Two heads better than two glass houses

One of the best feelings I know is being able to trust someone and to be trusted in return. First, it means one doesn’t have to think about how to behave. It also provides a sense of inner stability that can’t easily be found outside of a trusting relationship. Human trust is an inner contract with more promise than a loan from a bank, the praise of an institutional authority or than a foolproof plan.

The best thing about trust, however, is that it is always demanding new things. It won’t let interpersonal connection go stale. It won’t let one idolize the comfort of human relationship.

This applies on an international level as well as interpersonal. I believe Europe and the U.S. have come to trust in an outdated, comfortably human relationship with each other.

Europe is no longer as fractured as it was following World War II. Nor is the United States of America the shallow, judgmental country it has been seen as by its critics. Europe has adopted a common currency, and the US people undergone such abuse by their government that where used to be simple pleasures are now the voices of Muslims whom our justice system imprisoned and tortured.

Admittedly, it is presumptuous to talk about “the U.S” and “Europe” as if they could each be understood in simple terms. And I haven’t even mentioned Canada or Mexico or addressed the differences between Eastern and Western Europe.

Yet no matter how complex or vaguely defined each is, the United States of America and Europe have been world powers for the last several centuries. They have come to trust in their roles of power, but both are beginning to experience a change in the shape of these roles.

Psychological thinker Abraham Maslow theorized that human beings operate according to a pyramid of needs that must be fulfilled before an individual may grow into the ideal version of him/herself. When a need – whether physiological, safety, self-esteem, community or self-actualization-based - is fulfilled, the individual changes their goals to adjust to a new level of potential for growth.

As a pair Europe and the US have fulfilled their need for political empowerment, probably closest to Maslow’s definition of the need for esteem. They have established themselves as intellectual and material leaders in the world. Countries like Zimbabwe and Uganda in Africa and Burma in Asia are going through the type of political turmoil that marked Europe and the US’ rise to their current leadership positions. These areas of the world are forming their civic identity. The US and Europe are not perfect, but functional civically.

But the two regions are moving out of their established roles. Each is experiencing discomfort with its current image in the world.

Europe has established itself as an intellectually vibrant community, but with all of the mistakes the US has made in recent years, America has more to think about.

The United States prides itself in its strength of character. Yet it has tarnished its dearly-held independence by entangling itself in Iraq’s political system. The U.S. people (yes, me included; I enjoy a good tv show and know the word “Brangelina”) have abandoned justice by letting the media entertain us away from truth and into “truthiness.”

Europe is strong internally. It has focused on building up interconnecting services and coalitions in order to create unity, and could teach the US about doing the work that sits behind cultural values honestly held.

But Europe could also do more for itself if it allowed itself the moral flexibility that Americans allow themselves. While this flexibility has caused the U.S. to become dependant on foreign oil and violently defensive, it has also made for perhaps the most ethnically and socially diverse country in the world.

The U.S. and Europe no longer need to be in a combative relationship with each other to be the world power. Other areas of the world are stretching toward new forms of self-governance.

Trust is wonderful because it presents the sacrifice of self-knowledge in order to broaden one's life and perspective. May America and Europe work together to enrich and expand each other’s traditions and continue their service to those who need it.

Let's ditch debt and failure - can't be that hard, right?

Popularity. Wealth. Inclusion. Adoration. Leadership. Respect. Atractiveness, Confidence.

We fight to win these things into our lives from day to day. One can argue the virtue or absence of virtue of pursuing any of them, but they are our – specifically Americans’ – favorite things. The media, through a relentless feed of ideas about how food, money, social success and exterior beauty are better companions than we are to ourselves, glues our gaze to these objectives.

Our gaze and our dollars, and hey, we enjoy it. It feels good to be a perpetual customer, always courted by advertisers. There is always someone waiting to fill an empty moment with words about how your life could improve by buying, or empty space with the objects themselves to buy. Life is a service waiting to be bought.

But it is also a problem. A recent article in the NY Times reported that Americans are saving 7.6 percent less money annually than they did in 1968, and have gained 22 percent more debt than they had in the year 2000.


I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with having a full material life. If buying makes you happy, then go and buy! Yet, not the same things all of the time, please. Americans are genius shoppers when they have their eyes open to their own needs.

