#there so many other things that could be said about whole hobbes locke and other philosopher debate from ep 4

[anamelessfacelessnerd]

Not me rewriting the ending to Mizumono only to have a much better idea halfway through so as soon as I finished the first one I started on the second

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Hannibal (TV)

Relationship: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter

Characters: Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter, Abigail Hobbs

Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Smut, Anal Sex, Anal Fingering, Mild Blood, Rough Sex, Coming Untouched, Not Beta Read, Dark Will Graham

Language: English

Summary: “I need him to know.” Will looked into Hannibal’s eyes then, searching for the desperation he could hear in his words. “If I confessed to Jack Crawford now, you think he would forgive me?”

“I would forgive you.” It’s clear that Hannibal’s not talking about the murder, but the betrayal. He would still forgive Will for conspiring against him. “If Jack were to tell you all is forgiven, Will, would you accept his forgiveness?” The double meaning is apparent. Hannibal was asking Will if he would go with him knowing that Hannibal would forgive him. It’s an invitation. One that Will wasn’t sure he wanted to decline.

“Jack isn't offering forgiveness.” Hannibal wanted to say “I am”, but he didn't. “He wants justice. He wants to see you. See who you are. See who I've become. Know the truth.” Will takes another sip of his wine and Hannibal accepts his defeat. He really hadn’t wanted to hurt Will, but it seemed that it would be the only option.

“Still, I suppose we don’t owe Jack that do we?” Will spoke again.

Notes: Okay, I know I rewrote the ending of Mizumono yesterday, but I had this idea while I wrote it and I couldn't help myself.

“Do you know what an imago is, Will?” Hannibal asked.

“It's a flying insect,” Will replied.

“It's the final stage of a transformation. Maturity.”

“When you become who you will be,” Will said, catching on to the point Hannibal was making.

“It's also a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of a loved one buried in the unconscious, carried with us all our lives.”

“An ideal.”

“The concept of an ideal always searching for an objective reality to match. I have a concept of you just as you have a concept of me.”

“Neither of us are ideal,” Will says after taking a long drink of his wine. Hannibal considered what Will had just said for a moment. He had nearly trusted an ideal. He thought that Will would leave with him until he smelled Freddie Lounds on him. Perhaps Will was right, neither of them were ideal.

“We are both too curious about too many things for any ideals.” Hannibal paused a moment, feeling a twinge of hesitation for what he was about to ask. It was completely out of character for Hannibal to grovel, but in recent weeks he had grown accustomed to the idea of running away with Will, and he wasn’t quite ready to give the fantasy up. “Is it ideal that Jack die?”

Will matched Hannibal’s pause. Most would not even notice the hesitation, but Hannibal did.

“It's necessary. What happens to Jack has been preordained.” Will’s voice was cold, free from any emotion. In any other circumstance Hannibal would be proud of how well he schooled his expression, but now it just frustrated him.

“We could disappear now. Tonight. Feed your dogs. Leave a note for Dr. Bloom, never see her or Jack Crawford again. Almost polite,” Hannibal was nearly begging now and Will knew it. Their eyes locked and at once Will understood. Hannibal knew and he was willing to forgive.

“That'd make this our last supper,” Will said, considering Hannibal’s offer. Now, just days away from the sting that he and Jack had planned, Will still wasn’t sure whose side he was really on. Part of him wanted to be good, he wanted to atone for his sins and clear his name for good, because even though he had been acquitted, there were still those who believed he had actually killed all those people.

The other part of him wanted to become what everyone thought him to be. Though he hated to admit it, he had felt a thrill as he killed and mutilated Randall Tier. Even worse was that now thinking about that feeling didn’t make him feel guilty or sick, only enhanced the adrenaline.

If he was being completely honest, half of the thrill was seeing how Hannibal looked at him when he knew what Will had done. The subtle adoration and pride that he was no doubt allowing Will to see. Hannibal’s gaze made Will feel things, things that he had never felt with anyone before, and he wanted to chase that feeling.

“Of this life. I am serving lamb.”

“Sacrificial? Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Will snorted.

“I freely claim my sin. I don't need a sacrifice. Do you?”

“I need him to know.” Will looked into Hannibal’s eyes then, searching for the desperation he could hear in his words. “If I confessed to Jack Crawford now, you think he would forgive me?”

“I would forgive you.” It’s clear that Hannibal’s not talking about the murder, but the betrayal. He would still forgive Will for conspiring against him. “If Jack were to tell you all is forgiven, Will, would you accept his forgiveness?” The double meaning was apparent. Hannibal was asking Will if he would go with him knowing that Hannibal would forgive him. It’s an invitation. One that Will wasn’t sure he wanted to decline.

“Jack isn't offering forgiveness.” Hannibal wanted to say “I am”, but he didn't. “He wants justice. He wants to see you. See who you are. See who I've become. Know the truth.” Will takes another sip of his wine and Hannibal accepts his defeat. He really hadn’t wanted to hurt Will, but it seemed that it would be the only option.

“Still, I suppose we don’t owe Jack that do we?” Will spoke again. Hannibal perked up almost imperceptibly.

“Perhaps a note will be sufficient. I didn’t want to leave the dogs alone, but they’ll be fine for a while. Knowing Jack he’ll send a cruiser to my place within an hour after I don’t show up in the morning.”

“Let us prepare then. I would like to be out of the country before Jack realizes that you are no longer his man on the inside.” Hannibal stood and began gathering plates to bring to the kitchen because of course he would want to leave the house spotless. Will helped him with the dishes and wiping everything down. They caught eyes several times, both revving with the anticipation of what was to come. Will considered apologizing for his conspiracy, but when he looked into Hannibal’s eyes he knew he was already forgiven.

It was a little intoxicating to know that he had this kind of control over hannibal. To know that he made Hannibal beg. He wondered how else he could compel him to beg. That was, once they stopped dancing around the physical aspect of their relationship and finally just fucked like they both wanted to.

Once they were finished they retired to the study to write a note. Hannibal wandered around, collecting particular books and knick knacks that he wanted to bring while Will drafted a note. After much thinking and many balled up pieces of paper, Will finally got it right. When he finished, he handed it to Hannibal to read.

“This will do nicely,” Hannibal said. He slipped the letter into an envelope and sealed it with blood red wax and a stamp that bore his initials.

Will watched as the wax dripped. The flow of the thick liquid was giving him all sorts of dirty thoughts. Thoughts of Hannibal pouring that warm liquid all over his body. Thoughts of being covered in other kinds of red liquid. Will had to take a deep breath to steady himself and bring some blood back up to his head.

When the wax had dried, Hannibal handed the letter to Will, fingers brushing against Will’s skin tenderly.

“I have a surprise for you,” Hannibal said, hand coming to grip Will’s wrist.

“Oh?” Will replied.

“Come with me.” Hannibal led Will upstairs, never letting go of his wrist. Will had only been to the upper floor of Hannibal’s house a few times, and never in the dark, so he didn’t really know where they were going. He had two ideas, one much more enticing than the other, but both equally likely.

As it turned out, neither of his assumptions were correct. Hannibal led him to a closed door at the end of the hallway and knocked.

“May we come in?” He asked. Will didn’t even have time to question who was in there before the door was being opened from the inside. Standing in the doorway was none other than Abigail Hobbs.

“Hi Will,” She said, a small smile playing on her chapped lips.

“Abigail?” Will asked, voice barely audible. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Had Hannibal drugged him? Was he hallucinating?

“How are you here? You’re dead,” Will said.

“Not dead, just misplaced,” Hannibal replied, “they never found a body, well, not a whole body at least. It was merely a charade.”

Abigail tucked her hair back to show Will the flesh where her ear had been. It was healed over by now, but it still brought a wave of bile up in Will’s throat.

“You’ve been here this whole time?” Will asked, choking down the anger that was building in him. There was no sense getting angry now, especially when he was teetering on the edge of a new beginning.

“I’m sorry,” Abigail said, tears welling in her eyes.

“I forgive you,” Will said. Abigail took two big steps forward and wrapped her arms around Will’s middle, burying her tears in his shirt. He brought a hand to her hair and stroked, both soothing her and assuring himself that she was really there and really alive.

“Thank you,” Will whispered to Hannibal. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking him for. Maybe for keeping Abigail alive, maybe for bringing him to her, maybe just because he didn’t know what else to say.

Hannibal’s hand came to rest between Will’s shoulder blades, fingertips shooting electricity down his spine.

“I do not wish to rush you two, but we must be going,” Hannibal said, “there is still much for us to do and little time to do it.”

Abigail pulled back from Will and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, sniffling a few times.

“Will, would you care to help me pack?” Hannibal asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Will cast one last glance at Abigail before following Hannibal to his bedroom.

“Everything in that top drawer must come,” Hannibal said as he set a large suitcase on the bed. Will began transferring the carefully folded garments from the dresser to the suitcase while Hannibal sorted through his suits to find the ones he liked best.

Will and Hannibal's hands brushed for what felt like the 500th time that night as they both attempted to place clothing in the suitcase at the same time. Their eyes met and there was a moment of contemplation before they pounced.

Will dragged Hannibal to the floor and straddled him, hands balling up around fistfulls of Hannibal’s jacket as he pressed their lips together. Hannibal kissed back with equal fervour, hands sliding back to cup Will’s ass. Will moaned into the kiss and rutted his hips against Hannibals. Hannibal bit Will’s lip, not stopping until he drew blood.

They broke away, panting and breathing each other in. Hannibal brought one hand to Will’s cheek and stroked, the pad of his thumb brushing over Will’s parted lips. Will sucked the digit into his mouth, tongue lapping at the sensitive skin.

Will ground his hips down, ass rubbing against Hannibal’s rapidly hardening cock. The older man stared up at him in wonder, lips parted and eyes blown wide. He withdrew his hand, swiping his thumb along the bleeding cut on Will’s lip until the skin was stained red. Then he brought it to his own mouth, his eyes rolling back as he savored the metallic taste of his lover’s blood.

“You taste divine Will,” Hannibal said, deep voice sending tremors through Will’s body. That was it, that was the breaking point for Will.

“Take your fucking clothes off,” He demanded as he scrambled off of Hannibal to remove his own clothes.

“Such crass language,” Hannibal scolded, clicking his tongue disapprovingly, “whatever should I do about that?”

Hannibal was trying his best to regain some of the power he had lost in this exchange. Will would let him believe that he did, if only to sate his ego, but Will knew deep down that he was in control. He had known since before Hannibal had pleaded with him that he was in control here. Hannibal had several layers to his persona. The first was the polite, yet slightly eccentric doctor who loved good food and opera, behind that was the calculating psychopath cold, and emotionless. His true personality was hidden deep within himself, but Will was able to see it, after all, he had not yet met a person he couldn’t read.

The person that Hannibal truly was was driven by his emotions. Anger and hurt bubbled under his skin, suppressed by years of burying everything akin to a feeling deep below the surface. He was intensely narcissistic and hedonistic. Everything he did was to fulfill his desires. He ate to satiate his hunger, he killed to assuage a compulsion. He acted solely in his own self interests, and right now Will was his interest. That gave Will ultimate power over Hannibal. He wanted Will in every sense of the word, and would do nearly everything to have him.

Perhaps what solidified Will’s control was the fact that he was aware of this while Hannibal wasn’t. Hannibal had spent so much effort repressing feelings that he genuinely believed that they were never there in the first place. Will knew about Hannibal’s nature, not from the beginning, no he was fooled like everyone else at first, but certainly longer than he let on. He only raised the issue with Jack when he was in danger.

Will put on the facade of being overly emotional, of being unstable, but deep down he was something different entirely. That’s why he was so good at “faking” the coldness he showed with Hannibal, it was never fake, the emotions were fake, and Hannibal was none the wiser. This was Will’s game and Hannibal was barely aware he was playing.

“Will?” Hannibal asked, pulling Will from his thoughts. He kneeled in front of him, now fully nude, his erection jutting out proudly from a bed of well trimmed blonde curls.

“Fuck me,” Will insisted, trying to pass his momentary spacyness off as fascination with the admittedly impressive cock that hung between Hannibal’s legs.

“As you wish.” Yes, as Will wishes. Hannibal will do exactly as Will wishes.

Will doesn’t wait for any more negotiations. He turns around and sinks to his elbows, thighs spread wide to accommodate Hannibal. He heard the older man’s breath catch as Will displayed himself.

“Oh Will, you truly are exquisite. Beauty incarnate.” Hannibal mused. Will watched between his legs as Hannibal reached into the bedside table for a bottle of lube. Hannibal poured the lube onto his fingers, then pressed them to Will’s hole, tracing the rim to get it nice and wet.

Will buried his face in his crossed arms to stifle a moan. The last thing he needed was for Hannibal to know exactly how sensitive he actually was and to exploit that fact. They didn’t have much time and Will was really just looking to be fucked.

Finally, one finger breached Will. It slid in with little resistance and Hannibal added a second. His thumb came to press against Will’s perineum as he scissored his fingers. Will let out a choked sob when Hannibal’s other hand tangled in his hair and pulled his head up sharply.

“I want to hear you Will. I want to hear exactly how much you like this.”

“God, just fuck me already Hannibal,” Will begged, “I’m ready, just get in me.”

Hannibal withdrew his fingers at once. Will didn’t even have a chance to get a word out before Hannibal was pressing his cock inside.

“There you go sweet boy, taking my cock so well, like you were made for it. Like you were born to take me.”

Will had never heard Hannibal speak so lewdly before, but he liked it more than he would ever care to admit. Not that he even could right now with Hannibal thrusting into him with punishing force, hitting his prostate every time.

Hannibal still had one hand in Will’s hair. The other was gripping his hip so tight he would undoubtedly have finger shaped bruises in the morning. He brought his lips down to Will’s shoulder, placing a few gentle kisses there, and that would simply not do. Will needed him to be rough, he needed to be fucked hard.

“Harder,” Will grunted, “come on Hannibal, you can do better than that. Do it like I know you want to. Hurt me.”

“Are you sure you can handle it?” Hannibal panted.

“Fuck yes, give it to be Hannibal, fucking ruin me.”

Hannibal complied immediately, using all of the force he could to pound into Will like he was trying to split him clean in half. He bit down hard on Will’s shoulder, just short of drawing blood.

Will rocked back to meet every thrust, letting out a litany of pathetic noises that he probably should have been embarrassed about. Hannibal was groaning now too, grunting like a beast in Will’s ear as he shoved in impossibly deeper.

Will’s orgasm was so sudden, he didn’t even feel it coming. In an instant his body went rigid as white hot pleasure coiled in his abdomen and he came completely untouched.

After coming for what felt like hours, he dropped to the floor, thighs shaking too hard to support himself any longer.

Once he had caught his breath, Will rolled over onto his back and spread his legs.

“Keep going,” he told Hannibal, “I want you to use me to make yourself come.”

Hannibal didn’t need to be told twice before sliding back into Will. He hoisted the younger man’s knees up over his shoulders to get a better angle as he slammed in over and over again.

At last, Hannibal gave a final hard thrust and spilled inside Will, coating his insides with his seed. He pulled out and laid on the floor next to him, breathing hard and trembling.

“I would have run away with you a long time ago if I had known that was in store for me,” Will panted, struggling to sit up.

“If I saw you every day, forever, Will, I would remember this time,” Hannibal said, reaching over to brush a lock of curly hair behind his ear.

Will smiled and kissed Hannibal again. It was softer this time, full of much more affection, especially on Hannibal’s behalf.

“I would sit here with you for eternity Will, but I fear that we must leave soon. We would not want to keep Abigail waiting.” Hannibal said when they pulled away.

“Of course, but first will you promise me something?”

“What is it that you desire?”

“Do that again as soon as we get to wherever we’re going.” Hannibal grinned and cupped Will’s cheek.

“I would gladly have you every day, my dear Will.”

Notes: Listen, we all know who's actually in control and this relationship and it's not Hannibal "Simp" Lecter.

[im-the-punk-who]

Can I ask your opinion on Woodes Rogers?

Oh boy. Oh boy, howdy. I mean you can.

So, uhhhh the first time I was really thinking about Woodes Rogers as a character besides just being a little bitch boy was after I read Sage Street’s meta where he talks about the ways in which Rogers mirrors James in the early seasons/pre-series. And that’s pretty much how I see him. 

(On a side note, while I don’t agree with everything he has to say, I highly highly recommend Sage’s meta because it brings up some really interesting parallels and scenic cues, and particularly the meta on the S3 finale just....makes me scream a lot. Some of the painting stuff can get a bit reachy because as someone who works in theatre and has friends in film, some of the parallels is likely more ‘the set designers thought this would be cool’ than a directorial choice but like, it’s still awesome to see.)

But back to Rogers. So, personally, I think he’s a little bitch boy, but that has more to do with the fact that the show sets him up as the upholder of civilization and oppression, in direct opposition to Flint - who seeks freedom and an end to persecution based on society’s morals and whom I personally vibe much more with. Character wise I actually think Rogers is pretty interesting in that, like all the Black Sails villains, he is a complex character. He is sometimes humorous, sometimes charming, and sometimes straight up unwilling to listen to anyone’s voice but his own - hello, Eleanor! (And, yeah, I’m aware that’s how a lot of people describe Flint. It’s purposeful.) While I don’t like him, I appreciate that about him.

He has a backstory that makes it clear what his motivations are and how he reacts when faced with adversity - he hates chaos and wants order and is willing to compromise his own civility if he thinks it will bring an end to those things. In my personal opinion the reason he wants so badly to bring Nassau back in line could be that he thinks it will help him get over the loss of his brother - who died in a random act of chaos and cowardly violence. (And whose name was Thomas....) Like Flint, he is fighting in the memory of someone he idolized. 

The show underlines the similarity between them when Rogers says “All I have done here is finish what you began. I am now what you were then. And without you there would be no me.” 

Here, he is setting himself up as the continuation of James McGraw. Which is super hella rad, since we know that Flint views himself as at least partially a wholly separate persona from James McGraw. And that we’re led to believe that ‘James’ died or was buried when Thomas was taken. While I don’t think Rogers knows the full story I think it’s likely he has a pretty good picture. I’ll direct you to this post where I bring up the fact it’s likely he and Peter were working together on the pardons(and also because I assume Eleanor told him about James being McGraw as she found out during the Charlestown plotline).

Also:

“Everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it.”

“If you insist on making me your villain, I will play the part.”

Rogers!! Stop!! Get your own lines!!

I know a lot of people like to compare him to Thomas, and while I think we were meant to see the parallels(hi, they’re both put in green!), I disagree he is meant to mirror what Thomas would have been. In fact, if anything, he is Thomas’ foil, even as he mirrors James. 

Flint even points out this difference: 

“No one is being hanged. No one’s even being tried. Just as you wanted. Just as Thomas Hamilton wanted. So what is it that you’re fighting for that I’m not already offering?”

“Thomas Hamilton fought to introduce the pardons to make a point. To seek to change England.”

Aside from the classic “I want my Thomas back you sonofabitch.” vibe of Flint’s full answer, this is the difference between Rogers and Thomas. While it would ultimately have the same effect as Rogers’ actions - to bring Nassau back to heel - I think it’s important to recognize the intentionality of both characters as it illustrates not just who Rogers is, but also Thomas.

The reason Thomas wanted to offer the pardons was to make a point that pirates are still men deserving of forgiveness. To “offer forgiveness to any man who would seek it.” He is not coming from a point of control, but of freedom. To offer to these men a way forward.

Rogers is offering the pardons as a way to bring Nassau and the pirates back into civilization but we never actually hear him offer a suggestion of what they’re to do afterwards. And indeed, with how he runs Nassau when he has it, it seems he’s much more concerned with keeping control than in offering any meaningful change to the people he governs. 

Rogers is, in essence, exactly what James was talking about all those years ago when he said “Put a man on an island, give him power over other men and it won’t be long before he realizes the limits of that power is nowhere to be seen. And no man given that kind of influence will remain honest for very long.”

This is underlined in so many ways, from his scene with Berringer about ‘dark men’ to where he wants to accept the pearls he knows are from the Spanish gold, to when he straight up threatens Madi with the death of someone close to her in order to try and force her into surrender.

So, I think he’s a really cool character in that he underlines things about so many of the other characters.

However, Rogers is also a little bitch boy and I hate him because he’s is both a little confused and does not have the spirit. :) 

He is everything Thomas and James were fighting against instilling in Nassau - the very thing Thomas realized isn’t the way a good leader should act. Rogers falls very much under that Hobbesian view of The Social Contract - that a monarch or person in power has absolute sovereignty without needing to give value to individuals needs or wants(literally every interaction he has with Max, hi!), whereas Thomas falls much more in line with John Locke, who says that in supporting the needs of the individual, we support the state by default.

(And I can and will go on another whole tangent about this view of Locke vs Hobbes and how it’s a theme throughout the whole show, I can, I will, please don’t let me.)

Rogers is a fantastic villain for S3 and S4 because he illustrates all the ways that civilization puts down revolution and keeps people in line - right up to how his actions ultimately cause Silver to betray the cause and sell out his own friends for a personal safety that is only marginally implied - and still leaves those on the outskirts oppressed! 

Wow! Black Sails! Stop!!

And even though he as a character was eventually defeated, Rogers’ motives and ideas were actually instilled by the very rebel leaders who fought against him! It’s his treaty Rackham and Silver get the maroons to sign! It’s his version of civilization that is imposed on Nassau and the Maroon island even as he himself is ‘defeated’. 

And isn’t that a kicker? 

That Rackham in particular thinks he’s victorious because they’ve defeated the bad guy, but then he goes ahead and uses his plans, proving that it wasn’t the revolution or freedom or Charles’ idea of living free he was supporting at all but his own personal narrative of victory! What a sellout! What a direct parallel to how even progressive-seeming leaders will almost always sell out the ideals of their constituents for their own benefit! Boy, howdy!!

And I know fandom likes to throw him under the bus as all that is wrong with civilization - call him a little bitch boy and cheer his defeat. I know that he and Alfred Hamilton(and Peter, to an extent) get to be the villains in the narrative so our ‘heroes’ Silver and Rackham and even Flint can be put in opposition to them but like - that’s not the point. That’s not the point, that’s not the point, that’s not the point!

The point is that these men were tools of the empire - tools that were incredibly effective! They succeeded! Rogers succeeded in bringing civilization to Nassau. And in doing so he forced the pirates to choose between their own loyalties - he divided the camps until victory seemed hopeless and that is exactly how history generally works in terms of continued oppression. 

Hell, that’s exactly how current political events are happening right now. It’s a tried and true method of oppressive governments to pin things on one particular person (Woodes, or, y’know, Trump?) and say ‘if you defeat this person, your revolution has been successful’ while silently just going ahead with the plans of those people’s ideals anyway. It’s not the people who are the villains. It’s the ideals they perpetuate. 

