Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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October 19. On a tangent from Monday's post, that comment about Trump's hypomania mentions a book called The Hypomanic Edge, in which the author "surveyed leaders in Silicon Valley and they almost universally agreed that the clinical description of hypomania matched what they thought was needed from the most successful startup CEOs."

I'm thinking, suppose we went back millions of years to our primate ancestors, or not so far back to the most brutal groups of humans. In that world, the largest and most aggressive males are the leaders. In our own world, being physically large and aggressive is increasingly useless. There are still lucrative roles in pro sports, but nobody thinks Ndamukong Suh has the right skillset to be a president or a CEO.

My point is, hypomanic people don't either. There is no correlation between hypomania and making good decisions. The correlation is with speed, having the sleepless drive to make a large number of decisions in a day.

This is only a factor because of our extremely fast-paced society. And it's a factor in other jobs too. Peter Higgs, "the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered 'productive' enough." There are people out there who would make great leaders, scientists, house builders, chefs, you name it, but they can't hold those jobs because they're not fast enough.

I dream that this will change. If more speed-dependent jobs are automated, if an unconditional basic income moves more jobs into the realm of volunteer work, and if our culture slows down to match the end of economic growth, we might unlock the vast contributions of high quality slow workers.


October 17. Some notes on the presidential race:

1) What an embarrassment for the Republican party, that all this stuff is coming out now after Trump sailed through their nomination process. And it's not like Trump is the kind of guy you'd never suspect. The accusers were probably thinking, "I'm not going to stick my neck out to put Ted Cruz in the White House, and Republicans probably won't believe me anyway." And I wonder who made the decision to release the tape that started the whole thing. Maybe they would have held onto it if they thought Trump would be a good president.

2) Everyone knows that Bill Clinton has used power to get sex. I don't think Bill has been perfect, but there's a continuum all the way from full consent to creepy sexual assault, and clearly he has been a lot closer than Trump to the good side of that range. How has he done it? By knowing how to read women. Where Trump sees injustice and a double standard, I just see a competent person and an incompetent person.

3) This reddit comment diagnoses Trump as hypomanic:

I'm moderately bipolar and have become very aware of when I become hypomanic. High energy, drive, sleeplessness, grandiosity, a compulsion to talk a lot, and extraordinary self esteem are definitely part of it. At my highest levels of hypomania, I was driven towards a goal where I felt like it was the singular purpose that my whole life was converging towards, I was the one person in the world that could best accomplish it, and it was something the world desperately needed. That is certainly Trump right now.

4) Hillary Clinton has her own tragic flaw. She cannot let go of the belief that people at the top deal with truths that ordinary idiots can't handle. That's why she hid her emails, not because she was using power selfishly, but because she believed she was using power for the greater good in ways that she does not trust you and me know about. In the age of Wikileaks and Russian hackers, Hillary's Nixon-like obsession with keeping secrets is likely to bring her down, because if she does something even a little bit shady, and it comes out, it's going to look like she was trying to cover it up.


October 13. I'll eventually write about deeper stuff, but next week it will probably be politics again, and today, TV show reviews. I used to think it was a real danger that high-tech superstimuli would devour human attention, but as I get older that no longer matches my personal experience. It's getting hard for me to find shows that I like better than daydreaming and listening to the rain.

Starting with the worst, The 100 has a good premise, teenagers from a space station exploring Earth after a nuclear war, but the writing and acting could not be any worse without being more interesting. One notch up, Zoo is more interesting by being more trashy, with a ridiculous plot about a mutation that makes animals attack humans worldwide.

I love 19th century gothic literature, so I wanted to like Penny Dreadful, but the writers have no idea how to tell a story. Episode after episode drags by without advancing the plot, and the whole thing becomes a tiresome showcase for the beautiful dark cinematography and Eva Green's acting. (Update: the key to enjoying the first season is to view every scene as a stand-alone short film and pretend you don't speak English, or to skip episodes 4-7.)

