One of the hardest things I’ve seen people struggle with is their cognitive incapacity to realize someone else they’re talking to is NOT understanding what they’re saying, and that the target of the communication likely cannot understand. People, of course, want to map this kind of miscommunication to subject matter. I have a Ph.D., I did my research in chaos theory, so therefore if I talk to someone about chaos theory, they won’t be able to understand what I’m talking about because THEY don’t have a degree in engineering. 

Of course, this does indeed happen. If you write a thesis on chaos theory, you’ve hopefully gotten a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the ins and outs of said theory. Unfamiliar words, like bifurcation, limit cycle, attractor and so on will likely cause confusion for a lay person, not grounded in advanced mathematics. 

But I also ascribe to the viewpoint “if you can’t explain your research to your grandma, you likely don’t understand it very well yourself.” What that really means is very different. It means you ought to be able to take what you’ve done and analogize it so that a non-specialist can generally get the gist of what you’ve spent 3 years sitting in front of a computer doing. 

Sometimes, topics are so convoluted, that’s not even possible. But I’ve found that most subjects are not so weird that if you practice analogizing, you can spin a narrative that grandma can grok. 

All that’s well and good. You SHOULD be able to take whatever it is you do and at least have as a goal that people can modestly understand some complicated, multivariate process that you need to explain. At least with you in the room, and connecting to the people you’re explaining it to. We do this all the time in engineering education. Young people aren’t raised on concepts like entropy and enthalpy, of course (and probably not most readers of this blog!) But when you’re navigating complex issues (like whether COVID was invented in a lab) with multiple twists and turns, that contradict the mental models that people have on how the world is supposed to work, things get more challenging. 

An example is in order. Let’s talk about my job as a professor. One of my favorite multi-panel pastiches is below. It’s wildly accurate on how people perceive my position.

There are multiple versions of this meme. Here’s another one. 

Or this one… (you have to have some deep memory to get all the frames on this meme…)

It IS true that (at least before the Age of Laptops) that most of what I did was pushing some version of paper around. Now, of course, I push the electronic version. Last week, for example, I had to confirm for one of my grants that I had not stored nor kept any equipment from a given project (the sponsors take my word for it!) that should have been returned THREE YEARS AGO. I’m lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast — not the equipment requirements for one of about 80 projects I’ve had in the meantime. 

But even that doesn’t convey the actual complexity of my job. Let’s say I write a grant to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the branch of the federal government that hands out money to people like me to do research on things various people might, temporarily, consider to be VERY IMPORTANT as an up and coming area of national interest. I, as an expert in something, am supposed to be paying attention to announcements from the NSF, where Very Smart People have figured out what we’ll need to know in the future. And then pay people like me, or rather have people like me pay graduate students to actually figure out that knowledge so the national interest is served. 

On the surface, this seems reasonable. 

1. VSPs figure out where our knowledge deficit is.
2. They publish a Request for Proposals (RFP) .
3. I read the RFP, and think I have some ideas that might help.
4. I write a proposal to NSF.
5. NSF reviews my proposal, along with others, and then gives me (hopefully) the money.
6. I supervise the graduate students who then generate the knowledge.
7. We publish the knowledge in journals, where other scientists have reviewed our work to make sure it’s right.
8. Science, my career, and life march on!

All this maps to what I would call a meta-linear progression that would make sense to most people. Except, of course, it’s not how it works at all. 

It’s not impossible to draw a block diagram of how this ACTUALLY works. But it would be complicated. And what are the complicating factors?

1. In order to have any hope in hell of getting the money for a given RFP, I likely have to have something like 50% of the work already done that I might propose.
2. I might have participated, if I have a close relationship with NSF and the program manager, in constructing the RFP, so there are potential (but never acknowledged) conflicts of interest in getting the money.
3. If I’m reading the RFP for the first time, the odds are I could never write a competitive proposal, because NSF really only funds mostly incremental research that will only stretch out about 1-2 years in the metacognitive space.

I could go on. There are also memetic forces inside the agency I’ve written about here that make the agency resistant to funding any truly innovative work at all. All this is counterintuitive, and in a complicated and complex fashion, have most people either a.) rubbing their heads in disbelief, or b.) assuming there’s a conspiracy afoot to make us all stupid. 

In order to actually believe what I’ve written, you’ll either need some grounding validity experience yourself in the process, meaning you’ve written proposals to NSF that alternately were or were not funded, you think I’m a sour grapes kook that hasn’t had much luck with NSF funding (kinda true) or you’ve lost the plot and thrown all this into the ‘government is a fucked up conspiracy anyway’ bin.

Here’s the point. Somewhere along the plot line, unless you’ve had a lot of experience with NSF (as I have) you hit your complexity limit. You had likely a straightforward interpretation of how things work in getting a government grant, and when I started loading all the other stuff in the hopper, you got lost (or you didn’t care.) In short, I lost you. Either the story itself wasn’t so great (very possible) or my authority on the issue, in your mind, was weak, and so you just flushed the whole thing down the garbage chute. 

The knowledge structure work that I’ve done can help you understand this — here’s a recycled picture.

Short answer — once we get off that relatively straight line progression, most humans hit complexity limits relatively quickly. 

What’s the takeaway? All we have, especially when communicating with the public, is to remember the straight line principle. Make sure to use models that people understand when making analogies, especially when blended into narratives. 

Or you’ll lose virtually everyone. 

Ghillie and Boo Boo, on a cold day outside of Genessee, ID

One of my favorite literary tropes comes from one of the most talented fantasy writers of all time — someone who, with maybe a little literary polish, might give J.R.R. Tolkien a little run for his money. 

I’m talking about Michael Moorcock, known for writing pulp fantasy fiction, and notably expanding a number of genres in superhero fiction that are accepted de facto plot devices across lots of fantasy universes. Though he did not, for example, invent the idea of the Multiverse, Moorcock gave it real legs. And instead of Good vs. Evil, Moorcock introduced the idea of the Cosmic Balance — Law vs. Chaos. The gods of his creation were also semi-disposable — they could be killed by heroes in Moorcock’s Multiverse.

Moorcock achieved notoriety through his Eternal Champion series, which took place across space and time, on a variety of different worlds, and with a set of characters that roamed all over the Cosmic Balance. The most impressive thing about these ideas was that he came up with these in his 20s. It’s almost unbelievable.

One of his most famous characters was Elric of Melnibone’, a somewhat chaotic evil prince, with a conscience. He rules over the Kingdom of Melnibone’, an island kingdom, stagnating in decadent decline, as some kind of humanoid, half-elf prince, with a troubled mind. He’s supposed to just be taking advantage of his populace that he governs, and spend time screwing his sister — in fact, said populace can’t understand why he doesn’t. But instead, he embarks on a series of adventures in about six books, written in non-sequential order. For those interested in the fine detail, the Wikipedia page on Elric is pretty good. 

Elric is a weak albino prince, and counts on various herbal medicines to even maintain day-to-day. But most important in Elric’s world is his sword, Stormbringer. Stormbringer is the iconic Black Sword, actually an incarnation of an evil mage, and when Elric wields Stormbringer, every time he kills an enemy, he receives some of the strength through the sword of his fallen foe. But it’s more than that. Stormbringer eats his foe’s souls. No reincarnation, no afterlife, is possible if you are killed by Stormbringer. If that doesn’t give you shivers, you really are a true atheist. 

It should come as no surprise that in the end, Stormbringer kills Elric, and basically everyone he loves, even as he vanquishes the foes in front of him. 

Having fought long, pitched battles in the various wilderness timber wars, the Stormbringer trope has long been resonant for me. Though I spent a piece of my activist career on the famous 2001 Clinton Roadless Rule, that ended up protecting over 58M acres of roadless forests across the United States, most of my activism was centered on saving the Clearwater and Nez Perce NF in north-central Idaho. That story is here, in a book I wrote back in the mid-’90s. There, the US Forest Service – USFS – (not just there, BTW) was famous for having a given timber sale shot down, and then resurrecting it with some of the legal weaknesses wrung out of the various Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) that are required when you want to hack up a piece of pristine country. The USFS wouldn’t go back to the drawing board. They’d reissue basically the same sale with some allusion to the legal argument made by us in front of the federal judge, and then we’d go back through the rinse cycle. 

I don’t think I was the only person calling them Zombie Timber Sales, but they certainly were. And one can see why the Stormbringer idea was particularly appealing. If you didn’t have a tool to suck the soul out of a given project, it would be back. Again and again.

