Do we live in the Age of Rebus? We’re swamped with emojis and memes, aren’t we? It’s as though we’ve returned to hieroglyphs to say what we mean. “I speak pics,” is a  reasonable response to “What is your native tongue?”


Using pictures instead of words isn’t a new practice. It extends through many cultures and across all human-bearing landscapes. Totem poles and petroglyphs in North America, many glyphs in Central and South America, and those well known Egyptian hieroglyphs are examples. I suppose we could include the images of the ancient Greeks’ zodiac, also, when I look to the heavens to spot Orion or Cancer or Sagittarius. Words seem so abstract by comparison. No wonder that even in an Age of Words, we live in a parallel Age of Picture-Writing. If you have a smart phone, chances are you have received at least one text with more emojis than words. Call it a sign of the times. Why are we so motivated to speak in pictures? Is it because they truly are “worth a thousand words?”


In The Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes:


“Despite the great wealth of words which European languages possess, the thinker finds         himself often at a loss for an expression exactly suited to his conception, for want of which he is unable to make himself intelligible either to others or to himself. To coin new words is a pretension to legislation in language which is seldom successful; and, before recourse is taken to so desperate an expedient, it is advisable to examine the dead and learned languages, with the hope and the probability that we may there meet with some adequate expression of the notion we have in our minds. In this case, even if the original meaning of the word has become somewhat uncertain, from carelessness or want of caution on the part of the authors of it, it is always better to adhere to and confirm its proper meaning—even although it may be doubtful whether it was formerly used in exactly this sense—than to make our labour vain by want of sufficient care to render ourselves intelligible.
“For this reason, when it happens that there exists only a single word to express a certain conception, and this word, in its usual acceptation, is thoroughly adequate to the conception, the accurate distinction of which from related conceptions is of great importance, we ought not to employ the expression improvidently, or, for the sake of variety and elegance of style, use it as a synonym for other cognate words. It is our duty, on the contrary, carefully to preserve its peculiar signification, as otherwise it easily happens that when the attention of the reader is no longer particularly attracted to the expression, and it is lost amid the multitude of other words of very different import, the thought which it conveyed, and which it alone conveyed, is lost with it.”




With regard to words, you know that meanings, and therefore, uses, change. Take the word testament. The word’s original meaning of “contract, covenant, will” has been altered to mean “testimony.” The switch in meaning might derive from a confusion of sounds (testament, testimony—maybe the same reason people confuse cavalry with Calvary). Testimony, which means “evidence,” “formal statement,” “attestation,” and related terms like “confirmation,” “proof,” and “witness,” does not and has not meant “contract” or “covenant” until recently. The Old Testament was a “contract,” that is, a “covenant” between Yahweh and the Hebrews. The New Testament is a newer contract (Though as the late comedian Mitch Hedberg says—here in paraphrase— because it is about 2,000 years old, it ought to be called the More Recent Testament or the Latest Testament—the implication, of course, is that it is not really “new”) But because living languages always undergo changes, if you look up testimony, you will probably find that testament is now listed as a synonym, such is the way of widespread use, even widespread erroneous misspeak. Today’s normalcy is yesterday’s normality--thank you, President Warren G. Harding.


So, words undergo changes in meanings. Kant advises that we look at the etymology of words to find their root meaning, but that advice ignores the nature of living languages. It also ignores the addition of knowledge that has occurred with the rise of empiricism. Certainly, no one in Kant’s circle of acquaintances knew about DNA, black holes, or quantum effects. The name deoxyribonucleic acid is a product of word synthesis; black holes lie in the fabric of space-time; and quantum, derived from a Latin word, has a new meaning, even showing up in a James Bond movie title (Quantum of Solace). Yes, Immanuel, we have gone back to the origin of our words, but we have repurposed their use. And even if there were such an animal as “proper meaning,” it would be at best a chimera.


Maybe we rely on hieroglyphs and emojis because we cannot delve deeply into every idea. We are simply simplifiers (Is that a redundancy?) We like short cuts (more redundancy?), and emojis are those short cuts. Do they convey the precise meaning that a paragraph of carefully chosen words might convey? Probably not, but we’re accustomed to generalizing. Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason is a very long work, some of it not well explained: Regardless of the intellect and logic of the philosopher, he could not account for nuances both intended and unintended in his own writing. And to be purely logical, I should say that a full explanation of anything might require an infinitely long explanation, or at least an indefinitely long one—too much for us finite beings in a rush.


Etymology, that branch of language study Kant advises we use, fascinates me because words came into existence under the influence of insight, accident, and habit. Modern teacher evolved from tacn, an Anglo-Saxon (Early English) word for “sign” or “guidepost.” I hypothesize that it originated during an insight about the relationship between teacher and pupil. As a blogger and formerly as a professor, I thought of myself as a guidepost who pointed the way toward knowledge and discovery more than as one who gave out either or both. I like leading the horse to water and leaving the drinking up to it—though I confess to lapses in practice, namely, to trying to force others into seeing what I see. That notion of being a guidepost is the reason I write on the title page of this website that these essays are meant to be points of departure for your insightful thinking. “Thirsty? Look, there’s a stream (of thought).”


