Eliot Spitzer's kink

Well, I can't help pointing out the lighter side Eliot Spitzer's plight. He's proven to us once again that it is the moralists who are most likely to keep the skeletons in their closets. He is the one who signed NY State law against sex tourism. I understand that some people will readily object that the comparison does not hold because no one would ever think of Washington DC as a place for a tourist. But then again, the legacy of Lincoln not only inspires the tradition of public service but also attracts the tourists to his monument. Of course, a good deal of public servants turn out to be more inspired by the Washington memorial, but this really is beating a dead horse. I think it is important to keep sight on one very important aspect of Spitzer's ordeal. It is very clear that he, in fact, never did have sex with that woman -- Monica Lewinsky. Hillary Clinton has yet to make it as clear that she (as fellow New York Democrat) has never had sex with Monica Lewinsky. And yet Hillary is still seeking a public office... a national one at that... and mine, oh, mine... in Washington DC.

On Communication

I've been thinking lately what constitutes communication. How does it so happen that so many people manage to transfer ideas from one to another, transfer states of minds, even transfer feelings with nothing more than just sounds? This can easily become physiological question, but as a laymen I'll stick to trying to understand the nature of what is communication rather than how it actually happens on the physical level.


Forms of communication can be broken into 3 different categories. The top-down communication, the down-up communication and the across-the-levels communication. Wow. This is actually trivializing it a great deal.

The subject that actually got me thinking about this in the first place is the nature of abstraction. I define abstraction as communicating a certain point of view on an idea in such a way that all the details that are not pertinent to this point of view are stripped away. This naturally helps me to say what I mean by the "top-down" communication. It is the process of finding of all the abstractions that fit the situation under the discussion. People who communication in this manner usually end up sounding like they are constantly summarizing their opinions and not justifying them by any facts. Why would they? Facts are not pertinent in this form of communication. Only the most central, the most essential part of the idea is what matters. Occasionally, they will give an example and sometimes out of desperation to be understood they'll start enumerating the details that they skipped over. This is the "down" part of the "top-down" communication.

The "down-up" form communication, as is probably easy to guess from the previous paragraph, is the form of communication in which facts are simply enumerated one by one, not even necessarily in any particularly order. This allows people to draw their own conclusions from the facts. Occasionally while this form of communication is in use, a conclusion or two are drawn, but certainly it never leads to a full description of the complete picture. It is even often biased by the types of facts that get emphasized or omitted. The greatest example of such form of communication is the modern western media. The media sees it as its main mandate to just report the facts. Of course, the emphases that it puts on this or that particular fact skews the communication away from the truth. But it does communicate a particular world view. It certainly constitutes a form of communication. Other examples of this form of communication are people who seem to go on and on on every topic that they talk about. They fail to grasp what are the most important details and so they proceed to list all the details that they can remember.


The last example of communication is the one that is, of course, the most effective and the most difficult to achieve. It borders on creating a sense of empathy in the listener (or reader). It comes out of understanding one's audience to such an intimate degree that the speaker knows how the audience thinks before uttering a word. The most successful practitioners of such communication are artists. They are the people who can tap into part of ourselves that makes it impossible not to understand what they have to say, show, etc. So what does it take? It takes being very attuned to what the audience knows and believes to be true. And then trying to communicate the idea that one needs to communicate in such a way that the audience already knows most of the details that abstraction that is about to be presented to them is based on, but filling in those details which the audience may not be familiar with. After those details have been filled, the "conclusion" (or the statement of the new world view that is comprised of the abstractions which naturally arise from the newly communicated information and the information already internalized by the audience) becomes self-evident. And forces the audience to simply think to themselves "how did I not think of this before"?

Progress And Nihilism

A lot of soul-searching happened in light of the Virginia Tech shooting. Many people sighed with relief that the shooter was not a video game player. Many others sighed with relief that he wasn't a Muslim. Everyone shockingly asked "why?" Far be it from me to know what was the last straw that made him snap. I've known angry people in my life. I've known people fascinated with the truly morbid. None of them snapped. The last I heard, they were all living productive lives. So what made Seung-Hui Cho snap?

