There is also simply telling someone involved with open source you appreciate what they do. Whether this is by email or over IRC or in-person to some contributor of the project, having someone literally say "thank you" goes a long way. I know this might sound trivial, but realize that people contributing to open source over long periods are basically either dealing with negative people or people who are cordial but still want something from you. Having someone who doesn’t explicitly want something from you and still feels like saying "thanks" shows that your hard work is appreciated in general and not in some specific instance where you fixed some bug someone needed help with. Think of it as the difference between when you do something for a loved one and then they give you a hug as thanks versus that same person simply giving you a hug out of the blue just because they care; the former hug is nice but the latter one is what makes you feel truly appreciated.

In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

Why Mental Health Professionals Diagnose Anti-Authoritarians with Mental Illness

Gaining acceptance into graduate school or medical school and achieving a PhD or MD and becoming a psychologist or psychiatrist means jumping through many hoops, all of which require much behavioral and attentional compliance to authorities, even to those authorities that one lacks respect for. The selection and socialization of mental health professionals tends to breed out many anti-authoritarians. Having steered the higher-education terrain for a decade of my life, I know that degrees and credentials are primarily badges of compliance. Those with extended schooling have lived for many years in a world where one routinely conforms to the demands of authorities. Thus for many MDs and PhDs, people different from them who reject this attentional and behavioral compliance appear to be from another world—a diagnosable one.

I have found that most psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are not only extraordinarily compliant with authorities but also unaware of the magnitude of their obedience. And it also has become clear to me that the anti-authoritarianism of their patients creates enormous anxiety for these professionals, and their anxiety fuels diagnoses and treatments.

In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell. When I was told by some faculty that I had “issues with authority,” I had mixed feelings about being so labeled. On the one hand, I found it quite amusing, because among the working-class kids whom I had grown up with, I was considered relatively compliant with authorities. After all, I had done my homework, studied, and received good grades. However, while my new “issues with authority” label made me grin because I was now being seen as a “bad boy,” it also very much concerned me about just what kind of a profession that I had entered. Specifically, if somebody such as myself was being labeled with “issues with authority,” what were they calling the kids I grew up with who paid attention to many things that they cared about but didn’t care enough about school to comply there? Well, the answer soon became clear.

Mental Illness Diagnoses for Anti-Authoritarians

A 2009 Psychiatric Times article titled “ADHD & ODD: Confronting the Challenges of Disruptive Behavior” reports that “disruptive disorders,” which include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and opposition defiant disorder (ODD), are the most common mental health problem of children and teenagers. ADHD is defined by poor attention and distractibility, poor self-control and impulsivity, and hyperactivity. ODD is defined as a “a pattern of negativistic, hostile, and defiant behavior without the more serious violations of the basic rights of others that are seen in conduct disorder”; and ODD symptoms include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules” and “often argues with adults.”

Psychologist Russell Barkley, one of mainstream mental health’s leading authorities on ADHD, says that those afflicted with ADHD have deficits in what he calls “rule-governed behavior,” as they are less responsive to rules of established authorities and less sensitive to positive or negative consequences. ODD young people, according to mainstream mental health authorities, also have these so-called deficits in rule-governed behavior, and so it is extremely common for young people to have a “duel diagnosis” of AHDH and ODD.

Do we really want to diagnose and medicate everyone with “deficits in rule-governed behavior”?

Albert Einstein, as a youth, would have likely received an ADHD diagnosis, and maybe an ODD one as well. Albert didn't pay attention to his teachers, failed his college entrance examinations twice, and had difficulty holding jobs. However, Einstein biographer Ronald Clark (Einstein: The Life and Times) asserts that Albert's problems did not stem from attention deficits but rather from his hatred of authoritarian, Prussian discipline in his schools. Einstein said, “The teachers in the elementary school appeared to me like sergeants and in the Gymnasium the teachers were like lieutenants.” At age 13, Einstein read Kant's difficult Critique of Pure Reason—because Albert was interested in it. Clark also tells us Einstein refused to prepare himself for his college admissions as a rebellion against his father’s “unbearable” path of a “practical profession.” After he did enter college, one professor told Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel.

By today’s standards, Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would have certainly been diagnosed with one or more disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Alinsky also recalls a time when he was ten or eleven and his rabbi was tutoring him in Hebrew:

One particular day I read three pages in a row without any errors in pronunciation, and suddenly a penny fell onto the Bible . . . Then the next day the rabbi turned up and he told me to start reading. And I wouldn’t; I just sat there in silence, refusing to read. He asked me why I was so quiet, and I said, “This time it’s a nickel or nothing.” He threw back his arm and slammed me across the room.
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

I have also spent a great deal of time with people who had at one time in their lives had thoughts and behavior that were so bizarre that they were extremely frightening for their families and even themselves; they were diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, but have fully recovered and have been, for many years, leading productive lives. Among this population, I have not met one person whom I would not consider a major anti-authoritarian. Once recovered, they have learned to channel their anti-authoritarianism into more constructive political ends, including reforming mental health treatment.

Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.

There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job

It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.

Maintaining the Societal Status Quo

Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society.

The reality is that depression is highly associated with societal and financial pains. One is much more likely to be depressed if one is unemployed, underemployed, on public assistance, or in debt (for documentation, see “400% Rise in Anti-Depressant Pill Use”). And ADHD labeled kids do pay attention when they are getting paid, or when an activity is novel, interests them, or is chosen by them (documented in my book Commonsense Rebellion).

In an earlier dark age, authoritarian monarchies partnered with authoritarian religious institutions. When the world exited from this dark age and entered the Enlightenment, there was a burst of energy. Much of this revitalization had to do with risking skepticism about authoritarian and corrupt institutions and regaining confidence in one’s own mind. We are now in another dark age, only the institutions have changed. Americans desperately need anti-authoritarians to question, challenge, and resist new illegitimate authorities and regain confidence in their own common sense.

In every generation there will be authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. While it is unusual in American history for anti-authoritarians to take the kind of effective action that inspires others to successfully revolt, every once in a while a Tom Paine, Crazy Horse, or Malcolm X come along. So authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”

Documentaire/conférence super intéressante, et tellement bien présentée.

I keep having this idea, not that I think it’s true, that when you die you appear in a talk show studio, and everyone is clapping. A host shakes your hand and asks you to sit down, and the both of you go over how you think you did.

On a large screen, they play a long montage containing some of the more significant moments in your life. You and the host, along with the audience, look on as you make pivotal choices, overcome dilemmas, and meet the people who would become your friends and partners.

The film includes a lot of personality-defining moments, such as when you made the choice to embrace what became your art or your calling, if you had one, or when you took on a long-term responsibility that became a part of who you were. You also get to see, for only the second time, the moments in which your most important relationships went from superficial to true. Everyone in the studio is moved.

The members of the audience have seen many episodes of this show, and were once on it themselves. The overall tone of the production is quite pleasant and earnest. Clearly everyone is happy for you, celebrating your life rather than judging it, and probably remembering similar moments from their own reel.

The montage also covers things you missed—many of of the experiences and relationships that didn’t happen, but could have, if you had accepted or extended a particular invitation, if you had made a particular effort at small talk instead of sinking into another painful silence, if you had bought that piano after all, if you had attended the indoor climbing center’s open house instead of telling yourself you’d go next year.

Of all the missed possibilities, the missed human connections stand out above the other kinds—the missed career and travel opportunities, cultural experiences, even the creative achievements—because by the end of your life the only thing that seemed relevant was the people you loved, or ended up loving. When you died all the value in your world resided there, in the simple and all-important fact that you really knew other people and other people really knew you.

And this part lasts forever, because, as you learn quickly, you missed many more connections than you made. Maybe fifty or a hundred times more. In fact, many times a wonderful connection with another person was just one simple action away from you, but you pulled back.

Such an incredible wealth of human connection—the greatest part of life, you know now—hinged on a phone call you didn’t bother with, a conversation you shut down, or an apology you’d make in an instant if they sent you back now. There was so much available to you, and it was so much closer than it seemed at the time.

In most of these moments, you pulled away from a budding connection because you wanted to protect yourself from some mildly uncomfortable moment—that you might be bored at an acquaintance’s party and have to excuse yourself early, that a conversation you start might be difficult to escape from, that your act of openness might be taken advantage of. So you stayed home, said no, made excuses, and avoided many conversations. This small amount of uneasiness you avoided, you realize now, cost you many friendships as deep and rich as the best ones you did manage to have.

But you’re not going back, and there’s nothing left to cling to, and nothing left to protect yourself from. So the feeling you get watching all these missed connections isn’t regret, it’s abundance. It seems really wonderful that a human life could have contained fifty undeveloped relationships for every one that was allowed to thrive, given how rich and fulfilling some of those connections were. You’re happy to see that those chances were there, even though you didn’t quite recognize them in time to take advantage.

This all rests fine with you, knowing that you don’t need any more life advantages, because you’re done with the whole thing. Your lifelong wish of being safe from everything you fear has been granted. For the first time there is truly nothing to worry about.

It was all tradeoffs anyway. One thing you didn’t do allowed for something else to happen. But you can’t deny that there is a pattern in these tradeoffs: you frequently chose another dose of the predictable and comfortable over developing a relationship with another person.

After your segment finishes, new guests come on the show and you see the same thing in most of their clips. There are a few people who apparently had no reservations about being open and proactive towards others, and a few people whose reticence clearly helped them get by. But for the most part, you see people who really valued friendship and connection—more than anything else, they would say now—but let it pass them by again and again, because of some comfort-related concern that seemed more important at the time. It is the perfect example of John Lennon’s “making other plans” remark.

Happily, a little bit of this kind of wealth goes a long way. Even one great friendship is enough to make a person feel blessed that life went the way it did. So you don’t feel bad for the new guests. But it is endlessly fascinating to watch people learn that there was so much more out there, just a little bit beyond what felt perfectly safe.

So, fun fact! Zootopia underwent some major plot changes late in production … and it is so much better for it.

Only 17 months before completion, Zootopia had a very different premise. It featured Nick as its protagonist, a world-weary fox scraping by in a Zootopia in which predators were forced to wear “tame collars,” which shocked them every time they felt primitive (and thus dangerous) emotions like anger or excitement. You can see Nick wearing his in some of the concept art.

Nick was going to be framed for a crime he didn’t commit, and a tough-as-nails Judy was going to chase him down. Though the story did conclude with the abolishment of the tame collar mandate (there’s even a screen test of Nick’s reaction when the collar is removed) the filmmakers eventually decided that they’d created a world too unjust to save and characters too unlikable to root for. So, they rewrote the script to make Judy the main character and the discrimination in Zootopia more covert.

While the early version’s dystopian (dys-zootopian?) setting and darker story might have been as good as what we ended up with (the world shall, sadly, never know), I think it’s safe to say that the movie’s depiction of bigotry would have been much less interesting. The tricky thing about writing an allegory about prejudice in which the minority group faces codified oppression is that it tends to evoke thoughts of historical injustices rather than present ones.

It’s not that Zootopia’s anti-predator sentiment doesn’t draw parallels to current issues like Islamophobia, but there’s a knee-jerk reaction in people to connect allegories of institutionalized injustice with past wrongs, perhaps because it’s comforting to think that That Sort of Thing Doesn’t Happen Anymore.

Ultimately, a governmental mandate to collar all predators would have been perceived as an allegory for the registration of Jews and Romani under the Third Reich or the internment of Japanese Americans rather than for the casual prejudice and covertly bigoted legislation (i.e “Voter ID Laws are only intended to prevent voter fraud, we swear”) that are prevalent today.

What makes the final cut of Zootopia so brilliant is that its depiction of prejudice is distinctly modern and therefore much more uncomfortable to deal with. The city of Zootopia is integrated and progressive enough that, on a superficial level, it appears that its citizens aren’t prejudiced at all.

Clearly, predators aren’t regarded with suspicion, because the mayor is a lion. Small animals aren’t belittled or abused, because a sheep made it to assistant mayor. Rabbits aren’t dismissed as weak and dumb, because the ZPD just took on their first rabbit lieutenant, and foxes aren’t excluded, because there’s no legislation prohibiting a fox pup from joining the Junior Ranger Scouts.

Needless to say, if you’ve seen the movie, you know things are a lot more complicated.

We can’t know how deftly the earlier drafts of Zootopia tackled its subject matter (I really do feel bad about criticizing a script I haven’t even read), but I can’t imagine that Judy’s openly anti-fox sentiment would have had the same cringe-factor as her condescension in calling Nick “a real articulate fella” or that her revelation that it’s wrong to forcibly collar 10% of the population would have been as heartbreaking and ugly as the moment Judy instinctively reaches for fox repellant and she and Nick realize that—despite everything they’ve accomplished together—she’s afraid of him.

I don’t want to be unfair. Had the earlier draft made it to the final cut, Zootopia might have still been a great film that addressed the origins and consequences of bigotry with intelligence, empathy and humor. Again, we’ll never know.