Finding the exact words that convey a precise meaning to all is a difficult task because every person takes a background into a conversation. We can state and imply, but the audience can infer. The phenomenon of audience participation in meaning is one reason emojis have proliferated. The original smiley face has morphed, and now there are emojis of faces squeezed in laughter with tears on either side of the face. Nuances abound, and they derive from writer and audience. Emojis have their “synonyms” and “antonyms.” And when someone sends us one, we are more than passive recipients of a smiley face. We apply meaning that the sender might not have included in the message. And even if we don’t change the meaning, we change its degree of representation by interpreting it as more or less intense.


Is there an ever-increasing desire to go back to the days of hieroglyphs because choosing words is work, hard work? I’d guess that that’s part of the process of living in fast times with overwhelming connections to the world, connections that our medieval and ancient predecessors did not have. There might also be a desire to simplify a world of exponentially greater knowledge and an indefinite number of facts both tied to a global “culture.” English might be a Germanic language, but it is also a language of borrowed terms just as diet in affluent countries is an amalgam of culinary internationalism. That long period of Roman occupation and the widespread Latin Church left their marks as every struggling biology and paleontology student learns.


Rebuses, emojis, memes, glyphs, and even sign languages, all these complement the words that we, like Kant, find difficult to use for precise meanings. We could speak math, I suppose, in an attempt to make meaning as unshakeable as the meaning of two plus two. But every use of math is usually so specific that those nuances we treasure as the heart of meaning, would not be possible. How does one find an analog of a smiley face and a smiley face with tears in two plus two? By going to a Base Six math?


We are, it seems, bound to indefinite variations of meanings whether we choose glyphs or words. If you pick up a formal logic book, you’ll see that symbols play a part in “pure reason,” but you’ll come away with a quizzical look on your face because such precision doesn’t seem to apply in human interactions. Even in “science” there’s variation, particularly in the social sciences, but also, apparently, in some of the so called “hard sciences.” If you doubt that, you need to review the history of civilization during the COVID pandemic or during current debate over global warming. What is “THE science?” What is the most reasonable course of action? Quick, someone show me an emoji.


Where does all that leave us? Well, to paraphrase a famous cigar smoker, sometimes a smiley face is just a smiley face with only a generalized meaning, and sometimes a group of words… (Thirsty? There’s a stream—of thought)

Okay, let’s start with a little test.

1. Name the various European revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century.
2. Name one king of France during the Reformation.
3. Who was emperor prior to the reign of Marcus Aurelius?
4. What were you doing the day after your seventh birthday?

That’s enough. Pencils down. 


You might have been able to answer those three questions. If so, congrats. You’re more knowledgeable than I because I had to look up the answers. (1. Revolutions occurred in France, Austria, Prussia, Hungary, Bohemia, and in Italy; 2. Francis I, King of France from 1515 to 1547; 3. Antoninus Pius aka Titus Aelius Hadrianus and Antoninus Augustus Pius; 4. I have no idea, and you probably no idea)


The gap in my knowledge is typical. Much of the past is lost. There’s no way any of us could know all the details of what went on in previous centuries or millennia. And the deeper past is filled with more gaps than we can count. Although some remnants of the past are still held in Mind, even they are generalities; they lack specifics: We don’t know much about Charles Martel and the Battle at Tours except that it was a turning point in preserving European culture and shaping Western Civilization. But who other than some historian specialist or a college history student preparing for a history test needs to know more? No one can point to the exact location of the Battle of Tours. Was it closer to Poitiers? There’s a gap in knowledge about one of the most significant events of the past.


Gaps in historical knowledge are inevitable in a world of finite beings. Heck! We even have gaps in our own lives, as evidenced by the expression, “Oh! I forgot about that.” Gaps are punctuated by significant memories. I would argue that gaps dominate both the past of humanity in total and the past of individuals in total. That such gaps exist probably derives from our inability to see ourselves as continuums though we feel we have continued. That is, I know I’m somehow the same person I was in kindergarten, but I know that I have changed. The continuum of my life is more a series of episodes that surely have added to the sum I am today, but any past event represented only the “me” of the moment as I was at that time. I have, therefore, lived both a continuous and a discontinuous life.


Gaps: They’re the discontinuities. And sometimes when I look on that dichotomy between the continuous me and the discontinuous mes, I realize that often my present me lies unconformably on my past mes. In other words, I don’t quite know how to connect those discontinuous mes to my present.


If you were to drive to Alexandria Bay and elsewhere along what is called the Frontenac Arch and along the eastern side of Lake Ontario into the Canadian province, you will see in some road cuts an unconformity, call it the Great Unconformity. Tilted and metamorphosed much older rocks, some of them ancient lithified sand dunes, lie beneath horizontally oriented carbonates and other rocks. At the unconformity, Paleozoic rocks some 400-500 million years old overlie rocks in excess of a billion years old. There’s a gap between the rock units of widely different age. The older rocks underwent erosion long before and up until the younger rocks were deposited as sediments and then lithified.


