The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Book Reviews Page 1 of 5

Looking To Healthy Cultures (Review of “One Disease, One Cure” by Whip Randolph)

One disease one cure cover

If you found yourself in a bad situation, say living in an extremely toxic and unhealthy society, but really any problem, what is the first thing a wise person might do?

One answer is they’d trying to find out if anyone else had a solution which had worked.

Now ever since the rise of Kings I don’t think there have been a lot of cases of civilizations which caught the disease of having rulers and ruled finding a good way out, but if you live in an unhealthy society, you may want to find a healthy society and see how it functions.

That sets out the end-goal. “We’re here, we need to get to something like that.”

Of course, you’re not an idiot, this doesn’t mean giving up all technology, say, if the healthy society has less tech. It means distilling the principles that makes a society healthy, and aiming for that.

This is what Whip Randolph set out to do in his life, and it’s what his book, “One Disease, One Cure” tries to explain to readers.

I have to admit, my eyebrows lifted at the start. Whip’s firmly in the “there are and have been healthy indigenous society and we should look at them.” There’s a whole genre of writing in this tradition, and eyes tend to roll at it, especially because one wonders if such societies could scale.

It’s not that societies which are more caring than ours don’t exist. There’s a ton of ethnographic literature and accounts from anthropologists, visitors and even missionaries who describe those societies. Even Christopher Columbus praised the Arawaks to the Heavens as being the best people alive, before proceeding to enslave and slaughter them, with generous sides of rape and torture.

The Founding Fathers of America praised the Iroquois confederacy. (They called themselves the Haudenosaunee, and Randolph spends more time on them than perhaps any other culture presented in the book.)

There’s also a series of books dealing with “how did this come about”, like “Against the Grain” or “The Origin of Inequality” or Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything.”

And there are endless small groups in America who try to learn from the wisdom of such groups and engage in various spiritual practices based on what is remembered and survives of North American indigenous traditions. Mainstream Americans tend to roll their eyes and sneer at them. At best they’re seen as impractical Hippies.

Randolph’s in this group and spirituality is fundamental to his book. But don’t run! What he means by spirituality is fairly simply and straightforward.

Whenever you’re looking into fixing or changing a society you’ve got a problem at three levels. Individual, group, society. No solution will work at the society level if it isn’t supported by how things are done at the group or individual level. Our society, for example, is organized around corporations whose primary motive is greed. People are rewarded for making more money, with very few limits on how much they are allowed to hurt other people along the way.

Capitalism  is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all

— possible John Maynard Keynes

As is usual in books these days, Randolph starts with the story of his despair, then moves to his first experience indicating something better was possible: he spent time living with a healthy society, where no money was used, everyone was fed and taken care of and people were kind and caring as a rule. Children were raised by the community, there were no prisons or police and the leaders had no coercive ability.

It felt to him almost like utopia. Not “nowhere” but “oh my God, this is actually possible and no one can tell me otherwise, because I have now experienced it!”

This leads to the normal followups, and Whip follows up very well indeed.

  1. I’m personally not like these people and I can see they are better people than I am. How do I change to become a better person?
  2. Why isn’t my society like this when it’s obviously so much better in so many ways?
  3. How can we change society, or at least ourselves and groups of ourselves, to live in the so much better way I now see is possible?

At a personal level Randolph identifies three core spiritual practices:

  1. cultivating a practical, aware gratitude for all the gifts
    I receive;
  2. giving my own gifts fully;
  3. and living in reciprocity.

When you look at these you’ll see they all come down to generosity and gratitude. Give what you have, be grateful for what you are given. And this comes out of Whip’s diagnosis of the fundamental social problem.

Healthy Societies are Gift Societies and Unhealthy Societies are Profit Societies

Randolph means something other than capitalism. Ancient Egypt where the Pharoah owned everything is part of the large class of profit societies and so would be Europe in the Middle Ages or even the USSR. In all cases some people have more than they need and they don’t share with others.

In a gift society everyone is rich or poor together. A simple saying from my childhood encapsulates: “share and share alike.”

Leaders are those who give the most, not those who have the most.

There is no organized ability coerce in these societies. No police. Leaders can’t make decisions without community support for each decision. Those who violate the society’s norms are corrected, and if they can’t be corrected are ostracized or killed. The Zapatistas are a good example: when they took power they let everyone out prison except for rapists, murderers and drug trafficking bosses. (If you want the details of how this works, well, read the book.)

The core assertion here is simple. The moment you have rulers instead of leaders, your society is sunk. The moment your society operates on individual accumulation of wealth rather than sharing (gifting), you are sunk. (Remember that in virtually ever famine there has always been enough food. The famines occur because those with more than they need, horde. Likewise, the US has far more empty homes than homeless people.)

For a gift economy to work, we have to all want to give and we must abhor selfishness. We must know that everyone in our group wants to take care of us, and we must want to take care of them.

And that’s what Randolph’s three core spiritual practices are about.

But individuals are just individuals, and this is about creating a better society. The next level up is the group level, and here’s Randolph’s advice. A group should:

  1. define what challenge it’s tacking;
  2. decide what we’re going to do to meet that challenge; and,
  3. figure how we take care of each other along the way.

At the society level:

  1. Decide what the external boundaries are. Who’s outside the group, and who is inside it?
  2. Decide on internal boundaries. “what rules and systems of accountability do we want to have to ensure that, within
    our group, everyone treats everyone else and the land respectfully?”
  3. How do we want to live together and take care of each other?

Now, again, all of this seems pretty utopian, especially if you’ve grown up in a profit (greed) based society. Yet, at its basis, wouldn’t most of us agree that the role of society should be to look after each other? And wouldn’t we acknowledge that if someone’s hungry and someone else has way more than they can ever eat or use, it makes no sense for the other person to be going hungry?

