In Love with Our Own Thinking

While we spit into the wind and complain about the insanity of our leaders, we might as well examine our own thinking. President Obama is not so different than you and me—when we are in an ego state-of-mind, we are in fascinated with our own thinking and the solutions that arise from our thinking.

No matter how dysfunctional our thinking is, no matter how much pain it causes us or others, we refuse to question it. We are in an abusive relationship with our own thinking, and we fail to see that we can open the door and just leave those thoughts behind.

My elderly aunt is in a nursing home. Although her physical situation is problematical, her mind is still “clear.” The only problem is she spends her days using her mind to rehearse grievances. My brother and sister-in-law live nearby, and the burden of my aunt’s care has fallen primarily on them. My aunt complains bitterly, almost daily, about my sister-in-law. No matter what my sister-in-law does for my aunt, in my aunt eyes, it is either not enough or she did it the wrong way. The other night, I had this conversation with my aunt.

Aunt: “Your sister-in-law has not been here to see me.”

Me: “That’s good; you complain about how much she upset you every time she comes.”

Aunt: “She should still come. She makes me upset whether she is here or not.”

Me (Attempting to get her to see the absurdity of what she is saying, laughing I say): “I’m glad you still have your sense of humor intact.”

Of course, a problem for my aunt is that she has no sense of humor. She would rather, metaphorically, grind glass into her hands each day, via her own painful thinking, than be interested in anything else. She is an extreme case—she is literally interested in little else than her own thinking. But, what she does is not so different than what you and I do.

Notice that my aunt uses the language of a victim when referring to my sister-in-law: “She makes me….” Ask my aunt if thinking about her grievances all day is helpful and she will tell you that she needs to remember and that she has no choice.

We all have a choice of two teachers; in our mind is a teacher of love and a teacher of hate. Which teacher we turn our attention to will determine the thoughts we will receive. The teacher of hate—our ego—will disguise itself. It will convince us that the thoughts it generates are appropriate reactions to the circumstances we are in and that we are being completely reasonable. Its teachings are rooted in erroneous interpretations of cause and effect. Often, it will disguise our inwardly hateful thoughts with appropriate social veneers.

While it may be marginally better to have appropriate social veneers, there is another choice we can make. We can stop inwardly sugar-coating our thoughts. We can stop justifying our thoughts, and we can become more aware of the pain that our thinking is causing ourselves and others. Once we reach that point, we can make another choice to begin to drop our dysfunctional thinking. With that choice we automatically choose a different inner-teacher.

For my birthday, I received a Logitech Internet radio. This is an ingenious device; in the flip of a button, I can listen to a classical radio station from Paris or a rock station from Seattle. The content of the radio’s output is exactly equivalent to the choice I make. And so it is with our thinking. We are not victims of our thinking—while we don’t choose each thought that arises, we choose the channel that determines the content of the thoughts we receive. Understanding this truth is not the end of our troubles, but it is the beginning of a process that helps us to make another choice.

Nuclear Power is Neither Safe or Necessary

Among the biggest whoppers President Obama told us last night during his State of the Union address was this: “To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.”

Under current law, it is literally impossible to build a safe, clean nuclear power plant. My 1984 paper explains why. The text is available here. In short, there would be no nuclear power plants operating in the United States without government subsidies. The Price-Anderson Act places a cap on damages that a nuclear power plant operator will incur should the plant have an accident. In other words, for over 50 years the government has introduced the same type of systemic risk that we have seen in financial industry. The industry gets the rewards, the government says, and taxpayers absorb the risks.

The insurance industry is a necessary mechanism in a free-market to help prevent excessive risky behavior. We ask a 16-year-old to drive safely, but we require him to hold insurance. Asking the financial services industry to not make risky bets or asking the nuclear power industry to build a safe plant is useless if we continue to prevent both industries from suffering the consequences of their actions.

Now, I suppose that President Obama would tell me that we need nuclear power and that the government can be trusted to place appropriate safeguards on the industry. That’s like saying the 16-year-old doesn’t need to hold insurance, but the government will monitor his driving habits.

Did the government direct Steve Jobs to produce his new iPad? Has the government directed the extraordinary innovation that has been centered in Silicon Valley and is transforming the world? There is nothing inherently different about energy. Free-market entrepreneurs innovate; governments waste resources by directing them into industries and firms that could not survive without subsidization. Think about ethanol.