Consider this quote from the blog of the CEO of United Capital Investment Advisors, Inc., which manages over $8 billion in client assets:

Investment decisions should reflect the assumption that extraordinary and unpredictable events are not the norm, and can create new investment opportunities. Without a doubt, there are times when market behavior is painful – but investors who avoid emotional responses and look at events from a historical perspective will often find that their patience is rewarded.

In my life, I want more than the choice of what to buy. I want the choice whether to buy, and when to buy. I want the numbers on my bills to reflect myself, my decisions, me in purposeful relation to objects. I want that independent orientation to the world called an ethical stance.

How do I buy that?

At the core of the American mind, I believe, there is a deep desire to escape to the past. We want to return to the freedom of behavior that came from our original loyalty to ethical intelligence. The intelligence that drove the penning of the Declaration of Independence, that has enabled us to expand minority rights over and over again, that brought us through the sweat-beaded desperation of the Cold War.

We want the past back because we’ve fallen apart, as is our inclination as a diverse and 300 million-person nation. Our past has shown that there are other ways to improve our lives than to buy more things, become more popular or win personal glory.

Yet our present attitude reveals none of that past teaching. Our reasoning about self-improvement may as well have been taken from Baldesar Castiglione’s medieval dialogue on ethics, How to Achieve True Greatness, in which a character comments:

‘As for me, I have very seldom known men who are any good at anything who do not praise themselves. It seems to me that it is only right to allow them to do so, since, when a man who knows he is of some worth sees what he is doing is being ignored, he grows angry at the way his qualities are hidden from sight and is forced to reveal them in some way lest he be cheated of the honour which is the rightful reward for virtuous endeavour.”

We want to have a fair market in terms of character. We deserve credit. We have been good; the government has been bad. If a bad government refuses to reward good people, what are the people to do?

Buy, on imaginary credit. But this isn’t working for the average American household, which is in $8,565 of debt, according to a blog on ZDNet.com. It doesn’t make sense to praise ourselves now. There is little chance of becoming an ethical hero to yourself while there is a tower of debt threatening to crash on your head.

Americans, by definition, have a choice in how to be and what to be. In denying our own failures, we lose and have lost the ability to choose a path of success. We are in debt to our authentically chosen being.

A friend said to me recently while lifting weights, “You know that feeling when you set a goal, and then you can’t do it? I hate that feeling more than anything else in the world.” That feeling is what debtors can use to become debt-free. “Yeah,” I responded to my friend’s comment. At a previous point in my life, I would have said back “Well, every failure leads to a new kind of success,” or “You’re the only one judging yourself.” I don’t believe those things anymore.

I propose a new approach. We need to decide from our failures how we have been unfaithful to ourselves, and stop being that way. If we include our government in that self, we have more hope of returning to government that seems fair.

Instead, I choose to let go of thinking about my failures. They are my failures. I’m not going to fix them, because they are over.

Instead, I am going to pay off the debt I owe to my interior life – to my ethical intelligence – by abandoning the idea that I have to improve upon anything. My life is about more than buying an identity. It’s about responding to the world with a moral flexibility that allows for improvement in undetermined directions.

Song of my angst - Self defeat in the US

To me, the most fascinating aspect of the mind’s functioning is its ability to give shape to a person’s life. A mind has many choices in how to entertain itself when not being educated. To a certain extent, living a life shapes one’s mind. Yet the mind catches the pieces that fall in between these impressions, creating ideals and compelling a human life toward realizing them.

How does it achieve this? I am amazed at its ability to perceive events, and run the body through cycles of ingestion, digestion and disposal, all while gradually drawing an existence into line with the strength of its will. The mind knows where it wants to go, and pulls that which isn’t headed there into its orbit.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher who asserted that every detail of one’s life derives from human choice, would be irked were he alive and present to read my above statements; I have implied that humanity is a puppet living in the shadow of an autocratic life-deciding entity.

I wouldn’t blame him for rolling his eyes, nor even someone who hadn’t devised a philosophy on the dominance of human choice in all situations; life would not be very rewarding if it were true that an alien awareness controls it from beginning to end.

But total choice comes with what another prominent existential thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, called angst. Experience grows more complex as it gathers, and one’s chances of making a fatally wrong decision only grow with that complexity. In a model of total responsibility, there are two forces: yourself, and your attempt to perpetuate that self by making super-intelligent decisions every moment.