Certainly those are the rules most of us were taught as very young children. “Share your toys. No one gets seconds until everyone has firsts” And perhaps “leaders get the last share, not the first.”

One problem with reviewing Whip’s book is that it’s long. It goes on and on, because Randolph tries to address all the ways our societies have gone wrong, from sexual abuse and authoritarianism, to lack of integrity, to education, to policing, to… (add your issue here, it’s probably covered).

So what we’ve done is hit the highlights: the big picture. But if you’re dubious: read the book, because a lot of the details are dealt with.

This isn’t to say that I agree with everything, and I think there’s a bit of “lack of plan”. Lots of diagnosis, some treatment. But the fundamental diagnosis is correct. The moment we have rulers and hoarding, we’re sunk. And we’re way down that path. There may also be some excessive idealizing of indigenous societies, but a society need not be perfect to be better, even much better.

Whip is also a bit of devolutionist, who wants a controlled reduction in the amount of technology we used. I have a few quibbles with this, but they’re secondary. No one with sense can’t think we need to stop using plastics, for example, or give up almost all use of fossil fuels. I think there’s a role for advanced technology, there just needs to be far more care and deliberation in what we use.

Overall I’m happy to recommend the book. Understand you’re going to get a lot of “personal journey” and lots of hippy vibes, but read carefully and see whether you agree with the diagnosis. Time and time again I did.

The book is “pay what you want” and you can get it here.

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Is Consciousness Reality’s Organizing Principle? (Beyond Biocentrism, by Lanza and Berman)

Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.

But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.

The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)

Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)

Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.

Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.

Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.

Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”

Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.

While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.

I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.

As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.

Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)

I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.

The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.

At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)

Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.

I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”

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Review of Wolfgang Streeck’s “How Will Capitalism End?”, by Marku52

By Marku52

Streeck’s book “How will Capitalism End” is a collection of essays he wrote for the New Left Review almost a decade ago. It seems very prescient today. Much of his points are shared in the introduction, and first few chapters, and some of the points get repeated. Later chapters involve German politics, and are less useful to us. I find his idea that without corrective dialectics, capitalism will die of its own excesses, persuasive and I will go into more details in this review.

“The fact that capitalism has, until now, managed to outlive all predictions of its impending death, need not mean that it will forever be able to do so; there is no inductive proof here, and we cannot rule out the possibility that, next time, whatever cavalry capitalism may require for its rescue may fail to show up.”

For a while now, I’ve come to believe that capitalism must end. How can a system continue with such internal faults as:

  • There being no present economic value in staving off an apocalyptic disaster if it is far in the future.

  • Debt grows faster than income, which means eventually one entity owns everything. In the biblical past, debt “jubilees” reset the debt clock. But to Calvinistic capitalism, that is immoral. So capitalism has financial crises, revolutions, and periodic busts instead

  • Rewarding the search for “externalities”, which means profiting by moving a cost somewhere else-usually the ecosystem or society. An example of this would be the mine-tailings from a mine long closed, profits taken, destroying a fishery. But it also applies to party house AirBnBs that raise the rents for locals and disquiet a neighborhood. Or those Bird scooters that end up piled up all over the sidewalks.

Streeck posits that capitalism and democracy have an oil and water relationship, in that democracy favors a “moral justice” approach (“Everyone should have housing and health care”) and capitalism responds with “economic justice” (“You can have all of that you can afford”). Now that capitalism-and in particular extreme neoliberalism has vanquished all opposition. you would think that capitalism is secure. Instead Streeck proposes that this makes neoliberal capitalism’s status even more precarious.

Streeck’s hypothesis is straightforward. Capitalism requires a dialectic opposing force to save it from its own self destruction. In the past such forces existed -unions, functioning democracy, and public outcry. Now that all these forces are vanquished, it would seem that neoliberal capitalism is here to stay.

“The social world of the post-capitalist interregnum, in the wake of neoliberal capitalism having cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, can at any time be hit by disaster; for example, bubbles imploding or violence penetrating from a collapsing periphery into the centre. With individuals deprived of collective defenses and left to their own devices, what remains of a social order hinges on the motivation of individuals to cooperate with other individuals on an ad hoc basis, driven by fear and greed and by elementary interests in individual survival.”

Streeck says that even without a competing narrative, capitalism will fall simply because its stops working.

In past times excesses of capitalism have been countered by opposing forces, leading to compromises like the New Deal. Capitalism’s destructive tendencies were reined in to some extent, and capitalism was “saved from itself”. However, Streeck points out that this was only possible in an era of high enough growth that both the owners of capital and the moral justice society could be content with their share. Once stagflation hit in the 1970s, there was not enough “pie” to go around, and capital went to war with labor.

Capital won, unquestionably. Unions crushed, regulatory agencies corrupted or co-opted, global capital strode the globe looking for arbitrage opportunities and labor took what abuse it had to.

“Socialism and trade unionism, by putting a brake on commodification, prevented capitalism from destroying its non-capitalist foundations – trust, good faith, altruism, solidarity within families and communities, and the like.”

“Capitalism without opposition is left to its own devices, which do not include self-restraint.”

Why do our “leaders” seem so incompetent and clueless?

“After a certain amount of time, it may no longer be possible to stop the rot: expectations of what politics can do may have eroded too far, and the civic skills and organizational structures needed to develop effective public demand may have atrophied beyond redemption, while the political personnel themselves may have adapted entirely to specializing in the management of appearances rather than the representation of some version, however biased, of the public interest.”

It seems governing has become performative, rather than actual. I’d describe a democratic government as one that implements policies voters have indicated they want. However, I’d argue, once neoliberalism has infested the government, that function changes. The government serves to protect the “Sacred Market” from interference by the desires of the voters. Look at FDR’s Social Security VS Obama’s Affordable Care Act (LOL, what a misnaming!)

