This short lesson from logic can save us a bundle of folly and strife. If we all understood it, it could even save the world, since among the biggest threats we face is ideologies gone wild, unalterable and armed to the teeth.

It’s about how people of any faith or belief system get sloppy and over-confident. I’ll start with a few illustrations, simplified to make the pattern obvious:

It’s good to be liberal.

Interesting. How do you define being liberal?

Being liberal is defined as doing good things.

When you’re mindful things go right.

Say more. How can I tell when I’m being mindful?

Easy.  By things going right.

Christians are good people.

Sounds useful. What defines a Christian?

Their goodness.

Selfishness is bad.

OK.  And how can I tell when I’m being selfish?

By whether you’re being bad.

To see what’s really going on here we’ll borrow a distinction between two kinds of statements from logic and philosophy:

News statements (AKA Synthetic):  Statements that synthesize (combine) independent ideas to generate new knowledge. For example, “Christians are good,” if Christians are one thing and goodness is another.

Definitional statements (AKA Analytic): Statements that declare a definition, in other words, one idea given two names.  For example, “All bachelors are unmarried men.” These statements don’t give you any news about the world, just about how you claim you’ll define things.

Definitional statements can’t really be proven wrong. If you think Joe is a bachelor and then discover he’s married, you don’t say “Wow, so I guess I was wrong. Apparently not all bachelors are unmarried men.” Instead you say “So Joe isn’t a bachelor after all,” since, by definition bachelor and unmarried man are one and the same thing.

Definitional statements are un-debatable. No amount of evidence could ever prove them wrong. Even if you discovered that 1000 bachelor acquaintances are actually married, you’re not going to start wondering whether maybe bachelors are married men after all. You’ll just stop saying those 1000 acquaintances are bachelors.

News statements are debatable. They can be proven wrong by evidence. If Sue believes that all Muslims are terrorists and her sister marries Ali, a Muslim who isn’t a terrorist, Sue faces a choice about how to interpret Ali’s deal. She could decide Ali isn’t really a Muslim or that he really is a terrorist, but more likely she’ll discover that her news statement is just wrong—news to her, not all Muslims are terrorists.

We have a love-hate relationship with both news and definitional statements. We love news statements for the wisdom they might provide about how to live. But we hate the hard work of defining our terms, and we hate that our news statements are debatable, always vulnerable to being proven wrong, the way Sue’s was when she discovered that she’s been living a falsehood—All Muslims aren’t all terrorists after all.

We love the reliability of definitional statements, the way they are beyond debate. They can’t be proven wrong because they’re just definitions: the two terms, bachelors and unmarried men traveling reliably together forever. But analytic statements give you no news about the world, and therefore no wisdom.

Given what we like and don’t like about these two kinds of statements, we tend to try to achieve the best of both worlds through what I’ll call a debate and switch. We claim we’re making news statements for their newsy, though debatable wisdom, but then we’ll switch to treating them as definitional statements, so we don’t have to go to the trouble to define our terms and so they become absolutely beyond debate.

News statement: Being mindful makes things turn out better.

That sounds like wisdom I might could use. So how can I tell whether I’m being mindful?

Definitional statement:  You can tell that you were being mindful by things turning out better.

Or on the global stage:

Assad’s news statement: My leadership will prove good for Syria.

Dude, that’s highly debatable. You’re killing your people with chemical weapons. How is that good for Syria?

Assad’s definitional statement: Because by definition, my leadership equals good for Syria.

No one is immune to this debate and switch tendency. For example, I work in a field called “emergence theory.” Emergence is the scientific term for the observed tendency for behavior to change as you move from one science to another. For example, physical and life science operate on different rules, and science’s best guess is that life’s rules somehow emerge from physic’s rules. We make the news statement that mind emerges from matter, and then the burden is on us to define emergence so we know what the hell we’re talking about when we say “life emerges.”

But some emergent scientists convert the news statement into a definitional one:

News statement:  Emergence is how life originates out of physics.

Cool, so what exactly is emergence?

Definitional statement: I already told you. It’s the process by which life originates out of physics.