You've probably heard about Stranger Things. It's sort of like Close Encounters or E.T., except that instead of advanced and benevolent space aliens, it's a brutal and horrific parallel world. The whole thing is really well done except that sometimes there are overacted arguments for no good reason. My favorite thing is that the people who seem completely crazy are the ones who best understand what's going on.

A while back I mentioned Dark Matter, the trope-heavy Canadian show about a space ship crew. It's no Firefly, but it continues to get better, and it's one of two shows we're currently watching where I look forward to the next episode.

The other is Scream Queens. The story is a parade of horror cliches, I can't relate to any of the characters, and most of the conversations are annoying macho posturing, but on the micro scale every element is bursting with creativity, and everyone involved seems to be having fun.


October 10. I've been avoiding writing about the election but it's getting too interesting. Here's Nate Silver with a good summary of where it's been and where it stands, The Second Debate Probably Didn't Help Trump, And He Needed Help. Last night Trump excused his 2005 boast about groping women as "locker room talk", and here's a reddit thread in response, What are actual "locker room talks" usually about?

Back in January I called Trump "an unstoppable juggernaut." I like being wrong, because it's an opportunity to examine deeper assumptions and bring them more in line with reality. In this case, I assumed that the general election is not that different from the Republican primaries. It turns out that it's a lot harder, and that's a problem for Republicans.

This video, How Donald Trump Answers A Question, gets good around the 2:10 mark when they analyze his language: 78% one syllable words, 17% two syllables, in a rhythmic cadence that usually puts the strongest word at the end of the sentence. As a writer I know how hard it is to put words in a good order, and I'm impressed with Trump's ability to do it extemporaneously on the fly.

Is this a skill that Trump has studied and practiced, or does he do it without quite knowing how? I'm sure it's the latter, because otherwise he would study and practice how to talk in a way that resonates with general election swing voters. I think Trump is some kind of idiot savant. He's really good at one thing, and he has relied on it so heavily that he's not much good at anything else, and now he has finally reached a level where talent is not enough. More than anything he reminds me of a quarterback who was great in college and bad in the NFL, like Johnny Manziel or Ryan Leaf.

He could still win if Hillary has another health crisis. During last night's debate a fly landed on her face, which means nothing rationally, but it's not a good omen. And I don't see anyone from either party who looks strong in 2020. It will be fun if Trump runs again and the party elites try harder to stop him.


October 7. Leigh Ann says my last post sounds like an Enneagram 1, and that if I really understood fun, I wouldn't have to argue that it's important, because it's enough that it's fun.

It's true, keeping life fun is not something I do naturally but something I have to work at. This post, The problem with perfection, describes how falling away from fun has happened in classical music:

Imagine a theatre where the author dictates the speed at which the actors should read each sentence, and how loudly each word should be read, the length of each word and the tonal character of the voice of the actor.

On to my usual weekend subject, drugs and music: High Hitler is an article about a new book, Blitzed, and the close relation between Nazi Germany and powerful stimulants. German chemists invented methamphetamine, and soldiers all took it so they could stay awake for three days and nights and invade France. Hitler himself was addicted to cocaine and oxycodone, and Mussolini was getting the same drugs from the same doctor. At the end, on top of losing the war, they were all going through withdrawal.

Anyone on cannabis will enjoy this video, Minecraft Acid Interstate V2. I hate the music, but I love how the video is synchronized to the music, with the stone things passing exactly on the beats. It shouldn't be too hard to make software that can take any music and go farther, with different kinds of trees and buildings matching different instruments and vocals.

And some better music. Diane Coffee is the stage name of Shaun Fleming. He's a good songwriter and performs with an energy that's going to make him much more famous than he is now. I think his strongest song is WWWoman, and here's a live performance (at 14:05) of his prettiest song, Green.

In honor of Hurricane Matthew, here's a video I made in 2014 using footage of Typhoon Haiyan, and a live graphic mapping its location and wind speeds.


