Atlas part II: the personal

Yesterday I finished reading Atlas Shrugged, all 1160+ pages. The book had a curious effect on me. It seemed that whenever I read it, or thought much about it, I felt more invigorated, more determined, more interested in life. I'm not getting my hopes up; new drugs lose their effect with time.

Rand presents a worldview with the notion that the prosperity of a society derives from the selfishness and will-to-live of its members. This is grand-scale political talk, but the worldview also has intimately interpersonal and psychological facets.

So much comes down to the elasticity of language that it will never be absolutely clear if Rand is offering anything fundamentally different than what most people already believe. What his selfishness exactly? For that matter, what is self? If self is a genetic code, than isn't there some kind of overlap between a parent and child, such that a mother sacrificing for her baby is actually another kind of selfishness? And it's not just genetics; to the extent that ego is built on friendships and career, dedicating our lives to these things is again not sacrifice but selfishness.

Additionally, Rand's version of selfishness severely qualified. As the central dogma goes,

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. [emphasis added]

At least half of selfishness consists of actively taking from others; Rand absolutely rejects this part.

So, semantics aside but not forgotten, I find the Rand creed to be useful. I am a man of near-constant sorrow. I've seen sorrow all of my days. Of course the sorrow has many sources, including chemistry, but I think one that I've overlooked is the sorrow that consists of needless wishing that other people would live for the sake of me.

This wish has taken many forms:

• I wish that an employer would pay me more or promote me faster.
• I wish that more friends would devote more time and energy to inviting me to stuff, feeding me, and learning about me.
• I wish that a romantic friend would show more interest in who I am and what I want.

All these are natural wishes, but according to the Rand creed, asking (or in the broadest sense, even wanting) for them is generally not productive. There is an undercurrent in society that corrupts us even as we sleep, an undercurrent that whispers that it is good and right and possible for us to be wanted and loved just "for who we are," independent of what we have to offer the world.

An empowering part of the Rand creed frees me to stop wasting my time looking for love where I have not earned it and from those to whom I have nothing to offer.

A hearty shrug for Atlas

I was born a sell-all-that-you-own-and-give-to-the-poor Jesus-freak communist. I believed that humanity deep down was bound together by a spiritual ether which would allow us all to achieve our highest potential collectively as soon as enough people woke up and brought their honey to Jesus, the queen bee of the spiritual hive. The way to get from here to this utopia was to lead by example, practicing generosity and service and putting the needs of others ahead of my own. This was no idle ideology. I gave a substantial portion of my earnings to charity and watched in admiration as family members dedicated years of their lives to service that represented real sacrifice. With tremendous enthusiasm I was headed down this same set of tracks.

Maybe it was money or income potential that derailed/liberated me. (It is a curious coincidence that many people seem to move away from socialist thought in lockstep with their savings accounts. This correlation (if it is even real -- a statistician can't think without data), raises some questions, and I am not trying to avoid them.) The wrecking balls that smashed my worldview were many.

The Practical:

• In college I read The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. This [admittedly anecdotal] account is a crushing account of the futility of a wide variety of large-scale charitable efforts.

• A much more scholarly work, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly, a pre-eminent scholar of economic development, was partially offset by the more optimistic work of Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Together, these works did not eliminate the possibility of improving human welfare through generosity, but they made it look damn complicated.

The Experiential:

• I volunteered. One semester I interned at the Mennonite Central Committee Washington Office, a group that lobbies for liberal Mennonite concerns in Washington. I very briefly experimented with after-school tutoring volunteer-ship and soup kitchen work. In every case I was struck by a lack of organization, lack of focus, and general inefficiency in these efforts. It made me sick. (Or was I too sick to see the good in it?)

• Entering my first graduate program (an emotionally battering and lonely two years) I made sacrifices cut my spending enough so that I was saving a substantial portion of my meager graduate stipend. I took the cheapest apartment I could find, which resulted in going for a few weeks without hot water due to a malfunctioning landlord. I would have taken a cheaper place if I could have found one. This wrecking ball was older than the Bible: What fun is it trying to bail out people who are not even willing to ride along in a boat as lowly as mine in order to get ahead?

