By Susan Babbitt for The Saker Blog
Antonio Gramsci said optimism is lazy. It is because optimists believe in the result they want, regardless of evidence. More useful, Gramsci suggested, is seeing things as they are, even if bad, and starting there.
It’s more interesting. Bertoldt Brecht agreed. He learned from ancient Chinese theatre: The “thinking man” sees the storm and crouches down, becoming small.[1] In European theatre, Brecht noticed, the hero “stands tall” against the wind, uselessly. Brecht was a realist.
It doesn’t mean to cave. Brecht’s realism involves seeing a situation for what it is, discovering its real opportunities: seeing things as they are, not as you want or expect them to be.
Realism is not understood. Indeed, truth is not understood, at least not in the North, even in universities. It leads to silly ideas such as that individuals have power to seize their destiny. Individuals don’t have power to seize their destiny as human beings, realizing unique human potential, not alone.
At least, not in a dehumanizing world. It is because we cannot, alone, access relevant truths. It’s easy to show. It has to do with the nature of thinking.
Victor Hugo was a realist. This gets missed. He’s called a liberal. True, he believed in freedom but that doesn’t make him a liberal, philosophically (although perhaps politically at the time). Liberalism is a view of freedom, assumed in the book I am about to discuss. It involves a confusion about thinking, which is also a confusion about the power of individuals, as already suggested. Hugo didn’t buy it.
He had a connection to José Martí, who also didn’t buy it. Martí was a nineteenth century Cuban revolutionary, philosopher and poet.[2] He translated Hugo into Spanish. Martí also is called a liberal, even by some who sympathize with the 20th century revolution he authored, intellectually, in Cuba.[3] It is easy see Martí was not liberal if one reads him philosophically.
But few do, outside Latin America.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, released this week, is an optimistic book, by its own account.[4] The authors considered calling it Deaths of Despair and the End of Capitalism. They comment that even their own students favour the more realistic view: Students don’t favour “democracy”. The meaning of democracy is taken for granted in the book along with the value of optimism.
It is part of a misconception about truth and how we discover it. In the first place, it is a misconception about existence, evident to philosophers for millennia, although not liberal ones. If one asks how Princeton University professors and Princeton University Press get it so wrong, the answer is rhinoceritis.
Eugène Ionesco wrote about this in 1959. I explain below.
Deaths of Despair
“Deaths of despair” are by suicide, drug overdose and alcoholic liver disease. Their increase in the US is not due to globalization, automation, inequality, wage decline, financial crisis, or impunity of corrupt rich folk. Otherwise it would happen elsewhere. Such deaths are explained by meaninglessness, indignity and loss of pride in community and work. Increased despair is a US phenomenon. The US is doing something very wrong and the world should not follow.
But the problem is not capitalism.
So argue Anne Case and Angus Deaton. At first glance, the argument – that US capitalism has special toxicity – is uninteresting. Few would object, given its almost daily street massacres and 800 military bases abroad (two features not mentioned).
But the argumentative strategy is interesting. The authors want readers to learn from the US example. We should learn from the argumentative strategy. For this alone, the book is worthwhile.
Case and Seaton follow Amartya Sen, liberal political philosopher famous for his capacity building theory of development: development as freedom. Sen received a Nobel Prize (1999) for a view of global development advancing a conception of freedom similar, in theory, to that of Marx: Freedom as the capacity to realize essentially human potential. But Sen is not a realist like Marx. Some Marxists don’t know this about Marx. Allen Wood, in his valuable book about the philosophy (not just the political economy) of Marx, argues that Marx’s realism, naturalism and essentialism are the “mystical shell” of Marx’s philosophy, ignored by academic Marxists who don’t read Marx as a philosopher.[5]
He had a vision of what it means to be human, a sensible, scientific view. It is a view also argued for by the Buddha and Martí, among others. We come back to this.
According to Sen, if we identify injustices, and remove them, we get a better world.
The health system, rent seeking, and the pharmaceutical industry are three big causes identified in Deaths of Despair. The US health system is a “disgrace”, delivering the worst life expectancy of any rich country. It is a “cancer at the heart of the economy, one that has widely metastasized, bringing down wages, destroying good jobs, and making it harder and harder for states and federal governments to afford what their constituents need.” The well-being of ordinary people is subordinated to the private gain of the already well-off, including doctors and health administrators.
Rent seeking (e.g. lobbying and protection rackets) is the second big cause. It is not just Google, AT&T and Boeing who are to blame. According to Case and Seaton, rent seeking is most lethal in the US among medium size businesses and professionals protected from competition by political interference. This includes physicians and their associations, for example, the American Medical Association, who control access to medical schools, keeping the numbers of doctors down and salaries high.
Rent-seeking is basic to capitalism, identified by Adam Smith as the tendency to increase one’s own wealth without producing new wealth. In the US, corporate CEOs are not the guiltiest but rather, for example, car dealers, realtors, optometrists and the US Chamber of Congress. Small and medium sized businesses, through their associations, spread over the country in every congressional district, lobby for exemption from regulations and special tax breaks. Lawyers show them how to avoid jail.
The third big cause is a pharmaceutical industry which “has been responsible for an epidemic of addiction and death that earned it billions of dollars”. Although Purdue, makers of OxyContin, may lose billions of dollars of past profit, aggressive marketing to doctors and patients is still in place. The behaviour of pharmaceutical companies is like “showering gasoline on smouldering despair”.
Drug overdoses are the largest category of deaths of despair in the US. However, eliminating the drug epidemic would not eliminate the root causes of despair.
Solutions are considered: wage subsidies, raising minimum wage, anti-trust legislation, universal basic incomes, and government interference in the pharmaceutical industry. Since deaths of despair occur most among those without a BA, the educational system might be changed so those without a BA are not so disrespected.
The beast should be tamed not slain. In nineteenth century UK, at the beginning of the century, capitalism failed many. By the end, without war or pandemic, it had changed. The example justifies “limited optimism”. Capitalism can be “better monitored and regulated, not to be replaced by some fantastical socialist utopia in which the state takes over industry. Democracy can rise to the challenge.”
Strategy
The argument is well-researched, clear and engaging. But let’s look at the strategy.
