The four areas, the efficiency and convenience of which to be improved upon, are cited as follows: remote proceedings, e-procedure, e-management and finally i-justice. The first two refer to general digital technologies that could potentially better facilitate the actual process of a hearing. But the latter two are areas in which a beneficial use case for AI systems was identified. For e-management, the task of an AI system would be the digitization of case related information, interpretation and classification of judgements and creating online appointments. As for i-justice, the task would be to serve as intelligent customer service assistants, automated stenographers, as well as the composition of press releases for high-profile cases and the automatic generation of judicial decisions. All this information I attribute to the article above, which itself references Taiwanese media.

Just yesterday, I've watched the new movie "Psycho-Pass: Providence" with friends. It was an interesting watch, not yet fully digested. Like some strange twist of fate, this particular rendition of the Psycho-Pass series focuses on a world in which the law seems to have become superfluous, with the Sybil system managing every aspect of life and most critically, determining the "value" (literally as well as figuratively) of an individual. The Psycho-Pass is a computed value, based on incomprehensible (or at least unexplained) metrics that determines whether a person is criminal and should thus be subdued using, for example, the police force. Does it compute the value of an individual to society, or does it compute the value of an individual to the Sybil system itself? To me, the answer to this question seems to depend on whether the Sybil system functions as an autonomous being that has the "will to live" as Schopenhauer defined it.

Another interesting subplot of the movie is the interaction between the legacy law system and the new Sybil system, which still co-exist. Heavy spoiler incoming: just like it was the case in the first season, a person comes up that commits what seems to definitely be a crime in the face of the legacy law system, but not a crime in the face of the new Sybil system, only that this time it prompts a nationwide discussion about this discrepancy and what to make of it. The act is committed by none other than our old protagonist and it is committed precisely to delay the death of the legacy law system. She reckoned, the human component in the process of justice shall not go down so easily.

Psycho-Pass offers a compelling narrative calling into question where the truth really is and where it is headed. But in the real world, thankfully, things don't seem as complicated, yet. We do know that AI systems we build have biases, it is obvious considering that AI models are trained using training data, a specific slice of the world. Perhaps it is this very bias that allows these systems to solve complex tasks with efficiency, but it is a bias nonetheless. Would it be possible to bias this system towards the continued existence and welfare of humanity, or is that even the right goal? Should it instead attempt to minimize societal harm, and if so, at which temporal level? Besides a training bias, AI systems such as ChatGPT have other constraints under which they operate put in by the developers themselves, disallowing certain kinds of output.

For me, then, it seems completely bizarre that AI systems would so readily be incorporated in the most significant part of the judicial process, the judicial decision. The article has a lot of additional criticism, certainly more comprehensive than mine. Psycho-Pass goes a lot further than what is currently even possible, yet even the writers of Psycho-Pass kept the legacy law system and the new Sybil system as two distinct entities while in the real world, a fusion between both seems to be happening. We are living in strange times indeed and it will be fascinating to see where the road leads.

The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed. (William Gibson)

[1] https://www.chinatalk.media/p/taiwans-ai-courts-taipei-meetup-sept

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The more I think about this topic, the more I am convinced that the only solution to this insurmountable problem of ascertaining what is truly real, such that our beliefs trend towards a qualitatively better direction, such that our beliefs get updated as the world around us changes, such that every aspect that permeates our world gets its time in the spotlight, this solution to this problem can only be an absolute right to free speech. Maybe I am just too unintelligent to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to come up with a solution that does not include an inviolable absolute right to free speech, a right to express ANY view, no matter how controversial, ridiculous or offensive, a solution that respects "the feelings of others" and "prevents hatred." In my view, and in my experience, and in my parents experience, and in the experience of many others I presume, having only a limited pool of socially accepted views and expressions does not prevent hatred and it does not respect the feelings of others. The only function it seems to serve, in retrospect, is to shut down those who are undesired and different.

Speech should not be restricted. We have words for this kind of situation: censorship, conformism, unipolarity, synchrony, consolidation. Even more impressive, now that I think about it, even Nazi Germany had a word for it: "Gleichschaltung". "Gleich" directly translated to "same" and "Schaltung" to "circuit". It is a direct analogue to electrical engineering, where all circuits are put on the same switch such that one (master-)switch can activate or deactivate all the circuits. The process of Gleichschaltung was in fact the process of the Nazification of Germany, where speech was restricted to create conformism and unipolarity. Restricting speech is to eliminate opposition. That is not just a hypothesis, but we have actual historical examples even besides Nazi Germany that support this view, quite grotesque examples even I would say. Grotesque enough that people might not want to think more deeply about it.

Have we been updating our beliefs according to the changing world around us, or has reality been re-engineered? There is no shortage of new facts of life that are just utterly bizarre. I think the most preposterous example is transgenderism and the redefinition of gender. If we cannot accept that some people are male and some people are female, we will not succeed as a species. We are failing one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of being part of a species, which is to correctly identify the sex of other members of the same species and to use this information to further our lineage. Maybe there are valid reasons not to want humanity to succeed, to procreate and extend the unfathomably long chain of this particular form of life, but I do not hold those views. I'm happy to exist and I'm consider myself blessed to be able to feel like so. Even these views might be controversial to some, because such views can be demeaning to those who are not blessed enough to feel happy to exist. My thoughts on this particular topic have been chaotic and disorganized, but after thinking about it for so long, this is the only answer I can come up with. Of course there are no proofs or other assertions of correctness, that is left as an exercise to the reader.

The only reason ALL of us exist, is because for thousands upon thousands of generations, people have kept on procreating through the most insufferable of times. No one forced them to, except perhaps their biology, but those early H. sapiens 200.000 years ago have worked very hard to make it possible for me and anyone else who lives, today, as a human, to exist. They couldn't have had even the slightest idea what they were really doing, for this chasm of time runs just too deep. But here we are, in this beautiful, beautiful world.

For this reason, I am completely sick of censoring myself and taking part in what appears to me to be a big lie. If the trajectory of humanity is to cast out those who feel like I do, then so be it. I don't have anything against transgender people in particular, there is probably no single person on earth who isn't confused or misled in some way. No one has any fault of their own, but everyone has the capacity to own up to their perceived faults. And just maybe, I'm digging my own grave, displaying how wrong, confused and misled I am. Once more, an exercise for the reader. But this entire blog post serves to vent my anger, as I've noticed that most of my blog posts do... for posterity of course.

Back to the main topic of speech and truth, we are completely reliant on speech to find common ground, to define in any useful sense what is reality so that we can all live better lives. Experience, of which speech is an integral part, is the only way to define reality for ourselves. Perhaps speech developed just for this purpose. I imagine early speech must have been confused, confusing and completely odd. Perhaps it might have been infuriating to some, leading to instant tribal warfare. Imagining the possibilities is very fascinating in fact. Whatever it might have been, we can agree that as a society we have had an awe-inspiring history, full of seeds of what we might call progress, although not in the progressive sense. Why limit ourselves to ideas that might turn out to be false? Or if those ideas were true, why limit ourselves to ideas that might become false as the world changes? The only constant in life is change, as we should all remember. For Christians, Buddhists, even for Stoics and presumably others, the transience of everything is the bedrock of reality.

So who really defines truth? I think my answer (again, my personal answer) to this question is at least hopeful and positive. It is not some arbitrary arbiters who define truth. The universe itself defines truth. Truth cannot be changed except by the universe in total, that is, by all the processes of the universe that exist as they exist together. Try as people may, they will not be able to bend truth. If there is any truth at all, it can really only be defined by what really is. We cannot define truth, we can only suppress it, hide it and bury it. Or we can accept it.

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Of course one instantly sees the parallels when looking at computers. By now, I would say the computer revolution has already begun and is well underway, but the transformations keep happening and one is never quite so sure where it will all lead to and what computers are really going to become.

One very important thing he mentioned (his talk was from 2007 by the way), was that a critical piece was missing: there are no children's computers. Yes, children are the people of the next generation who will actually bring about the computer revolution. That rings very much true. But from the perspective of an onlooker living in 2022, there is dark twist, a kind of elephant in the room that slowly grows more obvious: at some point we introduced children's computers, we call them smartphones.

is this a good development?

To me that is very sinister. Not because smartphones are inherently a bad computer platform, but because of the context smartphones exist in: they are largely controlled by the Google and Apple duopoly, with several manufacturers taking a piece of the Google pie and Apple keeping a lot of its control to itself. Huawei have tried to diverge, but they are not a favorable alternative, they are essentially controlled by the Chinese government. When I say control, I refer to how these companies can direct in which direction these platforms develop. They cannot do everything, any change that incurs too large a backlash will be met with resistance. But they can slowly boil the frog.

By now probably everyone is familiar with or has at least a vague idea of possible problems with smartphones, or rather the things they are most commonly used for. Social media for example is clearly disrupting society and it seems like more and more influence is migrating into the hands of those who control what we see. So many people have raised possible issues with social media that it would be repetitive to go into them here. Besides social media, smartphones are positioned more as a consumer device that should be used for consuming. Some people pursue creative endeavors using their smartphones, for which they seem to be good devices, but a large part of smartphone use is passive consumption rather than active creation.

Smartphones have effectively trained people to believe that devices should be regularly upgraded, even if they work just fine. They even suggest that sensible repairs can only done by companies, consumers should never touch the internals. Smartphones have also trained people to believe that advertising is inevitable, which by now is not even deniable. The same goes for data collection and outright surveillance. Admittedly these issues are broader in scope, encompassing the entire computer market or the internet in general. But I would argue that smartphones have accelerated these issues and made them more inevitable by increasingly restricting a user's control over their own device. Locked bootloaders, unrootable phones, preinstalled uninstallable apps, dark patterns everywhere, arguably the modern smartphone is at the forefront of developing devices that are increasingly user hostile and give more leeway to entities that want to reign over their consumers. The most symbolic indication of this, the taking away of a user's control over their own device, is that sometimes a smartphone user cannot even become root: the system user who has complete and irrevocable control over the device. Indeed, to shield users from themselves, or to disallow undesired changes, a user can now sometimes only operate as a subordinate part of the system. For desktop computers and servers, the same cannot be said.

Of course there is already a rebound effect, new and old movements are trying to improve this state of affairs. Projects like the PinePhone of Pine64 aim to counteract these developments. But the overarching direction of the market, led by industry leaders with big heaps of resources and influence, seems to be generally pointing towards this controlless future. Controlless for the user of course, less control for the user means more control by the service providers.

These are the classic good old arguments I've been convinced of already in the past. Admittedly there might be a bias that is difficult for me to detect. I've forsaken my smartphones years ago now and I plan to keep it that way until there comes along a device that won't consume me, but serves as a genuinely helpful and unobstructive tool to live my life the way I want. Talking about this reasoning is a bit nostalgic now, as I keep forgetting smartphones even exist until a thought like this one comes along.

but think of the children

Back to the main topic, how many children have actual computers compared to smartphones? Even though smartphones are computers too, they are crippled and gloomy for the aforementioned reasons. I wish I had what it takes to survey the state of scientific literature on this topic, because there are a couple of interesting statistics to be looked at: how many children have devices and when do they get them, how much do they use it and what do they use it for? I've found two articles that at least offer interesting perspectives, one about general smartphone and tablet use of children with not too high but also not too low a sample size, called "Young Children's Use of Smartphones and Tablets" [1]. This one shows that children get a mobile device at a surprisingly young age and they also show that these devices are most commonly used as enablers of consumption. Another study with a sample size an order of magnitude smaller has looked at more subjective and qualitative aspects of smartphones use, this time for adolescents. It's title, "“From the moment I wake up I will use it…every day, very hour”: a qualitative study on the patterns of adolescents’ mobile touch screen device use from adolescent and parent perspectives", is not particularly uplifting [2]. (Yes it said "very hour", probably citing a parent.)

But I think just being surrounded by younger people in one's own vicinity already hints at the data: younger people are using mobile devices, a lot. I'm not at all the first person to raise this issue, others have lamented the fact that society might suffer from all the consequences, many of which we cannot even grasp yet, of younger generations using smartphones so much and being utterly reliant on them. Couple this with the fact that smartphones have an essentially locked down ecosystem in which these younger people are taught what they ought not to do and better leave to companies, and also the storm of information that serves to indoctrinate its subjects. To me this is an unbounded and absolute disaster.

Maybe this is too hyperbolic and maybe people will find a way to coexist with technology that serves to undermine them, but I'm not optimistic. There is every reason to assume the worst. Ironically, the phrase "but think of the children" has been co-opted by governments and companies alike to encroach what used to be under an individual's control, so I cannot even say this phrase without sounding sarcastic. Thinking about these issues serves maybe as a possible explanation for many of the strange developments we have been experiencing these past years. The pandemic itself has, as others have argued and shown, also served to increase how much we use devices in general.

It was a genius move, the scale of which was probably not comprehensible when it was first tried, to bring smartphones to children and market them as ways to increase their safety. Like Alan Kay wanted, children can make extensive use of computers now, but probably not in the sense he envisioned back then. I wonder what he thinks about all this. To me, the way children use smartphones is a big elephant in a small room, but one we love to subconsciously remove from our view, however impossible. Somehow this time I felt obligated not to ignore the elephant and say that it exists.

It's not actually that useful to think about doom and gloom, because this is hardly anything an individual can change or influence. But an individual can still make individual choices and seek the best for their kids.

The real question is, which computer revolution exactly is underway?

[1] Young Children’s Use of Smartphones and Tablets

[2] “From the moment I wake up I will use it…every day, very hour”: a qualitative study on the patterns of adolescents’ mobile touch screen device use from adolescent and parent perspectives

To introduce what the book is trying to be I have to delve into its structure a little. Each chapter besides the last is devoted to some special person who has produced their own original work trying to advance some set of ideas. All chapters thus summarize and build upon seminal works of some more or less important historical figures. Each person, besides the first, is what Burnham considers distinctly Machiavellian, in the sense that their ideas are at their core similarly structured and similar in their message to Niccolò Machiavelli's writings in The Prince.

For this review I will make sections pertaining to each of the sections of the book and look into some of the valuable insights they bring about.

Dante: politics as a wish

The first author to be presented is Dante Alighieri, who forms the exception. Besides being the author of Divine Comedy, frequently characterized as one of the most important literary works, he also wrote De Monarchia, a treatise on power. In it Dante supposedly tries to characterize divine rights to rule and constructs his ideals for politics. Burnham explains all this while contrasting it with interesting bits of history. Dante used to live in Florence, a wealthy place in many respects, Italy was then quite prosperous. There were opposing factions that were tied in with different parts of the church, making for interesting power dynamics. In the end, Dante was on the wrong side and was later exiled from Florence. Burnham tries to argue that there are many parallels between Dante's political characterizations as well as general ideals and his concrete and immediate situation, a real race for power playing out in Florence. What Dante considers to be righteous politics is really just a reflection of what he wishes to be the case in the power play of his time.

It is argued that what Dante actually writes in his political work has a kind of formal meaning, while the actual intentions of his political work form the real meaning. The rift between these formal aims and arguments and real aims and arguments is sharp according to Burnham. While many consider Dante's politics outdated, for Burnham there is some value because it illustrates this important distinction and is characteristic of a lot of political discourse even today.

After delving into Dante, then, Burnham starts with his quest to present authors whose formal meaning and real meaning coincide. What is written is exactly what is meant, that should be an important property for political science to be scientific. Convincingly so I would say. Having cleared up what should be the quest of a person seeking real formalisms (generalizations or laws) that apply to the real world, thus begins the analysis of the Machiavellians.

Niccolò Machiavelli: the science of power

For those who are uneducated, like me, Burnham thankfully starts with characterizing Niccolò Machiavelli and his ideas first. Machiavelli had this tendency not to take things for granted, everything could turn out not to be true. Particularly in politics, faith in the good will of man and other assumptions about human nature that could turn out to be grossly wrong are widespread. Much of political science is idealistic. When considering actual empirical evidence and correlating the facts, how do people actually behave? Although Machiavelli takes a close look on human nature, it is not man in its entirety, but rather "political man", the part of us that inherently wants (or doesn't want) to be political.

Machiavelli was well positioned because he lived in a time where powers were shifting. Back then, great nations like those we are intimately familiar with today didn't exist yet and power was more distributed, although the great nations were beginning to form. It was Machiavelli's chief immediate practical goal to unify Italy, thus he wrote The Prince, diving into what a ruler needs to do. Machiavelli's characterizations of those who are rulers and those who are ruled were worthwhile contributions, although I'm unsure in what percentage to the ruled as opposed to the rulers. His point about nations and princes also turned out to be accurate, Burnham writes at this point:

"Machiavelli concluded that Italy could be unified only through a Prince, who would take the initiative in consolidating the country into a nation. Those who think sentimentally rather than scientifically about politics are sure to misunderstand this conclusion. Machiavelli did not reach it because he preferred a monarchy or absolutist government - we shall see later what his own preferences were. He reached it because he found that it was dictated by the evidence."

"Moreover, in this conclusion Machiavelli was undoubtedly correct. All of the European nations were consolidated through a prince - or, rather, a succession of Princes - and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. So it was in France, so in England, so in Spain. The feudal lords did not want nation-states, which in the end were sure to bring the destruction of their power and privileges. The masses were too inarticulate, too ignorant, too weak, to function as a leading political force. The Church knew that its international overlordship was gravely threatened if the national system were successful."

