We're Crazy!, a Memoir About U.S. Values

INTRODUCTION

More than 50 years ago, I read this quotation from Balzac (and where he says son, you could as accurately insert daughter):

So he had grown rich at last, and thought to transmit to his only son all the cut-and-dried experience which he himself had purchased at the price of his lost illusions; a noble last illusion of age....

That quotation began an article by Charles I. Gragg, Because Wisdom Can’t Be Told, in a book, The Case Method at the Harvard Business School. I was getting ready to start the two-year MBA course at the school, having until then led a fortunate and somewhat picture- perfect life but not knowing how the road was going to soon start taking some unexpected twists and turns.

In some brief comments at a 75th birthday dinner that my wife put together for me with some good friends, I read that quotation and noted that the truth of it was one thing I had learned in a lifetime.

But here I am, just a few years later, with more time to reflect, and liking to think that I have indeed learned at least a little in a very active life. I do know that I have developed opinions on a great number of subjects, but that those views are uncommon and place me definitely in a small minority.

Yet I do of course think my many conclusions about life are right, although I say that with the proviso that business school certainly greatly strengthened an attitude of trying to keep an open mind and always continuing to question.

Presumably, all of us at some time wonder, What’s life all about? Or, What is the meaning of life? What is important and what isn’t? If material comfort isn’t a proper value, why are so many of us pursuing it so hypocritically? Out of the flood of data and information that pours over us, what is relevant and what isn’t?

In order to try to bring a bit of order to that kind of confusion, I want to put together a summary of my views on what I consider to be the important topics, with everything that I have to say being, in effect, prefaced by statements such as, In my view,... or As I see it, ...

Either of those qualifications could be an accurate title to this book,, but I chose We’re Crazy! not as a rant or an angry complaint, but as simply a whimsical commentary on how much sense there seems to be to what we believe and do.

I do proceed, though, with not only a full understanding of the truth of what Balzac said, but with a belief that it is really hard to help anyone. I have often said that you can’t give answers to someone who doesn’t have the related questions.

The main rationale (or rationalization) behind my trying to summarize my views on life is that I think I am dealing with topics on which thinking people should have conclusions, whether they agree with mine or not. So this may at a minimum be kind of a potential checklist of the important subjects that a concerned and involved person in the US should be thinking hard about and having well-thought-through conclusions about.

Fortunately, on each of the topics with which I deal, there are people—living and deceased—who have devoted much of their lives to thinking about just that topic, with one result being that there are also many, many books getting into each subject in infinite detail. But for the average ones of us, with busy lives to live, we have to reach some summary conclusions to guide us until we have the opportunity to learn more. So it is simply not possible to fully justify why I believe everything that I do.

My hope is that by putting my thinking together as I will try to do, I may expedite the process of reaching important (and ever-evolving) judgments, principles, and values that will guide others who are further back on this road of life, and working on their own answers to these questions.

The categories that I think are important are dealt with in this order, with at least a few comments here on each, to scratch the surface:

A very basic topic that is too neglected in our thinking is semantics: words themselves. We communicate with words, in a world that is increasingly closing language gaps, but without thinking enough about what words mean. A great amount of the confusion in the world (particularly in religion and politics) comes from the lack of attention to generalities and high level abstractions, as contrasted to specifics. God? Entitlements? So the first chapter covers Words.

Then those words need to be used in The Decision-Making Process, which is the subject of the second chapter. Life involves decision after decision, and we need to be more conscious of the process. What is really the problem? Who are the decision-makers? How accurate is the information you are using? What are your criteria? Similarly, what are the biases built into the lives of those involved in your decisions? What are the varying goals or objectives? How will success be measured?

As people try to find the meaning of life, starting in the most backward tribes or societies, religion exists to provide answers. It fills the need for assurance about many fearful facts in the world, but also introduces quite important questions about how thinking people are to develop individuality and maturity, as contrasted to fear of authority. That leads to quite a few thoughts in Chapter 3 about Religion Versus Morality. They are two quite different things. (And the question is not religion vs. atheism, as several recent books have contended.) The chapter includes a contrarian analysis of Christianity, its inapplicability, and its required intolerance, in a world that can be brought together based on universal morality, but not one religion.

