In short, you really can’t predict when and how your words and actions will influence others.
 
For four decades I attempted to teach well, failing, no doubt, many times. I think I might have been one of those professors whose students had little ambivalence: They seemed either to dislike (hate, maybe) or to like (love, maybe) my rather odd teaching styles. Over the decades I discovered that I never knew ahead of time whether or not a lesson, a lecture, or a lab exercise would spark some interest in my students. I assumed that if the information was part of a logical, coherent and unified lesson or set of lessons, the students would see their value.
 
Although I entered each class with internal enthusiasm and a drive to do well by my charges, I found that sometimes the words just didn’t “come out right” and that I “seemed to lose my audience.” Now, losing an audience makes any performer question his or her ability. Of course, all members of all audiences carry into the arenas of entertainment and learning their own life’s and moment’s baggage. Some audiences, as many standup comedians have discovered, are hostile, and some classes are the same. Seemingly naturally, human emotional chemistry keeps us from interacting with some people in a mutually beneficial or, at the very least, cordial way. Also, as I aged, I found myself becoming more easily judged negatively by younger students, possibly solely on the basis of my appearance and their associating me with other “older people.”   
 
But I was often wrong in my assessment of the relationship between student and professor, and I discovered that by being pleasantly surprised after class one day. After a class that I thought went poorly because my presentation in my own opinion, to put it in the vernacular, “sucked,” a student approached me to say, “That was really interesting, Professor Conte. Where can I learn more about it?” Understand this: I had no idea that such a poor lecture had done anything other than bore the students. 
 
So, in your own life, recognize that you never completely know when and how you might influence others. 

First, the hypothesis: Self-proclaimed intellectual aristocrats are often little different from those they label and deride as unintellectual mental bourgeoisie and proletariat.
 
Second, a not-too-detailed, but true anecdote from an afternoon some decades ago: I was sitting in the stands of a college baseball stadium on a southern NCAA Division I team’s campus. Teams were vying for the conference championship on that beautiful late spring day. The home town’s team drew many fans and onlookers, among them MLB scouts, long-time university supporters, parents of players, college students knocking off classes, players’ girlfriends, and some professors escaping office hours. 
 
Sitting with a parent of a visiting-team player, the two of us were enjoying the game, ignoring the crowd’s frequent loud razzing of the visiting players we were there to support. No big deal, all fans are used to loud comments aimed at visiting teams by home town fans. Razzing is ubiquitous in the sports world. The practice probably transcends time: Roman fans in the Coliseum and Aztec fans in every tiachtll yelled similarly, from booing to epitheting. As I said, no big deal. Games are temporary events by any standard of serious human interaction, events readily forgotten except in the minds of coaches, players, and the truly-committed die-hard fans. 
 
Before the game, my friend and I found seats in what we later realized was a section favored by home team fans. As we watched in the midst of antagonistic noise, we engaged in conversation about the players and the plays. But after one of the visiting players for whom we were rooting  hit a monster homerun, monster because it cleared not only the outfield fence, but also a netting strung between tall utility poles on the side of the adjacent field, my friend said in laughter and exclamation, “Holy cow, he put that onto the next field!” That’s all, nothing else. It was the first statement made by either of us that might have been audible to anyone around us. However, two college professors, a man and woman, were sitting in front of us. They looked at each other as one said, “Oh! Looks like we’re sitting with a bunch of hecklers.” And they got up and moved to another section of the stadium. Talk about needing safe spaces! A professor myself at the time, I was rather amazed at how thin-skinned the two were. My friend, also observing the couple’s actions, looked over to me in puzzlement, saying simply, “Hecklers? He had to have hit that ball 450 feet.”
 
Wait! Don’t draw any conclusions yet. This might get a bit complicated.
 
Third, something of a personal nature: Sometimes I think I’m sitting in the audience of a daily concert. The music? Why it’s by Camille Saint-Saëns. Specifically, his La Danse Macabre. The concert? It’s the 24/7 news and punditry. There’s no letup in actual nastiness and judgment from those who, upon hearing what doesn’t please them, run to some safe space, a stage on which they can pound on tympani when speaking about those they don’t favor and lightly pluck strings in a pizzicato when speaking about those they do favor. In the stands of life in these times of 24/7 news and pundit shows, the concert’s melody is backed by contrasting pizzicatos on violins and reverberating thunder from tympani. So much of the music is a repetitive phrasing. And then there are crescendos too numerous for such a short piece. Pianissimo building to fortississimo in a moment and back again, all depending on points of view. When the subject is the perceived “enemy,” anchors and pundits do the Dance of Death. That’s typical of a work by Saint-Saëns. (Think Symphony No. 3, the Organ Symphony) And it appears to be typical of the 24/7 news cycle. 
 
Frenzied news reports, always suggesting that we’re on the edge or that political adversaries are more than just political; they are life-threatening at the very least. They can’t be tolerated, especially when they voice anything, even something that is obviously true. And the tolerance for the favored group runs through the news cycle like those quiet measures in Saint-Saëns’ music played on piccolos and plucked violin strings. Pounding tympani while discussing the opposition, few are willing to admit that the other side has accomplished something worth praising, even lightly praising—sometimes not even mentioning. And few are willing to pound the tympani on the obvious failures or miscreants in their favored group. And in the audience are those whose inabilities to tolerate have been over the past century emerging like those crescendos. 
 
That homerun was by most standards a monster hit. The statement by my friend was a statement of fact. Outsiders, as in the case of the two of us, saw and noted that we were macabre to the hometown folks who ironically performed their own La Danse Macabre in their moving to find some refugium, some safe space, where nothing threatening might be heard and where everyone is of one agreeing voice. And so what one sees these many decades later is the macabre manifesting itself in name-calling (i.e., “heckler), in ad hominem attacks, in failing to recognize a truth, all while tolerating the heckling in the opposite direction. We live in a world of defensive ad hominin responses and people fleeing to safe spaces where only the likeminded occupy the seats. And strangely, as we all perform a real La Danse Macabre on our way to personal extinction, we can’t tell that what we do and say is often a mirror image of those we find macabre. 
 
Like a musical piece by Saint-Saëns, say the Organ Symphony, each news cycle ends in a whimper that suggests, “Why did we make all the fuss?” “Nothing was resolved to our liking.” and that says, “I guess what we were concerned about wasn’t quite as serious as we suggested or as worth remembering as we thought.” Life goes on; the orchestra plays another night; a new audience listens to new—yet similar—crescendos and pounding tympani. And when the home team loses because it committed an error? Well, there’s no “we were wrong,” but rather a move onto the next dance macabre. “We stand by our reporting. To retract would make the state of affairs not quite as macabre as we suggested. This is serious, folks. We need you to feel the horror. Onward to the next story, onto the next bit of macabre reporting to prove our point.” 
 
And those who make a truth-containing exclamation, such as the comment on the homerun, are dubbed as mindless hecklers, or in the vernacular of today, “conspiracy theorists.” There’s no rational debate with point and counterpoint, no attempt to measure objectively. The thin-skinned run from two postulates: 1) There can be homeruns that are definable as “monster hits” through objective measurements; and 2) there can be reasonable or logical responses to facts that do not entail ad hominem attacks or fleeing to some safe space where no one contradicts anyone because everyone in that section of the stands is of one mind. 
 
Fourth, a discussion: Just a few minutes of watching any news channel can depress even the most lighthearted and rational among us. Certainly, watching the news isn’t a day’s happy outing at the field, at least not happy for the thin-skinned who do not hold the tenets of the hometown editors. 
 
And if we do not hold the tenets of the dominant culture, the culture whose members fill the stands of the home team, we find ourselves in the section of fans that consider us, however muted and reasonable our arguments and however verifiable our facts, to be hecklers to be shunned and avoided if not derided. In that daily concert of news, every pianissimo gives immediate cause for fortississimo led by a conductor whose sweeping gestures signal performers to increase the volume, to pound on the tympani. Volume and repetitiveness substitute for reason. 
 
Weren’t there less macabre times? Could we go back to them? But even if we could take that time machine on a trip to pre-modern information technology, we might find ourselves in the midst of negative information and hecklers, albeit usually more localized. Just a couple of hundred years ago, bad news took weeks to months to traverse distances that today are crossed in a split second. More recently but still years ago, there were just a few “town criers” telling us the news on a few networks. Yes, bad things have always happened, and yes, we were informed as those in control decided to inform, but today, almost everyone is in the orchestra, almost everyone has practiced what the conductor of common thought directs. 
 
Paintings and sculptures from the Middle Ages show us the repeated themes that frighten in the Dance of Death. Back then, time and distance protected the mind and emotions from the onslaught of negative and distant affairs. Today, we can know of a tiff or an assault by people we would never encounter personally. Today, we can hear or read incendiary comments by celebrities, politicians, and people with an agenda supporting contrary values and beliefs. Today, we can watch the dance of Death half a world away and watch it 24/7. In the Middle Ages, one had to walk by a tapestry or painting to see the dance. Now, we see the dance everywhere and all the time.  
 
Where does one go for relief? Is relief even the right word here? It might be if we consider the word’s origin and historical meanings. Apparently, the word entered English in the 14th century, derived from the Old French word for “assistance,” and from the Anglo-French relif. Its literal meaning was “a raising,” or “something lifted.” Eventually, the word came to mean “alleviation of distress, or hunger, or sickness” and by extension, some mitigation or removal of pain, grief, and even evil. From the late Middle Ages on, it was used as a term during war and famine. Towns under siege looked for “relief,” and starving people looked for the same. We can think of our twenty-first century analog in the COVID-19 pandemic, as the entire world population looks for “relief.” That the word is associated with lifting is evident in the art term “bas-relief which takes the etymology back to the Latin infinitive relevare, meaning “to raise” or “to lighten.”
 
