1. You want respect as an individual.
2. You claim you want respect for other individuals.
3. You know that no one has yet found a way to provide complete individualism for all.

 
You have a dilemma. In the extreme, total individualism would mean anarchy, and you don’t want that because anarchy, if it does anything, jeopardizes individuals, maybe you. So, you think there is some compromise, some cross between imposing rules on individuals while protecting some of their freedoms. But no one has ever truly found that compromise though many have tried.
 
Enter Plato. He started us on the path of thinking about the role of society and its conflict with the individual. In some ways, that path of thinking leads all Westerners back to Greece and Athens, where democracy—and, thus, the elevation of the individual—was born, but where Plato saw its potential flaws in the mismanagement of his times.
 
True democracy in which everyone has an equal say is akin to mob rule at times. We see it today in condemnations on social media, condemnations grown in ignorance of all the facts and based on hints and suppositions, on predeterminations, and in molded minds. Were he alive today, Plato would see in the destruction of individuals by Internet trolls the same kind of demos that condemned Socrates to death. Think about it. Not only Socrates, but Christ, also. Are Internet trolls different in kind from those who yelled in unison, “Crucify Him”?
 
So, Plato, not knowing he anticipated social media more than two millennia in his future, devised a social order, comprising the philosophers, the warriors, and the producers (artisans), and rejected the idea of true democracy in which everyone has an equal say in government. Makes some sense, or, at least, it did to him, and obviously, to America’s founding fathers, it also made some sense as they fashioned a representative government. When everyone has a voice, cacophony is usually the result. Historical examples abound, and the current population of Internet trolls is our contemporary example.
 
Following Plato’s advice partly unconsciously as an extension of Greek thought, theoretically, but not precisely, the founders decided the country needs (Should I say “wise”?) leaders to guide its protectors and the citizens who make and transfer stuff. The representatives, Plato’s “philosophers,” are the filter, supposedly, that keeps mob rule in check and tempers the demos’ desires of the moment.
 
But there’s a hitch in the plan that affects all within his ideal society. Plato didn’t want individuals to have complete control over their lives; rather, he wanted the State, via the philosopher/rulers to make major decisions, such as who could or could not reproduce. Shades of twentieth-century eugenics! Shades of 20th-century communism! Shades of the one-child policy of China, state-run child communes in the Soviet Union, and the death of the traditional family unit! Plato said all this would elevate individuals, but, in truth, it puts their personal growth aside except in service to the state. The Athenian was arguing for a Spartan rule!
 
If you were born in the Occident, you probably “think Greek” in math, in logic, in literary expression, and in philosophy. Westerners just can’t shake the influence of ancient Greece and, in particular, the influence of Plato and Platonists. Westerners are attuned to elevating the products of their frontal cortexes because of Plato’s refinements. Yet, arguably the greatest Greek thinker—one could argue for his student Aristotle, of course—seems, to me, to have thought little about the practical consequences of his ideal State, consequences that survivors who endured the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism well understand. I say that because I see links between the products of socialism and Marxism and Plato’s Republic.    
 
Plato lived long before science (empiricism) entered the human sphere. Unlike his reasoned approach, the methodology of science is experimental. We can “reason” as many utopias as we wish, but, alas, the proof is in the experiment. And so far, all attempts to put Plato’s ideal State (or Republic) into effect have produced null results. Whenever the State takes control of individual lives, individuals become expendable, as they became expendable by the millions under Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. There seems to be no compromise position: Elevating the State means devaluing the individual except in his or her service to the State. Plato reasoned and believed that the overseeing State would somehow enhance individualism, but reasoning and believing aren’t the same as experimenting. Again, we’ve run the experiments at the cost of too many disrupted and murdered lives. *
 
Yet, today, there are those who propose once again adopting a utopian image as a model State. Karl Popper called such a State “a metaphysical dream…married to a cruel reality.” * Popper, if you recall, is the guy who framed the fundamental test of science: Falsifiability. If what one does is falsifiable under further testing, then it is scientific. If there is no possible method by which one can falsify, then no objective science is performed. In looking at Marxism in particular, Popper said the political philosophy had adopted an “immunizing strategy.” That is, there is no discernible way to challenge the system. It is assumed to be workable. Its failings are ignored as irrelevant anomalies. It is immunized against threats like some Socrates or Christ that might call its efficacy into question.
 
And so, as we see today, those who would propose the adoption of a metaphysical dream, i.e., a utopian world in which everyone is equal and all wealth equally distributed, have established an immunizing strategy. Who, they appear to argue, can be against helping those in need?  Who, they ask, wants a lopsided society in which a few people hold most of the wealth? There is no falsifiability to their proposed utopian solution. Rather, they offer only an emotional appeal that ignores the empirical evidence of history. They are Platonists in regard to their metaphysical dream society without realizing they are. They are thinking Greek. They are using reason in the absence of or in contradiction to the experiments that have been run and the tests of falsification that history has applied.
 
One of the problems we face when we put everything in the hands of the State is the demise of charity. In fact, even more: The demise of morality. Individuals might have little to no motivation to help when everyone knows the State will come along to lend a hand. In the minds of those under State control, all problems become State problems; all problems require State solutions. “They” (an impersonal State entity) will fix “it” (whatever the problem is).
 
