Ivy Leaf Reel

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on September 15th, 2011 filed in Uncategorized
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The Pursuit of Excellence on One Hard Day

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on July 13th, 2011 filed in Action
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By Paul H. Dudley

For my part, yesterday was a hard day for hope.  Normally the mainstay of my faith in the value of human life is based upon the idea that personal excellence embraced on a global scale could save us from the barbaric side of ourselves.  But yesterday, the practice of pondering humanity’s collective foolishness hit me hard and knocked me down; I further found myself implicated as a contributor to the cause of our myriad societal problems because I’m as flawed as anyone else.  My errant emotions compounded as I faced this realization for the millionth time, and I lost faith in the future.  I found it difficult to see the way in which even excellence could save us.

By the time I found my way out of my conundrum, I had learned another important lesson about the pursuit of excellence: that it would sustain me in bad times as well as in good times, when I’m confident and when I’m not, and through physical action I was able very simply to re-affirm that it could be the same for all of us.  But let me start at the beginning.

As I mentioned, I was down on humanity, and for legitimate reasons.  I had become wrapped up in thinking about the endless distressing scenarios we create that play out over and over, all around the world.  Our human folly causes numberless repeating problems, as it has throughout history.  Any given news story on any given day is likely to be a copy of a hundred stories from the past in which only some of the names are different.  Yesterday I wondered if our ceaseless cycle of dysfunction ever would grind to a halt.  Furthermore I was afraid it wouldn’t.  Ever.

The most popular attempted remedy for our perpetually cyclical mistakes involves reliance upon leaders and administrators of various governments and organizations.  But this consideration is incomplete and by itself has proven to do very little to break our continuous cycles of violence and waste.  The responsibility for our shared improvement as countries and as a world community does not belong to any institution; it belongs to us, individually, personally, and when we hand responsibility solely to anyone other than ourselves, we pay a dear price for our abdication.  It’s an immutable dictate of reality, as former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare John W. Gardner explained in his book Excellence, that people generally get the “leadership” they deserve.

In Excellence, Gardner further wrote from his experience as a former government functionary about the need for individual responsibility as the impetus for societal improvement.  He expressed his ideas from a U.S. perspective, but the concepts apply regardless of national affiliation:

“…the old, hierarchical model is of limited value today.  Less and less can top leaders, political, corporate, or whatever, make the system work without the help of many others throughout the society or organization.  When we refer to ‘our system,’ we obscure the fact that the nation is made up of innumerable subsystems loosely related in ever-changing configurations – subsystems that sometimes mesh but often clash.  The difficult task of making fluid, interacting systems function effectively cannot be ordained in Washington nor for that matter in the headquarters of a corporation.  A great many capable people in various segments of the system must take the initiative in responsible action to improve the functioning of the system at their level, reweaving connections between warring subsystems and proposing redesign of malfunctioning processes.”

Yet I was acutely aware yesterday that too many of us either haven’t heard or don’t understand the concept expressed in Gardner’s commentary.   This ignorance is a primary cause of our collective human problems.  Ultimately, there’s no other solution than for those of us with our heads stuck in the mud to extricate ourselves, wipe our eyes, unblock our ears, and make some honest, unflinching analyses of our surroundings.  The reason that’s our only solution corresponds to the following axiom: knowledge is the only antidote to ignorance.  We – all of us – must actively acquire knowledge all the time.  As individuals who comprise the human species, we need to force ourselves to think our thoughts all the way through logically, thereby engaging our dormant powers of independent reasonable thought, even if the resultant conclusions scare the daylights out of us.  We need to work very hard to learn what one notable contemporary thinker capitalizes as the Truth, no matter how very hard that is.  But too many of us don’t do that.  My fear was that maybe it all just was too difficult for us ever to accomplish, and that fear sullied my view of the world.

The rewards of our excellence would be tremendous.  If we were to spend our time being positively productive instead of personifying acquisitiveness and bellicosity we could make great strides toward alleviating even our worst problems.  So it’s a grievous waste of positive potential that instead of improving our universal situation, we tend to make things worse with our blundering.  To quote the scholar H.D.F. Kitto’s interpretations of Zeus’s words at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey: “How foolish men are!  How unjustly they blame the gods!  It is their lot to suffer, but because of their own folly they bring upon themselves sufferings over and above what is fated for them.” Homer expressed those thoughts more than 3,000 years ago, and it can be source of discouragement when it seems like not much has changed in all that time.

