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shadowkat1. Saw a large rainbow on the way home -- not sure that's a sign that it won't rain tonight and tomorrow as predicted, or not.
2. Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished…”
"Half a century before Bertrand Russell admonished that, in a universe unconcerned with human interests, the equally naïve notions of optimism and pessimism “spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy,” Nietzsche paints the backdrop for the drama of truth:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
The desire for knowledge, Nietzsche argues, stems from the same hubristic self-focus and is amplified by the basic human instinct for belonging — within a culture, what is designated as truth is a form of social contract and a sort of “peace pact” among people. A century before Laura Riding observed that “the task of truth is divided among us, to the number of us,” Nietzsche writes:
A uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, “I am rich,” when the proper designation for his condition would be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences.
Suggesting that language itself can become a tool that conceals rather than reveals truth — something Anna Deavere Smith would echo a century later in her observation that “some people use language as a mask [and] create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not” — Nietzsche probes at these linguistic conventions themselves:
Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason… We speak of a “snake”: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing!
[It should probably be noted that I don't always agree with Nietzche and he gave me a headache in college. But the above excerpt and link felt fitting -- considering I keep getting into arguments over words. The latest argument was on FB over the word "tribalism" and what it meant or how I was using it.]
3. And now... Betrand Russell... The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
[Seemed weirdly fitting today..even though I can't say I'm much of a fan of Russell either or for that matter Henry Miller. Also, is it just me, or are philosopher's ever so slightly arrogant?]
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
[...]
Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.
Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order:
Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner.
[...]
However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for rivalry:
The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.
Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly poignant in the context of today’s social media, he observes:
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame. "
[I don't really agree with him -- because seems to be an oversimplification. Although, I guess I do to the extent that I've begun to think people are just varying degrees of selfish. And horribly un-self-aware regarding it. ]
4. The End of Capitalism is Already Starting if You Know Where to Look
Well, yeah. I mean it's sort of inevitable in a way -- the pendulum shifted too far towards free-market capitalism and nationalism, with the middle class feeling more and more disenfranchised. Whenever the middle class gets disgruntled or angry, economic upheaval occurs. I just hope we do it peacefully this round -- Revolutions never end well.
" Before capitalism emerged in Europe, there was feudalism, a radically different system in which nothing–neither land nor labor–was for sale, and serfs orbited their feudal lord like ribbons tethered to a maypole. Feudalism’s inhumanity was different from capitalism’s: Instead of being unable to work and earn money to pay for rent and necessities, serfs were dependent on the lords for their livelihoods and their schedules and for a piece on land upon which to labor. Their stability was contingent on the lord’s generosity or lack thereof.
Sometimes, serfs would get squeezed, Wolff says–maybe a serf who was permitted to work his own land three days a week was cut down to two, and had to work on the lord’s the rest of the time, struggling to feed his family. Those serfs would run away. They’d jet off into the forests around the manors, where they’d encounter other runaway serfs (this is the origin of Robin Hood). That group of runaways, who’d cut ties with the feudal system, would establish their own villages, called communes. Without the lord controlling how the former serfs used their land and their resources, those free workers set up a system of production and trade in the communes that would eventually evolve into modern capitalism.
“The image of the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the French Revolution, and that was part of it,” Wolff says, “but it wasn’t the whole story. The actual transition was much slower, and not cataclysmic, and found in these serfs that ran away and set up something new.”
In the U.S., businesses converting to cooperative workplace models are the functional equivalent of those runaway serfs. Around 10 cities across the U.S. have, in recent years, launched initiatives specifically to support the development of worker co-ops, which have been especially beneficial in creating job and wage stability in low-income neighborhoods. Because workers are beholden to themselves and each other, rather than a CEO and a board of directors, the model parts ways with the capitalist structure and advances something that more closely resembles a true democratic system.