Nuclear power is neither a liberal or conservative issue; it is a human rights issue. It is a human rights issue because under current law, it is coercive technology. It places in harms way Americans who have not voluntarily chosen to absorb the risks. Just as in the financial service industry, where Federal Reserve policy made a financial meltdown inevitable, increased subsidization of nuclear power may make a disastrous accident inevitable.

That’s How Budgeting Works?

President Obama’s State of the Union address last night contained the usual presidential howlers. Those who thought it was a good speech had to buy into the usual underlying assumption of a presidential address—centralized authority, personified in the president, in Congress, and in nameless bureaucrats, knows best. As always, the empty promises that flow from this assumption were delivered-up without even a little irony or humility.

If you read the official transcript of his speech this morning, a line that should be the butt of every late-night comedian’s jokes will not appear—missing is Obama’s ad-libbed remark. There were snickers in the audience when Obama delivered the section of the speech about his partial budget freeze that “wouldn’t take effect until next year, when the economy is stronger.” The snickering was due to how little spending was being frozen and to the fact that the little spending that was being frozen would not be frozen until next year. Obama ad-libbed, “That’s how budgeting works.”

Suppose your alcoholic friend, in the midst of a drinking frenzy, told you he couldn’t stop drinking until he was sober. Further, suppose that this is your friend’s plan to get off alcohol: For the next three years, he would freeze his drinking level for only a fraction of his alcoholic intake—for instance, at parties he would not increase his drinking. For the vast majority of his drinking—his daily vodka, wine, or beer consumed at home—he would drink more than he does today. You wouldn’t exactly pat him on the back and tell him “way to go.” Yet, President Obama intends to do the equivalent for the federal budget—while freezing discretionary spending at current levels, most of the budget will continue to rise. Obama’s plan will have about as much success as that of your hypothetical alcoholic friend. The New York Times reports, “The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.”

Populist anger is rising in America. Last night, Obama attempted to harness this populist anger by playing the role of an outsider; he failed miserably. He may have been sincere in his belief that bailouts were necessary to save the economy, but his sincerity will not mollify the public. Many in the public may be more angry over what Washington is spending their money on—Wall Street bailouts—than the fact that Washington is spending more of their money. There is a real danger that this anger will eventually be channeled by unprincipled demagogues. When that happens, we will look back at our current political situation and its leaders as “the good old days.”

The nation needs statesmen and women who can clearly articulate and champion principles that promote prosperity and peace. That Obama is not such a statesman reflects less on him and more on America. Our leaders reflect back to us the state of our collective consciousness; what we see in that reflection is a decent, well-spoken, but clueless American public. Americans need to believe again in principles that promote peace and prosperity. When we do, our leaders will follow.

Obama may say stupid things, but he is not a stupid man. However, without time honored principles, values, and purpose to guide behavior, anyone behaves stupidly. President Obama is no exception. Actions that are unprincipled, not guided by timeless values and a higher purpose, inevitably lead to adverse consequences.

Bonuses and Free Markets

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, columnist James Stewart observed this about Wall Street bonuses:

Despite the populist stereotypes, I recognize that many people on Wall Street deserve to be highly paid. They are talented, smart, highly educated, hard-working and generate enormous revenues and profits. They work in an intensely competitive environment with little or no job security. This being a free country, they are entitled to spend their money any way they want.

Stewart’s observations echo those of others, but that doesn’t make his argument correct. First, salaries in a free-market are not a function of how hard we work or how smart we are. I am highly-educated; people often tell me I’m a smart guy. It is not uncommon for me to work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Many of my readers can probably say they are just as hard-working or as smart. Yet, our earnings in a year won’t equal a fraction of the bonus that financial industry employee are being paid.

To the characteristic of being “hard-working,” Stewart rightfully adds the idea that these well-compensated workers generate “enormous revenues and profits.” Profits are indeed a measure of value contributed to society—but only if they are earned through non-coercive means. For example, I generate far more tuition revenue than my salary. Since students voluntarily sign-up for and pay for my classes, we can conclude that I contribute more to society than I am paid.

