A Thin Margin

"The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That’s impossible. Capitalism works only if the vast majority of the population are kept poor enough to never quit working, are kept poor enough to accept distasteful jobs society cannot function without. If everyone were a millionaire, who would empty the trash or repair the sewers? It follows that the poorer the general population is made, the greater the worth of the money held by the wealthy, in terms of the lives which may be bought and sold with it."

— Michael Rivero



I can't say for sure where my future will take me. I do harbour very serious hopes of eventually becoming an academic researcher who writes his own books and gives conferences on subject matters pertaining to human nature, and this is a profession that is likely to pay well if I get far ahead enough.

But I will never forget that this privileged route I can choose to take, just to even give my passions and ambitions a shot whether I succeed or not, means that I am adequately fed, clothed and housed upon the hardships of others, many of whom will never have the opportunity to get a formal education, leave the borders of their country, contemplate career choices, survive until the age of fifty, or live without the insecurity of those things I am privileged with - food, clothing, shelter and social stability. Who I am and what I can do rests on the shoulders of primary workers who began an agricultural revolution thousands of years ago such that division of labour freed some people from being chained to the soil. I belong to that category of people free from hard labour so that I can, in economic speak, "put my resources to better (more efficient?) use". With a cosmic roll of the dice, I might very well be a poor labourer who has no access to any of the opportunities I have now.

For those reasons, it would be a sin not to make the most of my potential. I will strive to ensure that I make the most out of what I can do and contribute and, as far as I can manage, give back to society where it has allowed me to chase my dreams.

Can't believe how easy it was to not see it coming. I'm thankful that at my trough, a friend I've once helped came giving me my own advice.

Never externalize your insecurities. Feel low? Avoid situations in which you will be judged socially or where you're expected to "be yourself". Take some time off alone to work your issues out before dumping them on a cherished one. Some of those cycles of despise, when allowed to start during moments of weakness, can be awfully hard to get rid of.

You'll find yourself, alone.

My First Plant - The Venus Fly Trap

Against the superstition of my parents, I got myself a venus fly trap from Takashimaya Cold Storage two days ago! (I used to own a typical female tree lizard when I was 11 years old and had to release it into the wild when my mum became pregnant with my brother because it was 'inauspicious'.) Why only now? Because I had never seen it sold anywhere else around Singapore before. This is officially the first plant I have ever owned, and as an evolution and natural design junkie this is probably THE plant to own.

Costing a silly $28.50, the venus fly trap has always been a childhood fascination for the simple fact that it is a very different kind of plant, which makes it cool. It doesn't just sit around, immobile, settling for bland water. It lures, seduces, attracts and kills, which means it has personal tastes and an appetite. Awesome.

You can read up all about it at HowStuffWorks, but in a nutshell the venus fly trap is an ode to evolution. It is native to the coast of North and South Carolina, because of the abundance of wetlands and humidity. Most plants can't survive in these areas because the soil is acidic, and minerals and other nutrients (which are necessary building blocks for plant growth) are scarce. The venus fly trap has evolved the ability to thrive by finding an alternate means of getting key nutrients such as nitrogen via living creatures like insects which also contain additional energy-laden carbohydrates.

As a result of trying to own a venus fly trap outside of its natural wild habitat, my venus fly trap is quite a baby for the care it requires. In order to mimic its natural conditions, distilled or rain water is needed as it cannot survive off tap water that is treated with unnatural chemicals. The dissolved solids in tap water - sodium, calcium, alkaline salts, sulphur, chlorine and magnesium - are detrimental to its health. My brother and I had quite a bit of fun trying to distill our own pure water, using a trick I learnt from the survival tip on how to extract drinking water from sea water (click here for another variant of this trick that can be done at home). Other simple, practical and readily available sources of pure distilled water include condensed water from air conditioners and car battery water.

The venus fly trap may survive without eating prey, but it certainly flourishes when it has nutritious food sources. So, if the venus fly trap is not located in the wild, feeding must be manually done. Good food includes flies, spiders, crickets, slugs and caterpillars within the length of 1/3 an inch (one inch being the size of an average trap). 2-3 bugs a month constitutes a healthy diet.

In the absence of a brain and animal perception, the venus fly trap accomplishes its task of capturing prey through specialized leaves that are both mouth and stomach in one. The leaves forming the trap secrete a sweet nectar that attract insects in search of food. It's a very interesting process but gets a little bit scientifically technical from here on, so a copy and paste from the HowStuffWorks page will have to do:

"When an insect enters the trap, it is likely to run into one of six, short, stiff hairs on the trap's surface. These are called trigger hairs, and they serve as a primitive motion detector for the plant. If two of these hairs are brushed in close succession, or one hair is touched twice, the leaves close down upon the offending insect within half a second.