All this is to say that I don’t feel particular malice towards Rogers other than that I feel towards all the characters who ultimately uphold oppression because I think Rogers is another great commentary by Black Sails on how we get so distracted fighting for what feels good that we can ultimately end up becoming exactly what we thought we were fighting against. 

(”A man casts his vote for the same reason he does anything in this life. Because it feels good.”)

And finally, he’s definitely a little bitch boy for how he treats my girls Eleanor and Madi (and Max) and I would absolutely cross the street to punch him for that alone. :)

[historyy]

The Oxbridge Applications Masterlist✨✨✨

I’ve had a ton of people both online and irl ask me for this, so here it is. I’m sorry its a month or so later than I initially promised but I’ve been pretty busy. This is basically a breakdown of the application process, some advice, and my experiences as an applicant for History and Politics to Oxford in 2018-19; because of that its pretty Oxford / humanities specific. I was lucky enough to have some great resources available at school but applying for Oxford was still daunting, so I wanted to demystify it and give some advice. Hopefully you find it helpful!

Personal Statement

How you write it: 

My main advice with the PS is to get started early, because Oxbridge is early entry so you’ll have months less time than your friends. Do a first draft of your personal statement in summer Y12. Mine was pretty much done by September and it made that early deadline much easier to reach.

Keeping a list of everything relevant you’re doing will be useful when you come to write the PS, as well as for developing your ideas for interview. My list was split into Books, Academic Papers, Extracts, Documentaries, Podcasts, Lectures / Online Lectures, Other Publications, Courses, Newspapers, and Extracurriculars. I also had a list of my particular interests related to my subject. 

It will need lots of editing, but thats what teachers, friends, and former applicants are for! I edited so many personal statements for people in my year, because they knew I was a writer and thus good at cutting words and finding shorter ways to express.

With your first draft, write big. Go way over the character count and put everything you want to in it, then cut. A few tips for cutting: 

Don’t waffle on about irrelevant anecdotes 

‘Such as’ ‘like’ ‘indeed’ ‘including’ are useful but overused 

Rearranging sentence structure can cut lots of characters and make your syntax snappier. E.g I interviewed a civil servant which showed me… versus Interviewing a civil servant showed me…  

Semicolons will save your life.

It will hurt, but kill your Oxford commas 

You don’t need to give each author / source a bio, assume the reader knows their stuff, and you don’t need to use full names / titles 

What you write in it:

With the PS, a catchy opening is vital; you need to show why you’re interested in your subject and why you’re the right choice. Mine was:

The 2015 Leaders’ Debate sparked my interest in politics and the language surrounding it, when I realised I was focussed both on what the debaters were saying and how they were saying it.

The best advice I got is to treat your PS like you’re narrating your journey with your subject. Start with why you got into your subject, show what you did following on from that sparked interest, then how you built on that action, and so forth. You might want to map this out before you start writing. An example might look like this (this isn’t mine, but assume its for HistPol):

Saw an exhibition on Renaissance artists - interested in social and political context of the art - researched Italian city states focussing in on famed patrons of the arts who were politically eminent  - read Machiavelli’s The Prince as is based on Cesare Borgia - interested in other theories of rule and governed/govt relations - read Locke and Hobbes to compare later theories and the development of these ideas - entered an essay competition about the development of the state citing Locke’s ideas on the social contract

Then you build on this journey, talking about your reading and research. Cite specific papers / books / articles you’ve read, and engage with them. Did you agree with everything they said? Or not? How do they link to other things you’ve read? For example, I wrote:

D’Ancona’s ‘Post-Truth’ with its discussion of disinformation and the collapse in trust also influenced me, though I disagreed with his assertion that the post-truth era only began five years ago (Orwell springs to mind).

Don’t just name drop books etc, actually engage with them, or you might as well not have read them.

In terms of what to include, Oxbridge don’t give a damn if you do Grade 5 piano or were the lead on your ballet show; you should focus your PS on the subject you’re applying for. When I mentioned extracurriculars it was in relation to the subject; I was editor of the school magazine, and I interviewed a senior civil servant on Brexit’s impact for it, increasing my understanding of current affairs and I gave a presentation on sexuality in the Weimar Republic at our LGBT society, exploring oft forgotten facets of history.  

I would suggest that only 10% of your PS should be about extracurriculars, and even those should be related to your subject, or linked to transferable skills.

You should end your PS with a brief concluding statement or paragraph which summarises why you want to study your subject.

Aptitude Tests 

I did the HAT so this is skewed towards that, but other tests are similar.

The aptitude tests are stressful but formulaic, so once you’ve worked out the formula and done as many practices as you can, you should be fine. You don’t need to get a high mark, only pass the benchmark to secure an interview, so it won’t be perfect. No one gets full marks; I think the benchmark for the HAT was 60% last year. 

My main advice on the tests is to go to all the sessions on them with your teachers that you can, and if your teachers don’t offer sessions ask them to hold some, or find a former applicant. Do lots of practices, starting not in timed conditions and work up doing them in time. Talk through your completed papers in detail with your teachers. If there are other applicants doing the same test, talk with them — orally write the essay together and bounce ideas off one another. 

Learn how to pull together an argument in a way which will grab the reader’s attention and show that you’re interested and engaged, and that you think outside the box and are different to the other candidates. For example in our HAT, the source was on a 16C woman’s relations with her servants, and I talked about her household as a microcosm of a class stratified and hierarchical society with moral expectations of servitude.

Basically, its an exam paper, treat it as such! 

Interview

The interview is, on the whole, more important than the PS. If you’re lucky enough to get one it means you’ve already done better than most people. I found the experience to be a mix of absolutely terrifying and weirdly enjoyable. 

I had two interviews, one for History and one for Politics, but you can be called to interview at other colleges. I know someone who had six…

The interview is basically like a tutorial will be if you get in, and there are different types (this is a bit humanities specific, sorry). You can get asked about your PS and reference, though this is rare. Extract interviews are common, for my Politics I was given an extract about citizenship. You can also get asked about your submitted work, as I was for History. 

In terms of prep, make sure you’re familiar with your submitted work and PS, as well as all the stuff you say you’ve done in your PS and your reference. You can get asked about any of it. Bring copies of these and your reading notes with you to interview so you’re familiar with them. Also look into some other key concepts of your subject, for example I looked at a lot of historiography, and in the interview talked about the concept of history as teleology and how I disagree with it. I think I was actually asked if I agreed with the Idea of Progress, having read on that a lot I felt equipped to answer it. 

Do as many practice interviews as you can. I got lucky as we had teachers who could do these, and I also did one at my sister’s school. However even if you don’t have that access, ask a friend, parent, teacher, a previous applicant, or even someone online. Even just talking about your subject helps. On the flip side of all this, don’t do so much prep your answers are stale and formulaic, you need to show you’re thinking on your feet. 

Both my interviews were only 20-25 minutes. My Politics interview was really chill, I had an hour reading time before in which I made notes on an extract and basically wrote a script for myself. The questions I was asked were actually given to me in this time so I had lots of material to work with. The man was really nice as well, and I enjoyed the experience. In contrast my History one was a disaster and I felt like I was being interrogated by the two women the whole time, though they were nice.

Don’t be scared if you screw up, in my History interview on my Tudors essay on Tudor parliamentary changes (which I’d been studying only 2 months), my interviewer was an expert on Tudor parliament, writing a book on the subject. This one question about groups of people represented strongly in parliament really threw me, and I went through three answers before I found the right one (lawyers). At another question I blanked for thirty seconds before speaking. I came out in tears and was certain I’d failed, but clearly I did okay…

General advice

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Go chat to that scary teacher who told you your essay was too journalistic and not historical enough and just because you want to be a journalist you can’t write like one in academia (personal experience? me?). Ask them for advice and just talk to them about the subject! 

Leading on to: JUST TALK ABOUT THE SUBJECT. Talking nonstop about History and Politics helped me know my interests inside out and it gave me a way to develop my speaking skills as well as my love for my subject.

Also, read. JSTOR is your bff for academic articles and Niche Stuff here, but you can find plenty of good books at libraries and shops. The A Very Short Introduction series is amazing for this, as they’re all really short and written by Oxbridge academics, I read tons of them. You can even just dip into longer books or collections of articles. 

Keep asking yourself And so? — take your ideas further. This was my History teacher’s advice for essays, but it works for PS, tests, interviews, and general critical thinking. 

For example in the HAT (I’m making up this example, it might have asked you what you could learn about social norms of a time from a source): You could say: The woman bosses her servants around but is subordinate to her husband so we can learn about gender and social roles. Or you could say: The woman commands her servants, yet remains servile to her husband, indicating the prevalence of hierarchical gender and class relations in the society of the time; her role as wife is clearly interlinked with her position as ‘head of the household’, which she is unpaid for. Viewing this through the lens of feminist theory, one can infer that an unequal sexual division of labour exists in this society, and women’s contributions to society are not appreciated, as when the husband ‘dismisses’ his wife. While her command of the servants shows she is elevated by her ‘great wealth’, her subordination to her husband suggests that a woman in this society was unable to further her position as easily as a man could. 

Don’t fret about choosing a college on the form, 1/3 of people (including me) get pooled. 

And finally, don’t set your heart on Oxbridge. They’re by no means the only good universities out there, and they’re not for everyone. If you’re not enjoying the research for the PS, or are finding the aptitude tests unbearable and the interview style uncomfortable, it might not be for you. But if you do decide to apply, good luck!✨

[elfnerdherder]

Opus Dei: Chapter 1

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A special thanks to my patrons: @evertonem @sylarana @starlit-catastrophe @frostylicker, Mendacious Bean, Superlurk, Duhaunt6, and Laura G.! <3

Well guys, here’s to another Fannibal fic. :) I’m not sure if there’s a lot of call for a sequel/revenge fic, but I’m going to do my best to not make a muck of it. As always, I hope you enjoy! Happy Friday.

Summary: "Behold, I will make you fishers of men," Abigail said with a laugh.

And so Will did. Bait for Hannibal the Cannibal is tricky, though, especially when the hunter knows they're hunted. Four years in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane gave him time, and in the end time was all he'd really needed, isn't it?

Will Graham had never meant for so much death. After being released for crimes he hadn't committed, he knows the right thing to do is move on with his life and begin a new chapter as an innocent man. Go to college. Meet the girl. Fall in love. Put his past behind him.

There's just one small problem: Hannibal Lecter isn't quite ready for him to move on, and truth be told, Hannibal is a itch that Will just can't help but scratch. When The Great Red Dragon begins to stalk the halls of George Washington University, Hannibal's ready to see just how far Will is willing to go to see his reckoning through.

In the end, the fire could take them all.

Thriller, cat-and-mouse, romance, angst, murder, mayhem, gaslighting, slow(ish) burn, old(er) Hannibal, whole-heartedly grumpy college-aged Will Graham.

Act I: A Part in Which the Hero Meets His Arch-Nemesis

Chapter 1: Enter Stage Right

The Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane specialized in two things; first, they provided a safe space for the criminally insane to receive aid, and second, they took perfectly sane individuals and found delicately devious ways to make them certifiably mad. Within the dreary brick and concrete blended walls of only a lower-income-modest budget, there were certain rooms that aspired for civility with their floral wallpaper and gauche leather sofas, but even the hired help could barely boast the environment in which they toiled away at. The mental instability was an airborne virus, one that preyed on the strong of mind and completely obliterated the weak.

Will Graham was neither of these things –the criminally insane, nor the perfectly sane. Rather, he was a curious mix of both, and currently to date he would actually call it more of a curse.

He currently sat in the only room not bugged by the warden’s microphones, staring at the hands of a gristly, aged FBI agent. There was no polite ceremony to his visit. They knew each other well enough that pleasantries died when Jack Crawford first accused him of a murder that Will most certainly had not committed –several, in fact.

“Are you listening?”

“Vaguely,” said Will. A lie, but he’d become pretty good at those.

“Vaguely,” Jack repeated, awed. Before Will could tack something on, he tossed the file down for Will to see. “Read for yourself, then.”

Will glanced down nonchalantly. “I see what it says. I guess I’m just processing what it means for me exactly, is all.”

“What it means?”

“I mean, it says here the Chesapeake Ripper’s been at large for the last four years. Says here he’s actually been killing for awhile before that.” Will pushed the file folder back to Jack and crossed his arms.

"Yeah."

"Says there's evidence showing there was no copycat to Garrett Jacob Hobbs, just the Chesapeake Ripper."

Jack gestured and nodded. “So?”

“So?”

“I’m saying you’re innocent, Will.”

Will smiled. “Shit, Jack, but I already knew that."

“We made a mistake,” Jack replied, and it was obvious in the lines of his face that he’d been forced to eat crow. A whole lot of it. “One that the FBI does not take lightly. We contacted your lawyer, and a negotiation of wrongful imprisonment reimbursement was reached.” He slid a crisp, bland check over to him, scritching along the file folder. Will scratched the whiskers on his cheek thoughtfully.

His lawyer had called the night before, so he'd had time to mull it over. He lets it sit in a puddle of discontent on the table. “Two hundred thousand is pretty high dollar,” he finally said thoughtfully.

“Considering the specifics of the situation—"

“—My sickness the perfect excuse to not participate in any real detective work—"

“—it wasn’t difficult to convince us to offer the maximum amount,” Jack finished.

Will looked to his eyes, then to his mouth. “Is it that difficult for you to realize you should have listened to me?” he asked.

“Is it still that difficult for you to look people in the eye?” Jack retorted.

Will forced himself to look into his eyes. “I already know what I’ll see when I look into your eyes, Jack,” he said, “I'm sick of looking in eyes like that.”

“The evidence—"

“Was gift wrapped with a neat bow on top for you to keep as a souvenir,” Will cut him off. “So easy that you didn’t think to question whether or not it was really that simple to catch someone supposedly so smart you’d recruited an eighteen-year-old to tag along to horrific crime scenes. Easy as pie.” He folded his arms and dragged his thumb over his bottom lip, thinking. Temper, temper. Try again. Finally, “I’ll take your money. Four years in this place will ensure that I take anything I can from you.”

Jack’s lips puckered, but the papers were produced. Will took the stack and signed each specified place, gaze occasionally cutting to the check that rested at his elbow. Two-hundred thousand was indeed the highest he’d ever heard of, the closest being Inmate 2361-B who’d been imprisoned for allegedly killing his brothers. Three years got him one-hundred thousand dollars, but it also got him a bullet to the head a week after his release when he couldn’t adjust to civilian life and decided that eating a gun was better.

Paperwork done, Jack placed everything in a neat stack and seemed to hesitate. Will studied the clock overhead. 2:13 P.M.

“This killer that framed you—"

“Not interested.”

“He’s killed at least fifteen people, and we could really use your insight.”

“I don’t care,” Will snapped. “You know who I said did this to me.”

“Not that tired old drum about Hannibal-”

“Where you’re not inclined to hear me out, I’m not inclined to give a singular shit about your inability to catch a serial killer.”

“We did investigate him, Will! We found nothing!”

“Only because he’s smarter than you.”

They glared at one another from across the table, and Jack nodded reluctantly. “This killer is, yes. I need you to at least look.”

“I don’t care about your problems.” A beat. “And I don’t want to look.”

“No, but the Will Graham I know wouldn’t want to see so many people get hurt, even if it meant that you got to see me flounder in the process,” Jack said.

Will rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, and he sighed. “The Will Graham you claimed to know was, in your eyes, a psychotic killer,” he said conversationally.

“At the very least, help me because you could become a target if he wants to go after you again,” Jack prodded, not rising to the bait.

“My struggles are old and overused to him. I’ve become a boring study as of late, so it furthers him nothing to continue to try and ruin my life,” said Will with a non-committed shrug. “That’s the only thing you’ll get from me. Free advice, too: you’re no match for him, Jack. Let someone else take the case while I get back to my life.”

“Your life’s not—"

“FOUR years, Jack,” Will snarled, and something in his tone startled Jack enough that he didn’t interrupt. “Don’t you dare try to soften that.” He paused, waited long enough to get control of his voice. Temper, temper. “I don’t…I don’t want to help you.”

“It’s not about me, it’s about the innocent people,” Jack argued.

“At this point, I don’t care about them, either,” Will lied. It was a good lie, though, the kind that slid smooth off of the tongue like oil. “When can I leave?”

“Today,” Jack said, and he looked to the small window in the corner, just big enough to be legal. “They’re already processing your things for release. I took it on a hunch you'd say yes.”

Will heard the lock in the door turning, and he stood, studying Jack out of the corner of his eye. It was something he’d had to learn to do, and he’d become as good at that as he has at lying. “If you’re trying to imagine four years here, Jack, I’d not recommend it.”

“Oh?” Jack turned, likely ready for another fight.

Will stepped out when the door opened for him, and he smiled grimly. “You’re an FBI agent. They’d have slit your throat a week in.”

When Will returned to his cell, he found his things –what little he had in his cell that could be claimed as his –put neatly into a small vinyl duffle bag, the hospital’s logo emblazoned on the side. Clearly this was something that’d been in the works long before he’d ever been consulted.

He wasn’t handcuffed, and he walked down the endless grey walls without the metal biting his wrists for the first time in his entire life. The guard that walked beside him wasn’t friendly, but he made no move to stop Will when his pace quickened. He swore he heard whispers, hisses, other inmates calling out, and it nipped at his heels, threatening to trip him until at last the thick, barred doors shut with a definitive THUD.

A familiar face met him at the small space between worlds, where the check-in blocked both the entry to the institute and the exit to the real world. He’d been allowed to change out of the jumpsuit, a simple pair of sweatpants and a plain white t-shirt his only other clothing, and he was relieved when she threw her arms around him that they’d been recently laundered. He dropped his duffle bag to hug her back, only a beat too late. It’d been a long time since he’d been embraced like that.

“Look at you,” Alana breathed, letting go of him. Four years hadn’t changed her, although it could be said that was because Will had witnessed those four years. Her raven hair was still swept back in loose waves, and her blue eyes still froze whatever they set their gaze on. She smiled, and he felt his own lips twitch in response, a tingling sensation rippling over his skin.

“Look at you,” he replied. He tugged loosely on his shirt, and he grinned. “They said that I could keep one item as a souvenir.”

“A good choice, Mr. Graham,” Alana stated, studying it. “I’d have done the same.”

“Are you off so soon, Mr. Graham? I’d have thought you wanted an exit interview.”

Will couldn’t help the small, tense knot of unease. “I don’t,” he said, curt.

Frederick Chilton laughed as he reached them, although it wasn’t quite humorous enough to be real. “I found the timing of your release interesting,” he said, gesturing to Alana. “I must admit, I was a little upset that I only found out ten minutes before you did that it would be occurring.”

“I think you know me well enough to know that nothing that happens is coincidence,” Will replied. Frederick opened his mouth to reply, but at the expression on Will’s face, it snapped shut.

“Congratulations on your promotion, Frederick,” Alana said from around Will. She moved around him to shake Chilton’s hand, and her offer was returned after a beat.

“It was a surprise to me, truly,” Chilton said with faux-modesty.

“The last Head Administrator was lobotomized,” Will informed Alana. “No one wanted the job after that. He was the only one with credentials that applied.”

“Yes, well, I met all of the criteria, and they were more than happy to offer the position to me. If you’re looking, Bloom, I can set you up with a wonderful residency here,” Chilton offered coyly.

“I have a good residency, but thank you,” Alana said with an amiable laugh. “Will, should we go?”

“Oh, yes, you should,” Chilton stated, laughing at a joke only he knew. “Whoever the killer is that framed you, you must find yourself inherently indebted to him for deciding to let you go free.”

“Goodbye, Frederick,” Alana said curtly, and she led Will towards the exit before he could reply with something nasty.

It was spring in the real world, sunlight rippling through maple leaves, and when Will’s shoes touched the concrete outside, he stopped at the steps and stared, eyes hungrily consuming everything in sight. Baltimore, Maryland wasn’t exactly home, but the trees were green, the flowers bloomed, and the air positively reeked with growth and birth and all those happy, renewing things. He inhaled deeply, savoring it.

“What do you think?” Alana asked.

"I'm hungry," he said, taking a step. No guard burst through the doors to detain him. No orderly found just the right spot to sink a needle and send him into a dizzying sleep. He hurried down the steps, pace quickening.

“What are you feeling?”

“Burgers,” he replied. Then, dryly, "glad to see the car hasn't changed."

"Hey, student loans before cars," she laughed, and they climbed in.

His bank assured him that four years had grown his account by exactly a penny and a half. Not surprising. Will drummed his fingers on his leg and was quick to leave after the check cleared, mingling by the mildly spindly maples struggling to grow in the indirect sunlight. Sunlight by the trees felt nice.

“Whoa,” Alana laughed, following him out, “no need to rush. They aren’t going to take it back, Will, I promise.”

“Right,” he said, and it took him a second to really register what she was saying. He laughed, a curt sort of noise that startled a woman walking by. “…Right.”

He waited outside of the burger place, loitering beside a table with an umbrella, and when Alana walked out he sat himself down with his back to the building, watching everyone on the street. His gaze flicked from teen to child to angry, middle-aged man, fingers plucking at his steak fries. He was hungry, but there was a different sort of hunger that took precedent, the kind that made him note hand gestures and tone, smiles that were quick and lingered. The only people he’d been able to observe for the past while had been guards, orderlies, and inmates, and those were the worst sort of people to see in a miserable, dreary, everyday setting. Miss Avery would have cautioned him that those were not the people one wanted to imitate and reflect.

“How are you processing everything?” Alana asked as she added ketchup to the burger. Will grabbed a fry and stuffed the entire thing into his mouth, sitting up to get his burger unwrapped.

“It’s very real,” he said, hands grazing over a bun that didn’t feel like it’d been baked at twelve thousand degrees before being dropped on something cold and left. “But it very well could be a dream. I could still wake up on that cot tomorrow.”

“It’s not a dream,” Alana assured him. “I was there when Agent Crawford met with the lawyer, and we discussed a few things before it was approved and he went to meet with you.”

"Jack didn't know I already knew." Will grinned. He'd enjoyed watching Jack dish out what he already knew was coming.

"I told him no matter what he did he was to get you out as soon as possible," said Alana.

“That’s a relief,” Will said. “I don’t think I’d manage another round.” And that was a lie, but it was the kind she’d allow him to have. If there was one thing Will had learned about himself, it was that no matter what seemed to happen to him, he woke up the next day –not necessarily stronger, but angrier. More resilient.

He took a bite of the burger, and yes; just what he thought. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. He chewed slowly and swallowed, savoring every moment.

“Do you have plans?” she asked.

“Get my phone turned on, call my dad, get my things, get a car, get a place, get a job.” Will ticked off the items on his fingers, grabbing another fry.

“Does…Hannibal fall into your plans?”

Will made a face. “Why would he?”