That Great Unconformity is a gap of great immensity, a half billion years or so—give or take a week as I usually say. But it’s not unusual. the Grand Canyon also has a Great Unconformity, and its gap is a missing billion years of rock. So, what happened to 500 million years’ worth of rock at Alexandria Bay and a billion years’ worth at the Grand Canyon? Either the rocks were there and have been eroded or there never were such rocks.


Let’s revisit that test. It seems to me that a mention of the famous Santayana statement (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) is applicable here. The problem we all have is that gaps are inevitable, even our own personal gaps. I think I’ll admit that I have made the same mistake more than once (overeating, for example, or exercising less than I should around the holidays). The reason for the repetition is that memories have more gaps, more discontinuity, that continuities. We can’t keep in mind all that was and all that we were. Surely, we often operate as though the present is all that is. And even when we do recall, the recalling is often tinged by the present and lacking in detail. Remembering isn’t even a guarantee against repeating because remembering itself is often flawed by intervening events and false memories.


It appears to me that I—and maybe you—have a tendency to lay down new layers of living over eroded older layers. I—and maybe you—have erased some of the past. But that might be how humans move ineluctably toward their futures. Not everything that occurred is worth remembering. Some of what occurred is definitely worth forgetting.


The present doesn’t always lie conformably and continuously on the past. In fact, it mostly lies on unconformities. And that might be good. It means, for example, that like the changing environments that either laid down new sediments or eroded the older ones away, we can change. We can begin again like a reformed criminal leaving prison behind to become a contributing member of society or a drug addict leaving addiction behind to lay down a new lifestyle.


In this tug of war between continuity and discontinuity, humans can selectively erase layers of past lives and emplace new layers unconformably on the old. It is in this ability to build unconformably on the past that is the essence of hope.

The 62-foot long American F-22 Raptor has a 44.5-foot wingspan;  yet, this warplane’s radar cross section is a mere 0.0001 square meter. * That makes it appear, as one commentator has remarked, as small as a bee on radar screens. It is, however, a bee with a deadly sting, and just the threat of its presence is enough to frightened pilots in less capable military jets. **


Having a small cross section isn’t a detriment in a confrontation. In fact, as an incident between a Raptor pilot and Iranian pilots reveals, the bee can frighten off an enemy without having to use its stinger. I think of all those times when I’ve seen large humans running from the threat of a little bee at a picnic.


The principle here is simple: A person doesn’t have to be large to control others. Stealth works well. Whereas it is true as evidenced in elephants spreading their ears and bears standing tall that a large cross section can intimidate, it is not necessarily true that appearing “larger” is more effective than appearing “smaller.” And nowhere is this more true than in social media, where stealthy hackers and online trolls do what they can to destroy the work and lives of others. Hidden from identifying radar, hackers and trolls have one goal: To unseat the Good.


If Friedrich Nietzsche were writing today, one of his key concepts would be inapplicable. Nietzsche wrote, “To expect of strength that it not express itself as strength, that it not be a vanquishing will, a subjugating will, a thirst for enemies and obstacles and trumps, is just as foolish as to expect of weakness that it express itself as strength.”*** Nietzsche’s analogy for this principle is the relationship between the bird of prey and a lamb. There’s an obvious truth to this concept in the real world of animal interactions, including human interactions revealed in Hitler’s and now Putin’s hegemony, and the Nietzschean concept applies, in that sense, to the twenty-first century as much as to the nineteenth century when Friedrich wrote it. But today’s world isn’t exactly the same as Nietzsche’s. Whereas it is true that strength often imposes itself on weakness, it is also true in the world of social media that the weak and seemingly powerless can impose themselves on the powerful. And nowhere is this more evident than in hacked social media accounts in which the hackers, the anonymous weak, can wreak havoc on the lives of the strong simply by making comments and ascribing them to another.


Cybersociety is filled with nearly invisible “Raptors.” These online “trolls” fly under the radar to destroy both random and specific targets. People who come under attack by these raptors usually have no forewarning other than that they are trying to do Good or exhibiting a talent or strength that is visible to all “out there.” Powered by engines of hate and envy, the trolls attack all that is Good as soon as it becomes visible.


Unfortunately for anyone who attempts to ward off the raptors, there’s not much of a defense, and once the damage is done, it’s done. Reputations suffer because some anonymous weakling has found a compensating strength. It’s as though lambs have, contrary to Nietzsche, discovered the secret to making eagles the victims.


In the universe of social media, the anonymous weak and cowardly have acquired inordinate strength that they could never possess in the real universe. That they are driven by an inherent need to destroy is a reality that anyone with a public presence will have to dismiss as a hazard of being Good, doing Good, or supporting Good.


