Social Science – KNOMO CHOICIUS

The Means Determine The Ends

People like to justify doing something they know is wrong to accomplish something that they think is right.

It’s true that there are higher truths and mundane truths.

Sometimes we might think it’s okay to break a law in order to live up to our moral ideals. We’re willing, in some circumstances, to pay the price of breaking the law.

Often, this comes up when people decide to use violence against their opponents.

Yet violence will beget violence.

In the Hebrew Bible, God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites. They refused. In my opinion, they did the right thing. Judaism has a history of encouraging argument with God, and disobedience.

For example, God teased Adam and Eve, using reverse psychology (Don’t eat that apple!!), to get them to “Eat THE Apple.” It wasn’t until Eve disobeyed that she became a human exercising choice. Free will is a different story. But without a real option to make some choices, we are like most other animals, usually acting out of our genetic programming. Wasn’t God sick of watching a play with everything predetermined? Giving humans a higher level of choice spiced things up.

Anyway, which was worse? Eve feeding the apple to Adam? Or Cain killing Abel?

Even if we don’t have a clear answer, the direct message of the Cain killing Abel story is that killing another person in anger is bad. Maybe the point of God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites was for us to realize that it would be better to make friends. Which happened at some point. Why else were the prophets always ranting about not marrying them?

The consequences of the descendants of the Biblical Israelites choosing to try to obey God after a 3000 year delay are plain to see, for anyone with a sense of the phrase “cause and effect.” It’s very sad. It’s very painful. It’s very shameful. It’s impossible to find words to adequately describe the growing horror.

Rene Girard, in his book “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” explains that the whole point of almost all of human culture, as hidden in many myths from around the world, is to contain the intermittent violence that inevitably erupts whenever humans live together. Girard points out that NO “SIDE” will ever acknowledge that “We started it.” Billy Joel riffed on this theme in his famous

“We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

Maybe God changed “his” mind in the intervening series of eternities. There are multiple instructions in the Bible where humans are instructed to love their neighbors and enemies, and to be kind to the stranger.

The problem is that kindness requires contemplation. Because expressing kindness to one person may require different actions that would befit someone else. We need skill and desire to be kind. We need to be willing to put in the time.

Above clipart from https://clipart-library.com/clipart/cause-and-effect-clipart_34.html

Note that most complicated things in the world do not result from the “simple cause and effect” that kids are taught in school. The truth is closer to the Buddhist idea of “dependent arising.” The rain does not, by itself,” cause a rainbow. Other conditions are required to see a rainbow. MANY other conditions must be met.

I’d like to acknowledge Daniel Aliya for bringing up to me the idea that the means determine the ends. I see this as a great truth, probably greater than the other “great truth,” more commonly spoken, that the ends justify the means. See Aldous Huxley on this idea.

Ageing Part 4: Multi, Mono, or Semi-Tasking?

More Signs of Ageing

The latest on ageing from Phil Van Huffel. He’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment!

Shrinking

I hardly noticed. Since I traveled almost every week, I seldom had trouble hoisting my carry-on luggage into the overhead bin on airplanes. In 2019 I finally retired and quit traveling by air. Therefore, I drove my car to exotic places like Florida. At some prodding from my younger cousins, I began to write a book about the Van Huffel Family history, which was finished and published in 2021.

Surprise! When I went for my physical in 2020, my height had changed from 5’ 11-1/2” to 5’ 9”. I had shrunk by 2-1/2”. I could still reach the top shelf in my kitchen cabinets but not all the way to the back. My spine had compressed that much. Sitting in a car and at computer most of the time, not walking, not stretching, not exercising would be a root cause (so to speak). With all the falls this past year, I have lost another inch in height. I am now 5’ 8” tall. I can no longer reach the top shelf in the kitchen cabinets. My spine is bent out of shape. If I put a pillow over one shoulder I could be Quasimodo. My ship is listing to Port. My trousers now bag over my shoes. I’m not going to have them shortened.

But I can still reach the light switch.

Dexterity

I was a good typist. I took typing in Highschool. I used a portable typewriter all through college. When electric typewriters became affordable I bought one which I still have. I have several font balls for it. I could type 60 words a minute.

When computer keyboards became available, I could type even faster. Now my fingers have slowed down to such an extent that I type between 5 to 10 words a minute. The fingers don’t find the right keys that my brain is directing them to. It’s as if they were a young child defying a parental directive on purpose.