“Jack tells me you’re still convinced he framed you for everything,” she said tentatively.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what Jack’s playing at either, telling you that. He says a lot,” Will replied with a shrug.

“You think Jack is...playing with you?”

“This whole thing could be Jack’s idea. He could try and use you to convince me to help him suss out his killer.” Will shrugged, taking another large bite, uncaring of the use of too much mustard and not enough tomato. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d even had a tomato, let alone a meal that hadn’t come pre-packaged.

On second thought, he could remember, and he didn’t want to.

“You think so?”

Will finally braved a glance to her face, and the tone matched the facial expression. Her displeasure and disbelief were matched only by her reluctance to intentionally hurt him.

“No. I think Hannibal finally got bored with me, and sooner or later he was going to have to take credit for his work.” A beat as Will mulled something over. “Is that what they call him since they refuse to use his real name? Chesapeake Ripper?” He glanced over to a mild argument a couple was having at the farthest table, partially to note how she flipped her hair when she was indignant, and partially to avoid Alana’s disapproving expression.

“Leave it to you to still accuse the only man that stood by your side during the trial and believed your innocence,” she replied dryly.

“I don’t think any of you understand just how much he enjoys toying around with people,” Will said with pseudo-pleasantness. He took another bite, looking away from the couple to study Alana’s hands. They’d forgone handling her food in order to maintain business.

“He was trying to help you, Will.”

“He wanted his thesis to be new, bold, and innovative, and if he got to crawl into the head of some messed up kid that was too stupid to realize he was being manipulated, then so much the better,” Will snapped. “Which, by the way, I read his thesis; Dr. Chilton ensured I had access to see just how much Hannibal profited off of everything that happened to me.”

“Then you’ll have also read that he urges others to look for the necessary signs in order to prevent what happened to you to happen to anyone else,” she retorted.

“Yes, if the great Hannibal Lecter can’t cure the encephalitis, no one else should try,” Will said sarcastically. “I got to read a lot about psychology in the hospital, since everyone at first was convinced that I was an intelligent psychopath. He uses forms of coercion and persuasion to get what he wants, all the while his hands stay clean.”

“You’re not an intelligent psychopath,” Alana said pointedly. “Your presence here should show you that none of us think that.”

“The evidence shows me the Chesapeake Ripper finally decided that he wasn’t having fun anymore, so he needed to change things up a bit. Now he gets to take credit for his work, and judging by the desperation in Jack Crawford’s tone, I can assume he can continue toying with Jack a bit more. If he’s going to Hannibal to ask for help next, the Chesapeake Ripper won’t have to go far to get his kicks –the FBI will take the fun right to him.”

“He still asks about you, Will. Even after everything you’ve said, he still worries about-”

“My well-being, and do I eat, sleep, bathe, shave, read, and just generally take care of myself because sometimes at night he wakes up with such paternal thoughts in his head he can’t help by drop by the next day to make sure everything’s alright,” Will interrupted.

“Then why-”

“Because I know him better than any of you, and I see exactly what lies behind that artfully constructed veneer of calm, collected concern,” he replied. “And let me be honest, Alana, behind that careful construction is an intelligent psychopath that took away some of the few people in my life that I care about, and when I was able to piece it all together, he framed me for it.”

“He hasn’t taken me,” Alana observed, tilting her head. In that moment, he saw her as more of his therapist than his friend. “In your skewed perception of him, why is that?”

“You’re useful,” he said, swallowing with difficulty. “And you’re better off blind to him than dead.”

She pursed her lips, and maybe it was the way that she bowed to the meal for a moment that gave it away. Halfway through her burger, she set it down. “I’m dating Hannibal, Will,” she admitted at last.

He blinked, stunned. Another bite, then a douse of soda to wash down the bitter taste of disappointment masking fear. “…I see.” He nodded, feigned contemplation. He couldn't quite look past her chin. “And when should I expect the announcement in the mail?”

“Stop,” Alana warned.

Will laughed bitterly, plucking at the bun. “No, no, congratulations,” he praised, waving a hand dismissively. “I mean, really, I’m just…happy for you.”

“No you’re not.”

“No, I’m not,” he agreed, and he drummed his fingers on the table, needing to expel the anger that threatened to burst from him. He focused on the feel of the plastic table against the pads of his fingers, ruminating in the silence.

“You have every right to feel upset, given what you think about him,” she offered lightly.

“You’ve put yourself in a very dangerous position,” he finally replied, when he felt that he could control the timbre of his voice, “and it’s frustrating when I’ve warned you for years, and you still somehow thought that the best place to be was right beside a man like that.”

“Hannibal is a good person, Will,” she said, exasperated.

“You know, if you say it with a little more passion, you may just convince me,” he urged. He needed his hands busy; he fiddled with more ketchup for the fries.

The couple at the farther table was beginning to lose their cool, too. The man’s voice rose and lowered in cadence, rough and stiff with something like the hard consonants of an insult. The woman’s arms were crossed, her posture stiff.

“What are your plans, Will?”

“You already asked me that,” he sighed.

“Are you going to hurt Hannibal?” she pressed, and he looked back to her as he realized what she meant.

“Oh…oh, do I have plans for him?” he asked, incredulously. “Are you serious? I want to stay as far away from that man as I possibly can!”

“It’s not an unfair question.”

“It is when you’re being protective of a man capable of cutting the lungs out of someone while they’re still using them,” he replied sweetly. The more he felt the anger bubbling from the other table, the more he felt an insistent need not to replicate it.

Alana treaded carefully. Maybe she sensed it, too. “I know that in traumatic events, especially when undeserved actions are done against you, it makes sense for people to find ways to blame mentors friends for what happened,” Alana said gently. “You went through something horrifying, and you weren’t really allowed to properly grieve for your losses because everyone turned against you when it happened. It makes sense to me that you, in a time that was plagued not only by severe and horrifying losses but also a sickness that literally set your brain on fire, would take that burden and sub-consciously place it on Hannibal since he’d been trying to help you for months and was unsuccessful.”

By choice.

The man was gesturing with his phone, jabbing for emphasis. The woman was furiously ignoring him, her own soprano cutting into his tirade every so often with something biting but indistinct.

“Is that an apology? You completely believed I killed those people--”

“I never believed you as Will Graham consciously did anything to hurt anyone,” she countered. “I have always believed in you. Did I think that it was entirely probable, given the evidence, that the person that manifested as a result of a high-stress situation coupled with a deadly disease had a capacity for violence? Yes.”

“Those two people are the same person. One just had better control over our time.”

She startled him when she reached forward to grasp his hand just as the man shouted something particuarly foul. “I’m sorry for any time that I made you feel like a criminal.”

Will swallowed with difficulty, and he looked at their hands. Unlike Jack’s, dry and calloused with a life of hard work, Alana’s were smooth and unblemished, nails filed professionally and scented with something floral--Fresias? In stark contrast, his looked much closer to Jack’s, and he saw the precise place that one of Charlie’s hooks had caught on the back and broke skin. He let go of her hand to snag another fry, nodding curtly.

“If you want to talk about Hannibal-”

“I don’t want to talk about Hannibal anymore,” Will said curtly. “When I say that I want to remove him completely from every aspect of my life, I mean that. We can talk about what you want to talk about.”

“What I want to talk about is what you don’t want to talk about,” Alana said with a small smile.

“We can talk about whatever it is that I do or don’t want to talk about, how’s that,” Will offered. He glanced at her eyes, then over her head where a man in a greasy t-shirt carried a to-go order in one meaty fist.

“I don’t want you to worry about me, Will. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long, long time.”

“People that I care about tend to die. Worry comes with the territory.”

“You still have me, your father, and despite what you think, Jack Crawford is very much invested in your well-being.”

A rum deal, no matter how you looked at it. The only one he felt especially grateful for was the one sitting just across from him, and she was currently dating the only person in the world he’d gladly murder.

“Just promise me that you’ll be careful,” he said, looking to his food. The burger had about two bites left, and he wanted to savor them. “I know…I know you believe Hannibal is great, but he’s a snake. His venom is slow acting, and…I just want you to be safe. When the time comes-” He sighed, scrambling to find the words-- “when the time comes that you…have the choice to be blind or brave, Alana, please just be blind. I think maybe he’d let you live if you just chose to be blind.”

“You weren’t blind.”

“Oh, I really was, until I wasn’t. By the time I saw, though, I wasn’t in any position to do anything about it. I think that’s one of his favorite parts.”

“I’m as safe with Hannibal as I am with you,” Alana assured, and Will peeked up at the umbrella again, resisting the urge to roll his eyes.

He could say with utmost confidence he’d never had the inclination to eat someone, but maybe his definition of safety and Alana’s were completely different.

[sroloc--elbisivni]

It’s been three months since my dad died.

I think about him every day. Never in the same way twice. Sometimes it’s like last night, where I started remembering the way he grinned and the way he made salmon and how much I miss him and start crying into my pillow. Sometimes it’s like today, where I feel numb and dull and empty until I realize it’s been a quarter of a year and I’m not going to do anything for the rest of my life but get further and further away from him, and the person I was when I knew him. And then I start crying on a plywood platform thirty feet off the ground at work.

I’ve been working a lot this week. This whole semester, really. I’ve wanted to be busy. I’ve wanted to not think about things. And I hate it, because I know that thinking about him is one of the only ways he’ll get fully remembered, and I’m too afraid of getting lost in missing him, and I need to move on and be in the world and I don’t always want to.

But the further away I get, the more I lose. So let me tell you about my dad.

‘You’ being, the general world I guess. You don’t need to read this. I just need to say it. Pretend I can shout at the world “A GOOD MAN IS DEAD” and have it matter.

My dad was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and he had the state in his bones—one time I needed to know what city for paperwork, and I texted him to ask if it was Fargo, and he said “No, the other big eastern city.” He understood blizzards and thunderstorms and dressing for the cold, and he taught them to my brother and me even though we were growing up in coastal California, where only one of those happened, and then rarely.

He was brilliant. If you want to know anything about my dad, it was that he was brilliant, and he was kind, and he was loving. He also had several small strokes at the end of his life that meant he didn’t remember or retain things well, and that he got more irritable, and reclusive, and locked into routine. We didn’t know about the smaller strokes until a month before the one that would kill him. Just that he was getting more distant.

My dad was prickly at the oddest times, and he had a temper, and he hated telemarketers, and bad drivers. He lashed out when he got mad and got sulky when you lashed back. He could snipe, and pick at things you didn’t even realize you were sore about, and didn’t know how to listen to a problem without trying to fix it.

He was good at fixing problems. He would take apart a toaster to fish out a burnt piece of bread, and study up on the riding lawnmower engine and go at the engine over and over again, and learned like he breathed. He wanted to write a book about learning, about the way we think and how it actually works, and what thinking is and what learning is and therefore what teaching should be. He believed that learning was just patterns of action. He and my mother literally wrote a book on how to teach in a way that built things up, rather than trying to pick at people’s behavior until they did what you wanted.

My dad was a teacher. He was a wonderful teacher. He taught me how to ride a bike, and drive a car, even when I was yelling at him, and he taught me how mean, median, and mode worked for a third grade science project. He helped talk me through algebra, and fractions, and division. He tried to teach me editing, but that went badly, because I was fourteen and had decided I knew what was best, and he never knew how to let things he cared about go.

He was a teacher for all of his adult life, even though he only ended up in the teacher’s program at his college because he took the RA’s keys after the RA left them lying around and he thought that was irresponsible, and the authority in charge of his punishment was his mother’s friend and also the Dean of Education. He stayed in the education program at the University of North Dakota for the next several years, helped found the school’s first no-hazing fraternity, found a skull with some friends at an archaeological dig site and held onto it for a couple years, went nocturnal for a while, and wrote his dissertation on the way we learn and the history of education. He talked about cave paintings, as early human abstract thought, but he didn’t get to see them until last year, when we went to France. My brother and I had to make sure he didn’t fall, as we went down into the cave, because it was rough and sloping and he was unsteady on feet he couldn’t quite feel anymore.

My dad had diabetes. My dad loved food. By the end of his life, he had lost feeling almost all the way to his knees, and insulin was taking up more room in our fridge than the eggs and milk put together. He was a great believer in the power of ice cream, as a special treat or just to hide in the fridge for when you wanted a taste. His favorite food that I baked was chocolate chip cookies. I made them with his mom’s recipe. Every time i was baking, he’d walk by and try to steal a piece. He stole popcorn every time we made some, too. Called it a ‘popcorn tax’. He used food as a love language, which made it awkward every time you ended up stopping on the way home for dinner without him, on a night he was cooking. He loved going out to eat, and would always talk to the waiter. He would always talk to anyone, really. More than the rest of us would like. My brother and i would always complain that he didn’t have to tell people our whole story, that they didn’t care. But he cared, and sometimes strangers did too, and sometimes they became friends.

My dad loved having friends. He loved knowing people, and talking to them, and learning from them and teaching them. He loved people, but had the misfortune of marrying an introvert and fathering two more. He was the popular kid in high school, on the football team and the newspaper. It was a Catholic high school—he was a Catholic until college, and then he started asking a lot of questions and never really went back. But he remembered all the theory, and all the questions, and all the things they tried to answer, and he could tell you about them if you wanted to know. My mom remembers when he met her aunt for the first time, a former nun, and they spent a good hour debating the finer points of something she couldn’t understand and barely remembered about the Holy Stations. He was good at that, at making you feel in every conversation that he was looking right at you, and interested in what he saw.

He got his doctorate in education, moved to Colorado, learned to ski, learned to parallel park—at 38, something I never failed to bring up when he was trying to teach me to drive—got married, became a step-father, started a charter school, had a wonderful couple of years teaching things the way he felt people would learn them, worked a paper route to try and keep it going, closed the school, dressed his stepkids up as Jawas for Halloween, got divorced—not necessarily in that order. I wish I’d asked my dad more about this part of his life. All I have are unconnected stories. Eventually he went back to North Dakota, and met my mom, and they spent the rest of his life together as “itinerant academics,” trading off who found a job at another university when they wanted to move. They got married at a courthouse two days before Christmas, because my dad needed health insurance and Mercury was going into retrograde. They had a kid in St. Paul and another in Tacoma. They were progressive educators, at a time when that wasn’t a comfortable thing to be in the Northern Midwest, and they made the giraffe their mascot because they kept ‘sticking their necks out’. I didn’t really appreciate that my parents were rebels against a system until I found out that in his first year of teaching, my dad and his friend had adjoining classrooms, and they came in with sledgehammers one weekend and knocked down the wall so they could have a big open classroom.

I found that out at his funeral. So many people my parents know are scattered all over the country, which is great for road trips and hard for gathering. They sent stories instead.

My dad played the guitar, and he sang in his first year of college—at a Catholic school choir, before he transferred, and the Beach Boys on the bus. He loved the Grateful Dead, and Jimmy Buffet, and the Eagles, and Peter Paul and Mary, and the Kingston Trio, and Bob Dylan, and he loved singing along in the car and dancing along in the kitchen, shuffle-step bouncing to the beat. He wore a sweatshirt with the logo of the elementary school my brother and I went to for fifteen years at least, from the time I was in kindergarten to the time he died. I remember it getting covered with cat hair, after the cat followed us on a walk to school too far to turn around and take her home, so he picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. She shed in terror. He used to carry the little half size cello I started learning on to school and back, every Wednesday and Friday, on his back making jokes about being a Sherpa.

My dad liked jokes. My dad liked to laugh. He loved comic strips, and insisted that my brother and I be allowed to read as many as we wanted. Probably the reason he and I got so very good at reading. I would recite Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield and Baby Blues to him, retelling what I remembered and hoping he’d laugh at the punchline. I’d show him things I found on the Internet when I got older, still trying and trying to make him laugh. I was less and less successful over time.

He was excited about the new Star Wars movies. I remember him telling me from his computer in his office, showing me the article. I remember going to the midnight showing of Episode VII, but not VIII—he couldn’t stay up that late. We saw Rogue One with my uncle, weeks after it came out. My dad was always the one who took us to movies as a kid. He liked stories. He liked to have fun. He liked Terry Pratchett and Robert B Parker novels and books about how the universe worked that took him months to finish. He had a brother, a younger brother, and lost him months after he lost his dad, years after he lost his mom. He saved things from them—the couch he grew up with, half a dozen chairs, boxes and boxes of books and records, a flag on the wall, a breakfront with china in it, all kinds of other keepsakes. My dad liked things. liked to save things. Liked to remember people—and he had a good memory. Up until the end.  I came out to him about my gender six times, because he just couldn’t retain it when I told him. and every single time, he was supportive, and careful, and kind, even when he didn’t understand.

He loved our dog so much. He would make her food just so, with kibble and wet food and bacon grease all mixed together and heated in the microwave just so she’d like it. He used to take her on walks, every single day, and took her everywhere in the car with him. They walked on the beach a lot. My dad loved the beach, probably because he lived so far away from it until he was 51. I was born when he was 52.

My dad worried a lot about math education. how people get traumatized by math, and when they become teachers and parents, they pass on that learning math is hard. He worked for UC Berkeley for years, running a program to give engineering students the skills to become teachers. He ran a summer camp in Emeryville for STEM for high schoolers. Or…middle schoolers? I don’t remember anymore. He made these math models, abaci and blocks that showed ones and twos and tens and how numbers fit together into bigger numbers, and then he painted them all the colors of the rainbow so they wouldn’t be scary. So they’d be toys, something fun and beautiful and clever.

There are so many more things, about what a full and beautiful and complicated human he was that I can’t pull to mind or don’t have the words for, but I need you to know he was more than everything I’ve managed to pour here. 

He wasn’t perfect, but he was the best dad I could have had. He was smart enough to answer all the questions I asked him, and he gave wonderful hugs, and he loved with a heart as big and open as the prairie sky. And I miss him, so, so, much, and it hurts to think of how I’ve been missing him for a long time, as little pieces of him broke off and drifted away when we weren’t noticing.

His name was George W. Gagnon, Junior. People called him ’Sandy’ as a kid to keep him distinct from his dad, because he had blonde hair as a baby. When I was little, it was dark, dark brown on the sides and circling the bald top. In the beginning of July it was a snowy white.

He’s my dad, and he’s gone, and I’ve spent the past three months knowing that I’m never going to go home again, not really. And knowing that ‘family’ is too big and whole a word to fill with what we have left.

I can’t cry in front of other people anymore. And I don’t want to talk about how I’m feeling, or what the world is like now. I just want people to know.

A good man is dead. He loved, and was loved, and laughed, and learned, and ate good food and made bad jokes. And even after writing all of that—I still miss him, and he’s still gone.

[bombardthehq]

Patriarcha

by Robert Filmer

published 1680 (written by 1640), read 15/09/19 - ???

Filmer was, by all accounts, the most popular and influential political theorist in England in the 17th century. The seminal works of many major contributors to the political theory of that century - particularly Locke - were responses to Patriarcha. But he is not read today, really by anyone. He was the principle theorist of a tendency which would, by the next century, no longer exist anywhere: of absolutism, and in particular, that Kings ruled by divine right. Most courses of political science or political philosophy in universities do not even mention Filmer: the only reading list that I found him on was an infographic originating from /pol/ which was structured from most socially acceptable (things like Hayek and Burke) to least (things like Hitler and Kaczynski): under the section ‘Reactionary Right’, Patriarcha appears at the very bottom.

I began reading out of curiosity but it became clear that it was both a relatively complex text and one that is both downstream and upstream of things important to us: thinkers like Tacitus and Machiavelli, and the theory of Sovereignity respectively. So, notes. I always say I’ll try to keep my notes brief and never do, how about this time I promise to be thorough?

Chapter I: That the First Kings were the Fathers of their Families

Filmer opens by talking about an idea which contemporary political theorists believed in, which is that humans are “naturally endowed and born” with “freedom from subjection”, and that forms of rule only have power over them because they give them that power.

Often Hobbes and Rousseau are contrasted on a certain point about human nature: Hobbes believed that civilization was a necessary imposition because of the disastrous anarchy of man’s natural condition, while Rousseau believed (something like) man’s natural condition being good and peaceful and civilization creating problems, although he still affirmed the necessity of civilization in some sense. Anyway, both of these thinkers were later than Filmer, and both take as their beginning the very point that Filmer notes here, which Rousseau makes when he writes that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Filmer says that this is a new idea, and not something originating from the bible or the early church fathers, and hints that it was devised by the Jesuits!

He gives a logical conclusion to the idea: that if the people gave the Prince his power, they can take it away. He considers this a dangerous idea.

In fact, Filmer rejects the very idea that Kings are subject to the laws of their country, and when other theorists (he names ‘Buchanan’ and ‘Parsons’ - two names I’ve never heard) criticize the sovereign for breaking the law he considers it an error.

Equality is mentioned (just like that!) in connection to natural liberty, when he mentions their position as “the natural liberty and equality of mankind.”

Anyway, he comes around to saying, its time someone takes this seditious idea of natural liberty to task! (An early appearance of the ‘say what you’re going to say in the introduction’, by the way!)

Filmer enumerates a number of ‘cautions’ he’s giving himself for the discourse.

First he spends a paragraph going over how it isnt for him, nor anyone else, to pry or meddle into the affairs of the state, “the profound secrets of government”, which he refers to as arcana imperii. “An implicite Faith is given to the meanest Artificer in his own Craft,” he writes - true enough! - and so even more faith ought be given to the sovereign, who is “hourly versed in managing Publique Affairs.”

Arcana imperii (literally ‘mysterious power’, more semantically ‘state secrets’) is an expression from Tacitus which has gone on to have a certain currency in political theory (see here), apparently appearing as recently as Agamben, and having been appropriated earlier than Filmer, by “Botero and Clapmar” (who?). In Tacitus, arcana denotes secrets which ought to be kept secret.

The end of this paragraph is confusing to me, so I’ll note its location (here). The gist is that people ought to obey the sovereign, and he relates this to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s...”

In a sentence which goes “...knowledge of those points wherein a Sovereign may Command...”, he has a footnote - attatched to the word may ! - which leads to a paragraph weighing rule and tyranny. For Filmer, a King who rules by his own laws becomes a tyrant, "yet where he sees the Laws Rigorous or Doubtful, he may mitigate and interpret.” I’m going to note the location of this footnote too (here), because it is actualy a very clear and very early exposition of the Non-Derivative Power of sovereignity, and states precisely what Carl Schmitt means by “the leader keeps the law”.

His second caution is that he isn’t going to dispute the “laws or liberties”, only inquire wether they came from Natural Liberty or from “the Grace and bounty of Princes.” Obviously, Filmer will come down on the latter position: that any liberty one has is the benevolant gift of the Sovereign.