*See YouTube video: Top 5 Combat Aircraft with Lowest Radar Crosssection (RCS).


**See four YouTube videos: 2013 That Time US F-22 raptors Told Iranian F-4 Phantoms to “Go Home” /DCS Reenactment; How the F-22 Flew Undetected under an Iranian F-4 Phantom #Warthogdefense; Iran Panic: That time an F-22 pilot told the Iranian Air Force to go home; and Here’s How an F-22 Raptor Flew under the Iranian Fighter Jet and Told Him to go Home.


***The Genealogy of Morals (1887).

There’s a YouTube video of an interview between a Ukrainian reporter and a captured Russian soldier that reveals the depth to which propaganda embeds belief in people. The Ukrainian interviewer uses his cell phone to call the soldier’s mother and allows him to speak to her. The young soldier tries to explain that what he has seen on the ground in Ukraine runs counter to what Russian media and officials proclaim, but the mother simply says he has been brainwashed. From inside Russia, she tells her son in Ukraine what is happening in Ukraine. You can see the emotional effect in the soldier’s eyes as he finds himself being accused of lying.


The Russian’s mother has been persuaded that the Ukrainians are evil minions of the Americans because, she reports, Biden’s son has had dealings with Ukraine. She is also convinced that Ukrainians are a threat to Russia because they are Nazis. And it doesn’t seem to matter to her that her son is trying in the phone call to explain a different reality. There’s a similar interview with another soldier who has a conversation with his grandmother. The view from Russia is that the young men are brainwashed.


From the perspective of outsiders, the statements by the mother and grandmother seem out of touch with the reality easily viewable on numerous videos, including those that report on the massacres of civilians. But, then, the Russians at home might have little or no access to YouTube videos or outside news channels. And, in another “but, then” they might choose to see only videos favorable to what they already believe. I assume just about everyone leans toward seeing that which is self-confirming and reassuring.


That confirmation (bias) process is tough to avoid in the twenty-first century because of the many ways we receive information and the frequency we receive it. For example, once we view a couple of related product or services websites, the algorithms in Heavenly Cyberspace choose to show us more of the same. So, if we look at a video favorable to Ukrainians and unfavorable to Russians on YouTube, the next time we turn on the computer, we see videos with the same perspective. The repeated exposure to “more of the same” embeds it within the nucleus of our being. Once there, it is almost as long-lived as a proton which, by the way, lasts 1.67 X 10^34 years—give or take a week.


To speed up the process of proton decay, the physicists at CERN use the Large Hadron Collider in which accelerators ram protons into protons. The process requires an enormous expenditure of energy. The interviews with soldiers and their relatives in Russia reveal that beliefs emplaced deep in the nuclei of people are just as difficult to break as protons are at CERN. In spite of the young captured soldiers’ efforts to convince their relatives that the situation in Ukraine is not what Russian TV proclaims, the Russian women prefer their reinforced belief over their offsprings’ experiences.
The belief those women hold that Ukrainians—fellow Slavs—are evil is unshakeable and unbreakable.


Because we are all subject to durable propaganda, our own biases are difficult to break. Obviously, ramming them into contradictory realities doesn’t guarantee a decay. Those interviews reveal the cohesiveness of belief.


At CERN, the protons whiz around a giant loop till they collide at nearly the speed of light. We might suppose that going round and round to ram into realities that contradict our beliefs is an effective way to break them. The words of the mother and grandmother, however, reveal how difficult the process is. Their beliefs did not break even during a prolonged collision with the realities their children revealed.

Is there any worldview that does not contain its antithesis if not in logic, then in practice? Can you think of any intellectual system, any philosophy, any ideal that anyone has ever been able to embody in a flawless realtime manifestation? Are worldviews like Platonic “ideal trees” whose very representation cannot be imagined? Do they, to ask a fourth question, exist only in the mind as formless forms?


Look, for example, at the arguments made by both those on the Left and those on the Right. Take “freedom of expression,” as a starting point. As has always been the circumstance in human interactions, the “freedom” does not extend to either the opposition or to the partially sympathetic. I think of the lockstep voting by members of political parties and the outrage within those parties when a few members express an opinion that appears to side with the opposition.


To avoid stirring the hornets over a specific twenty-first century matter, I will mention instead the 1848 insurrections against the political and social circumstances in Europe. The third and last of the “Roman Empires” (1. Western, 2. Eastern, and 3. Holy Roman) was about to fall after a thousand-year rule. The Industrial Revolution’s burgeoning working class challenged monarchical reigns from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. In uprisings, the “revolutions” led to changes in France and shook the ruling classes of Austria, Prussia, and Germany. Military, often brutal, intervention thwarted most of the insurrections, but the Powers in existence at the beginning of 1848 had by the following year begun to accede to the wishes of the insurrectionists by establishing some “constitutional rights.” Unfortunately for the French, the pendulum of social and political change never stops swinging, so over the course of just several years, the popular idealistic revolution that started in Italy and spread throughout Europe, led to the reestablishment of a monarchial rule as Napoleon III assumed control in 1852.