Chapter 4 then adds Some Miscellaneous Thoughts About Religion, those ranging from prayer, Catholicism and politics, the evangelicals vs. the mainline church in the US, immigration and sanctuary cities and churches, to the Dalai Lama and Tibet, abortion and adoption, several other controversial topics, and finally, to death, the body, and funerals. A lot to think about.

Taking the subject of morality further, Chapter 5 is about simply Getting Along With Each Other. We think we know people, when we really don’t. We think we understand situations, based on what we have heard, read, or seen, and usually we don’t. So some thoughts are included here about violence, defensiveness, listening, and the roles of commanders or teachers in bringing up children. Also about adolescence, premarital sex, finding the right spouse, family values, the deterioration of the US family, mental illness, languages, multiculturalism, and the even bigger problems of the relationships between nations.

The world runs on power, from an energy standpoint and from a political standpoint. To ignore the role of power—including military power—in life is to be unrealistic, although many of us think that more can be worked out by just talking than in fact can be. Wars end when one side surrenders and admits that it is defeated. Our way of life has to be defended and protected. So Chapter 6 is about Aggression and Power.

Faced with the problems of getting along with each other and contending with questions of the proper use of power, a natural reaction is to do something toward Helping Others, but it is not as easy to do as people generally think. So Chapter 7 looks at the difficulties of actually being helpful to other people, to other relationships, and to other nations.

Chapter 8 then deals with the role of Business in our society, and also includes some methods for understanding profitability and return on investment in business. There are responsibilities that have fallen to US businesses that they should get out of.

As societies develop, we come to the point of needing organization of our efforts, and we get Government and Politics, covered in Chapter 9. In the United States, our government was formed by men who had exceptional insights into human nature and prior governments. They gave us not only a Declaration of Independence, but a Constitution and Bill of Rights that dealt with the possibility, If men were angels... But they knew that men weren’t angels. So our Founding Fathers set out to maintain comprehensive controls over big government, and to protect the rights and responsibilities of the individual. And for the last 100 years or so we have lost track of that vision. We are so very far off track in our government that we need to understand some major errors, and change our ways. Our nation is headed very soon into financial disaster and a great weakening of our position in the world. Our politicians won’t face up to it, so dealing with the resulting crisis is going to be difficult.

Finances, Saving and Investment and making money involve all of us, in that we have to at least provide for our food and shelter. But in order to make it all the way through life with maybe some retirement from work in the later years, there are things that we need to understand. For one thing, others can’t afford to pay for all that we want, so responsibilities are going to need to change, and quickly. Do we understand the Rule of 72, about compounded earnings or inflation rates? Yes, we should save more, but what good does that do if inflation eliminates the value of everything saved? Why should we end the Fed? What does it mean to individual liberty that we want our state and federal governments to give us what we want, although we are unwilling to pay for it, and we accordingly have run up debts that can’t be paid? What happens when we can no longer find others to pay for what we refuse to do without? Who is responsible for what? Chapter 10 then deals with these questions and more.

Health is of course something we all need, and the first part of that responsibility is how each one of us chooses to live and eat. But how do we share responsibilities for the costs of the truly disadvantaged, the random accident or disease? And how do we pay for the predictable probability that our greatest medical expense may come in our later years (or final months), when we are no longer working and can’t afford the care we need? Chapter 11 also deals with how we must change what we Americans eat if we are going to get our cholesterol counts down to the much lower levels that are required in order to reduce the record levels of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and probably Alzheimer’s disease in the US. Hamburgers, our national food, are a form of suicide.

Another factor that has overwhelming but usually ignored impact on our lives and futures is Demography, the impact of birth rates, life expectancies, and death rates in the world. So Chapter 12 summarizes the outlook on this major big picture. We need to understand the implications of the projections that within less than 40 years, what we call the West will have dropped to being only about 1/7 of the world’s population.

