vacuum.  On June 5, 1993, during a routine inspection of weapons storage facilities, twenty-four Pakistani peacekeepers were ambushed and killed by militia loyal to a warlord named Mohammad Farrah Aidid.  In response, a resolution was passed by the United Nations Security Council to apprehend those responsible for the atrocity, including Aidid and his Somali National Alliance.”

According to US Army Ranger Staff Sergeant Matt Eversmann, “The task force [to apprehend Aidid] was broken down into three separate groups: the assault force, the blocking force, and the ground convoy.  We would have an assault force of Special Forces soldiers to do the work inside the target building.  Almost simultaneously the Rangers in the blocking force would set up a perimeter around the target.  Finally, the Rangers in Humvees and five-ton trucks would drive through the city and link up for extraction once we had Aidid in our hands.  The assault force and the blocking force would fly to the target site in MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and MH-6 Little Birds.”

As you read about this battle, you quickly realize a big hole in the US side, the lightly armored Humvee.  This is part of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, the idea of heavy reliance on airpower and light reliance on lightly armored ground forces.  This doctrine was probably the outcome of the Vietnam War as well as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings.  Rumsfeld knew that high US death tolls would create heavy pushback by the public.  What he didn’t realize that was the US would tolerate heavy death tolls as long as there was sufficiently skin in the game, namely terrorism.  The US didn’t tolerate Vietnam or Lebanon for that matter, because the Vietnamese and Lebanese terrorists weren’t a threat to the ordinary American.  That all changed with 9/11.  The US public would tolerate great losses to assure security at home. 

The Humvee was a veritable coffin on wheels.  In the beginning there was no protective armor for the gunner on the roof, and they often were targeted and killed.  Even with armor, the Humvee was vulnerable to RPGs and IEDs.  Today, the Humvee has been replaced by much heavier and heavily armored vehicles.  On top of all this, the Ukraine War is showing us that there is still a critical roll for the old World War II relics of artillery and tanks.  From Mogadishu to Afghanistan and Iraq, we continually deployed an insufficient number of ground forces to minimize their exposure to attack when we should have done the opposite to ensure total dominance.  In fact, it’s actually amazing that we only sent Special Forces to Afghanistan to take on the entire Taliban in addition to al Qaida.  We also had insufficient numbers in Iraq leading to the success of insurgents and ISIS. 

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The author notes that he was impressed by just how articulate the soldiers were and how much detail they remembered, but I would warn that this is selection bias.  Soldiers who were not overly traumatized and could remember a lot of details would be the ones to volunteer to talk with a writer while those who were too traumatized and would not be able to recall all the details would see no point in talking with some writer.  I would guess that because the soldiers were higher level and in ‘elite’ units with much more training, they likely would have handled the situation better than say some 18-year-old infantry kid.  There’s a positive feedback loop when you’re surrounded by similarly highly-motivated, tough, physically talented people.  It’s like in sports where a team that has gifted offensive players will naturally improve the abilities of the defense facing them in practice all the time.  Likewise, gifted defensive players will naturally improve the abilities of the offense facing them in practice every day. 

One of the keys of surviving and remembering a stressful ordeal is breathing.  Whenever we encounter a new physical activity or challenge, we naturally hold our breathes to maximize our muscular strength in the form of anaerobic energy which simply means without oxygen.  While this provides us with a turbo-charged effort, it doesn’t last long, and the most dangerous part is that the lack of oxygen causes our brains to shut down the higher-functioning areas renown for judgment, analysis, planning, and considering options and consequences.  In other words, we become highly impulsive, and in high-stress situations, that can mean, we can do things that are very antisocial and atypical of our usual personality or behavior. 

I’ve noted this often after reading the book Acts of War about frontline combat soldiers.  We have the capacity for both heroism and cowardice.  There are many factors involved, some in our control, and others out of our control.  Whether in a particular instance we act heroic or cowardly depends on so many factors including random ones like the time of day, the day of the week, the season, the weather, the temperature, our gut bacteria, what we just ate, what just happened to us a few hours or days ago, whether we were experiencing any previous stress, whether we encountered a similar experience and overcame it or succumbed to it, etc.  To call someone a hero or coward I believe isn’t accurate and also could be very damaging to those we call cowards.  And many people who believe that they are cowards are going to be tormented the rest of their lives.  Training does work in mitigating soldiers being overcome in battle just as training and scrimmage helps athletes handle the chaos of a real game.