Mosca: the theory of the ruling class

Next up, Gaetano Mosca and his seminal work Elementi di scienza politica, a work that has been revised and expanded in 1923 on his original formulations from as early as 1883 in Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare. His seminal work is translated into English as The Ruling Class. Mosca's ideas were based on his theory about the nature of society, which was that universally there exists a ruling class, who is always a minority, besides the ruled.

"Among the constant facts and tendencies there are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies - from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies - two classes of people appear - a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, nor more of less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism."

"In practical life we all recognize the existence of this ruling class.... We all know that, in our own country, whichever it may be, the management of public affairs is in the hands of a minority and influential persons, to which management, willingly or unwillingly, the majority defer. We know that the same thing goes on in neighboring countries, and in fact we should be put to it to conceive of a real world otherwise organized - a world in which all men would be directly subject to a single person without relationships of superiority or subordination, or in which all men would share equally in the direction of political affairs. If we reason otherwise in theory, that is due partly to inveterate habits that we follow in our thinking...."

Even though the message here is that the existence of these political classes is obvious, the remarkable point made here by Mosca is showcasing just how ubiquitous this class distinction is. Burnham goes on to stress:

"The existence of a minority ruling class is, it must be stressed, a universal feature of all organized societies of which we have any record. It holds no matter what the social and political forms - whether the society is feudal or capitalist or slave or collectivist, monarchical or oligarchical or democratic, no matter what the constitutions and laws, no matter what the professions and beliefs. Mosca furthermore believes that we are fully entitled to conclude that this not only has been and is always the case, but that also it always will be."

That's quite a strong message and especially the latter part is not so easily trusted, even excluding our tendencies for optimism. It would be too long to make all the same arguments that Mosca and in consequence Burnham make in the book, but there are a few easily explained reasons why it should be so. For one, the minority often has a good chance of succeeding by being an organized minority. It is in fact much harder if not outright impossible for a larger majority to be as organized as a minority is. There are very real and probably implicitly understood logistical problems in the organization of a large number of people.

Maybe it is interesting to note at this point that Burnham likes to stress a particular property of the Machiavellians, a tendency to try and avoid making moral judgements, not arguing whether a certain proposed fact is good or bad, whether the mankind should follow such a course or not. That impartialness is also an important part of seeking the truth.

Another interesting proposition of Mosca's writings is the dualism between democracy and aristocracy. It is argued that both are always present as tendencies, whatever the form of government. Only the proportion of them differs and supposedly, a "heavy predominance of one of them is usually the occasion or the aftermath of a period of rapid and often revolutionary social change." (Burnham)

Sorel: a note on myth and violence

Goerges Sorel was the author of Reflections on Violence, the work that was his most famous. In it he discusses two very interesting concepts, the effect of myths and the function of violence. Myths, as he calls them, are in this political sense supposed to be some kind of ideal for society to desire and strive for that can realistically never be reached. Social revolutions carry such myths with them, as people act in the promise of something great. It is the point of Sorel that myths not only accompany social revolutions, but are in fact required to propel them and always a part of them. Sorel writes:

"The myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act.... People who are living in this world of 'myths,' are secure from all refutation.... No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before...."

There is something of a scary resemblance to fanatic idealists worshipping a particular kind of government. I would personally say this is most obvious with revolutionary communists, because their struggle is never finished until the ideal that is unrealistic is reached. Never getting there is to them not an expression of the remarkable difficulty of getting there, but mankind's refusal to reach nirvana. But this fascinating description of myths applies to any overly zealous movement and I would trust that the myths are in fact what keeps these movements going.

Michels: the limits of democracy

I find it interesting in this section of the book how Burnham tries to begin his characterization:

"When someone writes a book on democracy, we are accustomed to share with him the assumption, as a rule not even mentioned, that democracy is both desirable and possible. The book will sing the praises of democracy."

"Its ostensible problem will often be 'how to make democracy work' - because even the most ardent democrats, when they get down to the concrete, discover that it has not been and it not working quite as well as democratic theory would lead us to expect. A similar approach is made to such goals as peace, employment, justice, and so on. It is assumed that these are desirable and possible. A writer then devotes his energy to stating his personal scheme for securing them, and thus saving mankind from the ills that somehow in the past have always beset it."

"No Machiavellian, however, makes such an approach to social and political subjects. A Machiavellian does not assume, without examination, the desirability of democracy or peace of even of 'justice' or any other ideal goal. Before declaring his allegiance, he makes sure that he understands what is being talked about, together with the probable consequences for social welfare and well-being. Above all, no Machiavellian assumes without inquiry that the various goals are possible."

Quite remarkably, this passage puts our intuitive desires and our programmed responses to such questions aside and tries to get real about the subject matter. This is not necessarily Burnham's point here, but here it is interesting that he writes about probable consequences. It is true that to reach utopia from our present society, our society would need to traverse along some path from the current state to the desired state. I would argue this transition is why the ideal is never realized, the transition is where we go wrong, and this transition might even be where myths propel us to commit righteous violence, to play into the work of the previously considered author.

Only towards the end of the book does Burnham tie in together all the concepts and ideas of these quite varied authors, but there is a kind of satisfying resemblance of concepts between each of them. For example, Mosca's "ruling class" and the "ruled" might as well be called identical to Pareto's "élites" and "non-élites" which appear a bit later throughout the book. Mosca's "political formulas" function just like Sorel's "myths" and so on. This is just one possible reason that Burnham places them all inside this one big Machiavellian basket.

In this section of the book we consider another seminal work, this time by Robert Michels who has written Political Parties, a masterpiece according to Burnham. The following two passages shall tell how Burnham sets out his own (and Michels') uncompromising analytical journey to find out what are the roots of democracy and oligarchy:

"... Moreover, these working-class movement did arise historically for the sake of democratic struggle against oligarchy in all of its forms throughout social life; their official doctrine was and remains uncompromisingly democratic; their founders, who began the organizations and established the doctrine, were for the most part men of unquestionable and remarkable sincerity. Their membership is based primarily upon and comprises great numbers of the working mass of mankind. Upon all of thes grounds, therefore, if democracy is possible, we may properly expect to find it, or the strong tendency toward it, in these organizations."

"If, on the contrary, we discover in these organizations, also, not democracy nor a tendency toward democracy but rather oligarchy and powerful tendencies toward oligarchy, this will be a decisive test in establishing the fact that democracy, as theoretically conceived, is impossible. It will, together with the corroborative testimony from the study of other organizations, demonstrate that oligarchy or a tendency toward oligarchy is inherent in organization itself, and is thus a necessary condition of social life."

The first chapter on Michels takes an extensive look at leadership. If there were a true democracy, which is in this case described as a social group that governs itself, practicing so called "self-government" without any external authority (a defining and fundamental feature of democracy), no leadership would be necessary. Mechanical causes and logistics amongst other practical difficulties strike again at this point to make us painfully aware of the fact that leadership cannot really be done away with.

Whenever we are dealing with large groups of people, the challenges grow. A mathematician would say the complexities grow non-linearly and a computer scientist might even fear that they grow non-polynomially. For example, to illustrate the difficulties, consider any problem where a quick decision has to be made. Many such cases exist and they even tend to be the most critical and decisive decisions to be made. It could be whether to strike or not strike the armed forces of an enemy at the border, it could be what to do about some kind of internal struggle. It could be many things. We would need a way for all members of the group to participate in a timely fashion.

So we fall back to leadership, or what Burnham and Michels call representation. Burnham himself writes:

"Democratic theory is compelled to try to adapt itself to the fact of leadership. This it does through the subsidiary theory of 'representation.' The group or organization is still 'self-governing'; but its self-government works through 'representatives.' These have no independent status; what they do or decide merely represents the will of the organization as a whole; the principle of democracy is left intact."

The trained eye, that is to say, a sufficiently disillusioned realist, will immediately catch up the idea that representation might be what introduces new power dynamics, oligarchy, authority or however you want to call it. To disclose my bias, that is exactly what I believe. Burnham continues:

"This theory of representation is suspiciously simple, and those who are not bewitched by word-magic will guess at the outset that it is brought off by a verbal juggle. Indeed, the basic theorists of modern democracy were themselves more than a little troubled by 'representation.' The truth is that sovereignty, which is what - according to democratic principle - ought to be possessed by the mass, cannot be delegated. In amking a decision, no one can represent the sovereign, because to be sovereign means to make one's own decisions. The one thing that the sovereign cannot possibly delegate is its own sovereignty; that would be self-contradictory, and would simply mean that sovereignty has shifted hands. At most, the sovereign could employ someone to carry out decisions which the sovereign itself has already made. But this is not what is invovled in the fact of leadership: as we have already seen, there must be leaders because there must be a way of deciding questions which the membership of the group is not in a position to decide. Thus the fact of leadership, obscured by the theory of representation, negates the principle of democracy."

That in itself is already quite a significant train of thought and a lot more inspired than anything I could come up with. It's a good point made about a difficult problem. I keep wondering how and why we would so easily delude ourselves into thinking that our systems of politics would accurately represent our society at large in a way that keeps the sovereignty of the mass or majority intact, although it seems to me that a large part of the population isn't or wasn't ever under any such delusion. Of course, assuming that current political systems don't end up somehow representing an optimally democratic system, I don't think a single person who would be ready to argue that.

The next chapter dives into problems of leadership and its seemingly inherent tendency to autocracy. Michels considers actual organizations to make his points based on evidence. One interesting type of organization to consider is a labor union, because it is an organization that in the first place primarily exists to empower workers. Unions should be the foremost defenders of democratic principles because it is for the masses almost by definition and for oligarchy to show up in them is already a grave sign. One such example (picked by Burnham not Michels mind you) is given by the United Automobile Workers, which was a very large union, young and not yet so organized. What follows is the actually comical [annotated] citation by Burnham "of the New York Times report of the session of the 1942 convention devoted to the salary question:"

"The salary row started when the constitution committee moved that the salary of the international president be advanced to $10,000 a year; that that of the secretary-treasurer be increased from $5,000 to $9,500 and that of executive board members from $3,500 to $6,000 and that the pay of the new vice presidents be set at $8,000. [Modest enough sums, as union salaries go, but the power of a ruling class is not built in a day. The U. A. W. administration knew that more conventions would come tomorrow.]"

"Mingled applause and boos drowned out the chairman's appeal for order as speakers on both sides of the question went into action. [When the U. A. W. is older, the ungrateful boos will disappear.] James Lindahl, chairman of the constitution committee, stated that U. A. W. had more than 600,000 members, that presidents of many local unions made almost as much as President Thomas [a revealing argument] and that an organization such as the U. A. W., which boasted of being 'the biggest union in the world,' could afford to pay its leaders salaries commensurate with those paid other union leaders."

"The sharpest opposition was expressed by William Mazey, delegate from Hudson Local 154 of Detroit, who was against any increase at all."

"'I feel our officers should be paid the same salary as the rank-and-file back in the shop,' he shouted. 'Pay them like bosses, and they begin to think like bosses!' [Delegate Mazey is one step behind: the leaders, thinking like bosses already, logically demand to be paid like bosses.]"

"To this, another delegate retorted: 'We're treating them like the bosses try to treat us when we ask for a raise!' ..."

"President Thomas told the convention that if its delegates desired to do so, the committee could take the amendment back under consideration 'and cut our salaries.' He said the debate was embarrassing to him, and surrendered the gavel to James B. Carey, international secretary of the C. I. O. [A mild variant of the resignation device, combined with effective democratic piety.]"

"Curt Murdock, president of Packard Local 190, of Detroit, told the opponents of the measure that they ought to be ashamed of themselves and that the leaders of industry, to whom the union men would apply for their own raises, 'would be pleased to hear our arguments against wage increases today.' [An appeal to the sentiment of gratitude, combined with a veiled threat that the delegates had better knuckle down for their own good.]"

At this point I want to mention that Mozilla's CEO has made the same argument as James Lindahl, saying that increases in her salary are justified by the fact that other CEOs are in fact paid much more and that her compensation is not commensurate with industry standards. All the while Firefox's users were steadily tumbling. I'm not sure how much I butchered her original statement here. Taken out of a Q&A session where someone confronted her about the fact or her salary. That is of course to say that I personally cannot reasonably believe that a single executive who is vested in an organization that is supposed to represent the values that Mozilla represented is in any way eligible for millions as a salary. Maybe it should also be remarked that the sums quoted for the discussion in 1942 were worth more in terms of buying power than they are today.

A possible defense of (representative) democratic theory is that there exist mechanisms to overrule leadership and maybe even revoke the powers of leadership. Usually leadership asserts its control over the masses, but when it fails to do so, arguably the masses have won in their struggle. But is this really the case? Michels argues that leadership always wins if it remains united, not in particular because it can assert its control, but rather because leadership can change dynamically in its structure and assimilate new members while ejecting the old. Burnham concludes:

"In the first place, if a division occurs among the leaders, one section or both is forced to seek help from the masses of the membership, and is able to organize their strength. The opposition leadership is sometimes successful in eliminating the old leadership. Second, new leaders may, and do, arise as it were 'spontaneously' out of the masses. If the existing leadership is unable or unwilling to crush or assimilate these 'outside' leaders, then it may be overthrown. In both of these cases, however, though the process may appear to take the form of a successful struggle of the masses against their leaders, and thus to prove the supremacy of the masses, in reality it consists only of the substitution of a new leadership for the old. Leadership remains in control; 'self-government' is as distant as ever."

Another interesting aspect discussed here is the excursion to Bonapartism and how it might be the inevitable course of an infant democracy. Bonapartism refers to the regime of two Bonapartes. First they rules as democratic representatives, until they were legitimately Consul, Consul for life and then (1804) as Emperor; or in the case of Napoleon III, twice as President and finally (1852) as Emperor. Taken from Michels work:

"Napoleon III did not merely recognize in popular sovereignty the source of his power, he further made that sovereignty thetheoretical basis of all his practical activities. He made himself popular in France by declaring that he regarded himself as merely the executive organ of the collective will manifested in the elections, and that he was entirely at the disposition of that will, prepared in all things to accept its decisions. With great shrewdness, he continually repeated that he was no more than an instrument, a creature of the masses."

This is quite remarkable, even more so because of the parallels that Burnham has noted as occurring during his time. It was around the time of the second world war, many of us are intimately familiar with those struggles. They were similarly Bonapartist if one considers how history has granted us Hitler, Stalin and perhaps Ceaușescu. To complete the chapter Burnham writes:

"It is a grave historical error to identify Bonapartism with other forms of despotism. Bonapartism is not mere military dictatorship; it is not the traditional hereditary or God-derived despotism of absolute monarchies; it is not the oligarchical rule of a closed hereditary caste. Mature Bonapartism is a popular, a democratic despotism, founded on democratic doctrine, and, at least in its initiation, committed to democratic forms. If Bonapartism, in fact rather than in theory, denies democracy, it does so by bringing democracy to completion."

The next chapter is aptly named "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" and it reinforces again the idea that oligarchy is a necessary part of organization. However, somewhat inspiringly, Burnham stresses that Michels hasn't concluded as a consequence of his theory that striving for democracy is undesirable or worthless. In the end, even if our democratic struggles end up as renewed oligarchies, the struggle forevermore goes on. It is a kind of cyclical nature that is being presented here and that in my view certainly agrees with history. We might never reach a true democracy, or ever find out whether its possible, but we can certainly keep on trying and trying. Arguably, the untiring efforts of mankind have brought about more free societies, although I lack historical education to know for sure. To end with the words of Michels:

"The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggled so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end by fusing with the old dominant class; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy. It is probable that this cruel game will continue without end."

Pareto: the nature of social action

Vilfredo Pareto is an interesting entry on this list of people discussed in the context of the Machiavellians. He is the one who formulated the Pareto Principle, a principle that is known by many at least in its description: roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. Whether it might be that 80% of the money comes from 20% of the customer base, or 80% of software features are implemented in 20% of the total development time or that 80% of the worlds wealth belong to 20% (in the case of Pareto's analysis it was suposedly that approximately 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population), it seems that some things out there follow a very interesting kind of distribution. One might even say that there is a close resemblance to the iron rule of oligarchy or the fact of leadership.

He was an economist, but he has written in Mind and Society about society at large. Pareto's ideas could be called the culminatin of all that we have considered up until now, including some of the parts that are contained in the book but were left unmentioned here.

Although Pareto might arguably have the most complete and consistent portrayal of some of these ideas we have been considering up until now, he defines very specific devices like what is "logical" and "non-logical", "residues" and "derivation" and a concise concept of "élites" to explain his theory. It is a bit too difficult to explain in depth how Pareto reaches the same conclusions as other Machiavellians, it certainly reinforces and substantiates all claims made up until now. Burnham, after extensively diving into the dynamics laid our by Pareto, at least makes the same claim:

"Pareto's theory of the circulation of the élites is thus a theory of social change, of revolution, and of social development and degeneration. It is a re-statement, in new and more intricate terms, of the point of view common to the modern Machiavellians and found, more crude, in Machiavelli himself."

a summary of Machiavellianism

In this last section of the book, Burnham writes not about any one work or author in particular, but summarizes and draws conclusions from the ideas of the group of Machiavellians he has so carefully constructed. Quite stunningly, perhaps by not restricting his analysis to the confines of his own thoughts but by referring to a consistent series of historical figures (each of which were Italian) so distinctly realist and Machiavellian, he has described with great detail the probable political nature of man. There is a lot of evidence to believe that at least some of these theories are true and in fact universal, but they also ring remarkably true with personal experiences. This is particularly conspicuous when looking at Burnham's great summary of the main points carefully developed and made throughout the book. Not only does he list the Machiavellian principles, but he contrasts them with a contrary point opposed to these principles. They are as follows:

"1. An objective science of politics, and of society, comparable in its methods to the other empirical sciences, is possible. Such a science will describe and correlate observable social facts, and, on the basis of the facts of the past, will state more or less probable hypotheses about the future. Such a science will be neutral with respect to any practical political goal: that is, like any other science, its statements will be tested by facts accessible to any observer, rich or poor, ruler or ruled, and will in no way be dependent upon the acceptance of some particular ethical aim or ideal."