Finally, then, Chapter 13 seeks to tackle the big question of how we can go about "Putting It All Together", in the face of these assessments made in the prior twelve chapters.

And, for those who might want to do further reading on these topics, A Bibliography is included, listing at least a few books that I found most helpful.

The Appendix then is a copy of a letter that I wrote to my children and nephews several years ago, hopefully helping them to keep track of things that will be important in their lives.

One thing that I can be very thankful for is that my upbringing kept me inquisitive, open-minded, and analytical, so I kept asking questions and figuring things out as I went. Problems certainly came along to surprise me, such as mental illness inherited by those close to me, that I knew nothing about and had no idea of how to deal with. But, as all of us have to do in our brief lives, I had to figure it out on the run and eventually become able to handle it.

Each life has different challenges, and each of us learns different lessons accordingly. Your conclusions may be so different from mine that you can’t even begin to see things the way I do.

My own particular experiences , though, have led me to think in ways that can be labeled with some common generalities that are of course not accurate in all regards, but at least give a little guidance as to what you might expect: Fiscal conservative, social liberal. Libertarian (although still not totally convinced about their near-isolationist views about international involvement). Unitarian/Universalist (and mainly the latter, although that faith hardly even exists any more). Pro-choice. Humanist (rather than atheist or agnostic). A Skeptic. Vegetarian (now, although that is only a recent change). A contrarian investor, very intent on trying to figure out what the big picture is (given demography, world finance, where the growth economies are, etc.). Convinced that the experts aren’t (experts), and that common wisdom is certainly common, but not wise.

And although you may find some of my views harsh or quite impossible to agree with, I hope that those who know me might say that I am realistic, independent, tolerant, thoughtful, perceptive, reasonable, kind, and loving (at least some of the time).

But I have always liked the saying, All generalizations are wrong, including this one. So let’s get into the specifics (and into some generalizations, too!).

CHAPTER 1

Words

(and especially abstractions)

It was only in my late 20’s that I somehow came upon S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, a book about semantics (the study of human interaction through communication). (A shorter version came out in 1990, the introduction to which said the book had become a classic, with over a million copies sold.)

Basically, the book is about words, how they are symbols, and how they really mean or communicate entirely different things to some people than to others. But the part of the book that really gave me new understanding was the part about abstractions. Other words for abstractions are generalities, generalizations, concepts, and ideas.

Hayakawa communicates his ideas about high-level abstractions and low-level abstractions by an example of Bessie, a cow, and a ladder of abstractions. We start at the bottom of the ladder, with Bessie actually being the 3rd step up the ladder, and we thereafter go up the steps of the ladder with more and more abstract words that include Bessie. We go up from the specific, to broader categories, in a process of leaving out differences:

#4: The word ‘cow’ stands for the characteristics we have abstracted as common to cow1, cow2, cow3......cown. Characteristics peculiar to specific cows are left out.

#5. When Bessie is referred to as ‘livestock’, only those characteristics she has in common with pigs, chickens, goats, etc., are referred to.

#6. When Bessie is included among ‘farm assets’, reference is made only to what she has in common with all other salable items on the farm.

#7. When Bessie is referred to as an ‘asset’, still more of her characteristics are left out.

#8. "The word ‘wealth’ is at an extremely high level of abstraction, omitting almost all characteristics of Bessie."

Later, he continues: "When people say things like, ‘Let’s have no more of progressive methods in our schools,’ ‘Let’s get back to sound business principles in running our county government,’ ‘Let’s try to do the Christian thing,’ ‘Let’s restore family values,’ we are entitled to ask, ‘What do you mean—extensionally speaking?’ To ask this question often—of ourselves as well as of others—is to do our bit toward reducing the vast amount of non-sense that is written, spoken, and shouted in this incredibly garrulous world."

He then gives an example of Chasing Oneself in Verbal Circles:

"In other words, the kind of ‘thinking’ we must be extremely wary of is that which never leaves the higher verbal levels of abstraction, the kind that never points down the ladder to lower levels of abstraction and from there to the extensional world:

‘What do you mean by democracy?’

