I was reading a discussion about some mafia-like crimes being committed against H1-B workers for an IT firm in New Jersey and came across this gem:

…Also, the whole “Our Jobs” concept is bogus. There is work to be done. There is no place where god or satan defined which work is “our work”. There’s work to be done, and people willing to do it. If I live in New York, does that mean I should say people can’t come from New Jersey to do it “My” New York work? I mean, get real. Bitching about people coming to the US to work will only result in the work being moved overseas instead, and the US will decrease in relevance. Oh yeah, Americans love a free market, when it works to their advantage. As soon as it goes against your advantage, then you don’t like it. Part of capitalism is that you will earn the market price. With the world shrinking, and a lot of people overseas willing to work harder than americans for less pay, that market value is falling for many basic jobs…

For most activities that belie our intiutions about the nature of one person vs another (like war), it’s been easy to drum up the latent prejudice present in every person to paint a narrative of good and evil. The reality is that globalization together with commication advances shed light onto exactly how arbitrary a lot of the ideas are that make civilization possible. Many of the big events that define our past occurred in a world where distinctions were very real to the people involved, but as society evolves they become harder to believe*.

Americans many times feel entitled** to work as if their willingness to do labor should be rewarded with fruit. Yet as pretentious as it may be from someone who’s about to graduate from college, the relationship that capitalism defines between the employer and employee is that of need, and it’s not a two way relationship. For a century we’ve been riding on the spoils of being the first into new industries, handing down decent work at good wages while the rest of the world struggled to earn enough to live. But now that they’ve reached a sufficient level of industrial progress (all the while living with a much more inexpensive standard of living), we can’t compete. The capitalism and democracy that America ruthlessly evangelized cares not for its parents as much as it cares about material need as it tears down the invisible walls that kept us apart. The consequence of universal equality is a degeneration (or improvement) or conditions to the average***. As the world turns, we’ve redacted nation and race from an ever-shortening list of distinguishing features for potential employees. Game on.

* Here’s a leaked CIA report on strategies to gain support for the war in Afghanistan.
** I use the word ‘entitled’ in particular to point out that it is not a feeling endemic solely to my generation.
*** Healthcare reform, a perfect example, will diminish the quality of care afforded the wealthy due to the influx of new patients who were unable to pay.

I figure this might be a good thing to record as university winds down. If you have anything to add, I’ve put up comments and will give you credit.

Quick Tips

• Do not completely finish anything that is a completion grade. Most teachers have souls and won’t give you a zero. Some will. It’s still worth it.
• Understudy (especially for the first test). The typical psychological cycle of most college students (that is exploited by most professors) is to bomb the first exam and study like crazy for the second exam or the final and sit in the front row. If you study and do poorly, you’ve miscalibrated yourself for future exams, you’ll get upset about your grade, and you’ve wasted all that time studying.
• Intern well. If you are interested in a job, two internships and some decent accomplishments will compensate for almost any deficit in GPA during an interview. Getting an interview is another topic. Most internships pay well.
• Study abroad. I didn’t, but everyone who did thinks it’s a good idea so you should too.
• If you do poorly on an assignment (or forget to turn it in), send a well-reasoned email to your professor explaining your logic as clearly as possible and asking for clarifications. Announce that you expect no change in grade and are just curious. You will not get a change in grade, but at the end of the semester when you’re at the borderline you can expect a bump. Additionally, in most subjective exams you will notice an increase in your grade.
• Show up late to one of the first classes, make it obvious, then ask a really solid question a little later on. You’ll be remembered and the agreeable classmates will respect you.
• The first lab you have to turn in with a partner is a race to see who will do the least. Most people think the opposite. If you miss this your partner will take advantage of you the rest of the semester.
• Bike to class.
• If there are freshman in your class, say hi to them the first day of class. They take great notes and yearn for friendships.
• Don’t buy a meal plan.
• Don’t buy books before you get a syllabus.
• Plan early for senioritis. Spread hard classes out. Ask upper classmen what classes are challenging and who makes a good professor.
• Unless the first week of classes is mind-numbingly boring, drop a class. It’ll pick up pace quickly and you won’t have the opportunity to later.
• Join an organization. If you don’t like it, quit and find one you do. The quit button is the most unused feature of crappy organization. There is no virtue in enduring pointless stuorgs.
• Don’t ask for others’ grades, particularly if yours is high. If you do poorly, don’t announce it unless you would like to work alone on group projects.

