To what extent is decision making rational

I took a decision theory class as part of obtaining an Industrial Engineering degree; it was interesting learning quantifiable tools to apply to decision making. Those don’t map directly onto how we ordinarily tend to make decisions, more related to analysis of engineering problems and solutions, but there was some overlap.

It was even more interesting taking logic classes, related to pursuing two separate degrees in philosophy (a long story), learning to what extent we actually use binary logic as part of our form of reasoning. Binary logic is also how computers “think,” to some extent. Really that’s more the underlying basis for hardware operations, that is then designed to run complex forms of programming code, in that case. Binary logic is also what is taught in logic classes, in a related but different form. In that context it is said to tie back to reasoning.

It probably works better to call what computer design is based on “Boolean algebra,” but it’s essentially the same term, just expressed differently. I took a digital logic class once too, along with a practical lab; fascinating stuff. Those forms of logic gates and circuits aren’t completely separate from the argument and derivation forms used in formal logic classes, just not all that similar either. The mapping / terminology for both looks like some sort of advanced math script, like what is left on the chalkboard after a calculus class.

Back to the point: we don’t use ordinary reason in a form similar to either. It’s true that we express truth values as true and false, but a lot of the commonality ends there. Ordinary language cannot be converted to assertions of binary logic, even in discussion or presentation of ideas in which it would seem most likely to apply. If someone had taken formal logic classes they might be able to try and speak in structured phrases, and then related derivations, that match that type of form, but ordinary language and reason is really completely different. I’ll try to explain why, and then work back to how decision theory tries to land in the middle, but applies best to engineering problems, versus everyday life decision making.

Things really seem to be true or false (facts, propositions, assertions), until you examine them more deeply. Then it turns up that truth values have other range, that there is a lot of indeterminate scope, that things can be unknown, or true only in a limited sense, or related to preferences but not truth. Assumptions frame the context of any line of thought, and that context dependency means that most ordinary assertions are only true or false within a limited framework of ideas.

This isn’t only a reference for boundary condition problems, but that is an interesting special case. Is it day or night out, or raining outside or not? Usually that’s all clear enough, but there would be boundary condition cases. A lot of ideas and contexts just don’t relate to truth value variables. What should I eat for dinner, is the person I’m in a relationship a good partner, what is the best value car to buy related to a set of performance attributes within a certain price range, which stock should I invest in? The last example is quantifiable, at least; if one could set up some formal expectations and modeling that one could be answered, it would just involve guesswork and probability calculation. That’s the kind of thing we worked on in that decision making class, setting up and using models.

I’ll give an example. If you buy a car you might have expectations and preference related to a number of different factors (cost, style, fuel efficiency, maintenance expectations, etc.). You could weight those as being important to different degrees and then review different models based on how you’ve modeled weighting, assigning proportion values and doing a calculation. Of course without making up any formulas you would be doing the same sort of thing in thinking it all through. If a problem involves multiple variables that involve guessing out expected probabilities this kind of approach can help, but otherwise it’s too much extra process without enough benefit over an informal evaluation. In complex projects you tend to need to break options into sets, and then apply financial analysis to parts that work out that way (lease versus buy, related to maintenance expectations, considering functional alternatives, etc.).

Back to the formal logic versus language idea, it would be natural to have a vague, general idea that when we argue what we are doing is using true and false propositions and something like formal logic (derivations, relationships between ideas) to arrive at a conclusion. Not really. Fallacies do point out logical relationships that don’t work (in the scope of rhetoric, related to logic, another category of it), and there are equivalent connections between propositions that do hold up, but it leads back to the theme of context. If there was any underlying, comprehensive, “flat” basis for these ideas, and more extensive connections between related propositions than usually apply, within that context formal logic—like that binary value Boolean algebra—would describe how we think and discuss. Our use of concepts just isn’t like that. The contexts we frame ideas within is complicated, and lots of the range doesn’t reduce to true or false states or numerical values.

Lately I’ve been considering the subject of confirmation bias quite a bit. That’s familiar enough, that we tend to accept the evidence and support for beliefs that we already hold, and reject input that doesn’t match current understanding. This implies that we are actually using rational, reason-based processing to evaluate ideas, we just use a filtering process for inputs that limits the potential for changing current views. The more I think about it we really aren’t even as rational as that implies.

Biases occur well before any reason at all, and well outside that scope, determining how we shape our worldview, and arrive at specific conclusions. There is limited evaluation process overlapping with those inputs at all, in most cases, whether flawed or well-grounded. We don’t buy a car based on clear, limited preferences, technical considerations, and other individual expectations, we just like an image, and start within a narrow range. Things get even murkier related to politics, gender issues, culture or class perspective; all the subjects that are currently cluttering up Facebook feeds with jarring, one-sided content. Decisions like selecting investments really are a special case. Even for that a subject specialist assigned to provide input would probably narrow context for us quite a bit, limiting our own use of reason and decision analysis within a very narrow scope.

It’s not a problem being irrational (essentially). Given the connotation of that term we might be regarded as arational instead, but most typically I support ordinary use of language and broad interpretation of meaning of terms, so it wouldn’t be necessary to go there. It does help noticing why we are making decisions, and hold specific views, to typically consider related preconceptions, in order to “push down” the level of analysis to where it is really occurring anyway.

If it’s any comfort formal logic classes don’t help, learning how structured, formal reasoning would work, if we were using it. Ordinary introspection is a much better tool. It’s interesting to try and break down ordinary perspective and reason, delving into subjects like psychology and Buddhism (as practical psychology, versus religion), but those sorts of approaches involve taking very long paths.