Depressed by the news? You need relief. Again, where does one go for relief? And what kind of relief should we seek. If we rely on others to provide relief, we ask them to sculpt our lives, to raise them slightly from the background. Bas-relief has no undercut surface that separates the image from the matrix surface. It’s part of the background. 
 
One could, of course, leave the theater to find some place where the orchestra, however loud, can’t be heard. That is a viable option. But seeking such a “safe space,” is temporary. There are similar orchestras playing similar music everywhere. Why should orchestras playing music one doesn’t want to hear determine how one thinks or feels? 
 
So, if finding a safe space isn’t a permanent solution, what should one do? What should you do? Here’s a list: 

1. Acknowledge that like those with whom you disagree, you also play pianississimo when you must address your own failures and misdeeds and play fortississimo when you address the failures and misdeeds of others.
2. Recognize when you choose to emphasize the macabre in others and when you choose to ignore the macabre in yourself.
3. Lest you become a hypocrite, add tympani and brass to the measures of self-criticism and pizzicato strings and light piccolos to the measures of criticism directed at others.
4. Listen to the discordant music of those you oppose to find some measures of harmony and melody or some rhythm to which you can dance.
5. Recognize that all humans eventually perform La Danse Macabre when they partner with Death, that every concert ends, and that every audience is replaced by a new audience at the next performance. (The following image is Dance of Death replica of 15th century fresco; National Gallery of Slovenia)
6. ​Recognize when a homerun is a monster homerun regardless of who hits it

Make a list of what you assume to be true, the axioms of your life. For example, I sat with a cup of coffee this morning to list my own assumptions. I might, with another cup of coffee or in a discussion with someone, decide to revise my following list of 30 assumptions. Certainly, thoughts derived during a single cup's consumption aren't the most thoroughly developed of ideas.    
 
I assume:
 
1.That I can discern the differences between most falsehoods and truths, and I can also discern the difference between Falsehood and Truth.
2.That, in contradiction to #1, I rely on emotion as well as on reason in that discernment, so that in relying on both emotion and reason, I open myself up to errors, including the possibility that #1 is a fiction I tell myself to establish psychological security.
3.That I am subject to external influences and internal drives, some of which are endemic to my species and others endemic to my physiology and neither of which I always recognize.
4.That I am at times, therefore, subject to—driven by—unrecognizable motivations.
5.That no matter how astutely I argue, I will miss the mark of becoming infallible; as a corollary, I believe that others, too, always miss that mark, giving me a way to challenge and defeat the ideas and arguments of others.
6.That because of #5, all the tenets and conclusions of philosophy and psychology are subject to unending debate or refinement.  
7.That regardless of my assumption that I can discern between both truths and Truth and their antitheses (#1) and because of my assumption that I cannot be infallible (#5), I am ultimately a relativist no matter how I strive to find or live by absolutes.  
8.That as a relativist (#7), I can always find a justification for any action because I cannot avoid arguing on the basis of a situation, that is, on the basis of the circumstance at hand or in light of my limitations (#7).
9.That I am, regardless of my attempts to be otherwise, shortsighted.
10.That my shortsightedness can sometimes be countered by happenstance, making me in retrospect look to be farsighted.
11.That like minds can join readily, but that unlike minds only rarely join.
12.That because of #11, human social and political interactions occur in mental mazes with few and difficult-to-find intersections.
13.That out-of-body experiences, while rare, are possible not because of floods of neurotransmitters, but rather because mind is not limited to the boundaries of the brain.
14.That because of #13, #11 is possible.
15.That a complete explanation of Nature is impossible; and, as a corollary, since I am part of Nature, that I will always remain somewhat mysterious to others and to myself.
16.That I am the Cosmos temporarily and partially conscious of itself.
17.That a complete explanation of consciousness is impossible.
18.That humans and animals can be simultaneously aware of circumstances and perceive them similarly.
19.That as a result of that simultaneity of awareness, both humans and animals can act in concert.
20.That free will, though impossible to demonstrate irrefutably, shapes personal and human history and drives all forms of entrepreneurship.
21.That I have a physical reality regardless of my knowledge that matter is itself inexplicably composed mostly of nothing.
22.That place and life are intertwined and that they mutually affect each other’s form and function.
23.That place is more significant than time.
24.That physical laws on which the Cosmos operates are endemic to this universe and are, therefore, part of this universe.
25.That the Cosmos did not, as Stephen Hawking argued, come into existence from nothing because physical law demanded it since by definition nothing could have no physical law.
26.That the Cosmos did have a beginning and that contrary to the belief of some physicists that the universe is part of an infinite regress of “branes” or previous universes (the old “it’s turtles all the way down” story), any such explanation is untenable.
27.That although much in the universe seems to make the appearance of consciousness either unlikely or unlikely to persist after its establishment, that the universe, having originated from nothing had to have a conscious creator.
28.That all attempts to explain a Creator fall prey to relativism (#7).
29.That a belief in a Creator, regardless of my admitted relativism, is more acceptable than any belief or argument that the laws of nature demanded Being’s being.
30.That an evolving Cosmos with its endemic evolving life is an undeniable reality as evidenced by historical and current phenomena and processes.

“You remember Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper?”
 
“Never the read it, but saw the movie when I was a kid.”
 
“Which one. There was a popular version with Errol Flynn, the Mauch twins, and Claude Rains. I saw that on TV one rainy afternoon. I also saw the one with another famous cast: Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston—yeah, the guy who played all those people in robes and armor in El Cid, Moses, Ben-Hur—George C. Scott—yeah, famous for Patton—and Oliver Reed of Oliver, and both Three and then Four Musketeers, plus Gladiator. Lots of actors have played the characters. Twain’s story has been so popular that there have been about as many adaptations as there are elements in the Periodic Table. Even Mickey Mouse, Garfield, and Barbie have versions. Oh! And not just Hollywood versions; there’s a Bollywood version and even a Netflix version. And I read that Thomas Edison made a version in 1909. As I said, as numerous as the elements, all these versions bombard us like unstoppable cosmic rays.”
 
“I think I saw the one with Raquel Welch.”

“Raquel Welch? Who could forget? What do you mean ‘I think I saw’?”
 
“Okay, I know I saw Raquel Welch. Fantastic Voyage, One Million Years B.C., Lady in Cement…”
 
“Let me guess. You’re a Raquel Welch fan.”
 
“Are you related to Richard Conte? He starred in Lady in Cement with her and Frank Sinatra.”
 
“Not to my knowledge, but then don’t most of us who share the same name have some common family background by biology or marriage, kinda like the elements, look different, but are all made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Some underlying Conte thread. But I have to confess. Raquel Welch, “The Summer of George” episode of Seinfeld! You know, actors and actresses are like elements and their isotopes. You recognize Raquel Welch no matter what part she plays, from comedy to tragedy, from movies to TV and stage. But as an actress, her characters are different from her real character; the outward stuff always hides the inner realities. Fans’ assumptions about actresses and actors are always based on incomplete knowledge. Did you read her bio? I’m thinking about her becoming a big star on the basis of a role as a microscopic human being in Fantastic Voyage or on the basis of her saying only three lines in One Million B.C., a movie about the past that cast her into the present. Who could forget that animal-skin bikini?  But I digress.”
 
“Look at us. Started talking about Twain’s story and ended up with drooling over Raquel Welch.”
 
“Geez. The mind unravels on a single thread of thought. But that’s like all our thinking and discussing. One thought leads to another. Start out with hydrogen and end up at uranium all in the brilliance of some burst of explosive digressions.”
 
“Prince and the Pauper.”
 
“Right. I was thinking about how Prince and the Pauper, about two kids who look alike but who had different backgrounds ended up being in the same place and apparently playing roles that showed similarities and differences.”
 
“Why?”
 
“It dawned on me that the singer-songwriters Prince and Cyndi Lauper are in some ways the same and some ways very different. And that got me to thinking about Twain’s story and about a recent discovery about cosmic rays.”
 
“Your mind never fails to fascinate and exasperate.”
 
“Well, both Prince, sorry, the Late Prince or however one’s supposed to say his symbol-name, and Lauper arrived on the music scene about the same time, definitely both stars of the 1980s. Both talented composers. Some might say they had meteoric rises to success, but I prefer to think that they hit the music world like incoming cosmic rays, both causing bunches of imitators to mimic their compositions. You know what I just thought of?”
 
“No.”
 
“You know how Twain’s story is about guys who look alike and how the roles have been played by twins like the Mauch brothers? Wasn’t Prince or Love Symbol from the Twin Cities area?”
 
“Yeah. Your mental thread’s unravelling again.”
 
“Sorry. Anyway, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper—had to say it—could be a story written by a group of physicists. So, both are musicians. Both have been popular musicians. Both shaped the music industry. Both came on the scene like cosmic rays. But both were different forms of popular musicians. I know, I’m pushing the metaphor. Anyway, though many in the so-called serious world of music might have dismissed their work as mere pop music, both of those songwriters made their mark on the world of music, Prince in Purple Rain and Lauper in Kinky Boots, which tells the tale of two people who seem radically different but who discover their similarities. Just like a cosmic ray producing other cosmic rays, so the music of Prince and the Cyndi Lauper did the same, producing so many similar trends from their original songs.”
 
“Whoa. That isn’t entirely true. Isn’t one of Prince’s songs the center of a plagiarism case in Italy?”
 
