Siddhārtha Gautama, who became known as the Buddha, began his life as a prince, pampered and surrounded by luxury. The journey what would change his life and the lives of millions who came after him began when he left the gates of his palace and saw the suffering around him for the first time. It was a devastating realization that such suffering is universal and unavoidable that spurred him on to a years-long quest for "the answer" to the challenge posed by the suffering of all humanity. In the long run, he came up with a few insights that have been welcomed in the "West". He saw that much, if not all, suffering resulted from attachment to the things of this world - even attachment to the "self" and life itself. He recommended meditation as a way to let go of attachment. These days, Westernized Buddhists recommend meditation as a way of dealing with the stresses of "modern life". This is a a very long way from the problem that Buddha was up again...

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine". I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover. The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our worl...

It is saddening to see the candidates in the most recent elections I'm following (in Canada and the US) pretend that political decisions we face and options available to us can be cast solely in terms of economics. Jobs. Growth. Competitive industries. GDP, Debt. We need to wake up to the fact that economics has never been a reliable measure of human welfare, never a "science" and the worst possible guide for political action. In fact, the Achilles heel of economic theory is the fact that it is ultimately based on the needs and behavior of human beings. Paradoxically "laws" of economics only make sense when you forget the people involved. Take the "law" of supply and demand. A special case would be the supply of labor. Wages will fall if the supply of labor exceeds demand. There is no limit to how low wages will go. In fact, according to this "law", wages can go to zero as the number of workers exceeds the number of "jobs". The prob...