Guest essay by Caleb Shaw
It is not merely the physical science behind Global Warming Alarmism that is rotten; the social science is equally rotten. The fiasco involves both the Sciences and the Arts. You cannot stick merely to facts, and avoid the topic of morality. Therefore this examination of the mutated ethics behind Global Warming Alarmism must begin with a very long digression, involving sportsmanship.
I have always admired good losers, because I am not one. For years I have made a New Year’s Resolution to become a better sport, but can’t keep the resolution. It only took me forty years to quit cigarettes, but quitting bad sportsmanship will take me longer.
Perhaps the roots are genetic, and boil down to owning an inherently bad temper, which my older brothers thought was amusing, when I was small. I was easy to disarm, so they would enrage me on purpose, just to see me dash off to the kitchen and come back at them with a carving knife. Then I grew as big as they, and my temper was no longer so amusing. The larger brother became more cautious when he teased, and the smaller one took a course in karate.
It wasn’t fun being a bad sport. I couldn’t lose a game of checkers without my rage uplifting me and sending me stomping about the room, wildly thrashing and accusing the other person of cheating. The only one who would play checkers with me was a special sort of person who was able to say, “You’re right. I cheated. You win. Want to play again?” (He did this so he could beat me again.)
When I grew to be a teenager I found it hard to keep a girlfriend, as most girls don’t particularly like childish displays of temper. But I do remember one diminutive girl who sort of liked beating me at tennis, despite my poor sportsmanship. I relied on brute strength, and towered above her, but she’d been to several tennis camps, owned something called “skill”, and I never could beat her.
The games always began with me saying I didn’t want to play, but she’d guilt me into playing by saying exercise was good for me and tennis was fun and something we could do together (when I was only interested in something else we could do together), so I’d wind up playing, and getting beaten. Sometimes the games began close, because I was much stronger and smashed the ball so hard she could barely see it, but as I tired my inaccuracy increased, and soon I’d be drenched in sweat while she looked cool as a cucumber, and my shots would start to stray and be “out”, and I’d get really mad, which always caused her to try very hard not to smile. That made me really, REALLY mad, so my next shot would be clear over the fence, which might be good in baseball, but in tennis it meant that once again a midget had beaten me.
I tried to explain to women that the reason I raved was because I was “sensitive”, and an artist, and not because I was a really bad sport. Amazingly, this sometimes worked, but not for all that long.
Another excuse for stomping about and raving was that I owned a “healthy competitive instinct”. This worked with the football coach, but not very well with women. Come to think of it, it didn’t work very well with my fellow artists, either, for back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s being competitive was not “hip”. It wasn’t “mellow”, “layed-back”, (and other words no one uses any more). In fact among artists having a “healthy competitive spirit” meant you were aggressive, a militant “hawk”, and a loser.
This exposed me to a perplexing ambiguity, for artists tended to be a collection of losers to begin with. They tended to flunk all their classes and never went out for sports. The only way they could see themselves as winners was to totally redefine everything, and to call winners “losers”, and to call losers like themselves “winners”. (Do not ask, “What about the production of actual art?” Being an artist back then was more a matter of who you hung out with, and where you hung out, and how you wore your beatnik beret, and, increasingly, what drugs you took.)
A shocking number of these friends of mine died young, either due to drugs or to AIDS, which would tend to suggest that when you are a loser you do lose, were it not for the fact that the survivors of this morally twisted collection of winners-are-losers nitwits are now running our nation, which is why my experience among losers is valuable, even though I myself was not very good at being a loser, and in fact was a bad loser.
Initially I had the required attributes of being a loser: I got poor grades and did badly on the teams I bothered to go out for. However I was a very bad sport about it. Then, as I gravitated towards artists, I discovered I was a loser even among the losers. I was a very bad sport about that as well.
It made me realize I was after something that the winners were not after, and the losers were not after. I needed to do some redefining of my own. Just as my fellow artists had redefined themselves as winners, despite being losers, I needed (simply to muster the self-esteem necessary for my egotistical survival), to redefine myself as a winner, despite the fact I was bad at winning and bad at losing.
Such a redefinition is no small matter. It has taken me half a century. Therefore you will have to forgive me if I digress yet again and take up a little less than a half-century of your time.