While this may be an unpopular position during this time of our unsuccessful prosecution of the war in Iraq and the all-too-obvious fact that the war on terror was hijacked to become a war to grab oil, I will still make the claim that this was a terrorist act. And I will attempt to say why terrorism occurs and why it is the scourge of civilization. While the term "civilization" is often used to distinguish those within one's group from those outside of one's group, I will try to be more precise in defining it. I will say that a civilization is a society that is committed to progress. Where progress is a process of making physical life (not spiritual, but physical) more comfortable. That is progress is the process of improving creature comforts for people so as to relief the suffering and discomfort that is caused to them by the mother nature. By the same token, I will define "terrorism" to be an act of destruction that is intended to instill despair and to knock the wind out of the sails of those committed to the work of progress.

Progress has a certain life-cycle. First, it is born. It is born out of innovative thinking of visionaries or out of aimless wondering of the curious. But it always starts with a new way of seeing the world. That is followed by a period of convincing the general population that this particular piece of progress is a good thing (tm). This is not always successful. Often the new and innovative ideas die at this stage. But those ideas that succeed, attract a following of the competent (often confusingly called "technologically elite") that wish to profit from blessing the world with this new way of living. As they go through the iterative stages of making the new progressive idea more usable and acceptable to the world, the "technological elite" earn enough power in the form of the world's gratitude (usually expressed in financial compensation) to join the ranks of the actual elite -- the people who wield actual power over the general population.

Those who don't see the hard work, ingenuity and talent that is involved in creating progress don't see why it happens. All they see is the progress' missionaries' rise in power or affluence. They feel that they are not part of this rising tide (even though they do become benefactors of progress) and as a result they lose hope. For what is hope? It is the belief that future will be better than today. And once the rise of others is clear and is accompanied by realization that one cannot participate in that rise, it becomes very easy to believe that endeavors of one's life to improve one's condition are not fruitful. Many times this is a fallacy because one's "moment of greatness" simply hasn't come, yet. Alas, sometimes it is, in fact, true. There are those who just coast through life not trying to improve it. Their moment of greatness never comes.

So what is the next step after the hopelessness sets in? Well, inevitably it is nihilism. And that is the last stage in the life-cycle of progress. Those who did not participate in progress' fruition lose hope and become nihilistic. Nihilism is a destructive tendency. As a matter of fact, it can be defined as taking joy in destruction (not necessarily caused by one's own hands).

Nihilism takes many forms. Communism is one of the most grandiose nihilistic movements because it wishes to reverse the clock on progress and to re-distribute the wealth created by progress so that those responsible for it would get no more benefit than those who idly stood by. Large scale terrorism is a smaller scale nihilism. It only wishes to wrest the laurels of progress from the peoples that created it in order to give it to those peoples that did not. Mass murder is an even lesser scale and harder to understand form of nihilism because it is always impossible to predict when it so happens that a single individual passes that threshold of having a glimmer of hope and having none.

It is the wish of everyone involved in the work of bringing progress to fruition that they be recognized for the great benefit that they bring to the world. They are the only ones that separate us from savages. Social scientists and clerics would argue that they contribute a great deal, too. But their work has not changed much in 2000 years. Civilization has improved in that time tremendously though. So what can a civilization do in the face of nihilism? Well, its only choices are to surrender to it or to fight it. Now I can feel the reader's eyes rolling up at the word "fight". How can I suggest that destruction be met with something so uncreative as more destruction? I am doing nothing of the kind though.

This fight must be for the minds of those without hope. It must be waged by teaching the uninitiated how to become active participants in the work of progress. The primary goal of governments must not be only protecting the civilization from the destructive drive of those who surrendered to the nihilism, but also the educating of those who have a glimpse of hope -- educating them how to create. The missionaries of progress must walk hand-in-hand with those in power so as not to isolate themselves from those who can contribute and who wish to contribute to the work of creation. It is very tempting to argue that it is a basic human right to be left alone. But that won't stem the building tide of nihilism outside of one's castle.

In the end stage of life-cycle of progress is a test of civilization. The test of whether a civilization can fight nihilism without itself becoming more destructive than the nihilists. The civilizations that pass this test get to part-take in the next wave of progress. The ones that fail it, get to be fondly remembered as the "good old days".