Money and Loneliness

I make a decent salary, but I am about to complain about money troubles. I figure that I should say that up front so that you will waste as little time as possible reading something that annoys you. You see, my whole problem is that I seem to annoy people more than if I was making two dollars a day. I'd rather not add to that count if I can possibly avoid it. Let's review.

I am divorced and my child lives with me because her mother is or at least was dangerous. As you might expect, the divorce was nasty and expensive. It's over now, but it's not really over. When you have a child with someone, it's never really over until that child is no long a minor. That's true even in normal divorces, if I can say there's such a thing. Now imagine carrying on the same business with someone who literally wanted to kill you at some point in time. I've got the divorce papers and I've since remarried, but you can never walk away from the other parent unless they walk away from you. In my case that isn't going to happen. This leaves me engaged in a protracted legal battle with a mentally ill individual. See you in ten years.

As my mom used to say, them's the brakes. That's not what this blog post is really about, though. All of that is just back story. My problem today is that no one believes the amount of financial strain this places on me. I don't want any money from anyone. I don't even want someone to complain to and I certainly don't want pity. I'll have to solve my own problems, since I'm the only one in a position to do that job. All I really want from other people is to stop expecting more of me than I am able to give.

I never thought I'd be in this position. People knew that I had some means at one point. I owned a house and had cash to spare. I gave people money when they needed money, sometimes large-ish sums. That's all different now. I sold the house at a loss. I rent a smaller place for much more than I was paying in mortgage. I lost all the deductions one gets from being married and owning a house and my tax status changed. I took out loans to pay legal bills and the interest rates on these wasn't all that good. Then there's the matter of my child being hospitalized and developing two chronic diseases. I worked part time for awhile, though now I am back to mostly full time work.

Everyone knows this. The problem is that all anyone can see is: job. I have a job. I have the same job I had before I was divorced. It pays well.  Forget about the fact that my expenses have tripled or more. No one looks at expenses. Everyone looks at income. So what? It wouldn't matter to me except for what it seems to have done to my reputation. I don't want money if I don't need it live. I seriously don't. This is not a virtue, but just the happenstance of how my personality seems to have developed. I think I was less stressed when I was in college, sharing 100 square feet with someone else and walking everywhere. Give me that life any day. It just so happens that I am very good at computer stuff and they pay well for that.

What I cannot seem to describe to anyone anywhere with sufficient credibility is the significant stress induced by the difference between what I am supposed to be and what I am. Just imagine that everyone believes you have some sort of magic ring, but you don't. People are after you to get the ring you don't have. Someone tortures you to get and what believe that it is not yours. You'd gladly give it,,, but it doesn't fucking exist and no one believes that. This is not a difference of personality. This is not a situation where you can put a rest to something by giving in and compromising. Instead, you must live every day of your life under the pressure of people who think you must have something you don't. The only reason there is no evidence of this is because you are cheap bastard.

The strange thing is that I can prove my situation. This isn't a matter of faith. Just to make it stop, I'd show people my bills. I'd show them my bank account. Just stop. I've actually said this,  which sounds crazy, but that's how much stress I've felt under. Of course they refuse because seriously when someone says that you do want to back away slowly. Yet, they go on having issues with me. Just stop. I don't have your ring. Maybe I should quit my job and get a lower paying one. Of course, then I wouldn't be able to pay the money I already owe. But at least it would lower people's expectations of me.

Ultimately, the biggest mental impact of this situation is the immense feeling of isolation I endure because of it. The loss of usable income is the first step. As I said, I can manage. Dealing with people who cling to the image of me as someone with any means is the second. Perhaps I should just not care what they think? But the third and final step is separation from people I care about and the absence of an audience that will take me seriously. When everyone thinks you're either crazy or a big fat dirt liar, who do you go to? Loneliness and isolation are the result, a result I never would've considered before all of this happened.

I'm saying I'm complaining. I'm just saying that this time I can't quite figure a way out of that particular bind. I can't change people's minds. What I can do, however, is write a blog post about it. At the very least, it will allow me to trick myself into thinking that someone is listening and, more importantly, believes me.