“Oh! Right. But there’s much in his music that is original. Okay, so the ISS has a gizmo called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It can detect cosmic rays and measure their energies. So, without going into it too much, this AMS device on the Space Station discovered that iron cosmic rays don’t have the identities they were thought to have, that they are very much like the so-called cosmic rays of helium, carbon, and oxygen, the so-called ‘lighter’ cosmic rays. And I don’t think anyone knows the reason any more than anyone could tell the difference between the Prince and the Pauper in novel or film. They look alike but are different; the iron cosmic rays were thought to be different but look the same, or act the same as lighter elements’ rays as detected by the AMS. Same and different. A heavy element acting like a light element.”
 
“You made me engage in a conversation about Twain’s story and Raquel Welch just to tell me that iron cosmic rays act like lighter element cosmic rays?”
 
“Well, not completely. You know how on the surface we are different? How we distinguish among ourselves on the basis of obvious physical characteristics?”

“Yeah.”
 
“So, I was thinking about how unexpected similarities bind us, make us twins in a sense. How it took a special detector on the Space Station to find out that iron cosmic rays have energies—actually, the ‘rigidity dependence of the flux’ in iron is identical to the fluxes of helium, carbon, and oxygen cosmic rays. What we thought was so different wasn’t. Now, what if we had a detector that showed us more of our similarities than our differences?”
 
“Nice thought, but not the reality of human interaction. It took a bunch of scientists and engineers to make your Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, put it on the Space Station, and read its data. * That was a pretty big effort. And even with all those bright minds at work trying to explain their findings, no one has a clear idea why a heavy element like iron acts like a light element like helium, how the two seem to belong to the same class of cosmic rays and not to different classes as people previously thought. You’re not going to get ordinary people to go through that effort just to get a similar result of not understanding how different people can be so much the same, can have so much in common. It’s easier in our everyday world to classify on the bases of differences, like number of legs, spiders with eight and insects with six—the obvious stuff, people with certain features, the Neanderthal-inherited European bigger nose and lighter skin color, the people with more almond-shaped eyes, and so on. Of course, I guess you can say it’s just as easy to group by similarities, putting all the insects together, for example.”
 
“But it’s the hidden similarities that I’m thinking about. Twins appearing to be the same, but different. People appearing to be the same, but different in reality, like Edward the VI and his lookalike Tom Canty in Twain’s story. Okay, let me say it another way. Iron seems different from other elements in both real and superficial ways. It’s heavier than helium, carbon, and oxygen, but deep down, it’s the same because it’s made of the same subatomic stuff. And now we know that its cosmic rays should be grouped with those lighter elements’ cosmic rays rather than with heavier elements’ cosmic rays. What’s expected by the surface appearance or characteristics is contradicted by what’s deep down, and what’s deep down actually makes iron similar.
            “It’s a strange, a confounding universe. So much that seems different is very much the same and so much that seems the same is very much different. Prince and the Pauper, Prince and the Cyndi Lauper, and iron and helium cosmic rays. I guess the universe really is a place of paradoxes. Maybe it’s just one big Paradox, one filled with irony for those with a sense of humor and seriousness or despair for those without a sense of humor.”
 
“As usual, or should I say, ‘yousual,’ you go around the long way, like some cosmic ray wending its way across the galaxy, across the whole universe, just to make a point. But I have to say that with this one, you do what cosmic rays do when they enter the realm of Earth’s atmosphere, you make secondary rays of electrons, positrons, muons, and pions: I guess those secondary rays are my thoughts about human similarities and differences and how they aren’t necessarily what they seem to be or are expected to be.”
 
“Oh! Yeah. Sorry, I lapsed back into that thought of Raquel Welch in her animal-skin bikini.” ** 
 
Note:
*Lopes, Ana. 17 Mar 2021. AMS reveals properties of iron cosmic rays: The properties are unexpectedly different from those of other primary heavy cosmic rays. CERN. Online at https://home.cern/news/news/physics/ams-reveals-properties-iron-cosmic-rays  Accessed June 19, 2021.
 
**Yes, you can see that picture of Welch in the bikini. It’s online at https://www.thatmomentin.com/one-million-years-b-c-and-that-animal-skin-bikini/

“We’re all a bit too involved in our cultures to see how they influence our perspectives. Even when we look in a mirror, social commonality influences the view. There’s just no mirror into which we can peer without seeing some culturally derived distortion or manifestation of Self. 
     “But even if there were a perfect mirror that yielded a perfect reflection, one even more precisely ground than those big telescope mirrors, the act of seeing lies mostly within, all of us seeming to have developed cataracts in the brain’s visual centers. Those wavy lenses interfere with clear seeing and prevent us from recognizing commonality’s control over individuality. Maybe if we had eyes in the back of the head closer to the occipital lobe’s neurons, we might get a better view. Then that common expression, “Just be yourself” we hear given to teenagers and to TV characters in quandaries over their desires for affections, might be realistic advice.
     “We see what we’ve been trained to see in ourselves through four brain centers involved in vision, one of which is the memory-active temporal lobe that helps us understand what we see. And since enculturation is a matter of memory, the temporal lobe’s job in vision is to assign meaning based on experience and training. I recognize objects through memory. Apparently, I recognize Self similarly.
     “We think we’re wise old owls, capable of seeing through obscurity and darkness. Sure, owls do have good night vision. But there’s a price they pay for those large eyes. Unlike us, owls have to move their heads because their eyes are fixed in place by sclerotic rings. Culture likewise fixes our vision centers and lessens our ability to see peripherally and to move our perceptions, so we often accept the ostensible reality as the independently-confirmable reality. With regard to Self, we frequently remember rather than observe.”  
 
“Selfies. Selfies show us who we are,” you say. “I can take a pic of myself and see what I look like. I know who and what I am through introspection, and though I acknowledge I might be blind to my connections to my culture just the way I can’t hear my dialect or in hearing it, think nothing of its identifiable distinctiveness, I understand my nature; I see ME. I see through the shroud of culture. I see myself.”
 
“Really?” I ask, “When you look at a Selfie, don’t you still see what your culture has told you is important to see? What if I said every Selfie is actually a group pic that reflects family, tribe, and region? What if I said that the only true individuals are feral children, kids raised by animals? They don’t do well in society because they lack all those connections you have developed over your lifetime. Some feral children, after being found, fail to acquire even the most basic of cultural skills, the use of verbal language. You can find lists of such people online. Wikipedia has an article on feral children, both real and fictional, the latter including the hoaxes and fictional characters like Tarzan.”
 
“Meaning? Are you saying I’m not an individual?”
 
“You ask a pertinent question. No, I’m not. There’s some individuality in there, something recognizable in the mirror or in the Selfie or in the eyes of others, particularly as vision wends its way through that temporal lobe to the back of the brain. But all of us are reflections of our culture. Those who see you, see as they’ve learned to see either as members inside your culture or as outsiders. Even hermits have a cultural heritage, albeit one they believe they have rejected and left. I suppose the only exception to our group nature is that rare feral child I mentioned. But then, too, there are those species traits, the ingrained patterns of movement, neurological responses to physical stimuli, species abilities, and limitations that are all part of an evolutionary history. I can’t, for example, run on tree branches like a squirrel. A feral child named Saturday Mifune, found in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, was supposedly raised Tarzan-like by monkeys; at 17 he reportedly still moved monkey-like and couldn’t talk, and he had no human socialization skill, none whatsoever. But with regard to those non-cultural aspects of human life, note that he moved ‘monkey-LIKE.’ Consider the word after that hyphen, like. With longer straighter legs than his monkey parents and guardians, his greater natural ability for bipedalism, and structurally slightly different attachment between hip and femur, different number of lumbar bones, and that opposable thumb, Saturday’s movements were imitations at best and distinguishable as such. Yet, he was steeped in monkey culture. Observers could distinguish his human nature from his adherence to monkey culture and his anomalous human behavior.”
 
“Yes, I get it. I know what you are saying. Saturday looked human, right? He had human genes, human biology. I’ll grant that all humans have much in common on some fundamental species level. And biology is different from psychology. I’ll also agree that culture shapes behavior, attitude, idea, and that it informs observation. I’m also going to grant you that each of us reflects a cultural heritage and that because of our connections we are identifiable by our culture, by our viewpoints, even by our mannerisms. Everyone carries some tribal mannerism. That’s always evident when we look at brothers or sisters and see something they have in common or have in common with one or both parents, like basic appearance, for example, or gait, or facial expression. I’m sure we can identify commonality because we speak of idioms, of idiomatic expressions, many of which are not translatable beyond some literal meaning. 
     “But everyone adds some difference to the picture. Everyone sees someone different in the mirror, sees those variations however subtle they are. Your Saturday Mifune didn’t have the opportunity to acquire those community skills and mannerisms as a kid, and we all know that among kids reared in a human culture that those exposed to only one language as a child usually end up having an ‘accent’ when they learn a second language after the brain shuts neurons off to certain sounds. I saw an experiment once with a baby and an English-speaking adult who were tested to see if they could tell the difference between homophones and homonyms easily recognized by a native Inuit-speaking adult. The baby could tell the difference; the English-speaking adult could not hear the differences. Probably, Saturday Mifune’s brain had shut down unused neurons that might have been trained by human culture. As always, I have to ask what brought this topic to the surface of your mind. What made you start
 
“Complementary cognition.” *
 
“What’s that?”
 
“It’s a different hypothesis that its three proponents say is an ‘explanatory framework for why language and many aspects of cooperation evolved.’ They call it ‘a new theory of human cognitive evolution,’ though I would call label it an hypothesis.”
 
“Tell me.”
 