Guide to Asking Good Questions in College

The first thing about asking questions is that the environment is pivotal. If your classmates are annoyed at you, the professor will not give you the answer you’re looking for and the rapport that is helpful to establish. Questions serve three purposes: proving yourself to your classmates, earning rapport with the prof, and getting an answer. The last purpose is most easily served by a friend, the internet, or the book. Do not ask too many questions. When you ask a question, plan it all in advance and recite it in your head. Stumbling through your delivery will earn the ire of your classmates. If you don’t understand something, ask a question that is not being covered that will reveal your answer. For instance, if you don’t remember the nature of gravity, it might be helpful to present a hypothetical situation and discern the answer from the response. Include a lot of things you know for sure if you must present something you are unclear about. Correcting a mistake is one thing, correcting an incorrect model is another. Professors hate repeating themselves directly, yet they will do it incessantly when asked for examples (to their credit it’s part of the learning process). Do NOT use language not discussed in class or English words that aren’t typical. It sounds haughty. Write (or pretend to write) down their response. If you don’t understand it, ask another indirect question a little later or drop it and use the internet later. Most lectures are not tutoring sessions. Finally, smile when you get what you need, use subverbals (like “ok” and “mmhmm”) while your listening, and look the professor in the eye. If you do it right, even if you don’t get the answer you were looking for, you’ll help your grade.

When people ask the question “what is the meaning of life?”, they may as well be saying “tell me something that will instantly and permanantly max out my feelings of meaningfulness.” In essence, “what is the meaning of life?” is a response to a low feeling of meaningfulness or a high feeling of futility as opposed to a real inquiry. In some ways, it’s loosely equivalent to “give me five reasons not to kill myself” mainly because this question begs for a solution to fatally low levels of meaningfulness. In this sense, as with all feelings, it has no “answer”. “Tell me something that will instantly and permanently max out my feelings of happiness” is laughable. If you were a very convincing person, you might be able to remark “you’ve just been promoted, nominated for a peace prize, a genius supermodel is interested in you, and your work at the office has saved millions of lives” but it would be a very temporary high until they found out the truth. Even the achievement of all those things has been shown to not produce lasting happiness. Life is so much more dynamic than that.

Now some will quip that the meaning of life is to be happy. Happiness sometimes correlates well with feelings of meaning, as does anger with stress. This again offers a palpable solution to the problem of increasing feelings of meaningfulness, but is in no way foolproof. There are a lot of things that increase happiness without a corresponding increase in meaningfulness. These obviously vary culturally and amongst individuals. For Americans, a life of leisure is difficult to accept as meaningful, despite bringing happiness, simply because Americans value hard work. The correlation between activities and how they affect happiness is trainable. Aqua Teen Hunger Force is amusing to some, not to others. Meaning is similar. Protesting abortion clinics is meaningful to some, and the opposite to others.

All of this discussion in no way precludes the actual presence of an external “meaning of life”, it’s just a way of saying that our ability to judge the validity of a given suggestion is hindered by the temporal, subjective nature of our feelings (or sense) of meaningfulness. To arrive at any permanent conclusions we need to divorce ourselves from these effects.

So, how do we live?

Certain things should be avoided as they hinder our ability to find meaning in the world. Cynicism, as an idea, is rather infectious, and ideas that are destroyed by cynicism rarely find a second life after the virus has died. Simple people are born immune to cynicism, which is why, for the most part, simple people are less plagued by questions. Some people get it for a short time and grow antibodies. Some people never get rid of it. It’s not impossible to be happy with cynicism. It’s just hard to be an active agent in your life once you’ve surrendered subjective decisions to the virus. (The fact that comparing an attitude to a virus is absurd points out the prevalence of our fatally shallow view of human health.)

