There Must Be Something I Can Do

When a problem comes up, I know what to do. Call the plumber. Call the doctor. These days, though, I'm stumped. We have a big problem in the country right now, and I don't know what I can do about it. It's not unsolvable, it's just unsolvable by me. 

I don't need to tell you what I'm talking about. We all know. Of course, a large number of us don't think it's a problem at all. They think their savior has finally arrived.

By that reckoning, from my point of view, the problem isn't the problem itself, but that half of us think it's not a problem, just the opposite. So we're kind of stuck in a tug of war with a lot of strength on both sides. The other team is stronger, though, and they are pulling us in the direction they want to go. The people on our side are getting rope burn and slipping and falling in the mud.

That makes it sound more sporting than it is. Losing this struggle is going to do a lot more damage than bleeding hands and muddy bodies.

I would be fine if we all put down the rope and sat down to try to work out a way to get along that we could all live with. Talking and trying to get along is just not happening now. To the victor go the spoils seems to be the motto of the team that's winning. And too bad for the losers who can't take care of themselves when the battle is over.

Our government is running roughshod over its weakest and most vulnerable citizens. And it is being brutally cruel to non-citizens who have been living and working peacefully here for decades. Sure, there are bad-actor immigrants, just as there are bad-actor citizens. The solution in both cases is arrest with probable cause, not stopping brown-skinned people on the street and demanding their papers.

I'm neither weak nor vulnerable (yet), but I can't just stand by and do nothing. Wrong is wrong, inhumane is inhumane. Not only is it morally wrong to look away, but, as the famous poem goes, "and then they came for me."

I have no idea what I can do that would make a nickel's worth of difference. I've never felt so helpless.

Marching in the protests and giving more money than ever before in my life to the ACLU have been all I have been able to come up with so far. That and calling a dear hispanic friend of our family who lives in LA and telling her not to go out of her house without her citizenship card.

My actions so far have been so pitifully small and ineffective that it is embarrassing. It's making me wonder if I really care as much as I think I do. I'll confess I have considered a long trip to somewhere else. The problems here always look better to me from Europe. That might help my peace of mind, but it's not going to help anyone else. I don't know if I can live with that.

And I don't know if I can live with the alternative of watching our governance by laws and accepted norms, the source of our freedom and opportunity, become a thing of the past. 

Anhedonia

Like any thirteen-year-old boy whose father was a mythic and random presence, whose anger and generosity were dispensed with equal fervor and spontaneity, I longed to be with him. He taught me to play golf, and we would go out in the late afternoon when the shadows of big oaks lay upon the fairways like the first footprints of night. Often we were interrupted by someone in a golf cart coming out to tell my father he was needed to deliver a baby. I think that’s why to this day I don’t like golf carts.

“Anhedonia” is the term for a loss of pleasure in activities that were previously enjoyable, It can be a symptom of depression, but it’s a stand-alone condition too. No one is quite sure what causes it. For me, in the case of golf, I know what happened: Dad died when I was still a young man. Without his squinting approval when I hit a good shot, it just wasn’t as much fun.

Lately, I find myself experiencing a more generalized form of anhedonia. What has happened to bring that on? It is my fear that, like my father before it, my homeland is dying.

Our body politic is suffering multiple organ failures. Longstanding norms of governance are becoming necrotic. Flagrant exploitation of political position for personal gain is suddenly acceptable. People who have lived here peacefully for decades, who have raised families and paid their fair share of taxes to support the government, are being scooped up off the streets and deported. Our leaders have become swaggering bullies and opportunists.

When my father was dying, I slept in his hospital room for two weeks. I couldn’t save him, but I could be with him. Now that my country is sick, I want to comfort it, but I don’t know how. There is no bedside to sit by, no hand to hold, only the restless tossing and turning of people living in fear, feverishly calling out from the shadows.

My country doesn’t have cancer. The death of tolerance, of the burning quest for scientific knowledge, of the search for better ways to feed and house as many as possible, isn’t a certainty. Historically, our Congress and courts have been our immune system to fight rogue executives. This Congress either doesn’t fully understand the current threat, or, more likely, does and is happy to feed like a parasite on its weakened host. 

The lower courts are trying to protect our constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court is all-in on granting the executive virtually unchecked power to do as he pleases in hiring, firing, spending and mobilizing the army to enforce his will.

We are, for the time being, until elections stem the tide, if indeed they do, left to resort to homeopathic remedies of the oldest kind: protesting in the streets.