Naturally, when we would win a round, it was as exhilarating a feeling as one could get. But victory was only short-lived. Most of the public still doesn’t believe the USFS sells timber, and views the USFS like the National Park Service — people there to protect our remaining wild country. They basically wear the same uniforms, after all. And most of the places we were fighting to save were, and still really are unknown in the public eye.

Destroying timber sales, even if only temporary, taught me a lot about politics, though. The USFS had, and still has no problem with lying to the public on a whole host of issues, including exactly what they do. And while most people who know even a little bit might believe there are things like the Endangered Species Act (ESA) protecting rare creatures on the landscape, the reality is that statutory law like the ESA, or a host of other acronyms, are only part of the picture. The other real, emergent driver is what I call the Law of the Budget. If Congress decrees that money will be spent on planning timber sales, you had better believe that timber sales will run what is done on any given National Forest. Following the money doesn’t always take you to the end destination. But I guarantee it will get you close.

The whole idea of Stormbringer, though, is very useful in our current psychopathic political environment. It’s no accident that Stormbringer fit well in Elric’s hands for all his adventures. I’ve had the recent experience of helping consult on a number of national issues, and the biggest flaw I’ve seen across the board is people attempting to rationalize the irrational. Things are done in our society not so much for any rational purpose, and unpacking it basically makes you spend all your intellectual energy attempting to empathize with their position on the topical level. 

But that’s really not what’s going on now. We’re undergoing a psychosocial relational downshifting that is intended to fragment us, and it’s working. It is indeed amplified by social media, because while it is possible for social media to create larger connected narratives, it mostly doesn’t. Or rather, it hands the megaphone to the various actors who can create compact sound bites that quite literally “feel right”. They factually may not have anything to do with reality, but they map with the reality that people want, or their emotions are familiar with.

The lesson of Stormbringer is that if you really want to kill an unreal thing like a zombie, or our current batch of psychopathic politicians, you need a chaotic evil sword. You need to get down on whatever the Survival v-Meme level your opponent is really functioning on, and not listen to their bullshit reasons, which, if they’re psychopathic, are just stories made up to confuse you and drain your energy. You need to hack out the soul out of your opponent, and drink in all that chaotic energy for yourself. That’s the price — and the benefit– of dealing with the truly Undead.

But it’s all problematic, of course. Remember what happened at the end of the story cycle to Elric.

Nursemaids

For those unfamiliar with my health travails this summer, I had a mesenteric venous thrombosis — basically a blockage in the primary vein in my bowel. As such, I’ve been plunged into our health care system in far more depth than I ever intended. I wish I could tell you that being bedridden gives one plenty of time to think, but it turns out when your primary energetic systems aren’t working very well, your brain does a poor job of keeping up. My problems were in my small intestine, which is where you absorb the energy from the food you eat. And when you couple that with a morphine derivative (I was on two separate starvation diets both lasting approximately a week) you don’t get many new thoughts.

But I’m pulling out of it. And there’s nothing like having real skin in the game to make you realize how your medical care is actually operating on your system. I am not particularly medically literate — I do count on my medical professionals to tell me what’s going on. And, not surprisingly, I’m observing them — predominantly what v-Meme they’re operating under. Why? It matters deeply what knowledge structures your doctors use. Are they sophisticated thinkers, breaking down symptoms, and matching them to different titrated medicines? Or are they root cause analysts, asking that question “how did this patient end up in front of me in the first place?”

Depending on the problem you have, there are needs in the medical system for both kinds. Sometimes, knowing why you have a given condition really doesn’t do you much good. Other times, it may save your life. But the reality is that we are overwhelmed with the level that different mental models are ingrained in our understanding of medicine.

Which is fascinating — because our brains don’t really care. Brains are alternatively wired and biased toward evolutionary thinking, or sophisticated thinking. For those that haven’t pored through all the pages of this blog, the short-version upshot is this: sophisticated thinking has lots of fine-grained thinking, fractal, and self-similar; and evolved thinking is doing the pattern matching across domains that seems obvious — you drank too much, and now your liver is on the fritz. But when you back off from both your liver, and the drinking, one can see that this level of pattern matching requires being able to see things not only in the realm of cause-and-effect, but also across very different behaviors and symptoms. You drank wine because you were at an event. Now, your liver produces unbalanced levels of enzymes. This is VERY different than dialing in the exact dose of a given medicine, which occupies the same cognitive domain.

And your brain only knows the containers you’ve generated for it. So if your relational diversity is low, and grounding is weak, expect more sophistication, though there’s also no question that a good, sophisticated doctor will augment their knowledge through feedback loops with a number of patients.

But the second — the evolved, root cause thinker — has to follow a different path. I wish I could tell you I’ve done an extensive background survey with every doctor I’ve identified as a root cause thinker. I haven’t. But it’s pretty quick to the point of “I know it when I see it.”

So, all you doctors out there that happen across this short column. Something to think about — why do you care about alternately understanding exact dose, or deep reasons behind pathologies? How can you all up your game? I’ve had a pretty arbitrary journey through the medical system — but it would be great to get to a shared realization on why both areas of knowledge development matter to your patients.

And your receptivity is all in your shared experiences and relational development.

Looking out at the big, empty Pacific — just beyond the outer break, Kauai, Hawaii

Note: While I can’t promise this post will be what some might consider “jargon free” — I’m going to do my best to illustrate some important concepts in my work in the context of medicine. If you’re ingratiated in the rest of this, hopefully you’ll still find it useful. And I’m going to start with my own recent health story.

This past year, I had the misfortune of actually having a health problem that could acutely kill me, at some accelerated time from what I thought would be my actual departure. We all don’t live forever, of course, and as Clint Eastwood said in the movie Unforgiven, “we’ve all got it coming.”

The problem was an irregular heartbeat, caused as much by a combination of ani inherited genetic frailty, along with the stress of dealing with the last days of the cordoned pandemic. Racing hearts are easily detected (or felt), especially during exercise, so I was referred, and then scheduled an appointment with a cardiologist, who happened to be located in Coeur D’Alene. Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, is about a 90 minute drive from my house, so it’s a day out of my life to drive up there.

The doctor did the usual miniature stress test on me, read the trace, said “yep, you have a small arrhythmia” and prescribed a dose of magnesium to be taken daily. Done and done.

Except it wasn’t done. Sometime, in the middle of the summer, I received a phone call from a local hospital that will go unnamed. “We are supposed to schedule you for a formal stress test,” the nurse said. I said “Are you sure? My cardiologist didn’t mention anything about future testing during my visit. And it’s been three months.”

The nurse snapped into the phone, “I don’t take orders from patients! Only doctors!” and then basically hung up on me as I pleaded to her to check with the cardiologist’s office.

Three months passed, and I finally get another call from the hospital to schedule the test. This time it was a different nurse, the order had been checked — apparently the cardiologist thought it would be a good idea, but had not thought to contact me. So I said “sure,” and ended up on the schedule for the end of October.

While I am not quite an exercise nut, I’m pretty serious about my exercise habit. I ride my bike (a real one, not an electric one) anywhere from 1300 miles to 2000 miles a year. If you are interested in my weight loss story, I’ve written extensively on the memetics of our dysfunctional approach to holistic health and nutrition, basically starting here. I lost approximately 65 lbs. about six years ago through fixing my diet and pursuing a LCHF approach. I had always exercised, and had basically resigned myself to being a ‘fit fat guy’ until friend Ryan prodded me to “just try something different.” That something different forced an entire re-evaluation on how we approach diet and health, which, not surprisingly, is powerfully distorted by the uniformly low level of psycho-social evolution of the medical community.

So, like any good exercise nut, I went trundling into my heart stress test armed with my phone and its Garmin Connect app, which records the various traces of my heart in different activities, including my bike riding. The nurse was nice enough, and I said “I’m in really pretty good shape for a 60 year old guy. Let me show you my bike traces.” When I ride, I normally get my heart up to 150 bpm. And considering the nominal max heart rate for my age is only 160 bpm (220 – age) that’s not too bad. In the cardiologist’s office last April, everyone but me looked like death warmed over.

“That’s all fine and good,” she said. “But we have to get you to be winded in order for the test to be effective.” “No problem,” I said.

So I got on the treadmill. These things run something like 10 minutes, and the short description is they turn up the knob on the speed until you can’t take it any more. At the time, I had no perspective on any of this, other than the weird detached comfort I have around doctors (my father was a physician) mixed in with a healthy dose of skepticism. Most doctors have never fixed any problem I’ve ever had, and with the whole system of Primary Care Physicians (PCP) you’re lucky to even spend any time with a doctor that might have some familiarity with the long term arc of your health trajectory.

