Chapter 19: Truth & Consequences

“It is the theory that decides what can be observed.” —Albert Einstein


Seeing survival as the primary motivation in human existence is not new with Mises. Spinoza considered it dominant in the mid seventeenth century. Ernest Becker saw death as the “worm at the center of the apple” a few decades ago. Mises placed human action at the center of what we would call a self and nicely avoids the insoluble dilemma of mind/body interaction with his focus on purpose. Mises considered himself a theoretical dualist, which I take to mean that he employed both mental and physical concepts together but did not postulate independent hypothetical forces as well. He is a monist, although with mental realizing a fundamentally different function while grafting on the physical.

That alone makes his system closer to reality, but the issue that strikes me as most original and compelling is his inversion of cause and effect on the etiology of positive social emotions. It changes the way we play the game. Carts and horses are rearranged everywhere. It is useful to see this in examples. For this purpose and my own benefit, I shall use myself as someone for whom this inversion offered a path to salvation:

As stated earlier in this book I was purchased and raised by people with whom I had no biological or legal connection. For $250 it must be admitted they got a good deal in most ways. I stayed out of trouble, did well in school, played sports year round, got along with everyone, and almost supported myself financially since age twelve. But all was not well in the land of secrets. I could do what I willed but not will what I willed. For example, I could go somewhere with Stanley Andersen and never enjoy it, yet go anywhere with Uncle Frank and be thrilled. That never changed, no matter how I felt about it, although, to be honest, it only mattered to me in that I was rarely with Frank.

No matter what I did the Andersens never seemed satisfied. Some ethereal substance of human compassion seemed to be missing. I could connect with animals, and people in various contexts, but at home we were almost autistic, and the responsibility for that deficit defaulted to me. No one looked at context. The problem was soul, mine. Doing what I willed was not good enough. I should also be able to feel what they expected. But nothing ever changed. I liked being with Frank and did not like being with Stanley. That was simply fact.

So what to do? I imagined there must be ducks in multiple dimensions (agencies) that really cool people somehow all get in a row. Mind, body, and soul presented the leading contenders for fields of agency in those days, although soul might be more neatly tucked into mental today. Apparently all three of these areas mattered, and it appeared that I could only function in one. I could hit a baseball, solve geometry problems, and save money but apparently not radiate the warmth of human kindness. Soul and mental needed work, as I ranked near the bottom on everything that could not be weighed or measured.

There were no books for those deficient in human compassion, so I worked with what was available. Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale were popular then, and positive thinking was the dominant technique. So in addition to keeping one's shoulder closed, and taking outside pitches to the opposite field, you had to think in a prescribed way about hitting also. A home run with every swing! Should one just ignore realistic possibilities, or perhaps in good taste mentally feign limitatons? I don’t know, but I did hear that “winners never quit and quitters never win”;” laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”; “positive thinking is better than negative nothing”, and so on almost forever. We would run out of printer ink before we run out of aphorisms.

Just reciting this stuff makes me sick. I hated it then, and I hate it now. Perhaps I have no talent for blind optimism. I scored poorly in pretend and trying harder simply illustrated my ineptitude. Perhaps I simply did not know how, although there is no limit to how much one can expend (waste) in trying. Then again, it might just be a stupid idea, and I could somehow see the mistakes. The Marines say they do the difficult immediately, but the impossible takes a little longer. But that Emperor has no uniform. Maybe the Marines should be issued a dictionary with each field manual. "Impossible" should be impossible to misinterpret.

I cannot say that I spent long, lonely periods shouting injunctions at myself, so maybe I did not give it enough effort. But one can say that about any project and waste a lifetme trying to square the circle. Yet I did construct the idea that there was a big world of mental action, and perhaps even a place for a soul, in which I got the lowest grades in class. Maybe it would be best for me simply to try to compensate. Someone involved with me might never feel the radiation of love and caring, but I could make sure the bills got paid and the grass was cut, as might a competent domestic. I was defective, no matter how many batters I could strike out, how high my test scores, or how well I pretended to enjoy artificial.

