Category Archives: Belief and Knowledge

Hate is for Haters

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I don’t hate anyone. I’ll leave that to Trump supporters screaming “BUILD THAT WALL!” and “LOCK HER UP!” Notice I didn’t say Trump, but Trump supporters. As they are now learning (perhaps – it’s not a habit for them), none of that is going to happen. They were conned, in one of the most elaborate yet also one of the most simplistic cons in history. According to Trump himself and his closest aides:

  • There will be no wall.
  • Trump: “The Clintons are good people.” So no, she won’t be locked up. I mean, on what charge?
  • “Criminal” (felonious) aliens MAY be deported. But that’s already standing policy. We’ll see if they dedicate the resources.
  • Trump: “Marriage equality is the law of the land, we can’t change that.”
  • Trump’s transition team is chock full of Washington insiders, GOP establishment figures, lobbyists, and other assorted “elites”. Call it revenge of the swamp creatures.

And so on. Sometimes, though, it takes a simpleton to know a simpleton. Trump may be ignorant (he has said himself that he has never read history), but he’s smart in a way that your standard con man is smart – he “knows people”, he says, and he really does. He knows what motivates the least thoughtful of people – hatred and a desire for revenge against those who have “kept them down.” It’s the populist answer to the problems of the poor since the advent of populism: Someone is grabbing all the money you deserve. There can be no other (complex) answer.

As Trump himself famously said, channeling P.T. Barnum: “I love the poorly educated.”

I saw it early on, but the press seems to have missed it. Trump’s campaign was a WWE match writ large, a massive long-term pre-bout trash talk. Say anything! Say you’re going to kill your opponent, mash them into dust! Because The Undertaker is evil, folks, he’s evil! He wants to eat your puppies, I tell you, I know this! And so on. So used to getting riled up about Steve Austin or Dandy Dan or whoever, these same crowds were ripe to explode in a mushroom cloud of hate for….for who? Who do we hate, Donald? Who’s doing this to us?

Donald had two answers, both deftly crafted to lay his path to victory: 1 – Hate the elites. They’re keeping you down. They’re stealing all the money, they rig all the elections – they are making fools of you. To this end, he made a tool of the press corps by “caging” them at his events, then directing the crowd to spew their hatred at these fancy-pants elitists with their nice clothes and expensive haircuts. And 2 – who is the most elite of the elites? Hillary Clinton, of course. She can commit crimes at will – she murdered Vince Foster after all! – and she walks away Scott free. Just like Bill and his serial sexual assaults (note: none proven). She sold out the brave Americans at Benghazi – it’s in the emails! – but you won’t see her prosecuted, because the whole system is rigged.

Donald could not have been more surprised – and elated – when FBI director James Comey swept in during the last week of the election and raised the specter of “treasonous emails” once again, mere days before the election, in violation of Justice Department policy not to tilt the election with hearsay or conjecture (and possibly in violation of the Hatch Act – but law is relative now, as the Senate showed us by ignoring its duty under the Constitution to hold hearings on Obama’s Supreme Court nominee).  But the real clincher came on election eve, when Comey again violated the protocols of his office and said that – whoops – those emails are OK, they don’t implicate Clinton after all. Never mind.

Could Trump have asked for a more spot-on indictment of the “rigged” system and the untouchable elites? Trump was quick to exploit this news, asking his now-rabid crowds (who were anticipating “the steal”) “how could they have possibly gone through 650,000 emails in a few days? Rigged, folks, all rigged.”

Of course, modern computing resources can search 650,000 emails for numerous sets of keywords (such as “Hillary Clinton”) in minutes, even seconds. But of course Trump supporters in Appalachia (and Western Nebraska) don’t know that, don’t understand that. But Trump knew all too well what these people don’t understand.

I’ll leave a smaller but significant portion of the hatred to anarchists and extremist faux liberals, who also got caught up in the baseless anti-Hillary, anti “rigged establishment” hysteria, people like Susan Sarandon and assorted Bernie Sanders fanatics dripping with white privilege – some of these being former Facebook “friends” of mine. They at least should have the critical thinking skills necessary to put 2 and 2 together to get 4. To wit: if the system was rigged by the “crooked” Bernie-hating DNC, why didn’t Hillary win?