So, I got on, and she turned up the treadmill rheostat. We got to 130 bpm, and then 140 bpm, and the nurse exclaimed “You’re not breaking down!” I responded “well, I ride my bike blah blah blah…” And she kept turning up the speed.

In hindsight I should have thought about the world that cardiac nurse lives in. She sees mostly fat, unhealthy people that don’t exercise. If they can get even to 135 bpm without being out of breath, they are the exception — not the rule.

We got to 155 bpm, and I was still going strong. “You’re not breaking down!” she said, and I said more blah blah. We got to 160 bpm, and I could see she was getting excited. “You’ve got to break down!” And like a good Boy Scout, I ran harder. My heart rate went to 165 bpm, and then I was finally getting winded. I SHOULD have stopped, but I didn’t. “You’ve got to break down!” she said again. “Only 20 more seconds!”

And then my heart went sideways. It was pretty clear on the traces. The mild arrhythmia turned into a major arrhythmia, and my heart did NOT feel good. I got off the treadmill, as she whimpered “you only had 20 more seconds…” I said “I really do not feel good,” and then packed my bags and got out of there. Where before I had never felt any heart pain, now I had a strange, dull angina. It is unprovable, of course, but I likely had a heart attack during my stress test.

The whole reason I had the test was because I had to, for my insurance, pre-qualify to the more advanced thallium-tracer “nuke stress test.” Now, since I some real documentation of a fucked up heart, likely really fucked up by the test itself, insurance would now approve this next level.

I’m not completely sure about all the timing of this, but in the same range, I also had a Trans-Ischemic Attack — a mini-stroke. Whether it happened post-stress test, or just right before (I think it was afterwards) it wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t shit myself, or pass out. I was getting ready to walk into my classroom, where I am famous for knowing all the students’ names. And I couldn’t remember any of them. I had also had a dizzy spell and some temporary (very!) crossed eyes.

There were now some increased diagnostic activities in the mix. I got the modern version of a Holter Monitor – a microelectronic device to record 2 weeks of my heartbeats, as well as an MRI. But the next real milestone happened some six weeks later. I was scheduled for the “nuke stress test”, which tells you your ejection fraction — the amount of blood moved out of your lower heart, and a generalized measure of efficacy. So I went back to the hospital, and donned my mask like a good boy, and sat down. My name was finally called, and I went back to the CT scanner for the initial scan. The radiation tech was a very nice man, and I said “look, we have to have some ground rules here. I’m not convinced that the last round I had didn’t cause me to have a heart attack. It’s a problem because I’m in really good shape for a 60 year old man, and we can’t run my heart up to 170 bpm because that’s where I experience failure.” He was very nice, and reassured me that was not the case. Then he shot me up with drugs and did the scan. Easy.

The next stop was at the stress test with the cardiac nurse. I started “OK, I have some ground rules.” She immediately snapped back at me – “You don’t make the rules in this office. I make the rules.” I was taken aback, but firm with her. “I am the patient here. I have rights. You don’t get to kill me because you have issues,” I told her. She then immediately launched into “you’re not wearing a mask!” and then started running around the treatment room, attempting to find a mask to put on my face. I had left my original in the other room with the CT machine. More tense words ensued, and my blood pressure shot through the roof. She then put the blood pressure cuff on me, and declared she couldn’t do the test. Then she left the room. I had already almost walked out, and was thinking of the futility of all of this. When my blood pressure goes up, it doesn’t come back down after sitting in a chair in a conflict situation.

She came back, declared the test incapable of being performed, and I gathered my clothes and got out of there. I was very careful to not use any threatening body language, or language in general. When you live with limited medical options, you cannot get banned from a hospital. One day, you might need services, and they’ll refuse treatment.

So I left. I called my PCP’s office, and told them I wouldn’t be returning to that facility. There was one other local option, and they sent me there.

A very different scenario unfolded at that facility. There was only one radiation tech., in charge of both steps — the CT scan and the stress test. She was very kind, and our conversation led to an informal advice-giving session on how to deal with adolescent child problems. I told her about the heart rate limits, and the blood pressure issues with the last test. She said “we never get even close to that high for this test. And regarding your blood pressure, if we can’t get your blood pressure in an acceptable range, there are drug-based alternatives.” So we went through the steps, and she checked the scans.

Then came the bad news. “I can’t let you leave. The scan shows you have a problem. We may have to move to immediate admission. I have to check with the local cardiologist, because I’m not sure you can even drive.” We are now nine months after the initial diagnosis by the cardiologist in Coeur D’Alene.

In 15 minutes, the cardiologist called her back and released me. Because of the bond we had built over conversation, the radiation tech. immediately sent my files to everyone in the sphere of my care. That day, the cardiologist’s office in Coeur D’Alene called me and recommended that I have a heart catheterization/angiogram completed. I attempted to communicate the sequence of events to that nurse/scheduler (at no time did I talk to a doctor) and she accused me of being a high conflict patient. “Well, you first had a problem at Hospital X, and now you’re telling me you’re having problems at Hospital Y.” I said “no — I had a problem at Hospital X, but I went to Hospital Y and everything went fine. It’s the reason we’re having this conversation.” She hurriedly hung up on me, and called back later with a potential date three days later. To be fair, her tone was very apologetic, though she did not address the former comments. Since I had been asking questions, she asked if I wanted to schedule a visit with the cardiologist first, and then return for the treatment. “No,” I said. “That’s just going to push us back another week at a minimum.” I elected to talk with the cardiologist — all he basically did was angiograms — right before the procedure.

Scheduled for an angiogram, my wife and I drove to Coeur D’Alene, and spent the night. We were first on the list for treatment that Friday morning. It involved getting up at 5:00 AM, but my wife was adamant. “If there’s something wrong with you, then you can just go and get treated.” So we did. But after we checked in at the hospital, we discovered the real reason that going in at 5:30 AM was the correct call. “If you get bumped because it’s the end of the day, and the cardiologist doesn’t get done, you’ve got to come back tomorrow. And hope there’s room.” The receptionist never said it. But it sure looked like it could go on for days, if luck wasn’t with you.

At 5:30 AM, we showed up at the hospital. Everything was nominal. The cardiologist came in. An affable man in his 30s, he explained the procedure to me. I said “fine”. Then he said “OK — where are you feeling pain in your heart?” I said I had felt no pain, at least not until my original stress test. And that pain was a dull ache. “When are you having shortness of breath?” he next inquired. I said “I’m not having any shortness of breath. I exercise…” and then I’m sure I went on about my Garmin traces. Blah, blah, blah.

He then said “OK — this is what I think is going to happen. We’re going to thread the catheter up your wrist and look around in all your arteries. If we see a constriction, then I’ll just go ahead and put in a stent. But we may find nothing. And if I had to bet, I’ll bet we find nothing.”

The procedure went off without a hitch. The performing cardiologist came into the room, drew a quick picture — 3 out of 4 arteries were perfectly lean, but one had a clog, but had already formed collateral veins around the clog. “You’re fine,” he said. “Take a baby aspirin once a day, and double your cholesterol medicine.” I was still woozy, but relieved.

Two weeks later, I am finally scheduled in my PCP’s office. “I don’t think this looks very good,” he said. I said “why?” I had a misunderstanding of the state of the one clogged artery. I said, “well, what can we do?” He said “take a baby aspirin a day, and double your cholesterol medicine.”

As of this date, I finally have a real appointment with yet another cardiologist to understand the poor results on my Nuke Stress Test. I am still not dead.

---

While it may not be obvious, my case is an emblematic example of a good hunk of what is wrong with American medicine today. And the core problem? A lack of empathetic development of both the social system, and the individual providers along my journey created a circumstance where if I had been more sick, I would very likely be dead. If I had not encountered effective advocates at stages of my journey, I would be in even worse shape than I am now. I am absolutely not an expert in anything related to care for coronary heart disease, so it is difficult for me to evaluate exactly whether a specific act of care was adequate or not. Since there has been no positive treatment modalities in my journey, other than taking magnesium (which did help) it is also difficult for me to understand efficacy. I only know that I’m a pretty smart guy, and a systems thinker, and importantly, not fear-bound.

But I also know what it means to be an expert — and I certainly am not in cardiac medicine. I am, however, an expert in processes, and analysis of individual actors I encountered along the way. So that’s where I’m going to start.