Perhaps in the middle of the 20th century, an existentialist could overcome cognitive overload by retreating to an extended, intensely moody walk. Upon returning home, he/she could then continue on a satisfying decision-making path. Yet with the
surplus of information that now defines daily experience, a long walk won’t suffice. Choice is in danger of drowning in an excess of options.

Humankind is born condemned to be free, Sartre said, but maybe the truest damnation has only come about recently: to become free of freedom in a process of cultural, sensory and perceptual globalization.

Up until now, the United States’ values of wealth and freedom – embodied in entrepreneurial drive and liberty of expression – have been rocks upon which millions of citizens have founded their lives. Now, the Patriot Act has undermined Americans’ security in expressing their often-passionate and diverse opinions. Additionally, confidence in the US economy has reached its lowest point in two decades, and predictions are bleak.

We may now be experiencing a reprisal of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” except this time rather than Biff failing to carry on his father’s business, Americans have failed to sell their way of life to the world. Existential dread has shifted its gaze from material abandonment to cognitive incapacitation. In striving to save the entire outside world, the American will has turned from choice and toward compulsion.

I would like to believe that I alone determine the shape of my life – or as Sartre might put it, that it is my responsibility to create my existence. Yet I wouldn’t know where to begin were that level of choice available to me. I find myself stuck between a stifling and unsatisfying relationship to freedom.

Simone DeBeauvoir wrote inThe Ethics of Ambiguity that “the means [of living] determines both the definition and fulfillment.” Life seems to me more complex than are my own means. I am willing to make a place in my mind for a foreign consciousness to help me chart a way through my American existence.

When belief quakes

Hearing about the recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China from my stable home in New England has thrown my imagination into hyperactivity.

I see only still pictures and words about these events, but they come to movement and life inside my mind. I look for parallels to them in my experience, but find consistent alienation from them. Thinking about my in-tact foundations and these countries’ damaged ones has brought me to thinking about why each is as it is.

I see no external reason for China and Burma’s misfortunes, nor for my ongoing physical security. The two settings - East Asia and the United States - are as distinct in current situation as the cultures that they house; in Asia, a road to recovery is straining to get underfoot, while summer is approaching New England in a slumping economy but generally stable period.

This distinction is not so clear in my mind.

In the midst of a young adulthood in which the church I grew up in has been shown to be rife with sexual misconduct, and my home-country’s government has initiated and perpetuated a highly destructive war, I do not feel the stability that I see around me. My outer state may be well and East Asia’s in ruins, but on a human level, we are both falling apart.

Perhaps this is but a symptom of Nietschze’s philosophy, that “history repeats itself,” but the US and East Asia are now being forced to rebuild themselves. Each is being brought to a realization of vulnerability, and to a humility before change.

When one looks at the central value systems of Eastern and Western culture, each has now lost what was at its core.

Christianity, the value system that dominates the US, teaches salvation from the immanent world through good works. The US’ current dependence on oil and near –golden-calf idolization of celebrities point to the fact that we have become disconnected from our ideal of autonomy from material possessions. Buddhism, a religious staple of East Asian countries and proponent of the idea that the immanent world is paradise, took major blows when that world destroyed parts of itself through natural disaster.

The exterior lives of Christianity and Buddhism’s ideals have started to crumble. My biggest question is: What is rising up beneath them?

When I am struggling for answers to question miles above my head, I have found it helpful to look at the details of my surroundings for clues.

As an example, recently I have been mulling over the place of gay marriage in my ethical thought system. A friend had informed me that he had seen “Now that gays can marry, siblings should be given the same right,” written on a wall of a stall in an MIT men’s room. Upon hearing this, I wondered whether biological risk or cultural belief should determine romantic morality. I looked at the facts in front of me: incestuous marriages do proven genetic harm, while the gay marriages I had seen only made people morally uncomfortable. While moral ground may shift in human conversation, genetic integrity is less malleable. Based on the resources I had on hand, I judged gay marriage less harmful than sibling marriage.

I have neither studied conservative religious precepts nor engaged in a homosexual relationship myself; being a factual beggar on the issue, I am sticking with my choice of standpoint until a greater wealth of experiential knowledge arrives.

I’m not sure what the official “Christian” and “Buddhist” stances are on gay marriage, but I do think the logical method above illuminates the existential state of both religions.