The pride and shame of New England is that we seemingly have a habit of redefinition. Sometimes the redefinition is a shining advance, and sometimes we fix something that wasn’t broken, and sometimes it is both. Both good and bad ideas have unintended consequences.
It continued long after the Boston Tea Party sparked a Revolutionary War, where the good idea of Liberty cost the young nation 1% of its population. A half-century later Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded doctors wash their hands (a decade before Louis Pasteur got the credit for discovering germs), and inadvertently this caused a crisis in the Church at a time when New England was the “Bible Belt,” (because germs were an invisible power other than God.) Not long after that other redefiners pushed the radical idea that slavery should be abolished in all places, which rather than mere paper legislation inadvertently led to the horrible slaughter of the Civil War, which cost nearly as many American lives as all the nation’s other wars combined.
And so it has continued, on and on, into my boyhood, where Timothy Leary advanced ideas about Liberty involving sex and LSD, inadvertently involving tragic consequences that many of us have seen play out with our own eyes, involving people we cared (and care) for deeply.
In conclusion, redefinition is no laughing matter, and nothing to take lightly. You can’t blithely reform things like the Ten Commandments or the American Constitution, without facing reverberations of a magnitude that is far from blithe.
To return to the topic of sports, as a boy I noticed New Englanders tend to be less athletic than the rest of the nation, perhaps due long winters stuck indoors, and perhaps due to an overdose of colleges and universities. New Englanders tend to be intellectual, rather than physical. Back in the last century the idea was that the only way New England could have a good sporting team was to invent a new sport. And this was proven by the fact that, during my boyhood, New England had among the nation’s worst baseball, football, and hockey teams, however we invented basketball, and had the best team for a while, before the rest of the nation figured out how to play better than our star Bob Cousy (who was ambidextrous and could amazingly (for that time) ball-handle with both hands!!!) (Nearly every player does that now.)
Considering I was a bad loser, it was rough to grow up last century, and be a boy supporting the last-place Red Sox, last-place Bruins, and last-place Patriots. You might think that, since I had so much experience supporting last-place teams, I would have become a better loser, but it didn’t work out that way. Instead it fed an intense craving within me to win.
I think this is how the psyche works. When we experience loss we replay it in our minds. The psychologists may call it “Post Traumatic Stress”, but we are replaying the films of the past game, noting the mistakes, and planning to play better in the next game. We own a craving to improve.
I often see this manifest the morning after the Patriots have lost a close football game. When I open our Farm-childcare, I get to see the state young parents are in, in the dusk before dawn, and after a Patriots loss many look haggard as they drop off their kids. They have suffered insomnia, as their mind kept replaying crucial plays, and they agonized over the details. Usually it is the young men who care about football, but the young wives suffered as well, for they had to sleep with the thrashing, kicking, sighing, muttering insomniacs. And of course I am able to empathize and commiserate, for I am the worst loser of them all.
This agony of defeat does not seem to be truly slaked by the thrill of victory. This century has seen New England win more than its fair share of championships, and an entire generation has grown up without a clue of what it was like to be a New Englander last century, but if anything championships have only increased the craving for victory, and made the agony of defeat worse. What’s more, if you win too often you become despised.
Just as I used to stomp around raving and accuse friends of cheating when I lost at checkers, New England fans have discovered winning means you get accused of cheating. 
It is interesting to stand back from all the emotion inherent in the agony of defeat, and see what actual improvements come from the pains of Post Traumatic Stress. One thing that becomes swiftly apparent is the importance of the rules. As one devises new and improved trick plays, one must constantly refer to the rulebook, to make sure the adjustments are legal. For example, one option that springs into my mind, during the agony of defeat, is to shoot the opponents. There is nothing in the NFL rulebook prohibiting this (I checked) however that isn’t the only rulebook we need to refer to.
And here’s where it gets interesting. It turns out that the rules we actually write down in the rulebook, for any particular sport, are but a dim reflection of higher and greater laws, which are “self evident”. These laws can be divided into two basic types. There are physical laws, such as the law of gravity, and then there are spiritual laws, which people tend to be a little squeamish about discussing.
In the case of football the physical laws come up because the amazing athletes push their physical limits. The spiritual laws come up when we attempt to keep them from hurting themselves too badly, and because we should care for these amazing men after they have sacrificed their bodies (and sometimes brains) and are crippled.
