You Won't Get To Mars That Way

Making predictions is hard - especially about the future.

- Ancient Internet Saying

Elon Musk has been much in the news lately.  Elon is purported to be the richest man on earth, and his corps of public-relations spin doctors present him as a man whose wealth is largely self-made.  Like Stephen Wolfram, Musk talks much about his supposed "genius."  Not only does Musk appear to be a "cerebral narcissist," but he also appears to be a "somatic narcissist" as well, based on the fact that he posted pictures of himself fighting a sumo wrestler and that he challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight.  When people make such grandiose claims as his, it's only natural for objective observers to want to put such claims to the test.  I'd like to consider myself such an objective observer (although some may disagree).  Today's post will examine the claims of Musk through my particular lens, and will try to show Musk as a typical case of a certain symptom of late capitalism.  Note: I am not interested in Musk's claim to be a bad sumo-wrestling dude.  Maybe he can sort that out with other contestants on some American "reality TV" show.

First, let's consider Musk the late-capitalism phenomenon.  To me he seems to represent the kind of "hero" who would have been quite at home in an Ayn Rand novel such as Atlas Shrugged.  That is to say, he is a poster child for the assertion by many of the wealthiest members of the Right that transcendent projects of human endeavor are best handled by heroes who have enormous wealth and not by governments or the collective efforts of societies.  Such assertions are the basis for claims that privatizing of government services leads to better service for the citizens who depend on those services.  Of course, the actual track record of privatization is horrible, and includes people whose houses have burned down because they could not afford the services of privatized fire departments.  Other notable side effects of privatization include the monstrous expansion of the private prison industry as well as the creation of professional mercenary corporations like Blackwater.  

Those who promote the benefits of privatization claim that it saves public funds.  Yet these are often the recipients of massive corporate welfare payments to rich people, also known as government subsidies.  In this, Elon Musk is no exception.  Musk started life with massive advantages already in place, as he is the wealthy son of a white South African family which built its wealth by means of the apartheid regime during its existence in South Africa.  And the companies which Musk has founded since he came to the United States have all been the recipients of corporate welfare, as documented in the following articles:

• "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
• "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
• "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
• "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015

It is an open question whether most of Musk's business ventures would have survived without subsidies and other corporate welfare.  This is particularly true of Tesla.

Now among the claims which Musk has made, one of his most spectacular is that he will boldly take mankind where no man has gone before.  This claim also includes the claim that he, a private individual with enormous wealth, will manage this feat even though the space agencies of various governments have not managed to do this.  Therefore his claim goes beyond merely putting people into space.  It also transcends merely going to the moon.  Nay, it reaches even to the planet Mars.  It is this particular claim which I'd like to examine in more detail.

First, a bit of background about space travel.  To send a spacecraft from Earth to anywhere else, one must provide that spacecraft with a certain amount of kinetic energy.  That kinetic energy is given by the equation 

Kinetic Energy = 0.5 x (spacecraft mass) x (spacecraft velocity squared)

At a minimum, this amount of kinetic energy must be greater than the potential energy represented by the distance from your target to the surface of the Earth (and to a much lesser extent, the surface of the Sun since the sun is much farther away).  Potential energy represents the energy you must supply to an object to raise it a certain distance above the surface of a body that produces a gravitational field.  If Mars was stationary with respect to the Earth, then in order to reach Mars you would need to supply only the minimum kinetic energy required to equal the difference in potential energy of the gravitational field of the Earth and Sun at the position of Mars relative to the Earth's surface.  But it would take you a really long time to get to Mars!  