‘Democracy means the preservation of human rights.’

‘What do you mean by rights?’

‘By rights I mean those privileges God grants to all of us—I mean man’s inherent privileges."

‘Such as?’

‘Liberty, for example."

‘What do you mean by liberty?’

‘Religious and political freedom."

‘And what does that mean?’

‘Religious and political freedom is what we enjoy under a democracy.’"

Speakers who never leave the higher levels of abstraction, however, may fail to notice when they are saying something and when they are not.

My own observation would be that high level abstraction is very common in religion and politics. What is spirituality? The words God, Allah, or equivalents, must be the highest-level abstractions possible, meaning something different to almost everyone.

He continues: "...all we know are abstractions.....The test of abstractions then is not whether they are ‘high-level’ or ‘low-level’, but whether they are referable to lower levels."

Words that pull people down out of the abstraction clouds and into the real world are, For example?, or Such as?, or maybe, What does that mean? or How does that apply?

In graduate business school, the case method was used, meaning that we students were to study case material and come to class ready to discuss it and defend conclusions. In the Labor Relations class, we had an exceptionally good professor who pressed us hard with his questions. After one such class, a fellow student made the interesting and accurate observation to me that what the professor did all the time was to take a student back and forth between specifics and generalities. In essence, for example, if we said what should be done in a given situation, the professor would then ask us if the generality that he therefore stated was true. If we agreed with the generality, then he would ask whether it applied in a very similar situation. And so forth. In effect, he was running us up and down the ladder of abstractions.

On the other hand, Hayakawa points out that some people get stuck at a low level of abstraction, so ,They go on indefinitely, reciting insignificant facts, never able to pull them together to frame a generalization that would give a meaning to the facts.

The more words at extremely high levels of abstraction we hear or read, the more conscious we must be of the process of abstracting. He goes on to give a sampling of high level abstractions that can inevitably lead to communication problems or human misunderstanding: Jew, conservative, Arab, ex-convict, communist, un-American, and woman driver.

I would add the example that many people in some countries see themselves as either Sunni or Shiite, (those supposedly being two versions of the same religion), those abstractions being enough that these people set out to kill each other.

A good summary of Hayakawa’s point is, "If ...we habitually go down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to ‘have our feet on the ground’ and know what we are talking about."

Or maybe better yet: "Consciousness of abstracting prepares us in advance for the fact that things that look alike are not alike, for the fact that things that have the same name are not the same, for the fact that judgments are not reports. In short, it prevents us from acting like fools. So, ....realize fully that words never ‘say all’ about anything."

Actually, one result of absorbing the messages of Hayakawa’s book was that I decided that I wasn’t as dumb as I sometimes thought I was, when hearing some respected person wandering around in high-level abstractions. I realized that not only did I not understand what he was saying, but he probably didn’t either. Or at least he didn’t know how to get his real message across.

So one of the things that I learned belatedly, and which I now rank as one of the things a person should know to start with, is about how dangerous words can be, and particularly abstractions. In fact, I would recommend Language in Thought and Action as a good book to read, not only to be fully conscious of abstracting, but to have at least a superficial awareness of semantics and of how carelessly we do use words. And if a good semantics course is available, it could help people think better and avoid all sorts of problems.

This isn’t all just academic. The careless use of abstractions truly is very, very, dangerous, and it is worth thinking about at least a few examples of enormous disasters that have happened right within my own lifetime, justified by single words, usually high-level abstractions.

With World War II and the decade leading up to it in Germany now being some 80 years ago, few people are probably interested in reading the book, The War Against the Jews 1933 - 1945 (10th anniversary edition), by Lucy Dawidowicz. But someone gave me the book recently and I did read it. It was absolutely sickening and horrid, those being totally inadequate words for what happened to men, women, and children who were classified as Jews by another group of people who viewed themselves as Germans. These people who were Jews had their belongings taken from them, were rounded up and herded like animals, shipped around in crowded rail cars, dying on forced marches, separated from each other, starved, gassed, machine-gunned in large groups, with their bodies dumped in mass graves, and with some of them used as slaves. Some six million of them died horrible deaths because of what that word Jew meant to Germans. Not thousands, but millions.