Pavlov was more prominent then than now. He conditioned responses in dogs so perhaps that is how people work. If something happens often enough you begin to expect it. That expectation might act to insure it happening. A virtuous circle could develop. Coaches say winning is a habit. So just win, Baby, and eventually it will become automatic. But you cannot fix a problem that is not there with an action that would not work if it was. The bottom line became that no matter what I tried and how hard I worked nothing changed. Everyone else in the world seemed to have been born with something not present in me. I was the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz. If I was going to be artificial, the Terminator would have been my preference. At least I could have been enthusiastic about that, in my limited way.

But you know how this stuff goes. You start down a path. It gets thicker and darker. Nothing works, the feelings become intolerable, so you just shut down. You look away, pretend nothing happened, and file it subconsciously as something to address later. It goes nowhere, and the judgment does not change, but that elephant gets locked in the garage. Good luck there.

We had a definite emotional deficiency in my family. I assumed it was due to me, perhaps because I was an only child. Children with siblings learn to share. They come to like giving away half their Twinkies or letting someone borrow their glove, bat, bicycle, or car. To me that usually seemed like an imposition, but then everyone else had been conditioned to love it, just like embryos hung upside down in Brave New World loved to work upside down when they grew up. I could struggle with it but saw little gain. As a child I resembled a congenial puppy who was house trained and barked at intruders. But I did not wag my tail very much, and perhaps a poodle would have been a better choice.

Now consider Mises’ formulation. Feelings are not endogenous. They do not stem from operant conditioning or hormonal stimulation of the milk of human kindness. Compassion is not the result of faking it until you make it, whereupon it transforms into donations and Peace Corps service. The flow goes the other way. Love is not bestowed, it is collected. People get affection for each other because they realize that through cooperation they mutually benefit. It is a win/win situation with a huge dynamic upside, which does not go unnoticed. This is cool in that the process does not happen without awareness and is logically intrinsic to purpose. We can will what we do, and what we do results in what we feel. Love is not a sensation we observe in ourselves. It is an awareness, a mental/physical correlate of cooperative action. This is redemption for me. It is something I can grasp. No messing around with souls and mental agents. Let’s play ball.

The world does not see it as just described, but that is quite my point. The world sees love flowing from soul, self, or pheromones out from the person onto others. The others have nothing to do with it except as triggers, like light or movement. I think that demeans relationships. People explain love as if contained in the individual. Is the loved one irrelevant other than as a stimulus? Does the relationship contribute nothing to the feelings? Fortunately, we do not simply react as light sensors when someone passes by. We can just say no to pheromones. We can choose.

It makes little sense to me that the loved one would be so incidental, but this was not apparently my strong suit. I, for example, have no reaction to incidents like the earthquake in Haiti or famine in Somalia. I am bothered by the animals caught in such situations but not the people. I don't presume a connection, quite the opposite. I could be stereotyped as the typical capitalist, and hence seen as having cheated and lied my way to my twenty acres. I owe it all to the vast numbers of others who I swindled along the way. Whatever the mechanism I expect that somehow their crisis will become my responsibility. I was never big about sharing my cookies when I was young and have little interest in giving away my acres today. I pay at the office every two weeks and paid all my early years for the fact that the Andersens could not have their own children. Losing supplies does not make one prosper. Spinoza says that is experienced as displeasure. So does Mises. So do I. Altruism does not work, has never worked, and will never work. What we get is self-interest that under the division of labor brings benefits to everyone. We appreciate that, and call it love and all the good feelngs that go with it. But that is all there is. There is no self-sacrifice except for those who want to save the world, and the only sacrifice they refer to is that done by someone else.

