Jonathan Marcus's Blog, page 2

Presentosis

It’s the beginning of a sweater which brings us to the raw guts of the problem:  this “sweater” is not a sweater.  At all.  It’s a bunch of loose threads hanging from a neckline, otherwise known as a chaotic mess.  It’s not a sweater at all, people!  It’s just a bunch of loose threads and nobody is sure how they’ll get connected.

That’s the present.  You can’t wear it, it looks crazy, it is crazy, and you can’t make judgments about it until later, when the loose ends connect into something whole-ish.

Huh?  You can’t make accurate judgments about the present until it’s passed into the past?  What about this “live in the moment” ethos?

Good question.  Glad you asked.  Let’s jump right in—right into the maelstrom of time and consciousness, which is the only known cure for Presentosis.

It might sound a little tricky or bogus but if you’re out of patience with Presentosis, you’ll probably be open to trying this hoary, venerable medicine man recipe:  first, mix up equal parts New Age froth with Old Age gravity, then add more equal parts of past, present and future, and shake until stirred.  Set aside until your mind undoes itself, about seven minutes in most cases (depending on altitude).  Conserve one-fifth for delving into the eternal now later.  Pour the remaining four-fifths of the froth, wisdom, past, present, and future mixture into four empty one fifth bottles, and drink three of them or be willing to consider another analogy, whichever comes first.

If you’re still good with all this, then consider the following analogy.  And if you’re not, well, consider it anyway.  And it doesn’t matter if you’re a football fan or not.  What have you got to protect?  Just pretend for a minute.  It won’t kill you.  (And if it does, well, you were going to die of Presentosis anyway.)

Everyone in football knows the coaches’ maxim is true:  you can’t tell what happened in the game until you see the film.  What?  This from the guy on the sidelines, in real time, watching the game as it happens, plus he knows every player’s name and proclivities, and he doesn’t know what happened in real time until he sees it replayed in slow motion later?

Think about this for seven minutes, or seven seconds at least, and you see twenty-two guys racing around a flat field with well-marked boundaries for about three to five seconds and they all fall down, and they get up and do it again, and nobody knows what happened until later?  No, they don’t know, because it’s too complicated and you can’t figure out the flow and the errors and the magical athleticism until it’s all in slow motion and viewed from another point in time.

So if twenty-two guys racing around a very well-defined acre of flat ground is too complicated to understand until later, then how in the hell can anyone pretend to understand—in present time—the flow and interactions of around two hundred nations with around 6.5 billion human beings and more other species than we can even count, on a planet rotating in multiple directions around a star, a galaxy, and bunches of other supra-galactic conflagrations?

So if you can’t understand now until later, where does this leave us with our live-in-the-moment ethos?

Not to worry, folks!  You can eat and have your cake, too!  You can be both player and coach.  Which is to say—you can have your indelible moments of pure immersion on the gridiron of life when bodies are flying and everything is happening at once yet you see it all and find the guy sprinting down the sideline as if on slow motion film and you heave the pass that floats into his palms in eternal present time that lasts forever.  And you can also nurture comprehension of it all from the ever-gathering perspective of time, thanks to the fifth of the concoction conserved in the recipe.  How so?  The retained fifth is the part of attention that rolls across the years, so that the player-in-the-moment intelligence and the slow motion review intelligence enrich each other.

But don’t screw it up with shallow Presentosis.  Don’t go around saying,  “In these uncertain times . . .”  because all times are uncertain.  All times are trying and fraught; some more so than others, certainly.  But the present is always a mess and a tangle and perpetually unwearable, at least to the office or jobsite.

But maybe that’s why it’s called “the present.”  It’s also a gift dripping with gobs of opportunity interwoven with tons of proto-undone bristling-with-life fuckedupedness.

But we digress.  Or at least you have.  So back to the hard-boiled point.  Actually, several emerge:

•  The eternal now exists forever, but not always.

•  If you’re being a human being, you have to spend a good portion of your present time removed—away in the past and in the future.  It’s part of your job, and it goes on your permanent record.

•  Don’t ever go around bloviating about “these fraught times.”

•  The present is not a sweater.

•  The incomprehensibility of present time is enhanced by comprehending the incomprehensibility of football, but it would better if it were two-hand touch.

•  Don’t ever write any of us here in the room about “in these uncertain times.”

Everyone Who Has It Wants To Keep It

That said, unregulated “pure” capitalism, does not really exist in practice—as every capitalist nation does impose limits and regulations on its economic system.  Political debates question what these rules and limits should be, but they do not question whether or not any regulations that optimize capitalism ought to exist.