First off — when I talk about empathy, I am not talking about giving someone a hug. A global picture of empathy is a nested stack, with lower levels being incorporated into higher levels as scaffolding. If you want a medical system that works, it is incumbent that almost ALL the people in the system have a combination of developed empathy as well as emotional self-separation (the ability to discriminate their own emotional responses from the patients they deal with) from their patients. While certain parts of medical practice do not require as much as others — it IS helpful to have a practiced specialist in one of the more manual/craft-oriented branches of medicine, like heart surgery — every patient that presents to the medical system is a host of physical and psychological symptoms and history.

A quick review of empathy — let’s look at the Empathy Pyramid.

Understanding empathy is really understanding how humans (and in general, sentient beings) connect. It is not just “feeling bad” for someone. Empathy in individuals can be characterized by the type of connection one has. In order to have the higher levels, you have to have evolved, at some minimum, from the bottom. So you can have someone at a higher empathetic level of development connect with someone more down to the bottom — in fact, it’s imperative in a field like medicine.

The other poorly understood consequence of empathy (or a lack of it) is the ability/inability to process complexity. A cornerstone concept of this blog is “as we relate, so we think.” Complex, nuanced relationships condition our brains to create more containers for other types of complex, nuanced knowledge. The simplest indicator of this is the ability of a person to entertain more than one solution to a problem. As opposed to dichotomous, black-and-white thinking, higher levels of thinking contain multiple avenues, and many different shades of gray.

If one needs more coupling to the relational space, think of the ability and brain practice of a person to connect to multiple people and sort out multiple opinions in the context of coming up with a diagnosis. In order for this to even be possible, a person has to have the abilities to: a.) talk to multiple people; b.) actually understand what was said by those people in a coherent fashion, and c.) integrate/synthesize that train of thought into a combined diagnosis. One can see also that this requires a sublimation of ego — there’s no point in seeking alternate opinions if you cannot change your mind.

Finally, social structures in institutions, according to their topologies, and their aggregate empathy levels, profoundly reward or discourage all the different levels of empathy. And practice makes perfect. Doctors exist primarily in hierarchies (often rigid) and tend to lower empathy development than nurses, who congregate in work groups around nursing stations, with directions to provide appropriate care for patients, reading the signals that often come directly from the patients themselves. Doctors give orders — and orders are one-way and inherently top-down. Nurses deal with a variety of patient requests, while being reminded through the social structure of their position in the hierarchy.

And while certainly not all doctors are hierarchical, narcissistic assholes, some certainly are. Perfect for rising to the top of dominance hierarchies that are so prevalent in medicine. Nurses, with their more communitarian sensibilities are often caught in a neurotic anxiety trap. A sign of this imbalance — it used to be that nurses were considered heavily sexualized and attractive. Now, they are by and large obese, consuming brownies at their nurses’ stations. The people who are supposed to be delivering health, through a combination of self similar social dynamics that I call the Principle of Reinforcement, are often the most unhealthy.

It gets worse. As medicine has advanced (and I believe it has) the need for specialists has also grown. But specialists are inherently ensconced in silos — their titles matter, and their diagnostic spread is limited. The people that are selected to study also must conform to this ‘complicated knowledge’ paradigm — and to the readers of this blog, the emphasis is very likely to award success to complicated procedure followers (Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Memes) than someone with a broader, more integrated perspective who can parse information from a patient.

Nor is the system likely to create scenarios to fix its bad habits. In fact, one thing I immediately noticed in the context of my own care was the ‘McKinsey-ization’ of health care. You went to a specialist for a particular ailment, and that specialist did that one thing, over and over. If you needed that thing done, well, it was going to be thoroughly practiced. But if you didn’t need that thing, or you had other confounding symptoms, you weren’t going to get very good care. And if you had a low probability situation going on, you’d end up with nothing except “I don’t know.”

Sometimes this system does work. In the case of my angiogram, the same cardiologist spent all day, every day, doing them. The day I was booked for mine, there were seven scheduled for him. But if there were any confounding symptoms, he would never have discovered them. My relationship with him consisted literally of three minutes at the start, before I was sedated, and three minutes at the end. He declared my condition at the end of the procedure to be “fine” — and I honestly believe that diagnosis. And look — he was a very nice person. But he was definitely in a rush. He had some six other angiograms to do. Or he would get behind — with predictable consequences.

But he delivered no context for my condition, nor any information about downstream treatment. In talking with him, I actually missed that one of my coronary arteries was 99% clogged, and didn’t understand the outgrowth of collateral arteries that had occurred that had prevented what likely would have been a heart attack that would have killed me. I didn’t walk with any understanding of when I might need another look-see inside my heart to see if other vessels were clogging. I was half-doped up, at any rate. I never really had a chance to understand his perspective that might have helped. Nothing along the lines of “you should’ve seen the last ten people I plumbed. Compared to them, you’re a Boy Scout.” His position had been scaffolded with one thing in mind — maximum, efficient operational throughput. As McKinsey/BCG a solution as I had ever witnessed.

Let’s walk back through what happened in my other history of procedures. My first cardiologist appointment, a referral by my PCP, was actually pretty good. Sitting in the waiting room with a bunch of oldsters who looked like death warmed over had both its good and bad points. On the one hand, I knew I had to be at least nominally in better shape than them. Every single one of them was obese, with a gray pallor that screamed death. But on the other, well, I was in the room with them. My initial nurse in that visit was awesome. Laboring under a mask, she told me I was free to take mine off, and that she thought it was ridiculous. The same with finally the cardiologist when she came to visit. We talked a respectable amount of time — 15 minutes about my condition, and when I left I felt like I had been treated decently and understood.

But the system is inherently fragile, and rapidly goes off the rails when a High Conflict person is introduced. When I was contacted about the first stress test and I requested a check on whether there might have been a mistake in orders, the High Conflict cardiac nurse flew off the handle. Had I actually had a life-threatening problem, the delay in my receiving appropriate diagnostic analysis might have killed me. It is important to realize there was something like a 3 month delay in receiving a reschedule because that nurse decided I was not responding in an appropriate, Authoritarian v-Meme fashion. Which is to mean I should shut up and not respond at all. Orders move down the hierarchy. Feedback does not come back up. Or you get denied treatment.

Further, when I finally did receive the stress test, the nurse (not the same one) at the hospital was not paying any attention to me. She had an algorithm (Legalistic/Algorithmic v-Meme) she had to complete, and that involved some level of minor collapse on my part. They keep defibrillators in the room for good reason. And I’m not saying to remove them. But she simply did not, even with briefing her, process that the test for a fit male at 60 might be run differently than a test for a morbidly obese patient. One of the pieces of advice I now give all my friends in my age cohort is that unless you know the nurse running the test, do NOT assume that she will sort consequences well, and certainly not entertain multi-solution pathways. She has a test. She will run the test. And if you die, well, you signed the release form. Hey, they had the paddles on the wall.

More stuff went downhill from there. Finally scheduling the Nuke Stress Test at least revealed who the High Conflict nurse was. But the fact that any nurse would simply refuse to listen to a patient at the start of a test, with no prior experience, is criminal malpractice. I suspect, but cannot prove she was likely the same person as the first nurse who refused to check on my initial orders. The response of the first radiation tech clearly illustrated the Communitarian/Authoritarian v-Meme split present in medicine. And it’s no surprise that the rebarbative cardiac nurse had to chase around attempting to mask me (this was now in December of 2022) was more proof of her pathology. Especially as masking during procedures for the patient was de facto optional, if not nominally so. In fact, the insistence on masking in general was an amazing memetic sorting tool for all people in the hospital. Of course, in regards to their own situation, they were constrained through hospital policy. But there was quite a bit of elective judgment regarding the patients. For those mask-insistent, it was clear they were low empathy all the way. Most were “just following orders.” But it was also painfully obvious that they reacted negatively to anyone who challenged the authority stack.

One last comment — one can never tell how memetic resonances will work in the context of one’s treatment. I was seriously taken aback when the Coeur D’Alene cardiologist’s nurse in charge confronted me, telling me that I was a difficult patient, and even inferring multiple conflicts with other care providers because of my problems with the one High Conflict nurse. What inevitably happens in conflict is that organizations will close ranks around their lowest level of social development. And in medicine, that is raw Tribal affiliation. You’re either with us or against us. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the AMA rallying around the recent round of barbaric trans surgeries being performed on youth. All of the trans issue turmoil is a very recent surprise to the majority of the public. Yet the AMA, realizing some small cohort of doctors have been complicit, instead of holding anything resembling an open debate, or even hearing, has closed ranks. Sterilization of children is endorsed by both the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics. And trust me, folks — it’s memetic. We’re deep in the Matrix with this one.