Any philosophy student learns that fair argument involves considering rival views in their best light, at least to start. If you assume at the outset that your rivals are stupid and/or morally deficient, you make your job easy. Your rival may have such qualities but that’s not the place to start in good scholarship.
The authors consider socialism “some fantastical utopia” controlling the economy and that’s as good as it gets. No more is said. Yet socialism is a view about democracy, with history and arguments. It is a view about what it means for “the people” to rule themselves, different from liberalism. It may be wrong but assuming this without argument, is called “begging the question”.
But let’s assume socialism doesn’t work, for the sake of argument.
There is a more fundamental point about how the argument is organized. It is an argument, after all, about why people increasingly kill themselves in the worlds richest and supposedly most free (according to Noam Chomsky) society. It matters.
In 1975, US philosopher Hilary Putnam argued that before Einstein there existed evidence against Newton. [6] However, because Newton’s views were well-established, the empirical evidence was dismissed. Rationality works like this. If I release an object and it fails to fall to the ground, and I offer arguments against gravity, you won’t consider them. I could show you a thousand times that the object doesn’t fall. You see it with your own eyes, but you won’t give it importance. It is because what you see is implausible, even though you see it. Even without an explanation, you are confident there is one. Rational folk won’t consider my arguments. They know based on other beliefs that it’s a trick.
Putnam points out that only after Einstein reconceptualized mass and energy, did the empirical evidence against Newton, which existed and was known, become interesting. It became plausible. The point is that we consider empirical evidence when the importance of such evidence is plausible given expectations. Evidence becomes interesting when there is something which such information explains that we care about. There must be a question in relationship to which the evidence matters.
This point is now well-known in philosophy and psychology.
Following Sen, these authors consider injustices given expectations of liberal capitalism. They do what Sen does which is to take for granted a way of seeing the world that arose around the time of the Renaissance. Philosophical liberalism is a view that identifies the self with the mind and considers anything “outside” the mind to interfere with the “self” which is to interfere with freedom.[7] One of liberalism’s key ideas is freedom from “within”. Sen opposes it but not all the way. He doesn’t oppose the view of knowledge that became influential after David Hume’s empiricism evolved into logical positivism which is enormously influential still today although it is false.
I won’t recount the story here.[8] What matters for present purposes is that positivism, which is the view, roughly, that knowledge consists of beliefs deducted from direct observation, failed more than half a century ago. This is because there is no such direct observation. Observation depends on beliefs.
Positivism is known to be false, and yet it still influences. It convinces some to debunk science. They notice scientists influenced by social, moral, political, and cultural values, and conclude that science is not objective. Or they notice that what was once considered true is no longer considered true, and they refer to “truth,” as if there is none.
There are no absolute truths. Sure. Truth is always partial. But to expect absolute truth is a misunderstanding of how we exist in the world, which is causally interdependent, including in the way we think. We exist and think dialectically within relations of cause and effect that include the causal effects of the physical and human worlds upon who we are and how we think. We know the world, when we do, in part because it acts upon us.
This wasn’t just Marx’s view. It was also the Buddha’s. And it was the view of countless smart philosophers, throughout time, who bothered to look at the world and notice that human beings, like everything else in the universe, exist in relations of cause and effect. Mind and body, and the world and the mind, are causally interdependent. We return to this. It matters to questions about dignity.
Psychologists now agree that we don’t think alone.[9]
Stephen Hawking, not a Marxist, describes knowledge as dialectical. He compares scientists to artists. Cosmology is highly speculative but still empirically grounded. It involves a “leap of faith”. [10] Scientists imagine how the world might be and then figure out how to test, empirically. Einstein had to envision the curvature of space before two teams of astronomers, many years later, tested it out.
Imagination makes testing relevant. So does caring. [11] If you didn’t imagine a just world, even without evidence, and even if it’s impossible, you won’t ask how to get there or why we’re not there yet. It doesn’t make sense: If you think injustice is all there is, there is no sense to asking how to eliminate it.
The point is that science and social science, done rationally, involve something like faith: believing what cannot be proved. [12] if we can’t envision how the world might be, we don’t ask why it is the way it is in relevant respects. It doesn’t make sense to question what cannot be otherwise.
European philosophers were mistaken when they separated facts and values and said you can’t get one from the other. The view has been around for centuries. Academics, including philosophers, take it for granted that there are no facts about what ought to be, only about what is.
Jean Valjean in Les Misérables had a different view. Javert in fact had the same view as Valjean although he responded differently. We discuss this in the last section.
Intellectuals on the left buy into the “fact/value distinction”, unwittingly. Spanish author Javier Cercas’ recent thoughtful reflection on the Spanish Civil War is an example.[13] Cercas’ great-uncle fought and died for Franco. That he was “politically mistaken, there’s no doubt.” But by the end, we understand Cercas’ uncle as “a man of flesh and bone, a simple self-respecting muchacho disillusioned of his ideals.”
Cercas tells us four times in the book, using the same words, that he is a seeker of facts, not stories: Legend is unreliable, dependent on people, “volatile.” Facts are “safe” and “brutal.” He wants facts.
Fact and fiction are distinct. This is true. But they are not separable in the way Cercas annoyingly insists.
Cercas tells his great-uncle’s story as well as the story about the story of his great-uncle, which is the story of why it is important to tell that story. It is important. This much is compelling. But Cercas tells a third story, which he does not admit to telling, and of course, does not defend. (It is not defensible). It is a philosophical story he assumes unwittingly: the separation of the personal from the objective, as if the latter is only achievable if you liberate yourself from the former.
This view is known to be false by philosophers and psychologists, as suggested above.
Cercas is in its sordid grasp. In the end, he’s told the story of why his uncle went to war just to tell the story rather than “leave it rotting”. He doesn’t say he has told the story because it contributes to moral knowledge. He can’t say that. Legends can’t do that. Or so he believes, or thinks he believes.
Misunderstanding science has consequences. It leads otherwise progressive thinkers, like Sen, to suggest that we arrive at a better world if we just remove the injustices that appear to us to be injustices from the perspective of liberal capitalism.
It protects the status quo beside undermining enquiry about dignity, which matters to deaths of despair.