Plato assumed that his ruling class, the philosophers, would be wise leaders. He seems to have failed to recognize that those same “philosophers” would also be drawn from a class of imperfect beings. Have you ever met the perfect person, the person without some failing? Have you ever met one who has acted on purely rational grounds without the slightest unconscious bias?
 
That’s why I started this with statements about individualism. You want respect as an individual, and you claim to respect the individualism of others. But under any overriding State system, individualism gives way to collectivism of some sort, even moral collectivism. Eventually, the anonymous State condemns a Socrates or Christ.
 
Yes, in a society grown so large that Plato could not have imagined its population, some collectivism under overseers seems necessary and some decision for the many requires some decision against the few. Got a natural disaster? Look to FEMA. Got a problem with gang violence? Look to the police force. Got a problem with too many drug-related deaths? Someone in the government will solve the problem. Think the world is warming? You know the government is working on it. Right?  
 
What value do you prefer? One inherent in your very being? Or, one granted by the auspices of a presumed benevolent, albeit metaphysical State?
 
 
*Want some sense of scale to frame the history of such governments? Then read Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. London and New York. Routledge, 1994. p. 9. Rummel has data that show 169,198,000 people were murdered in the last century under socialist, fascist, and communist rule.

“Nature” keeps astounding us. We’re romantics, really, that is, romantics in the sense of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets and painters. Sunsets can mesmerize even the most hardened of individuals with varied skies of pinks, oranges, blues, whites, purples, and rainbows that follow the passing of an evening squall line.
 
A magnificent sky isn’t new for any of us, so why are we so caught up when we see one? The answer is twofold (at least): however similar they might be, no two magnificent skies are the same, and brain chemistry turns on at the sights. In the days between exceptionally mesmerizing skies we forget the wonder as we focus on the details of our ground-based lives.
 
As brilliant as we all like to think we are, we are, as we look at the sky, like Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or like some dog, trying to understand what we see. For mentally-challenged Benjy, “The moonlight came down the cellar stairs.” The sky appears; we had nothing to do with its appearance, its fading, or its disappearance. It envelopes us, cascades upon us. Independent of any of our actions or thoughts, an amazing sky appears, fades, and disappears. It teases us briefly, gives the brain an amusement-park ride, and then as unexpectedly and inexplicably as it “came down the cellar stairs,” it leaves. In its absence, we tend to the ordinary, often monochromatic dullness of everydayness.
 
So, we are re-astounded by the show that occasionally comes to us from the sky. Experience tells us that we can’t, save by photograph or art, capture the moment in all its glory in our otherwise occupied minds. We never see those representations the same way we see the original.
 
What are we to do with all representations? Art of any kind an effort to capture the elusive and temporary. But it never quite does that. There’s always a difference between real sunset and a photo or painting of it, always something missing in representation. To escape the disparity between representation and reality, some simply immerse themselves in the former. For some, art is the reality.  
 
Maybe we long for the totally immersive art of a Disney-World ride, for movement, smells, and aspersions as we sit before films like those of Disney's Flight of Passage or Soarin’. Amusement park engineer/artists have attempted to capture that kind of reality since the rise of kinetic art. Yes, such moving art enthralls us for the moment, but we always exit by saying “It was so much like reality.” The caveat being “like reality” or “like being there.” But we know that unless we dissociate our reason from our emotion that it isn’t really like reality. Something is always missing. The reality of representation is never the reality of reality.
 
Unlike knowing where or when we will experience a similitude, knowing where or when a sunset might astound us is impossible. The wonder we find in a particular sky is unpredictable and peculiar to a place and time not of our choosing. That might indicate that unexpectedness is a key to stimulating the brain and forcing wonder on the mind. It might also indicate that even in seeing something similar, we marvel at differences within a similarity. Does that strike a chord with you when you consider times you have rediscovered friendship, desire, or love?
 
Certainly, none of us wants to think of ourselves as mere biochemical machines; yet, we can’t deny the Sunset Effect in our lives. We find ourselves re-astounded by Nature, certainly; we find ourselves re-astounded by those we love. We can’t predict when or where astonishment and wonder will occur, and that’s why that beautiful sky or that familiar person for a moment seems to transcend any effort at representative capture. No art form can capture rapture. 

There’s a famous line in William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming” that appears to apply to almost all post-WWI societies in a punctuated cycle. That line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” is the poet’s pessimistic view of a world whose centers of civilization were disrupted by the madness of a war that destroyed cities and claimed millions of lives. Since that time and particularly recently, a number of political commentators have melodramatically used the line in their political despair.
 
I’m intrigued that many people in any society—past, present, and probably future—believe a disruption of their current status is an “end of the world” event. Maybe I have believed similarly at times. In doing so I—and they—exhibit both ignorance of the past and an intellectual weakness born of a narrow worldview. Of course, any personal disruption can be for an individual a major event, and some such events appear to be life-altering.
 
But whether or not a political event, a war, or a natural disaster is the destruction of “the centre” can’t really be known except in retrospect. Many seem to panic under the circumstances of sudden change and disappointment. Although it is true that the “centre” can, indeed “fall apart,” it is also true that some “centres” do so gradually and haltingly. Take Centralia, Pennsylvania, as an example.
 