“This is the beginning of the end of capitalism,” Wolff says. “Whether these experiments–which is what we have to call them at this point–will congeal into a massive social transformation, I don’t know. But I do know that massive social transformations have never happened without this stage. This stage may not do it, but change won’t happen without it,” he adds. These subtle shifts away from capitalism are not just apparent in the development of more co-ops, Wolff says. Over the past year, he’s been called in to meet with CEOs at large financial firms, who seemed to Wolff to be steeling themselves for a dethroning. As CEOs continue to disproportionately outearn their employees, the call for a dismantling of the system has become loud enough that they seem to have no choice but to pay attention. While it’s a flimsy gesture, some have distributed their bonuses to their employees.
“The move toward co-ops and the change in consciousness I’ve witnessed in workplaces and among my students are the two mechanisms of transformation that are now underway globally, and I’d like to say–it’s more a wish than anything else–that it’s too late to stop them,” Wolff says. “And the sheer beauty of this is that nothing fuels this movement more than capitalism’s own troubles, and the displeasure, disaffection, and anxiety it produces.”
Of course, the thought currents and little blooms of democratic workplaces are not enough to engineer a new economic system. These developments are all happening outside of the political system; in the White House and in Congress, the presence of big capitalist businesses continues as strong asever. But the fact that local governments like New York City and Austin have launched incubator programs for worker-owned cooperatives indicates that they’re not incompatible with the current political system."
5. Hot People are Stressful
" The problem starts with brain chemistry. “When you see an attractive person, the left ventral tegmental area of the brain becomes active and will pump out dopamine,” says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies attraction at the Kinsey Institute. “Dopamine is a stimulant to the brain, so some people might react with surprise or awkwardness.” That feeling is the weak-kneed giddiness that very attractive people can inspire, which can leave you fumbling for words and feeling off balance, even though a dopamine rush is a fundamentally pleasurable experience.
Based on Fisher’s research, which used fMRI scans to observe the brain lighting up in response to stimuli, the left ventral tegmental area (commonly referred to as the left VTA) is responsible for pleasurable reactions to beauty. Meanwhile, the right VTA provides the dopamine that fuels romantic love; the two responses are similar but neurologically distinct, which means that what people feel when they see a random pretty face isn’t necessarily a desire for romance or even sex. “The same thing probably happens when you look at a good painting,” says Fisher. “It can pump out the dopamine and perhaps make you slightly giddy.”
The left VTA appraises and appreciates what you see, but lighting up that part of the brain doesn’t necessarily make you want to interact with the person whose appearance gives you pleasure, which is why most people don’t try to ask out every hot person they see. The stress I felt wasn’t the same as a fear of rejection; my hot surgeon wasn’t even my type. Instead, I panicked because of a key difference between gazing at a painting and a hottie: A painting doesn’t judge you back.
That’s where a second, potentially more nefarious brain chemical comes in: cortisol. That’s the stress hormone that gets blamed for everything from weight gain to road rage, and Fisher thinks a cortisol spike is probably what I experienced when surprised by my extraordinarily attractive doctor. “Some people may see someone beautiful and feel very inadequate. Then cortisol would go up,” she says. A spike in the hormone can trigger a fight-or-flight response, which could be why my brain hurtled toward intense irritation and embarrassment at beautiful strangers in situations where I was at a disadvantage: when I was sick, in the middle of moving, or watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta inside my own apartment.
“It’s the context of who you are, how you feel about yourself, if you enjoy surprises—lots of things,” Fisher says. It doesn’t help that American culture tends to code physical beauty as an indicator of overall superiority, which can make the sense of inadequacy in these interactions particularly stressful.
While people’s brains certainly enjoy beauty, our appreciation is often not that straightforward, because our perceptions are also influenced by everything else about a particular interaction. Indeed, researchers have found that the adrenaline rush created by fear can make other people seem more attractive in the immediate aftermath. And if you’re already feeling good, Fisher says, suddenly encountering an attractive person can make you feel even better by triggering a dip in cortisol levels. In hindsight, that happens to me even more frequently than the panic I had with my surgeon, but humans tend to have better recall for negative memories than positive ones.
Even if hot people have the element of surprise on their side, that gets them only so far. “Good looks are important in the beginning, because it gets you to look at a person and you might go talk to them,” says Fisher. “It’s a great first signal, but mating has breaking points and escalation points.” She notes that usually, in the long run, being really hot isn’t enough to keep people attracted to someone who has a terrible personality or a bizarre worldview. Whether knowing that pretty people have problems too makes you feel better when you’re wearing a hospital gown and suddenly confronted with a sentient Ken doll is another issue."