We felt nothing in the Andersen family because there was nothing. It was not a deficiency in me. It was a deficiency in the relationship. There was no honest sharing of responsibilities. We did cooperate in maintaining the yard and locking the doors, but the idea of pooling our resources in addressing the critical issues of existence never occurred. They lied about the basics, and I lied about my response. That is not sharing. That is pretending. I do well in any relationship with reciprocity. All the feelings are there then, at least from my perspective. So the relationship is there also. The other and I cooperate on something that matters to both, and as a result all the affects of human compassion exist in that relationship. But these situations do not generalize to abstract humanity. I do not like humanity in general. I like individuals with whom I share life on this planet. But I don’t owe them anything nor they me. We just travel this life together and are both the better for it. And the love comes from that, not from some endocrine gland at the base of the brain. It exists in the relationship, as it should, because it is not caused. It is lived, together.

There is no way to measure the milk of human kindness. It does not come in milliliters or ounces. It is a metaphor that does what metaphors do—present abstractions as concrete. The abstraction is the relationship between the people. The love does not exist there. It is something we feel because of what we do there. But like all cause and effect relationships, we define it by the cause, and the cause here is both people acting together, not two individuals acting apart. There are differences in the degree that people love, but it can not be measured with an instrument. It is measured by the degree of interdependency involved in dealing with life issues as a team. One does not sit on the couch managing the remote, eating Cheetos, and feeling the love. One might remember a love, but that love was not borne eating Cheetos and emoting. It came from shared efforts to address the issues life presents us. The more you block out the world, the less you feel, the less you love. The more you experience of the world, its pleasure and its pain, and the more you cooperate with others to deal with the problems, the more you love and experience the positive emotions. The State can take away the product of those shared efforts and give them to whoever they dictate as more deserving. But they can never create or delete the love. In the end that is all that really matters. And along the way it is what makes life worthwhile.

As another example, Karla works at the animal shelter, when she feels like it. Sometimes she does not show up. The dogs do not leave, which means someone else has to work her shift. Karla does the minimum, never anything extra and does not manifest any intrinsic interest in the animals. Those that care for the animals make this their life. Those who work for the money do not find the pay satisfactory. Yet Karla says she loves the dogs as much as anyone else. Can she make that claim? Is that information only available from her private perspective? Perhaps, if love emanates from within, but if it is a product of the relationship then she cannot love them as much as the regulars. Love is a product of appreciating the cooperative support in ensuring survival. The dogs give the regulars purpose and they give the dogs hope. Both benefit and you can see that in the wagging tails and the staff smiles. Karla gets paid. When she is there the dogs get fed, like in prison. They share space ten hours a week and nothing more. Feelings are a part of that, and the feeling that fits here is indifference. My guess is that Karla shares indifference at more places than the kennel.

Also, a National Guard advertisement has a young, sturdy lad say that his priorities are “country, community, and family”. The ad is well done, the people are all well chosen and I can see the intended audience trying to emulate the guardsman. If it was me as I existtoday but being the intended age I would say he has those three priorities in inverse order. And I would have to realize that my concept of family is ideosyncratic in that dogs have a prominent if not priority spot in my sense of family. But if was me as I was at age eighteen my reaction would have been to try to copy him which would have prompted a need to shore up my love for country. How does one do that? I guess as a youth one could rely on idealism and the capacity to cast others in a way that invites cooperation. If not that then perhaps you just fake it untill you make it. “Constant repetition carries conviction”, says a positive thinking quote. But what might have sounded like duty when I was young sounds like brain washing today.

The point here is that there is nothing to work on that would bring a person and country together unless they share the same ideology and a project to support it. There is no way to gain affection for the country while lying on the couch eating Nachos. And there is no way to share ideologies if you do not. Repetition then simply brings irritation.

Finally, Hillary Clinton was talking about an Arab country and said they are going to have to develop a more positive attitude about the United States. Apparently they are supposed to do that on their own. I have no idea how. Neither does Hillary.

The bottom line is that we do not love and therefore get involved. We get involved and therefore love. That is such a better way. We can control what we do and through our actions what we feel. It does not work the other way around. There is no free lunch. The price of love is experience. The price of experience is loss. No loss, no love. We did not design this system. But we have to live in it.

