How to win friends and influence people

I remember Thanksgiving with my wonderfully generous hosts in Boston, a Jewish family with two really smart kids. During the meal the eldest (eight years old) was quizzed :

"And what's the capital of K's country, India(no matter that we were from Pakistan) ? One out of one. Good.

"And who was the first Sultan of Delhi?"

Don't look at me kid. But he did, from the corner of his eyes. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders, deflated. But now they were looking at me. I'm buggered.

And so the whole meal passed in this pathetic game of approval and rejection. I felt myself gradually slouching into my chair. I was going to ask the kid to pass the oranges but thought better not, they might ask him when oranges were first introduced into Europe!

I came across these lines from Gaddis:

On the one hand the parent looks for signs of potential failure-this search arises in part from guilt and anxious preoccupation about himself. On the other hand he looks for signs of talent-this must not be wasted.

I couldn't but help think of all those false smiles, the picket-fence perfect lives, the beauty pageants and the strong desire to be a celebrity, to be someone , to be liked. (Roth's portrayal of 'the Swede' is brilliant on this).

The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.
---Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

First best. Kick ass. We gonna show those towel-heads in I-raq..

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.

Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports...
---Norman Mailer , New York Review of Books

But what of those who don't make it to first place, all those scroungers on welfare? What of those who do not answer to the 'calling'?

Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss.

Step up to the rush for second place. One has to wonder if what Solzhenitsyn saw as the constant desire to have still more things, and a still better life (the American Dream) ..imprints many western faces with worry and even depression doesn't go to the heart of the matter. With so much pressure to be the best, to always have the perfect life, have all the answers to the questions, is it any wonder that in order to keep the quiet desperation at bay life should be lived on the surface only? (Roth, again)....

and the day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You....mortifying confessions, group therapy, primal screams and "making it"..Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self esteem....books on how to be happy, how to obtain peace of mind, how to win friends and influence people (sold 15 million copies), how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.
--Gaddis.

I don't know. Perhaps some think this war on Iraq is another game (play station for the troops, something else for the politicians). The death of other people's children is insignificant: no mournful flutes for them, no playing of Barber's Adagio, just the grim reality of dust returning to dust. There is some talk now of "lowering of expectations", of hoping for the second best. Maybe one day people will start to ask, as in Lord of the Flies, if the beast wasn't within, if there wasn't something terribly flawed, right from the beginning , with the first best.

Somehow I doubt it. Talking of Vietnam, Gerald Ford would say:

It seems a shame that at the last minute of the last quarter we don't make that special effort,..It just makes me sick.