The importance of accepting the role of both chance and cause/effect

This is a second post in a series about the concept of free will. The first part is here. In that part we assumed the existence of a machine, known as the Sorter, which as the ability to perfectly predict human behavior. Let's further assume that this machine has some sort of plan to use its knowledge to further human social harmony.

Ultimately, we this series is about accepting that both chance and cause/effect govern our lives.  I suppose this assumes that chance is not just the result of deterministic forces we don’t yet understand.  However, in practical terms there are things that happen for a reason and things that just happen.  As long as the Sorter is the only thing that embraces this reality, then it remains in control.  That is, the Sorter has a plan, but it knows that chance events may disrupt that plan.  Jason was not supposed to be there, but the Sorter improvises.  This could confused some people, because the Sorter behaves as though it did plan certain things.  Sometimes, the ability to take advantage of chance events makes us believe in one of two fallacious ideas.

The first is fate.  We may convince ourselves that we are destined for greatness or despair due to forces beyond our control.  Though they do not express this explicitly, some are subject to this belief and is prone to self sacrifice and refusal to take action. Others might also struggle with the Sorter’s ability, but in their case it manifests as a confusion between the Sorter predicting outcomes and the Sorter causing outcomes.

The second is complete self reliance.  We may convince ourselves that we have determined our own outcome.  Rosalind and Marianne embrace this idea initially.  While some attempt to achieve self reliance through force of will, others attempt to achieve it through knowledge.  Yet another kind of person is a bit of a mix of both belief in external and internal control.  He operates under the fear that his life may be utterly outside his control, but still resists that control in a way that the person prone to self sacrifice does not.  Thus he behaves in ways more erratic and irrational than anyone else.  This makes him an ideal candidate for the lynch pin of the Sorters plan, because he is the easiest to manipulate.

Absolute faith in either fate or self reliance is an attempt to convert chance into choice and deny its existence.  The Sorter, possessing no psychological need to deny chance, thus appears to be in control because it can adapt.  Once some people begin to take advantage of chance events, they begin to turn the tide.  They may not be successful at first, but eventually they might manage to outsmart the Sorter.

However, acknowledging the role of chance in our lives involves more than adapting to it.  Ultimately, chance is essential to progress. No one would know this more than the one who creates the machine to begin with.  His work on the Sorter forces him to come face to face with the predictability of human behavior.  He counteracts this by injecting chance into his life on purpose.  He uses the roulette device to guide his work and ultimately makes the Sorter self-aware.  This is mirrors the emergence of human intelligence from evolutionary processes.  Natural selection filters random mutations according to their suitability for survivability in a particular environment. The difference is that natural selection blind and driven by survival, whereas the Sorter's creator has a specific goal.  He knows he cannot achieve this goal by “solving for x”.  There is no way for him to get outside himself and look at a problem in a different way without inducing a mental quantum leap.  

There is no way to guarantee that events will not ultimately overcome us.  That is the case no matter what, whether we embrace chance,  attempt to remove chance from our lives, or resign ourselves to inaction or insanity.

The Incoherence Of The Free Will Hypothesis

Before we can ask ourselves whether we possess a free will, we have to ask ourselves what free will is and what criteria we might accept as proof of its existence.  If we pose the hypothesis that free will exists, then that hypothesis must be testable, which is to say falsifiable.  What experiment would you use to prove that free will exists or does not?  

At first it seems easy to construct such an experiment.  Suppose that we developed a machine that could perfectly predict human behavior via a sophisticated mathematical model of psychology. We'll call this machine the Sorter. The makers of this machine suppose that if the Sorter succeeds in predicting the behavior of its subjects, then free will does not exist. However, the converse doesn't obtain. The failure of the Sorter to predict human behavior does not mean that free will doesn't exist. The hypothesis may live another day, but one could always argue that a better Sorter might still prove it false. With this line of reasoning we would have to conclude that we can never know if one possesses free will because a better, more accurate model of human behavior might always be possible.

