As you know, I am fascinated by many aspects of Albert Einstein, and one of them is his habit of doing thought experiments. We don’t do those enough!
In Einstein’s case, he mused (picture him day dreaming) about things such as elevators falling through space and painters inside of them, about two-dimensional beetles crawling around three-dimensional wires, and so on.
But his most famous thought experiment has always bothered me. So I was delighted that Mark Anderson, a physicist who writes the Strategic News Service, which offers trend-spotting analysis, echoes my frustration in a recent newsletter. Here he goes:
The most famous scientific anecdote of all time remains half-done, unfinished, although countless authors have told the story of Albert Einstein as though it makes sense. Here is how the “thought experiment” goes: when he was 16 or so, Einstein decided that he needed to travel alongside light to understand its nature. (Drum roll.) In this way, he came to understand Special Relativity, a bit later in life. Wow.
There’s only one problem with this apocryphal story: Special (and General) Relativity talk about time and space. They don’t say a word about light, except as it responds to gravitational force.
So, none of us knows what Einstein saw (or did not see) of the light itself, as he (illegally) screamed along at the speed of light, looking sideways…
Well, I have been doing this thought experiment for a while now, without success. (That is not surprising since I opted out of physics as soon as I could in high school.) Here, by the way, is a cool illustration of it.
It always seemed to me that if I were looking sideways at a wave-like quantum of light going at the same speed, it should not even “exist”. Mark seems to think the same thing:
Waves, at their deepest origins, are relative. If you stand at the shore, in they come. But if you fly along with one, like a seagull – say, at the crest of a traveling wave – there is no motion at all; there is no wave.
Having said that, I remind myself, through the haze of my confusion about such matters, that Einstein’s Relativity ended up being about time as much as space.
So perhaps what happens to a light-beam rider is that time … stops. Which is, ironically, exactly what happened when I opened my email inbox this morning.
Seth Godin, in a slightly older post, gives “advice to authors” which amounts to “lower your expectations” and somehow ends, in a non sequitur, with: “You should write one.”
Well, I am writing one. Once it’s published, will I post, right here, some advice and/or satire about how bad it was to write a book?
The other day, I compared Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the chakras in Indian philosophy, and I promised to expound a bit on the highest need/chakra, which we might call, to use Maslow’s word, self-actualization.
It’s an ugly term, born out of Esalen in the late sixties, when hyphens, Latin roots and the noun form of verbs were considered good things because they bestowed credibility in between naked massages in the Esalen hot tubs which I myself once had to endure as part of my journalistic research.
So let’s just call it something else. To self-actualize is–to use the technical Jewish-Buddhist term ;)–to be a Mensch. I consider it perhaps the highest form of success, and it thus becomes relevant in the penultimate chapter of my book. According to Maslow, only about 2% of the human population self-actualizes!
Needs you fill and forget & needs that grow as you fill them
Take another look at Maslow’s famous pyramid, which I showed you in the previous post on the subject. There is one difference between the top of the pyramid and all the lower rungs. At the bottom (breathing, eating, feeling safe etc), we feel needs only when we lack something. We cease to feel them as soon as we have what we crave. So, if I am suffocating, all I care about is air. But once I have air again and can breathe, the obsession is gone. Maslow called these cravings deficit needs.
Self-actualization is different. When we feel that we are fulfilling our potential–by being creative, for example–the need to self-actualize does not go away but grows. Fulfilling our potential makes us feel alive and satisfies us. So Maslow called these motivations being needs to distinguish them from the deficit needs.
Character sketch of a Mensch
So what kind of person reaches the highest stage and becomes a Mensch?
Maslow studied biographies. (That happens also to be my approach in my forthcoming book; among the people Maslow studied are even some that are characters in my book.) From his studies Maslow concluded (we can debate whether he was right) that the Menschen shared certain traits that are actually quite rare. In this group of self-actualizers were:
The traits they shared, according to Maslow, were the following. They:
were able to discriminate between what is fake and what is genuine,
were able to treat life’s challenges as problems demanding solutions rather than personal affronts to be angry or depressed about,
felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means could be ends themselves (this is the opposite of strategic thinking),
enjoyed solitude,
had deep and intimate bonds with a few people rather than shallow relationships with many people,
felt “autonomous” from society (I think this means that they were non-conformist),
had an unhostile sense of humor–preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others (which comes close to my definition of irony),
accepted themselves and others, enjoying harmless flaws as personal quirks,
tended to have “peak experiences“, which we might call episodes of rapture or ecstasy–mystical feelings of merging into an infinitely large and eternal whole.