However, Mars is not stationary, but moving in its own orbit around the sun.  So your spacecraft must have additional velocity in order to catch up with Mars and enter into orbit around it.  Supplying the energy to move from a moving Earth to a moving Mars is an expensive proposition.  If we therefore wanted to supply only the minimum energy required for such a trip, we'd need to inject our spacecraft into what is known as a Hohmann transfer orbit.  A trip from Earth to Mars using a Hohmann orbit would take 259 days, according to the NASA source in the preceding link.  So a manned mission to Mars would require a spacecraft capable of keeping at least four people alive for nearly ten months - unless you wanted to bring those people alive and safe back to Earth again after their mission to Mars was completed, in which case your mission would require another 259 days, plus the time required for the Earth and Mars to align in such a way that a Hohmann transfer from Mars to Earth would be successful.  We're talking about a mission that could last over three and a half years.

That's a lot of time, and thus a manned spacecraft would require extensive life-support systems on the same order of magnitude as the systems on the International Space Station.  But there are two further wrinkles: first, the effects of prolonged weightlessness on human bodies, and second, the fact that astronauts would need to be shielded from lethal radiation from both cosmic rays and solar storms.  It is well-known by now that prolonged weightlessness produces harmful changes in human bodies (see this, this, and this, for instance), so missions that use Hohmann transfers might need some means of exposing humans to near-Earth gravity on a daily basis.  This would require centrifuges, which would add mass to the spacecraft.  Radiation shielding would also add mass.

So let's talk about mass.  The International Space Station has a mass of 450 tons and can support seven astronauts.  But the ISS is also regularly resupplied from Earth.  Let's optimistically assume that a crew of four astronauts would need a spacecraft with a mass of 200 tons for a Mars mission.  How much fuel would it take to get them to Mars?  The answer to that question is found in the rocket equation, namely

Wet mass (that is, rocket + fuel) = rocket mass x exp((change in velocity)/(exhaust velocity))

So for a rocket that had a 200-ton payload and that needed to change its velocity by an amount needed for a Hohmann orbit, we could calculate the fuel required.  I leave that exercise to you, although I will give you the escape velocity of the earth: 11.2 kilometers (or 7 miles) per second.  I'll also give you another hint: Elon Musk has focused on rockets which burn a mixture of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.  An optimistic exhaust velocity for such a mix is 3,780 meters per second according to one source.  If you do the math (which I don't have time to do now, but which I may get around to in the next week), you will see what a sizable amount of chemical propellant is required to get your spacecraft to Mars.  And we haven't begun to discuss how to get it back to Earth again!  To get a glimpse of how someone else solved the rocket equation, consider Expedition Mars by Martin J.L. Turner.  He calculated that a spacecraft with a mass of 145 tons would need a total fuel mass of 5,000 tons.  That's 10 million pounds of fuel.  And that's just to get to Mars.  It would take another 400 tons of fuel to return to Earth.

Now you can travel faster than the minimum required velocity for a Hohmann transfer, but that will require more fuel, and the fuel requirement increases exponentially the faster you want to go.  If you switch from chemical rockets to rockets powered by nuclear fission, it is possible to save a significant amount of reaction mass.  But worldwide rates of extraction of naturally occurring fission fuel have already peaked, according to the German Energy Watch Group.  Making artificial fission fuel in breeder reactors has never yet been commercially viable, although the process has been used to create small amounts of plutonium.  But breeder reactors don't last long, as they suffer from neutron embrittlement.  Building a fleet of fission-powered manned spacecraft might therefore not have much of a future.  So Musk might barely be able to send a few people to Mars (although he might bankrupt himself in the process), but it appears that neither he nor anyone else has the ability to establish a colony there.  Speaking of colonies, the colonists would likely need to carry soil or expensive chemical processing apparatus from Earth to Mars if they wanted to live there long-term.  The ground on Mars is toxic to Earth-based plants.  So forget about becoming a Martian farmer.  And Mars has no free oxygen or natural shielding from cosmic rays or radiation from solar flares.  It would be a really hard place to try to colonize.