However, the changes made two-thirds of the way through production fundamentally altered the film’s approach to prejudice. It made it more relevant and therefore more complicated. It was a risk, and that risk paid off. To Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and everyone else who worked on this film, thank you for that.

hen I was young, there was nothing so bad as being asked to work. Now I find it hard to conjure up that feeling, but I see it in my five-year-old daughter. “Can I please have some water, daddy?”
“You can get it yourself, you’re a big girl.”
“WHY DOES EVERYONE ALWAYS TREAT ME LIKE A MAID?”
That was me when I was young, rolling on the ground in agony on being asked to clean my room. As a child, I wonderingly observed the hours my father worked. The stoical way he went off to the job, chin held high, seemed a beautiful, heroic embrace of personal suffering. The poor man! How few hours he left himself to rest on the couch, read or watch American football.
My father had his own accounting firm in Raleigh, North Carolina. His speciality was helping people manage their tax and financial affairs as they started, expanded, or in some cases shut down their businesses. He has taken his time retiring, and I now realise how much he liked his work. I can remember the glowing terms in which his clients would tell me about the help he’d given them, as if he’d performed life-saving surgery on them. I also remember the way his voice changed when he received a call from a client when at home. Suddenly he spoke with a command and facility that I never heard at any other time, like a captive penguin released into open water, swimming in his element with natural ease.
At 37, I see my father’s routine with different eyes. I live in a terraced house in Wandsworth, a moderately smart and wildly expensive part of south-west London, and a short train ride from the headquarters of The Economist, where I write about economics. I get up at 5.30am and spend an hour or two at my desk at home. Once the children are up I join them for breakfast, then go to work as they head off to school. I can usually leave the office in time to join the family for dinner and put the children to bed. Then I can get a bit more done at home: writing, if there is a deadline looming, or reading, which is also part of the job. I work hard, doggedly, almost relentlessly. The joke, which I only now get, is that work is fun.
Not all work, of course. When my father was a boy on the family farm, the tasks he and his father did in the fields – the jobs many people still do – were gruelling and thankless. I once visited the textile mill where my grandmother worked for a time. The noise of the place was so overpowering that it was impossible to think. But my work – the work we lucky few well-paid professionals do every day, as we co-operate with talented people while solving complex, interesting problems – is fun. And I find that I can devote surprising quantities of time to it.
What is less clear to me, and to so many of my peers, is whether we should do so much of it. One of the facts of modern life is that a relatively small class of people works very long hours and earns good money for its efforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example, work more than 50 hours a week. Some professionals do twice that amount, and elite lawyers can easily work 70 hours a week almost every week of the year.
Work, in this context, means active, billable labour. But in reality, it rarely stops. It follows us home on our smartphones, tugging at us during an evening out or in the middle of our children’s bedtime routines. It makes permanent use of valuable cognitive space, and chooses odd hours to pace through our thoughts, shoving aside whatever might have been there before. It colonises our personal relationships and uses them for its own ends. It becomes our lives if we are not careful. It becomes us.
When John Maynard Keynes mused in 1930 that, a century hence, society might be so rich that the hours worked by each person could be cut to ten or 15 a week, he was not hallucinating, just extrapolating. The working week was shrinking fast. Average hours worked dropped from 60 at the turn of the century to 40 by the 1950s. The combination of extra time and money gave rise to an age of mass leisure, to family holidays and meals together in front of the television. There was a vision of the good life in this era. It was one in which work was largely a means to an end – the working class had become a leisured class. Households saved money to buy a house and a car, to take holidays, to finance a retirement at ease. This was the era of the three-Martini lunch: a leisurely, expense-padded midday bout of hard drinking. This was when bankers lived by the 3-6-3 rule: borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and head off to the golf course by 3pm.
The vision of a leisure-filled future occurred against the backdrop of the competition against communism, but it is a capitalist dream: one in which the productive application of technology rises steadily, until material needs can be met with just a few hours of work. It is a story of the triumph of innovation and markets, and one in which the details of a post-work world are left somewhat hazy. Keynes, in his essay on the future, reckoned that when the end of work arrived:
For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
Karl Marx had a different view: that being occupied by good work was living well. Engagement in productive, purposeful work was the means by which people could realise their full potential. He’s not credited with having got much right about the modern world, but maybe he wasn’t so wrong about our relationship with work.
MARX IS NOT CREDITED WITH HAVING GOT MUCH RIGHT ABOUT THE MODERN WORLD, BUT MAYBE HE WASN’T SO WRONG ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH WORK
In those decades after the second world war, Keynes seemed to have the better of the argument. As productivity rose across the rich world, hourly wages for typical workers kept rising and hours worked per week kept falling – to the mid-30s, by the 1970s. But then something went wrong. Less-skilled workers found themselves forced to accept ever-smaller pay rises to stay in work. The bargaining power of the typical blue-collar worker eroded as technology and globalisation handed bosses a whole toolkit of ways to squeeze labour costs. At the same time, the welfare state ceased its expansion and began to retreat, swept back by governments keen to boost growth by cutting taxes and removing labour-market restrictions. The income gains that might have gone to workers, that might have kept living standards rising even as hours fell, that might have kept society on the road to the Keynesian dream, flowed instead to those at the top of the income ladder. Willingly or unwillingly, those lower down the ladder worked fewer and fewer hours. Those at the top, meanwhile, worked longer and longer.
It was not obvious that things would turn out this way. You might have thought that whereas, before, a male professional worked 50 hours a week while his wife stayed at home with the children, a couple of married professionals might instead each opt to work 35 hours a week, sharing more of the housework, and ending up with both more money and more leisure. That didn’t happen. Rather, both are now more likely to work 60 hours a week and pay several people to care for the house and children.
Why? One possibility is that we have all got stuck on a treadmill. Technology and globalisation mean that an increasing number of good jobs are winner-take-most competitions. Banks and law firms amass extraordinary financial returns, directors and partners within those firms make colossal salaries, and the route to those coveted positions lies through years of round-the-clock work. The number of firms with global reach, and of tech start-ups that dominate a market niche, is limited. Securing a place near the top of the income spectrum in such a firm, and remaining in it, is a matter of constant struggle and competition. Meanwhile the technological forces that enable a few elite firms to become dominant also allow work, in the form of those constantly pinging emails, to follow us everywhere.
This relentless competition increases the need to earn high salaries, for as well-paid people cluster together they bid up the price of the resources for which they compete. In the brainpower-heavy cities where most of them live, getting on the property ladder requires the sort of sum that can be built up only through long hours in an important job. Then there is conspicuous consumption: the need to have a great-looking car and a home out of Interiors magazine, the competition to place children in good (that is, private) schools, the need to maintain a coterie of domestic workers – you mean you don’t have a personal shopper? And so on, and on.
The dollars and hours pile up as we aim for a good life that always stays just out of reach. In moments of exhaustion we imagine simpler lives in smaller towns with more hours free for family and hobbies and ourselves. Perhaps we just live in a nightmarish arms race: if we were all to disarm, collectively, then we could all live a calmer, happier, more equal life.
But that is not quite how it is. The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable. The problem is that they are not.

Drinking coffee one morning with a friend from my home town, we discuss our fathers’ working habits. Both are just past retirement age. Both worked in an era in which a good job was not all-consuming. When my father began his professional career, the post-war concept of the good life was still going strong. He was a dedicated, even passionate worker. Yet he never supposed that work should be the centre of his life.
Work was a means to an end; it was something you did to earn the money to pay for the important things in life. This was the advice I was given as a university student, struggling to figure out what career to pursue in order to have the best chance at an important, meaningful job. I think my parents were rather baffled by my determination to find satisfaction in my professional life. Life was what happened outside work. Life, in our house, was a week’s holiday at the beach or Pop standing on the sidelines at our baseball games. It was my parents at church, in the pew or volunteering in some way or another. It was having kids who gave you grandkids. Work merely provided more people to whom to show pictures of the grandkids.
This generation of workers, on the early side of the baby boom, is marching off to retirement now. There are things to do in those sunset years. But the hours will surely stretch out and become hard to fill. As I sit with my friend it dawns on us that retirement sounds awful. Why would we stop working?
Here is the alternative to the treadmill thesis. As professional life has evolved over the past generation, it has become much more pleasant. Software and information technology have eliminated much of the drudgery of the workplace. The duller sorts of labour have gone, performed by people in offshore service-centres or by machines. Offices in the rich world’s capitals are packed not with drones filing paperwork or adding up numbers but with clever people working collaboratively.
The pleasure lies partly in flow, in the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend. The sense of purposeful immersion and exertion is the more appealing given the hands-on nature of the work: top professionals are the master craftsmen of the age, shaping high-quality, bespoke products from beginning to end. We design, fashion, smooth and improve, filing the rough edges and polishing the words, the numbers, the code or whatever is our chosen material. At the end of the day we can sit back and admire our work – the completed article, the sealed deal, the functioning app – in the way that artisans once did, and those earning a middling wage in the sprawling service-sector no longer do.
The fact that our jobs now follow us around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Workers in cognitively demanding fields, thinking their way through tricky challenges, have always done so at odd hours. Academics in the midst of important research, or admen cooking up a new creative campaign, have always turned over the big questions in their heads while showering in the morning or gardening on a weekend afternoon. If more people find their brains constantly and profitably engaged, so much the better.
Smartphones do not just enable work to follow us around; they also make life easier. Tasks that might otherwise require you to stay late in the office can be taken home. Parents can enjoy dinner and bedtime with the children before turning back to the job at hand. Technology is also lowering the cost of the support staff that make long hours possible. No need to employ a full-time personal assistant to run the errands these days: there are apps to take care of the shopping, the laundry and the dinner, walk the dog, fix the car and mend the hole in the roof. All of these allow us to focus ever more of our time and energy on doing what our jobs require of us.
There are downsides to this life. It does not allow us much time with newborn children or family members who are ill; or to develop hobbies, side-interests or the pleasures of particular, leisurely rituals – or anything, indeed, that is not intimately connected with professional success. But the inadmissible truth is that the eclipsing of life’s other complications is part of the reward.
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.
This life is a package deal. Cities are expensive. Less prestigious work that demands less commitment from those who do it pays less – often much less. For those without independent wealth, dialling back professional ambition and effort means moving away, to smaller and cheaper places.
But stepping off the treadmill does not just mean accepting a different vision of one’s prospects with a different salary trajectory. It means upending one’s life entirely: changing locations, tumbling out of the community, losing one’s identity. That is a difficult thing to survive. One must have an extremely strong, secure sense of self to negotiate it.
I’ve watched people try. In 2009 good friends of ours packed their things and moved away from Washington, DC, where we lived at the time, to the small college town of Charlottesville, Virginia. It was an idyllic little place, nestled in the Appalachian foothills, surrounded by horse farms and vineyards, with cheap, charming homes. He persuaded his employer to let him telework; she left her high-pressure job as vice-president at a big web firm near Washington to take a position at a local company.
My wife and I were intrigued by the thought of doing the same. She could teach there, we reckoned, and I could write. It was a reasonable train ride from Washington, if I needed to meet editors. We would be able to enjoy the fresh air, and the peace and quiet. Perhaps at some point we would open our own shop on the main street or try our hand at winemaking, if we could save a little money.
IT WASN’T THE STRESS OF BEING ON THE FAST TRACK THAT CAUSED MY CHEST TO TIGHTEN AND MY HEART RATE TO RISE, BUT THE THOUGHT OF BEING LEFT BEHIND BY THOSE STILL ON IT
Yet the more seriously we thought about it, the less I liked the idea. I want hours of quiet to write in, not days and weeks. I would miss, desperately, being in an office and arguing about ideas. More than that, I could anticipate with perfect clarity how the rhythm of life would slow as we left the city, how the external pressure to keep moving would diminish. I didn’t want more time to myself; I wanted to feel pushed to be better and achieve more. It wasn’t the stress of being on the fast track that caused my chest to tighten and my heart rate to rise, but the thought of being left behind by those still on it.
Less than a year after moving away, our friends moved back. They had found themselves bored and lonely. We were glad, and relieved as well: their return justified our decision to stay in the city. One reason the treadmill is so hard to walk away from is that life off it is not what it once was. When I was a child, our neighbourhood was rich with social interaction. My father played on the church softball team until his back got too bad. My mother helped with charity food-and-toy drives. They both taught classes and chaperoned youth choir trips. They socialised with neighbours who did these things too.
Those elements of life persist, of course, but they are somewhat diminished, as Robert Putnam, a social scientist, observed in 1995 in “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. He described the shrivelling of civic institutions, which he blamed on many of the forces that coincided with, and contributed to, our changing relationship to work: the entry of women into the workforce; the rise of professional ghettoes; longer working hours.
One of the civic groups that Putnam cites as an important contributor to social capital in ages past was the labour union. In the post-war era, unions thrived because of healthy demand for blue-collar workers who shared a strong sense of class identity. That allowed the unions’ members to capture an outsize share of the gains from economic growth, while also providing workers and their families with a strong sense of community – indeed, of solidarity.
The labour movement has unravelled in recent decades, and with it the network that supported its members; but these days a similar virtuous circle supports the professional classes instead. Our social networks are made up not just of neighbours and friends, but also of clients and colleagues. This interlaced world of work and social life enriches us, exposing us to people who do fascinating things, keeping us informed of professional gossip and providing those who have good ideas with the connections to help turn them into reality. It also traps us. The suspicion that one might be missing out on a useful opportunity or idea helps prod us off the sofa when an evening with “True Detective” beckons seductively.
This mixing of the social and professional is not new. It is not unlike Hollywood, where friends have always become collaborators, actors marry directors, and an evening out on the town has always been a public act that shapes the brand value of the star. Or like Washington, DC, in which public officials, journalists and policy experts swap jobs every few years and go to the same parties at night: befriending and sleeping with each other, exchanging ideas, living a life in which all behaviour is professional to some extent. But as hours have lengthened and work has become more engaging, this social pattern has swallowed other worlds.
There is a psychic value to the intertwining of life and work as well as an economic one. The society of people like us reinforces our belief in what we do.