I watched a Netflix documentary on German constables that were recruited to murder Jewish civilians including children and babies.  They said that one third of them reacted by enjoying their work and becoming sadistic, going above and beyond their orders to make their victims miserable before killing them.  One third did the minimum necessary and were likely troubled by their actions, but they continued to do it day in and day out.  One third resisted and out of them, many requested to be transferred and were.  This was the most important part.  The constables were all asked if they wanted to continue killing civilians or they could be transferred, likely to a combat role.  I believe in all of us, we could react three different ways to such a horrible situation.  A third of us will break and lose our minds and believe that we are evil, horrible, sadistic people and will fill that role and double down.  A third of us will bend and continue forward and suffer the guilt and shame.  I believe these people will suffer the most.  A third will refuse involvement and walk away.  If they can’t walk away, they will do everything to undermine their orders and actions.  In Vietnam, many soldiers simply missed their targets purposefully, and we’re talking about unarmed civilian targets. 

I feel that this is one major reason why the US moved away from relying on ground combat forces to win wars.  These ground forces were simply unwilling in many cases to follow orders and kill civilians.  (Of course, many did obey orders and kill civilians.  The book Kill Anything That Moves reveals that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg.)  In Vietnam, since they couldn’t outright defeat the enemy for fear of getting China involved, they had to simply rack up body counts including mostly civilians.  Their strategy was to terrorize the civilians into submitting to their side as opposed to the Communists.  Basically, they asked the civilians, would you rather fear us or fear the Communists?  Because the enemy refused to face the US out in the open, I am convinced that the US placed soldiers in ambush situations to draw out the enemy and kill them using airstrikes.  Pilots would be much less willing to refuse to drop bombs, because they were being told their targets were all armed, and they would be less capable of seeing that they were not.  This is what happened in Mogadishu too.  They put fewer ground forces on the ground in order to draw out the Somalis and then simply slaughter them from the air.  The ridiculous 5.56mm rounds are not meant to kill the enemy but wound them and slow them down and allow airstrikes to wipe them out. 

The move toward 6.8mm rounds, I believe, is confirmation that the US is moving toward using more ground forces and making them more lethal and not just relying on airstrikes.  Fact is, the US public is more willing to absorb combat fatalities in the service of protecting America from terrorism on US soil.  They were not so willing to sacrifice lives for abstract ideological battles with Communists.  On top of this, the vast majority of soldiers in Vietnam were white.  Whether you like it or not, the US would not be so concerned with casualties that include more people of color in today’s volunteer military.  The exception would be women, and for that reason, women would not be placed in combat situations.  I think the episode with Private Jessica Lynch was a warning to planners that female POWs would be a horrendous PR nightmare.  However, fact is, the military needs women with recruitment so difficult.  A recent study showed that one of the reasons women don’t join the military is fear of sexual assault.  When the military says they can control their soldiers, they can’t.  Placing soldiers in any town or village to search for insurgents will have the blowback of these soldiers overreacting to threats and killing innocent civilians turning the town or village against them.  The military can order soldiers to walk into a firefight, but they can’t control their soldiers when engaged in combat or searching a town or village for insurgents.  Young soldiers filled with fear and trauma will murder innocent civilians.

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A ranger notes that he believes every single man wants to test himself in combat to see if he has what it takes to fight and face death.  I believe everyone has a warrior spirit, but that only applies to self-defense.  I don’t believe everyone wants to go fight a foe on his own land, especially not for oil or bullying a poor nation into selling their natural resources for cents on the dollar.  If the US were invaded by a foreign power that wanted to steal our land and resources, most all people would stand up to fight.  Many, mind you, would find ways of collaborating with the enemy if they realized the enemy was succeeding.  It’s just human nature whether you like it or not. 

But once you see combat and either kill and/or watch your buddy being killed, it will change you forever, and you won’t have the same feelings about war and combat as you had before.  You’ll likely realize that it’s all a scam.  All the pageantry, the code, the ‘honor’, the elite units, the patches, the medals, they’re all a scam to distract you from the fact that you’re just peasant canon fodder and have always been and will always be used by rich people to steal resources from others.  You won’t look back and think of all the people you killed and all the friends who were killed as a good memory, and I don’t think you ought to think of yourself as heroic for it unless they were trying to attack your hometown and kill your family and friends.  I think there would be a huge disconnect in your mind between what the US portrays in war and combat and what you experienced in it. 

When I was a kid, especially after my father left, I had a conundrum.  I wanted to be tough, and I wanted to know what it meant to be a man, but I didn’t have anyone to turn to for advice.  Even had my father stuck around, I don’t think he would have helped me much.  If you don’t know anything, you think that the toughest guy in the room is an alpha, and he’s hard.  He makes fun of and bullies little ‘pussies’ and ‘bitches’ for being soft and weak.  He calls them ‘f*ggots’.  He’s a ‘man’s man’.  He does tough, hard things like fight a lot, cuss, lifts weights to bulk up, maybe he injects steroids, and he drinks hard, maybe snorts coke, and has a lot of sex.  He’s a good fighter with a no mercy rule.  If someone picks a fight with him, they’re going away in an ambulance.  He owns a lot of guns, and don’t even ask him if he’s ever had to use them.  This is pretty much a depiction of a clown.  Unfortunately, so many young men, and for that matter, women, assume that this is what a tough, grown-ass, alpha man is all about.  (Girls who grow up without fathers also fall for this trap and seek these types of ‘macho’ men who are actually nothing but scared little boys trying to act tough who will quickly resort to violence and crime.)