The authors of Deaths of Despair, like Cercas, don’t know they assume a moribund philosophical view denying truths about humanness or any human or moral value. The argumentative strategy of Deaths of Despair fails because it doesn’t consider other forms of social organization but, much worse, because it doesn’t ask how to know dignity.
But then, dignity is whatever you want it to be. Who’s to say?
Rhinoceritis and the Happiness Machine
We live in an “age of authenticity”.[14] What matters is happiness and choice. Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, says we don’t have to look far to see that the ultimate authority on human well-being is ourselves. Historians refer to “myths and fictions”, not truths. [15]
Indeed, the dominant philosophy is: “Follow your dreams”. And let’s be clear: You don’t follow dreams because they’re good. It is because they are yours.
Sen, for example, refers to “shared humanity” in his acclaimed study of global development.[16] Yet Sen never asks how to know it, or what it feels like to discover or express it. He treats “shared humanity” as if it is already known. He doesn’t ask how it is known and what it costs to know it.
There is a cost, as we’ll see below.
Popular cultural anthropologist, Wade Davis, [17] claims to study cultures to know what it means to be human. Yet Davis gives a platform to some cultures. He says the life of the Waorani of Ecuador should not be preserved but as regards the Penan of Borneo, sadly, a “unique vision of life” has been lost.
Only some cultures express our “better angels”. But Davis does not say how he decides which ones. Supposedly, he just knows. It’s typical. Humanness is whatever we want it to be.
The Buddha, in contrast, focused his entire work on the question of how to know essential humanness. It’s not easy. For the Buddha, and for anti-imperialist, Martí, it is the most difficult task we face.[18]
They weren’t alone. Simón Bolívar, admirer of Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, knew European philosophers were ignorant about the Empire’s dehumanization. They couldn’t imagine what it meant to be “even lower than servitude . . . lost, or worse, absent from the universe”.[19] Bolívar’s question wouldn’t occur to Europeans: If one is lost or absent from the universe, how is one known?
If one rules the world, one doesn’t ask how peoples are known, as people. One doesn’t need to know them, or care to.
For Martí, the question was goal of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Initiating war for the liberation of Latin America (1895), Martí wrote that the party’s goal was that Cubans know dignity and know that they know dignity. [20] Remarkably, Martí went to war for a fundamental philosophical question: how to know what it means to be human and how to know we know what it means to be human.
Eugène Ionesco cared about the question. His 1959 play, Rhinoceros, is about a small town in France where people turn into rhinoceroses. At first, everyone is horrified by the rhinoceroses but eventually is seduced. Even the town’s logician happily becomes a rhinoceros, wanting to “move with the times”.
Ionesco’s play is about totalitarianism, but not political. Reason is totalitarian when no questions are raised about names: “human”, for example. In the end, Berenger, the only human left, reminds himself that “[a] man’s not ugly to look at, not ugly at all!”. However, a few sentences later he says, “I should have gone with them while there was still time”.
Berenger is now a monster. To think of himself as human, he needs to resist a way of thinking, which is a way of life, the fabric of society. It means Berenger’s claim to humanness can be dismissed, rationally, just like you dismiss my arguments against gravity, rationally.
There’s a popular thought experiment. Students like it. Suppose you could enter a happiness machine that would make it appear that all your desires are satisfied. Once you enter the machine, you will not know it is a machine. You will have a happy, fulfilled life, within the machine.
Few choose to enter. However, they don’t know why: “I know something is wrong, but I am not sure what.” They want to earn their happiness. But the machine makes it seem they do so.
No one rejects the question itself: about happiness. But why should the meaningfulness of a life be about happiness: how I get what I want? The truth is that the more you pursue happiness for yourself, the less happy you are. It involves, again, a mistake about existence and how we discover new truths.
The more you pursue your “dreams” (because you have them), the more you build up ego, which is a fiction invented by you and presupposed in everything you observe and make important. It is the ultimate judgment of plausibility, determining what you know and experience. You believe only in yourself and you get alienation, along with delusion.
The problem with the happiness machine is not that desires are not really satisfied, and it is not that by entering the machine, you do not know your desires are not really satisfied. The more interesting problem is that pursuing your desires in fact or in fiction is itself a prison of delusion.
And it makes rhinoceritis unassailable.
Hugo didn’t buy it
The ancient Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tzu, said that when the shoe fits, you don’t feel it.[21] He meant that when you live well, realizing human potential, you don’t ask yourself whether you do. The question doesn’t arise. Victor Hugo wrote: “Thoughtful people rarely use the terms, the happy and the unhappy…. The true division of humanity is this. Those filled with light and those filled with darkness”.
He meant truth. Some don’t believe in it. And they don’t know they don’t believe in it.
Truth and happiness don’t always go together. There’s a simple reason. We are “happy” (in the sense offered by liberal ideology)[22] when expectations are realized, when we get what we want. But expectations come from society.[23] Truth, if we believed in it, removes their lustre.
One truth, for instance, is that a fraction of the world’s population “lives well”. Another is that those who “live well” do so because others don’t. We kill and rob to be “happy”. A further truth is that we think we live well precisely because we don’t think about the people we kill and rob. They don’t count but we don’t admit they don’t count. Finally, it happens to be true that we don’t live well.
We are increasingly depressed and anxious, as shown in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean would have liked to not see the truth.[24] However, for him, it was “better to suffer, to bleed, to tear your skin off with your nails … [than to] never look openly, to squint”. Valjean wrestled with that “implacable light [that] … dazzled him by force when all he wanted was to be blind (1132).”
Hugo’s “implacable light” stands over Valjean. This alone shows Hugo wasn’t liberal. The “inner voice” of liberalism [25] is not something I can be “appalled and dazzled” by. I create it. Che Guevara called it the “bourgeois myth of the self-made man”. Recently, US scientists with no interest in revolution have agreed with Guevara about the “myth of the self-made man”. [26] They admit it undermines science.
It undermines truth.
Inspector Javert is also committed to truth. He kills himself because Valjean’s action, experienced for what it is – kindness, miséricorde – contradicts what Javert stands for, and Javert knows it. It reveals to Javert, not just an “unknown morality” but how to know it. It is humbling, scary and inescapable.
It involves profound insecurity. Hugo writes that Javert understood how “authority could be unseated, that the rules could be brought up short by a deed,… that the unforeseen commanded obedience” (1082).
