So I read Atlas Shrugged and I liked it. I ended up heading over to UCLA and attending a lecture on Objectivism and Ayn Rand philosophy just to hear more about it. But here is what I don’t like about it–the idea that it is somehow noble to just quit and leave. Yeah sure, society was awful to them and the weak used the virtues of the strong against themselves, so on and so forth. How is this not any different than the Allegory of the Cave?

I thought Plato wrapped it up nicely for us. Suppose all we could see were shadows against the wall of a cave, couldn’t we be forgiven for thinking that that was reality? Let’s say you escape from the cave, and you see the situation for what it was: an illusion. The burden–the Philosopher’s Burden–is the price you pay for a peek outside the darkness. If you’ve been privileged enough to be exposed to the good life, if you start to figure out some truth and see the shadows and dust for all that they are–you have to go back. Of course that’s not the best incentive, but if it was about weighing what was easier or came with the fewest consequences, we’d just lay around all day.

They might beat you, or mock you, or laugh at you for your persistence but it is all we have–to try and move collectively from one plane to the next. As Alinsky said, history is a relay race of runners with the torch of idealism.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but I agree with that. You have to get up each morning and try again–even if it never works, even if they never listen. I’m not saying that the world needs more evangelists, in fact, they’re part of the problem (they propagated the illusions in the first place) . What we need more of though, are people willing to head back down to the Cave. There is that Roosevelt quote about the gladiators in the arena, or the Aurelius line about how nothing provokes change like seeing the virtues embodied in the people around you.

Even if you push it just one step forward, so long as you hand it off to the next in line. Maybe it’s just me but it seems like there is more dignity in that than in cavorting around in a hidden valley in Colorado reciting verbose creeds to unlock magical doors. I’m not saying I want to die on a train like Eddie Willers, not knowing what I was working for or why, but if they’d never turned it around and the world had ended, I’d have rather gone out as Dagny Taggart than as John Galt. Because at least she tried.

Thoughts?

Most days to the office, I wear jeans and a white t-shirt. It’s the same thing I wear on the weekends…and have for pretty much every other day of the last three or four years. I like it. It’s comfortable. I don’t have to stress about brands. It makes me happy and that is why I do it.

But a lot of people dress up. I have a feeling it’s because they think they’re supposed to, not because they like it. What are the chances of everybody picking the same style?

When I was in 2nd grade, they took us to the computer lab for the first time. The same year, they forced us to learn cursive. “Nice handwriting is key to business documents.” How wrong did that turn out to be? It was the first thing I decided not to learn. To this day, I cannot write in cursive. What teacher was going to fail me because I couldn’t add a tail to my vowels? I can fake it–I can sort of drag the pen on the paper and connect the letters, but I can’t write in cursive.

That’s the thing. You can walk in other people’s footsteps and you make all the moves they tell you to make. But see, the people teaching you have a certain bias they don’t like to disclose. If they teach you their rules then you’re a lot less likely to challenge them on your own terms. And they’ve already got a solid head start when it comes to the old system. Think of it this way, if there is a general rule or aphorism that lays out your path then it’s probably a common one. And thus it lacks any scarcity or value. We know for sure at least one person has already done it, and enough followed to propagate a cliché about it. Is that what you want? Does that sound like the field or the life for you?

A crowded field with a lot of competition is one low profit margins–so success hinges on brute strength, on bearing the unpleasantness longer than everybody else. You’ve decided to beat them in cursive instead of in content–and gotten all the joy that comes from staring a page with curly letters. Enjoy.

So you can dress like everybody else, and you can pay your dues. You can go to grad school because that’s what your brother did, or you can become the best damn paper filer in the entire world so then you can be the best trainer of paper filers and then later you can maybe pick which papers they have to file. And then you can pray to everything that is holy that the world will remain exactly as it is so you can get the same payoffs as everyone else.

Or, you can understand strategic options and flexibility. And grasp that a lot of people have done it their way but no one has done it your way. Thucydides realized way back then that the weak subsidize the strong. [ “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.“]. If you bring something to the table, you get to take something back. When you add value, you get to decide the terms of its delivery. So seriously, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

The Dip—Seth Godin

Maybe the best book I’ve read on work/inspiration/creation since The War of Art. It’s only 70 pages and it looks like something someone would give as a joke gift, but it’s anything but. Godin talks frankly about quitting and pushing through–and when to do each. Quit when you’ll be mediocre, when the returns aren’t worth the investment, when you no longer think you’ll enjoy the ends. Stick when the dip is the obstacle that creates scarcity, when you’re simply bridging the gap between beginner’s luck and mastery.

10 Discoveries that Rewrote History—Patrick Hunt

This is a short read but definitely worth it. It gives you a great introduction to the discovery of Troy, Pompeii, The Tomb of 10,000 Warriors, Thera (possibly Atlantis) and the Rosetta Stone. Again, it doesn’t go far in depth and it is very anecdotal, but I found the stories to be fascinating. Hunt starts with the discovery process and ends with the implications–which really, unless you plan on pursuing the field–is all you need. Before the book I had no idea how pivotal the Rosetta Stone was in deciphering Egyptian Culture.

Learning from Iraq: Counter Insurgency in American Strategy (academic paper)–US Army Strategic Studies Institute

Part of some research I am doing on strategy in Iraq. This paper breaks down a lot of the assumptions we have about the conflict–that we’re not fighting an insurgency but a hybrid of criminal gangs and guerrilla fighters and that we are simply engaged in a propaganda war in which violence is particularly successful. The only solution is to wage a battle for information, which of course is something that goverments (and Bush specifically) are atrocious at.

Trends in Marital Stability (academic paper) Justin Wolfers at Wharton

Basically, the rise in divorce rates (from some recent studies) that stupidly forgot to synchronize their dates. But interestingly, some of the rise in divorce rates is explained by the fact that people are living longer and thus *obviously* more susceptible to the risk factors that cause people to split. (The paper was pretty mediocre, you should probably skip it)

Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades— (academic paper) Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer

A post on this is coming but this paper is a short form version of The Tipping Point. Interestingly it actually analyzes what information cascades mean, not just how they happen. Turns out, they aren’t all that great as far as information goes.