He says that the greatest liberty in the world is to live under a monarchy, and that anything else is Slavery, “a liberty only to destroy liberty” - although this whole paragraph is actually plainly an apology for writing a political text, which was surely somewhat dangerous back then, and while this is the official ideology that everyone had to believe (even Rousseau makes the same gestures, framing his dialogues by saying ‘this is all what I would say if I didnt live under a benevolant rulership...’), its actually clearly a bit more extreme than even Filmer is willing to commit to.

His third caution is that he isn’t disparaging the people he criticizes, simply adding on where there are gaps in their thought, and so on. “A Dwarf,” he writes, “sometimes sees what a Giant looks over.” He briefly summarises his idea about the cause of their error: that in order to ensure the authority of the Pope, they placed the People above the King. I’m not sure if thats how Buchanan saw it! Anyway, this is how he explains that the two major factions at the time were the “Royalists” and the “Patriots” - the error, for Filmer, is that people had come to believe that one could be loyal to ones country while traitorous to the King. (True enough - isn’t patriotism always a kind of category error?)

Cautions set aside, he begins the critique proper. He starts by quoting Cardinal Bellarmine (now a saint!), which we’ll reproduce:

Secular or Civil Power is instituted by Men; It is in the People, unless they bestow it on a Prince. This Power is immediately in the whole Multitude, as in the Subject of it; for this Power is in the Divine Law, but the Divine Law hath given this Power to no particular Man— If the Positive Law be taken away, there is left no Reason, why amongst a Multitude (who are Equal) one rather than another should bear Rule over the rest?— Power is given by the Multitude to one man, or to more by the same Law of Nature; for the Commonwealth cannot exercise this Power, therefore it is bound to bestow it upon some One Man, or some Few— It depends upon the Consent of the Multitude to ordain over themselves a King, or Consul, or other Magistrates; and if there be a lawful Cause, the Multitude may change the Kingdom into an Aristocracy or Democracy.

Filmer comments that this is the strongest defence for Natural Liberty that he’s ever seen, and thats why he selects it for critiism: after all, as he said earlier, its usually never a position argued for but simply taken for granted. Filmer now begins a fairly fascinating sequence of deducing things ‘backwards’ from this quote and examining what it presupposes, in a way that very closely reflects the way I approach argument (this is the reason I decided to take notes on this text)

“First,” Filmer writes, “He saith, that by the law of God, Power is immediately in the People”, and therefore the political system that God gave the world is Democracy! because Democracy has no meaning but power belonging to the people. Therefore, not just Aristocracies, but also Monarchies are against God’s will, who rightly gave the people Democracy. (This is a sort of reductio ad absurdum, I think - today it seems quite a natural thing to say!)

We want to object to Filmer here by saying that the Bellarmine does not necessarily refer to Democracy (of course, he explicitly refers to Democracy as something other than the ‘Power and Law of the Multitude’), but its not quite as easy to dismiss as one would think initially. Bellarmine does not argue for a kind of Hobbesian state of nature here, because in Hobbes’ anarchy there are surely no Powers, nor a Law. For Bellarmine, God gave men powers and laws. I would like to look more into what Bellarmine meant by this, that he perhaps thought of a prepolitical power, prelegal law... but there is surely some basis for Filmer equating it with Democracy. That said, it does not necessarily follow that investing those powers and laws in a form of government should be against God’s will.

Second, Filmer says, the only Power that men have in Democracy is to give their power to someone else, and therefore they really do not have any power. (Ho hum!)

“Thirdly,” Filmer writes, Bellarmine says “that if there be a lawful Cause, the Multitude may change the Kingdom.” Filmer asks: who will be the judge of wether something is lawful or not? It would be the Multitude. Filmer considers this “pestilent and dangerous.” (Again, surely quite natural today.)

Now Filmer quotes Bellarmine making what he feels is his only argument for the existence of Natural Liberty. Bellarmine writes: “That God hath given or ordained Power, is evident by Scripture; But God hath given it to no particular Person, because by nature all Men are Equal; therefore he hath given Power to the People or Multitude.”

Filmer now pulls out another quote from Bellarmine to refute the position just quoted, which he is proud as punch about, calling it out right before he does it and also including it in the chapter summary at the beginning (”Bellarmine’s Argument answered out of Bellarmine himself”).

The promised passage goes like this: “If many men had been together created out of the Earth, they all ought to have been Princes over their Posterity.”

Take that, shitlibs! Absolutists: 1 Republicans: 0! See you in hell Milton!

Anyway, Filmer takes this to be true: that Adam, and the succeeding patriarchs, had authority over their children: “by right of father-hood”, they had “royalty over the children”, in fact.

So children are subject to their parents, and parenthood is the “fountain of regal authority”, and this authority was bestowed by God himself. The argument promised in the chapter title begins to take shape: the first Kings were Fathers of their Families.

God also specifically assigned it to the eldest parents, which I think becomes important later.

He ‘saith’: Adam had dominion over the whole world, a Right granted him by God, and that Right was passed down to the Patriarchs. He gives what this Right is specifically, using biblical examples of authority: Dominion over Life and Death, the ability to make War, and to Conclude peace. (All of this is quite fundamental to later theories of sovereignity, especially critical ones: biopower! necropolitics! Indeed, Filmer refers to them as the “chiefest marks of Sovereignity”)

Although his history is Biblical and not the kind of historic epistemology we tend to use, as far as we’re concerned, Filmer’s argument is correct. At least for some parts of the world. I need to read more about stone & bronze age sovereignities globally but my reading on ancient Greece absolutely confirms this: the first forms of authority in that part of the world that we have record of was that exercised by a familial Patriarch who governed over a small kinship villages, setting the law (which is spoken of in terms of having ‘power over life and death’), and declared wars. There would eventually become a ruler who was largely symbolic but who, for this or that reason (not even political reasons, but often reasons related to the development of the productive forces or of national security) would appropriate more and more power from the Patriarchs while the social groups based on kinship ties would lose coherence.

Filmer’s argument here is not quite a naturalistic fallacy because he does not argue directly that it is right because it was so. Rather he uses history here to say that liberty is not natural to men, which he feels most Republican theories of government presuppose. Monarchy is argued to be good only indirectly, so the fallacy only happens ‘between the lines’ of the page.

[laserhunter136]

Educated By Tara Westover Amazon

Imagine you were born and raised in a family with radical religious beliefs. And imagine you didn’t have a birth certificate until the age of 9 and were not allowed to go to school until 17. Would you be able to muster the strength to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge? “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of a fascinating firsthand witness!

Raised by Mormon survivalists

Tara Westover was born in a small Idaho farming town, the youngest of the seven children of Mormon survivalists Val and Laree Westover, hidden under the pseudonyms Gene and Faye in the book. Due to the beliefs of the couple, Tara was born at home, and she was not issued a birth certificate until she reached the age of 9. Until then, there was no way for anybody outside of her family to know she had been born at all: Gene and Faye had decided to live in isolation after the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents ambushed and gunned down a woman and her 14-year-old son for, at worst, a minor offense.

Even before that event, Gene had firmly believed that public schools were just a way for the socialist American government to brainwash individuals into obedient slaves of the system, which is why neither Tara nor her six siblings ever got a proper chance to experience education. Gene didn’t believe in hospitals either, meaning Tara’s concussions or burns over the years were treated with herbs and home medicines. On the other hand, Gene did believe in a Mormon God, and this god (like, unfortunately, most other gods) didn’t seem to be that fond of women, proclaiming their place to be in the house – which is where Faye was all of the time.

Skip to main content.ca. Tara Westover grew up in the same era as Vanilla Ice, 'Beverly Hills 90210,' 'Saved by the Bell' and MC Hammer but apparently none of those other 'book learning' kids in town mentioned this. Pretty much the only pop culture references in the book involve Ralph and Alice Kramden. Tara Westover grew up in the same era as Vanilla Ice, 'Beverly Hills 90210,' 'Saved by the Bell' and MC Hammer but apparently none of those other 'book learning' kids in town mentioned this. Pretty much the only pop culture references in the book involve Ralph and Alice Kramden. Harrowing, near-fatal accidents appear in what to seem to be. Buy Educated: The international bestselling memoir 01 by Westover, Tara (ISBN: 021) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. “Like The Glass Castle, Educated is a wise and deep reflection about surviving one’s family. I bow down to Tara Westover, not only for her marvelous, sentence-by-sentence craftsmanship but also for making sense and meaning from a confounding and hair-raising childhood.

Tara’s grandmother wanted her youngest granddaughter to get a proper education, so one day, when Tara was 7, she offered her a chance to escape to Arizona and go to school. Tara, however, stayed. To nobody’s surprise, really, not even hers. To this day, she claims, she has very fond memories of her childhood. In view of what followed, that is somehow hard to believe.

Opening doors to the world

At the age of 10, Tara’s mindset changed abruptly. It happened when her 18-year-old brother Tyler, the third son of Gene and Faye, announced one day his intention to go to college. Gene, of course, objected to this choice, both because Tyler’s older brothers Tony and Shawn were not around the house anymore to help and because, well, he believed that going to school would not teach him how to support a wife and a few children. However, Tyler persisted, and this inspired Tara to start reading a bit more, mostly the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

Soon after Tyler left, Tara’s older sister Audrey left the house as well; and the only ones who remained were Luke, Richard, and her. Due to the lack of helping hands, Gene had to move away from farming and Tara had to help him. So, already at the age of 11, she was scrapping old cars for parts. However, she felt that she could do better, so one day, she posted a flyer at the local post office, offering her services as a babysitter. This opened her up to the world.

One of her clients, a woman named Mary, offered Tara an opportunity to visit a dance school. Tara enjoyed the experience very much, but her father soon forbade her to go anymore, believing that dancing inspired immodest and unfeminine behavior. By then, however, Tara had started taking voice lessons as well, and these were something even her father could find nothing wrong with. Especially after they helped Tara impress the congregation at their local church one Sunday. In fact, she was good enough to even get a part in a play at the local Worm Creek Opera House. More importantly, she was starting to enjoy life.

It’s the end of the world – as we know it

As far as Gene was concerned, Tara’s 13th birthday should have been her last. Not because she had done something to drive him mad, but because it was supposed to occur sometime during September 1999, about three months before the end of the world. A Mormon survivalist, Gene believed that on January 1st, 2000, all the computer systems in the world would fail and that there would be no electricity or telephones anymore. Everything would sink into chaos, he claimed, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said that there exists nothing worse than a man believing to have had a revelation, since no argument would convince them of the opposite. Not even if reality invalidated their beliefs. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it. In the case of Gene, the problem was far more severe than it is for the rest of us. Case in point: even when the end of the world didn’t arrive with the year 2000, he didn’t change his beliefs. He just changed the dates. Even so, his worldview was visibly shaken, so the family finally left Idaho for Arizona to visit Tara’s grandmother.

On the way there, the family’s van spun off the road and crashed into a field. Everyone survived, but Tara was badly hurt, even losing consciousness for a while. That did not matter one bit to Gene: as far as he was concerned, curing Tara was a job for God and Nature, not for doctors. Fortunately, even though Tara’s neck frequently locked up on her for a while, the accident didn’t leave any permanent damage. Even her neck got back to normal, eventually.

However, untreated head injuries not unlike Tara’s probably contributed to the very unstable condition of her brother Shawn, who continually abused her and her sisters. Prone to violence and as fanatic as his father, he once violently attacked Tara, waking her up from her sleep and dragging her by her hair from her bed. The reason? Tara had started wearing makeup and spending time with a boy named Charles. In Shawn’s opinion, this was not an appropriate behavior for a 15-year-old girl. Gene’s reaction? A little short of, “Way to go, son!”

College, finally

Encouraged by her brother Tyler, at the age of 16, Tara finally decided to take the ACT test, a standardized test used for college admission in the United States, not too dissimilar from the much more well-known SAT test. Tara failed the test, scoring 22 out of the 27 points she needed to get into Brigham Young University (BYU), a Utah-based university entirely owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – that is to say, the Mormons.

Considering the fact that she barely knew any math, it wasn’t such a bad score; however, she was devastated. It took her some time to recuperate and a lot of help from her mother to figure out algebra and geometry. The effort was more than worthwhile. When Tara took the ACT again, she scored 28! Everybody was happy with the result, except for her father, who didn’t want to let Tara go. His reason? God had told him personally that Tara would greatly displease the Almighty if she ever went to college.

Even so, Tara decided to throw all caution to the wind and three days before her 17th birthday, she left for BYU. It wasn’t long before she started experiencing culture shock. For example, one of the first things she noticed there was that her roommate Shannon wore pants that had the word “Juicy” written on them. In an act that seemed blasphemous to the teenage Tara, her other friend Mary even dared to shop on the Sabbath!

The classes were challenging and scary for Tara. She took English, American history, Western civilization, religion, and music. As you might guess, she didn’t have many problems with the last two, but she had quite a few with everything else. The history she had been taught at her house was very different from the history being taught at university, and the whole idea of Western civilization seemed as strange to her as Einstein’s theories of relativity would seem to a novice in physics.

Just one quick example. One day, she asked her professor what the word “Holocaust” meant. The professor thought she was joking and scolded her. She wasn’t, of course. Her father had talked at some length about the Boston massacre and the Ruby Ridge incident, but he had never mentioned the Holocaust. So, Tara believed that, at worst, it was just some small conflict that very few people would really know about.

The education of Tara Westover

The Holocaust incident didn’t discourage Tara. On the contrary, she started studying harder and, after overcoming the initial issues, she eventually sailed through almost all of her exams, Western civilization being the only exception. Not wanting to leave any gaps in her knowledge, she didn’t back off. So, eventually, she aced that exam as well.

But that was always her philosophy. It wasn’t, “Stay away from things you don’t understand,” but rather, “Where trying doesn’t work, try again and try harder.” Consequently, even though she had come to college to study music, she kept signing up for history and politics classes. Her professors noticed her enthusiasm, and one of them referred her to a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge.

Tara applied and, soon enough, she was headed to King’s College, Cambridge, to study a course under world-renowned professor of European history, Jonathan Steinberg. Just a short time prior, she didn’t even know what the word “Holocaust” meant and now Steinberg, a Holocaust expert, was supposed to grade her words and ideas. Amazingly, he had only nice things to say about them, telling Tara that her final essay was one of the best he had ever seen in his long career. Because of this, he promised to help her with her graduate application.

And that’s how Tara managed to win the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, only the third BYU student to achieve this feat in the long history of the university. After enrolling at the prestigious Trinity College, Tara became a celebrity back in Idaho and was revered by almost everyone who had ever known her. Everyone except her father Gene and her brother Shawn, that is.

Educated By Tara Westover Amazon Prime

Family troubles

Everything was going well after Tara returned to England, this time as a graduate student. So, well, in fact, that Tara began feeling as if she was a new person, one who was allowed to drink coffee and wine, and even tell stories of her fabulously strange upbringing. However, back at home, things were stranger and darker than ever.

First, Gene suffered an accident which almost killed him and left him with severe burns all over his body. Even so, he refused medical help and, once again, stayed alive against all odds. Then, Tara received a letter from her sister Audrey, in which she informed Tara that she was planning to confront her parents about the abuse she suffered from Shawn. Tara stood by her side and went back home to testify in her favor.

However, Gene and Faye were left unconvinced by the claims of the sisters, even though Shawn had explicitly threatened to kill them in their presence. To make matters worse, he repeated the threat to Tara by phone, not long after ceremoniously hugging her during the peacemaking sessions with their parents. Simply put, he was beyond treatment.

The same could be said of Gene, who, as Tara learned at one of her psychology classes, suffered from a severe case of bipolar disorder, which was getting worse by the day. On the bright side, while Tara was in England, he had started a line of medicinal oils with Faye. The business brought them local recognition and a lot of money. It also brought them a lot of interest from big companies. One of them offered Gene $3 million to buy the recipes. Gene declined the offer.

Educated Tara Westover Amazon Uk

The meeting of the two Taras

Tara’s trips back to her family opened her eyes to a strange discovery: that there were now two Taras. One of them was the respected student of a prestigious university, and the other the lost daughter of a couple of Mormon survivalists. Gene and Faye loved the old Tara much more than the new one and they were trying to get her back at all costs. However, it was the new Tara who was really experiencing life, and the one who was starting to understand the world.

Among other things, the new Tara realized that she had been lied to all of her life about one fundamental thing: the real value of women. “I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft,” she writes, “but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: ‘It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.’ The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

Educated A Memoir Book

Soon after, Tara began reading more about Mormonism, but this time she read with a much more open mindset. It didn’t take her long to realize that, compared to almost many other intellectual and religious movements, Mormonism was downright radical. She decided that she didn’t want to remain an adherent. Quite the opposite: she wanted out.

The triumph of the new Tara

One day, while Tara was doing research for her Ph.D. at Harvard (where she had won a visiting fellowship) her parents appeared at the doorstep of her dorm room. The reason was that Gene had had another one of his revelations. This time, the angels had told him that Tara’s soul had been taken away by Lucifer and that the only way for her to save herself from Hell was by accepting his blessing and by coming back to her hometown.

Everything Tara had worked for – as she writes at this crucial place in her memoir – had been to acquire for herself just one simple privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to her by her father, and to use those truths to construct her own mind. “I had come to believe,” she goes on, “that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

This was a price she wasn’t interested in paying. Even though she suffered a mental breakdown in the process of severing the ties with her family, she eventually persevered and opted to finish her thesis instead. The breakthrough came one seemingly ordinary day, when, looking in the mirror, Tara realized that it was time for her to bury her old self in the past. “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones (the old Tara) would have made,” she writes. “They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.” Tara says that different people might use different words to describe this new selfhood: transformation, metamorphosis, falsity, betrayal. She chooses to call it an education.

Final notes

There are really not enough superlatives to describe “Educated.” Alluring, courageous, heartbreaking, heartwarming, beautiful, propulsive, best-in-years, one-of-a-kind, fascinating, extraordinarily evocative – these have all been used by different reviewers. And all of them quite justly.

Book Review Educated

A unique memoir, “Educated” seems almost too strange to be believed. And yet, despite its singularity – as one Vogue reviewer has noted – the questions Tara Westover’s book poses are universal: “How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”

Educated By Tara Westover On Amazon

To quote the Sunday Times, “Educated” is a book “fit to stand alongside the great modern memoirs.”

12min tip

Be curious. Research. Contrast and compare. As Tara Westover learned, the only way to create an authentic self is through the evaluation of many ideas, histories, and points of view. Everything else is dogma.

[huntermagazine362]

Educated Tara Westover Amazon

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For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future #1 International Bestseller. Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse.

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“Tara Westover is living proof that some people are flat-out, boots-always-laced-up indomitable. A heartbreaking, heartwarming, best-in-years memoir.” ( USA Today (four stars)) “Memoirs of difficult childhoods have a high bar to cross these days, but Westover’s struggle to make sense of the world and of her upbringing sails right. “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of. Educated is a nonfiction coming-of-age memoir by the historian Dr. It describes her life from her childhood in rural Idaho salvaging in her father's junkyard, her first time away from her family in college, and her experience discovering that the world is not the place her father always said it was.

Imagine you were born and raised in a family with radical religious beliefs. And imagine you didn’t have a birth certificate until the age of 9 and were not allowed to go to school until 17. Would you be able to muster the strength to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge? “Educated” by Tara Westover reads as if a barely believable novel. And yet, it is a true-to-life memoir. So, get ready to relive a life stranger than fiction – through the eyes and heart of a fascinating firsthand witness!

Raised by Mormon survivalists

Tara Westover was born in a small Idaho farming town, the youngest of the seven children of Mormon survivalists Val and Laree Westover, hidden under the pseudonyms Gene and Faye in the book. Due to the beliefs of the couple, Tara was born at home, and she was not issued a birth certificate until she reached the age of 9. Until then, there was no way for anybody outside of her family to know she had been born at all: Gene and Faye had decided to live in isolation after the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which federal agents ambushed and gunned down a woman and her 14-year-old son for, at worst, a minor offense.

Even before that event, Gene had firmly believed that public schools were just a way for the socialist American government to brainwash individuals into obedient slaves of the system, which is why neither Tara nor her six siblings ever got a proper chance to experience education. Gene didn’t believe in hospitals either, meaning Tara’s concussions or burns over the years were treated with herbs and home medicines. On the other hand, Gene did believe in a Mormon God, and this god (like, unfortunately, most other gods) didn’t seem to be that fond of women, proclaiming their place to be in the house – which is where Faye was all of the time.

Tara’s grandmother wanted her youngest granddaughter to get a proper education, so one day, when Tara was 7, she offered her a chance to escape to Arizona and go to school. Tara, however, stayed. To nobody’s surprise, really, not even hers. To this day, she claims, she has very fond memories of her childhood. In view of what followed, that is somehow hard to believe.

Opening doors to the world

At the age of 10, Tara’s mindset changed abruptly. It happened when her 18-year-old brother Tyler, the third son of Gene and Faye, announced one day his intention to go to college. Gene, of course, objected to this choice, both because Tyler’s older brothers Tony and Shawn were not around the house anymore to help and because, well, he believed that going to school would not teach him how to support a wife and a few children. However, Tyler persisted, and this inspired Tara to start reading a bit more, mostly the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

Soon after Tyler left, Tara’s older sister Audrey left the house as well; and the only ones who remained were Luke, Richard, and her. Due to the lack of helping hands, Gene had to move away from farming and Tara had to help him. So, already at the age of 11, she was scrapping old cars for parts. However, she felt that she could do better, so one day, she posted a flyer at the local post office, offering her services as a babysitter. This opened her up to the world.

One of her clients, a woman named Mary, offered Tara an opportunity to visit a dance school. Tara enjoyed the experience very much, but her father soon forbade her to go anymore, believing that dancing inspired immodest and unfeminine behavior. By then, however, Tara had started taking voice lessons as well, and these were something even her father could find nothing wrong with. Especially after they helped Tara impress the congregation at their local church one Sunday. In fact, she was good enough to even get a part in a play at the local Worm Creek Opera House. More importantly, she was starting to enjoy life.

It’s the end of the world – as we know it

As far as Gene was concerned, Tara’s 13th birthday should have been her last. Not because she had done something to drive him mad, but because it was supposed to occur sometime during September 1999, about three months before the end of the world. A Mormon survivalist, Gene believed that on January 1st, 2000, all the computer systems in the world would fail and that there would be no electricity or telephones anymore. Everything would sink into chaos, he claimed, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes once said that there exists nothing worse than a man believing to have had a revelation, since no argument would convince them of the opposite. Not even if reality invalidated their beliefs. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance, and we all suffer from it. In the case of Gene, the problem was far more severe than it is for the rest of us. Case in point: even when the end of the world didn’t arrive with the year 2000, he didn’t change his beliefs. He just changed the dates. Even so, his worldview was visibly shaken, so the family finally left Idaho for Arizona to visit Tara’s grandmother.