How does the “unforeseen” command obedience? That is, how does a vision – moral or human – become compelling?
How does an answer to rhinoceritis become worth sacrificing for?
It is when it is true, approximately. Javert chooses death because he recognizes that truth. And it created “an immense difficulty in being”. Javert is no longer certain. He is insecure. Indeed, a “whole order of unexpected acts surged up and subjugated him … He saw in the darkness the terrifying sun of an unknown morality dawning and he was appalled and dazzled by it” (1082).
He regrets that he did not insist Valjean kill him at the barricades when Javert was a prisoner. It is what every part of his being expected. And when, instead, Valjean set him free, Javert “felt emptied, useless, cut off from his past life, demoted, dissolved” (1084). Javert’s expectations – about himself, justice, morality – are broken, and in consequence he is broken.
Javert faces “a terrible situation. To be moved”. He is moved by what happens to him, which is an act of humanity by Valjean. Javert doesn’t accept the “diverting of a rectilinear conscience … mounted on the blind iron horse of the straight and narrow” (1084). He cannot accept two roads where there had only ever been one.
But he does see the two roads.
And he knows the importance of the second one. He feels compelled. Javert’s failure is not moral. It is existential. Valjean and Javert are similarly convinced of the existence of (human) truth and what it requires: renunciation. The difference is that Valjean is capable of insecurity. Javert is not.
This is the price of discovering humanness. You can’t discover humanness, when rhinoceritis is your identity, without cost: to yourself, your expectations.
Javert’s alternative would be to acknowledge a lie, as happens in Crime and Punishment. Standing over the river, Raskolnikov “submits”. Dostoevsky writes that “In torment … [Raskolnikov] may have sensed a profound lie in himself and … that this sense might herald a future break in his life, his future resurrection, his future new vision of life”.
Case and Seaton don’t consider this possibility: the lie embedded in liberal identity. It has been considered by independistas in the South. [27] Dostoevsky suggests, and Javert knew, that learning there are “two roads” involves insecurity.
Insecurity, though, is the nature of existence. We live with much less fear and anxiety when we know reality for what it is.
Conclusion
Philosophers of science use the term “radical contingency” to refer to the dialectical relationship between knowers and the world, and the intricate causal connection between mind and body. It means that at any one moment in time, in the process of discovery, a complex array of factors is involved. There is no formula for getting it right, which doesn’t mean we don’t get it right, sometimes.
Lenin, who articulated dialectical materialism, which is a causal view of how we know the world, recognizing that cause and effect applies also to thinking, described discovering the world as it is (not as we expect it to be) as a “passage through dark waters”.[28]
It involves giving up expectations: about yourself. Martí said “To think is to serve”.[29] Cuba has quietly challenged European ideas for 200 years, especially the cherished liberal idea that we live best when we live “from the inside”, satisfying desires.
If rhinoceritis looms, and it does, Martí’s “revolution in thinking” is worth considering.
The opening verses of the Dhammapada, an accessible poetic rendering of the Buddha’s philosophy, say that when you serve others, happiness follows you “like a shadow”. [30] It follows you. You don’t have to follow it. Serving others, being useful, happiness comes by itself.
It doesn’t require “positive thinking”, just awareness of cause and effect, the nature of existence. At the start of the twentieth century, Lenin was studying Hegel’s notes on science. [31] Stalin told him not to bother, that it was more important to unify the party. Lenin replied that by the end of the century, the nature of science would be the most urgent question: how to get truth?
It is not clear what he foresaw. Reading Deaths of Despair, it is clear why it matters.
- Stephen Parker, Bertoldt Brecht: A literary life (2014) epigraph ↑
- Carmen Suárez León, José Martí y Victor Hugo, en el fiel de las modernidades (Havana, 1996) ↑
- John Kirk, Jose Marti Mentor of the Cuban Nation (University of Florida Press, 1984) ↑
- See review: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/deaths-despair-and-future-capitalism ↑
- Karl Marx (Routledge, 2003) 266 ↑
- “The analytic and synthetic” in Mind, language and reality (Cambridge University press, 1975) ↑
- I’ve argued this, e.g., in Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014) ↑
- See e.g. R. N Boyd, “How to be a Moral Realist”, in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181 – 228; “Realism, Conventionality, and ‘Realism About’” in G. Boolos (ed.), Meaning and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 171 – 95. ↑
- Cozolino, L. The neuroscience of relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (Norton, 2006) 6; Mauss et al, 2001; Larson and Almeida, 1999; Hill et al 2010 all cited in Michal Barnea-Astrog, Carved by experience (UK: Karnac Books, 2017) ↑
- Jim Ottaviani, Stephen Hawking (First Second 2019) 91 ↑
- See e.g. “Science and religion” and “Religion and science” in Ideas and Opinions (Wings Books, 1954) ↑
- So argues Philip Kitcher, for one, in Abusing Science: A Case against Creationism (MIT Press, 1982) ch. 2 ↑
- See review here: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/lord-all-dead ↑
- Taylor, Charles A secular age (Harvard University Press, 2007) 470-9. ↑
- E.g. Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens (McClelland & Stewart 2016) ↑
- Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999) 283 ↑
- Light at the Edge of the World (British Columbia: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007); The Wayfinders (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009). ↑
- E.g. “Prologue to the poem of Niagara”, p. 49 in Selected works (tr. Esther Allen) ↑
- Bolívar, Simón. “The Jamaica letter”, in David Bushnell (Ed.), Simón Bolívar, el libertador. (Frederick H. Fornoff, Trans) (Oxford University Press, 2003 (Originally published 1815) 19– 20. ↑
- In “Montecristi Manifesto” ↑
- Cited in Merton, Thomas, “Introduction”, in The Way of Chuang Tzu (Boston, MA: Shambala Press, 1992) 1 – 28. ↑
- The Buddha, of course, emphasized happiness but in a different sense, explained further below. ↑
- E.g. Searle, John, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995) ↑
- Julie Rose (Tr) (NY: Modern Library, 2009) References in text are to this edition ↑
- See also Appiah, Anthony, The Ethics of identity (Cambridge: Princeton University Press, 2007) ↑
- Most recently, Kleinman, Arthur, The Soul of Care (Penguin Random House 2019). See review: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/soul-care-moral; ↑
- So I argued in José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics (Palgrave 2014) ↑
- “Conspectus of Hegel” in Stewart Smith (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 38. Clemens Dutt (Trs.) 85 – 126. ↑
- “Our America” ↑
- See verse 2 here: http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/scrndhamma.pdf ↑
- Lenin was writing Materialism and Empirio criticism (Volume 14, Collected Works) ↑
Thank you Susan for a very learned and philosophically enlightened criticism of the shallow and philosophically absurd arguments constantly articulated in favor of “bourgeois individualism.” I always read your work and prosper from it. Bourgeois individualism, as I understand it, argues from a place of mind alienated from the living body. But it is not the mind that really lives. It is the soul inside the body. When you boil it all down bourgeois individualism as a philosophy is a form of egoism attempting to impose its own illusions on reality.