What causes the leaves to squeeze shut? Nobody knows exactly how the sequential, mechanical stimulation of the trigger hairs translates into closing the trap. The prevailing hypothesis of the day is that:

1. Cells in an inner layer of the leaf are very compressed. This creates tension in the plant tissue that holds the trap open.
2. Mechanical movement of the trigger hairs puts into motion ATP-driven changes in water pressure within these cells.
3. The cells are driven to expand by the increasing water pressure, and the trap closes as the plant tissue relaxes."

The plant is thus capable of "distinguishing" between prey and inedible debris according to whether more than one trigger hair is touched. The food selection process may not be perfect (because real food in the form of flies and spiders may be crawling all around the plant, but the fly trap may be closed shut over something useless such as a leaf or twig), but this simple strategy has allowed it to do without muscles or a brain, which are very costly organs and tissues to sustain.

The digesting process is also very remarkable. Once the trap fully closes, the leaves form an airtight seal through long hair-like projections known as cilia so that digestive fluids and insect parts are kept inside the trap and bacteria and molds cannot enter. The finger-like cilia create the awesome impression of spiny teeth that has captured the imagination of monster-plant story spinners, but they are really only used to keep the trap latched shut.

Sometimes, a trap does not close shut and as a result may suffer from a bacterial infection, rot and fall away. The venus fly trap can tolerate losing traps because it can eventually sprout new ones. However, beyond this, the venus fly trap is also capable of losing traps "strategically" through "planned obsolescence", and this is one of its most amazing characteristics to me. When a trap runs its course of about 10 to 12 closures, it loses the ability to capture anything. The leaves of a trap remain spread wide open and it then devotes all its energy to the process of photosynthesis for the remainder of its life span, usually around 2 to 3 months. This former trap thus no longer goes through the ritual of attracting insects and eating them. In a purely evolutionary sense, this is somewhat similar to how menopausal mammals contribute to their social groups. This way, if a trap is repeatedly stimulated by inedible objects either because it is incompetent or poorly located, the rest of the plant can recoup some of the energy and ATP lost on its inefficient trap and make it focus instead solely on photosynthesis.

Once the insect is firmly gripped by the trap, a process of digestion begins. The trap secretes acidic digestive juices that dissolve the soft tissues and cell membranes of the food, serve as an antiseptic to kill bacteria and enzymatically digest DNA, amino acids and other cellular molecules into small pieces that can be eventually ingested by the plant. The process continues until only the hard exoskeleton of the prey remains. Once the prey's nutrients are depleted, the plant reabsorbs the digestive fluid. This serves as a signal to reopen the trap, and the prey's remains are left behind. In natural conditions, wind and rain water helps to remove the remains but, indoors, I'll have to manually remove them for my plant.

As this is my maiden attempt, I'm not certain of my ability to keep my venus fly trap alive. But I'll give it a shot. Most plants hardly pique my interest but this high-maintenance creature certainly is a beauty!

Chinese Prayer

When I go to the chinese temple to pray, I usually experience a sensation of reverence. This is quite a recent and novel development, given how it was that only about four or so years ago I was anti-religion to some degree.

However, much of the awe and humility isn't so much because of the holiness and spirituality behind the religion and practice (although they do play a huge part still), but rather because of the fact that it belies a long-standing tradition. When I get on my knees, I am acknowledging that this practice arises from a philosophy and way of life that has sustained the lives of thousands of generations before me.

I find it virtually impossible not to pay my respects to that.

Midway

Been offline for a pretty long while, but the girlfriend and I have departed Southeast Asia and headed off for the India-Nepal leg of our trip. At this point, we had just left India after 5-6 days traveling around the bustling cities of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, and are nicely nestled in Kathmandu. 6 days here, and then I'm off to Washington DC for my psychology conference!

Actually, there's a transit point between South Asia and the US for me, where I'll be in Singapore for a day. I think that day is a Monday... Bad ass fate.

Once more, get updates from Angie's blog, where she details our adventures around South Asia!

Southeast Asia on a Shoestring

I'm currently out of the country at the moment on my long-awaited graduation trip. For updates, do head over to Angie's blog, for a really awesome coverage of our journey!