Centralia overlies a rich anthracite coal field and was once the site of a highly active mining industry. Not so anymore. Its coal caught on fire decades ago, gradually baking the ground and releasing carbon monoxide into the town’s air. Eventually, the population abandoned it—but not all. The last census showed an ageing population of ten people still living in a community whose roads have been shrink-cracked as the ground dried under the excessive heat from below.
 
Possibly, those ten people just don’t want to let go of a world they once knew, a home where they were born, grew up, and made a life. Possibly, they cling to a center (centre) that holds only for them in an unrealistic view that it can be the center it once was. For their neighbors who abandoned their town for safer ground, however, Centralia fell apart and could not hold.
 
Centralia is the product of a physical destruction of the landscape just as the Europe of William Butler Yeats had been the product of physical disruption during WWI, a time when many “things” did fall apart, such as individual families, cities, and entire governments. For Centralia’s residents there appears to be no Second Coming in its immediate, or even distant, future. That’s a fact of a mine fire’s destruction (though the air quality has improved as of late because the fire is moving out of town).
 
Political and social centers are another story. There’s little one can point to that marks them as concrete entities clearly identifiable. Such centers are locked into individual and group emotions based on assumptions and perceptions. Look at the British press’s coverage of Brexit, for example. Look at the American press’s coverage of the election of 2016. For those in the press, broadcast media, and other interconnected groups, that apparent falling apart rose to the level of world-ending melodrama. Research firm FACTIVA noted that Yeats’s line was quoted more in 2016 than in any of the previous 30 years. *
 
Again, I’ll admit that for everyone, including me, a disruption of any kind can seem at the moment to be a dissolution of a “centre.” But history tells us that things that once fell apart have either re-coalesced or given way to a new center. Pessimism in the context of a physical change to the center, such as that caused by a war that killed millions, the Black Death that killed half the population of Europe, or a giant tsunami that killed 250,000, is, I think, understandable. Under such circumstances, only a few people out of many survivors can be emotionally resilient. But in general, humanity rebounds. Old “centres” can reform as such, or new centers take their places, sometimes, as in the rise of suburbia, as somewhat diffuse, but still recognizable centers.
 
But melodrama over social and political changes derive from emotional “centres,” and those are the least stable. They fall apart rather often, don’t they? That the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” was used so often of recent in Britain after Brexit, the USA after 2016, and France after recent terrorist attacks, bespeaks of an ignorance of history and possibly also of an egoism that can’t let go of a past and that can’t embrace the possibilities of a different kind of future.
 
Centralia’s 10 residents are ageing and will eventually pass into the area’s history. In their way, they have done what they could to maintain a center that had fallen apart. There might not be a potential for regrowth in the area for many years, just as there might not be a potential for regrowth of a population in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Physical disruption isn’t emotional disruption; it can be real, and it can last a long time. But history has given us a number of examples of revitalized centers that had at one time fallen apart: Hiroshima (atomic bomb), London and Berlin (conventional bombs), Kobe and San Francisco (earthquakes), and all those centers once devastated by the Black Death or the 1918 Spanish flu. When physical disruption isn’t long term, history shows us that centers can once again become centers.
 
Those who have of recent shown their despair over political change by quoting from “The Second Coming” might be a little less melodramatic if they look at the history of “centres.” All centers eventually fall apart to some extent, but in the absence of some long-term physical disruption, such as from dangerous radiation, volcanic eruptions, and ongoing wars, all centers can re-coalesce.
 
What centers center your life? Which have fallen apart? Which have re-coalesced? And finally, how desperate did you think you were when any center fell apart?  
 
*FACTIVA. 

It truly is an Age of Distraction, and no one out there needs me to cite the numerous distractors. The noise in our lives is the product of both social pressure and technology, the latter exacerbating the former even more so since the rise of social media and 24/7 news about everything—even stuff from far away and irrelevant to our personal lives. We are a distracted species as numerous accidents seem to prove. And our attention spans are probably shorter than those whose lives have been quieter and less frenetic.
 
That many of us are so enveloped in the noise of life isn’t a new observation.  So many of us prefer the noise in our lives because it keeps us from anxiety the existentialists foisted on us back in the days of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Ionesco, and the Dadaist artists who were inspired to discombobulate in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich.
 
Is there a way to get away from the noise? Think of your life as running an experiment on some protons. Now that requires some focus, doesn’t it? And since protons are so small, any “noise” in the experiment can disrupt the process and give a false reading. An experiment on protons requires a mechanism that eliminates the noise.
 
When Mohsen Arabgol and Tycho Sleator at NYU wanted to observe the nuclear Barnett effect, they faced the problem of noise. What the Barnett effect is, is irrelevant here, except to say that it is basically the magnetization of an uncharged body spinning on an axis.  Here’s the part of the experiment germane to this little discussion: Arabgol said, “As far as I can say the beauty of this experiment was not finding an extraordinary technique or utilizing a novel apparatus, but finding the very narrow combination of many parameters in the experiment and running the whole experiment with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises.” *
 
And that’s your experiment for the day: Find the combination of parameters with the highest level of care and awareness about the variety of available noises in your life. It’s about the only way you’ll be able to run the beautiful experiment of your life in the Age of Distraction.
 
 
*Fadelli, Ingrid. The first observation of the nuclear Barnett effect. Phys.org. 23 May 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-05-nuclear-barnett-effect.html   Accessed May 24, 2019. Original article’s abstract available at https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.177202

“And that’s why I’m saying Marie Curie is overrated,” says Know-it-all.
 
