4-Part Balance

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I've always enjoyed getting close to that elusive Big Game--the balanced human being--and studying them carefully. Having the unique circumstance of observing someone for 35 years, and THEN becoming friends with them (heck, we darn near adopted each other. I've got a Dad!) gives me the chance to find structure within the chaos, and watch my own mental processes as a ton of information falls into pattern.

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I want to preface this: Steve Muhammad is as flawed as the rest of us. I have no doubts about that at all. He also lives in a mansion, runs his own successful business, has a houseful of kids with a beautiful, strong woman he's been married to for thirty years, and at 70 years old is still the finest karate man I've ever known or seen in action. (But man, I heard stories about Mas Oyama!) He's been a father figure to countless young men and women, and was one of the all-time Horndogs before he met his lovely wife, for whom he changed his entire life for the better. What men will do for the love of a good woman!

Anyway, it makes sense to look at the core of the way he sees the world, and the search for excellence, and try to map it over with what I've gotten from other people who operate at high levels. Or super-high levels. Isn't that the Holy Grail for ambitious types?

1) Spiritual Law

2) Dietary Law

3) Fitness Law

4) Skill Law

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There is an interesting "loop" going on here. I wanted to comment on these steps as I interpret them.

1) Spiritual Law. To me, this deals with your answer to the question: "what was the shape of your face before your parents were born? What will become of you after you are dead?" Answers may range from "dust to dust" to various Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Native American, Druidic and whatever answers. Believers, atheists...on one level, this has to do with the sense of intent in life, what you ultimately want it to mean. In a more practical sense, having a context for the days of your life is useful in adding meaning to every moment. In an even more basic way, focus releases a fountain of energy. Focus on the finite nature of life, and the need to make our time matter--at least to us and the people we love. Courage, from the understanding that death comes whether we reach for our goals and dreams and loves or not. Why not go for it? Why be afraid of anything in life, especially other human beings, when death is inevitable? Energy, courage, focus, clarity. However one deals with mortality, it should be in a fashion that empowers. Sijo Muhammad embraces Islam, and has found in the Nation a way to serve his community and save lives--something he has been committed to the entire time I've known him.

2) Dietary Law. Sijo uses a variant of Intermittent Fasting--he eats all his meals between 4 and 6 in the evening, and is a rail-thin vegetarian. Interestingly, this is what is referred to as the "Warrior Diet." This provides both a rise in energy, improved health, and incredible discipline. Anyone who can eat like this (and he has for 27 years! Been a vegetarian for 25) simply has a different order of discipline than the average human being even dreams of. I think it's one of the easiest ways to develop world-class discipline, the kind that can kick your life into overdrive. Again--great energy, and the focus to apply it.

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3) Fitness Law. Sijo exercises every day. Every day. Sometimes only for a few minutes. Sometimes for hours. Aside from martial arts, his routine is surprisingly mundane: pushups, rhythmic sit-ups (to a special 4-count beat), jogging (in place or on the road). I guess it works for him (!) but I prefer Coach Sonnon's increasing motor complexity approach. The mind is the edge of the sword, but the body is the sword. Many martial arts masters let themselves go physically, and it's sad to see. Physical fitness, again, gives energy and focus...there are other values as well (increased blood oxygenation leading to increased functional intelligence, for instance. Proprioceptive sense, much more).

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4) Skill law. Here's where the rubber meets the road. For Sijo, these are mostly warrior arts: unarmed combat, firearms, team combat theory. But it applies to the law, writing, the sciences, whatever. The intent: to be great. He and I agree on this. Greatness is a poor reward for having to die at the end of life...but it will have to do. Why the hell settle for anything less than greatness? Mastery of almost any human task can be acquired in just 10,000 hours of practice. If the task involves real-world application or competition, you get serious feedback to your efforts, which can help you avoid falling into illusion.

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What do we have here? An atheist or agnostic who wants to provide for his family or community, or just to make his own life meaningful to the max, can use this as well as any religious person. Total commitment gives grounding to all efforts. Diet and exercise give discipline, energy, health to invest in your chosen profession or activity. By going full-tilt boogie toward your goals, adjusting as you get results, always motivated by the urge to perfect yourself, find greatness, serve your community, God, or your own deepest emotional needs...well, it looks like a fantastic syntax for life success to me.