I see it as a dictatorship of egoism. The supreme imperative of the West’s religion of capitalism. Pity the mind that must attempt to understand the world when it has been socially conditioned to cut itself off from the soul. This trait of being socially conditioned to sever the “rainbow bridge” that unites mind with soul is, in my experience, the single most destructive and tragic reality in USA. It results in an unconscious dictatorship of fear.
Great article and a lovely condensed piece of wisdom in response.
”The beast should be tamed not slain. In nineteenth century UK, at the beginning of the century, capitalism failed many. By the end, without war or pandemic, it had changed. The example justifies ’limited optimism’. Capitalism can be ’better monitored and regulated, not to be replaced by some fantastical socialist utopia in which the state takes over industry. Democracy can rise to the challenge.’ ”
Susan Babbitt’s above conclusion is incorrect. The beast should indeed have been slain. What happened in the course of the 19th century was that the British ruling cllass bought the consent of the majority population with massive imperialist loot from overseas, most notably Africa and India. It’s easy to be generous with other peoples’ lands, natural resources, and labour output. Cecil Rhodes had a very firm understanding of imperialism abroad as a guarantor of social peace at home.
Greetings Nussiminen; That wasn’t Susan’s viewpoint. Notice the quotation marks. She was quoting the authors of a book which she clearly saw as deserving criticism. I agree with your point in general, but would add that Susan is too familiar with the integrity of socialism to be expected to either dismiss it or make cheap arguments in favor of capitalism.
Greetings, Snow Leopard
Yes, re-reading Susan’s blog post, I see now that the contents in my snippet above are mostly her indirect quotation of Case’s and Deaton’s book. Still, she omits to make the point that the improved living standards in 19th century Britain were based upon genocide, enslavement, and lawlessness overseas (including Ireland).
Nussi, I am not trying to argue your point, which which I sort of agree. History shows that Democracy is a useless system (Athens could never decide on anything due to constant disagreements, even though they used their secret voting system using pebbles) just like the total Socialism (which uses one party system with dictatorial powers). In the end they (sytems) always ended up with some form of “dictatorship” turning into some form of military rule or “Elected Emperor/King”. Rome, Sparta or Macedonia being excellent examples. Unfortunately there was always the “elite” to contend with, which usurped the right to be “The Puppet Masters”. There is no place for hereditary Kings, because most of the time kingdoms ended up with useless tools. Oh yes do not argue about Macedonia, because the king had to be approved by the “100 houses”, even though their kings did belong to one family (Argeades? because the dynasty founder Perdikas came from Argos in the south) which ruled for more than 450 years. Officially, as I said above they were sort of “elected or approved if you like”. In the end they (the kings, etc” got “disposed of” (Alexander the Great was poisoned while still in the East, so was his mother (who did not manage to warn him in time), as well as his “idiot brother” and the dynasty died with his young son).
Today we do not kill the kings but divide the countries.
Nussiminen,
I agree with you. To ‘slain the beast’ is a necessary violence, needed to avoid endless violence. You have explained very well why. I have no problems with this idea.
Thank you Susan,
I want to make a compliment in odd way. I don’t like this form of philosophizing, I would generally avoid it at all costs as a literary device inherently deceptive. In your hands, I am won over.
It is literary in the best sense, concepts are introduced and the reader must make their own, work their minds to take in, the broad scope is there of a world view shared by many and over time, different in every case and identical in essence.
Keep writing and Saker, keep publishing her work, I don’t care where it goes or how it goes, a superior mind is at work here and I would Like to see more of it.
When I was allowed to teach in my country, Australia, before the great stupidity embraced our education system and expelled people like me; I taught literature at high school. That is quality literature taught conceptually, the effect on students was a transformation, teaching was not a chore, but a delight; it was not work but pleasure.
Thank you for giving me a reminder of what I loved, and allowing me to become student myself again.
to pretend meaningless is conquered by servitude to others is like edgar allan poe’s the masque of the red death….mesmerizing when you’re young and full of beans….grab despair by the short-hairs and let it sleep at the foot of the bed….and take it out to pee in the morning….death old age and sickness “said the buddha” and suffering too….the buddha is a marxist?
Off topic first sentence removed … mod
I offer my perspective from the summit of lived experience.
“There’s a popular thought experiment. Students like it. Suppose you could enter a happiness machine that would make it appear that all your desires are satisfied. Once you enter the machine, you will not know it is a machine. You will have a happy, fulfilled life, within the machine.”
The conundrum here, is that the satisfaction of desire is the fulfillment of satisfaction, which is not happiness.
Happiness is the allowance of our humanity to occur without desire; for happiness: IS : where and when, desire is not. Desire is lack of fulfillment.
As you write in conclusion: “Serving others, being useful, happiness comes by itself.” And further, I so agree, “The more interesting problem is that pursuing your desires in fact or in fiction is itself a prison of delusion (a priori, a lack of fulfillment).”
Next, Susan writes, “the intricate causal connection between mind and body.”
My experience is that the body responds to the mind. Co-response between mind and body and not connection between mind and body has been my experience.
Happiness, is similar and dissimilar to the mind.
Happiness is not within the body, nor does happiness serve the body, but rather, happiness comes from what time offers, when it is understood that time is purposeful matter in motion (id est, light). Known as holiness: purposeful matter in motion.