In the case of politics, and especially the politics of Global Warming, the exact same factors come into play, though some might protest politics is not a sport. But politics does involve winners and losers, and a rulebook called our laws, and the temptation to “amend” the laws, and to “redefine” how the game is played, and even what constitutes “winning”. It requires we be civil, if we are to call ourselves “civilized”, and that we follow certain set procedures we call “civil procedures”. And here again we see two basic types of laws that restrain man within certain limits: Physical laws and spiritual laws.
The physical laws are easier to deal with, because they are more obvious, though not always clear to a layman. They involve science and engineering, and require scientists and engineers to explain some of their less obvious details. For example, I once had a friend who wanted to install a huge hot tub up in her bedroom; despite the fact her plumber worried about the pressure this put on the drains. She learned to listen, after a major flood downstairs. Physical laws represent Truths that will not be mocked.
Spiritual laws are harder to deal with, because they often run counter to more selfish laws that politicians deal with, that are tantamount to a sort of Law Of The Jungle. For example, a politician needs to curry favor among constituents, and this sometimes tempts them to hand out money and jobs inappropriately, with the money diverted from the people and the job it was earmarked for. In the case of the levees of New Orleans, very little of the money Washington sent to improve the levees was actually spent on the levees, while a lot went to various sorts of “inspectors”, and to lawyers involved in endless environmental lawsuits. The result of this was that, when Katrina arrived, the levees were not ready to hold back the flood. It did not matter that the Law Of The Jungle had been obeyed, when The Law Of Nature arrived.
Politicians always claim they need more money, but money is useless if corruption misappropriates it. Few projects have involved cost overruns as insanely huge as Boston’s “Big Dig”, but the vast expense couldn’t change the result when substandard materials were used, resulting in a dangerously leaky tunnel that has already killed a driver with a roof collapse. Bostonians were happy when there were lots of jobs and Federal funds were being flung about, but they will be less amused when a tunnel-collapse cuts their city in half.
The Law Of The Jungle seems smart in the short term, but in the long term Truth will not be mocked. It is for this reason the Navy conducts trials. They will not trust a ship given to them by bureaucrats. The last high-speed troop carrier delivered to the Navy had its bow cave in, the first time it was tested in heavy seas. You don’t want to discover a shortcoming like that in the middle of a war.
It is hard to have such a trial when you are building a bridge, and it is embarrassing to all concerned when a brand new bridge has a structural failure, as occurred recently with the Nipigon Bridge in Canada. Glitches like that are suppose to be seen and ironed out when things are still in the planning phases, and not after a bridge is already built.
The sad fact of the matter is that we are likely to see more of these costly mistakes, not fewer, as long as we allow the political Law Of The Jungle to rule science and engineering. The sooner we erect some sort of barrier between politics and science the better off we will be.
This seems unlikely to occur until people recognize they can’t take the money and run. There seems to instead be the attitude that it doesn’t matter if levees fail in New Orleans, tunnels collapse in Boston, and bridges close in Canada, as long as one can retire safely to Florida. People think they can escape the consequences.
However this implies there are consequences, and some are not even willing to admit that. They assume they are the winner in a situation that causes others loss, and that others are the losers. They think that if there is karma to face or hell to pay, others will face it, as they sit back, eat cherries, and laugh last.
This is not how the Law Of The Jungle works. The king of the jungle doesn’t get to retire to Florida. The moment he shows any sign of weakness, he faces the jungle-consequences of weakness, of aging. Only a civil society cares for their elderly, or even allows the elderly to become philanthropists. In the jungle, as soon as you weaken, all your wealth is taken. That is just the way it works, when you abandon civil procedures and ignore spiritual laws.
Because of this some adopt a splendid hypocrisy, wherein they ignore civil procedures while amassing their fortune, but as soon as they have their hoarded pile they become very, very interested in the very same civil procedures they once so blithely ignored. Few onlookers buy this double standard, (though some will nod and put on an agreeable face, if paid a high enough salary). Gradually the hypocrite experiences a dawning, painful to behold, wherein they move from calling others suckers to realizing who the sucker actually was.
