All You Need Is Not Enough

Whenever I explain my "two essentials" theory of success it generates vociferous denial.

The two essentials are Status and Confidence. There are people with status who lack confidence, and confident people who lack status; neither type will become achievers. Both characteristics are essential to gaining success. And the two characteristics are sufficient, needing nothing else. (I'll be coming back to this last point later, so save your outrage.)

Bear in mind that I'm describing qualities as perceived. Status and Confidence can each be faked, and both together. If they are perceived by others as true, the faker will have success with the gullible.

But true Status and true Confidence certainly exist, and sometimes in the same person.

True Status means a social standing certified by some impressive institution that represents a summary approval of a person's quality. They have been evaluated and found qualified, and the rest of us can trust that judgment without conducting our own evaluation. Professionals have status, the rich have status, PhDs have status until they blow it. Teachers today in the US have little status, and lawyers are always under suspicion.

True Confidence means a self assurance that obstacles will be overcome even if they cannot be fully foreseen. A confident person says to herself or himself, I know I can do this even though I've never done it before, I have faith in my abilities to perceive, assess and respond because I'm ever striving to do my best, and although I have always a wall of doubt to scale, I have always been able to climb over that doubt and deliver good results.

A faker in each of these two qualities simply believes the lie he tells himself, which enables all lies to others.

There are fakers who have true Status and Confidence—as fakers. They are widely acknowledged as being really good at telling the lie that others want to hear. Some of them are politicians and some are motivational speakers.

Whether faked or true, perceived Status and Confidence are essential to success. But they are no guarantee of quality. This fact explains most of the mediocrity in life.

For what happens is this: People with perceived Status and Confidence are often given opportunities on the strength of perception alone, with no due diligence whether they can actually deliver desired results. Con men build penny stock empires that invite their own collapse, blue ribbon panels of prestigious people issue clueless reports, managers who have successfully job hopped to a high level position demonstrate they have no talent for running an operation, having never run anything but their own career advancement.

Thus, much of what we reflexively attribute to the Peter Principle is the fault of the people who promoted candidates of perceived Status and Confidence to their level of incompetence.

Now, back to what is not on the list of necessary characteristics for success: Talent, authentic, enviable talent. Its products are worth stealing, its mysterious wellspring quite frightening to those who have little talent of their own. Talent is like being born a magical person, someone who can make things happen. And magical people are considered threatening, they need control. Talent is not necessary for success because talented people can be appropriated.

To many creative people, talent is a curse. People of perceived Status and Confidence confiscate the golden eggs and give the creative person the goose. Snarky critics demean the talented person, attempting to deny them Status and to shake their Confidence. Talent brings out the quiet mean streak in mainstream hypocrisy.

This truth is pretty widely acknowledged, and it does not offend. My hypothesis receives vociferous denial not so much because it does not make talent essential, but because it does not acknowledge the commonly believed fount of success: Dedicated Ambition. 

If you believe that wishing hard and working hard trump all else, you are in the mainstream. If you realize that wishful thinking and unproductive effort is delusional, you are a heretic. I am a heretic, and this makes people angry, as if I were refuting the only path they see for themselves to success.

There is a relationship between talent and hard work. People with basic talent can greatly improve their skills. But Dedicated Ambition is something apart from the effort, drill, study, training, and self discipline that hones talent to its sharpest edge. Dedicated Ambition is an occult potion for those without talent. It gives one powers that are not natural gifts. It is not exclusive like talent, it is available to all.

The quotidian essence of Dedicated Ambition fits it well into the American Zeitgeist. We as a people have always believed to our marrow that with enough hard work and pure determination, anyone can achieve anything they want, you just have to want it hard enough. 

This belief is demonstrably untrue and at the same time, impossible to falsify. For every gold metal winner there are silver and bronze "losers" who just didn't want it hard enough, and countless also-rans, a vast majority, for the sole victor to leave in the dust. The true statistics of competition are easily dismissed by the culture of winning. Such denial is overwhelmingly powerful, built into the American psyche. We don't fault ourselves for not being good enough, we fault ourselves for not trying hard enough.

