And as God as my witness, you should be too!

Now let me set the record straight right here at the outset : I am a crouton lover. I am pro-crouton. When push comes to shove, when the chips are down, the schist hits the fan, the die is cast, and the cliches are thicker than paste in the air, I will support the crouton agenda every single time.

So if you’re a died in the wool anti-crouton agitator and the thought of reading a thoughtful and insightful polemic from a lifelong croutonist makes you quiver with rage, please, go back to your boring soups and salads and leave us decent thinking people alone!

No, this rat is not about the blatant superiority of croutoned life over the broken and senseless heathen life before or without croutons, it’s about those nasty little cubes of compressed sawdust currently offending all that is good and right by daring to call themselves croutons.

These appalling monstrosities are everywhere. Sold in bulk in gigantic bags in shady supermarket produce sections, running down the property values in side street salad bars, and worst of all, lurking in the appetizer sized Caesar salads of otherwise respectable family restaurant chains, these flavourless affronts to all croutonery, and indeed the entire art and science of the Garnishing Way, have, with their foul ubiquity, come to represent the entire concept of crouton qua crouton in the battered zeitgeist of the masses.

It shames us all to realize that many people have never so much as glimpsed the true glory of the true crouton, and thus, tragically, consider those unspeakable horrors masquerading under that title to be all there is of the crouton in this world.

With such a poor presentation to the world, is it any wonder that the youth of today are increasingly falling prey to the slick predations, high-flying rhetoric, and devil may care flashy lifestyles of the powerful anti-couton forces which roam the streets of suburbia in search of naive and pliant victims?

But fear not, my fellow travelers! For I have visited the promised land, and bring back glad tidings of the truth glory and wonder of the crouton. The reality is far more wonderful than even the most epic of songs sung by the bards of old, and this overpowering effulgence can no longer be denied. The majesty of the mighty crouton is both Real and True, and I, its humbly self-appointed herald, am here today to declare, in no uncertain terms, that as of this moment, the long national nightmare is over and the crouton can once more reclaim its throne as the One True Garnish for all times.

For you see, gentle readers, I have actually had real croutons, and they are wicked awesome.

A real crouton is not some uniformly extruded and guillotined cube of utterly dry breadlike non-substance which tastes vaguely of nothing and even more vaguely of something, oh no. It is a crisp (not crunchy and certainly not ‘so dry it explodes into dust under pressure) piece of fine quality white bread thoroughly soaked in melted butter which has in turn been infused with wonderful spices, and above all, garlic.

If you are having trouble imagining just what sort of thing this “true croutons” is, well, mere words cannot truly describe, but imagine a wonderful hybrid of the bread crumbs from Stove Top Stuffing and the best garlic bread you have ever had, and you will be comfortably within the proverbial ballpark.

As you can easily tell from mouth-watering description I have just given, the true crouton bears only the basest and most superficial resemblance to the benighted cubes of hate and lies currently being foisted on the innocent public under the crouton’s noble name. Indeed, once you have had the real thing. you will weep for all the un-croutoned days you have unwittingly suffered before that blessed moment.

But dry those righteous tears, for all is not lost! We the people have the power to correct this injustice, if we but have the courage to use it!

All we need to do is refuse to accept anything but the One True Garnish as a crouton in any sense of the word, and soon market forces will ripple from our mighty blows of justice and bend to reverse this tsunami of tastelessless, and once more restore the honor and glory of the mighty crouton.

So the next time you order a salad in a restaurant and they give you anything less than real, honest, mother-loving croutons on it, get your server’s attention, then in a clear firm voice, say to them :

“I’m sorry, but I order this salad with croutons, not turd nuggets. ”

This should lead to a prompt and satisfying conclusion to the situation.

First off, a story whose very headline seems like it was written to make me click on it : Why a lack of empathy is the root of all evil.

Could not have said it better myself. I have been saying the same thing for many years now. And even better, this guy, Simon Baron-Cohen (any relation to Sascha?) is saying it with science!

I agree with him entirely that the word “evil” is largely too vague and unhelpful to be useful in any sort of serious discussion of the world. Explaining abhorrent acts by simply saying “The people who did it are evil” does not answer anything. It’s a non-answer. And it begs so many questions. Were they always evil? If not, how did they become evil? Was it a choice they made? Were they “good” until they made that choice? Does that mean anyone could cross the line at any time?

Unfortunately, the answer “they lack empathy” is not a whole lot better. I am impressed with the degree of study Baron-Cohen has put into his theory, but I think it too is over-simplistic. It’s easy to point to obviously deranged people like serial killers and rapists and say “Clearly, they lack empathy.” Obviously. But is it a blanket lack of empathy? Is every killer also a sociopath? Or is it more complicated than that?