It turns out civil society is based on spiritual laws involving fairly simple concepts, such as being a good neighbor, and that it is better-to-give-than-receive. Some lawyers might scrutinize the scriptures of various lands and say it is only better-to-give-than-receive ten percent of the time (because “tithe” means “ten percent”), but nearly all religions include the concept of “charity”. However it is when examining the concept of “charity” that the most horrendous hypocrisy and most stupendous violations of spiritual law are seen.
The simple fact of the matter is that you are not supposed to get richer if you give. If you have a hundred credits and give ten percent, you are suppose to only have ninety credits left. Therefore you should be highly suspicious if you notice the giver winds up with three hundred credits. That money is coming from somewhere, and more often than not it is stolen from the very poor the charity was suppose to be helping in the first place.
I will not belabor you with countless examples of people who claim they are spiritual, and helping the widows and orphans, the sick, the oppressed, and those in prison, yet who wind up wealthier, even as those they claimed they would help wind up worse off. I’m certain you can think up examples of this gross hypocrisy on your own. What I would like to propose is that such behavior is actually the antithesis of charity, and a major violation of spiritual law.
It seems to me that, just as an engineer cannot mock physical Truths, people who work outside the sciences cannot mock spiritual Truths. In both cases the mocker will face a day of reckoning. Brown stuff will hit the fan. In the case of do-gooders, fewer and fewer will be persuaded by the altruistic arguments of the ones who claim they do-good. People disbelieve that glib altruism, when the speaker resembles a fat tick bloating off the lifeblood of a nation.
Rather than depressing you with examples of people involved in Global Warming discussions who resemble fat ticks, I think it would be less depressing to revert to contemplating young artists, and their losers-are-winners attitude.
When you come right down to it, art is very rarely a way to get rich. For 99.99% of all artists, giving the gift they were given is a form of charity, for the artists does not see much material gain. Even if they get some money thrown into their guitar case, as they play on a sidewalk, they could likely be making far more money hammering nails at a construction site. And many others do not play, or paint, or compose, or write, in public at all. They sing for their family, or friends, or in a church choir. They give for the joy of giving. That may be why poets are defined, in Sufi humor, as “proud beggars”.
This underscores the fact that the benefit of art, and all gift-giving, and all charity, is not a thing measured in dollars. Unfortunately, a very few artists, perhaps .01%, are so amazingly good that they do make piles of dollars. In my generation the example of this was the Beatles. By being successful they inadvertently gave the other 99.99% the false hope that they too might someday be millionaires, and “winners”. However the Beatles made their money by being more honest than most, and one truth they dared to sing was that that they were not the winners they appeared to be.
I sure wish I got paid millions for publicly confessing I’m a loser, but it hasn’t worked out that way for me, or for the other 99.99% of all artists. The real “pay” for art is in the joy of giving. This is why we speak of “playing” a guitar rather than “working” a guitar. The funny thing is that when you inform many young artists that they will not get paid as much as the Beatles for playing, they say, “Then the heck with it,” in which case they were not really artists. They were in it for the money, which makes them con artists. (Other artists get a Real Job to make money, but continue their art for joy, which is described by saying they have a “vocation” and an “avocation”).
The fact of the matter is that there is a distinction that needs to be made between the Arts and Sciences, but many of my generation failed to make it. Somehow they got it into their heads that giving should make you materially rich, and that charity should be profitable. What is more, they took steps to make charity lucrative, even though that violates spiritual law and is strangely grotesque, like a nursing mother with coin-slots on her breasts.
One .01% artist was Bono of “U2”, who became rich and famous enough to be asked to give the commencement address at a major American university, and he told our youth, “Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will.”
I think that future generations will look back at Baby Boomers, and will be stunned by our delusion that giving should gain the giver material wealth. It doesn’t. The wealth gained through giving is measured in joy. However so insistent are some that money must come from charity that they will ignore all the evidence so freely given by Reality, when one foolishly ignores physical and spiritual Truths. Truth will not be mocked, but when faced with the complete bankruptcy of their beliefs, some will just print more money.
“Just print more money.” Isn’t that the sign of a counterfeiter? To me it is also the sign of a bad loser, who can’t even admit that he or she lost the game with Truth.
(I could give countless examples from the history of Global Warming Alarmism of how individuals have lost the game, both in terms of physical laws and spiritual laws, but as this essay is already too long, I’ll leave the giving of specific examples to others.)