I just wrote a bit on confirmation bias that might be of interest, mainly related to the subject of tea preference (right, I’m all over the map), adding depth to the part I covered on that here:

On roasting sheng pu'er, and tea culture confirmation bias

What is the spiritual meaning of Yin and Yang?

I just answered this on Quora, and related to writing a couple of posts here recently it reminded me that the ideas fit this blog theme.  That answer link.

This might seem to relate more to Taoism than Buddhism, but the answer does touch on how the two overlap.

Lots of different answers here cover different scope, and they aren’t necessarily wrong, but they also don’t really provide a common sense answer. Any answer that attempted to simplify that down to an ordinary language based concept set would leave out a lot, but that’s what I’ll attempt. I studied Taoism a reasonable amount, and Chinese Buddhism, and other Buddhism. This set of concepts is really mainly from the first, but it can mix with other ideas.

Yin and Yang relate to experienced reality tending to be experienced as a pairing of opposites. The Wikipedia answer would do better with listing out which is which, hot versus cold, male versus female, and so on. Parts of a reference like that would include spirituality scope, but it would likely make reality sound like some mystical theme, occurring on indescribable and complex levels. Maybe related forms and actual reality really are a little like that, but common sense and conventional reasoning captures part of it too.

It’s obvious enough that our worldview and perspective is geared to interpret everything in reference to binary pairing of types: hot / cold, male / female, true / false, dark / light, good / evil, high / low, long / short, easy / difficult, wrong / right. Why is that? Is it because the universe is like that, or because we are biased towards that framework? What about variation across three parameters instead, or mapping of ideas and factors across several dimensions at the same time, or dropping the emphasis on two extremes and doing more with a continuum?

It seems to be both; it works well to simplify and isolate any one factor as a set of polar opposites, which really typically involves a continuum, but gets mapped out as a binary pair. Take hot and cold: that means completely different things (temperature ranges) depending on the context it’s used in. For weather it’s one thing, and even then a cold day in Bangkok is 25 C (77 F), which is a warm day elsewhere, maybe just not hot. Something you touch is hot or cold based on relationship to body temperature, obviously, with soup tied more to a range of other expectations.

Binary truth values tend to introduce special kind of error. That is sort of a framework for how we think but it takes some doing setting up any concept as regarded as true or false. Background context does a lot of the work prior to any final judgement. The more that you study formal logic the clearer you realize that it’s not really how we think. A proposition can be partly true, nonsensical, indeterminate, or misleading; all sorts of things beyond true or false. Something can only be true or false based on being situated within a context that defines whatever parameter it’s covering. All of that fleshes out in logic classes; there’s too much to it for a short set of sentences to do the subject justice.

One might next wonder, how does this tie back to the subject of Taoism and Chinese religion? Is it only used as a description of the framework for human cognition, and the nature of experienced reality, versus an assertion about what is external to us? Mostly yes, per my understanding. I take the main general point to be very clearly realizing what we add to reality as we interpret it. Of course lots of things do occur in nature, outside our interpretation and concepts, as binary pairs. Temperature doesn’t, or truth value, but male and female do (just not to everyone), and lots of other pairs and spectrums.

Let’s let the Tao Te Ching weigh in on it (the main Taoism core text, as I take it):

'Tao Te Ching' by Lao Tzu (Full Text)

(chapter 2)

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn't possess,

acts but doesn't expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever.

The observation about duality is clear enough; to me that part doesn’t require a lot of interpretation. To me the last part does, extending that to a suggestion about more functional perspective, and other passages go further in explaining that.

(chapter 16)

Empty your mind of all thoughts.

Let your heart be at peace.

Watch the turmoil of beings,

but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe

returns to the common source.

Returning to the source is serenity.

If you don't realize the source,

you stumble in confusion and sorrow.

When you realize where you come from,

you naturally become tolerant,

disinterested, amused,

kindhearted as a grandmother,

dignified as a king.

Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,

you can deal with whatever life brings you,

and when death comes, you are ready.

Really the meaning of this never could be completely clear, as I interpret it, because it’s not written to propose simple, isolated ideas with one clear meaning. It’s guidance in proper form of use of reason versus experience alone, and approach to reality, so it transcends that sort of thing.

A lot of Chinese beliefs are something else altogether. Superstitions and stories about gods and all sorts of minor deities are common enough. Zen Buddhism (derived originally as Chan Buddhism, as a merging of Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism that occurred in China, and later was transmitted to Japan) took up these other ideas, from Taoism, and developed practices and perspective beyond this early expression. The idea is to live beyond the bounds of conceptual frameworks, as I interpret it, to experience reality directly. How that would work out in practice would be a bit complicated, but the theory is that it becomes simpler instead of adding things.

We’re not on to “spiritual” in the ordinary Christian sense yet, right, or into what one would expect from a Chinese worldview? The ideas get taken in different ways; some parts would match such expectations better. Since it seems to clearly relate to an approach and perspective that simplifies things, versus adding layers and levels, to some extent bringing in spiritual forces and realms probably opposes one main take.

Buddhism in comparison with Judaism and Christianity

I was just talking with a friend about the differences and similarities between Judaism and Buddhism.  It makes for an interesting starting point in explaining what Buddhism is.  It's too broad, but narrowing back to the points one might cover in such a discussion works.  We spent about half an hour talking about that theme, related to him leaving town (Bangkok) soon after; that's about right for how long such a thing would take.

No matter what writing or other channel one uses setting up an audience perspective, who you are talking to, is very important.  Before you do much writing it seems like talking to everyone, adopting a general listener perspective, would be completely workable.  In actual practice that doesn't work very well.  We are accustomed to communicating things to people in different ways, and "talking out into the world" only works for some subjects.  You have to assume what people already know, for example, or match use of language to what people can relate to.  Doing that "in general" is problematic, especially related to narrowing down a very broad set of ideas to what one might be able to say in 10 minutes or so.  We had a great discussion, and already had a feel for what each other might already understand, so all that worked out.