This is not so for many of the Wall Street and banking industry workers receiving bonuses. Many of them have generated “enormous revenues and profits” due to Fed policies. For instance, near- zero interest rates have created enormous opportunities for arbitrage by trading unstable currencies. At the same time, these same near-zero interest rates have significantly harmed those who save; and thus, they harm the economy. The profits on Wall Street are being paid by the rest of us.

More than this, many financial industry workers, if not bailed out by the taxpayer, would’ve lost their jobs during the subprime mortgage crisis. They destroyed value via the disastrous risks they took, and the reaction of the market would have been to reallocate both capital and labor to those who would better serve the most urgent needs of the public. This necessary process was short-circuited by bailouts. On these grounds and more, we can conclude that, in most cases, these bonuses are not deserved as Stewart argues. Instead, these bonuses are a reflection of disastrous policies that are helping to destroy the economy.

Stewart advocates some vague reforms, such as no guaranteed bonuses:

At the same time, reform is in everyone’s interest. For bonus recipients themselves, it will quell calls for even worse sanctions. For shareholders, it should boost profits and share prices, which will also benefit all those employees being paid in stock. For the public at large it should restore some sense that people being paid large bonuses might actually deserve them.

Stewart’s idea air of reform is absurd. For those who have earned their bonuses as a result of disastrous policies, any income they earn is too much and is not “deserved.” It is like allowing a street mugger to keep a fraction of what he steals from you on the grounds that he has worked hard. To borrow a line from Mish Shedlock: “Like rats on a ship made of cheese, [Wall Street does] not understand that consuming the ship will cause them to drown.

Stewart doesn’t get it. There is no need to meddle in compensation decisions on Wall Street. Eliminate the bailouts and the problem solves itself.

Has Google Saved the World?

While a worldwide economic depression is all but certain, the despotism and wars that depressions usually breed are not certain. My nominees for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize are Google’s co-founders Larry Page, president of products, and Sergey Brin, president of technology, and Eric Schmidt who joined Google as chairman and chief executive officer in 2001.

Last week Google threatened to shut down its Chinese operations over two key issues: censorship of its search results and, even more importantly, a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on (Google’s) corporate infrastructure originating from China.” The latter seemed to be designed to obtain information on dissidents and journalists and was almost certainly launched by the Chinese government.

Some have argued that Google was never much of a success in China and that they will surrender very little if they pull out of the Chinese market. On the face of it, these arguments are absurd. China is, all at once, the world’s fastest growing major economy and one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for mobile phones and Internet usage. With Google’s expansion of its core business into mobile phones, they will potentially surrender billions of dollars of profits by leaving the Chinese market.

There is an important business reason why Google is willing to risk its Chinese operations in a showdown with the Chinese government. Google is among those firms who have made a heavy bet on cloud computing. Cloud computing shifts both software usage and file storage to the Internet. The widespread adaptation of cloud computing depends upon the perception and reality of security. No one will trust their files to Google if users perceive that either they are not secure from hackers or that Google will voluntary relinquish files to national security agencies.

The coming years are likely to be terrible times in the world. As national economies collapse, governments will seek to distract their publics and stifle dissidents and critics. When citizens fail to unite behind further centralization of government power, blame will be heaped upon the Internet because “the Internet provides too much freedom to disseminate radical views.” Despite the fact that we are only in the very early stages of an economic depression, such nonsense is already being chanted in the United States.

When internal scapegoating fails to assuage their citizens, governments predictably turn to external enemies. I’m not capable of predicting who the governments of the United States and China will blame for their coming economic miseries. One wouldn’t be surprised if both countries act against their economic self-interest and blame each other. I say “one wouldn’t be surprised” because politicians place their own political success above the economic well-being of their nation; and with the recent tariffs placed on Chinese steel, this process is already underway in the USA. Often, as the socionomics work of Robert Prechter has pointed out, after years of deteriorating social mood and near the bottom of an economic depression, war breaks out.

If you have followed me so far, you understand why Google’s actions last week are heroic. In their efforts to crackdown on critics, governments around the world will depend on the cooperation of companies like Google. If Google is joined by Silicon Valley and other firms who refuse to cooperate, a major weapon disappears in the war of governments against their own citizens. A vibrant and free Internet community will continue to play a major role in providing alternative views, preventing tyranny, and slowing—and eventually reversing—further centralization of governments. More importantly, a free Internet community will provide alternative views to the demonization of foreign and domestic “enemies.” By their actions last week, Google may have begun a process that will save the world from the horrors of another world war. Sometimes an act of courage can change the world. Stand tall, Google, the world is in your debt!

