John Cleese interviews top scholars and professionals in psychology, cosmetic surgery, and evolutionary psychology to study facial expressions (e.g., Paul Ekman), how we communicate with them (e.g, John Gottman), and our evolutionary preferences for symmetric faces (e.g., David Buss).

In the first episode Cleese reviews the literature (including Ekman’s), which I first read in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, that shows how simply smiling can put one in a better mood. This may sound like the clichéd ideas of motivational speakers, but it’s true.

At the end of the third episode, Cleese references quotes George Orwell: “At 50 everyone has the face he deserves.” (article about it.) I wonder if there’s truth to it. It reminds me of a Talking Heads song from their Remain in Light album, Seen & Not Seen.

First 3 episodes are quite good. The last one is weak: very little or no scholarship or science. It’s more like a feature on Entertainment Tonight. The 2nd disc is also disappointing. There’s an interview with David Buss and a neuroscience researcher that are worthwhile.

It’s good, but I got distracted by other things. The basic take-home messages for me are:

1. Accept what satisfaction you can get out of your job, and what you can’t, look for elsewhere.

2. Become an asset to your company by concentrating on making your “boss’s” job easier. Pollan profiles different personality types for managers, which is quite helpful.

3. Always be on the lookout for better opportunities. Pollan addresses common concerns, such as how to handle it if your manager finds out. Pollan turns it into a positive. His suggestion is quite good and can be done with integrity.

Peter McWilliams is certainly a hero of mine for his prolific writing and political activism for civil liberties. This book interested me as both a memoir and a profile of the psychology of cults and indoctrination. The first few chapters satisfied my curiosity on the latter, and subsequent chapters were too heavy on the sordid actions of a cult leader, which I am not too interested.

Interestingly, this organization, The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), has roots in common with Landmark Education Corporation. McWilliams speaks well of Werner Erhard and Stewart Emery, who were both instrumental in Est, Landmarks previous incarnation in the 1970s. Apparently MSIA used the term “enrollment” in the same unconventional way LEC does today.

This book is out of print and is the only one not on-line on McWilliams’s website. Life102.com is an interesting page. It begins:

The book Life 102: What to do When Your Guru Sues You by Peter McWilliams was declared out of print by Prelude Press in 1996. The copyright for the book is now owned by the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA). In August 1999, Peter McWilliams offered to write a letter, on behalf of MSIA, to express Peter’s opinion of LIFE 102 to someone who had put LIFE 102 on their web site without permission from the copyright holder. The following letter represented Peter’s thoughts about LIFE 102 and MSIA at that time.

David Friedman provides a brilliant analysis why government programs fail by using basic and refreshingly lucid economic analysis. His illustration of how special interests tend to win (diffuse costs and concentrated benefits) is fantastic. See sample chapters for a taste of his writing.

I read this because I plan to take an improv comedy class in a few weeks. A few good parts: “The truth is funny. ... Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention. ... And when we’re simply opening ourselves up to each other and being honest, we’re usually the funniest.

“Giving up control may be disastrous for a stand-up comic, but an improviser has to put his trusts into the hands of the ensemble. ... A truly funny scene is not the result of someone trying to steal laughs at the expense of his partner, but of generosity—f trying to make the other person (and his ideas) look as good as possible.

Ch. 2: “The most direct path to disaster in improvisation is trying to make jokes. ... Chances are you’re concentrating on telling a joke, you’re not looking for connections in a scene.” Telling a joke “sucks the energy out of a scene.” “When a player forces a joke, it is usually a comment about the scene. Unfortunately, if you are able to comment on the scene, then you are not really involved in the scene.”

I have, of course, listened to this before. I;m curious as to what, say, AllMusic.com has to say of this album. It’s a bit darker than other Luna albums, or perhaps edgy, mostly because on a few tracks Dean Wareham’s voice is distorted. “Whispers” has what I call the “thrash guitar” common among popular songs from the late-1990s. (Surely there’s a more specific term for this, but the guitars saturate, so to speak.) David Byrne did this in “Gates of Paradise” on 1997’s Feelings, which came out in the same year as Pup Tent. Though this is not my favorite Luna album, it has some great tracks, such as Bobby Peru.

A couple of good reviews:
Wendy McElroy:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcelroy/mcelroy80.html

Chris Sciabarra:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/essays/valliant.htm

My notes:
Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz during WWII. He’s a psychologist, and relates his observations of what it means to be human from the perspective of a concentration camp survivor.

Note: Frankl often uses “which” instead of “that”. Given the circumstances, who cares?
Page numbers from Pocket Books Edition, 1963.

45

“I shall never forget how I was roused one night be the groans of a fellow prisoner, who threw himself about in his sleep, obviously having a horrible nightmare. Since I had always been especially sorry for people who suffered from fearful dreams or delirium, I wanted to wake the poor man. Suddenly I drew back the hand which was read to shake him, frightened at the thing I was about to do. At the moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how horrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him.”

59

“I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”

93 Frankl has a chance to escape the camp, but feels uneasy about it, as he’d be leaving some of the patients he’d been caring for there. So he stayed. Tough decision.

”...in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”

108. Resurrection, film adapted from a Tolstoy novel.

111 “Provisional existence:” not able to aim at the ultimate goal of one’s life. Happened when people did not know when they would get out of the camp. That caused them to loose their inner resolve to resist the camp’s degrading influences. Days seems like weeks to some prisoners, while weeks past very quickly. Hmm.

“The prisoner who has lost faith in the future - his future- was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”

The following, to me, is the core of the book. At the same time, I was reading Creativity, by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi. He talks about the
same thing, and I incorporated these ideas into a fellowship application I was writing at the time.

121. “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” —Nietzsche.

125

“A very strict camp ruling forbade any efforts to save a man who attempted suicide…Therefore, it was all important to prevent these attempts from occurring.

“I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing, not a person. Tis man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child’s affections.

“This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits from him, or to an unfinished work, will never able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

Feynman’s narrative about the Challenger investigation is a great illustration of bureaucracy and politics that goes on in Washington, D.C. A great passage is at the start of the section entitled “Committing Suicide,” a term Feynman used when referring to go to D.C. to be part of the committee:

When I heard the investigation would be in Washington, my immediate reaction was not to do it: I have a principle of not going anywhere near Washington or having anything to do with government, so my immediate reaction was—how am I gonna get out of this?...

My last chance was to convince my wife, “Look,” I said. Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else.”

“No, said Gweneth. “If you don’t do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people - all in a group, going around from place to place together - while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won’t be anything, but if there is, you’ll find it.” She said, “There isn’t anyway one else who do that like you can.”

Relevant reviews:
1. Tibor Machan: Don’t Attack Choice!
2. Will Wilkinson: Schwartz on Freedom: Vacuity or Stirnerism?
3. Virginia Postrel: Consumer Vertigo:A new wave of social critics claim that freedom’s just another word for way too much to choose. Here’s why they’re wrong.