As I spent my childhood playing on the shores of the Clyde River in Scotland, I watched ships as they headed eastward to sea. Where were they headed? What lay at their destination?

I did not know that halfway around the world was another child harboring similar questions as he stood near the shipbuilding yards on the Columbia River in Vancouver. We two were destined to meet in Canada where we married more than 50 years ago.

Once our family was grown, our innate love of the water surfaced. Wed enjoyed recreational sailing on the Columbia River, and set our sights farther. After reading, taking appropriate classes and attending talks by others who lived the cruising lifestyle, John and I were ready to pursue our own retirement dream. We sold our home, packed our car and began a two-year sailboat search.

We found her in Texas, renamed her Pacific Rose and began our quest to find paradise.

One afternoon, under a cloudless blue sky, we anchored off Sand Dollar Beach by Georgetown, Bahamas. I stood at the bow, clearly seeing scattered wisps of green grass swaying on the white sand floor about 10 feet below. John was swimming along to check that the anchor was holding fast. Pacific Rose swayed gently with the current under the bright sunshine.

We planned to spend the afternoon tending to boat chores. Having raised the dinghy onto the deck, John was using a felt pen and letter template to refresh the registration numbers on each side of its bow. I was going to soak the dock lines, which had become soiled and salt-hardened during our travels.

John glanced across the deck, adjusting his eyes from the effects of the glaring sun to the shaded cockpit. It surprised him to see my derriere in the air, toes clutching the cockpit floor. The rest of me was slung over the edge of the starboard storage locker, my arms stretching downward into the space below.

My fingers almost reached the pail that rested on the floor of the locker. I was attempting to grasp the handle in order to lift it onto the deck so I could go ahead with soaking the lines.

Nan, for heavens sake, let me do that, shouted John, who is over a foot taller than me.

Its OK. I can reach it, I said.

But you cant, he said knowingly.

Yes, I can, was my assertive reply.

Confident and determined, I suddenly banged my elbow against the lever on the fire extinguisher attached to the side of the locker. Unbeknownst to us, the safety pin was not replaced when the extinguisher was last serviced. Before either of us could utter another word, the inanimate fire extinguisher spouted to life. It spewed forth a fine talc-like substance, covering everything stored in the locker: lines, pail, bosuns chair, tarp and miscellaneous marine equipment and supplies.

Of course, I was not immune. I grabbed the edge of the locker, pulled myself to standing position and turned to John with white face and prematurely white hair.

I guess I couldnt, I quipped.

We spent the rest of the afternoon emptying the storage locker, wiping down its walls and contents before neatly replacing each item. We were pleased about one thing: We knew the fire extinguisher worked. Now all we had to do was have it recharged at the marine supply store down island.

And so it went, one of our many adventures in paradise.

Everybody Has a Story welcomes nonfiction contributions, 1,000 words maximum, and relevant photographs. Send to: neighbors@columbian.com or P.O. Box 180, Vancouver WA, 98666. Call Everybody Has an Editor Scott Hewitt, 360-735-4525, with questions.

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Everybody Has a Story: They retired with two tickets to paradise - The Columbian

Uncharted territories are difficult to navigate, but what if you had the ability to do a test run for one of lifes most important milestones retirement? This pandemic has been just that in more ways than one.

Families, schools and businesses have been left feeling whiplashed by the efforts of government and officials as they close, re-open and re-close aspects or our economy and our daily lives. The global pandemic has tested our true grit on so many levels as a nation and economy.

It is also shining a spotlight on many of the areas where we have done a good job at preparing for retirement andsome areas that still need some work.

As the saying goes, the show must go on. The good news is if youre not retired yet, then theres still time to make some changes.

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You may be finding yourself working on various home projects, taking on new hobbies, or reviving old ones during the lockdown. What has been your experience? Maybe the initial thought of a wide-open schedule and an unplanned day sounded exciting, but it turned out to be unfulfilling and boring. Or maybe it was heaven.

Figuring out what to do with all the extra time youll have during retirement to live a purposeful and meaningful life is just as important as figuring out how youll allocate your money.

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As a result of the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, families and loved ones had nowhere to go and were forced to spend more time together. This presented a unique opportunity for families to find meaningful engagements in relationships that were often pushed aside or hurried as a result of everyday life demands. On the flip side, coronavirus has amplified problems between some couples as theyve been stuck in close quarters and forced to confront compatibility issues and navigate the unique problems of the pandemic. In fact, divorce rates have skyrocketed amid coronavirus, and 31% of couples admitted the lockdown has caused irreparable damage to their relationships.

Stress levels will hopefully not be as high during retirement as they are now, but couples should similarly expect more time spent together and garner a sense of what that means for their future whether positive or negative.

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With the economy shut down and many areas faced with stay-at-home orders, weve been forced to hunker down and focus on what we need to survive. The common epiphany shared by many is that, well we dont really need all that much. You probably noticed that besides food, housing and utility costs, there wasnt much else you needed.

If you were lucky enough to transition to telework, your transportation costs likely declined. And shopping for business attire and dry-cleaning bills? Those costs likely plummeted as well. There are expenses that may well increase in retirement like medical bills so take this time to note how your spending has changed throughout the pandemic. It should give you a good indication of what you really might need to get by in retirement.

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This pandemic has also highlighted more than ever the importance of having a cash cushion for emergencies. When an unforeseen expense occurs, its best to have three to six months worth of expenses in a liquid account. This is no different during retirement.

Its especially helpful to have a cash cushion when your investment accounts take a dip and youre best off pausing distributions from these accounts. Being dynamic with your distributions and temporarily bridging expenses from savings will allow your portfolio time to recover.

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Whether youre furloughed, searching for employment or are a business owner re-working your strategy, youve probably been forced to look at how long you can manage all your bills, given how much you currently have. Although not an exact science, calculating your retirement is much like that.

Regardless of whether youre living off a 401(k), pension, Social Security and/or investment income in retirement, youll need to weigh your current investment income plus expected future income against your annual expenses.

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If youre nearing retirement, this last bout of market volatility probably made you acutely aware of how market shocks can impact your carefully laid-out plans. It likely also underscored the importance of managing risk as you get closer to retirement.

Luckily, weve seen a rapid recovery in the markets this time but take this opportunity to revisit your portfolio allocation to make sure that your risk is aligned with your goals and time horizon. Sometimes there are no second (or third) chances.

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Being flexible and able to adapt to the worlds uncertainties is always a great strategy. Having the ability to pivot and re-tool their finances is helping individuals, families and businesses survive right now. Everyones path to retirement looks different. But a test run is one thing that will certainly help you run the show as you get closer to that date.

Wealth Adviser, Halbert Hargrove

Julia Pham joined Halbert Hargrove as a Wealth Adviser in 2015. Her role includes encouraging HH clients to explore and fine-tune their aspirations and working with them to create a road map to attain the goals that matter to them. Julia has worked in financial services since 2007. Julia earned a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in Economics and Sociology, and an MBA, both from the University of California at Irvine.

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6 Ways the Pandemic Has Been a Dress Rehearsal for Retirement and How You Can Take Advantage - Kiplinger's Personal Finance

The specialist knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

It has been almost one hundred years since Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930). A prescient indictment of anti-Reason, and an immediate forerunner of modern classical works by German scholars Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,[1] Ortega was most plainly concerned about Europes growing fragmentation of learning. Witnessing a world rapidly abandoning the traditional goal of broadly-educated or whole human beings, he worried about a future in which there would be more capable scientists than ever before, but where these scientists were otherwise unexceptional and without any wider embrace of erudition.

These observations were seminal. Among other things, the prophetic philosopher foresaw educated societies in which even the proud holders of impressive university degrees were conscientiously ignorant of everything outside their own vocational bailiwicks. In essence, Ortega had anticipated the present-day United States. Here, even in an oft-vaunted advanced society, the most exquisitely trained physicians, lawyers, accountants and engineers generally reason at the same limiting level of analysis as technicians, carpenters or lightly schooled office workers.

In large part, this is because professional education in the United States has effectively superseded everything that does not ostentatiously focus on making money. The adverb here is vital in this description, because the overriding lure of wealth in America remains the presumed admiration it can elicit from others. As we ought already to have learned from Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.[2]

Almost by definition, any American concerns for intellectual or historical issues per se have become extraneous. This does not mean, however, that our strenuous national efforts at improving professional education have been successful or productive. On the contrary, as we witness the multiple daily technical failures of American democracy e.g. the all-too evident incapacity of our ballot calculating technologies to keep abreast of shifting vote-counting modalities this beleaguered polity is failing on multiple fronts.