“Helen Taylor, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight published an article on what they call the evolution of complementary cognition. They say that humans have cooperatively adapted and evolved through what they term a ‘system of collective cognitive search.’ To call it a theory is to jump ahead of the research game, that’s a bit of hubris on their part. But as an hypothesis worth pursuing, I think they might be onto something.
     “What they propose is that you and I as individuals are ‘individually specialized in different but complementary neurocognitive search strategies’ and that we ‘regulate search for adaptive information at the group level, adapting cooperatively.’ They say this is an emergent system of collective cognitive search they call Complementary Cognition.”
 
“So far I’ve heard ‘blah-blah-blah.”
 
“Well, I can’t give you their whole argument. Essentially, because we live in a complex world with high variability and uncertainty, individual humans couldn’t possibly have found the answers to success and survival on their own; they needed some form of cooperation, some kind of group search for solutions that provided ‘efficiency and capability in search.’ It’s this ‘system of collective cognitive search’ that has enabled us to pool our individual abilities to solve problems’ that accounts for the success of our species on this challenging planet.”
 
“What’s this search stuff?”
 
“It’s a process of exploring and exploiting resources. The three authors go into it at length, but I like to think of it simply as not eating poisonous fruits like yew berries.”
 
“Yew berries?”
 
“Somehow a long time before I existed, someone discovered, maybe by becoming very sick or by watching someone else get sick that yew berries, holly berries, mistletoe, and belladonna are bad for humans. That collective discovery was passed down—unfortunately, not to everyone. The people who tried nightshade were part of a ‘search’ that produced a common wisdom and mechanism for survival.
            “I can’t think of a better example than the Life cereal commercial of the 1970s. Three brothers are sitting at a table with Life cereal in a bowl. The two older brothers argue about trying the cereal for the first time. They get the idea that their three-and-a-half-year-old brother Mikey, a picky eater, should try it. Mikey tries the cereal and they exclaim, ‘He likes it! Hey, Mikey!’ I guess ‘Mikey likes it’ is the best example I can give for complementary cognition. With regard to all those poisonous foods we don’t eat, I guess someone said, ‘Don’t eat that. Remember what happened to Mikey.’ By the way, that commercial ran so often over more than a decade that it became a part of the American idiom. And Mikey, played by John Gilchrist became the center for a conspiracy theory: He supposedly died when he swallowed a mixture of Coca Cola and Pop Rocks. He didn’t. But the story is the kind of ‘search’ that the collective does in order to survive. Sure, there are many false cognitions. Some keep people from succeeding and whole populations from succeeding, such as the ‘tough guy, anti-learning culture of many inner-city youths.’ That’s a pop-rock-Coke search gone terribly wrong and one that doesn’t lead to adaptive success. And there are many famous Mikeys and influencers out there who convince large groups to adopt a strategy of life. I’m thinking of comedians who get audiences to laugh and applaud over jokes about being an addict, and peer groups that convince themselves to act in ways detrimental to their survival, like the Heaven’s Gate community or the Jonestown community that committed suicide.
            This Complementary Cognition ‘theory’ is an analog of Darwin’s notion of evolution through natural selection. The authors say Darwin identified a ‘search process by which successful adaptations are inherited and updated.’ You and I are a product of an unknown number, certainly a very large one, of searches by our ancestors, and even today, you and I participate in similar searches, though the risks have been lessened by all those Mikeys who learned the lessons of survival and resource exploitation the hard way.”
 
“No doubt, as usual, you are going to draw some lesson from this.”
 
“I think that Taylor, Fernandes, and Wraight might consider exploring Complementary Stupidity in their follow-up studies. Whereas it is apparent that we have conducted ‘searches’ that have led to successful exploitations of resources, it is also apparent to me that we are just as prone to complementary stupidity from false searches, like the experiment of Nazi Germany that destroyed so many lives. That nation’s group search for some ideal form and its group think led to its destruction. What intrigues me is that the complementary cognition they provided by failure like the complementary cognition provided by the failed Soviet Union hasn’t been passed down as an irrefutable sign to the current generation. 
            “So, I might accept their hypothesis that they call theory that collective ‘searches’ in biological and societal evolution have enabled or species to survive, but I don’t accept that all such collective ‘search strategies’ ultimately lead to survival solutions. You know that old expression that you can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time? Maybe you can. Certainly, that was what happened in Germany—okay, I exaggerate. Yes, there were some Germans who saw that collective cognition wasn’t going to end well. The question for us, today, is whether or not we can act both individually and collectively realize those ‘searches’ that will not lead us to better lives. Whenever we fail to recognize detrimental searches, we’re mixing Pop Rocks and Coke, yew berries and nightshade, anti-intellectualism and crime, heroin and meth, and Communism and Socialism. Just because someone called Mikey likes it doesn’t mean it’s good. But I'll grant that we need--and have needed--many Mikeys to try something in order for our species to survive.”
 
*Taylor, Helen, Brice Fernandes, and Sarah Wraight. 16 June 2021. The Evolution of Complementary Cognition: Humans Cooperatively Adapt and Evolve through a System of Collective Cognitive Search. Cambridge University Press, Online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/evolution-of-complementary-cognition-humans-cooperatively-adapt-and-evolve-through-a-system-of-collective-cognitive-search/F198B30682343E92C7E9C986332D380A   Accessed June 16, 2021. Although I find some of what the three write to be, in part, mere neologism, I believe they have an approach worth considering in regard to individuality and enculturation. Complementary cognition seems to me to be an undeniable part of human interaction and a process that has led to both positive and negative results. You know, the old “If famous So-n-So jumped off a cliff….”

Primer: Snails might be known for their lack of speed, but they are also known for their ability to reproduce in great numbers. After they invade, they can dominate an ecological niche and wipe out a native population. 
 
After invasive rosy wolf snail species were introduced to the Society Islands, it wiped out most of the native snail species, but not one labeled Partula hyalina. The white-shelled P. hyalina survives in the sunlit edges of forests because the rosy wolf can’t tolerate the sunlight. Essentially, P. hyalina hides from the predator in the daylight. *
 
Antithetical Analog: After invasive Communists introduced themselves into American academies, they became as proportionally numerous as the rosy wolf and devoured positions once occupied by Capitalist-leaning, free-thinking professors. But unlike the rosy wolf snails in the Society Islands, this invasive academic species of Communists adapted. At first sticking to the shadows, they proliferated and now appear to have adapted to the light, where they hide in plain sight. That is bad news for the Capitalist-leaning professors who are the reverse analogs of P. hyalina. Because of cancel culture predation, they now have to hide in relative darkness lest they lose their jobs or undergo censure on the road to eventual extinction. 
 
*U. of Michigan. 15 June 2021. Snails carrying the world’s smallest computer help solve mass extinction survivor mystery. Phys.Org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-snails-world-smallest-mass-extinction.html   Accessed June 15, 2021. 

 Ever feel you are the de facto or default “little guy”? You’re the powerless one in the path of forces well beyond your control? That you can see what others who should be able to see similarly just don’t see what is obvious to you? Helplessness isn’t uncommon. In a world of constant verbal turmoil, where those who want to stir the fires of civil unrest can do so with a click on a computer, yes, in that world of social media and media stages for those who veer too far right or left in your reasoned opinion, you might feel you have little control and that those who should exert the control you seek just fail by simple mental inertia. You see that one of the problems is, in fact, inertia in a large society encompassed by a bureaucracy for every aspect of human endeavor. Imagine a conversation between a frustrated guy who found out that research that could be used to prevent a potential outbreak or to control its effects wasn’t being fast-tracked and his friend who understands the nature of bureaucracies, even health agency bureacracies. 
 
Frustrated Guy. “What’s a layperson to do? I don’t have access to a lab, don’t have expertise or time to run year-long or multi-year multifaceted or double-blind experiments, and don’t have the power to force government health-care bureaucrats to pursue some research that they don’t favor.”
 
Friend. “Let me guess. You are probably thinking about how slowly biological research advances when you need a rapid response as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. But no one has the funding to pursue research that would eliminate potential disasters.”
 
Frustrated Guy. “Yep. Sure, we got vaccines faster than usual in 2020. The panic-mode drove us under Operation Warp Speed to dive into previous research to find those RNA-based vaccines. But think of how long those RNA studies languished without coming to fruition until the pandemic struck. It took a pandemic to overcome that inertia. Where’s the NIH been? Where’s WHO been? What about preventing the next one?”
 
Friend. “Yeah, no doubt another one is just around the corner.” 
 
Frustrated Guy. “I just read that camels are carrying MERS-CoV and that it is just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic. * All it’s gonna take is for an African dromedary to go to the Middle East and make the return trip. It’ll pick up the more contagious and deadly version of MERS-CoV, carry it back to Africa, and spread it to Saharan people and from there to the world.”
 
Friend. “Whoa. Camels?”
 
Frustrated Guy. “Dromedaries, not Bactrian camels. Gotta get your hump-count right.”
 
Friend. “Okay, I’m hooked. What’s this about?”
 
Frustrated Guy. “Three things, really. Hard to keep epidemic diseases straight nowadays, but if you remember, in 2021 MERS-CoV was found in Saudi Arabia, a dangerous form that has the knack of killing 40% of those it infects. Well, it seems that the disease has a refuge in dromedaries that might have gotten it from—you guess—bats. Anyway, that’s the first thing to think about. The second one is something that investigators—even people in the Congress—are seeking answers to, you know, whether or not some gain-of-function research was the cause of COVID-19. Now, here’s the scary third thing. I just read that some researchers took variants of MERS-CoV found in African and Middle Eastern dromedaries and discovered that if they genetically engineered one of the African variant’s amino acids, it becomes more transmissible. That’s gain-of-function research. So, here we are in 2021 thinking, ‘Woo! We’re getting to the end of this thing.’ And while we’re breathing more easily without masks, there’s a group out there experimenting on something that might put masks back on our faces.”
 