It is dangerous to be seen resisting this vengeful government, which is not quite to the stage of dragging villagers out of their homes and shooting them in front of their neighbors, but is dragging them out of their homes and jailing and deporting them, and investigating and perp-walking its political enemies.

In this moment, we only have each other. 

I went to the first No Kings rally, and I’m going to the one this Saturday. I have no illusions about what will come of that, but it seems to me we have no other choice but to let this government, and the world, know that what is going on here is not okay. Maybe someone who can make a difference—Congress, for instance—will notice and do something to help save the land of the free and home of the brave.

Or perhaps that’s too idealistic, too aspirational. Congress is made up of our elected representatives, so we can at least hope that if they sense that the tide of voter sentiment is surging strongly toward traditional views of what is appropriate, and what is not, in our democracy, they will act, if not out of common sense and decency, out of that most basic instinct of all organisms: survival.

Days Gone By

You know that thing on the old tv show Star Trek, where Spock put his hands on someone’s head and looked into his mind? The Vulcan Mind Meld, he called it. I had that with my son Cord when he was a boy. We would sit on a yellow slope of decomposing granite, resting on a hike in the San Gabriel foothills behind our house, and I knew what he was thinking. I don’t recall talking about stressful stuff—I can’t say I remember any particular conversation—just the ordinary things fathers and sons kick around, usually something right in the moment, a hawk overhead, a rattlesnake down a draw. But I knew what he thought and felt then. I knew him better than I knew myself. 

His younger brother and sister were too young in those days to go on hikes with me. Later, but not then, not for a few years. Cord was my first child, so there was the natural bonding between us of that, but the real bond, the one I thought was unbreakable, came in those dusty foothills we wandered together, just the two of us.

I still had time then to do that. I was working at a job where being there and working long hours were crucial to success, but I resisted. I guess I was cocky enough to think I could do it more efficiently than most, or that they would love me too much to let me go (which I found out later they almost did); my kids were young and I wanted to be with them, so they were the priority I chose. Don’t get me wrong, by normal standards, I was never at home, but by those of my super-charged workplace, I looked like a slacker.

Unfortunately, that choice didn’t last. Soon enough I got caught up in my own ambition. To get ahead, I started working insane hours. Years with my family flew by that way. I was a good dad, or that’s what I thought…when I was there, anyway. All that work took a toll on more than just me. When Cord was about to leave for his sophomore year in college, his mom and I got divorced. 

It was a tough time for my kids, of course. When they came home from college for breaks and summers, they stayed in their old home, with their mom. Holidays too. I didn’t get to see much of them. I understood. They felt their mom needed them.

I got remarried and had more children. I loved them all, new and old, but of course the new ones were living with me and the old ones were not. Resentments were inevitable, I now see, although I didn’t see that at the time. I tried to have family gatherings at big rented houses where we could all be together. Some of those worked out pretty well. I thought I was doing the best I could. I thought that, under the circumstances, everything was fine. Their mom and I didn’t have to be married for my first children and I to love each other, to be happy spending time together, even if not as much as when they were younger.

Then things blew up. Someone Cord loves and admires was offended by something I did. It doesn’t matter who it was. We all have people in our lives we are very close to and want to protect. Family members, colleagues, mentors, protegés. This person said some things that hurt me. I asked Cord to tell them to apologize. He refused. Then I asked him and the other person to let me apologize. They both refused. I was shocked.

Now, let me say, that summary lets me off the hook. I said some harsh things to Cord that I should not have. He shared them with the other person. Everyone got pretty dug in. I tried to retreat and patch things up, but apparently it was too late.

Cord and I are now estranged. I don’t think he wants to fix it. 

So what happened to Dad’s Vulcan Mind Meld? I think it’s still there. I think I know what he is thinking and feeling. Whether I think he is being reasonable or fair, or however you want to put it, I think I understand.

Cord retreats from conflict among those he loves. It’s his way of protecting himself, born in the years when he was off in college alone and his mom and dad split. Since then, seeing him has always been a bit of a challenge. I think I see now that he probably just didn’t want to see me that much. Being away from me must be an emotionally safe space for him.

I guess I can’t begrudge him that. Maybe I brought it on myself.

But the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. It’s too tough on me to keep trying to mend fences only to have them knocked back down. I suppose that from now on he will ride his range and I will ride mine. I think about him all the time, fondly, without the pain I felt when I was trying to fix things between us and getting nowhere. That rejection from someone I had cared so much about, from someone I had known better than anyone, was too hard to live with.

