Information Sharing and Stress

Humans like to communicate.  I believe we like to share information, insight and stories, especially with people who we love and trust.

We have better tools than ever to do it, but, there is a flip side to this ease.

I find that more and more, there are pieces of information which one is not supposed to disseminate.  The most striking instance of this restriction is the workplace.  The most important information: that of compensation, is kept a closely guarded secret.  Almost all the communication from within the firm are supposed to remain within the firm.  And of course, there are trade secrets, intellectual property and whatnot, which are closely guarded lest the firm lose its competitive advantage.

I believe that when you know something, and when you know that that information is of interest to the other person, but you withhold it, it causes stress.

I find that more and more, information asymmetries are what are deciding wealth or the lack of it in our knowledge economy.

A salesperson dare not tell the customer about the shortcomings in what he is trying to sell.

A job candidate knows his shortcomings, but tries to suppress that information and and hopes that the interview process doesn't reveal him.

A firm advertises its product, highlighting a small subset of its features which are better than the competition, but not talking about the others.

I believe this pervasive environment of information withholding is a massive source of stress in the modern workplace.  It is even more stressful when it is lying not just by omission (e.g. Bill Clinton's evasive replies during his testimony about the Monica Lewinsky affair), but when the lying is blatant (e.g. Yahoo's CEO lying on his resume, Paul Ryan "mis-remembering" his marathon time, and so on).

Consider also the laws related to insider trading.  If you just go ahead and indulge your human predilection to share information with your friends, and they use that information to their benefit, that is a criminal offense.   It is not hard to understand why it should be an offense.  You received that information because of privileged access, and you are therefore abusing that privilege by sharing the information.

But I cannot but help imagine the stress that must be felt by such a holder of secrets.  The more information you have which you cannot share for fear of consequence, the more stressful your interactions are with your fellow human beings.

In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the protagonist breaks down due to this very stress of keeping a big, guilty secret within himself.

One of my uncles very astutely and pithily commented - and this was many years back - that people are stressed in the modern world because they have to pretend, lie and put up a facade more than ever in human history.  I agree with him.

More and more, we are part of a "market" where the most astute and cunning player wins.  In such an environment, an attitude of transparency, honesty and forthrightness is a sure fire way to lose.

The more you are able to be just "yourself" with someone, the more stress-free that relationship is.  The more you have to be withheld, non-spontaneous, aware, calculative, the less emotionally nourishing the relationship becomes.  If almost all your relationships demand watchfulness and some form of deceit, then it is not surprising that you will find yourself stressed and alienated.

Humaneness and a feeling of kinship makes us want to share interesting information.  But because today there may be valid (and some not so valid) reasons for keeping things bottled up, we cannot but go against our nature if we are to play by the rules.  And this unnatural way of being takes its toll.

Introduction to "Gorges and Demons"

This is my draft, unedited, introduction to my first book that I have started writing.  I hope to finish it by the end of the year.  I am tentatively calling it "Gorges and Demons".

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Introduction

Does Man need to be saved from his Saviors?

Does Man need to be delivered from the desire for deliverance?

The Buddha, in his famous Four Noble Truths, appeals to all of us for whom sorrow and suffering become too much to handle.  He acknowledges our sorrow in the first truth, explains its causation, provides a way to end it, and then points to its end.

Such is the promise of all messiahs, mystics, Gurus, self-help teachers, new age therapists, evangelists, long-time seekers, the enlightened, the delivered, the ones who are One with God, and of all those who, in their compassion, are driven to save others from the pangs of life.

What is suffering?  What does the way entail?  What is “worldly” life and what is the so-called “transcendental” life?  What do men do when they claim to be free of suffering?

Is suffering inevitable?  Can man be free of suffering, without delusion?

Why do some suffer more, and others less?  Why does continued happiness elude almost everybody?  Why does fulfillment seem to require “many lives”?

This book is an exploration of these questions.

Too many people jump into the pursuit of seeking freedom from earthly life, without first understanding what earthly life is, and more importantly, without understanding what that “freedom” looks like.  In the process, they not only spend a rather significant part of their lives in agony and ambiguity, but cause tears of helplessness and heartbreak in the ones who love them.

The state of Nirvana, and the path to that Promised Land, seem mysterious.  Very few say they are in that state, millions say they are making progress, and even more say they are stuck and need guidance.  Nobody says with any clarity what that state is.  Every sect and every cult has a different story, and a different take on why so many are failing to achieve that state, and where the remedy lies!