6. The Cultural History of Nancy Drew
"The original Nancy Drew stories, published starting in 1930 by ghostwriters for the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pen name Carolyn Keene, championed a kind of Depression-era mindset: that all able-bodied individuals, including children, should pitch in and labor for a greater good. But this is one of the few indicators of the novels’ shared temporal setting. The Nancy Drew mysteries are startlingly, escapistly devoid of any hallmarks of an economic recession—there are no obvious signs like breadlines, shantytowns, or starving children, no subtler references to families pinching to save where they can, no background noise about political letdowns or governmental ineffectuality or crumbling infrastructure. What there is, is robbery. This is how the Depression worms its way into the stories: people have valuable things stolen from them, and so are down on their luck, and Nancy Drew will help retrieve their missing possessions. But this is done in the larger context of a prosperous world. As Troy Boone, a scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, writes:
“[T]he novels—which first appeared and achieved their great popularity during the Depression years—fantasize a redistribution of wealth resulting not from a radical transformation of the economic system but from exactly the social coalescence of middle-class identity and disavowal of working-class consciousness that has become the dominant feature of American ideological life in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Nancy Drew herself is only identifiable as a Depression-Era archetype because she models a kind of bootstrapping spirit relevant to the decade but gratuitous to the booming, alternative universe in which she lives. This gung-ho spirit is also checked by other social factors, though, causing her to embody diverging understandings of feminine identity, ability, and power. As much as she is “a thrill-seeker” or “adrenaline junkie,” in the words of Caroline Reitz, a scholar at CUNY, she is also a paragon of domesticity, social conservatism, and virtuous womanhood. She may be a badass, but she’s construed as one through a paternalistic, constraining gaze, as always being slim, attractive, and neat—always being a “good girl.”
But the CW’s Nancy Drew offers a new kind of take on this character, presenting a Nancy Drew in a totally modern age, complete with the modern age’s two main signifiers: an iPhone and disillusionment. Nancy is not a millennial, it is worth pointing out, she’s Gen-Z (she’s in high school circa now, which places her birth post-2000). Making Nancy Drew a Gen-Z-er supplies her with an awareness and a grit that fulfills the character’s original bandwidth. As The New York Times explains:
“Millennials, after all, were raised during the boom times and relative peace of the 1990s, only to see their sunny world dashed by the Sept. 11 attacks and two economic crashes, in 2000 and 2008. Theirs is a story of innocence lost… Generation Z, by contrast, has had its eyes open from the beginning, coming along in the aftermath of those cataclysms in the era of the war on terror and the Great Recession…”
The Nancy Drew of the 1930s was empathetic, sympathetic, and energetic about helping someone in need, but, with her lawyer father and upper-class background (the Drews employ a full-time housekeeper, for example, and live in “River Heights”), she was isolated from personally experiencing social or economic danger. The CW’s new incarnation of Nancy Drew as a Gen-Z-er, then, supplies a meaningful cultural context to her preternatural dyed-in-the-wool grit. She’s a young woman already wise to the unfair ways of the world, already aware of the ineffectuality of bureaucracy and jaded by the indifference of society to those it has screwed over.
Nancy Drew herself is only identifiable as a Depression-Era archetype because she models a kind of bootstrapping spirit relevant to the decade but gratuitous to the booming, alternative universe in which she lives.
Nancy does not have to lose her innocence to arrive at her disposition, in this adaptation—though maybe someone else does; indeed, the gambit of the CW show is that a wealthy socialite has been murdered, maybe at the hands of “Dead Lucy” Sable, the unhappy ghost of a woman who fell off a cliff in 2000 (the year of a Recession, but who’s counting?). Shots of her tombstone tell us she was born in 1983, so, really, the CW’s Nancy Drew TV show is haunted by a millennial—revealing the show’s possible internalization, even inadvertently, of the letdown and subsequent limbo experienced by the generation. (What is a ghost, really, if not someone who is strenuously unfulfilled to the point of stagnation?)
