Category: Flawsophy

  • The constraints on freedom

    The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow was in my long list of favourite reads in 2021. It would have been in the top 10 if it weren’t for my Arundhati Roy bias, because it gave me at least a couple of fundamental perspective shifts.

    The first is at an information level. The book is primarily a rebuttal of what now looks like a simplistic and linear way of looking at human history. The two Davids go up against the Goliath of the contemporary civilisation narrative that comes out in practically every book that even briefly touches upon the evolution of our species. This popular narrative can be (simplistically) summarised by three of my favourite books – Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and the two-part Political Order series by Francis Fukuyama. We were foragers until wheat domesticated us (as Harari would say), which led to societal hierarchies as we now see it. To massively paraphrase Fukuyama’s books, from various kinds of states (governance styles), we then evolved into preferring liberal democracy through the interplay of the state, rule of law, accountable government and social mobilisation, idea legitimacy, and economic development. Both Harari and Fukuyama have been instrumental in helping me understand what we could call ‘the system of the world’. (borrowed from a Neal Stephenson trilogy).

    But in this book, Graeber and Wengrow use archaeological evidence to show how these broad strokes don’t do justice to the experiments and trade-offs that many societies played with in farming, property, democracy and thus civilisation as we know it. It is far more nuanced, and in doing that, bring up the freedom that our ancestors had.

    Which brings me to the second shift. This insight, while was stated in a broad human context, also hit close to home. Has civilisation, they ask, caused us to lose what they see as our three basic freedoms – the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? It’s something to ponder over at a personal level. Liberal democracies might tom-tom freedom as a non-negotiable and enshrine it in their constitution, but ‘civil society’ and its economics would probably crumble if we actually had these freedoms. As I tweeted, The book made me realise even more that the freedom the individual needs and the structure that society wants will always be at odds. The differences are of degree not of kind.

    It’s when I think about it that I realise how much we have normalised the loss of these freedoms at a societal and an individual level. Why is anyone obliged to obey anyone else? I realise I’d be ok with an answer that has some emotion as the primary reason, but the most likely answer is power – physical or monetary. Between state and corporations, a duopoly exists on this. But the tyranny is rampant in daily lives too. House help, people being turned away from public parks, expectations of service staff everywhere. The list can go on.

    Why can’t we simply go anywhere else? Beyond money, the lines that we have drawn on paper get translated into checkposts and immigration counters, and crossing them is now a privilege. The lines aren’t natural, but try crossing them without the necessary paperwork. And even if you manage somehow, you will live in constant fear of being thrown out. It’s not that easy to go someplace else.

    Between these two losses, the freedom to change one’s social arrangements is pretty much taken out of play. Who one is (identity) and what one does and where, are very difficult to change. Wake up, go to work, get paid, use the money to add to cart, travel, entertainment. Rinse, repeat. Yes, we all have choices, but society’s choice architecture also bias our decision-making.

    How the hell did basic freedoms become a privilege? How did the ‘civil society’ we traded it for go rogue and become tyrannical? I hope to get a better understanding through the books I read this year. How does this manifest in my own life, and what can I do to help myself and at least a few others become a little more free? That’s a life’s work, and a different post!

  • Reflections on my OS – Part 2

    Continued from here.

    A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the book “Behave”  gave me insights on the ‘why’ behind the mindsets I have in life. Since mindset isn’t something you can leave at home, there is some impact on the professional front too.

    Work

    As I had mentioned, my OS has a few known features (uncharitably, bugs) – the scarcity mindset, a low regard for familial bonds and (until recently) friendships, and a belief that in a crunch the only person one can depend on is self. This has led to some obvious implications and some not-so-obvious ones at work.

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  • Reflections on my OS – Part 1

    Alternately: Internal Pattern Recognition: IPR? 😉

    If there’s one thing that Stoicism has taught me, it is that the good fight is not with the world, but yourself. Many of the books I read and observations I try to make on family are to get a better understanding of the ‘why’ behind my thinking. Among the many things that “Behave” gave me insights on was this, and an explanation for how siblings can be very different in terms of mindset and behaviour, despite inheriting not just ‘nature’ but sharing ‘nurture’ too.

    ‘Another dogma was that brains are pretty much wired up early in childhood – after all, by age two, brains are already about 85% of adult volume, but the development trajectory is much slower than that. …the final brain region to fully mature (in terms of synapse number, myelination, and metabolism) is the frontal cortex, not going fully online until the mid twenties.‘

    “…the brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.” 