I did not unfriend the haters  because I hate them, or even dislike them. As I said, I’m unfamiliar with hate as an emotion. I’m like Spock on that one. I understand myself, and therefore I know that to hate them is to hate something in me, not in them – motivations of baseless hate are due to some deficiency of empathy, a kind of personality disorder – an inability to see the world through the eyes of those fellow humans considered “others” – not “one of us” (and probably born in Kenya – that birth certificate is phony).

I unfriended them  for the simple reason that I am no friend to haters, and it’s better to be honest about that. I have nothing in common with these people. I don’t base judgments on hate, and I’m not a fanatic blind to facts that don’t fit my preconceived, hate-based agenda. I have to believe they would not want me as a friend either, because I won’t – I will never – just “accept” the fact that the voters of this country put a self-avowed sexual predator in the White House.  A man who cheated on each wife with the next one, who has said it’s time to “trade up” when a wife hits age 35. A man who defrauded the ignorant at “Trump University”,  who cheats his business partners, who stiffs his contractors, and who brags about all of it. A man who mocks the disabled, who got angry at a baby, who is obsessed with demeaning women while simultaneously horrified at their bodily fluids (or their “whatever”).

They elected to lead them a man with no honor, no compassion, no empathy – a man who is no man at all.

I’ve been thinking of my father. He was not from privilege, he was a child of immigrants’ children, one of nine.  His parents had accents. Like all of us, my dad had his faults. But he also had honor, and grit, and perseverance. There was no money for college, so he worked hard and got an appointment to West Point. He graduated (most drop out) and was soon serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he watched his classmates die in a war he had no stake in. But it wasn’t about him. It was about something higher, a higher honor he had dedicated his life to preserving. It was about the motto of West Point – “Duty. Honor. Country.”

My father did not teach me that much – I’m sure he figured I’d be tougher after sorting  life out on my own, making my mistakes. And I’ve made plenty. But I remember one thing he taught me: that honor is worth preserving. That a man with no honor is not a man at all. That the only ones less deserving of consideration than a dishonorable man are those who would blindly follow him.

So I know I’m a Facebook nobody (now even more so) and I like it fine that way. I have no brand to build, and ironically, perhaps, some of my best friends want nothing to do with Facebook for reasons I’m understanding more each day. I don’t “count” friends, I count “on” them. Would I ever count on someone who based their most precious instrument in this democracy – their vote – on hatred or a desire for witless anarchy? No. Do I want anything to do with them? No. I do not wish them ill – I do not want to think of them at all.

Secular Trinity

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You live, and you grow, and you change. At some point you realize you’re an adult (for me, around age 25). You feel at that point you are not going to change anymore, although it still remains difficult to imagine yourself as middle-aged (and forget about “old”).

You feel “done” maturing, as if at 25 (or whenever) you will simply lock into place and be the “you” that you are now for the rest of your life.

There’s some anecdotal truths around this. For example, artistic tastes. I believe they tend to form as part of childhood and adolescence, and of course one’s taste matures and is refined by experience. But at some point, usually late adolescence, you have kind of “decided” what kind of art, music, film, philosophy, etc., that you “like” or identify with, and this gets rather chiseled in stone for many people. This is why, for example, Journey and Foreigner are still touring.

(Artists are an exception. They are always looking for the new. But given enough time, even they may lose their taste for the now.)

We’re amazed at how richly detailed our childhood memories are, our adolescent and post-adolescent memories. The time between age 6 and 21 seems a lifetime in itself, a kaleidoscope of change, when recollected at age 50. But the time after that, and all the way up to the present, seems a fleeting moment, punctuated by memories of only the most obvious junctures of change (career start, marriage, children, deaths of relatives, new job, big vacation, etc.). Personally, I can barely remember anything that happened between age 25 and 35, but I have a huge catalog of incredibly distinct memories from childhood and adolescence.

Science now has good evidence that there is a reason we have such vivid memories of childhood and adolescence—our brains are wired to create more permanent memories during these years. It would seem to go hand in hand with our greater ability to learn at a younger age.

And, as science has also proven, as you get older time does literally move faster. At least from the individual’s perspective. Gyp!