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I see this overlapping with many other approaches to life success, and since I've had the opportunity to watch Sijo more closely than I have many others. Burns the reality in more deeply. I treasure my exposure to excellent men and women, the opportunity to watch the way they live their lives. Wouldn't give up those memories at any price.

My Most Humiliating Moment

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Another reason I didn't criticize "Trek" for the Uhura-Spock episode. (The first one being that I loved the movie, thought it worked well, and gave it a special dispensation). Ms. Saldana's mother, Theresa, and I have a small amount of humiliating history...

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Some of you may already be aware of Theresa Saldana's rather notorious history. If not, you will in a minute. Well, I was at a party at Norman Spinrad's house maybe twenty years ago. He hob-nobbed with Hollywood types, and there was a slender brunette who looked very familiar there. I introduced myself. "Hi, I'm Steven Barnes."

"Hi," she replied. "I'm Theresa Saldana."

I'm sure my brow wrinkled. "I'm sure I know that name," I said, desperately searching my memory. She seemed a little uncomfortable, and I was certain that she had a fragile ego, and needed to know that I knew who she was. Actress? Yes. But where...

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Finally, she sighed. "I was stalked by a man who stabbed me several times," she said.

Suddenly, the entire memory burst back on me. The headlines, the television stories, the whole horrible mess. But all I felt was relief that the question was resolved. "Oh, yeah!" I burst out. "Great!"

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I'll draw a veil across the rest of the evening. Leave it that that may have been my all-time low in social discourse.

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All right--that was my most humiliating gaff. What's yours?

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Watching "Transformers" with Jason, and...wait just a damned minute. Wasn't "Jazz", the Transformer with the black voice ("this looks like a cool place to kick it") also the only one to die? Damn! Even black robots can't survive SF movies. So we have sex less often, and die more often. The artistic equivilent of genocide, I'd think, brought to us care of the collective unconscious.

Starting to get back into the groove.

An unbelievable amount of information from Steve to process. This man took a tiny section of a 4-dimensional dynamic sphere (any profound movement discipline connects with the rest of life so as to embrace the totality of human experience. But Ed Parker didn't give his commercial students the full sphere. He didn't even promote Steve directly. We won't go into the motivations for this here--except to say that Parker was an exceptional man, but a man of his times.) But as anyone who understands geometry can recreate a full circle given any three points. By a lifetime of experimentation, he not only found the way of fighting that works for him, but for thousands of students. But then he began caring passionately about his community, so he started lecturing us about how if you can learn martial arts, you can be anything you want. His spiritual connection to Islam takes him even deeper: he's aligned and congruent, "coherent" perhaps, with every aspect of his life supporting every other aspect.

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And he's balanced: a beautiful family, a thriving career (owns a security company), and an absurd level of physical efficiency. I know of no 70 year old man, anywhere, who can do the things he does. And still spars regularly with students a third his age--often experienced martial artists from other styles, and simply dominates them. It's ridiculous. His efficiency is so high that he can move SLOWLY and still destroy your position effortlessly. While he no longer explodes up and down the floor doing hundreds of martial wind-sprints a day, his initial explosion is just as volcanic, and his follow-up, in close range, is more like Wing Chun than Kenpo. Except with a kind of torquing power that had Chinese grandmasters looking at him and shaking their heads, I kid you not. In other words, he embraced the scientific method big time. He's had over a thousand street fights. Still has them--leading his troops into battle regularly, in a context embraced by by law and his church.

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What does this lead to? Well...I'm going to say this, understanding how it sounds. It is quite possible that Steve Muhammad is the best man I've ever known. I've watched him for 35 years, and watched the impact he's had on countless lives. He has the same flaws that the rest of us have, but somehow he has managed to walk his walk as purely has Harlan Ellison has walked the line of his career. And that is SERIOUS purity, let me tell you. I feel incredibly blessed to have a man like this in my life, and I suspect that the road ahead for me is going to be clearer than much of the road behind.

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Almost twenty years ago, Mushtaq asked me: "what kind of 70 year old do you want to be? Well, whatever it is, you'd better get started working on it."