Working effectively at a good job builds up our identity and esteem in the eyes of others. We cheer each other on, we share in (and quietly regret) the successes of our friends, we lose touch with people beyond our network. Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group’s distinguishing vices as virtues.
Life within this professional community has its impositions. It makes failure or error a more difficult, humiliating experience. Social life ceases to be a refuge from the indignities of work. The sincerity of relationships becomes questionable when people are friends of convenience. A friend – a real one – muses to me that those who become immersed in lives like this suffer from Stockholm Syndrome: they befriend their clients because they spend too much time with them to know there are other, better options available. The fact that I find it hard to pass judgment on this statement suggests that I, too, may be a victim.
My parents have not quite managed to retire, but they are getting there. Even with one foot in and one foot out of retirement, their post-career itinerary is becoming clear. They mean to see parts of the world they couldn’t when they were young and had no money, or when they were older and had no time. Their travels occasionally bring them to London to see me and my family. On a recent visit the talk shifted, as it often does, to when I might be planning to return to the east coast of America, much closer to the Carolinas, which is where they and most of the rest of my extended family still live. As my father walks around the house, my three-year-old son trotting adoringly behind him, they ask whether I couldn’t do my job as easily closer to home.
I get hung up on as easily. The writing I could do as easily, just about. Building my career, away from our London headquarters, would not be so easy. As I explain this, a circularity threatens to overtake my point: to build my career is to make myself indispensable, demonstrating indispensability means burying myself in the work, and the upshot of successfully demonstrating my indispensability is the need to continue working tirelessly. Not only can I not do all that elsewhere; outside London, the obvious brilliance of a commitment to this course of action is underappreciated. It looks pointless – daft, even.
And I begin to understand the nature of the trouble I’m having communicating to my parents precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few -- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep's eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.

The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other's throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people -- not those who fight and pay and die -- only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell's bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war -- anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter's dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the "open door" policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war -- a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit -- fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people -- who do not profit.

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CHAPTER TWO

Who Makes The Profits?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven't paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children's children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits -- ah! that is another matter -- twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent -- the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.

Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket -- and are safely pocketed. Let's just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people -- didn't one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn't much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let's look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump -- or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let's look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let's group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren't the only ones. There are still others. Let's take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That's all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company -- and you can't have a war without nickel -- showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public -- even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here's how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought -- and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn't any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it -- so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches -- one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 -- count them if you live long enough -- was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14¢ [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30¢ to 40¢ each for them -- a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers -- all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment -- knapsacks and the things that go to fill them -- crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them -- and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn't float! The seams opened up -- and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee -- with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator -- to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn't suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses -- that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

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CHAPTER THREE

Who Pays The Bills?

Who provides the profits -- these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them -- in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us -- the people -- got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par -- and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement -- the young boys couldn't stand it.

That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead -- they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded -- they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too -- they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam -- on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain -- with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don't forget -- the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share -- at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.

Napoleon once said,

"All men are enamored of decorations . . . they positively hunger for them."

So by developing the Napoleonic system -- the medal business -- the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure."

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance -- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -- and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back -- when they came back from the war and couldn't find work -- at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly -- his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too -- as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

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CHAPTER FOUR

How To Smash This Racket!

WELL, it's a racket, all right.

A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn't they?

They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won't permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people -- those who do the suffering and still pay the price -- make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn't be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant -- all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war -- voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms -- to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide -- and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don't shout that "We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation." Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can't go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

| Top |

CHAPTER FIVE

To Hell With War!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had "kept us out of war" and on the implied promise that he would "keep us out of war." Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money . . . and Germany won't.

So . . . "

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a "war to make the world safe for democracy" and a "war to end all wars."

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war -- even the munitions makers.

So...I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!

Silicon Valley rarely talks politics – except, perhaps, to discuss the quickest ways of disrupting it. On the rare occasions that its leaders do speak out, it is usually to disparage the homeless, celebrate colonialism or complain about the hapless city regulators who are out to strangle the fragile artisans who gave us Uber and Airbnb.

Thus it is puzzling that America’s tech elites have become the world’s loudest proponents of basic income – an old but radical idea that has been embraced, for very different reasons and in very different forms, by both left and right. From Marc Andreessen to Tim O’Reilly, Silicon Valley’s royalty seems intrigued by the prospect of handing out cash to ordinary citizens, regardless of whether they work or not.

Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s premier startup incubators, has announced it wants to provide funding to a group of volunteers and hire a researcher – for five years, no less – to study the issue.

Albert Wenger, a partner in United Square Ventures, a prominent venture capital firm, is so taken with the idea that he is currently at work on a book. So, why all the fuss – and in Silicon Valley, of all places?

Basic income is seen as the Trojan horse that allows tech companies to say we are the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop
First, there is the traditional libertarian argument against the intrusiveness and inefficiency of the welfare state – a problem that basic income, once combined with the full-blown dismantling of public institutions, might solve. Second, the coming age of automation might result in even more people losing their jobs – and the prospect of a guaranteed and unconditional basic income might reduce the odds of another Luddite uprising. Better to have everyone learning how to code, receiving basic income and hoping to meet an honest venture capitalist.

Third, the precarious nature of employment in the gig economy no longer looks as terrifying if you receive basic income of some kind. Driving for Uber, after all, could be just a hobby that occasionally yields some material benefits. Think fishing, but a bit more social. And who doesn’t like fishing?

Basic income, therefore, is often seen as the Trojan horse that would allow tech companies to position themselves as progressive, even caring – the good cop to Wall Street’s bad cop – while eliminating the hurdles that stand in the way of further expansion.

Goodbye to all those cumbersome institutions of the welfare state, employment regulations that guarantee workers’ rights or subversive attempts to question the status quo with regards to the ownership of data or the infrastructure that produces it.

And yet there is something else to Silicon Valley’s advocacy: the sudden realisation that, should it fail to define the horizons of the basic income debate, the public might eventually realise that the main obstacle in the way of this radical idea is none other than Silicon Valley itself.

To understand why, it is best to examine the most theoretically and technologically sophisticated version of the basic income argument.

This is the work of radical Italian economists – Carlo Vercellone, Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli – who for decades have been penning pungent critiques of “cognitive capitalism” – that is, the current stage of capitalism, characterised by the growing importance of cognitive labour and the declining importance of material production.

Dutch city plans to pay citizens a ‘basic income’, and Greens say it could work in the UK
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Unlike other defenders of basic income who argue that it is necessary on moral or social grounds, these economists argue that it makes sound economic sense during our transition to cognitive capitalism. It is a way to avoid structural instability – generated, among other things, by the increasing precariousness of work and growing income polarisation – and to improve the circulation of ideas (as well as their innovative potential) in the economy.

How so? First, it is a way to compensate workers for the work they do while not technically working – which, as we enter cognitive capitalism, often produces far more value than paid work. Think of Uber drivers who are generating useful data, which helps Uber in making resource allocation decisions, in between their trips.

Second, because much of our labour today is collective – do you know by how much your individual search improves Google’s search index? Or how much a line of code you contribute to a free software project enhances the overall product? – it is often impossible to determine the share of individual contribution in the final product. Basic income simply acknowledges that much of modern cognitive labour is social in character.

Finally, it is a way to ensure that some of the productivity gains associated with the introduction of new techniques for rationalising the work process – which used to be passed on to workers through mechanisms such as wage indexing – can still be passed on, even as collective bargaining and other forms of employment rights are weakened. This, in turn, could lead to higher investments and higher profits, creating a virtuous circle.

The cognitive capitalism argument for basic income is more complex than this crude summary, but it requires two further conditions.

First, that the welfare state, in a somewhat reformed form, must survive and flourish – it is a key social institution that, with its generous investments in health and education, gives us the freedom to be creative.

Second, that there must be a fundamental reform of the tax system to fund it – with taxes not just on financial transactions, but also on the use of instruments such as patents, trademarks and, increasingly, various rights claims over data that prevent the optimal utilisation of knowledge.

This more radical interpretation of the basic income agenda suggests that Silicon Valley, far from being its greatest champion, is its main enemy. It actively avoids paying taxes; it keeps finding new ways to estrange data from the users who produce it; it wants to destroy the welfare state, either by eliminating it or by replacing it with its own, highly privatised and highly individualised alternatives (think preventive health-tracking with FitBit versus guaranteed free healthcare).

Besides, it colonises, usurps and commodifies whatever new avenues of genuine social cooperation– the much-maligned sharing economy – are opened up by the latest advances in communication.

Why is Silicon Valley so 'tone deaf' to India?
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In short, you can either have a radical agenda of basic income, where people are free to collaborate as they wish because they no longer have to work, or the kind of platform capitalism that seeks to turn everyone into a precarious entrepreneur. But you can’t have both.

In fact, Silicon Valley can easily make the first step towards the introduction of basic income: why not make us, the users, the owners of our own data? At the very minimum, it could help us to find alternative, non-commercial users of this data. At its most ambitious you can think of a mechanism whereby cities, municipalities and eventually nation states, starved of the data that now accrues almost exclusively to the big tech firms, would compensate citizens for their data with some kind of basic income, that might be either direct (cash) or indirect (free services such as transportation).

This, however, is not going to happen because data is the very asset that makes Silicon Valley impossible to disrupt – and it knows it. What we get instead is Silicon Valley’s loud, but empty, advocacy of an agenda it is aggressively working to suppress.

Somehow our tech elites want us to believe that governments will scrape enough cash together to make it happen. Who will pay for it, though? Clearly, it won’t be the radical moguls of Silicon Valley: they prefer to park their cash offshore.

Suddenly, it feels like 2000 again. Back then, surveillance programs like [Carnivore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software%29), Echelon, and Total Information Awareness helped spark a surge in electronic privacy awareness. Now a decade later, the recent discovery of programs like [PRISM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program%29), Boundless Informant, and FISA orders are catalyzing renewed concern.

The programs of the past can be characterized as “proximate” surveillance, in which the government attempted to use technology to directly monitor communication themselves. The programs of this decade mark the transition to “oblique” surveillance, in which the government more often just goes to the places where information has been accumulating on its own, such as email providers, search engines, social networks, and telecoms.

Both then and now, privacy advocates have typically come into conflict with a persistent tension, in which many individuals don’t understand why they should be concerned about surveillance if they have nothing to hide. It’s even less clear in the world of “oblique” surveillance, given that apologists will always frame our use of information-gathering services like a mobile phone plan or GMail as a choice.

We’re All One Big Criminal Conspiracy

As James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are “[n]early 10,000.”

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

We Should Have Something To Hide

Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.

As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.

What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

The cornerstone of liberal democracy is the notion that free speech allows us to create a marketplace of ideas, from which we can use the political process to collectively choose the society we want. Most critiques of this system tend to focus on the ways in which this marketplace of ideas isn’t totally free, such as the ways in which some actors have substantially more influence over what information is distributed than others.

The more fundamental problem, however, is that living in an existing social structure creates a specific set of desires and motivations in a way that merely talking about other social structures never can. The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn’t able to. Any teenager can tell you that life’s most meaningful experiences aren’t the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible. This is why same sex relationships, in violation of sodomy laws, were a necessary precondition for the legalization of same sex marriage. This is also why those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.

Technology And Law Enforcement

Law enforcement used to be harder. If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people.

Today things are very different. Almost everyone carries a tracking device (their mobile phone) at all times, which reports their location to a handful of telecoms, which are required by law to provide that information to the government. Tracking everyone is no longer inconceivable, and is in fact happening all the time. We know that Sprint alone responded to 8 million law enforcement requests for real time customer location just in 2008. They got so many requests that they built an automated system to handle them.

Combined with ballooning law enforcement budgets, this trend towards automation, which includes things like license plate scanners and domestically deployed drones, represents a significant shift in the way that law enforcement operates.

Police already abuse the immense power they have, but if everyone’s every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they’d like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all.

Even ignoring this obvious potential for new abuse, it’s also substantially closer to that dystopian reality of a world where law enforcement is 100% effective, eliminating the possibility to experience alternative ideas that might better suit us.

Compromise

Some will say that it’s necessary to balance privacy against security, and that it’s important to find the right compromise between the two. Even if you believe that, a good negotiator doesn’t begin a conversation with someone whose position is at the exact opposite extreme by leading with concessions.

And that’s exactly what we’re dealing with. Not a balance of forces which are looking for the perfect compromise between security and privacy, but an enormous steam roller built out of careers and billions in revenue from surveillance contracts and technology. To negotiate with that, we can’t lead with concessions, but rather with all the opposition we can muster.

All The Opposition We Can Muster

Even if you believe that voting is more than a selection of meaningless choices designed to mask the true lack of agency we have, there is a tremendous amount of money and power and influence on the other side of this equation. So don’t just vote or petition.