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“A half-century later Oliver Wendell Holmes demanded doctors wash their hands (a decade before Louis Pasteur got the credit for discovering germs), and inadvertently this caused a crisis in the Church at a time when New England was the “Bible Belt,” (because germs were an invisible power other than God.)”
Which “Church”? Can you please me more precise. Can you give some references to support this claim? But as we approach 2017 which, as some of you may know, is the 500th anniversary of the publication of Luther’s 95 Theses, it is as well to note that one disastrous, but inevitable, consequence of Luther’s revolution, has been the spawning of thousands upon thousands of “Churches”, each with its own leadership, its own doctrines and its own history. It is therefore fairly easy to find an example among these many “Churches” of one which did something which can now be criticised. But to equate the actions of that “Church” with THE Church is somewhat misleading. Anybody approaching history in a rigorously scientific way would never make such a claim.
Incidentally, I put “church bible washing hands germs invisible power” into Google and found nothing relevant except a link to this article in WUWT.
Hm. What is so bad about having a variety of churches? Also note that this diversity is pronounced only in North America. In Europe, you have the Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia, the Anglican Church (for which Luther can’t be blamed) in England, and little else.
So all of those wonderful French Cavalle-Koll organs are Lutheran Churches ??
Coulda fooled me.
g
“the Anglican Church (for which Luther can’t be blamed) in England, and little else.”
There are lots of “chapel”-churches in Britain–eclipsing membership in the C of E. Methodism was invented there.
My father first started to study medicine on his way to becoming a surgeon back before we had antibiotics. His elderly mentor had actually studied under Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. So I got some history word-of-mouth, from my father and other doctors at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Its a good story but would take a lot of time. Look up the beginnings of the Christian Scientists and the Unitarians, and the divisions caused in the basically Calvinist town-meeting structures of Yankee towns.
I thought germs were discovered by somebody Dutch or similar; name like van Leuwenhoek. (maybe Anthony was his name.)
Pasteur just discovered that cooking kills them.
g
I googled “christian rejection of germs”. No shortage of relevant hits. Depth of research would take a bit, but it is consistent with my own experience and study.
[What years? .mod]
“What about the production of actual art?”
There has always been a distinction between “being an artist” and producing art. The former is a social role and the latter is an activity. But playing the role is much easier than actually making art and doesn’t involve any personal commitment or risk of failure. So the serious artists who genuinely strive to create something of value will always be outnumbered by the posers who use “being an artist” as an excuse to adopt a certain lifestyle that they find agreeable. The same can be said about “being a writer”, “being an actor” or “being” anything that has glamour or prestige. There are always more people who want the image than people who actually want to do the work.
I gather you are a musician. For most that I know, ‘giving’ may be a part of it, but my impression is that the real pleasure is the ‘joy of playing’, of creating. It’s great when others appreciate your music, or your painting, or whatever—especially when the others will pay for it—but the greatest satisfaction comes from the struggle to create something cool, neat, pretty, beautiful, meaningful, and when you actually succeed at it.
Minor point, I guess. In general, I enjoyed the essay but aside from how AGW promoters violate both ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ truths, I don’t see how that ties in with ‘winning and losing’. Maybe it’s just over my head. For me the real danger of Climatism is not just its perversion of Truth, or its proliferation of ‘fat ticks’ (nicely repellent image!), but its insidious connection with totalitarian politics. For the ideologues, the end always justifies the means: they stifle dissent, and the inevitable casualties are Freedom, and the Truth.
/Mr Lynn
” Playing ” a gittar does not ” give joy “. (to the listener)
g
To the contrary, I get a great deal of pleasure (≈ joy) from hearing a well-played guitar, in a variety of styles (bluegrass and western swing, particularly). YMMV, of course. /Mr L
LEJ: I think George was implying that most guitar playing is not well-played.
Too true, but the person playing is hopefully having fun, If too many listeners throw tomatoes, you can sing in the shower, though that is hard on the guitar, and shocking if you use an electric guitar.
I never took debate class or went to law school, but is there a term for the debate strategy of setting up a false argument to label your opponent with and then proceeding to knock it down while mocking it? I see that being used often in the more biased dens of global warming media outlets all the time. It’s interesting to watch this tactic being deployed for use on the young, distracted, and the already biased followers. Such tactics are an easy warning flag that they have something to hide to undertake this strategy but it must work overall or in a probability model. This question may related to other iterative models of truth detection as cases of unethical tactics are compiled.