For many reasons, many of them overlapping, this has been a lamentable retrogression. Above all, it has impaired this countrys capacity to sustain an enviable or even minimally credible democracy. Though Thomas Jefferson had already understood that proper human governance requires a purposeful acquaintance with historical and sociological learning, Americans now inhabit a country where the president can say unashamedly, I love the poorly educated. Significantly, this perverse preference of Donald J. Trump did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing.

It is a portentous but credible echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: Intellect rots the brain.[3]

Ortega yGasset had a specific name for this generally defiling intellectual deformation. More exactly, he called it The Barbarism of Specialisation.[4] Earlier, and in somewhat similar fashion, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the educated philistine.[5] Both Ortega and Nietzsche recognized the irony that a society could become progressively better educated in various sub-fields of human knowledge and yet, simultaneously, become less and less cultured, less and less truly civilized.[6] In this regard, the German philosopher placed appropriate conceptual blame on what he preferred to call the herd.[7] For his part, the kindred Spanish thinker cast his particular indictment on the mass.

Whatever the terminological differences, both sets of ideas were centered on the same basic critique; that is, that individuals had been casting aside the necessary obligation to think for themselves, and had, thereby, surrendered indispensable analytic judgments to crowds.[8]

Today, both ideas can shed some useful light on American democracy, a system of governance under increasing assault by US President Donald J. Trump. To the extent that American education has become rampantly vocational that is, oriented toward more and more pragmatic kinds of specialization the wisdom of Ortega yGasset and others is worth probing with ever-increasing care. Moreover, the corrosively barbarous impact of specialization foreseen earlier by philosophers is now magnified by the injurious effects of worldwide disease pandemic.

Without doubt, this unwelcome magnification will need to be countered if American democracy is able merely to survive.[9]

But analysis should begin at the beginning. Inter alia, it is a discomfiting beginning. Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly fragmented and rancorous that even their most sincere melancholy is seemingly contrived. Wallowing in the mutually-reinforcing twilights of submission and conformance, We the people have strayed dangerously far from any meaningful standards of serious learning. In consequence, though still a nation with extraordinary scientific, medical and commercial successes, the American public is often ill-equipped to judge candidates for high political office.[10]

As we have seen, utterly ill-equipped.

Surveying ever-mounting damages of the Trump presidency,[11] some of which are synergistic or force multiplying, could anything be more apparent?

The grievously baneful selection of Donald J. Trump in 2016 was anything but a cultural aberration. It was, rather, the plausible outcome of an electorate relentlessly driven and even defined by mass. Without any real or compelling reasons, voting Americans freely abandoned the once-residual elements of Jeffersonian good citizenship.

Together with the unceasing connivance of assorted criminals, charlatans and fools, many of them occupants of the present US Governments most senior positions, a lonely American mass now bears core responsibility for allowing the demise of a once- enviable democratic ethos. To expect any sudden improvements to emerge from among this homogenized mass (e.g., by continuously making the citizens more particularly aware of this presidents manifold derelictions) would be to overestimate its inclinations. Though truth is always exculpatory, there are times when it yields to various forms of self-delusion.

What the mass once learned to believe without reasons, queries Nietzsches Zarathustra, who could ever overthrow with reasons?

There will be a heavy price to pay for Americas still-expanding ascendancy of mass. Any society so willing to abjure its rudimentary obligations toward dignified learning toward what American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called high thinking is one that should never reasonably expect to survive.[12]

There is more. Treating formal education as a narrowly instrumental obligation (one should get better educated in order to get a better paying job), Americans now more easily accept flagrantly empty witticisms as profundities (We will build a beautiful wall; Barbed wire can be beautiful; The moon is part of Mars; Testing for corona virus only increases disease; Just one percent of Covid19 victims have symptoms, etc., etc), and consult genuinely challenging ideas only rarely.

Always, the dire result of anti-Reason is more-or-less predictable; that is, a finely trained work force that manages to get a particular job done, but displays (simultaneously) nary a hint of worthwhile learning, commendable human understanding or simple compassion. Concerning this last absence, empathy is not directly related to the barbarisms of specialization, but it does generally exhibit some tangible nurturance from literature, art and/or culture. Incontestably, the Trump White House is not only indifferent to basic human rights and public welfare,[13] it quite literally elevates personal animus to highest possible significations.

This is especially marked where such animus is most thoroughly pedestrian.

Intentionally mispronouncing the Democrat vice-presidential candidates first name is a small but glaring example of Donald Trumps selected level of competitive political discourse. By its very nature, of course, this demeaning level is better suited to a first-grade elementary school classroom.

There are even much wider ramifications of gratuitous rancor. When transposed to the vital arena of international relations, this presidents elevation of belligerent nationalism has a long and persistently unsuccessful history as Realpolitik or power politics.[14] Thinking himself clever, Donald Trump champions America First (the phrase resonates with those, like the president himself, who have no knowledge of history),but fails to realize that this peculiarly shameful resurrection of Deutschland uber alles can lead only to massive defeat and unparalleled despair.

I loathe, therefore I am, could well become Donald J. Trumps revised version of Ren Descartes Cogito.[15] Following Descartes, Sigmund Freud had understood that all human beings could somehow be motivated toward creating a spontaneous sympathy of souls, but Americas Donald Trump has quite expansively reversed this objective. Reinforced by the rampant vocationalism of this countrys education system, Trump has consistently urged citizens to turn against one another, and for no dignified, defensible or science-based reasons. In absolutely all cases, these grotesque urgings have had no meritorious or higher purpose.

Instead, they remain utterly and viciously contrived.

In the bitterly fractionated Trump-era United States, an authentic American individualhas become little more than a charming artifact. Among other things, the nations societal mass, more refractory than ever to intellect and learning, still displays no discernible intentions of ever taking itself seriously. To the contrary, an embittered American mass now marches in deferential lockstep, foolishly, without thought, toward even-greater patterns of imitation, unhappiness and starkly belligerent incivility.

All things considered, the American future is not hard to fathom. More than likely, whatever might be decided in upcoming politics and elections, Americans will continue to be carried forth not by any commendable nobilities of principle or purpose, but by steady eruptions of personal and collective agitation, by endlessly inane presidential repetitions and by the perpetually demeaning primacy of a duly sanctified public ignorance. At times, perhaps, We the people may still be able to slow down a bit and smell the roses, but this is doubtful.

Plainly, our visibly compromised and degraded country now imposes upon its increasingly exhausted people the breathless rhythms of a vast and omnivorous machine.

This machine has no objective other than to keep struggling without spawning any sudden breakdowns or prematurely inconvenient deaths.

Much as many might wish to deny it, the plausible end of this self-destroying machinery will be to prevent Americans from remembering who they are now and (far more importantly) who they might once still have become. At another reasonable level of concern, Americans remain threatened by nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, especially now, during the incoherent Trump-era. Significantly, although there exists a vast literature on law-based strategies of nuclear war avoidance, there is little parallel jurisprudential effort directed toward the prevention of nuclear terrorism.[16]

In fact, presidential banalities aside, this is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of ad hoc, narrowly visceral response.

There is more. Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we harbored a preciously unique potential to nurture individuals, that is, to encourage Americans to become more than a smugly inert mass, herd or crowd. Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also fellow Transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau) described us optimistically as a people animated by industry and self-reliance.

Now, however, and beyond any serious contestation, we are stymied by collective paralysis, capitulation and a starkly Kierkegaardian fear and trembling.

Surely, as all must eventually acknowledge, there is more to this chanting country than Fuehrer-driven rallies, tsunamis of hyper-adrenalized commerce or gargantuan waves of abundantly cheap entertainments: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, rhapsodized the poet Walt Whitman, but today, the American Selfhas devolved into a delicately thin shadow of true national potential. Distressingly, this Self has already become a twisting reflection of a prior authenticity. Now it is under seemingly final assault by a far-reaching societal tastelessness and by a literally epidemic gluttony.

Regarding this expressly gastronomic debility, its not that we Americans have become more and more hungry, but rather that we have lost any once residual appetites for real life.[17]

In the end, credulity is Americas worst enemy. The stubborn inclination to believe that wider social and personal redemption must lie somewhere in politics remains a potentially fatal disorder. To be fair, various social and economic issues do need to be coherently addressed by Americas political representatives, but so too must the nations deeper problems first be solved at the level of microcosm, as a matter for individuals.