Burma, having recently allowed international aid into the country, and China, reaching out for help in commercials and solicitations from the Red Cross Society of China, are looking outside of their present destruction.

The U.S. is calling on both its liberal and conservative political extremists to look outside their belief systems, to unify in order to save a national future darkened with the threats of debt and grave international dischord. Both Asia and the U.S. are, in fact, seeking – the East a new material foundation, and the West a new transcendence.

The evidence points to hope for a new international future. As our opposing ideals fail us, we are envisioning new ones in order to recreate that eternal, yet ever-living principle: the self.

Ideas vs. Poems: A Reality Showdown

As an English and Philosophy major in college, I considered English my complicated major and Philosophy the one that provided simple certainties.

Poems and literature were, by nature, a little strange, seemingly intentionally obscure. I could walk out of an English class with a fuzzy concept of what had been taught, and it was okay; language was, by nature, up for interpretation. In Philosophy classes, I wanted answers.

My Philosophy major culminated in a seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote his books as a series of short, axiomatic phrases. The budding realist part of me rejected the simplicity of his certainty, wanted to throw his short statements at the wall and go back to my vague but fun life as a Boston student. The larger part said, "No, this is what philosophy is, keep quiet and get your Bachelor of Arts degree in May."

I did, and am now out of college. Yet my concepts of language and thought are becoming messier.

To a poem, I am able to say with the simplicity of a seasoned film critic, "This is good," or "Reject." In my thinking life, though, I find myself wading through streams of facts spat out by the media, only to land back in a bog of humanity. I have learned to submit to complexity in newspaper articles - the realm of facts - and to simplicity in poetry. 

Perhaps I was talking, reading, and writing to myself through the course of my well-defined English and Philosophy majors.

I have begun to grow into more respect for poetry than I had when I was in college. People don't put their mental hands all over poetry. It is personal. It is beyond analysis. It doesn't have to reflect the real world. It often does anyway, or at least the kind of world I would like to live in. 

Journalism, a discipline that strives to forge clear connections between events - the concrete - and human understanding, does not now command so much respect. The diversity and freedom of modern media has turned truth into something more resembling play-doh than a rock of cultural foundation.

I don't think this is purely an issue about poetry and journalism, or English and Philosophy. In the age of technology, knowledge has become human. It has become disputed, hypocritical, foreign information. Facts are universally available, and have forgotten their stubborn loyalty to themselves.

In college, I saw poetry as something to fool around with, and philosophy as a giant in front of which I should kneel - or at least sit with and read fine print about epistemology for hours.

The working world has flipped me on my head. Philosophy, truth, knowledge all now rest at my feet as material with which to create frames for adulthood. Poetry is now speaking in Wittgenstein-esque axioms. Ideas from the media may flood my experience, but poetry is setting the mark for my reality.

A simple reality. In this reality, there are only brief sense-impressions taking shape and arriving on a page as words. I know what I believe and what I love. What I believe and love flows from within me, unobstructed. 

Although both thought and feeling are present in my life, I am not sure how to live both in the world of poetry and in the world of facts. I now trust my senses most, and find it incongruent that I have come to work in the field of technology journalism. 

This misaligned trust shows itself in the fact that poetry is always creeping into my work; I usually have a window open to poets.org as I move through technology news on the net.

At times I forget the boundaries between poems and news stories. Each is a gathering of perception, a creating of mores to help readers navigate towards their own ideal sense of truth.

When it comes to poetry, I am now more of a philosophical journalist than a poet. I simply let daily experiences slowly boil down through my awareness until a poem arrives at my hand. Sometimes I like what arrives, and sometimes it sounds very much like nonsense. But unlike in college, I have a good sense of when it's based in fact.

I want to talk back to all of those philosophers whose work I studied in school. The events of my life three days ago are speaking back to what they said. Due to the media's new power to give voice to individual truths, my life carries more of the weight of truth than it has in the past. It also has more poetry. 

Honeymoon's over - meeting modern technology at home

What do your online identities do while you’re sleeping? Perhaps your Facebook persona steals pricey antiques from eBay. Maybe your MySpace face can be spotted regularly on the online poker scene. In fact, mine told me it saw yours at pokerparade.com just last night!