And Musk's boast has been that he will establish a colony there.  Musk's boast about Mars thus appears to be a boast without much basis in fact.  It may be that during the last ten years we have developed the ability to send a 150-ton or 200-ton spacecraft to Mars - but the journey would have been prohibitively expensive even for governments, let alone individuals, which is why no government has done it.  I think putting humans in such a craft and bringing them back again alive is still beyond our capability.  Making such a mission pay benefits that are worth the expense is even farther beyond our capability.  The challenges of such a journey appear to place a limit on the modern myth of the uber-wealthy hyper-capitalist self-made hero.  These challenges demonstrate once again that there are challenges beyond the powers of any individual, challenges which can only be met by the collective response of societies.  Such a conclusion may cause some of Elon's flying monkeys to choke a bit - but such is life.  As for me, I don't think he, much less "we", will be going to Mars anytime soon.  Maybe Musk would be better off wrestling Putin.

P.S. For more information on the life-support challenges of a manned mission to Mars, please see "Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Mars," Nature, November 2020.

P.P.S Today's post is an example of the kind of post that I can currently write with only a modest amount of pain and suffering, since I already have a fairly large background knowledge of the subject and therefore I don't need to do as much research.  I still owe readers some posts which I promised over a year ago, but those posts will involve high levels of pain and suffering, due to the large amount of research and analysis involved.  Just saying that I haven't forgotten...  Also, I'm really irked by the way so many websites that present technical information have dumbed down their content over the last several years.  (See this for instance.)  Their coverage of many topics has collapsed into mere titillating "soundbytes" full of cute pictures and sometimes baseless hype, and their web pages are now full of paid ads, which reduces one's ability to take them seriously.  This is a crying shame.

Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)

There are two kinds of surprises in life, I suppose.  The first kind is the sudden event that no one could have foreseen, and the second is the sudden event that could have been foreseen by anyone with decent situational awareness.  Of course, the greater a person's situational awareness, the greater the proportion of events which the person can put into the second category of surprises.  Take lightning, for instance.  Anyone who is outdoors during a thunderstorm should know that he or she can be struck.  But sometimes lightning can strike out of a clear blue sky.  Before the advent of radar and satellite weather imagery, such events could be considered a genuine surprise.  Today, not so much.

Anyone who has watched the political climate in the world and particularly in the United States can see that we have been having some stormy weather.  The latest instance of this is the savage hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi by David Depape, a 42 year old male drug user aligned with QAnon, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theories.  While shocking, such events as this are hardly surprising.  Unfortunately we live in a political climate which has been engineered to produce just such events.  Those who did the engineering are those defenders of white supremacy who are genuinely terrified at the prospect of the emergence of a world which they will have to share on an equal footing with all the other people in the world.  These people were energized into action by the gains of the American civil rights struggle of the 1960's, and have been working tirelessly ever since to roll back those gains.  Their energies were kicked into overdrive by the presidency of Barack Obama, as white supremacists vowed to themselves that they would create a world in which such power-sharing could never happen again.  

We know the result of their efforts.  Under Donald Trump, we got an acceleration of the social and environmental diseases which are typical of Republican, conservative governance: an increase of mass shootings due to easy access to guns, an increase in wealth and income inequality, a shredding of social safety nets, an acceleration of climate change (including life-threatening wildfires on a massive scale), a cannibalizing of government, an increase in persecution, oppression, and outright murder of people of color, and an increasing destruction of the ability of the United States to make large-scale coordinated responses to large-scale emergent threats.  This is why in 2020, so many nonwhite nations in the developing world were so much better than the United States in their response to COVID-19.  