When I was in my 20’s, I’d read men’s magazines like Esquire, GQ, and then later Maxim and FHM.  All the adds showed these tall, grizzled, masculine dudes, and they drank hard liquor, rode motorcycles, rode horses, and had hot women hanging on their arms.  As someone who grew up mostly without a father, I had no idea what it took to be a full-grown man.  I assumed it was all about looking cool, being tough, partying hard, getting in fights, and sleeping with a lot of hot women.  That is what I aspired to do.  In reality, I was only acting like a clown in order to become a clown.

Just like someone who protests too much when they’re lying, someone who keeps boasting about being tough, hard, and alpha is the guy who’s the most scared, the weakest, and the guy who constantly questions his own masculinity and maturity.  It’s like the guy who is constantly berating gay people.  It’s like, why are you so concerned with them?  Why are they constantly on your mind?  These are men who are constantly afraid that they might be gay.  In their minds, if they constantly mock gay men, they’ll convince everyone around them that they’re not gay.  Likewise, a guy who is constantly mocking and bullying effeminate, ‘weak’, scared men are actually effeminate, weak, and scared themselves.  I don’t know why more people haven’t figured this out.

In prison, everyone is obsessed with putting on a tough-guy, macho, butch, masculine front.  But then they go off and have anal sex with an effeminate man, but don’t call them gay.  Are you telling me that the toughest guys in prison are having gay sex?  Fact is, the real toughest guys in prison don’t care for gay sex.  They mind their own business, do their time, and get the hell out of the circus.  In fact, if you’re a tough guy, you don’t even wind up in prison.  You can toughen it out when you have a difficult boss, a difficult job, a difficult life, a difficult upbringing, etc.  Those who can’t handle a difficult life wind up committing crimes, the shortcut to brief and temporary money.  So-called tough guys in prison are actually vulnerable, scared, weak, and prone to quitting when things get difficult.  Sure they bulk up and are violent, but this doesn’t mean they’re tough.  This means they’re dangerous, certainly, but not tough.  When they encounter difficulties in life, they run and quit, and on the way out the door, they may punch someone in the face.  That’s not being tough.

If you’re a tough guy, you don’t really care about convincing anyone that you’re tough.  If they test you, they’ll find out.  You don’t go around bullying and harassing what you think are weak and vulnerable and scared people.  In fact, you’re looking out for them and protecting them, because who else can?  There is no need to bully and harass weak people if you’re really tough.  The loudest guy in the room is often the most insecure.  The quietest guy is either just really shy or they’re really secure in who they are and what they know.  The loud guy doesn’t want to be mistaken for the really shy guy, but they completely miss the fact that the most secure guy is also one of the most quietest. 

Recently, there was a podcast with Sean Strickland, this troubled UFC champ who likes to talk a lot of shit.  He’s sitting across two smaller, less fit guys interviewing him, and he tells them that he has this unusual desire to go across the room and beat the shit out of them, because they’re soft.  The two interviewers are visibly afraid.  But that’s what a weak person does.  He picks on people he views as even weaker than himself.  Then on another podcast, he’s asked about his childhood, and he starts crying.  This is so revealing of bullies.  They’re the ones who puff out their chests and do the best to show the world how tough they are, but in reality, they’re actually fearful, scared, little kids crying inside and fearful that everyone will think they’re the ‘pussies’. 

Besides prison, the next area where they promote masculine, macho, hard, tough culture is the military.  Supposedly, you can prove yourself to be a man if you join the military and go overseas and kill people who are defending their homes from First World powers trying to bully their countries into selling their natural resources for cents on the dollar.  It’s all a scam.  Of course, like with every scam, there is a small piece of truth and then a lot of bullshit.  The small piece of truth is that if you push people to do strenuous physical activity and force teamwork upon them, they will improve themselves and become physically tougher and better team players.  They will likely be less selfish and less likely to quit when the going gets tough. 

The bullshit part is the constant screaming and harassment they get from drill sergeants and the total obedience they must have toward authority without question.  There is an atmosphere of fear instilled in them.  It’s interesting that the US Army has ditched it’s so-called ‘shark attack’ whereby numerous drill sergeants harassment recruits and jump on them for disobeying what are often confusing and contradictory orders just to make them do pushups and try to break them.  However, I don’t believe the reason is just to get rid of a ritual that broke recruits down and focus on building them up through supportive coaching, mentoring, and kindness.  I think the reason they got rid of it was because they were losing too many recruits who were so shocked by the ‘shark attack’ that they either refused to continue training or they became so demoralized and traumatized that they were no longer capable of getting through training.  Recruits would also tell their friends that basic training sucked and deter them from joining.