Let us presuppose two universes. One bounded; the other unbounded. To move in a universe unbounded; remove distance and time. A boundless universe permits movement without time or distance. The mind is boundless, it exists beyond time and distance. This is what makes Mind : Pure.
Eternal mindful truth rests serene in a boundless universe beyond the body of boundedness. The mind does not move; and so in ultimate terms, the mind never wanders, it is always pure. Mind can be anywhere and is everywhere, but it is not connected to the body, for the body is an illusion, and the mind cannot be where nowhere is a constant state.
Other coherences: though unrelated are to help with my explanation:
The body is bounded and not pure; whereas the mind is always pure and unbounded.
Time is distance moving. The body is time in motion. The body is lifelessness in motion without the energy of significance, or emotion. Ergo, without external energy, Chi or Qi, there is no motion, nobody home. The body is lifelessness eternal.
The mind is also not bounded, and by truths extension, not within the body.
The body co-responds to the demands or wishes of the body. But wishes are not truth, whereas demands are noble, and thus eternally true, when your demands are whole or holy with providence. The key is alignment. What are you in alignment with? The eternal unbounded truth or the lies of boundedness.
My apologizes to brilliance, the sun is simply shining to bright.
To my God Manu, my Hand – The Holy Ghost
providence noun
prov·i·dence | \ ˈprä-və-dən(t)s , -ˌden(t)s \
Definition of providence (Entry 1 of 2)
1a.often capitalized : divine guidance or care
b. capitalized : God conceived as the power sustaining and guiding human destiny
2: the quality or state of being provident
(Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/providence)
History and Etymology for demand
Noun
Middle English demaunde, demande “question, request, claim,” borrowed from Anglo-French, noun derivative of demander, demaunder “to ask a question, claim as due” — more at DEMAND entry 2
Verb
Middle English demaunden, demanden “to ask a question, ask, claim as due,” borrowed from Anglo-French demander, demaunder, borrowed from Medieval Latin dēmandāre “to entrust, send, send word of, send instructions (to), make a claim on,” going back to Latin, “to entrust, hand over (to), lay a duty on,” from de- DE- + mandāre “to hand over, deliver, order” — more at MANDATE entry 1
(Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demand#etymology)
History and Etymology for mandate
Noun and Verb
Middle French & Latin; Middle French mandat, from Latin mandatum, from neuter of mandatus, past participle of mandare to entrust, enjoin, probably irregular from manus hand + -dere to put — more at MANUAL, DO
(Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mandate#etymology)
History and Etymology for manual
Adjective and Noun
Middle English manuel, from Anglo-French, from Latin manualis, from manus hand; akin to Old English mund hand and perhaps to Greek marē hand
(Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manual#etymology)
History and Etymology for do
Verb and Noun (1)
Middle English don, from Old English dōn; akin to Old High German tuon to do, Latin -dere to put, facere to make, do, Greek tithenai to place, set
Noun (2)
Italian
(Link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/do#etymology)
to Stuart Doblin:
Time and space are intertwined – i.e. one cannot exist without the other.
A universe without time and space would be that everything would be static. Something like a point without space at all.
Therefore, if it would happen – if at all possible – one particle is not in the same place at the other (which contradicts already such an universe) both would feel the same at the same time, i.e. no time and space in between.
Our body cannot exist without external feeding. There would be no move, nothing at all. Simply it would not exist. Therefore, the innate life forming power of each cell couldn’t be able to do anything. Therefore, no existence at all.
Moreover, happiness is connected with the body. You forgot the innate chemical and physical process of the cells. If you feed your body with good thoughts you could – sometimes but not always – achieve a good result within the chemical/physical process in your cells. This goes along with the food you are taking.
So it is intertwined if we like it or not. However, it is in our hands to feed our body with good thoughts and with good food. Chemistry and physics are still prevalent but with thoughts and behavior you can – up to a certain point – manage it.
Monnalisa, good day.
Happily we agree on the qualities of a bounded universe, “it is intertwined if we like it or not.” but what of the existence of what is Eternal and never changing, The Truth with a capital ‘T’. The eternal truths are always true and exist in an unbounded state which provides that they remain always pure.
If as you write, “happiness is connected with the body”, then war could not exist, for all, would be always connected to happiness, which is clearly not the case in our world.
This unbounded world that emerges is a place of pure separation, or holiness, or unboundedness from our world of, “Chemistry and physics”.
I wrote and quote: “Let us presuppose two universes. One bounded; the other unbounded.”
Have you ever visited an unbounded universe? Where light (or holiness) is everywhere and anywhere and time has no existence and matter is not present but your shard of consciousness, still is? Have you?
You write of such an unbounded universe as, “A universe without time and space would be that everything would be static. Something like a point without space at all.”
Rather, an unbounded universe is whole and moves as one, omnipresence, where all points are alive and the same, and time is timelessness, or eternity, for all is pure or the same wherever you go; yet always alive with possibilities that are not discussed but all are aware of. This is the silence of “Qigong” “‘life-energy cultivation” (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qigong)
The door to the unbounded universe is protected by doubt, guilt, and shame: The Swords of Damocles if you will. You can not speak of the unbounded eternal truth that rests beyond corruption unless you are free of guilt and shame and doubt. For it is guilt and shame and doubt that keep us bounded to this world of form and corruption or transformation.
If you believe the word, “eternal” to also mean “static”, then life does not exist either. For the law of the eternal is that it is ever constantly aware, but only in the moment of the now. The unbounded universe is here and only now; for only eternity could be ever-present, and yet also not static but alive with providence.
Monnalisa, you wrote and I quote, “Time and space are intertwined – i.e. one cannot exist without the other.”, in a bounded universe yes you are correct, but what of another world, that has no bounds, that has no space, that has no time, that is eternal, and also endless. And it is from endlessness that you will find peace, joy, and yes, the source of happiness, the Will of Life.
For yes, happiness does exist in our world, but only as a glimmer of real contentment, inner peace; yet “Chemistry and physics” do not apply in an unbounded world, so science is separated from holiness.
Further you write,”So it is intertwined if we like it or not”, but not in an unbounded universe where nothing exists except that that will never change, yet is also constantly renewed, yet only in the now and no where else.