In the end, American politics like politics everywhere must remain a second-order activity, a faint reflection of what is truly important. For now, it continues to thrive upon a vast personal emptiness, on an infirmity that is the always-defiling reciprocal of any genuine personal fulfillment. Conscious of his emptiness, warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.

Even in an authentic democracy, only a few can ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider American nation, but these self-effacing souls will generally remain silent, hidden in more-or-less deep cover, often even from themselves. In a democracy where education is oriented toward narrowly vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward barbaric specialization, these residual few can expect to be suffocated by the many. Unsurprisingly, such asphyxiation, in absolutely any of its conceivable particularities, would be a bad way to die.[18]

Donald J. Trump did not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo, out of nothing. His incoherent and disjointed presidency is the direct result of a society that has wittingly and barbarously abandoned all serious thought. When such a society no longer asks the big philosophical questions for example, What is the good in government and politics? or How do I lead a good life as person and citizen? or How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings? the lamentable outcome is inevitable. It is an outcome that we are currently living through in the United States, and one that might sometime have to be died through.

Going forward, what we ought to fear most of all is precisely this continuously self-defiling outcome, not a particular electoral result. To be certain, at this point, nothing could be more urgently important for the United States than to rid itself of the intersecting pathologies of Covid19 and Donald Trump, diseases that are mutually reinforcing and potentially synergistic, but even such victories would only be transient. More fundamentally, recalling philosopher Jose Ortega yGassets timeless warning about the barbarism of specialisation, this country must resurrect an earlier ethos of education in which learning benefits the whole human being, not just a work-related corner of the universe.

Also vital is the obligation to acknowledge the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and the binding universality of international law.[19]

To survive, both as a nation and as individuals, Americans need to become educated not merely as well-trained cogs in the vast industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens. Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself, cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this single monumental failure of operationalization that human civilization has most conspicuously failed though the ages. To wit, in Trump-era American democracy, the presidents core message is not about the co-responsibility of every human being for his or her fellows, but about winners, losers, and a presumptively preeminent citizen obligation to Make America Great.

In this Trumpian context, greatness assumes a crudely Darwinian or zero-sum condition, and not one wherein each individual favors harmonious cooperation over an endlessly belligerent competition.[20]

How shall we finally change all this, or, recalling Platos wisdom in The Republic, how shall we learn to make the souls of the citizens better?[21] This is not a question that we can answer with any pertinent detail before the upcoming US presidential election. But it is still a question that we ought to put before the imperiled American polity soon, and sometime before it is too late.[22]

American democracy faces multiple hazards, including Ortega y Gassets barbarism of specialisation. To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, by itself and also in coordinated tandem with all other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be daunting and overwhelming, but the alternative is simply no longer tolerable or sustainable.

Donald Trumps removal from office is a sine qua non for all applicable remedies, but even such an needed step would target only a catastrophic symptom of Americas national pathology. By itself, saving the United States from Donald Trump would surely be indispensable, but it would leave unchanged the countrys still most deeply underlying disease. In the end,[23] because Americans will need to bring a less specialized form of learning to their citizenship responsibilities, the nation will quickly have to figure out practical ways of restoring educational wholeness.

Can this sort of rational calculation be expected? Maybe not. Perhaps, like the timeless message of Nietzsches Zarathustra, this warning has come too soon. If that turns out to be the case, there may simply be no later.

[1] See especially Martin Heideggers Being and Time (Sein und Zeit;1953) and Karl Jaspers Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). Is it an end that draws near, inquires Jaspers, or a beginning? The answer will depend, in large part, on what Heidegger has to say about the Jungian or Freudian mass. In Being and Time (1953), the philosopher laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present and interchangeable herd, crowd, horde or mass. Each such conglomerate exhibits untruth (the term actually favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) because it can encourage the barbarism of specialisation and suffocate broadly humanistic kinds of learning.

[2]Smith published Theory seventeen years before his vastly more famous and oft-cited Wealth of Nations (1776).

[3]See, on commonalities between Third Reich and Trump-era American democracy, by Louis Ren Beres at Jurist: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/

[4] Chapter 12 of The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is expressly titled The Barbarism of Specialisation.'

[5]Here, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal. This German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine. Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light upon Donald Trumps ongoing support from among Americas presumptively well-educated and well-to-do.

[6] On this irony, Kierkegaard says it best in The Sickness Unto Death (1849): Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[7]Sigmund Freud introduced his own particular version of Nietzsches herd, which was horde. Interestingly, Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and also its corollary commitment to the crudest forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was grievously lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

[8] In essence, the crowd was Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaards equivalent of Nietzsches herd and Ortegas mass.

[9] The most ominous synergies of barbarism would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis Ren Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis Ren Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis Ren Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: Americas Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis Ren Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis Ren Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israels Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy

[10] At a minimum, in this regard, the US public ought to be reminded of the explicit warning in Nietzsches Zarathustra: Do not ever seek the higher man at the market place. (Moreover, it would not be unfair to Nietzsches core meaning here to expand higher man to mean higher person.).

[11] Most egregious, in any assessment of these damages, is this presidents wilful subordination of national interest to his own presumed private interests. In this regard, one may suitably recall Sophocles cautionary speech of Creon in Antigone: I hold despicable, and always have.anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.

[12] Still the best treatments of Americas long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).

[13] See, by Louis Ren Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/

[14] The classic statement of Realpolitik or power politics in western philosophy is the comment of Thrasymachus in Platos Republic : Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Ciceros oft-quoted query: For what can be done against force without force?, Marcus Tullus Cicero, Ciceros Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988).

[15] I think, therefore I am, says Ren Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637). Reciprocally, in his modern classic essay on Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre observes that outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable.

[16] See, by Professor Louis Ren Beres: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gjicl

[17] An apt literary reference for this condition of lost appetite is Franz Kafkas story, The Hunger Artist.

[18] In more expressly concrete terms, average American life-expectancy, unenviable for several decades, has now fallen behind most of the advanced industrial world. While Trump boasts of a wall to keep out Mexicans and assorted others, more and more Americans are trying to cross in the other direction.

[19] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[20] Here it could be helpful to recall the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself is false and against nature.

[21] Long after Plato, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of soul (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to soul. Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true consciousness (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.

[22] Sometimes, says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, the worst does happen.

[23] In the end, says Goethe, we are always creatures of our own making.

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American Democracy and "The Barbarism of Specialisation" - Modern Diplomacy

The specialist knows very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.-Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930)

It has been almost one hundred years since Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset published The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas, 1930). A prescient indictment of anti-Reason, and an immediate forerunner of modern classical works by German scholars Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers,[1] Ortega was most plainly concerned about Europes growing fragmentation of learning. Witnessing a world rapidly abandoning the traditional goal of broadly-educated or whole human beings, he worried about a future in which there would be more capable scientists than ever before, but where these scientists were otherwise unexceptional and without any wider embrace of erudition.

These observations were seminal. Among other things, the prophetic philosopher foresaw educated societies in which even the proud holders of impressive university degrees were conscientiously ignorant of everything outside their own vocational bailiwicks. In essence, Ortega had anticipated the present-day United States. Here, even in an oft-vaunted advanced society, the most exquisitely trained physicians, lawyers, accountants and engineers generally reason at the same limiting level of analysis as technicians, carpenters or lightly schooled office workers.

In large part, this is because professional education in the United States has effectively superseded everything that does not ostentatiously focus on making money. The adverb here is vital in this description, because the overriding lure of wealth in America remains the presumed admiration it can elicit from others. As we ought already to have learned from Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.At the thought of this, his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.[2]

Almost by definition, any American concerns for intellectual or historical issues per se have become extraneous. This does not mean, however, that our strenuous national efforts at improving professional education have been successful or productive. On the contrary, as we witness the multiple daily technical failures of American democracy e.g. the all-too evident incapacity of our ballot calculating technologies to keep abreast of shifting vote-counting modalities this beleaguered polity is failing on multiple fronts.

For many reasons, many of them overlapping, this has been a lamentable retrogression. Above all, it has impaired this countrys capacity to sustain an enviable or even minimally credible democracy. Though Thomas Jefferson had already understood that proper human governance requires a purposeful acquaintance with historical and sociological learning, Americans now inhabit a country where the president can say unashamedly, I love the poorly educated. Significantly, this perverse preference of Donald J. Trump did not emerge ex nihilo, out of nothing.

