the presence of the unforethinkable.....

 

Contingency, or the "presence of the unforethinkable," is at the heart of earthly reality, according to philosopher Albert Borgman.  Contingency doesn't make life random or meaningless, he says, adding that in ancient times contingency meant something like consummation.  Rather, it attests to the "unsurpassable eloquence" of a reality that often asks us to confront what we cannot control or even understand.  A face-to-face meeting, which demands a mutual reading of body language, emotion, and soul, is harder to fathom, and less predictable than a virtual encounter.  But by losing the will to face one another, we are turning away from the messy, unpredictable, and real in life.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

The world has always been messy................

 

The aging Sultan Abdülhamid II convened his cabinet in a crisis session on 23 July 1908.  The autocratic monarch faced the greatest domestic threat to his rule in over three decades on the throne.  The Ottoman army in Macedonia—that volatile Balkan region straddling the modern states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia—had risen in rebellion, demanding the restoration of the 1876 constitution and a return to parliamentary rule.  The sultan knew the contents of the constitution better than his opponents.  One of his first measures on ascending the Ottoman throne in 1876 had been to promulgate the constitution as the culmination of four decades of government-led reforms known as the Tanzimat.  In those days he was seen as an enlightened reformer.  But the experience of ruling the Ottoman Empire had hardened Abdülhamid from reformer into absolutist.

-Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

sits......................

 

In between the numbers, charts, and data sits the messiness and absurdity of the human mind.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money

occasional messiness........................

 

     Modern election campaigns are often criticized for being negative, and today's press is slammed for being scurrilous.  But the most brutal of modern attack ads pale in comparison to the barrage of pamphlets in the 1764 Assembly election.  Pennsylvania survived them, as did Franklin, and American democracy learned it could thrive in an atmosphere of unrestrained, even intemperate, free-expression.  As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech.  In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discussion.

Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

messy..........................

 

     What I love about Barry's work is that he views investing as a game of emotions and behavior, rather than one driven by intelligence and data.  That's important, because a) it's accurate and b) behavior is messy (if not sloppy), unpredictable, varies from person to person, and—unlike data—doesn't pretend to offer a simple answer.

-Morgan Housel, from his introduction to this book

And we have front-row seats............

 

The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

honest, essential generosity..............

 

"These steps are not prescriptive, they are descriptive.  All of it, relapses included, are just how people change.  The process becomes less painful when we honor the honesty of it, when we honor the truth that nonlinear progress is still progress." . . . 

"So what does honoring this process mean, then?" . . .

"It means that we don't expect to be perfect.  It means when we miss a goal and slip backward, we smile and acknowledge that it isn't a tragedy, that it is the process working as we expected.  When we give ourselves that honest, essential generosity, it isn't so painful to try for that next step, because missing isn't a refutation of what we have accomplished or who we are.  It is just another experiment.  More data." . . .

There is no central wisdom that turns messy human endeavor into easy, linear efficiency.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

Ah, history.........................

 

Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history. 

-Kelly Hayes, as culled from Morgan Housel's recent quote collection.

Ed. Note:  Been reading Walter Stahr's biography Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival and I can tell you for certain that politics in 1840 were just as messy as they are today.  I suspect by the time the author gets around to the late 1850s we will find the politics might have gotten even messier.

a never-ending chain............

      If you've relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you'd have been confused for a hundred years straight.

     Economist Per Bylund once noted: "The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any)."

     Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason.  So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. . . .

     The danger, one you see often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like—so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise.  No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time.  Always asking, "Why is this happening?" and expecting there to be a rational answer.  Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.

     The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

-Morgan Housel, as excerpted from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Checking in........................

 ............................with Cardinal Richelieu on the goings-on in the Ukraine:

You solicited my advice, Spengler, because you cannot bear the self-satisfied moralizing of the well-meaning people who set this tragedy into motion, and you are appalled by men of action who clean up the mess left by practitioners of the politics of virtue. Get a stronger stomach if you want to see under the surface of history – including the history that is unfolding before your squeamish eyes.

On the messy stuff............................