The unbounded universe of which I speak is where creation began, and remains. Our bounded universe is an illusion, it is maya…”a creatrix, her magic (my choice would be, “intention”) is the activity in the Will-spirit.[21]”.
What is difficult, is to live without guilt, shame, and doubt, the three cords of division that we are to unwind in the bounded world. This is known as the three strings of tantra. The lyre of Solomon. The three circles of grace. The triune of Creator/Creatrix, the shadow of Creator/Creatrix, and the sum of all Life, The Christos or The Silence of The Word. All one, all eternal and unbounded. Each not subject to time or distance or space.
Monnalisa, have a (Godly) good day.
Referenes:
21 Heinrich Robert Zimmer (2015). Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton University Press. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-1-4008-6684-7. Quote: Māyā is precisely the maker’s power or art, “Magic” in Jacob Boehme’s sense: “It is a mother in all three worlds, and makes each thing after the model of that thing’s will, it is not the understanding, but it is a creatrix according to the understanding, and lends itself to good or to evil (…) In sum: Magic is the activity in the Will-spirit.
It was a real pleasure to see and read this article on the Saker Blog. In order to correctly comment it, I should have read (parts of) the book criticized in the article as well as some other texts written by Susan Babbitt. I did not. Nevertheless, I like to share some of the ideas which emerged during the reading.
The article speaks of a recently published book, written by two professors of the university of Princeton (USA) which, apparently, are „well known“ in the Western university world; one of the two has obtained a Nobel Prize. So, one may suppose that the book has some weight and that this is the reason why Babbitt has written a comment.
Babbitt writes that the book is shallow, philosophically speaking, and that it is not really looking for the truth. This is of course no surprise, in particular not in economics. By the way, I really doubt that economics in Western universities can be classified as science; they are not even capable of attributing a correct place to Marx.
Babbitt does not speak very much about the content of the book. It seems to me that the book fits well in the following description which can be found in the „Manifesto of the Communist Party“ (1848):
„A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers (sic) of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformes of every imaginable kind.“
Each class has its own intellectuals. According to my memory, this is from Lenin, but apparently, Gramsci said the same. It is clear that the authors (Anne Case and August Deaton) of this book belong to the US-bourgeoisie. But what about Susan Babbitt? In her article, she speaks of José Marti and of Bolivar. In some sense, she „belongs“ to the „class“ of Latin-American revolutionaries. But I doubt that this is a correct „classification“. Nevertheless, the question remains. One may also consider that she has written an article for The Saker Blog which also means „Stop the Empire’s war on Russia“. What does this mean? As Babbitt underlines, such questions need objective, not individual answers. For everybody with some respected professional position inside the Western empire – such as Babbitt as professor of a Canadian university – these questions are important and the answers have yet to be found.
After reading the examples given by the author, some important conclusions can be drawn : 1) there is a reality of natural laws
2) there is a reality of human beings
1) The realities of natural laws are clear and indisputable, being part of a much larger law, that of the Universe. Here must be added that the seen and unseen Universe
is ruled by intelligence or what we can call Higher Spirituality.
2) The realities of human beings is different, although the human body itself is bent to the same laws of nature and Universe, they are also part or “shareholders” of a certain level of intelligence and spirituality, fragmented in each person according to their spiritual degree. In this sense, we humans, are not equal, each of us is an independent entity struggling to find its way towards “liberation” – which means an evolution in our intelligence and spiritual level up to a degree of universal harmony and peace.
The road to achieve that has been and it is very hard if we take in consideration the inequalities among us as individuals, as nations, as races. This has led and is leading to conflicts in the family, in the nation, among countries. This has also led to certain necessities such as centralized power for each country, the rule of human laws was born. As the global population has become fragmented, the survival instinct has become radicalized and weaponized, the powerful took over the weakest leaving behind sufferings and havoc for the beaten one and better life for the victorious one. The spiritual inequalities have been transformed in material inequalities, opening the gates for the appointment of matter as the most essential value in life, thus marginalizing the spiritual values.
Under such circumstances, the humanity ventured itself on the road of material evolution, cultivating the spirit of materialism, consuming everything which the nature can offer, not having the slightest mercy in its madness, forgetting even its own future. And all these thanks to a handful of people who believe they have the right to accomplish the fate of others. The tragedy of “others” is that they have elected those leaders in accordance with the rules of “democracy” approved by themselves, being accomplices to the state of reality they are facing now.
In conclusion, yes, there is a difference between one man and the other, like there is a difference between the Pope and Jesus Christ. Can we be optimists that the Pope will be like Jesus Christ ?
Thank you for the article.
I think this article misses the point about ‘dreams’.
There is a combination of factors required for ‘dreams’ to come true.
First is the commitment to the dream. That does require it to be yours, quite frankly. It is you making a deep, personal commitment to achieve what you set out to do.
The second is having chosen a suitable dream for you. Most of us cannot be professional golfers, professional pianists or atomic scientists. That does not make such goals bad per se, it merely makes them inappropriate for us.
The third factor required is finding the right environment, the right mentors, the right team, maybe even the right country. Talent can be rejected in one country but embraced in another. I know that from my own life. A particular mentor may tap into your current emotional framework and enhance it rather than crush it. True confidence comes from facing realistic challenges and rising to them. Great mentors are talented at selecting the initial challenges before letting you start framing them yourself. An apprentice evolving into a young independent professional. It does not mean you abandon your mentor, it just means that the relationship evolves healthily, just as a healthy parent-child relationship evolves as the child grows.
The fourth factor is timing. One of the worst things any parent can do is project onto children dreams that were appropriate in their own generation but are now no longer suitable. In my generation, biologists were artisans. Twenty years later with automation appearing, they became thinkers using automated technology to answer questions. The skills needed were totally different. I would have been a top scientist born in 1980, being born in 1964 I was a disaster.
There are certain folks who think ‘older folks know best’. Quite frankly they know best what worked in their generation. There is no a priori reason why they would ever know what would work best in the next generation. They are not living in it, after all. Yes, advice can be sought, but no, it should not be taken uncritically. The best skills of the older generation are in mentoring, supporting and financing. It is not necessarily in selecting.