More troops to Iraq anyone?I can see next year's bestseller, having won Muslim hearts and minds : How to Win Friends and Influence People.

~~~~~

Wrote that just before the 'surge'. But the same thing applies to Afghanistan: 'We' cannot, simply cannot, fail or be seen to fail.

At the level of the individual, is this frenzy to 'succeed' leading to fatigue, exhaustion, nervous disorders? As the pointy heads keep on telling us, happiness depends on comparisons (with other people and other times in one's life). Not only does the pursuit, then, warp our sense of our self, but it could ultimately be futile-even according to its own narrow standards.

Look back on your life. What have you achieved? Look at the people around you, the high-flyers (who are easy, too easy, to mock) and those who have settled in to stable patterns of bourgeois mediocrity and quiet plodding success. They've done it, managed to grow up, make their peace with the world, religion, God. No-one your age is still a liberal. Conserve. Build. Forget. Learn to count: 1st best, 2nd best...

It happens agreeably enough to this maxim,the Whigs are
friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.

---from Hazlitt

It seems (or I find) the most useful definition of Man is that he is without definition.
---after Hazlitt

Well, yes, there's something a bit fishy about people who want to talk about "the soul" and all things deep and profound, or who always complain about the prosaic nature of the world and its duplicity, her masks; they are, instead, greatly animated and at the drop of a hat ready to swoon like lovers in a tryst of mutual self-negation or like teary-eyed patriots before the flag.

Like Americans who want to reestablish America's 'moral authority' or Christians and Muslims who see life as one steady but uneasy falling away from some intitial pure state, every change speaks only of decadence, and time itself is the great carrier of this disease.

The changeless as an ideal; religion and tradition as a closing of the circle of possibilities.

companions

One of the best things about blogging has been the sharing of books/films/music by my readers and the always insightful comments that have made me think twice about my views. Danke.

Economics and friendship (fellow-feeling):

One of the reasons that economics is a spectacularly narrow approach to understanding reality is that it posits that the sole principle underlying human motivation is self-interest (Edgeworth). Well, actually, that isn't true,strictly speaking,since economic (utility) theory doesn't actually say anything about the substance of one's preferences and instead focuses on their structure. So, for example, to say that one's preferences are rational is not a comment on the ends of one's actions/desires but, simply, that they-as a set- meet some sort of conditions of rationality (such as consistency).

However, for practical purposes most economists actually do take the self-interest idea as a working proposition or as the principle of motivation. It says something about "human nature": what it is, or what it ought to be.

And of course, the picture we set for ourselves-in our institutions, culture, and ideals- is often the one we grow into. The market, the "selfish gene", conflict, the survival of the fittest etc go up to make a constellation of ideas that views things like kindness, commitment, altruism, reciprocity, a sense of fairness and duty etc as fundamentally suspect. They are either veiled forms of self-interest or they are signs of weakness: if we were strong enough we wouldn't need to depend on others. Self-sufficiency is the deal. We are, it is said, at odds with one another. A warre against all.

We've been talked out of kindness, duped by a shallow form of intelligence (academia plays its part here). It would be mistaken to deny the great appeal of the notion of autonomy, but equally so to lose a sense of a 'we' (J.Luc Nancy)

Alan Ryan: "we mutually belong to one another" and this is necessary for the good life. Happiness: I-We.

Kindness-kinship (sameness). Philanthropia: the love of mankind. Caritas and open-heartedness. The desire to connect, to break out of the self, to live with others. Or man as a selfish beast, defined by his biological inheritance?

To be sympathetic to the vulnerability of others is to be so to our own-but not because it is so. Pleasure may accompany friendship but it is not the reason for it. Or, to put it another way, it is a qualitatively 'higher' form of pleasure.

What do we hold in common? Our needs? Our finitude? Is self-sufficiency and narcissism a turning away from the trauma of that acknowledgement? Kindness opens us to others but also to the dread of our own vulnerability and fragility.

Self-interest...assumes that we know what the self is, and what its interests are (next post)

Seneca: No-one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purpose. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.

'We' as a way of fulfilling one's humanity, our common humanity, without filling it.

Oikeiosis: the attachment of self to the other

R.I.P. Michael

navigate by the stars

humanity finds itself in the position of a captain whose ship has been built so strongly of steel and iron that the magnetic needle of its compass no longer responds to anything but the iron structures of the ship; it no longer points north.
---Heisenberg

Snow, drift.
Down.
far, darkly
into the night.

Or to the sea.
Weightless.
Relinquish your love
of Earth.

Snow, striking,

like the cold fever

of burning suns

in your eyes.

Snow, holding
the lost future,
like a shimmering face
with blank expression.

It/you falling
generally particularly
in ever-widening angles
obliquely into oblivion

White, fall.
like a spell.
Erase my name now,
from your still heart.

white and light

the mystery of the veil

Two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason.

Well, it appears that the French are getting their knickers in a twist (again!) over the Very Important issue of the niqab.

The first question: why is this the first question?

Surely anyone who was really concerned about the inequalities between men and women, about oppression in France -and the starker ones in the so-called muslim world- would talk about education, work, political participation, patriarchal, tribal and feudal attitudes and practices, access to water, shelter, safety...

Of course, very often religious practices are inextricably connected to some of these issues, but the desire to reduce all questions of identity and all problems to religion (rather than class or justice, say)is, perhaps, symptomatic of a rather fanatical mindset.

Why is this issue, for example, more important than education, poverty or access to good housing when it comes to Culture (note the "C") and citizenship?

remember the colours

What I saw:

I sawe the grey spaces intervene and many clever people think themselves clever. Dull men in hats expounding fabulous theories, professors of Philosophies with their grand airs; and learned men of science tightening the noose around Mysteries. A buffoon Preacher with grotesque hands so puffed up at the sound of his own braying. All and one claimed to know what could be known. And yet, to my way of being, there was to be found no light in their words, no delight to be had in their companie.

To be the wind, not a statement about it.

I have become a question to myself.

Who said what? Analyse it, dissect it. Point to the passage in the book..and wouldn't you just die without Mahler? What does it matter if you cannot live it?


Alone. Together.
alone, together
alone together

Distinctness, singleness. togetherness. uniqueness. gem-like separation of our being. love is not a goal; it is only a traveling. only.

blossoming means the establishing of a pure new relationship with all the cosmos..this mysterious other reality of things in a perfected relationship. it is into this perfected relationship that every straight line curves, as if to some core, passing out of the time-space dimension...

creation proceeds from the ever inscrutable quicks of living beings, men, women, animals, plants. the actual living quick itself is alone the creative reality. once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from creative reality and entered the realm of static fixity..you can't make an idea of the living self...

the great lesson is to learn to break all the fixed ideals, to allow the soul's own deep desires to come direct, spontaneous into consciousness.

Education as a guard against falling into mechanical thinking..a proper approach to the past and the future, memory and desire. To keep open, free from "rust" ..the spontaneous, free-wheeling self that spins away from dead material reality, mechanizations, the satanic mills of thought.

there must be no fixed activity, no fixed direction.

---D.H.L.

May I run, run, and never find.

---Shah Latif.

The slow, circling descent through time. like the gentle curvature of the hand that encloses itself. a return to silence, a deep welcoming silence. you hear the profoundly familiar creaking wooden floorboards under your feet, the sighs of the white doors. the radio with its steel dial like a compass, pointing north, true north. when dust settles and you can see clearly. you are attentive, child-like in your wakefulness. the return of music and silence. they turn to their books. everyone lovingly in their own world. you sit in the conservatory ("the conservative") and allow yourself to fall and fall...a dizzying stillness. the hand learns not to reach out. all the colours were here. home.