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  • An incognito good life

    For a particular generation, Wet Wet Wet’s “Love is all around” from the soundtrack of “Four Weddings And A Funeral” is a special song. And thus, catching Andie MacDowell (yes yes, Sex, Lies, and Videotape too) in Maid was a pleasant surprise. She plays Paula, mother to Alex, played by her real-life daughter Margaret Qualley, and grandmother to Maddy, Alex’s daughter.

    Paula is an artist, reasonably disconnected from reality. Probably her way of coping with the unpleasant things that happened earlier in her life. In Episode 3 (Sea Glass), we see her preparing for an art show. (Minor spoiler ahead) When Alex (who did a lot of heavy lifting literally and otherwise) drives her to the gallery, it turns out there is no show. Paula had completely misread some charitable comments made by the curator! She might have been a flavour at some point, but is now middling, at best.

    At dinner on the same day, Paula and Alex squabble, with Paula delivering a low blow. But the next day, when Alex returns to her (temporary) home in the evening, she finds that Paula was there earlier, and had painted a wall mural for Maddy. Maddy gets all giggly and excited.

    And all that was one part of the context. The second part is what I have been reading in ‘Lives of the Stoics‘, around the same time. ‘We naturally care what people think of us; we don’t want to seem too different, so we acquire the same tastes as everyone else. We accept what the crowd does so the crowd will accept us. But in doing this, we weaken ourselves. We compromise, often without knowing it; we allow ourselves to be bought – without even the benefit of getting paid for it.‘ 

    I thought about it in the context of Paula’s exhibition vs mural. Exhibiting one’s expressions (art) to a crowd which is seemingly interested in such things vs delighting her daughter and grand-daughter. I understand it does not always have to be an either-or, but I think we subconsciously optimise for one or the other, and neurons wire together etc.

    As I have written before, when the ‘why’ of creation changes, so does the ‘what’. And there are many slices to this. For instance, doing something because it gives me joy vs doing it for validation from ‘Instafam’ or Tweeps. And not just validation, but validation at scale – ‘We have created a world where we reward the manipulation of quantities more than the appreciation of qualities.’ ~ Roger L. Martin. There is another slice, more on that later.

    For some time now, I have consciously tried to avoid this direction, and instead, focused on a different path. From experience, it is a matter of training one’s mind, and being mindful of the distractions. Easier said than done, especially when a staged presence has a direct implication on things like employability. But possible.

    ‘For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.‘ ~ Toni Morrison. For instance, something I am grateful for is the ability to make people laugh. Not a prepared standup act, but something on the spur of the moment, with a bunch of contexts built in. These days, when I am able to make D laugh, I consider the day a success. I also find the opportunity to make friends and colleagues smile rewarding.

    Not that I don’t share random wordplay on Twitter, or don’t find validation pleasing, but I am increasingly becoming ok not getting it either. Just being able to do it makes me happy. ‘To have but not want, to enjoy without needing.’ 

    And then there is the other slice. The work on this continues, but that’s another post.

  • Next change

    This little phrase is from the PT classes of the 80s – the command to change the drill pattern. I was reminded of it as we started making our way back into the real world after 18 months.

    After a whole lot of deliberation, we began a hybrid model at work in mid- September. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly thrilled, primarily because of two reasons. One was the obvious one – the rigours of the daily commute. In addition, I felt that I was more productive at home. But it wasn’t so bad. Not so surprisingly, the time for commute has been cut by half as most folks are still WFH. I continued to read on the way to office, but instead of watching a show on the return journey, I chose a favourite pastime – people gawking. Maybe I’ll get back to shows after the initial days and/or when the commute time starts matching the episode times! And surprisingly, I found a strange comfort in being in office. Despite the chaos of many people in nearby cubicles being on different calls, getting to meet old friends, and new ones whom I had only met online, was very pleasant. Not to mention a certain reassurance of watching people work towards the same goal.

    Life had changed quite a bit too. D and I used to spend Saturday evenings discovering new eateries or revisiting favourites. But now, even though we have the option, we prefer staying at home with sundowners on the balcony, and ordering in. Thus, weekly excursions have become fortnightly. We still look forward to travel though, though we still don’t know when we will get back to it.

    I wrote this post for a couple of reasons. One, the usual premise – how would this read a decade from now? A good test to understand how my mind has remembered the return to civilisation. The other is to remind my later self about a few lessons learnt. One, while neurons that fire together might wire together, there is also a certain unpredictability of attitudes – as evidenced by my reaction to the return to office. The mind, in many respects, remains unfathomable, in its capacity to both resist change, and to normalise. Two, being able to change one’s mind is a superpower, especially as one gets older. And three, in many of the daily interactions one takes for granted, there is an inherent joy that sometimes gets obscured.