On the way there, the family’s van spun off the road and crashed into a field. Everyone survived, but Tara was badly hurt, even losing consciousness for a while. That did not matter one bit to Gene: as far as he was concerned, curing Tara was a job for God and Nature, not for doctors. Fortunately, even though Tara’s neck frequently locked up on her for a while, the accident didn’t leave any permanent damage. Even her neck got back to normal, eventually.

However, untreated head injuries not unlike Tara’s probably contributed to the very unstable condition of her brother Shawn, who continually abused her and her sisters. Prone to violence and as fanatic as his father, he once violently attacked Tara, waking her up from her sleep and dragging her by her hair from her bed. The reason? Tara had started wearing makeup and spending time with a boy named Charles. In Shawn’s opinion, this was not an appropriate behavior for a 15-year-old girl. Gene’s reaction? A little short of, “Way to go, son!”

College, finally

Encouraged by her brother Tyler, at the age of 16, Tara finally decided to take the ACT test, a standardized test used for college admission in the United States, not too dissimilar from the much more well-known SAT test. Tara failed the test, scoring 22 out of the 27 points she needed to get into Brigham Young University (BYU), a Utah-based university entirely owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – that is to say, the Mormons.

Considering the fact that she barely knew any math, it wasn’t such a bad score; however, she was devastated. It took her some time to recuperate and a lot of help from her mother to figure out algebra and geometry. The effort was more than worthwhile. When Tara took the ACT again, she scored 28! Everybody was happy with the result, except for her father, who didn’t want to let Tara go. His reason? God had told him personally that Tara would greatly displease the Almighty if she ever went to college.

Even so, Tara decided to throw all caution to the wind and three days before her 17th birthday, she left for BYU. It wasn’t long before she started experiencing culture shock. For example, one of the first things she noticed there was that her roommate Shannon wore pants that had the word “Juicy” written on them. In an act that seemed blasphemous to the teenage Tara, her other friend Mary even dared to shop on the Sabbath!

The classes were challenging and scary for Tara. She took English, American history, Western civilization, religion, and music. As you might guess, she didn’t have many problems with the last two, but she had quite a few with everything else. The history she had been taught at her house was very different from the history being taught at university, and the whole idea of Western civilization seemed as strange to her as Einstein’s theories of relativity would seem to a novice in physics.

Just one quick example. One day, she asked her professor what the word “Holocaust” meant. The professor thought she was joking and scolded her. She wasn’t, of course. Her father had talked at some length about the Boston massacre and the Ruby Ridge incident, but he had never mentioned the Holocaust. So, Tara believed that, at worst, it was just some small conflict that very few people would really know about.

The education of Tara Westover

The Holocaust incident didn’t discourage Tara. On the contrary, she started studying harder and, after overcoming the initial issues, she eventually sailed through almost all of her exams, Western civilization being the only exception. Not wanting to leave any gaps in her knowledge, she didn’t back off. So, eventually, she aced that exam as well.

But that was always her philosophy. It wasn’t, “Stay away from things you don’t understand,” but rather, “Where trying doesn’t work, try again and try harder.” Consequently, even though she had come to college to study music, she kept signing up for history and politics classes. Her professors noticed her enthusiasm, and one of them referred her to a study-abroad program at the University of Cambridge.

Tara applied and, soon enough, she was headed to King’s College, Cambridge, to study a course under world-renowned professor of European history, Jonathan Steinberg. Just a short time prior, she didn’t even know what the word “Holocaust” meant and now Steinberg, a Holocaust expert, was supposed to grade her words and ideas. Amazingly, he had only nice things to say about them, telling Tara that her final essay was one of the best he had ever seen in his long career. Because of this, he promised to help her with her graduate application.

And that’s how Tara managed to win the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, only the third BYU student to achieve this feat in the long history of the university. After enrolling at the prestigious Trinity College, Tara became a celebrity back in Idaho and was revered by almost everyone who had ever known her. Everyone except her father Gene and her brother Shawn, that is.

Family troubles

Everything was going well after Tara returned to England, this time as a graduate student. So, well, in fact, that Tara began feeling as if she was a new person, one who was allowed to drink coffee and wine, and even tell stories of her fabulously strange upbringing. However, back at home, things were stranger and darker than ever.

First, Gene suffered an accident which almost killed him and left him with severe burns all over his body. Even so, he refused medical help and, once again, stayed alive against all odds. Then, Tara received a letter from her sister Audrey, in which she informed Tara that she was planning to confront her parents about the abuse she suffered from Shawn. Tara stood by her side and went back home to testify in her favor.

However, Gene and Faye were left unconvinced by the claims of the sisters, even though Shawn had explicitly threatened to kill them in their presence. To make matters worse, he repeated the threat to Tara by phone, not long after ceremoniously hugging her during the peacemaking sessions with their parents. Simply put, he was beyond treatment.

The same could be said of Gene, who, as Tara learned at one of her psychology classes, suffered from a severe case of bipolar disorder, which was getting worse by the day. On the bright side, while Tara was in England, he had started a line of medicinal oils with Faye. The business brought them local recognition and a lot of money. It also brought them a lot of interest from big companies. One of them offered Gene $3 million to buy the recipes. Gene declined the offer.

The meeting of the two Taras

Tara’s trips back to her family opened her eyes to a strange discovery: that there were now two Taras. One of them was the respected student of a prestigious university, and the other the lost daughter of a couple of Mormon survivalists. Gene and Faye loved the old Tara much more than the new one and they were trying to get her back at all costs. However, it was the new Tara who was really experiencing life, and the one who was starting to understand the world.

Among other things, the new Tara realized that she had been lied to all of her life about one fundamental thing: the real value of women. “I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft,” she writes, “but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: ‘It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.’ The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

Soon after, Tara began reading more about Mormonism, but this time she read with a much more open mindset. It didn’t take her long to realize that, compared to almost many other intellectual and religious movements, Mormonism was downright radical. She decided that she didn’t want to remain an adherent. Quite the opposite: she wanted out.

The triumph of the new Tara

One day, while Tara was doing research for her Ph.D. at Harvard (where she had won a visiting fellowship) her parents appeared at the doorstep of her dorm room. The reason was that Gene had had another one of his revelations. This time, the angels had told him that Tara’s soul had been taken away by Lucifer and that the only way for her to save herself from Hell was by accepting his blessing and by coming back to her hometown.

Everything Tara had worked for – as she writes at this crucial place in her memoir – had been to acquire for herself just one simple privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to her by her father, and to use those truths to construct her own mind. “I had come to believe,” she goes on, “that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

This was a price she wasn’t interested in paying. Even though she suffered a mental breakdown in the process of severing the ties with her family, she eventually persevered and opted to finish her thesis instead. The breakthrough came one seemingly ordinary day, when, looking in the mirror, Tara realized that it was time for her to bury her old self in the past. “The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones (the old Tara) would have made,” she writes. “They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.” Tara says that different people might use different words to describe this new selfhood: transformation, metamorphosis, falsity, betrayal. She chooses to call it an education.

Final notes

There are really not enough superlatives to describe “Educated.” Alluring, courageous, heartbreaking, heartwarming, beautiful, propulsive, best-in-years, one-of-a-kind, fascinating, extraordinarily evocative – these have all been used by different reviewers. And all of them quite justly.

A unique memoir, “Educated” seems almost too strange to be believed. And yet, despite its singularity – as one Vogue reviewer has noted – the questions Tara Westover’s book poses are universal: “How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”

To quote the Sunday Times, “Educated” is a book “fit to stand alongside the great modern memoirs.”

12min tip

Amazon Usa Amazon Usa

Be curious. Research. Contrast and compare. As Tara Westover learned, the only way to create an authentic self is through the evaluation of many ideas, histories, and points of view. Everything else is dogma.

[geopolicraticus]

The Red Pill for Philosophers and Scientists

On the Possibility of Living in Truth for Those Who Hold Truth as an Ideal 

“The Red Pill” has become a pervasive metaphor since the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is offered a choice between taking a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill has come to signify difficult and unpleasant truths, while the blue pill has come to signify the comfortable and comforting lies with which most people are pacified. 

There is a relationship between the idea of the red pill and Vaclav Havel’s conception of “living in truth.” An individual may not be able to change a dishonest society, but one can still choose to live in truth in the midst of a dishonest society simply by refusing to go along with the lies that others are willing to tolerate. There is a cost—often a high cost—to living in truth, but it is always an option for us, even if it is a difficult path to walk. “Taking the red pill” is in many contexts essentially the idea that one is living in truth, that is say, that one has recognized and acknowledged the unpleasant truths that others try not to see, and one thus lives in the full consciousness of that knowledge. 

Havel’s conception of living in truth had a further implication, and that is the idea of a parallel polis: that the extant social order is so corrupt that it is beyond reform, so that the only option left for those who have chosen to live in truth is to opt out of the extant social order and create a parallel social order, a parallel polis, in which the false and failed social order is simply ignored, and one lives and acts as though living in a parallel society in which one is not forced to assent to lies—the parallel polis is a society in which all live in truth.  

While Havel’s concept of living in truth remains an inspiration, the parallel polis never grew to a scope at which it had to be reckoned with (i.e., it never became a power in its own right), and, after the Iron Curtain fell, the institutions of civil society in regions where the parallel polis seemed to be the only option for those living in truth mostly retained their legitimacy and transitioned to remain viable under a new political dispensation. In many nation-states formerly behind the Iron Curtain, the only institutions that were permanently and irretrievably forsaken were the ruling communist parties in these states and the secret police apparatus of each.   

In other words, the compromised institutions of state, education, industry, and so on, were reformed and are now largely considered to be institutions in good standing, their past collusion with communist dictatorship notwithstanding. This is an important and a sobering lesson for us today. We can live in truth at our own expense, but the initiative to create a parallel society is not likely to be successful, because institutions have an enormous weight of social inertia behind them—so much that even profoundly corrupt institutions are more likely to be salvaged than to be junked.

This, then, is one “red pill” for scientists and philosophers who wish to live in truth (and, hopefully, the majority of scientists and philosophers do want to live in truth) but who also wish to be in the good graces of institutions that are in a position to grant status, opportunities, career advancement, and remuneration. Moreover, when it comes to the lifework of scientists and philosophers, institutions not only confer benefits upon the individual, but also confer benefits upon the ideas of individuals, so that a well-placed individual is in a position for their ideas to be transformed into a scientific research program with institutional backing, meaning that these ideas will transcend the life of the individual and will become a social and cultural legacy. That is a powerful inducement to cooperate with institutions, no matter how corrupt they are.

There are, however, many red pills, including many red pills for philosophers and scientists contemplating life-altering choices. There are many red pills, recognized in different communities, as each community has its own bête noir and its forbidden fruit and its unspeakable realities that inevitably attract the curious no less than the malevolent. And because the red pill has become such a pervasive metaphor, there is predictably a reaction against it, as in any social milieu there will be decent people and jackasses alike on both sides of every issue. Thus there are decent people who refuse whatever red pill is offered, and bad actors who see the same red pill as an opportunity, which they eagerly embrace. Thus it has been quite easy to tar with the same brush all those who have taken the red pill as being deluded opportunists who believe themselves to have grasped a Truth that others have not the courage to see.

The most painful red pill that philosophers and scientists have to swallow is this: no one is on your side. You have no side, other than other scholars, and many of those other scholars will be your rivals who are invested in scientific research programs you may consider pointless or harmless at best, or pernicious and malign at worst. It’s like the old Quaker saying: everyone is queer except me and thee, and sometimes I think thee is queer.

The rivalry for funding alternative scientific research programs means that scholars who might agree in principle that science should be funded, cannot agree on who exactly should receive this funding. If it were my call to make (and it’s not; I am utterly powerless), I would require that ten percent of every large grant for research (everything over some given dollar amount—say, a million dollars) go to adversarial research. Someone would have to be put in charge of funneling money to the scientific rivals of grantees, including those (especially those) whom the grantees sincerely believe to be mistaken, if not mentally defective.

If it is mostly true that scientists have no allies and are well and truly alone, it is indubitably true for philosophers. If you think that someone is on your side, you are deluded, plain and simple. No one is. You have no tribe; you have no people. As a philosopher you are a wanderer in the wilderness, and you cannot return to society from the wilderness without compromising yourself. Philosophy’s entanglements with power have not been to its credit. Plato’s mission to Dionysius of Syracuse, Aristotle’s education of Alexander the Great, and Seneca’s tutelage of Nero all speak to an admirable desire to have a beneficent influence, but it could be argued that the least effective of these and such efforts were also the least harmful.

Since the nineteenth century philosophers have been transforming themselves into academics, and have gained a measure of bourgeois respectability by this path. Many philosophers today get married, have families, and own a comfortable house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a reasonably new car in the driveway. This is all well and good for personal fulfillment, but philosophy is not about personal fulfillment.

Perhaps the historical dialectic between being an isolated eccentric and being a respectable bourgeois citizen is the philosopher’s version of departure and return, for we have been here before. Once universities began to be founded in western Europe, at a time when no distinction was made between philosophers and scientists, philosophers were at the center of this development, and philosophy was ensconced within university institutions for hundreds of years, until the scientific revolution and modernization so transformed the landscape of thought that the whole tradition of professional medieval philosophy—Scholasticism, as it is usually called—was largely abandoned. Much of the logical work of late medieval philosophy only came into wide recognition again in the twentieth century, so completely was it disregarded after Descartes.

This same early modern period dominated by Descartes and the epistemic turn in philosophy was a time of great social turmoil in which philosopher’s lives were on the line with each pronouncement. A book or a pamphlet could result in a literal death sentence. During the sixteenth century, pretty much every western European philosopher spent some part of their life in Holland, because the Netherlands at this time was wealthy from their seaborne trading empire and they were tolerant, meaning that they allowed philosophers to live mostly unmolested, even if they wrote unorthodox books—a rare thing in early modern Europe. Spinoza is perhaps the most obvious example of this, although Descartes, Locke, and Hobbes were also part of this philosophical diaspora. 

Spinoza, enjoying the quiet life in Holland, received a letter from I. Lewis Fabritius, Professor of the Academy of Heidelberg, and Councillor of the Elector Palatine, offering him a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, saying: “You will have the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching, which the prince is confident you will not misuse, to disturb the religion publicly established.” Spinoza replied with a letter that is a classic, hopefully known to all philosophers: “…I do not know the limits, within which the freedom of my philosophical teaching would be confined, if I am to avoid all appearance of disturbing the publicly established religion. Religious quarrels do not arise so much from ardent zeal for religion, as from men’s various dispositions and love of contradiction, which causes them to habitually distort and condemn everything, however rightly it may have been said.” This was true in Spinoza’s time, and it remains true in our time.

Spinoza knew he had to be cautious. Even sheltering in the Netherlands, he was several times under threat. He wrote that he long deliberated over the offer, and we have no reason to doubt the sincerity of this claim. We know that Spinoza was a thoughtful man, and he probably thought through all the advantages and disadvantages of accepting the position, ultimately deciding against it. Others might have decided differently; there are no right or wrong answers to questions like this. One chooses a path, and makes the best of it that one can.

There may well be further departures and future returns for philosophers and scientists as historical circumstances temporarily push them toward the center of events, and then the shifting currents of history push them away from the center to the outer periphery again. Whatever the currents portend, whichever way the wind may blow, for scientists and philosophers, life must be a cautious and continuous negotiation with the powers that be, and by “the powers that be” I do not mean only political regimes, their enforcers and their office holders, but also custom, tradition, social mores, and the tendency of the mob to riot when they are exposed to anything that lies outside their competence. Taking some public stance on a controversial issue is mostly foolhardy, especially if it gets one killed and therefore marks a sudden end to one’s research. Philosophers and scientists need to keep themselves alive, but they also need to avoid needless entanglement with institutions that can only compromise them. This is not an easy balancing act, but it is the highwire act demanded by those who would hold truth as their ideal.

[buttdawg]

FTR vs. The Initiative (Brandon Cutler & Peter Avalon)

Pineapple Pete & Michael Nakazawa vs. Joey Janela & Sonny Kiss

Abadon vs. Skyler Moore

Will Hobbs & Shawn Dean vs. Dark Order (Stu Grayson & Evil Uno)

Corey Hollis vs. Scorpio Sky

Kenzie Paige vs. Penelope Ford

Aaron Solow vs. Wardlow

Best Friends vs. Dark Order (Alex Reynolds & John Silver)

Lance Archer vs. Frankie Thomas

Orange Cassidy vs. Serpentico

Fuego Del Sol vs. Sammy Guevara

SCU vs. Private Party vs. Santana & Ortiz

I’m watching this one right now, so I might as well throw in some liveblog commentary.

--This episode marks the beginning of the Cutler/Avalon team using the name “The Initiative”.   The implication is that they’re finally getting comfortable working as a unit.

I don’t really get FTR’s “Follow The Rules” gimmick.    This match is a good example, because they nag Aubrey Edwards about enforcing proper tag rules, but then they tried to do a hand-to-boot tag themselves during their match on this show.    And then they win using a spiked piledriver, which used to be illegal in 1989, so it seems weird that these “Old School” traditionalists would adopt it as a finisher.    Or maybe it’s supposed to be ironic, I don’t know.   They’re a great team, I’ve always thought so, but I keep losing the plot with them.

--Sonny and Joey have a new remix entrance theme.   Not sure how I feel about the music, but I like it when teams enter together.

I guess Pineapple Pete is into baby oil like Nakazawa now?  This match sees Pete oil up Naka’s back and then slide across him to spear Sonny in the corner, using Naka’s back like a homoerotic slip’n’slide.

Pete just tagged Joey even though they’re on opposite teams?   Was Pete mocking them, or did Joey think that was Sonny’s arm because they were all locked up in a hold?    Or did Pete think he was in his own corner?    So many questions.

Joey and Pete sell Naka’s thong claw like a champ.    I feel kind of bad for Sonny having to deal with all these goofballs, but he looked good out here.

--They talk a lot about how green the AEW Women’s roster is, and I’m not disputing that, though I can’t tell which women are experienced and which ones aren’t.   Nevertheless, they’ve got a lot of strong characters in this division, and I think that’s something women’s wrestling usually lacks.   Abadon is a prime example.    Maybe she’s a total rookie, but she looks so horriffic that it doesn’t matter.   She’s like Bray Wyatt but actually scary.

And then you’ve got Britt Baker’s dentist/role model thing, Kris Statlander’s alien gimmick, Rayche Chanel’s “what have I stumbled into?” character, Leva Bates, and so on.   That’s the cure for a roster with limited experience.    They need to repackage Skyler Moore as some sort of truck driver or a witch or something.

--Promo package for Shawn Spears here.   I saw this on Twitter, and it made no sense to me, because he didn’t explain what the glove does.    Basically, Shawn lost on PPV to Dustin Rhodes, and Tully Blanchard chewed him out on Dynamite, and then he gave him a black glove like it was the key to furthering his career.    

Now that I’ve watched all these Dark episodes, I finally see what’s going on here.   The glove isn’t loaded.   There’s nothing special about it, and they even have the refs make a big deal out of checking it before the bell.   But then Tully will pass a metal slug to Shawn during the match, and then he’ll load the glove.  

And this is great, because it justifies Tully’s presence (the glove only works as a cheat if Shawn has someone to smuggle the slug to him.), and it gives Shawn a winning record.   My beef with the “Search for Spears” angle was that Tully kept putting him in tag matches to audition potential partners, and they never won.   The implication was that Shawn Spears sucks and the only possible way to fix him is to pair him up with a better performer who can carry him through a tag match, except there isn’t one.

But the glove works, because it really is a coaching tool.    Sometimes, Tully doesn’t even give Shawn the slug until after the match is over, because Shawn doesn’t always need it.    So it’s not just a cheat.   It’s a secret weapon if Shawn needs it, but it’s also a confidence builder.   As long as Shawn is wearing the glove, he knows he can use the slug if things go poorly, but he also feels motivated to do his best without the slug.  

My only complaint is that they introduced the glove on Dynamite, but only explained how it works on Dark.   But now that I’m caught up, it doesn’t bother me as much.

--Not much to say about these Dark Order matches.  I looked them up the other day because I wanted to make sense of their numbering system, but as far as I can tell they never used 6 or 7, and you never see 8 or 9 anymore.   Maybe the unnnamed “spokesman” guy is 6 and Brodie Lee is 7?   I thought the whole point of Brodie Lee was that he was the Exalted One, but they have Evil Uno, so that’s shot to hell.   Is Brodie #0?   Is he unnumbered because he’s in charge?    Does Anna Jay get a number?   Does Colt?  

--It’s weird to watch Scorpio Sky’s winning streak on Dark, because I watched his TNT title match with Cody first, and I think that was supposed to be the payoff of this story.   But I sort of hope this keeps going.   Sky might as well keep doing singles matches, keep racking up wins, and take another crack at the AEW World title.    While he was fighting Cody, the announce team talked about him becoming the first Black AEW World Champion someday, and it got me thinking about how he could very easily become TNT Champ someday, and I think the World title’s only a few years away at most.    Really, the conversation should be about Scorp becoming the first AEW Triple Crown winner.   

In terms of Black firsts, would he be the first African American Triple Crown winner?   Nah, Booker T pulled that off in WCW, right?  I’m not even sure he was the first to do that, but I’d have to look it up.   Anyway, Sky looks like a guy who could win all the singles belts, and he’s already done the tag title, so he’s got a leg up over just about everybody. 

-Dig the psychology of Penelope Ford locking in a camel clutch and (illegally) hooking her fingers into Kenzie Page’s face, then turning Kenzie’s face from side to side to hide her fingers from the referee.   Nice stuff.

-Aaron Solow kind of looks like Kirk Hammet from Metallica.  Wardlow wins by KO, then keeps attacking Solow after the bell, and I feel like they really need to bring back the thing where the ref will reverse the decision to punish the heel for excessive brutality.   It didn’t get a lot of use in early 90′s WWF, but it was pretty cool when it happened.

-I really want to see Lance Archer mow down a whole squad of Dark Order guys.    That’d be pretty sweet.

Holy shit they didn’t cut off Lance’s theme song during his entrance!    First time for everything.

Taz asks on commentary how Jake can control Lance Archer, because he thinks he needs pointers on how to control Brian Cage.   Taz, Jake’s just some guy Lance Archer lets follow him around.    He’s gonna beat the shit out of Jake too; he’s just saving Jake for later.

-A lot has been made on Dark about Serpentico’s streamers.   I dig them, but I don’t know what more there is to be said.   I’m more interested in the weird protrusion from his luchadore mask.

-I dig the laid back commentary from Excalibur and Taz, including where they try to figure out what to call Penelope Ford’s leather garter (thighlet?) and whether or not “smooth as ice” would be a good figure of speech.  

-I’ve seen Sammy Guevara’s GTH a few times, and I can’t really tell if it’s anything other than a GTS.   Well, he carries the guy face-up on his shoulders, and I think the GTS starts out with the guy lying face-down on the shoulders, so maybe that’s the difference? 