But all this is just complaining if it’s not accompanied by the citation of specific, actionable solutions.  The conditions we all face, described above, were the source of my sorrow yesterday, but the point here isn’t to criticize; it’s to press forward toward a bright future.  The only real value of this tract is in the disclosure of what I referred to at outset above: that I did find a solution to my worries yesterday and that it brought me back to the erstwhile mainstay of my faith in the value of life, which is the pursuit of personal excellence.  In the consideration of excellence, I once again identified my own best and most accessible response to the overwhelmingly gargantuan problems facing global society.  Regardless of my momentary forgetfulness, the solution as always was to improve myself, thereby contributing absolutely everything I could to an improved world population.  Yesterday I realized the Truth of excellence through physical action.

Please allow me the following brief explanation of the way in which it happened.

Evening had arrived, and on selected evenings I’m in the habit of training my unremarkable body at a nearby mixed-martial-arts academy.  Yesterday was Tuesday, and I usually train in Muay Thai on Tuesdays.  (Muay Thai is kickboxing from Thailand.)  I first trained in Muay Thai under the instruction of an astounding teacher named Christopher Clarke, who learned Muay Thai from the incomparable Guro Dan Inosanto and from famed fighter and teacher Ajarn Chai Sirisute.  From a young age, I’ve trained in various martial arts.  I first started training because it was a compelling activity for a young boy.  But I’ve continued training long into my adulthood because I believe it’s every human’s unfortunate responsibility to learn to defend himself or herself to the best of his or her ability, to assume control and authority over his or her own physical safety and survival.  I also believe realizing one’s best physical potential in general is an essential part of one’s personal excellence, and that if more humans were to establish themselves as formidable, healthy physical beings, humanity would grow more capable as a whole.  As a result, far fewer people would be victimized.  To wit, fewer victims would mean fewer instances of victimization.

So it was in my unsettled mood yesterday that I decided to get up and go to training rather than sit and wallow in my misgivings about the future.  I wanted to do something that had a reasonable chance of helping, not in some self-destructive, short-term bromide of a way, but in a way that would earn a fighting chance of improvement and that wouldn’t incur some greater payment later.  And at that moment the only action I could think to take against the numberless insults and injuries of life, and in the name of doing my best to improve the world, was to go the academy and train myself to be less weak.

There it was.  In that one dark moment, I saw a pinhole of light.  I realized that as clouded as the world was to me right then, at the very least I could expend the effort to live in the best way available to me in that one moment.  Was that it?  Was I really establishing a nexus between trying to rectify global socio-political chaos and working out?  Had I learned to find meaning and encouragement in doing something so simple?  Yes, I had.  And if I were to do the best possible thing I could do, no matter how small, would I be achieving excellence?  Yes, I would, because excellence – in condensed form – is one person simply doing the best he or she can do.  Even I could do that.

The only caveats for my simple attempt at improvement were, the improvement had to be real and not ultimately counterproductive, and the action I chose couldn’t infringe upon anyone else’s ability to choose his or her own most beneficial actions.  The decision to go to training didn’t immediately lift the blanket of gloom, but I was aware I had to disregard my feelings for the moment and rely on my brain, such as it is.  Rather than follow my emotions, I had to lead with reason.

To be absolutely clear, going to the academy was not some idle distraction.  It was not the easy way out.  Muay Thai training is strenuous.  It was strenuous when I was younger, and it does nothing but get more difficult as I get older.  However, it helps me fulfill my human responsibility always to develop the ability to defend myself, and it’s inimitable as a means of physical conditioning.  All this is regardless of the fact that Muay Thai is beautiful when it’s expressed well, though I’m not particularly good at it.  In any case, it passes the test: Its net result is more good than harm.  The idea solidified in my brain, which gave me the strength to get up and go.  With that, I had committed to the evening’s training.

I had no great revelations as I drove to the academy.  As far as I could tell, the world around me had not changed due to my small effort to pursue excellence.  I was aware all the world’s problems still existed in full effect.  The only element of the world that was improving, however slightly, was me.  And that was a settling thought, because I could understand the way in which the improvement was real, regardless of the machinations of our chaotic world.  Engaging in the process of training finally allowed me to arrive, if not at peace of feeling, then certainly at peace of mind.