Social Security was a simple act of a few pages, implemented by a competent civil service. The ACA was negotiated over a year of wandering farther and farther away from “Affordable” or “Care” (advocates of Single Payer were excluded) and ended up being over 300 pages. Nobody knew what it did, or how it worked. But it created yet another Market and derailed any other reform of health care for decades while insuring the profitability of the entirely parasitic health insurance industry. Responding to the needs of the voters? No. Creating yet another market? Check.

Another damning case was when Jen Psaki, Biden’s spokeshole, was asked why, if people were finding it hard to get Rapid Covid Tests, the government didn’t just give them out. She was speechless. “The government would just Give Them Away?”

The neoliberal rot on full display. That program was one of the few effective Covid policies that Biden implemented.

Look at the government response to Covid in the western countries. Initially, public health measures were taken: quarantines, travel bans, shutdown pay, mandatory masking. This lasted a short while until the neoliberals regained control, and those efforts are unlikely to be seen again. (“Won’t someone think of the Economy!?”)

When neoliberals infest your government, their sole qualification is that they will look good in front of a camera and ensure that the government will never interfere with the operation of the Sacred Market. Hence a typical election will ask you to choose between two neoliberals with different color Culture War coats…..

Streeck posits that capitalism confronts five challenges that it cannot solve by itself.

The capitalist system is at present stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy.

Declining growth has been apparent since the first oil crisis, way back in the 70’s. Capitalism depends on growth to be able to pay back the debt that it creates. But without new fields to plunder, that growth is impossible (Heinberg calls this “Peak Everything”) Much of the alleged “growth” in the past 30 years is just counting fictitious digits in the ever more hypothecated financial economy, completely divorced from real production.

Inequality (oligarchy) is one of the basic productions of capitalism. It can’t and won’t solve this by itself, and all corrective forces, like government redistribution, have been banished.

Starvation of the public sphere is everywhere evident. Particularly in the US, where some municipalities no longer have safe drinking water. Potholes, libraries closing, public heath abandoned. There is no money to be made in the public works, so they either aren’t performed or sold off and performed poorly.

Ah, corruption……Like the entire US political electoral finance system. Or Big Pharma drug testing. But also finance itself.

“Finance is an ‘industry’ where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking; where the pay-offs from semi-legal and illegal activities are particularly high; where the gradient in expertise and pay between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme;”

Capitalism grows by creating markets where there never was one before. Why can’t I make a market in cocaine, human organs, or children? And since capitalism owns the government, many of these immoral “markets” do get established, or ignored where they do appear.

“Capitalism’s moral decline may have to do with its economic decline, the struggle for the last remaining profit opportunities becoming uglier by the day and turning into asset-stripping on a truly gigantic scale.”

In the US, Pirate, er, Private, Equity is now buying up veterinary offices and cosmetologists. Just proving that there is almost no interaction left that does not have Wall Street’s corrupt hand in the middle of it.

International anarchy was barely on the horizon when Streeck wrote back around 2014. International capitalism requires a hegemon to provide a stable currency for trade, to police the trade ways for safe transport, and an enforcer (like the IMF) to ensure national debts get paid. You may have noticed that this is all very much up in the air these days. The US’ poorly conceived war in Ukraine has upended all this. The US basically stole $300 billion of Russian assets, and attempted to interfere with all their trade. The world is now dividing into blocks affiliated with one side or the other, and alternative trade regimes are being put into place. The US can no longer be viewed as a safe haven for assets, when one’s asset can be confiscated at the whim of the hegemon.

“Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

So, to bring up Stein’s Law “If a thing can’t continue, it won’t…..”

Reading List

A few years ago someone asked me for a reading list. I recently came across it again when someone else asked, and I thought I’d share it with everyone.

I wouldn’t necessarily read this exactly in order, and what you need to read will will depend on your background, the person asking had very little in the social sciences and humanities.

Writers who had an outsize affect on me compared to how others view them are Randall Collins, Jane Jacobs and Damasio.

“Conflict Sociology” is dense and long and many would be served by skipping it, but it’s also the book I read that no one else has that has done me the greatest service. “Debt” is also long.

“Cities in Civilization” is long, but each chapter is on one city and it can be read in gulps, and it’s excellent.

The List

To start in Philosophy I would read A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel, it’s a bit dated so you won’t get a lot of 20th century, but excellent for the rest, just remember he has a point of view.

I would read the two Collins books I reviewed: Max Weber, A Skeleton Key” & An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology.

If you like those find a 1970s copy of Conflict Sociology, and read Interaction Ritual Chains by Collins as well.

I would read Jane Jacobs Economy of Cities & Cities and the Wealth of Nations“. If you like those the next two would be Death and Life of the Great American Cities and Systems of Survival.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of scientific revolutions – short, to the point

Justice by Michael Sandel – reviewed on my site


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Mancur Olson, Power and Prosperity (be careful to see how this applies to more than the USSR.)

Confucius and the Chinese Way by Creel (older book)

I would read some Freud, because you can’t understand the 20th century, especially mid 20th century, without him. Three or four of his early books. They’re short and well written.

Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips

Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells — an understanding of the effects of the agricultural revolution is necessary

The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (be sure to google the critiques of it, particularly with respect to women’s religion.) Dense, very dense, but fascinating.

Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang.

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, in the commons, you can probably find a *.pdf, but it’s long.

Debt, the first 5,000 years by Graeber.

Medieval Cities, their Origins and Revival of Trade — nice short book, .pdfs available

Sun Tzu, The Art of War. (Get one with commentary)

If you have time on your hand Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization will reward you, it’s about much more than cities.