All capitalist countries nationalize industries that are compromised by the profit motive.  It is generally accepted, for example, that public highways are best built by governments.  The costs are so high, and their function so critical to a nation’s prosperity, that public highways must be built to serve public needs, rather than the need to generate profit.  Another example is the military.  Again, the costs are prohibitively high.  And more important, a system in which an army makes money by going to war, or promulgating the threat of war for profit, would inevitably bring dire consequences in terms of human lives and national interests.

Consider another example on a smaller scale:  the local fire department.  Generally, around the world, the fire departments are government organizations.  In case of fire, they respond without question.  Imagine the alternative:  what would happen in a for-profit fire department?  Would the crew rush to your house, and demand proof of payment before dousing the flames and rescuing the baby?  If you haven’t paid your “fire bill” do they watch your house burn?  And do they wait until the neighbor’s house is smoking, and then check the neighbor’s payment history?

No!  Instead we have a socialized system that works:  everyone pays a small fee in the form of taxes and we’re all covered in the rare event of a fire.  It’s like insurance!

The great majority of enterprises can thrive in the capitalist system.  Look at automobiles.  Ready-to-wear clothing.  Ballpoint pens.  Computers.  Industrial machinery.  Building materials.  Furniture.  Groceries.  Liquor.  Tanning salons.  Nuts and bolts and nails and screws.  You name it.  On and on.  All of these industries and myriad others have enjoyed progress and have been rewarded by the profit motive while delivering ever-better products to consumers who buy them.  And while capitalism is certainly not perfect, it confers benefits to all stakeholders when reasonably regulated: the capitalists, the consumers, and the workers.

Indeed, capitalism functions optimally when workers earn enough to participate in the system as consumers as well as investors;  and when investors participate in intelligent risk on a level, reasonably regulated playing field;  and when the captains of industry can fairly seek outsized rewards for their well-considered risk and wise management.

Society suffers, however, when a critical industry reaps handsome profits denying crucial services instead of delivering those services.  Think about this for a moment.  How can society as a whole prosper when absolutely essential needs are denied so that one industry can make piles of money?

Any industry that constructively serves all the stakeholders of capitalism earns profit when a product or service is delivered.  When a car is sold, the manufacturer and the dealer earn money, and the consumer gets a new car!  What a great arrangement!  Everybody is so happy!  The same is true for ballpoint pens and time in a tanning bed and ordering a meal in a restaurant and just about everything else . . .

. . . with one giant, agonizing, destructive, insane, cruel, gruesome, blood-sucking exception: health insurance.

When controlled by the insurance companies, the profit motive is at odds with the delivery of care.  The less medical care the client base receives, the more money the insurers make!  What a great deal for the insurers!  You pay me.  You see a doctor and file a claim.  I say no—that’s not covered, it says so on page 1,287 of your policy.  Didn’t you read it?  You ask again, I say no, you ask again, I say okay and maybe give you just enough to make you go away.  Unregulated health insurance is ass-backwards to capitalism because the industry gets rich while society, as a whole, suffers.  This would make a wonderful horror movie, but it does not make a wonderful society.  The issue is very simple: health care, like fire fighting and waging war, do not serve stakeholders’ needs when chained to the profit motive.

When health insurance companies are left to their own devices—which is to say relatively unregulated—they opt to insure only those who are healthy, and decline coverage to those who are likely to need care.  Such denial of care does serve the profit motive well, but robs our society of basic health.  And to add insult to pain, those in thrall to this gruesome parasite on the body of capitalism call citizens who need medical attention “consumers.”  You are a consumer when shopping for a new truck or a ballpoint pen or a nice egg salad sandwich, but you are not a “consumer” when suffering from a stab wound or a cancer diagnosis or ebola.

In a broad sense, the system preferred by the insurance companies ought to be called non-health insurance—as in,  “Let us make lots of money while we make it damn near impossible for you to get the care you need.”  The broad economic and social costs of national non-health insurance are difficult to calculate.  These costs spread out in heavy waves and include:

The ripple effects of family bankruptcy, the primary cause of which is a health care crisis that most families cannot afford.
Higher lifetime medical costs accelerated by avoidance of routine and preventative care, because such maintenance, which has proven to reduce lifetime medical costs, is unaffordable.
Dampened economic and social freedom because many cannot leave a job in order to start a small business because decent independent health care is either unaffordable or unavailable.

Automobile insurance is routinely required by the states, because it has become obvious that the cost of uninsured motorists is prohibitively high to both motorists and insurance companies.  The common good is served by requiring all car owners to carry insurance.  The same common sense imperative should apply to health care, only more so, because unlike auto ownership in which  [1.] you may opt out of car ownership, and  [2.] an accident may never happen—virtually everyone needs health care in the course of a lifetime, even if it is only preventative.

Control groups are impossible to establish among nations.  So we have to use the best comparisons available.  And overwhelming conclusions obtain from this simple fact:  all but one of the modern, industrialized nations have nationalized health care, and none that have it are trying to get rid of it.