The word you want is straw man argument.
… and you gave a good summary of it.
My main point is that the choice to use the straw man argument and the frequency of the usage tells more about the users than the opponents or the topic itself. It seems more important as a self expressing lie detector tool than anything else.
Virtually a text book definition even.
G
“New England fans have discovered winning means you get accused of cheating.”
New England fans have discovered that cheating gets you accused of cheating.
It is a nice essay. I liked it. However, I would suggest it would have been better to leave off the global warming alarmist comments, refine it a little more it could even be longer and try to publish it in a more appropriate journal (Readers Digest? ) and it would be about life, choices and changes to society. Even though WUWT is not the best place for this essay from the perspective of being the best audience, it is still good for WUWT that they get these kinds of essays from time to time as it can widen the readership of WUWT. Those who don’t like to read a long essay such as this don’t have to read it.
WUWT gets me thoughtful comments like yours. They sure beat a faceless rejection slip.
This is such a wonderful bit of writing that I never worried once about where it was going or how long it would take to read. That was fun, because I am usually very aware of the time taken. And there is a nice prompt at the end for the readers to supply their worst anecdotes of scientific misbehavior. What could possibly go wrong?
I think I see the reason why this entertaining and substantive essay got such a prickly and cold response.
Maybe you just can’t win when you criticize the Boomers.
If I am correct, the responses are extremely funny when you look at it in that light.
In that case I think it was well worth playing. Winning isn’t everything.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I didn’t mind some of the more cold responses, as I was intending to stir things up a bit. This web site generates better responses than most, and criticism here often makes me smarter.
Thank you Caleb. It brought back all my memories of losing. In our house the loser got to dump the board and pieces over, and maybe even fling it a few feet.
I am glad I never played tennis with midgets though!
After 40 years the humiliation of losing to a midget fades away. Memory can have a nice bias, and prefer to recall the smiles.
I remember Timothy Leary was a household name as I grew up. My mother was sure that there would one day be drugs to effect perfect memory and cause new experiences that would change people. But that wasn’t all.
Timothy Leary thought that the taboos on four letter words were a ridiculous restraint. “They’re just four letter words,” my mother said.
Now several decades later what are the results of the attitudes of the Boomer generation towards psychoactive drugs? The entire society is using mood enhancers at the least provocation. 25% or more of boys are on drugs so that they will be able to sit in rows in public schools. Children as young as 3 are being diagnosed and drugged for disorders such as bipolar disease. The schools are up to their eyes in substances and the suicide and overdose rate goes basically unremarked and unreported.
Every other word on youtube is profanity, whether you read comments or click on a video. Movies and media place four-letter words where you least expect it. There is no enforcement of simple standards of decency.
Well hoorah for you.
I was all for drugs as a teenager, but after seeing too much ugliness I became anti-drug in 1972, whereupon lots of people wouldn’t invite me to their parties any more. To this day I am always advising parents not to drug their energetic boys.
Both my father and stepfather taught at Harvard while Tim Leary taught there, and neither approved of his “experiments”, especially when the daughters of other Harvard professors were invited to participate. After all, he was a man in his mid 40’s. I could tell a tale or two, but the guy is dead, and if I am going to point out bad examples I should really look in a mirror and confess the stupid things I myself did back then, and still do from time to time (though now my stupidity doesn’t involve drugs.).
I agree with you that mind-altering drugs have not helped our society. People really thought drugs were going to “expand consciousness” but instead they seemed to increase stupidity. Rainbows in the short-run, charcoal and ashes in the long-run.
The dumbest idea is that you can get smarter with a pill. It takes study and experience, and likely also some luck (also called the Grace of God.)
And primarily a source for truth that is actually True, Then believing it.
Neither come from a pill. They just throw the doors of the mind open to a source that is not True.
PS I don’t remember much of the game, but I was at a game when Bob Cousy played for the Cincinnati Royals.
Caleb,
I always liked this Leary quote (it’s in the chart, at the bottom of the second graph):
http://oi56.tinypic.com/16ifevq.jpg
Leary liked to borrow the quote, “If you can remember the sixties you weren’t there,” which I think is a sad quote, even if true. Pioneers went off on an exploration, but could make no maps.