Reorienting Our Purpose

It would be hard to find a human being that does not have some problematic life circumstances. In the not so distant future, for many of us, our financial life circumstances may become problematic, or more problematic than they are already. If special interests continue to fight for the last ounce of blood from a bankrupt nation, we will not be able to avoid the catastrophic scenarios that are possible. Yet, at the same time, I reflect on what a friend recently wrote to me: “I think I’m seeing tell-tale signs of something like a spiritual awakening going on amongst people who used to just be about consumption. I hope we all rise on that wave of goodness.”

The late psychiatrist Thomas Hora used to remind his students that we are not here to get what we want. Regarding that spiritual truth, I frequently suffer from amnesia. When I’m caught up in my ego, my thinking centers around getting what I want. That thinking brings suffering. But, relief from that suffering comes as I become aware of what I’m up to and I gently laugh at my shenanigans. The “wave of goodness” of which my friend wrote can only arrive if we are collectively willing to laugh at our shenanigans.

So, if we are not here to get what we want, how can we reorient ourselves? We can reflect on our purpose; purpose is behind anything we do. Suppose, for example, you have made a New Year’s resolution about diet or exercise. Many such resolutions if they are just, for example, about losing weight (however worthy that purpose is) will quickly be broken. In their presentation “Who We Are: Toward a Unified Theory of Coaching,” the Arbinger Institute asks us to consider our choices to exercise (or to not exercise) in the context of our relationships to others. They write:

I might consider whether, and to what extent, my desire to exercise (or not) is due to either Resistant or Responsive attitudes I am having toward others. Perhaps I am motivated to do or not do because of certain blaming ways of seeing others or certain self-justifying ways of seeing myself that I need the world to confirm. Perhaps I see myself, others, and the world the way I do because of my need to feel justified in how I am being in the world … Any exercise routine is necessarily about me, but because I am necessarily with others, questions of exercising or not exercising are necessarily about others as well—or more precisely, about how I am being with others in my exercise or lack of exercise.

In other words, it is not the behavior (exercising or not exercising) that matters—it is the purpose behind the activity that affects the results. Exercise itself is neutral; we give meaning and purpose to the activity. In his book The Inner Game of Stress, Tim Gallwey observes that our experience of recreation will reflect the purpose we choose:

When I was teaching golf and tennis, I was always struck by how people got very stressed doing an activity that was supposed to be recreation … They had everything they needed for enjoyment, but their faces told a different story—of grim concentration, disappointment, resentment … The stress we encounter is not inherent to the games of tennis or golf. It comes from the meaning we attribute to winning and losing, to playing well or not playing well.

We might ask this question of our choice to exercise (or to not exercise): Are we exercising to fulfill our ego’s purpose, or are we exercising to get closer to the Love, to the “wave of goodness,” that is in our Mind? Once we begin to ask these questions about any one of our activities, we can ask the same questions about all of our activities. And, we can make a different choice. It is not so much what we do, but how we do it. Is what we do an expression of Love? Or, do we do it to get what we want? This basic choice makes all the difference for the level of happiness that we will experience.

In his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose Eckhart Tolle writes, “The true or primary purpose of your life cannot be found in the outer level. It does not concern what you do but with what you are—that is to say, your state of consciousness.” It is helpful to be reminded that we share the same inner purpose with every human being that has ever walked this earth. We are here to awaken to our true nature; we are here to find that source of Love and Goodness within.

Back to our economic future. Many individuals and organizations view government as a sugar daddy ready to dispense what they want at the expense of others. Since that purpose for government is not sustainable, we are running into the end of that era. To the extent that we continue to demand what we want, the coming transition will be more difficult; it will be less difficult as we shift our purpose from an outer, to an inner one.

Saturday, January 2, was my children’s first Nordic ski meet. It had snowed about 4 inches overnight and was still snowing in the morning. Shortly after 7am, my wife and children were driving to the high school to meet the team’s bus. No sooner were they on the road when the coach called. The place of the meet had been moved; the original schedule was pushed back one hour. I explained that my wife was on the road. The coach replied that the assistant coach was already at the school to meet those arriving at the original time. When my wife arrived, she was surprised to see the high school theater directors (a wife and husband) walking into the ski shed ahead of her. The ski coach had called to ask them for help; the assistant ski coach had neglected to turn on his cell phone. “Could you go to the ski shed and tell him to turn on his phone?” she’d asked. In the spirit of being helpful, the theater directors got themselves out of bed and onto the snowy roads.