Back to the opening point: All worldviews contain contradictory positions. All worldviews suffer in practice. When manifested in social reforms, worldviews quickly lose support among those who see that the products of their ideals cannot establish a universal utopia of peace and harmony as promised in the “ideal form.” In short, disagreements arise just as they arose in the mid-nineteenth century between people who associated with the république démocratique and people associated with the république démocratique et sociale. Think of this in the context of today as a devision between those who support the anarchists and Communists and those who support the avowed “democratic socialists” in the American Congress. The pathway to “revolution” differs in practice; the results differ widely.


Writing that generalizes usually fails to make valid an argument, and in this I am guilty here. But note this. If you look at what has occurred in American society over the past couple of decades, you will see that those who march Left lose members to those who march Right and vice versa. And both Leftists and Rightists lose members who discover a “middle path” that they find after experiencing disappointment or discouragement. Upon reflection or after an “incident” that shows what an extreme position can produce (destruction, injury, or even death), some marching Left and some marching Right redefine their worldviews, noting that “That’s not what I stand—or march—for.” Thus, the shooting of Republican lawmakers while they practiced baseball or the burning and looting of stores in various cities stand for actions not supported by the membership from which the perpetrators originated. In practice neither worldview proves to be “ideal.”


Thus, I ask myself a question: Why am I so sure that I am sure? In searching for an answer, I came across this 1849 comment by Alexander Herzen * :


    “Who doesn’t remember his own logical romance, who doesn’t remember how the first seeds of doubt, of audacious investigation, entered his heart, and how there they grew riotously until they reached its innermost recesses? That is precisely what it means to stand before the terrible court of the mind. It is not as easy as it seems to execute one’s convictions: It is hard to part company with thoughts which grew up with us, and became part of us, which cherished and consoled us; how ungrateful it would be to give them up! Yes, but there is no gratitude at that tribunal; nothing is held sacred, and if the revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children, then negation, Like Nero, assassinates its own mother to disembarrass itself of the past. People are afraid of their logic and, having rashly summoned to court the church, the state, the family. and morality, good and evil, they endeavor to save some scraps, fragments of the old.”


The problem with any group that supports a particular worldview is that it never accounts for the exceptions to the rule. It never accounts for individuality and for degrees of adherence. It never accounts for pride, that vice that prevents one from relinquishing long-held thoughts. You can see this problem in religions which span schisms both large and small: Protestantism, for example, breaking from Roman Catholicism and Protestantism breaking into High and Low Church, Lutherans, Methodists, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and denominations too numerous to mention. Even within a “unified” Church, the practice of the religion varies over place and time, as the various religious orders stand in testimony, Franciscans being the best example of a group divided (Secular Franciscan Order, Third Order of Saint Francis, OF Minor, OF Minor Conventual, OFM Capuchin, and Order of Saint Clare and other divisions—in both the Roman and Anglican churches). Would Saint Francis recognize his offspring?


There is a lesson in this for me if not for you. It’s that my own worldview is subject to change as I encounter other worldviews and real-world incidents. My own worldview is subject to the tribunal of the mind. And if I refuse to stand before that court, do I do so out of fear or pride? I think of an incident that occurred not too long ago in the breakaway “community” of CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupied Protest) in Seattle. Mayor Jenny Durkan called the protests the “summer of love,” ignoring, it seems, the arson, multiple assaults, and the gunfire death of a nineteen-year old.” Then, realizing the nature of CHOP, the mayor attempted to walk back her remark. One might assume that her worldview was somewhat altered by the actual events and by destructive reality that put indelible marks on idealism. The practice of any “ideal” inevitably faces trial in that court of the mind.


Like the 1848 revolution in Paris, the twenty-first century “revolutions” have also resulted in destruction and bloodshed. Everyone, not just the Seattle mayor, needs to think through to the consequences of putting a worldview on the stage of life. In practice, most ideals—if not all ideals—fail. Formless forms can’t have form. And they fail because no worldview can be inclusive enough to account for individual variations as the multitude of Franciscan orders attest. Those who want to “defund” the police, for example, find that reality demands some kind of police force to maintain public safety.


I recall the famous Brook Farm experiment started by nineteenth-century Transcendentalists. The ideal community they sought to establish fell apart rather quickly as individuals in the commune acted as individuals serving their own interests.


You can choose any contemporary worldview to test my hypothesis that practice reveals the imperfection of Perfect (Ideal) Forms. We all have hard choices to make about our own worldviews. Do we ignore the consequences of their application, or do we take them to the court of the mind to stand trial?


* A. Herzen. Selected Philosophical Works. Translated by L. Navrozov. (1956). Foreign Languages Publishing House. Available online. Accessed May 16, 2022.