The one country in the contemporary world of industrialized nations that does not have a national health care system happens to be the richest of them all.  The United States.

The internal arguments in this richest nation seem to focus on two issues:

[1.] People should not depend on the government.

[2.] Other national health care systems are flawed.

These arguments are nothing but thinly veiled ploys to sustain the immoral, society-sucking profits gained by denying health care to those “consumers” who need it.

Depend on the government?  Yes, we depend on the government!  We depend on the government for our national defense.  We depend on the government for highways and fire departments and police departments and airline safety and disaster intervention and on and on.  We should depend on the government to judiciously regulate health care, which is a matter of health or death, people!

The United States prides itself on freedom.  Freedom includes the right to leave a job, start a business, get treated for cancer and go on to live a productive life without screaming at a soulless bureaucrat over why a band-aid in the hospital cost $50 when I said I didn’t want one!!!

And here’s the most politically startling bit:  this is not a liberal or conservative issue.  Ask a mainstream conservative Brit if he or she believes the National Health Service should be taken away.  He or she will look at you as if you’ve taken leave of your bloody senses.  Of course not!  The same is true in Canada, Germany, Spain, Japan, France, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, the Netherlands—you name it!

Again and simply:  we have the right to a stalwart national defense and a fire department that douses a fire and an interstate highway system that allows us to travel around and haul goods across the country.  We ought to be able to get fixed when our bodies break.  That’s the freedom we deserve, and it’ll cost less, socially and economically, than the you-can’t-have-it system we have now.

As if all this wasn’t stupid and morally obvious enough, here’s a crazy little secret hiding in plain sight:  we already have national health care.  It’s called Medicare.  And anyone who has it wants to keep it.  Yes, we already have national health care, but it’s only for some people.  And the some people who have it won’t let it go.  Why not for everyone?

And regarding the shortcomings of national health care systems around the world, here’s a News Flash:  They Are Not Perfect!  Welcome to real life!  Nothing out there is perfect.  But all the other systems of national health care do allow citizens to receive treatment without question or worry of bankruptcy.  And everyone who has it wants to keep it.  And for all you economists out there, all the other nationalized health care countries in the world spend less and get better results than we do.

Yes, we want capitalism to work—for everybody.  All the stakeholders benefit when the citizens are healthy, reasonably paid, and able to enhance their own fortunes with the freedom and quality of life conferred by Medicare.  And at the same time, such national well-being augments fortunes of the wealthy capitalists because healthy, free, happy citizens consume everything worth consuming.

The Founding Mothers

These major rebel dudes marshaled a scrawny, patched-together, hungry crew—barely what you’d call an army—and they manned-up in a major dust-up with Great Britain, sporting the greatest army on earth.  With red coats.  A snappy marching band.  And commanders who spoke the King’s English.  The founding dudes shook rebel fists at royalty.  And they hurled royal words at the royal ass.  And then they kicked royalty’s ass when royalty came kicking.  Rich, eloquent, tough, scrappy, victorious rebels:  the poster dudes for Masculinity.  They stood up to the greedy, small-minded, power-drunk King of England and kicked his royal sycophants off the continent.  Masculinity at its very finest.  They were major badasses who risked it all for truth, justice, and the American way.

These victorious rich guys had plenty of manly options, as victors have had since the fall of Atlantis.  They could have formed an oligarchy club, members only, and owned everything worth owning.  They could have taken turns being king.  Maybe some supremely Machiavellian player could have claimed the throne for life.  Or they could have made a back door deal with King George, and pocketed buckets of gold by wheeling, dealing, and subterfuge.  Yup, they had options, lots of cushy, self-indulgent options.  All such opportunities would have been well within the bounds of the historically condoned, masculine birthright.

But not so fast.  These badass, musket-loading, kick-em-when-they’re-not-looking founding revolutionaries studied philosophy and botany and astronomy and history and yet more philosophy and they embraced the Scottish Enlightenment, read French and Latin and Greek and Hebrew, parsed fine wine, wore wigs and knickers, and wrote long letters to each other.  How masculine is all that highfalutin French fuss and fancy continental lingo?

They declared independence.  They won a war against all odds.  They had lots of choices.  But what did they want?

They wanted the citizens of this new nation to bounce off their rich, powerful, intelligent shoulders.

They argued about how to pack that punch, and spawn that bounce.  And spawn they did, with over three hundred million great-great-great-great grandchildren bouncing around nearly a quarter of a millennium later.  Even if the great grandkids are not all so great.  Anyway, some turned out really great!  Some didn’t!  Some are really horrible!  And no matter how you rate the grandkids, the whole messy, crazy, miraculous enterprise they spawned still bounces like crazy.

