Author: Brand Smit

Six thoughts over nine weeks

TUESDAY 5 JANUARY 2021

12:11

To share or not to share – your chocolates or nuts in the fridge, the bananas you actually bought for yourself, the money in your wallet that you thought you were only going to use to pay for your own meal. The bigger question is, who do you want to be? A wealthy person, in terms of attitude and bank balance, who likes to share, or a person with a little money, a few nuts or pieces of chocolate, or a bunch of bananas, but who deep down believes that a lack of resources is the true state of affairs, and if he shares, whatever he has will not be replaced?

* * *

You are to a large extent responsible for the environment in which you live your existence, the environment in which you have sensations and experiences that you collectively call your life. This environment includes the atmosphere created between you and the people with whom you share your living environment – at work, at home, even in public places.

14:05

Don’t think in terms of true or false, but in terms of probability: How likely is it that something happened, or happened in a specific manner?

SUNDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2021

One man asks another: “Don’t you feel embarrassed, even ashamed? You failed at doing what a good son ought to do! You didn’t buy your parents a house, and if your sisters didn’t also make a contribution, they wouldn’t have been able to survive on just what you sent every month!”

The other man answers: “I used to feel embarrassed, even ashamed. To some extent I still do. But I also believed, for a long time, that the make money game was rigged against creative people, against true believers, and against lost souls looking for something to hold on to, for their place in the world, for who they’re supposed to be, or could be.”

WEDNESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY 2021

Imagine an author favoured by the political and cultural elite publishes a book and Amazon bans any negative or critical reviews. How can you determine the quality of the book if no dissent is allowed from the official and approved narrative?

SATURDAY 6 MARCH 2021

In his book, Carnage and Culture, Victor Davis Hanson explains how certain aspects of Western culture gave Western soldiers, military leaders, and governments a critical advantage in military conflict from the Ancient Era to the twenty-first century.

The very last item in the glossary gives a description of the word, Western: “Generic adjective for European civilization that grew up in and west of Greece, and shared core values that originated in classical antiquity, including but not limited to constitutional government, civil liberties, free exchange of ideas, self-critique, private property, capitalism, and separation between religious and political/scientific thought.”

According to Hanson, adopting and developing these aspects of Western culture would make non-Western nations like Iran, China and North Korea more dangerous than the wide-scale import of weapons and technology developed by Western scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, and companies.

______________________

Partially improvised play in 20-year chapters

FRIDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2021

Look at life in overlapping 20-year periods:

0-20: From new-born to young adult, includes virtually your entire programming of who you are, what you believe, how you fit into the world, and how you need to function and act to stay out of trouble most of the time and enjoy a reasonable chance of a good life

10-30: From young child, almost teenager, to 30-year-old adult; includes final elementary school years, high school, post-high school education, starting a career, maybe buying a house and getting married

20-40: Tertiary education, start your working life, get married or find a partner, settle down, maybe buy a house, maybe start a family

30-50: Work hard on your career or own business; may raise children and see how they become their own people; think about what you are going to leave behind of your existence; work on financial well-being

40-60: May reach the pinnacle of your profession; work on what you want to leave behind, make as much money as possible to look after family and prepare for retirement; make lifestyle adjustments to combat health problems

50-70: Work on what you want to leave behind; continue building wealth; keep a close eye on any signs of deteriorating health; make specific preparations for retirement

60-80: Start living at a slower pace; focus on maintaining your health and a good quality of life; give advice when asked by younger generations; fervently hope your money lasts until the end

70-90: Become increasingly dependent on other people – family, or staff at a retirement resort or nursing home; most likely no longer economically active; focus on relaxed activities with family and contemporaries

SATURDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2021

The bad thing about the above scheme is that it makes your life look like a play with the parts neatly outlined.

On the one hand, it’s how it is: the first block of twenty years, you’re actually just waking up. By the time you realise you can indeed end your own life – that you’re not caught up in something that was never your choice, you are already knee-deep in it, and you realise the price of doing so may be too high for yourself or other people you care about.

On the other hand, there is plenty of space to go beyond the outline. You can improvise. You can start a new career in your forties, or even fifties. You can start your own business and get rich from it in your sixties. Some men become fathers for the first time in their sixties and sometimes seventies, and some women have their first child in their early forties. And people also get married for the first (or second, or third time) long after their twenties or thirties.

There is always a mainstream that varies by country or region, and by culture. It also adjusts with time – people no longer do things exactly as older generations did in the fifties or sixties of the last century.