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Steve Muhammad is almost EXACTLY the kind of 70 year old I want to be. In a world of boys, he is a man. By bonding his physical and mental skills (he is a kinesthetic genius, on the level of any genius I've ever known. The mathematical precision of his thought excels his ability to convey it with language. Hopefully, I'll be able to help him here) to his family life and his spiritual life, he has done exactly what martial arts masters and grandmasters have done for centuries: transformed an athletic activity into a holistic life path. An international panel of Grandmasters said that he had actually created a new martial art. I think what he's done is as significant as what Ueshiba did in transforming various Jiu Jitsu forms into Aikido. But more than that, at 70 he's still kicking ass, taking names, and saving young men from the streets.

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I walked one of the shopping centers that he protects in Atlanta. When he took it over, there were like fifty gangsters hanging around, chasing away the customers and killing business. He and his men took these guys out back, and...well, you can imagine.

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I met some of the guys he did this to, and they are all, like: "good evening, Mr. Muhammad. Can we help you, Mr. Muhammad? (to their friends, with pride:) This is Mr. Muhammad!" The shop owners adore him. Mothers thank him for protecting their daughters. It was amazing. They LOVE him. His men love him. His students love him. The damn gangsters whose heads he whipped love him.

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And dammit, I love him, right down to my toes. He and Larry Niven are the closest things to a father I have, and I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to have them. Maybe the best trip I've ever had.

STAR TREK (2009)

Look, I'm just gonna say it: this is really the best "Trek" movie ever. Yeah, I said it. Better than "Wrath of Khan", which really only gets top marks because it had the original cast, and that was such an incredible blast seeing them get it right. If they'd re-cast it..? A decent space opera. but other than that, every other "Trek" had no sense at all of being a movie. All of them were blown-up episodes of the television show, with aging casts and no sense of wonder at all. Where were the monsters? Even on Trek they had beasties, within the limits of television budgets. Where was the romance? The Borg Queen was about as close as they ever came. They were never about the human relationships, really--they were about recreating the fun of watching television actors we enjoyed playing characters we loved, and frankly, many of the actors weren't really that good. Go ahead...tell me...how many of the core Trek actors really had much of a career outside those shows? They were decent actors, but lucky beyond belief to find roles so iconic that fit them so well.

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So J.J. Abrams comes along and shakes things up. Gives us real full-screen spectacle. Sensuality. Tragedy. Dynamite action sequences that are genuinely breath-taking (nothing in any of the 10 previous movies has anything CLOSE to that sky-dive sequence.) Leonard Nimoy, back as Spock and just wonderful. I could complain that most of the fight scenes looked under-rehearsed, but hey, nothing's perfect. Hell, I liked it so much I'm not even complaining about Uhura and Spock, and don't think for a moment I couldn't. This is just the most fun I've had at a movie in ages, my second-favorite "re-boot" after "Casino Royale." And the topper? The absolute topper? I saw it with my karate instructor, Sijo Steve Muhammad. Half way through the movie, I was crying, and realized that it felt like seeing "Enter the Dragon" with my father, back in the day. The kid inside me was happier than I've been in quite some time. Yeah...this is real movie-making, real entertainment, and it will make more money in its first week than any other "Trek" in its entire run. Deservedly so. I enjoyed the original "Trek." It was genuinely groundbreaking, and wonderful entertainment, and I've seen 'em all. But this movie pays more honor to the original than any of the other films, which just kept trying to re-capture the same old lightning in musty, small-minded bottles (when they broke out the go-carts in "Nemesis" I just wanted to hide.)

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Trekkies, rejoice. The thrill is finally back. When I saw "Casino" I realized I'd been faking it for years with 007. That I wanted so badly to be entertained by Bond that I was willing to make happy noises as genuine as those emitted by a fifty-dollar hooker on the fourth day of a Shriner's convention. This is the real deal. Enjoy. Oh...for Trekkies? An "A+". For the rest of us? A solid, solid "A."

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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Wolverine (2009)

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Well, it isn't as bad as I'd heard, which is definitely damning with faint praise. Hugh Jackman makes a terrific hero, but the movie, dealing with the origins of this nearly immortal, rapid-regeneration, feral X-Man is just "meh." After a terrific credit sequence showing how Jim Logan and his brother (Liv Shreiber, terrific) fought in every American war from the Civil War to Vietnam, Logan is recuited into a secret military unit composed exclusively of mutants. After a massacre in Nigeria (which a Nigerian friend of mine took offense at) Logan quits and tries to live a normal life, falls in love...and of course, the government comes after him. The story deals with the issue of Wolverine's indestructable adamantium skeleton, his loss of memory, etc...while never really dealing with his blood thirst (oh, come on...WE know why he fought in all those wars!) and a few other things. Some of the effects are a bit tacky, but others are terrific, and the overall feeling was "popcorn movie." Before "Dark Night" and "Iron Man", before people started expecting Comic book movies to be quite so good, it would have been perfectly acceptable. As is...