To the extent that we’re “from the internet,” we have a certain amount of power of our own that we can leverage within this domain. It is possible to develop user-friendly technical solutions that would stymie this type of surveillance. I help work on Open Source security and privacy apps at Open Whisper Systems, but we all have a long ways to go. If you’re concerned, please consider finding some way to directly oppose this burgeoning worldwide surveillance industry (we could use help at Open Whisper Systems!). It’s going to take all of us.

Analyse de l'actualité pour en sortir une liste d'événements annotés sémantiquement. Vraiment classe !

In the VR community, “presence” is a term of art. It’s the idea that once VR reaches a certain quality level your brain is actually tricked  —  at the lowest, most primal level  —  into believing that what you see in front of you is reality. Studies show that even if you rationally believe you’re not truly standing at the edge of a steep cliff, and even if you try with all your might to jump, your legs will buckle. Your low-level lizard brain won’t let you do it.

With presence, your brain goes from feeling like you have a headset on to feeling like you’re immersed in a different world.

Computer enthusiasts and science fiction writers have dreamed about VR for decades. But earlier attempts to develop it, especially in the 1990s, were disappointing. It turns out the technology wasn’t ready yet. What’s happening now  — because of Moore’s Law, and also the rapid improvement of processors, screens, and accelerometers, driven by the smartphone boom  —  is that VR is finally ready to go mainstream.

Once VR achieves presence, we start to believe.

We use the phrase “suspension of disbelief” about the experience of watching TV or movies. This implies that our default state watching TV and movies is disbelief. We start to believe only when we become sufficiently immersed.

With VR, the situation is reversed: our brains believe, by default, that what we see is real. The risk isn’t that it’s boring but that it’s overwhelmingly intense. We need to suspend belief and remind ourselves that what we think we’re experiencing isn’t real.

As Chris Milk, an early VR pioneer, says:

You read a book; your brain reads letters printed in ink on paper and transforms that into a world. You watch a movie; you’re seeing imagery inside of a rectangle while you’re sitting inside a room, and your brain translates that into a world. And you connect to this even though you know it’s not real, but because you’re in the habit of suspending disbelief.

With virtual reality, you’re essentially hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to believe.

This has implications for the kinds of software that will succeed in VR. For example, a popular video game like Call of Duty ported to VR would be frightening and disorienting for most people.

What will likely succeed instead are relatively simple experiences. Some examples: go back in time and walk around ancient Rome; overcome your fear of heights by climbing skyscrapers; execute precision moves as you train to safely land planes; return to places you “3D photographed” on your last vacation; have a picnic on a sunny afternoon with a long-lost friend; build trust with virtual work colleagues in a way that today you can only do in person.

These experiences will be dreamt up by “experience makers”  —  the VR version of filmmakers. The next few decades of VR will be similar to the first few decades of film. Filmmakers had no idea what worked and what didn’t: how to write, how to shoot, how to edit, etc. After decades of experiments they established the grammar of film. We’re about to enter a similar period of exploration with VR.

There will be great games made in VR, and gaming will probably dominate the VR narrative for the next few years. But longer term, we won’t think of games as essential to the medium. The original TV shows were newscasts and game shows, but today we think of TV screens as content-agnostic input-output devices.

VR will be the ultimate input-output device. Some people call VR “the last medium” because any subsequent medium can be invented inside of VR, using software alone. Looking back, the movie and TV screens we use today will be seen as an intermediate step between the invention of electricity and the invention of VR. Kids will think it’s funny that their ancestors used to stare at glowing rectangles hoping to suspend disbelief.

One day in the early 1980s, I was flipping through the TV channels, when I stopped at a news report. The announcer was grey-haired. His tone was urgent. His pronouncement was dire: between the war in the Middle East, famine in Africa, AIDS in the cities, and communists in Afghanistan, it was clear that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were upon us. The end had come.

We were Methodists and I’d never heard this sort of prediction. But to my grade-school mind, the evidence seemed ironclad, the case closed. I looked out the window and could hear the drumming of hoof beats.

Life went on, however, and those particular horsemen went out to pasture. In time, others broke loose, only to slow their stride as well. Sometimes, the end seemed near. Others it would recede. But over the years, I began to see it wasn’t the end that was close. It was our dread of it. The apocalypse wasn’t coming: it was always with us. It arrived in a stampede of our fears, be they nuclear or biological, religious or technological.

In the years since, I watched this drama play out again and again, both in closed communities such as Waco and Heaven’s Gate, and in the larger world with our panics over SARS, swine flu, and Y2K. In the past, these fears made for some of our most popular fiction. The alien invasions in H G Wells’s War of the Worlds (1898); the nuclear winter in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957); God’s wrath in the Left Behind series of books, films and games. In most versions, the world ended because of us, but these were horrors that could be stopped, problems that could be solved.

But today something is different. Something has changed. Judging from its modern incarnation in fiction, a new kind of apocalypse is upon us, one that is both more compelling and more terrifying. Today our fears are broader, deeper, woven more tightly into our daily lives, which makes it feel like the seeds of our destruction are all around us. We are more afraid, but less able to point to a single source for our fear. At the root is the realisation that we are part of something beyond our control.

I noticed this change recently when I found myself reading almost nothing but post-apocalyptic fiction, of which there has been an unprecedented outpouring. I couldn’t seem to get enough. I tore through one after another, from the tenderness and brutality of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars (2013) to the lonely wandering of Emily St John Mandel’s survivors in Station Eleven (2014), to the magical horrors of Benjamin Percy’s The Dead Lands (2015). There were the remnants of humanity trapped in the giant silos of Hugh Howey’s Wool (2013), the bizarre biotech of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), the desolate realism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).

I read these books like my life depended on it. It was impossible to look away from the ruins of our civilisation. There seemed to be no end to them, with nearly every possible depth being plumbed, from Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers (2011), about the people not taken by the rapture, to Nick Holdstock’s The Casualties (2015), about people’s lives just before the apocalypse. The young-adult aisle was filled with similar books, such as Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011), James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009) and Michael Perry’s The Scavengers (2014). Movie screens were alight with the apocalyptic visions of Snowpiercer (2013), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), The Hunger Games (2012-15), Z for Zachariah (2015). There was also apocalyptic poetry in Sara Eliza Johnson’s Bone Map (2014), apocalyptic essays in Joni Tevis’s The World Is on Fire (2015), apocalyptic non-fiction in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007). Even the academy was on board with dense parsings, such as Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy (2010) and Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife (2013).

I would stand on the overpass and watch the cars flow underneath. They never slowed. There was never a time when the road was empty

In the annals of eschatology, we are living in a golden age. The end of the world is on everyone’s mind. Why now? In the recent past we were arguably much closer to the end – just a few nuclear buttons had to be pushed.

The current wave of anxiety might be obvious on the surface, but it runs much deeper. It’s a feeling I’ve had for a long time, and one that has been building over the years. The first time I remember it was when I lived in a house next to a 12-lane freeway. Sometimes I would stand on the overpass and watch the cars flow underneath. They never slowed. They never stopped. There was never a time when the road was empty, when there were no cars driving on it.

When I tried to wrap my mind around this endlessness, it filled me with a kind of panic. It felt like something was careening out of control. But they were just cars. I drove one myself every day. It made no sense. It was like there was something my mind was trying reach around, but couldn’t.

This same ungraspable feeling has hit me at odd times since: on a train across Hong Kong’s New Territories through the endless apartment towers. In an airplane rising over the Midwest, watching the millions of small houses and yards merge into a city, a state, a country. Seeing dumpster after dumpster being carried off from a construction site to a pile growing somewhere.

When I began my apocalyptic binge, I could channel that same feeling and let it run all the way through. It echoed through those stories, through the dead landscapes. And now after reading so many, I believe I am starting to understand the nature of this new fear.

Humans have always been an organised species. We have always functioned as a group, as something larger than ourselves. But in the recent past, the scale of that organisation has grown so much, the pace of that growth is so fast, the connective tissue between us so dense, that there has been a shift of some kind. Namely, we have become so powerful that some scientists argue we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, in which humans are a geological force. That feeling, that panic, comes from those moments when this fact is unavoidable. It comes from being unable to not see what we’ve become – a planet-changing superorganism. It is from the realisation that I am part of it.

Apocalyptic fictions of the current wave feed off precisely this fear: the feeling that we are part of something over which we have no control

Most days, I don’t feel like I’m part of anything with much power to create and destroy. Day to day, my own life feels chaotic and hard, trying to collect money I’m owed, or get my car fixed, or pay for health insurance, or feed my kids. Most of the time, making it through the day feels like a victory, not like I’m playing any part in a larger drama, or that the errands I’m running, the things I’m buying, the electricity I’m wasting could be bringing about our doom.

Yet apocalyptic fictions of the current wave feed off precisely this fear: the feeling that we are part of something over which we have no control, of which we have no real choice but to keep being part. The bigger it grows, the more we rely on it, the deeper the anxiety becomes. It is the curse of being a self-aware piece of a larger puzzle, of an emergent consciousness in a larger emergent system. It is as hard to fathom as the colony is to the ant.

Emergence, or the way that complex systems come from simple parts, is a well-known phenomenon in science and nature. It is how everything from slime moulds to cities to our sense of self arises. It is how bees become a hive, how cells become an organism, how a brain becomes a mind. And it is how humans become humanity.

But what’s less well-known is that there are two ways of interpreting emergence. The first is known as weak emergence, which is more intuitive. In this view you should be able to trace the lines of causation from the bottom of a system all the way to the top. In looking at an ant, you should detect the making of the colony. In examining brain cells, you should find the self. In this view, the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga explains in his book Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011), ‘the emergent property is reducible to its individual components’.

But another view is called strong emergence, in which the new system takes on qualities the parts don’t have. In strong emergence, the new system undergoes what Gazzaniga called a ‘phase shift’, not unlike the way that water changes to ice. They are made of the same stuff, but behave according to different rules. The emergent system might not be more than the sum of its parts, but it is different from them.

Strong emergence has been grudgingly accepted in physics, a field where quantum mechanics and general relativity have never been reconciled, and where they might never do so because of a phase shift: physics at our level emerges from below, but changes once it does. Quantum mechanics and general relativity operate at different levels of organisation. They work according to different rules.

Whenever I think about reconciling my own life with that of my species, I have a similar feeling. My life depends on technologies I don’t understand, signals I can’t see, systems I can’t perceive. I don’t understand how any of it works, how I could change it, or how it can last. Its feels like peering across some chasm, like I am part of something I cannot quite grasp, like there has been a phase shift from humans struggling to survive to humanity struggling to survive our success.

The problems we face will not be fixed at the level of the individual life. We all know this because none of us have changed our own lives anywhere near enough to make a difference. Where would we start? With our commute? With candles? Life is already hard. Solutions will need to be implemented at a higher level of organisation. We fear this. We know it, but we have no idea what those solutions might look like. Hence the creeping sense of doom.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ says a character in Mandel’s Station Eleven. ‘Are we supposed to believe that civilisation has just come to an end?’

Another responds: ‘Well, it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?’

This is what our fiction is telling us. This is what makes it so mesmerising, so satisfying. In our stories of the post-apocalypse, the dilemma is resolved, the fragility laid bare. In these, humans are both villain and hero, disease and cure. Our doom is our salvation. In our books at least, humanity’s destruction is also its redemption.

Standing on that bridge now, I see even more cars than ever before. Beneath the roar of engines is the sound of hoof beats. As they draw closer, the old feeling rises up, but I know now that it comes not just from a fear of the end itself, but from the fear of knowing that the rider is me.

OLPC MEMO-1
Marvin Minsky, Feb 16, 2008 (revised March 22)

This is the first of several memos about how OLPC could initiate useful projects that then could grow without our further support—if adopted by groups in our Diaspora.

What makes Mathematics hard to learn? Drawbacks of Age-Based Segregation
Role Models, Mentors, and Imprimers Why Projects are better than Subjects
Making Intellectual Communities Why Classics are better than Textbooks

What makes Mathematics hard to learn?

Why do some children find Math hard to learn? I suspect that this is often caused by starting with the practice and drill of a bunch of skills called Arithmetic—and instead of promoting inventiveness, we focus on preventing mistakes. I suspect that this negative emphasis leads many children not only to dislike Arithmetic, but also later to become averse to everything else that smells of technology. It might even lead to a long-term distaste for the use of symbolic representations.

Anecdote: A parent once asked me to tutor a student who was failing to learn the multiplication table. When the child complained that this was a big job, I tried to explain that because of diagonal symmetry, there are less than 50 facts to learn.

½
However, that child had a larger-scale complaint:

“Last year I had to learn the addition table and it was really boring. This year I have to learn another, harder one, and I figure if I learn it then next year there will be another one and there’ll never be any end to this stupid nonsense. "

This child imagined ‘Math’ to be a continuous string of mechanical tasks—an unending prospect of practice and drill. It was hard to convince him that there would not be any more tables in subsequent years.

To deal with the immediate problem, I made a deck of “flash cards,” each of which showed two digits on the front and their product on the back. The process was to guess each answer and, if it was correct, then to remove that card from the deck. This made the task seem more like a game in which one can literally feel one’s progress as the size and weight of the deck diminishes. Shortly the child excitedly said, “This deck is a really smart teaching machine! It remembers which products I’ve learned, and then only asks for the ones I don’t know, so it saves me from wasting a lot of time!”