7. The Feud That Created America's Greatest Car Race - Ford vs. Ferrari
"It all started with a business deal gone bad. In 1963, Henry Ford II, "the Deuce," decided he wanted Ford Motor Company to go racing. The only problem: Ford didn't have a sports car in its portfolio.
The quickest way to acquire a sports car, the Deuce thought, was to buy Ferrari, then a race car company that only sold street-legal machines to fund its track exploits.
Ford sent an envoy to Modena, Italy, to hash out a deal with Enzo Ferrari. The Americans offered $10 million, but as the negotiations neared their conclusion, Ferrari balked at a clause in the contract that said Ford would control the budget (and thus, the decisions) for his race team. Ferrari, known otherwise as “Il Commendatore,” couldn’t stomach the surrender of autonomy, so he bailed, sending Henry Ford II a message the Deuce didn’t often hear: There was something his money couldn’t buy.
In lieu of the sale, Ford decided to direct his company’s cash and engineering toward petty revenge. He decreed Ford would start its own race team, with the singular goal of beating Ferrari in the world’s most prestigious race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“These two guys were larger than life,” says A.J. Baime, author of Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. “Here you have arguably the most famous and powerful CEO in America, Henry Ford II, up against Enzo Ferrari—the most narcissistic man to walk the earth, but deservedly so, because he was a genius. You couldn’t write it better.”
The clash of these titanic egos would propel Ford to design America’s greatest race car: the GT40. An unstable engineering mashup of California hot-rod ethos and high-speed NASCAR expertise, the GT40 failed to finish Le Mans in 1964 and 1965, but bold testing innovations and a never-before-seen brake strategy had them primed for 1966. Weeks before the start at Le Mans, Henry Ford II handed race program boss Leo Beebe a handwritten note: “You better win.” "
2. Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished…”
"Half a century before Bertrand Russell admonished that, in a universe unconcerned with human interests, the equally naïve notions of optimism and pessimism “spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy,” Nietzsche paints the backdrop for the drama of truth:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
The desire for knowledge, Nietzsche argues, stems from the same hubristic self-focus and is amplified by the basic human instinct for belonging — within a culture, what is designated as truth is a form of social contract and a sort of “peace pact” among people. A century before Laura Riding observed that “the task of truth is divided among us, to the number of us,” Nietzsche writes:
A uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. He says, for example, “I am rich,” when the proper designation for his condition would be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences.
Suggesting that language itself can become a tool that conceals rather than reveals truth — something Anna Deavere Smith would echo a century later in her observation that “some people use language as a mask [and] create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not” — Nietzsche probes at these linguistic conventions themselves:
Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason… We speak of a “snake”: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing!
[It should probably be noted that I don't always agree with Nietzche and he gave me a headache in college. But the above excerpt and link felt fitting -- considering I keep getting into arguments over words. The latest argument was on FB over the word "tribalism" and what it meant or how I was using it.]
3. And now... Betrand Russell... The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
[Seemed weirdly fitting today..even though I can't say I'm much of a fan of Russell either or for that matter Henry Miller. Also, is it just me, or are philosopher's ever so slightly arrogant?]
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.
[...]
Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.
Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order:
Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner.
[...]
However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.
In 1938, Henry Miller also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for rivalry:
The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.
Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly poignant in the context of today’s social media, he observes:
Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame. "
[I don't really agree with him -- because seems to be an oversimplification. Although, I guess I do to the extent that I've begun to think people are just varying degrees of selfish. And horribly un-self-aware regarding it. ]
4. The End of Capitalism is Already Starting if You Know Where to Look
Well, yeah. I mean it's sort of inevitable in a way -- the pendulum shifted too far towards free-market capitalism and nationalism, with the middle class feeling more and more disenfranchised. Whenever the middle class gets disgruntled or angry, economic upheaval occurs. I just hope we do it peacefully this round -- Revolutions never end well.