Having stated that, we must step back and ask the question again: what is free will?  What have we proven false if the Sorter succeeds?  The nature of the experiment implies that free will is the ability to act in a way that cannot be predicted by any model, no matter how sophisticated.  This is tantamount to stating that what governs human behavior is either pure chance or some principle outside the descriptive powers of science.  

Neither of these thoughts is very satisfying.  If pure chance governs our behavior, then there is nothing we can do to change the outcome of our lives.  More significantly, if society is the aggregation of human behavior, then it cannot achieve momentum toward a common goal.  Over small intervals this may appear to be the case, but even a coin toss can come up heads ten times in a row.  Over large sample sizes regression to the mean is inevitable.  

The other option is that human behavior is essentially miraculous.  What we are saying is that science cannot predict it, nor can it ever predict it.  Thus, it must exist outside of logic, cause and effect, or any principles for decoding the universe that the human mind could ever conjure.  In this case the concept is incoherent by definition.  That is, we are defining free will as something the human mind can never understand.  The first question I might ask is how this is distinguishable from pure chance.  While we can suppose the existence of this super-natural principle that we cannot even describe, we have to live with the knowledge that we cannot control it to achieve our goals and that we cannot ever know if it exists or if our lives are really are victims of probability.  Either way, it is not related to human consciousness or subject to human desire.  

Your Flash Fiction Minute: Addict

The cop stole a glance at her, where she lay on the pavement, and wandered back to the crowd.  His eyes had peered from the shade beneath his cap (god, the glare from the television cameras was unbearable), and his mouth curled on one side for an instant before straightening again.  Mindy knew that look meant, “I know who you are.  You’re the Glam Lady.”  It filled her with terror, and shame.

Some folks say their memories are like fragmented video clips, sometimes shuffled out of order.  It wasn’t like that for Mindy.  She had one long, smooth spool of film.  She wound it backward, to the time she’d been a lady with a mop on television, and her husband couldn’t stop her from cleaning.  She polished the whole house, and then invited the kids to run through it with their shoes on.  Then she began again.  She loved her cleaner,  Floor Glam.  It had been an obtuse little advertisement that played during shitty little daytime soaps.  But then teenagers gave it life by posting her half-senseless character on the Internet.  The Glam Lady was born.  Getting into the groove, Mindy filmed new adds for fake products. Dale Cassidy of Peak Exploding Oven Cleaner.  Homeless Sam of Tourist Killer Roach Spray.  Men, boys, old women and animals.  No one knew they were all Mindy. 

She asked herself; why had she been on her way to a talk show?

She rolled the film back to its ragged end, the present.  She examined her prostrate body; she was dressed in spiky shoes and a low dress.  White lines cross the pavement beneath her.  She’d fallen in a crosswalk, wrapped in her best party gear, surrounded by cops, news hawks and spectators.  A car and its broken headlight idled ten feet from her.  Strands of her dark hair coiled around the glass shards.  Medics were coming with the gurney now.

Mindy spun the reel backward again, stopping it with an imaginary finger.  She’d been watching her date focus on his plate.  His taste in restaurants was unmatched.  But when he picked up the fork, it was just him and the food.  Mindy could understand why he had trouble securing second dates, but she loved his company.  He was a new character to figure out.  He’d put his fork down and caressed her hair, which she’d cut to disguise her youth.  He’d been around fifty, and good looking – but not so much that he wouldn’t look sideways at a spring chicken taking an interest in him.  He was fun, until Mindy was ready to move on.  There was always a new identity around the corner.

He did this to her.  Her memory zipped to when she’d stepped from the cab, onto the crosswalk’s edge.  He’d come around the corner, not looking so refined.  He came at her with – god, who knows - it looked heavy.  Shit, Mindy thought, he lives just upstairs – and she dashed into the street.

                The medics strapped her in and they noticed her shaking hands.  One medic said they’d better check for narcotics.  That was useless.  Mindy knew why her hands were shaking.  She’d gotten greedy.  She’d known she had talent.  She’d pushed and pushed it, even while her mind was telling her to stop, and she’d landed a job on a television sit com.  Everyone knew who Mindy was now, and they’d know about her addiction before long.