No Yong, Chin & Ng (2011), YET

Fudge. We didn't get SUPC, so there goes the chance for the Asian Pillars of Psychology trio to make our mark as undergraduates. There's always more ahead.

Meanwhile, this comes as a very relevant article (forwarded to me by my evolutionary psychology professor) after last night's eventful visit to Le Baroque, with the NUS law exchange students holding some kind of post-exam party:

Is Love Color Blind?
by Steve Sailer

Challenge Accepted, Challenge Done

About a month and a half ago in Whine and Dine, I basically allowed myself to rant about the mountain of work I had to do (a rather rare occasion that I did about something mundane). In it, I said that I had to grapple with:

1) four modules
2) one thesis
3) three essays
4) three presentations
5) at least two publication projects
6) the Stanford Undergraduate Conference project
7) planning my graduate trip
8) working out my APS presentation in Washington DC
9) Graduate Record Examination
10) running a friend's psychology study
11) teaching assistantship
12) research assistantship
13) and more

all at more or less the same time, and that the one-week mid-term break was a make-or-break point where I either pull through or completely crumble, my dreams turning to dust and my GPA going down the drain.

Yes it was a rant post, but I ended it off basically saying CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

Today, I stand relatively unscathed, having completed almost everything and making it through (with the sole exception of the Stanford Undergraduate Conference not garnering a reply yet). Because of this, which I do consider to be quite a success on a personal level, I therefore feel compelled to reiterate some personal mantras I always tell myself, at the risk of sounding pompous.

1. Negativity never helped make anything better. It might make you feel better in some small kind of way, but just by rationally thinking about it, panicking, stressing out and complaining never improved things, especially if the odds are against you. Why make your looming mountain of work harder for yourself to complete, and worse still, irritate other people around you? It does not suffice to say that sometimes we can't help it. All it does is satisfy some part of our brain responsible for emotional gratification, or our primal desire to bail out or seek sympathy. You can continue to think that way if you do not want to accomplish anything. Perhaps the only negativity that is permissible is associated with hate, such as a burning desire to destroy or own your work so as to get it out of your way.


2. Just do, part one. Many times, the worst part of doing something is the part before we even get down to doing anything, because we contemplate the fear of failure, we experience the anxiety of embarking on a task that is potentially difficult or painful, and we entertain the apprehension of even trying. That is the worst and most unforgivable thing that can stop us - when we don't even give it a shot. If failure doesn't even get a chance, forget about success.


3. Just do, part two. You are often more resilient than you give yourself credit for. The moment you're thrown into the deep end, you'll find a way to survive. Of course, there's the odd failure, but going back to point 2, at least you found out. It would be extremely silly to miss the chance of finding out that you can succeed. And in most cases, we make it through somehow. Those times we make it through will give us the confidence we need to take on greater tasks in future.


4. Just do, part three. There's a lot of work to be done and you haven't started, so the road ahead looks like an examination paper with twenty questions, or a blank document expecting to be filled with 10,000 words. JUST GET STARTED. Do the more enjoyable parts first, or do the questions that are easier first. Once you gain momentum doing the tasks that are least costly to your time and efforts, you'll usually find that the rest of it isn't as difficult as you thought. The most daunting part of an essay is knowing that your document is completely blank. Start filling it out. The rest gets easier once the content starts to flow and your job list starts to shrink.


5. Enjoy the ride. Relish the challenge. Think of life as a journey, and that this is a small bump in the road. Years down the road, you'll laugh ridiculously at how difficult you thought your problems were then. Get real.


6. Point 5 requires you to be optimistic. Yes, you have to be, otherwise you would not dare to do anything. Like point 1, pessimism about your own capability is a feeling to be entertained if you don't want to pull through. It is not going to be easy for people who are dispositionally pessimistic, I'll grant that, but whatever it is, find a way to suppress your pessimism. Talk to people, get social support, and most importantly, do that because you WANT to remove your self-doubt, not because you want others to agree how uniquely dire your situation is.

Yes, the truth can sometimes sound like tough love, but truth is not a democracy. Carpe diem.

Human or Spiritual?

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

- Teilhard de Chardin


I'm not sure where I stand on this one but it does provide some food for thought.

Last Spanish Class

I guess I've always thought this, though I've never felt compelled enough to write about it until today when my Spanish class came to an end. We spent the last class studying about the festivals in Spain, and our Professor explained to us the significance behind the festivals which are heavily influenced by Catholicism. Finally, we finished off the lesson with a video showing the various festivals celebrated by natives across the country.