Notice that in the bootstrap mentality of Dedicated Ambition there is no special place for talent. You don't need it starting out, you just have to want it hard enough, and you will acquire it through belief in yourself. In this way, talent becomes a product of Dedicated Ambition. With enough desire, even a pig can fly.

Notice, too, that a lot of the "impressive institutions" that certify Status also highly value Dedicated Ambition. And why should this matter more than rigorous tests of excellence? I'll answer with another question: Why do some engineers build bridges that fail? Institutions can sometimes be too impressed with themselves and not enough with standards of performance.

Performance is the domain of talent. In some fields, talent prevails. Status and Confidence may gain an audition, but only performance will win the part. When is the last time you applied for a gig that included a performance test? If you are an actor or a musician, even a successful one, you understand and appreciate that auditions are a necessary part of your career. If you are a manager or a professional, you are used to coasting on credentials and recommendations, and would resent having to demonstrate your ability through repeated audition performance.

And that is why All You Need Is Not Enough. Status and Confidence are of little help in the performance arena, where talent emerges and shines.

But talent should never expect success as the reward. Knowing you did good work is often talent's only gain, incentive enough to do more good work with little expectation of reward and no escape from having to audition for your next gig. Talent is a compulsion, not a goal. Talent is who you are and who you must always be, regardless of outcome.

Deep Time and Shallow Clocks

Studying up on paleontology, the vast span of geological time I once thought intimidating doesn't seem so vast anymore. One hundred seventy million years of dinosaurs goes by fast.

Continents move at a quick pace for something as large as a continent. We can now measure contemporary velocities with GPS technology at centimeters per year, a stampede of mountaintops and shorelines. 

Continents moving as fast as fingernails grow seem to me in fairly rapid motion.

The major psychological shift I'm experiencing is that the human life span now feels impossibly brief. Deep time can be plumbed, but the breadth of existence from birth to death is a measure too thin to be useful.

And what a slight proportion of our time is spent transferring knowledge from generation to generation! Perhaps once there was a thing worthy of being called a culture, but nowadays, as we approach the attention span of Drosophila, what mechanism is there for collective learning that transcends the momentary sensation?

Yes, some will claim that the longest lived cultural institutions are the Abrahamic religions, which together span about three thousand years. And I answer that no religion has demonstrated itself to be a learning institution. Religions are stasis institutions, insisting on adherence to abstract timelessness and placeless ideals. They have no clocks and they do not value this world. They have sponsored scholars and universities, but their belief systems do not function as living, collective memories ingesting and processing human experience, constantly revising their conclusions.

For that, one would have to turn to science. Science might seem the only hope for a cultural repository of cumulative investigation, except that science as practiced has become diversified beyond comprehension, an institution of cubbyholes, where specialized experts don't understand each other's work.

And yet, science provides the only wide scope on reality we have beyond immediate sensation. The climate changes we have wrought might remain mostly under the radar of human awareness, save for sensationalist headlines written about scientist's findings. When things happen too slowly for us to notice, we think no change is taking place. The gradient of change is below the threshold of perception. When things happen fast, they usually happen in fits and starts, the jagged chart line of change providing ample excuse for denial.

A cultural learning process would have heuristics substituting for statistical analysis, ways of recognizing shifting envelopes of variability, an instinct for knowing that things are not as they were.

An individual can grasp time before and after one's existence, but a society cannot. Our clocks tick too fast and out of sync. We have no means for gathering and evaluating knowledge that transcends generations, save for a rare "longitudinal" study, and even then, the results are regarded by a public with severe short term memory issues as the curiosity of the moment, quickly forgotten. 

It occurs to me that human affairs should be run by scientists, and only scientists, and that democracy is absurd because it always tries to undo itself with ceaseless battles for dominance swaying between extremes, that make of our collective mind a bipolar paranoid schizophrenic. Taken together, we are a truly psychotic species.

But a world run by technocrats would be just as bad, solving problems through genetic engineering and extermination.

Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, has funded a ten thousand year clock. What we need is a society of ten thousand year clock keepers, people who invisibly nudge the course of human affairs toward wisdom.

This needn't be a secret society, as no one would take seriously an organization whose vision looked forward farther than recorded history can look back.

This society would need the endurance of religion and the awareness of science. It would have to pass its mission on through generations even as it adapted to changing circumstances. It would be able to infiltrate every center of power without revealing its methods for guiding human affairs.

Rather sounds like Asimov's Second Foundation, except that mentalism isn't an option.

I would not be disturbed to learn that there is a smart, benign hand guiding an otherwise stupid, self destructive species. Not the hand of a god who thinks nothing of destroying the planet it created, as a broken plaything is to a child, but rather, the hands of the smartest, most humane and empathetic people human genes can produce.

A society of Nelson Mandela types, looking ten thousand millenia hence. As far fetched as that sounds, it is about the only hope we have for lasting as long as the dinosaurs did.

The Political Thriller Revived

For awhile now political thrillers have been generic action movies playing out against vague and largely irrelevant political backdrops.

I think the genre is about to undergo a revival, politics to the foreground and the action more psychosocial. Always the threat of violence lurks, more frightening from the shadows and more insidious because those shadows reside in the soul.

Movies inspired by real events hit the screens a few years following those events. You can be sure that at this very moment, several scripts derived from the Snowden revelations and the federal shutdown are being shopped around. Most of them will hew to the familiar tropes about our government out to get us and the ruthless ambition of politicians, tropes that are throwbacks to the 1970s culture of paranoia.

I have in mind something different, a political thriller that turns tropes upside down.

In my story, terrorists, the usual suspects, are vastly overrated bunglers, struggling against their increasing irrelevance.

The Tea Party "patriots" are subversives in the legal as well as the rhetorical sense of the term.

Mainstream Republicans show themselves to be nothing more than money mongering opportunists with no moral center.

Journalists worthy of the name are few, and most with bylines and televised faces are self promotional hacks addicted to sensational speculation.

Liberal righteous rage finally, foolishly and fatally bursts out of its fabled self restraint, a serious menace posed by rational, overly tolerant people gone mad with vengeance.

Intelligence services are concerned primarily with avoiding culpability by erasing their tracks. In a strange way they are pathetically innocent of what they hath wrought.

The villain is not a secret movement, it is the American brew of apathy, self righteousness and impetuous power. The conspiracy is not about cover ups and murder, it is about collective denial in a culture where people nurture their favorite nemesis in order to justify their own agression.

Amongst the military are the good guys, the only adults in the room, and the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs is the wisest woman in the world.

The NSA fishing pond stocked with archived phone calls and emails becomes an asset vital to the survival of a democracy that is most threatened by a public too lazy and too ignorant to sustain it.

The main practical question to be faced by a story that leaves few unscathed by disdain is, will it sell?

I think that so much self disdain roils beneath the surface of our national shame, that, yes, it will sell. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves craves an outlet.

Dreams Are Made Of This

Insanity and magic.

That's what dreams are made of. 

When stories use insanity and magic they are dreamlike. They seduce us with surrealism.

I'm waiting for brain scientists to show movies to viewers strapped into MRI machines recording mind prints of the experience. The brain scientists will compare these with mind prints from the same subjects recorded while they were dreaming. For some titles the mind prints from movies and dreams will match.

What makes a movie gripping is the apparent illogic as it unfolds. Twists and turns defy our expectations. The story will set up expectations and then violate them. It will foreshadow strangeness and then make it happen. In the end we are left wondering what it all means, because it seemed to mean something, but the meaning is not clear. For two hours or so we are dreaming with eyes wide open. The experience echoes, just like a dream, just like a dream. 

What is insanity? What is magic? Both are ways of reconfiguring reality. In lucid dreaming just before waking we can influence the reconfiguration, sometimes sleeping through the alarm in order to continue the dream. We get to experience insanity, and exert control over it with magic, and then wake up without consequences. Just like watching a movie.