“I’m not following. What’s your argument? And why are you picking on poor dead Marie?” I ask.
 
“I think what she accomplished wasn’t by any special brilliance, just some drudgery. What’d she do, after all, but find a needle in a haystack, some radium in some pitchblende? I’ll grant that she might have worked hard, but, hey, she died from what she processed. That doesn’t seem to be very smart, not scientist-smart.”
 
“But you’re not looking at the big picture, at the context,” I counter.
 
“What context. That she was a woman who won two Nobel prizes?” asks Know-it-all.
 
“No, no, no. You’re not looking at the context of her life. It isn’t that she is a woman that she was a great scientist. It’s what she did in the context of her time. And that she died from her ‘invention’ is part of the context. There are plenty of similar examples, some of which would put you under the same critical glass through which you view Marie Sklowdowska Curie, famous recipient of two Nobel prizes, co-discoverer of radium, and hard-working scientist. I’m no expert on either her life or times, but I do know that she’s the one who isolated radium and that she did so in a context of type of ignorance we all at times share: Ignorance imposed by the unknown.
 
“And my saying ‘at times’ is significant. Marie’s discovery of radium eventually led to the use of the element in watch dials, applied as a luminous paint. Just gotta know what time it is day AND night, don’t we? So, watches with self-luminous dials were very popular; popular, that is, until sufficient information about their dangers irradiated the brains of officials who declared them hazardous. Sometime around the 1950s those warnings changed the watch-makers’ paints to safer materials bound to phosphor, but the general public, however, kept wearing the watches they had, oblivious to their dangers. Who knows? You might have one of those old watches lying among Great Grandpa’s effects in some old drawer or trunk in the attic, that is, lying around and accumulating radon gas you will release into your nostrils when you open the drawer or take the lid off the storage box. Doesn’t that make you ignorant? Why do you keep it in the house?
 
“In the context of general ignorance about radiation during the first half of the twentieth century, wearing a watch with glowing numbers and hands was fashionable for civilians and practical for soldiers during nighttime operations. What we don’t know never illuminates our minds. That people wore radium on their wrists seems to the scientifically astute a foolish practice. But all actions occur in a context. Think of Marie. She worked to isolate radium and thorium, and she worked very hard. But her work led to her early demise by aplastic anemia, caused, no doubt, by her years of work with radioactive materials in a lab not designed to protect Marie. Again, context is everything when we want to understand the consequences of any action and the lives of others. Remember, no one had any experience with radium before Marie. She writes, ‘We were very poorly equipped with facilities for this purpose. It was necessary to subject large quantities of ore to careful chemical treatment. We had no money, no suitable laboratory, no personal help for our great and difficult undertaking. It was like creating something out of nothing.’ *
 
“Not exactly nothing, of course, that would make Marie a deity. Rather, she went to the uranium plant at St. Joachimsthal, figured that radium was left “in the residues, and, with the permission of the Austrian government, which owned the plant…succeeded in securing…these residues, then quite valueless,--and used them for the extraction of uranium. How glad I was when the sacks arrived, with the brown dust mixed with pine needles…Some time later, the Austrian government…let us have several tons of similar residues at a low price.”
 
“Let’s add to the context of wearing those radium-bearing watches. When the United States tested atomic bombs in Nevada—yes, if you are too young to remember: open air blasts—people—probably many of them wearing watches with radium dials—gathered to watch from Las Vegas and in front of their black-and-white TVs. The Atomic Age seemed to be one of great promise and at that same time a step into the unknown, as many science fiction books and films detailed with their monstrous creatures that were formed by radiation. So, there was ignorance about ionizing radiation (I suspect there still is) and what it does to the body. Even Marie, a great scientist, found out the hard way.
 
“And her discovery, radium, led to the deaths of others, not as a purposeful act, but as a consequence of using radium paint. Asian women, working to apply the paint to the watch dials, for example, twisted the bristles of their brushes in their mouths to tighten them, and then dipped their fine points into the paint, repeatedly: Not a good thing, but in the context of not knowing, an action they performed without intention to self-harm. Like Marie, many of those dial-painters suffered from some disease caused by their exposure to radium. And probably a number of people who wore those watches had unexplained episodes with cancer of some kind. It wasn’t until the world was generally aware of radiation’s dangers that we stopped making those watch dials and stopped open-air nuclear testing.
 
“I suppose we can make an analog of our experience with radium in our experience with the thousands of chemicals we have invented, some of them seeming wondrous at first, only to have their dangers exposed with increased exposure. Hexachlorophene, for example. For a while, it was in some form in almost every medicine cabinet. Dial soap contained it. Once again, think context. In ignorance of hexachlorophene’s dangers, the public was persuaded to use products that contained the chemical for various reasons, including the treatment of acne. In ignorance, the public used it without intention to self-harm. It wasn’t until after some 50 deaths attributed to hexachlorophene’s effects on brains that the light bulb idea of banning the substance illuminated the minds of the FDA and its counterparts in other countries.
 
“The consequence of almost everything we do explains why we acted the way we did, why we made, for example, mistakes we would not in hindsight make again. Unfortunately, contexts are often too big to see, just as we can’t see the whole universe that contains us. The contexts in which we operate daily are often obscure. And our inability to see the entire contexts of our actions and the actions of others makes ignorance commonplace, produces unintended consequences, and too often ends in tragic decisions.
 