Meh.

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WARNING! SAMBO ALERT!

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Kind of interesting here. A couple of black women I know considered Wolverine to be extremely sexist. I watched it, with that in mind, and maybe I missed something. So a woman he trusted betrayed him. Half the characters in the movie are betraying each other, and most of 'em are men. So what?

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And a couple of women die. So? Anyone notice that ten times as many men died? And what puzzled me is that 100% of the non-white mutants died. One black, one white, one native American. And the one black mutant died specifically because he was trying to help the white guy. All surviving mutants: white. Check. Female mutants survive? Yes, an important one. Females behaving as badly as males? No. A woman does a bad thing, but for a reason even Wolverine ultimately accepts. Maybe I'm missing something here.

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I actually appreciate the reminders of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of the Germans, and can see how that historical cowardice could be seen as "and therefore, it is not always better to speak to your enemies." I get it. I consider it reasonable to count this as a case in which it hurt. I don't AGREE with this, but I do consider it reasonable. I would look at this as a case in which it was foolish to give an appeaser control over whether or not England went to war. A person who will not fight under any circumstances isn't much better than one who will not communicate under any circumstances. But as I accept this as reasonable and rational, it seems to me that the number of cases where people talked, and then went to war, are innumerable. And the cases in which people talked, and averted war, are also innumerable. And that the statistics go WAY in that direction. "Speak of peace, but prepare for war" would be pretty close to my motto--and having spent forty years of my life learning how to hurt people, what I know is that the people I respect most in the world are the warriors who can kill you with a touch...but will strive with all their power to have peace. They will speak to you, or to anyone, without fear. It is their teaching I have followed my entire life, and I have seen vast positive results in my own life from the attitude of communicating from a position of strength. I honor those who disagree with me--but those who believe that someone who disagrees with them must be ignorant is likely to have far more conflict in their lives than one who seeks common ground. In fifty-seven years of life as a black man in an often racist culture, I have NEVER failed to find common ground, even when those around me swore there was none. That common ground has not always been enough to prevent conflict, but it has always reduced it. Always. My attitude is clear: "I will kill you if you hurt my family. But you can kill me, as well. Is there not some way for us to coexist?" I see no reason to change it, or to think it does not work for nations as well as individual warriors.

"January Magazine" review of SHADOW VALLEY

Readers familiar with Barnes’ work before 2006’s Great Sky Woman (released in paperback just last month) will have an understandable challenge in knowing what to do with Shadow Valley (DelRey). On the one hand, Barnes is best known as a genre writer. That’s actually an understatement: Barnes is an esteemed and much awarded author in the twinned worlds of science fiction and fantasy. And since he’s also married to yet another esteemed author of speculative fiction -- Tananarive Due -- it’s a sort of familial thing. We have our expectations of Barnes. But does he deliver? Well, yes. But in unexpected ways.

Like Great Sky Woman, Shadow Valley holds not the merest thread of SF/F. No matter how hard you try to find it, it just isn’t there. This is straight up historical fiction, but more Jean Auel than James Michener: this is creation historical fiction. Or maybe most accurately prehistorical fiction. In Shadow Valley we go way back to ancient Africa where Sky Woman and Frog Hopping -- first encountered in Great Sky Woman -- are dealing with life beyond the devastating eruption of Father Mountain that concluded the last book.

This is exciting stuff. Epic, page snappingly thrilling, not to be missed. The literati have a way at holding their nose when they sense the faintest whiff of SF/F nearby. My hope is that Barnes’ literary pedigree won’t overshadow the excellence of this work. It’s a worthwhile book that has the potential to help a lot of people gain an understanding of their distant roots.

Talk is Cheap. War is expensive.