I'll start with a bit he told me about Judaism, but cut that part short, because it's interesting and somewhat related but not the main part of what I'm trying to share here.  Then I'll cover passing on a short take on what the Christian perspective is.  Odd, right; everyone knows that, don't they?  Maybe not.  I live in a Buddhist country, for example, in Thailand, and for people here it's a foreign religion.

Judaism

It's far from intended as a summary of what Judaism is all about but that friend made some interesting points, which I'll share an abbreviated version of.  The obvious qualifications apply:  I won't get what he meant completely right in my own summary, and he was only breaking off a part of the broad set of ideas that comprise Judaism to share them, based within a fairly limited scope conversation.  I'm not saying this is inaccurate, but a lot more is being left out than included.  Framing these ideas properly within the rest of what hasn't been expressed wouldn't be possible using only assumptions and extrapolation.  It's still interesting though.  I cut the material detail back even further to avoid making mistakes in interpretation, since I'm sure I didn't completely "get" what he was saying, only hearing part of a broad set of related ideas.

A main theme was that it's within basic human nature to desire things, and it's seen as ok within Judaism.  This was framed as a response to his take that Buddhism is really about cutting off all desires, simply eliminating wanting anything to achieve a very unusual form of inner peace.  That's not right, really, but I'll get to that part.  It's partly right.

Of course Judaism sets up plenty of limitations about what you shouldn't want, or shouldn't do, or experience (eating pork, murder, and so on).  We didn't get into all that.  The idea was that an interesting and novel form is set up for framing desires, and for satisfying them.  It's fine to want things, if they aren't prohibited, and fine to experience the things you want to experience, but you have to be thankful and receptive in very specific ways.  It's a form of communion with God and the rest of reality to be given things (with "given" here used in the broad sense, including earning them, in a conventional sense, or granted potential to experiences by chance).  Acceptance of positive things is responded to with a form of prayer, a step that occurs before you have the experience.  Like saying the blessing, right?  Just extended a lot further, across a lot of the scope of human experience.  It almost sounded more like a mindfulness related take on life, to keep track of all positive things as they happen to you, to emphasize self awareness and conscious experience of momentary reality.

To me this is interesting because it frames human experience in a different way.  Prohibitions and ethical guidelines, what you should do, are different kinds of things, and this enters into a different kind of experiential space.  It makes a lot of life experience a holy sort of undertaking.  Not just eating, as I took it many kinds of experiences, or as I took it all positive kinds.  Adjusting the form and perspective of routine activities, or special events and circumstances, frames much more of life experience within the scope of religious practice than occurs within Christianity.  Everything one experiences throughout their lives relates to God's setting things up, in Christianity, but the moment to moment experience isn't framed within religious practices, as it's commonly taken.  Christian teachings are much more active related to telling you what not to do and what general perspective to take up, then moment to moment you take it from there yourself, the form is a bit open.

This has been barely a shell of what I understood him to be saying, but I'll move onto the difference between that and Christianity, as I interpret it, and try to clarify this a little further through contrast.

Christianity

He asked me about the  Christian worldview, how it works out, moral guidelines and restrictions, adjustment of ordinary perspective.  People in the US just assume that everyone knows that, right?  There they kind of do.  Even someone raised to reject it would have some idea what they are rejecting, even if everyone isn't really on the same page about how it all maps out.

I just saw a fragment of an interview with Richard Dawkins, this one, which I may or may not get around to finishing, and it's strange to me how modern atheists seem to take on and reject relatively unsophisticated takes on Christianity.  The most literal forms are a bit absurd:  God looks like Zeus, he lives in the sky, Jesus is his son, you are following rules in order to gain admission to heaven, angels are related in some way, the Devil is out to get you, you can sin all you want, you just have to ask for the slate to be wiped clean and it's all good again.  Dropping out the most absurd half still leaves lots of relatively absurd parts.

To back up, I studied religion in a university program, or in two of them, really.  The second focused only on interpreting limited religious scope as philosophy but the first included actual religion classes, not philosophy-context versions.  To put details to that I studied religion and philosophy, focusing on Buddhism, in an undergrad program at the University of Colorado, and comparative philosophy for an MA at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  And I'm an industrial engineer, which I studied at Penn State, but that doesn't relate.  I've considered different forms of religion a good bit.  Study of Islam came up more than Judaism, but I covered quite a bit on Christianity and focused most on Buddhism.

This gets odd because what I accept as the most sophisticated form of Christianity and that answer to how it defines a standard American's worldview are two completely different things.  Funny how that goes.  The same comes up in Buddhism; the core message and practices I don't see as overlapping much at all with a conventional take or worldview here in Thailand.  Even among monks, to some extent, but I probably won't fill that part in much here.  I was ordained as a monk here once, for two months, with an earlier post here on how that went.  Let's break all that apart then.  I'll start with how I see Christianity as two different things, how people tend to take it, what I see as a more mature and developed form. 

I can't do justice here to the range of how religions are interpreted; that's too long a subject for a 1500 word blog post only about that.  We reviewed a relatively old work on that theme, from 1979, that mapped out some interesting ideas on that, James Fowler's Stages of Faith, described in summary form in this related reference.

In a basic form Christianity is interpreted as a set of rules, an afterlife scheme, and an explanation for things people couldn't otherwise know (who started the world, what the earlier form of it was, what happens after death, is there a soul or spiritual form of people).  Those parts should be familiar to most.  You can pick and choose which parts to take up or leave aside, of course. 