(Anyone who can make it to Washington, D.C. and see the Holocaust Museum there should beyond a doubt do that, and will come away with a new and deeply emotional understanding of how badly we human beings can treat each other).

It is a long and complicated story, about how the Germans, after World War 1, were punished by those nations that had defeated them in the war, how the German economy and living conditions became worse and worse, and how they blamed it on the Jews. The situation became ripe for demagoguery and messianic leadership, and the Nazis and Hitler stepped in to take advantage of it.

Another interesting aspect of what developed is covered with great insight in the book by the German psychologist, Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom. In very great summary, what Fromm says is that we escape from the responsibility of freedom by following authoritarian figures, and that this was the nature of the German society. Germans were admired for their devotion to order, their doing what they were told, and obeying and following, rather than questioning.

In any case, those human beings whom the Germans could identify as Jews became their scapegoats. Jews were not fellow human beings. They somehow could be viewed as lower than animals, needing to be totally eliminated, so the Germans would no longer have them causing the German society’s problems. People had to be viewed as general things—abstractions—, not as human beings like the rest of us. The massacre couldn’t have gone on for years if the Germans had stopped thinking in terms of that simple high-level abstraction, Jew.

Visceral reaction in the United States to one word (a high-level abstraction, of course), Communism, then cost the lives of at least 58,000 of our nation’s young men and of millions of the Vietnamese (both those who were called South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese), mainly in the 1960’s.

Every high school student should be required to view the 11 hours of 4 DVD’s, Vietnam, A Television History. After that, they should all view the 107-minute documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, in which they would get to watch his face up close as, late in his life, he painfully acknowledges how terribly wrong he was to lead our nation with such absolute conviction and sense of righteousness (as Secretary of Defense—another set of interesting words) in that war. Lyndon Johnson ended up resigning his US presidency in agony over the war.

Indo-China, or Vietnam, had spent years and years fighting those from other nations who came into their territory and tried to dominate them. Most recently, before the US, it had been the Japanese and the French. The Vietnamese wanted foreigners out of there, so they could be one nation. It appeared that it would work out that way, but then things started to go wrong, and the moving force became US concern about Communism. Viewed sensibly, years later, long after it was too late, we can realize that Communism wasn’t the problem. But that one word, that one concept, that one high-level abstraction guided all our thinking.

Sickening has to again be at least one inadequate word to describe the destruction that Americans caused in Vietnam. It goes on and on and on. We bomb them, we fire bomb them, we burn down their thatch huts, we bulldoze their villages, we kill men, women and children. We terrorize them, although these poor peasants can’t understand what is going on (any better, in fact, than we did). We give the needed approval to the assassination of their leaders. Our planes are shot down over North Vietnam and our pilots are imprisoned for years and tortured. Our president lies to our nation about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, in order to fire our people up about the conflict and justify escalating it.

In retrospect, none of this was necessary. Life would have been far, far better for the people of both North and South Vietnam if the US had never gotten involved in that area, and thought it had all the answers and had to fight off Communism. (If you disagree, see the DVDs and documentary.)

That is why we all need to learn about the danger of seemingly simple words and the way they can stir people’s feelings, without engaging their thinking about what the words really mean or don’t mean.

But another 40 years or so have gone by, and we now know better, right? Unfortunately, not so. From three different angles, let’s take a few minutes to think about three other words: Muslim (or Islamic), entitlements, and of course the Big Daddy abstraction of all abstractions, God.

Someone who wants to fire up a lot of emotion these days can get good guidance from the internet, where rabid antagonists can encourage you to be angry about all Muslims or people of the Islamic faith. This is particularly so, if you are a Christian and you feel that you need to be afraid of and to hate everything about all Muslims. Make sure you include ALL of those Muslims, because they are all the same and all bad, in every regard!!

The ignorant self-righteousness of those who are so agitated by the word Muslim would be a bit of a joke, if it weren’t for the actual extreme danger of where this lack of thinking is taking us.