Remember, it was New Year’s weekend. (On New Year’s Day, the coaches had given their time to be at the ski shed to help team members wax their skis.) Over and over again, I have seen individuals in this public high school make choices to help things go right—choices motivated by something other than what is in it for me. As a consequence, the high school is a happy place and has a good learning environment. No doubt in coming years, like other institutions, it will be affected by budgetary matters; but the “wave of goodness” that is humanity’s birthright will help see it through.

In 2010, may we all have the courage and wisdom to make choices from our inner purpose. Best wishes for a happy and peaceful New Year.

Real Charity

Recently, I was deeply touched to learn of a practice at our local high school. There are students in this high school who have little either in terms of family support or financial security. The faculty quietly identifies those young people and collectively ensures that they have a Christmas. This is all done behind the scenes, with no fanfare, and without any official bodies getting involved. Importantly, these students feel that someone cares and that this caring is genuine and heartfelt.

This is the essence of real charity. Thomas Jefferson wrote of charity:

I deem it the duty of every man to devote a certain portion of his income for charitable purposes, and that it is his further duty to see it so applied to do the most good of which it is capable. This I believe to be best assured by keeping within the circle of his own inquiry and information the subjects of distress to whose relief his contribution shall be applied … The question, then, is whether this will be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contributions to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control. Or would it be better that he shall divide the sum he could spare among all the institutions of the state, or that of the United States? Reason, … certainly decide in favor of the former practice.

As Jefferson tells us, even the smallest bit of reason tells us that our charitable giving is best deployed in areas of which we have direct knowledge. In the high school example I gave, there is no bureaucracy to drain away the money, no one-size-fits-all rules that create distortions and disincentives, and there are no applications to file. In the end, everyone—giver and receiver—is enriched by this kind of charity.

One can’t help but contrast this real charity with a story that arose during the debate on the health care bill passed by the Senate last night. Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator from South Carolina, was incensed over the provision added to the bill which permanently exempts Nebraska from paying Medicaid costs that all other states must pay. This exemption was the price of getting the decisive 60^th vote of Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson.

U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, responded, “Rather than sitting here and carping about what Nelson got for Nebraska, I would say to my friends on the other side of the aisle: Let’s get together and see what we can get for South Carolina.” In other words, Clyburn’s remedy is to expand the circle of theft. This is not charity, this is not kindness, this is not compassion—real taxpayers pay for these backroom deals.

Clyburn is very familiar with the art of taking from taxpayers and giving to special interests– in Congress this is euphemistically known as earmarking. The Myrtle Beach Sun News ran an article that in tell us of some of Clyburn’s earmarks for special interests dear to his heart—his own family:

One is a grant to The African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the other was to a non-profit organization in Georgetown, South Carolina which was intended to find jobs for the poor.  Both of these earmarks for building projects in which the Congressman’s nephew was the designer. Even more problematic is a grant to the airport in Augusta, Georgia, to build an extension.  The lobbyist for the airport was William Clyburn, Jr., a cousin of Representative Clyburn.

For all I know, these may be worthwhile projects. But Jefferson’s advice is sound. Let, for example, the citizens of Charleston contribute to their own museum on a voluntary basis. If the project has regional or even national merit, voluntary fund-raising can be expanded.

The great 19^th Century French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote, “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” Even more troubling, especially during this Holiday season, is that this fiction pits brother against brother:  Nebraskans against the rest of the United States, the needs of Clyburn’s relatives against the needs of our own. I would imagine that Clyburn’s remedy would be to tell us to lobby for our own relatives. But what if we don’t want to? What if appropriating other people’s money for our own benefit violates our sense of right and wrong? What if we want to be left alone and contribute to the needs of those of whom we have direct knowledge as Jefferson advised and as common sense dictates?

This Christmas, the Clyburn’s of this world are on the ascendancy. And as they ascend, real charity shrinks and real suffering increases. But as the faculty of our local high school demonstrates, human decency will always be alive.