Someday it won't be the bean counters who run Hollywood, it will be the brain scientists. Test screenings won't take place in Covina, they will happen in a lab. MRI scans will be compared with a massive database of mind prints, and movies will be reedited to firm up any scene where the audience shows signs of awakening from suspended disbelief. 

There are some surprises that are still surprising even when we have become entirely familiar with them: orgasmic surprises, fully anticipated, nevertheless startling when the climax arrives; sensual surprises, always pleasurable to the touch, like petting a cat; sentimental surprises, jerking a tear we need to shed. While the memory of a dream fades rapidly, a dream redux is still a dream, always potent, ever surprising.

Psychotropic drugs induce the dream state without turning off sensory awareness. The live feed becomes a dream feed, a dangerous mix. Movies cannot accomplish this mix because the theater shuts out the rest of the world. Home viewing allows the movie to be paused when reality intrudes. Eventually, augmented reality on mobile devices will become electronically psychotropic, making the connected world a collective dream state.

In the Matrix movies, the collective dream state has been imposed upon humanity. The denizens of subterranean Zion, outside the Matrix, live a basic, sensory existence of the flesh, dreaming in their sleep. Humans within the Matrix are always asleep, subsumed by the dream construct created for them. The human travelers between are lucid dreamers. The machines and programs in the Matrix want to dream they are human or superhuman, and only in the Matrix can they fulfill that ambition. The nanites that were sown by humans to block out the sun have used that solar energy to extend the Matrix into the physical world, a nanobot ether pervading all. 

When the whole world becomes entranced by the insanity and magic of the dream state, will it sleep through the alarms heralding its demise?

When A Story, Not A Story, Is A Story

A story is not a story when scientists use the term. They should say, an account, but they use the word, story. 

"And then and then and then" is not a story, it is a series of events. "Once upon a time" is not a story, it is a situation. "This causes this causes this" is not a story, it is a causal chain. These all can be considered accounts, a weak synonym for story.

When someone in science tells an actual story in the literary sense, with characters and action and motivation and conflict and theme and structure, scientists call this anecdotal. Anecdotal is a pejorative term to scientists, it means that a story cannot be entered into the record as reliable evidence. All stories, even true ones, rely on some contrivance in the telling.

Thus, the semantics of science and the semantics of the humanities are skew lines, non-intersecting long after C.P. Snow observed this state of affairs.

I just read an essay by a scientist that said, the rocks have stories to tell. Scientists will take literary license like this to make a point to a lay audience, and that is permissible. Scientists permit this hyperbole because the implicit meaning of this phrase is understood: rocks provide evidence of change, and science carefully pieces together this evidence to provide a cause and effect account of change. 

An account, even when positing cause and effect, falls far short of being an actual story. Ask a teenager how she spent her day, you will get a rambling account of one activity after another, annotated with exasperation and gossip and self justifying speculation about cause and effect, but you won't get an actual story. Ask a thoughtful adult the same question and the account soon digresses into philosophical ruminations, punctuated by disjointed personal anecdotes.

You can appreciate why scientists distrust anecdotal sources as too subjective and selective. And yet, scientists claim when explaining a scientific discovery that they are telling a story, an objective story, solidly platonic, elevated above any given human storyteller, a story told by nature itself. These stories are called lectures and journal papers, hard to follow and abstract and apparently having no overarching theme except to say that this is The Way Things Are.

The Way Things Are: that is the focus of interest for scientists. They are not particularly interested in how this construct, The Way Things Are, came to be. They would not admit to scientific findings being a construct. Construct is a humanities word, a solipsistic notion that the scientific method strives to transcend. This disavowal of collective subjectivity is the institutionally unacknowledged core of modern scientific practice, even as many practicing scientists wryly acknowledge as much in personal anecdotes that will never be included in any paper submitted for publication.

An authentic story (not to be confused with a story that is true, although an authentic story can be true, but it can also be fiction) is a construct, a shameless construct, an unapologetically bold collaboration of human minds, encompassing the minds of storyteller and story receiver. 