Many of us don’t even take the moment required to learn the difference in the terms Islamic and Islamist, the latter word meant to try to identify and separate the attention on the violent few among the millions of mostly poor and tribal people who live in that part of the world, generally between Indonesia and Morocco.

The problem has been compounded by demography. Europeans are having few children, so these nations are aging, leaving a sort of hole in the working age group. Meanwhile, bad conditions in places such as Turkey and Algeria have led people in those countries to flee north into Europe, where conditions are better and they can get jobs. These new arrivals in Europe don’t look the same as the Germans or French. They come in and naturally choose to live together. They may not speak German or French. Their way of life is different from that of Europeans: language, dress, food, morality, and religions. There is an enormous job of assimilation, because people simply do not understand each other and find it very difficult to start working together. It is a long process, and there are inevitable problems.

Language, and the selection of words, become the means to communicate positively or negatively.

Interestingly, in Germany, the Turks have been there long enough that their children have been born in Germany, grown up speaking German and thinking of themselves as German. So eventually, the Turks asked the politicians, Aren’t we ‘Germans’ too? And the encouraging word is that the answer was, Yes. But that took a lot of time and understanding.

A major problem comes from the black-and-white thinking of Christians vs.Muslims. To follow the general press (the not-too-smart common wisdom), you would think that all Christians need to draw their wagons into a circle, ready to defend themselves from all those attacking Indians. No, I meant to say Muslims, but it is all the same mentality.

We look for the differences, in things that have been written (The Koran, the Bible), regardless of whether people read or believe those things. We need to find things that show how wrong other people are, and how right we are. We aren’t all human beings? It has to be us versus them, and those high-level abstractions are the way to find differences.

Quite contrary to all the animosity that can be generated and obtained by looking for differences, a more sensible and specific set of facts can be found in books such as Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. This small book reports on the Gallup World Poll, the largest study of its kind, by actually going around in Muslim countries and finding out the specifics of what they really do believe. It’s amazing! Muslims actually think much the same way we do about things! Why? Because they are human beings, as we are, scattered around the nations of the world, speaking many different languages, and not fitting at all into any neat one-word high-level abstraction.

If we will take the time to get to know these people and to know about them, we will do it with specifics and not generalities. With knowledge, not fear and defensive feelings. Also, you might read Who Speaks for Islam?.

But for now the point is that it is of major importance for the developed world to have an accurate, factual, and specific understanding of this Muslim part of the world, which is made up of so many people and where there are presently so many power conflicts that can be dangerous for us, too. And the first thing we must do is to watch out for the use of words that fail to identify the ways in which we all have the same aspirations.

From an entirely different perspective, here in the United States, where the great majority of us in fact want benefits from our government when that government isn’t collecting enough money from us to pay for everything we want from it, we might take a moment to study the word entitlements. We are entitled to things? What? How did that happen?

These entitlements are also referred to as mandatory expenditures when politicians try to decide what to spend a limited amount of our money on. The politicians collect taxes from us, find that there isn’t enough money to pay for everything they have promised, but then define certain of those planned expenditures as mandatory. These are things on which they see it as mandatory that the money be spent (mainly on those who will vote for them). So words like entitlements and mandatory become a fixed part of our vocabularies and our thinking about what we are owed.

The classifications even become used in government documents, further locking in those concepts of certainty of obligations.

I put that money into my Social Security savings insurance account all my life, and I deserve to get what I paid for and was promised! I am over 65, so Medicare is supposed to pay my medical bills. Insurance should pay all my medical bills.

Unfortunately, these words and concepts have been given to us by politicians, who got elected and stay elected by collecting taxes from some of us, and promising things to all of us, regardless of whether they are in fact telling the truth or not. In many cases, it is also convenient that those politicians making the promises won’t be in office or maybe even still alive when it comes times to pay up, according to their promises.

And the quite major problem in the United States, which almost everyone wants to deny (and particularly the present politicians, who have inherited the problem), is that more has been promised than can ever be delivered back to the people.