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Machiavelli, The Prince and Discourses on Livy. Do not skip Livy, the Prince is all most people read and it gives a skewed vision of Machiavelli’s thought. Discourses is longer and more important.  Remember that Machiavelli gets a lot of history wrong, but it doesn’t really matter.

If you don’t have much background in them, Karen Armstrong’s books on Buddha and Muhammed are decent introductions, bearing in mind that Armstrong clearly doesn’t understand meditative accomplishments, so it’s an outsider look at Buddha.

Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, largest land empire in history, probably good to learn about it, and Genghis Khan was an amazing leader.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner (despite behaviouralism’s issues, it really does describe a lot of human behaviour very well, and you can easily apply it to mental events even if behaviouralists frowned on that.)

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (I got a lot out of this back in the day. It’s light in some ways, but still worthwhile)

Descartes Error by Anthony Damasio (I found his other books weak, this one is very important.)

There really should be more on India, and China but the topics I consider most worthwhile there are hard to find good introductions that aren’t misleading to people who don’t have a background. In particular Buddhist/Hindu metaphysics and epistemology is very strong, but also very hard to read and understand.  Pagan religion is missing, Roman history and culture, etc, etc.  Obviously if you haven’t read the New and Old testament’s you should, ideally with a very annotated version to guide you in the meaning where it’s less than obvious.  There’s a fair bit to be said for reading some Plato (especially the early stuff) and Aristotle, as well as Cicero, but I’d read Russel first, to get some background. Philosophy tends to be a pain to read until you learn the lingo of the specific type/period of philosophy; it seems harder than it is.

What are some books that had a huge influence on you?

Nine Lies About Work by Buckingham and Goodall

So, most business book are boring re-assertions of the same advice and most non fiction books are magazine articles extended to book length, without adding any real content.

Nine lies isn’t. During my reading splurge at the big box bookstore I started taking notes. The book with the most notes was this book, and I’m not even all that interested in business management and leadership. This is a data driven book, and it turns out most of how we manage people in firms is just straight wrong.

Let’s go thru the nine lies.

: People care which company they work for

Turns out it’s all down to the team, the people they work most closely to, and the number of teams they are on. You can work for a shitty company, but if the team is good it’s a great job and you can work for a good company and it the team is bad, it’s a shitty job.

The authors found the following questions predict good teams.

  1. I am enthusiastic about the mission.
  2. I clearly understand what is expected of me.
  3. In my team I am surrounded by people who share my values.
  4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day.
  5. My teammates have my back
  6. I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
  7. I have great confidence in my companies future.
  8. In my work I am always challenged to grow.

Notice that only one of these questions (7) is about the company, though number three can be effected by it. I bolded , “I have the chance to use my strengths every day” because it’s important throughout the book, the authors find that playing to people’s strengths rather than trying to shore up their weaknesses and make them all-round good is important.

Trust of the team leader is extremely important: if people don’t trust the leader, they won’t like the job.

All of the questions are framed to give yes or no answers. People are happy when they’re positive, not when they’re ambivalent.

: The best plan wins

Nope. Fast feedback on what works and doesn’t from the front, and fast decision loops win. Leaders are always out of touch with actual conditions and can’t make good plans.

This means:

  1. You should share as much info as possible
  2. See what data people find useful
  3. Trust people to make sense of the data, and;
  4. Let the teams make the decisions, not the top leaders, since they’re who has to deliver

Leaders should check in once a week, and ask “what are your priorities?” and “how can I help?”

: The best companies cascade goals

Nope, they do the following.

  1. Express values (write ’em on the walls!)
  2. rituals
  3. stories

In other words, they work on shared values almost entirely, they’re about creating a good culture, shared by the teams who do the actual work, and otherwise their job is almost entirely to support teams, not tell teams what to do.

: The best people are well-rounded

A strength is something you’re good at and enjoy. If you’re good and don’t enjoy it, it’s an ability. People look forward to using their strengths, enter flow when doing so and and feel fulfillment afterwards.

The best performers are defined by their strengths, not weaknesses and it is a leader’s job to make sure they use their strengths regularly and avoid their weaknesses. The best use of time isn’t making people all-rounded, if someone’s great at something and bad at something else, play to the strength and have another team member cover the weakness.

People learn from success, not from failure, and leaders should seek outcomes not control. Put your best person on it, tell them what you want, don’t tell them how to do it.

(This is how the best managers I ever had worked, as an aside. I remember one boss telling me that she had me doing audits and someone else running physically around the building because I’d be bored doing that job, and the girl doing that had so much energy she’d go stir crazy sitting down and auditing files.)

#5: People need feedback

Positive feedback is about 30X more effective than negative feedback, and negative feedback is 60 times more effective than no feedback.

Didn’t expect that last bit, but apparently people would rather be criticized than ignored. However concentrating on what people do right is vastly more effective. Again, when possible, focus your workers on what they do well and find someone who enjoys what they do badly (which they will dislike doing) to take that off their shoulders.

Further, because of how growth works, you should concentrate on improving strengths. If someone increases 10% every quarter say, 10% improvement in what they’re best at rather than 10% improvement on what they’re worst at means a lot more growth. A person does need to be competent enough at things they hate but must do that they don’t cause a disaster, but beyond that, hit the strengths.

To give positive feedback:

  1. interrupt them when they’re doing great and tell them (use common sense about interruptions)
  2. make up highlight reels of their best work and show them their own excellence (obviously, this can just be a list you talk to them about in a meeting, you don’t have to become a movie-maker)
  3. when praising say what you saw, how it made you feel or what it made you think or realize
  4. remember that praise increase performance more than performance increases praise.