Important to remember as you celebrate the transition from one block of years to the next: You are as free as you think you are.

______________________

Thursday, 31 December 2020

One of the outstanding features of this year – and there were a few – was the extent to which people were grouped into ideological tribes, or to which they aligned themselves with specific ideological tribes. More than any year since November 2016, you had to take a stand on the presidency of Donald J. Trump. You had to formulate an opinion about the Black Lives Matter organisation. You had to decide where you stand with the movement calling themselves Antifa in many Western countries. You had to decide if it is okay if protesters burn down buildings, destroy small businesses, and assault individual members of the public in groups against which the individual can offer virtually no resistance. (Previously, you might have thought it easy to condemn this type of behaviour, but 2020 was the year when even close family members and people in your social circle approved of such behaviour with a fist in the air, or a graphic of a fist in the air on social media.) It was furthermore the year you had to decide whether COVID-19 deserved the label of pandemic, or whether it is just another of the occasionally deadly viruses that plague the world every few years. And even if you agree that it is a pandemic, you have to form an opinion on measures that governments worldwide have implemented to combat the virus. What’s more, your own business, your own source of income, may have been threatened, and may have gone under, due to lockdown periods or other measures. Since November, you have also had to take a stand on the US election. Was it free and fair? Did the media in America give both presidential candidates the same treatment? Did they give both candidates an equal chance to state their case? If damning revelations were made about one of the candidates, did the media treat it with reasonable impartiality? Seeing that there were opportunities for corruption in the election – as with surely any large-scale enterprise managed by thousands of people, seeing that there was more than adequate incentive to commit fraud – political office brings many benefits to the victor and their supporters, and seeing that there was not enough time to investigate any serious allegations – the investigation into allegations of Russian involvement in the 2016 election lasted approximately two years, and in the light of improbable statistics, can it be said with certainty that the official winner of the election is the legitimate winner? Then, to round off the opinion bonanza, there was Climate Change and Global Warming, and the World Economic Forum and their Great Reset; there were the ongoing negotiations on Britain’s departure of the European Union; the debate over whether an adult man can simply declare he is a woman and from that moment on claim entitlement to protection and rights intended exclusively for women; the question of whether teenagers and pre-teens can decide on their own what gender they are and if it does not match their genitals, immediately proceed without their parents’ consent with hormone treatment which can have long-term, irreversible consequences; and the growing bias and political agendas of social media – maybe not a problem if they are politically in line with yours, but what happens if you change your mind? The trend that has been going on for a number of years of people losing seats on discussion panels, or being fired or losing contracts because they said or wrote something that is against the accepted currents of thought of the day, also compels one to wonder if there really is still room for free debate. Can you still think what you want and keep your job? Can you still express an opinion in a private conversation about taxation or immigration or religion or climate change and expect it not to cost you your way to earn a living? Can a scientist do experiments with the knowledge that he will still have a job if the results of his experiments are not popular among social and political activists?

Nevertheless … nevertheless … I am grateful. I’m thankful I’m still alive. I am thankful that my two sisters, their children, and my two dear parents also survived the year. And I am grateful for my wife and partner who makes every day better with her love, her companionship, and her support. Then I am grateful for my health, and for a good home in Taiwan. I’m grateful for our two cats. I am grateful for all the eateries in our neighbourhood where we can enjoy tasty and healthy meals. I am grateful for all the opportunities I have to make money. And – I’m thankful for the pleasant cool weather today in Kaohsiung (13ºC), and for the nice cup of hot, black coffee I enjoy as I type these words.

Be good to yourself in 2021. Be good to people who share your life with you, and whose lives you share. Be good to people who are strangers to you right now, but maybe later friends. And be reasonable with people you disagree with, and don’t burn bridges that you will later regret. And if people are not reasonable with you? Keep your conscience clean and your intellectual honesty intact. And make sure you have enough money in the bank – or in your safe, or in your crypto wallet, or in your little bag of gold and silver, and enough sources of income that cannot be cancelled overnight.

______________________

Some questions about the coronavirus

WEDNESDAY, 16 DECEMBER 2020

Some questions about the Coronavirus, just to make it clear where one stands:

1. What is the origin of the virus? If the origin is not yet clear, despite the value it will hold to know, and despite technological and human resources available, what is the reason for this?