Now the Republican Party is continuing to field political candidates who are nutcases.  We should not be surprised by the political violence we are seeing when we also see these nutcases openly calling for physical violence.  (See this, this, and this also.)  And the Republicans are trying to win elections by their usual strategy of lying.  They say that America is being swept by a dangerous crime wave under the Democrats, even though there is no evidence of this.  (In the city where I live, there are candidates for City Council who are trying to say that our city is suffering increased crime.  If that's the case, I haven't noticed.)  They say that the American economy is suffering under the Democrats.  However, this statement is refuted by the findings of institutions such as the Brookings Institute and the Center for American Progress.  They blame President Biden for the high gas prices we have seen across the United States in 2022.  However, their blame is dishonest, as the reality is that even without the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, global oil production cannot expand further.  In fact, Saudi Arabian oil production is either very near or at its peak.  And if we buy Russian oil, we finance the evil deeds of a would-be emperor, a dictator and murderer named Vladimir Putin.  The high price of gasoline (petrol for those who are British) should be seen as yet one more proof that the world is going to have to change its way of living very soon.

It could be asked how we who have been historically oppressed let ourselves fall into such a dangerous situation in which an organized group of narcissistic, fascist, supremacist oppressors could become such a threat to the rest of us.  Why, for instance, did we not organize ourselves for our own collective good to build our own nonviolent power?  Why was so much time wasted?  Why did we not create strategies to effectively deal with the increasing concentration of power - media power especially! - which took place from 1980 onward?  Fox News should never have been allowed to become such a powerful cult.  But asking such questions at such a time as this seems almost like asking too late - as if we were a party of golfers who had continued our play even as storm clouds gathered and we found ourselves stricken down by a bolt from heaven, a bolt we should have foreseen, and now those of us who survived were asking ourselves why we had been struck.  A more urgent question is the question of what we should do now.

I myself don't entirely know the answer to that question.  But I do have the following suggestions.

• First, have the right world-view.  According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6).  This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail.  Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people.  Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends.  Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are  frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
• Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society.  I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski.  (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.  If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.)  Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
• Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline.  The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years.  This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them.  In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy.  Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started.  By all means, vote.  However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence.  Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right.  Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you.  Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

A Clarifying of Stance, Part 2

From time to time I check my readership stats, as I want this blog to be informative and I want to gauge its impact.  I noticed that over the last few days, people have been exploring some rather early posts in my back catalog.  I am flattered by your curiosity, although I must warn you that some of my perspectives have changed over the years, due to the acquisition of newer information which superseded some of my early assumptions.  So today's post is a bit of a grain of salt for you who are exploring those early posts.  As a sign I once saw on a co-worker's desk once read, "I don't always agree with everything I say."

Generally, I do agree with everything I have written from the end of 2016 onward.  I also agree with some of the statements of the very early posts of this blog, namely that the modern industrial societies of the First World are running up against limits to growth.  These limits consist of resource limits and the cumulative effects of environmental degradation.  No reasonable person can disagree with this.  There is one other theme that I explored in parts and pieces throughout various posts from the start of this blog until now, namely, that there is a powerful, well-organized movement among the wealthiest and most privileged people to roll back all the civil rights gained by the world's poorer people - especially those who are nonwhite - during the 20th century.  I'd like to suggest that this movement would have emerged regardless of the emergence of resource constraints and their effect on economic growth.  Therefore, those of us who have become once again targets of oppressors must learn to thrive while navigating a threat environment.  My posts from 2017 onward have largely explored the question of how to do this.

One last caution.  Many of the people who were writing about the impacts of resource depletion, climate change, and American fragility from 2007 to around 2015 were actually aligned with white supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the Russian government.  I am thinking of how many of these people aligned themselves with the candidacy and later presidency of Donald Trump.  I am also thinking of how their earlier suggestions for dealing with the emergent crises of the early 21st century all revolved around buying a large-acre doomstead somewhere in the western United States and stocking up on guns, gold bullion, and baked beans in preparation for the zombie apocalypse.  Let me just say straight up that these people were and are dead wrong.  Their hyper-individualist responses have actually made them and their society much more fragile.  Look at the hyper-individualist responses to the COVID pandemic in the United States, and compare our shamefully high death rate from 2020 onward to the much lower death rates in many of the more collectivist societies of the nonwhite world and the developing world.  And as for the Russians, I hope that my posts on Russia from 2017 onward have completely erased any pro-Russian bias that exists in my posts that are earlier than 2017.  Please see my post titled, "A Clarifying of Stance" if you want more detail.  Vladimir Putin is a thieving little man in a bunker, and Putin's regime is a good-for-nothing piece of garbage.