"(Contrary views hold that a science of politics is not possible, because of the peculiarity of "human nature" or for some similar reason; or that political analysis is always dependent upon some practical program for the improvement - or destruction - of society; or that any political science must be a "class science" - true for the "bourgeoisie," but not for the "proletariat," as, for example, the Marxists claim.)"

"2. The primary subject-matter of political science is the struggle for social power in its diverse open and concealed forms."

"(Contrary views hold that political thought deals with the general welfare, the common good, and other such entities that are from time to time invented by the theorists.)"

"3. The laws of political life cannot be discovered by an analysis which takes men's words and beliefs, spoken or written, at their face value. Words, programs, declarations, constitutions, laws, theories, philosophies, must be related to the whole complex of social facts in order to understand their real political and historical meaning."

"(The contrary view pays chief attention to words, believing that what men say they are doing or propose to do or have done is the best evidence for what they actually do.)"

"4. Logical or rational action plays a relatively minor part in political and social change. For the most part it is a delusion to believe that in social life men take deliberate steps to achieve consciously held goals. Non-logical action, spurred by environmental changes, instinct, impulse, interest, is the usual social rule."

"(The contrary views assign an important or the primary place to rational action. History is conceived as the record of the rational attempts of men to achieve their goals.)"

"5. For an understanding of the social process, the most significant social division to be recognized is that between the ruling class and the ruled, between the élite and the non-élite."

"(Contrary views either deny that such a division exists, or consider that it is unimportant, or believe that it is scheduled to disappear.)"

"6. Historical and political science is above all the study of the élite, its composition, its structure, and the mode of its relation to the non-élite."

"(Contrary views hold that history is primarily the study of the masses, or of individual great men, or purely of institutional arrangements.)"

"7. The primary object of every élite, or ruling class, is to maintain its own power and privilege."

"(The contrary view holds that the primary object of the rulers is to serve the community. This view is almost invariably held by all spokesmen for an élite, at least with respect to the élite for which they are speaking. Among such spokesmen are to be numbered almost all of those who write on political and social matters.)"

"8. The rule of the élite is based upon force and fraud. The force may, to be sure, be much of the time hidden or only threatened; and the fraud may not entail any conscious deception."

"(The contrary views hold that social rule is established fundamentally upon God-given or natural right, reason, or justice.)"

"9. The social structure as a whole is integrated and sustained by a political formula, which is usually correlated with a generally accepted religion, ideology, or myth."

"(Contrary views hold either that the formulas and myths are "truths" or that they are unimportant as social factors.)"

"10. The rule of an élite will coincide now more, now less with the interests of the non-élite. Thus, in spite of the fact that the primary object of every élite is to maintain its own power and privilege, there are nevertheless real and significant differences in social structures from the point of view of the masses. These differences, however, cannot be properly evaluated in terms of formal meanings, verbalisms, and ideologies, but by: (a) the strength of the community in relation to other communities; (b) the level of civilization reached by the community - its ability, that is to say, to release a wide variety of creative interests and to attain a high measure of material and cultural advance; and (c) liberty - that is, the security of individuals against the arbitrary and irresponsible exercise of power."

"(Contrary views either deny that there are any significant differences among social structures, or, more frequently, estimate the differences in formal or verbal terms - by, for example, comparing the philosophies of two periods or their ideals.)"

"11. Two opposing tendencies always operate in the case of every élite: (a) an aristocratic tendency whereby the élite seeks to preserve the ruling position of its members and their descendants, and to prevent others from entering its ranks; (b) a democratic tendency whereby new elements force their way into the élite from below."

"(Though few views would deny the existence of these tendencies, some would maintain that one of them could be suppressed, so that an élite could become either completely closed or completely open.)"

"12. In the long run, the second of these tendencies always prevails. From this it follows that no social structure is permanent and no static utopia is possible. The social or class struggle always continues, and its record is history."

"(Contrary views conceive a possible stabilization of the social structure. The class struggle, they say, can, should, and will be eliminated in a Heaven on Earth or a "classless society," not understanding that the elimination of the class struggle would, like the elimination of blood-circulation in the individual organism, while no doubt getting rid of many ailments, at the same time mean death.)"

"13. There occur periodically very rapid shifts in the composition and structure of élites: that is, social revolutions."

"(Contrary views either deny the reality of revolutions or hold that they are unfortunate accidents that could readily be avoided.)"

"It may be remarked that these Machiavellian principles are much closer to the more or less instinctive views of "practical men" who are themselves active in the social struggle than to the views of theorists, reformers and philosophers. This is natural,because the principles are simply the generalized statement of what practical men do and have been doing; whereas the theorists, most often comparatively isolated from direct participation in the social struggle, are able to imagine society and its laws to be as they would wish to have them."

liberty

The beauty of this particular book is that, after establishing Machiavellian principles, it finally dives into what is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of the book overall, the topic of liberty. After having asserted the impracticalness of democracy as laid out by democratic theory in terms of self-government, Burnham wishes to reinstate a kind of practical sense of democracy that takes as its core tenet liberty. It is as if the entirety of the analysis of power that started with Machiavelli comes around for us to finally consider what we can do against power. In the end, the question of politics has always been how to make our world the best for everyone. Even though we have so many competing ideologies, even though politics is so confused and wrapped up in power struggles, we do come around to consider all this and get back to the original question. Whether Burnham is right, or whether liberty for us as individuals is not the way remains to be seen, but it serves as a ray of hope that society can become better by recognizing the nature of power as what it is and reinstating again this core value of liberty.

What is concretely meant by liberty I will come to in a second when I return to Burnham's writings again (because it's important to define terms early: "what Mosca calls 'juridical defense,' a measure of security for the individual which protects him from the arbitrary and irresponsible exercise of personally held power"), but I find it important to note that many people seem to have become disillusioned with the idea of liberty. The past two years, as the politics of the power hungry pandemic has enriched again the few and taken from many, have somehow made people give up on the idea of liberty. People are not so fond anymore of granting others what they personally think of "as a right to idiocy." Increasingly, everyone has to be shielded from themselves. The wise have to take charge for the unwise. Dangerous opinions and potential misinformation have to be censored in favor of what everyone thinks to be more socially useful doctrine. As an example of this, free speech, once a cornerstone of Western culture, has been put behind the supposedly more important goal of making sure that what everyone says is not dangerous misinformation. In the words of Parag Agrawal who has and still serves as the CEO of Twitter, "our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation ... [and to] focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed." Vaccine mandates and severe restrictions also show us that our choices are declining. Maybe an uncomfortable example for some, but axioms of LGBT ideology are sometimes enforced in the sense that not adhering to them is inherently harmful, with people zealously hunting deniers like witches. Climate deniers have in stock for them the same fate.

I don't wish to defend people who want to be free to make truly stupid decisions, and in particular I don't wish to decide what is stupid, in the end who is to say what decision was truly stupid or not? It's not that liberty itself has been in decline, but faith in liberty has. To be in favor of supporting that which one thinks is right we suddenly have to sacrifice those who do not. Thinking like a Machiavellian, having a culture of arbitration of opinions makes way only for the power of the few to increase. Each of these modern examples has sadly already served as an instrument for those who change with the times to dominate with political powers those who do not. People have been arrested for tweets, cancel culture is widespread and I don't think I need to explain that health mandates are just dominating relationships between the ministers of health and the masses. Health mandates in particular might even righeously be beneficial, but they serve as an instrument to power.

What we really need to shield ourselves against power of the "ruling class," "autocratic leaders," "oligarchs," or the "élite," is not their promises that they will do only good, but liberty in the sense that Burnham and his Machiavellians define it. Burnham sees it as follows:

"If we examine, not the verbal definitions that most people, including dictionary-makers, give for "democracy," but the way in which they use the word in practical application to affairs of our time, we will discover that it does not have anything to do with self-government - which is not surprising, because there is no such thing. In practice, in the real world rather than the mythical world of ideologies, a "democracy" means a political system in which there exists "liberty": that is, what Mosca calls "juridical defense," a measure of security for the individual which protects him from the arbitrary and irresponsible exercise of personally held power. Liberty or juridical defense, moreover, is summed up and focused in the right of opposition, the right of opponents of the currently governing élite to express publicly their opposition views and to organize to implement those views."

"Democracy so defined, in terms of liberty, of the right of opposition, is not in the least a formula or myth. We will never be able to decide whether the democratic wills of their respective peoples are more truly represented by the governments of the United States and England than by the governments of Japan, Germany, Russia, and Italy. We cannot decide because the whole problem is fictitious and the disputes in connection with it purely verbal. But it is a fact, an objective and observable fact, that liberty exists in some societies and not in others; or, more exactly speaking, that it exists more in some societies, less in others. It is a fact that today there exists more liberty, much more, in England or the United States, than in Germany, Russia, Italy or Japan; and it is also a fact that in the United States today there is less liberty than 15 or even 2 or 3 years ago."

"The modern Machiavellians, like Machiavelli himself, do not waste time arguing the merits or demerits of the myth of democracy defined as self-government. But they are very profoundly concerned with the reality of democracy defined as liberty. They know that the degree of liberty present within a society is a fact of the greatest consequence for the character of the whole social structure and for the individuals living within that structure."

"What does liberty, juridical defense, the right of opposition, mean for a society? Let us examine the conclusions reached by the Machiavellian analysis of this question. I shall disregard the effect of the presence or absence of liberty on individual self development (great and significant as this seems to me to be) because this would lead to problems of subjective moral evaluation which I wish to avoid; I shall confine myself to observable distinctions of a sort that may be called sociological."

"Within any field of human interest, liberty is a necessary condition of scientific advance. This follows because science can proceed only where there is complete freedom to advance hypotheses contrary to prevailing opinion. Pareto, indeed, considers liberty to be an indispensable requirement of scientific method: "It follows that before a theory can be considered true, it is virtually indispensable that there be perfect freedom to impugn it. Any limitation, even indirect and however remote, imposed on anyone choosing to contradict it is enough to cast suspicion upon it. Hence freedom to express one's thought, even counter to the opinion of the majority or of all, even when it offends the sentiments of the few or of the many, even when it is generally reputed absurd or criminal, always proves favorable to the discovery of objective truth." It must be added that it is possible for liberty to remain within restricted scientific fields (the physical sciences, for example) even when it has disappeared in political and social affairs generally. Nevertheless, under such conditions, its continuance in the restricted fields would seem to be precarious, as is indicated by the political intervention of modern totalitarian governments (especially Russia and Germany) to suppress or lessen liberty in fields like biology, and even physics."

"Experience seems to show that, almost always, liberty is a condition for an advanced "level of civilization," in the sense that Mosca uses this expression. That is, liberty is needed to permit the fullest release of the potential social forces and creative impulses present in society, and their maximum development. With liberty absent, great development may occur along certain restricted lines - in religion, perhaps, or the technique of war, or a conventionalized art style - but the compulsory conformity to official opinion limits variety and stultifies creative freshness not only in the arts and sciences, but in economic and political affairs as well."

"Liberty or freedom means above all, as I have said, the existence of a public opposition to the governing élite. The crucial difference that freedom makes to a society is found in the fact that the existence of a public opposition (or oppositions) is the only effective check on the power of the governing élite."

"The Machiavellians are the only ones who have told us the full truth about power. Other writers have at most told the truth only about groups other than the ones for which they themselves speak. The Machiavellians present the complete record: the primary object, in practice, of all rulers is to serve their own interest, to maintain their own power and privilege. There are no exceptions."

"No theory, no promises, no morality, no amount of good will, no religion will restrain power. Neither priests nor soldiers, neither labor leaders nor businessmen, neither bureaucrats nor feudal lords will differ from each other in the basic use which they will seek to make of power. Individual saints, exempt in individual intention from the law of power, will nevertheless be always bound to it through the disciples, associates, and followers to whom they cannot, in organized social life, avoid being tied."

"Only power restrains power. That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions. Oddly and fortunately, it is observable that the restraining influence of an opposition much exceeds its apparent strength. As anyone with experience in any organization knows, even a small opposition, provided it really exists and is active, can block to a remarkable degree the excesses of the leadership. But when all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident."

There is another chapter, the last chapter, in which Burnham finally asks whether politics can ever be scientific. But this entry is already too long, so I will finish it off by paraphrasing one final time with last paragraph of this masterpiece:

"It is probable that civilized society will, somehow, survive. It will not survive, however, if the course of the ruling class continues in the direction of the present, and of the past forty years. In that direction there lies destruction of rulers and ruled alike. But, during the monstrous wars and revolutions of our time, there has already begun on a vast scale a purge of the ranks of the ruling class. That purge, and the recruitment of new leaders which accompanies it, may be expected to continue until they bring about a change in the present course. Though the change will never lead to the perfect society of our dreams, we may hope that it will permit human beings at least that minimum of moral dignity which alone can justify the strange accident of man's existence."

Of course, he wasn't alone in this. His former wife Duan Weihong, who he refers to as Whitney Duan, formed a team together with him. Their relationship is a bit complicated and it takes Desmond quite a while to untangle the story, but it likely suffices to say they where both trying to hit it big in China. They certainly had a drive to create something of significance. That was all good and rosy, until it wasn't. The book is titled Red Roulette, because he goes on to explain that doing high enough stakes business in China is inevitably a gamble against the red aristocracy.

on verifiability

Assuming there is something to the book, and there is good reason to believe there is, Red Roulette is undescribably eye opening. Politics and business in China are inseparable. Some might say this is obviously the case, but it surprises me a little that it wasn't too different throughout Desmond's journey, a time where Chinese communism seemed less intimidating. That politics and business are entangled is not unique to China, but the sheer scale of the entanglement might be. The pervasiveness of governmental influence is difficult to describe.

Governmental power structures are usually opaque, in the sense that a layperson cannot really look into them without being either a part of them or in any way involved. He just goes through what he knows, what he personally experienced as well as what is generally publicly known. By doing so, he gives us an amazing insider perspective. Only a select few are in a position to shed light on the Chinese elite, but practically none ever do. Doing so would have incredible repercussions. As Desmond has effectively fled the country, he is in a unique position to write this book. His former wife Whitney who hasn't fled the country has disappeared in 2017. She is just one of many incredibly rich Chinese entrepreneurial people whose money didn't end up protecting them.

I want to make clear, quite a lot of what is mentioned is not really verifiable. Add to that the problem of authoritative information, where the truth is actively and sometimes even retroactively manipulated. As such, topics like this one are often a shot in the dark. There aren't many accounts of Desmond's caliber, few are as recent and it is not likely that such detailed accounts will be written down in the near future. As such, Desmond's book represents a unique opportunity to at least think about the Chinese government the way he presents it. He might well be biased, but there is every reason to at least initially assume that he is genuine.

the value of guanxi

To really give an accurate picture of his story as well as the scale of corruption and abuse by the whole system that is effectively imposed by rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would take as many words as his book. It's really an unbelievable rollercoaster, crazier than a movie plot. To begin to untangle it, it's necessary to introduce the Chinese concept of guanxi, connections into the system. As Desmond writes, "Shandong taught Whitney a valuable lesson, similar to one that I learned in Hong Kong. She discovered that the only ones who truly succeeded in China were people with guanxi, connections into the system. These connections into the system, together with luck, are ultimately what made Desmond and Whitney rich. Such connections can be complicated, quite an effort is made to portray the most important connections and their dynamics. Definitely the most important was to the family of Wen Jiabao and Zhang Beili (the wife of Wen). Wen was vice-premier at the time, but he was poised to become the premier, "head of China's government and the second most powerful man in the Chinese Communist Party." Being on good terms with such authoritative figures is powerful even without invoking actual authority. In fact, Whitney and Desmond primarily dealt with Zhang who often wasn't in a position to actually meaningfully exert an influence, as she would have to convince the premier who for the most part was left in the dark. This is one of the powers of having connections: even if the authority of Wen wasn't going to be invoked, how would people know? Just the fact that Whitney and Desmond were on good terms with such an influential family was useful.

Without further ado, here is Desmond's account of getting familiar with the value of guanxi in China:

"I became the firm's representative to Tait Asia, which held the accounts for Heineken beer and Marlboro cigarettes. The appetite for these goods in China was extraordinary. In the space of a few years, Heineken's sales in China went from zero to $40 million, and Tait Asia had the distribution rights."

"China had enacted heavy duties on imported beer - upward of 40 percent - to protect Chinese breweries. Tait Asia brought beer into Hong Kong and resold it to companies that figured out a way to move it into China duty-free. We didn't want to know how that happened as long as sales and profits increased. It wasn't just ChinaVest, of course. Anyone doing business in China did it this way, circumventing the rules in the search of profit. I quickly learned that in China all rules were bendable as long as you had what the Chinese called guanxi, or a connection into the system. And given that the state changed the rules all the time, no one gave the rules much weight."