It is a portentous but credible echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: Intellect rots the brain.[3]

Ortega yGasset had a specific name for this generally defiling intellectual deformation. More exactly, he called it The Barbarism of Specialisation.[4] Earlier, and in somewhat similar fashion, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the educated philistine.[5] Both Ortega and Nietzsche recognized the irony that a society could become progressively better educated in various sub-fields of human knowledge and yet, simultaneously, become less and less cultured, less and less truly civilized.[6] In this regard, the German philosopher placed appropriate conceptual blame on what he preferred to call the herd.[7] For his part, the kindred Spanish thinker cast his particular indictment on the mass.

Whatever the terminological differences, both sets of ideas were centered on the same basic critique; that is, that individuals had been casting aside the necessary obligation to think for themselves, and had, thereby, surrendered indispensable analytic judgments to crowds.[8]

Today, both ideas can shed some useful light on American democracy, a system of governance under increasing assault by US President Donald J. Trump. To the extent that American education has become rampantly vocational that is, oriented toward more and more pragmatic kinds of specialization the wisdom of Ortega yGasset and others is worth probing with ever-increasing care. Moreover, the corrosively barbarous impact of specialization foreseen earlier by philosophers is now magnified by the injurious effects of worldwide disease pandemic.

Without doubt, this unwelcome magnification will need to be countered if American democracy is able merely to survive.[9]

But analysis should begin at the beginning. Inter alia, it is a discomfiting beginning. Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly fragmented and rancorous that even their most sincere melancholy is seemingly contrived. Wallowing in the mutually-reinforcing twilights of submission and conformance, We the people have strayed dangerously far from any meaningful standards of serious learning. In consequence, though still a nation with extraordinary scientific, medical and commercial successes, the American public is often ill-equipped to judge candidates for high political office.[10]

As we have seen, utterly ill-equipped.

Surveying ever-mounting damages of the Trump presidency,[11] some of which are synergistic or force multiplying, could anything be more apparent?

The grievously baneful selection of Donald J. Trump in 2016 was anything but a cultural aberration. It was, rather, the plausible outcome of an electorate relentlessly driven and even defined by mass. Without any real or compelling reasons, voting Americans freely abandoned the once-residual elements of Jeffersonian good citizenship.

Together with the unceasing connivance of assorted criminals, charlatans and fools, many of them occupants of the present US Governments most senior positions, a lonely American mass now bears core responsibility for allowing the demise of a once- enviable democratic ethos. To expect any sudden improvements to emerge from among this homogenized mass (e.g., by continuously making the citizens more particularly aware of this presidents manifold derelictions) would be to overestimate its inclinations. Though truth is always exculpatory, there are times when it yields to various forms of self-delusion.

What the mass once learned to believe without reasons, queries Nietzsches Zarathustra, who could ever overthrow with reasons?

There will be a heavy price to pay for Americas still-expanding ascendancy of mass. Any society so willing to abjure its rudimentary obligations toward dignified learning toward what American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had once called high thinking is one that should never reasonably expect to survive.[12]

There is more. Treating formal education as a narrowly instrumental obligation (one should get better educated in order to get a better paying job), Americans now more easily accept flagrantly empty witticisms as profundities (We will build a beautiful wall; Barbed wire can be beautiful; The moon is part of Mars; Testing for corona virus only increases disease; Just one percent of Covid19 victims have symptoms, etc., etc), and consult genuinely challenging ideas only rarely.

Always, the dire result of anti-Reason is more-or-less predictable; that is, a finely trained work force that manages to get a particular job done, but displays (simultaneously) nary a hint of worthwhile learning, commendable human understanding or simple compassion. Concerning this last absence, empathy is not directly related to the barbarisms of specialization, but it does generally exhibit some tangible nurturance from literature, art and/or culture. Incontestably, the Trump White House is not only indifferent to basic human rights and public welfare,[13] it quite literally elevates personal animus to highest possible significations.

This is especially marked where such animus is most thoroughly pedestrian.

Intentionally mispronouncing the Democrat vice-presidential candidates first name is a small but glaring example of Donald Trumps selected level of competitive political discourse. By its very nature, of course, this demeaning level is better suited to a first-grade elementary school classroom.

There are even much wider ramifications of gratuitous rancor. When transposed to the vital arena of international relations, this presidents elevation of belligerent nationalism has a long and persistently unsuccessful history as Realpolitik or power politics.[14] Thinking himself clever, Donald Trump champions America First (the phrase resonates with those, like the president himself, who have no knowledge of history),but fails to realize that this peculiarly shameful resurrection of Deutschland uber alles can lead only to massive defeat and unparalleled despair.

I loathe, therefore I am, could well become Donald J. Trumps revised version of Ren Descartes Cogito.[15] Following Descartes, Sigmund Freud had understood that all human beings could somehow be motivated toward creating a spontaneous sympathy of souls, but Americas Donald Trump has quite expansively reversed this objective. Reinforced by the rampant vocationalism of this countrys education system, Trump has consistently urged citizens to turn against one another, and for no dignified, defensible or science-based reasons. In absolutely all cases, these grotesque urgings have had no meritorious or higher purpose.

Instead, they remain utterly and viciously contrived.

In the bitterly fractionated Trump-era United States, an authentic American individualhas become little more than a charming artifact. Among other things, the nations societal mass, more refractory than ever to intellect and learning, still displays no discernible intentions of ever taking itself seriously. To the contrary, an embittered American mass now marches in deferential lockstep, foolishly, without thought, toward even-greater patterns of imitation, unhappiness and starkly belligerent incivility.

All things considered, the American future is not hard to fathom. More than likely, whatever might be decided in upcoming politics and elections, Americans will continue to be carried forth not by any commendable nobilities of principle or purpose, but by steady eruptions of personal and collective agitation, by endlessly inane presidential repetitions and by the perpetually demeaning primacy of a duly sanctified public ignorance. At times, perhaps, We the people may still be able to slow down a bit and smell the roses, but this is doubtful.

Plainly, our visibly compromised and degraded country now imposes upon its increasingly exhausted people the breathless rhythms of a vast and omnivorous machine.

This machine has no objective other than to keep struggling without spawning any sudden breakdowns or prematurely inconvenient deaths.

Much as many might wish to deny it, the plausible end of this self-destroying machinery will be to prevent Americans from remembering who they are now and (far more importantly) who they might once still have become. At another reasonable level of concern, Americans remain threatened by nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, especially now, during the incoherent Trump-era. Significantly, although there exists a vast literature on law-based strategies of nuclear war avoidance, there is little parallel jurisprudential effort directed toward the prevention of nuclear terrorism.[16]

In fact, presidential banalities aside, this is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of ad hoc, narrowly visceral response.

There is more. Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once, we harbored a preciously unique potential to nurture individuals, that is, to encourage Americans to become more than a smugly inert mass, herd or crowd. Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also fellow Transcendentalists Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau) described us optimistically as a people animated by industry and self-reliance.

Now, however, and beyond any serious contestation, we are stymied by collective paralysis, capitulation and a starkly Kierkegaardian fear and trembling.

Surely, as all must eventually acknowledge, there is more to this chanting country than Fuehrer-driven rallies, tsunamis of hyper-adrenalized commerce or gargantuan waves of abundantly cheap entertainments: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, rhapsodized the poet Walt Whitman, but today, the American Selfhas devolved into a delicately thin shadow of true national potential. Distressingly, this Self has already become a twisting reflection of a prior authenticity. Now it is under seemingly final assault by a far-reaching societal tastelessness and by a literally epidemic gluttony.

Regarding this expressly gastronomic debility, its not that we Americans have become more and more hungry, but rather that we have lost any once residual appetites for real life.[17]

In the end, credulity is Americas worst enemy. The stubborn inclination to believe that wider social and personal redemption must lie somewhere in politics remains a potentially fatal disorder. To be fair, various social and economic issues do need to be coherently addressed by Americas political representatives, but so too must the nations deeper problems first be solved at the level of microcosm, as a matter for individuals.

In the end, American politics like politics everywhere must remain a second-order activity, a faint reflection of what is truly important. For now, it continues to thrive upon a vast personal emptiness, on an infirmity that is the always-defiling reciprocal of any genuine personal fulfillment. Conscious of his emptiness, warns the German philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), man (human) tries to make a faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In Vain.