" Before capitalism emerged in Europe, there was feudalism, a radically different system in which nothing–neither land nor labor–was for sale, and serfs orbited their feudal lord like ribbons tethered to a maypole. Feudalism’s inhumanity was different from capitalism’s: Instead of being unable to work and earn money to pay for rent and necessities, serfs were dependent on the lords for their livelihoods and their schedules and for a piece on land upon which to labor. Their stability was contingent on the lord’s generosity or lack thereof.
Sometimes, serfs would get squeezed, Wolff says–maybe a serf who was permitted to work his own land three days a week was cut down to two, and had to work on the lord’s the rest of the time, struggling to feed his family. Those serfs would run away. They’d jet off into the forests around the manors, where they’d encounter other runaway serfs (this is the origin of Robin Hood). That group of runaways, who’d cut ties with the feudal system, would establish their own villages, called communes. Without the lord controlling how the former serfs used their land and their resources, those free workers set up a system of production and trade in the communes that would eventually evolve into modern capitalism.
“The image of the transition from feudalism to capitalism was the French Revolution, and that was part of it,” Wolff says, “but it wasn’t the whole story. The actual transition was much slower, and not cataclysmic, and found in these serfs that ran away and set up something new.”
In the U.S., businesses converting to cooperative workplace models are the functional equivalent of those runaway serfs. Around 10 cities across the U.S. have, in recent years, launched initiatives specifically to support the development of worker co-ops, which have been especially beneficial in creating job and wage stability in low-income neighborhoods. Because workers are beholden to themselves and each other, rather than a CEO and a board of directors, the model parts ways with the capitalist structure and advances something that more closely resembles a true democratic system.
“This is the beginning of the end of capitalism,” Wolff says. “Whether these experiments–which is what we have to call them at this point–will congeal into a massive social transformation, I don’t know. But I do know that massive social transformations have never happened without this stage. This stage may not do it, but change won’t happen without it,” he adds. These subtle shifts away from capitalism are not just apparent in the development of more co-ops, Wolff says. Over the past year, he’s been called in to meet with CEOs at large financial firms, who seemed to Wolff to be steeling themselves for a dethroning. As CEOs continue to disproportionately outearn their employees, the call for a dismantling of the system has become loud enough that they seem to have no choice but to pay attention. While it’s a flimsy gesture, some have distributed their bonuses to their employees.
“The move toward co-ops and the change in consciousness I’ve witnessed in workplaces and among my students are the two mechanisms of transformation that are now underway globally, and I’d like to say–it’s more a wish than anything else–that it’s too late to stop them,” Wolff says. “And the sheer beauty of this is that nothing fuels this movement more than capitalism’s own troubles, and the displeasure, disaffection, and anxiety it produces.”
Of course, the thought currents and little blooms of democratic workplaces are not enough to engineer a new economic system. These developments are all happening outside of the political system; in the White House and in Congress, the presence of big capitalist businesses continues as strong asever. But the fact that local governments like New York City and Austin have launched incubator programs for worker-owned cooperatives indicates that they’re not incompatible with the current political system."
5. Hot People are Stressful
" The problem starts with brain chemistry. “When you see an attractive person, the left ventral tegmental area of the brain becomes active and will pump out dopamine,” says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who studies attraction at the Kinsey Institute. “Dopamine is a stimulant to the brain, so some people might react with surprise or awkwardness.” That feeling is the weak-kneed giddiness that very attractive people can inspire, which can leave you fumbling for words and feeling off balance, even though a dopamine rush is a fundamentally pleasurable experience.
Based on Fisher’s research, which used fMRI scans to observe the brain lighting up in response to stimuli, the left ventral tegmental area (commonly referred to as the left VTA) is responsible for pleasurable reactions to beauty. Meanwhile, the right VTA provides the dopamine that fuels romantic love; the two responses are similar but neurologically distinct, which means that what people feel when they see a random pretty face isn’t necessarily a desire for romance or even sex. “The same thing probably happens when you look at a good painting,” says Fisher. “It can pump out the dopamine and perhaps make you slightly giddy.”
The left VTA appraises and appreciates what you see, but lighting up that part of the brain doesn’t necessarily make you want to interact with the person whose appearance gives you pleasure, which is why most people don’t try to ask out every hot person they see. The stress I felt wasn’t the same as a fear of rejection; my hot surgeon wasn’t even my type. Instead, I panicked because of a key difference between gazing at a painting and a hottie: A painting doesn’t judge you back.