In answering my friend's question this was more or less what I focused on, about how Christianity tends to define an American worldview.  Rules stand out; you should or shouldn't do a lot of things.  Stay within those bounds and in general the more prescriptive parts, about what you should do, or general approach, can be a bit flexible.  It doesn't necessarily relate to momentary perspective all that much.  Ideally of course I think it should; I'll get into more of that related to what a more sophisticated take might be.

Jesus taught about being more compassionate, about seeing yourself as connected to others, as here to help others as much as to help yourself (or more, one might reasonably interpret).  All this works well from a practical standpoint, and not just as a set of rules to follow, when you consider that your connection with your family, friends, co-workers, employment context, country, social groups, and so on really do define you. 

The more you consider all of those ties and demands as important the better a person you turn out to be.  Your own longer term good follows.

Beyond just being external rules to follow, or break, all the different ethical short-cuts also limit your support of and connection to those around you (lying, stealing, treating people unfairly, failing to be empathetic and supportive to others, etc.).  Benefiting others benefits you.  To the extent you are reliable, consistent, supportive, and so on you are a good friend, family member, employee, and social group member and all those connections will be stronger.  Only following a list of 10 or more restrictions doesn't help to highlight that.  Of course that's not exactly where the Old Testament left off, but that is a main difference in the two sets of ideas.

The most mature perspectives on religion develop this, and set aside the mythology.  Jesus was a person but it's not necessary to believe that he performed miracles, or was a divine being in some way, or that he talked to the Devil like my friend and I conversed. 

The mythology is what people like Richard Dawkins tend to attack.  They want to accept that you can just assume the ethics and social connections are important, and take them up and leave aside all the rest.  What they don't realize is that this also works as a mature interpretation of Christianity, that it is really the point, or also the point of any other religion. 

I've taken ethics classes, about the study of morality, and another part they miss is that it's not so easy to derive what Jesus taught as what we should do, as a positive approach to ethics and reality in general.  I'm not getting into all that here, just suffice it to say that it really doesn't work to use a standard approach to get to the same general context (eg. accept Kantian ethics derivation, or Utilitarian / Consequentialist versions instead).  Those approaches take the short-cut of heading for an end point they already accept, basic Christian and Buddhist morality, more or less.  They gloss over that what seems to be a complete and independent derivation really isn't that at all.  You already know what "doing the right thing" is because it's in the air; all that has been an underlying theme in every organized society since prior to known history.  If it wasn't people couldn't collect into an organized society; there would be chaos instead.  That does come up in places from time to time but there's a function in order; it tends to spread.

In the end I told that friend that Christianity asks us to put others above ourselves, to focus on the interests and needs of other people.  To me that is completely consistent with everything else I've said here, even though if what I mean by that isn't clear then it wouldn't seem so.  In the end that's really a pursuit of our own highest good, our own self-interest, because we really are linked in with other people in countless ways.

Jordan Peterson gets all this; the people who reject what he says about religion don't get him.  An example:  he admits that there is an appeal for successful men to have many physical or relationship partners, since they can.  An example like Tiger Woods might come up.  It's obvious enough why that doesn't work out in his own case; that typically prevents a successful monogamous relationship from succeeding.  Someone like Donald Trump might seem to be able to cheat the system, to have a wife and experiences outside that relationship.  But then he has two ex-wives now, and others end up identifying people for who they really are related to their values, as in his case.  It's atypical for an incriminating voice tape to turn up but that would come up in different ways.  It's not an isolated example; practicing generosity or empathy pays similar returns, and so on.

Buddhism

One mistaken take on Buddhism is that it suggests that people should cut off all desire, get rid of attachments of all forms, which will result in achieving an unconventional neutral perspective, and "inner peace."  Taken the right way all that sort of works but it's just as wrong as it is right, and it's much more incomplete than it is descriptive.  I'll pass on how I explained it.

Buddhism is about limiting attachments, about examining parts of a worldview and personal perspective and discarding what doesn't work.  What makes the cut-off or fails to is problematic to describe in broad terms.  The introspection / review process is a methodology, not a form of external mapping of that sort.  There is a good bit of ethical guidance in the core teachings, but that's only one part of a set of 8 main types of teachings.  I have a graphic about that handy:

Ok, maybe it touches on a couple branches.  That's only one broad, general model of what Buddhism is, so relying on that as a complete description only goes so far.  And it only breaks teachings and subject scope into 8 parts, which is of limited helpfulness, since detailed review follows or else it's meaningless. 

A more detailed idea mapping makes things worse than they might really be, since there are a lot of different starting points and relatively equivalent explanations for different parts:

In the end for me Buddhism is really a system of introspection and adjustment of self-definition and worldview, a set of ideas I'll get back to developing just a little more.

Thais don't necessarily take it that way, even though 90% of them are Buddhist.  They take it as explanations for supernatural reality, as ethical guidance, and so on, all a close parallel to how Christianity is most commonly interpreted in the US.  Go figure.  People get it that meditation is a part of it but even their take on meditation and mindfulness practices (two related but different things) tend to not be mature, in my experience. 

They think meditation helps you accumulate spiritual good credit, karma or merit.  Sort of, maybe, but there is also an introspective aspect, which is probably more of the main point.  It's not an ordinary form of introspection, and I can't really do justice to describing how it's different in a short space.  Mindfulness is about staying calm and consistent, being able to apply rules in different circumstances, but it's also a practical tool for clearly observing a layer of reality that usually goes completely unnoticed.  It helps you unpack what is typically only included as subconscious experience.  That should ring a bell, for students of psychology.  Being present in the moment isn't nearly as simple as it seems, and the inputs in how we interpret reality and what we react to aren't simple at all.