The Woodcutter's Dull Ax

If the ax is blunt and one doesn't sharpen the edge,

then he must use more strength;

but skill brings success.

- Ecclesiastes 10:10, World English Bible

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a paid audiobook subscription during the waning months of the COVID lockdowns.  For the price of my subscription I get one credit per month which I can apply toward a free download of an audiobook, and I also get audiobooks at reduced prices if I decide I want more than one new audiobook per month.  At first I used my audiobook credits to obtain downloads of fiction (particularly Chinese science fiction), but lately I have been sampling some nonfiction.  So it was that this past month I stumbled across a book called Rest by an author named Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.  

As advertised on the audiobook website, Pang's book invites us to "Sit back and relax and learn about why overworking and under resting can be harmful to yourself and your career."  And the website also informs us that "If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."  Such statements intrigued me precisely because for the last seven months, I have been working like a dog.  While there are elements of entrepreneurship which I have enjoyed, overwork has not been one of them.  So I gave Mr. Pang's book a listen or two to see what I could learn.  Below are some of my observations gleaned from my listening.

First, a few observations about Mr. Pang.  It seems that he is a member of that sector of the economies of the First World known as the "advice industry."  This "industry" includes many "content" producers whose advice is aimed at aspirational members of the middle and upper middle class.  Some of their offerings are well-researched and contain original and valuable insights, but other offerings have a familiar snake-oil smell to them.  (Think of Norman Vincent Peale for an early 20th-century example, or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for a couple of modern-day examples.  Note also the dissatisfaction which some people are now expressing toward the advice industry as they see its use as a tool of capitalism.)  

But let's get to Pang's book, shall we?  Rest is laid out thus: Pang's thesis statement is set forth in the introduction and the first two chapters.  Then the next six chapters describe the day-to-day setup of the  habits of rest in the lives of elite creatives, drawing on a number of historical examples.  The last four chapters describe the ancillary activities of recreation of these creatives, some of which can be fit into a day-to-day schedule, and some of which are larger activities which take creative people out of their daily routines for a while.

Pang's thesis statement is something that I think most reasonable people would agree with, namely, that appropriate rest is the necessary precondition for excellent work.  When we don't rest appropriately, our work suffers.  As he says, "I argue that we misunderstand the relationship between work and rest.  Work and rest are not polar opposites...Further, you cannot work well without resting well."  Pang rightly points out the contrast between the harried lives of most employees (especially "knowledge workers") and their employers versus the unhurried pace of the lives of the people who were responsible for some of the greatest discoveries and innovations of the modern industrial era.  

Focusing more closely on the harried lives of workers, Pang says, "As a result, we see work and rest as binaries.  Even more problematic, we think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities....When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it.  Americans work more and vacation less than almost any other nationality in the world..."  Finally, Pang's thesis statement contains the following words: "Rest is not something that the world gives us.  It's never been a gift...If you want rest, you have to take it."

A problem arises when we move from Pang's thesis statement to the chapters describing the day-to-day routines of history's greatest creatives.  The problem does not lie in the efficacy of the routines themselves.  In particular, the observation that the best creatives spend no more than four or five hours a day working deeply on their craft has been validated by the research of K. Anders Ericsson and others who studied the role of deliberate practice in producing expert performance.  Similarly, there is abundant evidence for the benefits of establishing morning routines, taking daily walks in order to clear one's head, taking naps during the workday in order to recharge, and getting enough sleep each night.  The research cited by Pang also validates the larger ancillary activities of recreation which he describes in the latter part of his book.  (I really, really like the idea of sabbaticals!  I've got to get me one of those things...)