When one shows a print photograph to someone, there is no lurking fear that the image will change the identity of the person it portrays. Everyone knows that our online identities have no life of their own. With so many clicks, we control their actions, their words, their purchases...wait, their?

If they were really such pawns, the idea of their self-possession would feel less suspicious.

For almost every aspect of your life, there is a website to live it on. On Match.com, you can click closer and closer to your love match. At LinkedIn.com, you can type your way to having a professional network. On Facebook and My Space, you can create a cross-country social dynasty without buying a single plane ticket.

Yet this system is flawed. When we see someone in public whose online identity we came across in private the night before, do we not in our minds perform a critical comparison between the present and the online picture of them? Dare I say that our humanity is moving online – first intellectually, but now also emotionally?

All of the things that normally hang alongside one’s daily life – opinions, money, words spoken, gifts given and received – are in limbo in the presence of an online identity. The breathing, real person to whom they were attached has split off into an ideal, electronic piece and a true one. In immersing ourselves in technology, we lose our connection to that more vague, often dysfunctional thing called reality.

“News flash!” you may say. “Reality as we have known it has been disappearing since Al Gore invented the internet in the early 90s.”And good riddance! No need to hold onto the awkward self-forging of puberty, or the stiffness of a first meeting at a job fair. We have created a way around those former facts of life. Our most crucial decisions, the ones that determine our identities and place in society, have started to occur on the net. The boundaries between social and software codes have come to blend.

In this blending sits both a blessing and a danger. The prodigious posting of personal information that goes on at certain sites may betray more than a desire to share oneself with others.

Let the internet take care of your identity; then, when you’re in reality, you can relax and be someone else completely.

Within this mindset, when one’s eye is not fixed upon his/her Facebook. Myspace, or even eBay profile, one feels paranoid about what it is doing. Some malevolent electronic force may have kidnapped it into a social scene where in reality, one would never be found. There has been much controversy about intellectual property rights on the internet. Imaginative property rights have been neglected. We know how to create boundaries around our self-imaginations in reality. The frequent unwieldiness of our face-to-face encounters at present reveals our ineptness at setting those boundaries in the online world.

We have now warmed up to modern technology to such a degree that we trust it with our romantic, professional, and interpersonal image. We can no longer get by through presenting it with contrived faces while living in our own, real world dimensions.

The online world is summoning us to make its reality ours. We do now have the power to create our identities on it, but in order to successfully do so we must trust that the internet imagines us as we imagine ourselves.

It takes a person to raise a village

I don’t like to think of the city and the suburbs as opposing worlds. However, the conditions of my life have repeatedly pointed to a gap between these worlds. Places and experiences appear on a continuum running from cosmopolitan to country.

In high school, I lived in two modes. One involved sitting on the couch watching classic films Friday nights, and fulfilled my suburban persona. The other entailed any strange adventure into a Boston event/performance I could pull together. These outings re-fueled my Friday couch-time imaginings of what a life in the city would be like.

In college I did live in the city. I went on long walks alone through the city’s streets, images of broad green lawns and the moon from my rooftop view at home floating in between honking cars. The chasm between my understandings of city and suburb remained stubbornly wide. I didn’t know which place I belonged, but I knew absolutely that they were distinctly different realities.

This way of seeing of mine bugs me because it uses places, rather than people’s behavior or choices, to define people. It says that a person submits to character rather than cultivating it. It’s like our identities are uncomfortable uniforms designed either by Walmart or Donna Karan.

Pesky distinctions between urban and rural people still arise in my head more often than I’d prefer. This person speaks slowly; he must go for long bike rides along quiet rural roads on the weekend. That person wears baggy, outworn clothes; she must return home to the 15th floor of an industrial apartment building at night. City people are alert, if not well-educated. Country people are kind, if not in touch with societal realities. People in the suburbs are wealthy but oblivious, while those from the city are poor and clear-sighted.

I doubt that I am the only one who passively has these thoughts. It takes some effort to become aware of the lives that exist in between the ways one has been taught to think of things.

Ideas are easy and realities are hard - which is probably the reason why I am writing this.

I wonder how I and others have grown into a place where our experience of the people and lives around us is ideologically filtered. Not racially, not religiously, but ideologically filtered. Part of me believes that I can judge a person’s cognitive and/or emotional character based on their geographical origin. This belief disconnects me from people, but also from society as a whole.