-Private Party and Matt Hardy do a promo before their match.    The problem I’ve got with Matt is that he announced that he was dropping all of his characters, but I can’t tell the fucking difference.   I think he was doing a bit as “Big Money Matt”, which I vaguely remember from a run he had in ROH?   I never saw it, though.    But it doesn’t sound that much different from all the other Matts, including default Matt.   Also, he went nuts on the last episode of Dynamite, attacking a guy he thought was Sammy Guevara when he actually wasn’t.    So is that him going nuts and descending back into his Broken gimmick, or is Normal Matt just going normal nuts?    I sort of don’t care enough, is the problem.

-I like this triple-threat tag match, as it features the three teams that sort of got overlooked in this whole Young Bucks/FTR/OmegaPage thing.   Those three teams have been circling around this “who’s the best?” business, but I think Private Party, SCU, and Santana/Ortiz have plenty of business in that conversation.    Oh, and the Lucha Brothers, but yeah, there’s an embarassment of riches in this tag division.

-And of course PNP wins, because they’re THE BEST THE BEST THE BEST THE--!

[compassdatacenters]

Compass Datacenters’ Sharif Fotouh Sits Down with datacenterHawk to Talk All Things Edge

In one of the best conversations about the edge, David Liggitt and Sharif Fotouh discuss the past, present, and future of the edge, from repurposed cell-tower "fiber huts" to never-before-seen data patterns. Watch the full video below or read the entire transcript. Enjoy!

  David: I'm David Liggitt with datacenterHawk. And I'm here with Sharif Fotouh. He is managing director at EdgePoint at Compass Data Centers. And we were talking about the edge, it's one of my favorite discussions ever. You gotta watch it.

I'm David Liggitt with datacenterHawk. And I'm here with Sharif Fotouh. Sharif, good morning.

Sharif: Good morning.

David: Thanks for joining us here on Hawk Talk number 33. So, really excited about that. And excited to get your feedback on the data center industry. Obviously, you have a very interesting focus around the edge and that type of, I would say, like, vertical in the way companies are using that or will use that in the future. So, excited to get your feedback.

Sharif: Oh, well, thanks for having me. And I wanna say before we get started, congratulations on your five-year anniversary.

David: Thank you. Thank you.

Sharif: It's a heck of a milestone.

David: Thank you.

Sharif: And it's been cool to see the story of datacenterHawk develop over the years.

David: Yeah, you bet. Well, I appreciate that. You know, let's talk about, you have a really interesting background as far as some of the things that you were doing before EdgePoint and before being acquired by Compass. And so, talk about that, those maybe...your career path and how that really shaped...we're talking about it a little earlier, but how that shaped the ability for you to go out and do what you're doing today. I'd love to hear more about that.

Sharif: Great question. My career path is kind of if you imagine one of those Calvin and Hobbes comics with the, like, squiggly line, definitely not the most efficient route. But I think that variability kind of lended some interesting colors. So, I've been in the industry for about 15 years now. I started working for a regional data center operator out of Austin, Texas. And I had a very interesting collection of roles there throughout the years, I was there six years. Part of it was operating, you know, retail colocation facilities. But part of it was also deploying for various web properties that was under the same family of companies in data centers all over the globe. And so, throughout those five, six years, I kind of never specialized in any one aspect, but rather, had, you know, familiarity and experience with, you know, everything up the network and system stack, all the way down to power whips and space planning.

David: So, you got a really wide variety of kind of a knowledge base of the industry?

Sharif: Yup. Jack of all trades, master of none, right? In 2013, I started with Google on the Google Fiber project. And back then, it was, you know, very kinda early stage, a pretty small team. They had just had Kansas as their city. And it was publicly kind of known, it was just a trial or, you know, a test, right?

David: Yeah. So, they were putting their Google Fiber product in that city?

Sharif: Yup.

David: Got it. Yup.

Sharif: And so, I moved out to California to the Bay Area. And over the next five years at Google, I built and led the facilities and network deployment program for Google Fiber nationally.

David: Wow. What was that like?

Sharif: Actually, it was quite exciting. But at times, really challenging. Everything from, you know, mundane labeling standards to, you know, building templated footprints for various, you know, kind of peering functions, and that kind of thing, so you could kind of cookie-cutter it across the country. But it was really exciting, the mission was exciting, innovating in a space that's, you know, traditionally pretty slow, telecom. And the public was, you know, really energized by the product. And so, you know, that kinda fed into the excitement.

So, that program at Google Fiber encompassed kind of a wide spectrum of facilities, right? So, everything from, you know, megawatt deployments within Google's hyperscale facilities for kind of our back-end services, regional pops all over the country to effectively build your kinda national backbone network, you know, for acquiring other networks and peering. And then most pertinent to what I'm doing today, hundreds of these small prefabricated telecom shelters that were dubbed by the press fiber huts. And that name stuck.

And so what was really interesting about that fiber hut story is when I started, we had a very rough design that was effectively, you know, 10 to 15-kilowatt footprint, you know, barely n+1 with a lot of single points of failure, it was a stretched cell tower shelter, right? They called the guys that are making shelters for cell towers sites, and they said, "Oh, yeah, we can build you a slightly bigger one and, you know, upgrade some components." And then over the years, right, outages, failures, requirements for increased density, variability and footprint, we went from just kind of the typical PON gear, which is Passive Optical Network gear, went from just PON gear to including transport systems, including, you know, servers, and getting more advanced. We went through multiple iterations of that design on my team. And so, kind of what started as 10 or 15 kilowatts, you know, the last design we produced over there was over 50 kilowatts. And solidly n+1, if not 2n in some places.

David: Yeah, interesting. You know, you bring up the point about the iteration of the product. And, you know, it's one of the things we were talking before just about when I started in the space back in, like, '07, and just watching how, you know, the physical larger data center facility has been iterated over the last, you know, I don't know, 5, 10 years. I was...just got back from Northern Virginia, and one of the things we were talking about is just the difference in design, you know, and how different obviously it is today than it was 5 or 10 years ago. And really, I think when that iteration begins and, you know, it's really the product positioning itself for scalability down the road. And so you basically finished your time at Google. And then tell us about starting EdgePoint, and that process, and what was your mindset behind really wanting to get out there and go do that?

Sharif: Yeah. No, that's a great question. And so, let's see. Late 2016, the Google Fiber project, you know, effectively went on pause, right? There was a change in strategy. And the organization kind of halted the expansion plans. And I had this kinda moment of wondering, okay, like, you know, we went from racing down the highway to, you know, stopping, like, what do I do next, right? And what was really interesting, and this is kind of pre a lot of the discussions and conversations that are centered around the edge space now, you know, there was barely a of couple articles and players in that space at the time. And it's really, the initial premise was as somebody that was sourcing colocation all over the country, in tier-two markets, because Google Fiber was specifically targeting tier-two markets, right? I was surprised and shocked by how many markets were underserved from a colocation perspective.

David: Interesting. On, the secondary...in the secondary markets.

Sharif: In the secondary markets. And look, since that time, a lot of those markets have been solved by players in that space your EdgeConneXs and TierPoints. But what really surprised me was a study we were doing for a specific city. I think it was Minneapolis at the time. And we were going to have to pay an exorbitant amount to a colo provider there to add a second generator. They had one generator for the whole facility. We were going to buy a second generator for the whole facility. So, I could take my 150 kW footprint inside, right? We didn't have, like, a huge footprint requirement, but we needed it to be...

David: Yeah. The redundancy, yeah.

Sharif: Redundancy, right?

David: Yeah.

Sharif: And I remember walking out of that conference call. My VP was with me. And I turned to him and I said, "You know, it'd just be cheaper to put a couple of our huts and, like, it would..."

David: Robust, yeah.

Sharif: "...it would be more robust." And that was months before we went on pause. But that thought kept gestating in my mind. And so, when Google Fiber went on pause, I kind of locked into that and thought, well, hey, I'm uniquely positioned with this experience in producing hundreds of these shelters, deploying them all over the country, right, all the specific jurisdictional concerns and, you know, going to seismic regions or regions with snow load, you know, very humid and hot regions. And so, you know, I thought that ecosystem I've really tapped into and understood. And there is an option there to support areas where the capacity, the colocation capacity or facility capacity, is in an ideal location. And that's kind of what turned into edge.

David: Sure. Interesting. So, for those that are watching that don't have a good grasp on what edge is, you know, and you're in it every day, and granular with the thought process, and the definitions, and things like that. But do your best to describe, you know, and I think you've kind of done that through your conversation with what you did at Google. But do your best to describe, you know, what the edge is and why you believe that there's such a big opportunity, you know, in the future with this type of data center product?

Sharif: Got it. What the edge is?

David: Just a question we should all laugh about. Yes.

Sharif: Yeah. It's, like, religion, politics, and the edge, let's not talk about those three things, right? No. I mean, I like to keep things pretty simple.

David: Let's go.

Sharif: So, on the simplest level, distributing infrastructure is not a new trend, right? When I started my career, you know, advanced organizations would take a footprint domestically so to say, you know, in Ashburn, Virginia, and, you know, maybe West Coast like Los Angeles, and maybe Chicago, right? And that was effectively the coverage you needed for those applications. Over time, we've seen, you know, a boom of secondary markets or other NFL cities that perhaps aren't, you know, specifically acquiring subsea cables. But, you know, you look at your Atlantas and everything else, they've just boomed, right? That was the march towards the edge, right? And that same trend is continuing, right?

And so, what was secondary markets, we're now looking at tier three markets, we're looking at, you know, big metropolises like Dallas for example, if all your data centers are located in the center of Dallas or in the outskirts, it doesn't do good for the majority of your actual eyeballs in residential earn, in customers, right? And so, that's effectively, it's just an extension of that same trend, right? As bandwidth demands go up, as application performance becomes more critical, you're going to want to locate the capacity closer and closer to the user.

David: Yup. So that's, like, a great point. Let's talk about strategy and how companies...you've seen companies do that well or not do that well. You know, one of the biggest growth points in the data center market over the last, you know, three to five years has been the hyperscale market. It's really taken the industry to new levels from a demand perspective, etc. But there's also the enterprise user-base. You know, these are companies that traditionally have housed their infrastructure inside facilities of their own, they have come out most of them, half of them, into colocation facilities and now have some sort of hybrid approach with their IT infrastructure. So, you know, this edge idea and what you just described, there is an infrastructure strategy in play where some people are probably doing this well and some people are not. So, maybe talk about that, how have you seen companies do that well and approach their strategy well, maybe the enterprise user sector, how have you seen them do that well?

Sharif: Specifically in the enterprise sector, I think it's important to, like, you know, kind of...there's the Buddhist concept of the new mind, right, come into the problem with a clean slate. And that's really hard for larger enterprises because, you know, you have, you know, years of backlog and technical data, you know, facilities of different ages and infrastructure that's in different stages of its life cycle. And so, it really is hard to tackle that problem really as blank slate. But that really is, to me and from my perspective, the key to success for those enterprises, because there's a lot of different toolsets that are now available. And if you're thinking within the paradigms of 5, 10, 15 years ago, you're probably not going to build an optimal infrastructure, right, or a topology.

And so, you know, specifically, you know, you see a lot of enterprises shift and kinda cloudify their footprint. And then very quickly, they realize there's kind of a long tail of applications and services that don't make sense in the cloud. They're high bandwidth consuming, really expensive to locate far away. And so, you know, you see them kind of contract and reduce their, you know, enterprise data center footprint and as they cloudify. And then you walk through this building and there are 10 or 20 racks, right? And they still have to keep all of the infrastructure running for them, right? And so, that's really the challenge that I think we have a new tool to offer. It's like, hey, reclaim that real estate. You know, use it for whatever your primary revenue driving activities are. If you're a hospital, use it for patient beds. If you're manufacturing facility, use it for assembly lines. And we can put a facility in your parking lot that takes six or eight parking spots that are fully 2n, and redundant, and hardened, and free up all of that space, and all the operational costs of that large infrastructure.

David: Yeah. Let's do a little deeper dive on the product. You know, when the Compass edge product, what is it and, you know, where can you deploy it? I mean, talk about the actual details around the product itself.

Sharif: Okay. I'll try not to get down the rabbit hole with this one.

David: Come on, you're good, you're good.

Sharif: But this was one of my favorite topics.

David: Let's go.

Sharif: You know, I'm really proud of what we've built at Compass. And the key premise is the edge is in about one or two facilities and, you know, something I've, you know, told our board multiple times, anybody can deploy one or two little shelters, right, a little data center. So, it's not from an astronomical feat, right? The complexity becomes in mass and scale, right? And so, I have this kind of oh, crap moment when I was at Google when we ordered a new wave of 50 shelters. You know, we went through the normal pricing discussions and design discussions.

And finally, we were ready, everything was signed off. We issued the PO. And an hour later, I got an email, "Hey, we're really excited about your business. And attached is a spreadsheet. Please put the delivery addresses for all 50 of these shelters and the dates you need them by." And that was my oh, crap moment because I realized, well, now I have 50 little construction projects to manage, 50 little facility integration and commissioning projects to manage, 50 system deployment projects to manage, cabling, and racking, and stacking,

David: Hire 50 more people. We need...

Sharif: And they were all over the country, right? I mean, so it's...And so, that's the oh, crap moment. And everybody will hit that point, right? Anybody that's in this edge space, you know, right now we're kind of in a trial and nascent stage. But as the volumes increase and as the market demands grow, people are going to hit that point. And one of the breaking points there is those construction projects are rarely going to happen on the same time. And construction is ugly and, like, always unpredictable, right? That's just the nature of beast. And so, you can try to fight that, right? But good luck. Instead, what we try to do is design around that. So, what means is, we need to be able to ship one of our facilities, one of the EdgePoint data centers to whichever location is ready first.

And here's where the problem becomes, because what if one of your locations is in seismic zone four, and one of them is in a wind-rated area, right, where you need, you know, Miami-Dade County or something, right? So, all of a sudden, you're playing this game with the factory where they're going, "Okay, this shelter is ready." And you go, "Oh, no, the site that needed the seismic shelter isn't ready. We need the wind-rated one, or we need the one with the snow load rating." and you literally are playing kinda musical chairs with the factory trying to consolidate your multifaceted construction schedule with their production schedule. And it's, I mean, again, I lived through it and, like, messy, right?

And so, with our EdgePoint shelter, the key premise is that it's a single consistent footprint that can go into any region. So it's wind-rated, it's seismically rated, it's designed for, you know, high snow load areas, you know, hot and humid climates, wherever you need to place it in the country, it can go without any changes. And so, it allows a user to buy 200 of them and start 200 construction projects in just-in-time delivery as they come off the line, send them to whatever site is next.

David: Yeah. And physically, you can put them inside, outside, talk about that a little bit, I mean...

Sharif: So, technically, you put them wherever you want. With that said, we primarily designed it to be an outdoor shelter, specifically because we think from a real estate perspective, it's designed for that highest bar, designed to be withstanding the elements, designed it to be a hardened shelter. And then, yeah, if somebody wants to put it into an existing shell, there's no reason it won't work. But on the other hand, again, that consistency in product is key.

David: Yeah. Yeah. Your comments about the production of these units is really interesting because we've seen the focus on supply chain at the big scale in the space over the last three to five years. I mean, all you'll hear larger data center operators talk about hyperscale builds or they're talking about supply chain, you know, how quickly can we deliver this, how efficiently can we deliver this, how, you know, inexpensive for the user can deliver it. And it's interesting to see the supply chain conversation on the smaller scale, as far as the, you know, 100 kW, 200 kW range. Because I think what it shows is that speed of delivery and your ability to scale up quickly is super important in, you know, both sizes of requirements, and just speaks to the fact, I think, that the users today, the data center user expects or has matured to the point where, you know, they expect that solution to be delivered as quickly as possible. And it's interesting to see you all work through the process of going, "Hey, now we know we can deliver X amount of these in this amount of time in these regions, and they're all the same." So...

Sharif: No, absolutely. And it's about consistency and delivering, right? I mean, speed is obviously important, but at the end of the day, there's somebody managing their application performance, they're about to release a new feature, and they're looking at their capacity curve and graph, and they're going, "I need to turn on this new capacity the compute, the storage, its bandwidth, by Q3 or we're sunk," right, or, "we're not going to release this new feature. We're gonna lose against our competitors that are." And so really, that's the nature of the beast, and just understanding that you're a tail on a very large dog for these organizations. And working around those constraints is critical.

David: Yeah. Have you seen any different when you think of, like, industry verticals, you know, retail, healthcare, technology, financial, those type of firms, have you seen any of those companies gravitate more towards this type of, you know, data center in this approach, or does each one of those have a different mindset around that? Have you seen the different industry types embrace what you all are doing?

Sharif: Yeah. No, that's an excellent question. I think there's kind of two different segments of verticals, or categories of verticals. So, one of them is kind of on-premise solutions, right? So, I'm a university, I'm a hospital, I'm a manufacturing facility, I'm deploying more connected devices, there's more data being generated, that data doesn't all need to be backhauled, right, you know, video cameras, your surveillance cameras around your facility, that doesn't need to be cloudified, right? I just need to store 30 days of retention and then throw it away. And so, the on-premise solutions is in one category, I think the other...And honestly, you know, as I look at the edge space in general, I think it's often ignored. A lot of people are instead of gravitating towards the second category, which is that kind of wide mesh, you know, I'm going to deploy 5, 10, 50 of these around a city, and, you know, there's usually graphics of, like, autonomous cars or somebody with a VR headset involved, right?

And, you know, definitely at the base of a cell tower, it has to be at the base of a cell tower. And that's in its own category. And that opens up a whole slew of verticals, whether they're hyperscale companies, MNOs, Fixed Network Operators, anybody could technically play at that kind of edge mesh network space. But to be honest, like, while everybody's attention is there, I think there's a lot of applications that we're assuming will require X, you know, milliseconds of latency or microseconds of latency. Those applications haven't even been developed, much less adopted, much less those requirements fleshed out, right? And so, I'm not saying that trend isn't going to exist where performance needs to improve, but, you know, from my perspective, we're kind of assuming a lot as, you know, facility people and infrastructure people, as far as what the future will hold.

David: Yeah. You mentioned 5G. And, you know, talk about the impact that the growth of 5G and the maturity of 5G will have on the edge market. And what opportunities does that create for your team at Compass?

Sharif: Oh, great question again. No. So, everybody is excited about 5G, right? It's one more G better than what we have.

David: [Inaudible 00:21:09].

Sharif: No. I mean, it's obviously exciting, especially as mobile traffic keeps growing, right? And so, you know, we're now hitting the constraints of what our mobile devices can support. And we're seeing breaking points in stuff like jitter and latency on the performance on 4G networks. So, 5G is super exciting. With that said, 5G in and of itself doesn't demand edge computing, right? So, 5G is vehicle, right? And so if I say, "Hey, I'm going to give you a car that's twice as fast as your current car," does that mean you'll get everywhere in half the time? Well, no, right? You're still gonna obey the speed limit, you're gonna be at stoplights, right? Now, if I say, "Hey, if I give you a car that's twice as fast, but there's a family emergency across town," well, yeah, then you'll probably be. So, that's the need there, right? That family emergency is the need or the application. And so, sure, 5G will open the door to a bunch of needs and applications, but which one that will be, it's still to be seen.

David: So, that's a great tie-in to what do you feel like the needs are that are coming, that will help drive that? You know, so, say 5G is in place, it's efficient, you know, what are the needs that you all look at and go, hey, once these hit the way we anticipate, it really changes things for, you know, the market?

Sharif: Edge computing...So, first off, we really like to take an application-centric perspective, right? So, let's focus on the top of the stack, and then trickle those assumptions all the way down, right, rather than starting at the bottom. So, when you think about the applications, and you look at the trend, I mean, and we're gonna skip past, or I'll skip past all the, like, you know, surprising statistics over, you know, in the year 2022, data usage is going to be a kazillion petabytes, and, you know, like, sure. But we can all agree, we're not gonna be using less data, and it's probably a safe assumption we're going to be using more sure. What's really interesting about our data usage patterns, however, isn't just the quantity. What's specifically interesting about it is that the type of data that we're using is changing, it's evolving.

So, if you think of the internet 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, those data patterns were largely a broadcast network. The majority of data was video data that was getting sent from central sources and down to our TVs and devices, right? And before that, it was music, and before that, it was, you know, email or articles, right, a broadcast network, duplicating, you know, newspaper, radio, TV, right? Well, now, we're seeing interesting data patterns that aren't going top-down, they're going sideways, they're going up. If you think, you know, my little surveillance cameras, my Nest cameras or whatever, is generating as much data as a TV station, you know? Like, I'm effectively a broadcast station at this point. I've got five channels, you know?

So, what an interesting traffic pattern. And now, the question is, well, does that traffic necessarily need to go over to Ashburn, Virginia or Phoenix? Now, chances are, I'm down the road in my office, and I'm just checking that, you know, UPS delivered my latest package, right? Why is that data getting backhauled across the country, right? When you order an Uber, why is that data getting sent out of state? You can't even order an Uber from out of state, you're definitely ordering one nearby, right? So, those are local traffic patterns that we're seeing with the data and the data going in different directions. And that, to me, is what's really going to drive a shift in the facilities and network architectures that support those patterns.

David: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, one of the interesting things I read about, this is probably three or four years ago, but it was talking specifically about how YouTube and how when that platform arose, how it really, you know, changed, it gave everyone the opportunity to, now you've got so many people producing data, and it's a similar...you know, you mentioned the Nest cameras, but it's like a similar approach, now you have this technology pieces that are producing the data. And if we put them into use from either a business perspective or a consumer perspective, the amount of that data is just exponential. And that's, today, let alone, you know...

Sharif: Whatever, 20-whatever, right?

David: Three years from now, five years.

Sharif: And it's not just that, that old broadcast model was largely supplemented by local caching, which was great, you know? Netflix has very efficient caching programs. And their Open Connect program is great at intercepting a lot of those requests and serving video very locally, right?

David: Yup.

Sharif: That's how their business model has managed to survive. But, again, when you're talking about broadcasting your videos, you know, to your grandma across the country, or your extended family, all of a sudden that local caching is completely useless, right? And so the way we've designed our systems, infrastructure, and topology, it needs to evolve.

David: Yeah. How has the hyperscale growth and what's happened over the last several years, how has that impacted the edge space? I mean, has that had a positive effect on the opportunities, a negative effect, neutral, maybe too early to tell, what's your thought on that?