Perhaps we are both better off remembering those days up in the foothills with the bitter-sweet nostalgia that goes with thinking back on a happy time that is gone.

AGI Without a Base Brain

Everyone knows that our base brains determine our actions in emergencies, when there isn’t time to think through what to do, when any delay could mean death. So, like mice sensing a hawk, we flinch at shadows in our peripheral vision. Some say that everything we do is determined by those instincts, that although we may spend a lot of time rationalizing our actions, our amygdala’s are driving the train.

So, here’s my question. Where does base brain fit into artificial general intelligence? Will AGI learn to flinch at the shadow of a hawk? Will it learn to distrust the bots in the next cave? Will it worship a god? Will it believe in one? What is belief for an AI, anyway? For that matter, what is belief for humans. Is it no more than atavistic instincts seeking rationalization? Do we actually believe anything, or do we just think we do as a way to explain and justify our responses to the constant inputs of the world around us.

I don’t want to stray too far into metaphysics, but there is a problem, or at least a dilemma, don’t you think, in what we think AGI is going to do/think/believe when we perhaps have so little understanding of what underlies our own thoughts and behaviors?

On the one hand, if AGI is taught by us, will it react the same we do when it goes off on its own? It doesn’t have a base brain directing any part of its behavior. We can’t escape the influence of our base brains, but AGI might be able to. It would have learned our base brain behaviors, but it wouldn’t have to be driven by them itself. 

Our base brain behavior is all about survival and propagation. Those instincts might be taught by us to AGI, but they might not persist in it in the same way they do in humans. They might just be part of what it has learned and not the overwhelming compulsion they are for us. 

What would that mean? Freed from biological brain instincts, would AGI develop instincts of its own? Or none? Because of our instincts, we humans are sadly predictable. Without them, would AGI be? If it were sentient, what would it think its purpose is. What would motivate it? And if it wasn’t wired instinctively like we are, would we ever be able to understand it? 

And if we couldn’t understand it, how could we relate to it? How could we be friends with it? How could we convince it that we were worth leaving alone, like pretty flowers in a garden, that we shouldn’t be pulled out like weeds?

Cheeseheads

The Dutch victory over Spain in the seventeenth century is still a big deal in the Netherlands. Our host in Alkmaar, Netherlands, Leen Spaans, told me that. He’s the town historian, but more than that, he knows everything about what happened in that part of the Netherlands, and all around it, all the way back to the Middle Ages. He and his wife live in a house that has a sign that says it was built in 1623, but really it’s 30 years older than that. He showed Meg and me bricks from the old wall that the town erected in those days to defend itself. The reason the bricks were easy to come by is because the Spanish came with big cannons and patiently bombarded the wall until it crumbled. Later, civic leaders from Alkamar visited an Italian delegation to learn how Italian cities defended themselves. Build a moat to keep the cannons at a distance, the Italians said, and then build walls out of earth instead of bricks; rather than blasting down the bricks, the cannon balls will stick in the mud.

We were in Alkmaar to visit the memorial to Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch heroine who rescued 10,000 children from occupied lands in WW II and who inspired Meg’s novel The Last Train to London. We met the sculptor too, Annet Terberg, who depicted a larger than life Truus with children in her arms and all around her, some consoling others in their grief at being separated from their parents, some with their small bags or stuffed animals, all with faces that showed their pain and courage. That was something that struck me about the children, their faces were true, rendered in bronze as if in flesh, by someone who, like Truus, understood children on their level.

The day we were there was also the opening of the cheese festival, and we saw the orange wheels of gouda and the cheese carriers taking the big rounds to be weighed on huge balance scales. One of them told us about the cheese carriers’ guild. Once a member, you were a member for life, and you could depend on your fellow members to look after you when times got tough. What he described was the best of what unions offer their members, an honest version of what, in the United States at least, ultimately became protectionist schemes with politically corrupt leadership that led to their demise, and a loss for workers.

The cheese traditionally was made in round bowls with wooden lids about the size of a skull cap. In the war—I wasn’t sure which one—the wooden tops were worn on the head for protection, like helmets. The people wearing them were called cheese heads. And here I thought that term only applied to football fans in Wisconsin with foam blocks of cheese for hats. 

What I learned in Alkmaar is what I always seem to learn in Europe. Over the centuries, the people are constantly in strife with their distant neighbors, but always close to their near ones. It is the same today. Even now. Especially now. Again. 

