Daily Archives: Oct 26, 2010

Headless Youth

The verdict of Milgram experiment was, ordinary people would obey immoral orders. Ordinary people, just like you and me, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can actually become agents in a terrible destructive process. We’re capable of becoming evil.

Fanfan reminded me of that scrap of paper I gave her some, gee — must be 10 or 15 years ago, with my handwriting on it: “Reason is, and only ought to be the slave of  the passions. David Hume.” The headless youth!

What comprises human passions? In his last major work, Descartes listed six categories: wonder, desire, love, hatred, joy and sadness. But Descartes was more concerned about how to control passions with acquired skills, which he called “the chief use of wisdom”.

Ordered six books from Amazon.com. Most looking forward to “How Real is Real” by Paul Watzlawick. Out of print actually. The best that the creative mind can do, is to heroically create new illusions.

And also two books on body-mind connections, a topic to which I will devote my amateurish research vigor.

All problems started with Descartes. The radical doubt he set off some 400 years ago still sticks around. All epistemology since then has had to seek to battle the possibility the Great Frenchman raised: There may be no World outside the Self.

Blue Moonlight

Woke up in the early morning again. A light blanket of moonlight was shining through my window. Some similar moments in the past — 20 years ago so exuberant about great books as to handwrite them down in thick notebooks in the wee hours powered by ice coffee, not knowing where I was going but full of hope; some 12 years ago at a shared dorm in Southwest Beijing, toning down desk light to read in the early morning; nine years ago in the first couple of weeks in the U.S., staying on a boat and counting the stars in the early morning, filled with equal amounts of anxiety and hope; five years ago in a smallish HK flat plotting my return to CA and getting up early for a run in Quarry Bay Park nearby…these shreds of memories, are so real and so close. My life is a blink.

So who was the chicken to call off the USS GW-involved joint exercise between Pentagon and Seoul in the Yellow Sea? The 3rd flip-flop over 2 months, which made Pentagon look pretty bad. Someone just said Washington had bigger fish to fry and Seoul was fuming…and am still slightly surprised Beijing seems increasingly able to have its way these days. Just a day ago, Geithner had to meet Wang Qishan at the Qingdao airport for an impromptu meeting. Second time the treasure secretary met with his Chinese counterpart in a makeshift meeting room inside the airport.

There was this meta-analysis on the relations between democracy and economic development (Przeworski and Limongi, 1993) — 21 finds, 8 positive, 8 negative and 5 no relationship. Exactly even. What did that tell you? Democracy doesn’t necessarily make you rich, and dictatorship might just work if you get the mixture right.

My Kindle has arrived. So has that box of wines.