Tiger Woods’s Universal Lesson

We’re told by some pundits that Tiger Woods has a sexual addiction disorder and that he needs to be more actively engaged in repairing his public image. Both conjectures are self-serving. Both are designed to give the pundits more to talk about and to give their audiences cheap thrills and comfort. The cheap thrills come from focusing on someone else’s life instead of our own. The comfort comes from believing that somehow, because he has been labeled an addict by the experts, the human drama in the life of Tiger Woods is fundamentally different from our own.

Polly Berends, in her book Coming to Life, observes, “Day by day, year after year, we live our lives out of certain fundamental assumptions of which we are almost completely unaware. These assumptions govern our lives, yet they are so universal and unquestioned as to be virtually unconscious.” We don’t have to look far for a universal, fundamental assumption that few ever question. The universal human drama throughout the millennia is people doing foolish things, because under their behavior lies an unquestioned and unexplored assumption that something outside—power, money, sex—can fill the emptiness they believe is within.

Woods is perhaps the most famous athlete in the world, he has more money than he could spend in many lifetimes, and he has a beautiful wife. Yet, something was missing; and something within drove him to foolish behavior. Labeling him as an addict with a disorder allows us to dismiss a universal lesson that he is inadvertently teaching. While most of us will never reach such extremes in behavior, we have our own repertoire of coping behaviors to fill what seems to be a universal void. These behaviors may include excessive eating, drinking, shopping, Internet surfing, and television watching. Often we engage in these activities to avoid becoming aware of and then questioning our own faulty assumptions about what we think will make us feel complete.

Our failure to the question our assumptions is all the more remarkable since our coping behaviors never relieve our angst for more than brief intervals of time. In his classic book on addictions, The Diseasing of America, Stanton Peele writes,

One of the key dynamics in the alcoholism or addiction cycle is the repeated failure of the alcoholic or addict to gain exactly the state he or she seeks, while still persisting in the addicted behavior. For example, alcoholics (in research, these are frequently street inebriates) report that they anticipate alcohol to be calming, and yet when they drink they become increasingly agitated and depressed. The process whereby people desperately pursue some feeling that becomes more elusive the harder they pursue it is a common one, and appears among compulsive gamblers, shoppers, overeaters, love addicts, and the like. It is this cycle of desperate search, temporary or inadequate satisfaction, and renewed desperation that most characterizes addiction.

But what are we hoping our coping behavior will do for us? Berends writes, “All compulsive behaviors make sense in relation to some perceived threat to self survival. It is impossible to give up an impulsive behavior until the underlying perception of threat is faced and seen to be false.” Berends echoes the perennial spiritual wisdom when she explains the origin of our pleasure seeking: We are afraid. She writes, “Afraid? Of what? Feel it. What is it? Fear and separateness. Separateness and fear. These occur together.”

Separateness? Berends writes, “The threat is always of some separation—from job, boss, financial support, family, spouse, from psychological and emotional outreach and support—from whatever you see as your interpersonal life-support system … Whenever something makes you doubt your viability, a desire to make some connection is triggered.” In other words, we seek unreliable and false ways to fill empty, inner void—a void of which we often don’t let ourselves become aware.

But what if the void that we do not let ourselves feel is itself not real? Again, echoing the perennial spiritual wisdom, Berends tells us, “The basic idea that we are separated and disconnected, from each other and from everything else, is the one idea we have not examined.” You may not have examined your belief in separation, but others have, and they assure us it is false. For instance, Einstein wrote,

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Berends writes, “Whatever our false surface goal may be, before it can be relinquished, it has to be questioned. Before it can be questioned, it has to become questionable. For most of us this is a painful process. For anything cherished to become questionable it has to not work out.” It would be hard to find a human being that to one extent or another does not have a problematic life situation—often things do not work out. We have the power of choice—before we reach for another drink or click the remote again, before we choose another angry outburst, before we…—we can question our faulty assumptions and make another choice.

Gratitude or Grievances

This Thanksgiving week there will probably be as many expressions of grievances as there are expressions of gratitude. Some of us will experience travel difficulties; instead of feeling grateful that, in our lifetime, we can travel so far in such a short time, our minds will focus on conditions over which we have no control—airport security, overcrowded airplanes, and delayed departures. When we arrive at our destination, we might be faced with that one relative who irritates us. Instead of being filled with gratitude for the incredible standing of living that we enjoy, our minds will focus on the minutia of the grievances we hold.