In general, the savvy here comes from keeping the two kinds of statements distinct, and making sure that when people claim they’re giving you news about how to be in the world, they define their terms.

It’s good to be Christian.

It’s good to be mindful.

It’s good to be liberal.

It’s good to be conservative.

It’s bad to be selfish.

It’s bad to be inattentive.

It’s bad to be liberal.

It’s bad to be conservative.

Don’t let folks go circular on these, defining Christian as being good, for example or conservative as being bad. Don’t let the old debate and switch go unnoticed. We should call people on it, ourselves included when we do that ol’ debate and switch.

I like the way the Calvinist religion has boiled its doctrine down to a simple acronym: TULIP, and wanted to make an acronym not for my atheist doctrine, but one that lays out the fundamental question I think is at the heart of the conflict between of us over what to believe and how to believe it.

Here’s the Calvinist acronym.

Total depravity: This doesn’t mean people are as bad as they can be. It means that sin is in every part of one’s being, including the mind and will, so that a man cannot save himself.

Unconditional election: God chooses to save people unconditionally; that is, they are not chosen on the basis of their own merit.

Limited atonement: The sacrifice of Christ on the cross was for the purpose of saving the elect.

Irresistible grace: When God has chosen to save someone, He will.

Perseverence of the saints: Those people God chooses cannot lose their salvation; they will continue to believe. If they fall away, it will be only for a time.

And here’s mine for the science religion debate and the question it poses for all of us. I’d love to hear your response to the question, but also any objections you might have to any of my 12 precepts. However know that to avoid a double standard, anything answers or objections you make should applies to your beliefs as much as they do to anyone else’s. 

PUFF MEDS WHEN?

Personal interpretation:  We each form our own personal beliefs.

Underlying reality:  Still there is the underlying reality independent of what we believe about it.

Fitness prized:  We all believe that it’s better when our beliefs conform to underlying reality.

Fitness Subjectivity:  We have divergent beliefs about which beliefs better conform to reality, and we have no final arbiter of which conform better other than the good and bad consequences of our interactions given underlying reality. We each predict which beliefs will have better future consequences and since the future is not here to prove us right or wrong, our predictions are all fallible.

Method Subjectivity:  We form beliefs about which methods of forming beliefs are more likely to yield beliefs that conform to reality.

Elbowing Beliefs:  Living and making decisions together, we elbow each other with of our divergent subjective beliefs, beliefs about which beliefs best fit reality and beliefs about which methods form better beliefs.  Our beliefs have consequences for each other.

Deliberation and intuition: All of us form our beliefs through some combination of active deliberation and confident intuition.  On any aspect of reality some of us have done more work in forming our beliefs than others.

Subjective Sufficiency: No amount of active deliberation or confident intuition ensures that our beliefs conform to reality. We can all identify cases in which we think deliberation and intuition have succeeded and have failed.

Wondering works: Nonetheless, and on the whole, active deliberation tends to refine our intuitions and beliefs over time, as shows from our increasing ability to yield good consequences within reality.

Healing beliefs:  Though better beliefs conform to underlying reality, one of one of those underlying realities is our individual emotional reality.  Beliefs increase or decrease our personal comfort, self-confidence, esteem, happiness.  Beliefs can puff us up, serving as medicine to heal and improve our emotional reality independent of how much they conform to the rest of reality.
Entitled happiness:  We believe everyone is entitled to find happiness through whatever beliefs serve them.

Necessary belief:  Still, given that we believe it’s better when our beliefs conform to underlying reality, and given that we live and make decisions better and therefore that our beliefs affect one another. We will therefore have conflict over which of our beliefs to impose upon each other, in other words, which are the better meds for our emotional realities and which are the better fitted to overall reality.

?:  When then should we tolerate or fight other people’s beliefs which we believe are puffed up meds?

Guns are so negative. So are bombs.  So is saying no, stop, halt, don’t go there, shut up, be quiet, go away. So are walls, roadblocks–constraints of any kind.

I don’t mean they’re bad or wrong necessarily. They’re negative in that they negate. They stop, end or reverse things.