As the video went on I couldn't help but marvel at the diversity and the richness of the culture and tradition I was witnessing. It struck me that it is really the small but very embedded things like these - looking forward to your holiday festivals, carrying out the rituals of the tradition (the Spanish eat twelve grapes while counting down to the new year, carrying the "Three Wise Men" (Los Reyes Magos) on platforms while the whole town is gathered on the streets, getting chased by bulls while wearing red in Pamplonas, dancing and making merry in public), visiting friends and family on important dates, always having something to cheer, drink, dance, sing and celebrate about - that make one proud to be part of something and want to perpetuate these things, generation after generation. I almost felt like crying for some reason. I think I feel quite strongly that I'm missing out on something important.



Cultural traditions like these retain the child-like innocence and longing in those who have been captivated by them when they were kids. They grow up, get married, have kids and want their own sons and daughters to experience what they did, because the experience is so significant and personally meaningful, and therefore important. Art, beauty and performance in culturally rich countries like these live on because these festivals allow those forms of expressions to thrive. It does not take some profit-driven economic nonsense to determine if art to them is worth pursuing or not. At least from what I saw, art and performance is important because the tradition and the culture is worth preserving. And boy were those festivals huge. On fiesta day, my Professor says that nobody stays at home. Sometimes, Spanish who are overseas miss it so much that they gather around television sets watching the celebrations back home, because it is inconceivable to forget about the celebrations. What longing and devotion that is. Maybe that's really what it takes to feel like part of something, and how a character that is guided by the heart, so that ideals and beliefs are stood up for, is formed.

I've thought hard about it, and I honestly can't say anything about my own personal culture that I'm particularly very proud of, nor do I even really know what it really is. I just was never brought up adequately that way, and I think my brother is there too (although he's far less aware of how potentially important this can be, which can be bliss seeing how agonized I am about this issue). Chinese New Year isn't half what it was one or two mere decades ago, and most youths I know of aren't proud of it or see it as a chore. I think Christmas fares somewhat better, but it is so terribly commercialized that I think many people are chasing commercially-fabricated dreams rather than celebrating traditions and values. Kudos to those who still genuinely put in the yearly efforts to re-establish kinship ties.

I must go to Spain one day to see for myself what this is like, right in the flesh. I will never truly know what they're experiencing, because I never grew up there and I think that it is in our developmental years that these things capture the heart. But I think it will be more than enough for me to experience it vicariously through the emotions on their faces.

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

- Albert Camus

Is Philosophy Dead?

I am reminded of the latest book Stephen Hawking published late last year titled The Grand Design. In it, he proclaims that "philosophy is dead."

I can only hope that he said those words in the spirit of a publicity stunt, because if he really meant it, I must say that I am sorely disappointed. For someone whose enterprise is dedicated the search for knowledge, meaning and truth (and no less someone many people admire for his intellectual brilliance), the statement demonstrates that he has completely and utterly missed the point.

Since the beginning of man's ability to philosophize, thinkers who consider themselves the end-all-be-all of knowledge have been trying to kill philosophy over and over again to no avail. I am reminded of Hegel's belief that philosophy ended with him.

One only needs to return to Albert Einstein for insight on why seekers of knowledge even do what they do:

"The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religion."

To quote a few useful rejoinders to the statement that "philosophy is dead,"

By Angie Hobbs from Angie Hobbs' Blog:

"It's an extraordinarily ill-informed view of what philosophy is, even if we leave to one side the vital work that philosophers like Zeno did in kicking off mathematics. What of the valuable work in, for example, ethics and political theory and aesthetics and philosophy of mind that philosophers do when they have studied the supposed 'facts' with which scientists present them?"

"... What of the fact that philosophers are often asking different kinds of questions from the ones that Hawking asks? Aristotle says that one can look for four different kinds of 'cause' or 'reason' (aitia) when examining any thing or fact or state of affairs: material, formal, efficient and final. I suspect that if Aristotle were to read The Grand Design he might suggest that Hawking has concentrated on the material and efficient explanations of the cosmos, and simply not fully understood the force of questions about possible formal and final explanations."

"To say that the law of gravity allows the universe to create itself from nothing won't do: is the law of gravity supposed to be 'nothing'? Why is there a law of gravity and not no law of gravity? Appeals to M-theory will not satisfy either. Quite apart from the fact that this theory is by no means polished or finalised [...] appeals to M-theory are only pushing the problem upstairs: even if all the maths eventually works out, we can still ask 'Why M-theory and not nothing?' This does not mean that the answer is necessarily a designer God [...] though again, there is space for such a view. It does not even mean that there has to be any answer at all to the search for a 'final' cause of the cosmos; but humans can and will still ask the question, and some of us will feel that Hawking has not understood what such questioners are asking."