Friend. “All those scary movies like Twelve Monkeys and Outbreak are becoming real-life.”
 
Frustrated Guy. “Yes. If people are correct in saying that a lab developed COVID-19, we’re already living those movies.”
 
Friend. “So, what’s this that got your wire spectacles so twisted?”
 
Frustrated Guy. “Well, I was thinking about how bureaucracies work, how they are big, and how once any human gets put in charge of something there’s a mess-up waiting to happen. And there’s no one for the little guy to blame. Bureaucracies, like governments, protect their own, protect their interests. That’s what got me to thinking I about diamidobenzimidazole.”
 
Friend. “Diamid what?”
 
Frustrated Guy. “I know. It’s a mouthful of letters. So many letters that you need a toothpick to get them out of your teeth. Anyway, it’s been shortened to diABZI-4.”
 
Friend. “What is it?”
 
Frustrated Guy.  “It’s a compound. It’s a carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen-oxygen compound. I don’t know all the subscript numbers. It’s a potential so-called STING agonist; it has something to do with stimulating interferon genes—that’s what STING stands for. I guess it can be used to prevent a virus from infecting because it ups the prophylaxis effect; and I hear its effective, or might be effective against COVID-19 and maybe that dromedary-spread disease. It’s anti-viral.”
 
Friend. “Sounds good. What’s your problem?”
 
Frustrated Guy. “It’s not available now, and it reminds me of experiences I’ve had with the biases and inertia of bureaucrats. I’m going to go around a mountain of digression here to get to that. Years ago, I went to a Department of Energy conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. There were presentations on a number of energy problems—we were still energy dependent on OPEC and other oil producers. Anyway, entrepreneurial small companies presented their solutions to problems like what to do with nuclear power plant waste. One set of guys proposed enclosing radioactive wastes in glass or in glass-like substances. They had it all worked out, even had samples and diagrams of the process. But as in all government gatherings, some favored theory, group, or process got the stage. The glass guys got little attention though I thought they had something worth examining and debating at length. Now here’s another digression—a digression within a digression, but I digress. I was on the phone with someone from the National Science Foundation, also years ago, asking about oceanographic institutes where I might go to do research during a sabbatical leave. The guy on the phone started to list institutes in a hierarchy of prestige. Now, I know that doesn’t sound interesting or related to the energy conference, but to me it reveals that those who work in government agencies have their biases and preferences. In other words, if someone has a potential solution to a problem that the government could support, the first obstacle is the person in charge of the funding. That person doesn’t necessarily make decisions on the basis of pure science or logic, but rather on the basis of reputation. People with ‘track records’ of research get to stay on the tracks until they disappear at the ‘vanishing point’ by retiring or dying.
            “So, when someone with a novel idea comes along, like putting the nuclear wastes in glass, the presenter gets the proverbial short shrift—though I don’t know that shrift, or confession, is the right term. If the powers-that-be aren’t in favor of the idea, the idea dies of neglect. So, when a group of people now say that diABI-4 has promise as a viral prophylaxis, if that group of people doesn’t have the right reputation or isn’t associated with the ‘right’ lab, then the government funders put the proposal on the bottom of the pile.” 
 
Friend. “Bureaucrats. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t keep them from proliferating. Certainly, can’t get them to act swiftly and efficiently. All that paperwork. But what can you expect from agencies grown larger than small countries? Look at all the government waste. Heck, I just heard that more than 300 million bucks of stimulus money can’t be accounted for and might have been stolen by foreign interests.”
 
Frustrated Guy. “And now we have to consider that Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS-CoV, is hiding in dromedaries AND in some lab. Back in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, it was deadly. If it mutates and makes its way back to the African continent by way of some traded dromedary, it might start another pandemic. Right now the trade in dromedaries is a one-way street, going from Africa to the Middle East. But what if it reverses? Why should we have to wait to develop this kind of STING therapy?” **
 
Friend. “I guess that’s why we are called the ‘little guys.’ For all our supposed sophistication, we aren’t much better prepared for an epidemic than those fourteenth-century victims of the Black Death. For all our affluence, we find ourselves at the mercy of some accidental or purposeful release of disease. Accidents are inevitable, but so are actions by people and whole governments with malicious intent.”
 
Frustrated Guy. “And now that we know after the mainstream media shut down reporting on the surmised leak out of a Wuhan lab, where research was conducted with funding indirectly funneled by the NIH, gain-of-function research is the suspected likely cause of the pandemic, what are we supposed to do with gain-of-function research on MERS-CoV found in dromedaries? Do we ask the governments of many countries to shut down that research? Or do we ask governments to expedite research into STING therapies? And in either request, do we expect a response? You know that we’re likely to be dismissed because we are the ‘little guys’ who need to mind our own business while the ‘professionals’ handle what we don’t understand. Geez. We laypeople can’t say the word diamidobenzimidazole any better than a first grader learning to read phonetically. I think you can understand my frustration.”
 
Friend. “I do, and I don’t have a solution. Maybe I’ll just stock up on toilet paper, masks, nitrile gloves, and canned goods in case someone lets MERS-CoV with its variant amino acid escape a lab and enter the general population. Then I’ll turn on the TV and watch people with an agenda whose supposed job is unbiased investigation refuse to hold accountable those responsible because of some political viewpoint. And I’ll watch health officials stand before cameras to say, ‘Hey, don’t look at me. These things happen. We want everyone to wear as many masks as there are blades in a Gillette razor.’” 
  
Notes:
*Yirka, Bob. 8 June 2021. MERS-CoV just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic threat. MedXpress. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-mers-cov-mutations-pandemic-threat.html   Accessed June 8, 2021. See Ziqi, Zhou et al. Phenotypic and genetic characterization of MERS coronaviruses from Africa to understand their zoonotic potential. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021)  DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103984118
 
**Fessenden, Jim. 11 June 2021. Research identifies potential antiviral compound for COVID-19, flu, other viral infection. MedXpress online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-potential-antiviral-compound-covid-flu.html   Accessed June 12, 2021.  See also Fiachra Humphries et al. A diamidobenzimidazole STING agonist protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Science Immunology (2021) DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.abi9002   Accessed June 14, 2021. 
Also consider this. A group of doctors and medical researchers pleaded with Congress to get the government moving on Ivermectin as a therapy for COVID-19. They were met with political responses and scoffed at. But then the National Library of Medicine released this statement in February, 2021: "Ivermectin, a US Food and Drug Administration-approved anti-parasitic agent, was found to inhibit severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) replication in vitro...There were no severe adverse drug events recorded in the study. A 5-day course of ivermectin was found to be safe and effective in treating adult patients with mild COVID-19." The doctors seem to have been vindicated. Politics and bureaucrats blocked and mocked, and while they did so, people died. Real people with real loved ones who might have been saved by a rapid and unbiased response to the advice and research of the doctors. See Ahmed, Sabeena, et al. A five-day course of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 may reduce the duration of illness. PubMed.gov. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.11.191, Online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/​

If the mind had a mechanism that automatically shut off anger, keeping it in check, the world might—nay, would--be more peaceful. But there’s a catch. Conflict isn’t always a matter of emotion. Sure, emotions play a significant role in individual and group conflict, but reason also plays a role, especially in larger conflicts. Although there are psychological mechanisms useful in quashing anger and calming the inner brain by connecting it to the outer brain, such as Dr. Christian Conte’s successful Yield Theory, * there is a need for some mental mechanism that keeps those larger conflicts driven mostly by the outer brain from growing larger.  
 
Conflict engendered by the frontal lobe is often the driver of violence between and among nations, especially when the leaders of a country reason they have something useful to gain through conflict with another country, such as its energy or metal reserves or maybe some maritime or continental trade route. Frontal lobes can justify almost any action through a philosophy of utilitarianism. 
 
World War II’s Pacific Theater battles were a consequence of an island nation with few natural resources invading other countries. Japan’s invasions of the Asian mainland and various islands was motivated in part by a need for oil. Its attack on Pearl Harbor was its reasoned response to a major obstacle to its acquisition of resources, especially in the context of sanctions imposed by America after the invasion of China. 
 
Utility can drive a runaway rationality that justifies conquering and enslaving. It has been used to justify slavery and serfdom since the rise of agriculture and widespread commerce, and, as in the case of the Pacific Theater in the mid-twentieth century, to justify conquests of foreign lands. No doubt, utility will provide the rationale for future conflicts that will, like those of the past, grow large as reasons pile on reasons till the tower collapses. Japan needed resources for its growing population and military. Japan conquered resources. The United States reasoned differently. Japan attacked. The United States reasoned a response. And so on and so on until the reasonable conclusion in 1945 was to drop atomic bombs “to save lives” under the premise that an invasion of Japan would cost a predicted million casualties. Thus, in utility, “only” the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were killed. Seemed to be reasonable actions to Truman and the US military.
 
In a study of cell growth published in Science by Marco D’Ario and others, the researchers revealed that eukaryotic cells can assess and maintain sizes endemic to their species by regulating the amount of KRP4, a protein. The protein “inhibits the progression to DNA synthesis.” ** In short, to keep their size “normal” and symmetric in a plant species, cells regulate their growth by waiting for KRP4 to accumulate or by waiting until excess KRP4 is diluted. Cells, in effect, adjust their “growth period before DNA synthesis.” The process avoids both stunted growth and runaway growth; KRP4 serves as a control on homeostasis and on mutant forms. It is neither emotional nor reasonable; it is simply a cellular process that governs size. 
 