 My Grandmother, Emma Sue, had a garden at her farm in the North Carolina mountains where she grew Jurassic Park sized vegetables.   I asked her one day how she did it.

     "Chicken droppings," she said dryly.  "A garden won't grow right without it."

     It took a few years after that to really enjoy a tomato out of her garden again.  But I never forgot the lesson:  It's the messy, unpleasant stuff that grows a great garden.  Just like sometimes it's the messy stuff in life, the mistakes and wrong turns, that grows a rich existence.  Yet we bemoan every tiny mistake.

-Rev. Susan Sparks, Laugh Your Way to Grace:  Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor

On the optimal amount of hassle.............

 The thing people miss is that there are bad things that become bigger problems when you try to eliminate them. I think the most successful people recognize when a certain amount of acceptance beats purity.

-Morgan Housel, from this read-worthy post

Messy................................

 One of the flaws in the way we recount stories of innovation is that we unfairly single out individuals, ignoring contributions of lesser mortals. . . . Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

The prelude....................

In the Spring of 1918 death was no stranger to the world.  Indeed, by then the bodies of more than five million soldiers had already been fed into what was called "the sausage factory" by generals whose stupidity was matched only by their brutality.
     German generals, for example, had decided to bleed France into submission by matching it death for death at Verdun, believing that Germany's greater population would leave it victorious.  The French later replied with their own massive offensive, believing that their elan vital would triumph.
     Only slaughter triumphed.  Finally one French regiment refused orders to make a suicidal charge.  The mutiny spread to fifty-four divisions, stopped only by mass arrests, the conviction of twenty-three thousand men for mutiny, with four hundred sentenced to death and fifty-four actually executed.
      Yet nothing expressed the brutality of this war as did a sanitation report on the planned eradication of rats in the trenches to prevent the spread of disease.  A major noted, "Certain unexpected problems are involved in the rat problem. . . . The rat serves on useful function—he consumes the corpses on No Man's Land, a job which the rat alone is willing to undertake.  For this reason it has been found desirable to control rather than eliminate the rat population."

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

Many truths................................

There are a few things that are so obviously true, and true for everyone, that no one argues about them. But most stuff isn’t black or white. Most of the stuff we argue about usually have many truths – several “right” answers depending on the person and situation – and we’re actually arguing over the other person not having the same goals, needs, risks, and wants as you do. It’s a mess. And the only thing worse than thinking everyone who disagrees with you is wrong is the opposite: being persuaded by the advice of those who need or want something you don’t.

This is common in finance. You can count the number of things that are certain on one hand, so the “right” answer to most finance questions is just however much uncertainty you want to accept, which is not only different for everyone but constantly changing for everyone. People don’t agree on a lot of big investing points because they shouldn’t.

-Morgan Housel, as he starts this blog post

Never thought of.........

...........................................Seth Godin as a pessimist, but this feels dangerously pessimistic:

Because even though it doesn’t make compelling TV, the long-term challenges ahead of us aren’t going to respond to politics.

Organic and messy..................

Relationships bring us everything from joy to sadness to angst - sometimes the same relationship on the same day can bring all those!  Give your relationships attention and they will be the better for it:  more joy, less haste;  more up times, fewer difficult times.  As organic, messy human beings we cannot predict the consistency of our relationships, nor should we try and control them.  We should simple do our best to care for them.

-Nicholas Bate,  as excerpted from here

an inherent messiness..............

“The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what's going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called "true enough." I think that's a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.” 

-Rupert Sheldrake

via

On nothingness................................

The best sort of ruler promises nothing, and delivers on his promise every time. The worst sort of tyrant has “plans.”...

“That government is best which governs least,” said Henry David Thoreau. Well, yes and no. The statement is used to champion weak government. But I am for a government that is unbreakably strong.

Chinese sages understood this, too, including the mystical Lao Tzu and those old Tories, Confucius and Mencius: that it takes tremendous power to do nothing. Voting whittles that power away.

-as excerpted from this David Warren post

Irrational....................................

"It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort."

-Alfred Jules Ayer

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