The training session was harsh.  During the workout I felt as if my lungs were roasting over coals, and I left the academy afterward with thrashed shins and thighs.  But I knew I’d done something real toward living my best possible life on that particular day.  I walked away with a few bruises, a more formidable self, and that peace of mind I mentioned, which by then had become profound.  That’s a lot of improvement for one little person considering the predicament in which I so recently had been mired.  Then I remembered there are billions of little people in the world.  I found myself even postulating that if I myself could achieve self-improvement despite my earlier state of confusion and timorousness, then our vast population, which also is often confused and scared, could represent astounding power for collective improvement rather than the liability it’s widely considered to constitute.  Thus, I was reminded anew about the astounding possibilities excellence comprises and the effects it could have if enough people would pursue it.  My individual efforts are tiny, but billions of individual efforts would be colossal.

On the way home, I thought about those who have done so much more than I have in pursuit of excellence.  John W. Gardner, Sifu Christopher Clarke, Guro Dan Inosanto, Ajarn Chai Sirisute, H.D.F. Kitto, and the Greek poet Homer headed the list of those who influenced me.  All those people had collaborated to throw me the lifeline I had used to pull myself out of the muck of my bleak outlook.  While they never promise to lift me out of the muck if I’m not willing to participate in my own rescue, they’ve provided me a lifeline by living exemplary lives, and I’m actuated by their examples.  I still must engage my own mental and physical muscle to pull myself up the rope, but that’s as it should be.  Personal excellence absolutely requires personal effort.  No one is exempt.

As an added benefit of yesterday’s training, afterward my thoughts intermingled with resurgent feelings of encouragement, which couldn’t be attributed exclusively to the endogenously produced anandamide scientists say was permeating my brain barrier as a result of the tough workout.  My improved mood also was the product of my renewed understanding of the power of personal excellence.

Personal excellence of course requires more than just physical training, and fortunately achieving physical self-improvement begat in me the desire to improve myself in other areas.  I decided I should read a while, to try to learn something new.  So I did that.  Later in the night, I did what I often do, which is to consider the notion of my soul and whether it means anything, because the overarching implications of spirituality  are essential considerations pursuant to the understanding of life; hence they are necessary for excellence.  When I woke up this morning, I meditated to strengthen my mind, and today I’ll concentrate on my profession, which I strive to make the cause of more good than harm.   I’m thankful that today will be another hard day and that if I’m fortunate and perseverant, I’ll live to experience more of them.

Today I’m also thinking about the fact that what happened yesterday was what John Gardner could’ve meant when he advised us to “take the initiative in responsible action.”  I’m also thinking about how something so seemingly small and mundane as completing a workout was in reality so meaningful and how it was such an important step toward improving humanity.  Through this understanding, general excellence theory has turned into the real-live, replicable practice of excellence, which even I was able to accomplish and which served me well.

On the heels of my recent dolefulness, I’m enlivened by the realization that my life can be a contribution toward global improvement – my life, me, just one obscure run-of-the-mill person – if by no other means than by taking small actions that remove me from the list of people causing or allowing the world’s problems through willful ignorance and lassitude.  Regardless of whether my efforts at becoming an excellent person have any measureable positive effect on the world at large, in my little life I can continue to do my part, and I will.  I’ll continue to pursue excellence because I realize great personal benefit from the practice, but more so because pursuing excellence is the best possible choice any human can make.

At last I realized the truth that eradicated the last of my leftover heartache from yesterday: that even with all my limitations, if someone such as me can contribute to the improvement of the world, literally anybody can, and that if more people did, maybe we humans could improve beyond Homer’s derogatory assessment.  Maybe someday humans could be a categorical asset to the world, rather than the less desirable alternative.

The pinhole of light I found yesterday has expanded; it’s become brighter, so that today it is a beacon as it has been before.  I know individual excellence could save the world.  Today, again, I believe.

I believe, but not out of blind faith or trust in some external authority.  I believe, but not because someone told me to believe.  I believe because yesterday on one hard day I did it, and yesterday it worked.  It’ll work again today, and tomorrow, and the next day.  Maybe greater and greater numbers of people eventually will pursue their own excellence because they’ll love the fact it works so well.  If they do, we’re saved.  We have that chance.

That makes today a wonderful day for hope.

 

Suggestions for further reading:

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin Books, 2011

Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, 2011

John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? Revised Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 1984, p. 136

H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 54

 

 

Diodotus

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on July 12th, 2011 filed in Theory
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“Haste goes with folly, passion with coarseness and meanness of mind; both are the enemies of wise counsel.” – Diodotus of Athens, son of Eucrates, 427 B.C.