It is a cliché by now to say that Life is what happens when you are preparing for it.  So many of us spend so many of our years learning to live rightly, that the occasions to live according to our learnings pass us by.  A great tragedy of life, if one may call it that, is that we get but one opportunity and one time to do things rightly.  After that age is gone, we can but look back in regret and nostalgia.  How we treated our children, how we loved (or didn’t love) our parents, how we broke others’ hearts, how we behaved with people whom we will never meet again, how we renounced something which is only available in youth...

Whether we like it or not, our options to shape our lives diminish with age.  In Youth we are infinitely hopeful and life is a boundless spectrum of possibilities.  We want to break the rules, travel in strange lands, find love at the most unexpected of places, we have ideals and principles which we hold with passion, …

In Old Age, we smile ruefully at what could have been, and we convince ourselves to be content with our little comforts and joys and we look with amusement at the hopeful idealism as well as the naiveté of the young.

If you ask people what they want, they may not be able to list things out, but they will unquestionably say that they want to be happy.  What is this “happiness”?  What theories and tomes have been written about it!  We know we were happy at a certain time, and the present appears not a little unsatisfactory.

When I was young and ignorant and idealistic, I used to look at people immersed as if hypnotized at a busy urban crossing, and wondered: Where are they going? What is driving them?  Why do they not stop and reflect on their lives?  They seemed like robots following orders and not stopping for a moment to question what was going on.  How can they go on like this?  Do they not value their time and their years?  I wanted to stop a few of them and look into their eyes and tell them that they need to wake up.

After many decades, I can hesitatingly say that I understand, to a satisfying extent, the "normal" "worldly" people and why they do what they do.  

But, interestingly, now I have the urge to stop and ask the same question to the seekers of exalted states, who cannot give up on their journey and are ceaselessly driven by something that they consider a holy desire to be free.  To be sure, the seekers are usually ready to talk to you about the “deep questions”.  But the fact that they have chosen a way (or so they think) makes it almost impossible for them to recognize that they could be blindly driven by something that they also may not understand. 

I think I have some ideas as to why they may be pursuing these states, and I want to have a word with them, with you.

This book is not a treatise in pessimism, but a look at a few facets of our seeking a state beyond what we consider “the mundane”.  It is true that blind enthusiasm may make one achieve goals hitherto considered unachievable, but most of the time, it pays to know about the risks and the pitfalls.

Humans are not very different from each other.  There are almost seven billion of us.   We share the same DNA, the same morality (more or less), and given a similarity in our social standing, we suffer from similar discontents.

Others like you have sought inner happiness in its very essence, and might have interesting tales to tell of gorges and of the demons they encountered in their journeys.  

This book is dedicated to your capacity of contemplation and reflection; to what is essentially human in you.

The Why of File Sharing

Many of my friends and relatives have asked me this question: Why do these hackers go to such lengths to share copyrighted stuff on the internet?  It puts them at risk of prosecution and nobody from those they benefit ever gets to know of them as individuals.  So why?

One can understand the existence of BitTorrent tracker sites, subtitles search engines, torrent search engines and aggregators.  These sites are all quite commercial, and indulge in all sorts of sorry tactics to make money: redirecting you to other sites, displaying popup ads, stealthily trying to get you to download some software or toolbar, and so on.

One can also understand the motivations of software cracking groups, as many of them include malware and rootkits in the cracked version, and thereby infect computers of unwitting freeloaders.

But why do hackers and hacker groups go to such lengths to secure an early copy of a film and release it free of charge on the world wide web?  Ripping an audio CD is not too much work, but creating a tight, 700MB rip from a BluRay disc or including telesync audio streams takes a lot of patience, skill and effort.  Also, OCR subtitles!

My explanation for the hackers' motivation is this:

They want to feel the joy of doing an altruistic deed. 

Industrialized society offers very limited avenues to indulge one's altruistic tendencies.  Especially for introverts, who don't like to go out of their homes; to do something altruistic from their computer is a real pleasure for their spirits.  Even if they don't get recognized, just for them to secretly know that they have done something which has brought millions of people all over the world a measure of joy or satisfaction is reward enough.

The more the recording industry and law tries to stop them, the more heroic they feel in doing their altruistic deeds.  Overcoming obstacles to help others, and defeating "big evil corporations" and "devious" DRM technology towards a "noble" end must provide them a deep satisfaction.

I call this the Digital Robinhood principle.

Some of their work might benefit roadside stalls in South Asia and elsewhere selling bootleg DVDs or rips, but I'm guessing that the vast majority of their consumers are individuals who download their stuff on their personal computers.