Even in an authentic democracy, only a few can ever hope to redeem themselves and the wider American nation, but these self-effacing souls will generally remain silent, hidden in more-or-less deep cover, often even from themselves. In a democracy where education is oriented toward narrowly vocational forms of career preparation, an orientation toward barbaric specialization, these residual few can expect to be suffocated by the many. Unsurprisingly, such asphyxiation, in absolutely any of its conceivable particularities, would be a bad way to die.[18]

Donald J. Trump did not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo, out of nothing. His incoherent and disjointed presidency is the direct result of a society that has wittingly and barbarously abandoned all serious thought. When such a society no longer asks the big philosophical questions for example, What is the good in government and politics? or How do I lead a good life as person and citizen? or How can I best nurture the well-being of other human beings? the lamentable outcome is inevitable. It is an outcome that we are currently living through in the United States, and one that might sometime have to be died through.

Going forward, what we ought to fear most of all is precisely this continuously self-defiling outcome, not a particular electoral result. To be certain, at this point, nothing could be more urgently important for the United States than to rid itself of the intersecting pathologies of Covid19 and Donald Trump, diseases that are mutually reinforcing and potentially synergistic, but even such victories would only be transient. More fundamentally, recalling philosopher Jose Ortega yGassets timeless warning about the barbarism of specialisation, this country must resurrect an earlier ethos of education in which learning benefits the whole human being, not just a work-related corner of the universe.

Also vital is the obligation to acknowledge the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and the binding universality of international law.[19]

To survive, both as a nation and as individuals, Americans need to become educated not merely as well-trained cogs in the vast industrial machine, but as empathetic and caring citizens. Everyone is the other, and no one is just himself, cautions Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but this elementary lesson once discoverable in myriad sacred texts is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this single monumental failure of operationalization that human civilization has most conspicuously failed though the ages. To wit, in Trump-era American democracy, the presidents core message is not about the co-responsibility of every human being for his or her fellows, but about winners, losers, and a presumptively preeminent citizen obligation to Make America Great.

In this Trumpian context, greatness assumes a crudely Darwinian or zero-sum condition, and not one wherein each individual favors harmonious cooperation over an endlessly belligerent competition.[20]

How shall we finally change all this, or, recalling Platos wisdom in The Republic, how shall we learn to make the souls of the citizens better?[21] This is not a question that we can answer with any pertinent detail before the upcoming US presidential election. But it is still a question that we ought to put before the imperiled American polity soon, and sometime before it is too late.[22]

American democracy faces multiple hazards, including Ortega y Gassets barbarism of specialisation. To be rescued in time, each hazard will have to be tackled carefully, by itself and also in coordinated tandem with all other identifiable perils. Overall, the task will be daunting and overwhelming, but the alternative is simply no longer tolerable or sustainable.

Donald Trumps removal from office is a sine qua non for all applicable remedies, but even such an needed step would target only a catastrophic symptom of Americas national pathology. By itself, saving the United States from Donald Trump would surely be indispensable, but it would leave unchanged the countrys still most deeply underlying disease. In the end,[23] because Americans will need to bring a less specialized form of learning to their citizenship responsibilities, the nation will quickly have to figure out practical ways of restoring educational wholeness.

Can this sort of rational calculation be expected? Maybe not. Perhaps, like the timeless message of Nietzsches Zarathustra, this warning has come too soon. If that turns out to be the case, there may simply be no later.

[1] See especially Martin Heideggers Being and Time (Sein und Zeit;1953) and Karl Jaspers Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952). Is it an end that draws near, inquires Jaspers, or a beginning? The answer will depend, in large part, on what Heidegger has to say about the Jungian or Freudian mass. In Being and Time (1953), the philosopher laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present and interchangeable herd, crowd, horde or mass. Each such conglomerate exhibits untruth (the term actually favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) because it can encourage the barbarism of specialisation and suffocate broadly humanistic kinds of learning.

[2]Smith published Theory seventeen years before his vastly more famous and oft-cited Wealth of Nations (1776).

[3]See, on commonalities between Third Reich and Trump-era American democracy, by Louis Ren Beres at Jurist: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/05/louis-beres-america-rise-and-fall/

[4] Chapter 12 of The Revolt of the Masses (1930) is expressly titled The Barbarism of Specialisation.'

[5]Here, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined an aptly specific term, one he hoped could eventually become universal. This German word was Bildungsphilister. When expressed in its most lucid and coherent English translation, it means educated Philistine. Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light upon Donald Trumps ongoing support from among Americas presumptively well-educated and well-to-do.

[6] On this irony, Kierkegaard says it best in The Sickness Unto Death (1849): Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience, as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs.Philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility.it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.

[7]Sigmund Freud introduced his own particular version of Nietzsches herd, which was horde. Interestingly, Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most strenuously objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this countrys shallow optimism and also its corollary commitment to the crudest forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was grievously lacking in soul. See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.

[8] In essence, the crowd was Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaards equivalent of Nietzsches herd and Ortegas mass.

[9] The most ominous synergies of barbarism would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis Ren Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis Ren Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis Ren Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: Americas Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis Ren Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis Ren Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israels Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy

[10] At a minimum, in this regard, the US public ought to be reminded of the explicit warning in Nietzsches Zarathustra: Do not ever seek the higher man at the market place. (Moreover, it would not be unfair to Nietzsches core meaning here to expand higher man to mean higher person.).

[11] Most egregious, in any assessment of these damages, is this presidents wilful subordination of national interest to his own presumed private interests. In this regard, one may suitably recall Sophocles cautionary speech of Creon in Antigone: I hold despicable, and always have.anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.

[12] Still the best treatments of Americas long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).

[13] See, by Louis Ren Beres: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/04/the-trump-presidency-a-breathtaking-assault-on-law-justice-and-security/

[14] The classic statement of Realpolitik or power politics in western philosophy is the comment of Thrasymachus in Platos Republic : Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. (See Plato, The Republic, 29, Benjamin Jowett, tr., World Publishing Company, 1946.) See also: Ciceros oft-quoted query: For what can be done against force without force?, Marcus Tullus Cicero, Ciceros Letters to his Friends, 78 (D.R. Shackleton Baily tr., Scholars Press, 1988).

[15] I think, therefore I am, says Ren Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637). Reciprocally, in his modern classic essay on Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre observes that outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable.

[16] See, by Professor Louis Ren Beres: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=gjicl

[17] An apt literary reference for this condition of lost appetite is Franz Kafkas story, The Hunger Artist.

[18] In more expressly concrete terms, average American life-expectancy, unenviable for several decades, has now fallen behind most of the advanced industrial world. While Trump boasts of a wall to keep out Mexicans and assorted others, more and more Americans are trying to cross in the other direction.

[19] Apropos of this universality, international law is generally part of the law of the United States. These legal systems are always interpenetrating. Declared Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction. (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called Supremacy Clause.

[20] Here it could be helpful to recall the words of French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man: The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself is false and against nature.

[21] Long after Plato, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of soul (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to soul. Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true consciousness (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.

[22] Sometimes, says Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, the worst does happen.

[23] In the end, says Goethe, we are always creatures of our own making.

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Kamala Harris as Vice President Attractive for the Indian American Voter? - Modern Diplomacy

Female leftist students chant anti oppression slogans while standing in rows with piles of newspapers and cardboard ready to burn in case of tear gas attack by Revolutionary Guards, before street clashes with Hezbollah forces broke outside Tehran university campus, on the occasion of Cultural Revolution, 21st April 1981. The Cultural Revolution (1980-1987) was a period following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran where the academia of Iran was purged of Western and non-Islamic influences to bring it in line with Shia Islam. The official name used by the Islamic Republic is "Cultural Revolution." Directed by the Cultural Revolutionary Headquarters and later by the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, the revolution initially closed universities for three years (1980-1983) and after reopening banned many books and purged thousands of students and lecturers from the schools. The cultural revolution involved a certain amount of violence in taking over the university campuses since higher education in Iran at the time was dominated by leftists forces opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini's vision of theocracy, and they (unsuccessfully) resisted Khomeiniist control at many universities. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)

The literature that has always fascinated Australian-Iranian author Shokoofeh Azar, 48, is the kind that has the pulse of its time in its hand. The kind that grabs my heart, slaps me in the face, captures my soul, wakes me up from ignorance and reminds me that literature has the power and mystery of a dragon, says the Melbourne-based author, whose own novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions) does exactly this as it captures the zeitgeist of Iran following the establishment of an Islamic state.