We need an analog of KRP4 on a global scale. The United Nations doesn’t effectively serve as an analog because it reacts to, more than anticipates, conflict already ballooning. In contrast, cells anticipate. They control mutant growth before growth begins. Is it not strange that on the simplest level of organized life, there is an effective control on growth that doesn’t exist on life’s most complex level of human interactions? 
 
D’Ario et al. showed that KRP4 serves as a repeatable mechanism that dampens cell size variability and runaway growth. There’s utility in that. And it might be praiseworthy for humans to find a similar mechanism to keep battles from becoming wars. In the absence of historical knowledge, we might expect the frontal lobe, the seat of utilitarianism, to reason that an expanding war is detrimental to the species. But we have a history of warfare based on rational utilitarianism that reveals the “utility” of one nation, which seems rational, can run counter to the perceived utility of another country. That circumstance has occurred over and over on a planet with geographically unequal distributions of resources that are made more unequal by national, and therefore, artificial borders. 
 
Because of historical and ongoing incidents of hegemony based on unequal distribution of resources, some people argue that there should be no borders, no ownership. Their argument, however, seemingly based on a general utility and a rational way to eliminate conflict, fails by omission: It leaves out the role played by that other driver of conflict, the inner brain. Those who believe that borders are the root causes of conflicts believe that reason is the key to peace. Millennia of warfare generated by utilitarian reasoning don’t play a role in their worldview. That’s a naïve perspective.  
 
Utilitarianism’s appeal as a rational system misguides; we have evidence in slavery and war. In the American South before and during the Civil War, one argument for the continuation of slavery was the practical need for cheap and abundant labor on large plantations. It was, of course, a time before rapid advances in technology made machine labor available. Slavery, however unethical and immoral, was “utilitarian.” But the inner brain always plays its role. Working in the cotton fields was one matter; serving as household butlers, maids, and sex slaves, another. The former was driven by utilitarian reasoning; the latter, by the “utility” arising from the selfish inner brain. 
 
Reason. Emotion. Both can generate inhuman conditions, injustice, injury, death, and war. Both have their utility. Both allow small cells of action to grow either geometrically or exponentially. Both establish patterns of behavior that can be detrimental. Both have convinced theologians that war can be justifiable and that destroying, injuring, and killing in a “justifiable war” are moral acts. Thus, out of Buddhism, we have a 2,000-year history of monks trained in martial arts, supposedly originating in part from the reasoned need to defend monasteries like the famous Shaolin retreat from bandits. Seems reasonable; seems utilitarian. We have the biblical wars between the Jews and their civil and religious adversaries, such as the followers of Ba’al. We have the religiously motivated conquests of Islam. We have the religiously motivated Crusades and the wars in the Americas perpetrated by the Conquistadores. We have the religiously motivated wars of the Europe’s Reformation Period. We have the centuries-long wars and battles based on slight religious differences in England and Ireland. We have today’s jihadists. We reasoned in each of these circumstances from a combined moral and utilitarian justification in a feedback loop between emotion and reason always with the same dire consequences. Recall the famous lines from Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” After describing the horrible death by chlorine gas of a soldier in World War I, Owen writes in the context of seeing the man die, “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” *** 
 
Those who argue that they see utility in a borderless socialist world in which everyone has an equal share of resources must in their minds dismiss as inconsequential the machinations of nations, individuals, or groups intent fulfilling their perceived, reasoned needs and desires. They fail to consider how individuals have turned emotions and even faith into reasons for conquest and enslavement. They fail to see that utility is as utilitarians define. And they fail to realize that without a foolproof system of checks, such as that which individual cells employ with KRP4, runaway war is likely inevitable in every generation.      
 
 
Notes: 
 
*Conte, Christian, Ph.D. 2019. Walking through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World. Boulder. Sounds True Press. 
 
**D’Ario, Marco, et al. 11 Jun 2021. Cell size controlled in plants using DNA content as an internal scale. Science. Vol. 372, Issue 6547. Pp. 1176-1181. DOI 10:1126/science.abb4348.  Online at  https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6547/1176   Accessed June 11, 2021. 
 
*** Basically, “It is sweet and proper (or fitting) to die for one’s country.” Owen got the line from Horace. The year before the First World War, the Latin quotation from Horace’s Ode III was inscribed on a chapel wall of the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, England.  

Recently, a drone crashed into a tern nesting site. The birds fled, no doubt in fear of this strange predator. As a result, the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve lost a generation of terns, their abandoned eggs sitting on the beach. The terns did not return. * 
 
That humans have always altered landscapes is a given. From our nomadic days 200 hundred thousand years ago through our city-building beginning under 10,000 years ago, we used as we desired or needed, often without a sense that our actions often bred consequences for other life-forms. Desires and needs: The former driven by hormones and culture; the latter, by body and mind working sometimes separately and sometimes together for self-preservation.
 
Both desire and need drive individuals and groups to act without considering complex ramifications. But that is understandable. Regardless of how we try to anticipate the consequences of living, we cannot see the complexities of our future. The first drone pilots, having fun with the invention and thrilled by its potential for both entertainment and practical use, probably did not anticipate that so small an object could by its failure wipe out an entire generation of terns. And as in so many previous incidents involving failed technology, the drone’s crash, and not its successful flight, initiated the small disaster. We have a history in Chernobyl and Fukushima of technological failures, two relatively recent events that like the drone’s crash, caused immediate dire consequences. And we have a history of filling needs that have altered the planet initially to our advantage and then to our disadvantage, like irrigating soils in arid lands that subsequently become more saline and less productive or like robbing water reserves, such as the Aral Sea, a body of water that went from being an inland sea to being a puddle in just a few decades.
 
Desire and need. Would you say that both are never more closely related than they are in the context of peace? We desire peace, don’t we? We need peace, don’t we?
 
Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Second in importance after physiological needs is the need for peace (security and safety). Calls for peace echo through history. Calls for peace echo through diplomacy. Calls for peace echo from temples, churches, and mosques. Peace. Given peace, we can live harmoniously in communities; given peace diverse communities can coexist; peace eliminates most anxieties.
 
But again, what we desire and what we need can negatively affect other life-forms, and ironically, that applies to peace. Being human and living human always seems to disturb non-human existence. Even peaceful living.
 
Take this headline as an example: “Peace accord in Colombia has increased deforestation of biologically-diverse rainforest.” ** Imagine: Peaceful living can ironically bring about destruction and death. The study by Oregon State University on the effects of the 2016 peace agreement that ended the six-decade civil war in the Andes-Amazon region shows a “40% increase in conversion from forest to agriculture.” The negotiators of the 300-page peace agreement failed to consider the landscape of the conflict. No one thought about the consequences to the diverse life-forms and their rainforest habitat. 
 
But what could be so bad? Didn’t the people of Colombia gain peace and food production, two of the most fundamental human needs? Isn’t that a good result? Sure, but in the process people did what our species has always done, they set in motion an alteration of landscape that negatively impacts other life-forms.
 
Desire and need. Seems that we’re trapped in the irony of human life on a complex planet. Should we change the name of our world to Planet Irony? Maybe not. Irony implies humor, and a lost generation of seabirds or a lost Ukrainian or Japanese city seem to be serious matters. So, what about changing the name to Planet Paradox? We invent. Our inventions destroy. We advance technologically. Other life-forms succumb to our intrusions into their way of life.
 
It is possible that the terns might return to breed again next year. Disrupted flocks elsewhere have returned. But unless bird populations learn that drones aren’t predators, through an educational process that seems unlikely in both the short and long term, the next crashing drone—or overflying one—will disrupt the cycle of their lives. Even when our intentions are driven by seemingly harmless desires and innocent needs, we can alter the status quo of any natural or artificial phenomenon. And there’s no guarantee that those who dedicate their lives to protecting the life in a public reserve can stop every drone pilot from scaring off the terns. 
 
The future holds no change in the processes of pursuing desires and fulfilling needs that ultimately change the world, sometimes temporarily for our good, sometimes temporarily for the good of other life-forms, but often to the detriment of both us and the other critters that share the planet. 
 
According to David M. Raup in Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? terns will have their turn at going extinct. We will also have our turn. Raup estimates that only about “one in a thousand species” [that ever existed] is still alive.*** Count up today’s living species if you want. No one knows the exact number, but estimates run as high as forty million. If terns—and humans—make up only two of the current unknown number of living species, neither species has, in terms of Earth history, long to live. The number of extinct organisms might lie between five and fifty billion. Imagine. If today’s species number five million, that means billions of species have come and gone, and all our current neighbor species will, like the terns and us, have their turn at extinction. 
 
Extinction is inevitable for many reasons, disease, comet or asteroid strike, extensive volcanic eruptions, changing climates, and nowadays, nuclear war. The crash of a single toy drone shows how easily the scale of survival can be tipped unfavorably for any species. In 2020, the world braced for a devastating pandemic. Fortunately, we had the wherewithal to provide medical care and vaccines. Seems that we can handle disease—at least we handled this one enough to reduce the loss of life. But the next one…Ah! That’s another story, one that we might not be around to tell.
 
Our hubris takes a humbling blow when we consider the dire consequences of crashing a drone in the midst of a tern nesting ground. But the living often have only short term memories. We don’t remember the demise of the graptolites, those floating animal colonies that thrived between the Cambrian and Mississippian periods. They’re gone. So what? That was hundreds of millions of years ago. But what of those who now walk through Times Square? Do they remember that in 2020 and early 2021, it was an empty set of sidewalks? Do they remember that like the tern nesting ground, it was vacated? During the last three-quarters of 2020, according to a CBS report, some 330,000 people left New York City.**** Human terns? The flock was decimated when something far smaller than a drone hit the city. And having found new nesting places, will they return? 
 