Much of the problem is again what is called demography, which in this case means that the last generation didn’t have enough children to work and pay the taxes that will pay for the benefits that their parents voted for themselves. These baby boomers started retiring in massive numbers by around 2010, and thereby stopped working and paying taxes, and started wanting benefits instead. Rather soon, there will be only two workers for every retiree, and people do not want to accept the reality of the impossibility of that simple arithmetic. In a nutshell, both Social Security and Medicare are bankrupt, that meaning that there are promises that have been made to make payments, and there is no adequate source of funds out of which to pay.

So our nation is headed into a time of having to realize that it has believed words that are not true. Some people who think they are entitled to these mandatory benefits are enraged with insistence that they have not been lied to and that they still have their rights (one more abstraction). The basic fact is that the money is not there, even if it has been promised.

On Social Security, the matter of fact (and not getting into the entire lying vocabulary that it is based on, using words like Special Treasury Bonds, and interest income, and actuarial balance), is that nothing of what is paid in taxes (not contributions) is saved. It all goes into the same U.S. Treasury with the income taxes, so Congress has access to the money and spends all of it that Social Security isn’t paying out in benefits right now to cover at least part of Congress’s own perpetual deficits.

Social Security does keep track of what Congress has (in my word) embezzled from the retirement fund, and it calls this accumulating Account Receivable from Congress the trust fund. It is of course no fund, and it shows that no one involved in this charade can be trusted. And as of mid-2011, Congress has obligations to pay Social Security back $2 trillion 600 billion, and has no way in the world to do it, because Congress is now spending more than $2 for every other $1 of its income. And it is managing to cover all of that two ways: (1) by having a separate organization, owned by banks, called The Federal Reserve, print money and give it to Congress, and (2) borrowing the rest, mainly from other countries, such as China, Japan, and the United Kingdom (all of which, for their separate reasons, appear about ready to stop loaning to Uncle Sam. But that is another story.) As to words, the printing of the money—really worth nothing—is called quantitative easing. I hope you can laugh sometimes and understand why I say, "We’re Crazy!"

Also illustrative of another point that needs to be made is that the trustees (who are additionally not trustees as the word usually means) of Social Security have for years, in their annual reports, kept saying that what is going on is unsustainable. In other words, This can’t go on! The trustees could easily see that the money was not going to be there to pay what people were expecting in retirement benefits (with or without any trust fund). Even when we read that word unsustainable, we ignore it. But the point here is that we use all of these high-level abstractions in order to believe what we want to believe or not believe, whatever fits easily with our feelings, whatever isn’t actually difficult to face up to. Abstractions are easy to deal with, because their meaning is so vague that we can escape their real message, whereas specifics would be hard to accept and face up to. As the saying goes, Don’t confuse me with the facts.

We the People of the United States are in the confirmed habit of believing that we deserve, that we are owed, that we are entitled to get lots of things, with someone else paying for them. We may expect the payment to be by the rich, or by someone else (apparently in Washington, D.C. or in some other state), or by someone (in another country, these days) from whom we can borrow the money, and either not have to pay it back or have someone else pay the interest on, or have it paid for by the next generation. In this latter case, what we do is, in so many words, to put it on our credit card and give the card to our children to pay. This is what we do when we borrow the money to spend $2 for every $1 of our current income, or to pay for our retirements, or to pay for our medical benefits after we stop working. This is economic nonsense that doesn’t work in the real world, although it is possible to keep it going for a long time before the system collapses, as it is now doing.

We aren’t entitled to anything we don’t pay for by money that we earned. So we got into a very great amount of trouble, (mostly over the last 80 years of government), by believing a high-level abstraction that sounded good, but which enabled us to escape the specific facts of what that word meant.

Third and last, let’s tackle the highest abstraction of all high-level abstractions: God. To attack the subject head on, this is the conclusion: ‘God’ is just a word.

It is a word that means anything and everything to everybody all the time. And yet nobody knows what it means. It just means whatever we want or need it to mean, and that can even change to meet our changing wants and needs. In most cases, it basically fulfills a very emotional need, so you can almost be completely certain of conflict if you start questioning anyone as to the way or why he or she believes whatever about God.