And what about those infamous Nazi prison guards who perpetrated the most horrible acts of mass horror the world had ever seen? As far as I know, Hitler did not need to scour all of Germany in order to find the few total monsters willing to do these horrible deeds. These were average, normal Germans who turned people into lampshades and smashed gold fillings out of teeth with the butts of their rifles, then went home to their families, hugged their children, ate their dinners, made love to their wives. How is this possible?

And even more so than that, what about the every day evil? The acts of barbarity and sadism that never make the history books because they are not illegal and therefore count as “normal”? A cruel remark, a vicious rumour, a brutal shunning, a nasty and underhanded business move. Evil is far more than somethign that just happens at the ends of the bell curve. It happens every day, and is perpetrated by normal citizens who otherwise have a full complement of empathy and would pass a Voight Kampff test without a problem.

What about that? In the end, saying “evil is lack of empathy” does not advance our understanding by very much. A truly deep and comprehensive understanding of evil, of why people do bad things and hopefully how we can stop them, has to be considerably more robust than such simplistic reductions.

For a long time, I have used “malice” as the closest approximation of a workable definition of evil. Much of the world’s everyday evil stems from misdirected anger surfacing as the desire to hurt others and hence transfer our pain to them. This is an inherently empathic act. If you only view other human beings as objects, you cannot receive the sort of confirmation that you have successfully venting your pain into them that such malice and sadism requires. Malice requires empathy.

I see the propagation of evil as driven by many factors, but one of the strongest is the desire for revenge. Specifically, the desire for revenge where it A) is not directed back at the target but at some other person and B) the amount of pain is magnified as a punitive measure.

You hurt me X amount? Well, I hurt you 2X amount, see how YOU like it! You, and your stupid brother!

This leads to escalation, and that turns one simple crime which might even have been a total misunderstanding into a huge conflagration of back and forth escalating acts of evil. Whole nations have gone to war because of the desire for revenge and people being unable to restrain their more base urges to unthinkingly strike back at a ready target instead of working things out between them.

Lack of empathy is not even a factor. If anything, the primary factor is another root of evil, lack of self-control. Specifically, that critical component of self-control which allows a person to resist the urge to just do whatever their emotions tell them to do and instead think about the situation a moment.

Lack of empathy is a good place to start when examining evil, but it’s no place to stop.

Bad parents love their children just as much as good parents do.

I have said this before and will likely say it again, but nevertheless : this might well be the most startling and important thing I have ever uncovered in my endless rambling through the world of emotions, ideas, and memory that exists inside this skull of mind.

It’s not an easy thing to accept. In fact, I came to this realization over a week ago, and I feel like I have only absorbed a tiny fraction of its full and inescapable truth.

And it is truly inescapable. It is the sort of thing that once the words formed in my mind, I instantly recognized the inexorable truth of it. So while part of me does not want this to be true and wants to stick to the accusation, blame, anger, and “justice” model of the universe, as a seeker of truth, I cannot simply bury this in the back yard of my mind. It is true. I must accept this.

Here is the case for its truth, as simply as I know how to put it. Love is an emotion. Parenting is a skill. These things are not connected in any way, and one cannot be turned into the other by an act of will.

So no matter how much your parents truly love you, no matter how sincere and deep and powerful that love is, it does not make them any better suited to parenting.

And even more importantly, their lack of ability as parents does not mean that they simply did not or do not love you, or love you “enough”.

This is the truth of what every parent, at some point, has to say to an angry and accusing child : I love you, and I have done the very best that I can to raise you. I am not perfect. I have made many mistakes. But never doubt that I love you.

As we grow and mature, we become increasingly aware of our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, and our limitations, and it is not hard, as teenagers or even as adults, to see how these weaknesses and vulnerabilities can be traced directly to the imperfections in how we were raised and the weaknesses and imperfections of our parents.

And let be be clear : I am excusing nothing. I am demanding nothing. And I am not, I repeat, not, asking you to forgive anything, or everything. Forgiveness is not something you simply wish into being. I couldn’t talk you into it even if that was my goal.

Many people have truly severe grievances with one or both parents (or guardians… whoever raised you), and overcoming these is no simple or painless process. The conflicts with our childhood caregivers often form the very fault lines of our souls, and such deep pain is not easily washed away.

Instead, I will approach the problem like this : no doubt, gentle reader, you know a great deal about all the ways in which your upbringing was lacking. You can list, in great detail, all the things they did wrong from the moment you were born till your graduated from college. You know, intimately and bitterly, just how badly they bungled the entire parenting issue, and have grievances outstanding from decades ago.

But can you write the other list, the one that lists all the ways that they got things right? What about all those mistakes they never made? If you are having trouble getting started on that list, just think about all the other parents you have known in your life. Your friend’s parents, your aunts and uncles who had kids, your neighbors, your colleagues, families on television…. any examples of parenting styles and strategies you can think of. List all the mistakes other parents have made that yours did not. Do those count for anything?