Push-Ups

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 8th, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

The answer is, push-ups.

If you care to understand what that means, start doing your push-ups.   Then keep doing them.

You have to do the push-ups if you want to benefit from their value.  It doesn’t matter one whit that they’re difficult.  If you do them, you’ll get the message.  If you don’t, you won’t.  There are no exceptions to those rules, no way to cheat your way through or around them, no way to clamor or lament enough so that they change.  You can concoct an infinite number of excuses and complaints.  You can come up with endless ways to procrastinate.  You can invent fancy and dazzling avoidance systems.  You can babble away with contrived words describing imaginary conditions to justify your desperate remonstrations.  You can use all those things to cover up your eyes and plug up your ears.

But that won’t accomplish a thing, except that it’ll render you blind and deaf.

The rules are still the rules.  Push-ups still represent the answer, and push-ups don’t stop being push-ups just because lots of people conspicuously ignore them.  Further, you still can’t understand them by sitting motionless and talking about them.

All anyone really can say about push-ups is this:

-Push-ups make you stronger.

-If you don’t do push-ups, you won’t be strong in the same way as those who do.

-Push-ups hurt.

-If you do push-ups regularly, they often will feel monotonous.

-If you do push-ups regularly, they often will make you sore, and sometimes they may even cause injury, try as you may to avoid getting hurt.  Injuries are part of the game.  Often push-ups are brutal and unforgiving.

-Even if you cannot do one single push-up, trying – really trying – is the same thing.  But really trying isn’t what most people think it is.

-That being said, ten push-ups is a larger number of push-ups than five, and twenty is more than ten.  That’s non-negotiable.

-No one can make you do your push-ups, and no one can do them for you.

-You have the right to refuse to do push-ups.  But if you do, you forfeit the privilege of whining when other people are strong because they do theirs.

Again, those are the rules.  You can get mad because they’re written here, but that won’t change them either.

The good news is, you can start doing your push-ups right away.  Right now. Then, if you keep at it, you’ll understand.

Any book or trainer can instruct you to do your push-ups.  They’re not complicated.

Still, why are they important?  What do they represent?  What’s the real reward?

That, no book or trainer can tell you.  You have to do your own push-ups diligently to get it.  You have to push through the boredom, and the distractions, and the discouragement, and the mixed messages, and the injuries, your whole life.

That’s the only way to find out for yourself.

Job Security Is For The Birds

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 7th, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

In today’s deteriorated global economic climate, millions are desperately looking for jobs.  If you’re one of them, and even if you’re not, consider that excellence is the most important and influential item on your résumé.  The notion holds as true in your world of employment as it does in your world in general.

One of the greatest things about dedicating to excellence is that it constitutes your access to job security, in the literal and figurative senses of the term.  The literal sense doesn’t take much thought to comprehend, so put aside for a second the fact that excellent, productive people rarely have to worry about their next paychecks.  Focus instead on the more general truth that excellence is your real, guiding principal under any set of socioeconomic conditions, specifically with regard to your job of being a human being.

Excellence is your guide for success, on the job and off the job, in the best of times, and in the worst.  Excellence subsumes the rare feature of being universally applicable.

It benefits you anywhere, anytime, by constituting the classical difference between coddling the symptoms of problems and fostering the causes of solutions.  The former practice is singular and temporary.  The latter is universal and permanent.

Personal excellence is the solution for every single one of the world’s human ills.  Go ahead, think of any problem created by humans and determine whether universal personal excellence wouldn’t eliminate the problem altogether.

Excellence is your job, and it will be your job always, no matter what.  You can trust in it and rely on it.  In short, your excellence is your solution, and it doesn’t stop being your solution even after there are no more problems left to solve.  Even in the hypothetical perfect world, where there are no problems and no flaws, being excellent still would be the best way to live.  In fact, in a perfect world, being excellent is the only way you’d fit.

Further, excellence is your solution even if all the other humans on the face of the earth were to fail in their responsibility to achieve their own excellence.  Excellence is your job even if this world continues spiraling downwards toward its own demise.  You can find solace in the fact that your job never changes.  That’s ultimate job security.

What, by the way, is excellence?  It’s many things in theory, and it’s even more things in practice.  Yet for the moment, associate personal excellence simply with doing as much good as possible.  Just that.  Think of excellence as doing as much good as you can, all the time.