One might wonder what parts of self, normal experience, or reaction should be "cut out of" normal perspective and life practices, or at least what I'm claiming.  If Buddhism doesn't reject desire and does reject some view of self what is being retained, and what is left aside?  It's not so simple, but engaging such ideas is critical.  You drop what doesn't work, and keep what does.  There's not really as much clear, external, well-defined guidance for that as one might think.  In a developed conventional religion it might seem that there definitely would be, but to me that's not really what Buddhism is.  The starting point is your own perspective, life experience, and momentary experience of reality--only that.  As you delve into what you think you are, and what you really are, you untangle the knots of all sorts of assumptions.

An example:  it would be easy to define yourself based on what you own, in a consumer oriented society.  It's relatively low-hanging fruit, but examining the role of that within your own worldview could turn up that you've accepted the assumed importance of this as an external assumption, and you could later also drop it. 

An example:  that friend I started out mentioning talking to was moving without owning much; this is a very practical approach to experienced reality.  For some it would be natural to own a lot of clothing, furniture, electronics, collections of goods, and so on, but keeping all that limited simplifies your life.  The desire to always own more only complicates it.  This kind of realization would only work so well in the form of external guidance: "don't own a lot of things."  If someone could unpack what they think about a lot instead, what causes them stress, what goals they serve that can be cut back or simply eliminated, then giving themselves this advice works much, much better.

I'm into tea, and write more about that subject than Buddhism (here), and it comes up a lot related to people collecting teaware (or even tea itself).  Part of that is functional, but it also seems to become just a normal way of relating to things, that you mark out how much you enjoy a subject by how much you own related to it.  It can be a habit to collect things.  It's not exactly a vice but examining why it happens could be informative, and dropping it could free up space for working on something else.  You can only make tea in one device at a time; owning dozens of devices isn't necessarily functional, it's closer to collecting artworks.

Of course that's just an example.  In different individual cases different coarse findings would turn up earlier on, then more and more subtle levels of understanding and adjustment could occur.  The past and future are particularly fruitful areas to consider.  Regrets, worry, and even anticipation can cause people a lot of stress.  It's easier to say "just live in the moment" than it is to let the past and future go, and only deal with what is actually occurring in the present.  The tools of meditation and mindfulness help with this; they turn up what is simmering beneath the surface in your mind, and what is weighing down present moment perspective, in two different but related sets of ways.


I could keep going in lots of directions from there but that covers the main point, fleshing out what a friend and I talked about over the course of a half an hour or so.  Buddhism isn't about rejecting any normal view of reality, just uncovering what goes into one and improving it, little by little.  It's a negative process in the sense that things are removed or dropped, instead of added.  The end point is kind of a funny thing; eventually one gets to a purer form of more direct experience.  I'm not so sure about "enlightenment" or that process ever being completely finished; I guess that has to be a real thing.  It's generally as well to not worry too much about that.

So a Buddhist could definitely have a family, or own things, take up hobbies, exercise, and so on.  They would generally try to be positive and helpful to others, and take a leaner approach to material things, to not focus on them.  Really it's more about perspective than it is material ownership or following rules though.  It would be better to have more stuff and keep the perspective lighter, or really to do both, to focus more on positive forms of experience and less on piling up things and accumulating status.

Moral, cultural, and economic decay in the US

A video blog post reminded me of this subject; I'll get to the details of that starting point.  An example related to Trump also raises the same broad themes.  To be up front about that I don't see the Trump Presidency as a positive thing, and it's worrisome to me that 40% of the people in the US do.

I don't think the US necessarily is experiencing cultural and moral decay.  It's interesting to consider to what extent that might be the case, and the specific example offered in that video as evidence.  I'm much more concerned about the economic health of the US, even in the very short term.  I expect a severe economic down-turn related to the next recession cycle.  But that's not the point here, really, even though I do get back to saying more about that.  I'll cover what I mean towards the end, since it's relevant, if perhaps a bit less connected.

It works to use the two examples as a starting point and intro.

Two examples of cultural decay

The first relates to Roosh V, a minor cultural figure best known for starting an online forum related to hook-up culture, and for writing books on the subject.  That's exactly what you would expect, advice and discussion about how to have sex with women you don't know.  We have Tinder for that now, but he was exploring methodologies before that became what it currently is.  Of course that activity isn't regarded positively by many, and there are misogyny oriented aspects to what he said and what gets discussed.  He has since "found religion," and is touring the US giving talks about whatever it is he thinks is appropriate to share, spiritual guidance, or cultural commentary.

What I mean by "hook-up culture," and why that portrayal seems negative may not be clear.  Roosh himself devised a system, described as a game (or "the Game," really), as a developed set of approaches and practices designed to lead to success in having sex with random women.

This video covers the point I'll discuss further.  That point:  the US is experiencing cultural decay, with ultra-left liberal perspectives the main sign of that shift, which takes the form of economic decay as well (eg. the homeless issue).  It seems best to unpack all that further after introducing the other starting point.


Trump just removed troops from one part of Syria, enabling Turkey and Russia to invade that area and drive away or kill off a lot of the former Kurdish US allies that helped defeat ISIS there (a radical terrorist Islamic movement).  In this most recent comment on the move, which was criticized by both liberals and conservatives (which is rare for any position Trump takes up), he likened what is probably better categorized as genocide as a playground fight:

"Like two kids in a lot, you have got to let them fight and then you pull them apart," he told a rally in Texas...

...The Turkish leader's aim is to push Kurdish fighters - regarded by Turkey as terrorists - away from northernmost Syria and create a "safe zone" for resettling up to two million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey.

Between 160,000 and 300,000 people were reported to have fled their homes since the fighting started, and there were fears that the Turkish operation may lead to the ethnic cleansing of the local Kurdish population...