Normally I don’t like lists (as opposed to one single and large insight), but in this case a sort of composite personality emerges, which becomes stronger when Maslow adds to these positive qualities a few flaws that he found common among self-actualizers. They:
often suffered from anxiety,
were often absent-minded,
were occasionally ruthless and cold.
In short, they were, as Walt Whitman might say, “large”: they contradicted themselves and were fine with that.
And so…
Frankly, Maslow is a lot of work, and I have been pondering whether it has been worth it. I can’t decide whether the character sketch, and even his hierarcy of needs, is too obvious and thus banal, or whether it is helpful. For now I lean toward the latter.
Since I began this meditation by comparing his thoughts to ancient Indian philosophy, let me also conclude that way. It does strike me that self-actualization is strikingly similar to some visions of what “enlightenment” might be like.
First, I happen to believe that the yoga taught by Patanjali and his contemporary, the Buddha, leads to fleeting instances of samadhi (enlightenment, ecstasy), rather as it overcame St Teresa, instead of lasting bliss. “Peak experiences,” in other words.
Second, the “method” is similar: The simplicity, love of solitude, humor (think of Zen monks), non-conformism, withdrawal and even the occasional coldness of the self-actualizers resembles that of the Eastern yogis and Zen masters. They are really Einsteins in the Lotus position.
In short, I think that Maslow’s contribution is to humanize “enlightenment” for us Westerners.
As a dad, I have learned that the only (or at least best) way to get my children to do anything at all–to brush their teeth, eat their greens, jump into bed–is to turn the loathsome activity in question into … fun.
Perhaps the greens must become attacking naughties with shrill voices that want to fly into the mouth but keep missing and splattering. Suddenly, the little mouths are wide open, practically lunging for those mischievous little greens.
And as a former and frequently relapsing kid myself, I have learned that the only (or at least the best) way to get myself into a creative and productive mode is also to turn the loathsome activity in question (setting up interviews, doing research….) into … fun.
So I am delighted to see, and fully endorse, this research project that tries to elevate fun to a design principle. It appears to be a Volkswagen-funded undertaking in Sweden
dedicated to the idea that something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change.
Video 1: How to get people to use the stairs
Video 2: How to get people to throw their trash into the bin
Thought experiment: Extensions
So now I am thinking: What else could be made fun with proper, more humane design?
doing taxes?
doing jury duty?
going to the doctor?
being at the airport?
Recycling?
Conserving (water, energy …)?
I refuse to exclude anything. It’s all a matter of how much one is willing to imagine. My kids are teaching me to raise the bar.
On Monday I found myself standing on a chair, peering over the baying pack of television crews to see Bill Clinton endorse Gavin Newsom for governor of California. For some odd reason (the PR handlers explained it to me, but it was too stupid to reproduce here) they chose the space between shelves in the library of a community college in Los Angeles for the occasion. My cheek was pressed into the sign 808.8, which seems to be children’s literature in the Dewey Decimal system. Go figure.
I have met Newsom several times before, and have experienced Clinton twice at conferences (TED and Google’s Zeitgeist). As I was observing these two men, I could not help but think of their fathers, as I will explain in a minute.
First, though, the reason my thoughts went that way: their (arguably endearing) vanity.
Bill Clinton, who was allegedly there to endorse (ie, make look good) Newsom, spoke for 22 minutes, mainly about green technology and so forth, before letting Newsom get in about 11 minutes of thanking and campaigning. This is par for the course. I remember somebody asking Clinton a purely rhetorical question at Zeitgeist, and Clinton dissecting the question into three parts, then delivering an exegesis worthy of a State of the Union on each. The man, God bless him, cannot help himself. He must hold forth.
So does Newsom. He admires Clinton and spent a good part of my first conversation with him, three years ago, talking about the political and rhetorical lessons he has drawn from Clinton.