We all know that when impulse is in control, there is no control. Fortunately, for most people most of the time, impulse is overlain by compunction. But for some, compunction is a rare check on impulse as atrocities from ancient times through Vietnam’s  Mỹ Lai to the recent Bucha massacres reveal. We also see the obvious effects of a lack of guilt or propriety in the actions of the pathological killer or in that of the explosively angry person. But with regard to individuals, simplifications about human behavior, though easy to do are hard to justify given the complexity of personal histories and running circumstances. Humans have multiple motivators, so to label someone as “impulsive” is to miss layers of influence. Yet, there’s no denying that impulsivity exists and that its effects are often deleterious or regrettable.


Impulse throws people into imbalance. Whatever equilibrium people believed they experienced at the time just before their impulsive behavior and whatever equilibrium their brains acted to establish through that behavior never replace the equilibrium that was. Things always change, of course, but impulse changes things abruptly.


Take the invasion of Ukraine. One might argue that it was a plan in development over many decades—or at least since the fall of the Soviet Union—in the mind of Putin. That he did not execute that plan until 2022, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t driven in part by impulse. Impulse usually has a trigger, so the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the apparent weakness of the American Administration focused more on social justice and global warming than on foreign affairs seems to have been a trigger; add to that the trigger of Europe’s increasing dependence on Russian gas and oil. Since the current U.S. President did little to stop the earlier invasion of Crimea and has from the perspective of the Russians spent more energy on what he is convinced is an existential threat from climate change and also on his desire to eliminate energy from fossil fuels while buying fossil fuels from Russia in 2021 and 2022, Putin had no angel on his right shoulder cautioning him about listening to the devil on his left shoulder. And since that same Russian leader has an alleged history of tyrannical rule and corruption, he unleashed the hounds of his hegemonic impulse.


Impulse, however driven to establish a new equilibrium from the perspective of the impulsive, usually produces its opposite or an unintended effect, a circumstance with a new imbalance. That’s not unexpected because one person’s impulsive actions trigger another’s. European countries have reacted, and their responses are as much amygdalae-driven as Putin’s invasion. When action and reaction derive from pure impulse on such a scale, the tenuous equilibria of power and safety disappear.


The world will always be in a state of imbalance because no perfect equilibrium exists for long—if at all—in societies. If we had imbalance forecasters who could determine the impulse “weather,” we might have at least a 50-50 chance of anticipating the vicissitudes others impose on us through their capricious urges. I say 50-50 because predicting impulse is as difficult as predicting exactly where along a cold front a squall line will develop a tornado. People knew that an invasion by Russians was highly probable as they amassed a “front” of military along the Ukrainian-Russian border. The West seemed to have taken few steps to thwart that invasion. But just as many might hear about a potential outbreak of tornadoes, yet take few precautions, so the West took few precautions. All humans are subject to the whims of others. Keeping that in mind puts some pressure on all of us to be vigilant, but we have little choice to do otherwise if we want to mitigate the effects of impulse—our own or others’.

Bill and Nancy meet over coffee.


Bill: “Have you been keeping up with the news?”


Nancy: “Really depressing, isn’t it. If it isn’t the daily count of murders, the acts of terrorism, celebrities being attacked on stage, ladies on The View screaming at conservatives, rising prices, shortages everywhere, Twitter wars, actual wars, people losing self-control on airplanes, and…Well, it’s all so depressing.”


Bill: “Surely there’s good news. You know, puppies and kittens lost and found, a little kid raising money for the homeless, maybe a new cure for cancer….”


Nancy: “Where do I find that good news? I’m bombarded with the bad.”


Bill: “Well, you might have to look, but it’s out there. Things can’t be totally rotten in the state of…”


Nancy: “Even Denmark has its problems, but I just saw the Lego and Carlsberg Beer posted a profitable quarter, so I guess there is some good news.”


Bill: “We need to bring back President Monroe.”


Nancy: “Monroe?”


Bill: “Yes, President Monroe, the guy who downplayed partisanship and oversaw a period of relative unity and ‘good feelings.’ Remember? About two centuries ago, right after the War of 1812, the country entered into its Era of Good Feelings.”


Nancy: “Gotta be a myth. There’s never a time when any society is in an era of good feelings. If nineteenth-century people had TV, they would have their version of The View. I remember my history. Monroe traveled around on a goodwill tour during which he didn’t say anything negative about his opponents. New England loved him after the visit. But that doesn’t mean the times were all daffodils and dancing fairies. There was that Panic of 1819 and the Missouri problem in 1820 over slavery. You seem to think that the Era of Good Feelings was all lollipops.”


Bill: “Not exactly. I know that people will be people, that disagreements are inevitable, especially in a large and growing population. But for a brief time, people seemed to unify more than usual. I think of 9-11 and the response of most Americans in the days following the attack.”


Nancy: “Naive. Remember that Reverend Wright guy in Chicago, the “chickens come home to roost” preacher? The unity you think about is a generalization.”