We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. But we also know that two no’s do make a yes. Two negatives make a positive, both in language and math. What’s up with that?

Apparently no and wrong aren’t the same, a point that has enormous implications for how we think about peace and conflict from global war to interpersonal kerfuffles.

Guns are powerful negators. They are almost exclusively destructive.  It’s hard to imagine a way guns could be used to construct something. They stop growth, and the pacifist impulse would be to eliminate them altogether.  Why have something destructive around at all?

We need negators because two negatives make a positive. We need the ability to destroy bad things, antibodies to destroy germs, chemo to kill cancer, guns to kill killers, shut-ups to stop jerks, walls to keep out marauders, bombs to stop tyrants.

Of course if there were no guns, we wouldn’t need guns to stop bad gunslingers.  And guns are way too often used to wrong rights, not right wrongs.  Still, it’s not hard to imagine how weapons escalation could happen fully justified, or at least naturally.

Imagine living in a tiny village back before guns, a village constantly under siege from sword wielding marauders who outnumbered you villagers ten to one.  You could try negating the marauder’s negatives with your swords but the equation isn’t in your favor. You’d welcome the negating leverage of guns to offset the population leverage of the sword-wielding marauders.

I’m not saying that weapons of mass negation are always invented by the good guys.  Far from it. Still, I would say they’re pretty much always invented by people who think or claim they’re the good guys, righting a wrong, looking for leverage by which to negate a negative that would otherwise outnumber them.

Nuclear weapons are a classic and tragic example.  The US beat Nazi Germany to them by a nose. We used them to negate the overwhelmingly destructive zeal and unity of Japan’s military.  But Germany too was after them on an all-out mission to negate negativity–the supposedly overwhelming force of Jewish Bolshevism.
We keep them today for Mutual Assured Destruction, to negate the negativity of others using them. But North Korea keeps them for that reason too, to negate the negativity of enemies at the gate, marauders they claim have bigger guns and bad intentions.

In everyday interpersonal interaction we find a similar pattern.

For example, we think stress reduction as a good thing. All of us have our sore spots, and sensitivities, the topics that cause us stress. The prevailing stress-reduction technique is basically to not go there, not to get near the topics that bring us down, or wind us up.  Better to keep the stress from seeping into hearts than to let it in and then have to get rid of it.  We all have ways to negate the negative, to say “don’t go there” when thought or conversation ranges anywhere near our sore spots.

Human ingenuity is vast but nowhere more ingenious than in our many ways of saying “don’t go there” without sounding at least to ourselves as though we’re negating.  We can tell people to be quiet but rarely are we that straightforward.  We can bark “shut up” but we can also purr, whisper, brow-lift and counsel parentally that it’s unkind, immoral, indecent or churlish to get anywhere near our sensitive places. These days a very popular way to convey “don’t go there” is to say that it’s immoral or wrong to be negative.

Apparently one of online dating’s most accurate compatibility test is whether both parties like or don’t like horror films. I think there’s poetic resonance in that.  Our compatibility is best when we have compatible “don’t go there’s,” both parties averse to the same conversations, both parties negating the same negatives and both parties enthusiastic about visiting the same places.

But there will be conflicts in which one party tries to negate conversations it considers negatively stressful and the other party considers positively stress-reducing. A conversation that you find stressful could be exactly the conversation your friend needs to have, to keep from feeling stressed. One person’s stress-reducing “don’t go there” is the next person’s stress-inducing “shut up.” How we negotiate these incompatibilities makes a big difference to our ability to keep the peace constructively.

Many people have a “don’t go there” attitude about their “don’t go there’s.”  They’re prickly about certain topics as are we all. But they’re also meta-prickly–prickly about the prickliness.  If you say “I notice that you don’t want to go there,” they won’t go there. They shut down that conversation by saying “Moi?  I’m never negative!”

I founded and ran a DC-based lobbying organization working for arms reduction. I lived for seven years in a pacifist, vegan community. I am in favor of radical increases in gun control.  I studied military strategy in college trying to figure out how to reduce violence and war.  I’m sure not saying negators are all good. But I am saying that negative does not equal wrong.  It’s more complicated than that.