Excellence is not the opposite of failure, fixing mistakes doesn’t create excellence.

Advice tends not to work because we tend to say what worked for us. To give advice ask them what has worked for them in the past on similiar issues.

#6: People can reliably rate other people

Nope, what you find in statistical studies is that their ratings only correlate to their own personality. We don’t see other people, we see ourselves. Groups don’t make this better; increasing the number of people who are bad at rating others doesn’t, in aggregate, turn the ratings good. Everyone is wrong. (There’s a bunch of other statistical stuff here, but what it comes down to is everyone is that there is NO way to measure the performance of knowledge workers.

Generally the best thing to do, counter-intuitive as it is, is have people rate themselves.  When asking others, the questions are:

  1. Who do you plan to promote?
  2. Who do you go to get X done well?
  3. Who do you go to when you need extraordinary results.

This is still subjective information, but it is reliable.

#7: People have potential

Nope. Ratings create the future. If you tell someone they are good, they do good. If you tell them they are bad, they do badly. (Aside: this is true in school, as well, and gifted programs create gifted students more than predict them.)

#8: Work-life balance matters most

Nope. What matters is “love in work.” People who are doing what they love (that might be playing with your kids) have lives they love. It’s not about balance, it’s about doing what you love. If you want both happy and effective workers figure out what they love and get them to more of it.

#9: Leadership is a thing

A leader is someone with followers. Followers follow someone who

  • Makes us feel part of something bigger
  • Values us for who we are
  • Connects us to a mission we believe in
  • Make sclear what is expected
  • Values us for our strengths
  • Who show us teammates will be there for us
  • Who over and over again celebrate our victories
  • Who give us confidence in the future

In other words, a leader is someone who creates feelings in the followers, that’s the function.

Different leaders have different strengths. One long example in the book is Martin Luther King, whose strength was bringing festering problems to a crisis which forced change.

The best leaders are not well rounded, they are extremely idiosyncratic. (Think Steve Jobs.) People love or hate them, but the people who love them really love them. The more idiosyncratic (Gandhi) the more passionate their followers.

We trust leaders when they give us confidence in return.

Because we follow extreme ability, leaders tend to polarize. MLK was hated by more people than loved him. While Gandhi was loved, those who hated him hated him so much they killed him (MLK too.) Jobs was famous for generating extreme responses. You either really wanted to work with him, or you wanted nothing to do with him and considered him a giant jerk.

The book concludes with Truths.

  1. People care what teams they work with
  2. The best intelligence (not plan) wins
  3. The best companies cascade meaning (not plans)
  4. The best people are spiky (not well rounded)
  5. People need attention (not feedback)
  6. People can reliably rate their own experience (they can’t rate others)
  7. People have momentum (not potential)
  8. Love in work matters most (not work-life balance)
  9. We follow spikes (people who are extreme)

Concluding remarks

As I noted at the beginning, most business books are boring and just say the same thing over and over. This one doesn’t, it says most of what we do in large corporations is moronic, which we all know and somehow don’t break out of. (I especially appreciate the hard takedown of 360 reviews by everyone around you, which always seemed like a complete waste of time.)

But the books message goes far beyond work. There’s a message here about how to live life and how to interact with others. I found the advice on, errr, giving advice particularly useful, since I’ve been giving advice mostly wrong (and I knew I was, but didn’t know how to do it better.)

Likewise the celebration of difference, of the people around you mattering more than the larger organization (or society), and of doing what you’re best at resonate hard.

A good read, and a manual to help you avoid the group-think of standard corporate practices.


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“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” Is An Inapplicable Parable For Our Time

You’re probably familiar with Ursula LeGuin’s short story on Omelas. If you aren’t go read it now, it’s short and profound and you should know it.

Though a great story, Omelas is largely inapplicable to us, which is odd, because surely LeGuin wrote it, at least in part, as commentary on our society.

Omelas is a paradise, of sorts.. Many of us are well off, in some ways the majority of those of us who live in the developed world live in a paradise, with more access to food and pleasures than any society before us.

But Omelas’s prosperity is based on suffering. In Omelas’s case, the suffering of just one person, a tiny minority.

In our case, the number is much more, and our civilization is global. Our prosperity is based on slavery and poverty and degradation in developing and undeveloped countries. Blood minerals, effective slavery in mines and factories, children picking thru garbage dumps for food. It was born in mass genocide in the Americas, and mass conquest everywhere else.

At some point, every self-aware person with a smidgen of intellectual integrity becomes aware of these facts: that the good life is based on the suffering of others.

But we don’t leave, because we can’t.

Where would you go? There is no place left, no place that isn’t Omelas, where any good life is bought by the suffering of others. Even if you do nothing yourself, to participate in our prosperity is to eat of the fruits of the suffering of others, there is no avoiding it, save, perhaps, to become a hermit who takes nothing from our society.

Omelas is a powerful parable, but it isn’t applicable to our society because we are all locked in; there is no decent society to go to, no place to escape to. We cannot leave.

And so, if we are to be ethical, since we cannot leave, we must work to free those whose suffering our prosperity is based on.

Because whether we will it or no, our pleasures are always, to some extent, born from their pain.


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“FDR” by Jean Edward Smith

I picked this book up years ago. This week I finally read it, intending it as a palate cleanser for modern politics in general and Trump in particular.

I’ve read a few books on FDR (the best short one is “That Man” by Robert Jackson (who knew FDR well.))

This one’s thick, but middling length considering how much one could write about FDR.

 The book reads a little dry, but has information I haven’t found in other biographies, or perhaps just a different emphasis. Smith seems very concerned with how FDR became who he was, and how he actually operated, both before the and during the presidency.