Separating ourselves from the reality of life, we make ourselves miserable. While, on the surface, this way of being in the world seems normal—it makes no sense. We have all experienced how bad we feel as we struggle against life and hold onto our grievances. Further, many sources of the perennial spiritual wisdom tell us the same thing: Those with whom we have difficulties can be our greatest teachers; because of them we can remember the happiness and love we seek. Consider for example, this statement from A Course in Miracles:

Only appreciation is an appropriate response to your brother. Gratitude is due him for both his loving thoughts and his appeals for help, for both are capable of bringing love into your awareness if you perceive them truly. And all your sense of strain comes from your attempts not to do just this.

To an ego, this statement can be maddening. Gratitude is not only due those who seemingly cause us difficulties, but our feelings of being upset are caused not by what they have done to us but by we have done to them. No ego wants to take on this responsibility. An ego can never be a happy learner.

But, how can we truly live by this spiritual wisdom? The very instructive novel Paulo and the Magician by Bernard Groom gives us guidance. The book is a fantasy, and Paulo is living in medieval times. He has begun to question the way he has always walked through the world—some happy days punctuated by many days filled with grievances. His teacher is the mysterious Zeph.

Paulo is in the process of awakening from the mistaken belief that others are responsible for how he feels:  “His feelings about life and himself seemed to change constantly, and literally all the time yet the world never changes that much. It had to be something inside, he concluded. Yes, it must be something inside that keeps changing its story from day to day.”

Zeph responds, “You think the problem is out there in the world, because if you looked honestly within your own thoughts you would discover the terror that’s sitting there. So to avoid looking directly at this horrible sight, you see the problem as everywhere except where it actually is.”

Zeph continues: “Over time you will learn to use the outside conditions of your life in order to turn your attention inside and work with what you find there. This will help you already to stop blaming the outside scenes in your life so much. Only, in the beginning, what you find there won’t please you one bit because you haven’t learned to look inside yourself without judgment and fear.”

In other words, Zeph is instructing us, what we react against on the outside gives us a picture of what is going on inside. The objective facts may be that we are at the airport and our airline has broken its commitment to us. We may need to calmly take appropriate action. But if we find ourselves mentally rehearsing our grievances against the airline, we need to go inside. Looking inside we may ask, “What does the behavior of the airline remind me of?”  “Have I recently broken a commitment?” If so, our holding of grievances is really a grievance against ourselves.

Or, has the TSA agent been rude? Again, that may be a discernible fact. On the inside, sometimes we remain calm, while at other times we react mentally with feelings of anger rising up. Again, if we have gone beyond merely discerning a fact, we may ask questions of ourselves: “What am I reacting against inside myself?” “Recently, have I treated someone with less than kindness?”

Paulo reflected about the townspeople: “Everyone was feeling miserable with something around them, no one was considering for a second that the real problem and the real solution may be entirely inside them. No one, in fact, was really happy at all; and everyone was still convinced it was because of something on the outside that had to be fixed.”

If our happiness really depended upon correctly lining up all the chess pieces on the board, happiness could be only a temporary experience. But there is indeed another way, and for that we can feel much gratitude this Thanksgiving. Without our seeming problems and the difficult people in our lives, we would have little clue as to what is really going on in our minds. The happiness we seek is found by removing the barriers that we have placed in our mind. Happiness, rather than fleeting, can be an ordinary condition of life—once we get our ego’s grievances out of the way.

A Prosperous Future for Al Gore, A Poorer Future for America

Suppose there was a man who lectured and wrote about the catastrophic consequences of climatic change to adoring audiences worldwide. Yet, suppose this man was so ignorant about basic facts of science that recently, when on the Conan O’Brien national television show, he promoted geothermal energy stating the inner core temperature of the earth was several million degrees and that there are drill bits that could withstand that heat. (If the earth was that hot at its center it would be a star. The actual core temperature is very speculative, but is estimated to be around 3000°C  to 7000°C. )

Further, suppose this man, who wants to control the lives of others, is an avid meat eater; even though if he switched to vegetarianism, he could shrink his carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Further, suppose he has become so wealthy from his alarmist message that he owns a large home, and his home uses more energy in one month than the average household uses in a single year. Further, suppose he has convinced the government to subsidize a company in which he has invested, because the company makes an electric car that will sell for $89,000. Yes, according to the Wall Street Journal “A tiny car company backed by [this man] has just gotten a $529 million U.S. government loan to help build a hybrid sports car in Finland that will sell for about $89,000.” This man according to the London Telegraph could become the “world’s first carbon billionaire” after investing heavily in green companies receiving government subsidies.