The problem with incorporating these things into the daily lives of a significant number of workers is that they fly in the face of the culture of late capitalism which has been created and is being maintained by the world's richest people at the present time.  Therefore, these habits and practices are countercultural - and those who seek to practice these habits expose themselves to the possibility that they will suffer for trying to do such things.  Take doing only four or five hours of deep, focused work per day for instance.  I can truthfully tell you that I have never worked for an employer who would have agreed to such an arrangement.  From the time I obtained my bachelors degree until the time I quit my job to start a business, every employer I have ever worked for insisted on at least 40 hours a week, broken down into at least eight hours every day.  In those workplaces where the technical staff were unionized, we were allowed only two ten-minute breaks per day and one 30-minute break for lunch.  In the non-union places, 40 hours a week was not enough.  I remember one coworker of mine who worked 50 to 55 hours a week on a regular basis and who was kept alive by regular doctor's prescriptions.  I worked for another office whose local client base was shrinking due to mismanagement, and whose bosses offered me the chance to keep my job only if I was willing to travel extensively.

Take naps also.  For a long time employers frowned upon employees sleeping anywhere within sight of their managers.  This meant that if you needed a nap, you sometimes had to get into your car and drive a couple of blocks away from the office to sleep.  Admittedly there has been something of a shift in corporate culture over the last decade, in that a number of corporate offices now have designated "wellness rooms" where workers can retreat in order to decompress.  However, the first time I worked in a place that had a wellness room, I was told that the big boss in my office would allow employees to use the room as long as they didn't sleep in there.  This restriction applied even at lunch.  What a doofus!

In other words, I don't think Pang's book adequately accounts for the functional, structural factors which have driven rest from the lives of many American workers.  To be fair, the introduction of his book does mention the structural factors of "automation, globalization, the decline of unions, and a winner-take-all economy."  He also mentions the continuous increase in living expenses (especially housing expenses) which makes people hostages to longer hours and longer commutes.  But the tone of his book - especially of the introduction - implies that our failure to engage in the kind of deep rest he advocates is a result of our own ignorance or wrong attitudes, as exemplified in the following quote: "When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile, then it's easy to see rest as the negation of all those things...When we think of rest as work's opposite, we take it less seriously and even avoid it."

Because the radical adoption of the habits of the creatives cited by Pang is such a threat to the present order (especially in the U.S.), I think Mr. Pang fudges a bit in his advice to people who want to apply these habits to their own lives.  When I say that he "fudges", I mean that he sometimes takes the radical embodiment of a radical idea and whittles it down to a size and shape that does not threaten the established order.  For instance, in his chapter on sabbaticals, the radical idea of taking extended time off is weakened by citing modern executives who take two weeks off per year and label these breaks as sabbaticals.  I had to laugh at this, as the first job I had after I served in the military as a young adult was an assembler at a defense plant.  The plant was a union shop and new employees got only two weeks off, plus one week of sick leave.  Big whoop-de-doo.  There are other examples of what I would consider fudging in Pang's book, but if you want to spot them, you'll have to read the book.  

A couple of last observations.  In his choice to cite those creatives who were gentlemen of means in Victorian England, Pang elides the fact that these people had time to set up their lives for maximal recreation and deep work precisely because they were the beneficiaries of a social and economic system which offloaded their dirty work onto the less fortunate members of the British caste system.  This point is made abundantly clear by the description of the lives of coal miners in George Orwell's book The Road to Wigan Pier.  I am particularly struck by one of the Victorian sons of privilege whose life was mentioned in Pang's book: Sir John Lubbock.  It is amazing to me that Pang cites him as a beloved reformer who saw the benefit of rest for all of British society when one considers that his "Early Closing Bill" restricted the working hours of British youth under 18 to no more than 74 hours per week.  Consider that this still adds up to over ten hours a day, 7 days a week.  What a joke of a reform.