Mandating and then investing in green tech (to save the planet) is indeed a kind of charity which has been redefined.
A fine essay, Caleb. Thank you very much.
And don’t listen to those that try to tell you it’s too long. They just have short attention spans.
This whole article presupposes that people are driven by ‘winning’.
I find that concept very hard to believe. There are times in life when people are driven by that, but actually, most people I’ve come across (not all, but most) are driven by loving and being loved; understanding and being understood; finding a worthy goal to pursue in life and following it; and reproducing.
I know some people who think that ‘winning’ is hiring someone aggressively with a spiel and then, as soon as you signed them up, telling them to do things they’ve never done in their lives and aren’t any good at. Then, after they spend 15 months crafting out a niche and becoming successful, promoting them and telling them to going back to organising all the things they’ve barely done in their lives and really hate. They were ‘winners’ because they had more money than I did. They owned the business and I didn’t. Damn the fact that they broke the law over certain material omissions. Money is what matters. They won and I lost. Get with the program and all that……
I know some people who think that ‘winning’ is delaying the development of medical technology for 3 years whilst a speculative financial bubble bursts so you can ‘buy in cheap’. I’ve never quite got that myself. Why should someone’s greed be put before 3 years of treating people? People rationalise saying ‘capitalism is the least worst option’, but I”ve never quite worked out how far you are supposed to push natural human values aside so that a minority can get very, very rich. I wasn’t going to get that rich, however it all worked out.
What I think people need to ask themselves about is what they mean by ‘winning’?
Is winning for you hacking a rival’s computer to steal their intellectual knowledge and then portraying it as your own? The CIA helps many to do that. As I’ve no doubt do many organisations from many other nations.
Is winning for you gleaning what others share on your blog, then insulting their views as you regurgitate them in your next blog? I’ve met some like that too.
Is winning for you watching a business owner deliberately bleed the business dry, undermining every executive who tries to grow the company honourably, as by ignoring it all you keep earning your salary? I’ve met folks like that too.
Is winning for you turning a blind eye to genocide overseas if the dividend streams on your investments go up as a result?
Is winning for you threatening to end someone’s life for protesting in strong language about a war they disagree with fundamentally? I’ve been so threatened in the 21st century for just that reason.
For some of us, trying to find a way of ‘winning’ which isn’t simply organised crime is quite hard.
It’s much easier to be a trusty in a cheating organisation than it is to create value honestly.
Thing is: if you’re no good at lying with a straight face and not caring about it, you’ll even be a loser as a trusty in a dodgy organisation.
To be a good loser, you have to respect the rules of the game.
If your life’s course means that you can only win by changing the rules of the game, that may never be very possible……..
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, rtj1211. When you stated, “What I think people need to ask themselves about is what they mean by ‘winning’?” you touched a point I was trying to make.
Some suggest we need to become desireless, but until that day comes life tends to be divided into winning-vs-losing, profit-vs-loss, pleasure-vs-pain, gratification-vs-frustration, and so on.
The thing I was trying get start a discussion about was the difference between physical and spiritual laws. In terms of “profit”, business must see a profit, but profit shows a charity is failing. They are different realities with different laws.
My response also vanished.
(Mods: Response to rtj211 vanished. Can you recover? Either way, you can delete this.)
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Rewrote comment. Second attempt not showing up either. ??
“Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” But hiding somewhere, I guess. Not that it was so profound. Just vanity of authorship. 😉
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This is true. Caleb appears to reduce all of life to ‘winning’ or ‘losing’; indeed his essay suggests that he views his whole life history that way, which is probably unhealthy, if not worse. But rtj211 in his long list narrows ‘winning’ down to nothing more than cheating, if not worse. In point of fact, there are lots of competitive contexts where people win, honestly and compassionately. Indeed, that can be said to be the genius of the American system.
What any of this has to do with CAGW is a little obscure. Insofar as there is a competition with the ideological Climatists, they appear to have the upper hand, disguising their ambitions with the phony ideal of ‘Saving the Planet’, and riding roughshod over any who stand in their way. It is surely not enough for those who espouse the Scientific Method in the pursuit for truth to rely on future history for the Climatists’ comeuppance; they have to be defeated, somehow, yet without descending to their level. There, I guess, is the point of Caleb’s essay, unless I have missed it entirely.