An authentic story is an account using cause and effect to convey meaning. Even if the authentic story concludes that there is no meaning, then that is its meaning, that all is pointless. An authentic story is always meaningful, even if the meaning provides no consolation.

Science eschews meaning. I don't think it must, but traditionally, it does, because of the history and culture of science. Let the facts speak for themselves, let the rocks tell their stories, which are really accounts told by the scientists who investigate rocks, leaving themselves out of the accounting. "The way things are" should not be burdened with "the meaning of the way things are" lest science devolve back into the dark ages.

The position of science regarding what things mean is this: everyone is free to attribute their own meaning to The Way Things Are, but such musings are beside the point. Purpose is for philosophy and theology and fiction to ponder. Science investigates reality without prior assumptions of what reality is supposed to mean, and without fear of what reality compels as consequences. The facts are the facts, follow them where they lead.

I ask myself, is it possible to fashion an authentic story about scientific findings, a story that conveys meaning, that also is compatible with the detachment of science that makes it so potent?

I think it is possible. In truth, this is the way I learn science, by studying scientific findings and how they were found, and considering what this process means to me, transcendently.

Currently, I am studying paleontology, a field which in the past was mostly argumentation but which has become increasingly analytical, availing itself of computational tools. Paleontology has also become in the last quarter of a century more integrated with other earth and life sciences, as it strives to trace the tapestry of life over time. 

The vast span of geologic time, divvied up into episodes of unimaginable duration and labeled with Latinized place names where characteristic rock formations were first found, this brain-glazing ramble of global change that strains the attention span of even the most devoted student, has found a unifying paradigm over the last half century of earth science. That paradigm is Plate Tectonics.

Pretty simple when you distill it down to its essence: cold rafts of rock ride atop the billowing melt, splitting apart and colliding and annealing again in a recurring flux, changing atmospheric and oceanic flows and composition, while life evolves to exploit the opportunities thus provided, thereby changing the planet and itself still further.

Does this account have meaning? Is the Earth telling an authentic story?

I think the Earth is not so much telling as composing a story, an authentic story that challenges us to redefine what Meaning means. I think Earth's evolution invites us outside our bubble of self justifying constructs to consider Meaning from a detached perspective.

Life perseveres. Life adapts. Life invents. Life creates and destroys, devours and is reborn. Life's purpose is to go on living. Life is the fundamental product of Earth. Life is its own Meaning.

The rocks with their entombed fossils do not tell this story, we tell it. Life on Earth has no purpose other than to be, but we have a purpose as the voice of the Earth, speaking to our own kind about our inheritance and our legacy, our history and our destiny, as the most disruptive, and perhaps someday, the most healing life form on the planet.

That's quite a story.

Evolution as Cause for Pride

If all goes well, I'll be starting a stint this winter as a volunteer interpreter in the paleontology gallery at the Natural History Museum of Utah.

It is impossible to interpret paleontology without interpreting evolution. I think science education has done a poor job of this.

The resistance to evolution is essentially psychological, not religious. Attacking Creationism and Intelligent Design doesn't get to the root cause. These are empty fabrications, easily refuted with evidence and logic, and yet they withstand all rebuttal because the fusillade of reason simply passes through them. 

Science educators mistakenly argue that science and religion are "orthogonal" (a scientized word meaning that you can't measure one with the standards of the other). This approach only reveals how antisceptic scientists strive to be, doing themselves a great disservice.

Scientists and science educators should own up to the fact that science has much in common with religion, even as it has much to distinguish it from theology. As with religion, science has passion, conviction, devotion, pride, awe, wonder, and a striving for a comprehesive understanding of existence. Unlike theology, science invites questions, refutation, paradigm revolutions, and at its best, greets the great unknown with first a shrug and then a squaring of the shoulders. What we don't know, we will strive to find out.

This is how science is done. But science as it is presented in the classroom seems like catechism, barely distinguishable from theological doctrine and therefore, a potential rival to theologies of all stripes. There are scientists who embrace this, who have made a career of debunking theology, thus feeding the impression of rivalry. 