Life adapts when it can, sometimes by abandoning one ecological niche for another and other times by mutating to forms more resistant to extinction threats. Speciation preserves a genus when extinction threatens a member species. As one species says goodbye, another says hello and eventually fills the trophic and ecological niche it left; at least that appears to have been the pattern over the past six or seven hundred million years for multicellular organisms, and maybe, for single-cell organisms, going back maybe 3.5 to 3.8 billion years. Apparently, like tables at a restaurant, when one party leaves, another is ready to sit for its reservation. Turns reserved. But look at where we humans are in that process. When our species first appeared, other human species existed. The first Homo sapiens shared the planet with Homo floresiensis, Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo erectus soloensis, and others. They’re gone, leaving us as, in Jonathan Edwards’s frightening words, like a spider held on a thread over a fire, ***** not the fire of Hell, but rather the fire of extinction. 
 
Think. There are a dozen genera of terns right now; that species on the beach where the drone crashed belonged to Thalasseus elegans. Elegance. It’s a term associated with urbanity, dignity, grace, rich design, and sophistication. Probably many New Yorkers consider themselves to be elegant in one or more of those meanings. But nothing says “inelegant” more than fleeing and abandoning a generation of tern eggs or a city of offices and restaurants because of a tiny drone or an even tinier virus. And now many buildings in New York City lie as empty as the beach at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Terns and humans. Beaches and restaurant tables temporarily empty. Are they reserved for returning birds and people or for a future species? All life forms, billions in the past that have come and gone, have resided and fled, and millions in the present that reside and flee today, all living under a constant threat. And the irony, the paradox, lies in our elegant technology, the drone an invention of high tech and the virus apparently an invention of biotech. Elegant in their design, both crashed and frightened species—elegant humans and elegant terns—away from their habitats.    
 
 
Notes:
*Wigglesworth, Alex. 8 June 2021. A generation of seabirds was wiped out by a drone at a reserve. Now, scientists fear for their future. Los Angeles Times. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-seabirds-drone-reserve-scientists-future.html   Accessed June 9, 2021.
 
**Klampe, Michelle. 2 June 2021. Phys.org. Online at  https://phys.org/news/2021-06-peace-accord-colombia-deforestation-biologically-diverse.html   Accessed June 9, 2021.
 
***Raup, David M. 1991. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. The title of Raup’s first chapter is “Almost All Species Are Extinct.”
 
****DeAngelis, Jenna. 8 Jan 2021. Over 333,000 New Yorkers Have Left City Since COVID Pandemic Began In March. CBSNewYork. Online at https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/01/08/moving-out-of-nyc/  Accessed June 10, 2021.
 
*****Jonathan Edwards. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Edwards, if you forget your American history, was a prime mover in the movement called the First Great Awakening that was a religious revival between 1730 and 1755. The Northampton, MA, theologian was more doom and gloom than glorious salvation. His idea was to frighten his charges into moral living. If you’re having a really good day (see a previous blog on that) and want a downturn, you can read this famous sermon online at http://www.jonathan-edwards.org/Sinners.pdf  Accessed June 10, 2021.

Preface: 
 
Dear Reader, 
 
If you have read through some of the approximately 1,500 little essays on this site, you know that in some posts I employ verse and dialogue instead of prose. Not that I think I’m Plato, but I do find that through dialogue, I wend my way over the obstacles of objections and counterpoints to what I have to say. For the sake of brevity in the fast-paced world of tweeted aphorisms, I keep the conversations to a few minutes’ read. I might offer longer dialogues if I think the topic is multifaceted and rambling as coffee-shop, breakfast-at-the-diner-with-cronies, or talk-at-the-local-bar conversations usually run.
 
What I hope to do in the dialogues is to get you to involve yourself in the topic. I know I don’t have direct access to your thoughts and your counterpoints, but by guessing a hypothetical conversation with you, a total stranger, I try to anticipate what you might say to refute, or at least, to challenge me. No doubt I probably fail to achieve that goal, but since the purpose of this website is to provide points of departure for your insights, I endeavor by stepping into your role to get your mental juices flowing. 
            
I realize, also, that some of these dialogues take up more of your time than some direct, well organized treatise. But a rambling conversation sometimes serves a purpose. It allows the mind to wander and wonder. Thoughts you might not have in a direct essay might occur to you in a conversation. 
            
Sorry that I don’t hear those thoughts of yours directly. I realize I could turn on the comment box and even ask for comments, but I also realize that there are those out there who would use a chat not for making a point and correcting me politely, but rather for spewing some pent-up stuff and for ad hominem attacks. I hope to allow you to ponder or reject what I have had to say in your own way without the noise engendered by agenda. Although political views have always pervaded public conversations, nowadays they seem to dominate, probably, I think, because of their 24/7 broadcasting on social media and on those round-the-clock pundit shows on TV.
 
Anyway, today I offer a little longer conversation and one that brings to the reader’s attention a problem that has long nagged me, that is, the problem of bureaucratic minds influenced by intellectual, social, and economic fads du jour. In this dialogue, you might easily fault me for a reductionist viewpoint as I take on a notion that generalizes a population of individuals who are ultimately responsible for their own actions, regardless of social or economic circumstances. As I often do, I do not identify, script-writer style, the speaker. And as so many of us do after we end a conversation, I look back and say, “Oh! I should have mentioned….”  
 
Very truly yours,
Don Conte
 
 
Dialogue of the Day: Critical Stupidity Theory: Is Stupidity Systemic in Art and Politics?
 
“Does systemic stupidity run through the art world? I’m thinking of Kazimir Malevich’s 1918 painting Suprematist Composition: White on White.”
 
“Let me guess. You’re upset because you think the painting really isn’t a painting, because it’s an off-white tilted square on a white canvas. But Malevich was avant-garde in the early twentieth century. People were going through lots of turmoil, the First World War and the Spanish Flu; millions died. Existentialists of the day were challenging every traditional philosophy, physicists were talking about an unseen world of quanta, and Communism and Socialism were rising political and social movements. And in the art world there were attempts to mimic the confusion of life and to get away from mere representation. It was also a time of experimentation in film and literature. Three years before White on White, D. W. Griffiths revealed underlying cruelty in The Birth of a Nation and Kafka published The Metamorphosis; one year after the painting, the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari revealed the mind of a madman, and four years later T. S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’ with its intertwining of birth and death. I could mention other influences and influencers of the times if you want.”
 
“Yeah. What you said; that’s what I always expect to hear when I ask about so-called avant-garde works. It’s still a matter of someone selling an idea and a product to the gullible. Look at that painting. It’s a roughly drawn square.”
 
“But it’s what it symbolizes.”
 
“Here we go. Esoteric gobbledygook.”
 
“You know, I could never put my finger on it, but now I know your intellectual weakness, or maybe your main intellectual weakness. At heart, you’re a Philistine. Deep down inside all that surety lies a cultural vacuum. There’s just no subtlety, no sophistication. You’re the ultimate reductionist. The ultimate simpleton. Where did you grow up, in one of those fly-over states where people are not capable of a Manhattan or L.A. perspective?”
 
“Okay, so it’s all right for you to make fun of me but not all right for me to make fun of a painting a doodler might scribble at a boring meeting or a kindergarten kid might do when he uses a ruler for the first time as he learns how to draw geometric figures.”
 
“Again, your philistinism is showing through your curtain of certainty. Look, here’s what the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA to those of us who aren’t Philistines, says about Malevich and White on White. It’s ‘a white square floating weightlessly.’ The MoMA blurb also says Malevich was fascinated by airplanes.” *
 
“Whoa. You art aficionados buy into every thought foisted on you as erudite explanation. First of all, planes aren’t weightless; they stay up because of physical forces like thrust and the Bernoulli Principle. They struggle to stay in the air. And you elitist coastal people who fly over those fly-over states think you’re sophisticated, but most of you probably don’t know why the plane stays up over farmland air. Second, I thought you art and literature experts believed that art and literature could be appreciated without knowledge of the author’s biographical details.“
 
“Well, there are critics who take a biographical approach to explain a work. That’s a legit aesthetic.”
 
“Look, you can’t apply bio stuff to works written or painted by anonymous sources. Lit and art should stand on their own. I’ve written books, reports, and blogs that are ‘out there,’ but I’m not out there. If I said something unintelligible, it's my uncorrectable fault once it's 'out there.' I’m not around for a discussion to clarify what I might have meant or why I said it. If I wrote an ambiguous line, the reader is on his or her own to interpret it. I can’t ask Homer what he meant or how his life affected his epics. White on White has to stand on its own, I guess in the artist’s mind, weightlessly, if that was Malevich’s intention. Can I even trust that an artist sees all that’s on the canvas? Doesn’t everyone take to a viewing a set of biases and beliefs? Or should I say regardless of Malevich’s intention or life experiences, the aficionado sees and interprets from a different perspective? Anyway, what about the relatively common idea that ‘books write themselves’ or that paintings ‘paint themselves,’ taking the writer or artist wherever the pen or brush stroke says the creator should go?”
 
“Oh! So, you are aware of the roll of an artist’s muse. But artists often set out to capture some reality, and not all realities are physical phenomena. What if someone wants to paint a mood?”
 
“Yes, I get your point, but I’m more concerned with an art aficionado’s viewing muse, the inspiration to assume meaning where no meaning exists. White on White. Baloney. Tell you want to do. Go to the MoMA blurb and read about the painting. It says that Malevich thought white was the color of infinity. It also says he wanted a picture to have ‘nothing in common with nature.’ I’m turned off by meaningless gobbledygook that poses as profundity.”
 