Here is how that meeting, with my editor and myself and Newsom at a San Francisco cafe, went: Newsom came in and started talking about baseball. Realizing that neither my editor nor I seemed to have a clue about that sport, he switched effortlessly to … cricket. (The Economist … Brits…) Seeing that we knew nothing about that sport either and were geeky, wonky boffins, Newsom made another seamless transition and settled into … geeky, wonky politics arcana. He seemed liberated, as were we.
His eyes, I remember noticing, had bright circles of brown, yellow and green. He blushes very easily (as Clinton does). When there are women in the room, as there were when I met Newsom again a few months ago at the offices of Twitter, he preens very self-consciously, as if we were all at a high-school prom. The women notice this and like it.
In any case, both are very gifted and intelligent. Newsom, like many dyslexic people, has learned to overcompensate for his reading difficulties with other mental disciplines and is quick on his proverbial feet. He oozes Clintonian charm.
Their fathers made them
On to their fathers. Some of you may recall that, as part of my book research, I have been pondering the role of parents in the early stages of a young man’s (or woman’s) personality development. Obama and McCain both defined themselves against the (mostly abstract) idea of their fathers. Doug Wead, a presidential historian, has even put forth various theses that absenteeism by fathers somehow makes their sons more presidential.
Well, that’s what I was pondering as the 808.8 was jabbing into my cheek.
Clinton never knew his father, who died before Clinton was born. Clinton instead took the name of his stepfather, whom he recalls as an abusive drunk.
Newsom’s father separated from, and then divorced, Gavin’s mother when Gavin was a boy. His father was around, but the roles were apparently strained.
The quack psychologist in me would hypothesize that these father gaps left both men chronically insecure, permanently eager to win over and impress other people and to stay in their favor. In short, their fathers made them politicians.
You’ve heard of the seven chakras mentioned in the Yogic texts. They are energy centers along the spine often depicted as wheels.
I hesitate to bring them up because, well, the topic gets a bit touchy-feely and new-agey. Suffice it to say that one does, during pranayama (breath control) and the higher four of the eight stages of Patanjali’s Ashtanga yoga concentrate intensely on these chakras, perhaps visualizing them in their rainbow colors.
In this post I will not try to prove or disprove that the chakras exist. Instead, I would simply like to point out that Western culture seems to have the same concepts, especially if one views them more metaphorically than literally, as more mythos than logos.
Compare the hierarchy of chakras in the human body to the left to the hierarchy of needs as described so famously by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow to the right. Remarkably similar, aren’t they?
I believe the idea is the same.
In the yogic vocabulary, the root chakra above the anus (essentially in the male prostrate) and the sacral chakra just above it (near the female ovaries) govern our most basic drives: individual survival (eating, excreting etc) and genetic survival (sex).
Maslow lumped these together in his ‘physiological’ needs at the bottom of his pyramid. He believed that if somebody is choking you and you are not getting oxygen, breathing is the only need you care about. Once you can breathe again, you may notice that you are thirsty. Once you have drunk, you may notice that you are hungry. Once you have eaten, you may notice that you desire. And so on.
The next chakra (going upwards) is the yellow solar plexus just below the navel. In the yogic conceit, this governs our will to power. (So I sometimes think of the sacral chakra as Freud and the solar plexus as Nietzsche.) Maslow calls these “security” needs, but you notice that they involve what we consider the trappings of power: money, property, status, and so on.
Now we get into the higher or ‘nobler’ chakras.
In the yogic vocabulary, the first of these is the green heart chakra, which governs deep, selfless, non-sexual love (not Aphrodite but Hestia, if you will). Maslow calls these the ‘love and belonging’ needs for friendship, family and intimacy. Even the color corresponds. (Which is interesting: Green = envy in the West but love in the East.)
The blue throat chakra in Yoga governs intellectual clarity, the ability to communicate, creativity and so forth. This is where artists, scientists, writers and orators draw their inspiration. Maslow calls these ‘esteem’ needs, which is the reward of such things.
Yoga then distinguishes between two more chakras: the third eye behind the brow which is indigo and the source of inner peace and meditative calm; and the crown (depicted in the Western tradition as a halo) just above the head which is the area that is energized during enlightenment (ie, very rarely for most of us).
Maslow lumps them together under “self-actualization”, which is arguably the goal of life and the definition of success. Maslow studied biographies (as I did for my book), and developed a theory about what sort of qualities people have who self-actualize. Perhaps that’s why they called his approach “Jewish Buddhism” at Esalen. 😉
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 