Mom’s Contribution

Dan, this is an excellent reminder of how we overlook obvious resources to help us get things done, Your mom is full of energy and life and for you to include her in your work is an excellent gift and act of loving kindness. It also reminds us to not overlook the obvious human resource that may be tucked way in a corner or first floor desk in the back of the office. I will look forward to reading the 2nd book and watching your personal growth unfold for the world to see. Thanks for including mom!

What a wonderful column today. I am the mother of a writer and was enlisted to type his last book and add my editorial comments. In my past life, out of college, I was an editor, and, as you no doubt know, once an editor always an editor. I am a stickler for correct grammar as well as correct use of commas. This was a labor of love (after all the author is my son) that turned into an interesting project for me. Since I am now retired I can use projects that engage me. So let’s give a hand to moms today!

[another one i didn’t actually send]

At first I thought “well, I would have given him an ‘A’ if he’d done his own proofreading, but to actually get his mom and his wife to do it for him?” But then I realised that you’re benefitting twofold by also receiving what you know to be heartfelt and valuable criticism from knowledgeable people who are concerned about you. Understanding how what you write makes other people feel will go a long way towards staying positive and having the right attitude when you present your book to others. They’ll pick up on that and congratulate you. So though I was immediately critical, after I thought it through, I realised that you’d made a pretty good decision. Must be nice having parents!

. . . ” I need it to be right, but I often can’t find the discipline to get it just so. ”

Even after applying a lot of science, art, and any other perceivable discipline, even after putting in the fine tuning and adding a nice polish, the end result of work can fail to please.

I’d forgotten you were a Myers-Briggs subject.

Every person who goes into a body of work or makes a comment is a P-erceiver. Everybody who puts finishing touches on the work or decides whether the comment poses a security threat or not ends up being a J-udger. They’re common roles people go through every day, things a person could shift into or out of at a moment’s notice. I wish more people would forget about the MB and other personality quiz categories and just feel content with their persons. They certainly aren’t perfecting who they are by including complex thoughts about the result of some test made by some fallible other person.

And I think it does a grim disservice to the world every time people socialise over their special little clubs and categorical cul de sacs, but that’s my bag — I’d prefer if more people got the shadow-play over with and and just joined the human race. Though I suppose the massive guilt complexes bestowed on the masses by industrially agricultural civilization just won’t allow the majority of people to come out from behind the closed doors of membership and exclusivity just yet. That’s because industry has always been, from the beginning, about replacing the human necessity, and agriculture has always been about effacing that dirty and disastrous thing we call nature. We herald automation because it eliminates effort and, allegedly, frees us up for leisure time. What about all the time we have to spend justifying the automated, or getting it together to purchase it, or now having to automate to stay competitive or else lose out everything? It’s always amusing to me how the same person promotes always being productive but when it’s handy for promotes taking leisures.

I think the comment you made about a tendency to want to get things right, and about how you “often” can’t, is more worthwhile than “I’m a P”. It talks about you, personally, in your own terms, in a way that’s immediately relevant to other human beings. And, I think it’s a self-referential statement. Look at the statement (I quoted it above). Can you see the logical loop in it? Hint: place yourself in the “it” of the subject.

[ Dan: ” I need Daniel to be right, but I often can’t find the discipline to get Daniel just so. ” ] — if you can admit you do work on self-improvement, this isn’t impossible.

But: if you’re inspecting yourself, you’re questioning yourself; if you question yourself, you admit fallibility; if you admit fallibility, you recognize imperfection; recognizing imperfection, you feel you’ve fulfilled the purpose of inspecting — to find a flaw; considering imperfection to be a flaw is overly critical, since everybody’s imperfect it doesn’t need correcting. Nobody *would* be able to find “the discipline” to be just so, that’s why “just so stories” are just that — they’re make-believe.

Q: If you’re flawed, how can you expect a positive result out of self-inspection, self-correction, and self-discipline, at all, ever?

A: It works because you eventually give up and follow through with the action. You eventually accept who you are and get into what you’re worth to other people, over accepting your perceptory and judgemental abilities towards yourself and others.

Forgive me for picking over it with a fine-toothed comb, but I think it was a great RfL. It had a natural flow, you presented the reader with a normal/normative problem by offering a direct route to empathy, and you ran into the natural end-result of positively thinking through the problem: ” that it feels great to be useful ”.

Here’s another statement you might find immediately useful, since it sums this RfL up so well: ” The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. ” — Werner Heisenberg

Consider a person who is self-inspecting as either static or changing. If they are changing, they cannot come to a significant conclusion, because the information they based the conclusion on has changed and become irrelevant. If they are static, they can come to a conclusion about their current state, but to do this they would have to disregard the result of their self-inspection as very important, or else they’ll be moved and changed by it. So what a person does is stop everything (emotionally and developmentally), self-inspect, and move on. A person who dwells on their self-image or self-perception, no matter how pure or how positive, is going to be more or less inactive.