By Wes Alwan from The Partially Examined Life:

"... We should really ask people what Hawking and his ilk think of literature and the humanities in general. “I am only interested in the hard sciences and everything else is squishy and impractical and insufficiently number-ish” is not an argument. It simply reflects an orientation toward activities that are as far away from social concerns as possible. It’s what we associate with being a nerd, and in a sense these sorts of pseudo-philosophical Papal Bulls by the popularizers of science are simply the ultimate revenge of the nerds.

Worse, they are a rejection of interiority, a rejection of the idea that reflection is a worthwhile endeavor. Our own thoughts and feelings cannot be “data”; me [sic] must concentrate only on empirical objects. It’s an attempt to kill off large areas of inquiry, because those areas of inquiry defy easy answers and point to the limits of scientific inquiry."


And personally, as a cheap jibe at "philosophy is dead" (Hawking, 2010), the statement is inherently self-defeating because it is a philosophical statement.

Returning back to Einstein's quote, if philosophy ever dies, so will humanity.

Great Philosophy

Great philosophy is transcendental in the way that it is timeless, universal and requires little context. One can peer into the depths of a philosophy and know it speaks of truth without the cumbersome and lengthy explanations that science has to go through just to get close. Our automatic connection to great philosophy is instantaneous and revelatory because the unifying theme is humanity.

I think existential awareness or consciousness, a term I will loosely use, can be a double-edged sword. A lot of human experience is rich because we just go through them spontaneously, without entirely knowing that we are. Well, maybe we can know we are experiencing such emotions and experiences - that will be far better than if we went through life not knowing anything - but I think the modern tendency to want to scientifically and rationally know everything can be extremely detrimental to savouring life's experiences.

Those who know, just know. It is like how, if I had to explain what love is to you, you will never know love. I think the myriad self-help books capitalizing on science to teach everyone how to do everything from love, relationships, leadership, to immortality, will eventually lead everyone to miss the point.

(Almost) Perfect Brains

"Turing's original insight is as singular as Darwin's idea about natural selection, and like all great ideas, its simplicity hides its depth.

---------

It has been said about Darwin's theory of evolution that it's the ultimate tautology - the survivors survive. This faux complaint presents a powerful feature of evolution; whatever works to keep you alive and get your genes into the next generation is just fine, no matter how weird the reasons or the results. But there is another feature of survival that is often not emphasized so much - survival is hard, desperately hard. Darwin understood this clearly and emphasized it in his title to Chapter 3 in The Origin of Species - "The Struggle for Existence." Mere persistence from one moment to the next is a struggle. So the augmented tautology becomes "The survivors survive but their life is desperate."

... all early humans can be seen as quite desperate, living a hard life with the threat of starvation as a constant motivator. Hunting and gathering is simply not very efficient, and until agriculture was discovered, early humans were always just one major mistake away from starving to death. This point is hard to overemphasize. Life is unforgiving, and so life's mechanisms had a constant pressure to be efficient - to capture, store, and process energy efficiently. And when we look at the components of life, cells, they are literal wonders of efficient energy-handling.

Out of the pressure comes efficiency. We all know that we become much more efficient and creative when we are desperate - when circumstances dictate that we absolutely must find some solution to a problem even though and money have almost run out. Desperation is indeed the mother of invention. Plato called it necessity, but he really meant desperation. Life itself responds the same way: The tougher the times, the more crafty and efficient the solution; such is the power of evolution" [italics mine]

- Read Montague, computational neuroscientist, Your Brain is (Almost) Perfect


Cognitive neuroscience, computational theory of the mind and evolutionary understanding are indeed strange bedfellows that have come together to realize the potential of understanding human consciousness in the coming century.

And the italicized points are precisely, to me at least, why evolutionary thinking cannot be taken lightly. Detractors may dismiss it because of its tarnished past (brought on by determinists or extremist right-wingers with moral motives) or its whimsical present (pop books and magazines wielding evolutionary reasoning for sex and attraction and just-so stories), but its underlying logic still presents us a vital window to understanding why our brain is simply so efficient. And evolutionary psychology has still a lot more to offer insofar as the brain continues being a decision-making information processor. Computational theory of the mind (CTOM) combines to bridge the gap between 'machinery' and consciousness, and there we will find answers in the future as to how what we have always regarded as the mind - spiritual matter, consciousness, ideas, thoughts, etc - can be produced by a warm mass of tissue and neurons.

