Category: Society & Culture

  • The philosophy of Jubal Harshaw

    Robert A. Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961, and that’s where I met Jubal Harshaw, though he has apparently featured in other books by the author. He is described thus – “Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B., M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, neo-pessimist philosopher, devout agnostic, professional clown, amateur subversive, and parasite by choice.”

    Also, “Dr.Jubal Harshaw, professional clown, amateur subversive and parasite by choice, had an almost Martian attitude towards “hurry”. Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity – without fear, without hope, with sybaritic gusto. To this end he required something larger than Diogenes’ tub but smaller than Kubla’s pleasure dome; his was a simple place, a few acres kept private with electrified fence, a house of fourteen rooms or so, with running secretaries and other modern conveniences. To support his austere nest and rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return because it was easier to be rich than poor – Harshaw wished to live in lazy luxury, doing what amused Harshaw.”

    Some reviewers consider him to be the author’s mouthpiece. Whatever that might be, and from the little I know of him, I have been impressed by Harshaw’s philosophy. My favourites below.

    1. “…most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers.”
    2. “I believe in everyone’s working out his own damnation but that is no excuse to give a dynamite cap to a baby”
    3. “Do-gooding is like treating haemophilia – the real cure is to let haemophiliacs bleed to death… before they breed more haemophiliacs.”
    4. “You go into a man’s house, you accept his household rules. That’s a universal rule of civilised behaviour.”
    5. “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

    It’s really heartening to see how a worldview can resonate after decades. From there flows the idea of focusing on things that do not change.

  • Slowly and then suddenly…

    …because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

    We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

    The man… the machine

    This is from my first post on what I called the augmented human, back in 2009. And I continue to ask myself what the man-made man will be like.

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  • Opinion poles

    A few months ago, D and I were talking about something at work making me angry. Since Yoda has said that it is fear that leads to anger, and is the path to the dark side, I needed to figure out the root of that anger, and then understand the fear. I knew it wasn’t job loss (I had already quit), but was stuck.

    I would learn later we tend to focus on negatives, because in the savannah, avoiding the things that might kill you was more important than seeking the things that will give you pleasure. Pleasure and pain are just feedback mechanisms, not an end. Whether it’s the pain caused by your body failing you, or mental agony. Psychological pain is an indication that our subjective map of the world needs a revision. (Cognitive Fitness, Anil Rajput) And that indeed turned out to be the case.

    D insightfully pointed out that my faith in my value system, which I mistakenly assumed others at the workplace also subscribed to, might have been broken by the incident. And that would make me afraid because that is the only one I am comfortable with, and any changes in it would be a compromise I couldn’t abide by.

    I would also learn later that there is a term for something like this, borrowed from physics. Hysteresis – the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments.

    The last couple of months have been a great learning experience. About myself, the world at large, and the relationship. One of the important lessons has been that I am free to hold on to my values, and continue to negotiate with others, but as Marcus Aurelius rightly said, “the universe is transformation, life is opinion.“

  • Share Values Part 1

    In business, the share price of a company is an abstraction of value – a single number that subsumes every quality and quantity that affects the business. Or, in the succinctly insightful words of Ben Evans, an opinion of the future. This post is not about share prices, it is about sharing. But I felt a connect with both the above ‘definitions’. On the first, given the volume of sharing we now do online, it is no surprise that likes/shares/subscribers/followers are an abstraction of value. In many ways, the commoditisation of an individual. And so on the second, can the answer to ‘why we share’ explain the changing mindset of society at large, and thus shine some light on what this will lead to?

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  • Accustomed Reality

    Shared understanding is something I have been interested in for a while and have written about in some of my earlier posts – Default in our stars, An IG Story* – among the most recent ones. While the posts were primarily on the individual context, my concern has also been at the societal and species levels because the ability to create and act on a shared understanding is what got us this far. Variety, serendipity, and the opportunity to debate, agree, disagree, identify biases, agree to disagree but hopefully in a civilised manner.

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