You already know from the title of my post that I’m talking about Al Gore. You might wonder why anybody listens to him? A charitable interpretation would be that, even though he is a flawed human being like us all, people listen to him because they value his message about controlling the effects of man-made global warming. No doubt that is true of at least some of his followers. In my view, many are not cheering his message of “climate control;” they are cheering his message of “control.”

It is a dirty secret of academia; professors who cannot teach well but who do mediocre research that very few will ever read, can earn a very nice salary. On an unsubsidized free market, the value of their services would be much less than it is today. There would be no government grants and contracts for their research. Consumers (students and their parents) would be less tolerant of shoddy college courses; and if these professors couldn’t teach, they might find themselves without a job at all. Some people value and cheer any message of control—because it is in their economic self-interest.

Of course, professors receiving government grants and contracts are not the only ones who value any message of control. Mediocre artists who depend upon government grants for their livelihood value control. Government workers of all types, as well as union workers, who depend upon government privilege cheer for more controls. And now we have a growing class of business executives who instead of selling products valued by the market turn to the government for subsidies and bailouts. They too are in the corner cheering for Al Gore, because it means more handouts for them.

None of these people read my blog; and even if they did, they are unlikely to be convinced by the arguments I make. They have weaved a tangled nest of lies in their minds which allows them to justify seeking for wealth that other human beings have produced and that they have not earned. Barring some epiphany in which they clearly see the unrevealed values they live by, they will never be convinced to change their behavior.

But there’s another group of people who support controls—not because they’re trying to live off their fellow human beings—but because they are fearful of the world without controls. They believe for instance that we are running out of fossil fuels and that they will be cold at night if government does not subsidize new green fuels. Al Gore feeds off this energy of fear.

In his book The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker estimated that the complexity of the economy in New York City alone generates tens of billions of available products to New Yorkers. To many this is evidence of waste that should be controlled by government. After all someone might say, “Why do we need 500 kinds of breakfast cereals? Why do we need to be able to choose from hundreds of automobile models?” For many caring and economically illiterate individuals, it is natural to believe it would be better if smart people, like Al Gore, directed us to develop the “optimal” car model that was both safe and fuel efficient.

Beinhocker estimates, “Over 97 percent of humanity’s wealth was created just the last 0.01 percent of our history.” Complexity goes hand-in-hand with wealth creation—it is no spurious correlation. What seems to be a mess of competing products is what leads to the discovery of new, innovative solutions. Currently, there are literally tens of thousands of entrepreneurs working in the green energy field. Like Al Gore, some of those are not real entrepreneurs; they are simply political operatives getting wealthy off their political connections. They prevent real discoveries from taking place. Every dollar directed to them, is a dollar that the market cannot allocate towards viable solutions. In contrast, real entrepreneurs only make money when they serve the most urgent needs of the consuming public.

Al Gore may well be right in that geothermal energy may be an important part of our energy future. But, there are many different ways to harness geothermal energy, many yet to be discovered; just as there are many different ways to harness solar energy, many yet to be discovered. More importantly, just as no one ever heard of the internet company Amazon in 1990, there are forms of energy that we have not yet heard of that will change our lives in lasting and meaningful ways.

The more the likes of Al Gore gets to control, the poorer we and children and our grandchildren will become. Instead of being directed to the most promising new sources of energy—as it would be on a market system of profit and loss—energy resources will be directed to wasteful products, like Al Gore’s hybrid sports car.

Al Gore, like all of us, has a narrow mind filled with ignorance. The discipline of the marketplace reduces our ignorance and helps to direct our energy and our capital in the service of others. Those who do not understand this and those who feel a sense of entitlement that others should serve them want more controls. They want others to serve them more than they want to serve others. Of course, this is the age-old human story—human beings trying to live off the labor of others. To the extent that we collectively forget that this path leads to economic ruin, is the extent to which Al Gore’s future brightens while ours dims.