“You just don’t get it.”
 
“Really? Okay, defend this one. A guy just sold an invisible sculpture for $18,000. ** I’m not talking about a sculpture in glass, plexiglass, muscovite mica, or quartz crystals. The invisible sculpture is invisible because it’s sculpted out of nothing. Nada, zilch, emptiness. Now tell me that the art world doesn’t suffer from systemic stupidity.”
 
“I haven’t seen the work, but…”
 
“Haven’t seen it? You can’t see what isn’t there. Some guy does virtually nothing, and garners attention and money. Nice job. Wish I had thought of it. Maybe I should become an artist. Or should I say artiste? The ultimate con perpetrated on those who claim sophistication and intellectual superiority is selling nothing to them, the bitcoin of sculptures. When I hear that someone bought nothing for $18,000, I think that being cultured is not a state of being as much as it is the product of fermentation like cultured milk. Yeah. This Salvatore Garau sculptor guy, the sculptor who made $18,000 for nothing, is the ultimate con artist. I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think that if we keep you art appreciation guys in a room full of paintings and sculptures, you’ll all agree that if you don’t say something erudite-sounding and esoteric, the rest of the world will recognize the subjectivity and fawning praise in your analyses. Garau is a better con man than Malevich was. He didn’t need to buy materials and spend time on his ‘immaterial sculpture.’ The news article on the sale says Garau calls the sculpture Io Sono, which means ‘I Am.’ Yeah, that’s profound. Sorry for the sarcasm. It’s not profound. You know that story about the emperor’s new clothes? Remember that the emperor was a fool, and remember that all his sycophants said the nonexistent clothes were magnificent. Yeah. That’s that Io Sono sculpture and Garau eliciting bids for its auction. Call me the babe, but out of my mouth I’ll say it: There’s no sculpture there! An idiot just spent money on nothing. And you hung in a so-called prestigious art museum a painting by Malevich that was a tilted off-white square on a white canvas.”
 
“Okay, I don’t know that story about the sculpture; it does sound a bit like a scam, but with painting, you’re wrong. When we see a painting, we examine parameters like brush strokes. The MoMA blurb on the painting refers to the ‘texture’ of the painting and to the “subtle variations of the whites.”
 
“Again I’ll ask. Really? If you look at my kitchen wall, you also can see subtle variations of the whites, especially where splashes from stove or sink did their subtle work or where kids put their hands on the wall to round a corner as they ran through the house. Guess there’s no need to paint the kitchen. I can tell friends I’m an artist with subtle whites. Maybe I’ll take visitors outside to show them a patch of yard I didn’t cut and tell them that it represents an abandoned yard, that it’s my garden sculpture, or that it’s a cut lawn that they just can’t see, like undisturbed ground waiting to be a hole. Wait! Maybe I’ll say that the uncut lawn reveals the unfulfilled desire for a mowed lawn that is like the unfulfilled desire for peace in the world. I’ll probably get a head shaker to bobble in agreement. But what can I expect in these times when people make up whatever enters their heads and pitch it as reality? And what else can I expect but bobble-headed agreement?  
 
“I just heard a congresswoman say we should do away with prisons because they don’t stop shootings in the community. Well, she’s partially right, but totally stupid. New criminals are born every day. She’s right when she says putting shooters in the prisons doesn’t stop shooting back in the neighborhood; the guys in prison adapt and use shivs to kill one another. But she’s totally stupid when she wants to put something invisible in place of the jails. She says social programs with reformed violent offenders have reduced violence in her district. Tell that to the family of this week’s 15-year-old victim and the 13 people wounded in New York City over the Memorial Day weekend. Tell that to the people who suffered an 86% increase in shootings this past year because they are now defended by a police department that, through defunding, is becoming as real as Io Sono. Sorry for the digression, but that Malevich painting and Garau ‘sculpture’ make me think that there’s systemic stupidity in government as well as in art. I guess some believe that an invisible police force, a nonexistent police force will protect.”
 
“Wow. Where did that come from? Here’s my counter. If we had more people contemplating art, we would have fewer shootings. If we had more mental health workers, there would be less violence. People would gain insights about life that would take them out of the daily pettiness and the anger that results in shootings. Art elevates. And maybe the congresswoman is right in wanting to build more hospitals and mental health facilities.”
 
“Sorry. I can see man’s need for beauty and for symbolism and for mental health professionals, but you assume that outsiders can cover all the emotional and mental needs of 330 million Americans in the world’s third largest population. You assume that they can fill the roles responsible parents and guardians need to play. But sociologists and psychotherapists can’t respond to an active shooter with a malevolent intent. The work they do to alter violent tendencies and impulsive actions takes months to years to accomplish. And with regard to eliminating police departments, note that I can’t see what I can’t see. A sculpture made of nothing is nothing, nothing more. A city without a police department and a prison is a city without both protection AND justice. Criminals with criminal intent don’t sit around contemplating the weightlessness of White on White or the vacuum of Io Sono. I suppose what bothers me more than a looney congresswoman’s unrealistic rantings about the evils of police departments and prisons is that standing behind her while she made her comments to the Press were some middle-aged men shaking their heads in agreement. Keep in mind those sycophants in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. And why, oh why, is the Press so compliant? No one in the Press corps present had the guts to ask what she would do with pathological killers, with career con men, with people who rob, injure, and kill without compunction. And where are all those politicians who are mostly lawyers when someone among their number says nothing is better than something, that no police force is better than a dedicated police force? Geez, lawyers, officers of the court, representatives who make laws to keep the unruly in check and chaos at bay.” 
 
“Now we’ve gone from a painting to a police force. You just have a different opinion that you think is irrefutable reasoning. You have your own agenda. You don’t want to accept that crime is a social phenomenon brought on by poverty and mental disease.”
 
“And you want to believe that society is to blame for an individual’s actions. You see criminals as victims. They just need to be reformed. Someone just needs to explain to them the error of their ways. Tell me something. Did you ever take a paperclip or pen from work? What about a pen from the check-writing table at a bank? Did you return it? No? Why not. Do you think a sociologist could have kept you from taking the paperclip or pen? Or, if there was one hired by the bank or office staff, that he could be present for every check-writer or cubicle-sitter?”
 
“That’s silly. What’s a paperclip worth? Offices have thousands of them.”
 
“But you decided that there was no law, no rule, no restriction that prevented you from stealing. You think that you perceive the rules just the way the purchaser perceived that Io Sono was real or that MoMA bought and hung White on White. Is the value of a paperclip just a matter of interpretation? Was there no actual cost in its acquisition by the office?”
 
“You’re mixing apples and oranges, art and crime, the making of rules and laws and their enforcement and the subtle variations of interpretations of values. A paperclip doesn’t have much value.”
 
“No, it doesn’t. But it does have some monetary value. It was your decision to take it from the office supplies without permission. It was a slight wrong in your mind, but it was a wrong. And you got away with the theft because there wasn’t a paperclip cop to prevent you. When you begin to use subjective judgments, you can justify anything, from art to crime. For the pathological killer, there is no reality save his or her own. They see an invisible sculpture; they see a meaning in subtle variations in whites. They can ascribe any explanation they want to any phenomena they choose or to no phenomena at all. And sycophants and unquestioning people just accept the explanations. Eliminate police forces in favor of therapists: That’s an interpretation of reality that will get therapists killed in domestic violence incidents and during incidents involving criminal intent. Do you think anyone on those planes that hit the twin towers on 9/11 could have dissuaded the terrorists? Bobble-head agreement can have dire consequences, ramifications far more serious than buying White on White or Io Sono. Eliminate jail time for violent offenders? Send unreformed rapists and murderers back onto the streets? That congresswoman and the head-shaking men standing in agreement need to attend some funerals in the inner cities where there are daily murders or visit sobbing and life-shattered victims of rape. Sure, there are many people imprisoned for minor offenses, probably some for offenses not much more severe than taking that proverbial paperclip. But there are others…”
 
“Okay. Okay. I get it. I can see the argument with regard to shootings in inner cities, but artists and painters aren’t committing the crimes simply because they experiment.”
 
“Granted. No one needs to arrest Garau for fraud. No one needs to put White on White in storage in the museum’s attic. Of course, if whoever purchased Io Sono gets tired of the invisible sculpture, he wouldn’t know where to pick it up to move it, anyway. Wait! Get those guys who carry large panes of glass to move it. Get a mime. Whoa! Just had another thought. What if a mime can see Io Sono? White face makeup around eyes staring at nothing. White face makeup around eyes staring at White on White.  And, while I’m thinking about it, why not police mimes arresting nonexistent criminals and placing them in nonexistent jails? Can’t you envision the mime closing the cell door and locking it with a pretend key?”
 
“Funny, but you’re still a Philistine when it comes to art.”
 
“What am I when it comes to a rationally organized society that relies on police and prison systems to protect the general population from the actions of those with criminal intentions? I have an idea. We should incorporate Critical Stupidity Theory in our public education systems and TV pundit shows, but no, that would require teacher unions, school boards, politicians, and networks to add another level of wokeness. That would require people to see that the emperors really aren’t wearing anything, that White on White is silly, and that Io Sono doesn’t exist.”
 
Notes: 
 
*MoMA. Online at https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385   Accessed June 5, 2021. 
 
**Davoe, Taylor. 3 June 2021. An Italian Artist Auctioned Off an ‘Invisible Sculpture’ for $18,300. It’s Made Literally of Nothing. artnet news. Online at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/italian-artist-auctioned-off-invisible-sculpture-18300-literally-made-nothing-1976181   Accessed June 6, 2021.