“Think, today, of the contexts for your thoughts and actions. Can you really see the big picture? Is the big picture you think you see not somehow limited by the unknown? Your life must of necessity be a continuous pursuit of understanding contexts. The extent to which you fail to understand the unknown is the extent to which you find yourself in jeopardy of some kind or to which you misjudge the lives and motives of others.”
 
 
*Curie, Marie. Pierre Curie, trans. by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, 1923.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Anyone who has heard of John Stuart Mill has also heard that his estimated IQ was off the chart, maybe 200. I don’t know how one determines that for a guy who lived in the nineteenth century except to say it might have something to do with his having read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at an age when I was heavily into picture books as I   repeatedly read Little Toot (or had my mother repeatedly read it to me). Anyway, Mill was smart. He knew Greek before age five, read works in that language, and as a child tutored his siblings in it and in Latin.
 
John Stuart Mill provides material for the spectrum of topics that cross our minds today, so it’s difficult for me to center on a single aspect of his thought, much, by the way, with which I disagree from the perspective of my lower IQ. But one of his statements touches on something near to what I wrote about recently, using as I did, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” as a qualifier. * Mill wrote, “A world from which solitude is extirpated, [sic.] is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspiration which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.” ** Yes, in solitude and in silence we can do some thinking that our otherwise distracted brains could not do. So, I certainly can agree with Mill on this—in part.
 
I say “in part” because I also know that in the midst of mental turmoil and frenetic activity the human brain is also capable of insights. There is no single path on which genius walks. Just sitting on a rock at the top of the Himalayas doesn’t guarantee peace, insight, or creativity—though it does invite frostbite. Knowing humans, I might say, “The same grand scene, however wondrous, becomes after a while, the same scene for brains enthralled by ‘what else is there’ to see.” In other words, we’re an antsy species. We tend at times to favor both turmoil and frenetic competition. We tend to like the comforts of civilization as much as we like natural beauty. Maybe, we actually like those comforts more.  
 
But Mill’s main argument occurs in the rest of his passage from Political Economy. In it, he decries the endless pursuit of wealth, the use of all arable land for agriculture to support a Malthusian population growth, and the extinction of all animals, save those that support humans, through the destruction of habitats converted into landscapes purposed for human “progress.” He had looked at his times and the Industrial Revolution’s fostering the conditions conducive to rampant population growth, had seen that the needs of urban dwellers meant devastation of landscapes at home and abroad, had noted reasons for population explosions in countries whose resources were funneled into developed nations, and had concluded that people would only suffer in the long run by a competition for resources. He proposed a “stationary state” to replace the one in which population kept doubling at the expense of habitats, life-forms, and silence.
 
You can hear echoes of Mill’s thought today coming from philosophers like Peter Singer. Those who adopt such a position usually rail against uncontrolled population growth as though there were some realistic way of stopping people from procreating without unintended consequences. Imposing restrictions on procreation, as the Chinese did with the one-child policy, eventually leads to an ageing population, turning the population pyramid upside down. Then what? Who does the work to support the ageing? And that hypocritical scenario, though resulting in fewer births, actually births calls for euthanasia to cull the “useless” members of a population. I say “hypocritical” because those who call for a cull and a decreased population never include themselves as members to be culled. For those who think there are too many people, the ultimate surefire cure is death in the absence of demonstrable utility. And those who believe there are too many people see themselves as elite doctors who can appropriately administer that cure.  
 
In fact, we do live in a world with a growing population, and even devastating epidemics and wars don’t seem to stop the growth. We have to keep inventing, keep creating the only offspring of the Industrial Revolution that has brought us to this condition, that is, we have to continue creating technologies and the wealth that accompanies them. The pressure of the times requires it. Progress necessitates more progress, and, sorry to say, necessitates inequalities through competition. The opposite of progress, a “stationary state” such as Mill proposes, ineluctably leads to even greater inequalities.  
 
We number more than seven billion at the time of this writing, and many do suffer the poor conditions Mill foresaw. But, if we take Venezuela as a model for a “stationary state,” we can see that the problem is always with those elite who “run” such states. Chavez and Maduro initiated, according to an article in the New York Times, “the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 years….” *** People like John Stuart Mill have always supposed that a stationary economy with unmitigated egalitarian economy can work “if we have the right people in charge”—meaning them. Or they suppose that the stationary system itself somehow regulates an even distribution of resources while at the same time making life better for all. Regardless of failures in all “stationary” societies, those who believe in controlling the problems associated with material growth and the pursuit of material growth always generate the opposite of what they envision. Want proof? Study your history. Study the Venezuela of 2019.
 
Mill’s vaunted utilitarianism is a form of idealism. He asks whether or not everyone wants to become richer ad infinitum and then proposes that the “stationary state” is “a very considerable improvement” over the keep-up-with-the-Joneses materialist capitalism of his day. But every idealist ends in self-contradiction, and Mill and his modern counterparts are no exception. Want an example? Mill says, “Only when in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species and the means of improving and elevating the common lot.” Yep. Socialism. That’s Mill’s fallback position. And it is socialism under “deliberate guidance,” you know, under people like Stalin, Mao, Castro, and recently, Chavez and Maduro. The self-contradiction? Mill still favors individualism and competition in his stationary state.
 
