Instructions for Life by the Dalai Lama

1.  Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2.  When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

3.  Follow the three R’s: – Respect for self, – Respect for others and – Responsibility for all your actions.

4.  Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5.  Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6.  Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.

7.  When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8.  Spend some time alone every day.

9.  Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

10.  Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11.  Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12.  A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13.  In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

14.  Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.

15.  Be gentle with the earth.

16.  Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

17.  Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18.  Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19.  If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.

20.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Hat tip to Watering Good Seeds

The experience of seeing Earth from space

Hat tip for this to Hank Stone.

Adam Smith on happiness

What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt and has a clear conscience?

This quotation is from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is the founder of the modern discipline of economics.  He was a strong advocate of free enterprise and business competition, but he was not a friend of corporations, which in his time were almost all government-sponsored monopolies, nor did he oppose public works or a social safety net for the poor.

Being an old, retired guy with time on his hands, I read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments  several years ago.  As with most great classics, I found it different from what I had been told about it.   Adam Smith was not a social Darwinist, who believed in competition as a way of weeding out the unfit.   Rather he saw free enterprise as a way people could exchange things to their mutual benefit without interference of government on behalf of vested interests.

I hesitate to say how Adam Smith would judge current economic controversies, since today’s issues are so different from those of his time.  I don’t claim his ideas are the same as the ideas of self-described liberals such as myself, but I don’t think he aligns with self-described conservatives either.  He most certainly did not believe in maximizing wealth as a worthy purpose in life.

Click on Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy for a blog devoted to setting the record straight on Adam Smith.

Click on Adam Smith’s Theory of Happiness for more about Smith’s moral philosophy.

How to Treat a Woman? | Ask Old Jules

Old Jules is the handle of a blogger who lives in the Texas hill country.  In his Ask Old Jules blog, he answers questions from readers such as this one.

Old Jules, what can you tell me about how to treat a woman I care about?

I was only married 25 years, divorced 15 years ago.  Still learning a lot, but I think there are some learnings I’ve gleaned from 45 years of intimate contacts with women.

1. Be attentive and listen to what they say, even if you don’t agree or like what you hear.  The person probably knows you better than anyone else on the planet. Knows things about you that you don’t even know about yourself.  Listen and consider what’s said, ponder whether it’s true, or untrue.  And ponder whether, if true, it’s something you respect in yourself and don’t wish to change, or something you’d like yourself better if you changed.   Not for the woman you care about, but for yourself.
2. Respect boundaries.   Recognize the woman you care about is a human being with a life and desires unrelated to your own.  Recognize for your own benefit and for hers that much of what goes on in her head, her heart, and her life is simply none of your business unless she chooses to tell you.  Care enough about her to support her needs and goals even if they mean nothing to you.
3. Don’t expect your woman, nor anyone else, to ‘make you happy’.  That’s your responsibility.  Not hers.
4. Don’t use the phrase, “You make me feel [fill in the blank]“.  Nobody ‘makes you feel’ any way.  People behave the way they do and you choose how you will feel about it.
5. Remember things you might consider unimportant if they are important to her.  Valentines, anniversaries, birthdays and just simple hugs, hand-squeezes and touches mean a lot more to most women than they mean to many of us men.  It’s a small thing to us, but frequently a big thing to them.  Not doing it is nearly certain to result in frustration and tension.
6. Remember to say “I love you” frequently if you want to keep the woman you care about feeling you are the man she cares about.

Click on Make a Girl Like Me? for another sample of Old Jules’ wisdom.

Click on Ask Old Jules and So Far From Heaven for Old Jules’ blogs.

A message for our time from Bertrand Russell

I’m a member of the Bertrand Russell Society, and just now got back from the BRS annual meeting, which was held this year in Plymouth, N.H.   My friend Tim Madigan, who teaches philosophy at St. John Fisher College near Rochester, showed some video clips of Bertrand Russell that he uses in his class—including this one, which was taken from an extended interview shown on the British Broadcasting System in 1959.

Russell was asked what message he would sent to the future.   We are part of the future for whom his message was intended.

Below is another video clip of Russell.

Benefits of the unexamined life

Socrates is supposed to have said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

But Martin Cohen, commenting on a Marginal Revolution post, disagreed.

1.  You don’t have to waste time and energy listening to those others you know are wrong.

2.  You can make use of the dynamic duo of “It’s not my fault” and “It’s not my problem”.

3.  You can get from here to there much faster if you ignore the “Warning – thin ice!” signs.

4.  You will be supported in so many ways by the others living in the fact-free zone.

5.  It’s much easier if you think of those things you are climbing over as minor obstacles rather than people.

6.  It’s so much fun to creatively decorate those walls that surround you.

7.  Focusing on your own well-being takes all your energy, anyway.

8.  Finally, if you’re screaming inside, you don’t have to listen.

Click on Marginal Revolution and scroll down for Cohen’s comment in context.  The comment is on a thread discussing Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Teachers.