Other things enhance our ability to find meaning but are hard to achieve or acquire. An attitude of “finding meaning in everyday life” bolstered by sincere compassion and joy has the potential to build new meaning. Yet it is also a cover used by those who have abandoned the pursuit. It’s begging the question if you agree with the premise that we can reduce the question to “how do I increase my feelings of meaningfulness” but that doesn’t mean it can’t work.

This whole idea of meaningfulness being physiological has some really bleak conclusions: if we are passive recipients of the chemical reactions that go on in our bodies, then we have little autonomy with respect to these things. This is true. But the if is large. IF we are passive recipients. IF we are the product of chemical reactions. This is not a degeneration into determinism because it exists on a slightly lower plane and is true regardless of whether or not determinism is true.

To truly be in control of our lives (and I’ll call this “free” later) is to be able to break the chain of dependence of our identity on our material existence. In some senses you could claim we should be “in the world, but not of the world”. Others describe this as being “in the moment” and a critical aspect of “mindfulness”. Most religions would lump this together with a conception of “soul”, but I think that pairing that term with this idea clouds the air.

It’s clear that we spend most of our lives on autopilot. We operate like an organic machine until we’re jolted into the moment by something. It’s very scary when you “wake up” (not from sleep) and you’ve driven a few miles, or your work day suddenly disappeared. A lot of times, when we’re awoken it’s accompanied by a firestorm of activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with “planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior.”

In some senses, we only exist for a fraction of our time behind our eyes, “seeing” what we are seeing, “hearing” what we are hearing, etc. We are always a part of our lives in a very shallow sense, but we’re not always watching. This is as true on the macro level as much as it is lower levels. Walk into any restaurant and you can see tons of people texting, reading, talking on the phone… anything but be in their shoes at that time. In a poetic interpretation of quantum mechanics: once we become observers to our lives as opposed to simply part of the machine of life, we actively collapse the waveforms of reality and necessarily effect our destiny.

I believe this is the key to meaning. The practice of achieving “freedom” in the sense just described requires a radical departure from typical “ways of life” because it is neither a list of tenets nor a set of traditions. True meaning as separate from the meaning determined by our circumstances cannot be deciphered or created without freedom from our mechanistic selves. This involves an embrace of the happenings that serve to jolt us out of a treadmill existence: not a call to seek new experiences, but rather a suggestion to seek the inherent uniqueness of each moment. It’s an arrow instead of a plan and it’s pointed at the part of you that has relinquished control.

When we talk about economics, we generally are trying to solve the problem of getting people to feed themselves. This was a problem that didn’t come about until people started killing themselves for control of resources. We realized that these could be allocated more fairly. So we devised systems… governments… to dole out the resources to people. But governments were obviously not foolproof. Questions remained. Who would submit to governments? Why give our stuff to them? Who gets the resources and why?

People got together and came up with the solution and killed those who didn’t agree, or left them outside to starve and die: we’ll all submit to a system because it’s better than the alternative, or I’ll join your tribe because I don’t want to end up on a stick. Obviously, some made out like bandits from this transaction, namely the lazy, and some got gipped (the agressive hunters or prodigy farmers, maybe). Humans pick up on stuff like this pretty easily for some reason: the same reason you can’t get over your roommates lack of dishwashing capacity. We were kinda built for it. Yet instead of kicking out the lazy, we decided to make more efficient work of them. You “produce”, I’ll “produce” and we’ll get together and trade.

This, I think, was the first step down a long series of mistakes, that has nothing to do with the idea itself.

Systems, in general, are pretty well defined. We have bikes that work in fairly predictable ways, pipes that flow, and governments with their rules and laws that all spin around fairly predictably. Given a certain input: leg-power, water, or opinions, the output is similary well-defined. Except when it’s not. This is especially true where humans are involved. Our capacity for understanding purely physical systems if unparalleled. With a certain vector force on a pedal, the weight and aerodynamic signature of the rider, etc, I can tell you where the bike will be in 10 seconds. Wow.

Now I give you a means for people to send messages to one another. Wait ten years. Did you predict the internet? Darn.