I have spent much of my life trying to force myself to embrace the visions of others: it simply did not work. I did not have a deep personal commitment to the dreams of others and when the crunches came, that was obvious. Doing what someone else tells you to do is fine in worthy, middle class, safe occupations. Risks are low, you are not putting your entire soul on the line. You can satisfice and provide for a family. It works for many, but not for all.
If you want a life where getting up every day is a joy, you have to be committed at a deep level to the things you are going to be doing. That can include parenting, it can include studying, it can include being an apprentice, it can involve all kinds of things.
But you will not be the best at anything sacrificing yourself for someone else.
The folks you should be sacrificing for are your family, your kids. From 18-30 you should be maturing as an adult, which does not mean following your parents dreams, nor does it mean being unrealistic about your own ideas.
Doing what you are told makes you good for only one thing: doing what you are told.
Harsh, but reality.
Susan Babbitt’s essay raises and re-raises some excellent points. But to challenge one of them, I’d call attention to the paradigm shift that’s being spearheaded by the Electric Universe theorists, but which I believe doesn’t challenge what she’s trying to get across to us. Just a minor point: Einstein was wrong. Here’s a lecture by astrophysicist Wallace Thornhill in support of that claim: The Electric Universe Paradigm Shift.
Socialism fails because the people running it are flawed and pick and choose who helps run the programme, everybody else suffers. It also fails because entrepreneurship and creativity are held back.
Capitalism I would propose as two paths…. A businessman bringing value to a customer or consumer will succeed. And a large multinational corporation that brings value to itself and to its shareholders at the expense of society, and ecology, and fairness.
Gramsci was correct in his musings about Socialism that if they the socialists take over the education system, the entertainment system, the financial system, and the health and political system then everyone will eventually become a socialist by indoctrination. This was in contrast to that animal Lenin who made people sociaist with a club and a gun.
Individual socialism can be achieved best on an individual basis with ones surplus. Today more than ever we are confronted with a government shutdown that will see many struggling for basic needs. Can we as individuals rise to fill a void in a friend or a neighbor. I would hope so.
As for Lenin and Marx, everything I have studied point to the fact that these are Luciferians of the first order. They can wax eloquently about different topics but at the end of the day their actions define them.
This article brings much contemplation and reminds me of the Book of Ecclesiastes that talks about the vanity of man and how at the end of the day we are to fear God and keep his commandments for this is the duty of man.
What is needed are different drivers for multinationals.
IN microeconomics, the profit motive is essential for SMEs to survive, let alone grow. The profits of any small SME can never distort markets, so perfect capitalism can pertain for the SME sector.
Once you get market maturity and cartels of TNCs, the profit motive is entirely ugly. It distorts societies, pits one group against another and demeans workers at the expense of rentiers.
What is needed is a change to a value system where the TNC is driven by serving society as a whole, not a bunch of shareholders.
What that says is that when industries reach a certain size or provide services where not participating in the market is impossible (you cannot do without food and water for example), they need common ownership. Not necessarily state ownership, but common ownership.
How you manage a transition like that is going to be imperfect and lines will inevitably be fuzzy.
But that is the only way to retain capitalism on a micro-level without the whole of society descending into fascism.
We love to point out here that the Dem&rePug are both the same, the difference are non-existent. Those that push the left&right talking-points are boring. Bingo for the socialism vs capitalism narrative.
Same-Same with the -Ism’s, Queen Hillary Clinton is was a ‘socialist’ in talk, “It takes a village to raise a child, is an old commie slogan’
Just that Hillary, like Trump, like Bush represent “National Socialism”, aka Nazism, what we here call Anglo-Asian-Nazism-Zionism ( the only flavor available if you want to hold office in the west ).
When you get to the top, whether it be commie, socialist, or capitalist pig, what difference does it make?
I remember when China first opened, I went to Beijing, went to an event at the Peoples-Hall, it was a CCP event; Some of the most incredible food and layout I had ever seen in my life, that was early 1980’s, back then you still couldn’t buy any decent food in China for local money, and tourists couldn’t even use local money, had to use a different money and go to different shops. Outside of the “Great Hall” the only food I saw was Gruel&Rice.
The point is that all -Ism’s are just a cover, that in all the country’s the elite party together, eat together, and fornicate together ( andy-warhol said this not me )
In the last few months not a day went by on Saker and people said “The Hegemon is Dead”, now its “Capitalism is Dead”, … Capitalism is just fine, all & every will get bailed out to infinite.
Perhaps 1/2 of the minions in USA die, but this has been a plan since the 1950’s, often posted on this site, and most often deleted or ignored.
There are just a few people pulling the strings, and most of them are never seen, but they pay 10’s of 1,000’s to generate content for the show. So much turn-over that Hasbara has to constantly advertise for new content generators in Israel.
Carlin said it best “Its a club, and you aint’ invited”
…
Time and space are intertwined – i.e. one cannot exist without the other. – ABOVE
C = X/T ; Speed = Space/Time
C = 1/T; Speed of light is a constant; All space is unity, because of the referenced to standard of measurement. Everything us humans do during our short ‘time’ here is electromagnetic. The clock runs at this speed. We all get our predetermined heart beats, and electron orbitals in the hydrogen atom.
Time=1/C
Lastly, scientists physics people will tell you that there is no space-time, that their is just TIME,
Time is what it is, all notions of space are man-made measurement from his own mind. All length ( space ) is referenced by man, measured by man, and defined by man.
Our notions of Space, are dependent upon Electromagnetic & Gravitational flux
Space is measured in ‘meters’ but where does it come from? Some man said a meter is 1 10,000,000th of the distance from the north pole to the equator.
Space is a figment of man’s imagination, only time is real.
Only humans, have to be somewhere, ‘on time,’ which requires, imagination, in a world of figments.
“If you didn’t imagine a just world, even without evidence, and even if it’s impossible, you won’t ask how to get there or why we’re not there yet. It doesn’t make sense: If you think injustice is all there is, there is no sense to asking how to eliminate it.”
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
That’s what made a lot of us come to this blog in the first place: trying to figure out how to imagine a just world.
You’ll notice in the comments that you’ve got people pissed-off and thinking, which is what any good essay should do, which is to say, you’ve succeeded in your attempt.
Bravo Susan, bravo Saker, bravo blogmeister, superb therapeutic medicine for depressingly dismal days.