October 4. When I said that a perfect life is one with no obligations, I was trying to get at something more fundamental, but so obvious it's hardly worth saying: a perfect life is one where every action is intrinsically rewarding. And a perfect society is one where every action by everyone is intrinsically rewarding.

This is not as unrealistic as it sounds. At the beginning of his book In Search of the Primitive, Stanley Diamond argues that many tribal cultures, said by anthropologists to make no distinction between work and play, would be more fairly described as doing no work. Of course they do lots of stuff that might feel like work to us, but they carefully maintain a cultural and psychological context where everything necessary to keep the tribe going feels like what we would call play.

How did we get from there to here, where we spend half our lives doing useful chores, and the other half having useless fun, with almost no overlap? This is how I imagine the Fall of Man: not that we were lured from innocent righteousness by wicked fun, but that we were lured from fun by stodgy pragmatism, when someone said, "I don't care if you don't feel like doing it, you're going to do it anyway." Or maybe it started with prehistoric slavery, and once it became normal to separate useful activity from freely chosen activity, it got locked in, and it spread.

An activity redefined as a chore can be done on a consistent schedule, instead of waiting for people to feel like doing it. This is what we call industry, and it drags related activities into the same mind space -- if horseshoes can't depend on a whim, then nails can't depend on a whim. And if you try to go back, you have to pass through a stage where nobody wants to do any of that shit, and any benefits gained will be lost.

So what can we do about it? On the level of society, there are utopian dreams of re-merging the useful and the fun, but we're actually getting somewhere with another strategy: to shift the whole world of useful chores to machines, and leave humans doing only useless fun. I support this one hundred percent. Of course there will be challenges, described in dystopian fiction from The Machine Stops to WALL-E, but I trust human nature. If we all have the absolute right to do nothing, we will eventually learn to do things that reconnect us in a healthy way to the wider world.

Meanwhile, is there anything we can do on a personal level, maybe change our outlook so that our chores feel more like play? Once I stayed at an intentional community where the idea was that work would feel meaningful if people were doing it for their friends. In practice that didn't happen, and there were firm requirements, enforced by penalties, to do more hours of work per week than a frugal person can get away with in the dominant society. But one guy did figure out a mind hack. He turned washing dishes into a game, where the crew would try to do it as fast as possible, so they would get credit for however long it was supposed to take, while getting off work sooner and having fun.

Another thing is just to notice what makes us feel better or feel worse, and act on it, especially when it goes against what society calls normal. I just rode my bike to the store in the rain, even though we have a car, because I've noticed that driving is stressful and makes me want to curl up under a blanket, while bicycling is fun and I come home energized, even if I'm less comfortable.


October 1. Quick topical note. The Clinton campaign has found Trump's weakness: that he will not back down from public feuds even when he seems to be in the wrong. His first collapse in the polls came right after the Democratic convention when he bizarrely attacked the family of a fallen soldier. Now he's doing it again, making hostile tweets at 3AM in a nonsensical grudge against a former beauty queen.

This is especially bad for Trump because it undermines his strength in the world of myth. Trump represents the trickster archetype, and people are hungry for a trickster because the established order is getting more and more lifeless. But now he seems less like a joker and more like an uptight straight man. He needs to be Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack and he's turning out to be more like Ted Knight, or he needs to be Ferris Bueller and he suddenly seems more like the principal.

Trump could still pull it out if Hillary has more health problems. And even if she wins, she's clearly a one-termer, and in 2020 we're likely to get a trickster president if a candidate without Trump's negatives can play that role.


September 30. Some stuff from emails over the last couple weeks. Griffiths asks whether I think drug use is a zero sum game. My answer is that it's too complex to be zero sum, but that I would simplify it like this:

Infrequent use is positive sum, because not only do the benefits tend to outweigh the costs, but it changes your reality and expands your consciousness. And using a drug all day every day is usually negative sum, but even there you can find exceptions.