Bill: “But that’s about all we can say about any period. You think I don’t know that the Renaissance was replete with its antithesis, the Inquisition? No, I know that regardless of a general nature of a period, the specifics always contradict the description. The 1930s, for example, were called the Age of Anxiety. What age isn’t an ‘age of anxiety’? We could say that about any period, say, for example, the Romantic Movement in literature, noble savage stuff at the same time industrialization and urbanization were burgeoning. I guess we want to see society in convenient terms, like using Millennials to describe an entire generation. If we call this current period of ours a Period of Discontent—how about ‘now is the winter of our discontent?— then…


Nancy: “Shakespeare?”


Bill: “As I was saying, in this current period of discontent, there are some who are oblivious to the discontentment. Not everything affects everybody. There are some who are unaware of what is happening outside their small spheres of family, friends, fashions, and favorite team. I’m guessing that there are many people who live relatively happy lives interrupted only by their personal problems. The ‘biggest picture’ they see is a closeup.”


Nancy: “So, your advice is that when things look bad, look for good things?”


Bill: “Sure, why not?”

I just saw a report and video on the Daily Mail’s website that Russian TV commentators laughed about nuking New York City. Am I missing something? Do those pundits have any idea that the place they call home isn’t a safe location in a nuclear war?


Is this how far we’ve come in folly and ignorance that supposedly educated people have no idea that nuclear bombs do not have a limited effect? Are those people so unaware that they suppose an invulnerability to radioactive fallout and a nuclear winter that might drop world temperatures below Siberian winter numbers, killing crops everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere?


There’s a simulation that the pundits and smirking Russian journalists need to see on YouTube. It’s not unrealistic. It shows the rapid demise of more than 60% of the Russian population in just days after its leaders start of a nuclear war and more people dying within weeks and months. All infrastructure would be decimated; crops that survived would be poisoned, and at -85 degrees Celsius, just about all the remaining Russians who didn’t die from radiation poisoning, would succumb to the relentless cold of the Nuclear Winter that Carl Sagan predicted long ago. And that nuclear winter would be hemisphere-wide, so every country in the Northern Hemisphere would suffer.


The snarky smirking Russian pundits apparently demonstrate that the Russian educational system is as broken as the American system. How some 75 years into the nuclear age and how after the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents anyone can be unaware of the dangers of unleashed radiation is quite a serious indictment of educators.


If there are, in fact, Russians who believe that a nuclear war goes in only one direction and that the United States, the UK, and France would not respond in kind and maybe to an even greater degree, then the Russian school system needs an overhauling. Sixty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis there are still people who have no concept of the lethality of such bombing.


That callous Russian “highbrows” laugh at the idea of vaporizing millions of people is a disheartening display of depravity. But I suppose that such compunctionless attitudes abound in every country. I think of those who fall under the influence of gangs. Drive-by shootings are not uncommon. Human life is, as many have said, “cheap here.” And it’s always been cheap for those without a belief in the inherent value of life. Assassinations have been the modus operandi since Cain and Abel.


If estimates by statisticians are correct, more than 100 billion humans have come and gone. In the past century alone more than 200,000,000 million have been killed in acts of violence, some impulsive and others, like the Holocaust, carefully planned. The question those Russian pundits need to ask is whether or not a “planned” bombing would engender an impulsive response. And once impulse is at the controls, there is no guarantee of moderation. No nuclear war can be “little.” As the super computer reasons in War Games, “The only way to win is not to play.”


I will put aside the argument from consequence because I find that threats have little effect on human depravity. The threat of jail, for example, doesn’t prevent criminal behavior. Even the threat of capital punishment seems to have no effect—there are more, not fewer, murders. That fact leads me to ask whether or not any generation can be educated about the value of life. Was the Holocaust not lesson enough? No, not if one considers the 2022 massacre in Bucha, Ukraine, or the bombing of Red Cross locations in that country during the Russian invasion.


So, the Russian pundits today and some other country’s pundits tomorrow will advocate for and laugh about killing on an unprecedented scale. And none of them will believe they will suffer for the actions they propose. Such people will plague every generation because they will be fundamentally stupid as well as uneducated in the fundamentals of human survival on a planet full of natural risks. And we can add to that the self-righteous. Iran, for example, claims it supports the Palestinians while at the same time seeking nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Am I missing something? Don’t the Palestinians live in the very region that Iranian weapons would destroy?


The policy of mutually shared destruction that has kept the world free from a nuclear war cannot prevent those in this or in the next generation from ignoring self-imposed threats to their own existence. The Russian pundits are models of ignorance, human depravity, and folly.   

A: “Bad enough that we have a Russian guy with no compunction sending an army into Ukraine, but what seems almost as bad is that there are people in his country who believe that Ukraine is a Nazi country. I guess misinformation is the key to controlling a people. The actual Nazis had a pretty good propaganda machine, but it probably paled in comparison to the robust propaganda run by Pravda during the Iron Curtain years and by Russia’s twenty-first century state press.”