However, a more serious problem was that this child had no good image or “cognitive map” of what might result from learning this subject. What function might Math serve in later years? What goals and ambitions might it help to achieve?

Anecdote: I asked a certain 6-year-old child “how much is 15 and 15”and she quickly answered, “I think it’s 30.” I asked how she figured that out so fast and she replied, “Well, everyone knows that 16 and 16 is 32, so then I subtracted the extra two 1’s.”

Traditional teacher: “Your answer is right but your method was wrong: you should add the two 5’s to make a 10; then write down the 0 and carry the 1, and then add it to the other two 1’s.”

The traditional emphasis on accuracy leads to weakness of ability to make order-of-magnitude estimates—whereas this particular child already knew and could use enough powers of 2 to make approximations that rivaled some adult’s abilities. Why should children learn only “fixed-point” arithmetic, when “floating point” thinking is usually better for problems of everyday life!

More generally, we need to develop better ways to answer the questions that kids are afraid to ask, like “What am I doing here, and why? ”What can I expect to happen next?” or “Where and when could I find any use for this?

I’ll conclude with a perceptive remark from MIT’s Phil Sung: “Students are being led to think that they dislike math when they actually just dislike whatever it is that they're being taught in math classes.”

Students need Cognitive Maps of their Subjects

Until the 20th century, mathematics was mainly composed of Arithmetic, Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus. Then the fields of Logic and Topology started to rapidly grow, and in the 1950 we saw a great explosion of new ideas about the nature of information and computation. Today, these new concepts have become so useful and empowering that our math curriculum is out of date by a century. We need to find ways to introduce these ideas into our children’s earlier years.

In the traditional curriculum, Arithmetic was seen as so absolutely foundational that all other mathematical thinking depended on it. Accordingly, we sentenced all our children to two or three year terms of hard labor at doing addition, multiplication, and division! However, today it might be better to regard those tasks as little more than particular examples of algorithms—and this suggests that we could start, instead, with some simpler and more interesting ones!

For example, we could engage our children’s early minds with simple examples and ideas about Formal Languages and Finite State Machines. This would provide them with thoughtful and interesting ways to think about programs that they could create with the low-cost computers that they possess. Languages like Logo and Scratch can help children to experiment not only with simple arithmetic, but also with more interesting aspects of geometry, physics, math, and linguistics! What’s more, this would also empower them to apply those ideas to develop their own ideas about graphics, games, and languages—which in turn could lead them to contribute practical application that their communities can develop and share.

Similarly in the realm of Geometry, we can provide young children with interactive graphical programs that can lead them to observe and explore various sorts of symmetries—and thus begin to grasp the higher-level ideas that mathematicians call the “Theory of Groups”—which can be seen as a conceptual basis not only for Arithmetic, but for many aspects of other subjects. (To see examples of such things, type “Geometer's Sketchpad” to Google.)

Similarly in the realm of Physics, children can have access to programs that simulate the dynamics of structures, and thus become familiar with such important concepts as stress and strain, acceleration, momentum, energy—and vibration, damping, and dimensional scaling.

In any case, we need to provide our children with better cognitive maps of the subjects we want them to learn. I asked several grade-school teachers how often they actually used long division. One of them said, "I use it each year to compute the average grade.” Another teacher claimed to have used it for filling out tax forms—but couldn’t recall a specific example. But none of them seemed to have clear images of mathematics as a potential lifetime activity. Here is a simple but striking example of a case in which a child lacked a cognitive map:

A child was sent to me for tutoring because of failing a geometry class, and gave this excuse: " I must have been absent on the day when they explained how to prove a theorem."

No wonder this child was confused—and seemed both amazed and relieved when I explained that there was no standard way to make proofs—and that “you have to figure it out for yourself”. One could say that this child simply wasn’t told the rules of the game he was asked to play. However, this is a very peculiar case in which the ‘rule’ is that there are no rules! (In fact, automatic theorem-provers do exist, but I would not recommend their use.)

Bringing Mathematics to Life

What is mathematics, anyway? I once was in a classroom where some children were writing LOGO programs. One program was making colored flowers grow on the screen, and someone asked if the program was using mathematics. The child replied, “Oh, mathematics isn’t anything special: it’s just the smart way to understand things.” Here are a few kinds of questions that pupils should ask about the mathematical concepts we ask them to learn:

Arithmetic: Why does “compound interest’ tend to add more digits at constant rates? How do populations grow? How does recursion lead to exponentiation? It is easy to understand such things when one experiments with computer programs, but not when a child is constrained to the tedious rate of boring numerical calculation,

Geometry: How many different ways can you paint 6 colors on the faces of a cube? Can you envision how to divide a cube into three identical five-sided objects? We know that gloves come in left- and right-hand forms—but why are there only two such versions of things? We all live in a 3-D world, but few people learn good ways to think about 3-D objects. Shouldn’t this be seen as a handicap?

Logic: If most A’s are B’s, and most B’s are C’s, does this imply that many A’s must also be C’s? Many adults will give the wrong answer to this! Is it possible that when John Smith moved from Apple to Microsoft, this raised the average IQ of both companies? We all try to use logical arguments, but we also need to learn about the most common mistakes!

Mechanics: What makes a physical structure stronger when one braces it with triangular struts? That’s because two triangles are congruent, when their corresponding sides are equal—which means that that there’s no way to change a triangle’s shape, once the lengths of its sides are constrained. Today most children grow into adults without ever having learned to use the basic concept of “degrees of freedom.”

Statistics: Few mathematical subjects rival Statistics in the range of its everyday applications. How do effects accumulate? What kinds of knowledge and experience could help children to make better generalizations? How should one evaluate evidence? What’s the difference between correlation and cause? Every child should learn about the most common forms of biases—and also about why one needs to be skeptical of anecdotes.

A very few fragments of knowledge about statistics can illuminate most other subjects. In particular, it seems to me, that we should try to get children to learn to use the “T-test” method, which is an extremely simple statistical test, yet, one that handles huge ranges of situations. (To use it, only needs to know enough about the powers of 2!) Also they should understand using square roots to assess variations. (You can estimate a square root simply by halving the number of digits!) Example: Basketball scores often turn out to be number pairs like 103 to 97—which are not statistically significant!

Combinatorics: Consider that, when we teach about democracy, few pupils ever recognize that, in an electoral-college voting system, a 26% minority can win an election—and if there are 2 tiers of this, then a mere 7% minority could win! How do cultural memes manage to propagate? How does economics work? At what point should we try to teach at least the simplest aspects of the modern Theory of Games?

Abstract Algebra and Topology: These are considered to be very advanced, even postgraduate. Yet there are many phenomena that are hard to describe if one lacks access to those ideas—such as fixed-points, symmetries, singularities, and other features of dynamic trajectories, all of which appear in many real-world phenomena. Every large society is a complex organization that can only be well described by using representations at many different levels of abstraction—e.g., in terms of person, family, village, town, city, country, and whole-world economy—and “higher mathematics” has many concepts that could help to better understand such structures.

How can we encourage children to invent and carry out more elaborate processes in their heads? Teachers often insist that pupils “show their work”—which means to make them “write down every step.” This is convenient for making grades, as well as for diagnosing mistakes, but I suspect that this focus on ‘writing things down’ could lead to mental slowness and awkwardness, by discouraging pupils from trying to learn to perform those processes inside their heads—so that they can use mathematical thinking in ‘real time’. It isn’t merely a matter of speed, but of being able to keep in mind an adequate set of alternative goals and being able to quickly switch among different strategies and representations. This suggests that OLPC should promote the development of programs that help pupils to improve their working memories, and to refine the ways that they represent things in their minds:
The Impoverished Language of School-Mathematics.

There’s something peculiar about how we teach math. If you look at each subject in elementary school—History, English, Social Studies, etc.— you'll see that each pupil learn hundreds of new words in every term. You learn the names of many organizations, leaders, and wars; the titles of many books and their authors; and terms for all sorts of ideas and concepts—thousands of new words every year.

However, in the case of school-mathematics, the vocabulary is remarkably small. The children do learn words for various objects and processes—such as addition, multiplication, fraction, quotient, divisor, rectangle, parallelogram, and cylinder, equation, variable, function, and graph. But they learn only a few such terms pr year—which means that in the realm of mathematics, our children are mentally starved, by having to live in a “linguistic desert.” It is hard to think about something until one learns enough terms to express the important ideas in that area.

Specifically, it isn’t enough just to learn nouns; one also needs adequate adjectives! What's the word for when you should use addition? It’s when a phenomenon is linear. What's the word for when you should use multiplication? That’s when something is quadratic or bilinear. How does one describe processes that change suddenly or gradually: one needs terms like discrete and continuous. To talk about similarities, one needs terms like isomorphic and homotopic. Our children all need better ways to talk about, not only Arithmetic and Geometry, but also vocabularies for the ideas one needs to think about statistics, logic, and topology. This suggests an opportunity for the OLPC children’s community: to try set up discussion groups that encourage the everyday use of mathematical terms—communities in which a child can say “nonlinear” and have others admire, and not discourage her.
Mentors and Communities:

If one tries to learn a substantial skill without a good conceptual map, one is likely to end up with several collections of scripts and facts, without good ways to know which of them to use, and when—or how to find good alternatives when what you tried has failed to work. But how can our children acquire such maps? In the times before our modern schools, most young children mainly learned by being forced to work on particular jobs, and ended up without very much ‘general’ competence. However, there always were children who somehow absorbed their supervisors’ knowledge and skills—and there always were people who knew how to teach the children who were apprenticed to them.’

I’ll come back to this in another Memo about the disadvantages of modern age-based classes. Today most education is broader, but apprenticeship itself now is rare, because few teachers ever have enough time to interact very much with each of their students: a modern teacher can only do so much. The result is that no one has time to deal thoroughly questions like “What am I doing here, and why? ”What can I expect to happen next?” or “Where and when am I likely to use this?

However, now we can open new networks through which every child can communicate. This means that we can begin to envision, for each of our children, a competent adult with enough “spare time” to serve as a mentor or friend to help them develop their projects and skills. From where will all those new mentors come? Perhaps that problem will solve itself, because our lifespans are rapidly growing. The current rate of increasing longevity today is one more year for every four, so; soon we may have more retired persons than active ones!

Of course, each child will be especially good at learning particular ways to think—so we’ll also need to develop ways to match up good “apprenticeship pairs.” In effect we’ll need to develop “intellectual dating services” for finding the right persons to emulate!

In any case, no small school r community can teach all possible subjects, or serve the needs of individuals who abilities are atypical. If a child develops a specialized interest, it is unlikely that any local person can be of much help in developing that child’s special talents and abilities. (Nor can any small community can offer the range of resources to serve children with limited abilities.) However, with more global connections, it will be easier to reach others with similar interests, so that each child can join (or help form) an interactive community that offers good opportunities.

(Some existing communities will find this hard to accept, because most cultures have evolved to reward those who thinking about the same subjects in the same ways as do the rest! This will pose difficult problems for children who want to acquire new ways to think and do things that their neighbors and companions don't do—and thus escape or break out of the cultures in which they were born. To deal with this, OLPC will need to develop great new skills of diplomacy.)

Emphasizing Novelty rather than Drudgery?

Actually, I loved arithmetic in school. You had to add up a column of numbers and this was fun because there were so many different ways to do it. You could look here and there and notice three 3's and think, “that's almost a 10 so I'll take a 1 off that 7 and make it a 6 and make that 9 into a 10." But how do you keep from counting some numbers twice? Well, you could think: “Now I won’t count any more 3's.” How many children did these things exactly as they were told to do? Surely not those who became engineers or mathematicians! For when you use the same procedure again, there’s little chance to learn anything new—whereas each new method that you invent will leave you with some new mental skill (—such as a new way to use your memory).

For example, when you add 6 and 7 and write down a 3, how do you remember to “carry” a 1? Sometimes I’d mentally put it on my shoulder. How do you remember a telephone number? Most people don’t have too much trouble with remembering a ‘local’ 7-digit number, but reach for a pen when there’s also an area code. However, you can easily learn to mentally put those three other digits into your pocket—or in your left ear, if you don’t have a pocket!

Why are so many people averse to Math? Perhaps this often happens because our usual ways to teach arithmetic only insist on using certain rigid skills, while discouraging each child from trying to invent new ways to do those things. Indeed, perhaps we should study this subject when we want to discover ways to teach aversions to things!

Negative Expertise

There is a popular idea that, in order to understand something well, it is best to begin by getting things right—because then you'll never make any mistakes. We tend to think of knowledge in positive terms—and of experts as people who know exactly what to do. But one could argue that much of an expert’s competence stems from having learned to avoid the most common bugs. How much of what each person learns has this negative character? It would be hard for scientists to measure this, because a person’s knowledge about what not to do doesn’t overtly show in that individual’s behavior.

This issue is important because it is possible that our mental accumulations of counterexamples are larger and more powerful than our collections of instances and examples. If so, then it is also possible that people might learn more from negative rather than from positive reinforcement? Many educators have been taught that learning works best when it seems pleasant and enjoyable—but that discounts the value of experiencing frustrations, failures and disappointments. Besides, many feelings that we regard as positive (such as beauty, humor, pleasure, and decisiveness) may result from the censorship of other ideas, inhibition of competing activities, and the suppression of more ambitious goals (so that, instead of being positive, those feelings actually may reflect the workings of unconscious double negatives). See the longer discussions of this in Sections 1-1 and 9-4 of The Emotion Machine. Also see “Introduction to LogoWorks” at web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Logoworks.html

Différence travail/jeu, intérêt pour le travail, etc.