The problem with human systems are their emergent properties, and the problem with these properties is that they are almost unpredictable. The reasoning is pretty simple. If we want to define the bike’s motion, we can examine the bike in space (cute), the bike in a physics world (fun), the bike in the “real world”, and the bike in a crowded city. Each step progressively increases the scope of potential side effects, and each step reduces our fundamental understanding of the outcomes of the system. We isolate these side effects by nullifying them, but this is rarely accurate in bigger systems. When I describe the gear of a bike are you thinking bike lanes and car accidents? Possibly. How about Bob Dylan’s 1966 bike accident? Even the question of whether or not it was staged adds to the ambiguous nature of making far-out predictions. A problem.

Yet we are endlessly enamored with this idea of simplicity, with categorization and reductions. Our minds are finite and whether or not our world is truly so is irrelevant because we shall make it so, however wrong we are. We must, they say. Economics is the height of our hubris. It aims to make humans “productive” through incentive for work. But what about the side effects? Can we even consider them? The problem with systems that involve humans is that they are by very nature unpredictable. Approximatable, but unpredictable. The problem with systems that govern humans is that they go beyond this and effect our understanding of them. Capitalism, without getting too boring, is a proper example. In its infancy, it served a very important role: governing the production and distribution of goods and services. As it matured, certain emergent properties began to make themselves visible. What people in general want will be produced, and what people want can be controlled by marketing. Marketing is fueled by consumption, sales, which inherently requires production. This is a feedback loop. The empirical data shows that people, over time, have more and are unhappier. So what? This is a good thing. The idea assembled in one, grabbbed a million heads to convince you of its efficacy. You adopted your master in a transaction you still technically control.

In the beginning, people submitted to governments because it was a good idea. They adopted economic systems to get around problems, to provide for more people. Was it a good decision? The population of the world is exploding, but may settle. The environment is getting worse, but things are looking “green”. People are unhappier, but we’re able to provide for more of their basic needs. All I will say is that the essential principle that was missing from the initial plan was that of contradiction and reevaluation.

We as people don’t need to follow a straight line, nor do we need to make the same decisions (or even cohesive ones) to keep from fracturing our identities. As time passes and more data is added, it becomes necessary to reevalute our initial decisions, to make new ones, and possibly to reroute. The mistakes we make are primarily forcing ourselves into situations that rob ourselves of the power to change our minds, or kill the will to create new opinions. The current systems are faulty because they included provisions that changed our minds about what life was, right or wrong. People are starving not because we lack the right policy, leadership, or control, but because we lack the power to be fluid with our intentions and dynamic in thought. Ideas, then, are not the enemy. People are not the enemy. The villain is the imaginary chains that bind the two.

Unedited. A little after my freshman year began here at Texas A&M (Sept. 29, 2006):

Universalism is a touchy subject for churchy people. Funny thing is, in actuality we all are, and once were: universalists.

When I was a kid, I figured everyone around me was going to go to heaven after they died. Heaven is taught a lot more than hell to kids (though some people are trying to change that), and being at least marginally far from insane as a child, I didn’t consider anyone around me to be worthy of eternal torment. The people around me were my world, and in my world, everyone went to heaven.

Just as well, in the world today there is hardly a person alive who believes in some sort of eternal dwelling and also thinks themselves unworthy of it. We’re all saved. Yet, some people will assert others are not, and the others will assert that these people are not, and you have either pluralism and confusion. That’s not a typo. Wrap your mind around that philosopher.

As I grew older, beliefs and the politics thereof crept into my mind. Dissatisfied with simple answers to huge questions (shove it Occam’s razor), I sought out more. What I got to is that the standards I had as a child were a little lax. Humanity’s standards of justice typically put serial killers and terrorists in hell, but few others. The tendency is to gradually move along the spectrum of leniency until you get to the book of Romans (I’m not reading this out of context, and yes, I understand your interpretation) where “No one is good, not one.” It’s just not fun (or worthwhile) to pursue religious activities when the fruit of your actions is no different than the non-participators.