Can you really be sure it could not have been worse? Can you be so confident that you understand all the challenges of parenting well enough to assign your own parents a failing grade?

Maybe they really did a bad job of raising you. Maybe they truly were lousy parents. Maybe they got a lot more wrong than they ever got right. Maybe you truly had bad luck in the birth lottery and your parents should never have had children at all, let alone raised them.

But that doesn’t mean they do not love you with all their hearts.

It just means that they were never very good at doing the right thing with that love.

Along with Beck’s show itself, of course.

I’ve been avoiding the political commentary on this blog for a while but this is just too darned interesting to ignore. You heard it here last, folks…. Glenn Beck is losing his show on Fox News.

I am pleased, but not exactly surprised. The writing has been on the wall for Beck for quite some time now, as sponsors flee, fearing being associated with his particular brand of full on hardcore looney tunes craziness. For a long time, his name was synonymous with Fox News, as he was their manic Pied Piper, and as long as he was red hot in the ratings and had millions of senile citizens all too eager to follow him into the magical world where nothing is ever or has ever been or could ever be their fault. that was fine.

But a crazed pedagogue like Beck has a short shelf life. As pollsters have noted, his appeal was based on creating sensation, like a magician who dazzles his audience with increasingly elaborate tricks like making Bush’s spending spree disappear and turning Barack Obama’s blackness into a condemnation of everything that has happened since Eisenhower. And to his credit, he wove a web of stardust and evil that kept people spellbound for oh, a year or two.

But eventually, even the maddest of genius magicians runs out of tricks, and when you are an embarrassment like Beck, it is only your ability to keep your audience spellbound and therefore uncritical that keeps the humiliation of being associated with such deranged flimflammery from biting into your audience’s desire to feel they are socially normal. Once the pace slackened even slightly, the strong desire of social conservatives to appear not merely normal but super-normal begins to take its toll, and when the sponsors started to flee in droves, that was the sign that Beck was clearly on the crazy and weird side of things no matter what his political stripe might be.

The moment some little old lady gets laughed at (or worse, sweetly patronized) by her peers for quoting Glenn Beck at the CWL meeting, you know that all the mockery has done its job and Glenn Beck is a joke and if there is one thing serious minded social conservatives cannot stand, it’s being mocked as weird.

The direct link, in my mind, between the advertisers fleeing and the death of Beck is that as your more normal and usual sponsors fled, the nature of the advertising on his show simply got less and less respectable and more and more shady and kooky seeming, and that is the kind of thing which makes social conservatives very nervous. If Glenn’s show was a neighborhood, then the decline in sponsors made it an increasingly sketchy and outlandish one, and that, more than any failure in the appeal of his message or change of heart about convervatism, will doom any conservative pundit in a heartbeat.

They just simply cannot standing the thought of someone thinking they were “that kind of person”. It is really just that simple.

And of course, as other are saying, it was clear that the other pundits on Fox were never very fond of Beck. He was embarrassing and outlandish and stole their spotlight, which was bad enough, but even worse, because he worked so much on sheer inspiration and a fine tuned sense of the madness of his particular crowd, he was constantly shifting the ground under their feet and making it so that even the Bill O’Reilly types simply could not keep up. All they could do is follow behind him and try to pretend that this all made sense to them while gritting their teeth and biding their time, waiting for his star to fall.

And fall it has, and there are all his friendly friends at Fox and Friends waiting, daggers drawn, in the rotunda. Presumably, there have been people at Fox soothing each other’s Beck rage by saying “Just you wait, the minute that little fucker loses steam, he is out of here. ”

And lo and behold, so he is.

My only worry is that without Beck constantly injecting random momentum into the GOP’s opinion machine, they might actually be able to calm down enough to put together a coherent strategy for 2012 and might even produce a vaguely electable candidate.

The good news is, all those Tea Party loons are still out there, refusing to consider sanity as an alternative and rejecting all possibility of compromise, so odds are, they will still doom the party even without fresh Beck injections on Fox every day.

And hey, odds are they will still be able to find Beck on whatever he does next anyhow. Loon or not, he still brings millions of people to advertisers, however shady, and someone will pay him for that. Or barring that, he will just become another YouTube and/or podcast pundit.

Keep doing your good work for America, Glenn. We’re pulling for you.

Cuteness. It’s an amazingly powerful force in the human psyche, and yet you hardly ever hear it mentioned. It’s the sort of thing that is so absolutely fundamental to how we see the world that we don’t even notice it or think about it much. We notice it about as much as fish notice the water in which they live. It’s easily as strong a force in how we think and what we do as our oft-ballyhooed (and booed) sex drives, and yet, because its manifestations are considered almost entirely socially acceptable and even beneficial, it has somewhat perversely escaped attention.

