Month: March 2025

What Makes a Hero and the True Measure of the Human Spirit: Walter Lippmann’s Stunning Tribute to Amelia Earhart

“The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.&#8…

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/08/walter-lippmann-amelia-earhart/

My god! These quotes below by Walter Lippmann are like a symphony of thoughts that resonate so deeply with my own life’s work. Not just in its struggle to tell but in the experience of its emergence as well.

The best things of mankind are as useless as Amelia Earhart’s adventure. They are the things that are undertaken not for some definite, measurable result, but because someone, not counting the costs or calculating the consequences, is moved by curiosity, the love of excellence, a point of honor, the compulsion to invent or to make or to understand. In such persons mankind overcomes the inertia which would keep it earthbound forever in its habitual ways. They have in them the free and useless energy with which alone men surpass themselves.

Walter Lippmann

This resonates with why I perceive and believe play is the crucial missing element in our lives today. Not play in a conventional, trivial sense, which is seen as the opposite of work, but play at a deeper level than we can possibly imagine. This deeper play is the development work of our lives.

Such energy cannot be planned and managed and made purposeful, or weighted by the standards of utility or judged by its social consequences. It is wild and it is free. But all the heroes, the saints, the seers, the explorers and the creators partake of it. They do not know what they discover. They do not know where their impulse is taking them. They can give no account in advance of where they are going or explain completely where they have been. They have been possessed for a time with an extraordinary passion which is unintelligible in ordinary terms. 

Walter Lippmann

This singular, amazing quote embodies the emergent experience of my life’s work so far in a nutshell. In effect, how can you plan and move towards something that is an unknown domain of knowledge, something that you can explain emotionally more so than you can explain rationally to others?

In effect, whenever I say it feels monumentally difficult to describe my life’s work, I always feel like I’m just deluding myself and standing in my own way. But what if I’m not? What if it is as monumentally difficult as it is described above and…it is an inherent and natural part of the experience itself? If so, that would mean I’m not “broken” and I’m not doing anything “wrong,” even though that’s what most of us believe we are.

In other words, it’s all a natural part of the process, even though it feels unnatural (which is how I’ve described the process before).

No preconceived theory fits them. No material purpose actuates them. They do the useless, brave, noble, the divinely foolish and the very wisest things that are done by man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that man is no mere creature of his habits, no mere automaton in his routine, no mere cog in the collective machine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky.

Walter Lippmann

This perfectly resonates with the lifelong experience of transitioning from a Socialized Mind to a Self-Authoring Mind and then from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind.

At the first transition, the person realizes and becomes aware of how they were blindly following society’s cultural programming to fit in and survive, thus they learn to recode themselves and “self-author” their own scripts for life, thus allowing them to step out and thrive.

At the second transition, one even grows tired of one’s own personal scripts and learns to let go of them completely. In doing so, they discover their True Self (as the “player”) behind their previous constructed selves (as the “character’s” one was playing).

The Strength to Remember and the Strength to Forget: James Baldwin on What Makes a Hero

“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.” It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an …

https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/03/12/baldwin-hero/

“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.” 

It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”

Maria Popova

This seems to resonate deeply with the origins of my Be Real Creative mantra. Back at the time in 2011, I perceived us as both our own “worst enemies” and our own “heroic liberators”. It really just depends upon our perception and how we perceive the world and ourselves.

What the Self-Transforming Mind realizes is that it’s all a grand play or a role-playing game. One in which we make believe that we are one or the other and thus we believe we are tormented or triumphant, when we are actually neither. It’s all an illusion, a game, that our ego creates to try to maintain its permanence and control on You. That being the larger, limitless You as a player that’s behind the you as a character.

And of course, the greater realization is that there is no “epic struggle” or “war” within you, even though we initially perceive it that way. Thus when you can surrender and just let go of this struggle and just “let everything happen to you,” that’s when you’re able to move beyond the illusionary game, yet also paradoxically begin to truly play with life, rather than against it.

A great, concise presentation by Richard Barrett of The Barrett Academy for the Advancement of Values speaking about the importance of values and how it relates to the vertical development of not just people but organizations and nations as well.

It’s interesting because I saw an article the other day talking about how Mark Carney, the new Liberal leader of Canada, wants to transform Canada using a similar approach with business organizations being at the forefront of this change.

What’s interesting is that the person writing the article laughed this off because they believed that businesses aren’t interested in this, since corporate governance has been around for decades and not much has changed.

That person is right.

In fact, even Richard Barrett himself mentioned above that he was saying that “cultural capital was the new frontier of competitive advantage” over twenty years ago and it’s still a new frontier because “it’s taking a while to sink in.”

But that’s the whole problem and why we are in the mess we are in.

Most mainstream business organizations today are not interested in these things because they don’t see them as driving needs that they care about, thus they don’t value them as values.

This is exactly why most business leaders today have an almost complete disconnect with their employees. The leaders needs often do not resonate with their employees needs, thus creating a misaligned relationship between the organizational “mind” and the organizational “body.”

This is why both business leaders and organizations need to change and evolve as a whole, thus allowing nations themselves to change and evolve as a whole. Even more so since business organizations are on par or even exceed nations in influencing the world today, especially via technology.

In effect, this all starts from the bottom up. You can’t transform an organization or nation, if you can’t transform the individuals first, starting with its leaders.

That’s because you have to lead by example.

With this in mind, it will be interesting to see how Mark Carney runs his cabinet and if he implements practices within it that embody his own personal values, as well as the overall values of Canadians.

Perhaps most of all, it would be interesting if he unified Canada with a purpose and direction by clearly articulating these Canadian values (and how they differ from the US government’s values at the moment).

I remember recently sometime over the last year, a business or political person indicated that AI technology is dangerous because it “hallucinates”. I laughed out loud when I read this because, well, people “hallucinate” as well. We don’t call these hallucinations “hallucinations” though, they’re more commonly called beliefs and they’re an integral part of our society and a part of being a human being.

The thing to realize though is that beliefs are not reality. Beliefs can most definitely be or become reality. But it doesn’t mean that just because you believe something, it is a reality. And this recent interview with Elon Musk highlights this point.

When I was watching this, this appeared to me like a man who was on the verge of breakdown. It looked like a man who firmly believed in something so much, that he risked everything in his life for it, but it appears like he’s beginning to realize that what he believed in isn’t emerging into the reality the way he believed it would. This is especially evident near the end of the video when he looks like he’s on the verge of completely cracking.

Why am I bringing this up?

It’s because I don’t want to be this guy.

I don’t want to believe in something so much that it actually blinds me from the reality that’s right in front of my face.

You see I’ve spoken before about how one of my quests in transitioning to a Self-Transforming Mind is becoming aware of one’s fears as an important step in the process.

One of these fears that’s reared its head in the past was a fear of being seen as crazy because my allegorical framework for life might seem crazy and incompressible to people. This fear hasn’t subsided much because trying to articulate my framework feels exceeding difficult due to the scope of it, even though the tip of the iceberg is just a simple allegory comprised of metaphors.

But unless you can understand the foundation of what’s below the allegorical surface, understanding what the metaphors mean, the allegory itself will have very little meaning to you or, even worse, you may misinterpret and misunderstand the allegory completely (like some people already do).

But again, is this the reality that my framework is just highly complex and difficult to articulate? Or is my framework a hallucinatory fantasy with no real meaning or substance in reality?

It just seems like one can’t really know if they are truly “crazy” until they come out the other side. But there has to be a better way to approach this. This is something I need to work on and resolve.