More than that, he actually spends a fair bit of time sketching out his parents, grandparents and family in general. His first two names “Franklin Delano,” for example, are actually from his maternal family, the Delanos, not from the Roosevelts. Moreover, it was a break in Roosevelt tradition to name FDR that, which is one of your first hints that Sara Roosevelt, his mother, was a force to be reckoned with. Indeed, while there are a lot of people whom FDR wouldn’t have been president without, Sara’s the most important of the lot, and not just because she was his most important financial backer through much of his life.

Sara’s father, Warren Delano, earned two fortunes in his life, both in China. After he earned his first fortune he returned to America, invested heavily, then lost it all in one of the routine panics of the late 19th century. So he went back to China in his 50s and earned a second fortune selling opium,which he admitted was wrong, but felt was no worse than selling booze. Later in life, FDR was to say that one reason he refused to have good relations with Japan was because of this history; his family felt kindly towards the Chinese and wanted the best for them.

Sara raised FDR with almost absolute approval. He was a mama’s boy, thru and thru, though he spent a lot of time with his father (about 30 years older than his mother) learning the approved skills of the gentleman farmer of his period, and, perhaps most importantly, learning to sail. His father died when he was young, and he was devastated as his father had been his primary play companion, in effect.

As a teen he went to the Groton private school, run by one of those stern progressive clergymen that are so important to the first 250 years of American history. He fit in perfectly, had no problems at all (never a sure thing in boarding school, as I can attest), but as he was short as a teenager, did not do well at the sort of sports which Groton pushed so hard. (A real man, in 19th and early 20th century terms was absolutely an athlete, and Groton particularly liked American football.)

Groton taught noblesse oblige and progressive ideals: one was here on Earth to care for one’s fellow men and women and FDR himself said that Groton set him on the path that lead to him being the sort of President he was: one who tried to look after the American people. Groton’s headmaster, Endicott Peabody swore in FDR in when he became President.

After Groton it was off to Harvard. FDR, like those of his class at the time, lived off campus. He was an indifferent student, but worked assiduously at the Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper, which he was elected to run in his final year. Smith notes that he avoided all theoretical classes like philosophy and that thru his life had a very practical mind, unsuited to categorical and theoretical thought.

After Harvard FDR bummed around. Oh he worked as a lawyer for a time, went to Europe, and so on (he had been to Europe with his mother in his childhood) and so on, but he seems to have taken none of it seriously. As early as 1907 he had decided to go into politics and had even sketched out to friends at his law firm how he would do it: first get elected to New York’s congress, then become New York’s Governor (New York having the most delegates back then), then the Presidency.

This is exactly how he wound up doing it.

He married Eleanor. The relationship was close at first (though, as usual with Victorian upper class women, Eleanor came to marriage with no idea about either sex or how to raise children), but in its later years the marriage became a functional one only. This was primarily FDR’s fault, when in DC working as assistant naval secretary under Woodrow Wilson, he had an affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford. The Roosevelt marriage at that time was sexless (after six children, Eleanor didn’t want to have more, and FDR had wanted six kids, so that seems to have been the goal) and Lucy was, by all accounts, a very open and lovely young women and far closer to FDR in temperament than Eleanor (FDR’s kids loved her.)

Eleanor found out when FDR returned from Europe sick and had to be carried off his liner. Emptying his trunk at home she found the love letters between Lucy and FDR, and there was a confrontation. FDR’s mother, Sara, said she would cut FDR off if he divorced, and Lucy went away, but biographers seem sure that the love between the two was real.

FDR and Eleanor did not really reconcile. From that point on they supported each other, but were not very affectionate. In the White House Smith reports that Eleanor was only seen with FDR when she wanted something from him for one of her various projects (all good work supporting people who needed that support.) She did her duty as wife, including running the White House (and hired a terrible cook based on loyalty, not skill), but they never pretended to be close after the Lucy affair.

Eleanor would have a big tea party every day, with her progressive friends, while FDR would have cocktails (which he mixed) with his friends in the evening. Eleanor didn’t approve and never joined in (she probably wasn’t invited).

So the marriage, while loving at first, didn’t stay that way, but the partnership did, though it was often troubled.

FDR was a talented politician from the start. He first won office taking on a Republican in a Republican rural district the Democrats hadn’t won in ages by renting a car and criss-crossing the district talking to everyone he could find. Even then people noted that he could talk to anyone: could make almost everyone like him, perhaps because he genuinely enjoyed talking to them.

FDR had, throughout his life, a sort of imperturbable belief in himself. A calmness and sureness. He wasn’t scared of failure (and he did fail sometimes), but felt sure he would eventually succeed. He was utterly calm in crisis, even when someone tried to kill him just before his presidency, and he was able to pass much of that confidence to others.

More than that, it was a warm cheerful confidence. Fundamentally calm and optimistic, FDR would imbue those around him with this confidence. As a result of this, and a great deal of personal loyalty, over the years FDR created a circle of friends who also worked for or with him. He brought them into his family, and some of theme even often lived with him for years, like Louis Howe, his primary political operative.

This isn’t to say FDR was a Saint. He could make cruel jokes about people he didn’t like (General Marshall, of the Marshall plan swore to never laugh at one of these cruel jokes), he drank a great deal and his youth he was definitely a prig, who, while he theoretically believed in helping those poorer than him had no real understanding of them.

He opposed Democratic “Bossism” and Tammany Hall in the early years. Indeed he opposed them when first elected and his opposition was his first leap to fame, but in so doing he ignored things like terrible worker conditions and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Frances Perkins, who was to later become his Labor Secretary, and a very loyal member of his “family” at first despised him because of this.

And it is this which makes Smith’s book interesting to me, more than anything else. Smith spends a lot of time on what made FDR who he was: the man and president who pursued policies meant to help so many.

