Mystery

“Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’. ― Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. ― This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. ― What one acquires here in not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating rules.” ― Wittgenstein

1. The problem with the objective stance (where Reason is thought to reside) is it supposes man might subtract himself from experience. It supposes he might uncover what is truthful by not being a part of it. Indeed, the idea of scientific objectivity goes against the idea of engagement in the world (even of there being a world ― there are only components and causal relationships). Truth, the objective man surmises, exists solely with man and his special vantage point upon the world: from beyond it. Man attempts to make himself world-less, without direct experience in the world, studying it from afar, and in doing so he claims to know it.

2. This leads him to undermine the question of how to live. One who can truly ask this question is one who begins by examining the idea of how he is worldly. Only when man can grasp his worldliness can he begin to ask in what manner he should act in the world.

9. By being reasonable man risks losing the world.

12. One begins to grasp at truth when one stops looking for the formula. Indeed, it is where systematic description begins to fail. It is as if he were trying to retell a dream ― the chasm between the dream images and feeling, and the words he uses to recount it is vast. He feels in recounting the dream the limitation of his language, its insufficiency.

16. His technological inventions show him the correctness of his scientific method. He believes that the same reasonableness he uses to control the world may be put to use in his own life. But this same method when applied to himself entirely misses the mark. Problems and method pass each other by.

22. Poets and religious men disappeared at the same time.

41. How unfortunate that his religious belief has been limited to appeals made during hardship. The man who loses his child to accident laments, “Everything happens for a reason.”

42. It is as if the man said, there is a reason for this and I summon God to provide it. Surely it did not happen accidentally, or by bad luck. This mystery shall be solved. The child was too important. There is the assumption that despite the horror of the child’s death it will finally in the future lead to something better. The child will be redeemed. The father will look back at the child’s death and say “That is why it happened.” The man’s appeal is to reason and not to God.

45. What is religious is only a placeholder until a reasonable explanation can be made.

49. The difference of this age from another is in the following statements: “Everything happens for a reason” and “Everything happens by the grace of God.” The former implies the reasonableness of God’s plan, that it can be made clear by men. The latter leaves it all to God: what is mysterious to men is accepted as mysterious.

57. The inability to explain cruelty and suffering brings into existence the gods. The gods dwell in this place of mystery. It is where reason cannot go.

63. The Muslims are a more religious ― and stronger ― people because of their comfort living within God’s mystery. They feel no need to explain their suffering.

88. What of the time when explanation began and ended with the gods? When a man who was physically blinded was understood to truly see?

Home Depot Profiles In Courage

New Preface

These stories are the result of some years working on the overnight freight team at a Home Depot. There is much, however, that wasn't written and won't appear in this book. For some things are too hard to write and others you save for another occasion even if you cannot be sure that it will come.

There is nothing of Felicia and her years of crack addiction in Detroit, her molestations and rape while living in the streets; nor of Heather, Doug’s wife, who worked the cash registers and didn’t understand when a customer gave her extra coins in order to receive a bill as change ― she looked at the coins strangely, then thrust them back saying it wasn’t right and threatened to call a manager; nor is there anything about the man in the white Mercedes who parked behind the garden area and shot himself in the face. Corey found him, his jaw and nose shot off, blood splaying everywhere, holding where his face had been, hopping around and moaning ― But he’s got a white Mercedes, Doug said. Why should he want to kill himself? They were still discussing it in the lunchroom when the man died a week later.

Neither is there anything about Robert the Jew, who ate whoever’s lunch he wanted from the refrigerator, one time even offering Puerto Rican Dave a bite of his own sandwich. When someone caught him with their food or there wasn’t anything he wanted, Robert didn’t hesitate to root through the garbage. I once watched him pull up from the bottom of the trash bin a blackened, days-old bagel and quickly consume it.

And what of old Jay the ex-con, who had nubs for fingers on both his hands and was rumored to be the disowned son of the Kraft family. Jay moved slowly on his crutches, coughing, and smoking whenever he had the chance, the cancer slowly destroying him. He told fantastic stories about pointing handguns at sheriffs and beating up train conductors, all of them ending in clever escapes or police escorts back to his home with never any charge. Jay was an alcoholic and disappeared for months at a time into treatment centers.

Nor is there mention of 'Slick' Nick, big and slow-moving, who was run over by a car at 16 and spent two years in a coma. If you didn’t see him for a week he forgot who you were. Slick worked the parking lot pushing carts but regularly disappeared to prune the calluses on the soles of his feet. They grew quickly and required weekly attention, he said, and when they had grown too large or he had trimmed them too deeply, Nick claimed he was unable to work. The sight of Nick in the electrical aisle with his shoes off, hacking at his calluses with a penknife, had caused a number of customers to complain to management.

It might have been a better book if these other characters had appeared in it but this will have to do for now. To some readers the truth of these stories will be manifest, while to others, perhaps too educated and financially fortunate, they will only be regarded as fiction.


Bogota, Colombia

March 2012

Important Aphorism

1. Freedom is the opposite of money.

Productivity / Leisure

1. The real economic value of an invention is how well it is able to produce total leisure. For this reason the computer is more valuable than the video game. The latter soaks up leisure, while the former creates it.

1-2. The video game is an unproductive invention. Although it creates additional leisure for its creator, it causes the widespread destruction of leisure among the many who play it.