Of course that’s the very epitome of what they mean when they say, “Easier said than done.”  The truth is, achieving excellence consistently is not only the best thing you can do with your life, it’s also the hardest thing.  Still, that doesn’t change even one tiny bit of the truth that if everyone simply spent their lives doing as much good as possible, all the world’s problems that can trace their origins to humanity would evaporate right away.

Again, make no mistake: The difficulty of achieving excellence does not negate its value.  It’s simply weakness and delusional resignation to say it’s out of reach for every human to achieve excellence because achieving excellence is too hard.  Achieving excellence is hard.  There’s no doubting that.  But achieving excellence is not too hard.

Try an experiment.  Ask yourself the following two questions:

1.  What should I do with my life in order to solve all the social problems we face as a global society?

2.  What should I do with my life after all those problems are solved?

Now, consider the possibility that the answers to both questions are the same, that the answer to the second question answers the first, and vice versa.  Consider that the answer may be, “I should be excellent.”

Then say, “I will be excellent.”  More importantly, do all the quotidian work that earns you the right to say, “I am excellent.”

Finally, consider that the reward is instant success.  That’s the guarantee.  It can’t not be.  The moment you engage in excellence, you win.  The very second you achieve job-qualification, you are employed, for life.  Excellence – aside from being the best way to make a living – is its own reward.  To employ a naked analogy, being excellent is like being a bird taking to flight.  As soon as a bird fights through the fear of leaving the nest, extends its wings, and exerts the effort required to work its wings up and down through the air, the bird is flying, just like that.  Birds don’t need anyone’s special permission to fly.  They don’t need flying laws, flying unions, or flying unemployment insurance.  They just need to fly.  It doesn’t matter to the birds how many of them we shoot out of the air or how gruesomely we poison and destroy their habitats.  Birds will keep flying.  They have job security.  Birds, after all, are born with the natural instinct for flying.

Just like you.

You Alone, Connected

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 5th, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

The world is you, times almost seven billion.  The world community is a magnified reflection of you.  There are no groups, clubs, neighborhoods, political parties, states, or nations without individual people.  But there are billions of individual people, who at their essential levels are independent of any of those affiliations.  Without you, your groups are reduced.  But without your groups, you are still essentially you, the same, no more, no less.

That truth dictates you must do your own growing.  You must bear your own fruit.  You must do your own living.  And in the end, you will die your own death.

And though you are an individual, you are connected to every other life form on earth.  This world is one giant network of interconnected individuals, yet we are individuals first, and most importantly.  You are an individual, but you are not an individual alone.

You are connected because of the reality that every action creates a reaction.  When you speak, you make sounds others can hear.  When you are silent, you are responsible for the silence others experience.  When you consume, there is less available to others.  When you produce, there is more.  And so on.

Interconnectedness is not simply vague theory.  It means something quite specific and momentous.  It means all that happens on this earth is at least partly your doing.  You are never just an observer; you are always a participant.  You deserve credit for the good, and you bear responsibility for the bad.

This is not new information.  We are not the first to articulate these truths.  We are not concocting these ideas just so we will have something about which to write.

Do you recognize the following words?

“No man is an island entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

as well as if a promontory were,

as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;

any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

it tolls for thee.”

Those are the words of English poet John Donne, who wrote them around 1630, nearly four centuries ago.

Substitute “the world” for “Europe,” and instead of “man,” consider the application of “all people,” or if you‘re up to the thought, consider even “all living things.”  We can do this because we claim the benefit of a more global perspective than John Donne enjoyed.

That’s just one example, and even that one is relatively modern.  Feel free to check your own books.  See what you find.

Yet, more importantly, see what you think.

You.

Inward, Upward, Forward

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 3rd, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

It’s been hard work here these past three days.  If you’ve been here, you know.  Our sincere thanks go to all those who have been here working with us.

There’s no time for taking breaks, but more than one colleague recently has articulated the reminder that, included in the implications of thought and action, there could be more at play than the firing of neurons and the moving of muscles.

It’s enough to give one significant pause.  So while a break is not warranted, mindful pause may be.  Regardless of the answer, the question of higher purpose exists.  The question is worth studying, because of its implied overarching importance.

And as you consider it, you must continue to do good, with your body, your mind, and if you are a person who knows what your soul is, you must do good with your soul.

You must.  The cost of failing to do so is too high.