First there was his mother giving him such self confidence thru her absolute regard and constant attention to him. Then there was Groton. But even so, young adult FDR, though personally charming is rather an ass, politically (also anti-Irish, very common at the time in his class.)

This starts changing mostly after his New York Congressional career. FDR gets an appointment to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy (there is only one at the time, so it’s a very important position, or would be if the navy was important, which it wasn’t before WWI.)

Louie Howe, his political operative goes with him. Louie had actually entirely run FDR’s second New York campaign, because FDR was sick. FDR did essentially nothing and Louie won it for him by sending out early targeted letters to the district, doing things like promising farmers that he’d be in charge of agriculture and standardize apple barrel sizes. Louie knew exactly what each constituency wanted, and he was never a yes man, but told FDR exactly what he thought.

So, back in DC as Navy Secretary, one of the things that Howe insists on is that FDR deal with labor problems himself. When the  unions complain about something, FDR goes to where the problem is, and talks to the people who are upset directly, bypassing everyone in between. FDR, who as we know, just loves talking to people, gets to know the workers and the union bosses and his period at the navy has almost no labor strife.

More importantly, he learns to know and understand a class of workers he would, essentially, have never had anything to do with before.

He also learns how to deal with people in the opposite direction: Congressmen and the other members of Wilson’s administration. Again, after some initial missteps, he becomes extremely savvy. He understands what they want, and he gives it to them. He becomes an expert at the crony politics of the time. If a Senator wants something from the Navy, and he can reasonably be given it, he gets it (this was normal for the time.) He talks to them, and comes to appreciate their concerns and the pressures they are under. He knows what they want and need.

This, as you’d expect, becomes especially important when he’s President, where he’s usually able to get his way thru careful schmoozing.

The thing is FDR loves this sort of politics. He’s not just good at it, it’s fun to him.

But more than that, FDR seems develop a genuine sympathy for almost everyone he meets. He feels for the workers, he feels for the Senators, he likes them. It’s genuine. They feel that in return.

And this is part of the secret of his success: FDR likes people, likes talking to them, cares about them. They have his sympathy.

So the Navy teaches FDR about how DC works and about the lives and cares of workers and unions.

After WWI FDR runs for vice-president in 1920, and loses, which he had expected, but this gives him and Howe experience nationally and allows them to meet important Democratic politicians all around the country (not easy in an America before commercial airlines.)

He makes up with Tammany hall and drops his anti-bossism. The fact is that Murphy, the leader of Tammany Hall, has beaten him multiple times, and without Tammany support, he isn’t going to be President.

We’ll fast forward a bit, but the next really important bit is when he gets polio. FDR had been incredibly robust, with amazing amounts of energy, and very attractive, something both men and women mention repeatedly.

Then he spends months in bed running a fever, his legs not responding, unable to care for himself at all.  It takes years to regain even a limited ability to walk, and to the end of his life, FDR cannot walk and look normal without someone by his side, because he has lost control of his hips. While can maneuver by himself, to do so without someone else as an anchor means a very awkward, hip-swaying movement, politically impossible.

Most biographers put Franklin’s maturation into FDR at this point: his change from essentially selfish to someone who cares for others, especially those who are afflicted in some way. Smith thinks the affair with Lucy was also a turning point, that it gave him depth he had not had before, but she, like others, feels polio was important.

FDR’s never been helpless for long periods before (a few illnesses). He’s never had to rely entirely on other people to do everything. He himself, later, when asked why he is so patient and unruffled said that when you’re a cripple and you ask for a glass of orange juice and someone brings you milk, you drink it.

On top of this, recovery is incredibly painful. The physical therapy hurts, and most patients can’t take it more than a few days a week, but FDR does it every day.

He becomes convinced that hot springs help and sets up a spa called “Warm Springs” in Georgia for those with polio. They charge, but if patients can’t afford to pay, they are helped anyway. At first there is money from donors to pay for the moneyless, but when that runs out FDR has all such bills sent directly to him. Most of his fortune is spent on Warm Springs, and while it’s helpful to him, if it was just about him, none of this is necessary.

FDR sets up a car with manual controls while in Georgia and takes to driving around the state, and, you guessed it, talking to everyone he meets. He becomes so beloved that he wins Georgia every time when President, with margins like 16:1.

Meanwhile, Louis Howe keeps FDR’s presidential dreams alive, and FDR keeps his finger on the pulse of national and New York politics.

He goes back to New York and wins election as New York governor. When the Great Depression hits, FDR is the first governor to take it seriously and start mobilizing widespread relief. He has massive coat-tails and is able to turn New York’s congress Democratic.

This, you’ll note, is all according to the plan set out to friends in 1907: win a seat in New York’s Congress then become governor, then the presidency.

I won’t go into a great deal of detail on the Presidency and that campaign (perhaps another post, if people like this one), but there are a few things I want to note.

First: FDR changes the Democratic party from the party of business to a progressive party. People like Al Smith are mightily offended by this.

Second: FDR is progressive but not radical. The most hard-core progressives don’t like him. (For example, he could have nationalized the banks and chose not to.)

Third: FDR reaches out to Republicans (remember, back then they are the more progressive party), but freezes dead his internal Democratic enemies like Smith. They get nothing from him, often not even a nod. Once the party is his, he is ruthless in keeping it that way. On the other hand, Senators who work with him from across the aisle and are loyal are protected from Democratic challenges to the best of his ability.

Fourth: FDR’s governing philosophy is to try something to fix a problem, and if it doesn’t work, that’s OK, try something else. By framing things this way, and by doing it, he gets intense amounts of support and room to operate. A program can fail, and it doesn’t hurt him much at all.