However, having made my objections, I still think that the central idea of Pang's book has a certain merit.  (I'd also like to mention that Pang seems to be trying to organize a movement for good in this country.)  In particular, I agree with the idea that there is a certain cluster of optimum life arrangements which must be sought by those who desire to do groundbreaking intellectual work.  And I'd like to suggest something which was not found in Rest: namely, the idea that America is suffering an innovation crisis (see this also) precisely because the overlords of modern American society have driven rest out of the lives of most workers by making those optimum arrangements for rest impossible.  I think that will have consequences rather soon.

Man, You Got To Figure It Out Yo'self

(Pardon the title.  I've been listening to some old Billy Joel lately...)

I have been following Cosmic Connies' blog Whirled Musings for a while, and I really appreciated her latest post.  The first part of that post deals with Ginni Thomas, the crazy-mixed-up wife of crazy-mixed-up U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence (Uncle Tom) Thomas.  It appears that she got involved in a cult during her young adulthood, then saw the light and got out of the cult.  After leaving the cult, she did some very good personal work which helped to build an exit path for others who had been sucked into cults.  But much later, she fell into the present day cult of white supremacy and the conspiracies that have been manufactured to express the existential fears of white supremacists whose supremacy is now fading away.

A few observations.  First, I think that the cults which hapless rubes fall into tend to reveal a lot about the motivations and values of those rubes.  I am thinking of those who fall into money cults, for instance.  That Ginni Thomas could fall into the cult of Trump and the associated cults such as QAnon does not speak well about her inner motives and values.  But let's consider the issue of cults from a larger perspective.  It seems to me (having myself fallen into a cult once and gotten out of it after many years) that people who fall into cults are looking for a certainty in life that simply cannot be guaranteed.  Therefore they look for gurus who will show them the minutest details of a supposed "One True Way" so that they can regiment every aspect of their lives to fit this supposed "Way" without having to do any thinking of their own.  Gurus tend to be people who lay out every detail of all the steps which the lives of their followers should take, including what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, and where to work.  The guru's false promise is that if you follow all the steps which he (or sometimes she) lays out, you will never make any mistakes.  Cults provide both leaders and followers with an illusion of control.

But life can't be controlled the way the cults promise, simply because although we can know the past and experience the present, we cannot know much about the future except in its broadest brush strokes.  In many cases, all we can do for the near and intermediate future is estimate possibilities and probabilities.  There are general principles (especially moral principles) that we can and should apply in navigating those possibilities and probabilities.  And we can be confident that sooner or later, the moral principles will always work themselves out.  But we can't always know in advance the precise details by which this working out takes place.  People probably shouldn't expect a voice telling them to buy a certain lunch from a certain restaurant on a certain day.  You'll have to figure that out on your own.  

So in my own post-cult life, I have had three main priorities.  The first is to un-learn the malignant ways which I learned in while in the cult.  The second is to figure out for myself the general moral principles which I should follow.  Let me explain this one a bit.  I am a Bible-believing Christian and I intend to stay that way.  But I have had to realize that most of what I was taught by mainstream American evangelicalism is completely false.  (How could it be otherwise, when so many white evangelicals refuse to obey the Sermon On The Mount, when they are armed to the teeth, when they vote for slimy politicians like Trump?)  So I need to construct my own theology.  It is a work in progress.   The goals of that theology are that I myself may become a decent person, and that I may not get fooled again.  The third priority is to recover some of what was stolen from me.  To borrow a bit from Shawn Colvin,

I have lost too much sleep

and I'm gonna find it.

And as for the one in five Americans who still believe in QAnon or the Americans who still belong to the cult of Trump, I can only say that by their own evil they have made themselves the willing victims of "a politician who has fallen into populism and begun to make impossible promises...Naturally, his lies will come to light before long." (The Courage To Be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga)  Some of the lies which have come to light have come from the anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist members of that group, many of whom are now pushing up daisies because they became victims of COVID.  Based on my reading of trends, I think that life is about to serve up a number of other painful contradictions of the things which these people believe.