Set in Tehran during the first decade of the 1979 Islamic Islamic Revolution, Azars novel is a fine example of the ingenious use of magic realism. Narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl, Bahar, it tells the story of an intellectual family of five compelled to flee their home in Tehran for Razan, a remote village, in the hope that they will be spared the religious madness engulfing the country. They eventually succumb to the atrocities perpetrated by the fundamentalist regime.

Peopled by the living and the dead, humans and jinns, fireflies and dragonflies, spirits and soothsayers, magical creatures and mermaids, the novel opens with Roza, the mother, attaining enlightenment atop the tallest greengage plum tree in the grove of their house on a hill overlooking the 53 houses of the village. She does that at the exact moment on August 18, 1988, when her son, Sohrab, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back, is hanged without a trial after being in captivity for many months. The next day, he is buried with hundreds of other political prisoners in a long pit in the deserts south of Tehran, without any indication or marker lest a relative come years later and tap a pebble on a headstone and murmur there is no god but God. As the novel progresses we discover how the familys destinies are deeply entangled in the events that unfold over the decade and get a glimpse into the reign of terror unleashed by the mullahs at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme religious leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who came to power after overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Pahlavi dynasty.

Ayatollah Khomeini ( Getty Images )

A month after the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, in the summer of 1988, more than 5,000 opponents of the Islamic regime were executed in the prisons without trial or by speedy and unfair trials. From that date until today, the regime has never officially acknowledged the massacre. And, due to censorship, it has never been a part of the Iranian literature, says Azar, underlining that wrong political systems take more lives than the corona virus.

Written in Persian but never published in Iran though it is available on some websites, the novel captures the tumultuous social and political realities of Iran through a delicate blend of its classic storytelling styles myths, legends and folk traditions. It was translated into English and published in Australia in 2017 by a small publisher, Wild Dingo Press. After it was shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, the US, UK and Italy rights were sold to Europa Editions and the book was published overseas in January this year.

This is the first time that an Iranian author has been nominated for the International Booker Prize. However, it is unlikely that the novel will ever be published in Iran. The American translator of the novel, who often travels to the country, has chosen to remain anonymous. Azar, who worked as a journalist in Iran and covered social affairs, was put behind bars several times until she was compelled to flee the country and move to Melbourne in 2011. For Azar who is also the first Iranian woman to have hitchhiked the entire length of the Silk Road, the Booker International nomination was a dream come true. And though the award eventually went to Marieke Lucas Rijnevelds The Discomfort of Evening, the novels availability and recognition in the West means English readers will discover afresh the depth and significance of Irans rich history of classic literature and culture.

Azars focus is on highlighting the fate of humans under dictatorial regimes. For the novel, she drew on the stories of many of her friends who lost several family members and it is full of incidents and scenes that describe the atrocities of the regime in gruesome detail. In a paragraph following Sohrabs hanging, Azar writes: In the following days, the number of people executed increased so much that corpses piled high in the prison back yard and began to stink, and Evins ants, flies, crows, and cats, who hadnt had such a feast since the prison was built, licked, sucked and picked at them greedily. Juvenile political prisoners were granted a pardon by the Imam if they fired the final shot that would put the condemned out of their misery. With bruised faces, trembling hands, and pants soaked with urine, hundreds of thirteen and fourteen-year-olds, whose only crime had been participating in a party meeting, reading banned pamphlets, or distributing flyers in the street, fired the last shot into faces that were sometimes still watching them with twitching pupils.

For the mothers, just like Sohrab was to Roza, their sons were the culmination of heartbeats, desires, loves and hopes that they had endured their entire life only to lose them in the end. When Sohrab is hanged, the family sees a sense of hopelessness seeping into the very cells of their being. Their father, Hushang, asks them to write anything to come to terms with the tragedy. But with each word they commit to paper, they understand that, contrary to what their father believed, culture, knowledge, and art retreat in the face of violence, the sword and fire and for years after remain barren and mute. Bahar tells us: It had happened many times before, during the years following the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, for example, a period the scholar Abdolhossein Zarrinkoub called the two centuries of silence.

Azar says that a small minority in Iran, including her own family, believes that the Shahs regime was much more reformist, modern, and patriotic than the Islamic regime. History has practically proved the same to the Iranian people, she says, adding how, for the past 20 years, since the first large-scale demonstration, known as University Dormitory Demonstrations (Kouy-e Daneshgah) in 2000, people across the country have held thousands of peaceful demonstrations against injustice, discrimination, politicised Islam, economic corruption, political corruption, repression of dissidents and censorship. But not even in one case has the regime responded positively to these protests and the peoples share of these protests has been only arrest, imprisonment and execution, she says.

In the novel, Azar intended to be a narrator of a tiny percentage of Iranian dissidents in the 1979 revolution who voted No to the Islamic Republic in the 1980 referendum; the families that were very similar to her own. These families opposed Islam, Khomeini, and the Revolution, and considered the Islamic Revolution as an irreparable deviation in the development of modern Iran, she says. Even the dissidents, who were later arrested and executed in the summer of 1988, had voted Yes to this regime in the 1980 referendum. She says: If this novel had been written in the 1980s, a large population of Iranians would have opposed the story. But, today, 40 years after the regime formation, nearly 90 percent of Iranians have understood that the Islamic Revolution was an irreversible mistake in the process of development and democracy of Iran.

Author Shokoofeh Azar

In the novel, the fictional Khomeini is tortured by the ghosts of those executed, imprisoned in the palace of mirrors they force him to build. Trapped in the palace, the dictator meets his ugly end, having been forced to understand that while delivering monologues he may have been a fierce ruler, but in dialogue he was nothing but a bearded, illogical little boy, stubborn and pompous. The dictator whispers a single sentence in his last moments: It took 87 years to understand that the intellectual and formal rules of the monologue are fundamentally different from those of dialogue.

Azar, whose novel has brought the story of the political excesses of the Islamic regime in Iran to the attention of readers in the West, feels that there is a linguistic disconnect between the intellectual and literary products of Iranians and the world. Excellent books, mainly non-fiction, have been published in Farsi (inside and outside Iran), but have never been translated into another language. Thus, the West has little idea of the evolution of Iranian thought, she says.

Magical realism gives Azar the possibilities that realism does not. In my opinion, the best style to show the height and depth of real human feelings and emotions is magical realism. In this novel, I have tried to present that fantasy and magic in magic realism can be used in the service of factual events. Therefore, the magic realism in this novel has been used to document the real political, social and religious issues in Iran. That is, magic serves realism in this novel, she says.

It was magic realism that helped her write the kind of novel that Azar herself likes to read: one that belongs to the category of literature that reminds us of human conscience and morality amid the collapse of social morality; literature that believes in humanity; literature that comes from reckless, exploratory, critical, creative and pioneer minds. It is the kind of writing that has shaped Azars own mind and writing, as it has the minds and work of many other Iranian theatre writer-directors, mythologists, philosophers, music composers and painters.

Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist, translator and poet. He lives in New Delhi.

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Interview: I like to be reminded that literature has the power and mystery of a dragon, says Australian-Iranian... - Hindustan Times

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Akwa Ibom State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Comrade Ini Ememobong is set to partner traditional chieftains on enlightenment and enforcement of COVID-19 protocol.

The commissioner made this known on Friday during an advocacy visit to the State Traditional Rulers Council along Wellington Bassey Way, Uyo.

Comrade Ini Ememobong who was accompanied by his counterpart in the Ministry of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Hon. Frank Archibong said, as Royal Fathers whose subjects look up to for direction, their actions will impact greatly on the people and pledged to partner them on COVID-19 enlightenment and enforcement.

He urged the traditional chieftains to continue to lead by example in complying strictly with COVID-19 protocols so that the people in their different domain can key in.

Disclosing that, so far COVID-19 has no cure, the state Spokesman urged the traditional rulers to join hands with Governor Udom Emmanuel Emmanuel in the fight against the spread of the dreaded pandemic with increased awareness on the NCDC/WHO/AKSG COVID-19 protocols.

The traditional rulers expressed appreciation to the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Comrade Ini Ememobong for paying homage to the traditional institution and commended him for his readiness to partner the traditional institution in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic in the state.