It really doesn't hurt at all that its not just the evolutionary psychologists who are touting or at least acknowledging the reasoning power of evolution with regards to studying the human mind. Read Montague is one such case. Regardless of whether we have to skirt the terminology of evolution which bears the baggage of misunderstanding and misinterpretation, we will continue to find the logic and terms of adaptation and functionality in future studies of the mind if we are to understand consciousness in a scientific manner at all.

Will be eagerly devouring the book in the next week or so. CTOM holds immense promise.

Live

Yeah it's a TC Bank advert, but it's still a darn good video which strikes right at the heart of what it means to live.

Sometimes I play soccer on Sunday morning and we still see some uncles bringing a team down and taking on the young'uns. Some of them are in the 40s range, but they're still up and running, alive and kicking.

Maybe most of all, they're still bros who've got each other.

When we stop asking why, when we stop being awesome, when we stop dreaming, we die.

Whine and Dine

Work-life balance is at an all-time poor at the moment. At the rate I'm going I'll probably lose all my hair, develop stomach ulcers, bust an artery or lose my soul like Natalie Portman in Black Swan (except not so glamourously).

There's always school work, of course. Presentations and assignments for four completely unrelated courses (Design Thinking, World Politics, Cultural Arts and Identities, and Spanish), each with its own research essay and examinations, and then the thesis. Throw in my supervisor's publication projects and the Stanford Undergraduate Conference project, and that's three more or so huge projects outside of standard curriculum time, concurrently. Add to that planning for grad trip from April to May, squeezing in the APS Conference in Washington DC at the end of May, and Hong Kong in June. And if I get Stanford, which is also at the end of May, then that's Washington + California in the span of one week (probably have to pass on it). Then there's the GRE retake on March 24th (haven't began preparing for, AGAIN), my friend's study to help run at the moment (as well as the eventual data entry of 100 participants' survey responses), teaching assistantship (thankfully and mercifully ends tomorrow evening) and lastly research assistantship. And a whole list of errands to run - reapply for driving license (which I lost last year), get contact lenses, set up bank joint-account, go for immunity jabs and stuff for the grad trip, etc etc. My list of things to do is hitting the goddamned roof.

Next week, my much-needed midterm break will be here and I have this nagging feeling that if I don't sort out at least half the stuff I have to do, I will flunk everything that I'm doing (or will have to do eventually) - failure to meet coursework deadlines, poorly written thesis, lack of preparation for GRE, failure to send in the submission for Stanford and, generally, messing up my entire life plan (so far) for graduate studies.

Interestingly, while this is an obviously absolutely shitty situation to be in, part of me relishes the challenge. And regardless of what happens, I'm gonna get my ass into graduate school.

But first things first, do or die next week.

Some Thoughts on Goodwill

I woke up to one of the crappiest days I've had in recent times. The past week had been a mess - assignments that piled up, presentations due next week, the thesis to take care of, and other obligations I had to see to. The past three days saw me notching a total of about ten hours of sleep only, and when this happens I get an outbreak of sinus that usually lasts the whole day. The feeling of tiredness and a sneezy, leaky nose is one of the most miserable feelings ever, especially when there's a whole day ahead of you from 11am to 10.30pm consisting of studies to run/participate in, meetings and classes to attend, and teaching assistantships to conduct (of course this is nothing compared to enduring starvation or a lifetime of poverty, but... you get the drift).

I don't really know how to put this, but let me try. In my experience so far I think it is really rare to observe genuine goodwill in our modern day and age. Perhaps it is because our results-oriented societal character makes us think of efficiency all the time. Or maybe we are reluctant to help others because we are afraid, either of not getting immediate returns for our goodwill, or that we will be taken advantage of. People want bang for their buck, and are impatient to get it. People think of "there's no such thing as a free lunch" a lot more than "a little goodwill goes a long way."

I'm certainly not trying to impose or insist on any particular way of doing things here, but what I hope to do is to present a case where what goes around does comes around, even if we may not immediately see it. Goodness begets goodness, and so does evil, in the long run.