Because of my lack of depth perception I can no longer thread a needle. I use a jeweler’s eyepiece, and it still takes me several minutes to succeed. This manifests itself when I am eating. My hand-eye coordination is vanishing. If I eat soup the spoon and my mouth don’t always meet exactly, or the soup spoon tips to one side or the other spilling some of the contents.

The strength in my hands has ebbed. The tide has gone out. Things like opening a jar which I could do with relative ease have become a chore requiring inventive devices to replace my younger hands.

Buttoning a shirt now takes minutes because I no longer feel the opening in the buttonhole with the button in my other hand. The fabric under the button somehow gets in the way.

Shuffling cards is another changing activity. I used to be able to intersperse cards on a one-to-one ratio. I play Bridge twice per week. When my partner is dealing the next hand, I am supposed to be mixing up the cards from the previous hand. Often times I miss completely because of my lack of depth perception, and my fingers don’t have the strength to bend the cards so I can get a one-to-one interspersion like I use to. The cards now don’t get mixed as well.

On the other hand, the reduced dexterity gets me out of many tasks that others might have asked me to do.

Cognition

Concentration. I used to be able to spell any and all words without looking at a reference book. Spell check has now become my constant companion.

Sometimes my train of thought runs off the tracks. I am thinking through a problem and suddenly it’s gone. Or someone pulled the switch, and I am now pondering a completely different idea. Scenarios change like in a movie. I now have to retrace my steps to get to the spot where everything changed and move on with my thoughts with the original problem. Sometimes it may be hours later.

The same thing happens when I set out to perform a task. I start but interrupt with a different action. Then I recall what I started to do and seek to finish it no matter what I am doing at that time.

If I set out to perform an action, I now must consider every move in sequence. There is nothing automatic anymore. For instance, if I am climbing or descending stairs I have to decide which foot to use, the right for descending and the left for ascending, one step at a time.

I used to multitask. Now I monotask. Sometimes it’s semi-tasking.

Verbal

I am having a conversation with someone and the words come out wrong. My brain gets ahead of my ability to speak what I am thinking. Sometimes it’s a slurred word or the word that has skipped two spaces like a Monopoly game where I have landed on CHANCE.

Or a name I know but can’t find in my random-access memory until two hours later when it pops into my head while I am thinking or talking about something entirely unrelated.

Or someone asks a question, and three different answers appear to me out of nowhere. I have to consider which answer to give. If that person is expecting a quick response I may say something that is not accurate or to the point. It can be frustrating.

Nonetheless, I am curious to see what develops next. Maybe my upcoming birthday at 92 will be better.

The Room Begins to Move

Here is Part 3 of Phil’s journey into the challenges of aging. For most of my life, most of my friends were older than I was. This, I felt, gave me a heads up on what was coming my way. At 67, I now have a few friends who are younger, but Phil is filling the role to leading the way!

It all started when I was walking on the factory floor during an audit around 2011. Suddenly the room began to move. It was spinning at about 60 rpm. I told the person who was escorting me that I needed to find an empty office and sit down, explaining that I was having a dizzy spell. Fortunately, we were close to some shop floor offices and I sat down in a conference room. The spell lasted about 15 minutes. I continued with the audit.

Fast forward about 3 years. I was conducting a three-day audit at a factory in Minnesota. The first day uneventful. I had dinner at a restaurant within walking distance of my hotel. After I had made some notes of the day’s activities, and watched some TV, I went to bed. When I awoke early the next morning, I felt like I was in the center of a carousel watching the horses spin around but no music and I had no break. Now I was concerned. I went back to bed to see if the dizziness would abate. After a half-hour it slowed down a bit so I could maneuver. I washed, got dressed and went down to the breakfast room. I ate something and drank a cup of coffee. The vertigo did not leave. I returned to my room to consider my next action.

I decided to see if I could drive. I hefted my backpack onto my shoulders and caught the elevator to the garage area all the while still experiencing dizziness. I managed to get to my car, store the backpack in the trunk, and back out of my parking space. I traveled about 100 yards down the ramp and decided this was a bad idea. My vision was blurred and the car felt like a boat on rippling water. There was a turnaround just in front of me, so I took it and returned to my old parking space. In the process, I managed to scrape some paint off the driver’s side fender of my rental car. (That cost me my deductible on my insurance policy.)