In this related story and quote Trump says that the Kurds have a lot of sand to play with.

It's beside the point why Trump did what he did, or any of that background.  My take on this, and how it relates here, is that at this point the US government is behaving erratically, "turning on" recent allies, and randomly applying trade sanctions, and shifting internal policies.  A lot of it can be fairly assessed as highly unethical behavior:  rejecting climate change, rolling back environmental protections, adjusting taxation to favor the wealthy, restricting prior health care support for the poor (which wasn't completely successful), confining potential immigrants in internment camps that are not really different than concentration camps, and so on.

The ideas will connect, but the linkage could be tighter.  Let's start with exploring the first point in more detail.

Roosh V's observations

The context matters:  Roosh V is touring the US on a very small-scale speaking event tour.  He's admittedly burned out by that endeavor, which is probably coloring his observations to be more negative.  He best introduces himself on his website:


...Six years into my career, and a little over two years after I started DC Bachelor, I quit my job and finished my first book called Bang, a textbook for picking up girls and getting laid. Afterwards I spent six rough months in South America, which I detailed in my second book called A Dead Bat In Paraguay...

credit Youtube channel image

And it continued from there.  The rest of that bio starts in on how that practice evolved to include a personal philosophy:


6. Elimination of traditional sex roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation.

7. Socialism, feminism, cultural Marxism, and social justice warriorism aim to destroy the family unit, decrease the fertility rate, and impoverish the state through large welfare entitlements.


I'm not really sympathetic to any of those concerns or that perspective, to be clear.  It's interesting to see what I can make of points that I don't agree with, in this case, to break down observations and see which seem accurate, and to work back to a better understanding of root causes than he seems to have arrived at. 

Roosh himself abandoned a core part of his own lifestyle in "finding religion," but has retained some of the aspects of his earlier perspective.  It's an odd starting point.  This is his statement of what he is now trying to share with others:


I’m conducting private events in 23 American cities during the second half of 2019 where I will share stories that have revealed the truth to me up to turning 40 years of age.

I hope that my stories, which concern masculinity, relationships, work, human nature, grief, and spirituality, will allow you to find wisdom, contentment, and peacefulness during these difficult days of clown world.


The most obvious initial take is:  how did it come to this, that people are looking for life advice from a guy who wrote books on how to have sex with strangers?  Wouldn't that be like someone drawing on experience as a career criminal or long term drug addict to give out guidance for living?  People with such background might explain why one particular approach turned out to not be positive, but those experiences alone wouldn't be good grounds for teaching others to do better.

That whole "incel" movement is interesting to me, that people can gather together around something as strange as shared lack of success in relationships with the opposite sex.  There must be quite a bit of overlap with that theme and this context.  Is society broken because a subset of its members are failing in certain ways though?  There have always been poor people and disenfranchised in the US, in any society.  It's beyond the scope of writing out some thoughts here to try and figure out if that sort of problem is getting worse.  It seems to be, but impressions don't always match reality, even commonly held ones.

His most specific point in the last video, mentioned earlier, was that in places where liberal values take hold (like California, or Austin, Texas), where technology industries thrive, homelessness, poverty, and decay of values also occurs.  He didn't explain the connection.  As he crossed the Southwest (I just ran across a video based on an online mention--I don't follow this guy online) he also pointed out how other places had darker aspects, so that's the main shared theme, that different places have bad sides.  I think most of the smaller areas would've been quite conservative, and that seemed to resonate better with him; he sees himself as a modern anti-liberal.

That brings up another odd broad trend in modern US culture:  people defining themselves as what they're not, what they're the opposite of, instead of what they are, or in terms of views and perspective of their own.  I don't think he sees himself as any sort of conservative either.  What is he telling people then, what core message does he convey?  That society is breaking, in the ways he describes, or so it seems.  Since he has now taken up religion (an orthodox Christian form of one) it's implied that he now sees some resolution as possible through personal reform.

How could he even have an audience, recommending unrestrained sex tourism, and then traditional religion, after an abrupt shift?  That's an interesting part.  Apparently the two things are a lot more continuous than they might first seem.  He didn't lose his earlier audience, although some of them must have been turned off by the shift.

I don't think it's really possible to completely untangle the moral, cultural, and economic threads, which he skips past even trying to do.  His evidence that society is breaking down is most evident through homelessness, for example, which can't easily be connected to liberal perspective.  Conventional morality is an odd ground for him to take any stand on, but then the framing here seems to be that he has returned as a saint-like figure reborn out of the experience of vice.  Embracing immoral behavior is set up as his own personal path to finding a truer calling.  Who knows; maybe that works.  Maybe a career criminals or long-term drug addicts are good people to offer opinions on morality.

On the whole it seems not to work, really.  He sounds wistful and deep for speaking slowly and making interestingly framed points that don't necessarily connect.  He is at least partly broken, for sure, which he himself openly admits, but interpreting society as broken could as easily stem from that as from any unusual insight. 

I think considering the ideas he is proposing is of considerable value, and his observations aren't flawed enough to not serve well as a very promising starting point.  It just seems best to try to isolate aspects in observations from his interpretations, to take a broad view of all of it, and initially set aside defining what it all means.

This seems a good place to switch over to the other example.

Trump abandons Syrian Kurds to Turkish and Russian conquest

Why did Trump do this?  This article explore why, but can't really conclude any one reason.  This quote covers the general theme, it was in his nature to do so:


The Kurds were a mere afterthought to Donald Trump. Turkey’s Erdoğan is the type of authoritarian leader who can easily manipulate the president. Erdoğan wanted something done, and Trump was willing to do it.