If you are not one who knows what your soul is, and if you haven’t satisfactorily answered that question for yourself, an answer may be something worth attaining.  Of course that takes work too.

It takes work to look inward and upward, while moving forward.

You must think, decide, and act on that front too.

You.

Question This – Part Three: Act

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 2nd, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

(Continued from 3/1/11)

Having completed the prerequisites of appropriate action, we are here, at action’s precipice.  And it is indiscriminate.

If you procrastinate, someone else will be more than happy immediately to take over your right to act.

There, it just happened.  There, it just happened again.

Action doesn’t care about the force that animates it.  Action is equally action whether it’s right action or wrong action.  Action will stem from stupidity just as readily as it will stem from intelligence.  Action gives power to anyone who will take it.  To relate this to our earlier example, consider that most of the people we see above the fold in the newspaper aren’t qualitatively superior to us; they’re just free to act on their desires, because we, in large measure, do not.

The opportunity cost of our sloth is colossal; it is through appropriate action that the most life could be saved.  But it is also here, on the cusp of that action that the most life, at its most essential level, is lost, because action is left untaken.

Changing all of this is a tall order.  There is so much to change.  Our reasoning that tells us that through our lassitude we’re virtually begging to suffer the reality of every word contained in our front-page news.  The same reasoning tells us we beg for our inane television news programs, game shows, sitcoms, and movies, thoughtless excuses for music, unhealthy food, poisoned commercialized medicine, brainless crimes, self-destructive wars, and so on.  The reason the newspaper is such a good indicator of our societal composition, is that all those elements are reported there.  The newspaper is our societal balance sheet, and for decades and decades it’s been telling us we’re deep in the red; the most cursory perusal of history tells us our social deficits lead to recurrent disasters.  It’s anyone’s guess which one of them could be our last.  If that sounds overly figurative or reactionary, compare the implications of the message to the risk of ignoring it.

Still, we could change, surely, methodically, persistently, and quickly.  In the words of Benjamin Franklin, from his memoirs, “And like him who having a Garden to weed, does not attempt to eradicate all the bad Herbs at once, which would exceed his Reach and his Strength, but works on one of the Beds at a time, & having accomplish’d the first proceeds to a Second…”

Notice nowhere in that quote did Franklin advocate for moving slowly.  Neither did John Boyd.  One of Boyd’s many claims to fame was that he was able to run his four-step OODA Loop in fewer than 40 seconds against any given highly complex, multi-dimensional situation he encountered as a jet pilot.  And while the pursuit of excellent coexistence on this giant dirt sphere is vastly more complex than even the most complicated flight scenario, Boyd’s speed is exemplary and illustrative.  He just took things step-by-step, quickly.  We must do the same thing.

You’ve taken the first step by reading all of this.  Take the second step: Question all of this.  And bear in mind, sometimes you’re not questioning what you’re reading because it’s inaccurate.  Often it’s vastly more important to question what you’re reading because it is accurate, deadly accurate, like a sniper rifle aimed right at your heart.  But that’s something you must decide.  This is your life, so you should have the highest interest in making quality judgments about it.  Finally, work until you clearly understand what’s riding on your decisions.  It just happens to be absolutely everything, because on behalf of your own highest interests, you are the only one who can be expected to act.

You.

Question This – Part Two: Decide

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on March 1st, 2011 filed in Theory
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By Paul H. Dudley

(Continued from 2/28/11)

You pay a price when you exercise your right to think critically and to draw reasonable conclusions.  The price is your energy.  The price you have to pay, in energy, defines the difficulty of thinking.  Everything we experience involves some sort of exchange of energy, quid pro quo.  This universal principle of exchange comprises the reason it’s correct to say nothing is free.

Some are willing to pay the price for critical thought.  Most aren’t.  Most people break down and quit when the thinking gets critical and the price rises.

Critical reading falls into the same category, because it’s dependent upon the generation of critical thought, which is to say it also carries a steep price in personal energy.  To read critically we have to question what we read.  Our questions are not signs of some reactionary, paranoid mistrust of government or society.  Rather, our questions are enactments of our rights and responsibilities as human beings.  We must ask ourselves critical questions about every source we read.  This source is included.  Do not thoughtlessly agree with one single thing you read or see here.  Instead, question this, and everything else you see.  If you agree, understand the reason for your agreement.  If you disagree, then argue.  But again there’s a catch.  Argument takes more energy and thought than even critical reading does.  Argument also takes yet more energy and thought than the potential internal disagreements you generate after reading and thinking critically.  Again, if you’re still reading, it’s likely you’re already leading by example in the field of critical thought, not because anything here surpasses your intellectual quality, but because you are the sort of person who pays the price to read, to think, to question, and to decide for yourself whether herein there’s any truth.