We all use combinations of positivity and negativity, encouragement and discouragement, carrots and sticks in our efforts to achieve what we think is right and avoid what we think is wrong. Recognizing this, and that the correlation between negativity and wrong can’t possibly be simple and direct would be a good start toward more creative conversation and negatiation.

Great wrong is caused by people who negate the wrong things, but also by people who ignore their own negativity, pretend to be exclusively positive, encouraging, tolerant, open-minded, optimists, and shut down anyone they don’t want to listen to by calling them negative. We get that garbage as much from the Tea Party as we do from the New Age—anyone overly confident they’re crusading for what’s right, and underly curious about whether they really are.

Put your negativity on the table, where you can keep an eye on it. Pick your negations carefully so they negate true negatives. It would be a positive step for us all.

My first Burning Man was eight years ago. I arrived at the gate late on the second night with my then-girlfriend. We were ready for almost anything, but not for the manic clown-police at the entrance gate who, with a deft hand and an inch-wide white marker drew a giant ejaculating penis on our windshield and demanded (tongue-in-cheek) all our drugs.

My girlfriend left the gate in tears, but quickly recovered, falling in love with the scene and especially hula-hooping, which she’s done ever since.

I took the gate as a bit of social engineering, as if to say, “Welcome. Be audacious. Shine as weird as you want, but know that we can out-weird you, so don’t get too full of yourself. We’ve got you covered.”

I too fell in love with the scene, and have been back twice since, just last week with my 23-year-old daughter. I love the invitation to audacity but also the easy, reliable benevolence toward everyone, including me, a middle-aged duff, no longer as audacious as I once was.

Every time I’m back, that uplifting humbling line from the Beatle’s song “All You Need Is Love” comes back to me: “Nothing you can do that can’t be done.” Burning Man is crawling with talent and ingenuity. It’s a place to stand out in the midst of everyone else standing out, a place to both elevate and get over yourself, and in the process reflect on the tension between aspiring to be more than you are and being OK with what you are.

I know a bit about gate-keeping at freak gatherings. For seven years in my 20s I lived on the Farm, America’s largest and longest-lasting hippie commune. Burning Man is 60,000 freaks living together for about a week. The Farm was 1,400 people who planned to stay forever, and another 20,000 visitors a year streaming through our gate day and night, unscreened and unscheduled, staying a few days for free at what, in the ’70s, was something of a hippie mecca.

An elected elder of the Farm at the age of 23, I ran our gate often, meeting and managing whomever arrived. Most of the people came with great intentions and good vibes. Some were lots more trouble.

Running gate gave me lots of time to think about what it takes to invent an alternative bubble society within the larger society and how to handle the bubble’s semi-permeable membrane—a question that now, as an evolutionary philosophy and social psychology professor, still keeps me busy.

To create a new and distinct society you need dedicated focus and a degree of purity lest your vision of a new society get diluted. But to survive you need flexible interaction with the outside community. Getting the permeability right is the challenge: what to tolerate; what not to tolerate.

The semi-permeable membrane challenge runs deeper than creating a bubble society. It’s a core issue for all living systems, for example to the earliest life forms with their semi-permeable cell membrane walls, adaptively addressing life’s big give and take questions: what to join, what not to join, what to accept, what to reject, what to tolerate, what not to tolerate. Evolutionary biologist Terrence Deacon calls it the “paradox of individuality.” No creature is an island and yet a distinct individual can only survive as a separate being by interacting with the world outside.

Luck of the draw, this time my daughter and I weren’t met by cock-drawing clown police, but my daughter could have handled it. Many in her generation, the generation best represented at Burning Man, is used to a lot of cultural variability, and don’t harbor the purist, dogmatic visions of social change we disdainfully called “being High Brahman” on the Farm.