To stop this "piracy" (as the recording industry, rightly or wrongly, likes to call this phenomenon), one has to provide a remedy for the emotional and social disconnect of a great number of skilled, brainy, computer-savvy individuals.  This disconnect makes them want to do something meaningful: something which can help others.

I believe such a remedy is impossible, and therefore online file-sharing will only grow in extent.

Not finding a channel for their altruism which would use their excellent brains, the hackers turn to spending their days and nights ripping and sharing media and software with anonymous gratefuls around the world.

Atheism, Love and Acceptance

The love and acceptance coming from a (imagined) God is unconditional.  In the absence of this acceptance, there is no choice but to accept humanity as the "animal kingdom" of one-up-man-ship.  A close simile is the love from one's parents when one is an infant.

The conception of God, as a priori infallible, is a means of inspiring us to be more than animals.  It is an ideal to whose qualities we can aspire to.

God offers both an idealized sense of virtue, and an acceptance of one's fallibility.

In the absence of an infallible ideal and in the absence of an unconditional self-acceptance, a neurosis of alienation, nihilism, self-mortifying reflection becomes second nature.

The grace that comes from feeling loved makes one lovable.  A hated or self-hating person becomes hateful.

The need for love is the need for acceptance, as well as a need for one to have a reason to keep on living.  Why live when one's living or dying does not make a difference to someone?

In the absence of an irrational anchor, the neo-cortex, the rational brain, the social identity, is called upon to invent or find a rational anchor.

Unconditional real-world love and acceptance is a very tall order.  It is made almost impossible by the fact that commitment, to survive, requires a perceived narrowing of choices.  If the choices are kept open: at-will employment, at-will divorce, at-will engagement with the wider society, at-will cultural identity, then commitment absolutely requires superhuman will.

Without that commitment from you, and to you, how can there be that emotional security that traditionally was provided by God?

Martin Buber titled his landmark work I and Thou.  In the modern times, one has to struggle to move from regarding others as strangers, to finally recognize someone as "you".  But more significantly, in the absence of a secure ego, one has to first come to terms with "I".

One who is already loved, even by an imagined lover, has a healthier, less desperate "I" than one who is seeking love and acceptance with hungry eyes.

People are all hungry for receiving love, but increasingly unable to recognize the other's need of it.  The crushing aloneness in an increasingly competitive world makes one pine for union and rest.  So in need is one of nourishment in oneself that a relationship demanding anything at all feels a burden.  All seeking love, none to provide.

And any conditional love starts with marketing and manipulation.  The manipulation is unconscious in the better cases.  In either case, the realization of the conditional and stressful nature of love dawns sooner or later.  And again therefore, the blues.

The turn to spirituality, or a Guru, in the modern times of Godlessness, can be understood as a thirst for acceptance and love, for that release from the stress of constant competition and marketing of oneself.

The "spirit" is a thirsty being, an un-loved ego.  The harder it aches and pines for its beloved, the harder will be the path it will be willing to walk to seek that mythic union, an experience of oneness, in this world or beyond.

In this desert of parched souls, give the elixir of your love, kindness and compassion, as a balm on the wounds of orphaned infants.

...

I remember, from Tennyson's In Memoriam, a verse that I have partly quoted before:


Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Debunking the Spiritual

Thanks to "Rajiv", who commented on one of my blog articles about Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, I found this utterly fascinating YouTube video featuring Javed Akhtar saying some hard-hitting words in the very (ahem) divine presence of our very own Sadhguru.

Javed Akhtar's segment is only a few minutes long, and I urge you to listen to him (his segment starts at 6:20).  What a voice of reason!  Unfortunately, the top comments on this YouTube video page are quite vile and uncivil.  If anyone had a doubt about Mr Jaggi Vasudev being a godman, his squirming and impatience (when Mr Akhtar is speaking) betrays the godman's ... human-ness.

Javed Akhtar's remarks about human conceit reminded me of this famous George Carlin performance:

I also could not help but notice the neurotic aggression and arrogance in the body language and intonation of the female anchor, which is, by the way, also supremely present in Deepak Chopra when he debates Sam Harris (among others) in the following video:

Spiritual people are some of the most arrogant when it comes to their beliefs.  They think that anyone critical of them is the devil's messenger, an emissary of mayhem and Maya, and is against love and world peace.  Therefore they feel like they are doing God's work in directing their anger and arrogance at him.

All said, these videos make one ruefully nod at these words by Bertrand Russell:

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points...