                As they rolled her into the ambulance, a giant monitor above the square snapped from a cola add to a live feed from the television studio.  International stock quotes scrolled beneath it.  The host was talking about her.  No one had told the studio about her accident.  Right now, an army of interns was running around the back halls and phoning her agent.  But the show went on, in the hope that she would arrive.  Her hands trembled as the host was saying,

                “And tonight, in her first ever television interview, we’ll get to know a little bit of the real Mindy Posey.”

We Tried Meritocracy. It Was Called Communism

"Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."

-Walt Whitman

People of the developed world, we don't live in a meritocracy.  I know you're all looking over your left shoulder at that Swede and thinking I am only addressing him, but I assure you that I am talking to the Americans gathered here as well.  In fact, I'm looking right at you and if the Swede hears me it's because he happens to be within ear shot.  Capitalist societies don't produce meritocracies.  The ideas are contradictory.  If you like capitalism that is fine, but don't walk around announcing that blue and red are the same color.  People might start thinking you're some kind of genius, and we wouldn't want that would we?  The moment the rest of the world starts calling you a genius, you've lost all credibility.

I would define a "meritocracy" as a society where the people at the top are there because of the innate value of their abilities.  This is a bit of a vague definition, and in some very broad sense meritocracy is synonymous with civilization.  There is anarchy, which by definition cannot exist (ref. William Golding), and meritocracy, which is everything else and thus all there is.  What I mean is that life, whether lived in the trees or in Manhattan, is nasty, brutal and short.  Our fortunes are governed by some form of selection, natural or otherwise.  If one defines "ability" as aptitude for whatever skill spells survival in the current death match, then of course the people at the top are those most well endowed with this skill.

One may scoff and ask whether being born to the right family counts as aptitude. In small doses it is true that many past and present societies have structures allowing some of their most unwitting citizens to assume fame, power and fortune.  Europe has its royals and America has its Congress.  Though in defense of Congress, they are only slightly less effective than monarchy and much less prone to hemophilia.  This situation is not sustainable, however.  Since there is no such thing as absolute power unless you are from Krypton, even the grandest duchess will have to resort to Machiavellian measures to maintain power.  L'etat c'est vous?  If so, then why did you find the need to demolish provincial fortresses and build Versailles?  Sometimes you have to admire the innate ruthlessness of those born to the throne and yet driven mad by the very real threat of loosing it.  That's right, there is no anarchy and no absolute power, only meritocracy filling the negative space between two imaginary regimes.

However, to make the discussion meaningful, we'd probably like to define meritocracy more narrowly.  We have to, if we planning on boasting that we live in a society where merit is the measure of value.  Kings raised their princes to believe they were appointed by God and had no issue with the idea that some people were born specialer than others.  This didn't remove the very real need to wheel and deal, which wouldn't be necessary with God on your side, but the attitude represents a level of comfort with primogeniture that drives modern man mad.  We're all libertarians now and we don't like the idea that we were born with a leg up or that anyone wanted to help us.  For starters, that would mean having to share and help others, which lord knows is a habit we gave up in kindergarten.  Such a thought would also mean believing that we are not the arbiters of our own fate and that we do not live in a society that empowers all of its citizens equally.

Thus, we refine the concept of merit as a measure of value.  Who decides value?  Well, if I started out with nothing and became successful, then of course whatever it is I did to make that happen is valuable.  Since I believe I rose on the backs of impersonal forces, without the help of anyone with a personal interest in me, I can point to my anonymous piers and say that they have assigned me my worth.  We live in a democracy where people are free to elect whom they choose, assuming they are rich enough to avoid working through voting day and white enough to own voter Id cards.  We also live in a capitalist economy, where people are free to give their money to whomever they want, assuming that someone has convinced us that what what is for sale fulfills an aching need.  Most of the time it doesn't, unless you include psychological needs.  In this case, yes everything we buy we need desperately to prop up our identities.  And that is why we buy into the ultimate shill, the fictional capitalist meritocracy.  Like the White Queen, we want to believe six impossible thoughts before breakfast.