That’s where a second, potentially more nefarious brain chemical comes in: cortisol. That’s the stress hormone that gets blamed for everything from weight gain to road rage, and Fisher thinks a cortisol spike is probably what I experienced when surprised by my extraordinarily attractive doctor. “Some people may see someone beautiful and feel very inadequate. Then cortisol would go up,” she says. A spike in the hormone can trigger a fight-or-flight response, which could be why my brain hurtled toward intense irritation and embarrassment at beautiful strangers in situations where I was at a disadvantage: when I was sick, in the middle of moving, or watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta inside my own apartment.
“It’s the context of who you are, how you feel about yourself, if you enjoy surprises—lots of things,” Fisher says. It doesn’t help that American culture tends to code physical beauty as an indicator of overall superiority, which can make the sense of inadequacy in these interactions particularly stressful.
While people’s brains certainly enjoy beauty, our appreciation is often not that straightforward, because our perceptions are also influenced by everything else about a particular interaction. Indeed, researchers have found that the adrenaline rush created by fear can make other people seem more attractive in the immediate aftermath. And if you’re already feeling good, Fisher says, suddenly encountering an attractive person can make you feel even better by triggering a dip in cortisol levels. In hindsight, that happens to me even more frequently than the panic I had with my surgeon, but humans tend to have better recall for negative memories than positive ones.
Even if hot people have the element of surprise on their side, that gets them only so far. “Good looks are important in the beginning, because it gets you to look at a person and you might go talk to them,” says Fisher. “It’s a great first signal, but mating has breaking points and escalation points.” She notes that usually, in the long run, being really hot isn’t enough to keep people attracted to someone who has a terrible personality or a bizarre worldview. Whether knowing that pretty people have problems too makes you feel better when you’re wearing a hospital gown and suddenly confronted with a sentient Ken doll is another issue."
6. The Cultural History of Nancy Drew
"The original Nancy Drew stories, published starting in 1930 by ghostwriters for the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pen name Carolyn Keene, championed a kind of Depression-era mindset: that all able-bodied individuals, including children, should pitch in and labor for a greater good. But this is one of the few indicators of the novels’ shared temporal setting. The Nancy Drew mysteries are startlingly, escapistly devoid of any hallmarks of an economic recession—there are no obvious signs like breadlines, shantytowns, or starving children, no subtler references to families pinching to save where they can, no background noise about political letdowns or governmental ineffectuality or crumbling infrastructure. What there is, is robbery. This is how the Depression worms its way into the stories: people have valuable things stolen from them, and so are down on their luck, and Nancy Drew will help retrieve their missing possessions. But this is done in the larger context of a prosperous world. As Troy Boone, a scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, writes:
“[T]he novels—which first appeared and achieved their great popularity during the Depression years—fantasize a redistribution of wealth resulting not from a radical transformation of the economic system but from exactly the social coalescence of middle-class identity and disavowal of working-class consciousness that has become the dominant feature of American ideological life in the second half of the twentieth century.”
Nancy Drew herself is only identifiable as a Depression-Era archetype because she models a kind of bootstrapping spirit relevant to the decade but gratuitous to the booming, alternative universe in which she lives. This gung-ho spirit is also checked by other social factors, though, causing her to embody diverging understandings of feminine identity, ability, and power. As much as she is “a thrill-seeker” or “adrenaline junkie,” in the words of Caroline Reitz, a scholar at CUNY, she is also a paragon of domesticity, social conservatism, and virtuous womanhood. She may be a badass, but she’s construed as one through a paternalistic, constraining gaze, as always being slim, attractive, and neat—always being a “good girl.”
