Pretty much all of the ugly problems of the world - economic inequality, climate change, domination of our politics by money, and just general crap quality of life - are made worse by the gargantuan scale of our institutions. Bigness may not be the cause of our many problems, but it goes a long way towards preventing any progress in solving them. Government is vast, impersonal and distant; corporations are faceless monoliths that have their own needs and logic. I’ve long believed in the principle of subsidiarity: that institutions should be as close as possible to the people they affect. It’s why I believe in DEVOLUTION rather than revolution per se: revolution would keep our institutional elephantiasis, while devolving to smaller units of government and of business would make progress much, much more possible.

I think collapse of the US, Soviet-style, is not a matter of if but of when… and HOW. Empires crumble, and they’re often messy on the way out. I’d much rather see a planned devolution, rather than the Republic of New England skirmishing with the Union of Great Lakes States over access to the St. Lawrence Watershed, or nuclear war between Texas and California. But history will decide.

Even the Wall Street Journal is positive about the benefits of a breakup, and it’s true that this is one area where the far-left and the hard-right have often met. I think, though, that they envision a US much more like the EU than my own preference of a patchwork of city-states and county-scale governments from sea to shining sea, with a functioning judicial system to arbitrate disputes and ensure civil rights, so that the remnants don’t turn into apartheid states.

I think we’re much more likely to devolve into some Beyond Thunderdome dystopia than an anarchist commonwealth, but the future has a way of surprising you…

I woke up today wondering about altruism - the impulse to put another person’s interests ahead of your own. Is it all just, basically, people doing things out of a sense of obligation, drummed into their heads by religion or goody-goody liberalism? Or is there something fundamental that we all share, something that has enabled this counter-intuitive selflessness show up again and again throughout human history, uplifting us and guiding our better natures?

Animals do it: a bee, for example, gives up its own life when it stings an intruder. Somehow we humans formed hunter-gatherer bands (the original “is not a gang, is a club” social organization) and protected the weak. Darwin wrote that “each man would soon learn that if he aided his fellow-men, he would commonly receive aid in return,” and that over time, this habit became something that was actually passed down in our genes. And throughout human history, in fact, altruism shows up as the highest of all virtues.

In the Jewish faith, one of the primary teachings of God is “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). Christianity, of course, shows us Jesus dying on the cross for all of humanity, and proclaiming a “new commandment” in addition to the famous Ten: “that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34).

The everyday philosophy of our times is not only based on Judeo-Christian values, but also from the teachings of classical antiquity as well as pop culture. The Stoics in ancient Greece believed that a wise man would act for “reasons which do not further his own desires and projects” and would realize this “will benefit all equally, as well as himself.” In the great American film Bikini Summer II (1992), a couple of rich daddy’s girls meet a homeless man and take him home to care for him. In return, the bum teaches them about the real world and helps them start a band, thus proving the truth of the Stoics’ thesis.

The modern ethic, of course, is to put self before others. Ayn Rand holds that altruism is a form of theft. Reality TV shows are without exception (as far as I know, but then again I can’t stand reality TV so I never watch it) dedicated to the proposition that people need to fuck each other over in order to get ahead. And the unanswered question always seems to me to be who would want to live in a world that looks like reality TV? While it’s true that people do often behave that way, is it really so great that we want to marinate ourselves night after night in cut-throat behavior?

What seems to often get missed is that helping people out is fun. In fact, there are actual neurochemicals involved, which is kind of cool. A team of Israeli psychologists found that a group of individuals who displayed selfless behavior had a certain variant of the dopamine receptor gene, which is associated with feelings of pleasure. This corresponds to earlier U.S. studies that found that people who help others often experience a “helper’s high.”

There’s a grim kind of “eat-your-vegetables” Puritanism that’s often associated with volunteering and doing good, which obscures the fact that the helper’s high tends to be far more sustainable than the selfish kind. There’s really no end to the good that can be done, while there is a functional limit to the number of Benzes that you can actually enjoy. the second one doesn’t feel as good as the first, and by the time that you have a different S-class for every month of the year you may feel a certain jadedness set in. I’ve never heard of a volunteer being jaded after having made too many elderly shut-ins smile.

If the reality is that the things that our culture tells us make us happy actually don’t, and that the crappy boring things are really more fun…. what does that say about our culture? And what other things that are commonly accepted as true might be utter and complete bullshit?

It’s my last week on the West Coast. And of course, California is beautiful: the smothering heat that is scorching the rest of the Southland becomes just, like, normal summer weather by the time it’s cooled by coastal San Diego winds. It’s just about perfect.

My responsibility for my last week of work is to wrap up my few remaining projects and get everything set up to work remotely. They haven’t been able to replace me (or even find a candidate) so as a result they’re letting me work from, well, basically, wherever I want. I still don’t even have a clue - literally - where I’m going to go first, let alone where I will end up. So this creates the room for me to explore where I really want to be and what I really want to do, in a way I couldn’t do as calmly if I were stressed about money. It’s like “somebody” wants me to take this trip…

I’ve always taken a very gingerly approach to “fate” in my life. I was raised lapsed Catholic, with the basic watered-down Italian and Irish folk superstitions that many of us got as kids. I came up with the idea that my late father was “watching” me (from somewhere) and generally had the luck of a fatherless boy: I got into scrapes (usually of my own design) but something always saved me from serious misfortune. As I grew up and rejected religion, I strongly cast all that stuff aside… but kind of kept a little DMZ in my psyche so I can still access the part of me that accepts fatalistic thinking. The feeling that everything happens for a reason has proved too deeply rooted to shake, though I disagree with it rationally. Instead, I have more sort of a peace treaty between my rational and pre-rational minds: never use the woo-woo part to make plans and important decisions, but for things I can’t figure out, it’s OK for the pre-rational mind to trust that there’s some underlying order in the universe, and that it serves me. I do not “believe,” because that seems more of an intellectual exercise. I don’t think about fate or destiny with my discursive mind - not out of some idea that it will “break the magic” but rather that the nature of belief kind of excludes conceptual thinking. It feels kind of like riding a bike - don’t go too far in either direction.

I’ve watched in a kind of dismay as the marketing phenomenon known as The Secret has filtered out into American society. Propelled in no small part by Oprah Winfrey, the human Energizer Bunny of trends, the hype surrounding the book(s), video(s) and associated impedimenta of productization (The Secret 2008 calendar! The Secret toilet paper!) have created an enthusiastic base of supporters - and an equally rabid backlash (why is it that everything in America turns into two opposing teams?) that I find pretty much equally cringe-inducing.

On the one hand you have the starry-eyed, I’ve-got-it-all-figured-out smugness of the Secret initiate, who blames everyone for their own crappy luck - why won’t those Darfurians quit focusing on what they don’t have and see themselves already eating food and not homeless? On the other side are the dour conservatives who believe any insight not written in the Bible or the Wall Street Journal is a priori crap. Neither of these groups is a team I want to be on.

My rational mind believes in the power of positive thinking, but knows you can’t change the physical world with a thought. My pre-rational mind is infinite, always in the Now, and knows all stories have a happy ending. My rational mind believes that if my pre-rational mind keeps me happy and in a cheerful state that I’ll be more resourceful and handle things better — leading to a more positive outcome.

It works for me. But please don’t call it a Secret…