Chapter 18: The Competition

"An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it." --Mahatma Gandhi

Psychoanalytic theory is another view of human behavior. Sigmund Freud was a frustrated neurologist who, following the fashion of his time, tried to explain human behavior through Newtonian Physics. Everything in that system is mass and motion. His implicit model of the human mind was a reflex arc. The energy was electromagnetic. People were electronic circuits that generated instinctual energy and attempted to discharge it into the world. The system worked towards a reduction in energy, the process of which was somehow experienced as pleasurable (perhaps by another neural circuit). If this energy was not discharged it could be short circuited into other areas and produce neurotic symptoms. Therapy and health resided in removing these blocks so the energy could flow freely through. It was essentially a “just do it” philosophy, although with a hedge. He allowed for something called sublimation that could magically turn a sexual drive into a Mona Lisa or aggression into plowshares. He needed an out because people do not always get healthy by running around just doing it; instead, perhaps just as often, they get sued.

Freud succeeded in offering a model of man as machine, the problem being precisely that. Man became cause only, no purpose, and if everything is caused and determined then how does he change? There is no entrance into the system because that effort itself has to be caused, and so on all the way down. This leads to the following type of problem:

Waitress: “Would you care to order?”
Customer: “No thank you. I am a determinist so I am going to just sit here and see what happens.”
Waitress: “Hmm, perhaps I will just wait to see if I come back.”

Or course this would apply to Freud’s therapeutic endeavors as well. The people had left the room; only machines remained.

It gets worse. People understood the restriction scientific reductionism set for human experience. It ruled it off limits. So they snuck the patient in through the back door by hypothesizing that somewhere in the patient’s head there existed a conflict free ego that could assume human responsibilities. The conflict free entity in the therapist’s head could talk to his counterpart in the patient’s head, perhaps while the two of them observed the dialogue. Essentially the therapist could do nothing (since everything was determined) while pretending otherwise, and then charge for it. Just like the Federal Reserve.

We are more than instinctual drives and discharge channels. We act, we choose, we have purpose. We are not machines. Nor are we machines with little people in our heads pulling little levers. We are people who act, which means we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We think, choose, and act in concert. This only appears magical if one does not realize it is all simply part of the same thing, action.

There are more, perhaps many more theories, although I do not claim to be an expert on this topic. Frankly, I find most of them tedious to read, like government manuals. Operant conditioning pairs behavior with a response, while classical conditioning pairs an antecedent condition with a response (Pavlov). Again, the problem they have is that no one is at home. The theorist simply operates on a physical level assembling happy little habits like a Swiss watchmaker. Their writing chronicles an empty space where the mental is void of people and the physical is void of matter. Not much to root for there.

Cognitive interpretations see mental as an energy source. This implies a metaphysical dualism. This is the position to which most people default. Religion says that the thought is as bad as the action. Philosophers say a man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks, he becomes. And coaches say that winners never quit and quitters never win. Mental is seen as an instigator and potential equalizer, a possible fusion/fission reaction. But anyone can see that thought is different than action, so the concern must be that thought can inexorably lead to action. Yet it has no means to do so and is not even fueled by its own energy—it simply plugs into the physical.

If you find yourself thinking excessively about cookies in the cabinet that does not mean that the thoughts will somehow drag you into the kitchen. Rather it indicates you have a desire looking for a means. So deal with the desire. Targeting the thought is the wrong appoach. It has no authority; you cause the action. And you control it better with alternatives than injunctions. The choice should not be an abstract one about cookies or not, but a specific one between these cookies and these jeans. Do not expect a few platitudes to hold back desire. Intellect is no match for emotion. Control is your job. Choosing is how you do it. Do it right; compare apples to apples. Then decide.

