Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

Vonnegut: Nothing to see here, moving right along...

Folly in the Mist, Hann. Münden, Germany. Photo by Michael de Percy.

I was on my way to Germany to visit Berlin, Dresden, and Hann. Münden. Kurt Vonnegut, a second generation American of German descent seemed a good choice for the flight. I usually find it easy to knock over a Penguin paperback on a long-haul flight, but not this time. I've been struggling to read deeply since a major life event early last year shifted the focus of my spare time. 

So I didn't manage to finish the book until some months later. I found Vonnegut's work to be interesting but a little far-fetched - it smacked of a Woody Allen style of science fiction (see the trailer for "The Sleeper" below) that was somehow banal yet allegorical in a mildly interesting way.

    

Much of the social commentary was lost on me. I suppose for a conservative reader of the early 1960s the foot-touching free love may have been a bit out there, but for me it was all old hat. I had the feeling of the 'thirteen days' and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

Usually I am a fan of history but Vonnegut is rather economical with his contextual elements - an Animal Farm kind of focus on the sociological order rather than the 'iceberg' cerebral development approach. It was interesting today that I listened to a podcast on Jack London's literary style.

This sent me on a quest to look back at some of my previous readings of several of London's works. One thing I found was that I have been critical of London's racism (poignant in the wake of the Black Lives Matters protests beginning in the US and now happening in solidarity but focused on Indigenous deaths in custody here in Australia). 

But I was also pleased to note that I had picked up on a key theme of the overall problem (from Jack London's To Build a Fire):

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.

That's how I felt about Vonnegut's work. Until the meaning of the title came to my attention. The cat's cradle:

It's a child's illusion. It requires one's imagination. One flick of the hands and the cradle is gone. It doesn't exist.

I am usually way off but occasionally, like with Jack London, I am on the mark. 

I found in Cat's Cradle the Stoic technique of the "bird's eye view". Once we view the world from above, we realise two things. 

First, the insignificance of our petty existence. The arguments of today, the angry idiot tailgating me on the Hume highway last night, flashing his lights and sounding his horn. All nothing. I remember noting too, with flying, that once you are above the clouds it is always a perfect day. It is all a matter of perspective.

Second, we are all in this together.  I am currently reading Ryan Holiday's Stillness is the Key. He mentions Edgar Mitchell's famous words upon viewing the world from space:

You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

It is interesting that just this week, Mitchell's words have resurfaced in what has been called the world's first political protest in near space, but targeted at Donald Trump.

In the above musings, and almost two months after I finished reading Cat's Cradle, I realised Vonnegut's genius. It is all an illusion. There are hands, there is string, there is imagination. The cat's cradle is made up of reality and intangibles. Neither works without the other.

Fake news, The Guardian versus The Australian and all of the left versus right is more of the same nonsense. It is not imagination, it is not creative. It is dogmatic, divisive, and dodgy. Yet the people believe.

This is what I get from Vonnegut. It is not the illusion, but that we make sense out of the world through our "bounded rationality" combined with our sense of  imagination. Not fake or make-believe, but creative and expressive and from the depths of our intellect.

Regrettably, Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that without imagination (the creative as opposed to the conspiratorial kind), we are doomed to an inevitable end. Like London's "everyman" in To Build a Fire, we are not reflecting on our mortality in the face of nature, but rather imagining ourselves to be something more significant while smacking of hubris. For London:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

But London, too, was a fan of eugenics. He was human and he, too, was wrong.

Vonnegut was subtler, less egotistical, more realistic. If I had to sum up Cat's Cradle, I would say that London had too much imagination, whereas Vonnegut is the Goldilocks' little bear version of "just right".

P.S. It's a shame that The Three Bears was originally written by Robert Southey and not the Grimm Brothers to fit my German theme. And the original Goldilocks was an old woman and the three bears were bachelors. But you can use your imagination! I visited the Grimm Brothers Museum in Kassel, Germany, on 3rd December 2019.

Outside the Grimm Brothers' Museum, Kassel, Germany.
Photo by Michael de Percy.

Populism and a New World Order

Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, Jonathan Makuwira. (Eds.) (2020). Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid: Beyond the Neoliberal Hegemony. New York: Routledge.

My latest work has just been published by Routledge. My chapter entitled "Populism and a New World Order" looks at the rise of populism and its impact on the Bretton Woods institutions, particularly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). 

I am of the view that the current challenges by the United States and the United Kingdom against the WTO and the European Union (EU) (respectively) are simply tactics that are designed to appease domestic voters while appearing to slow the ascent of China. 

Further, China is using the existing world order to develop its technical governance capabilities and is complementing (rather than supplementing) the Bretton Woods institutions in response to US isolationism.

Australia and other middle powers have been fortunate in that populism has not taken hold of domestic politics as it has in the US and the UK. I agree with Dr Waleed Aly's opinion piece from the New York Times in 2019 and more recently a Daily Mail report on what he had to say about the current leadership during the Covid-19 social distancing measures in Australia. 

Australians are fortunate not to have suffered much more than the rhetoric of what have otherwise been competent policy responses both to international trade and the current pandemic. But it is a delicate balancing act between appeasing the US and not upsetting China, and the Bretton Woods institutions, in my view, provide the best option for stability into the future.

My main argument is that:

If we accept the premise of either institutional change being brought about by the displacement of old ideas by the new, or the exhaustion of traditional institutions creating the opportunity for new ideas to be implemented, then populism provides no alternative in either case. As history suggests, the multilateral institutions established at Bretton Woods have proven their ability to adapt to new economic ideas and changing global realities. Populism does not represent either. Rather, populism represents the reaction of domestic politics to the decline in economic dominance of the Anglo-West and subsequent dissatisfaction with the existing world order while offering no alternative to it.

Click here for details of the chapter and the book.

Abstract

Institutions tend to be stable for extended periods of time, punctuated by exogenous events that can lead to institutional change. If institutions tend to reinforce their own rules and routines, it can be said that institutions cannot then change themselves. While wars and other major exogenous events can lead to institutional change, ideas are also powerful, and relatively peaceful, drivers of change. Since the establishment of an international trade regime at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, new ideas about the best way to organise the economy have influenced global trade, resulting in the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. The idea of free market economics led to a new global trading system, coinciding with the end of the Soviet Union, and this system has remained relatively stable since the end of Keynesianism on a global scale. Recently, however, the rise in populism and the re-emergence of nationalism have challenged the existing world order. This chapter examines the impact of the rise in populism and the re-emergence of nationalism on the international institutions of global trade. Using theories of institutional change, the chapter examines the extent to which populist ideas about free trade versus protectionism are leading to a new world economic order.

The book is available at all major retailers including The Book Depository.

About the book: Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, Jonathan Makuwira. (Eds.) (2020). Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid: Beyond the Neoliberal Hegemony. New York: Routledge.