Think about it : the search for pictures which activate our “cute” response is second only to the search for ones which activate our sexual response in terms of Internet traffic. Almost as many people are looking to go “Awwwwww!” as are looking to go “Ahhhhhhhhhh…! “. Clearly, this is a powerful drive whose stimulation gives us great pleasure, and what’s more, all it takes is the right image to stimulate it.

I mean, look at this :

I has a fluffeh!

Doesn’t that just make you say “Awwwwwwww!”? The sleepy eyes on the dog, the adorable helplessness of the kitten, the sea of fluffy white fur in which the kitten is adrift… everything about this picture stimulates the cute center of our brain, and the resulting effect is so powerful as to completely take over our minds, and release feelings of affection, nurturing, protection, and attachment.

Clearly, evolution has given us this very strong drive, capable of swaying our reason and altering our perceptions, for a very good reason, namely, childrearing. If we did not find our children, and children in general, so endearing, and if this endearment were not so incredibly potent that it spills over to animals, cartoon character, and even cars, there is no way our motivation to nurture, protect, and raise our children could possible last through the longest maturation period in the animal kingdom.

A telling cue to this is in one of the most classic and cliched iconic images of cuteness is the classic bare bottom baby picture. ^[1]

Looked at objectively, one has to wonder why this image of a naked infant became so beloved. Specially, it is the bare behind that is the magic spark which seems to release an extra strong dose of the “cute” response. Why might that be?

The answer is that if we didn’t find baby’s bottoms not just cute but incredibly cute, there is no way our parental response could survive the incredibly strong signals from another strong drive, namely our “digust” response, that dealing with the management of said bottoms and their end products (ha ha) entails.

In other words, if baby bums were not cute, our parenting urges would die at the first diaper change.

This “cute” drive is so powerful that we domesticate animals who stimulate that urge and get them to live with us simply from this urge to nurture that which we find cute. Our pets become members of our families, just like our children do, and benefit greatly from this overflowing surplus of the nurturing urge.

It is so powerful, in fact, that it even gets mixed up with our love/sex drive. People of both genders invariably describe certain attractive members of their preferred gender (but interestingly, not others) as “cute”, and nobody seems to find this the slightest bit unusual. We use the same word to describe an adult with whom we wish to have sex and a child we want to cuddle, and yet obviously, we mean fairly radically different things in each case. Why, then, do we use the same word?

I think it is because, as a evolutionary strategy, some human variants have developed the urge to appeal to our two strong drives, sex and “cuteness”, at the same time. When viewed from that point of view, it is a winning combination. But one can’t help but wonder if the capacity for these drives to cross and combine plays a factor in things like pedophilia.

After all, the phrase “aren’t you a cute boy!” can be either adorable or creepy, depending on who is saying it, who they are saying it to, and how they say it, right?

So in conclusion, our cuteness response is so strong, it’s kind of fucked up.

Sorry for the grotesque mixing of Latin and German, but the proper translate for “Truth Over All” is “Die Wahrheit über alle” and I am pretty sure nobody who reads me would have understood that without going to Google Translate and I don’t want to end up getting weird tweets from Nazi organizations or some scheiße.

Truth. We pay a lot of lip service to the ideal of truth. We want it from our journalists, our lovers, even our politicians. We applaud heroes both fictional and real who fight for it and we all, to a person, claim to want it. Famous movie quotes talk about whether or not Tom Cruise can handle it. It even makes the list of ideals for that ultimate ideal hero Superman. And it doesn’t just make the list, it’s number one. Justice and the American Way (whatever that is) have to content themselves with silver and bronze, because in Superman’s mind, truth took the gold.

But like all ideals, the reality of life is more complex than can be summed up in a phrase or a motto. We all believe that what we think is true is The Truth, because nothing else is possible. It’s not possible to believe a lie. It’s not ego, it’s logic, or at least, the logic of a meat brain. You might pretend to believe a lie, or even fool yourself into thinking you believe something you do not, but you cannot believe a lie.

But for most people, the drive for truth is but one of many equally strong drives that wrestle for influence over our minds, our actions, and our lives every moment of every day. There is the desire for truth, yes, and a powerful drive it is, far more powerful than cynics and idealists would have us believe. Part of the powerful sentient human mind is an incredibly strong desire to understand the world and construct an accurate predictive model of it in our minds. But we also have drives to protect our fragile egos, protect ourselves from negative emotions, and keep our worldviews small enough to function in our conscious minds. And these drives, in most people, act as balancing and restraining elements to the drive for truth, so that for most people, the end result is a complex and three dimensional mind comprised of many diverse elements.