But the CW’s Nancy Drew offers a new kind of take on this character, presenting a Nancy Drew in a totally modern age, complete with the modern age’s two main signifiers: an iPhone and disillusionment. Nancy is not a millennial, it is worth pointing out, she’s Gen-Z (she’s in high school circa now, which places her birth post-2000). Making Nancy Drew a Gen-Z-er supplies her with an awareness and a grit that fulfills the character’s original bandwidth. As The New York Times explains:
“Millennials, after all, were raised during the boom times and relative peace of the 1990s, only to see their sunny world dashed by the Sept. 11 attacks and two economic crashes, in 2000 and 2008. Theirs is a story of innocence lost… Generation Z, by contrast, has had its eyes open from the beginning, coming along in the aftermath of those cataclysms in the era of the war on terror and the Great Recession…”
The Nancy Drew of the 1930s was empathetic, sympathetic, and energetic about helping someone in need, but, with her lawyer father and upper-class background (the Drews employ a full-time housekeeper, for example, and live in “River Heights”), she was isolated from personally experiencing social or economic danger. The CW’s new incarnation of Nancy Drew as a Gen-Z-er, then, supplies a meaningful cultural context to her preternatural dyed-in-the-wool grit. She’s a young woman already wise to the unfair ways of the world, already aware of the ineffectuality of bureaucracy and jaded by the indifference of society to those it has screwed over.
Nancy Drew herself is only identifiable as a Depression-Era archetype because she models a kind of bootstrapping spirit relevant to the decade but gratuitous to the booming, alternative universe in which she lives.
Nancy does not have to lose her innocence to arrive at her disposition, in this adaptation—though maybe someone else does; indeed, the gambit of the CW show is that a wealthy socialite has been murdered, maybe at the hands of “Dead Lucy” Sable, the unhappy ghost of a woman who fell off a cliff in 2000 (the year of a Recession, but who’s counting?). Shots of her tombstone tell us she was born in 1983, so, really, the CW’s Nancy Drew TV show is haunted by a millennial—revealing the show’s possible internalization, even inadvertently, of the letdown and subsequent limbo experienced by the generation. (What is a ghost, really, if not someone who is strenuously unfulfilled to the point of stagnation?)
7. The Feud That Created America's Greatest Car Race - Ford vs. Ferrari
"It all started with a business deal gone bad. In 1963, Henry Ford II, "the Deuce," decided he wanted Ford Motor Company to go racing. The only problem: Ford didn't have a sports car in its portfolio.
The quickest way to acquire a sports car, the Deuce thought, was to buy Ferrari, then a race car company that only sold street-legal machines to fund its track exploits.
Ford sent an envoy to Modena, Italy, to hash out a deal with Enzo Ferrari. The Americans offered $10 million, but as the negotiations neared their conclusion, Ferrari balked at a clause in the contract that said Ford would control the budget (and thus, the decisions) for his race team. Ferrari, known otherwise as “Il Commendatore,” couldn’t stomach the surrender of autonomy, so he bailed, sending Henry Ford II a message the Deuce didn’t often hear: There was something his money couldn’t buy.
In lieu of the sale, Ford decided to direct his company’s cash and engineering toward petty revenge. He decreed Ford would start its own race team, with the singular goal of beating Ferrari in the world’s most prestigious race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
“These two guys were larger than life,” says A.J. Baime, author of Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. “Here you have arguably the most famous and powerful CEO in America, Henry Ford II, up against Enzo Ferrari—the most narcissistic man to walk the earth, but deservedly so, because he was a genius. You couldn’t write it better.”
The clash of these titanic egos would propel Ford to design America’s greatest race car: the GT40. An unstable engineering mashup of California hot-rod ethos and high-speed NASCAR expertise, the GT40 failed to finish Le Mans in 1964 and 1965, but bold testing innovations and a never-before-seen brake strategy had them primed for 1966. Weeks before the start at Le Mans, Henry Ford II handed race program boss Leo Beebe a handwritten note: “You better win.” "
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Date: 2019-10-11 01:16 am (UTC)I don't find that to be true of me. But maybe it's age related. When I run into someone incredibly attractive, I just enjoy the hell out of it. I wish there were more beautiful people in my life.
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Date: 2019-10-11 02:13 am (UTC)Did find the article to be interesting though and another depiction of how screwed up our society is in regards to looks.
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Date: 2019-10-11 10:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-11 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-11 04:38 pm (UTC)