Sharif: It's a complex ecosystem. Like, I don't know that I'd go so far as to say this is directly causing, you know, that. But there's a lot of correlations you can tie. So, on one side, you know, and I'm going to get a little more specific not just hyperscale but specifically the drive towards cloud, has pushed consolidation. It's pulled out capacity from local areas. And has opened an opportunity for a solution that will effectively let your capacity get closer to users, right? It has driven a little bit of a need. On the other hand, because those hyperscale cloud players have such an immense network and also, you know, their scale, it also gives them the opportunity to potentially get into the edge game themselves and just offer their platform closer. And you can see some of the early kind of band-aids of the edge need. You know, AWS has their Greengrass project if you're familiar.

David: Okay. No, I'm not familiar with that.

Sharif: So, this is like, and I hate to call it band-aid, but that's effectively what it is. It's, you know, an IoT device, an IoT aggregation device that they'll ship to your locations effectively off-net, right? Your manufacturing facility out in West Texas, you have all these IoT and automated devices, and you want to run everything within the AWS environment, they'll ship you a little box, right? And today, it's pretty rudimentary and corner case but it points to the requirement and the need. And so, as that need grows, as those factories get more automated as more data grows, well, that little box is gonna grow and before you know it you're gonna have a few racks of it.

David: Interesting. For the people that aren't as familiar with the edge discussion, you know, there's a lot of...some people are familiar with cloud computing, we've talked about edge, but there's also terms on fog computing. So, help demystify the edge versus the fog from your perspective.

Sharif: Yeah. The key to the edge markets...

David: And sometimes I feel, like, you know, not just the data centers, but the technology industry, just thrives on confusing people, you know? It's like, "Hey, how can we..." Anyways...

Sharif: Oh, no, no. You know, I feel like as the technology industry has grown, marketing has become just as key as the actual technology. And so, you know, Internet of things turned into, you know, internet of everything, turned into, you know? It's just...

David: Is there a difference there?

Sharif: Yeah, no. So, fog computing is effectively an implementation of the edge that's effectively a shared resource pool with multiple distributed facilities. So, it's...the simple way to say is all fog computing is effectively edge, but all edge computing isn't necessarily fog computing. I could put a single edge footprint that's not connected to a bunch of them, that those workloads are solely homed at one location, that's not fog computing. But there are applications where you could see benefit to shifting workloads to nearby, you know, facilities if you have a mesh network of facilities. And what's primarily kind of enabled that is in the network space, A, like, networking high bandwidth, like, high capacities gotten enormously cheap, right? Like, the network devices themselves and the capacities they can handle, I mean, I remember when, like, 10 gig optics were out and it was, like, insane. And, you know, now you're talking 100 or 400 gig. And now, people are pushing terabits.

And so, that with Network Function Virtualization, or NFV, has effectively allowed the network to be the backplane now. It's the system backplane. And so now, you can connect storage units, and, you know, GPUs, and CPU units, and build a virtual system, and they don't have to be physically located in the same spot. And now, that opens up kind of the concept of fog computing is I can kinda sprinkle my capacity around and poach from it as I need.

David: So when a user has a need and they, you know, either they approach you all or other edge companies, I mean, let's say, they're more enterprise user, and they might have a need for one of these. But let's say they have the need for 10 or 20 to solve a problem, how quickly can those be deployed based off of, you know, supply chain, and where they send them? I mean, what should a company be thinking about how quickly you could set up a complex system of, you know, these different deployments?

Sharif: No. Complex system, I'll absolutely echo that, right? It's not just about manufacturing the facilities in time, you have to think about the program holistically. And that's really, I think, where our experience at Compass lends an advantage because it's not simply about spitting out, you know, little data centers out of a factory, you have to work on your site, you know, your whole real estate program and site development program. You have to ask all the questions that data center people generally leave out, which is, how are you going to accomplish, you know, system integration once the facility arrives? How are you going to commission these remote facilities? How do you ship $5 million of IT to a location where you don't have a facility, a non-addressable location?

And, like, look, there's experiences of, you know, guys on my team towing an 800-pound router up a dirt path up a hill to get one of them, you know? And this is, like, a million-dollar piece of gear, right, with a little, like, hand truck, a U-Haul hand truck, right, like, the rented dolly. And so, those are the areas that anybody that's going to be successful in the edge space really need to focus on, not just focusing on their simple, you know, facility design, but zooming back and looking at a holistic solution that solves for those customers of scale. Because calling them and going, or setting them that spreadsheet and going, "Let us know where you want them delivered." Well, now, you're commoditized product, you're not really an ecosystem product.

David: Yeah, sure. And it is so strategic, you know, with the end game of serving the user better, to your point. I mean, and those are really good questions. We should make sure that we log those in the show notes just on how companies are thinking through their strategy with what they're actually deploying. And, you know, I think what this shows, and in your experience certainly proves, is just as the data center user is maturing, there's just...it's a really exciting time in our space because it's giving, you know, your work and others' work in this space and...is giving people the option, companies the option to build more efficient systems and ones that serve their business better, that serve their end-users better. And so, I just think it's a really exciting time. And I'm fascinated to think about the next three to five years and what this space will become.

Sharif: No, absolutely.

David: And maybe talk about that, just the future of EdgePoint and the Compass EdgePoint product, and, you know, why you're excited about the next five years in the space, and what you think the opportunities are.

Sharif: Yeah, I think, so, first, you know, as kind of a self-professed geek, right? The next three to five years are going to see just a really interesting array of applications that I'm very selfishly excited in because I hate sitting in traffic and driving my own car, and, you know? So, like, A, just I'm really excited about all the gadgets coming out, right? Like, life has just gotten better with technology, right? Like, I can monitor my house, I can unlock my door, like, I can do so many operations that, you know, used to be tedious and, you know, very manual before, right? So, A, the applications are exciting. And that just excites me as a technologist. Second, it's really being able to leverage our experience and support those users in understanding kind of the journey that needs to be traveled as their application grows and needs distributed infrastructure.

Again, the lessons I learned over the past five, six years being in a program like this, I can't wait to leverage those for our customers, again, not because we're necessarily the smartest people here, but the scars on my back, I'd love to turn those into lessons learned and get a positive outcome, right? Lemons and lemonade. So, I'm really excited to be able to, you know, work with our customers and new potential customers to really lean on that experience, build a program for them that is holistic, and show them the advantages that we can bring to the table.

David: Yeah. Well, Sharif, thank you for sharing your insight with us. And, you know, for those that are watching, this is a fascinating discussion because it's very much today, but it's very much looking out at the future of where things are going. And so, I just always appreciate people that are willing to share what they've learned through their career path, through where they are now. So, I'm certainly excited about what you all are doing and it will be fun to watch over the next several years.

Sharif: Oh, thank you.

David: You bet.

Sharif: It was a pleasure.

David: You bet.

__

About Sharif: Sharif Fotouh is the Managing Director of Compass EdgePoint and an ex-Googler. Fotouh is responsible for the Compass EdgePoint's edge data center solutions as part of our comprehensive core-to-the-edge offering to customers. He is recognized across both the information technology and the data center industries as one of the preeminent experts on edge computing. He has more than 10 years of tenure leading large data center and technology teams, including founding and leading Google Fiber's national network facilities and deployment engineering program.

If you're interested in seeing how EdgePoint and Compass Datacenters can help your organization make the most of your data center needs - now and in the future, reach out to us here and someone will get back to you shortly.

Compass Datacenters’ Sharif Fotouh Sits Down with datacenterHawk to Talk All Things Edge was first published to: https://www.compassdatacenters.com/

[ongames]

Are Humans Inherently Selfish?

President Donald Trump has been dogged by questions about conflicts of interest. He has declined to divest himself of his assets or put them in a blind trust, as is customary for presidents, news reports say. He has tweeted in defense of his daughter’s clothing line. And taxpayer money may go toward the Department of Defense leasing space in Trump Tower — the president’s property — to remain close to the president when he is in Manhattan, CNN recently reported.

At the heart of any conflict-of-interest situation is the question of whether to act in your own best interest or do what is best for the greater good. Trump’s issues might make a cynic shrug. After all, don’t we all look out only for ourselves?

Psychological research suggests the opposite: that self-interest is far from people’s primary motivation. In fact, humans are prone to act for the good of the group, many studies have found.

“In the past 20 years, we have discovered that people — all around the world — are a lot more moral and a lot less selfish than economists and evolutionary biologists had previously assumed, and that our moral commitments are surprisingly similar: to reciprocity, fairness and helping people in need, even if acting on these motives can be personally costly for a person,” Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and author of “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (Yale University Press, 2016), wrote in an email to Live Science. [No ‘I’ in Team: 5 Key Cooperation Findings]

Age-old debate

Philosophers have been arguing about whether people are inherently selfish since there has been such a thing as philosophers. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates has a discussion with his older brother Glaucon in which Glaucon insists that people’s good behavior actually only exists for self-interest: People only do the right thing because they fear being punished if they get caught. If human actions were invisible to others, Glaucon says, even the most “just” man would act purely for himself and not care if he harmed anyone in the process.

It’s the sort of argument that might have appealed to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher famous for saying that the natural state of man’s life would be “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, humans must form social contracts and governments to prevent their selfish, violent tendencies from taking over.

Not all philosophers have agreed with this dour point of view, however. Philosopher John Locke, for example, thought that humans were inherently tolerant and reasonable, though he acknowledged humanity’s capacity for selfishness.

So what does the science say? In fact, people are quite willing to act for the good of the group, even if it’s against their own interests, studies show. But paradoxically, social structures that attempt to give people incentives for good behavior can actually make people more selfish.

Perverse incentives

Take a classic example: In 2000, a study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that trying to punish bad behavior with a fine backfired spectacularly. The study took place at 10 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. First, researchers observed the centers for four weeks, tracking how many parents arrived late to pick up their children, inconveniencing the day care staff. Next, six of the centers introduced a fine for parents who arrived more than 10 minutes late. The four other centers served as a control, for comparison. (The fine was small but not insignificant, similar to what a parent might have to pay a babysitter for an hour.)

After the introduction of the fine, the rate of late pickups didn’t drop. Instead, it nearly doubled. By introducing an incentive structure, the day cares apparently turned the after-school hours into a commodity, the researchers wrote. Parents who might have felt vaguely guilty for imposing on teachers’ patience before the fine now felt that a late pickup was just something they could buy. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

The Haifa day care study isn’t the only one to find that trying to induce moral behavior with material incentives can make people less considerate of others. In a 2008 review in the journal Science, Bowles examined 41 studies of incentives and moral behavior. He found that, in most cases, incentives and punishments undermined moral behavior.

For example, in one study, published in 2000 in the journal World Development, researchers asked people in rural Colombia to play a game in which they had to decide how much firewood to take from a forest, with the consideration that deforestation would result in poor water quality. This game was analogous to real life for the people of the village. In some cases, people played the games in small groups but couldn’t communicate about their decisions with players outside their group. In other cases, they could communicate. In a third condition, the players couldn’t communicate but were given rules specifying how much firewood they could gather.

When allowed to communicate, the people in the small groups set aside self-interest and gathered less firewood for themselves, preserving water quality in the forest for the larger group as a whole. Regulations, on the other hand, had a perverse result over time: People gradually began to gather more and more firewood for themselves, risking a fine but ultimately putting their self-interest first.

“People look for situational cues of ‘acceptable behavior,’” Bowles said. “Literally dozens of experiments show that if you offer someone a money incentive to perform a task (even one that she would have happily done without pay), this will ‘turn on’ the ‘What’s in it for me?’ way of thinking, often to such an extent that the person will perform less with the incentive than without.”

Natural cooperators?

Though cooperation is ingrained in the human psyche to some extent, it’s also obvious to anyone who has worked on a team that not everyone approaches group activities with the same attitude. An increasing focus on individual differences in humans reveals that some people tend to cooperate more than others.

“It has been known for quite a while that people differ quite a lot, and they differ in all kinds of behavioral tendencies,” said F.J. Weissing, a theoretical biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “But when people conducted experiments, they typically looked at the average behavior and not so much at the variation between subjects.” [Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special]

That variation among subjects turns out to be quite important. In 2015, Weissing and his colleagues published a paper in the journal PNAS in which they allowed people to play a game where they could choose to seek out either information about the choices of other players, or information about how successful those other players were. People were remarkably consistent about the kind of information they sought, the researchers found: Two-thirds always asked for the same kind of information, whether they preferred information about choices or success.

Then, the researchers split people into groups based on which information they preferred, with some groups comprising only people who liked choice information, some groups made up of only people who liked success information, and some mixed. These groups then played games in which cooperation benefited everyone, but a selfish strategy could elevate an individual’s fortunes while hurting the group.

People who fixated on the success of their teammates were more likely to behave selfishly in these games, the researchers found. This finding shows that this strategy — comparing others’ successes and failures — prompts people to engage in behaviors focused on their own gain, the researchers said.

In contrast, people who focus on how the rest of the group is acting, regardless of individual successes, might be more prone to working together, the researchers said.

Both cooperation and selfishness may be important behaviors, meaning that species may be most successful if they have some individuals that exhibit each behavior, Weissing told Live Science. In follow-up experiments that have not yet been published, he and his colleagues have found that in some economic games, mixed groups perform far better than groups made up only of conformists or only of those who look out for themselves. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

Very fundamental physiological differences between people may be at the root of these different social strategies, Weissing said, including differences in hormone levels and organization of the central nervous system. However, he agreed that situational factors can subtly push people toward cooperation or self-interest. More realistic studies of cooperative and selfish behavior are needed, he said.

“In real life, cooperation looks very, very different from these very, very simplified lab contexts,” Weissing said. “And the dominant factor is not really money, but something else. I think that makes quite a difference.”

Original article on Live Science. 

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Are Humans Inherently Selfish? published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

[yes-dal456]

Are Humans Inherently Selfish?

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President Donald Trump has been dogged by questions about conflicts of interest. He has declined to divest himself of his assets or put them in a blind trust, as is customary for presidents, news reports say. He has tweeted in defense of his daughter’s clothing line. And taxpayer money may go toward the Department of Defense leasing space in Trump Tower — the president’s property — to remain close to the president when he is in Manhattan, CNN recently reported.

At the heart of any conflict-of-interest situation is the question of whether to act in your own best interest or do what is best for the greater good. Trump’s issues might make a cynic shrug. After all, don’t we all look out only for ourselves?

Psychological research suggests the opposite: that self-interest is far from people’s primary motivation. In fact, humans are prone to act for the good of the group, many studies have found.

“In the past 20 years, we have discovered that people — all around the world — are a lot more moral and a lot less selfish than economists and evolutionary biologists had previously assumed, and that our moral commitments are surprisingly similar: to reciprocity, fairness and helping people in need, even if acting on these motives can be personally costly for a person,” Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and author of “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (Yale University Press, 2016), wrote in an email to Live Science. [No ‘I’ in Team: 5 Key Cooperation Findings]

Age-old debate

Philosophers have been arguing about whether people are inherently selfish since there has been such a thing as philosophers. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates has a discussion with his older brother Glaucon in which Glaucon insists that people’s good behavior actually only exists for self-interest: People only do the right thing because they fear being punished if they get caught. If human actions were invisible to others, Glaucon says, even the most “just” man would act purely for himself and not care if he harmed anyone in the process.

It’s the sort of argument that might have appealed to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher famous for saying that the natural state of man’s life would be “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, humans must form social contracts and governments to prevent their selfish, violent tendencies from taking over.

Not all philosophers have agreed with this dour point of view, however. Philosopher John Locke, for example, thought that humans were inherently tolerant and reasonable, though he acknowledged humanity’s capacity for selfishness.

So what does the science say? In fact, people are quite willing to act for the good of the group, even if it’s against their own interests, studies show. But paradoxically, social structures that attempt to give people incentives for good behavior can actually make people more selfish.

Perverse incentives

Take a classic example: In 2000, a study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that trying to punish bad behavior with a fine backfired spectacularly. The study took place at 10 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. First, researchers observed the centers for four weeks, tracking how many parents arrived late to pick up their children, inconveniencing the day care staff. Next, six of the centers introduced a fine for parents who arrived more than 10 minutes late. The four other centers served as a control, for comparison. (The fine was small but not insignificant, similar to what a parent might have to pay a babysitter for an hour.)

After the introduction of the fine, the rate of late pickups didn’t drop. Instead, it nearly doubled. By introducing an incentive structure, the day cares apparently turned the after-school hours into a commodity, the researchers wrote. Parents who might have felt vaguely guilty for imposing on teachers’ patience before the fine now felt that a late pickup was just something they could buy. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

The Haifa day care study isn’t the only one to find that trying to induce moral behavior with material incentives can make people less considerate of others. In a 2008 review in the journal Science, Bowles examined 41 studies of incentives and moral behavior. He found that, in most cases, incentives and punishments undermined moral behavior.

For example, in one study, published in 2000 in the journal World Development, researchers asked people in rural Colombia to play a game in which they had to decide how much firewood to take from a forest, with the consideration that deforestation would result in poor water quality. This game was analogous to real life for the people of the village. In some cases, people played the games in small groups but couldn’t communicate about their decisions with players outside their group. In other cases, they could communicate. In a third condition, the players couldn’t communicate but were given rules specifying how much firewood they could gather.

When allowed to communicate, the people in the small groups set aside self-interest and gathered less firewood for themselves, preserving water quality in the forest for the larger group as a whole. Regulations, on the other hand, had a perverse result over time: People gradually began to gather more and more firewood for themselves, risking a fine but ultimately putting their self-interest first.

“People look for situational cues of ‘acceptable behavior,’” Bowles said. “Literally dozens of experiments show that if you offer someone a money incentive to perform a task (even one that she would have happily done without pay), this will ‘turn on’ the ‘What’s in it for me?’ way of thinking, often to such an extent that the person will perform less with the incentive than without.”

Natural cooperators?

Though cooperation is ingrained in the human psyche to some extent, it’s also obvious to anyone who has worked on a team that not everyone approaches group activities with the same attitude. An increasing focus on individual differences in humans reveals that some people tend to cooperate more than others.

“It has been known for quite a while that people differ quite a lot, and they differ in all kinds of behavioral tendencies,” said F.J. Weissing, a theoretical biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “But when people conducted experiments, they typically looked at the average behavior and not so much at the variation between subjects.” [Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special]

That variation among subjects turns out to be quite important. In 2015, Weissing and his colleagues published a paper in the journal PNAS in which they allowed people to play a game where they could choose to seek out either information about the choices of other players, or information about how successful those other players were. People were remarkably consistent about the kind of information they sought, the researchers found: Two-thirds always asked for the same kind of information, whether they preferred information about choices or success.

Then, the researchers split people into groups based on which information they preferred, with some groups comprising only people who liked choice information, some groups made up of only people who liked success information, and some mixed. These groups then played games in which cooperation benefited everyone, but a selfish strategy could elevate an individual’s fortunes while hurting the group.

People who fixated on the success of their teammates were more likely to behave selfishly in these games, the researchers found. This finding shows that this strategy — comparing others’ successes and failures — prompts people to engage in behaviors focused on their own gain, the researchers said.

In contrast, people who focus on how the rest of the group is acting, regardless of individual successes, might be more prone to working together, the researchers said.

Both cooperation and selfishness may be important behaviors, meaning that species may be most successful if they have some individuals that exhibit each behavior, Weissing told Live Science. In follow-up experiments that have not yet been published, he and his colleagues have found that in some economic games, mixed groups perform far better than groups made up only of conformists or only of those who look out for themselves. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

Very fundamental physiological differences between people may be at the root of these different social strategies, Weissing said, including differences in hormone levels and organization of the central nervous system. However, he agreed that situational factors can subtly push people toward cooperation or self-interest. More realistic studies of cooperative and selfish behavior are needed, he said.

“In real life, cooperation looks very, very different from these very, very simplified lab contexts,” Weissing said. “And the dominant factor is not really money, but something else. I think that makes quite a difference.”

Original article on Live Science. 

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The Unquiet Grave

You can read Chapter 7 on Ao3 Here

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Chapter 7: Where Hearts Go to Quiet

           He sits by the river, fishing pole in one hand and a flask in the other. As he fishes, he finds himself revisiting the same scene over and over and over again in his head, and it’s enough of an imposition that he is more than lucky that he brought two flasks instead of one –god almighty, why hadn’t he brought the entire fifth to the river? Why had he left so much behind?

           Alana was going to be so upset with him when she finally got him to answer the phone.

           In truth, he could have handled his departure from the hospital far better than he did. He didn’t have to stand so fast he toppled his chair over, and he certainly hadn’t meant to barrel from the room so quickly he knocked a nurse into Hannibal. At least Hannibal had been able to catch her before she fell into a surprised and concerned Alana. The water hadn’t been saved, though, but he’s certain no one gave a second thought to the water dropping and splattering everywhere. No matter the protests tossed his way, furious heels on tile close behind him, he found himself all but running from the hospital, hailing the first taxi by stepping directly in front of it so that it had no choice but to stop for him.

           All in all, a rather dramatic getaway. If he was in control of himself, he’d have left with far better finesse, enough that no one asked questions, enough that when he returned to work he wouldn’t have to deal with Jack.

           He takes another pull from the flask, contemplating the fact that he wasn’t in control of himself then, and he certainly isn’t in control now. He hopes no one tells Jack.

           When the fish tugs on the line, he hauls it up with slow, careful turns of the reel, setting the flask down to give it his full attention. Sometimes, when nights are too quiet and dreams are too far, he finds himself thinking of his childhood, of the way he’d cried when his father once killed a fish in front of him. He doesn’t have many memories of his childhood, seeing as how his empathy was an early discovery. The memories he has locked away within the stream of consciousness in his mind sometimes blur the way old photos do, discolored and lacking details. Other times, though, they slide along the water with sharp clarity, so much so that it startles him with how each color fights against the other for attention, clear and bold and so utterly painful with the way he can only see the whole thing if he stands far enough away from it.

           His father hit the fish on a rock, and nerves kept it moving for many minutes after. He threw up later, thinking about it, the scales in the sunlight and the eyes that didn’t close. He was glad he hadn’t touched the fish, otherwise he’d have felt its death –luck, he told himself, after he knew what it was to be an empath, to feel the world within your skin. It was luck that day that kept him from feeling the sensation of death at only four-years-old.

           Now, he hauls the fish up with gloved hands and unhooks it, holding its curving and twisting body firmly before he sets it back down into the water and allows it to swim away. He sets the fishing pole aside and takes another swig from his flask, feeling the alcohol burn all the way down to warm his stomach.

           Will Graham has a problem.

           By law, empaths have to report to the EA. Each and every empath in the United States are registered, trained to handle their gift so that they can be useful members of society. In the eyes of the law, Will is committing a felony by not reporting Abigail, but anytime he considers picking up the phone, a dose of fear rushes through his veins and makes him freeze, so much so that he is more than sure he’s having a low-grade anxiety attack.

           He can’t report Abigail. He has to keep them safe.

           Safe from who, though? Her father is dead. Will Graham shot him.