I returned to my room and contacted the client, explaining my circumstances. We settled on a plan that someone from their company would pick me up at 1:00 pm and I would resume the audit. By noon time, the effects had subsided to the degree that I was able to walk without holding on to something. I was still unsteady but moving. The client picked me up on schedule. The afternoon went without incident, but I stayed at the prescribed table and did what is called a “desk” audit. By evening all evidence of dizziness had disappeared. The next day went off without a hitch.

When I returned to Grand Rapids, I called my primary physician and explained what had happened. He immediately made an appointment with a neurologist. (It helped that we played golf once a week.) I met the neurologist who conducted a series of physical tests. There were no anomalies. She then scheduled a PET scan of my brain. They found nothing.

I have not experienced a similar incident since. But something caused it.

I celebrated my Ninetieth birthday in November 2023.

The Van Huffel First Cousins planned a family reunion for June of 2023 to be held at Geneva on the Lake in Ohio. The Tuesday before that weekend I was hurrying to complete some chores before I left on Thursday. On the way into the garage at my house there are two concrete steps, one about a 10-inch drop and the other about half that. The sill plate in the door opening is an aluminum plate that extends about ½ inch beyond the frame of the house. As I was going into the garage to get to my car, the left heel of my shoe caught on the sill plate. I lurched face forward past both steps and landed on the concrete floor of the garage. My left arm was lacerated in my attempt to shield my fall. My face looked I had just gone ten rounds with Muhammed Ali. It was bloody and puffed up like a cream-filled pastry. That event led to subsequent incidents that cause me now to use a cane and a mobile walker.

No further incidents. But winter was less forgiving. I persuaded my son, Paul, to get me a walker. He obliged with an aluminum tubular device with three “U” shaped tubes that folded flat. It was good for trekking down my driveway to get the mail. None of the four posts had wheels. When the snow melted, the walker became a hindrance. It was like the old joke, “hit the ball, drag George”, place the walker one pace forward and drag Phil. A remedy came to mind. If I put casters in each of the four posts, I could mobilize it. Off to the hardware store to obtain a wood dowel, from which I cut four shorter pieces, which would just fit inside the tubes, and four casters to fit into the dowels. It all worked.

Then I decided to get a cane because I was experiencing some minor vertigo. Off to Meijers to see what they had. I found an aluminum foldup cane with the brand name, “Hurrycane”. It was supposed to stand on its own, but the design was inadequate. So, I modified it by taking the 4” lid from a plastic jar of nuts turned upside down and forcing it into the base of the cane. Then I drilled and screwed it into the cane base to secure it. Problem solved.

I celebrated year 91 in 2024 with a weekend of parties with my son and daughter and grandchildren. On Monday morning while I was in my kitchen at the sink, I started to move back and lost my balance. This resulted in a gash on my left arm from a drawer pull. I landed on my spine. It was an excruciating pain. But the blood gushing from my arm was where my attention was directed. I arose with some difficulty and put my arm under the cold water faucet. The bleeding did not stop so I wrapped a towel around my arm and proceeded to get dressed. I subsequently drove myself to the nearest hospital emergency room. After some delays, they stitched the gash together with 8 stitches. I drove myself home and began to feel the pain from my spine. I spent the rest of the day lying on the bed.

I fell in my bedroom three more times, injuring my back each time and damaging a chair that is positioned beside the end of my bed. Now I am psychologically conditioned to take very small steps. I have developed the “Van Huffel shuffle” which I had observed in my older brother and my grandfather. I now wear an electronic button which brings to mind a TV ad from the past. “I have fallen, and I can’t get up”. The device works. Press the button and it calls 911. I now have two canes, one for the house and one for the car. I have also purchased a fancy walker with a seat, fabric storage box, big wheels, and breaks. I use it every day now to maneuver between rooms.

I employed a chiropractor to see if he could straighten my spine. In several months of procedures there was some improvement but two days after a session things would return to the way they were. I could feel the disks in my neck and spine slip back. So, I gave up on this solution. I am now trying a posture correcting prothesis which I can wear under my shirt. It forces my shoulders into an attention position and supports my back with a Velcro belt with vertical stays. Maybe I can walk upright again instead of bent over.

We’ll see.

Stream of Consciousness: Enough Hate

In 1973, I had a difficult experience with two teachers. I was outraged at accusations they made against me. I felt angry. I felt hatred. I was nauseated for a week. Note that these are my memories from a long time ago, so the exact details are fuzzy. But I realized that the hatred was making me sick. I renounced hatred then and there. I can still dislike, take actions against things I don’t like. But hatred is not beneficial in any way that I have ever been able to determine. Not that I have gone out of my way to try to find benefits of hatred. Although one book on critical thinking I read some years ago suggested that if you have to hate, hating ignorance and hatreds, for example, could be an intermediate step to moving beyond hate.