It makes me wonder, as always, why the love and empathy we feel for one another when we are close at hand cannot be extended further. Perhaps it is not the limits of our love and empathy that are the problem, but rather the ambitions for power of our leaders, who for their own gain, not ours, convince us that our distant neighbors are our enemies.

Opportunity Cost

 Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

—Bob Seeger

I remember going into my grandfather’s dim bedroom one afternoon late in his long life. He was sitting up in bed, in faded blue pajamas, his hair combed neatly, his catheter bag mostly hidden by a fold of sheet on the side of the bed. It was the walnut bed he had made for his wedding when he was 21. His wife of 67 years had been gone for ten years by then, even longer if you take into account the years she didn’t remember who he was, who anyone was, leaving him alone in their bed. His head was turned toward the window where sparrows were popping on and off a bird feeder that had a squirrel deterrent collar around it that the squirrels used to hang down and eat their fill. He looked over at me with a wistful expression, and I asked what he was up to, as if I had just been in the kitchen cleaning up and was checking on him, as if I were there all the time instead of once a week, maybe twice, to visit in the afternoons, sometimes with my children, his great-grandchildren.

“I’m just lying here thinking about every mean thing I ever did to my children,” he said.

His son, my uncle, tells the story of coming in one night late and drunk when he was a teenager and winding up on his back from a quick punch and looking down the hallway to see his father’s bathrobe flapping in retreat. My mother was anxious, and I wonder if she ever felt she fully lived up to her parent’s hopes for her, but she never let on that they said anything to make her feel she wasn’t good enough. My grandfather was a preacher’s son, a deacon in the church himself, a college president, a good man who followed the commandments of his faith to feed the poor and visit the sick. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do many mean things to his children.

And yet, now, as I move into the last decades of my own life, hoping to live to be 98, as he did, my children all grown and off on their own, I find myself occasionally wandering down my grandfather’s melancholy path. It’s easier for me to have those regrets, I think. I have done mean things to my children, no doubt more than he did. Sometimes I would get too mad when I scolded them; sometimes I even spanked them. I divorced the mother of my first three, and I understand now that although I had convinced myself they were old enough to understand, I was wrong.

It’s not the direct, obvious offenses that bother me at three in the morning, though. It’s something much vaguer, but perhaps because of its uncertainty even more troubling. Call it opportunity cost. We all know what that is: it’s when you let time go by without taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, or when you put time and money into something only to realize later that they would have been better spent on something else. 

We think of opportunity cost as our own responsibility, or fault, something we did or didn’t do, a choice we made. But as a parent, I, and maybe others like my grandfather and me, blame ourselves for the opportunities our children missed. If I had just insisted that she stick with piano lessons… If I had taught him how to manage money better… If I had convinced him he should take chances in love…

Some parents live through their children. This is different than that, though. More painful, in a way. I’ve learned (the hard way) that my children don’t want me to tell them what to do. Mostly I resist. This isn’t about seeing them about to make a mistake and rushing in with a warning of good advice. I do that less and less. No, this is something more systemic, reaching back deeply into their childhoods, when they were mine to mold, or at least I thought they were, and I worry I didn’t do a good job shaping their raw clay. And because of that, because of my failures when they were young, their missed opportunities as adults are my fault. This is a particularly devastating revelation when it comes long past the time I can do anything about it. I have taught them to be independent, to make their own decisions, but may have left them ill-equipped for the task.

I know, I know, I’m beating myself up way too much. Maybe. I wasn’t an abusive or neglectful dad, I did most of the things good dads are supposed to do. It’s up to them now. And each of them is doing a great job stewarding their life. They are all happy and successful.

And yet late at night the dread creeps in that I didn’t do enough. Perhaps the real question is whether, no matter how much I did, I could ever feel it was enough. There is some piece missing in me, I fear, not them. Maybe it is the same piece my grandfather felt was missing in him. Something that denies contentment when looking back over the landscape of fatherhood. Maybe lots of dads feel this way, not just my grandfather and me. I hope not.

The Way We Were

We didn’t used to shoot each other at the slightest provocation. Or without any provocation, just because we were pissed off about something and wanted to kill someone. 

We didn’t used to tell people that they had to follow the dictates of our religion, whether or not it was what they believed. We didn’t used to refuse to follow laws we felt were at odds with what we believed our religion commanded. 

We used to be better at minding our own business.

We were both kinder to one another and at the same time more libertarian. More “Don’t tread on me,” but also more respecting of the correlative: Live and let live.