What is also interesting is that had I died, the system had covered its tracks the whole way. There would be no inquiry. There is not a level of evidence, in my opinion, to sue for malpractice. There is no timeline in any of this that indicates that time to treatment is even a factor. Other than when my second radiation tech got involved, there was no sense of urgency, and even active neglect in providing timely services — or even explaining to me why there was no rush. A lack of context delivered to the patient is an embarrassing failure of empathy by the medical provider — both emotional and place-taking/rational. Other than the High Conflict nurse, who was egocentrically threatened by my questions, the others were just too busy too care.

I do have to confess — as a doctor’s child, I’ve been raised to expect a high level of care from the medical community. But I haven’t seen this since I turned into an adult. I’m also used to being reasonably charming and charismatic, and building connected relationships with all my service providers. I’m the guy that waves to the garbage man, for chrissakes. None of this made any permanent dent in the medical community, though there were Matrix embeds that I encountered who were interested in the deeper Why of why everything was so fucked up. They knew it.

Finally, one of the most appalling aspects of dealing with medicine was how far south it has gone with regards to anything related to diet and lifestyle. My own PCP is a Seventh Day Adventist, and a very nice person. To be fair, he has only in a couple of incidences recommended some form of veganism to me. But a general incomprehension regarding my own weight loss (I lost 65 lbs. some six-seven years ago) hasn’t helped me much. The fact that I reversed a path that would have certainly led to diabetes is still not interesting to them. I’ve written about how empathetic development leads to higher consequentiality in thinking. Looking at my physicians, and even my revolving door PCPs, which has rotated in basically a constant state of flux for the past (at least) 10 years hasn’t helped with this. They have no history with me, and they are largely overwhelmed.

But this decay in empathy has profound consequences for treatment modalities. One of my favorite stories involves a request I made to one of my PCPs back literally 12 years ago. I’m a big guy — 6’2″, and 255 lbs. I had asked my PCP at the time to write a letter for medical exemption for work for a slightly roomier seat (think Delta Comfort + as opposed to Delta Coach) on flights. I was getting off the plane with severe back pain, and it would take me about two days to heal — especially if it was a long, transoceanic flight.

My PCP physician at the time immediately said “I can’t do that. I’m not going to use my position to give you privilege.” I pleaded with him — what diagnostic test could we do to validate my very real experience? This was no cost to him. But he (and almost every other physician) adamantly refused.

So I looked at him and said “would you give me a prescription for muscle relaxers that I could take after I got off the flight?” He said “that I can do.”

Medicine is going to have to answer whose side it actually is on. The system? Or the patient’s? Right now, the answer is painfully obvious.

Twenty+ years later — Erik and Braden — Life went on

For those that want the complete story, highly recommend you go back and read this first. It’s Part I.

The Cove/Mallard campaign, on a smaller level, and the larger forest protection movement, followed similar dynamics. Both these were really pre-Internet Full Spectrum Dominance. Cove/Mallard and the work of others in other venues led to the Pew Charitable Trusts efforts, headed up by pals Steve Kallick, Ken Rait, and Mat Jacobsen, which led to the 2001 Clinton Roadless Rule, that basically managed to save all the remaining US Forest Service Roadless Areas in the United States. I contributed quite a bit to this effort, both strategically and tactically, but that’s a story for another time. Brief historical note — it was Steve’s intuitive insight into complexity reduction (literally ‘save it all’, with ‘all’ being something we could maneuver on administratively) that gave us much of forest politics of today.

But back to Cove/Mallard. Like all campaigns running over a number of years (I lost track of how long the whole Cove/Mallard debacle lasted, because Cove/Mallard morphed into another adjacent USFS logging roadless fight over the Otter/Wing timber sales, with similar tactics of road and logging unit blockades, and such) it continued to evolve. I was there, always in at some level, but stepping out quite a bit as I was running my more creative efforts to support the larger roadless fight that Steve and others were running. There would be a call for some need, and if possible, I would attempt to fill it if I could. Things started hot with the original founders, then died down when an injunction against the timber sales was issue, only to heat up again if the injunction was lifted. Like all wars with a front that never moves, attrition became a big part of it. And that attrition then played into who was available to scheme up the next thing — getting less evolved over time. For example, I don’t recall any real new strategy after about 1996, but the various details for the various road blockades definitely did.

The other thing folks on the outside often don’t realize is that any long-term campaign against the government (and protesting the Cove/Mallard timber sales was definitely against the government) will, in the end, become infiltrated by that government. Every campaign of size has a certain number of federal agents (Feds) assigned to it. They are alternately selected from a class of individuals who will be either openly disruptive, and encouraging folks to do more dramatic, illegal acts, or they will ingratiate themselves into the machinery of the campaign to make it run more smoothly. The Feds implicitly realize the evolutionary dynamics of this piece. And they like to keep things going, if it CAN be kept going.

The rationale is this — the more people a given CD campaign can disqualify from participating in society, even as rational, legal actors, the better. If you actually manage to survive through an entire campaign like Cove/Mallard, you know lots of things that you can’t learn any other way. You learn legal strategy. You learn arrest procedures. You learn how jails and prisons are set up. These are things you cannot just pick up a book and read about, and assemble any cogent worldview on how the Octopus really operates.

The Feds involved in Cove/Mallard (I was friends with one, and he has now passed away, without admitting of course that he was a Fed) were not clearly distinguishable as smarter or more clever than any of the majority of the protestors. All of us knew when we were doing anything that there could be a Fed in the room (and often was) and acted accordingly. The rules of the campaign were also clear. Even if you wanted to do something that WAS CD, if it involved breaking the law, it should be planned in the context of your affinity group — a group of like-minded individuals who were all basically taking the same risk at the same point in time. The Feds were actively seeking RICO convictions for more of the prolonged environmental campaigns at the time, and the charge of conspiracy was far worse than any charge for the illegal activity in play. Ignoring this was tantamount to REALLY paying a large price for protest activities. RICO violations could send people away for decades.

And even the smallest protest activity could theoretically involve conspiracy. For example, let’s consider a case where someone might be locking their neck to a gate across a forest road to keep logging equipment from passing. That person willing to lock to the gate would have some small cohort of support individuals who would potentially bring them water, or make sure the loggers or local contractors wouldn’t kill them. They realized that this might involve them getting involved with the illegal act (locking themselves to the gate) and understood potential risks of arrest. But these particular things were never discussed in larger meetings. Driving supplies to base camp, as I did several times, or running a workshop on how to police timber sales post-logging (very legal activities) could be discussed. Illegal activities never were.

But things were changing in the broader environmental protest world. Concurrent at the time of the Cove/Mallard protests, organizers around such issues as stopping underground nuclear blasts at the Nevada Test Site wanted masses of people demonstrating at the test site. And obviously, masses of middle class people were not going to show up if they thought they were going to lose their jobs for standing in a place they weren’t supposed to be. I never did one of those protests, but Terry Tempest Williams, a friendly acquaintance of mine and a very famous women’s writer, wrote quite a bit about it in her book, Refuge. If you’re going to get middle-aged women in the middle of the desert, they’re going to want some commitments they’re not going to be stuck in a jail in Pahrump, Nevada. Cove/Mallard was truly old school. But the New School of large media/low consequence mildly illegal mass protest was already starting to emerge. Get hauled to the Test Site, get a picture taken, get a ticket and get on a bus. FWIW — this stuff did kinda work. But it also opened the door to the current mess we’re in now. Jail, or the threat of jail, is part of how civil disobedience works. Remove this, and an entirely different social structure was guaranteed to emerge. And it did.

So how are we to understand contemporary social movements, like Black Lives Matter, or even some of the Women’s Marches? (I’m think of this pink Pussyhat phenomenon of 2017.) There are some important points to remember that differentiate the majority of the black civil rights protests of the ’50s and ’60s, the Cove/Mallard protests of the ’90s, vs. the Test Site protests and of course BLM.