It is very depressing these days to be part of the American public. Having lived overseas in the 1970’s and 1980’s for a total of a little more than two years, I found out what people from other countries thought about American leaders. We interfered in many countries beyond the ones that were in the news due to the Vietnam war, and we took other actions to protect our comforts, even when they went against our stated values of democracy and freedom.

Recently, every day, the events happening in our country seem worse and worse. It’s hard to imagine how much worse it can get. The arrest of the extensively vetted green card holder, former UK Government employee, who just finished his masters degree at Columbia University, by all fact based accounts, someone who worked for peace and justice, is a much bigger problem than any of the news sources are saying. This goes far beyond free speech issues.

My neighbor, during the presidential campaign, insisted that “nobody is taking anybody away.” Well, he hadn’t read about Project 2025.

Read for yourself at the link below. My response: The members of any legitimate universal religion who promote sectarianism are betraying the higher teachings of their culture. The ADL used to promote tolerance, knowing that hatred is viral, and the targets never remain isolated. Now, they seem to have lost that most basic foundation of working for justice for all. The rise of far right Jewish groups goes to demonstrate what my wise friend Reverend Dan told me years ago. We do, in general, as we were done to, not as we would like to have done to ourselves. The competition among religious groups to out reproduce each other is a factor underlying the rise of the right, and the take-over by the intolerant, of national governments around the world. All of this getting us to focus on hating each other, instead of getting us to focus on what the powerful are doing to end humanity as a flowering of unique individuals, each of us doing our own thing to enrich the experience that humanity as a whole “uploads” to The Universal Consciousness, is a problem. Since the previous sentence is long winded, who knows who will try to understand it? Bottom line: Mahmoud Khalil is not a terrorist. His whole life speaks to his efforts at building a just peace. Why isn’t the UK speaking up louder about this?

We are now doing even worse things than what we’ve been doing to the Afghans who helped us during out twenty year military effort in their homeland.

As a person who tends toward gloomy outlooks, I have found, over the years, that taking a longterm view of the world helps me to stay centered and balanced. There was actually research done that demonstrated that while many people do better by staying in the NOW, depressed blood chemistry people often do better focusing on the past, present and future. That is how, after years of studying wisdom traditions from around the world, including science fiction, the Mythology of the Future, I am less gloomy than I was, despite the global turmoil being created by multiple organizations claiming to represent me, or “people like me”. Hint: I am unique and there is nobody else like me. Even my mother used to say that God broke the mold.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/israel-betar-deportation-list-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

But Nothing Knew Not Fear

And in the beginning, there was nothing.
And in the nothing, was the potential for everything.

And then suddenly the nothing became Everything,
which included the memory of nothing.

And so Everything knew Nothing.
And Everything feared Nothing.
But Nothing knew not fear.

And Everything knew not what to do
about its fear of Nothing.

But then Everything had an idea.
The idea was to forget about Nothing,

This should not have been difficult.
Everything was a veritable kaleidoscope
of moving matter and energy.
And so, Everything forgot Nothing,
by experiencing every thing.
And tried to know itself.

But Nothing never stayed away for long.
And so Everything understood Time,
as the recurrent memory of Nothing,
and how it became Everything.
And how everything changes.

In its attempts to forget Nothing,
Everything tried many diversions.
Metamorphosis into more and more
complicated forms, spread further and further apart.

And Every Thing became lonely.
And sought other Things.
And so part of Everything became Gravity.

And so things gathered together.
And eventually, particles became stars
and stars attracted planets
and planets sprouted life forms
and it was very interesting.
Everything was surprised.

And Everything almost forgot the
mystery of how nothing became Everything.

Watching the life forms emerge and diverge
was very surprising. Even delightful.
But then again, the sparkle dulled.
It was routine. A beautiful routine, but a routine.

And so Everything decided to renew exploration.
The frog was experiment 1.0.
It was a good experiment.

And dinosaurs and birds and shrews
and mice and wolves and elephants
walked the earth.

And Time passed. And things settled down.
And Everything noticed that nothing new was happening.
And was reminded of Nothing.
And decided to spice things up.

The photo at the top is of the ball joint that lets a bumblebee move its antenna around. Image obtained using a scanning electron microscope.