I’ve also noticed that physical aging is not a steady degrading of one’s appearance from “youthful” to “codger.” It’s a process with fits and starts. Nature, in her wisdom, seems to be most “interested” in us between the ages of 12 and 40. This makes perfect evolutionary sense if you think about it. And so, I don’t know if it’s by design or just a function of human aging, but it seems I did not age at all, physically, between age 20 and 40. I remember, when I was about 31, I walked into my first college class as an instructor. Some of the students laughed, and as I took my spot at the podium and smiled at them, some of them told me to quit fooling around and get a seat before the instructor arrived. I looked about the same as I did at 18. They ended up being a good class. (And that’s another thing – youth relates to youth. It’s not fair. A lot of things aren’t.)

Why this variability in physical aging, memory creation, and perception of time? I believe it’s because Nature has great use for us between the ages of 12 and 40 – to create and raise the next generation. I’m not saying that’s anyone’s “duty” by a long shot. Every life is valid. I mean that that is our usefulness to Nature, which is insistent that life will succeed, and indifferent to what happens after we help in that task. It is our “golden” time, the time when we are most vital, most animated, and most attractive. It’s all useful to be thus, in terms of evolutionary success. And when we get past that period, we are, I’m afraid, no longer so useful to Nature. We are free to stick around, perhaps to advise, but we’re largely relegated to being observers in the continuous cycle, the generational game that is center stage.

And then, when we aren’t looking, the fun begins.

There used to be an old joke about how when Dick Clark reached age 75 he was going to age all at once. Yeah, he was youthful for a long time. But then he wasn’t. And many are, as I was, slow to age. But to quote my old bud Robert Frost: Nothing gold can stay. Time is, as they say, the great destroyer. Or, if you’re a Jim Morrison fan: No one here gets out alive.

So now I do age. My face is fatter, my hair is thinner and coarser and grayer. My middle is more of me. My skin was perfect, now I’ve got more “character” in my face. I have a crown on what used to be a molar. I’m allergic to everything. My eyes are less bright and can’t see menus in dim restaurants. My body is, in general, less cooperative than it used to be. And I’ll be honest, it gets to me sometimes. All things being equal, it’s better to be young, healthy and beautiful. Right? Sure.

But all things are not equal.

Lately, I have felt a very odd transformation occurring. I can only describe it as being less “me” and more “us”. For my entire life, and largely based on my lifestyle, I’ve been a loner, even an outcast. It was always “me” and “everyone else.” It felt right, it felt safe and contained, and my personal philosophy had a lot to do with the idea of the “sovereign individual,” beholden to no one, bowing to no creed and no nation. I was (and am) a devotee of that famous iconoclast William Blake’s iconic statement: “I must create my own system, or be enslav’d by another man’s.”

That’s changed, at least in part. I would like to say it changed the day I married, but that would be dishonest. I was 28, still in Nature’s grip. I was not done figuring out who and why I am. I had a long way to go, and perhaps that was mutual. I suspect it was, and that’s fine. Nothing important is easy, nothing valuable happens in a moment (well, a couple of things). Building a life – an identity – I find it’s a lifelong process. And once I had decided upon my identity, way back then, it felt sound, but now it has shifted again.

Marriage is complicated, as the divorce and single-parent statistics attest. It’s not always worth it. And, most of all, the future – and our future selves – cannot be predicted, they will come to pass as they do, not as we will them to. So some fail. Marriage is a planned sacrifice of sorts, a giving up (eventually, if the union is successful) of a part of oneself, in order to accept being part of another self. I didn’t really understand this when our drunk minister, Reverend Fred, said the words in October 1990, that we were now “one.” I thought I did, but I didn’t.

Now I do. And not only do I feel I am truly not one person anymore, I’m not even limited to being two people. I can look at my daughter now, hear her words, witness her mature identity growing, and it grows like the acorn into a replica of the old oak. Really. She is a true part of the “us” that we are now, and there’s no competition regarding whom she is “more” like, because in a rather profound way we all seem to be the same person. Of course we are physically independent beings, with as much free will as anyone may have (or think they have). We have our own likes and dislikes, etc. But we do not go it alone, not at all. We are “in it” together, the “it” being life. We share it, as I have never before understood sharing.

No, it’s not readily explained.

But I know this: I’m no longer me, and it’s no longer me against the world. I’m us, and we’re us. And we are a world, within a world. And it feels better than anything I’ve ever felt before.

Socialism Part 2: What’s in a Name? Plenty.