1. Relationally, the two groups were profoundly different. The authentic CD protests counted on independently generated friendships for many of the actions. Core organizers especially, but even those in the trenches had to know the people they were protesting with. Hierarchies were flat because they had to be. Yes, scaling was different with the mass protests with no arrest scenarios really in play. But that also meant the leadership would also evolve in complexity of thought over time. And you either had to evolve up, or you had to retreat. And many, like myself, did both.
2. Contrast that to protected protest activities, especially those enshrined in institutions like universities. The only thing that might make a given protest more noteworthy was the level of rancor displayed. Leadership didn’t have to worry about more clever strategies to send the message, or leverage action to stop the target. People just had to get more angry.
3. With the large protests, the only thing that really mattered was numbers — not relationships. Status was achieved just by showing up. I remember being surprised in talking to people about the 2017 Pussyhat protests. Lots of women friends went to these. I asked them “who was collecting names and contact info for follow-up?” The answer was “NO ONE.” The mob appeared at the behest of some form of social or mass media. You likely went with a friend or or acquaintance. Evolving a more powerful, tightly connected network was never part of the deal. And naturally, this did not result in friendships and newer network topologies. Homogeneity of state (all wearing the same hats for the photo op.) was the only real goal.
4. Organizers of larger protests, because they faced no real personal or professional risk (grounding validity), would tend toward those seeking status. Both the BLM movements and to a lesser extent, the Pussyhat protests were umbrella-type protests. BLM supposedly was about police brutality/defund the police, but there were no real pieces of legislation as a goal to be moved. One might argue that the Pussyhat protests were more directly in line with legislative goals around abortion, but there was no bill # being proposed on a national level regarding this. So a successful leader of that type of protest would trend toward someone with institutional organizing experience, or a histrionic personality type that would attract attention. Over time, the most successful organizers would be those that used simplified, extremely well established mental models without nuance — in short no one would be making anyone else smarter in the context of the protests. And then, in turn, this type of activity would attract more psychopaths interested in notoriety, and extreme emotional reactions from portrayed victimhood. Being in such a protest might deliver on the same level as a singalong in a rock concert. But a person would not leave with a larger peer cohort, nor would they have increased understanding of the ensemble of issues being addressed. I cover how this works in this piece.
5. When what you’re attempting to do is get a large crowd going purely on emotion, that kind of event is going to attract psychopaths like flies to shit. Watch Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. The parallels of much of current political theater relies on similar emotional dynamics.

Joe Biden’s Sept. 1, 2022 Election Denial Speech — still stunning, but not in a good way

The challenge in much of this is breaking the chicken/egg problem of understanding societal evolution/devolution. Are we seeing more of the status-driven/emotion-laden protests (which will guarantee a spiral to violence) because the people running these protests are exploiting a hack in people’s development? Or is the larger societal devolution in part due to emotional development regression due to the relational disruption wreaked by COVID, as well as the rancor (fairly held or not) expressed at the Trump presidency? Of course, as with all chicken and egg problems, it’s tough to say.

I think a better way of framing the problem, at least if significant action is to be taken to reverse the decline of our a nation as a nation, is to realize that our fundamental demographics right now are all pushing decentralization. Like it or not, because of the destruction of geography, groups believing just about anything can find each other, and at the same time, harnessed against each other — and they will be taking advantage of the current political tides.

But I also believe that if we shift our own understanding of all this, we can also push back against this in our own local spheres. The U.S. is going to go through its own version of demographic shift as our population ages. Awareness of the actual problem — how this is occurring and how it is being driven by our relational milieu, is the first step in reversing it. The bad news is that this interpretation of our problem is not forthcoming outside a handful of thinkers, like myself and primarily other metamodernists.

And the recent addition of Trans Rights Activists, playing heavily on victimization and gaslighting basic elements of human existence in the rest of the population, certainly isn’t helping. Strap in, folks. It’s going to be a rough ride.

Roadside Creek, Pyrenees Mountains in France

If you had asked me 35 years ago whether I would end up as an expert on social movements, I would have laughed. That’s the best way to start this piece.

I originally moved out to Pullman/Washington State University back in 1988 because I was an outdoor sports enthusiast in general, and in particular, a kayaker. I had other job offers — my Ph.D. advisor, Earl Dowell, was a noted aeroelastician (dude that looks at wing flutter), the Dean of Engineering at Duke, and a National Academy member. I was his first native graduate student at Duke to get a Ph.D., and his wish was to place me in a peer or better institution (Duke was not as famous in 1988 as it is now) to establish the Duke brand with his contribution. He was/is a wonderful man, and I still communicate with him.

But instead of taking any one of a number of East Coast jobs, I took off for the territories. WSU, it turns out, is likely the Carnegie R1 institution closer to more designated wilderness than any other. So when I flew out here for a job interview, which was a ski trip, I knew, at some level, this was going to be it. I also knew that it was going to be lonely — prospects for meeting young women were notoriously slim. Land grant institutions, which WSU is, were built in the middle of nowhere in every state, with the intent that they would both support the agricultural economy of the region, and serve as a nucleus for the beginnings of urbanization. WSU definitely has done the former, but has really failed at the latter. Pullman, where I work, and where the main campus is located, is not the Ends of the Earth. But you can see them from here.

So I moved out, found a roommate, found a girlfriend (a whole ‘nother story) and after setting up shop, the next weekend drove down to the North Fork of the Payette in Idaho, which remains one of the premier Class V runs in the world. I had found my version of paradise, at least if it didn’t kill me. Running the North Fork in a kayak has more in common with being in a four hour car wreck than anything.

I did have that girlfriend, whom I met in the parking permit line, and it turned out she was both relatively compliant, and possessing of a large family on the Camas Prairie, which is just south of here. I would go off to kayak, I’d drop her off with said family, and return to pick her up at the end of the weekend.

But that left the rest of the week. I had been programmed by my parents for acts of public service, so I found a local environmental collective where I connected with one of the chief mentors of my young existence — Leroy Lee, a hippie-turned-Indian connected with the Nez Perce tribe. I’ve told many of these stories in my book, Wild to the Last:Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country. The book, for a first book, is pretty good. Some of it is actually amazing and still makes me cry/triggers my PTSD. You decide. It became a modest literary sensation, because it was written, well, by me, a rocket scientist with a dark sense of humor, that was looking to make sure I wasn’t gaslighting myself.

Along the way, in 1992, a very small group of activists, calling themselves the Ancient Forest Bus Brigade, also showed up in town. They were only nominally headed up by Robert Amon/Ramon, a former life insurance sales executive, and included a handful of literal misfits, including Erik Ryberg, an activist, then lawyer, then mayor of the town of Etna, CA. I think Erik now cooks pizzas in a stone bread oven he built.

At the time, I had been working with Leroy as an assistant on what turned into the Phantom Forest scandal. This was a situation where Leroy, a forest stand examiner by trade, had noticed that the Forest Service was keeping two sets of books — one somewhat fraudulent to justify cutting more trees than were sustainable, and one that was an actual inventory of real trees. Leroy went on with a couple of other activists to Washington, D.C., to testify in front of Congress about this fraud. He considered me his successor, which, quite frankly, I had no idea what the hell that meant at the time.

But back to the Ancient Forest Bus Brigade. They had decided to set as their campaign goal the preservation of the Cove-Mallard Roadless Area, a large, unroaded space (400K acres IIRC) adjacent to the Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness Area. But they were a handful of folks living on a school bus, in the middle of nowhere, for the summer. In this case, this “middle of nowhere” was located outside Dixie, Idaho.

Dixie, Idaho, is 98% pure anachronism. You have to see it to believe it. There are still places you can jump through the portal and travel back in time.

1992 ended with the arrest of some subset of the Bus Brigade getting some misdemeanor arrest/ticket for mooning a US Forest Service vehicle that was doing some road prep work, for the coming massive timber sale. I found out as much as I had previously known by reading an Outside Magazine blurb about the bunch. Outside used to be far more funny than it is now, and, well, this WAS a classic story.

It wasn’t long until the Ancient Forest Bus Brigade, or at least Ramon, ended up in Moscow, ID as a base of operations. Dixie is one of those places you can indeed live in the past, but once you do this, you’ll find out the past is not as glamorous as people like to make it out to be. Notably, there is a lack of food, or rather food diversity, in Dixie. The big grocery store is some 70 miles away, down a winding road. Moscow is far more accessible, to say the least. So I met at least some of them (the dynamics in all this involve more people than I want to write about, quite frankly) and decided to help their cause.

To say the campaign was disorganized would be an understatement. But that would be if you were thinking only a large, hierarchical organization can make a difference in the world. The Bus Brigade was hooked in with another couple of hand-to-mouth organizations — The Ecology Center of Missoula, and the Idaho Sportsmans Coalition (soon to be the Idaho Sporting Congress.) If there was one characteristic of most of the major actors in all this chaos, it was brilliance. Some amazing legal minds worked on the issue of saving Cove/Mallard. They were also what we call “low baggers” — basically living on the bum while working to prevent forests from being logged.