The Royal fathers used the occasion to thank Governor Udom Emmanuel for the appointment of Comrade Ini Ememobong and Hon. Frank Archibong as members of the State Executive Council.

The Traditional Rulers council comprising of all the 31 Paramount Rulers in the state, is headed by a Chairman of the Council who is the Paramount Ruler of Nsit Ubium and Okuibom Ibibio, Ntenyin Solomon Etuk.

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Akwa Ibom to partner royal fathers on COVID-19 protocol enlightenment and enforcemen - Daily Sun

Clarkesworld 6/20 Lightspeed 7/20 Tor.com 6/10/20, 6/17/20

Junes Clarkesworld leads off with The Iridescent Lake from regular D.A. Xiaolin Spires. Yunhe, who is dealing with the death of her son, works as a security guard at an ice skating rink where the ice has truly fantastic properties. Scientists have been studying it, but there are many active smuggling attempts that she must guard against and perhaps participate in. With How Long the Shadows Cast, Kenji Yanagawa brings us a slowly evolving story. Shunzo is a researcher of an alien language, and also an alcoholic dealing with the tragic and personally damning death of his partner. Hes been on one expedition to space and is hoping to maintain his spot on the next when a stranger comes into his life, camped out on his front doorstep. Shes a physics researcher with some esoteric interests. They fall in love, and he has many choices to make and hard truths to face. Shunzos character is nicely three dimensional, and the length of the story gives all the character and plot elements room to breathe.

M.l. Clarke continues to expand the world that we first saw in To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things. In this issue Nine Words for Loneliness in the Language of the Umau shows us a space station in orbit around the planet weve visited so far. Awenato is the sole survivor of a diplomatic mission to the station just as they were disembarking they were attacked by terrorists, and his mate as well as the rest of the party were killed. Now he must deal with recovering from his injuries, grieving, navigating the station when he doesnt speak the languages very well, dealing with other alien species with very different attitudes, and trying to get some measure of justice for his fallen comrades. Clarks inventiveness and attention to detail in building up these alien societies and characters continues to shine.

In a post-collapse future, the world is largely controlled by a panopticon AI called the Jade. In Optimizing the Path to Enlightenment by Priya Chand, Anju is a technician who begins furtively exploiting gaps in the Jades coverage in order to enjoy some mild hedonism, like drinking fruit juice. Even as she is starting to widen those gaps intentionally, she has some doubts about the wisdom of sabotaging the system, wondering what could be unleashed. Finally, she has an encounter with the Jade itself, placing her on a very different path to enlightenment. Own Goal by Dennard Dayle gives us the journal of an ad man struggling with the death of his mother and all the feelings that invokes, as his family goes through the grief and funeral process. He also has to keep up with his advertising job, in this case making a pitch for branding a particular weapons system. Then the space station he lives on gets caught up in the war. The ending could have been a bit punchier if the story had been a little more focused, but I had no problem enjoying it throughout.

Ray Naylers The Swallows of the Storm in Julys Lightspeed is the latest in a very productive run of short fiction lately. Dr. Nino is a Georgian researcher who has spent her whole life chasing a mystery perfect holes that show up in seemingly random places in the environment, taking chunks out of dirt, plants, animals, and sometimes unlucky humans. We meet her during a Congressional inquiry, when these holes have become too much to ignore. We get her testimony and also the perspective of her research assistant Harlan. The mystery is resolved in a nicely SFnal way, and I very much appreciated the denouement as well.

Kristina Tens Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills is very entertaining. Baba Yagas famous hut has gotten fed up with her and walked off, so she travels to San Francisco. Hilarity ensues as she rents a room and must put up with housemates, as she talks to waitresses and pot dealers, who have their own magic, and venture capitalist wizards speaking a completely different language. The concept and execution are great, but the story seems to almost stop dead instead of coming to a full resolution. Mari Ness continues mining rich veins of older stories to create her own: in Great Greta and the Mermaid she imagines scholars reconstructing a story about Greta, a pirate marooned on Peter Pans island, and how an encounter with a Lost Boy led to a much sexier encounter with a mermaid. The style of an academic continually interrogating different sources will work better for some readers than others, but the denouement fleshes out the story quite well.

I saw two stories in Tor.com in June. The first is Were Here, Were Here by K.M. Szpara. It imagines a near-future revival of the boy band phenomenon, and we focus on Tyler, a transgender man living his dream of being a boy band singer. During one performance Jasper kisses Tyler on stage, which sets off a tizzy in the management, not because of gay/trans issues but because they want Tylers image to be the wholesome, available one and dont want fans constantly shipping Tyler and Jasper. But Tylers had a crush on Jasper and this raises all kinds of intense feelings in him, feelings he can barely give voice to. He is again rendered voiceless when the management asserts control over his speech implant, but the boys of the band pull together. Its a very sweet story.

Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker starts off in a relatively mundane way. Stella has returned home because a childhood friends odd brother has died. She feels guilty that the friendship had faded, and offers to help clean out the brothers house. He was a hoarder and, after first being just gross, things take a strange turn when Stella invents what she thinks is a lie about an old local TV kids show, and instead finds videos of it in the brothers house. The Uncle Bob Show featured a man telling strange stories directly to the camera while children played on the set, and it turns out that most people remember the show even if Stella doesnt. As she researches more, she starts to see connections between the stories creepy Uncle Bob was telling and the fates of some of her childhood friends, and the story continues to get weirder from there. The ending is nicely underplayed.

Recommended Stories

Nine Words for Loneliness in the Language of the Umau, M.L. Clark (Clarkesworld 6/20) The Swallows of the Storm, Ray Nayler (Lightspeed 7/20) Two Truths and a Lie, Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com 6/17/20) How Long the Shadows Cast, Kenji Yanagawa (Clarkesworld 6/20)

Karen Burnham is an electromagnetics engineer by way of vocation, and a book reviewer/critic by way of avocation. She has worked on NASA projects including the Dream Chaser spacecraft and currently works in the automotive industry in Michigan. She has reviewed for venues such as Locus Magazine, NYRSF, Strange Horizons, SFSignal.com, and Cascadia Subduction Zone. She has produced podcasts for Locusmag.com and SFSignal.com, especially SF Crossing the Gulf with Karen Lord. Her book on Greg Egan came out from University of Illinois Press in 2014, and she has twice been nominated in the Best Non Fiction category of the British SF Awards.

This review and more like it in the August 2020 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

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Karen Burnham Reviews Short Fiction: Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Tor.com - Locus Online

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man wealthy, healthy and wise, is a saying of Benjamin Franklins, meaning he must have gone to bed early. Now, members of a Washington, D.C., governmental committee, wanting to defriend him sometime soon, cant even find their own beds. Maybe they are wealthy and healthy, but when they say they dont want any public building in the city to have his name on it, they are judgmentally impaired.

There I go, searching out euphemisms for these cancel-culture demons (not a euphemism) who think America is nothing to brag about, that our whole history is something akin to a Ku Klux Klan march. In D.C. right now, they have put together a list of some pretty extraordinary human beings whose duty is to disappear. What these foes of patriotism want is to disallow the names of all kinds of ex-presidents and founders on public office buildings, public schools and the like if they had anything to do with slavery.

And look, its true that, before he became an abolitionist also serving the sick, the uneducated, those whose houses were on fire and a revolution that likely would have fizzled without him, Franklin owned slaves. He gave them up as he then gave in to excelling in everything from chess to athletics and turning the world around for the better.

What may not be as well-known about him is that he was one of the foremost scientists of the 18th century, the Enlightenment. Just about everyone knows the tale of his flying a kite in a lightning storm and of his later inventing the lighting rod, but do people know how he worked with others in investigating electricity to the extent of better enabling modernity to become modernity, of surrounding us with electricitys endless civilizational benefits?

Read more here:
This isnt the time to forget Benjamin Franklin - Grand Island Independent

Snoozing alarms, a pale ale with mates or just a simple Ill go tomorrow: all common excuses for passing on the gym. If you disagree and were to tell us youve never skipped lifting weights to curl a couple of schooners, wed look up into the sky and expect to see some pigs.

Like it or not, your inner voice can have a tremendous (if somewhat unintentional) effect on your daily goals, especially when it comes to deciding whether or not to go to the gym.

Its something celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan seems to suffer from on occasion too, and hes recently taken to Instagram to regale his story and to provide worldly advice so that you never let yours take control of you again.