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The first step in the process is to reclaim the validity of the word “socialism.” American conservatives – capitalists by nature – have done a good job of transforming the word into a pejorative. For that matter, they’ve made good progress on the term “liberal,” as if the very concept of being open to new ideas and new approaches is anathema to our buttoned up, top-down economy and its trans-national corporate masters. Also not coincidental, the nation’s approved history textbooks barely touch on the popularity of socialism among Americans in the 1930s (with the Great Depression marking the first object demonstration that the Dow Jones is a measuring stick for the elite’s finances, not a system of governance for all of us). Of course, the end game of America’s flirtation with socialism and communism in the 1930s was Joe McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the great communist witch hunts it set off in the paranoid post-war 1950s.

Now the Great Recession has reminded us, once again, that the big risks of our economy are being borne not by ultra-wealthy “job creators” but by the 99.99 percent of us who do not own the world, its resources and its governments. When capitalist deal-making hits pay dirt, oligarchs get richer. But when it goes bust, as it did in grand style in 2008, strapped taxpayers foot the bill in the form of tax write-offs and bailouts. Then, as a final insult, when the government needs more money than the GOP will let it collect in taxes from billionaires, the government borrows it from – you guessed it – these same billionaire tax dodgers, who prefer to make interest on the money they “lend” to Uncle Sam. This is known as “privatizing gains and socializing losses.” Americans are picking up on this pattern, and they do not like it. The natural question that should come to our minds is, “If corporations are going to get the taxpayer-funded benefits of socialist policies, shouldn’t we taxpayers be eligible for them too?”

But as the options for choosing leaders dry up — as our politics gets deeper and deeper into the gutter, scaring off decent people who want to help — those who vie for office all appear to be variations on the same gladiatorial theme. Politicians are being molded by corporate interests, at corporatized universities, by special interest “AstroTurf” groups like ALEC and the NRA, and by corporate “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth. They are producing politicians the same way McDonald’s produces managers at Hamburger University—absorb the corporate philosophy, preach the corporate philosophy, defend the corporate philosophy, and project a belief that there are no viable alternatives to the corporate philosophy.

Except that it’s not a corporation—it’s my government, it’s your government, it’s our government, and it should work for all our interests.

Socialism = Despotism?

As an option for governance, socialism’s biggest hits came from those 20th century revolutionaries who overthrew their monarchies or oligarchies and put in place severe, ideological, paranoid, oppressive regimes that were called (naturally) “socialist” regimes. So for Americans who are not curious enough or creative enough to wonder how else one might implement a socialist system of governance, the only working models are the totalitarian regimes of Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, and the rest. Worst of all from the American perspective, the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” what Ronald Reagan famously called the “evil empire” – this evil empire was our object model for conceptualizing socialism. We perceived socialism through the prism of an anti-socialist, pro-capitalist society.

Now, as in the 1930s, people are waking up to the reality that a blend of our Democratic principles with Socialist monetary and regulatory policies may – that is to say it just might – be preferable to a system run by a cabal of self-interested billionaire families, a system that works for the benefit of roughly 0.01 percent of the population. Yes, it might be better than the oligarchy our current “democracy” is creating.

Next: Democracy on a Ventilator

Growing Up Socialist

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Based on my upbringing, it’s almost impossible that I would turn out to be anything other than a card-carrying socialist. This truism would make my father roll over in his Arlington National Cemetery grave, I suppose. But he – as an intellectual – would also have to agree with my reasoning.

Dad was a South Omaha Polish Catholic boy made good, graduating from West Point in 1958 to embark, along with his new wife (and my mother), on a globe-trotting career in the U.S. Army. He was a career man, with two tours in Vietnam attached to an SVA (South Vietnamese regular army) unit, a Signal Corps officer who retired at the age of 45 or so.

This means that as a child I also traveled the world, often living on federal property, and was essentially raised within the U.S. Army culture. It is a 100% socialist culture.

In the military, everyone has a job. Nobody is starvation-poor, and nobody is mega-rich. For 2016, the Army pay scale lists the lowest private at about $1600 a month and the biggest, cigar-chompingest four-star general making about $19,700 a month. That’s a difference in pay, between the lowest-paid grunt and basically the CEO of the Army, representing a factor of 12.3. Compare that to someone at Wal-Mart making minimum wage ($1,200 a month) and the Wal-Mart CEO making, let’s say conservatively, about $1.5 million a year or $125,000 a month. That’s a factor of 100+. (Top-earning CEOs make $125,000 an hour. Side question: how does one “earn” $125,000 in one hour? How is one person’s “labor” equal to the labor of 17,000 minimum wage workers?)