And they were unlikely heroes. The head of the Idaho Sportmen’s Coalition, Ron Mitchell, was an actual hunter, a fat guy, fabulously funny, who would walk around in his underwear in his house in Boise, being somewhat taken care of by his more normal girlfriend, Judy. Erik has a great story about walking into Ron’s house to find Ron skinning a turkey in said underwear in his kitchen. They were all brilliant, most were definitely non-normative, and they were all passionately committed to saving the remaining wild country in Idaho. They were going to do whatever it took.

(Side note — Ron Mitchell, along with Erik, and another lawyer, Mark Fink are probably responsible for saving the last great ponderosa pine forests in the Intermountain West. Other, more mainstream sissy groups can attempt to take the credit. All bullshit. The notion that one of the iconic landscapes of the American West was literally saved by this group of utter misfits with basically no money should serve as a history lesson for all the fucked-up-edness we’re dealing with right now. It is literally “same as it ever was.”)

But here is where we begin our story. The campaign to save this huge hunk of the Idaho wilderness was started by people who were fiercely independent, brilliant, somewhat broke, and completely committed to the goal. They had gotten to the point where the legal strategy that was running parallel to save Cove/Mallard was not going to result in a stay of action on roadbuilding in that area, in enough time to prevent the roadbuilding that would convert the Cove/Mallard area to being officially loaded. So they made a decision to launch a call to action in the Radical environmentalist paper of record, the Earth First! Journal. The text was somewhat classic (I can’t remember it) but it involved the usual stuff about implied vandalism. It announced there would be a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign outside of Dixie, ID, as well, in the summer of 1993, directly stopping the USFS from building roads into the area.

Here are some key things.

1. The people involved at the start of the campaign were brilliant, and virtuous (well, in their own way.) They had tried everything to save these wild places, and now they had been brought to the point where the only thing they could do was place their bodies in-between the forest and the roadbuilding bulldozers.
2. They knew that the various things that would happen in the context of the protests would likely end them up in jail.
3. They recognized there was a price to be paid if this place were to be saved. There was none of this contemporary nonsense of safe spaces, institutional endorsement, or other such icks.

I came to the campaign because, at the time, I was passionately committed to the same cause as the Bus Brigade. But unlike them, I fancied a life AFTER all this was over. I saw arrest scenarios written all over what they were proposing. And there was, at least in my mind, no doubt that there would be other stuff going on in the woods that was NOT civil disobedience (CD).

So I set myself up to help with logistics in running the nonviolent CD campaign. I had a truck. I could drive to Dixie with bags of whatever greasy beans the various hippies, still to arrive, that would show up would eat, provided we created the infrastructure. And I did. But I didn’t hang around Cove/Mallard all summer. I also took off for 8 weeks that summer to work at the USAF Academy.

The summer of ’93 would be one for the books. Dozens of folks were arrested, protesting in the literal middle of nowhere against the timber sales and road construction. At the end of the summer, all of these people had been cited, more or less, with something, and had to be processed through the federal court seated in Moscow, ID. We had trials we had to sit through. Erik got arrested for something (I think it was diving under a USFS truck that was supposedly delivering a message for a camp inhabitant, and locking himself to the steering mechanism.) Ramon had bought 40 acres of an inholding next to the Roadless Area proper, so they could operate without the USFS harassing them. I remember the spring of 1993, preparing the camp, putting up a gate, and whatever. It turned out that all of us had been Eagle Scouts in our former lives. We were all Boy Scouts Gone Bad.

All the people cited ended up with a fine, or some jail sentence. Usually it wasn’t long (now sequence starts to blur together a little bit) but I was watching all this happen, and it became obvious. The Feds would arrest you the first time. You would go to court (often with a bunch of other people) and you would plead your case to the Federal Judge. Most of the defenses were some version of the Necessity Defense — the USFS was going to do something wrong that would violate (pick some forest law) and you were the conscious citizen who was stopping them from doing this.

The Federal Judge — an extremely powerful person (people mostly have no concept how powerful a Federal Judge is — they serve for life, they can put a President in jail, etc.) listened to your shenanigans, and then got irritated. He looked at whether you had any history of recidivism, and then he would attempt to teach you how irritated he was by putting you in jail for a night or two, and admonishing you to NOT show up in his courtroom again with your bullshit, which he didn’t find compelling.

Don’t show up again. That was the big lesson. Or it was going to get radically worse — at least for you.

Moment of analysis

At this point I started to realize where things were going to head. The first round of folks charged would be the ones that had done their homework, and were passionate, intelligent and virtuous in their cause. They had studied the law, they loved the Wild, and they were willing to jeopardize their long-term viability in society by going to jail for this cause. There was a Price to be Paid, and they realized this was how CD worked.

But the price wasn’t that high. It was a misdemeanor, after all, which might fuck with you getting into Canada (it did) but most of life would go on. I didn’t want to pay that price — I was, after all, a rocket scientist, working with various organs of the DoD, and while I’ve never held a security clearance, that would be the end of that. There would be consequences.

What then started was the realization that our social movement was in the process of some memetic evolution. Of course, I didn’t have the vocabulary I have now, nor the insight, but I realized that the smart people were either going to a.) commit to a lifetime of getting arrested, or b.) fade out of the movement. I can’t tell you I completely comprehended how all that would go, but the beginning of the social devolution had begun. The only question was whether we would accomplish our goal (saving Cove/Mallard) before it all turned into truly mindless hippie nihilism.

To cut to the chase — it did. 1994 resulted in a federal injunction against the Cove/Mallard timber sales, we had another big round of arrests (I think) in 1998, we were strengthened by a couple of famous activists, namely Mike Roselle who went on to found Rainforest Action Network. Mike had been a founder of Earth First! and he is still a dear friend. He is brilliant of course, but the fact was we might be close would have as much to do with the fact that his father was a drunken womanizer, that beat him, kinda like my own dad. We shared enough background. ‘Nuf said.

SO here we go. How do large civil disobedience campaigns run?

1. The founders are very often big thinkers, passionately committed to the reality of the change. The system arrests them, and they have to make choices. Keep going, and end up with lots of jail time, or fade to the back and attempt to have a normal life.
2. The second tier are often very committed. But they are NOT as smart as the pioneers. They plug into an already established leitmotif and infrastructure, and duplicate, or modestly innovate on the founders’ actions. After one or two rounds of arrests, they have decisions to make, just like the founders. As opposed to six months in the federal penitentiary, living your life by homesteading in Vermont starts to look mighty attractive.
3. The third round of activists were far more unpredictable, but one thing is for certain — they will not be the best and brightest. And it will not end well. They, too, become aware of the choices they will be faced with. But they often don’t have a whole lot going on anyway, and some percentage will be in the “Three Hots and a Cot” category. A long protest campaign provides social connection for many, and an unending diet of stewed lentils.

The last round, for someone like me, who was a local, proved the most problematic. By the time we ended up in Round 3, I can’t say I was actually “in charge” of anything. But there were things I did that were counted on (I once drove a load of food to Dixie in the middle of the winter for activists over-wintering on the 40 acre property, for all the good that did.) Ungrounded and dogmatic, their actions were completely nihilistic.

I remember this one call I got where an activist, in a fit of pique, had locked themselves underneath a USFS pickup in the grocery store parking lot in Grangeville, ID. The call came into whatever our headquarters at the time was, and we were trying to figure out jail support, legal support, whatever. I can remember asking, frustrated, “why the hell did they do this???” We were 90 miles away in Moscow, and there was little we could do. That person was going to jail. And worse, they had blown one of their arrest tickets because of some brain spasm they had. I think the answer was “they just felt, at the moment, they had to do SOMETHING.” 3rd Gen. activism in a nutshell.

But one thing to remember. ALL of us, when faced with our activities, had to face up to the fact that there was going to be a PRICE that had to be paid. The institutional structure may indeed change with time, but at the time, there was either going to be a trip to court, a fine, a mark on your record, or an ass-beating that was all part of it. We never had any illusion that universities would give us jobs for raising hell.

In my case, as a person still WITH a real job in engineering, the natural resource faculty would insult me, even though they knew I was on the right side of the issue. The local timber baron called for my job, and to his credit, the WSU President at the time, Sam Smith, told him that I had not broken the law, and he would be doing nothing. Same timber baron’s son threatened to put a bullet through my then-wife’s skull. He was such an asshole (not all the folks in the timber industry are, FWIW) that we worried about this.