There are also of course many other words that mean God, because of different languages or religions: Allah, Yahweh, Savior, and in Christianity the Son of God is also God, etc., etc., etc.

You can start the trouble, when someone talks about God, by asking, For example? or What do you mean by that? You need to ask questions like that knowing that you are going to have to be extremely careful, in order to ever get out of the discussion still having the person as a friend.

One category of answers involves God as an explanation of nature and all the Acts of God that happen on earth, (or maybe now in the stratosphere too). That includes sun, air, wind, rain, snow, tsunamis, lightning, thunder, volcanoes, earthquakes, flooding, storms, ice and freezing, heat and fire, and presumably all those planets that we discover. As the Bible starts off saying, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Then God provides animals, birds, fish, insects, and trees and plants and all the things that grow (and which we acknowledge, die).

And there is a standard conception that God controls all these things, and will in fact make exceptions for some of us, if we ask him to (by praying to him). How could God do this to me? God’s will be done. How could God let a person suffer like that?

But the really strong feelings about God have to do with His (not Her or Its) power and love. Generally, these feelings seem to group around the concept of the father: Our Father, Who art in Heaven... Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

That heavenly Father has all the good and/or bad characteristics of a human father, depending on what the believer in God wants or needs. To some, He is all powerful and to be feared. To others, He is love. Or some combination of the two, depending on how you behave or do what He supposedly expects. It is, for me, a very intriguing thing to try to understand why people hold onto their feelings about God so very emotionally. Clearly, God fills a great need in their lives, or they wouldn’t defend this concept so strongly.

The Christian religion of course incorporates this existence of God into a way of looking at life in a distinct and different way. A person makes space for God, that presumably meaning something about taking time to think about Him or about being a good person, pleasing to Him. People should feel God’s presence more directly, and walk with God. People should look for a channel for God’s creative action in the world, and then people should allow God’s energy to move into the world through the work of art. Others should write out their thoughts to God or take a more explicit form of prayers or letters to God. We should, at community events, consider how God is made present and how we can open ourselves to the possibility that God speaks through others and in human relationship. Those are all ways to come closer to God.

The examples could go on and on. Basically, people don’t just do things themselves, for good human reasons. Instead, they do all of them with God, always conscious of Him and what He would want, and feeling the satisfaction of being with Him or loved, or not disappointing, etc., to Him.

You will hear as many descriptions of God as there are human needs or desires. If someone needs something, God can be enlisted to fill that need. For people who think in terms of this high-level abstraction, He is there with them, and they apparently find it hard, if not impossible, to think of living without God there in their lives with them.

I see the God concept as adding an unnecessary confusion to understanding our world and other people. The question isn’t, Why did God choose to do all that damage? There are all sorts of natural events on our earth, and those are the facts of life that we have to learn to deal with.

Similarly, in the lives of people, How could God let her have cancer? (as if God did this to someone and we should try to understand why). The better solution is to try to understand cancer, deal with it, and maybe cure it, as we have done with leprosy, polio, tuberculosis, and others.

God is on our side. That one is believed by everyone who is battling someone else. Some need to have In God We Trust on our coins, because Christianity is actually the right religion, compared to all others, and that is what it really means. When we thrill to hearing Kate Smith sing God Bless America, we know He has a special feeling for the United States, as compared to other countries, and that gives us a warm sense of good and righteousness.

When we say that she is going to heaven to be with God, that is certainly more comforting and diversionary than saying that she died and won’t be coming back, that we will never see her alive again, and we are going to miss her terribly for a long, long time, and it hurts.

I simply find my life clearer and more direct when I leave the word God out of it. There is no need to argue about it. It serves a necessary purpose for many others. But for me it gets in the way of direct thinking about what the real problems are here on earth among us people while we live and before we really do die. It can’t be left up to God. It is up to us people to think and solve as many problems as we can, in the process of trying to make the earth a better place.

As a simple analogy, a person not familiar with a computer can get totally frustrated with how the computer absolutely will not work right!! It makes her furious!! She wants to