How so in my case? I think I've always done my quiet little part for the people who matter to me - nothing more and nothing less. I'm not saying this because I'm consciously doing this in some warped self-interested manner everyday; I'm simply reflecting on it as it happened. And "people who matter to me" are very loosely defined. When my help is asked for - explicitly or implicitly - I seldom see reason not to give it. When people see what I do in research as an undergraduate and perhaps garner some interest in the possibility of going to graduate school, I'm glad to help and give information and my personal heartfelt take on the matter. When I see an elderly person on the train, I give up my seat; absolutely no questions asked. I wouldn't dare entertain the possibly of contemplating my act (often resorted to when people start thinking of costs and benefits), not that I had to. When I do work for others, either because I'm commercially contracted to do so or because I just want to help, I do the work because I want to give them what I can offer. This spans from designing logos, drawing caricatures, running studies, editing a coursemate's essay, taking care of the administration of a class, whatever. It doesn't matter. Do it well, do it good, do it for the fact that you desire to give of yourself first, and then for its external benefits - such as remuneration - second. That's a personal philosophy of sorts to me.

So as I slogged through today with a leaking nose and uncomparable drowsiness from lack of sleep, I was relishing the close of the day at 10.30pm with my negotiation class, for which I was a teaching assistant in. It had been a hectic term, and finally the course was ending - today was the last class before the final examination. I was absolutely taken aback and very pleasantly surprised when the Professor summed up his lesson, changed tack and said, "and finally, we have a very important person to thank today - our TA." He invited me down to the front and handed me some envelopes which I later opened after the class to reveal $100 worth of book vouchers.

Cynics and skeptics may say whatever they wish (my parents took their potshots when I told them, saying, "Oh, maybe he got the vouchers for free, and he could've just afforded them easily anyway"), but at the end of the day those vouchers were of value to a poor student like me. However, more than that, it indicated that there was some degree of recognition of the work I had put in. Cynics can debate the degree of recognition all day long, but to me the fact that the recognition was there shows that the cycle was complete. What goes around comes around, goodwill begets goodwill.

It made a case that my Professor described in class more salient. He recalled a time back in the 1990s when he visited China with his wife. When he checked into his hotel, a street chauffeur approached him and offered him chauffeur services for $50, whereby the Professor and his wife would be brought anywhere they wanted to go the whole day for that price. It wasn't a bad proposition, so the Professor took it up.

The next day, the chauffeur showed up and abruptly changed the terms of their deal. He said it will now cost $60. The Professor was taken aback - how tactical was this move! The Professor had no alternative - in fact, the alternative would be to endure his wife's distress, as she hated to negotiate. So he agreed to the chauffeur's terms, and the chauffeur got the $60 he pushed for.

My Professor then said that the cruel joke here was that the Chinese chauffeur had no clue what he had lost out on. My Professor, being a typical American-Israeli, would have spent the day traveling with his wife for $50, and tipped the chauffeur with an additional $50 for a job well done. But because the calculative chauffeur chose to approach the relationship in such a competitive manner, all bets were off on generosity and giving.

Perhaps it's not the Chinese chauffeur's fault for trying to rip off a traveling Westerner. But the point is that how we choose to conduct our relations with others can and will go a long way. We can choose to either go at it with goodwill or be calculative. What do you lose when you give? I don't know about most others, but for me I think in most cases it's usually very little. I think it often takes a rather competitive and calculative nature to sweat the small losses and perceive some painful cost in every little thing he/she does for others, and in a society where such a nature dictates the norms of social interaction, we stand so much more to lose.

My Professor's little gesture of acknowledgement reinforces my firm belief that if we hold on to being genuine and sanguine about our dealings with others rather than ulterior motives, some day we will get our just desserts.


P.S. It always amazes me how tokens are so much more effective in demonstrating reciprocity than cold, hard cash. Already, gift vouchers are probably the least remote cash items - we certainly find it harder to think of a gift of fruits, a watch or a dress in monetary terms, than a $50 book voucher. Yet, simply because the $50 gift voucher isn't a $50 bill (which would ironically allow me more freedom to choose what I want to buy - Homo Economicus would prefer the $50 bill) I'm still able to perceive it as a gift rather than a payment. This would allow me to remain very much in the realm of social norms, marked by reciprocity and closeness, rather than market norms, marked by transactional relations and coldness.

Regret

“Regret comes in all shapes and sizes. Some are small like when we do a bad thing for a good reason. Some are bigger like when you let down a friend. Some of us escape the pain of regret by making the right choice. Some of us have little time for regret because we're looking forward to the future. Sometimes we have to fight to come to terms with the past, and sometimes we bury our regret by promising to change your own ways. But, our biggest regrets are not for the things we did - but, for the things we didn't do. Things we didn't say that could've save someone that we care about. Especially when we can see the dark storm that's headed their way."