Chapter 1
I've been lucky enough to have been born before computers and video games were ubiquitous. I had the luck to play outdoors with friends and my brother, and of inventing our own games.
We could be our own heroes, use a twig that would instantly become a bow, a gun, a sword, or a telescope. It could be anything, except maybe a boomerang because once you throw the stick away, you have to go fetch it back.
comparison between a boomerang and a stick
At some point I grew up, and it became embarrassing to play that way. You can't treat a pinecone as a grenade and pretend to have magical powers when other kids think being an adult is cool. You just don't fit in anymore. You eventually get pressured into growing up. Still, that's a very lucky childhood.
At some point I got the chance to play video games, and to use computers. There could be the imaginary world you had wanted all this time, materialized in front of you. It's consuming you, and for a moment you live a different life.
But there's something particular about most video games: you don't create, you react, you consume. I eventually did improvisational theatre as a teenager. Then, again, it was okay to be with people and create and pretend out of nothing.
an improv rink with people playing
Of course, improvisational theatre in Quebec is different; there's an ice rink in there — everything's hockey.
When I got to a vocational college to study multimedia from 2005 to 2008, I eventually tripped into programming work. I found it amazing! Creativity was there again, and it could get me money! I then designed the mechanism of my first game, and it blew my mind.
HTML form of an old browser game named 'DANGER IL Y A UN HOMME ARMÉ DANS CET ÉDIFICE 3'
That's not a real video game, I was told. That's just an HTML form. You should have used an array for the text and options it would have been better. The code needs cleaning up.
I was a bit disheartened; the game was really about the 11 pages of text I had written for the "choose your adventure" aspect of it. But I realized that if I wanted to make stuff more people thought was good, I'd have to learn a lot.
I'd have to learn "real programming". Move from JScript in a GUI toolkit to something better, like PHP. So I learned that, along with Javascript. Then eventually I was told to learn how to do real programming again; PHP is terrible. I was told to maybe try Python, which I then learned.
But real programmers knew fancier stuff, and python's lambdas didn't cut it, object-oriented programming was not where you wanted to be. Reading SICP would be the next good step, I was told, because it was like the bible of computer science.
Book cover of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
That got me to Scheme. And I got the K&R book because real programmers in the real world did C, and I registered for part time classes at my local university while juggling them with work, because real programmers knew data structures and math, which I learned to some extent. I started reading papers and books, because real programmers stayed up to date and knew fancy algorithms.
Somewhere through that I picked up Erlang and started making a career out of it. I wrote a book on it. Curiously enough, nobody ever questioned if I were a real author, or a real writer, or a real illustrator. Hell, I got a job teaching Erlang without ever having used it in a production system.
Chapter 2
So I lived my life flying around the world, telling people how to do things I had sometimes never done myself, while everyone suddenly seemed to believe I was a real programmer because of things I did that were mostly not related to programming in the first place.
One day, I was stuck in an airport coming back from a conference, furiously typing at a terminal, when an odd, gentle voice asked me:
If you please, design me a system!
What?!
Design me a system!
I looked up from my screen, surprised by the request. I looked around and saw this kid who aspired to be a developer and wanted me to call him "printf", which I felt was very stupid and gimmicky. He looked a bit like this:
little printf, with a red and yellow tuque, similarly colored scarf, green coat, red mittens, and beige-yellow pants, standing in snow with a broken laptop at his sides
I don't know computers much yet, but it seems you do. I want to write programs and blog about them and have people use and read them. Please, design me a system!
Now that was a surprising request, and I had been awake for 20 hours by then, not too sure I fully understood or felt like it. I told him systems were hard. I didn't know what he wanted to do, how he wanted it to fail, how many readers it should support, where he'd want to host it, and I could therefore not design a proper system with so little information.
That doesn't matter. Design me a system.
So I made the following architecture diagram:
somewhat complex architecture diagram
He looked at it and said No, this system is not good enough. Make me another.
So I did:
a rather complex architecture diagram
and I gave him a rundown of how it would work.
My new friend smiled politely. That is not what I want, it's way too complex and does a lot of stuff I don't need
I felt a bit insulted, having considered redundancy, monitoring, backups, caches and other mechanisms to reduce load, external payment processor for legal protection, failovers, easy deployment, and so on. I could have charged decent money as a consulting fee for that! Out of patience, I just drew this:
a black box with the text 'enjoy!' written under.
And I added: this is your design. The system you want is inside the black box, hoping this shitty answer would have him leave me alone. But I was surprised to hear back:
That is exactly the way I wanted it!
And that is how I made the acquaintance of the little printf.
Chapter 3
I soon learned of this little guy's portfolio. In his repositories were only small programs, simple web pages with forms, trivial command line utils. They would be unspectacular, would come into being, and no sooner disappear.
Then at some point, he started working on a bigger program, that used multiple modules. It needed sockets, accessed the disk, talked to an actual database. When it first built and ran properly, little printf was amazed. But the program was not enough yet.
It needed refactorings, better tests, documentation, linting and analysis. The program would run for a while, and one morning, it crashed.
And it crashed again, and again.
The configurations were wrong, the logs would not rotate, the disk had unpredictable speed, the network would get the hiccups, bugs would show up, the encodings would be confused, the database needed vacuuming, transactions would hang, certificates would expire, CVEs would keep coming, and the metrics would remain silent.
a plate of meatball spaghetti
It kept turning to Spaghetti.
He told me: the fact is I didn't know anything! I ought to have judged by my needs. I got the hubris of writing a fancy system, and I spent so much time fixing it, it felt like it cancelled the time it saved me. Still, I should have known what a wonderful thing it was.
One morning, he decided to leave his office. Goodbye, he said to a blinkenlight that seemed to have burnt out. He left to see what the world of software had to offer aside from his messy little server.
The logs would keep accumulating, until the hard drive would fill no more.
Chapter 4
a building
He went to a workspace, looking for experienced developers from whom to get tips and help.
The first one he met was a very proud senior engineer who seemed to feel rather superior.
a balding man in a suit, with thick glasses
Ah, here comes a learner! Welcome to my domain, of which I am the expert he said.
An expert? Little printf asked. Does this mean you can program anything and everything?
Yes! the expert answered. He added Well almost; I only program programs that are worth programming. I don't lose my time on trivialities. Many programs I have never written but could write with all the ease in the world.
Ah, so could you help me with my system? As soon as the little printf started explaining his business, the domain expert interrupted him:
I'm sorry, but I don't really see the point of doing that.
Why not?
Experience. I am good at programming the things I program, and I program things I am good at. By getting better at this fairly restricted set of things I'm already good at, I make sure I'm more valuable than ever at it. Call it job security, call it survival of the fittest, but that's how I roll.
And why can't you help me?
Well you see, taking my time away to help you means I divert important self-investment into furthering the progress of others — that's a losing strategy for me. The best way to learn for you is the way I took myself: struggle very hard and figure it out yourself. It helps forge character.
That doesn't seem very efficient...
Well you can go to school and learn, or you can learn on your own. Really what it does is weed out the lazy people who just want it easy, and forces everyone who stays here to be those who really deserve it. The moment we let moochers in, the very value of the work I produce goes down with it.
Do you not think cooperation or colleagues could help you?
Not really. I work best when left alone and not being distracted. Every time I end up forced working with others, it's nigh impossible to get our stuff working together. Out of exasperation, I grab their work and rewrite most of it in a sane way; then it works right.
Little printf was surprised to meet an expert who seemed so disinterested in helping others, yet so annoyed by their perceived lack of skill. It was a bit sad that this man narrowed his vision of himself to just the one area he knew, to the point where he didn't do anything else than create problems for himself to fix!
I see... well I guess I'm happy you won't give me your help, said my little friend
What do you mean? asked the meritocratic man, whose value seemed suddenly downgraded. Don't you think the work I do is interesting?
Oh that I do. It just seems like you would see me as a hindrance and annoyance more than anything else, and what I am looking for is help, not affliction.
And little printf left swiftly, leaving the expert to realize he had made himself untouchable in more ways than just his job security.
Chapter 5
a man sitting at his desk in front of multiple filled bookcases
On his way, little printf went in front of the door to an office occupied by a man surrounded by thick hardcover books, with fancy images on them like wizards and dragons and fractals and mathematical patterns.
Nice books, sir, said printf
Thanks. I think they're essential material for programmers. If you don't have them, you're not really a pro
I guess I'm not a pro then, said little printf. Which one is your favorite?
Oh, well I haven't read most of them.
Are you not a good programmer then?
No, I am not. The developer proudly added: In fact, I'm a terrible programmer.
That's a shame, said little printf, who continued: I'm getting better myself.
Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?, asked the man.
No, what is it?
It's a cognitive bias thing. It basically says that people who are less competent tend to overestimate their qualifications, and people who are competent tend to systemically underestimate theirs.
So if I think I'm getting better, I'm probably not great
Yeah, exactly. You're probably bad. On the other hand, I openly say I'm a terrible programmer. But according to Dunning-Kruger, I'm probably underestimating myself, and that makes me a good developer, don't you see?
I guess?
That's because self-deprecation is a vital tool of the developer. The moment you feel you're good, you relax and stop improving.
Doesn't this mean that the moment you feel good about yourself, you're on your way to failure and then you should feel bad?
yes. But the way to go about this is to say that everything is terrible, even if you have no solutions to offer. That way you look smart, but don't have much to contribute.
What do you mean?
Say I go online and see a project I dislike. The trick is to point out everything that is wrong, give no more information than that. You can probably subtly point ways in which the person who did the thing is an idiot and get away with it.
And how is anyone better for this?
Well I like to think they are better for knowing they're on the wrong track, and I'm better off for showing them that. It's a bit of smoke and mirrors. Nobody knows what they're doing but that way it looks like I do.
And what happens when you are asked for help and can't do anything about it?
That's when you go back to saying everything is terrible; you have too much yak shaving to do, improving other things, and being overly pessimistic. They're on their own.
So this is all posturing? You're gaming your way through? You're the person who pretends to be incompetent at things they know, which makes people who actually know nothing there feel even worse, and you're the person who pretends to be competent at things you don't know, so that people trying to improve there also feel bad.
In any case, competence has very little to do with it. Reputation is pretty important though. People hire friends, and people who aren't liked and non-essential get fired first; try to change the system and you become disliked. It's all a very social game. It's how it works in the industry, and probably in academia too, though I wouldn't know, now would I? It's all about who you know, selling yourself, your own personal brand you know? That's how you get jobs in the business.
If this is how things are and that you must feel bad and make others feel bad to do well, maybe I don't want a job in the business, said little printf, before walking out.
Chapter 6
nondescript programmer sitting back to the viewer in the dark, with a sandwich on their desk
During the time that would have been lunch break, Printf interrupted a person who had seemingly forgotten to eat their lunch, a sandwich growing cold by the minute, while sitting at their desk and looking at their screen.
That seemed like quite a busy person who might have known what they were doing. Printf asked:
If a primary database can fail, can the follower fail too?
Everything you run, the person said, can and will sooner or later fail.
Even the things telling you things have failed?
Yes, even these ones. All large systems are in some state of partial failure at any given time.
Then, trying to make reliable systems, what use is it?
The person did not know, for at that moment, they were trying to answer a page for the sky falling out onto their head due to a broken cloud, wondering the same thing.
Then making reliable systems, what use is it? pressed little Printf again
Upset as the person was dealing with a production issue, with this kid not letting go and a sandwich going to waste, the person impatiently shot back:
It's of no use at all. Programming is all shit anyway.
oh!, he gasped.
Then there was a moment of complete silence.
a garbage can on fire with a golden plate saying 'programming' on it
The little guy responded, with a hint of resent:
I don't believe you. Programs are fragile, but programmers can make good efforts and make things better and useful.
No answer came back. At that point the person had opened the document explaining how to boot a new copy of the whole cluster from scratch, and things seemed to go from bad to worse.
And you actually believe good reliable prog-
Oh no! the person said. No no no! I don't believe in good or reliable programs! Not anymore! They're all terrible! I just told you the first thing that came to my head because I'm dealing with one of these shitty systems right now. Don't you see I'm trying to keep this stuff running? This shit is actually of consequence.
Printf stared back, with a shocked expression.
Actually of consequence? You talk just like a 'real programmer'.
He added:
You mix everything up, confuse everything. There's been millions of programs, and for years they've been running and failing just the same. And people have used them and needed them. And I know of some programs that run nowhere but on a single laptop, and in a single mistake could destroy entire communities, without even noticing. And you think that this is not important?
The person remained silent.
Chapter 7
a man at his desk in front of two monitors
The fourth workspace my friend visited had a man whose computer was covered in so many stickers nobody could tell what brand it was.
motor-mvc, quadrangular JS, GoQuery, cometeor, some japanese soundy thing, ...
Hi, interrupted printf. What are you doing?
alchemist, bongodb, mochascript, walktime.js, portasql, ..., the man kept going
What are you doing?, he asked again, louder this time.
Oh, I'm trying out new frameworks, tools, databases, languages.
Whoa, you seem to be going fast, maybe as fast as 10 programmers put together!
yes! well, the industry moves so very fast!, he looked at his phone for a second, and added there! the cardboard.io framework came up with version 3.5 which broke compatibility with 3.4 and this yielded 4 forks in the community! I have to try them all to know which to choose!
and what do you do learning all of these?
I'm an early adopter. If you don't stay up to date you get stuck writing COBOL or MUMPS for a living. You want to find the next big thing, and ride the wave to the top!
Has it ever worked?
Oh yes! I found out about Rails before it got big, and I figured out node.js before it was popular, and I was on the first beta copies of redis and mongodb and riak! I was the first one to use vagrant and then I got us to switch to docker but of course now it's all about unikernels..
Cool, and all these things you were at the forefront of, how did it pay off?
oh it didn't; by the time rails became huge I had moved on to the next big thing so I didn't get left behind. Similarly for the other ones. Here's hoping for unikernels though
I see, added little printf, pensively. What problems do you solve with all of these frameworks?
Oh, I make sure we don't use something that is not going to be big, so that this company doesn't get to bet on technologies that have no future. It's very important work, because if you don't do that, you can't find anyone to hire except old grey beards behind the times, and you want self-motivated go-getters, who are also early adopters., said the man.
That is funny, chimed our friend.
It is very hard! in the startup world, if you want a-players, you need good technology to bring them in! Otherwise you're stuck with inflexible laggards. Nobody wants to be an inflexible laggard.
The little printf interjected: No, that's not what I mean, and he then added I mean it's funny that tools are meant to solve problems for us, but for you, the tools themselves have become a problem.
And while the man stood there in silence (on his new cool treadmill desk), little printf hopped out of the room.
Chapter 8
a woman in purple hoodie, slouched over her keyboard with her desk full of empty mugs and bottles
In the next office over sat a tired employee, with dozens of empty coffee cups, slouched over, typing angrily.
Hi, said little printf.
The woman didn't stop what she was doing. She kept typing furiously.
Hello? he asked again.
The woman stopped at once, got a flask out of a drawer in her desk, and took a swig.
I have a terrible job, she said. I do devops. It started okay, where I'd mostly develop and then sometimes debug stuff, but as time moved on, it got worse and worse. I started fighting fires in our stack, and then more fires kept happening. I got rid of most of them, pulling small miracles here and there to then meet the deadlines on dev stuff I also had to do
And did they hire anyone to help?
No, that's the thing. Small fires kept happening here and there, and because of the time I took to fight them, I couldn't be as careful as before with the dev stuff, so I created more fires all the time. Now I'm fighting fires all day and all night and I hate my job
Why doesn't your employer do anything?
I'm good at my job, and I managed to keep things under control long enough that everyone got used to it. When you make a habit of small miracles, people get used to it. Then you're stuck doing miracles all the time or they will think you won't do your job at all.
That sounds very sad
It is; and because you're the most familiar person with these fires, you get to only work on them more and more, until your employer hires someone else to cover your old job, the one you loved. If you care hard enough about your work to be the one doing the stuff everyone else hates, you're thanked by doing more and more of that work you don't like, until that's all you do. And then there's nothing left for you to enjoy.
Then you're unlucky, said little printf.
And her pager went off again.
That woman, said little printf to himself, as he continued farther on his journey, that woman would be scorned by all the others: by the senior expert, by the rockstar developer, by the serial early adopter. Nevertheless she is the only one of them all who seems helpful. Perhaps that is because she is thinking of something else besides herself.
Chapter 9
software architect sitting at his desk with reams of paper on top of it
At the corner of the building, printf found a large office with big windows giving a stunning view of the area. In it sat an old gentleman with reams of documentation on his desk.
Ah, here comes a developer exclaimed the man, as printf stood in the doorway. Come in!
Looking through the windows, little printf noticed that they were full of writing. With the help of a dry-erase pen, the view to the outside world was masked by tons of circles, arrows, cylinders, and clouds. While it was curious the man needed clouds drawn where real ones could be seen outdoors, the whole ensemble was more intriguing.
What is this?, asked our friend, pointing at the windows.
Oh this? This is our production system! Said the man, not once thinking the question was about the outside world. I am a software architect.
What's a software architect?
Mostly, it's someone who knows how to best structure and coordinates the components of a large system so they all fit together well. It's someone who has to know about databases, languages, frameworks, editors, serialization formats, protocols, and concepts like encapsulation and separation of concerns.
That is very interesting! said little printf, here is someone who can answer all my questions! He glanced at the architecture diagrams. Your system is very impressive. Is it running very fast?
I couldn't tell you, said the architect. It should, though
How's the code then, is it good?
I couldn't tell you
Are the users happy about it?
I couldn't tell you either, I'm afraid
But you're a software architect!
Exactly! But I am not a developer. It is not the architect who goes and writes the modules and classes, combines the libraries. The software architect is much too important to go around touching code. But he talks with programmers and developers, asks them questions, provides them guidance. And if the problem is looking interesting enough, the architect takes over the planning.
And why is that?
Because we are more experienced. We know more about systems and what works or not. Developers can then be an extension of our knowledge to produce great systems!
But how do you know if things are going well without getting involved with code?
We trust the developers
So you trust them to implement your ideas correctly, but not enough to come up with their own ideas?
The software architect was visibly shaken by this comment. I guess I might have been a bit disconnected, he finally admitted. The problem is that after a while you are asked to work with ideas so much you don't have a good way to get them tested or verified... he stared down, pensively. Sometimes a software architect does neither software nor architecture, it seems.
Little printf left the room, and being done with his visit, exited the building.
Chapter 10
man in a plaid shirt, winter hat, with a clipboard and a bell
Little printf, once outside, met a man collecting money for some charity.
Hi, said the man. how would you feel about helping someone today?
It would probably make me feel better, said little printf back. I have been in this office all day, and now I'm more confused than ever.
Ah I see. These people are all developers. They are not really helpful, are they? What they love to say is that they're changing the world, and they pretty much succeed at that, in fact.
Why does it feel so awkward, then? Asked little printf.
Well, the best they do is often help convert some people's jobs into programs, or make everyone's leisure more leisurely. Software is eating the world and that changes its face for sure... but deep down it's the same old world, with a mangled face. The reason it feels awkward is that changing in that way doesn't mean things are getting any better. We have the same flaws and problems we always had, the same holes to fill deep down inside.
So how can I feel better? Little Printf was visibly anxious.
The man thought for a while, and offered printf to come help him help others, as this was this man's way of feeling better. During the afternoon, printf told the man about his problems and his adventure. After a long silence, the man said:
The games people play, the roles and reputations they chase and entertain, the fleeting pleasure they derive from solving intricate problems, is all fun for a while. Ultimately though, if you do not solve anything worthwhile, if you forget about the people involved, it's never gonna be truly fulfilling.
And that may be fine, and it might not be, and you may or may not get that from somewhere else than your workplace when you grow up. Work can be work; it can be for the money, it can be for the fun of it. That's okay. As long as you manage to get that fulfillment somewhere in your life.
In the end though, it is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right; What is essential is invisible to the computer.
It is the time you have spent on your system that makes it so important", the man added, "and when you lost sight of why it made sense to spend time on it, when it became a game of pride, it caused more grief than relief.
Developers have often forgotten this truth; If you lose sight of things, working on your system becomes its own problem, and the most effective solution is to get rid of the system, given it's the problem.
It is only when you solve problems with a human face that you can feel truly right, repeated little printf to himself, so he would remember.
Chapter 11
same image of printf as before, except he's smiling this time around
Printf, who's now sitting right in front of me, is on his way home. Talking with him made me realize how much of what I do flies in the face of what I liked, what I started programming for. Each of the people Printf met are roles I see myself taking one day or another over time. I was encouraged by them to become them, and probably encouraged people to do the same.
Where I got dragged in the game of trying to become a real programmer, Printf didn't. He said he was okay with not being a real programmer, that he preferred to be a programmer with a human face.
Today I'm stuck in the situation where I look back, and have to figure out if I can, too, become a programmer with a human face; or if everything I do is just a job. There doesn't seem to be too much that's worthwhile in-between.
In any case, where printf felt he didn't need to be a real programmer, I think I feel the same now.