The Farm was more pragmatic than dogmatic. We didn’t tolerate free love, but we tolerated junk food and for similar pragmatic reasons. We had a lot of work to do and for the most part picked our priority battles with an eye to what would keep us going. Casual sex would cut into our work lives and create more drama than the commune could sustain. And hand-wringing over occasional bags of chips or sodas wasn’t our thing either. We had higher priorities, and chose carefully where to allocate our tolerances and intolerances.

In retrospect, I think our disdain for High Brahman hippies was our unsuccessful bulwark against the New Age puritanism that was already taking root in the 1970s—a moral absolutism that still dominates in Berkeley, where I now live. Moral absolutes, whether from the far right, the far left or far-out New Age, stunt human growth.

I’m astonished at how strong and resilient New Age puritanism remains here in Berkeley, and how many people, especially of my generation, have gotten good at turning up their High Brahman noses through absolutist spiritual correctness.

I call it “yintimidation.” The sweeping final-word pontifications of the self-proclaimed “yin” and “spiritual,” who counsel hypocritically that you shouldn’t be judgmental (a judgment) that negativity is bad (a negativity) and that you should be closed-minded to closed-mindedness and intolerant of intolerance.

As the hypocritically spiritual demonstrate, you can’t live by these principles. Instead, you just get good at ignoring the places where you’re judgmental, negative closed-minded or intolerant. The principles stunt growth by keeping us from life’s age-old questions about when to judge, be negative, be closed-minded and intolerant.

No doubt New Age spiritual puritanism is a reaction to prior puritanisms that pointed the opposite direction; for example, the self-glorifying zero-tolerance policies of the far right and far left. All moral absolutes, once they became culturally dominant, can and will be abused in the human race to outshine each other, boss each other around, and act like the pope.

I’m awestruck and humbled by how Burning Man culture extends hippie philosophy in a healthier direction, an alternative to the New Age puritanism that has become just another route to standard-issue human self-certainty.

Burning Man culture doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s much more self-effacing irony to it, that strange and wondrous balance between elevating and getting over oneself. It was folk art at its best, everyone gifted and talented at something, often something as majestic in its triviality as hula hooping, a celebration of the expansive possibilities of what a body can do.

Not only are there no corporate logos at Burning Man, there are no famous names, no founders or philosophical leaders. The bands, music and camps all have transient names, meaningful and playful, but not really important. Everyone shines and no one is blinded or overshadowed by the shiners’ light. Not only is there no commerce, there’s hardly any promotion of anything, no glad-handing, no ideogical campaigning, hippy, progressive or otherwise.

Will Burning Man save the world? Certainly not. Is it sustainable? Not year-round the way the Farm was for 14 years, with a community of 200 still living there today.

And not, perhaps, in the environmental sense. It’s energy intensive—all that driving and burning. Still, though my priority issue is climate change, I’m not a purist about it. While I don’t fly to vacations in far-flung lands because the carbon footprint of such trips is too large, I’ll burn a tank of gas to be part of the Burning Man circus. I’m glad I live just five hours from the best exotic culture-bang-for-the-carbon-footprint buck.

And as an annual mecca, Burning Man is sustainable. Its resilience stems from its low ideological aspirations. It has longer legs than the Occupy movement in part because it’s not tilting at the towering windmills of commerce, but also because it doesn’t aspire to ideological or spiritual purity and so has some built-in resilience—just like many people of my daughter’s generation.

As a mecca, Burning Man has got something substantial to offer. It reminds us of the vast possibilities available to humankind. I love its harmonious dissonance and its sweet cacophony that comes from the collision of life’s two opposing truths: 1) We are all one; and 2) just do your thing. The paradox of individuality lived large for a week in the Nevada desert.

Myth 1. Love is connecting: We generally think of love as analogous to a chemical or magnetic bond. It’s not, and for reasons that give us a window into the fundamental difference between living and non-living systems.  Living systems do active, dedicated, ongoing work striving to maintain whatever they depend upon. Non-livings like chemicals or magnets connect and disconnect never striving to maintain anything.