Too bad Mill didn’t live to witness the more than 100 million people killed under socialist regimes or the billions of people who have suffered under the “deliberate guidance” of those in charge of “stationary states,” such as Venezuela. With hindsight, he might have used his great intellect to reevaluate his idealistic utilitarianism. History has shown that “common property” doesn’t elevate “the common lot.” Because he was not a strict socialist, he believed in competition as a way to ward off indolence: “Competition may not be the best conceivable stimulus, but it is at present a necessary one, and no one can foresee the time when it will not be indispensable to progress.” **** Mill—and maybe his modern offspring—want progress in a stationary setting.
 
There are those today who envision themselves as bright as John Stuart Mill. And they, like Mill, seem to want the preservation of individualism under the auspices of some regulating body guided by “judicious foresight.” Yes, Mill had a high IQ and maybe some of his modern-day intellectual offspring are also bright. But being smart and doing smart are different. Each generation that takes up the banner of socialism might be genuinely well-meaning and idealistic, but no generation has yet demonstrated a way to keep insidious indolence from dominating the lives of any population living in the absence of competition in a “stationary state.”
 
In On Liberty, Mill stressed the importance of preserving individualism. He saw in 1859 that “The tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society, and diminish the power of the individual.” ***** Now, it’s your time to find a way to preserve your personal individualism in time when pressure abounds to control all under “deliberate guidance.” There’s no easy answer, of course, but beware the evils that arise when the lives of the many are placed in the hands of the few. Beware the effects when a state monopoly replaces competition. And beware the insidious indolence that creeps into any stationary state. Beware, also, that laissez-faire does, in fact, generate its own detrimental effects on a population. Mill tried in two different works to resolve the issues that we still face today. That we are still discussing them is evidence that he had no final solution. In this all of us are simultaneously smart and dumb. We can raise the argument about a progressive or stationary state, argue for or against the ideals of either or both, but we can’t seem to reconcile the ideal with the real—except in the context of history. We’ve seen what has happened in past stationary states. What makes us think that any future stationary state will resolve the associated ills that seem inherent? ******   
  
*5/11/2019. “When Everywhere Is Times Square, No One Will See a Star” http://thisisnotyourpracticelife.com/blog.html
 
**Political Economy. 1865. Sixth ed., vol. ii. Bk. Iv. Ch. 6, p. 232.  
 
***Kurmanaev, Anatoly. Venezuela’s Collapse Is the Worst Outside of War in Decades, Economists Say. New York Times 17 May 2019, Online at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/world/americas/venezuela-economy.html   Accessed on May 17, 2019.
 
****Political Economy, pp. 376, 377.
 
*****On Liberty.
 
******Just a final note: After the fall of the Soviet Union, a “stationary state,” member countries sought outside help to clean the environments devastated by bureaucrats who had no personal interest in preserving Nature. Seems that complete government control was worse than, or just as bad as, laissez-faire in devastating the planet; devastation of natural settings was one of the reasons Mill took pen to paper.  

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, onetime playboy and Zoroastrian, certainly Neoplatonist, theologian, and finally Church Father, said this: “In order for us to understand the character of people, we have only to observe what they love.” * Francis de Sales, onetime target of assassins because of his evangelism in Calvinist territory, mystic author, priest and provost, eventual Bishop of Geneva, said this, “We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love.”
 
“Wow!” I said to myself when I saw both quotations. How insightful! Take the latter quotation and apply it as you wish, but recognize how it applies to people in your circle of friends and acquaintances. “Conforming ourselves to what we love” can fit almost any modern circumstance and lifestyle, any person or group. It can fit anyone from Goth to Golfer, black leather to pastel khakis.
 
Want to know someone? Want to know yourself? What’s the object of love? Is it a process, form, group, person, or way of thinking or of expressing oneself?
 
Let’s put the two statements together: In order for us to understand the character of people, we have only to observe what they love. We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love. What do you love? How has what you loved changed you? Time for self-examination.
 
 
*I owe a debt to Father Tim who found both Augustine’s and de Sales’s statements and put them in a church bulletin message on the significance of love. Those disinclined to hear statements from religious leaders might with an open mind consider that both statements have merit outside the traditional “love of God” and “love of others” message.

Peter Jones, author of Learn Latin, teaches that Latin reverses the way we say “I love.” As anyone who has ever studied the language learns in a first lesson, amare is the verb “to love,” and the first person singular, present tense form of that verb is amo (“I love”). Jones explains that “o” indicates “I,” and then he says, “So ‘watch your ending’ is the best piece of advice to give the Latin beginner. Useful rule in life, too” (16). *
 
As in language, so in life: Watch your ending. Anticipate the consequences of your actions.
 
 
*Jones, Peter. Learn Latin. New York. Barnes & Noble Books, 1997.

We live in the Age of Protagoreans. But, then, maybe every age is such, with those in power serving as the exemplars of Sophist thinking. In this age, however, we have added entertainers and TV pundits to political figures. Apparently, given the power to influence, all influencers influence all the time. They can claim, and rightly so because the masses allow them, that they have the wherewithal to judge and analyze for the rest. They are, to use the term attributed to Protagoras, “the measure of all.”
 