Julian Assange meets the Occupy movement

Julian Assange is under house arrest in Britain and can’t get out and about to interview people for his The World Tomorrow TV program, but an interesting array of people come to him.

In Episode 7, he interviewed members of Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street, including David Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist and political theorist, who was one of the original Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Click on Digital Journal for a summary of Episode 7 and links to previous episodes.

Click on David Graeber, the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street for a Business Week article about Graeber.

Click on “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe” for reasons why David Graeber should not be considered the leader or intellectual mentor of the Occupy Wall Street movement. [Added 6/5/12]

Click on Davod Graeber: anarchist, anthropologist, financial analyst for an article about Graeber and many links to his short writings.

Update [5/30/12]  Julian Assange lost his appeal to Britain’s supreme court against being extradited to Sweden to face chargesallegations of rape and sexual molestationmisconduct.  However, inasmuch as the ruling was based on an interpretation of international law not argued in court, Assange’s lawyers will have until June 13 to make an argument against the ruling.  Assange’s lawyers also are appealing to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.

If there is good evidence to support the charges, Julian Assange should be put on trial just like anybody else.  The problem is the possibility that Sweden’s current conservative government will hand him over to U.S. authorities, where he could be tried and sent to prison for revealing secret information about U.S. government misconduct.

Click on Julian Assange loses appeal against extradition for a report in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.

Click on Julian Assange Loses Extradition Appeal for Time magazine’s account.

[Added 5/31/12] Click on Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview for background to the case.

Freeing yourself from illusion

A friend of mine who practices Zen Buddhist meditation spent Saturday at a workshop studying a Buddhist sutra (teaching) that all is illusion.   On a superficial level, I don’t take this seriously.  I don’t believe I am living in the world of The Matrix, and quantum theory doesn’t have anything to do with my life.

But on a practical level, this teaching is profoundly wise.   People make themselves unhappy for all sorts of reasons that wouldn’t matter unless they thought they mattered.  I’m speaking now of healthy, well-fed people whose loved ones are healthy and well-fed, and not about Buddhist teaching about accepting pain and loss.  I know in my own case that I feel frustrated, insulted, disappointed, resentful, envious and angry about things that, in the cosmic scheme of things, do not matter in the least.

I can’t help these feelings.  But I can refrain from dwelling on them.  I can refrain from thinking up rationalizations as to why my disappointment or resentment is justified.  I can disconnect my ego from my negative feelings.  If they come into my mind unbidden, they aren’t what I think of as me.  If I didn’t do this, I can easily imagine myself dwelling on petty insults and jealousies to the point where they poisoned my whole existence.

Christians teach this too.  Martin Luther once said (if I recall something I once read correctly) that you can’t stop the birds of anger from flying overhead, but you can stop them from building nests in your hair.

Henri the existentialist cat

Nonviolent resistance to Hitler?

On this web log, I favorably reviewed two of Gene Sharp’s manuals for nonviolent resistant to despots.  A friend asked if I think nonviolent resistance would have worked against Hitler.

His ideas rest on the truth that the power of a tyrant is the power to command the obedience of the people he rules.  To the extent that they cease to obey, his power disappears.  Gene Sharp cited examples of successful nonviolent resistance to Hitler, including Norwegian school teachers who successfully resisted demands that they teach Nazi doctrines, and German women married to Jewish men whose protests caused the German government to rescind orders to deport their husbands to death camps.

But nonviolent resistance would not work for peoples marked for extermination or ethnic cleansing.  this would not work for the Jews, gypsies and others marked for extermination.  Hitler did not wish to rule the Jews, gypsies and others marked for extermination.   He wished to eliminate them.  Nonviolent resistance would not have been an obstacle to that goal.

I am not a pacifist.  I understand that war is sometimes the least bad option.  I do not think that the line between nonviolent and violent resistance is always clear.  Many campaigns of mass defiance involve both.   A nonviolent struggle has the merit of being inherently democratic, in the way that many seizures of power in the name of liberation did not.  M.K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had power that rested on the voluntary compliance of their followers.  Unlike the leaders of many supposed liberation movements, they didn’t kill people to keep their followers in line.

Click on The realism of nonviolent action for my review of Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action.

Click on Gene Sharp’s revolution handbook for my review of his From Dictatorship to Democracy.

Click on Gene Sharp: A dictator’s worst nightmare for a good profile by CNN.  [Added 6/27/12]