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I.T.






In a world of turmoil and trouble, it can be difficult to find sufficient peace of mind to allow space for gratitude. As we enter the next turn on the Christo-Roman solar calendar as adjusted by the edict of the Inter gravissimas, or as we say in e-Republikanese, "Day 5886", perhaps it is a good moment to reflect on transformations, on making the journey from rancor and divisiveness to tranquility and bliss.

But first, please note that there will be free gifts to the first batch of commentators!







The Apophastic Traditions

The "Via negativa" approaches the Divine by negation.

Versions of this practice are found in every religious, spiritual and philosophical tradition, from the ancient "whatever you think the Dao is, it's not" spirit of the Dao de Ching and the Zhuangzi, to the melding of Jewish tradition with Platonic ideas in the writings of Philo of Alexandria (summarized as "ontological nothingness", foreshadowing Sarte by some 2000 years or so), to the Early Church Fathers who picked up on Philo's sense of the "luminous darkness" of the Divine, on into the contemplative tradition of Hesychasm (inward stillness, silence of the heart) in Eastern Orthodoxy, right on up to Hegel's "negation of the negation" and W.V.O Quine's assertions regarding the impossibility of a throughly accurate translation ("to be is to be the value of a bound variable").

We find this tradition in mathematics too. Carl Jacobi -- famous for his work on elliptic functions -- proposed the maxim man muss immer umkehren (more or less: "invert, always invert") as the best method to clarify consideration of analytical problems. Stating the opposite of what he was trying to solve opened up a mental space that made it easier for him to find solutions to complex problems. Echoes of such an approach are common in the sciences and in the philosophy and theory of scientific methods too. For example, in Karl Popper's well-known assertion that a theory can only be considered scientific if it is falsifiable.





Turning things upside-down is a common practice among breakthrough artists as well. Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", with its many experimental approaches to tonality, meter, rhythm, stress and dissonance, is said to have caused a "near riot" when it was first staged in Paris in 1913. It is now widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century.

And it was only 30 real world years ago that the Seattle "grunge rock" band Nirvana did it again. They shook up the world of post-punk metal music with their album "Nevermind", which included iconic hits like Smells Like Teen Spirit. The album created a new space in the world's musical tastes for "alternative rock". Nirvana turned convention upside-down. Up until that point, big-hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions of US dollars to produce and promote each of their albums. Nirvana's "Nevermind" was produced for $65,000. Stripped-down and raw, it inverted all previous assumptions about how to succeed in this genre.






Avoiding Mistakes and Being Anti-Fragile

Some of the most successful wealth management experts in the USA are neither particularly famous, nor especially opinionated, and they don't go around behaving like privileged ass-hats. Yes, looking at you Mr. Musk.

Charlie Munger, who passed away last month, was Vice-Chair of Berskshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffet. His academic studies were in mathematics, meteorology and law. He also loved to play cards. In his writings on wealth management, he focused on acting ethically and being aware of the potential for "lollapolooza" effects, which is to say, mental models impacted by multiple biases which tend to lead to irrational actions.

This theme was developed further and in great detail in Nassim Taleb's magnum opus "Anti-Fragile", as well as earlier works like "Fooled by Randomness".

Albert-László Barabási gave this theme a more methodological treatment in his "Network Science", which pioneered the idea of scale-free networks and why they are robust to random failures but fragile to attacks, due to their fundamental characterisic of preferential attachments.

In a nutshell, particularly for Munger and Taleb, the takeaway is that economics is not, in fact, a hard science. Far from it. Economics, particularly "playing the market" is a gamble. Expecting to be dealt a winning hand and betting against the odds is a losing strategy. Munger thought cryptocurrency was a ridiculous scam. He advised that avoiding mistakes is surer route to success, longevity, and prosperity than being smart, fast and talented.

Munger's advice boils down to this: avoid sloth and unreliability. Being unreliable means you will crater.

This is what Taleb, who predicted the financial crisis of 2008, is getting at with "anti-fragility". He suggests that success comes from a combination of low fixed obligations with making small bets that have asymmetric payoffs. In other words, have some agency in your life, take responsibility, get engaged, try stuff, but don't go bonkers, don't act stupid, don't be greedy. Be cautious and stay fit. Then, in the rare case when a really great opportunity arises, be ready to seize it, but don't expect a huge payoff. Taleb is sharply critical of companies who pay CEO's enormous salaries and bonuses whilst ignoring the fundamentals of managing an enterprise for the long term.





Abigail Johnson is one of the wealthiest women in the world. She is a billionaire who is the CEO of Fidelity Investments, founded by her grandfather during the Depression as a sensible and safer alternative to the many failed banks. The company is now one of the largest asset managment firms in the world, with approximately $4.3 trillion under management and $10.3 trillion under administration, an economic "sector" in its own right, approximately the same size as Canada's.

Ms. Johnson succeeded her father at the helm of the organization. Her degree is in Art History. Her family did not pressure her or her siblings into working at Fidelity; it is a choice she made on her own. She worked for many years at virtually every level of the organization prior to becoming CEO. During the financial collapse of 2008, Fidelity's money market mutual funds were among the very few that did not "break the dollar". In other words, the share value did not collapse despite the severe market and currency crises. That's because the Johnson family had set aside a very large "rainy day" fund of their own money and used it to bolster the money market funds during the crisis.