But I can’t blame those given the power to influence by virtue of their position in media or in entertainment. They are victims of Sophistry, just as you and I are also victims.
 
If we were to apply Plato’s Protagoras to our times, we would probably see that we are as self-contradictory as any people ancient, medieval, or modern. We all seem to proclaim the existence of Absolutes; all seem to proclaim the right to self-assessment of what is real or good and thereby what is purely subjective; and all seem to have no problem proclaiming ourselves as the “measure” in support of the latter (relativism). We can see the difference at the level of states in the USA, with some having stricter laws than others, some allowing actions that others prohibit, and still others taking a laissez-faire position with regard to individual freedoms limited only by the country’s overriding Constitution as backed by Supreme Court decisions.
 
Protagoras appears to be caught in contradictions as Plato portrays him, but aren’t we all? Socrates in Plato’s book discusses one of the reasons for contradiction by equating or relating knowledge and virtue. When one knows, one acts virtuously. Ignorance is the stuff of evil; knowledge, the stuff of good.
 
Our contradictions seem to be played out daily on pundit shows that pit one side against the other, in most cases the Left vs. the Right. And we daily see what must have taken place thousands of years ago when Protagoras argued before crowds at Olympic games. Yes, there appears to have been a sideshow of the athletically-challenged, but intellectually-astute, orators arguing positions before people gathered at the sports events. It was a preview of what was to come with the advent of TV pundit shows. Were he alive today, Protagoras would be in great demand because he was a great debater—at least he was until he ran into Socrates in Plato’s work.
 
That brings me to ask whether you consider yourself to be what Protagoras calls the “measure of all.” Is how you perceive the world an ultimate reality, or just a local, personal reality? You have certainly heard others speak of the importance of their opinion. I know I have. “It’s my opinion” is all the justification most need to refute any belief in an Absolute of any kind and to quash opposing arguments. And “my opinion” doesn’t seem to need any supporting information; feeling and perceiving become absolutes for individuals—especially the young.
 
There’s another reason to excuse the ignorance or confusion of the times and to understand the subjectivity of our age. There’s much we don’t know. Even those who spend their lives seeking scientific “truths” find themselves incapable of pinning down an absolute interpretation. Physical reality beyond Newton’s three laws lies in unknown knowns. We know about atoms and their makeup, for example, but we can’t give them anything more than a mathematical description. We just have difficulty imagining the electron as both wave and particle. We don’t understand Dark Energy or Dark Matter, and we can’t, as Protagoras did in Protagoras, speak certainly about an “origin,” such as the origin of the genus Homo and the rise of consciousness. Yet, in a contradictory vein, we know that we can turn atoms into atomic power, showing that there must be some objective reality beyond our perceptions and opinions. “I don’t believe in atomic power” doesn’t stop a bomb from exploding. And we have some sense that deep in the past a number of Homo species existed simultaneously because we have some of their fossilized remains. We just don’t know their level of consciousness or even their possible relationship to that “First Human Being” some 200 to 300 thousand years ago. And unlike Protagoras, we can’t really say when exactly, where exactly, or how exactly the rudiments of civilization arose.  
 
So, we bounce between being the “measure of all things” to sometimes being measured by some absolute system that exists outside our individual opinion while still knowing that we live in ignorance about the ultimate physical reality of our existence. What’s left? Those arguments about to which we apply perceptions and personal opinions. Political, philosophical, and ethical arguments. And when some Protagoras with skills in rhetoric that exceed those of opponents wins the day in a public argument, we ascribe to his opinion. He (or she) is, after all, a voice heard and respected by many—or by at least one more than half a population.
 
It is a bit ironic that in their adamant belief in the absolutes of their opinions, so many ascribe to the positions of others and to their perceptions. It is ironic that in an Age of Protagoreans so many who claim a priority for their opinion actually seek the opinions of the most public voices. We are, in our times of TV punditry, largely dependent upon the thoughts of others.
 
One might think the primary question that someone who holds himself or herself as the “measure of all” might ask is “Who cares what others think on issues I care to care about?” The popularity of TV pundit shows seems to indicate that many people do care about the perceptions of others and that many take what the pundits say as expressions of Absolutes.
 
We really haven’t progressed much since the fifth century B.C., have we? We’re still making absolute statements about opinions. Still arguing in the public arena. Still running the gamut of self-contradictory positions. Still living in a great deal of ignorance. Still trying to define what is both right and virtuous. And, unfortunately, still imposing rules on ourselves as public perceptions allow. 

I’m not one who favors the use of recreational or addictive drugs. I’m usually on an “Earth-high,” what with all the wondrous natural beauty and interesting good people on this planet. Yeah, I’m a bit of an optimist. But I can understand that some people find their lives uninteresting or depressing, or find themselves ushered into using through social pressures and physical pain. There are also those who seek to find their identity or “expand their minds” through hallucinogenic substances, à la Timothy Leary’s followers. And there are those devoid of any support by loved ones, driving them to seek substitute "love" in mind-altering drugs.
 