In an email to Kevin, on the subject of anxiety and rage, I wrote:

When I get anxiety, what I fear is being in a social situation that's way over my head, which is a rational fear because that's actually happened to me many times. The clue that I've messed up a social situation is when someone is angry with me and I have no idea why.

And in my experience, anger is a secondary emotion that comes from processing pain a certain way -- usually the wrong way, although sometimes anger is useful. I should keep that in mind when people are angry with me, that they're misprocessing their pain.

On the subject of avoiding external demands, Tim asks, "Does taking out the garbage in your cosmology constitute something that comes from 'outside' or 'inside?'" Now I'm thinking that inside vs outside is not the best model, but my answer is:

Taking out the garbage is definitely outside. In a better primitive world, I could just drop it on the ground and it would decompose, and in a better high-tech world, nanobots would take care of it.

Finally, Carey quotes Bjork: "The best way to start anew is to fail miserably," which reminds me that one song lyric, which you've all heard a hundred times, turns out to be a really powerful mantra when things are going badly: "Hold your head up, movin on, keep your head up, movin on."


September 28. "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." If you interpret "stronger" like a Clint Eastwood character, that statement is dangerous bullshit. But after I've made a series of reasonable decisions and heroic efforts that only dug me deeper, after I faced larger fears leading to larger disasters, as the challenge has dragged on to the point where even deus ex machina would come too late to not feel like an insult, I find that I've become better in subtle ways.

Twice a week I drive Leigh Ann to physical therapy for her torn patellar tendon, so she can take Vicodin and not have to drive home, and I wait in the parking lot of the medical clinic building for more than an hour. Monday I forgot my book, so I just sat and watched the people go in and out, many of them in bad shape, patiently led by family members, or driven by people who waited in cars like me. Before that procession of the damned, I was overcome with the beauty of human persistence in the face of the tragedy of life.

Later, when someone on Reddit suggested that homeless people should be required to pick up litter, I realized, this person has never had a bad day. They might think they have, but if they really had, they would understand that anyone in the world can end up on the street if they don't have money or a support network and life deals them too many low cards in a row.

I hold my energy closer to my body now. It's hard to explain, but suppose I'm walking across my bedroom to pick up my shoes. There used to be part of me that reached out to grasp the shoes ahead of my hands, but now I feel that I could stumble on something before I get there, or I've mistaken something else for my shoes which are actually lost forever, or I'll be stopped by some other thing that I've forgotten or never imagined. So I try to keep my attention centered on where I am, not an inch or a second farther.

I'm better at meditating, because when I wake up in the night full of dread, I can only sleep by blanking my mind with the relentless focus of an elite athlete, or by expanding into the fear with the angry intention of breaking something inside. But it doesn't feel worth it. Whether life is meaningless, or whether the scales of chance are tipped by some program or intention, I just want to get this shit out of the way, not just the recent shit but all of it, so I can be trivial and happy. Am I optimistic? "We cannot defeat the armies of Mordor. But we will meet them in battle nonetheless."

Update, 10pm: After almost two weeks, I finally got through the original problem. It's a good story, but I'm not going to tell it just yet.


September 26. I've had some pushback from my definition of a perfect life as one with zero obligations, and I'm sticking to it, but I need to be more clear about what I meant. I wasn't talking about doing rewarding stuff that's requested by other people or demanded by society. That would be an even more perfect life, but it's wildly unrealistic, at least in this century.

In practice, almost everything I've done that's come from the outside has been a tedious and meaningless chore, while almost everything rewarding I've done has come from the inside, either indifferent to the outside world or opposing it. (Exploring the external world, including art and entertainment, is an important subject that's beyond the scope of this post.)