Among the innovations she has introduced are a carefully managed crytocurrency system for institutional investors, an Exchange-Traded Fund, a type of pooled investment vehicle, for Bitcoin, and micro-investing scheme called "Stocks by the Slice", which creates a mechanism for folks with little money or experience to try their hand at investing in equities. Abigail, like her father before her, abhors publicity. Her family retains about 49% ownership of shares in the firm, which are available only privately. Keeping the firm in private hands has prevented it from being driven by short-term quarterly profitability goals or targeted by vulture capitalists. Its success is one of the most remarkable examples of avoiding mistakes as a strategy.



Socialism and Freedom: Neither Not This Nor Not That Nor Not Neither This Nor Not That

In eRepublik, my favorite little "political party" (I put it in quotes because the whole she-bang is just silly and ridiculous beyond words) has long been the "Socialist Freedom Party" in the e-USA.

It has a long and interesting history, which I won't bother trying to recapitulate here.

Through a long string of ups and downs, periods of growth and shrinkage, of activity and dormancy, of venerable and storied veteran players bringing vibrancy and maybe a little shock and awe, and clever thinkers and game-players of all types bringing special pizzazz to its community, of the sad loss of many extraordinary players, and the arrival of enthusiastic newer players, and the occasional return of experienced ones, through all of this, the SFP has continued to be not only a lively e-community in its own right, but, at least from time to time, a little "engine" of originality, of new ideas and fresh perspectives, of critical thinking, even of -- dare I even use this word? -- well, OK, I will, of culture.

I am not saying all that in order to praise the SFP, though obviously I am a fanboi, so much as to observe how it is managed to stay lively and active for so long. In my view, it is because the SFP embodies much of what was reviewed above. Its internal processes are self-adjusting and anti-bureaucratic. The group allows for, supports and encourages a wide range of approaches to particpating in the game at its various levels, and seldom tries to "put all of its eggs in one basket". At the same time, it has, in some sense, "hardened" itself -- a bit of a necessity when calling yourself some kind of "socialist" in a USAnian community, where a real-life history of criminalization and demonization of leftist politics and "foreign" influences stretches back into the early 19th century.

In my view, there is a something like an ideological "core" to this flexibility, this anti-fragility, that is embodied in the name of the group and its its "official" in-game branding as "far left anarchist" and internal branding (according to its current Party Constitution) as "anarcho-syndicalist".

On a personal level, some of my most interesting days and evenings playing the game were discussions over chat channels and so forth with two players:

First, Osmany Ramon, one of the founders of the party, had a strong real-life interest in Italian workerist and autonomous-communist upsurge of the late 1960s. This was characterized, as in France's 1968 student-worker uprising, by a leftist critique of the traditional Communist Party, but rather than adopting a newly-minted "Maoism" or rejuvenated "Trotskyism", the Italian movement, as expressed in particular by Mario Tronti, developed a theory of voluntarist worker-led struggle independent of traditional union and party bureaucracies. After some ultra-left adventures, workerist thinking was succeeded, at least in part, by an "autonomist" trend which characterized the class struggle in much broader terms than previously, offering a sharp critique of standardized Marxist theory (see Antonio Negri and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in particular) and positing that the modern "social worker" (not in the same sense this term is typicaly used in American English, by the way) was as fundamental to the battle against oppressvie and exploitative capital, if not more so, than the traditional factory-based proletarians.

Second, Lysander Spooner II, who served as President of the SFP and Chair of its Revolutionary Committee for several turns during a period of reinvention and renewed growth. This was when the SFP shifted from a more "traditional" (albeit within a fantasy-world context!) socialist or communist project, envisoning (or if you like, role-playing) itself as a "vanguard" force, into its current incarnation as something like an anarcho-syndicalist cooperative, still seeking to play a role as a "revolutionary organization", but dropping any formal pretense of infallibility or insight into "special" (i.e, "e-Marxist") knowledge, while also avoiding the errors (mistakes) of extreme individualism and "tolerance of intolerance" observed in (RL) libertarian traditions that have completely abandoned the communist horizon.

In real life, my in-game encounters with the SFP, and especially with these two remarkable and thoughtful young men, has led me to an appreciation of the works of Murray Bookchin on "social ecology", as well as some the stuff by real-life Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), a Unitarian, abolitionist, labor activist and legal scholar associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.

Perhaps I can sum it up by simply reflecting Sub-Comandante Marcos' biting critique of ETA, as it was descending into right-wing nationalist hoo-hah, when he wrote his letter "I Shit on All the Revolutionary Vanguards of the World". Written, of course, from the liberated zone in Chiapas where the Zapatista Community continues to hold out to this day against global capital and the Mexican state, creatively forging a new kind of thinking that draws on both ancient indigenous, as well as Marxist and post-Marxist revolutionary thought. Neither this, nor that. And not not neither too.








Vote MollyMock for President on the 5th of January! Why not?








Happy New Year to all who celebrate! Gifts for all commentators until I run out!


xoxoxox, PQ