I finally ended up punching one of my holes on my ticket when a friend, Rein Attemann, who worked for a local NGO (the Lands Council) and I drove past a road closure sign on the Colville NF to take pictures of a fire-prevention timber sale that had, well, caught fire. I was full-on into large-format photography, and the photos ended up, blown up to poster size, in the Well of the Senate in the middle of the ‘Healthy Forests’ debate. Larry Craig, Senator from Idaho, ended up sending the federal marshals to my house to cite me and formally arrest and release me — not fun. But by this time, the tide had turned, the US Federal Magistrate got mad at the USFS for citing me with the misdemeanor, and the whole thing went away.

The key element of EVERYTHING we did, though was tied together with the concept of Grounding Validity. We had ideals, and we were prepared to act on those ideals. But CD is NOT CD unless the potential to get your ass beat is also in the cards. That keeps it real. There’s nothing wrong with marches, gatherings, assemblies and whatnot. But you are NOT fighting the Man if the Man can’t beat your ass. It’s part of the deal. You get your ass beat, people see that and think “hey, that’s not right.” And then the world moves.

And CD in general only works in systems where people have independent agency AND have consciences. CD would not have worked in Hitler’s Germany, at least on any reasonable timescale. Or Stalin’s Russia. That’s the other thing people are NOT getting about the disturbing trends in Lefty protests. With Cancel Culture, NO ONE is encouraged to have agency. You speak up, you lose your job, you’re excluded from society. The “Free speech has consequences” assholes (who, oddly stereotypically are from Hollywood far too often) will never face real consequences for their actions. In fact, what’s actually happened is protest in its current form has been captured by these elites as a tool of social control. They’ve finally managed to harness protest as both a relief valve for their young, dissociated members, and a memetic weapon against their enemies.

Short version, folks — We’re not in Kansas any more.

Part II — the rise of the psychopathic narcissists.

Or what happens when you remove Grounding Validity from your system. When nobody goes to jail the psychopaths ascend, and you really start to devolve as a society. When there is no price to be paid, the Joker smacks his lips.

For tomorrow!

Boo Boo loves Mellow

I’ve been avoiding writing about the whole ‘Woke’ phenomenon, mostly because I’ve written about it before, in smaller pieces throughout this blog. But I decided it was important enough for folks to understand the memetic implications of what Woke is all about, and decide whether they want to promote this or not.

I define Woke as the current social justice movement to relationally define everything outside a given individual’s agency and judgment. If you meet a Black/Hispanic/Lesbian/Whatever (the list is almost endless) you must follow a predefined script, created by a cross-section of academics and ersatz intellectuals, or in the preferred end game of these self-appointed elites, you lose your livelihood. That’s been the defining characteristic of the Woke playbook. You will do what you’re told, or you will starve. There is nothing more darkly humorous than hearing a Wokie say “Free speech has consequences!” Which means, of course, if you step outside the lines to color, you will deserve to starve.

Wokism is often portrayed by its proponents as a high empathy strategy for a better society. But it is far from that. What wokism really is is a relational power grab, with increasingly complex set of protocols, that functionally neuters and isolates everyone in the society outside a given, and small in-group. It’s targeted currently against white folks, and justified as a strategy to redress past wrongs (slavery, discrimination and so on.) But considering my own experience with the larger population in the U.S., where basically any coherent version of history has been under attack for the last 30 years, it’s mostly arbitrary, and outside large-scale documented phenomena, like chattel slavery, it lacks any detail or meaningful narrative besides a top level perspective. Your character is defined by your phenotype, and there is simply not much you can do to change it.

From a memetic perspective, this makes it a combination of the Tribal, Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Memes, with the largest weight given to the Authoritarian knowledge structure — what you see is what you limbically get. Once we understand this, there are a couple of larger memetic questions we should be asking. Caste systems of all sorts have shown up in history around the globe, and have proven to be remarkably stable. India and China both have them, with India’s being explicit, and China’s far more implicit. Maybe it IS better to leave relational definition to some group of societal betters, and just go along with it.

And make no mistake — Wokism is a call to a caste system, since moving beyond such a system inherently implies mixing of the various castes to establish a new, synthetic normal. And that will require independent relational definition.

In a modern society like the U.S., in order to move into an explicit caste system, some level of relational devolution is mandatory. What that means is that, at least for a time, psychopaths must be in charge of its implementation, in that people must be broken down and lose some culturally asserted agency in establishing it as the de facto protocol. This then inherently leads to warping of the concept — psychopaths are going to use mental models extant to establish their own power and control — until either the population’s larger spirit is crushed, or people kill each other in the numbers necessary to correspond to the amount of complex information available to run the society. Those are the social physics, folks. You’re going to bubble up with your assigned in-group, only approaching the other out-groups under Legalistic, dictated protocols.

The problem with all of this, besides the fact that the emergent goal is to make everyone as miserable as possible, through some societal level of narcissistic “Golden Child/Scapegoat Child” dynamic, is that it profoundly cuts down on a society’s ability to deal with change of any sort — but especially rapid change. I have been a strong proponent of diversity my entire professional career (check my resume’ sometime) and still am. But the way agency-driven diversity works is create interaction scenarios between different groups where individuals decide whether to trust, or not trust others. This pushes the society much higher up on the evolutionary scale, as well as driving community-building and goal-based knowledge structures and behaviors.

But Wokism responds to this with increased fragmentation and a multiplication of reconcilable strategies of intersectionality. You have to have that as well, in a country with 331 million people. Which then might lead to a more sophisticated society, but one increasingly out of the control of all outside the priestly caste generating the rules. And sooner or later, that’s going to get down into the infrastructure of actual society — food webs, transportation, and so on — and cause the material disruption and migration to the Survival v-Meme it needs to get people to start killing each other, which is, unfortunately, the outcome of that simplification.

And if anyone thinks it is somehow going to be executed fairly, or within the bounds of some nonexistent, universal moral code, well, that’s not in the social physics. The psychopaths propagating will also likely be killed, but the timescales in their brain indicate they don’t care. I love this clip from the Dark Knight of the Joker and Two Face in the hospital. Chaos, as the Joker says, from a moral position, is fair.

There are larger population dynamics going on with all this, that I can only surmise. My Taiwanese wife insists the caste system in China was set up during the Song Dynasty, and most was an outflow of intense rule-followers, likely autism spectrum disordered, who became promoted through the introduction and modest social mobility of the Chinese civil service exam, which didn’t focus so much on executing civil service. More, it was a knowledge sophistication test through the lens of ancient Chinese poetry. Societies before my writing had implicitly figured out the whole relational mapping to other subjects’ complexity before me (remember my tagline is ‘As we relate, so we think.’ ) But as I have noted, doing so freezes societies and their aggregate cultures in time. Not so good for dealing with wide-scale disruption that might occur in a global society.

There also is no doubt that looking at Chinese history, with its frozen-in-time model (they didn’t call it Jungguo — The Middle Kingdom for nothing) gives important insights on psychopathy in such a society. Psychopaths will, over time, get shunted to the side even in Authoritarian societies, often through cultural adaptations. No one knows psychopathic games played better than the general Chinese population, and things like chengyu spring up. People need happiness, and will find ways to find it through intimate understanding.

But you have to get there first. And in a country with 331 million people, we either double down on creating people in our society that navigate issues on their own. Or we have to expect the inevitable decline our memetics serves up, along with depopulation. Wokism is both a coupled cause and a symptom of where our own society and culture is at this moment.

One last thing. Advancing societal sophistication — increasing the cascades of categories that our academic elites dream up — may start as an imposed exercise of equality, equity or what have you. But in the end, the people who benefit from these sophistication cascades will be the elites. Why? Complicated cultural codes take spare energy and time to master, lest you make a mistake and get canceled yourself. That implies those with the best proxy — money — for both energy and time, are the only ones that will master them. What may start as an attempt to recognize the huddled masses really isn’t for them. What is fascinating is that we’re starting to see this adaptation increasingly in corporate America. The winners are going to create codes even if it is against their monetary interest — that’s simply how powerful the downward evolutionary pressure of the memetics are.

And odds are if you’re reading this blog, you ain’t it. You can’t fight social physics. So the next time you are getting called out for some element of nonsensical BS, you might remember this. The multi-faction civil war that is emergently being promoted is going to kill your children too.

Sidebar — I’m going to cut this off — I have a lot more detail in this post on Information Fractalization.

One more note — recently listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast with Naval Ravikant and David Deutsch. I’m not really a David Deutsch fan, but his concept on Wealth Creation — which is essentially cross-conceptual and paradigmatic mapping to create a culture of optimism– is spot on. One might think about how Wokism intrinsically affects wealth creation (basically destroys it, which then fits into the devolutionary relational spiral I’m discussing here.) David doesn’t do so well in the actual Theory of Everything category. But he’s still a smart guy.