Now enter the philosopher. See, they are the unkempt and unworldly person over there who is staring off into space like they’re either in a trance or watching the most riveting movie ever on a screen three thousand feet behind the nearest wall. They are ill groomed, inattentive, and often somewhat unhealthy looking, and can shift from apparent catatonia to sudden impassioned animation with mercurial swiftness, often based on some inner process that only they themselves understand. They speak with great force about their latest treasure brought back from Plato’s cave, note the general indifference with which it is received, and lapse back into their impenetrable brooding, sure the NEXT insight will be the one.

That is what it is like to be a philosopher by nature. The definition is simple : a philosopher is someone for whom the desire for truth has become an all-consuming passion, and who pursues the truth without thought or hesitation as to the emotional or even practical consequences to themselves. We are a strange breed, and our love of the truth takes many different forms, from the crusading journalist to the research scientist to the implacable prosecutor to the keenly accurate accountant. But we all share the same impassioned desire to find, expose, and promulgate the truth.

The classic ponderer of the more traditional definition of a philosopher is merely the most extreme version of this basic truth driven personality. We philosophers are defined by the kinds of truth we seek, and for the traditional philosopher, nothing but the eternal truths underlying reality will do.

Yes, I consider myself one of this strange and often unloved population. Like a lot of your traditional philosopher types, I’m an odd duck, an edge of the flock kind of duck who tends to observe life from the outside and who spends a lot of time just…. thinking about things.

Often, we are dreamy and unworldly head-in-the-clouds types. This is the sort of personality that is attracted to philosophy, because this sort of pondering appeals to people who already spend a great deal of time in their own inner worlds and enjoy having something to work on in there.

But it’s a dangerous game, because by disengaging (or never having) the usual safety mechanisms in order to pursue the truth unfettered and unleashed, we blind ourselves to our own emotional and psychological well-being, taking untold damage as the baying hounds of the hunt drag us through the swamps in the feverish pursuit of their pray.

So we tend to be a messed up bunch of people. Arguably, you have to be somewhat messed up to end up a philosopher in the first place. IF we were normal people, we would be too busy having normal socially-engaged lives to spend time pondering the eternal verities. But like a lot of high-risk addictions, the pathology of this hardcore addiction to the sensation of insight makes the problem worse while treating its most superficial symptoms.

I cannot begin to calculate what damage I have done myself in my own pursuit of the objective truth of life. At times, it has even overridden my inborn pragmatism and my deep desire not to hurt others. The truth is a very jealous lover, and if you are not prepared for it, can push all other ideals into the dirt in its zealous desire to know.

It’s not something I could change about myself. You cannot back away from the truth once you have caught its scent, just like you can’t believe a lie. The genie simply cannot go back in the bottle.

But as I grow older, and the passions become more attenuated and refined, I look back at my life and ask the fundamental question : what has all this pondering and wondering done for me?

I could give a glib answer like “knowledge is its own reward” or “I understand more than most people”, but I am not sure. It could be nothing more than elaborate mental masturbation and I would have been a lot better off spending all that downtime learning a trade.

I guess that’s one question I’ll never answer, huh?

I have been thinking about us crazy naked beach apes and our relationship with nature (and Nature) lately, and it’s gotten to the point where I really ought to write some of these thoughts down before I forget them. And where better to share random thoughts than one’s public blog?

When last I touched upon this subject in my article titled Modern Nature Worship, I had, in the course of said article, concluded that every animal has a deep sense of what kind of an environment feels “right” to it, feels safe and sensible and correct to them. In short, what feels “natural” to them.

It’s a very important instinct, because it leads the animal to gravitate towards and remain in the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted, without them needing to understand any of it consciously. From the tiniest tadpole to the mightiest bull elephant, all animals derive pleasure from being in their proper environments and feel uncomfortable in the wrong ones.

And that, of course, includes us crazy big-brained monkeys who hilariously call themselves Homo Sapiens (which, after all, just means “Like Us, But Smart”). We too have a deep down instinct that tells us what sort of environment suits us.

But this is a complex instinct, because in our adventurous and sometimes tragic history as a species, we have been forced to adapt to radically different environments, and so there are a few types of places where we feel comfortable, each corresponding to one of the stops on our way to modern civilization.

First, of course, we came down from the trees. Our most direct ancestors were forest monkeys who had come down from the trees and learned to walk in bipedal fashion. They retained the ability to climb a tree in a hurry (as to we, as any parent who has seen how alarmingly natural tree climbing is to their children can attest) but spent most of their time on the ground.

Hence, we like forests. Green spaces with lots of trees and water running through them give us a comfortable feeling of innocence, purity, and “naturalness”, and this leads to things like tree-lined streets, tree-filled parks, and one of the most treasured retreats of childhood, the treehouse. Why do the young ones like treehouses? Because being up in a tree makes them feel safe. (Not so much their mothers, who picture them falling and breaking their necks, but you can’t argue with instinct. )

Sadly, our time as a species in this real world Garden of Eden was cut short by shifts in the global climate that caused the jungles that covered our African home to retreat and become deserts that would make the Sahara look like a kindergarten sandbox. Most of the humans at the time were killed, dying in an increasingly futile search for that environment where they felt at home.