Of course, to master a life with no external demands you have to pass through boredom, but of all the challenges I've ever faced, boredom is my favorite. Giant blocks of empty time are the fires in which I've forged my identity and found my strength. I'm not saying everyone is like that, but I am. Some people say "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," but in my experience, what doesn't kill me only makes me want to spend the rest of my life in a Norwegian prison. Mass killer Anders Breivik has my perfect life, and of course he hates it because he's an idiot.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode where a thug dies and goes to heaven, where he can have everything he desires, and by the end of the episode he's gone mad with boredom and it turns out he's in hell. I think I would be happy for decades, and then I would just figure out how to selectively delete memories and be happy forever. Greg Egan's Permutation City is a sci-fi novel that explores this idea with virtual reality.

An even more ambitious utopia would be a world where external demands are stuff that we want to do anyway or that we end up enjoying. Some hunter-gatherer tribes have done this, but not all of them, and we've never come anywhere close with a large complex society.

That's why I used to be in favor of a hard crash, but now I think the path is not back but through: to use the present system as a shell, an incubator, a cocoon of a better system. Individualism has gone too far but maybe not far enough: imagine if we could break society down into atoms, billions of disconnected individuals kept from dying by an unconditional basic income, and then we can put ourselves back together in a structure where every link is understood, approved, and valued by every party.


September 23. Last Thursday I began a long run of bad luck and bad decisions, and I've been spending hours and hours on a tedious and fiddly bit of car repair to try to avoid going to a mechanic, which would cost more than $500 and force Leigh Ann to bus and walk to her classes and pet care jobs on a bad knee.

Through some combination of this event, the lingering effects of my concussion, and poor timing of drug use, I've been depressed. Everything that used to give me joy gives me only half as much, everything I do feels like walking uphill, I have that dread in the pit of my stomach a lot of the time for no apparent reason, and reality itself feels like going through a razor car wash.

Yesterday I even spent some time on the depression subreddit, which is mostly unloved 20 year olds and not people with my problems. But I did find this great short video on empathy, and I do expect to get better.

Back to the subject of drugs, it's crazy how much the effects differ from person to person. Most people have to try several antidepressants before they find the right one, and it's the same with the old drugs. I was just saying in an email how alcohol doesn't work for me -- I don't like any of the cognitive effects and the body buzz is feeble compared to cannabis, which also gives me awesome head effects. Hydrocodone has an even better body high, but the head trip is nothing special and it destroys my digestion.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I don't trip from psilocybin, but I do get a clear effect: 36-48 hours later I have more energy and it feels like my brain has been rebooted. This seems to be independent of dose size, and a big dose makes me feel like I have the flu, which is why I only microdose now. So to celebrate my birthday I took one psilocybin gel cap with some cannabis chocolate. Like my other bad decisions, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I would have held back if I'd really thought about it. If you're going to take a drug that reboots your brain, wait until you're feeling safe and happy and not in the middle of a crisis.

I also need to be more careful with cannabis timing. Just like in the movies, using it occasionally brings wisdom and inspiration, and using it all the time makes me numb and stupid -- although it seems to work for Willie Nelson. So I'm still trying to find the balance. I'm thinking, if my life is perfect (which I define as zero obligations) I can go four nights on and three nights off, but with more stress I have to take longer breaks and face the world hard and cold.

Some more marijuana links: How weed keeps you skinny, probably by increasing metabolism, and Former NFL player says he played his best games while stoned. Finally, some great hypnotic drug music, Wreaths - Goin' Back to Haiti.


September 21. Just a quick thought on the NYC bombings. You've probably heard that the bomber's family tried to warn the FBI two years ago, and they decided he wasn't a threat because he wasn't in contact with any violent political organizations. Of course they were wrong. Their mistake, which almost everyone makes, was to assume that violence is rooted in politics, when really it's rooted in psychology.

Still, I'm not sure I'd want to live in a world where the government looks for enemies by looking at psychology.


September 19. I still don't feel like posting, but since today is my 49th birthday, here's the Hawkwind song Seven by Seven.





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