"At one point, a Chinese naval officer offered Tait Asia a Chinese warship to smuggle the beer. I was floored. I'd grown up in China with a glorified image of the People's Liberation Army and had been taught that the army had battled Japan during World War II, freed China from the corrupt regime of Chiang Kaishek, and fought US forces to a standstill in Korea. And now the Chinese navy was trafficking in beer?"

"I was very junior at the firm and new to everything. But I found it perplexing to see ChinaVest so thoroughly unconcerned by how Tait Asia, which it had invested in, was getting beer into China. We'd intentionally created a black box inside of which a lot of money was changing hands. Because of US regulations, ChinaVest's leadership needed to pretend not to know. A lot of Western businesses in China adopted a similar, don't-ask-don't-tell business model. Abysmal working conditions in factories making high-end sneakers? "Who knew?" Prison labor making blue jeans? "There must be a mistake." In business with the army of the police? "We weren't aware.""

Of course, such cases of rule-bending occur all over the world. It's just that in the Chinese variety there is only one state party to bend the rules with.

the claim to wealth

Via a contact at the China Ocean Shipping Company, Whitney was informed that COSCO wanted to sell a portion of their stake in the Ping An Insurance Company. Not many people would even get the opportunity to consider the deal. The question of whether the Wen family name had anything to do with the transaction is left as an exercise to the reader. The stakes were quite high, with the 3 percent of shares being offered by COSCO costing $36 million (apparently 10 percent above their net asset value). The deal was complicated too, because Whitney and Desmond could only scratch up enough capital to buy 1 percent, the Wen family had to be convinced to buy the remaining 2 percent. But the deal went through and it proved a turning point in this wild ride.

What's fascinating to me is that such deals, deals that are out of reach for people without such capital, are supposedly more commonplace than one would think:

"... COSCO's sale to us wasn't too dissimilar from deals like this overseas. Private sales of stock in unlisted firms are not done publicly. A large Chinese state-owned enterprise is not going to announce that it wants to sell one of its investments to dress up its balance sheet and then offer the shares in a public auction. Only people within a limited network are going to get wind of it - no matter whether the deal is done in Beijing, London, or New York."

These 1 percent of shares were bought at $12 million by the duo, during a time where Ping An was not yet listed on a stock exchange. When Ping An got listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2004, the increase in share price has brought their shares to almost $100 million (an increase of 8 times their initial investment). They still couldn't sell these on the exchange, as the sale of Chinese stock overseas was legally banned, but that turned out to be very fortunate. When Ping An listed on the Shanghai stock exchange, the price of their shares surged to $1 billion (80 times their initial investment). They still couldn't trade at this time due to certain stock market rules. When they could, they still cleared a profit of over $300 million (26 times their initial investment). What makes this particular rags to riches story fascinating is just how much luck was involved, Desmond puts it quite frankly:

"The Ping An deal was basically a fluke and proved a theory I - and others - had that wealthy aren't so much brilliant as lucky. We bought the stock not sure that it would go up and unaware that the company was planning an IPO. I was ready to dump our shares once the stock hit four times what we paid for it, but regulations didn't allow it. We only garnered such a big return because we weren't able to sell when I'd wanted."

That's already a somewhat bewildering statement in and of itself. Personally I also find it more honest than seems typical. Of course this was pivotal point, but it isn't yet particularly reminiscent of the Chinese system, as he describes:

"For us, the Ping An sale was the first of two enormous financial triumphs, and chance played a major role in both. We'd viewed Ping An as a safe investment. Granted, we got access to the shares because of our connections, but that happens in thousands of other deals across the world. All of those transactions involve a certain amount of influence peddling. Ours was the Chinese variety. It wasn't influence peddling through an official; it was influence peddling through an official's wife. It wasn't particularly defensible, but it was how the Chinese system worked."

political parties, private ventures and bureaucracy

Influence peddling of this type is only possible because the CCP has such a pull. But make no mistake, that influence can exert quite a different kind of pressure. While the system creates opportunities for those in a position to capitalize on them, it also destroys them for those who are not in such a position. Even though there were quite ridiculous sums of money to be made, there was no guarantee that one would survive the political climate during the gold rush. Every organization, company, and by extension person was quite vulnerable politically:

"Two-thirds of the people on China's one hundred wealthiest list would be replaced every year due to poor business decisions, criminality, and/or politically motivated prosecutions, or because they'd mistakenly aligned themselves with a Party faction that had lost its pull."

"Anyone running a sizable business was bound to be violating some type of law, whether it be environmental, tax, or labor. So while the returns could be lofty, you were always vulnerable. When the Chinese government passes a law it invariably makes it retroactive, so events that occurred years ago that had been unregulated could become crimes today."

The narration goes on to describe in detail how Desmond and Whitney struggled in their projects to develop land, leave a dent and make bank, as well as the multitude of issues that arise in trying to do so. When they tackled the airport project they were in a weird position, it wasn't usual for people outside the government to work this closely with those inside on a project. The land they were trying to use was also (figuratively) a battleground for two different government projects. It was their contribution to bring those different parts of the government together to make a shared logistics hub and things were going surprisingly well after setting the sail. They catered to the appropriate people to get the stamps they need. It was another case of sophisticated influence peddling. But management invariably changed, due to political factors, and the project was seriously threatened by it. The person who was then director of the airport construction bureau of the Civil Aviation and Reform Commission was in fact prosecuted for corruption and sentenced to ten years in jail, a grave political assassination.

At this point there is a funny story to tell that paints an appropriate picture how bureaucreacies tend to work, it's the saga in which they try to get the stamp of approval by Chief Du, the chief of Chinese Customs at the airport:

"In exchange for his cooperation, Chief Du had some needs. He demanded we build Customs a new office building, providing four hundred thousand square feet of space for his three-hundred-man workforce. He also pressed for an indoor gym with regulation-size basketball and badminton courts, outdoor tennis courts with a high-end surface, a two-hundred-seat theater, a dormitory with four-star-equivalent rooms, a generous banquet hall with private rooms for senior officials, a karaoke bar, and a grand lobby with an atrium two stories high. Chief Du hashed this out with me over dinner one night. .I "If you don't give this to us" , he said with a big grin, .I "we're not going to let you build" . All of our political backing couldn't move him. In the end, his demands added $50 million to the cost of the project, and that didn't even take into account the cost of the land."

As if this wasn't baffling enough, there is yet another aspect to this saga:

"Obviously when one part of the bureaucracy makes a killing, other parts smell blood, too. The quarantine department demanded two hundred thousand square feet of office space. They didn't get the theater or the indoor gym, but they did cadge tennis courts, a big restaurant, and rooms at the standard of a four-star hotel. The Quarantine guys never let me forget it. "You owe us", one of their senior officials told me whenever we met. "We were never as greedy as customs.""

This brings me to an interesting point about the decentralism that such bureaucracies exhibit. While there is a kind of centralism, because the power is centralized within one political party with a clear hierarchy, it's still a hierarchy. Upon hearing about the Chinese law that requires companies to install political supervision, it's difficult not to visualize it as the CCP itself dominating the company. But out of necessity, there needs to be multiple layers to this hierarchy. There are ample opportunities for someone to abuse the bureaucracy in one way or another. While the central structures pose a risk, they also have an unimaginable attack surface. An attack against a local part of the bureaucracy is exactly what happened in the HSMC scam [1].

Perhaps the infinite appetite for control by the Chinese government is a remedy to the symptoms of their bureaucracies and it's potential for corruption. To have actual control, the government needs to put in place and oversee vast structures. But to oversee these structures, there needs to be even more bureaucracy, increasing the attack surface. So are the power grabs just remedies to the symptoms of having central power exert an influence on everything, if at the same time centralism helps mitigate abuse of bureaucracy? Recently the president, general secretary and whatever other titles were consolidated unter the same belt, which seems to counteract corruption by making it a single person's responsibility to do many jobs at once and simplify the operation. But at the same time, corruption by that one person is enabled. With centralization the attack surface of bureaucracies can be reduced, is something I would wager to say, although the attack surface exists only because governmental structures have to influence everything in the first place.

This new president for life was also the person who instigated the possibly greated anti-corruption campaign in history: "By 2020, China's authorities had investigated more than 2.7 million officials for corruption and punished more than 1.5 million, including seven national-level leaders and two dozen generals." Was this really about corruption? Probably, to some degree. But it really is remarkable how many people were incarcerated. It's difficult to judge what is really the deal with the CCP, one shouldn't forget for example how ideological the party is:

"In 2012, as Xi prepared to take power, a document circulated from the Party's General Office titled "Briefing on the Current Situation in the Ideological Realm." The report, known as Document Number 9, warned that dangerous Western values, such as freedom of speech and judicial independence, were infecting China and needed to be rooted out. These ideas, the document said, were "extremely malicious" and would, henceforth, be banned from being taught at China's schools and universities. The document also blasted the move to a more independent media, ordering Party organizations to redouble their efforts to rein in muckracking periodicals."

the current situation

Looking at the current political landscape, this is certainly troubling. These ramblings of mine are already this long and I haven't even mentioned Hong Kong yet, which is to me a very discouraging tragedy. Hong Kong showed us that even with the most fervent resistance, a political party that lusts for power will use a crisis to get an entire culture under their control. Not to even speak of Taiwan, which is realistically destined to struggle against the red artistocracy. Desmond later goes on to describe his shift away from his older pursuits. Together with Whitney, he has managed to build something of significance. Now he was turning to activism instead.

When the situation inevitably got too spicy, he pulled out, while Whitney didn't. According to Desmond, he lives in exile and apparently, he has already been threatened before releasing the book, for trying to release the book. If there is even the slightest weight to his writings, then it is uncertain in my view that he is now the perfect role model for an enemy of the Chinese state. It was a risky game of red roulette indeed.

The book itself begins with a Chinese saying that I personally find very inspiring. It not only gives me courage but also a good reason to hear Desmond out. It's a principle that appears to me very noble:

Better to speak out and die than keep silent and live. (Fan Zhongyan, 989-1052)

[1] https://interconnected.blog/chinas-semiconductor-theranos-hsmc/ China's “Semiconductor Theranos”: HSMC

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I'm not sure where to start, since this is an odd topic to breach. Recently I've become very interested in Tibetan history, practices and other aspects pertaining to their culture. All this was sparked in a weird twist of fate, where somebody motivated me to try breathing exercises. It sounds like a weird and esoteric pastime, but breathing is the cornerstone of our lives. Our bodies live and die by the breath.

I bring this up because I've been reading a book titled "The Wim Hof Method", authored by Wim Hof. Every piece of information about him makes him seem more and more like an anomaly, but he spends the entire book writing about his life, learnings and techniques, assuring people he is like everyone else. There is a strange connection to Tibet, for various reasons. Wim explains that at a young age he had an interest not only in psychology, but also yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism. In his words, "what one might call esoteric disciplines."

His entire premise is what he has developed throughout his life, a method composed of breathing, cold exposure and the mind. The connection is not only his interest, but the fact that the Tibetans have long since practiced what he does. The same practices that have allowed seemingly inhuman feats, as Wim Hof holds (or has held) some seriously impressive world records. In fact, Wim Hof writes in chapter 13 what inspired him, what his mission is really about and then goes on to describe how for example ancient Buddhist writings have factored into his study. Just to reminisce a little on the book, it is my belief now that Wim Hof's ideas, as well as the (in part ancient) texts of Buddhists and other spiritual exploration cultures have the ability to improve our lives on many fronts. "The purpose of this book is to bring various new insights to light and to change the way we perceive consciousness, human potential, and the truth of nature so that we can all experience happiness, strength, and health."

To get back to the point, there is one instance that highlights the strange connection between Wim and Tibet. Wim writes how people have likened what he does to Tibetan practices:

"In January 2008, I was invited to New York to stand packed in a thousand pounds of ice on the sidewalk outside the Rubin Museum of Art. It was my first visit to the United States, and we were attempting to set a new world record for cold endurance. Twenty teams of cameras descended upon me, and I was to open a new series of events for this museum, which specialized in Himalayan art and culture, with a public demonstration of my technique. They understood it to be loosely based on the ancient Tibetan practice of tummo, or inner heat. Lamas are trained in this traditional technique over the course of a lengthy solitary retreat. To prove they have mastered it, they have to dry out a wet sheet with only their body heat while sitting in meditation in the freezing cold. The Rubin Museum billed me as a master, which I suppose I was, but what they did not know is that I had studied under no master in Tibet, Dharamsala, or anywhere else. My teachers were the canals and parks of Amsterdam."

Note: Tummo is an elaborate breathing technique used to regulate the body.

To provide a little context, Tibet has been likened to the altar of the earth and spans a vast expanse of impressive geographical features. The area is about the size of Western Europe. Tibet is surrounded by the tallest peaks on earth, the colossal peaks of the Himalayas and huge expanses of windswept deserts. All this comes together to make the Tibetan plateau. Of course I couldn't produce such a good description, it stems from the documentary "Tibet, Cry of the Snow Lion". I will get back to this documentary.

When looking at the challenges Wim Hof faces, one can see that they aren't too dissimilar to the challenges Tibetans face. After all, they are confronted with the harsh reality of the Tibetan plateau. One has to be very comfortable with cold exposure to conquer the mountains, which is what the ancient ethnic Tibetans were faced with all the time. It makes complete sense that Tibetans have already extensively dabbled in breathing techniques, conscious breathing and the cold. The locality of Tibet is almost a defining feature of their mysterious culture. Wim further writes:

"But all of that is external. The cold and the breath haven't changed. Humans have battled the cold since the very first winter, and Tibetan monks have been practicing conscious breathing for more than a thousand years. You breathe more than twenty-three thousand times a day without even thinking about it at all. But when you breathe with intention, it kindles an evolutionary instinct, which, whether conscious or unconscious, heightens the experience."

In the documentary, Ph.D. Robert A.F. Thurman (Indo Tibetan Buddhist Studies of Colombia University) goes on to say some curious things about Tibetan Buddhism: "What I did not find was a religion, but I found an educational movement. Buddha's discovery, his enlightenment was, that human beings, if they'd make an effort to understand themselves, they can get rid of their negative tendencies and they can develop to an unlimited degree their positive dendencies. When they do that, they can genuinely become happy. So the Buddha's real teaching, what his real announcement was, that freedom is possible. I have attained it, you can attain it." This really striked me, because I myself have tended towards this view. I'm heavily influenced by positive turns my life has taken. I've come to be more mindful, live healthier and am generally happier. For example, I regularly exercise now. Exercise was for the longest time of my life a trade between time and health, a price I had to pay to experience the benefits. This was a trade where I had to give something that often I would think too valuable to give, time. But at the same time, I would spend this precious time mindlessly in front of a computer, often feeling a general sense of regret that I'm not in control over my time. I would call this one of the struggles of modern contemporary society. Overall, my friends, Wim Hof and also apparently Buddhists, have contributed to a better life. Now to get back to the point, what specifically striked me was this constructive attitude of these spiritual people. They aren't driven by ideology, they are driven by trying to be a better self. Their spiritual teachings are only a vehicle to exchange between people how to be a better self. I say this as a very non-spiritual person. In fact, I've hated religions for most of my life.

Tibetans have had an odd history with leadership and government. These aspects, too, are heavily influenced by religion essentially. Their history was apparently fairly bloody until Buddhism has taken over. In the documentary, Robert Ford (who lived in Tibet for five years) says the following: "Tibetans were very independent people, they didn't always see eye to eye the Lhasa government. Yet, they all owed allegiance to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. They fervently believed in their God King and their religion."

It saddens me to say, their current Dalai Lama lives in exile in India. Tibet is currently under control by the People's Republic of China. After diving a bit into the Chinese flavor of totalitarianism and reading the highly fascinating and curious characterization of the power elite by Desmond Shum, who as a businessman has developed what was at the time and still might be the biggest logistics zone in Beijing, I'm somewhat aghast about the state of Tibet. As a matter of fact, the documentary begins with the 1959 Tibetan uprising, where the Tibetans have attempted to assert their freedom. Historically, Tibetans have had a different culture, outlook on religion and language. The claims of Tibetan independence are not at all easily refuted, in fact refutation might equate to willing ignorance.

Tibet is effectively occupied, or one might even say colonized. Usually when people think about human rights violations by the Chinese, the struggle of the Uyghur minority group comes to mind (amongst many other things sadly). What is insane to me is how recent the invasion of Tibet is, the scale of the the disruption of their culture and how oppressed they have become. Somehow, no one is really reporting on the sad state of affairs in Tibet. In the documentary, Lhasang Tsering (Amnye Machen Institute of Dharamsala, India) brings my thoughts to the table concisely: "What most people don't understand is that the invasion, occupation and colonization of Tibet is recent and it's blatant. And because in most people's imagination Tibet is something very far away, very remote, the immediacy and urgency of the problem is not understood." However, his point is still yet too subtle. More immediate is the portrayal by Jeane Kirkpatrick (a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations): "What the West has done is avert its eyes while genocide takes place in Tibet. One of the specific violations of international law is the forced population transfer, the driving Tibetans out of their homeland. There has been a massive relocation of Chinese into Tibet, the ethnic cleansing has been underway in Tibet for about 20 years." It's very difficult to take this message in. It was at this point, I had to take a break and began writing this essay. As the documentary released in 2002, it has actually been going on for 40 years.