A year ago, President Trump was praising the Kurds as “great” allies, vowing to protect them. “They fought with us. They died with us,” Trump said. “We have not forgotten.” But just a few days ago, he dismissed the Kurds this way: “They didn’t help us in the Second World War. They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

President Trump doesn’t interpret his abandonment of America’s faithful and intrepid Kurdish ally as betrayal because he can’t even understand why betrayal is a vice. It’s like trying to explain color to a person born with no eyesight... 


It turns out after closer review that the Kurds did take part in World War 2 supporting the allies, and Turkey didn't, the exact opposite of what Trump said, but that's not the point.  That article does summarize the point:

“We should expect our current president to betray anyone or any principle or any norm or any ally whenever he has the impulse to do so,” a friend of mine who is a psychologist told me via email. 


Trump is impulsive, and what he does next isn't well thought-out.  If a decision relates to promoting his own business interests or the long-term national interest of the US he would probably fail to even notice the latter.  Fast-takes and knee-jerk reactions are like that; biases carry weight but analysis doesn't.

It doesn't seem like these ideas connect beyond the broad strokes, does it, a reformed hook-up advocate saying the US is morally bankrupt, and a US President exemplifying that?  The finer details don't match, the specific contexts.  Roosh sees problems within the normal experience of gender relations, and patterns of self-definition, along the lines of rejecting extreme forms of feminism.  Trump serves himself more than the US.  They are not similar things.  But the ideas do connect.

Somehow the very fabric of reality in the US seems to not be a shared experience now.  Maybe it never was, and there being a white, relatively conservative, middle class largest group maintained the illusion of that.  Now that's somewhat lost, to the extent it ever did even occur.  It seems like integrating the full range of other perspectives and experience may be an underlying problem.

That doesn't explain Trump's continued support from his base; nothing does.  It seems like he has tapped into the insecurity over this underlying issue, and regardless of what he does he still represents an ability to hold onto how things had been in the past to his supporters.  Nothing he does related to foreigners (like Kurdish allies), or foreign trade partners, or to immigrants can change that.  Slighting or limiting the rights of relatively large groups like homosexuals also doesn't matter, except maybe to members of that group.

This is where things get unusual.  Trump can even target women's issues, in whatever fashion he wants to, and in spite of that negatively affecting half the citizens of the US it wouldn't necessarily conflict with those "traditional value" themes, no matter what he did, or what position he supported.  He would have to find a way to advocate rights of minorities (immigrants, minority "races," sexual preference groups, etc.) over those of white, straight, middle class Americans to oppose his base.  Even supporting Russian and Turkish interests over those of the US could simply be reframed.

An odd twist:  giving the wealthiest Americans a tax cut wasn't regarded as a problem by his lower and middle class supporters.  No matter what actions Trump takes, since the assumed conclusion is that he is working for the greater good of his base, "average Americans," there doesn't really even need to be a plausible connection to why any one step isn't doing that.   The opposite needs to happen instead, for a clear opposition of these goals to be a problem.  Since so few things are clear in modern political and cultural society Trump is always in the clear.  Maybe until the next recession happens, but then there is no common understanding of the business cycle, and repeating patterns of those, so with a bit of shifting around of blame maybe even that wouldn't be a problem.

In the end nothing Trump could do can change his supporters' impression of him.  Being removed from office for multiple clear violations of US law might not even serve as an exception.  It's funny how all that works out.  This has nothing to do with current societal trends and everything to do with how biases are carried forward, as I see it.  It's an "us and them" issue, related only to people supporting their own team.  Those people should probably be a bit more broad-viewed and open-minded, but I'm not certain that's any different than how people have always been.

How I see cultural transition

This is complicated, but it seems helpful to go there.  I can't completely make sense of the current ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative themes, but anyone can guess about those.

It's a time of extreme perspectives; it seems normal for that to happen.  Maybe on a broad cycle, or maybe not, perhaps only related to causes and conditions repeating in complex ways.  That obviously happened in the late 60's through the 70's, and then dissipated through the 90's and beyond.  At a guess the perspective shift is occurring because a real change in how people define themselves is underway in the US.

It seems to help to look at what changed in the US in that earlier 60's-70's time period.  I've ran across a good set of video references for that, talks on the subject by subject experts and others, in this Youtube documentary channel, that of David Hoffman, a documentary producer.  Parts of the values and self-image of people did shift in that time, but the extreme forms of perspective and lifestyle changes went way beyond what "stuck" in the end.  Something similar will probably happen, or rather is probably happening now.  Parts of what is now considered ultra-liberal perspective will be retained as ordinary, shared perspective, and most of the rest will be all but completely discarded.  As to which parts are which who knows.

It could be that only the exact same themes experienced in that earlier time period will be extended slightly further.  That would seem a little anti-climactic, but not unlikely.  Women and minority rights, integration of these "groups" as more fully equal members of society, could be extended.  Electing a black (half-black) President and then a racist one, more or less as a response, would fit with all that, as natural later steps.

One read is that most of the cultural extremes we experience now are mostly noise, as commune living was in the 60s and 70s.  Maybe "overshoot" describes that better; trends and perspective extends further than is practical, only later to be retracted to where that will eventually reset.

Of course there is no narrow, well-defined, prior set of cultural values to get back to, the dream on the conservative side.  And the extremes on the liberal side are also illusions, the idea that people in the US might be given free health care by society at large, or even a universal basic income, that needing to work to support yourself might drop out as a requirement.   Complete self-definition is also impractical, the idea that someone could pick their own new, previously unheard of version of a gender, and then change that as frequently as they change clothing styles, or even outfits.  In the end maybe only greater equality of everyone will emerge as a practical, normal outcome.

What would be decaying, if anything really is?  My guess:  the economic base.