           It was a brilliant plan on Hobbs’ part, if Will is being particularly honest with himself. As he catches and releases several more fish, muscles loosening their taut hold the more he drinks, he admits to himself that Agent Hobbs was clever, hiding his daughter from the FBI and the EA. She was his treasure, the line of empathy following through his blood to hers, and he protected it by using himself as a shield and complying wholeheartedly with the FBI. Until he began killing those other girls, no one suspected that he would lie to the FBI. No one suspected he would use his daughter to hunt innocent people.

           Will knows now, though. By keeping quiet he is, in his own right, an accomplice.

           He can’t turn on her, though. As he packs his things away hours later and heads back to his house to make supper, he makes another admission to himself, one that acknowledges how cleverly she turned his gifts on himself. He’d never seen a Seer use their power as a weapon quite like that, using their eyes and their skin to make him see –each time he thinks of her, there is a small part of him that thinks of himself. In her moment of fear, she made him touch her skin and become part of her whole, a world in which if he turned on her, he turned on himself, too. A world in which if she died, he died, too.

           Hobbs, despite dying in the end, still somehow won. As long as Abigail remains a secret, there is a singular victory that he can be awarded, that he trained his daughter to be a hunter rather than a tool to be discarded when the FBI lost interest. Will can respect that, even as he fears just what it means for him should they ever find out.

-

           He’s hungover the next morning as he goes to his small office at the FBI, and it sits perched on the tip of his tongue, sour. Every time he exhales, his tongue curls at the taste of day old whiskey. He sips scalding coffee to chase it away, and he fires up his computer to check e-mails. Director Purnell is supposed to reach out to him about Dolarhyde’s work, so that he can plan the next step to hunt down Dolarhyde.

           “Alana called Jack,” Beverly says by way of greeting. She hovers near the door, waiting for an invitation to come in.

           Will grunts, typing his password. It wasn’t until later that he’d realized his glasses had fallen in his haste to escape the hospital, and he laments it now, missing the barrier between his eyes and the world. As the desktop boots up, he leans back in his chair and sighs.

           “How angry is he?”

           “Not any angrier than usual.” She snorted at her own private joke. “He’s in a meeting, but he wants to talk to you afterwards.”

           “What kind of trouble am I in?” he asks, looking over to her.

           She finds his question odd, and he notes her wrinkled nose and head tilt as she adjusts herself. “None. He just wants more information about Hobbs.”

           None. She’s not lying –even without his gifts, he’d know that. Beverly Katz is an honest person, from her quirky sense of self to her sharp observations at a crime scene. For a neurotypical, he’s comfortable around her –as comfortable as he can be around people for extended periods of time.

           She’s waiting for him to explain why he thinks he’s in trouble. He doesn’t want that conversation with anyone, though, so when the desktop finally loads, he clicks impatiently on the e-mail icon, taking a long gulp from his coffee cup.

           “Not a day for conversations?” she questions. Where others would wander away, disquieted by him, Beverly holds her ground. Will sighs and sets his coffee cup down.

           “I’m hungover,” he says curtly. Beverly’s grin is wide, her amusement palpable against his skin.

           “That kind of night?”

           “The Hobbs girl woke up,” he explains. At her nod, he continues irritably, “And hospitals are no good for me.”

           “Drinking alone?”

           “Is that a question?”

           She nods in agreement and ducks her head. “Not like you’d want the company, but drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism.”

           Her concern isn’t just kindness. Alcoholism is a big no-no in the EBAU for empaths, right alongside rules against serial killing and keeping empaths a secret. Will nods in agreement and scratches his stubble, casting her an appreciative look.

           “I’ll call someone next time,” he promises.

           “It’s not alcoholism if it’s social,” she quips. At Will’s wry, waxen grin, she continues, “I just wanted to get back to you on Dolarhyde. They looked into the background of the victims, but nothing really jumps out. Mr. Perkins worked with pharmaceuticals, and his wife took care of the house and finances.”

           “Pharmaceuticals?”

           “Yeah, he does a lot of work with psychiatrists, too. A lot of research facilities, testing, and distributing of anti-psychotics.” She flips through a folder and sets a sheet on top, eyeing it. “I’ll get copies of the file for you to look over. Maybe Dolarhyde got some bad medicine and lashed out?”

           “Was he on any medication at the time?” Will asks. The thought feels like a thread he wishes to tug at and turn over in his hands.

           “I’ll double check his file, but I don’t recall seeing anything. I mean, like I said before, Dolarhyde was a pretty calm guy. I wouldn’t have expected him to go rogue.”

           “It’s not always easy to pinpoint a potential RA,” Will says. It’s not so much to comfort her than it is to comfort himself.

           “Hobbs was almost obvious. They just didn’t expect him to…” Her voice trails off, and she clears her throat.

           “Kill eight girls, his wife, and attempt to kill his daughter?” Will supplies when she doesn’t finish.

           “They don’t always kill,” she adds with a shrug.

           “Dolarhyde does.”

           “Well, we set you on the case and you always find them.” She smiles to reassure him. “So far, you’ve always found them.”

Pleased, having said what she wanted, she sees herself out and closes the door for him so that he doesn’t have to get up.

           More than a little relieved that whatever Alana said to Jack, it’s not damning, he opens one of the unread messages once he sees the subject line.

To: Agent Will Graham, EBAU, E-3

From: Director Kade Purnell, EI

Subject: Francis Dolarhyde

           Director Crawford informed me of your interest in the RA, Francis Dolarhyde, and his investigations before the regrettable circumstances that occurred. It is my regret to inform you that his work was classified with a clearance A-1 level necessary in order to access the files. Clearance that you do not have, Agent Graham. I will not give leave for you to obtain it.

           I can assure you that the lack of knowledge of his work before becoming classed as an RA will not impede your current investigation regarding him. Continue to track his whereabouts so that he may receive the necessary treatment of an E-2 RA.

                                                                                               -Kade Purnell, Direct. EI

              Will reads the e-mail once. As he glares at the page, it’s not necessary to read a second time because the words feel imprinted on his eyes, ingrained in his skin.

           I will not give leave for you to obtain it?

           He finishes reading and responding to other e-mails less volatile than that one, and he forces himself to finish his coffee before he goes to find Jack, steps pressing down harshly on the thin carpet of the EBAU halls.

           He strolls into his office without knocking, and Jack is surprised as he holds a phone to his ear. His gaze cuts sharp lines along Will’s person, and whenever the speaker on the other line goes quiet, he lets out a quiet hum of affirmation. Will resists the urge to pace before him.

           “I’ll see what I can do.” A pause as he listens. “Yes, that’s fine…and I’m sorry, Agent Harris, but I’m going to have to call you back.���

           He hangs up, and Will wastes no time with posturing. “Director Purnell won’t give me the clearance.”

           “It’s clearly information you don’t need to know to do your job, Will,” Jack replies wearily. He’s been waiting for Will to come to him, and Will can see it in the way he rolls his shoulders back to prepare for a lengthy discussion.

           “Whatever it was that he was investigating, that is what set him off,” Will fires back. “If I know what it is, what made him feel so betrayed, I can see where he’d go next, what he’d do!”

           “Whatever it is, it’s sensitive information that she’s not willing to share.” A pause. “Or she can’t share.”

           “It’s bull shit, Jack! I need to know what he was working on!”

           “That’s not your call!” Jack snaps in return. Whatever hesitations that Will had been able to pick at before are gone, and Jack’s steel spine somehow manages to stiffen even more. “You’re an E-3, but that doesn’t give you special privileges!”

           That stops Will, and he stares at Jack, hands gripping his hips so hard he hopes the skin bruises, turns the color of old banana peels. The anger he so easily displayed, so easily shared isn’t so much dissipating as it’s curling in on itself, breaking down something more usable because clearly showing it isn’t fixing the problem. If anything, it’s making Jack rise to the challenge.

           “…I didn’t realize you though that I was granted special privileges,” he replies instead, coldly.

           “Will-”

           “What kind of privileges do you think I’m granted, Jack?” he asks, gritting his teeth. He’s aware that it’s more of a snarl than a smile, but he tries. “What sort of benefits do you think that I, as an empath, get to enjoy that you don’t?”

           “Don’t,” Jack warns him, and Will snorts.

           “Come on, Jack,” he chides. “Last I checked, you didn’t have to register with the FBI when you were a child for being born a certain way. You didn’t have to register Bella when you started dating her.”

           “I don’t get to skip out on work because of a little stress either,” Jack returns with equal grittiness.

           Was that how Alana worded it? Will stalks closer and leans over the desk so that he can get close to Jack, get close enough to make him nervous. He doesn’t look into his eyes, though. Jack is a man hounded by memories he can’t escape, and they’re so far into the front of his mind that Will finds himself falling into the same one every time he looks at him. It’s Jack’s only defense against empaths, and it’s a damn good one.

           What he can see, though, is the conversations that must have occurred in this very room without him, mentions of his psyche and his behaviors. Kade Purnell sitting with a sharp pencil skirt and a well-fitted blazer on one side of the desk, calmly putting Jack in his place as she denies him his request.

           When Will thinks that, though, he stops. He looks along the desk, inhales a certain sort of dreadful comradery. He can imagine the relief, the ability to place the blame off of himself and onto someone else. A sort of relief that smells like cough medicine and stale trail mix, and Will glides his gloved hands along the surface of the desk –if anything, to remind Jack that all he has to do to take off his gloves to feel the truth in the whorls and curves of the wood.

           No, Will may not want to look in his eyes to read his thoughts, but he can dream up the realities that happened when he wasn’t in the room. His gifts give him that.

           “I’ll keep looking for him,” he says at last, and his eyes fasten to Jack’s hands sitting curled to fists at his desk. “I’ll do my job, even if you’re inclined to hobble me to do it.”

           “Thank you,” Jack says, not sounding at all thankful. “That’s all we ask you to do here, Will.”

           “Abigail Hobbs is innocent, too,” he tosses in, heading towards the door. “I’m sure Dr. Bloom told you, but as your certified lie detector test, I can promise you the same. Traumatized, scared, and indignant that we’d even ask, but honest.”

           And maybe it’s because he knows Jack is lying to him, but he doesn’t feel all that guilty about lying in return. Whatever Agent Dolarhyde was investigating before he snapped, it must have been serious –enough for Kade Purnell to e-mail Will to shut him up. Enough for Jack Crawford to lie to him. Enough for Dolarhyde to lose some part of himself while looking in the mirrors stuck to the eyes of another.

           Will would keep Abigail safe. He’d keep himself safe. He’d find another way to find Francis Dolarhyde, too.

-

           As he’s walking to his car to go and see Reba McClane, something in the air sets him off. He isn’t sure if it’s the smell on the wind, or if it’s the way the back of his shirt presses too tight to his skin, but he pauses by his car door, tensing. There are many things about an empath that biologically are used to connect to people, this he knows. It has been his struggle since he was able to recall the way his father’s simple hug made his skin feel as though it were ripping in two.

           There are other things, though, things still being studied within labs and universities, among talk show hosts and scientists about empaths. As much as they struggle to connect, to broach that space between them and another, there is another aspect to their abilities, something that grants them an immense sense of knowing things that no one else could possibly know, things that make it impossible to connect because who wants to spend their time around a person that knows about any number of unknowable things?

           For example, things like the feeling of being watched.

           He looks about himself discreetly, but nothing immediately stands out. His keys fumble with the lock, and he slowly opens his car door, swallowing so hard it almost hurts, his heartbeat stuttering before beginning again. He’d heard neurotypicals call it paranoia, the way the hair on the back of their neck would stand up. He’d also read contradictory accounts from survivors of serial killers whose ‘paranoia’ saved their life when it came down to brass tacks.

           Being an E-3 empath, he was privy to enough tangible emotion floating along the breeze to know that it wasn’t paranoia. He was most certainly being watched.

           It wasn’t by another empath, though. If it was, he wouldn’t necessarily be able to sense it. Empaths trained to observe and investigate knew how to dampen their person, soften their existence within the world so that another empath couldn’t see. Much like Abigail Hobbs could draw barriers that held even Will back, any other trained empath could do something similar.

           A neurotypical, then.

           As he drives away, he thinks of Dolarhyde’s words to Reba, shared within the walls of the place he most liked to work, out of the gaze of the FBI:

           Is there someone like me watching someone like me?

-

           Unable to shake the feeling of being watched, he doesn’t go to Reba. He respects her desire for the FBI to be unaware of her relationship, and he doesn’t want eyes where they don’t belong. Instead, he finds himself sitting outside of the coffee shop he went to with Dr. Lecter, and he peruses the articles he’s posted once more, a decimated bagel in one hand and Beverly’s tablet in the other.

           Evolution of Social Exclusion through Empaths.

           Hannibal Lecter talks about empaths a lot for someone that isn’t an empath. He speaks as though they are their own species of person, all the while with the tone of someone that views them as equals in every way. As Will rereads his latest work in the journals, he picks at the bagel rather than eats it, and it’s only when his phone rings that he’s startled from such prolific words.

           “Graham.”

           “Agent Graham, it’s Dr. Lecter. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

           He wasn’t. Will wonders at that, that he shouldn’t be bothered by an unprompted phone call, and he sets the tablet down to better focus. He keeps the article up, though.

           “I’m taking a long lunch,” he says. “Isn’t that what was recommended?”

           “A long and early lunch, yes,” Lecter agrees. “Far be it from me to disturb a healthy eating habit, but when you left yesterday, you forgot your glasses at the hospital. I thought to return them to you.”

           Will notices that he doesn’t mention the how and the method in which he left, and he’s eternally grateful for that. He’s not sure if he wants to discuss it –is it safe to tell Lecter about Abigail? Fingertips hover over the top of the article, tapping the screen so it doesn’t go black.

           “Thank you.”

           “Do you have a free moment today?”

           His phone buzzes with a message from Beverly, and he glances at the notification before setting the phone back beside his ear. “I should. Dr. Lecter, in your article regarding the social exclusion of empaths, you mention a forced distance made unconsciously by both empaths and neurotypicals.”

           “You’ve read my work?” He sounds pleased, although Will can’t be entirely sure. His voice is always mildly pleasant in some manner.

           “Yes.” A beat. “Some,” he amends. All.

           “Early theories supposed empaths first broached that line diving one person from another due to a need to connect. It evolved into the gifts we see today, but first it was a connection.”

           “That connection was ultimately rejected by society, though.”

           “Mankind, as the apex predator, doesn’t enjoy feeling that there are some among them that are far more gifted,” Hannibal agrees. Will throws away the destroyed remains of his bagel and tucks the tablet under his arm, heading back to his car. If Beverly is texting him, he’s needed somewhere.

           “And in response, out of fear of that persecution, empaths created invisible barriers between themselves and everyone else, despite the initial needs for connection that supposedly gave them their gifts in the first place,” Will adds on.

           “An ironic reaction, but yes.” There is a pause as he seems to try gathering his thoughts around Will’s questions. “Should I ask about yesterday?”

           “Should you?”

           “I’d like to.”

           Silence once more. Will chews on the inside of his mouth and climbs into the car, shutting the door behind himself. On impulse, he locks it because despite removing himself from an uncomfortable scene, he most certainly still feels like he’s being watched. Just down the row, an SUV is parked under some shade, and he puts on sunglasses so that he can scrutinize it subtly.

           “I was unprepared,” he says at last. An understatement. “I didn’t handle it very well.”

           Another text buzzes against his ear, and he glances to it. When another one comes in, he puts Lecter on speakerphone so that he can read them, idly buckling his seatbelt.

           “What happened?”

Where are you?

We need you back here in thirty.

We got a call in Louisiana. It’s Dolarhyde.

           “Dr. Lecter, I’m going to have to call you back,” Will says distractedly, and he starts the car. His skin hums from the last message, comes to life at the way the text curls around the RA’s name. It’s Dolarhyde. It’s Dolarhyde.

           “Is everything alright?”

           “Dolarhyde –the RA –is in Lousinana. I’ve got to go.”

           “I can return your glasses at another time, then,” he says lightly, and Will nods distractedly, taking him off speakerphone so that he has both hands on the wheel as he peels out of the parking lot.

           “If you can be at HQ soon, I can get them there,” he says, and as he turns away from the coffee shop, he glances in the rearview mirror in time to see the SUV also pull away and head in his direction.

           “I can do that, Agent Graham.”

           “Bye.” As an afterthought, he tosses in, “Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

           “It’s my pleasure,” Lecter replies.

A special thanks to @hanfangrahamk, @matildaparacosm, Starlit-Catastrophe, Andrea, and Duhaunt6 for being so supportive and becoming a patron! You guys are the best :)

[imreviewblog]

Are Humans Inherently Selfish?

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President Donald Trump has been dogged by questions about conflicts of interest. He has declined to divest himself of his assets or put them in a blind trust, as is customary for presidents, news reports say. He has tweeted in defense of his daughter’s clothing line. And taxpayer money may go toward the Department of Defense leasing space in Trump Tower — the president’s property — to remain close to the president when he is in Manhattan, CNN recently reported.

At the heart of any conflict-of-interest situation is the question of whether to act in your own best interest or do what is best for the greater good. Trump’s issues might make a cynic shrug. After all, don’t we all look out only for ourselves?

Psychological research suggests the opposite: that self-interest is far from people’s primary motivation. In fact, humans are prone to act for the good of the group, many studies have found.

“In the past 20 years, we have discovered that people — all around the world — are a lot more moral and a lot less selfish than economists and evolutionary biologists had previously assumed, and that our moral commitments are surprisingly similar: to reciprocity, fairness and helping people in need, even if acting on these motives can be personally costly for a person,” Samuel Bowles, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute and author of “The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (Yale University Press, 2016), wrote in an email to Live Science. [No ‘I’ in Team: 5 Key Cooperation Findings]

Age-old debate

Philosophers have been arguing about whether people are inherently selfish since there has been such a thing as philosophers. In Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates has a discussion with his older brother Glaucon in which Glaucon insists that people’s good behavior actually only exists for self-interest: People only do the right thing because they fear being punished if they get caught. If human actions were invisible to others, Glaucon says, even the most “just” man would act purely for himself and not care if he harmed anyone in the process.

It’s the sort of argument that might have appealed to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher famous for saying that the natural state of man’s life would be “nasty, brutish and short.” According to Hobbes, humans must form social contracts and governments to prevent their selfish, violent tendencies from taking over.

Not all philosophers have agreed with this dour point of view, however. Philosopher John Locke, for example, thought that humans were inherently tolerant and reasonable, though he acknowledged humanity’s capacity for selfishness.

So what does the science say? In fact, people are quite willing to act for the good of the group, even if it’s against their own interests, studies show. But paradoxically, social structures that attempt to give people incentives for good behavior can actually make people more selfish.

Perverse incentives

Take a classic example: In 2000, a study in the Journal of Legal Studies found that trying to punish bad behavior with a fine backfired spectacularly. The study took place at 10 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. First, researchers observed the centers for four weeks, tracking how many parents arrived late to pick up their children, inconveniencing the day care staff. Next, six of the centers introduced a fine for parents who arrived more than 10 minutes late. The four other centers served as a control, for comparison. (The fine was small but not insignificant, similar to what a parent might have to pay a babysitter for an hour.)

After the introduction of the fine, the rate of late pickups didn’t drop. Instead, it nearly doubled. By introducing an incentive structure, the day cares apparently turned the after-school hours into a commodity, the researchers wrote. Parents who might have felt vaguely guilty for imposing on teachers’ patience before the fine now felt that a late pickup was just something they could buy. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

The Haifa day care study isn’t the only one to find that trying to induce moral behavior with material incentives can make people less considerate of others. In a 2008 review in the journal Science, Bowles examined 41 studies of incentives and moral behavior. He found that, in most cases, incentives and punishments undermined moral behavior.

For example, in one study, published in 2000 in the journal World Development, researchers asked people in rural Colombia to play a game in which they had to decide how much firewood to take from a forest, with the consideration that deforestation would result in poor water quality. This game was analogous to real life for the people of the village. In some cases, people played the games in small groups but couldn’t communicate about their decisions with players outside their group. In other cases, they could communicate. In a third condition, the players couldn’t communicate but were given rules specifying how much firewood they could gather.

When allowed to communicate, the people in the small groups set aside self-interest and gathered less firewood for themselves, preserving water quality in the forest for the larger group as a whole. Regulations, on the other hand, had a perverse result over time: People gradually began to gather more and more firewood for themselves, risking a fine but ultimately putting their self-interest first.

“People look for situational cues of ‘acceptable behavior,’” Bowles said. “Literally dozens of experiments show that if you offer someone a money incentive to perform a task (even one that she would have happily done without pay), this will ‘turn on’ the ‘What’s in it for me?’ way of thinking, often to such an extent that the person will perform less with the incentive than without.”

Natural cooperators?

Though cooperation is ingrained in the human psyche to some extent, it’s also obvious to anyone who has worked on a team that not everyone approaches group activities with the same attitude. An increasing focus on individual differences in humans reveals that some people tend to cooperate more than others.

“It has been known for quite a while that people differ quite a lot, and they differ in all kinds of behavioral tendencies,” said F.J. Weissing, a theoretical biologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “But when people conducted experiments, they typically looked at the average behavior and not so much at the variation between subjects.” [Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special]

That variation among subjects turns out to be quite important. In 2015, Weissing and his colleagues published a paper in the journal PNAS in which they allowed people to play a game where they could choose to seek out either information about the choices of other players, or information about how successful those other players were. People were remarkably consistent about the kind of information they sought, the researchers found: Two-thirds always asked for the same kind of information, whether they preferred information about choices or success.

Then, the researchers split people into groups based on which information they preferred, with some groups comprising only people who liked choice information, some groups made up of only people who liked success information, and some mixed. These groups then played games in which cooperation benefited everyone, but a selfish strategy could elevate an individual’s fortunes while hurting the group.

People who fixated on the success of their teammates were more likely to behave selfishly in these games, the researchers found. This finding shows that this strategy — comparing others’ successes and failures — prompts people to engage in behaviors focused on their own gain, the researchers said.

In contrast, people who focus on how the rest of the group is acting, regardless of individual successes, might be more prone to working together, the researchers said.

Both cooperation and selfishness may be important behaviors, meaning that species may be most successful if they have some individuals that exhibit each behavior, Weissing told Live Science. In follow-up experiments that have not yet been published, he and his colleagues have found that in some economic games, mixed groups perform far better than groups made up only of conformists or only of those who look out for themselves. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad for You]

Very fundamental physiological differences between people may be at the root of these different social strategies, Weissing said, including differences in hormone levels and organization of the central nervous system. However, he agreed that situational factors can subtly push people toward cooperation or self-interest. More realistic studies of cooperative and selfish behavior are needed, he said.

“In real life, cooperation looks very, very different from these very, very simplified lab contexts,” Weissing said. “And the dominant factor is not really money, but something else. I think that makes quite a difference.”

Original article on Live Science. 

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