Researching Tibet on my own, I've found Tibet Watch [1], a UK based Tibet advocacy group. In their words, they are "promoting human rights of the Tibetan people through monitoring, advocacy and research." They have some very detailed reports that present very compelling cases and evidence. For example, it was disturbing to read their one report titled "Destroying Heaven: China's campaign of destruction at Larung Gar". [2]

What is really striking is that religion is a problem for Chinese leadership. In the words of Mao Zedong to the Dalai Lama, "religion is poison." Tibet has no freedom of religion because of it. Previously I've had no clue as to why this might be, but I have theories now. I would say that religion as it is practiced by the common people exists outside the ideological realm of politics, or at least genuine religion does. Of course, religion has a long history of abuse and is sometimes closely intertwined with the power struggles of politics. But that is religion practiced by political entities. People who associate themselves not with the mechanisms of religious organizations, but with the actual ideas and beliefs almost seem like they exist outside the framework of law. To give an example, in the pandemic (even early on when things were more uncertain), religious people haven't stopped to gather. Religion in a sense is a force that unites people outside our modern construct of law or even nationality. Even if government officials tell religious people how to behave, or perhaps more importantly what to believe, a fair share will not acquiesce. They won't do what their told or believe what their told. At the end of the day everyone has to choose what they follow, and religion presents an alternative. I'm not sure whether this overall effect of religion operating orthogonally to other structures is a positive or negative force, but I'm grateful that it exists. In the end, everyone is trying to succeed as the best version of themselves. Not only Tibetan Buddhists, not only us, but probably even Chinese ultra nationalists.

In this penultimate passage I want to make one thing clear. Personally I want Tibet to be preserved. Like many other cultures, that of Tibet offers a treasure trove of insight. Even though Tibet is facing a seemingly existential crisis right now, I'm hopeful that Tibetan culture won't truly die out. It's really a difficult thing to believe in, it's almost like it boils down to whether totalitarian systems like the current Chinese mixture of communism and capitalism can be recovered from. I want to believe that it is possible. Incidentally, this message also extends out to Hong Kong, and possibly also to Taiwan in the future. In the words of John Avedon (Historian): "Tibetans have a tremendous body of spiritual knowledge, spiritual technology if you will. That is an immense gift to human learning. They have preserved in their monastic universities a vast corpus of learning and understanding about the nature of consciousness, the structure of the human mind, that Western science is just beginning to comprehend." This is only one aspect of many. Another good quote is: "His Holiness [referring to the Dalai Lama] has put that very succinctly where he said, while the Western world was exploring the outer space, we were exploring the inner space." It's almost like all spiritual aspects of Buddhism are simply metaphors for things that concern us in our capacity as human beings.

Now, finally, again in the words of Lhasang Tsering: "Even at this dark moment, even as bleak as the situation is today, why I still believe Tibet can be free, is because of the people. After all these years of suffering and oppression, the people inside Tibet have not lost the hope and the courage to be free." This essay written as a tribute, a recognition and a way to empathize with Tibet, its people and their sorrow. At last, here is a picture of the historic site that is the Potala Palace, a wonder standing high in the Tibetan capital, the city of Lhasa. The winter palace of the Dalai Lamas from 1649 to 1959, until that historic moment. This picture with a crude edit by myself, with the flag of the People's Republic of China on top of the palace replaced by the Flag of Tibet.

[1] https://www.tibetwatch.org/ UK based Tibet advocacy group, promoting human rights of the Tibetan people through monitoring, advocacy and research

[2] https://www.tibetwatch.org/larung-gar Destroying Heaven: China's Campaign Of Destruction At Larung Gar

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It is interesting what relationship these different transformations and their domains have, considering the regions of convergence, stability and pole/zero correspondence. It is mind-bending to think about, but the left half of the imaginary plane in the s-Domain is mapped onto the unit circle in the z-Domain. The bilinear transformation is often seen as a tool to get back to the s-Domain, even though transforming a discretized system to the particular continous one that generated it is generally impossible. In the q-Domain, the unit circle of the z-Domain is mapped back onto the left half of the imaginary plane. An image summarizing these relationships can be found below.

The difference between a continuous LTI system (in the s-Domain) and a discrete one (in the z-Domain) is also succinctly summarized in the following block diagram. The hold element has the function of taking a discrete signal and holding the sampled value for the duration of the sampling time. This makes it a digital to analog converter. An ideal hold element would create a kind of blocky curve and is referred to as a zero-order hold element. The sample element has the reverse function of taking a continuous signal and sampling it with the sampling rate, which is the inverse of the sampling time.

It is interesting to note that while control theory goes hand in hand with electrical engineering (particularly when dealing with digital signals), its applications extend far beyond it. In a more abstract sense, control theory is the general theory of feedback systems. As such, it has found its way into many unexpected fields of engineering.

In fact, it's difficult to measure just how important control theory has become. Besides its applications in electrical engineering (digital and analog circuits) and industry (cruise control, automation, heating and cooling systems, aerospace engineering just to list a few), its invaluable for robotics, computer engineers and even life sciences. It formed the basis for cybernetics and digital imaging. Digital imaging is a fascinating one, as its a concrete area of application that has invaded many other areas of applications: from sensors, image compression and more general compression of digitized media, to medical imaging. Arguably, control theory coupled with other ideas from neuroscience also inspired neural networks. This is more difficult to argue, since the brain inherently operates more like a control system. An interesting piece of history to look more closely at the relationship between neural networks and control theory would be the first implementation of the perceptron.

Adapting control theory to use it in such unconventional ways would not have been possible without the ongoing and tireless effort of many, many people.

[1] The Map of Control Theory (ver 5)

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It may seem as though life is not really progressing, as if we are continuously blocked in our attempts to improve our lives during this ongoing state of emergency. If it does, it's not true. The struggle is not only what hinders us from achieving what we want, it is what motivates us to do things and gives it meaning in the first place. $(date +%Y) has been an elaborate ongoing struggle for sure. A lot happens during a year, but it's up to us to make it count and maybe more importantly, make it stick.

There is this tendency to become amnesic towards the end of a year. We start imagining what we want the $(date +%Y --date='next year') to look like and making new year resolutions accordingly, but perhaps we should make past year resolutions instead. Concentrating a little, one can probably find many things they've done in the past year that turned out to be positive and deserve actual incorporation into our lives. Perhaps we should reflect on how we lived our lives, what happened during these past 12 months and what choices we want to keep making consciously in the future. I would argue that, because real life changes are implemented not on a whim or by wishing for ourselves to be different but by trying out these changes at some time due to some impulse.

Even though I'm not sure I like how the world looks by now, this everlasting state of emergency has revealed (probably to many) where the priorities lie. Life inevitably changes, but even so, I look forward to building upon some of the habits and other lifestyle changes I've made up until now and extend them well into $(date +%Y --date='next year'). Retrospection is one of our great allies that is all too easy to disregard. But the important part is not to ruminate about the past, it's to enable a better future.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. (Theodore Roosevelt) And I might add: considering what you have been to become what you want to be.

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It has to be noted that Merloo was born 1903, experienced both world wars from the perspective of a Dutch citizen and worked as a well regarded psychiatrist for decades. Of course this was during a time during which psychiatry was a more immature field, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate the content. Compared to when Merloo was alive and wrote this incredible piece, there has been what feels like a subtle and gradient political shift in modern democracies, disregarding or abolishing many of the values that resulted from the world wars as well as after-war time. Totalitarianism was much more immediate back then, since many people had directly experienced it or lived in the wake of it. Totalitarianism (perhaps any political system) always appears so very remote and improbable, even though one can never predict when it actually will arrive or how quickly it will be there. Personally I view the rise of censorship, outrage at non-conformist ideas, suppression of behaviors and the assumption of guilt that has been on the rise as deeply problematic. Seemingly these trends have monotonically increased with the amount of time that has passed since the last dictatorship, and they have certainly been vigorously reinforced ever since the beginning of the ongoing pandemic.

In order to remain within the scope of this essay, let's get to the essence of loyalty. Loyalty is definitely important and constitutes one of the bases of a coherent society. Larger complexes of people can after all only form once people band together, which requires a mutual assuredness between them (Merloo calls loyalty a result of mutual confidence in a later section). Of course one has to differentiate between the targets of this loyalty, I'll get to the taxonomy shortly after. People want loyalty for many different reasons, but what is curious is how humanity invents mechanisms that supposedly create loyalty. Even though loyalty is expressed through actions, we use words and empty rituals to designate it. Merloo offers us the example of the loyalty oath and the prayer wheel.

"As we have seen earlier, the whole question of loyalty is a complicated one. In our zeal to create guarantees of trustworthiness, we tend to oversimplify the problem, and thus we may overshoot the mark and become like our totalitarian antagonists, for whom over-simplification is a stock-in trade. Asking people for a loyalty oath asking them to perform that magic ritual through which they forswear all past and future political sin - may have a paradoxical effect. Merely taking an oath does not make a man loyal, although it may later enable a judge to prosecute him for perjury. Our insistence on official expressions of allegiance actually discredits and devalues the basic personal sense of voluntary and self-chosen identification with the community which is the essence of loyalty; it certainly does not either create or insure loyalty."

"The loyalty oath too easily degenerates into an empty formula, and the man who takes it may forget completely the meaning it is supposed to have. To many it has become simply red tape, another one of those endless, troublesome forms that must be filled out."

"The oath compulsion can easily grow into a childish magic strategy, a form of mental blackmail. There are some oriental religions in which devotions are performed through the use of a prayer wheel. When the wheel is set in motion by a flip of the hand, the worshipper has done his job. He need not recite any prayers; he need not think any devout thoughts. The practitioners of these religions no longer have any awareness of the content of their prayers. They are blind subscribers to a ritual whose meaning they have long since forgotten. Signing a loyalty oath can become as empty a gesture as turning the prayer wheel."

Loyalty is also selective. One has to choose his loyalties, sometimes very carefully. There is loyalty to the family, loyalty to friends, loyalty to the nation, loyalty to ideas, loyalty to principles, (the more modern cult of) loyalty to the company and, perhaps most remarkably, loyalty to the self. My experience has been that people too seldom consider loyalty to the self. Closely related to loyalty is the concept of treason or betrayal, and when considering self-loyalty, it is very difficult not to think about self-betrayal. There are many forms of self-betrayal, Merloo considers some of them (and gives interesting examples). A fascinating idea that comes up is that loyalty in general (towards other people) is an extension of loyalty to the self. For after all, he who doubts himself is unlikely to confidently trust others. When someone can not even depend on themselves, the breakdown of character or stable image of the self is to be expected, leaving them exploitable and manipulable. In a totalitarian system, this effect is exacerbated.

"Is it possible to decide whether or not a person is dependable? Only when we have some insight into his hidden motives and drives and into the workings of his unconscious. For complete insight, psychoanalysis is necessary, but the way the unconscious expresses itself in character traits and character defences can give us some very important indications. A person with excessive dependency needs or a weak ego, a person who is easily suggestible can usually be seduced into disloyalty. So can the boastful, inconsistent man, full of pride and vanity. Material egotism, desire for power, and continual hostility also lead to denial of moral values, among them loyalty."

"As is often true in psychology, it is easier to say what character traits the dependable person must not have than to give a positive picture of what he should be like. In general, we can say that the person who is honest with himself and shows a minimum of self deceit, the man who exhibits a stable structure of character, the person with genuine maturity, is most true to himself, and, as a result, most loyal to others."

"Nevertheless, the seeds of treason lie in each of us and may be fortified by environmental influences. In a totalitarian world, for example, everybody is educated in self-denial and self betrayal; when a person becomes a nonconformist, the label "traitor" will be attached to him. In a world stifled by dogma and tradition, every form of original thinking may be called sedition and treason. In such cases the environmental, social, and political factors, and not the confusing inner processes, determine what is treason. In this chapter, however, I have emphasized the personal factors in producing treason - the influence of family and group prejudices, and the inner instability resulting from complications in the immediate environment. There are so many subtle fantasies of self-betrayal and secret aggression in everyone, and there is so much desire to revenge secret resentments, that any government may make use of these unhealthy neurotic feelings to stir up the country."

He keeps emphasizing how important it is to be loyal to the self. Also, he ties the concept of loyalty to freedom in a curious way. Loyalty to the self is a property of a free society and (very often) impossible in a totalitarian system.

"Free man needs loyalty to the self first of all, and this implies the right to be himself. The man who feels that he is nothing, who feels that everyone, himself included, doubts him, who is inwardly weak, may become an easy prey to all kinds of totalitarian political influences. Loyalty hunts and loyalty oaths may provoke disloyalty to one's personal integrity and to personal freedom, since they create suspicion in ourselves and in others. Freedom is kept upright by the very presence of opposition - even at the risk of non-conformism and scattered subversion."

"Loyalty comes about as a result of mutual confidence; it cannot be created through compulsion. Any compulsion is, by its very nature, one-sided. Loyalty has to be deserved and won daily through mutual interaction, and through contact between leaders and citizens. Because it is based on confidence, loyalty is given spontaneously and of free will. True loyalty cannot be bought or demanded."

Loyalty, dissent, freedom and conformity are strangely intertwined particularly in the discussion of totalitarianism. Merloo stresses here how important actual loyalty (particularly to the self) is alongside dissent and non-conformity in combating totalitarianism and how different modes of thinking need to be allowed to prevent it. It could be said that totalitarianism is perpetuated when the majority feigns their loyalty, no matter their true affiliation, making this loyalty compulsion as Merloo calls it highly undesirable.

"Prosecution of dissenting ideas, insistence on loyalty according to some prescribed formula - these make it impossible for us to do this and may be the beginning of an unwillingness to argue and persuade. They may even lead to a new form of betrayal, the subtle treason of intellectual detachment, the unwillingness to take responsibility, the treason of doubting relativism which leads to inaction. It may degenerate into a dangerous form of mental laziness which can easily be turned into a life of no commitments or into totalitarian submission. The approaches to truth are multifarious, and it is only where there is a clash of opinion that these approaches can be discovered and the right road to truth be found."

"The danger in the loyalty compulsion is, then, that we may conceal mental apathy behind a rigid formula and thus lose sight of the constant need for psychological alertness and the real meaning of loyalty and a free way of life. The mechanical formula of a loyalty oath, because it checks moral alertness and a search for ethical clarification, may be the beginning of the thought control we all fear. True loyalty is a living, dynamic quality."

"In the subtle choice between loyalty to people and loyalty to principles (usually a much vaguer feeling) the lawmaker has to leave the individual as free as possible, because the latter type of loyalty is based on the first. Without personal loyalty there is no national loyalty!"

Inevitably loyalty ends up determining what kind of society we live in. It's analogous to consumer choice and the idea of "voting with your dollars", where the end result emerges due to individual decisions. I've written this entire essay because of how fascinated and inspired I am by what Merloo suggests. Our loyalties practically define our lives, on a small but also large scale. In the end, determining which loyalties are good or bad is not only personal, but should never be left to organizations and more importantly, governments.

This idea of choosing our loyalties well and defining our lives as well as entire societies is reminiscent of the concept of living truthfully as presented by Václav Havel. After all, to submit to a state of affairs that one does not actually find okay is to live a lie. Only by living truthfully can individuals demonstrate how they prefer life be lived and expose the advantages over other modes of living. Havel has written Power of the Powerless and played a major role in breaking the cruel rule of communism in Czechoslovakia. To me, Merloo's concept of (dis-)loyalty is strangely analogous to Havel's concept of truthfulness.

What follows are the last few particularly magical paragraphs of the chapter, tying loyalty into a much broader context.

"There is still another aspect to this problem. We must learn to distinguish between disloyalty in actions and disloyalty in feelings and thought. Subversion of opinion is never a crime. The right to dissent is the keystone of democracy. In a free state we must be willing to correct subversion by our better arguments. Persecuting dissenting ideas is a form of mental laziness. Psychologically speaking, a government cannot concern itself with conscious motivations (and the unconscious motivations which cannot be separated from them) of people because inwardly everybody has contrasting motivations. The quandary that such a government would provide itself is illustrated by the following quotation from the Oppenheimer hearing by the Gray board published in 1954."

"We believe that it has been demonstrated that the Government can search its own soul and the soul of an individual whose relationship to his government is in question with full protection of the rights and interests of both. We believe that loyalty and security can be examined within the framework of the traditional and inviolable principles of American justice."

"In these beautiful phrases lie hidden all the ominous beginnings of totalitarian thought control. The government that searches the soul of any thinking individual can always find a case against him, because doubt, ambivalence, and groping are traits common to all men. We cannot measure anybody's dependability on the basis of his thoughts and feelings as they appear to us. In the first place, we can never know what lies behind a seemingly loyal facade. In the second place, the man whose search for truth leads him to explore many heretical points of view can be the most loyal in his actions. His very exploration may well lead him to the considered judgment that underlies true loyalty. What counts in any man is the consistency and integrity of his behaviour, and his courage in taking a stand, not his conformity to official dogma."

...

"We have seen now that the problem of treachery has to deal with the failure to understand our inner mental processes. Every betrayal is in the first place a self betrayal, a disloyalty toward one's own standards. When people silence their conscience and compromise for the sake of convenience, at that moment they begin to be disloyal to themselves. Passivity - assumed when our conscience should have forced us to act - is the most common form of self-betrayal. Inwardly a man may be furious because of some injustice he has witnessed, but outwardly he may do nothing about it - this behaviour he feels inwardly is treason to the self and is often what makes him so touchy toward other people's flaws. When the pattern of passivity is repeated, the individual continuously piles up more feelings of injustice and grows more and more resentfulagainst society. Evasiveness and skilful dodging of issues of principle - these are among the most dangerous forms of self-betrayal in our time. They are dangerous because they lead unwittingly to the hypocrisy that puts power beyond ethical value."