My ideas of people are skewed, and so my idea of the places they are from must be similarly inaccurate. If I don’t understand any other parts of my culture than the ones I have lived in, what makes me a member of that broader, complex culture?

Some might say that each person has a role in society outside of which it is not his/her right to step. They argue that each person has possessions, material or of character, which it is their job alone to care for and understand. Those from the city are not suited for the leisure of thought allowed by a rural life, and those from outside the city are not capable of handling its conversely heady, production-oriented environment. Still others might say that the issue of ideological alienation is insignificant in comparison with our more obvious causes of division: political polarism, racism, religious differences, nationalism amid a growing trend of immigration.

Before thinking about the racial, religious, political, or cultural landscapes of city and suburb, I had to be fully in both places. In high school, my idea of an ideal life in the city blinded me to the closeness of my home’s comfort. In college, my nostalgia for the simplicity and silence of suburbia distracted me from the thrill of diversity I had longed for at home.

In seeing myself as I have been, I have become aware of a concept more basic than that of race, religion, politics, and even identity. I have coome to see that my home is a place that I choose. I am neither a city nor a suburb person, but a person who chooses whether or not to see either. Having made that choice, I can now choose how to be both.

Modern Freedom, Evolved Bravery

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when pioneers were traveling through North American wilderness seeking a new home, wealth, or even just survival, a self-reliant approach to measuring behavior was appropriate. These people’s main drive was to establish a way of life free from poverty, oppression and attacks from rival social groups. A governing democracy had not yet taken shape. Threats were real, and mandated direct judgment and action.

Yet in 2008, when we have developed a common system of government and a greater degree of civic order, many people still insist on creating their own rules.

I heard a report recently of a man who saw that his house was about to be robbed. He then took out his gun and shot the would-be offender, who died. The local news asked viewers to call in and give their opinion on the man’s decision to shoot the intruder.

Some said that the shooter’s reaction was disproportionate to the situation. Just as many, however, responded that he had been justified in his method of self-protection. It was a direct clash between self- and community-oriented government.

Despite our struggles towards unity through various periods of division – struggles with political ideology in the Revolutionary War, gaps between regions and race in the Civil War, gender and class inequities in the early twentieth century, and ongoing mass immigration - we are still clinging to individualism. We want direct answers to threat, when living in community requires more.

It asks us to submit to methods of interacting with each other that are as complex as we, ourselves, are. We don’t have to follow the voices that advocate violent self-defense as a response to perceived threat.

It is not a surprise that many people feel the need to protect themselves without the help of law. From a young age, Americans are taught that autonomy is a more valuable trait than most others. Our national heroes are not lawyers and government officials. They are the self-made: entrepeneurs, entertainers, and athletes. These public figures’ successes are not founded upon the support of the broader community. They are revered for their sheer grit, their ability to rise to the top alone.

It isn’t wrong to make rapid decisions about self-defense when faced with immediate danger. We have reached a point, as a nation, where that way of thinking need not be our first resort. The cowboy system of justice has become outdated.

No person can alone discern a moral path which is right for all. Random aggression and thoughtless self-justification tear holes in the shared thought of those who have worked together for common, rational government. They work against the creation of a safe public space in which to live. Autonomy, while a source of forward thinking, can also be a cause of backwards action. When each person lives by their own code of behavior, the meaning of a code of behavior dissolves.

I am not going to persecute the citizen who shot his potential robber because I find his action unjust. An idea must pass through the scrutiny of many critics before becoming law. Our shared legal institution will perform a reasoned examination before declaring his sentence.

America is not an outwardly selfish nation. We honor those who commit themselves to public service. We take pride in maintaining a sense of brotherhood from coast to coast. Yet how can such brotherhood exist if we fail to embrace the real necessity of moral conversation? We have battled direct threats from nature, class conflicts and racial strife. Through doing so, we have moved into a phase of greater potential understanding.

May we begin to look at each other and each other’s actions with an open mind. Instead of assuming ill-intention and adopting that sentiment ourselves, let us take the braver step of looking for our mutual complexity.

After all, even cowboys can evolve.

Note: The themes of this and my last post are very similar. In some places, I may contradict myself. This is because I see social rules as separate from legal rules. In my mind, they require different perspectives. Hence, I wrote an entry for each.