Love is living effort, that dedicated work we do to maintain the things that keep ourselves in good working order, and we love in ways we’re not likely to notice.  You love food, working to maintain access to it, since it keeps you going. You love food in that if it disappeared you wouldn’t keep working. Your lungs love your heart, and the love is mutual. Your lungs do dedicated work to keep your heart supplied with oxygen. Your heart reciprocates, keeping blood pumping to your lungs.  Not all love is reciprocated of course. You love nutrients enough to work to get them, even though they don’t love you back.

You’re not just chemically or magnetically bonded to the things you love. You work actively to maintain everything without which you would be at a loss, your ability to continue doing your life’s dedicated work impaired.

This ability to do dedicated work to maintain that which enables you to continue doing dedicated work is the distinctive feature of all living systems down to the first and simplest organisms. Love is what life does that non-living systems don’t do. To live is to love; to love is to live. The origin of life is the origin of love. What dies when you die is your ability to do this active ongoing dedicated work to maintain your ability to keep doing dedicated work.

Myth 2. You can love it all:  Our energy and time is limited, and therefore so too is our love, our ability to dedicated work to maintain the things we depend upon. You can have lip-service high regard for everything in an abstract sense, but you can’t love everything, because love takes work.  You have to choose what to love, and what to ignore.  Furthermore, loving one thing means not loving something else.  When you’re married, you actively resist come-ons from other people. The more you love your family, your tribe, your country, the more you’re willing to do fierce battle against any force you think would undermine them. That’s the dedication: your focused effort on particular things at the expense of others. Of all the things you could dedicate your work to, you dedicate it to particular things.

Myth 3. Love and addiction are apples and oranges: We think of love as good; addiction as bad, and the two as entirely distinct.  Actually, our attraction to love, and aversion to addiction is the only difference between them. We call loving, any dedicated work that we think is healthy in the long run, and addicted, any dedicated work that we think is unhealthy in the long run. Love and addiction are both names for doing dedicated work to maintain something that if it weren’t maintained would, in the short run, impair our ability to continue doing dedicated work. Deprive a lover of his mate, an addict of his drug, an animal of its food, a TV-addict of his TV, and all would feel an immediate loss of something that they had come to depend upon, at least in the short run. We debate what’s a good allocation of our limited capacity to do dedicated work and what’s a reliably sustainable thing to depend upon.  You may love something that someone else thinks you’re just addicted to, and visa versa.

Myth 4. We love more things than we don’t love: Do you love more than you don’t love?  In answering that question you’re very likely to fall prey to availability bias, the strong tendency for the most available or salient instances to come to mind. You’ll think of the people and things you love, that you think about, appreciate and do active work to maintain.  You won’t think of the bazillions of people and things you don’t think about. Why? Because you don’t think about them.  Your dedicated work is a laser light in a vast dark expanse. You can’t shine your love light on everything, and by definition what it’s not shining on is not going to come to mind. You will notice things at the edge of your laser light, the things toward which you think maybe you should be devoting more loving effort, but that doesn’t begin to touch the vast expanses you ignore.

Generally, to love one thing is to not love its opposite.  The more you love someone the more you’d hate for something to happen to him or her. The more you dedicate yourself to a particular form of success, the more you don’t love a failure at it.  The Tao says “When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad,” which is often misinterpreted as an argument that we should stop preferring one thing to another and just accept everything as what is. We can’t stop preference. Even preferring not to have preferences is a preference. Our dedicated work will be allocated to something, but, as the Tao suggests, we should notice the reciprocal nature of love:  The more you want one thing, the less you want its opposite.

Myth 5. You’re more loving than most people: You might think you’re more loving than others because you experience your own love more viscerally and vividly than you experience other people’s, or because you’re acutely aware of the ways other people fail to love what you love, and especially the ways other people don’t love you the way you feel they should. But, realistically, that’s not a measure of who loves more.  Since love is dedicated work and effort, the people who love more are the people who are most productive, have lots of energy and leverage, their loving attention maintaining more people and things.

Myth 6. Good people are loving; bad people are unloving: Loving lots is not necessarily a good thing.  Hitler was more loving than average by a lot.  He had tons of energy and leverage that he dedicated to loving himself, his third Reich and his ideology. His leverage came from convincing many people to love what he loved, the Third Reich, the restoration of the master race to its former glory.  We would call it an addiction, a very, very bad love, but in terms of dedicated leveraged loving work to maintain things, Hitler had lots.  What matters most is what and how you love; rather than whether you love.