Gloom and doom for the US economy

For context, I'm from "the Rust Belt," from the Industrial Northeast and Mid-West that experienced a relatively complete economic collapse over the last 40 years or so.  It's easy for me to accept that the sky is falling, on the broader economic scale.  But maybe it is, and maybe it's not.  I'm an industrial engineer; I can say for sure that not much manufacturing is going on in the US, or will ever be again.

My concerns about the US economy doesn't even relate to all that.  I think factors like ignoring the US National Debt sets up conditions that could lead to the eventual collapse of the US economy.  It's my opinion that the US government essentially supporting the broadening unequal distribution of wealth in the US is also potentially problematic.  It's hard to say why that's a problem, unless you are living out being at the bottom of the economic scale, the lowest 1/4th versus the highest 1 %.  Then it's easy to say why it is:  because your life sucks, and it's no small feat to change that.

Maybe I worry too much.  England experienced a relatively complete economic contraction when they lost their Empire back around the WW 2 time-frame, and they didn't completely fail as a country.

By Firebrace - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php

Officially the UK economy didn't even really contract; that's a pattern of continued expansion, with downturns in four places since the huge shift as a result of that major war.  Then again I'm not sure to what extent that accurately accounts for inflation.

A negative pattern of growth rate, like this, would probably feel a bit like decline, but in a real sense it's not.  Let's take a quick scan of how something like that might be playing out in the US:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4193310-june-2018-median-household-income

This probably shows as clearly as any graph image why a lot of Americans feel that things aren't necessarily improving, or staying as positive as they had been.  Graph after graph would seem to all tell different stories, but the mid-point family income just took a number of years to climb to around where it had been at the turn of the century 20 years ago, which was no improvement over that 20 years prior, and the next periodic recession down-turn will surely erase any gains.  Staying even isn't so bad, but surely not everyone is doing that well.

These seem like different subjects, don't they, economic issues and then moral and cultural concerns?  Am I not just repeating what I said didn't work in Roosh's observations here?  Maybe.

It seems like economic potential and improvement bring health to a society, and decline brings malaise, so they can't be completely uncoupled, even though they are essentially different subjects.

My home area is a good example of the results of long-term down-turn.  I'm from near enough to Oil City, PA, one of the next small villages over, which works better as a place description given the images it brings up.  It was the original center for processing (refining) oil in both the US and in the world.  Oil was first intentionally extracted by well in nearby Titusville, PA.  All of the other local industry and that one are gone, leaving behind a shell of a small town in a state of perpetual decline.  Steel production left the general area, and manufacturing; it's not as if that one commodity was an isolated case.

People don't lose morality quickly; it's not as if everyone immediately turned to drugs and crime.  Those have become much more of an issue since I graduated high school in 1986 there, which was really a decade into the main form of the decline, a decade prior to it being complete.  My sister raised children back there since then, and they're fine, normal, happy, positive individuals.  Maybe their worldview is slightly stagnant, never refreshed by any forms of positive changes, no outside input from economic renewal or social group transitions.  But they're fine.

Roosh wouldn't see it that way, if he visited there.  Crumbling infrastructure, vacant lots, and shabby looking buildings would be a sure sign of economic catastrophe, a decline into non-existence.  That wouldn't be completely wrong.

Looked at the other way though, other communities are thriving now (just not so much in that region), so it's more a pattern of change.  Things must have always been like that.  There are ghost-towns in different places where entire communities had existed and now don't, completely vanished.  It's a sad thing to be there for the decline, to ride it out, but from the perspective of society as a whole it's just normal. 

It reminds me of Reagan visiting Detroit (I think it was), and people asking him about how to renew the economy in that area, since job opportunities were increasing in the South but in sharp decline there.  He recommended moving to the South.  He wasn't joking, and it's not an impractical suggestion.  It's heartless, on one level, but only practical on another.  Government pushing against economic forces is typically a bad idea.

Conclusion

It's not tidy enough, is it, all these picked-up and abandoned threads?   There are plenty of threads I could've picked up but didn't.  I live in Bangkok now; it would be easy to sweep in why that is, and what it means to me individually and related to societal changes.  The short version:  any one individual life example doesn't mean anything, necessarily; the broad patterns are something else.

I think the US is just changing, and it may make sense to describe some of that as decay, as negative transition, but if one looks deeper it works better to just see changes instead, to keep that less broad and more value-neutral.  No one can clearly pin down what the individual cultural shifts mean, I don't think.  In retrospect that goes a lot better; things are much clearer looking back.  "Hindsight is 20-20," my Dad used to say.

Guessing about all that doesn't hurt.  Turning to people who you all but completely disagree with for input, as I have done here, can be interesting.  I think this is being lost now, open-minded review of these patterns and perspectives.  So it probably always went.  Back in the late 60s through early 70s there were probably few enough people in between the hippies and conservatives seeing things for what they were.  Probably almost no one knows exactly what Brexit really means now, in terms of societal shifts and economic factors, or where that's headed over the next 20 years or so.

It has been interesting talking to friends in China, Japan, Russia, India, and other places about how they see shifts in their societies.  More of that will help people place these trends as their own countries experience them.  Of course I'm much more familiar with how things go in Thailand now, having been here for 12 years, but living abroad naturally brings up international themes and foreign perspectives.

I'm an optimist; I think it will all be fine.  Except maybe for the US economy, but even then I think catastrophic decline might be fine.  I think people grow through challenges and set-backs, both as individuals and societies, and the US might emerge stronger for experiencing next-level set-backs.  The country might stop repeating the same mistakes, and gain a collective broader view of things, or fix some things that really are broken. 

It's nice being an optimist, seeing light even within darkness.  No other perspective is quite as practical.