B: “Well, aren’t we all subject to misinformation? Aren’t we all subject to propaganda? Just think of advertising campaigns. Don’t they mislead when they suggest happiness lies in the next purchase? Just think of political campaigns. And today, unlike those days before and after World War II, we get inundated by so much information that no one can keep up with what is true or false.”


A: “Not anymore. The United States just appointed a woman to head the Misinformation Corps. Tsarina. Female Caesar. I don’t know whether or not her agency will wear uniforms or whether or not they carry guns. In fact, I don’t know what the agency will do. I do know that the Czar, the head of the agency pushed misinformation. That’s demonstrable by her public statements—and by her self-uploaded social media singing performance. She clearly has a political agenda. She clearly isn’t an impartial intellect.”


B: “Yeah. I heard. I saw her video. Scary, really. When I think of truth and ‘information,’ I think of peer-reviewed scientific studies, experiments that demonstrated valid or null hypotheses, and I think of constant questioning that demands refinement and specificity. I think of objectivity. But I guess that’s all out the window since the widespread use of Windows made everyone a journalist. To that proliferation of conjectures and falsehoods we can add podcasts and YouTube videos, posts in social media, and spam in the inboxes of email and texts.”


A: “So, we seem to be in agreement that this misinformation agency isn’t going to be a good thing.”


B: “But it is typical of an administration that leans to the Left, toward socialism and fascism. Remember that the Nazis were a ‘national socialist workers’ party.’ Their chief propagandist was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s ‘Plenipotentiary for Total War.’ So, here’s my concern—and probably the concern of many Americans: What if this woman decides to declare religious organizations, philosophy departments at universities, and conservative speakers and writers as ‘enemies of The Truth’? What happens next? What if this woman declares that Lesotho is about to attack America? What if she deceives as the Russian media deceive? Does she use the power of the federal police forces and the military to influence public opinion, maybe even to imprison Americans or confiscate their stuff? I think of the power Hitler gave to Goebbels who used it to shut parochial schools after the Pope wrote an encyclical against religious censorship by the Nazi regime. He used that power to persecute all who spoke against the Nazi regime.”


A: “But how does anyone communicate with those who favor a Misinformation Czar/Tsarina because they see opposition speech as a threat? How does one convince those who favor such an agency that they are citizens going down a path that leads to a loss of freedom not just for their current political opponents, but ultimately for them when another group rises to power? They don’t seem to realize that once a government agency is established, it runs in perpetuity, meaning that any change in administration could bring about a Czar who shuts down any free speech?”


B: “Look, we just came through a period of ‘quashing’ by social media that somehow sees logic in shutting off conservative Americans while allowing groups like the Taliban freedom of speech. If it does not occur to those in control that controls are always arbitrary, then you will never convince people who favor censorship. Most people would rather not hear what they do not want to hear.”


A: “You’re right. Controls on humans are invariably arbitrary. We can’t even agree that a control like the Ten Commandments leads to infallibility. Take killing, for example. It seems to be ‘wrong’ and proscribed, but at the same time seems to be justified in self defense, criminal punishment, and war. And we have degrees of killing from manslaughter to first degree murder. Degrees of violation abound. Nobody seems to mind an office worker taking a paperclip.  There’s a sliding scale of sin, isn’t there? So, there’s also a sliding scale of control which can be applied as the controllers see fit: A Misinformation Czar/Tsarina of any 'gender' today might find herself, himself, themself, noself, humanself, pronounless-personself censored by the next Czar/Tsarina of Misinformation. Think of that famous meeting between Christ and Pontius Pilate in which Pilate asks, ‘Quid est veritas?’ (‘Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια,’ ‘What is truth?’).”


B: “I guess we’re about to find out what truth is? Maybe ‘truthful’ people will get a ‘truth tattoo’ or some kind of official document to carry.”


A: “How deeply do you think this Czar will penetrate society? Will the kid who says, ‘The dog ate my homework’ be forever branded as a Misinformationist? What about the person who says, ‘Oh! My phone battery is dying’? What if the Misinformation Czar/Tsarina is acataleptic?”


B: “Ah cat a …”


A: “Sorry, I don’t know whether the adjective is a word. Acatalepsy or ἀκαταληψία is a philosophical term that means ‘inability to comprehend.’ What if the Czar/Tsarina is a Pyrrhonist who believes that knowledge cannot be anything other than verisimilitude? We do live in an age that is particularly susceptible to appearance over substance. First impressions, you know. I wonder whether or not she has read Sextus Empiricus' work Against the Logicians. That's the one in which Empiricus writes, 'Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge's approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is trustworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum.'* I'm going to answer myself by saying that she probably hasn't read that work."


B: “I wonder how learned the new tsarina is. Certainly, she doesn’t inspire confidence by her past actions and her adherence to the Russian Collusion and Hunter Biden laptop stories. But then, what do I know? ‘What is,’ if I may quote Pilate, ‘the Truth?’ And who, I might ask, is this woman to be its arbiter?”

*Translated by R. G. Bury, p. 179.