The Philosophical:

• Without replacing the Spiritual Hive as an answer to why we are here, evolution gets as close as anything to the heart of it by answering why we are the way we are. The natural selection mechanism continually directs and defines humanity as agents of genetic propagation as unitized by individuals and families. Generosity (with corresponding notions of love) is supported within the natural selection framework, but only as tools for reproduction rather than ends in themselves. So are we slaves to our genetic inheritance? Can't humans "transcend" biology through mind and spirit? Let's hope so, but to the extent that we transcend at the expense of reproduction, these proclivities become more rare over generations of human reproduction, if I may be so mathematical about it.

• Men (here, an abbreviation for humans) are not created equal. What is the measure of a man? There are many measures. From biology, the measure of a man is how many kids he has. From Wall Street, it's the size of his portfolio. From psychology, it's his love of life. From Facebook, it's how many friends he has. From academia, it's how many publications he produces. Combining all measures in any interesting way, some men are just smaller than others. Distributing wealth to men who are small on the scale of materialism might (at least temporarily) increase their materialistic size, but how does this affect all his other measures? It's just a gut feeling: I think redistribution for it's own sake is poison to the human psyche, both to the giver and the recipient. But do not confuse redistribution with investment. Self-interest fully supports generosity matched by accountability in the context of networks of human friendship untainted by pity.

This discussion is motivated by my reading of Atlas Shrugged, which I find valuable despite some shortcomings. Reading this book completes my transformation from communist to capitalist. Prior to reading this book I saw my movement away from communism as a [not necessarily bad] loss of morality, a loss of values. But Ayn Rand gives a language of morality to support individualism. It is evil to cripple one's own zeal for life for the sake of others. It is good to live in full affirmation of one's own progress. The Rand creed is simple. To understand its value, I can only recommend the book:

I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

This outlook has interesting applications in personal relationships and love, which I hope to discuss in a future post.

For health and strength ...

My conversion experience was not dramatic. There were no visions or claps of thunder. What's more, the conversion was not much of a conversion. I've always been at least moderately health-conscious. But I some point I decided it would be cool, at least a brief time in my life, to have the six-pack of an underwear model.

Not eating was the hardest part. We'll see if I can keep it off:
Update: [Brutal honesty is a balm that brings me calm because a world wrapped in delicate pretense is sure to have sharp edges when it shatters.] As one brutally honest friend has pointed out, my weight appears to be trending upwards near the end. Maybe so, but this is just to clarify my goals: The green line is my target weight, and the red dashed-line is a unofficial boundary that I'll try not to go below. As long as I return below my target weight at least a couple days in a row every couple of weeks, I define this as success.

Not eating is good for you for lots of reasons. But one reason, which you don't hear the health profession squawking about very often, is that not eating is the one thing that science strongly suggests may extend your lifespan substantially, like an extra 15 years. The president of the Calorie Restriction Society gives charming discussion of not eating here.

As much as I'd like to live forever, I'm not going to let myself go below 175lbs. I don't want people to think I look sick, and I'm not sure that it would make me a happier person. As claimed by one researcher,

"Usually when you work with mice you can pet them ... But any mouse on a restricted diet would try to jump out of the cage and bite you."

The other part of becoming Hercules is gaining some muscle. To that end I began a push up regimen.
The plot shows that I haven't been doing many push ups lately. That's because my shoulder was starting to hurt. Maybe doing nearly 12,000 push ups in 70 days can lead to tendinitis. Even worse, despite all those push ups I did not manage to even break my own record for most consecutive push ups.

Introduction to Qatar

This will be my first time flying in about 7 years.

Qatar is a monarchy between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The oil rush expanded the population from about 22,000 nomads in 1900 to over a million residents at present. About 80% of these residents are foreign workers with temporary residence status. This partially explains why Qatar has the world's highest male/female ratio: 2.87. A related fact is that Qatar is -- or at least is perceived this way -- a repressive environment for women. The legal system is officially modeled on Islamic law. Eating in public during Ramadan is prohibited.

Summer temperatures in Doha, the capital, average 104 degrees Fahrenheit.



Map source: incomprehensible but here it is.

Update: I added the map source after I noticed a surge in international traffic to this blog, as if the map were drawing in image searches for Qatar.

Sheep and Goats

Life was decent before you showed up. It was nice of you to visit. I was hungry and you fed me. I was lonely and you gave me touch. But after you left it was harder than normal not to notice my imprisonment. The guards stood closer, the walls stood thicker, and the prison food seemed tainted. There was one less friend remaining on the outside whose ability to help me plot an escape remained a hopeful mystery.