Ben > Recent Status Updates

'Willing to take risks for the price of self-knowledge'. For many years, I considered myself risk-averse, prudent, conservative, calculating. I understood these adjectives in a way that's made me feel pathetic, small. But my teens & 20s were filled with intense, sometimes unbelievable in retrospect, risk-taking *in the pursuit of self-knowledge*. Taking risks *for this purpose* is admirable. I like that about myself.

Author says she read 32 books in anticipation of her 1-month experiment with microdosing. And people call *me* prudent!

The second chapter is worse than the first. The author starts making large & unfounded claims about the state of the nation & its history, e.g., his criticism of neoliberalism was opinionated & lacked a single reference to source material of any kind or quality. He claims that Australia isn't egalitarian but literally one sentence later says that it is, relative to England. It lacks the focus of the first chapter.

The first chapter deals with the story of how decades of Liberal Party failure led to the emergence of the Teal movement in the mid-late-2010s and through them to the permanent reshaping of Australian politics, as trends show that the dominance of the Liberal-Labor two party system is on an inexorable decline and that independents, the Teals most conspicuous among them, will figure ever more largely in political life

He redefines democracy to mean only direct democracy, for example as the kind sometimes practiced (to tyrannical effect) in ancient Greece. This is a clear example of the No True Scotsman fallacy and it denies or rejects the widespread contemporary understanding of the term that incorporates the liberal traditions and which presupposes as normal limits on democracy so as to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

von Leddihn is immediately suspect for claiming that the only "true" definition of democracy is direct democracy and that democracy is entirely and irreconcilably at odds with individual liberty. This is bafflingly ignorant because even the America of his day was a representative democracy that was carefully designed to be so by the Founding Fathers from whom he so liberally quotes. A basic category error.

But to cite only the Unabomber as an example is somewhat to mislead, because he is merely the harbinger of much worse things to come. Of course, there are many apparently intelligent but actually stupid lone wolves, such as Breivik, but the truly huge atrocities will be committed by much smarter persons, misanthropes such as antinatalists, deep ecologists, negative utilitarians, who'll wage war against all humankind.

A fantastic novel about the evolution of a family, which after many hundreds of pages transforms perfectly naturally & in a style typical of Houellebecq into a sociopolitical study of something prescient, in this case the increasing power & destructiveness of lone-wolf terrorists, particularly the kind about whom I myself am writing a novel, the rare kind that is intelligent intellectual & effective, eg the Unabomber

Houellebecq has changed. His standard themes return: the penetration of market forces into every corner of life, contemp. politics, terrorism of one kind or another, anomie, the extremes of sex. But other topics, such as love, which were always present in his writings, are now treated with an unprecedented, almost palpable yearning. The enfant terrible is as prescient as ever but he seems finally to have softened.

This is one of my favourite books. Its language is simple, vivid, and rich with understated subtext. I realise now that I was drawn to this book as much by its beautiful, clean prose as by its protagonist, Michael K, who in many ways resembles the Desert Fathers whom I obsessed over when I was young and whom I still revere. Both reduced their desires to almost nothing, and both were deeply, awesomely contented.

The second speech in this volume is ostensibly about Tassie lit. I will not steal from the interested reader the joy of reading such a wonderful essay, but I will say that the true purpose of the essay reveals itself about halfway through in a blaze of righteous anger. The man is a firebrand. Anyone who knows his bugbears can guess at the source of his loathing. Flanagan's is Oz's smart, wrathful social conscience.

But you can't be authentic by being self-absorbed. We're social animals in social worlds & to live at all let alone to live well means continually negotiating with the bits of the external world that impinge on & thereby partly define our sense of self. This is more not less important in free societies as the freer others are the more they can impinge on us. Authenticity implies some degree of identity with the Other

These historical & philosophical similarities between Buddhism & Western thought have led to the bastardisation of meditation as well as the near-total emancipation of it from its rich cultural/historical contexts. Without these contexts, which in the past have tied meditation to highly particular traditions, rituals, ethics, etc., meditation has radically changed into a tool that, like the West, can be narcissistic.

The modern Western understanding of Buddhism & meditation is profoundly tainted by the background assumptions of Western civ as a whole. Buddhism, alone among non-Christian religions, colonised the West because it was uniquely able to dress itself in the universalist languages of science & the post-Enlightenment projects of autonomy & authenticity. Hence also its widespread co-option as a tool for self-development.

Doctor & patient together negotiate their illness. The same happens with meditators, whose experiences of meditation are shaped in radical ways by the guides who help them interpret their exotic experiences. Meditation, then, even & especially the radical modern kind which falsely believes itself shorn of all cultural baggage, inculcates a deeply realised & believed but largely unconscious metaphysics & worldview.