I worry about this nation (especially this particular state, where it falls in the race to be fattest, least educated, and less likely to know how to conduct good business, at nobody’s fault but their own) sometimes, as the culture seems to have a strong lean towards one-dimensionality in personal characteristic, almost as if more and more people are coming to find it too taxing to be dynamic, well-rounded individuals, and would prefer to accept the put-downs and other labels of their competitive peers as gospel, and just act as and treat others as what literature calls “static characters”. What kind of person suggests that, or worse, accepts it?

Indeed, to many grown men, suggesting that they are still developing amounts to fighting words. We’re supposed to have grown past all that as a nation, but frankly, the liberals let us down — the movement accepted too many seriously flawed persons as “just fine”, “special is all”, and gave them equal standing with people who I’m sure weren’t put on God’s green earth to pull equal weight with people that don’t even see where the rope is.
Maybe some time you could address major and serious issues in one of your books, you know, like “The Cheating Culture” did. Or “Apocalypse Culture”, or the essays of John Zerzan. Many of your readers seem familiar with “five points of this and that”, “one point to the greener grass” sort of bunkum, but any arbitrary number can be applied to personalities and methods of being a human. Didn’t the bible say, though, the God has no desire for the diverse weights and measures? In any case, I think you’d probably find a really significant point to hammer home writing a book that takes the form of a nice cultural criticism essay. Your particular personal qualities make you seem warm and caring, and most cultural critics just seem aloof or amused. I know mine always break down in farce, because I feel it’s more effective to state things cruelly, especially when people are barely listening.

The point is that people, flawed as they are, not only fail to fit into categories and quiz-boxes, they’re also so dynamic that unless they accept their flaws, they fail to really fulfill their purposes in life and will just end up committing the inhumane injustice of putting theirselves down to less than really human. It’s a middle-ground, really: you have to accept the flaws or else you don’t get the really amazing package deal. That’s a concept for personal, self-improvement, though — it’s supposed to be beneath the workings of something as major as the agenda of an entire social order.

I also happened to have felt that your first book was early-grade. The thing is, your mom is probably a balanced and versatile person. Most of the nation isn’t — rich or poor, most of them are crawling out of the booby-hatches of their nuclear households and gunning for their comfort zones. Whether it’s a trust fund and alumnus or an encyclopedic knowledge of pro wrestling and track car racing that they’ve come to rely on, they have their little economic bubble machines. 9-11 didn’t change all that: 9-11 made it scared for its future. That’s just a little less security, but it’s not like there was something else to fall back on for such victims of upbringing and inbreeding. So, what change? Diminished, America? Heck no.

In any case, we’re talking about a nation of people who, even in their fourties, tend to not have developed much emotionally. I thought your last RfL was pure farce, until I realised you were really seriously shocked by the fact that most American men are full of theirselves and these days aren’t worth spit in business, blindsided by bubbles and taken in by even the simplest scam. Then it hit me: you’re WITH the financial sector. You’re really, actually, part of the problem, if you think about it. And your first book coddles the white-collar, adult-child American, to put it bluntly. But, then, so does much of America.

I’m sure that there’s some use for them all to be that way, though. And I’m sure they all appreciate it. A number of years ago there was a great study on the effects of pairing young and inexperienced (I’m talking really young — like, early high schoolers) people with much older, very experienced people (mid 50’s and older) in business settings, to see how productive it would be. They balanced each other out; they performed better than their middle-aged counterparts. Hopefully that’s the direction the country heads in, but the children in the study weren’t man-children — their minds were young and undistorted. And they knew to accept and respect their elders, something else sorely lacking in this country, but for generations, now. Of course, this is still the country where we have to have laws against throwing children out of the house to go lose limbs in a clothing mill so they can bring home a few coins for their parents to spend on booze, though, right? Or else it would happen. So respect for children is kind of out the window, too. Oh just recently a lot of Pentagon officials were caught with child pornography. Not big news, really: executives and legislators from various levels all over the nation have been known to fly off to exotic locales where sex laws allow them to do what they like with very young minors. Apparently not much can be done to them over it. Funny enough, barely anybody ever addresses these issues. So perhaps we’re not in the least bit fit to take the road towards productivity, that involves putting together think-tanks of the old and the young. Not homogenously, anyhow, not without some filtering, first. But who’s going to work that filtering? The CIA? Canadians? Who pays attention or cares much in this country? Who’s “intelligent”? Are they all just contained here, or in some other website? We have people earning degrees everywhere that aren’t worth anything. Were they to begin with or is that the lesson the economy is teaching us?

I mean, with the important subject matter split off into ten or twenty books, all of which are critical, why isn’t there a bigger market for one book about all the big problems rolled into one? Besides the religious books. And besides the self-help books. Something big for intelligent people.

Of course, if your Mom didn’t like your first book because the subject matter was already behind her, but did like the new one, then I’m guessing the new one is prime material. Please be sure that there’s a copy available for the Lansing public library — for some reason I was told they would have trouble obtaining your first book.

Here are some more quotes from Heisenberg about uncertainty in all forms of information (which the universe is made of):

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/physics-quantum-mechanics-werner-heisenberg.htm#quotes.werner.heisenberg