(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . A Jaundiced Eye Regards His Wanting [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-14 Scottish polymath and Grandmaster Jonathon Rowson has done a lot of thinking about thinking. So have I, but his dissertation topic was Wisdom, which is a bit more germane than mine. His second book The Seven Deadly Chess Sins is a magnificent tour de force presenting some of his early observations and conclusions, along with a large dose of wit. Historian Edward Winter has referred to Rowson as “One of the best and cleverest chess writers” but I find this faint praise, indeed. He is a shrewd observer of the human condition and one of the best and cleverest writers ; no qualification is needed. For example, he brilliantly deploys the literary device of inserting a pithy or entertaining quote in order to demark transitions in narrative. “Oh, we all want something .” — Pierce Patchett, in L.A. Confidential One of the Seven Deadly Chess Sins is Wanting. For top performance in tournament chess, no matter what your level, some key requirements are focus, objectivity, and a calm and placid mind. Investing in the Wanting of something can undermine all three , especially with the clock ticking. This hardly applies to chess alone, but chess affords a concrete and measurable example of how our reason can be undermined by ourselves. A witty Rowson exemplar of Wanting is the Jam Lust. Let’s say I have a nice chess position: a pawn up with few weaknesses while the opponent has no threats and few chances for activity. A tennis analogy could be up a service break early in the decisive set; a golf analogy might be two strokes ahead early in the back nine. That would be a bread-and-butter situation. A pragmatic person would be happy with that anytime and every time because situations like that put the win in reach and a loss far away. Bread-and-butter situations pay the bills. But too often humans are not satisfied with a bread-and-butter situation. In the illustrative context of chess that means thinking “Well, this is nice, but slow. Wouldn’t it really be great if I had a brilliant mating attack!?” Metaphorically: “Yeah, this bread-and-butter is ok, but boy what I really want is some jam!” The Jam Lust is not a weakness of chess thinking. It is a basic flaw in human cognition . One could also call it the-grass-is-greener delusion. Tossing away the bread-and-butter in search of jam is quite common, often with negative sequelae. I know several philandering men (and a few women) who could so attest. “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production . . .” — Adam Smith This tenet is the Axiom of Wanting. Under its sway, I have wanted many things, too many of them foolish. In my youth I was very ambitious and very unhappy. I cannot prove a causal connection, but they sure do seem correlated. I was firmly brought up in the right-thinking fundamentals of political economy: material growth is both natural and necessary, always; climbing the ladder is good, always; consumption is an essential economic goodness, always. This is why Jimmy Carter was such a vilified socialist traitor: he dared suggest we ‘Muricans consume less energy and turn the thermostats down! And put on a sweater!! Horrors! Looking back it seems crystal clear that, much like my nation, I have been possessed by Wanting most of my life. Despite considerable success, I was never satisfied with myself nor my situation. This anxiety and self-doubt was fed by helpful advice from respected and trusted influencers. It took me decades to realize their motives were to vicariously achieve what they should have done, or to have something to brag about at the country club, or both. My life’s decisions were fueled by Wanting, much of it not even my own. “Human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.” — Peter de Vries Carl Linnaeus was an amazing Swede. In the course of a forty-year career he almost single-handedly invented, systematized, and popularized modern hierarchical kingdom/order/family/genus/species taxonomy and the binomial (two-name) nomenclature that are now universal in the life sciences. Just as a matter of convenience, because he was focusing effort on legions of other organisms, Linnaeus considered himself the type specimen for our species. Based on that type specimen, he named our species Homo sapiens, Latin for “thinking man.” What a hoot. I have known a bunch of people, in many settings. “ Thinking ” has never been the adjective that occurs as a single-word description to generally encompass the people around me. Well, except for those couple weeks at the Math Olympiad training session. "Lost in losing circumstances, That’s just where you are.” — Yours Is No Disgrace The Algonquin legend of the Wendigo is illuminating. It is a creature of insatiable greed, lust, and consumption. It is a demonic personification of Wanting. I suspect it served the Algonquin as both a scary-story bogeyman and as a handy clinical description of a derangement of desires they viewed as a mental illness. Imagine their horror when a deluge of Wendigo-addled Europeans suddenly appeared in the 18th century. Imagine their fury as that flood raped their people and their lands, as Wendigo will. Willy-nilly, you and I have inherited the cultural legacy of that Wendigo flood. We are a people of Wanting. We covet what we see. Keeping up with the Joneses is our most universal and most cherished cultural norm. I suggest the best single-word description encompassing the people I know, myself included, is “ envying .” Modern Techno-Industrial man is not Homo sapiens but Homo invidens, Latin for “envying man.” We are all culturally nurtured, from an early age, to have Wendigo disease. Advertising works. “Happiness is not having what you want. It is wanting what you have.” — Hyman Schachtel I wish I could remember when first exposed to this simple, tautological, notion. I do vividly recall hearing it on NPR while driving north on Memorial Parkway, but couldn’t be sure whether it was seven or twenty-seven years ago. It’s the sort of idea that needs to germinate for a while. Initially it seems just silly and trivial, but the more you consider it clearly and objectively, the more interesting it becomes. The profound but simple is often mistaken for trivial. The idea is, since Wanting is inherent and unavoidable in Homo invidens, it is wise to consciously manage it. To be perfectly honest, I was lucky enough to work on wanting-what-I-had while living a comfortable suburban material existence. I did suspect that level of comfort would not last. It hadn’t before. As my feelings of envy, avarice, ambition, and the jam lust diminished, I experienced less anxiety and more equanimity and objectivity. It took a few years, but my blood pressure improved even as the rest of my health declined. Then the half-expected life-shock hit. Followed by several more. A couple years have witnessed shedding 99% of my encumbrances. Today I share failing appliances, cheap plumbing, and a tiny, minimal, concrete apartment with another fat, old man. This is not a level of retirement luxury I ever envisioned. The transitions have been harsh. Suddenly, involuntarily down-sizing my Wanting to my new Having was a sore trial. Is a sore trial. But after a bit of work and grief, sometimes now I have a calm and placid mind, again. “The Kingdom of God does not arrive by expectation . Rather, it lies all around us, and we have not the eyes to see it.” — Gospel of Thomas 113:2-4, tr. Joseph Campbell The prophet is correct. If we could shed the delusions of Wanting, we might then look with seeing eyes upon our better selves and a better world, lying all around us. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/14/2198681/-A-Jaundiced-Eye-Regards-His-Wanting?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/