- Lucas Scott, One Tree Hill


"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

- Sidney J. Harris

The Perils of Denying/Rejecting Human Nature

The solutions each of us proposes for problems of the world, if we took the time to think about it, depend very much on our intellectual and moral inclinations and starting assumptions.

I very much believe that there is a human nature which is innate to every human being that, at the crux, cannot be altered by socialization or some kind of mere hope, morality or ideology. This starting belief informs my intuitive interest in subjects like evolutionary psychology, Realism and Marxism, because such subjects are inspired by how so many aspects of our behaviour do not change despite the long span of human history. The patterns just inevitably keep repeating themselves, as evidenced by the vast literature of war, societal conflicts and love throughout the ages.

Despite numerous social movements that have seen humans living through the chastity of Victorian England, the oppression of Maoist China, the enlightenment of Renaissance Europe to the decadence of the Dark Ages (an obviously inexhaustive yet clearly diverse list), fundamental aspects of aggression, attraction, status hierarchies, coalition formation, kinship and reciprocity, just to name a few, still remain. Despite the promise of Liberalism and Idealism, which are all logically sound philosophies, wars still happen and states are still concerned with security. Exploitation still happens all over the world, at both global levels (the exploitation of third world nations by advanced capitalist states) and smaller levels (the exploitation of the poor by corporations).

I don't think I'm wrong in my judgment of the reality in this sense, even if it may appear rather bleak or, worse, nativist. It is clear that, with recurring travesties of war, discrimination, exploitation etc in the world today, the power of socialization (trumpeted by behaviourists, social constructivists and environmentalists amongst others who believe entirely in nurture/culture while refusing to acknowledge nature) and the power of cooperation (because man is good and rational) requires a serious raincheck. The worst thing to do, given where my intellectual concerns come from, is to deny that human nature exists and dictates a significant chunk of our motives and actions.

This is dangerous because denying our nature and our propensity for certain behaviours is to diagnose the problem wrongly and suggest the wrong cure. It is perhaps striking how so many people are surprised when others behave in a self-interested manner, or are upset in the sense that they get caught off guard when war and conflict happens. It reflects, perhaps, a certain kind of self-delusional belief that social theories of learning and positive reinforcement can eradicate 'bad' traits in humans. John B. Watson (1930), the founder of behaviourism, famously said, "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." Clifford Geertz, a firm believer of the culturally malleable human, also defined how many social scientists think today and therefore a large degree of the entire social sciences enterprise. Hence, to these theorists, "change society or culture and you change people... Intelligent, scientific socialization can make us whatever we want to be" (D. E. Brown, 1991).

The attempts to suppress 'bad' human nature have been huge fiascos. Suppression often results in a rebound effect, and large scale oppression of natural tendencies are bound to either fail (consider the Kibbutz movement, the Hippie movement or the feminist movement, just to name some) or will experience some 'leakage' - the secret societies that operate underneath a lawful society, the rich husband who cheats on his wife, the insecure friend who behaves competitively even though the friendship is tight. I guess with such high hopes for a better world, it should come as no surprise that many people are disappointed or jaded with the outcomes.

It should make more sense, then, to find ways to work with/around our human nature, instead of working against it. Monogamous marriage law is a great example to cite. If men are most aggressive when they have no mates, institutionalize monogamy. This solved the huge problem of a lack of females in society for men who weren't rich or powerful enough to get wives (although you get the problem of the cheating powerful husband because he is driven to seek extramarital affairs, but that's a small cost compared to the huge benefits of reduced societal violence). Realism provides the wisdom that states seek security, so find ways to induce balance of power. Zhuge Liang knew this so brilliantly when foresaw that stability will be achieved when the three kingdoms were balanced against each other. Marxism tells us that the rich elite will exploit the poor. So empower the poor - give them welfare and education - and offset the power differential between the bourgeosie and the proletariat. Stubbornly refusing to acknowledge exploitation, or perhaps worse, calling it by another name (comparative advantage and mutual gains?) to hide its dark side, will not result in betterment for society.

Betterment will come slowly, as it often does. With my basic starting assumptions outlined above, I believe the creation of institutions that work with human nature are often the solutions that succeed and result in progressive change. A good sense of creativity and level-headedness, with a healthy dose of reality, will go much further than overzealous revolution or radicalism with the refusal to acknowledge that our human nature cannot be denied and won't go away.