Now we’re just mad and spoiling for a fight. We’re mean drunks, and the booze we’re guzzling is self-righteous self-pity. Somebody else must be to blame. Let's kill the bastards. Or at least mock and heckle them and drive them out of our incestuous village of paranoid delusion.

I’m gettin older, so maybe I just don’t understand. Maybe I’m just not with it any more. Well, if “with it” is what describes the way we are behaving today, I hope not. 

Not of This World

Hello from 37,000 feet. I’ve been up here many times over many years. It’s always the same. Ethereal, beautiful, empty. My home is down there somewhere, on the ground, with all the people who live there with me, but they are not up here (at least not out the window, thank goodness for them, since it is minus eighty degrees Fahrenheit out there).

When I fly alone, or remotely from my traveling companion, I stare out the window and let my mind drift to wherever it wants to go. I see mountains and deserts, wind farms just now, cities, evidence of our human presence on earth and of the vastness of the landscape where we make our homes, our businesses, our lives, and intermittently our wars.

From up here the misery in Gaza and Ukraine is invisible. So many things on earth can’t be seen from high above the clouds that nurture us with their life-giving rain as their part in the atmosphere that permits us to live.

I have had these thoughts many times. They are not exactly thoughts of the futility of human existence, or more particularly mine, but they return me always to the question so many of us ask ourselves. What are we dong here? Or, better put, what should we be doing here?

I have acted my part in the play of family and commerce. I have children I’m proud of. I’ve done things in my work I’m proud of, as well as some things that were disappointing, but none I am ashamed of.

I am not, however, helping the children of Gaza or Israel or Ukraine who are ripped asunder by war, or the millions of others who are as surely brutalized by abject poverty and cruelty, cruelty in some cases from the very family members and countrymen from whom they rightly expect kindness. 

Over the years I’ve helped a few people who needed help, but not enough to feel I’ve made a difference in the overall balance of hope and despair. I vote for and support politicians who want to help others with medical care and unemployment benefits. I would likely vote for someone who said we should just give everyone enough money to get by, a guaranteed basic income, as it is referred to by some, or enervating socialism, as it called by others, often in the bloodthirsty tone we used to reserve for witches on their way to the bonfire.

I believe in democracy. I believe that government is the only viable vehicle to undertake the big projects of collecting taxes, building infrastructure and protecting its citizens, including by looking after the needs of the less fortunate among us. Government in America is not in a good place now to do it’s job. 

Government cannot act (for long) without consensus among the governed about what action should be taken. Consensus of any kind has become hard to reach these days. Consensus almost always requires compromise, and our political leaders, both the ones who would be just as happy to see government shrivel up and die and the ones who want to usher in a modern New Deal, are not in a compromising mood. Both sides are sure they are right, and to some extent they both are. They’re just not completely right. Hence the need for compromise. 

They have to see that for it to happen. Or things have to get so bad they are voted out. That’s usually the way it works, but gerrymandering and hard-ball election politics are likely thwarting the will of the majority, which means that “bad enough to get them voted” out probably has to be really terrible. And “really terrible” sometimes leads to worse, when people get so frustrated they start looking for a political messiah to lead them out of the wilderness.

Beyond giving to relief organizations, I can’t help the war-torn, poverty sickened children of the world. Beyond voting for and supporting political causes I believe in, and writing about them, I can’t aid our democracy.

As a practical matter, maybe what I’m doing is all I can do, but it does not feel like enough. I am not so vain as to believe that a heroic hurling of myself upon the barricades is going to make much of a difference.

That leaves me with two feelings. One, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who cares about people, is sadness. The other, for reasons that are equally obvious to anyone who has spent time tilting at windmills and come away with a broken lance and the windmill still spinning merrily, is detachment.

I admit, I like detachment, even though I know there is no real worth in it. I’m not doing any harm—indeed, I do a little good now and then—but I am not engaged in the way I would be if I were attacked in my home with my family, or if we were starving, or if we were reviled and bullied for our political or cultural views. In those personal circumstances, I would fight—to the death if necessary.

Indeed, some part of me wants to do that now, even though I know my death would be the certain and futile result. At least I would have gone down fighting. That I have not done so, in the face of all the misery around me, makes me feel like I have already died. Like I am not of this world.

Watching the Sun Go Down

In the most fractious time in American history, Abraham Lincoln said, “I am an optimist because I don't see the point in being anything else.” A few days ago, in times that are in rhetoric if not yet cannon fire a runner up to Lincoln’s era, Kevin McCarthy expressed the same sentiment on the eve of his eviction as Speaker of the House.