Let me clarify my distinction between religion and theology. Religion is a set of psychological questions, theology is a set of authoritative answers to those questions. 

Science is a set of methods for finding answers so that they can be reframed as further questions. It has much to say to religious impulses but it challenges those impulses to continue their inquiry. It has very little to say to theological doctrine that provides only pat answers intolerant of continuing inquiry.

The religious impulse is much stronger than any given theology, because it derives from the root psychology of the individual. We are born to wonder, to inquire, to formulate hypotheses. We are born to feel pain, and seek salves for our anguish. We are born to desire pride in ourselves and our associations. We are born to feel small beneath a starry sky and at the same time as large as the cosmos. We are born to question who we are and why. Without these religious impulses theology would find no footing in the human psyche.

Science education can connect with these psychological drives, not by asserting itself as a rival to theology but by showing a kindly regard for human nature.

When a child or adult feels discomfort at the idea that "we evolved from apes" that unease is an expression of our fragile self esteem. To imagine oneself as simply a naked ape with primate lineage and instincts feels degrading, while to imagine oneself an exceptional creation only one step removed from angels feels uplifting. 

I think what the interpretation of evolution should say to this person needing affirmation of personal worth is this: You are the sum of all the survivors who forged the path to your existence. You have their attributes built into your genes, a geneology of success. Making the best of that wonderful 3.5 billion year inheritance is your test in this life. The success of humanity in the eons to come depends on the choices you make now.

When an uplifting message is phrased as a challenge, I think it can set people in a forward direction. It can give them a way to earn their pride.

The Muse is not a Marketeer

Writers can wonder where ideas come from, but maybe a more important consideration is what the ideas stand for.

None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money, according to Samuel Johnson and Larry King. I think that is valid advice for the act of writing, but does it apply to the inspiration that prompts the writing? 

Should a writer think first about money, asking the muse for profitable ideas? Or should the writer request purposeful ideas and then dress them up to sell?

That's confidential information shared between writer and muse, isn't it? I would not decree my choice as guidance for anyone else, and I have no way of knowing if any given literary masterpiece started out as the gleam of dollar signs.

All I know is that when I try to talk myself into believing something, the contrived conviction eventually wears off. And when I try to talk myself out of something I believe inherently, the self inhibition eventually wears off. I've lived a long life experiencing a lot of wearing off.

What is true to me is what entertains me as it appears on the page, what is fun, even thrilling, to see in my mind's eye and describe with words. The muse doesn't hand me stuff ready made, it stands over my shoulder, kibitzing my own choices. 

Fun, even thrilling, for me likely would be absurd and depressing for most others. I analyze others, deriving a calculated version of how they function, which deprives me of true feelings for them but creates true feelings for the characterizations I have made of them. The best approximation I can make of Hope is to admit that I might be wrong. The best imitation of compassion I can manage is to identify with my characters' falibility.

Thus, my Muse is not a Marketeer. It does not spoon me ideas with a promising return on investment. Born naked, it is up to me to dress up for the party. I will sell myself through appearance, but that is packaging, not product.

If you want modernized Samuel Johnson, read any advice about script writing. The message is always about money: where to find it, how to deliver it by pandering to audiences. When I contrive to please others, I displease myself, which means that the essential talent in writing for hire is to repress one's well earned self loathing. 

And a screenwriter is a writer for hire, not necessarily starting out that way but any sale will make it that way. Either the script will be changed by others or others will insist that you make the changes yourself. Money becomes the salve for the wounds of indignation.

One of my absolute convictions in life is that audiences, whether reading or viewing, seek solice, forgiveness, salvation, self justification. They will accept truth only if it is kind. 

My work will never be popular because I think the truths worth writing about are cruel, and that the task of a truth teller is to show how one can cope with cruelty by refusing to practice it, refusing to let it corrupt one's soul, refusing to allow it dominance over the oases of beauty amidst bleak desert sands, refusing it by seeing beauty even in those desert expanses, and that the way to do this is to embrace one's pain and make it a thing of wonder, a reminder that you are alive.