There is a pattern involved in the expenditure of all this energy: We must look at something, think about it, and make decisions based upon our observations and thoughts.  Then we must act.  This articulation of the mechanics of human environmental interaction was popularized in the 1970s by American pilot and author John Boyd.  Boyd called the cycle leading to action an “OODA Loop.”  The acronym OODA stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action.

If we don’t wish to engage in the requisite effort to complete those four steps in our daily lives, then we’re left with no reasonable recourse but to sit down in our issued seats, clench our jaws shut, and submit ourselves to the observations, thoughts, decisions, and actions of others.  Yet, if we decide on passivity, perhaps due to lazy or fawning deference, we should at least be aware that the people who will be thinking our thoughts for us, making our decisions for us, and taking our actions for us, most often are no more qualified to do those things than we are.  In fact, frequently they are not nearly as intelligent or strong as we are; they’re just greedier and hungrier for perquisites such as power and money.  To experience proof of this statement, take another look at the newspaper.  Read about our politicians, pop icons, and the heads of our society’s big businesses.  Chances are you’ll find people there who are running our lives, and running them poorly, not because they’re more qualified than we are, but because we’re letting them.

They are running our lives.

We’re letting them run our lives because we’re not observing, thinking, deciding, and acting, and in the vacuum we’re leaving with our inaction, most of the people we read about in the newspaper have jumped at the opportunity to snap up our abandoned rights.  Often they’ve moved very quickly to do so, skipping the first three steps of Boyd’s OODA Loop and jumping to the last: action.  What the OODA Loop concept doesn’t describe – it’s original context didn’t present the need – is that not all the steps need to be performed intellectually in any given instance, and that whatever steps are performed can be performed in any order.  For example, humans are notorious for acting without critically observing, thinking, or taking the slightest trouble to make reasonable decisions.  Lucky for those who have taken up action where we have not, action is like a blade: It cuts as well wielded by the unjust as it does by the just.

TO BE CONTINUED on 3/2/11

Question This – Part One: Think

Posted by Oscar J. Lawson on February 28th, 2011 filed in Theory
1 Comment »

By Paul H. Dudley

The front page of a newspaper is a snapshot of the state of its constituent population.  Find the biggest, most popular paper you can find in your area and look at the top half of the front page, the area news editors call “above the fold.”  Editors reserve that area for the biggest stories.  Notwithstanding the high-minded but almost powerless intentions of a few individual reporters, ultimately the biggest stories are identified as the ones with the highest probability of inducing the greatest volume of newspaper sales.  The front-page space above the fold is valued so highly because it’s the part of the newspaper that’s visible to the reader while the newspaper is still on the stand, in the vending box, or lying on a table, before the reader has decided to pick up the paper.  Above-the-fold content is considered to have the most influence over a potential customer’s decision to be, or not to be an actual customer.  Today the online equivalent of front-page, above-the-fold space is a news website’s homepage.  In either case, the content on the front page you choose to read speaks volumes about your society, because it’s carefully selected to appeal to your collective preferences.

Be advised: The news you see above the fold, or on the home page of your online news provider, is precisely, word-for-word and picture-for-picture what the publishers want you to see, and that’s precisely because you’ve told the publishers that’s what you want to see.  The same rule then applies for the rest of the paper’s or site’s editorial content in order of priority, top-to-bottom, front-to-back.  You vote for what you like by buying the newspaper or clicking on the screen.  Publishers want to sell as much news as they can, thereby making the most money, and they do that by giving you what you say you want.

Now, look at the front page of your largest local newspaper.  Take a second to look.  Then ask yourself, “Do I want this?  Do I really want this?”

This is your society.  This is your life.

Face this fact: If we uncritically read or view a particular information source over and over, we are declaring overtly our willing memberships in the group to which that source is trying to sell its product.  However, if we read or view critically, it’s a different story altogether, literally.  When we begin questioning what we read in the news, we start seeing inconsistencies and hypocrisies, which should cause concern for any intelligent human.  Then we realize we’re looking in the mirror, and that brings the recognition of the need for big changes.

TO BE CONTINUED on 3/1/11