But a small, lucky group happened to wander in the right direction, namely towards the southeastern coast of Africa, where they discovered that the one place that is always moist and fertile is the sea shore. Granted, it wasn’t a whole lot like the forest primeval that was our original home, but there was plentiful shellfish, salt-water vegetation, and a comfortable climate, so the forest ape became the beach ape.

(Yes, now you all know why I keep calling us naked beach apes. Ta da!)

And as a legacy left over from those carefree days of coastal life, we still retain our love of going to the beach to relax. Something deep inside us associates the beach with a relaxed and easy life, where it doesn’t take a lot of work to get the essentials of life, and there is plenty of time to relax, swim for pleasure, play games, and just soak up the sunshine.

Hence our idea of an “island paradise”. Our instinct to go to the beach to relax is so strong, it even supports a thriving seaside holiday business in Great Britain, where the beaches are terrible. And even when were are landlocked everyone still heads for “the shore”, be it lake, river, or artificial reservoir.

It was here, on the beach, that human beings had the leisure to invent much of what would be the basis for civilization, like improved hand axes, the throwable spear, and primitive herbal medicine.

And so it was as beach apes that we, many generations later, wandered back onto what had once been their forest home, then had been life destroying desert, and was now, as the global climate cooled again, turning into the vast plains we now know as the Serengeti.

This wide open land was our third stop, but it was one extremely rough neighborhood. There were huge opportunities (like enormous animals just waiting to be felled from a safe distance by those neat thrown spears of yours) but also huge dangers from the highly evolved predators and scavengers who were already there and not too keen on newcomers except as cuisine.

So human beings had to adapt yet again. We had to lose the last of our thick fur in order to make room for a ton of sweat glands (no other creature sweats like us), so we could chase our food all over the plains and tire them out without tiring out ourselves, and develop the kind of closely coordinating group discipline needed to survive when you lack the bodily advantage of the locals.

And hence, we also like grass. Meadows. Fields. Wide open areas with green on the ground. We spend a fairly unhinged amount of money just putting grass everywhere. Why? Because it makes us feel good.

Because, to us, it feels “natural”.

Oh, and one last thing…. why do we like pictures of broken-down buildings, rusting industrial machinery, and other signs of civilization gone to seed?

Because deep inside us lurks our animal selves, who resents all the strictures and unnatural compromises of civilization, and is soothed by visions of nature trimphant.

It all makes sense when you look at it this way, doesn’t it?

In the first part of this article, we discussed how labour and consent form the first track of how human beings legitimately acquire wealth and material.

This track is easily understood by most people, and resonates with them in a way that suggests that this track is, more or less, natural to human beings.

But the modern world is largely run, at the higher levels, by the other major track, which is the rewarding of risk instead of labour. Once we embraced capitalism via mercantilism in the age of the tall ship, material prosperity caused capital to accumulate rapidly in the hands of a small group of people, and this enabled this group of people, like the early bankers, insurance men, and venture capitalists, to increase their wealth entirely by backing the ventures of other people. These other people did all the actual work, and in return for the risk the investors took, they got a percentage of the profits ad infinitum.

Thus, a group of people became still more wealthy simply by signing a document. They made money because they had money, and this allowed their wealthy to grow to staggering proportions.

This gave birth to the first stress between these two tracks of wealth acquisition, because wealth acquisition via investment simply lacks the intuitive resonance that the labour and consent track does. It is easy for the average person to understand being paid for work. The work is obvious. You work the production line, and you can see what you do while you are doing it. You tightened that screw, or worked that press, and thus you created wealth for your employers, and deserve compensation. It fits into the labour and consent model perfectly. I trade my work for your money. It is no different than hiring a kid to mow your lawn.

But investment lacks that clarity. From the point of view of the average worker, what, exactly, did the investors do? This is especially true when, as in most corporations, the investors (usually at least partly stockholders) retain a permanent interest in the business for their risk. Most people can grasp a casino model of reward for risk. You risk a certain amount and get a certain larger amount back if the risk pays out. But that’s it. You don’t get a percentage of the casino’s profits forever. You are paid and that is it.

In the business world, that is where loans come in. A bank risks money with every loan, but they loan you a fixed amount of money and then charge interest. If you business does well, you can pay back the loan, and that is the end of the bank’s interest in the business.

But investing for a permanent interest simply does not make sense to people on a gut level. And the longer the business prospers, the larger this gulf appears. Sure, someone took a risk by fronting the founder of the money the cash to start that first shop, but that was generations ago. Surely they have been paid back now? What have they done for the company lately?