...

"Loyalty is possible only when mutual mental aggression and hostility are allowed and tolerated within the limits of the law. This verbalized, sublimated, and civilized form of aggression presupposes fairness and good sportsmanship. It is the synthesis and conquest of rebellion and subversion. However paradoxical it may sound, democracy is founded on the mutual loyalty of politically opposed groups! You cannot doubt the good motives and intentions of your opponent without undermining the basis for cooperation and successful government. It is most undemocratic to impute disloyalty to the opposition party. History shows that only where there is opportunity to confront and integrate opposing ideas can man eradicate that form of psychological imbalance which gradually turns into a disloyalty to oneself and to the community. Fear of subversion and opposition is often fear of ideas, fear of being identified with certain unacceptable ideas, the fear of betrayal of the hidden part of oneself. Fear of treason will exist as long as loyal opposition is a crime."

"Democracy is nonconformity; it is mutual loyalty, even when we have to attack one another's ideas - ideas, which, because they are always human, are always incomplete."

Not only in this chapter but his entire book, Merloo reminds us of the forces, psychological underpinnings and mechanisms that control individuals, groups and eventually societies. He tackles isolation, conditioning, medication, coercion, mental intrusion, lies, confessions, yielding, surrender, needs, guilt, blackmail, survival, masochism, breakdown, liberation, techniques of mass submission, weapons of fear, cold war against the mind, engineering of public-opinion, psychological warfare, terror, indoctrination, totalitarianism, control, the robotization of man, cultural predilections, leaders, retreats from reality, totalitarian thinking, purging rituals, accusation, spy mania, criminalization, verbocracy and semantic fog, logos, labels, labelomania, trials, justice and its downfall, demagogues, prosecutors, hypnotism, intimidation, investigations, testimonies, judges and juries, television, detachment, fears of living, fantasies, regression, panic, reflexes and instincts, mental contagion, delusions, mass delusion, the loss of verifiable reality, magic thinking, technology, bureaucracy, administration, the bureaucratic mind, education, discipline, morale, courage, resistance, democracy, freedom of course alongside loyalty, treason, non-conformity and concluding with psychology, its role and the future age of psychology. While I've looked only at an incredibly specific subset of ideas concerning loyalty, he presents a much broader picture worth taking a look at in Rape of the Mind.

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The premise of the book is to elaborate on four different plants, or rather, four plants that have captivated us differently. The book title is a clever allusion to the one broad emotion that groups them all together: desire. We seek the apple's sweetness, the tulip's beauty, the potato's utility and marijuana's intoxicating properties. In fact, sometimes we desire different things in a plant, leading to diverging branches of a species. As an example Pollan recounts the story of marijuana:

"But what is so unusual about cannabis's coevolution (compared to something that of the rose, say, or the apple) is that it followed two such divergent paths down to our time, each reflecting the influence of a completely different human desire. Along the first path (which appears to have begun in ancient China and moved west toward northern Europe, then on to the Americas), the plant was selected by people for the strength and length of its fibers. (Up until the last century, hemp was one of humankind's main sources of paper and cloth.) Along the other path (which began somewhere in central Asia and moved down through India, then into Africa, and from there across to the Americas with the slaves and up to Europe with Napoleon's army), cannabis was selected for its psychoactive and medicinal powers. Ten thousand years later, hemp and cannabis are different as night and day: hemp produces negligible amounts of THC and cannabis a worthless fiber. (In the eyes of the U.S. government, however, there is still only one plant, so that the taboo on the drug plant has, pointlessly, doomed the fiber.) It is hard to conceive of a domesticated plant more plastic than cannabis, a single species answering to two such different desires, the first more or less spiritual in nature and the other, quite literally, material."

Right at the beginning, a case is made for a less anthropocentric view of the world. As humans we often consider ourselves as being in control, especially of nature. One needs only to look to natural disasters to see that we are still a long way off of being in control. We like to think that plants depend on us, particularly in our modern agricultural fields of monocultured plants, fields where genetic variability is contained and minimized, but we are just as dependent on plants. We also like think that we use plants as tools to further our species, but plants too use us as a tool to further theirs. Pollan called plants "nature's alchemists" and he has a very good point: "expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of turning sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry."

There is a neverending multitude of chemical wonders brought about by plants, some of which humans as a species would not have gotten to this point without. Even today, with all our feats of modern chemistry and bioengineering, we cannot exactly rival nature's alchemists. Often this is because we lack the ability to produce some of those chemicals as efficiently and elegantly as a plant does, making us dependent on them for manufacturing even today.

What if humans were to cease to exist? Plants and other species like fungi inhabited this earth long before us and probably will continue to do so long after that point. Not all plants of course, particularly those monocultures that were bred to maximize their efficiency at tackling our problems would face a difficult life in the wild, but overall these forms of life would certainly manage.

What is particularly interesting about the way Pollan recounts his masterful account of plant history is the chronology of the chapters. While Pollan's stories about the apple and the tulip play out long before our times, the story of marijuana is brought closer to our age, with the story of the potato focusing on recent developments. Earth in and up to 2001, in more exact space-time coordinates. In the chapter about the apple, we hear the curious lore of Johnny Appleseed and how the apple dominated the United States. In the case of the tulip, he zooms in on the tulip mania during the Dutch Golden Age. For marijuana, he recounts a fascinating history of intoxication and touches on the war on drugs that has carried on into our times. Finally, in the chapter of the potato, he writes about modern agriculture and novel ventures into the space of genetic engineering.

Definitely interesting as an example is the fact that the apple as we know it today is not even native to the U.S.. It was us who went to great lengths to take the apple and spread it far and wide for many regions of the world to contain apples:

"The apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume the plant is a native. (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or two about natural history, called it 'the american fruit.') Yet there is a sense - a biological, not just metaphorical sense - in which this is, or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to America. Bringing boatloads of seeds onto the frontier, Johnny Appleseed had a lot to do with that process, but so did the apple itself. No mere passenger or dependent, the apple is the hero of its own story."

It has to be said that Pollan has done his research. Not only is he well read in all of these different topics (he cites all his sources toward the end of the book), but for each plant (except for the tulip) he travelled the world (or his country) to find answers. Lastly, all this is, almost obligatorily of course, supplemented by experiments in his own garden. This is all necessary, because the problems he tackles are fierce: how does one explain the evolutionary advantages of beauty when discussing the tulip? What about intoxication? Intoxication is a difficult one, because it has been shown that even animals intoxicate themselves, sometimes on what constitutes a heavy psychedelic for us. ("Tukano Indians in the Amazon noticed that jaguars, not ordinarily herbivorous, would eat the bark of the yaje vine and hallucinate; the Indians who followed their lead say the yaje vine gives them 'jaguar eyes'.") Not only that, but according to Ronald Keith Siegel, who explored how humans and animals get high, came to the conclusion that "animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring." Of course, this is not intended to badmouth intoxicants, but the conclusion might be no conclusion at all. Around this point Pollan concedes that:

"What good, from an evolutionary standpoint, could it do a creature to consume psychoactive plants? Possibly none at all: it's a fallacy to assume that whatever is is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn't necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge."

What about genetic engineering? If we create genetically engineered potatoes to produce Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt for short, a toxin lethal to the Colorado potato beetle, who exactly profits? The Colorado potato beetle is a significant pest for the potato industry, so the potential market is huge, especially considering that we shower our fields with chemicals all the time because we have no better way to control these pests. Do note that these beetles drop dead after a single bite of any part of the plant, once they are genetically engineered to produce Bt. This might surprise you, but this is/was already reality, it's a challenge to know if those French fries you had at a fast food chain the other day were genetically engineered or not. To answer my original question, in theory both the potato and we as humans profit. But the matter is more complicated than that, before Bt was weaponized by the company Monsanto to develop this new kind of a potato, Bt was already in use as a sprayed chemical. Farmers worldwide rely on this chemical, as it is one of the safer ones and can be used on demand for a particularly plagued harvest. With genetically engineered potatoes, the sudden selective pressure might lead to a new beetle that Bt is useless against. Pollan makes a good case for thinking carefully about this, Bt as a chemical is a tool that is not restricted to any one company. But if the super potatoes lead to super beetles, the tool is lost for everyone as soon as that super beetle enters the gene pool.

What about patents? This genetically engineered product I have been talking about (they are called NewLeaf potatoes by Monsanto) is actually a patented product. There exists even a means of verifying if potatoes contain novel NewLeaf genes, giving Monsanto the ability to collect damages on their highly protective licensing terms. Or to quote Pollan (who has actually tested these potatoes):

"By 'opening and using this product,' the card informed me, I was now 'licensed' to grow these potatoes, but only for a single generation; the crop I would water and tend and harvest was mine, yet also not mine. That is, the potatoes I would dig in come September would be mine to eat or sell, but their genes would remain the intellectual property of Monsanto, protected under several U.S. patents, including 5,196,525; 5,164,316; 5,322,938; and 5,352,605. Were I to save even one of these spuds to plant next year - something I've routinely done with my potatoes in the past - I would be breaking federal law. (I had to wonder, what would be the legal status of any 'volunteers' - those plants that, with no prompting from the gardener, sprout each spring from tubers overlooked during the previous harvest?) The small print on the label also brought the disconcerting news that my potato plants were themselves registered as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Administration (U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474)."

Often times Pollan doesn't have clear answers, and neither do I. As for why things are as they are, were as they were, or how they will be is to my belief not accurately explicable. But the problems, the history, even the good parts are engrossing subjects. The picture I've painted is also somewhat reductive considering the plethora of curiosities presented in the book. Nature gets strangely alluring reading this carefully crafted tale of plants and desire. One thing is for sure however, my perspective on plants has changed beyond recognition.

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It would be a waste to use my breath on the many reasons why disciplinary technology is not necessarily for the betterment of humanity, but the gist is that these technologies typically impose outrageous, discriminatory and invasive violations of several rights all while trying to accomplish an unproven effect. There are eerie similarities to other surveillance technologies, but I digress. Something I only recently learned is how fierce the competition is in this field, it's almost like all these companies are racing against each other to the bottom of the pit that is unethical software. A good question is why? While a lot of students have protested this development [4], examiners remain paranoid about the integrity of their students. Perhaps the universities know something we don't, but without transparent discourse on the subject matter, examiners and examinees will never be on the same page. Openly discussing a high rate of cheaters is of course not in the interest of a university set to protect its status, so it's likely to remain unpublicised information, if it is actually happening.

Because of the lack of data, the points of the previous paragraph are difficult to debate productively. What can however be debated productively is the implementation of some of this disciplinary software, as one aspiring young security and privacy researcher by the name of Erik Johnson did. In a lengthy series of tweets [5] (I hate having to link the findings of a privacy researcher who posts his insights on twitter), Johnson exposes some of the inner workings, semantics and other great features of the "Proctorio" chrome extension. The code of extensions is something every browser user can effectively look up himself, Johnson even explains how. Nonetheless, because Johnson posted some highlights on pastebin.com, he was hit by a copyright infringement takedown notice. Not too long ago, the EFF joined Johnson in his saga to fight the people behind Proctorio [6]. In my eyes, Johnson did nothing wrong.

In the conversation, something disturbing pops up: examiners are reacting to supposed misdemeanors with coercion, according to one twitter user in the thread [7]. Many of these disciplinary software tools outright disregard that some people in this world are Linux users, even though Android is one of the most widely distributed operating systems today. Someone like me would have had a complicated process at the bar exam, because I refuse to install Windows in order to have an exam under complete surveillance. There are many other ramifications of such techology, some of which are outlined in the Vice article "Students Are Rebelling Against Eye-Tracking Exam Surveillance Tools" [4], that I don't want to touch upon now.

Automated examination protocols like the one used in the California bar exam are not without security risks, which has woken people up to the ever increasing amount of concerns [8]. Up until now, the outlook on this situation was not so excellent, but after what seems like a first step into the right direction, I have started to feel obligated to spread the message. Please let disciplinary software be a thing of the past.

NOTE: if links [5] and [7] aren't working for you, change the "nitter.eu" part to any one of the other public instances

[1] EFF: Fighting Disciplinary Technologies

[2] EFF: ExamSoft Flags One-Third of California Bar Exam Test Takers for Cheating

[3] The Biggest Bar Exam Disaster Ever? ExamSoft Makes Everyone’s Life Hard

[4] Vice: Students Are Rebelling Against Eye-Tracking Exam Surveillance Tools

[5] Erik Johnson examines Proctorio extension

[6] EFF: EFF Sues Proctorio on Behalf of Student It Falsely Accused of Copyright Infringement to Get Critical Tweets Taken Down

[7] Arie Germaine: Testing Protocol violations and coercion

[8] EFF: A Long Overdue Reckoning For Online Proctoring Companies May Finally Be Here

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Please go to the standalone blog entry to the full blog entry.

Postman places a lot of emphasis at the start of his book on the power of metaphors, as he calls it, to shape the nature of thought. Any medium, for its possibilities and impossibilities, exhibits an inherent bias in how it is used to convey meaning. It is logical now to examine how exposing a culture to a specific medium shapes culture itself, that is to say, the way people share, assimilate and disseminate information. Beautifully, Postman provides an analysis of oral culture, largely before print, to make his point:

"To explain how this happens - how the bias of a medium sits heavy, felt but unseen, over a culture - I offer three cases of truth-telling."

"The first is drawn from a tribe in western Africa that has no writing system but whose rich oral tradition has given form to its ideas of civil law. When a dispute arises, the complainants come before the chief of the tribe and state their grievances. With no written law to guide him, the task of the chief is to search through his vast repertoire of proverbs and sayings to find one that suits the situation and is equally satisfying to both complainants. That accomplished, all parties are agreed that justice has been done, that the truth has been served. You will recognize, of course, that this was largely the method of Jesus and other Biblical figures who, living in an essentially oral culture, drew upon all of the resources of speech, including mnemonic devices, formulaic expressions and parables, as a means of discovering and revealing truth. As Walter Ong points out, in oral culture proverbs and sayings are not occasional devices: 'They are incessant. They form the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible without them, for it consists in them.'"

The claim goes much deeper, insofar as to define the means of a culture as the definition of truth itself. Indeed, as following directly after the comparison shows, while a proverb might have served justice in oral cultures, a judge who bases his judgement on a mere saying in a culture where a system of law based on print exists might as well be called out of his mind. It also seems to be the case that people are limited in their ability to hold abstract thought together coherently using their heads alone, which is surely one of the reasons we depend on a medium to preserve the substantial contents of such abstract thought. It is not hard to construct any number of additional arguments as to why a medium is limited: whereas proverbs and sayings of an oral culture are made to be compact and memorable, so as to make remembering them more accessible, a print based medium can entirely disregard this need for compactness (perhaps not the need of memorability).

To take the argument a step further, the book examines the role of a medium in defining intelligence:

"Since intelligence is primarily defined as one's capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability. The wise Solomon, we are told in First Kings, knew three thousand proverbs. In a print culture, people with such a talent are thought to be quaint at best, more likely pompous bores. In a purely oral culture, a high value is placed on the power to memorize, for where there are no written words, the human mind must function as a mobile library. To forget how something is to be said or done is a danger to the community and a gross form of stupidity. In a print culture, the memorization of a poem, a menu, a law or most anything else is merely charming. It is almost always functionally irrelevant and certainly not considered a sign of high intelligence."

I find this point to be very fascinating, clearly there is merit in learning the ways of navigating the most commonly employed medium of thought. But for the already impossibly difficult to define property of intelligence to be entangled in human communication in such rich and complex ways is truly remarkable. Postman of course goes on to establish a plethora of additional reasons for why a predominant medium might be considered an influence on the nature of human communication itself, but for the sake of brevity I cannot attend to them. An interesting detail to note however is that Postman includes works by the printing press as well as works made without in the umbrella term of "print medium", but generally makes distinctions between both these categories of print, so to say.

At various points in time throughout the past century, a select few key technologies came around the corner to reshape discourse once more. Here I am referring to the telegraph, the photograph and their natural progression, television. Indeed, at this time we are already long past having to get used to the printing press. The long reign of the printing press gives Postman an entire era to compare against this newfound age of television in order to make his points. In print, it is necessary to present an idea orderly and coherently for the idea to be receivable, for the sequential nature of print makes it hard otherwise when the topic at hand is complex and interrelated with other topics. Naturally, the well known forms of exposition today are devices that emerge to make an attempt at presenting information well. There are stark contrasts between print and the telegraph, the photograph or even television. For one, photography is discontinuous by nature, a sense of place and time loses all relevancy confronted with the realities of photography. Photography reshapes reality itself, so to say. And the telegraph, or television, are similar in that they make possible the communication of information at (close to) the speed of light. While text is almost designed to be archived, television is meant for the moment.

"The debates opened, in fact, with Douglas making the following introduction, highly characteristic of everything that was said afterward:"

"Ladies and Gentlemen: I appear before you today for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind. By an arrangement between Mr. Lincoln and myself, we are present here today for the purpose of having a joint discussion, as the representatives of the two great political parties of the State and Union, upon the principles in issue between those parties, and this vast concourse of people shows the deep feeling which pervades the public mind in regard to the questions dividing us."