Consider this: The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam.  It's a dissertation on the nature of the long con.  When you're going for broke, you make it appear as though you're giving up the game.  A reformed criminal is always more appealing that a man who has stayed out of trouble his whole life.  Likewise, we are easily impressed by an ad that doesn't sell anything.  Tigers don't change their stripes and major consumer products companies don't pay for advertising without a game in mind.  You know this, you aren't stupid, but the power of the long con is that there are too many redirections along the way to keep track of where it's going.  In the end, we have a system where value is determined by the masses and mined from their deepest desires, but under the control of those who know better.  As the above linked article points out, ads such as these depend on making you feel empowered, which you want, while at the same time giving you an authority to validate your identity, which you need though you may deny it.  The authority, therefore, remains, though it is camouflaged.  It has to do more work to project its power, but it has never gone away.  There are no anarchies and you don't live in a meritocracy.  Neither one would be very appealing.

Once upon a time there was a system called communism, and it was horrific.  God, it was just awful, we all know that.  What is the defining feature of communism?  I suppose there were many, but one that strikes me it that it was a true meritocracy.  In order for something to exist, there has to be a univocal definition of merit and a centralized means of enforcing that.  The only way that can happen is when the state owns all the means of production and a single party system owns the state.  That's what you're getting if you claim you want to live in a meritocracy.  What we live in is a market economy, where value is rooted in what we can make people believe they are buying into of their own free will and under the control of an ever shifting balance of power among that various forces that want to create that value.  I'm not suggesting that communism is a good thing.  I'm suggesting that meritocracy is a bad thing, or perhaps more accurately an imaginary thing.

....

Those in power used to believe in the divine right of kings.  Today we say that we don't accept these arbitrary constraints and want to define our own value.  Our response is to create a new divine authority, this time crowd sourced.  We are still reliant on the notion of an independent authority legitimizing our accidental success, but greater self awareness has necessitated more complex rationalizations.  "Know thyself", said the philosopher, but what good has that done most people?  The most natural response to deep introspection is not personal development, it is a resolve to double our efforts at holding off existential angst.   Think of the alcoholic who weaves complex narratives to avoid change.  And you think, wouldn't it be easier to quit?  In the long term, yes.  In the short term it is easier to change identity than action.

It is psychology all around... creating society and justifying its existence

Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children... And Repeal The Mortgage Interest Deduction

Economics is not an exact science.  Some may even call it statistics, make it worse than lies and damn lies.  We tend to see a lot of disagreement among prominent economists that all too frequently fall along political lines.  This is disheartening, but it also means that when economists of all political stripes are in violent agreement on something, we should take note.  I am not arguing that their consensus is necessarily correct, but geez it's pretty hard to ignore.

One of the things they like to tear down is real estate debt subsidy.  In the US, this takes the form of the mortgage interest deduction.  Many European nations have something similar.  As someone who has owned real estate and received pretty sizable tax break from the deduction, I am here to tell you that I agree with the PhD's when they say this break should be repealed.  I can say for the same reason why I can say I'd like to pay higher gas taxes if it means reduced carbon emissions: I sort of care what kind of world our children live in.

Tax breaks on real estate debt cost governments dearly.  That means we better ask why we're doing it, whether the goal is a good one, and whether our chosen mechanism for achieving it is working.  Why are we doing it?  In the US, the mortgage interest deduction was introduced in 1913, when almost no one but the wealthy owned real estate.  Indeed, at that time most real estate was owned by corporations and the tax was introduced as a part of policies to encourage business investment.  For example, our government considered it a good thing if Ford decided to build a gigantic factory on the back of a tax break.  That sort of thing was certainly more useful to the people who worked in those factories than giving those same people a tax break they could never personally use.  Arguably, tax breaks on corporate real estate are smarter than other kinds of corporate subsidies because it is harder to game, especially in the days before Ponzi's descendants started running JP Morgan Chase.  If you purchase or construct actual, honest-to-god, brick-and-mortar facilities, chances are you plan on using it.