On a warm morning in December, a few dozen Syrians from Aleppo and Idlib—former students, teachers, vegetable sellers and farmers—gather in an abandoned firefighting training center near the Syrian-Turkish border. They have come here to learn advanced rescue skills that they will use to teach newly recruited emergency workers back home. They are members of the Syrian Civil Defense, known as the White Helmets—the largest civil society group in Syria and one that is nonsectarian, neutral and unarmed.

The site looks like a deserted campground, aside from the burned-out bus in the middle of a neighboring field and collapsed concrete buildings that they use for simulation exercises. The exact location of their training center is undisclosed, and most of them ask to be identified by only their first names, because the White Helmets have received death threats. They also know there are sleeper cells of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) in the area, and there have been shootings and bombings nearby.

It’s Week Three of training, and soon the men will go home. The mood is somber—a recent bombing in Idlib killed more than 50 people—but there is a sense of deep bonding here. Some of these men have known one another since childhood, and they are bound by this vital and perilous work they have undertaken.

Instructors of the White Helmets, or the Syrian Civil Defense, during a training course in southern Turkey, on December 13 and 14. Volunteers are filling the void of emergency responders, simultaneously becoming firefighters, paramedics, and search and rescue teams during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. From top left: Samer Hossein (30, from Idlib, Syria), Ali (40, from Aleppo), Khaled (40, from Idlib, Syria), Yusuf Azzo (27, from Heyyan, Syria), Mahmoud Hatter (27, from Aleppo, Syria), Husam (25, from Binnish, Syria), Osama (29, from Jebel Zawiyah, Syria), Ahmad Al-Imam (30, from Anadan, Syria), and Ali Juma (39, from Al Atarib, Syria).
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Their first exercise involves building a huge oil fire near the ruins of the bus, then extinguishing it. As they pull on protective gear, including gas masks, and unravel hoses, they make a few jokes and talk about their lives before the civil war and people they know in common. One of their trainers has “better than nothing” scrawled on the back of his jacket. Khaled, a father of four from Idlib, explains, “We have a strange gallows humor. We’ve seen so much. It’s a way of releasing tension.”

“Tell her about the sheep market in Aleppo,” one man says. Samer Hussain, 30, responds, “A bomb hit the market when it was most crowded—people had come out to buy food. The animal flesh was mixed with humans,” he says. “We found arms, legs, heads. We lost around 25 people that day. Some of them were beyond recognition because of the bombs. You could no longer describe them as human.”

Several other men work on building up the fire. Then they take a break, pull off their helmets and masks and take out packs of cigarettes. They exist, they say, on cigarettes and coffee. “It’s not like we worry about dying from cigarettes,” says one. “We probably have the most dangerous jobs on earth.”

With the war in Syria now in its fifth year, average life expectancy there has dropped by two decades. More than 250,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million injured, according to the United Nations. Millions more have been driven from their homes, including more than 4 million who have fled the country as refugees.

There are more than 2,800 White Helmets, including 80 women, all volunteers who work full time and get paid a $150 monthly stipend. So far, according to Raed al-Saleh, 33, the founder of the White Helmets, they have saved more than 40,000 lives.

Although they operate largely in rebel-held areas of Syria, the White Helmets don’t discriminate between victims on one side or the other. “To save one life is to save humanity” is their motto, and from the rubble they have dug out members of Hezbollah or Iranians fighting on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, as well as Free Syrian Army opposition fighters. But most often, they save civilians. For those who live in frequently targeted areas, the Syrian Civil Defense, or Difaa Midani in Arabic, is a symbol of hope in an exceedingly bleak conflict.

This is a war that has attracted limited international humanitarian assistance, given the risks of operating in Syria, so the civilian population has suffered terribly. Nearly all structures of society have broken down, from education to health care. Schools have not functioned for years, and if you have a chronic disease, such as cancer or diabetes, you most likely die without treatment.

The White Helmets formed in 2013 as a grassroots operation funded by the British, Danish and Japanese governments to recruit first responders. It has a budget of $30 million a year, much of which is spent on equipment, such as heavy diggers to remove bodies from under concrete that has collapsed, and the stipends.

After initially working with foreign advisers, it is now an entirely Syrian operation, with around 20 to 30 new recruits coming forward each month. “The very fact that this exists in communities gives people more of a sense of security,” says James le Mesurie, a former British soldier with Mayday, a nongovernmental organization that along with skilled Turkish rescue workers helped set up and train the first cadre of White Helmets.

So far, 110 White Helmets have died on the job, and four times that many have been seriously wounded. The average age is 26, although one elderly man joined the day after he buried his son, who was a White Helmet. The youngest is 17. They work at all hours of the day and night, and their centers, although in secret locations, are frequently targeted, as are their vehicles, including their ambulances. They say this has happened with more alarming frequency since Russian airstrikes in support of Assad began on September 30.

01_29_SyriaWhiteHelmets_03
The volunteers say they often run toward a scene fully acknowledging that bombs may still be falling.
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“This is the least we can do for our country,” says Khaled, the father from Idlib. He likens it more to a “calling” than a job.