Modern business practices, with boards of directors many layers away from the people who do the actual labour, in addition to shareholders to whom the stock is just a string of letters on a computer screen and who couldn’t care less what the company does because they only care about the stock price, only increases this alienation between the labour and the investor. Add in the confounding factor that in many large corporations, the company itself owns a lot of its own stock and hence its fortunes are driven by the fluctuations of the stock market, as opposed to old-fashioned concerns like whether they make a product that anybody buys. It becomes harder and harder for the average person to understand what, exactly, the stockholders are contributing to the equation. After all, the investment came when the company sold the stock the first time. The company doesn’t get any money when other people sell its stock. Yet everyone is, theoretically, working for the stockholders. Why?

This gulf between the investors and the workers has never been larger, and recent world economic events have brought this to light in a painfully obvious manner. The trend towards more and more money in fewer and fewer hands has reached the point where the billionaires are nations unto themselves, and view any attempt to stop them from doing anything ever to be outrageous violations of their sovereignty, and use their vastly superior personal power to fund whatever it takes to protect themselves from the rule of law.

The tension has grown to the point where there seems no way for the average person to bridge the gap.

What do you think?

In the field of the psychology of capitalism (psycho-economics?), there are two main ways that human beings justify their ownership of and control over that which they consider their personal property. In other words, two theories of justified transfer of material into their possession.

These are via labour, and via risk.

First, though, to quickly clear this up : all human societies have had personal property. Despite what some well meaning socialist and communist theorist have said, even primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers have some personal property. This my spear. That is Klingt’s portable hut. This is our kill, not theirs. The amount shared in commons varies from society to society, but all societies have some degree of personal property. Therefore, it is safe to assume that personal property, like marriage, is natural to human beings everywhere, and not an arbitrary construct.

But where they is personal property, there has to be a method of transferring ownership, both in transferring it from the unclaimed commons and transferring it between individuals and groups.

The most common and natural of the former of these is via labour. The classic example is two friends walking through the wilderness when one of them finds a fruit tree heavy with ripe fruit. As his friend catches up with him, he picks a fruit, and begins eating it.

Most people would agree that this fruit now belongs to the person eating it. They have every right to eat it, or stick it in their pocket, or throw it away for that matter. It is their fruit. If their friend was to just take the fruit from them without asking and start eating it themselves, we would all agree that this was an act of theft. and quite wrong. This, despite the clear fact that moments ago, nobody owned the fruit, and thus seizing and eating it would have morally justified.

So what happened? As Locke said, by mixing an object with their labour, it become an extension of their labour and hence became part of their person, part of their personal property. By picking that fruit, our friend in the example took that fruit into their personal domain and thus signaled to all the other humans that this fruit is “taken” and they should look elsewhere for their own fruit.

This happens even in cases where there is no actual transfer of property in the legal or moral sense at all. In modern life, a perfect example is shopping carts in supermarkets. As people shop, they put items into their shopping carts. They don’t own the items. They don’t own the cart either. All of these things, most people agree, still belong to the supermarket, exactly like the items still on the shelves. And yet, if someone was to simply take off with another person’s half-full shopping cart, or simply pick items out of it and put it into their own carts, we would all agree this was extremely rude and quite wrong. Maybe it would not technically be theft, but it would feel like theft, and theft is wrong.

What makes it theft? Because by the simple act of putting the item in their carts, people have clearly signaled to all other humans that this is now part of their temporary personal domain. Legally, the item is not yet theirs, but emotionally and morally, it is no longer part of the public commons and is, in fact, theirs more than it is anyone else’s but the supermarket’s. .

Obviously, then, the labour theory of signaling a justified transference of public domain objects into private ownership is a deeply rooted psychological instinctual truth in humans.

But it is far from perfect. If all that was required was any amount of labour to justify transferring an object into your ownership, then stealing the fruit would be just as legitimate as picking the fruit yourself. The thief invests as much labour to steal something as the owner does to acquire it, after all.

Clearly, then, there is a different set of rules regarding the transfer of objects between individuals or groups than between transferring from the unclaimed commons to said individuals or groups.

This is the entire basis for our concept of ownership. Owning an item means it is no longer in the unclaimed commons and thus may only legitimately be acquired with the consent of the owner. Capitalism, then, is largely a system for managing these consensual transfers.

This basically boils down to barter. You have a duck, I have milk from my cow, I want that duck more than I want my milk, you want my milk more than you want your duck, we exchange duck and milk, and thus, we both have more of what we want.

Through this simple human interaction, we have increased one another’s happiness. Multiplied by all the human barter interactions that happen every day on planet Earth, it is clear to see why this sort of free trading results in happy, productive citizens. All a currency does is add a mutually agreed upon barter intermediary to the equation, thus making it even more fluid and granular and hence more efficient. I don’t need to have the milk you want for your duck. I can simply pay you for your duck, and you can then use that money to buy milk from someone else.