It didn’t have to.  It wasn’t guaranteed.  We could have been like Brazil for the past three centuries.  Nothing against Brazil, but as far as an idea with big bounce in multiple realms—starting with the political—well, the United States has been as bouncy as it gets these past few centuries.

So these Founding Fathers debated how to give their power away for the greater good.  By contemporary standards, the rich guys who gave their power away for the greater good while studying philosophy in a foreign language would appear to be extreme east coast, softy, smarty-pants-know-it-all-elites who would never get elected.  But these present day unelectables are the very ones who agreed to give their power away and imbue this new nation with world-class bounce.

And herein hides—in plain view—the kernel of our miraculous national inception:  the rich guys gave their power away.  That’s what happened.  No one made them.  Never happened before, not in any history I’ve ever read.  This is amazing, and bears repeating:  the rich guys gave their power away, and nobody made them do it.

Certainly, they were not saints.  And neither are most saints, now that you mention it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that the guys who had it all, and could have grabbed more, opted for less.

With philosophical winds at their back, and the sunshine of the common good on their faces, they opted to give their power away.

Quick pause for context:  the 1770s are closer to the Middle Ages than to modernity.  Do the math. About 250 years have passed since the incipient murmurings of the American Revolution in 1770.  So consider that 250 years on the other side of 1770 would put you in the year 1520, which was during the Renaissance, which was dangerously close to the Middle Ages when guys and horses jousted in metal outfits and women wore metal chastity belts.

The Founding Fathers were looking forward, though, a good 250 years or more, which is what more people should try now, but that’s another story.  The Founding Fathers paid attention to the Scottish Enlightenment in particular, in which it was established that the divine right of kings was bullshit and that individual people had value, pure and simple, because they were people, and if the king had a problem with that, he could appeal to a mirror.

Their place in time does add context, yet these revolutionaries ultimately transcended context, and the proof of that transcendence is the ongoing viability and vitality of the political entity they argued into existence.  It is now, in its third century, one of the world’s oldest and most stable existing governments.  Nobody could have imagined that a system devised when kings had divine rights and slavery was the norm would thrive in the space age.  And it was not the battlefield victory that resulted in such longevity.  The viability and vitality of the government they created emerged not from muskets and ambushes but from mind and spirit and language and desire.

Let’s say that these Founding Dudes were victorious twice:  on the battlefield, and on the conceptual field.  And let’s take a fresh gander at these unusually paired accomplishments, and see where they fall on the spectrum of masculine and feminine engagements with life.  This is dicey ground, as no clearly defined distinctions separate masculine and feminine.  Yet we all understand that the differences exist.  And obviously, victory at war exemplifies masculinity.  When you consider “feminine victory” it tends to be broader, more subtle and nuanced than the clearly scored victories enjoyed by masculine energy.

In terms of our rich guys who won the war and gave their power away, consider the arc of their engagement from victory in war to depth of thought (rather than power-mongering) in the aftermath.  Such achievement in war rarely, if ever, manifests as a profoundly humane and active adaptation of philosophy.  And in spanning this arc from warfare to brainstorming, they also spanned the interface with life from masculine to feminine.  Yes, the Founding Fathers expressed their essential feminine nature as they pondered and grappled and argued and compromised their way to forming a nation based on ideas that honor human potential.

Which brings us to the Case of the Founding Mothers.  That’s right, the United States was founded by moms.  Moms who were also dads.  Because the Founding Fathers who mothered a nation were imbued with bountiful masculine energy as well as bountiful feminine energy.  Both.  They embraced both persuasions, both of these primary interfaces with life.  They roamed far and wide in each of these dimensions, and we are the beneficiaries.

They defeated the bad guys, and in victory they gave their power away.

For over two centuries, we’ve been extolling the Founding Fathers.  As well we should have.  But, we underestimated them.  They were also the Founding Mothers, and in this sense, they broke the glass ceiling in the eighteenth century.

So here we are in the twenty-first century.  The feminine energy of our Founding Mothers has lain dormant too long.  We can still have the mightiest army on earth.  But that’s not enough to live the life the Founding Moms envisioned.  Let’s revive the essentially feminine devotion to human potential that got us here in the first place.  Women can be assertive, and men can nurture.  And thus we can choose leaders—be they women or men—who express our essence with a depth of thought and consideration that the Founding Mothers manifested.

The Writer at Work

Short Cuts

Inspired by living feet first, instead of head first . . .

Lead with your feet and the mind will find new ground.

Looking at your feet twice

 with a camera lens

or a mindfulness lens

 or a frame of mind

could be both anchor and sail.

Could lead to questions linking

politics, physics, life, love,

and the aha! moments.

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Desire + Failure + Success + Methods +

Curiosity + Adaptability + Perseverance

=

WoW! I never knew that before!

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If You Want To Know Where You Are, Look at Your Feet Twice.

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