Move over Buddha; though a little rough around the edges, this could be true enlightenment

Speaking of his inner [wimp] and how it put up a hell of a fight today, Joe says he nearly did skip the gym in favour of enjoying the morning and just drinking coffee and relaxing instead of the workout that I planned.

His story didnt end there, however. Instead Joe got after it and completed his workout, much to his benefit. Im so happy I did, he tells his fans.

He then parts some advice, Its amazing how procrastination and laziness can sneak up on you some days, and how, much like inspiration, its got weak days and strong days.

I think the key is to never give yourself that option. Ever.

Today was close, though, but ultimately I got it in, and I feel so good because I did.

Its not just Mr. Rogan: taking this non negotiable approach with yourself is something renowned self-help coach Tony Robbins is a huge advocate of too (see him try to explain the concept to a hilariously indisciplined Russell Brand here).

It seems Joes words have resonated with several Instagram users, with comments such as:

Needed this today, got the class done.

Thats it, Im working out today

Even Hollywood actor Josh Brolin found Joes words useful: Yes! Did the same today and so glad I did it. My lungs dont want to expand right now and I will fight through it until they do. Time to break through to next level conditioning.

Summoning the motivation to work out, or to lose weight and gain muscle, is a trait shared by many. But as weve previously seen from this Redditthread, simply looking at guys around you, or accepting that youre going to have low times not to mention taking heed of Joes advice to not let your inner voice get the better of you is all the motivation you could need.

The weights await.

Read more from the original source:
Joe Rogan's 'Inner Voice' Hack Could Be The Secret To True Workout Zen - DMARGE

How Tibbetan Buddists Helped Me Seek Enlightenment at Howard Jarviss House

Want to stop worrying so much about the future of California? Go and say a prayer at Howard Jarviss house.

No historic plaques mark the five-bedroom home at 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd., which sits between West Hollywood and L.A.s Miracle Mile. But this is where the famed anti-tax activist Jarvis lived, held meetings with Gov. Jerry Brown and other California players, and organized Proposition 13, 1978s tax-limiting ballot initiative that still dominates California politics.

Another fall fight over Prop 13 is underway. The November ballots Proposition 15 proposes to lift Prop 13 caps on taxing commercial properties, thus creatingdepending on whom you askeither billions of dollars for education or new burdens for businesses. So, recently, I went over to check on the historic houseand got an unexpected lesson about how California and its homes keep changing, even if its initiative politics never do.

The recognition that I have more questions than answers is OK. Because uncertainty about what comes next, for me or for a proposition or for a house, might be the most powerful answer we ever get.

Jarviss undistinguished gray house is nowNechung Dharmapala, L.A.s Tibetan Buddhist Center. The home has been painted a distinguished shade of orange associated with Buddhism. Above the front windows, two deer surround a wheel representing the Dharma, and a small stupaa hemispheric structure representing the enlightened mindrests outside the front door.

Inside, bedrooms are occupied by two monks, one an administrator, and the other the centers spiritual director. The large, high-ceilinged living room where Jarvis once conducted the angriest California politics of the 20th century has been turned into a 21st-century sanctuary for lessons on the renunciation of ego, the development of compassion, and the possibility of enlightenment for all beings.

At first, the homes political past and religious present seemed discordant, but the more I contemplated the place, the more I began to see the continuities and connections. Indeed, 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd. has become a double-monument to both the perils of revolutions and the paradoxes of protection. The houses history asks: Why do humans suffer so much in their search for the safety and stability that this world only fleetingly provides?

Prop 13 was a great victory of a conservative California revolution that promised protectionagainst rising taxes, especially the property taxes that raise the cost of homes and thus displace people. The paradox is that the protector Prop 13 hasnt protected us from Californias high taxes or extortionate housing prices.

Protection is also Nechung Dharmapalas reason for being. This Buddhist center is associated with Tibets centuries-old Nechung Monastery, which is the headquarters of the State Oracle of Tibet, who embodies the deity Pehar, also known as The Protector of Religion.

Of course, the protector Pehar couldnt stop Chinese communists from destroying Nechung Monastery and Tibets other religious sites after the 1949 revolution. But therein lies the paradox. The communists attacks on religion actually protected the faith. Tibetan Buddhists fled, spreading their teachings and establishing centers around the globe, eventually reaching Howard Jarviss front door.

Jarviss Tudor-style house was built in 1925, according to county records. Jarvis, a Utah native and jack Mormon (he drank cheap vodka he carried in his briefcase), bought it in 1941 for $8,000. He stayed there for the rest of his life, through at least one renovation and three marriages, the last to Estelle Garcia.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Jarvis held court in a big comfortable chair, smoking a cigar and eating Estelles corn soup, while distinguished visitors sat on simple sofas. The house was filled with energy and the conviction that a handful of people, without holding office, could upend the world.

There were some curses, but no prayers, recalls the Jarvis aide Joel Fox, who also served for a time as president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which remains a force, leading this falls campaign to fight Prop 15, and thus protect Prop 13.

Prop 13 governs modern California because it controls the money: Specifically, it requires a two-thirds popular vote to raise local taxes, and a two-thirds vote of the legislature to raise state taxes. But most Californians associate it with its property tax provisions, which cap overall taxes and allow for the reassessment of properties at market value only when they are sold.

When Prop 13 passed, Jarviss 3,000-square-foot home, on a 5,900-square-foot lot in a desirable part of L.A.s westsidewhich hed bought nearly 40 years earlierwas assessed at less than $60,000. Its annual tax bills, based on that low base, would stay below $1,000, even as neighboring homeowners paid 10 times that. In 2005, the home assessed value for tax purposes was $75,854; in 2006, after Estelle died (Jarvis himself died in 1986), it was reassessed at $1.25 million.

The house was sold in 2008 according to county records, and put up for sale again in 2013as Tibetan Buddhists were growing desperate in their search for an L.A. headquarters.

The Nechung Kuten, who is also the Chief State Oracle of Tibet, had visited L.A. in 2007 and 2009 and called for the establishment of a center where Tibetans, Mongolians, and Westerners could study and practice Buddhism in a non-sectarian way. A donor stepped forward to fund a center, but finding the right placewith both a big gathering room and small bedrooms quiet enough for monkswas hard. Until a real estate agent took them to 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd.

They bought the house in 2013 for $1.38 million. It took more than a year to redecorate the home in a Tibetan style, construct the shrine, and install the Buddha statues. In 2014, the center opened, and the space is often full.

In Jarviss old living room, resident teacher Geshe Wangchuk now presides. He became a monk at age 12 (with ordination at the Nechung Monastery in Dharamsala, India) and arrived at Nechung L.A. in 2016. Hes skilled not only in explaining Buddhist philosophy but in the creation of sand mandalas and butter sculptures.

During the pandemic, Geshe Wangchuk shifted his daily practices and weekly teachings online. On Saturday mornings this summer, I watched him instruct, via nechungla.org, Zoom, and Facebook, a highly diverse group of Californians. The lessons leaned on a text, The Three Principal Aspects of the Path, by Je Tsongkhapa, a 14th-century teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. One passage presented a particular puzzle:

Furthermore when appearance dispels the extreme of existence, And when emptiness dispels the extreme of non-existence, And if you understand how emptiness arises as cause and effect, You will never be captivated by views grasping at extremes.

I wondered if a mind could really be that open. Does avoiding extremes require feeling empty and uncertain about whether you actually exist? And how, I asked, might I apply such enlightenment to 515 N. Crescent Heights Blvd. or any of the extremes of todays California?

The team at Nechung L.A. had no idea of the houses history and knew nothing of Jarvis. In a conversation with Nechung L.A.s board secretary, Tenzin Thokme, I found myself starting to explain Prop 13, and then why Prop 15 is in the news. But my explanations were mostly just questions. Might Prop 15 pull a few billion more dollars out of commercial property and into the schools? Or might the initiatives many exemptions be exploited by wealthy property owners? Might this measure at the very least make a symbolic strike against Prop 13or will the whole exercise just reinforce Prop 13s power?

But if I understood Geshe Wangchuk, the recognition that I have more questions than answers is OK. Because uncertainty about what comes next, for me or for a proposition or for a house, might be the most powerful answer we ever get. Je Tsongkhapa taught it best 600 years ago: If the entire object of grasping at certitude is dismantled, at that point your analysis of the view has culminated.

Joe Mathews Zcalo

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Prop 13: Taxes and the Importance of an Open Mind - LA Progressive