Fifth: FDR uses radio to cut past the gatekeepers. Every week he talks to ordinary Americans on the radio (his fireside chats) and honestly describes the situation, what he’s doing, and why. He speaks simply, but he doesn’t oversimplify. He does not talk down. This also leads to overwhelming support.

At any rate, “FDR” has indeed been a palate cleanser for me. To my mind, though he wasn’t perfect (who is?) FDR was the greatest president in America’s history (only Lincoln competes, but I give it to FDR.) And it’s really interesting how Franklin becomes FDR: the personality, the character, with all its flaws.

Another nice thing about this biography is how Gray makes time for all of the people around FDR, giving them mini bios. Eleanor receives a lot of copy, perhaps half as much as FDR, which is a great deal but there are bios of his secretaries like Missy LeHand (actually incredibly important as the gatekeeper), the main political operatives and even long time bodyguards and so on.

This gives one a feeling for the time, albeit for the privileged part of the time (and FDR was definitely born with a silver spoon in his mouth.)

If you’re interested in FDR, in the time, or in how America changed its politics in another time of crisis, this is a good book.


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“Behave” By Robert Sapolsky

For much of last year my daily routine included sipping a drink and reading a book at a coffee shop in a big box bookstore.

I went thru a lot of books that way. A few standout, and Behave was the foremost among those.

When you’ve read a lot of books, you rarely read much that is new to you, but Behave told me things I didn’t know. Some were because when I learned biology and neuroscience, a lot wasn’t known. Some I’ve caught since then (brain cells do keep growing in adulthood, which the neuroscience of my childhood said was the not the case), but some I didn’t.

Behave is a genuinely comprehensive book. Too many books these days amount to magazine articles padded with another seventy thousand words, but Behave actually requires its length, so I’m going to pull out four piece of knowledge to share, but encourage you to read the book. (I have it on my “read again” list.)

The first is about the prefrontal cortex, and there’s a good chance that you know the prefrontal cortex is the part of the cerebral cortex (the outer skin of the brain which evolved last) we use to override decisions from the lizard and monkey parts of the brains.

The problem with cerebral cortex is general is that it’s slow: the lizard and mammalian parts operate faster. For the prefrontal cortex to override a decision made by the parts of the brain that are closer, as it were to the metal (run! fight! fuck!) you need to slow down. If you act instantly, it isn’t a judgment call, it’s your reflexes and conditioning working. That might be good, it might wind you up in a fight you can’t win or having sex with someone you’re going to hate after you spend two years with them.

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t finish growing until you’re 25 or so, which is reflected in automobile actuarial tables, as it happens: younger than 25, more accidents. This doesn’t mean those younger than twenty-five have no self control, no ability override the older parts of the brain, instead younger brains use other regions, such as the ventral striatum to help the under-developed prefrontal cortex.

Still adolescent and childhood impulsiveness and difficulty with self-control is entirely real and based on brain development. It’s not that they (we) don’t want more control, especially more emotional regulation, they just don’t have it.

Anyway, if you want more control, slow down. Also, fairly standard Vipassana and Shamatha meditation will give you more control over time. A couple teachers I know have sped up their perceptions so much that they can decide whether or not react to a flinch reflex.

The first “holy shit” moment in the book, for me, was about testosterone. We have been propagandized to view testosterone as related to violence.

Nope.

Oh, it can be. But what testosterone appears to actually be related to is status seeking. If violence and bullying is what a society rewards with status, then yup, testosterone is about violence.

But if hugging and caring for people will get you more status, suddenly high-T individuals are the biggest huggers and carers around.

Rather changes the question of what society types are viable, doesn’t it? Makes nonsense of the idea that society has to be nasty because people (high status men) are nasty.

And here’s the thing, in hunter-gatherer bands (note the word bands), the high status individuals are caring, wise and slow to anger. The high status caring men also spread their genes around plenty.

Then there was the simple revelation about Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which is supposed to make both men and women more caring and nurturing. (Insert picture of man cradling baby if this was a magazine.)

It does. It does!

Er, but there’s a thorn on this rose. What it actually does is increase tribal behaviour. You act better towards members of your tribe, your people and worse towards others, because it reduces your empathy to outsiders. Oxytocin, one imagines, along with baby hugging, probably has a role in genocides and not that the groups and people who commit violence to outsiders tend to have strong internal cohesion. (This clearly isn’t the only factor, but it is interesting and suggests that ideas involving increasing our Oxytocin won’t work to solve our larger problems.)

Finally, something which younger readers probably know: the effects of many genes are turned on and off by the environment.

This sure isn’t what I was taught in biology. Back then it was “genes are one thing, the environment is another.”

What’s even more lovely, if like me you had to sit thru hours of listening to Lamarck being castigated as a fool for saying that developed characteristics could be passed on to offspring “hahahaha, what a fool, and those Soviets are obviously ideological cretins for believing it, hahahaha!” — well, it turns out that genes being turned on and off can be passed on. And yeah, genes involved in building muscle are among that group, so Arnold Schwarznegger’s kids, if they lift, probably put on muscle easier than you do.

As Sapolsky notes, the question “nurture or nature?” in light of this, is very close to nonsense. The answer is “both”. For a lot of things you need both the genes and the environment. Saprorsky hammers relentlessly on this, one example is a genetic predisposition to less sensitive mothering that occurs only if the mother herself had an adverse childhood; another increases violence only when drunk.

On top of all that, the effects of most genetic determinants of behavior were small, even when activated by the environment.

These four points are only a small part of what Saporsky offers. There may be a more comprehensive, up to date book (if you think so, drop it in the comments), but this one is extraordinary. It’s not a fast read, it’s packed with information, and I think it really will require a re-read to digest properly, but I can recommend it whole-heartedly if the question “why do we behave how we do?” interests you at all.


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