The “master anecdote” for this week’s chapter — “Cooperation vs. Competition” — is a sketch of a family that’s run completely on a competitive basis: the kids have to earn the right to a ride to school, etc.

The point was to establish that some institutions in society — family is the prime example — are overwhelmingly cooperative.  And even institutions that are more competitive — school, work — could use a balance between cooperation and competition in order to run better.

(School is famous, for example, for not training workers very well for the world of work.  There are multiple reasons why this is so, but balance of cooperation and competition is among them.)

The work is going pretty well, although I was no more prepared for this chapter than for 1 or 2.

Once again, the vomitout proved more difficult than I thought.  As I said on Tuesday, some of that came from new sources creeping into the work.  That’s not at all a bad thing, but one of the massive challenges of this project is reining in the scope.  Each of the 7 Problems could be a book in itself (or more! cf. Marx or Freud or Kant) so the challenge is to 1) say something interesting about each one and 2) not get bogged down.  It’s easy in these vomitouts to kind of skate over the material at what we might call the “Wikipedia” level of detail.  Nothing wrong with that except that people can just go look at Wikipedia.

Also, once again, the material was completely relevant to current events.  The talk about muckers this week jibed 100% with new (and newly senseless) mass attacks.  The talk about debt and debt forgiveness jibed 80% with our environment of trade wars and “nationalism”.

So that’s heartening in the sense that the project continues to seem very relevant.  If individuals applying a “self-improvement” narrative to themselves can improve our overall human performance on these seven hard problems, my work will have all been worthwhile.

A couple of comments and “likes” this week, as well, which is very heartening to me.  Please keep commenting!  I’m basically doing all this blogging in order to hear from you.

This week I trusted my “vomitout muscles” a bit more than the previous week.

I was helped by the fact that I had even less of an outline to work with this week.  I kind of had my case study in place — in this chapter it was going to be Gun Violence, a textbook standoff between liberty (right to bear arms) and justice (right to life, so to speak).  But I didn’t have much beyond that incident.

So I kind of sat back and let what came to mind come to mind.

When I was thinking about gun violence, I recalled Stand on Zanzibar, an SF novel I had adored in the late 60’s, and when I dug into it I found a bunch of stuff about overpopulation, where “muckers” (slang in the novel for “those who run amok”) come from, how humanity might bridge the gap between liberty and justice.  Great grist for the mill.

Similarly, thinking about violence led me to the discussion in Debt: The First 5,000 Years about honor and saving face and why it’s important to understanding debt and solvency.  I think the several of the discussions in Debt are going to be indispensable for Ch. 2.

So I let my mind kind of wander a bit, or free-associate perhaps, and great stuff comes up that turns out to be incredibly useful.

Stay tuned, please.

Last week I didn’t 100% complete the vomitout of Chapter 1 (“Individual Wealth vs. Commonwealth”, aka WEALTH).

But vomitouts are peculiar.  Or maybe my vomitouts are peculiar.  I suffer from terminal terseness.  I’ll go to vomitout the big love scene in the novel and I write down “They were happy together for at least a while.”  And that satisfies my writing unconscious.  “He did it!  He finished the big love scene!”

It’s only when I come back to the scene later — as I did this last week in my first encounters with the adequacy of my outline — that I find out I really didn’t even begin to capture the scene.

So the vomitout for WEALTH is still incomplete.  What to do?

I’m going to go on with Chapter 2, “Liberty vs. Justice”.  (I’m not sure I have a one-word rubric for this one).  My reasoning?  I’ve got a head of steam for vomiting out, and what’s holding back the remainder of WEALTH actually depends on doing more background reading.  So I’m going to try to multi-task this week, and do both “Liberty/Justice” vomitout (4 pomos a day) and reading for WEALTH (4 pomos a day).  If I can do that, I can probably make some progress and get my other stuff done as well.

So what’s the reading for WEALTH?  I’m going to try to do two books this week (in addition to Black Reconstruction, of course, on which the clock is still ticking).

Book #1 is Thomas Piketty‘s warhorse, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  The title is an obvious nod to Marx’s Capital but the books couldn’t be more different.  Marx is deeply theoretical; he is intent to teach you a new way of thinking about history.  Piketty is deeply empirical: he is intent on proving, even to the satisfaction of a conservative economist, that the balance of power in the 21st century is shifting over to capital (mainly from labor).

In part you have to chalk up his empiricism and bending-over-backwards to the shame which all leftish thinkers feel over the failure of socialism/communism in the 20th Century.  The transformation of Communism-as-liberation to Communism-as-despotism undid leftish thinkers, and rightfully so.  It makes you think.

Book #2 is David Graeber‘s Debt: The First 5000 Years.

Graeber is also leftish, but he is after something bigger than Piketty: he wants to reimagine economic history as a cycle deeply formed by attitudes toward debt.  I am not at all doing justice to the book with a blurb like that, since Graeber, who is by training an anthropologist, delves into a welter of topics which are fascinating, brilliant, and annoying all at the same time.  I read the book once a couple of years ago and am now returning to read it more carefully for 7Hard.

I’ve been taking pretty careful notes for the first few chapters, but today I was reading “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord” (Chapters 4 and 5) and I got caught up in the narrative.

“The General Strike” substantiates DuBois’ thesis that the decisive thing in the Civil War was the defection of the 3.5 million slaves from the Confederate side to the Union side.  This was an unorchestrated spontaneous defection, a true “general strike”.  At first the Union troops returned the slaves who crossed over to the Union lines to their owners, but it was senseless: why return labor to the enemy in order to allow more white Confederate soldiers to go to the front lines?

“The Coming of the Lord” discusses the transition from mere defection of slaves to active military service by freedmen on the Union side.  There are some horrific and inspiring stories of Black units in combat.  Unbelievable stuff.

DuBois wrote this book in the 1930’s.  It’s worth reading today for the same reason it was worth reading then: it addresses a very relevant and very deep historical wrong: Reconstruction was a noble experiment in real democracy that failed because the majority in America lost its nerve.  Very relevant today.