The Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Nietzsche recognized that without courage we cannot have truth:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

Bari Weiss' newest article discusses the relationship between courage and truth. The title: "Some Thoughts About Courage We are living through an epidemic of cowardice. The antidote is courage."

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history

. . . .

As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”

What caused our leaders to buckle under? To say things they don't believe and to refuse to say things that they know are true? Weiss blames the lack of courage:
There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility — that is how we got here.

I'll conclude with this excerpt from a conversation between Bari Weiss and Brian Stelter:

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Matt Stoller Discusses the Overconcentration of Economic and Political Power in Many American Industries

I've followed Matt Stoller for months and I now support his Substack newsletter. He discusses the over-concentrations of power in many places. This is incredibly important to having a meaningful understanding about what is going on in Washington DC. Mere Supply and Demand does NOT explain what is going on, contrary to many economists.

Krystal and Saagar talk at length with policy expert Matt Stoller about the monopolization of the American economy, supply chain shocks, corruption in government, consumer culture, meat packing consolidation, the anti-trust movement and more.

From Stoller's first Substack newsletter:

You see, I was taught basic economics by Martin Feldstein at Harvard, and he told us that banks and corporations were neutral technocratic institutions. And I believed him, because I was an arrogant Harvard student who trusted economists. Witnessing the policy choice to concentrate wealth and power during the Wall Street bailouts, and talking to lots of people in foreclosure who didn’t get a bailout, broke me of that illusion.

After you learn about Too Big to Fail banks, it’s hard not to look around and begin seeing that Too Big to Fail is everywhere. Eventually I came to read Cornered by Barry Lynn, and that book helped connect the dots and set me on the path to researching my own book, Goliath. (Later I found out Feldstein was on the board of AIG, which was one of the central villains of the financial crisis.)

What’s your story? And what monopolies are you noticing these days?

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About Compounding

Shane Parrish of Farnham Street pointed out that “Compounding,” is a really useful concept, especially when applied to things outside of finance, where the term refers to earning interest on interest.

Then along comes an article by Daniel F. Chambliss, "The Mundanity of Excellence," reminding us that great talent can happen only when we stand on the shoulders of numerous sub-talents:

Excellence is mundane. Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all to- gether, produce excellence. When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on. Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them to- gether, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games. The win- ning of a gold medal is nothing more than the synthesis of a countless number of such little things—even if some of them are done unwit- tingly or by others, and thus called “luck.”.

One final thought: It has increasingly appeared to me that anything good that has happened (and many bad things) are the result of work I’ve done (or failed to do) over many years or decades. Compounding is behind my biggest successes and failures. One of the biggest ways this show up in in your reputation. As the saying goes, a good reputation is hard to earn and easy to lose. When you've spent your entire life trying to be trustworthy, truthful and kind, that opens doors for you, over and over. But you might forget that this superpower was something you assembled over decades.

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Michael Shellenberger Discusses The Origins of San Francisco’s Homeless Problem with Joe Rogan

This is an excerpt from a much longer discussion. Michael Shellenberger is discussing San Francisco's homeless problem with Joe Rogan. One of his conclusions is the well-intentioned attitude by many liberals that all homeless people are purely victims and that they cannot be blamed for any of their behaviors, including their uses of dangerous drugs.

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Mother Trees that Care For their Children Trees

What I'm currently reading: Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard (2021). Simard makes a stunning claim. Here's an excerpt from her introduction:

My queries started from a place of solemn concern for the future of our forests but grew into an intense curiosity, one clue leading to another, about how the forest was more than just a collection of trees.

In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. What started as a legacy, and then a place of childhood home, solace, and adventure in western Canada, has grown into a fuller understanding of the intelligence of the forest and, further, an exploration of how we can regain our respect for this wisdom and heal our relationship with nature.

One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading acrossfungal membranes.

The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin.The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.

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