1) I say it's better to talk to enemies or opposition. Mentioning cases in which it apparently didn't help doesn't change that. Since there are many cases in which negotiation or conversation (communication) DID help, that's a positive. Those in which it DIDN'T help are a zero. The average result? Positive, unless you can identify cases in which conversation HURT. Since you can't possibly know what the outcome will be until after the conversation, I maintain that the best policy is communication. Communication between leaders, even during war, can help minimize casualties. And there is an entire type of person who plays the game "let's you and him fight" where for their own reasons, they will carry corrupt messages back and forth, or deliberately lie about the intentions of the other side, because it profits them for there to be war and conflict. I see no downside to communicating.

2) Frank, I didn't mean to be slippery, but I can see what you mean. Here's my contention: people who think we shouldn't talk to the other side ARE MORE LIKELY to believe that the people on the other side simply are "different" from us, usually in a way that is inferior. Yes, it is possible to believe someone is equal, but unreachable. But just because someone else says that the opponent's logical foundation is immovable and irreconcilable doesn't mean it is. It might well mean that they are merely as inflexible as the other side. I can't even count the number of times side "A" has said: It's "Heads!" while side "B" screams "it's Tails!" and I managed to say, "wait a minute, it's a half-dollar!" A major fallacy I've seen my whole life is that if someone can't see an answer, they often believe one doesn't exist. Or more specifically, that the limits of their perception are the limits of possibility. Arthur Clarke had a saying something like: "when a distinguished and elderly scientist says something is impossible, he is most likely wrong." The capacity to resolve apparent dualities to find a new option is a mode of thought I've prized all my life. And I see no practical limits to it, unless the other side is actually deranged. The right Jew might very well have been able to negotiate immigration for the Jewish community rather than extermination, even though co-existence might have been out of reach. In retrospect, I'm sure a LOT of Nazis thought "we should have just let them go." While not an ideal solution, it might have been a better deal for both sides.

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People often take what seems the best option, but under fear and stress, develop tunnel vision and only see a fraction of the options available to them. Unless you can mention a shit-load of cases where the situation was WORSE because people engaged in polite communication (yes, I'm qualifying that, assuming that our communicators are actually skilled), then I have to think that the net result is positive.

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Note, for instance, that merely the insistence upon polite discourse has made this site a place where people of opposing views can express themselves without being attacked personally (usually). Just a tiny tiny example of what I'm talking about. I just don't believe that human beings are that different. I believe that by far, most of the sane ones want the same thing (and even most of the unsane ones--their mechanisms are just too screwed up to function right.)

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Convince someone that their behavior is likely to end with their own children and grandchildren exterminated, and you usually have their attention. Give them a way to surrender with honor, or negotiate with dignity, and most people will at least open themselves to discussion.

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There is a Bell Curve of human ability, and the ability to create rapport, read expressions, find common ground and so forth is just as open to genius as any other. I'm no genius at it, but I've completely lost track of the number of times I was told a group or individual was beyond discussion--only to discover that the person saying that had a hidden agenda, or just wasn't good at reading/communicating. They then assumed that they WERE (like everyone thinks they're a better driver/lover than average. Can't make your girlfriend come? Why, it's HER problem!) and can't believe that maybe, just maybe, they have blinders on. Unless you can demonstrate lotsa cases where it was a NEGATIVE value to communicate, I have to repeat that the net result is positive, and we should always go for it.

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And yes, I think there is overlap between the assumption that the other is "different" and the group that thinks that that difference is inferior. The group that thinks that, say gays aren't worthy of marriage and the group that thinks blacks aren't worthy, period. The group that thinks that Islam is evil, and those who think Arab extremists or leaders cannot and should not be talked to. Yes, I absolutely believe that the TENDENCY to believe in differing value between groups is related to the tendency to racism, sexism, homophobia, cultural eliteism, and so forth. Now, I've never met a person who didn't believe that there were differences--but there is, again, a Bell Curve with this. As I've said before, I think that the "disease" of the Right is too MUCH of this, and the "disease" of the Left is too LITTLE of it. Too much cultural relativism: "everything is o.k."

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I would bet anything that if you surveyed the group that believes we should not speak to our opponents/enemies, you would find a disproportionate number of those who disagree with gay marriage, opposed civil rights, a woman's right to choose, and think Islam is evil. Not that every member of that group believes those things, but if anyone can find stats demonstrating I'm wrong, I'd love to see them, I really would. In other words, some people just have more of the "we're right and good, they're wrong and bad" voice in their heads, and that voice looks for opportunities.