2. How deadly is the virus? Specifically, assuming a reasonably healthy person in their twenties gets the virus, what is the probability that the person will die from the infection? What is the probability if the person is in their forties, or fifties, or sixties, or seventies, or eighties? What is the probability that a healthy child or teenager will die from a coronavirus infection? How deadly is the virus for people in their twenties who already have other health problems (diabetes, heart problems, asthma, obesity, high blood pressure)? And for people with other health problems in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties?

3. How effective are lockdowns in controlling the spread of the virus? How well does it work to close restaurants and other places of entertainment, and to close schools? Has the type of measures the world has seen in 2020 ever been utilised in other pandemics and epidemics? If not, why not? Was the data on which health officials and government leaders based their decisions accurate and complete enough to make such decisions? At the beginning – in February or March – one could understand that there was not enough data available yet, but after more than eight months the picture should be clearer, right?

4. How effective is the wearing of masks by healthy people to combat the spread? Are there any studies that prove that masks make a significant difference between healthy people getting the virus and healthy people not getting the virus? Are there any negative consequences for healthy people if they wear a mask for hours on end – even outside when walking on a beach or in a park?

5. Since lockdown measures were put in place to control the spread of the virus, how many people have died as a result of the measures, and not from the virus itself, for example from cancer and heart problems for which treatment had to be postponed?

6. What is a reasonable projection for the number of people who will die over the next decade as a direct or indirect consequence of poverty caused by measures that have destroyed their businesses or other sources of income?

7. Over the course of 2020, the WHO has made divergent statements on the severity of the virus, on international travel, and on masks. There is also a spectrum of opinions among epidemiologists, medical doctors, and other experts about the virus and the most effective ways to combat it and protect the population. Yet free discussion in the news media and especially on social media is strongly discouraged. Only opinions approved by the WHO and by national governments get the stamp of credibility. Alternative opinions are labelled “Disinformation” or simply banned. Yet it has repeatedly been shown that experts who hold these banned opinions were right, and government leaders and health officials working with governments wrong. Who should the public trust? If free discussion is not allowed, and criticism of approved opinions is punished, how does one arrive at the truth?

MONDAY, 28 DECEMBER 2020

Two most important questions:

1. Is SARS-COV-2 the deadliest virus that has hit humanity in the last hundred years? If not, why implement measures that have never been tried on such a large scale, and that even a politician could work out for him- or herself would always have destructive effects on the population, as they are having now?

2. How many people will eventually die as a result of measures intended to save lives?

______________________

Thoughts on the way to Costco

FRIDAY, 25 DECEMBER 2020

I had to go to Costco this afternoon – on my own. As a matter of course I cast my mind back over the last twenty years in Taiwan.

I thought, among other things, what had been important to me all the way back in ’99, 2000 and 2001, namely the freedom to do what I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was not waste time. In fact, I was deeply aware of the limited lifespans of us humans, or as one character in the 1999 cult classic, Office Space, put it: “Michael, we do not have a lot of time on this earth! We were not meant to spend it this way” (meaning in small cubicles, staring at computer screens.) Spending my time trying to teach primary school children English was literally and figuratively a case of me being on my way somewhere with people blocking the door, or pulling on my clothes, or challenging my authority when I just wanted them to keep quiet and sit still for one minute so I could get done what I needed to do so I could stretch my wings and fly away to the mountains.

One of the things I wanted to do was write. And not for fame or money. Writing was a coping mechanism. I felt better about my daily existence when I filled a few pages in my notebook, or on my computer – usually about my own life, and for no reader other than myself years later. I still write, but now mostly because it makes me happy – even when I write about politics. I always experience a mixture of relaxation (or relief) and euphoria when working on a piece of text.

The other thing I have realised over the last two decades – the golden penny that dropped, as it were, is that there isn’t a golden penny of secret knowledge that must drop before you can make enough money to lead a good life.

Or, if I want to properly confuse myself, there is a golden penny that needs to drop before you can start doing better. You need to discover what your relationship is with money, and you need to confirm your identity as someone who does have the ability to generate income. The fact is that most people from childhood receive poor or incorrect programming about money, and about making money. It sometimes takes half an adult life to identify this programming, and rewrite it line by line in your subconscious.

The key that can unlock the door to a better future is thus not only knowing that your current financial condition is to a large extent the result of the same thing that makes a computer function in a certain way, namely programming, but knowing that it is fully in your power to change this programming, to change your relationship with money, and to transform yourself into someone who is able to live the life you want to live.

______________________