After training and pledging to abide by the code of conduct—no guns, strict neutrality and no sectarianism—they are given a white uniform and helmet and sent on their first mission. The training rarely prepares them fully for the real thing, says Abdul Khafi from Idlib. The most difficult part of the job is not the physical but the psychological impact of seeing so many dead and injured. “Killing is easy. Saving lives is much harder,” he says. “Sometimes the pressure is more than our endurance.”

Once they join, they rarely quit. One White Helmet left to become a refugee in Germany. “We need this,” says Jawad, 35, from Idlib, a married father with two children, who once worked in a fire brigade. “We need to save as many people as we can, especially as the war gets worse. It shows something. It means something. ”

“No words can adequately describe what it is like to save a life,” Saleh, the founder of the White Helmets, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in March 2015. “But for us the elation never lasts because we are constantly under attack.” A former electronics salesman from Idlib, Saleh addressed the U.N. Security Council this past summer in an attempt to explain the misery of living under bombardment.

When they race to a location that has been bombed, they are acutely aware that more bombs—“the second tap”—are probably coming within minutes. This past summer, they had to start painting their ambulances in camouflage colors. Back then, before the Russian airstrikes began, the biggest killer was barrel bombs—rusty containers loaded with nails, glass, shrapnel, explosives and sometimes chlorine gas. (The U.N. has accused Assad of using barrel bombs, though he denies it.)

For a White Helmet from Idlib named Osama, 29, the greatest challenge was overcoming his fear. “You learn, slowly,” he says. “But now, since the Russians started coming, I am more frightened than ever. It’s a different kind of bombing.”

The White Helmets have their detractors. Regime bloggers and Russian Internet trolls accuse them of being the Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria. In the early days of their operation, one White Helmet was photographed with a gun (he was immediately dismissed). Yet at night, gathered in the hotel where they are living for these three weeks of training, most of the men don’t want to talk about religion or politics. “If you make the decision to risk your life, to save other people, it goes against radicalization,” says le Mesurier. “They’ve emerged as the representative of the average, good Syrian.”

During the evening, there are more cigarettes, along with laughter, singing, even some planning for a wedding in Aleppo. Life at home, under regular bombardment, is hellish, but few of these men seem to exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. “The fact they are part of a strong community helps them,” le Mesurier says. “They are not isolated.”

And yet, they go out when the call comes knowing there is a strong possibility they will either be injured or not return. Khafi tells of a recent raid near his home in Idlib, when a Russian bomber first targeted a civilian area, then took out the White Helmet center. It was, he says, his worst day. “It only took 10 minutes for the bombs to land, and by the end of it seven out of nine of us were badly injured,” he says. “In a matter of minutes, our center was no longer operational. That quickly, you can wipe out lives.”

A few days earlier, Khafi and his team responded to an attack outside Aleppo involving “more than 40 cluster bombs.” People were screaming for help in every direction. “Sometimes, you don’t know where to begin,” he says, describing the chaos, the confusion, the dust. Once he spent hours building a 100-foot tunnel through the rubble to reach an 8-year-old girl who had been trapped when her house crumbled.

“When we reached her, the first thing she said was, ‘Get my sister out first,’” Khafi recalls, and she pointed to another corner of what had once been her room. Her twin sister died before the White Helmets could reach her.

“My worst day so far was at the end of October,” says Osama. He says he got a call that a Russian fighter jet had hit a chicken farm where refugees were living. As he raced to the scene with a digger to trawl out the bodies, he got another call: “Our spotter saw more Russian planes coming in for a double tap,” he says.

01_29_SyriaWhiteHelmets_04
The Syrian Civil Defense numbers at roughly 2,500 members throughout various cities and villages in the country. At least 150 have been killed in the line of duty, and four times as many have suffered serious injuries, many as a result of secondary bombs that land on the site they have responded to initially.
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He got out of his vehicle and watched helplessly as the jets bombed a second time, while his colleagues continued to work. When he arrived, many of them were gravely injured. “One of my colleagues was cut in half,” Osama says. How do you abandon people, he asks, who are buried under rubble, crying out for help? “It makes you feel completely helpless.”

He and his team continued to work for hours trying to excavate a mother and seven children. “But in the end, we couldn’t do it,” he says. “By the time we got to them, they were so badly burnt I couldn’t tell if they were little boys or little girls.”

Hossam, who is 25 and was studying English literature before the war, says he joined the White Helmets in 2013 after he got out of a regime detention center, where he was held for a month. He says he entered because it was the only nonviolent way to help his country. “When I look at the last three years of my life,” he says, “I feel proud.” But his memories are also gruesome: pulling up the head of what he thought was a doll from a pile of rubble only to discover it belonged to a small girl, and finding a weeping mother who had lost all her children and asked, “Where are my angels?”

After days spent dislodging mutilated bodies covered in dust and blood, Hossam is not sure how he keeps going, but he says it is important to do so. “We know we are saving,” he says. “The bombs are destroying, but we are building. The regime is killing. We are saving.”

Hossam doesn’t know what he will do after the war ends. “I’m not sure I can go back to the life we had before,” he says. “But there is one thing: We built something here, out of nothing.”

Ten years ago, I reached a point in my career that felt either like a dead-end or a turning point – I wasn’t sure which. By then, I had spent 25 years as a gerontologist, professionally occupied with everything to do with ageing. I conducted research using longitudinal data sets and sophisticated statistical analyses. I developed and evaluated programmes to improve older people’s lives. I taught courses and gave lectures on ageing. I opined on policy issues affecting our ageing society. So what was the revelation?

I never talked to old people.

My research kept me at more than an arm’s length from the living, breathing individuals who were its subject. At best, hired interviewers spoke with my respondents. Elsewhere, I used even more distant secondary data sets. My ‘engagement’ with real people involved checking codes and running statistics. The living, breathing humans who reported buoyant life satisfaction or high levels of caregiver stress were equally distant from me. And so I suddenly felt an urge to go out into the world of people in the eighth decade of life and beyond, and listen to what they had to say. What I heard changed my whole approach to life. Perhaps it will do the same for you.

In a seminar room on an Ivy League campus, I sat across from hopeful, earnest, and anxious college seniors. In a few months, they would leave the classic tree-lined campus, the football games, and the near-gourmet meals that US dining halls now serve. I had arranged the meeting to find out what these ‘emerging adults’ wanted to learn about work and careers from their elders.

Sitting with these students on a bright spring morning, I anticipated that they would want to hear about success strategies, tips for getting ahead, and suggestions for landing a high-paying dream job. So I was taken aback by the first question. It came from Josh, a future money manager dressed in a jacket and tie. He asked:

I’d like you to ask them about something that really worries me. Do I need a purpose in life? That’s what all the books say, but I guess I don’t have one. Is there something wrong with me? And how do I get a purpose if I need one?

There was furious nodding from the other participants. Because these students were driven to excel, they had devoured books about career strategies and success, many of which emphasised purpose. They had heard motivational speakers exhort them to find a single life passion, without which they were sure to drift, rudderless, through a disappointing career. But as we talked, it became clear that it just didn’t feel that way to them. They might have an interest, an inclination, an inkling for something they would enjoy – but one all-consuming life goal eluded them. They feared that this lack of a unique and compelling purpose might doom them to a life of failure and futility.

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And yet, from the other end of life’s voyage, our elders give us a very different view of a life purpose – and a tip for finding one. Basically, the oldest Americans (most of whom also struggled with the question) tell you to relax. They say that you are likely to have a number of purposes, which will shift as you progress through life.

Marjorie Wilcox, aged 87, brought this lesson home to me. Marjorie is tall, fit and active. She captures a certain casual elegance – there’s a bit of Lauren Bacall in both her appearance and the tone of her voice. Marjorie devoted her career to developing affordable housing, travelling to the worst parts of industrial cities throughout the US. With this passion to make things right in the world and her own history of adversity, I expected a strong endorsement of purpose as the first condition for a good life.

In fact, I heard something different from Marjorie and many of the other elders: namely, that our focus should not be on a purpose, but on purposes. She reported that the ‘purposes’ in her life changed as her life situation, interests, and priorities shifted. She warned specifically against being railroaded in the direction of a single purpose:

You will do several different things. Do not be on one train track because the train will change. Widen your mind. That’s what you should have as your priorities as a young person. Make sure you keep flexible. Lead with your strengths, and they will get you where you want to go.

The elders recommend that we re-shape the quest for a purpose, thinking instead of looking for a general direction and pursuing it energetically and courageously. Determining a direction in life is easier, more spontaneous, more flexible, and less laden with overtones of a mystical revelation that sets you on an immutable life path. Times change, circumstances change – indeed, change itself is the norm rather than the exception. A grand purpose, in their view, is not only unnecessary – it can also get in the way of a fulfilling career. Instead, they have offered the idea of finding an orientation, a ‘working model’ if you will, that guides you through each phase of life.

But how should you go about finding a direction? How to settle on a purpose that fits your current life stage? One technique turns out to be immensely valuable – and yet most people ignore it. If you are searching for a direction or purpose, interview your future self.

There are in fact a host of benefits to doing this. Experiments have shown that when people are made to think in detail about their future selves, they are more likely to make better financial planning decisions, show altruistic behaviour, and make more ethical choices. But it’s hard to do. A good deal of social science research over the past decade has shown that most people feel disconnected from their future selves. It takes work to imagine oneself a decade or two from now – let alone a half-century or more. Researchers have gone so far as to invent software that ‘morphs’ the reflection of a young subject to age 70 or 80.

But this is as far as time-travel technology seems to have got, so it’s sadly not possible to meet your real future self. Yet it’s astonishing how few people do the next best thing: interview an older person who embodies the ‘self’ you would like to be. This idea came to me from Barry Fine, a highly successful serial entrepreneur who still manages a business at 89. In fact, he didn’t use the term ‘future self’. He used a word he’d learned growing up on New York’s Lower East Side. His advice was to ‘find a maven’.

You don’t want a 40-year-old if you are 20; you want someone in his or her 80s, 90s, or a centenarian if you can find one

Like many Yiddish expressions, ‘maven’ defies a single definition. It’s derived from a Hebrew word meaning ‘one who knows’, or ‘one who understands’. Mavens are trusted experts, reliable sources of accumulated wisdom. That’s who we need to guide us, according to Barry:

In whatever business I’ve been in, and I’ve been in about eight businesses – some successful, some not successful – the most important thing is to have is a maven. Somebody who can really guide you. Where I’ve done this, where I’ve had a wonderful maven, I’ve always been successful. Where I went by myself, on my own, I’ve always failed. When I haven’t listened, I’ve lost a lot of money. Younger people may not be so aware of this. They don’t really understand that there are so many aspects of business you don’t get taught in school. They have to see long-term into the future. They need to think three years, six years, 20 years out. That is what the maven is for, steering them in the right direction, based on his or her experiences.

In any period where you feel directionless, wavering, stuck with one foot in two different worlds, and hearing in the back of your mind the song lyrics ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ – find your future self. He or she should be old – and preferably really old. You don’t want a 40-year-old if you are 20; you want someone in his or her 80s, 90s, or a centenarian if you can find one. You need your future self to have the truly long view, as well as the detachment that comes from a very long life.

This person also needs to be as close as possible to your imagined future self. Debating a career in medicine? Find a doctor who loved what she did. Worried about whether you can balance your values with a career in the financial services industry? Find an older person who struck that balance and made it to the end of life without regrets. Planning to work an undemanding day job so you have the energy to paint/write/act in your spare time? Some very old people did just that (and can tell stories of bohemian life that will sound very familiar today).

When I hit my crisis point 10 years ago, I couldn’t decide what to do, so I sought out Henry. Standing just a little over five feet tall and equipped with two hearing aids, Henry might not have seemed an imposing figure. But he was one of the leading developmental psychologists of his era, and he still came into the office every day to conduct research. Henry was cagey about his age, but I knew from talking with his wife that he had recently turned 93. On a whim, I asked him if we could have lunch. While he ate a green salad and I a cheeseburger, I let it all come out. Could I embrace this kind of risk, moving from churning out scientific articles in turgid academic prose to take the step of writing a book? A non-academic book, at that? And if I didn’t, would I regret it when I was his age?

He stopped me with the single word ‘Yes.’ Yes, he said, I would regret it if I did not take this leap, just as he regretted opportunities in his life that he had let slip by. He assured me that at his age, I would be much more likely to regret something that I had not done than something I had. And so I stepped away from the computer and the statistical software packages, and went on a search for the practical wisdom of older people. Ten years, 2,000 interviews, and two books later, I was not disappointed.

Sometimes things turn out to be less complicated than they seem. In preparation for my research, I ploughed through books that promised to help me find my life purpose in a short six or eight weeks; books that offered to show me my purpose in a set of steps or exercises; and more books that simply exhorted me to find that purpose and do it now! Along the way, I have learned that I would be helped by synchronicities, purpose boot camps, life portfolios, and a number of books by divine inspiration. Maybe, I realised, it can be much simpler than that.

Why not begin with an activity as old as the human race: asking the advice of the oldest people you know? Because older people have one thing that the rest of us do not: they have lived their lives. They have been where we haven’t. Indeed, people who have experienced most of a long life are in an ideal position to assess what ‘works’ and what doesn’t for finding a direction. It is impossible for a younger person to know about the entire course of life as deeply and intimately as an older person does. They bring to our contemporary problems and choices perspectives from a different time. These insights can make a world of difference to us. So find someone who mirrors your image of your future self, and ask about your direction – you won’t regret it.