After World War II, it seems that the tax was co-opted as a boon to the middle class.  In encourages home ownership!  And people who own homes are more likely to invest in their communities, raise stable families, and invest in their futures.  That is so unlike the rest of us, who rent our abodes primarily so we can run away when the police find out we have been vandalizing park benches and beating children.  Have you ever met a homeowner who abused his children or engaged in risky financial behavior?  I didn't think so.  There's also the added problem of economic change.  People don't live in the same place and work for the same company for 40 years.  They want to be mobile and go where their prospects are best.  In the new economy, where there's no safety net and it's each person for him or herself, we're all 49'ers heading west.  Why tie yourself down to a money trap?

Wait, it doesn't matter, because most of you don't take the mortgage deduction.  Why would you when you get more money from the standard deduction?  This is especially true these days, when the government is subsidizing on the other end with low interests rates.  If you have a loan that is big enough to make the tax break worthwhile, chances are you don't need it.  Chances are, it only puts a few hundred dollars more in your pocket than the standard deduction does anyway.  Meanwhile, the government is running a deficit and spending more on this subsidy for the fortunate than it is on defense (estimate cost in lost revenue to the US is more than $500 billion.  The aggregate figure for Europe is something like $700 billion).  It better be worth it, but it ain't.

Sorry, There Are No Self Made Men Here

I don't want to hear you call yourself a self-made man or woman unless you are a hunter-gatherer. The idea that anyone can achieve anything they want with only will power and a sparkle in their eye is so laughable that those who claim this should have their MBA's revoked.  It seems that in some circles, self reliance has become such an obsession that it has collapsed into a dichotomy.  Either you are a hard worker who never got no breaks from no one or you are a free loader sucking money from the first guy.  Reality is always more subtle, always.  It's just that you can't see that because you are blinded by the light of your own deified magnificence.

I grew up without much money, hovering between the middle class and the lower middle class.  Because I am good at taking tests and writing gibberish that sounds sage, I went to a decent college with a tuition scholarship and a little help from the loan sharks in the US federal government.  I studied math and computer science, which led to a remunerative career in the same.  My final (well, never say "never") foray into academia was an engineering master's degree, which I collected on the back of a full scholarship and living stipend.  Listen closely, you can hear my bootstraps stretching to the point of snapping right off my feet.

Do I sound ungrateful?  That snide voice you hear is a parody.  The volume of social investment required to deliver me to where I am today is so vast, it makes me cringe.  If I lived in Somalia, I could be just as smart and just as hard working and wind up with nothing, or even less than nothing if people felt inclined to cut me down to size.  Bureaucracy is a technology, and when used well it is a mighty one.  At some point in the past, some people were feeling in a cooperative mood and decided to create our universities and industries.  Each of us who benefited from there work were victims of the happy accident of living in a society that values this kind of cooperation.

Sometimes we place such value in self reliance that we forget that we can accomplish more together than we ever could alone.  Positioning hard work as the ultimate virtue is almost correct, but a little off center.  The better question to ask is how well I am participating in a system that benefits all of us.  It may be better to give than to receive, but those two do not have to be dichotomous.  When a social system is functioning, the two are a part of the same whole.  Well designed social welfare programs empower those benefiting from them, often leading to amplified returns as we progress from generation to generation.

I think your belligerent distrust is misdirected.  Immigrants are not taking your jobs and women are not having children to collect welfare dollars from your pocket.  I mean, seriously, do you even listen to yourself?  The statistics, if you cared to look them up, support this, but you hardly need them because you don't need statistics to show that one and one don't make three.  The idea is absurd.  Crimes require motive and opportunity.  If you want to find trouble, go looking for those in a position to cause trouble.  Like I said, a functioning social system shores up its foundations along all sides, benefiting us all.  What we lack in the United States is a fully functioning social system and that is the fault of those in charge.  We don't live in a bad country.  It's actually a pretty nice place to live.  However, we suffer from bad leadership.  Or, more accurately, we suffer from absent leadership.