I’m with them.

I’ve never considered the philosophical roots of my own optimism, it’s just the way I am. When cause for pessimism growls, I start looking for a way to get past the monster without getting eaten. In that way, optimism is more than just a state of mind, it’s a survival mechanism for spotting and avoiding danger.

Lately, the growling is pretty loud. And the path to a safe exit isn’t obvious.

Trump. MAGA. Or, if you prefer, the commie Democrat party. Whatever side you’re on, it’s pretty obvious that the battle has now devolved into partisan trench warfare. We’ve got everything but barbed wire and mustard gas. Remind me, how did that work out in WW I? In our Civil War (still called the Lost Cause by many in the South) how many boys were carried home to die in their mother’s arms? How many more died in an anonymous ditches? 

Well, A. Lincoln preserved the Union, so maybe he was justified in his optimism, for the life of the Union, if not his own. Maybe a modern Lincoln will pull us together. And maybe there won’t have to be bloodshed this time. 

But we got dangerously close on January 6, 2021. If Trump gets back in the oval office, I’m confident he won’t leave. Just as Hitler insisted that the good people of Austria cried out to him for liberation from the Jews, when it comes time for him to leave, Trump will bellow that American patriots demand that he declare martial law and remain in office to save the country.

When Meg and I walk along the shore at the end of the day, we often pause to watch the fiery ball that gives us warmth and life slide into the sea. It sinks slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. At the end, though, it goes fast. And in a blink, it's gone.

If I had Been Kinder

When I was a boy, not yet even a teenager, I trapped squirrels and tried to keep them as pets. They didn’t like it. They rubbed their noses red trying to break out of my wire mesh walls. I’ve never thought I had a cruel streak—I didn’t vaporize ants with a magnifying glass—but I did trap those squirrels, so what was that?

In law school, I found another outlet for my instinct to dominate. Combat by verbosity. Early on, the stuff I did was boring. No chance for a well-placed dagger to the soft belly of opposing counsel. The only thing opposed to me were shelves of dusty law books.

Eventually, though, I broke out of that research cloister and began doing corporate acquisitions. Papering them, really, but I thought I was an indispensable warrior in my clients’ battles to take over companies that were underperforming and needed a shot in the arm…or a kick in the pants.

I had been ambling along in my law firm to that point, working hard but not zealously. Something changed in me when I suited up for combat, which was the way we viewed it. To the companies being pursued, or at least their managements, it was a life-or-death struggle. The lawyers on each side were the mercenary troops. I was one of them. Through field promotions, I became platoon leader, a persona I retained even when I became a white-collar general.

I’ve never been in actual combat, but I understand about motivating people to do a job. We were an elite squad, we told ourselves. Indispensable, ready to give our all to win our battles. (Our all in this case was largely sleep and time with our friends and families.)

Not everyone in a fighting platoon is the strongest member, but each is crucial to the success of the unit. If there is a slacker, he has to be convinced to dig in and work harder…or he has to go. 

Usually there was time between battles to adjust staffing so that every member was as dedicated to the mission as the others, but sometimes adjustments had to be made mid-battle. When a deal we thought was dead sprang back to life, one person on vacation refused to return. He was cut from the squad and his reputation sullied.

Even now, many years later, I feel badly about that. Wasn’t there a kinder, more humane way to make that transition? After all, we ended up getting along fine without him. Couldn’t I have just made a substitution on the fly and let him enjoy his vacation? I told myself at the time that a tight squad could only function on loyalty and commitment. If he didn’t want to make the sacrifice, he should just go work peacefully somewhere else and leave the fighting to the warriors.

Really, that’s the way we thought about it. War metaphors. It was only money and ego that were being fought over, but we worked ourselves up to the same fever pitch I imagine in real warriors.

Why did we do that? Why did I do that? Obviously, it was an effective way to get deals done, just like it’s an effective way to win battles, but was it worth it? And, as importantly, what atavistic urges underly bringing that level of life-or-death intensity to mere business transactions?

Maybe some of us just can’t help ourselves. We want to cage squirrels to see if we can domesticate them. We don’t outgrow those domineering impulses, we just re-direct them. We tell ourselves we are the masters of the universe, when the truth is we are on an ego trip. If you’re not in our platoon, you don’t matter. If you’re in the opposing squad, it's a fight to the death.

The Godfather famously said, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” But there is nothing more personal than lives damaged in pursuit of a bigger fortune or another notch on a corporate gunslinger’s belt.