1-3. Real economic progress is the creation of additional total leisure.

3. Only with sufficient leisure time―undistracted by unproductive, leisure-squandering inventions―is it possible for man to create those inventions that would increase his leisure and the leisure of his fellow man. It is only from leisure that greater productivity, and additional leisure, is created. Only during his leisure does man have time to tinker and experiment and possibly create the next leisure-producing invention.

4. Leisure may also be applied towards man's spiritual life through art and religion (when properly practiced), creating in him a particular feeling about his own life, that of his fellow man and the world. Though it is disregarded today, this is undoubtedly leisure's most important application.

4-2. One must be careful in discussing it, but a spiritual and moral progress and productivity may also be spoken of. That is to say, the health of a society and its culture.

4-3. Why is it that man today turns away from using his leisure for his spiritual life to instead spend it on leisure-squandering activities? Verily, man may be spiritually ill-equipped to understand his leisure ― leisure is perhaps a burden for him. He has been trained to become bored easily.

Connections

The connections made by the philosopher’s comparisons are similar to the connections the poet makes with metaphors. This is like this, the poet says. The philosopher performs a similar operation: Here, this situation is like this other one, he says. Do you see it? Do you see the connection? Now, has the confusion gone?

The poet’s motivation is different. He writes not to dispel a particular confusion, but to extend the language of the world. But is it simply a grammatical extension confined to language? Or is it indeed a material extension of the world? Or perhaps it is a poetic extension of the world ― and what does that mean and consist in? Of course, there is still the question of whether this is useful or not.

Reason & Financial Markets

1. The fact that the top students of science and mathematics have since the mid 1980s chosen a career in Wall Street finance and investment banking cannot be remarked upon enough. The danger of staking Western life on a debt-based financial system constructed upon the models of scientific men is just now coming into view.

2. The financial engineers have over the course of decades developed masterful innovations to extend and hide debt. They have at the same time endeavored to make the financial system reasonable and predictable. They have re-engineered the system basing it upon Reason, rather than upon men.*

3. By remaking the financial system as ‘systematic;’ subjecting it to, as well as structuring it upon, certain models--making it rational--the system is undermined and made fragile. The clear rationality and beauty of the model then justifies a significantly higher level of leverage. The crowd following the model continues to grow, with still more leverage applied. But with the growing crowd an even greater leverage is required to make the model profitable, and systematic risk is pushed to extreme levels (see the carry trade, LTCM, etc.).

4. Any human system that can be modeled, with a significant proportion of its systematic participants following those models, is a weakened system. Any tiny breakdown or failure is felt system-wide, particularly in overleveraged systems (the mortgage-backed securities market, MBS, for example, represented less than 3% of the GDP of the United States in 2008, yet the breakdown of this market nearly brought down the world’s financial system).

5. A system that does not hold up well under the scrutiny of Reason, is difficult to model, and that is opaque to many of its participants, is a strong system, not prone to failure. Within such a system crowd behavior will be limited along with leverage. Any market breakdown will be limited in scope among market participants, without far-ranging effects.

6. Crowd behavior as it pertains to the belief in the men of science and Reason has perhaps built up to its most dangerous level in the financial markets. Whereas the belief in Reason had formerly been contained to the sciences and mathematics--not affecting the daily lives of men in a significant way--its spread into finance--with the concomitant buildup of leverage based upon the models of financial engineers-- puts society as a whole at risk, with any breakdown felt by all men through the banking system and money supply.

7. With interest rates at the zero-bound it would appear that a 30+ year cycle of debt growth (Bernanke’s “Great Moderation”) has come to a close. It would seem that without the expansion of the debt base the financial markets will be less ably modeled, will be more human. Verily, a particular model has worked for a time, not because financial markets can be comprehended by a rational scientific approach, but predominately as a result of structural changes to the market (derivatives), pro-banking legislation (leverage increases, repeal of Glass-Steagall), pro-debt growth government subsidies (FNM, FRE among others), and the continuing assistance of the Federal Reserve in lowering rates and increasing the money supply. Now there are few new grand structural changes to be undertaken and interest rates can hardly be taken lower without disastrous inflationary consequences. The human component of the system, long marginalized as the models flourished and the financial system was made reasonable and ‘systematic’, is preparing its return. Irrationality, built up in the system over decades, is set to be released.

8. What sort of system-wide horrors are set to be unleashed as the models break down? Perhaps a period of irrationality and unpredictability in markets as long as the 30 year period of stability that proceeded it?

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*Computer programs have replaced the day trader. I know. I myself was of the replaced. No human can process price data on a screen and act upon it with a click of a mouse faster than the trade execution of a computer program.

Honesty

1. The idea of objectivity is nonsense. There is only the subject. He is always a subject in the world. As a man of the world what must be demanded of him is honesty, integrity, character, and courage. A man who philosophizes or investigates or creates must be assessed as to these qualities ― how he has consistently demonstrated these qualities in his life ― for the truth and value of his work is decided upon them.

2. The most dishonest of biases is self-preservation. When he has allowed himself to become raw, totally unguarded and insecure ― without the deepest bias to keep himself alive ― at that moment a man sees clearly.

3. It is not objectivity, but honesty, that is necessary. Indeed, the idea of objectivity is perhaps the most dishonest idea, hiding the most profound of dishonesties.