Myth 7. Religion, from the Latin for re-binding, re-unites us in love:  What do you get when you cross life with a capacity for language?  A creature like us, looking to leverage its dedicated work by recruiting others to love what we love through the power of persuasive language, often by telling each other that what we love is the one true, original love, and that all we’re asking them to do is restore it to its original priority position.

The history of religion is a history of people campaigning to re-bind us to some imagined One True Original Purpose, some version of God, truth, purity, right-minded community, in other words, to reverse the fall from grace and get back to whatever we claim was our original connectedness.

There was no original love. The universe is roughly 14 billion years old and for the first 10 billion years, nothing loved anything. Love originates with life, roughly four billion years ago. There’s no returning to some former perfect love. Life is not a treasure hunt for one true perfect unchanging focus of our dedicated work.

That’s bound to be disappointing news to anyone who thinks he’s found the treasure, but it’s actually good news overall. It means that we can evolve and learn new loves adaptively, learning new ways to leverage our work by turning it toward new focuses.  Think of how many times your love has changed focus just over your lifetime. Think of how life’s dedicated focuses have changed over the course of evolution.

Indeed, if you want a good definition of free will, you can’t do much better than our evolvable re-orientable love. We can switch our dedicated work from one focus to another, never autonomously, but still, in ways that yield new work in the world.  We can switch our focus from one job to another, from one person to another, from one belief system to another.

All of life is adaptable but human life is extraordinarily so, given the power of language and ideas, the power to persuade ourselves and others to let go of one love for another. It makes our loves less certain than the religious are confident that they should be. It makes it hard to tell what’s a loving groove and what’s an addictive rut.  But it makes nature wondrously incomplete, not just a re-discoverable formula.  Life is a work in progress, a changeable road we build as we travel it.

Myth 8. Love is the opposite of cold economic thinking:  Economics in its pure, theoretical form, is an attempt to understand value dynamics, how preference or love manifests itself in living systems.  Economists talk of demand and supply.  Your demand for something isn’t just a declared preference, but a practical commitment of effort, how much dedicated work you would invest in maintaining something. And supply is how much dedicated work or effort it takes to maintain that something.

Economists talk of goods as fungible meaning that we can often find functional substitutes for the things we depend upon.  If your partner leaves, maybe you can find another partner. If your grocery store disappears you can go to a different one. If your heart fails maybe you can stay alive with an artificial heart or heart transplant.  Economics, in practice is often cold, but at heart it’s about how love really works, where you’re going to dedicate your work and effort to maintain the people and things that maintain your ability to work.

Myth 9. People who promote love are virtuous: More often than not, when people promote love as an abstract universal virtue, they have particular loves in mind. They are appealing to some abstract moral absolute as their way of getting you to love what they love. They call you “uncaring” if you don’t care for them. They declare you a narcissist, not because you only love yourself but because you don’t love them as much as they want you to. They exploit availability bias claiming to love everything by ignoring all the things they don’t love. They may be right, that you’ll do better in the long run by loving whatever they think you should love.  Or they may be wrong. Chances are good though, that in promoting universal love, they’re oblivious to how non-universal their love is. They’re ignoring the amount of effort love takes, how impossible it love everything given our finite energy and time, and how much care it takes to bet well on what to love.  Often when people claim that love is the answer, they’re elevating their own status, their sense of superiority, out of self-love.

Myth 10. Love is the answer:  Love is not the answer, it’s the question:  What and whom to love, given that you can’t love everyone and everything.  Since the beginning life has been dealing with the challenge of figuring out what to join and not join, where to be as one and where not to be. United we stand, but divided we often can get further.  We can’t be we with everything.

To we or not to we: That is the question.  It has been since the origin of life and it is for you to this day and beyond.  So love not more, but more carefully.  Dedicate some effort to placing good bets on what’s worthy of your dedicated effort.