You Should Talk With Your Elementary School Kids This Holiday Season About…MATH!

Why is life such a struggle for what is left of the middle class, and the working class today, compared to 40 years ago?

Because the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else, from being stolen from. Legally. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Last night, at a holiday gathering, I met a charming gentleman wearing a mint green suit jacket. The gentleman shared that he was retired from accounting work, and was now working in the public schools, among other duties, helping tutor kids in math and reading. He must be a mature and patient man! From what I have recently read, half of Americans ages 16 – 65, are unable to read above 8th grade level. Their math skills are similarly weak.

WHO CARES?

Who cares? he told me one of his descendents asked.

Well, I said, they, the youth, the adults, everyone should care, because how else can you follow the work of the investigative journalists who are trying to help us see how the rich are stealing from the poor? If you can’t read, and you don’t know what a percent is, you will not be able to understand why our society has arrived at this point of oligarchy.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH.

You won’t understand HOW the very few have gained control of the very MUCH. If you can’t understand HOW the rich steal from the poor, you won’t be able to protect YOURSELF, YOUR FAMILY, YOUR FRIENDS, or anyone else. You will continue to facilitate funneling more and more of the group wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Give your kids the gift of math awareness.

Kahn Academy has free math, basic literacy for all ages, and financial literacy for older kids.

I made my employee look at a couple of the geometry lessons, because he was disinterested in geometry when he was in school. Yet to do the work in my lab, he had to understand the properties of circles in a little more detailed way than he did. The lessons are very good. And oh, did I mention? They are free.

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be disadvantaged….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on this planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin, at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my ex’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

Spiritually Attached to India

“She won’t like it here,” the good professor wrote. “Westerners never do. There’s no room service, and the food in the cafeteria is all South Indian style.”

“She’s spiritually attached to India. She speaks fluent Hindi. This isn’t her first trip. She’ll be fine.”

My soon to be friend Shankar nailed it. I had never thought about it in exactly those words though. I’m spiritually attached to India. It would be my third trip to the subcontinent. The fluent Hindi was a bit of an exaggeration. I had pretty darn good tourist Hindi, maybe a thousand words. Grammatical mistakes in most of my sentences, but I was usually understood, then corrected, proving that they understood what I was trying to say. (My most used sentence on the hair-raising ride on the 1.5 lane wide roads on the sides of the “foothills” of the Himalayas, was -after correction- Nicche na dekko!!- “Don’t look down!”

sometimes followed by “But Look Down- it’s beautiful!”)

Shankar was correct, but he humored the professor, and asked me if I agreed that the accommodation planned, without room service, would be ok. I assured him that it would, and was very happy to have this new idea of spiritual attachment, and to have had someone who never met me in person realize it was true. I can’t really explain it; maybe I had a past life or three in India.

Really, my main concern about hotels in Asia is that the mattresses are so hard. Difficult on my arthritic joints. But I had resolved to just take extra pain killer, when I needed it. This was my bucket trip. I was acting on my desire to teach a failure analysis class in India, before the onset of my ultimate, inevitable deterioration. The mattress at the University guesthouse was unlikely to be harder, I reasoned, than the one at the rural Christian monastery where I was going to be spending the first week and a half in India on the upcoming trip. And the food was unlikely to be more difficult to enjoy than what the monks and nuns ate. And anyway, I had just returned from Japan, where I became convinced that the more expensive the hotel, the harder the mattress.

If I really hated sambar, rasaam, and idly, I probably wouldn’t go to south India. But I had learned to eat, if not love, the first two items, spicy soups, back in the mid 1970’s, when my South Indian ex-boyfriend moved to a town near my parents, who really liked him more than any other boyfriend I had before or after, and proceeded to teach my mother how to do South Indian cooking. I learned to more or less enjoy idly, a somewhat bland lentil flour based sponge, used to sop up the sambar, on my first trip to India, where they served it at the Hindu monastery (ashram) that hosted the meditation retreat that I was attending in 2001.

So I just had to deal with the reality of the hospitality that my hosts, for what was becoming a four day speaking tour in Chennai, were able to provide. I had offered to teach a two day seminar, give a dinner talk to my fellow members of our international engineering society, and a lecture to the engineering students at the local university. I ended up also giving a longer version of the dinner talk at two private companies, and another presentation to some eleventh graders, entitled “Is a Career in Materials Engineering Right for Me?” I wasn’t charging a speaking or teaching fee, but I thought it was reasonable to ask them to cover my expenses for the four days that I’d be visiting them. They agreed, but were concerned about the budget. It all worked out. I was back to normal food after buying myself four days of temptations at the Radisson Blu buffets.