Medical diagnostic criteria legitimate not only illnesses but their symptoms. People seeking help unconsciously act out in ways newly recognised as legitimate symptoms of specific diagnoses. One reason for the rise in diagnoses of certain illnesses is not merely that our doctors' understanding of them has improved, but that patients' understanding unconsciously makes them act in ways that reliably lead to diagnosis.

To steal a simile from Grothendiek, reading complex humanities texts that provide deep context is like placing a walnut shell in water. The shell softens slowly & imperceptibly over time, until one day, without anything special happening, the shell falls away to reveal the nut inside. Likewise, imbibing lots of cultural & historical context slowly softens prejudices & ideologies until at length it reveals: the world.

This is but one reason among many why the humanities and some so-called soft sciences, such as history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, are essential fields of study. They broaden and deepen our understanding of the world as it actually exists and thereby help us navigate that world with real, rather than narcissistic, confidence. The hard sciences do this too, but about very different things. Both are vital.

This is because importing ahistorical ideas about meditation has wrought immense psychological & social harm. Certain demographics of people in modern West are especially susceptible to the harms of meditation but, because of the way meditation has been transmitted to the West, they are completely ignorant of these harms & unprepared to combat them. These harms were well known in their cultures of origin.

The study of the history of ideas is not simply a matter of scholarship but of morals: essential to the proper function of any society is the ability of its citizens to situate ideas in their proper historical context. This prevents ahistorical distortions, omissions, and lies from spreading through its culture and damaging its institutions. This is true even of topics as niche as the cultural history of meditation.

Crucial insight: the widespread modern conception of meditation (which is almost always taken to mean basic mindfulness meditation) as an objective, empirical, values-free, "science of the mind", is almost certainly false. "If there is any realm in which the observer affects what is observed, it is consciousness". And if there is any practice that closely observes, and thus affects, consciousness, it is meditation.

Scholarship of the highest order: cautious, nuanced, detailed, full of caveats, sceptical, learned, and open to a wide variety of sources of information. It explores the relationship between meditation and Buddhism as they were practiced and understood in ancient India, and the kind of mindfulness meditation which is pushed everywhere in the modern world as the essence of Buddhism and the essence of meditation.

I'm already recommending this to people. It contains simple actionable insights, the kind of insights that're obvious in hindsight & which even when you first encounter them seem like common sense. 2 are: money is more impactful when you're younger: you can buy a family home, travel, play, invest, etc. So old ppl should transfer wealth BEFORE they die & young(er) people should spend MORE on the things that matter.

For a long time I've wanted, in a weak & wishy-washy sort of way, to learn about the history of my country, about how the particular kind of civilisation that I live in was formed & has evolved over time. This would mean learning about its political history, about its prime ministers. And then I'd know, for example, that Albanese's housing promises have been made many times before by his Labour predecessors.

Not many people are interested in politics. Sure, lots of people are made angry by politics, lots of people have political opinions, but nonetheless few people are truly interested in it, take the time to understand it, care about it abstractly. Fewer people still care about the political history of their country. Which is bad. Because if you know your history, you know what's been tried, promised, and lied about.

LBJ's dad was a great optimist. He bought disused farmland & dreamed of making it fecund again. But he went bankrupt & his family suffered greatly thereafter. Everyone else knew that the soil was dead. LBJ learned a hard & enduring lesson from this: the consequences of losing, of relying on optimism & sentiment & dreams. Everything that got between him & winning was a dangerous delusion. Hence his ruthlessness.

When LBJ entered congress, he didn’t even know how to open a bank account! But he was renowned for his intense ability to learn. It didn’t matter than he didn’t even know how to open a bank account; what mattered was that he took the effort to learn, and to learn quickly, and to remember what he learned, and to use what he learned very wisely and very well.

In his biography of Caesar, Goldsworthy showed how Caesar & other Roman politicians manipulated vast networks of favours to accrue political power. LBJ did the same, to historic effect. His pro bono legal wrangling for wealthy financiers won him their love, which he used to procure numerous small cash grants that he personally directed to congressmen, whose favours he won in turn. In Oz it's called pork-barreling.

Working on The Power Broker for 5 years in total isolation from other writers had made Caro aware of a deep sense of doubt & unreality pervade all his thoughts about his work. People would ask how long he'd been working on it; 5 years, he'd say, & the way they'd look at him would make him feel ashamed. Then he found a writers' group & they'd say, "Only 5 years? Mine took 9". Years of doubt were effaced in an instant.

Cats have very long and very short-term memories. Their memories are long because their early-life experiences set their personalities for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, their working memory apparently lasts for a mere 7 seconds. One practical consequence of this is that cats need to be disciplined & rewarded immediately after doing something. Scolding them for gifting a dead mouse is totally pointless.