"This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure the fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word. Not only did Lincoln and Douglas write all their speeches in advance, but they also planned their rebuttals in writing."

Postman compares these old forms of political discourse against the ones of his time, which are televised battles where both presidential candidates try to appeal to the emotions of their viewers. In his own words:

"Prior to the 1984 presidential elections, the two candidates confronted each other on television in what were called 'debates.' These events were not in the least like the Lincoln-Douglas debates or anything else that goes by the name. Each candidate was given five minutes to address such questions as, What is (or would be) your policy in Central America? His opposite number was given then one minute for a rebuttal. In such circumstances, complexity, documentation and logic can play no role, and, indeed, on several occasions syntax itself was abandoned entirely. It is no matter. The men were less concerned with giving arguments than with 'giving off' impressions, which is what television does best. Post-debate commentary largely avoided any evaluation of the candidates' ideas, since there were none to evaluate."

This brings me to the core, the finale of Postman's exposition. Clearly, the televised presidential debates were not meant to appeal to reason, but to entertainment. Entertainment is, as Postman takes care explaining carefully, the currency of the showbusiness. Even though television as a medium is not inherently opposed to providing a coherent appeal to reason, there is no reason to do so, for people would rather watch something that entertains them at the same time. Even if television tries to be informative, or even educational, it falls short. Because in television, god forbid trying to impose a hierarchy of information. "There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to enter at any point without prejudice." Even though it is not impossible for television to be informative, educational, important, inspiring, empowering, or any combination thereof, it excels if it is additionally entertaining. The final point that permeates the book is how Huxleyan this state of affairs is:

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.' In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."

A task a reader of today is (hopefully) presented with in reading this book, is trying to compare the many arguments of a strictly televised culture with the interconnected culture of today. The internet has disrupted television, adopted some of its principles while abolishing some others. There is quite a lot to deconstruct in the context of today, but this text of mine has already exceeded its intended scope, doing so would only take up more screen space. I leave the task up to the reader, who, I trust, will take it upon himself to draw these parallels.

Ironically, this portrayal of the many arguments Postman provides falls short on coherence by having to condense it all. To assume that everything can possibly be adjusted to be portrayed with brevity is a grave mistake. The book is not very long, so I suggest giving it a read.

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After all, the only constant in life is change. (Heraclitus)

It is probably futile to attempt to judge how much suffering in current-year has increased relative to (- current-year 1). The political distress and civil unrest resulting from a certain virus of Chinese origin is another unfortunate consequence. On a less serious note, it also surprised me a little to see the stock price of CORONA CORP tank 20% in March, the stock market works in mysterious ways they say.

While current-year might have been very devastating, I suspect it was in many ways helpful to people who know how to keep healthy and make use of the extra time. Newton made his discoveries during a pandemic they say. Whether I can really count myself as part of that group I am not convinced of.

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There are these general sentiments floating around: "the internet was supposed to empower people!", "people only use the same five websites!" or "the old web was much better!" I wonder how much objective truth there is to these general sentiments. It's true that big corporate websites overshadow many smaller websites in terms of bandwitdth, but then again, you wouldn't compare this static site against some (shitty) streaming service like netflix. From another lens one could also argue that nothing is stopping people from trying to make the web the way they want it to be. Be the change you want to see, as they say. This webring is fantastic for this reason and incidentally also solves the problem of discovery, albeit only on a small scale. I've also seen individual people participate in more than one webring, which is fascinating, essentially they're endpoints between two different webrings, the node connecting two subgraphs, or the portal between two different worlds, however you want to frame it. I wonder if we secondary denizens of the internet can manage to put together a web of our own.

To conclude my ramblings, glory to webrings.

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"Quit, don't quit. Noodles, don't noodles. You are too concerned with what was and, what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."

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• who is responsible for the crime, the whodunit
• how was the crime executed, the howdunit
• what is the reason behind the crime, the whydunit

We can already see that some very interesting puzzles can emerge in works of detective fiction. Different authors place different emphasis on each of these individual puzzle pieces, making the task of finding out answers to all these questions variably difficult. But in the first place, is it always a puzzle? After all, murder mysteries are dealing with the dynamics of real people, where victims can be dead for no other reason than coincidence. To introduce even more complexity, not all crimes find closure in real world. Indeed, some aren't ever noticed to begin with. Thankfully, our compassionate literary overlords wouldn't put us through the torture of letting us think there was a guessable solution when there is none. Most of the works that originated during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction go though great efforts to present a reader with enough clues to reach the truth. Not always can the three dunits be easily guessed, but at least some combination of them. Unlike in real life, all the factors necessary for crime are without exception presented throughout the story. The murderer is always one of the people our detective meets with, for there wouldn't be any reaching a conclusion if the murderer were to be some person not introduced yet. The same goes for the howdunit, there shouldn't be any hidden magic mechanisms that remain undiscovered as a means for the murderer to kill their victims. Guessing the whydunit is yet still harder, because every author has a different take on psychology.

It is curious to me how a great heap of literary writers somehow collectively invented this protocol for all their works. A many detective fiction works could be said to follow Knox's "Ten Commandments", or alternatively S. S. Van Dine's "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", a list of properties meant to ensure the reader can unravel the mystery using only what is presented in the book (perhaps alongside their common sense). Just by following the protocol, such works attain the almost mathematical sort of property of being self-contained intellectual puzzles, a set of facts closed under completion so to speak. On the other hand, real life is assuredly more complicated, because real events do not necessarily follow this protocol. Detective fiction is truly a fiction and could be said to be slightly out of touch with reality, but that is as much a con as a pro. In any case, once such rules are imposed, writers get very creative and bend their stories enough to be too tricky to easily guess while remaining self-contained. In the case of the works of Van Dine, this inevitably leads to highly prepared and competent murderers and many, many misdirections thrown into the mix, but the outcome always follows a clear trace of logic. I can't say I myself have an easy time getting the right answer for these sorts of works, but it certainly makes detective fiction all the more enticing.

One last point, a lot of popular detective fiction works are not contemporary. These stories often live in a word in which there are no internet, computers or smartphones. These technologies greatly complicate the job of a single detective and have really transformed how we do justice today. Older works, besides being written in terms of simpler times, have the added benefit to be entirely uninfluenced by modern developments, unlike modern society. Even if some of the works are about a hundred years old, they are surprisingly accessible, although there can be a lot of archaic english.

"Do you hope to run a murderer to earth by dillydallying over a chess game?"

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This is interesting in its own right: how many people you pass in the streets daily are currently hallucinating in some form? Putting it against statistical odds like that diminishes the effect, probably making it not so many. After all, some types of hallucinations are only experienced once very particular conditions are fulfilled. Sleep related hallucinations for example (hopefully) only happen at home. Many people are aware of sleep paralysis for example, a very curious phenomenon on its own, because sleep paralysis is actually something many people experience. Sleep paralysis however is only one of many types of hallucinations experienced during hypnopompic state, during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Interestingly, there is plethora of sensations experienced during hypnogogic states too, during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. It is easy to miss or not recall these, as during this state our consciousness fades. Repetitious exercise can induce the Tetris effect during this state for example, but there is also a creative element to these hypnogogic hallucinations. Some artists, be it of literature, music, etc., claim to have drawn great inspirations from their hallucinations of this type, be it visual, auditory, or of another nature. Quite illustrative are the accounts of Vladimir Nabokov, who since young experienced hypnogogic hallucinations, reporting of vivid hallucinatory imagery. Some apparently also try to purposefully induce such a state as a means to spur on their creativity.

Delirious states are also reported to bring about very interesting or surreal experiences. Something as simple as a fever or as dramatic as injury followed up by surgery can bring about such states. Many substances have the same effect, the anti-malarial drug Lariam Sacks himself reports to have taken before his trip to the Amazon commonly causes very vivid and colorful dreams (or nightmares) and much more rarely full-blown hallucinations and psychoses. In delirium people experience effects like hearing music, or seeing music sheets painted on the walls.

Now for something a little different, various types of hallucinations varying in intensity come from migraine and epileptic attacks. Migraine related hallucinations are typically less complex, consisting of hallucinated geometry or other patterns, flashes of light or other obstructions of vision. Epilepsy on the other hand can lead to complex hallucinations, with many people reporting quite peculiar experiences during the onset of a grand mal seizure. Epilepsy haunts the general populace for as far as we can look back, quoting Sacks:

"Epilepsy affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all cultures, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history. It was known to Hippocrates as the sacred disease, a disorder of divine inspiration. And yet in its major, convulsive form (the only form recognized until the nineteenth century), it has attracted fear, hostility, and cruel discrimination. It still carries a good deal of stigma today."

Giving the sheer volume of particular hallucinatory experiences enough credit in a blog post is impossible. Even Sacks struggled, even though he had an entire book on to paint on. Nonetheless, I want to touch on the social effects of hallucinations. In general, people don't like to talk about hallucinations, because of their portrayal as a sign of lunacy in our modern times. This culture entirely unfit to harbor people with hallucinations makes someone experiencing hallucinations questioning their own sanity. Even when talking to trained practitioners, as Sacks reports, are people reluctant to even mention the fact of having experienced hallucinations. While many types of hallucinations are harmless, others are often indicative of some sort of neurological inconsistency.

I've also touched on how hallucinations can make people creative. Complex hallucinations where objects, animals or people are sensed in some way. I've always wondered about spiritual beliefs of supernatural entities, but after reading about various forms of hallucinatory manifestations it would arguably be more weird for these supernatural entities to not exist. To quote Sacks:

"Until the eighteenth century, voices—like visions—were ascribed to supernatural agencies: gods or demons, angels or djinns. No doubt there was sometimes an overlap between such voices and those of psychosis or hysteria, but for the most part, voices were not regarded as pathological; if they stayed inconspicuous and private, they were simply accepted as part of human nature, part of the way it was with some people."

While sometimes hallucinatory entities appear malicious in their nature, like entities observed during sleep paralysis are often purported to be, other times these hallucinatory entities can appear to be entirely benign. With no other way to explain certain phenomena, psychology was not a developed field not too long ago after all, it is no wonder how some of the curious variety of subjects of folklore came into existence today. To end my ramblings on a positive note, I want to leave a final, particularly incredible and heartwarming story of a hallucinated externalized voice experienced during life-threatening circumstances:

"The threat to life may also come from within, and although we cannot know how many attempts at suicide have been prevented by a voice, I suspect this is not uncommon. My friend Liz, following the collapse of a love affair, found herself heartbroken and despondent. About to swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and wash them down with a tumbler of whiskey, she was startled to hear a voice say, “No. You don’t want to do that,” and then “Remember that what you are feeling now you will not be feeling later.” The voice seemed to come from the outside; it was a man’s voice, though whose she did not know. She said, faintly, “Who said that?” There was no answer, but a “granular” figure (as she put it) materialized in the chair opposite her—a young man in eighteenth-century dress who glimmered for a few seconds and then disappeared. A feeling of immense relief and joy came over her. Although Liz knew that the voice must have come from the deepest part of herself, she speaks of it, playfully, as her “guardian angel.”"

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Folklore in general is a wonderful thing. On the one hand, the many pieces of wisdom one can extract from these tales is staggering, on the other hand, it is easy to interpret meaning where there actually was not supposed to be any. This is really what makes folklore so enticing initially, but also keeps individual tales reverberating. I speak generally about folklore here, but really, I have not much of a clue about non-Japanese folklore. I do hear though, Irish folklore can be very interesting too.

Another observation is, while the sayings of Japanese folklore are typically very brief (unlike this blog), their explanations are often-long winded, littered with historical connotations and the like.

So as to not let this monologue remain in all its worthlessness, I want to supply an example:

Tsukumogami represent household objects or tools that have acquired a spirit or kami inhabiting them. The legends tell, all types of tsukumogami gain sentience in one form or another after having existed close to or exactly 100 years. They can be peaceful, or vengeful, depending on their treatment during use.

So, there are a few interesting things of note here. First of all the meaning of the word, tsukumo for example can be literally taken to mean 九十九 ("nine-tens and nine"). The -gami part can be likened to kami, representing a spirit in the religious sense of Shintoism. The disposition of this spirit depends on how well it has been treated during use, such that tools that have been treated or thrown away disrespectfully become animate, angered because of its treatment and hostile towards humans. Such tsukumogami are characteristic youkai.

As an ancient folklore story, it carries a certain persuasive reasoning, because it is a very human idea to treat that which is important to you with care and respect. It could also exist to make people realize tools are not always so worthless that they need to be thrown away immediately, because their [a tool's] very existence represents opportunity. In today's landscape, where technology is built but much too soon disposed of, because their designers deliberately made them irreparable, this particular piece of folklore is surprisingly profound.

Another insightful interpretation follows, when the idea of tsukumogami, an object becoming a youkai, is not taken as literally. After all, many objects that serve well and survive a century are typically prized collector objects. Their value, then, comes from having "lived through" quite a fair amount of time, carrying fragments of civilization and culture from back then, capturing the "spirit" of their respective time. These objects can then be seen as distinct from their original purpose, because of this newfound association. Can it not be said that legendary objects have a name of their own?

Of course, it is easy to lose oneself in the many reasons a piece of Japanese folklore could exist. This quality of having apparent wisdoms and many possible meanings, while in itself being a silly belief is widespread in the likes of Japanese folklore. I'm not sure for what reason, but Japanese culture seems to have a lot of stories or concepts of this particular nature and these are from my point of view one of the defining aspects of this culture. You can still see the remnants of folklore in shrines, architecture, even in everyday customs, making it, alongside the culture, all the more charming.

Curiously, Blindsight only masquerades as a book about first contact, but really tackles a much more earthly concept. The question of consciousness, namely. Ingeniously, the premise is a first contact scenario between two wildly life forms, one being us puny but crafty humans, but the other a vastly more intelligent appearing but also seemingly intelligible collective intelligence called Rorschach. What makes this life form peculiar, is that Rorschach is not a solid entity, but a comparably gigantic gaseous composition with intense EM fields that constantly emit radiation. A crew attempts communication, upon which they detect specific EM waves emitted by Rorschach that could be synthesized as speech. The two parties exchange, but a linguist crew member eventually suggests Rorschach is simply generating familiar seeming speech patterns it learned from telecommunication exchanges on earth and doesn't actually understand what either party is actually saying. Understand in this context is to be interpreted as the conscious action of processing and interpreting language.

This is really peculiar, because it suggests that a vastly more intelligent life form has evolved without any traces of consciousness. Consciousness is the key here and what decidedly makes Blindsight speculative fiction, because there is still no consensus on the mechanisms or even the purpose (function) of consciousness. Whether discussions of consciousness are ever scientific is also an ongoing debate, but this never stopped humanity in its attempt to test other complex organisms for consciousness.

In the science forum Ratio 2017 Peter Watts held a talk titled "Conscious Ants and Human Hives". He goes on to mention a study on ants, where the scope of the study was to test whether ants are self-aware. This sounds like a crazy idea, but seemingly ants will recognize themselves in a mirror. This means they seem to be able differentiate between themselves and other ants! The talk showcases many more such concepts.

Rather than speculating the origin of consciousness, Watts focuses on a characteristic that would hint at the origin. His grand idea was to ask, what is consciousness dispensable? We all take for granted that at least part of our intelligence is attributed to our peculiar consciousness. Some research suggests otherwise.

Seminal work by Libet et al. in the 1980s suggested that movement preparation (i.e. neural indicators of wanting to execute functions that lead to movement) as a neural process occurs before any awareness of it! This would imply that awareness is not a prerequisite for movement preparation. We like to say actions of ours are the result of deliberate thought. If awareness only follows suit, we instead are in a process of constantly justifying actions already in the execution pipeline. More recent evaluations of awareness timing confirm parts of this seminal work but also question whether accurate enough methods are even available yet, suggesting further research is necessary before something of this gravity can be shown. The original study does have very convincing arguments and there has been difficulty in refutation. [1]

More bizarrely, separate studies inspect our capacity for making good choices consciously. Specifically the phenomenon of intuition presents a mystery I still can't reason about, how can intuitive answers ever beat results of deliberate thought processes? A comprehensive study analysed our capacity for choices made consciously and unconsciously. They presented catalogues of products from within categories, tasked people to make choices that are as optimal as possible in terms of some known criteria. It is hard to summarize a study this comprehensive, but basically groups of people who consciously reflected on optimal decisions made objectively worse decisions compared to groups of people who intuitively answered. [2]

Perhaps we really are capable of complex cognition without having to be aware of it. People can drive to a destination and arrive without any subsantial recollection of the process of getting there. People can achieve feats while sleepwalking (homicidal sleepwalking anyone?). For Watts this begs the question: is consciousness a parasite? Albeit somewhat radical, he does have a point. Evidence suggests consciousness is not in charge, evidence suggests consciousness is not even a prerequisite for complex cognitive tasks and we still have enormous difficulty in framing the purpose of consciousness at all. Is consciousness just a side development? A parasitic result of evolution that is neither responsible for harm or benefit? If we assume all of humanity is conscious (which is also hard to confirm at times), what specific evolutionary advantage does consciousness grant us? There is actually no trivial answer to this question!

[1] Timing and awareness of movement decisions: does consciousness really come too late?

[2] On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect

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Incidentally, this is also the end of current decade. Supposedly this assigns current year greater importance.

As a reminder to myself, this new decade has the potential to become the best one yet. When times are rough, pull through and achieve greatness. After all, what else is there to be done in life.