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For instance: anyone who thinks that Liberals or Conservatives are inferior, stupid, blind, etc. is falling neatly into that category. And that's damned near anyone who is seriously politicized. The tendency is a survival trait in one context, and the source of a fantastic amount of human misery in others. I like the middle range far better. And from the middle, it looks like a damned good idea to talk.

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Or to put it simpler: I am having a VERY difficult time thinking of cases in which I would be worse off for having spoken to someone. At the age of 57, I've yet to have a single instance of that, and I've dealt with violent criminals and the insane. And unless the number of cases where it was WORSE to have spoken to the opposition outnumbered those in which value was produced. The logical answer is to speak whenever possible, but expect the opposition to do everything possible to twist the discussions to their own end--much like you're doing. The difficulty with "Crazymakers" isn't listening or speaking to them--it is accepting their map of reality, or value structure in place of your own. THAT is indeed a problem. But it's a problem awake adult human beings shouldn't have.

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What's the fear? That the opposition will learn more about you than you will about them? That they will convince you of their point of view more effectively than you will convince them of yours? But isn't that the risk in any conflict? Isn't it better to work this out with words rather than bombs? To lose at the negotiation table rather than on the battlefield? Either you have confidence in your people, or you don't.

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Unless...there is some benefit that accrues from NOT understanding the other person's point of view. If I want an oil pipeline, and can convince the American public that the opposition to our presence in a given region is based on religious extremism, and not the fact that, oh, say Halliburton assassinated a group of local chiefs, it makes damned good sense to keep our people from ever talking to theirs. But what possible downside is there to communication? Worst case scenario seems to be that you get nothing. Best case is that you stop a war. No comparison.

Speaking with the Enemy

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ﾠﾠI do enjoy the conversation about copyrights. Someone saying I was "frightened" by the situation was just wrong, however. I am concerned, partially that good creative people are going to suffer because they cannot control the fruits of their labor. And since almost all the people who argue that such duplication should be legal are NOT members of the group who might be hurt by it, this strikes me as self-serving. Because technology makes something easy doesn't make it right. The "loaf of bread" thing is irritating. If you want to make loaves of bread, DO IT. Just don't duplicate a loaf of Wonder Bread complete with packaging. Create your own recipe and duplicate THAT. Or are you afraid you aren't smart enough? I think people are absolutely smart enough to create their own creative works. When they don't, and use technology to duplicate someone else's, they are inviting everyone to simply make up the rules the way they want to. If you can justify what you want to do with my stuff, then I have the right to justify what I want to do with yours. I will have exactly as much respect for your boundaries as you have for mine...and trust me, I'll make up rules that make sense to me, not to you. Societies can't operate like that.

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Frank--it could be that as I learn more about finances, I'll be less happy with Obama. But here's my thought on that:

1) He moved into a burning house, and is draining the swimming pool to put it out. I don't like it, but I don't blame him for shallowing the pool somewhat.

2) With any number of subjects, I don't know enough to make a direct judgement. So I sit back and look at the judgements of people I respect. There is enough disagreement among those people for me to realize that NO ONE can be said to know "exactly" what to do in this instance. But I notice that the criticisms pretty much balance between he's "doing too much," "doing not enough" and "doing the wrong thing" and "doing the right thing." When it all evens up, he seems to be going down the middle. And the worst critics are people who started criticizing him before he even took office. So when I discount the obvious partisans, what I'm left with is: "looks very interesting. Sure hope it works out."

3) You guys, quite reasonably, talk about people who can't be reasoned with or communicated with, whose views on the world are simply so different that you can't find common ground.

a) All my life I've had people tell me that group or person X, Y, or Z can't be communicated with. I didn't believe them, went ahead and tried, and 99% of the time found that the problem was that the person who said that had either a vested interest, or wasn't as good at communication as I was.

b) I'm supposed to take someone else's word for this? The President should be someone who can form his own opinions about people, hope to God. Meeting them face to face is the best way to take someone's measure. Note that I never said "placate" or "give in to." How in the hell is talking to someone giving in to them? Unless you speak directly to someone, how do you even know if either of you have been lied to by your councelors, advisors, and others who would manipulate the situation. You think I don't know people will lie? Christ, that's something we know by the time we leave the playground. All I can figure is that people who don't want communication believe that they lose something in the process. If that has been their experience in life, I respectfully submit that they are lousy at communication and judgement of others.