In the army, as in a classically imagined socialist society, there are “party members” (officers) and the “proletariat” (enlisted). Officers “run things” (executive) and the enlisted “do things” (labor). The executives get better pay and more perks—they have college degrees and undergo extensive educational training (War College, Command School), not to mention the added responsibility of being in charge. But those in the ranks of labor are provided for as well – in addition to base pay the enlisted soldiers in the barracks eat for free, have free housing, and free uniforms. (Officers pay for most of these things unless deployed in a war zone.) Yet everyone is guaranteed vacation (30 days a year last I checked) and sick leave. And if you get really sick, guess what? You’re covered, because health care is free. Provided you make a career of it, a soldier gets free medical care for life, plus a fair pension after twenty years of service. (Right now the pension is 50% of the soldier’s highest average 36 months of pay, regardless of rank, and this is in addition to Social Security retirement benefits.)

Everyone is covered. There are no homeless, there are no “illegals”, there are no charity cases, there are no elderly workers left high and dry by raided pension funds or crappy 401K plans.

Because of the “uniform” quality of life in the military—nobody stands out, nobody is singled out for special treatment—the military has largely marginalized the effects of American racism and classism in its culture-within-a-culture (except for the traditional, generalized class differential between officers and enlisted). Obviously these effects cannot be entirely eliminated. But as folks like Colin Powell have shown, a black soldier faces no institutional barriers to success in the military. He or she can get all the way, as Powell did, to the very top. You don’t have to come from any particular family or go to any particular school. (West Point helps, but again, anyone with the chops to succeed there is welcome. There’s no tuition—students get paid—and of course room and board are free. And you have a good job the day you graduate.) As you may recall, the military was even out ahead of the rest of American culture on gay acceptance. Women, in a culture invented for men, have had a rougher road, but they too are progressing. The army just graduated its first two female Rangers last year (both West Point graduates).

It’s simple: an egalitarian culture promotes and nurtures egalitarianism in its members, who feel a natural sense of dignity, of being respected within the culture no matter their individual role. Regular soldiers, not generals, tend to win the highest of military decorations. Most enlisted soldier’s I’ve known regard officers as “different” than them in their career path, not “better” than them because of their rank.

Of course, the U.S. military is an artificial culture in that, socialist as it may be, it is completely dependent on the greater American economy for its continued existence. The military is not an economy, it does not “produce” anything (aside from abstract “security”), it only consumes tax funds. The U.S. military is not the answer to our struggles with corporatism/oligarchy, but it does serve as an object lesson in how to build a fair and equitable societal structure, one in which all can thrive and all can live with dignity. We can learn from it.

Why Now?

It feels like I could have written this item a long time ago. Maybe, because in my past the word “socialism” was roughly equivalent in the American lexicon with terms like “godless communist” or “evil empire,” I felt like it would be a wasted effort. I mean, I think I’m pretty safe in arguing that before 2016, no socialist of any kind could have expected to be nominated for the presidency, let alone occupy that office.

And maybe that’s still true. At this writing, the bean counters expect Hillary to win the Democratic nomination this summer despite the extraordinary grass-roots popularity of her Democratic Socialist challenger, Bernie Sanders. She simply has the math in her favor, and – not incidentally – the party apparatus and its many veteran Democratic voters.

But the phenomenon of the nation’s young people “feeling the Bern” and coming out for the man in huge numbers looks like a harbinger of a new direction for America. It feels as though the dismantling of the oligarchy may come, if not next year, then soon—regardless of who wins the next presidential election.

Next: What’s in a Name? Plenty.

Mad Men Made Sane

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I like TV shows, but I only watch a few of the modern ones – I might like some others, but who has the time to wade through all the crap?

One show I like is Mad Men. But I might like it for different reasons than most people. Some people like the period clothes, some have a crush on Don Draper or Betty or big Joan, some think it’s great storytelling (it’s not great, but it’s good). On the other side, I’ve heard it called a soap opera, I’ve heard it called misogynist and racist and depressing. Maybe. The reason I like it is that it’s an excellent dramatic portrayal of a society confronting the nihilism of the modern world. The 1960’s ad business milieu seems the perfect environment in which to experience that confrontation firsthand.