So the labour theory of value makes sense to most people, and it is how most of consumer capitalism operates. The institutions involved have become quite large and complicated and it’s a long way from two farmers dickering, but the essence remains the same : labour and barter.

But there’s another route to legitimate acquisition of material, and it’s the subject of the next part of this article : risk via investment.

VI. Thou shalt not confuse their innocence with your own. As we grow up, we lose our innocent. It is a sad but necessary part of becoming an adult. The simple safe world of childhood, where the world is no bigger than the house we grow up in and the biggest threat is bedtime, slowly gives way to the real world, with all its complexities, stresses, ambiguities, difficulties, and unpleasant truths. It’s a process we all go through, and no matter how grown up we might become, there will always be that inner child within us who wishes none of it had happened and who wants to “go back to when things were better”. And this is the part of us that comes to the fore when our own children are young. It is the part of us that, with the best of intentions, wants to preserve our children’s innocence as part of us wishes our own had been preserved. But as adults, we have to remember that loss of innocence is a necessary part of growing up, and it is we as adults who suffer far more from our children’s perceived loss of innocence than the child themselves. It is not our children’s job to preserve our own innocence, to keep the part of ourselves safe from the pressures and realities of adulthood. They can handle more than you think they can.

VII. Thou shalt not attempt to be a perfect saint of parenting. Restraint is a very good thing in a parent. But like all good things, it too can be taken to excess. Children do not need a robotized and lobotomized parent who is always the perfect, plastic model of saintly beatitude, who never gets angry, never seems upset, never gets stressed, and is never, ever worried about anything. For one thing, it’s absolutely impossible for anyone with a pulse to keep that up for the entire eighteen years it takes to raise a child. You are bound to break down sooner or later, and when you do, it will likely be in a catastrophic way as all your suppressed negative emotions boil to the surface all at once. A parent who is human and imperfect is far better than one who is falsely perfect most of the time then periodically explodes into tears and anger. And even if you could keep up the facade indefinitely, you shouldn’t, because children need to learn emotional coping skills from their parents, and they cannot learn what is never modeled for them. And they also need to know that part of dealing with others is that certain behaviours make people angry, and it is better that they learn this from you, someone who loves and cares for them more than anything, than learn it for the first time on the school’s playground.

VIII. Thou shalt give generously and meaningfully of your love.Every parent loves their children, but communicating that love to them is not always easy. Parents often worry about what is the “right” amount of affection to show towards their children, and I don’t claim to have a formula for the perfect answer, but I do have a question : Name one case you know of where a child was harmed by being loved too much. You can’t, can you? So err on the side of “lots”. Concentrate on how much you love them and try to find ways to show them. Telling them is not enough, especially if they sense you don’t mean it at that second. Speaking of which, concentrating on how much you love them will also help you through those moments when they are driving you crazy, so it is good for you as well as them. It’s win/win.

IX. Thou shalt treat your children with respect. Our first impression of our children is of a helpless, squalling, squirming creature who can do nothing for itself, and from there into the Terrible Twos and Threes, we are dealing with a person who is supremely self-centered, has to be constantly watched to make sure they do not kill themselves in ways that even mentally retarded adults would not do, and who tries out patience and wears out our nerves in ways we never thought humanly possible. This does not leave the best impression, and even a very patient and understanding parent might find themselves reacting to their child as though they were a very ill behaved adult, as opposed to a child who knows no better. But through all this, we must remember to not just care for our children, but to value them and respect them as well. Really listen when they talk, even if they rarely have anything interesting to say. Take them seriously when they are concerned about something. Never belittle or dismiss their fears or concerns. They do not have the advantage of your adult perspective on the world. Above all, always treat them with respect. That doesn’t mean treat them like an adult, but treat them with the level of respect that you yourself desires. Only this way will they learn to respect themselves.

X. Thou shalt meet thy children every single day. We do not kid the kids we want. We get the kids we get. And the truth is, we have little control over what their basic personality will be. When your little one came home from the hospital on that first day, they already had their own personality, moods, temperament, likes, dislikes, and attitudes. You can’t change these things. And the further truth is that, no matter the genes of the child’s parents, they are a brand new human being, a fresh combination of traits that might well be absolutely nothing like their parents in any of the basic ways we normally look for when we decide with whom we wish to associate. Think of everyone you have ever known, and think : my child might be like them. Or like nothing you have ever experience before. You have to accept, as a parent, that despite raising them, loving them, worrying over them, and being more intimately involved in their lives than anyone else every will be, you don’t truly know them. Every day, you meet your children and get to know them a little more. But they are their own beings, and you will always be faced with the reality of the child you have, who might just be the sort of person you would not even mix with socially if you could help it. Knowing this before you conceive is best. But even learning it after they have moved out of the house after college can save a parent a great deal of confusion and heartbreak.