Back home after a month in India, I feel more spiritually attached to the people and place than ever. After twenty years of trying to get traction exploring new ideas of how engineers can embrace critical and creative thinking, or what I’ve started to call “cultivating clarity,” I am lucky to have developed a small group of local, American people, who appreciate my creative approach to critical thinking. But each of the two Indian companies that invited me to the give the “Thinking Skill Optimization” talk had 85+ people attend. And they participated. And their managers thanked me in unique ways that allowed me to see that they were also paying attention. My new friend Prasad told me “You have gotten pretty close to giving a method for developing intuition.”

Yes, that’s right. And it was very interesting to me that someone who lives in the land of the longest lasting collective consciousness, the very source of intuition, understood that to be a major part of my approach. Of course many engineers would not be attracted to a class on developing their intuition, and even if they were, I imagine they’d have a hard time convincing their bosses to cover the costs to attend. It sure is useful to have a way to calibrate intuition though. When effective, it’s a lot faster and easier than calculations and analysis.

Thinking about it further, I am just realizing how unusual it was that both managers attended the training with their employees. How often does that happen in the USA? Most American managers think that the only thing they need to know how to do is balance a budget.

I think there is more to the success of the contribution of Indian industry to the global economy than low wages.

The Problem with the Two Party System

Sometime in my youth, I remember expressing happiness to my dad that my preferred political party had won the presidency, after a long drought. Unfortunately, the new president was having trouble finding well known, experienced, skilled, proven Democrats to fill the leadership roles in the Cabinet, and beyond. My father, long interested in government, to the extent of reading multiple histories of the Romans, ranted about the incompetence of the new president, and the general failure to fill many of the positions, due to the refusal of Congress to approve his nominees, thus proving his general incompetence to be president.

Is Now The Time to Expand Our Two Party System?

That’s the problem with election cycles in the two party system that we Americans love so much. We’re proud of the fact that we have only two major parties. We avoid that messy coalition building that other democracies have to to through. We let the people choose, and then let the chosen person / party govern. At least that’s been the theory. The winning party claims a mandate based on the electoral college “landslide,” even if the popular vote went the other way. The winner then gets to fill the leadership roles in agriculture, the military, education, finance, drug policy, and all the other aspects of modern life.

But experience builds on experience.

As an engineer, age late 50’s, suddenly my clients are asking new types of questions. I would not have been able to answer these questions even a few years ago. Or maybe the questions have always been there, but I’m able to hear them now. Hard to say. A few times in the recent past, the answers have popped into my mind almost as soon as they are asked, and anticipated side concerns also seem to articulate themselves in the compost of the confusion of the questioner.

When only Democrats get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Republicans don’t gain the skills required to lead. When only Republicans get to fill top positions for 8 or 12 years, Democrats don’t gain the skills required to lead. When Republicans, who by definition think multi-level hierarchy is the natural and best state for humanity, are in charge for long stretches of time, the sprouts of true egalitarian democracy are killed, pre-emergence.

Empowerment is the Key!

I heard an African-American community leader calmly insisting, correctly in my opinion, that money for White-led organizations helping African-Americans was wasted. African-Americans, he kept insisting, have to be empowered to solve problems by themselves. That means the role of the white cultural matrix must be to try to weed out the systematic discrimination that keeps African-Americans dis-empowered.

Empowerment is related to the SELF.

It does not mean power OVER others.

What are the major, current and actionable sources of this dis-empowerment? I’ll leave that question for all of us to meditate on.

Only by solving problems can we learn to solve problems.

This happens at many simultaneous levels: individual, community wide, city wide, state wide, nation wide, and world wide, and over many generations. It takes a long un-interupted time for the poisonous preconceptions carried in every culture to be weeded out in the “market-place of ideas.” These poisonous ideas are left from earlier times, were created in different circumstances, by well meaning people. But the only constant is change. And as change accelerates in the accelerated mingling of different groups in modern times, we need to move toward a system where people of all cultures and political persuasions have un-interupted chances to develop their leadership skills.

You may wish to view this Wikipedia article on other problems associated with the type of voting we have, which is not necessarily confined to two party systems. Thanks to the person who called this article to my attention.