There are of course theological views of human behavior. People should know where they stand on them. It is not possible for us to avoid considering ultimate purpose. And it appears to me that people who do not have a God tend to act like one. But other than from a faith based position we do not seem to have any idea what might help us to prosper in any world except ours. Personally, I choose to believe in a higher power, but apparently what will be will be regardless of what we do about it. So it seems reasonable to make the most of this life and let God handle the next one. That is, unless your faith tells you otherwise. But then be careful not to step all over the principles that seem to help us in this world.

Then there are instinct theories, but as we have said that does not help much. The term instinct is simply a name we give to something we do not understand. It is an attempt to bridge thought and action. Emotions are hybrids as well, although they are more than just hypotheses. Affect is thought en route to action. But feelings are not agents, so we cannot build a theory of human behavior on them.

Yet we need to consider them. Feelings are evidence-based information. Emotions are hybrid creatures, part mental and part physical. They could potentially be measured, meaning some endorphin or neurotransmitter could be correlated with an experience. They underscore sensory experience and help us make sure we do not miss that which is important. It is impossible to cry about something that does not matter or enjoy something you do not like. The practical point is to keep your feelings and use them, rather than deny or distort them. Behavior, not feeling, is our area of responsibility. Emotions are just signs.

The metaphysically critical issue is whether emotion can usurp authority or does authority remain with the person. A bet could be made here, the truth of which can be assessed in consequences. I am axiomatically saying that the individual at all times in all situations remains in charge of the action, which means that "losing control" involves choosing to do so. A person never gets swept away by emotion. Instead, he or she chooses to act emotionally, the consequences of which might be disastrous or the fact of which may violate important ethical principles. But the claim is not that our choices are always good, just that we always make them. Sometimes a choice explodes, but no one makes us do it, and emotion does not cause it. The buck stops with us, at times raining down in pieces on a very dumb move.

It is irrelevant how strong an emotion becomes internal to the individual. By itself it can never storm the Bastille. Control is entirely defined by when an action enters the external chain of causality, and that is always a matter of choice. This is an all or nothing issue like pulling a trigger or trading a stock—you either do it or you don’t. Of course emotions can run right through ideas. Resolutions rarely last through the day. But the caveat about fighting desire with desire remains. When an affect is opposed by a comparably energized alternative, any action, no matter how intense, can easily be seen as a choice, and there is always a valid way of evening up the sides. It remains to the individual how he presents to himself the possible exchange, i.e. 1) read about the monetary system versus no one else is, or 2) read about the monetary system versus someone has to. Such a choice probably most often takes the abstract form of free lunch versus responsibility, but while desire is never subtle, responsibility might need representation. The case for it needs to be presented in high definition accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Honor is not hard to maintain when consequences of dishonor are clearly laid out. And we control the media. The more we care, which means the more we have committed and the better we present the alternative to impulse, the more we hold fast to our principles.

We are in good company here. This was Spinoza’s approach to emotions. He was the one who called the positive ones those that support our existence and the negatives ones those that oppose it. And he saw emotions simply as facts about the nature of our experience. There is much to sort out about them, and that is what makes us human. But suppressing emotion is like sticking one's head in the sand. Not much down there is going to help us.

Spinoza’s term for our responsibility in handling emotion was to find the “adequate” response. Keep the emotion; figure out what to do about the situation. Anger will not eat you up, but losing it might get you killed. Anger provides motivation. The same is true for love, which is a feeling that may not last untill death do you part, but which is something, and better supervised than left wandering around at night on its own. Keep your affects until you have decided what to do with them. They will not bother your T cells. Emotions both guide and energize us. Do not leave home without them.

Action defines us. Thoughts can spin around forever and never leave our heads. Emotions are unborn actions, but they can grow. Thoughts can be left alone, while emotions might need light supervision. Choice, however, is a full time job. Choice defines what we are and what we become. We are purpose, a small bit of autonomy in a world of causality. Perhaps this connects us to a higher power, and if so, then all the more reason to get it right. It is what we do.