Like any of us, I can’t point to a single cause as the source of my negative attitude toward mind-altering drug use. Maybe my never having suffered the pain that some suffer because of cancer or accidents makes me speak about something I don’t understand. I can, however, think of something my paternal grandmother told me a long time ago when she was suffering from breast cancer. Seeing her swollen left arm and hearing her say, “Donald, you can’t imagine the pain,” I said as a naïve youth, “Grandma, why don’t you take something to dull the pain?” It was her response that might have been a key shaper of my attitude toward drug use. She said—and mind you she was about 90— “I don’t want to take anything that will dull my mind. I want to be fully conscious and in charge of my life.” That was a very tough lady who had lost her husband before the Great Depression yet still managed to own two homes and rear three children.
 
I suppose I can also attribute my anti-mind-altering-drug attitude to playing football, to having a WWII marine father teach me to “rub a little dirt on it” in response to injury, and to a dentist who convinced me that I didn’t need any numbing substance just to have my teeth drilled. And I can also think of my seeing the negative effects of drug abuse on peers during the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s I was convinced that we were headed for a Frank Herbert Dune society in which just about everyone would be on some mind-altering drug like melange. Can anyone say “Colorado”?
 
That I thought drugs had become insidious was probably also influenced by my living in Miami a few years before Miami Vice began its six-year run on TV. I had witnessed the growing infusion of drugs into that city’s culture. Pop TV, pop films, and pop songs captured the drug culture’s spread. I can think of Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues,” as an example, a song whose lyrics contain the lines “You ask any DEA man/He’ll say there’s nothin’ we can do/From the office of the President/Right down to me and you…/It’s a losing proposition….” There lies in that song the encapsulation of hopelessness: “But it doesn’t go away….” Insightful composing, right?
 
The drug culture of the past 60 years has been unstoppable, partly because it has been glamorized and partly because shrewd pushers have infiltrated every level of society. Yet, there might be another, more ancient motivation afoot. Now, we know for certain that a millennium ago people gravitated toward mind-altering drugs. Because we tend to think the world began when we began, we sometimes fail to see our relationship to the past. Apparently, humans have long had a fondness for drugs and their various effects.

José Capriles, a Penn State anthropologist, and colleagues discovered a millennium-old cache of psychoactive compounds in a rock shelter called Cueva del Chileno in Bolivia. About 1,000 years ago people in the Andes were sniffing cocaine and drinking ayahuasca, as Michael Price reports online for Science (May 6, 2019). * Speak of smuggler’s blues! Price quotes Melanie Miller, a bioarchaeologist at the U. of Otago (New Zealand): “Whoever had this bag of amazing goodies…would have had to travel great distances to acquire those plants…or they had really extensive exchange networks.”
 
So, the hopelessness of Frey’s song has roots in an ancient past that, in Central and South America, includes widespread use of peyote and psilocybin mushrooms. In the cache that Capriles found were traces of cocaine, benzoylecgonine, bufotenine, harmine, and dimethyltryptamine.
 
I write this at a time of extensive opioid use that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. At the same time, I see the push for legalizing recreational drugs out of both a desperation that efforts to stop drug traffic and use have failed and a Dune-like attitude that finds drug use not only favorable but also desirable and “harmless.” There are those who argue that if mind-altering drugs have been around for thousands of years, they would always likely fail to prevent their use.
 
In spite of the seeming hopelessness of anti-drug efforts, there are those who energetically try to alter cultural attitudes of acceptance. Their efforts are commendable, but not commendable by all, as those firmly convinced that mind-altering drugs are harmless make the battle against abuse as uphill as climbing into the Bolivian Andes.
 
I suppose I can offer no solution because those who don’t see a problem just don’t see a problem, and I don’t have the wisdom other than what my grandmother, my dentist, and my parents taught me about life, about pain, and about being who I am. I could, however, cite another popular work of the 1980s, a song by Huey Lewis and the News called “I Want a New Drug.” It’s as clever a set of lyrics as those of “Smuggler’s Blues.” Lewis sings about finding a drug in the companionship of another, a drug with no negative side effects, a drug of love.
 
So, maybe there is a solution to our societal addiction to drug use, an individual solution. That solution rests in an individual’s finding what I mention at the outset of this little essay: An Earth-high grounded in a personal, loving relationship. In my experience, love has never been a losing proposition. I think I’ve been fortunate to have the influences I’ve had, and I know that I can’t share them with anyone else. If I could take you to back in time to meet my grandmother during her trial by cancer, my parents, my dentist, and my various coaches who advocated a toughness in times of stress and injury, I would. I understand that two people cannot have similar experiences that produce similar results, but I’m sure that a little of their attitude would rub off on almost anyone, maybe not enough to prevent drug use, but certainly enough to understand why they were anti-mind-altering drugs.
 
A millennium from now some archaeologist will stumble not just upon small bag of mind-altering drugs, but also upon a widespread diffusion of them. Possibly, “stumbling upon” might be an inappropriate description. More likely and because of the widespread use of drugs today, that future archaeologist will “stumble over” ubiquitous leftover drugs. “Hey, this stuff is everywhere. How addicted were these ancients?” It won’t be the isolated bag of drugs found in a cache that will be significant those many years hence, it will be the isolated place where drugs aren’t found. Maybe that archaeologist will conclude that he or she had just discovered an ancient place of love and wonder.
 
 
*Price, Michael. Archaeologists find richest cache of ancient mind-altering drugs in South America. Science online. 6 May 2019, 3:00 PM, online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/archaeologists-find-richest-cache-ancient-mind-altering-drugs-south-america  Accessed on May 13, 2019.A Losing Proposition?