After all, the only constant in life is change. (Heraclitus)

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Probably anyone is familiar with stories of time puzzingly speeding up in very emotionally intense situations. Claudia Hammond chose a very memorable example, the story of Chuck Berry. My short synopsis likely won't do justice, I recommend looking it up. In essence, a veteran specialist in anything to do with aerial stunts (sky diving and more for 25 years) attempts using a Swift (a light sail plane to jump from a mountain and glide through the skies with) to glide after jumping the Coronet Peak. The wings of his Swift however start fluttering, upon which they shear of, leaving Chuck in freefall at about 200 km/h. To spoil it, he survived. Curiosities arise in questioning what was going through his head during these inarguably very intense moments. The whole ordeal took merely a few seconds, but for Chuck, time stretched seemingly indefinitely. Upon being asked, Chuck explained his thought processes during those few seconds, but this internal dialogue was simply too extensive to be contained by merely a few seconds.

A lot of other factors play into our perception of time: attention, emotional state, personal well being, sunlight, psychopharmaceuticals, et cetera. The whole concept of being bored and being immersed for example is dependent on time being perceived to pass varyingly fast. One might ask at this point, what is responsible for all this change in perception?

An excellent question, sadly not too easily answerable. Obviously the brain is going to play a role in perception shifting. To make this question less abstract, it would be prudent to first examine how time is formed within our brains, but this posed a huge problem in neuroscience. There would have to be some mechanism in our brain responsible for perceiving time, but there just isn't any one "part" that acts as a clock. Theories have come up and they are all incredibly fascinating. A hypothesized mechanism to act as a clock for example were brain oscillations. This was part of the belief that the brain infers time by using "general features of the brain circuits". During neuronal activity, action potentials shoot constantly, and the rate of this activity, given by the very short alpha waves for example, could discretize time in small packets. The issue with alpha waves though lies in their resolution: alpha waves, due to the way they oscillate, would limit time resolution to multiples of 30 milliseconds, but studies have shown that we can just as well count durations not divisible by 30 milliseconds.

Other theories try to instead find a "series of clocks", where multiple body regions are responsible for our measurements of time. Perhaps more excitingly is the "Attention Gate Model", which tries to do away with this concept of a clock entirely. This is best explained by the following passage taken from the book:

"Perhaps the whole notion of a single clock or a series of clocks is too complex. An alternative explanation focuses on concentration. Just as time flies when you're absorbed in a book, the more complex a task you're given in a lab, the shorter you estimate that time period to be. So if you are presented with a list of words and asked to spot the words beginning with E as well as any words that represent animals, this requires two different skills and more concentration than simply looking for animal words alone. So the more that's going on, the faster time seems to go by. The Attention Gate Model is an example of this kind of idea. The theory is that we have a pacemaker which emits an endless series of pulses in the brain, and a gate that allows our brain to count up every pulse that passes through, just like a shepherd counting sheep as they're herded through a farm gate. If you're feeling anxious, the pulses speed up, and so more pulses pass through the gate within a given period causing you to believe that more time has passed than really did."

No one answer is decisive enough to this particular question, but scientists have managed to attribute the counting of certain time intervals to certain areas in the brain, though these brain areas are just implied in time perception, not exclusively responsible. Using TMS to damp the cerebellum "reduces people's ability to perform in tests where they have to judge milliseconds, but makes no difference when the time intervals are many seconds long." (incidentally, the cerebellum is also involved in proprioception). The frontal lobe enables the counting of seconds. The basal ganglia for longer durations, as well as the anterior insular cortex. Our original problem however persists:

"So neuroscientists know where the brain counts time, but the mystery remains as to how. Does information come in from the basal ganglia and the cerebellum and then somehow the frontal lobe counts up that information, giving a sense of duration, or do we count up these emotional moments as Craig proposes? Either might be true. But there is one problem; with all the developments in neuroscience there is still no sign of this elusive clock to do the counting."

And this is not even considering a related but very different problem: prospective time and retrospective time. Prospective is yet to pass, and retrospective already passed. Experiments usually involve either asking people to judge the passage of time at a given moment (prospective) or asking people to judge elapsed time (retrospective). Retrospective implies having to recall, which brings us to memory. Memory is already very problematic on its own, it has been shown consistently that our memories are not to be trusted.

One last I want to bring up (without elaboration) is the revolutionary work by Michel Siffre (a speleologist), who accidentally founded the field of chronobiology. He originally set out to answer the question whether "glaciers carve their way through caves underground as they gouge through mountains above ground", but instead presented very confounding evidence for a "body clock that can function independently of light and dark". Without daylight, our body clock estimates 24 hours and 31 minutes to be a day. Further elaboration in section "2. Mind Clocks" chapter "The Perfect Sleep".

I am aware this whole post is a big [citation needed], but all information presented is basically taken from the book. Almost all concepts presented are merely outtakes from the first two chapters. Just the sheer amount of interesting interconnected concepts presented in the actual book is, in my humble opinion, very mind-boggling (as is time itself). It follows that this depiction of Claudia Hammond's work cannot hold a candle to the actual thing. I want to end my ramblings with an introductory quote to Time Warped:

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once"

• Albert Einstein

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• listings of definitive principles to live by
• productivity rules for time optimization

This is of course a gross generalization, but I'm deliberately choosing these definitions to challenge a recurrent theme in self-help books. Endless comparisons. Examples are brought up to illustrate points made. These are contrasted against each other. If there is no specified reference to be contrasted against the suggestion, the reference is implicitly the reader. Inducing feelings of inferiority doesn't imply positive change, thus doesn't help the damn reader. Conceptually, a self-help book is supposed to help the reader better their life. Just as conceptually, a self-help book practically assumes that there is a better life to be lived by the reader. This, depending on the type of growth the book in question is trying to propose suggestions for, can be very toxic.

It is useful to consider the following variables:

• personal values of the reader
• personal values of the writer

Although this is up to the individual, there exist values that are just very crappy. The stereotypical "maximizing for financial success in life" instantly comes to mind, albeit there might be many more. Incidentally, the choosing of values and its effects is one of the key points made by Manson. I conjecture for a self-help book to actually point a reader towards true happiness, either:

1. the reader already manifested positive intrinsic values, which the book helps reinforce
2. the writer offers values that are recognized by the reader to be more intrinsic and positive, leading to productive change

Of course this raises an interesting question, are intrinsic values inherently superior to extrinsic values when trying to achieve happiness? I've always thought the answer to be true, it is I find a logical and intuitive standpoint. Take for example a very common metric, good grades. If I define my values extrinsically, the good grades are probably tools for social status. If I define my values intrinsically, I might be using good grades as a (perhaps crappy) metric for actual education. Manson basically agrees, but he goes even further and gives an actual explanation as for why this distinction works out this way. Regardless of the metric used, extrinsic values define success that is independent of our own actions. The example used in the book, "make everyone I meet like me", is a value where achieval of success can be influenced by personal action, but is ultimately not a result of pure personal action. Success in this case is dependent on external factors, and simply cannot be achieved sometimes.

In the end I do not know if good self-help books are rather the rule instead of the exception, but I would definitely liken Mansons work to the better books out there. Instead of trying to dictate good values or depress the reader by showcasing all these people that are in some way more successful, this book actively tries to decompose existing values. Even though some of the language chosen is questionable (I particularly liked chapter 6 subchapter "Kill Yourself"), this book is meant to serve as a reality pill and shakes the very foundations of our personal values.

Some summarizations of lessons learned, for which I am too lazy to give elaborations for:

• We choose what in particular to give a fuck about, or, what to struggle for
• We cannot not give a fuck
• Upon solving all our problems, we invent other problems
• The point in climbing is not to reach to top and stop climbing
• Ordinary is not boring, average is not bad
• Responsibility and fault are not the same
• The only certainty in life is uncertainty
• Life is an accumulation of immortality projects to further manifest a symbolic self (Ernest Becker)

And a very stimulating finishing thought from Manson:

"Yet in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life's meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero."

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Nonetheless, Sacks has a knack for pointing out the extraordinary. His patient Dr. P, as the provocative title leads one to think, literally lost the ability to discern faces! But in all his clinical tales, instead of just highlighting deficits (a term he very much despises), he gives a personal view of how people live with their condition, what exactly is lost, what in turn is pronounced and how the brain adapts to the situation. This brings me to perhaps my favorite of the tales presented in this book, "The Disembodied Lady" (part one chapter 3). In this section, a functionally fundamental part of the body is taken under neurological review: prioprioception. In this tale, a sudden neuritis befalls Christina, who in turn loses her proprioception. This proprioception, colloquially called "the sixth sense", is what gives us our fine grained control over our entire bodies. It is comparable to feeling, but instead of feeling the world outside our bodies, we "feel" inside our bodies. Sacks goes on to elaborate on how a person (seems) to handle motor control: three key influences, in weighted order, enable our motor control, a proprioceptive body model, a visual body model and our vestibular system. This had astonishing implications for Christina. In her early adaptation phase, where she learned to get around her loss of proprioception, she heavily relied on her visual model of the body. That means, she looks at body parts she wants to move, and in turn loses the ability to move if she does not look. Trying to stand, she risks collapse by blinking. She gradually learned, with the brain being as typically resourceful as we know it to be, how to function properly in society again. Still, this story, like a lot of the Korsakov syndrome ones, sound simply unreal.

Sacks makes sure to let us know his immense empathy for his patients (or clients, whichever he in the end took to be less offensive I'm not sure) and made very philosophical points about his Korsakov syndrome patients. These suffered some of the most extreme amnestic conditions I have ever encountered in literature. Such befell Stephen (part one chapter two) for example, who by retrograde amnesia was not able to form new memories. Imagine having old memories of the place we call home that are perfectly intact, Stephen would examine his home and be perturbed by any differences to his old memories. Quoting Sacks:

"He was distressed and puzzled if the smallest changes were made in the house. ('You changed the curtains today!' he once expostulated to his wife. 'How come? So suddenly? They were green this morning.' But they had not been green since 1978.) He recognised most of the neighbouring houses and shops - they had changed little between 1978 and 1983 - but was bewildered by the 'replacement' of the cinema ('How come they tear it down and put up a supermarket overnight?')."

Trying to describe this absurd situation myself would very likely have been futile, for nothing really induces such an eerie image better than the original text itself. Perhaps not so fun, you could just wait and suprise Stephen about the same thing once more. Is life worth living if time simply stops?

"Such patients, fossilised in the past, can only be at home, oriented in the past."

Other amnestic patients have their own interesting peculiarities to them, I would be hard pressed to list them all. If it isn't already clear by now, part one was personally the most intriguing section of the book. Like the seemingly spiteful review I linked says, the book doesn't get too technical, so it doesn't take an expert to read it. On the other hand, I was not too sure what to make of a majority of chapters from part four. The tale of "The Twins" seemed particularly wacky, with their psychic ability to instinctively recognize prime numbers, without even having the mental capacity to do arithmetic. Part four hints at some internal mechanisms of the autistic, but I think it moreso highlights just how much uncharted territory some of these highly specific neurological conditions pose to us. I feel bad complaining about it, but Sacks always points out in length how important it is to understand and feel with patients in their particular life situations, so as to give them a place worth living in. Sacks ends his very last chapter with the, perhaps not very encouraging, following words about his artistically gifted but otherwise autistic patient Jose and his future:

"For, as the stars stand, he will probably do nothing, and spend a useless, fruitless life, as so many other autistic people do, overlooked, unconsidered, in the back ward of a state hospital."

Consumption of any particular piece of media of any form is not necessarily a wasted experience, if said media is later reflected on to produce positive change. In my quest to identifying instances of unproductivity, the no-brainer is to reflect upon an experience some later time. No matter how temporally delayed a reflection, there has to be some remembrance to content, some memorable effect on personal values. I came to realize, a lot of things I watch, read or in any other form consume, have little effect in retrospect. If content can't be reflected on because it has been forgotten, if nothing else of particular remains after an experience, it might just as well not have happened at all. This applies in particular to literature. Thinking back, I have no idea what certain thought pieces were actually about. With not even a vague notion of content left to introspection, has it registered on a neuronal level at all? Not in any tangible way at least.

This long introduction explains a sudden and random blog entry on a book by Chuck Palahniuk. Personal reflection on a work relatively immediate to completion date has proved a valuable habit. All those pages upon pages of produced text I have for the most part not given a second read, but merely the act of formulating thoughts and writing them down helped get a clear view of what exactly it is I learn from consuming a particular piece. After completing any thought piece, I am typically left in disarray. Taking some time and collecting my thoughts helps let good ideas sink in and possibly reason about what the author wanted to express. (By the way, my excuse for writing unseen and arguably useless essays on consumed media was to in turn become a better writer, as I forced myself to write in different languages)

As of recently, I put up this blog. The blog has infinite potential to revolutionize this workflow of writing essays on consumed media, as I can conveniently connect to my own server from anywhere at any time and just start writing. I was always too shy to formulate opinions for a blog, but by now I convinced myself, no one except for myself watches this god forsaken place anyway (if that is not the case, I still like to pretend it is).

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Our protagonist ends up very confused about the world and passively playing assigned roles. The Creedish cult had a simple way of life with many arbitrary rules, which he lived through, until he was inserted into the real world in the role of an eternal worker. Though he missed their big stunt, 'The Deliverance', and effectively lost his single life purpose, the capitalistic machine of the real world had just the right future in stock. With a soulless agent trying to make our protagonist famous for personal gain, our protagonist instead pursues celebrity, fame and riches, just like he perceives he is supposed to. Until, in admittedly a very funny manner, that end goes sour too.

It could be argued that our dear protagonist just failed to see the point of life. What is important to us is also subjective to us. The Creedish with their endless lectures about Do's and Don't's of life, the endless stream of, often very ridiculous, personal problems people have when calling our protagonists suicide hotline, the caseworkers wasted effort in support of our progranotists case. Perhaps the biggest contribution to our protagonists misanthrope mindset is his time as famous Tender Branson. With literally everything revolving around his persona being made up by someone else with the sole purpose of drawing money from people, he simply ends up a stage actor. Watching people being drawn to this made up persona, brewing controversy because of it or in any other way making a bigger deal out of Tender Branson than our protagonist himself, surely must have busted his bullshit meter, for people love to indulge in irrelevancy. Throughout the course of it all, our protagonist a lot of times ends up wondering whether or not the time to kill himself has come, but figures he can always continue to play his assigned roles passively until he has a better reason to kill himself. A sort of suicide procrastination mechanic. Even his brother later haunts him with deeply existential questions, pulling at the root of our protagonists very identity. Our protagonist realizes his lack of sovereignty. There hasn't been a lot of active, instead all passive action.

What is it he was supposed to do? For any given stage of his life, he has no answer, for he lacks real purpose. It remains for him to unironically kill himself. Which he very officially does, in the most attention-seeking fashion imaginable. Hijacking a plane and recording his personal life story. He is dead, but his story will be searched for and will be found. Just like that, he officially dies.

This is just how the book starts (a very captivating introduction), oddly just how it ends. His narration of this planned plane hijack suicide. I wasn't aware until I found out what Palahniuk actually intended as an ending, but our protagonist doesn't actually die. It just wouldn't do poetic justice to Palahniuk not to mention his ingenuity, so I am going to give it my best shot: Tender Branson, with everything we associate to his purposeless character, his Creedish upbringing, staged fame and so forth, dies with that plane crash. The catch is the twist introduced by his late relationship with Fertility, where he may have found purpose. Tender Branson remains part of the plane crash, never to leave the flight recorder. His new persona, finally having found meaning in life through Fertility, survives (read Palahniuk's statement for an official explanation). In essence, the plane crash is meant to make the entire world watch him put his entire life story, all of Tender Branson so far, behind. For what remains might as well be called differently...

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This empty space on the web served no particular purpose, except perhaps teaching some important self-hosting concepts personally. Out of curiosity, I decided to set up a blog. The blog has to fulfill two important criteria:

• dead simple to use
• dead simple to set up

Well, curiosity killed the cat. There are a couple interesting static site generators out there, but for my purposes, it would have well sufficed to write a simple (c|python|shell) application that knows how to drop HTML tags into a template. I have instead opted to give something a go that captivated my fascination earlier this year, Luke's blog and rss system. It didn't take particularly long to set up, but were my criteria fulfilled?

• dead simple to use: Initially I was planning to write plain text freely within some source directory, upon which each file automatically gets compiled into a single HTML using a prebuild mechanism like make with an appropriate Makefile. Luke's idea beats mine hands down, a simple echo article-name | lb n opens up your $EDITOR and lets you write your first draft. Once the draft reaches a state at which it is considered ready for publishing, the article is publiished using lb p. lb is no source of wizardry and mysticism, anybody can look into the source code of his lb script. Grasping its contents is not even a meme, the script is in fact <80 LOC. It appears lb is indeed dead simple to use.
• dead simple to set up: This is not particularly difficult either. Apart from having to mangle with your web server to display some extra sites, the setup really just requires slight modifications of the several initial HTML files as Luke uses them. This equates to modifying some html, perhaps some css, done. It appears lb is also dead simple to set up.

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stars have beginnings too, but meet an end of their own making - finite

history has shown that those with wisdom are the greatest fools of all

fish that live in the sea know nothing of land

if they had wisdom, they, too, would be ruined

for humans to exceed the speed of light,

is more foolish than for fish to start living on land

these words are meant for those who dare to defy god's final warning

it is the wise who are most foolish

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