/Mr Lynn
(Curious. WordPress thinks it got the (second) comment. But it doesn’t display. Repeating with slight modifications (header notes) doesn’t seem to work. Any explanation? No links or forbidden words in the comment. These small complaints seem to work. )
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Thanks for your thoughts. I can see weaknesses in my expressions. Allow me to attempt to be more succinct.
Perhaps true saints are detached from cravings and desires, but most of us are trapped in duality involving winning-vs-losing, profit-vs-loss, pain-vs-pleasure, gratification-vs-frustration, and so on.
While playing such a “game” it is important to see certain realities govern certain arenas.
For example, consider the concept of “profit”. In business if you don’t show a profit you are failing. In charity if you don’t show a loss you are failing. They are different arenas with different rules.
Caleb, thanks for being more succinct.
With all due respect, it seems to be you who are “trapped in duality.” I don’t think most of us are, except in the contexts where it is relevant or even important. Winning and losing determines who advances to the World Series and eventually gets the rings. It also determines elections. Losing a baseball game or an election may be disheartening, but it doesn’t mean you can’t go home and have a nice dinner with your family. Your ‘dualities’ only become dysfunctional when we can’t compartmentalize them. Come to think of it, that’s how you described your youth.
You write: “In business if you don’t show a profit you are failing.” More succinctly, if a business cannot earn a profit, it will fail. It’s not a matter of perception; it is reality. Nor can charities continue to lose money, either. That just “the nature of the game.” Ultimately, everyone must eat to survive—even “true saints.”
But you don’t have to be a “true saint” to rise above “eat or die.” Human culture and civilization enable us the luxury of “rising above it”—ancillary pursuits and pleasures, a product ultimately of surplus energy and leisure time. A chef takes pleasure in his creations, a football player enjoys his ingenious plays, a guitar player invents a new lick, an industrialist marvels at how the components of his products come together, and so on, and so forth.
That, by the way, is why the insidious attack on our modern energy sources (so-called ‘fossil fuels’) by the Climatists and their ilk is so potentially destructive: the idealists among them want to return us to some kind of Rousseauian “state of nature,” getting our water from polluted streams and burning cow dung for cooking and heat; the Marxists among them want us to turn over our lives to some centralized ‘global governance’ that will rob us of our freedom and independence. They may indeed be “trapped in duality”: “Their way, or the highway.” And we don’t want their way.
There is a duality here, with which we must deal: We don’t want them to win.
/Mr Lynn
I’m reminded of the Confucian concept of the Rectification of Names. “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. …” Just imagine what would happen if you had politicians who took that to heart!
Thanks for a very refreshing article, Caleb.
Your discussion of ‘artists’ changing their perception base so that losers are winners, and vice-versa, is akin to the assertions of the ‘progressives’ that white is the new black, and black is the new white. Already in the 80’s I was coached at work to ‘manage the perception, not the reality’. Now the notion that seeming is more ‘real’ than reality pervades a large part of our population. Unfortunately, there will be no soft landing when reality strikes back.
Caleb, perhaps of interest to you. Perhaps of interest to others.
I composed a lengthy reply, and I tried to use it in the Reblog feature. Either there is a limit on the length, or my length exceeded the function’s capabilities. It wouldn’t load. So, I wrote it at my blog, and here is a link if anyone wants another long essay of loosely joined thoughts prompted by Caleb’s thought provoking essay.
https://gottadobetterthanthis.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/regarding-some-comments-at-wuwt/
Lonnie E. Schubert: Did you try to post your “lengthy reply” here? If so, you may have run into the traffic jam that apparently I did. The Reblog function seems to have a cutoff after a certain length. I’ll have a look at your blog. /Mr Lynn
I visited your site and read your lengthy reply. I enjoyed reading your thoughts. Thanks. I was especially glad to read this: “Feynman taught us the truth that we are easy to fool, but nature will not be fooled.”
Your proposed amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or education or scientific research, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” would surely provoke some lively debate. It has got me pondering , that is for sure.
One thing I have seen is that you cannot legislate spirituality.
Thanks again.
“Facts” are a cishet white patriarchal social construct. Stop oppressing people with facts, Caleb!
It’s more personal when it’s the building you live in.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/02/09/hundreds-california-homes-buildings-used-plans-drafted-by-2-phony-engineers-say-authorities.html
Yikes!