But the thing is, deep down inside we just earnestly hope universalism is true. We don’t hope our own beliefs are false, we just hope everyone will be saved. There’s a difference, I think. Some I guess will cite the practicality of meeting the requirements of an exclusive system (one in which everyone is not saved) citing game theory (though note that no atheist will believe something simply because of the proposition that it’s better for them, beliefs don’t work that way). Others find it hard to reconcile with their particular scriptures, and others are just so entrenched in their thinking one way or the other that they refuse to open their minds to the possibility.

I think the last one is the worst. Being a church-goer myself, there is a certain element of brainwashing that does take place. I’d like to say it’s good, that they’re being indoctrinated with “truth”, but the rate at which I change my mind on pivotal issues is astounding (to me and others). Unfortunately, people are unable to look at something with any degree of objectivity, at least allowing an idea to be entertained in their heads. I’m not saying you have to even declare “hey, I’m thinking about a heretical (sometimes) idea!” but an open mind would be appreciated (just not too open, you might catch a cold).

Atheists like to call themselves “free thinkers” because they’re free from the confines of religious dogma. But most of the time, they’re confined to the religious dogma of anti-religion and atheism. I think another term used is “bright”, but it’s not widely used because it seems to be a little harsh to the religious people. I read an essay once that allowed for religious people to be “free thinkers”. Thank you.

The principle Christian fruit of the spirit is joy. Joy differs from happiness in most word definition battles, in that joy is deeper. Where happiness might come from a good day or a compliment, joy comes from almost a lifestyle. For me, in orthodox Christianity, joy is hard to come by. This may be different for other people for varying reasons, but it’s really hard to look at unbelievers and know that according to your definitions of faith, hell, and the doctrine required for salvation, they will likely end up being tormented for eternity. What they have now is the best they will ever have, and sadly, it’s hardly great.

There are sufferings of all sorts even outside of poverty. I think hardship and suffering end up affecting a person depending upon the degree in which they’ve suffered before. In that sense, the breakup that “that preppy girl” went through might be just as emotionally traumatic as going hungry for another day. Maybe even more so (gasp). That sounds ludicrous to say, but with almost all human sentiments, we feel change rather than absolutes. More like the derivatives. You can’t sense speed, but you can feel the change in speed: acceleration. Lying down to bed is almost catastrophic after a great night with friends, but after a long day of digging trenches with a hoe and shovel, it is bliss. Loneliness is killer to the stereotyped, popular person in high school. To the introverted computer nerd, it’s a way of life (and efficient at that).

It’d be pointless and hard to defend for me to say that because we’ve suffered just a bit in this life, we deserve something greater. No, that’s not what I’m saying. Nor am I saying that God’s standards are the same as our own. Whereas God is (and rightly so) offended by our unbelief, this seems like a trivial sin in light of rape and theft. But this still leaves us with a problem: a world of suffering people doomed to suffer more.

God is love. A lot of people will argue that if I, Stefan, in my imperfect love would willingly save the world (had I the power), including the people who had wronged me and hurt me, how much more would God do? I think that’s a good question. I also think the alternative deserves some thought. God created all men, knowing full well some would never get the evidence they wanted or the experience they needed to accept him (free will it up all you want, there’s still the environmental factors that effect every decision we make). And those who didn’t would be punished eternally. ?. Or how about in the most amazing show of grace the universe has ever seen, God sends himself to die for humanity (“greater love knows no man than this…”), and even though they continue to spit in his face (even the believers), he ultimately brings them all to salvation through faith in His Christ.

When I think about the latter, I get really giddy. I look out through the window that I simply adore and see people walking to get themselves drunk, or to slave away at books, or whatever. I see people who are happy, and those who are upset, small people, tall people, smart and dumb, black and white (and yellow and red), and I think of a God who will save them. I think of a God who will pull them out of this life, show them Himself, and save them through faith even though they piss on his name and pretend he doesn’t exist. I think about the God who is the savior of “all men, especially those who believe”, and finally I can look out that window and say to myself, this is joy, the fruit of the spirit. I think that makes me a hippie and an idealist.