c) To restate "b" above, one of the most important things anyone would want from a leader is the capacity to communicate and make judgements of others. I would want the very very best person on my team at this critical quality, and would NEVER turn over communication entirely to those who were inferior to his judgement. People often make the mistake of thinking "if I can't do it, no one can," not realizing that they are limited by their own prejudices, inadequacies, rigid belief systems, fears and angers. But I've met people who are so good at reading people, and so good at building consensus, that they are almost magical. When the same side that says "we shouldn't talk to them" also has a disproportionate number of those who say "Islam is evil," I have to suspect that THOSE people would never think communication will help, because at their heart they believe their opponents are critically, basically different. This is why Sting's song about "if the Russians love their children too" was so important.

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Every government trying to mobilize their population for war uses the simplest way to rile up their people: the "Others" are different than we are. Worse than we are. More godless than we are. They are baby-killers and monsters. Both sides do it. In boxing matches, martial arts matches, the fighters have to be very careful not to veer into negative emotions, hatred, dehumanizing their opponent. It is the absolute easiest, default position, and you see it at Pep ralleys between different high schools.

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It's that Octavia Butler thing: we see the world hierarchically, and we place ourselves high on that hierarchy. All my early life, I watched an entire culture saying that about my people, saying many of the exact same things white people now say about Arabs or Muslims. The exact same things I heard said about the Japanese in WW2. The exact same shit I hear people all over the world saying about any group they are in conflict with: especially if they want their land or resources. They aren't like us. They're not as good as us. They can't be reasoned with.

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Remember that I don't think 99% of people communicate with THEMSELVES honestly and elegantly. Otherwise, they'd have better careers, relationships, and bodies. People who ARE balanced in all three arenas tend (not always, but in the majority of cases I've seen) to be FAR less likely to believe other people, other groups, those in opposition to them are just intrinsically different, and can't be communicated with, only controlled or exterminated.

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That belief is the raw seed of so much human evil I just cannot believe it. It is the belief pattern not just of good people I believe are mistaken (as I think about those on this blog) but literally every monster I've ever known or heard of. I've never ever known of a monster who didn't believe in some version of this delusion.

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So the question for me is: how do I gather information about my opponent without weakening my own position? If we do not include this capacity among those things we want from our leaders, that is a grave, grave mistake. And about people who lie? I have a pretty simple solution.

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Trust no one. Instead, rely upon them to do what they perceive as being in their best interests, and concentrate your attention on determining what that might be. Pay more attention to their actions than to their words, but pay special attention to the GAP between what they say and what they do. Assume that every human being feels alone and afraid...and look for what they do to deal with that loneliness and fear. All violence except in the tiny percentage of the human race that is functionally insane arises from these emotions (in my way of thinking). If you think that those "other" groups have a higher percentage of actual crazies, the burden of proof is flatly on you.

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I got so sick of people pointing to black rioters and assuming that there must be something wrong with them, like no rational white people have ever rioted, as if there was something intrinsically sick about dark-skinned people that from time to time, for no discernable reason, they would just erupt. Insane! Childlike! Primitive!

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It was decades of this that pushed me to develop global theories of human behavior that could help me explain this without hating white people. And the attitudes I have come right from this: you want me to believe that Arabs and Muslims are intrinsically just less than us? That they cannot be reasoned with? Then I'd have to believe that there really are basic, innate differences in quality between groups. And trust me. Believe me when I say that were I to believe that, my very next thought would be that white people are just as sick and evil. I mean that. And all the way to my toes, I don't believe that to be true.

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So there it is, and there we are. I believe that most violence is a matter of miscommunication, fear, and tribal hierarchicalism. And that we are just as vulnerable to it as anyone else. Women are as vulnerable to it as men. Whites as blacks, Christians as Muslims. It's hard-wired into our survival mechanism, and you have to stay constantly aware and alert to prevent it.

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And, not to put too fine a line on it, the same people who want me to believe Muslims or Arabs are somehow inferior are vastly more likely to think the exact same thing about any other group that doesn't look like them. Including me. I'd be a fool to fall into it.

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That doesn't mean I believe what people tell me. It means that I have the capacity to judge for myself, and would want nothing less from my leaders.