The cover of the April 8, 1966 edition of Time magazine asked the question “Is God Dead?” I believe Mad Men is one dramatist’s answer. And it’s not “yes” or “no”.

In the world of Don Draper, there’s no right, no wrong, only what “is”. There’s no saving grace, and nobody – and everybody – gets what they “deserve”. It’s a world untethered from any higher authority or over-arching moral code.

In an early episode, Don Draper in his fine suit is denigrated by the beatnik friends of his mistress as they sit around her apartment smoking weed. They are dissing establishment ad man Don for being part of the “big lie”, which implies the beatniks are above all of that, on some higher and better plane. Don answers them with: “I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie, there is no system.” After a thoughtful pause he delivers the coup de grace:

“The universe is indifferent.”

Don’s shot across the bow of pious morality is a warning to the self-righteous that their reality is not the only possible reality, their good is not the only good. There are other, competing realities, and the people who believe them are just as convinced of their veracity as anyone else (for example, just watch the monotheists and atheists go at it). More important to me, it’s a warning to people raised on traditional “good versus evil” narratives that those, too, are only stories. Reality is something else – reality is what really happens in the world.

Reality should be self-evident, but it’s not, which is the root of our problem. We have a whole collection of phrases expressing the wish to get to what is real beneath what we perceive: “The real deal”, or crazy Ayn Rand’s “A is A”, or hippies with “the nitty gritty,” or old school “brass tacks”, or the “nuts and bolts” of a situation.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, the English novelist Iris Murdoch, wrote a novel called Under the Net, which includes this statement:

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.”

In other words, we impose a “net” of cultural belief systems and traditions on the reality of our sensory perceptions (a baby bird falls from its nest and dies – what does it mean?). Call them religions, superstitions, social mores, gender roles, philosophies, whatever. Our philosophical “net” of order, which we apply to the surface of our chaotic everyday reality, causes us to think that by extension there is some even grander system that is somehow manipulating these various smaller outcomes, both happy and sad, toward revelation of some great universal TRUTH, which we will someday know if we only persist in our struggle in “good faith.” The peace of God, someone said, surpasses all understanding. But even though we never really can, Murdoch expresses the belief that we should always try, as much as possible, to discern what’s “under the net” rather than just be content to perceive reality “through” the organizing net(work) of our preconceptions.

There’s nothing particularly new about this idea, I know. The poet William Blake wrote, long ago, “I must create my own system…or be enslav’d by another man’s.” It’s always been a favorite line of mine, since I first read it. Blake knew all our systems are invented and ephemeral. As a poet and outlaw, why imprison yourself in some banker’s or vicar’s construct of reality? No – better to live your own reality, however terrifying it may be.

I haven’t seen the last season of Mad Men yet, so I don’t know if Draper gets the “comeuppance” many are waiting for – whether he wins or loses in the end. This was supposedly a big cultural deal. Some see him as a total rat – after all he’s a liar, a fake, a cheater and a bully. They have anticipated his downfall and would cheer his ultimate failure as a sort of moral justice. Others see him as a victim of circumstances, still others see him as the kind of “real man” who’s fallen out of fashion in post-Alan Alda America.

To me, it doesn’t matter what happens to Don Draper. If he wins, it’s because a complex set of circumstances, only some of which he controls, have resulted in him winning. If he loses – same reason. In Don’s world, it’s all a crap shoot. If we feel frustrated by that, I think it’s because of our steady diet of happy endings, of stories large and small that almost always “reward” faith and hope while almost always “punishing” immorality or cynicism. Writers know that’s what we like. But it’s not real.

We can hold out for a just and fair future society, but it is not very likely to arrive on its own or be ushered in by ancient philosophers we’ve since deified. We must choose to build it ourselves. The past is the best predictor of what the future will bring – in short, continued moral ambiguity and human frailty hobbling our worldly systems, and zero direction from above (if there is an above) to get us on the better path. We must choose to see the right path with our human, open eyes. As the oft-repeated quote, attributed to Ghandi,  goes, “We must be the change we want to see in the world.”

While its stories can veer into melodrama, Mad Men depicts a society grappling with this reluctantly reached philosophical conclusion, and all its attendant modern anxiety and frustration, with aplomb.