Ethics in Blogging: A Normative Constraint on Excessive Economizing and Power-Aggrandizement

Blogs are interesting creatures. Like humans, they seek not merely self-preservation, but also the expansion of their domain on the internet. The empire-building does not have power-aggrandizement as its goal; rather, bloggers use what power they have to maximize the reach of their words. To be heard by as many people as possible—as if quantity were more important than quality—is a still more intermediate means, with the end being to bring one's words to the world-at-large. At the extreme, a blogger wants to see a world that has become a projection of his or her own words. Less extreme, a blogger wants to be a significant player in societal discussions even beyond the internet. Toward such ends, bloggers economize in the sense of seeking to minimize what they incorporate of other blogs beyond what they view as being useful to themselves, while attempting to maximize that of themselves that is incorporated on other blogs by power or moral suasion. For example, a blogger might say to another blogger, “I’ll blogroll you if you blogroll me.” This is a variant of “I’ll follow you if you follow me” on Twitter. As Susan Gunelius, an expert on blog marketing, observes in Blogging for Dummies, such reciprocity is no longer a normative practice in blogging. Indeed, the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” mentality is questionable at best. It implies that one person follows another not because of any value perceived on the followed’s account, but, rather, solely so he or she can be followed by yet another person. In other words, the apparent reciprocity is actually egoist.
Fortunately, “semi-permeable” normative constraints can be applied to the two forces that seek to maximize self-interest. One might call such constraints ecologizing, for like an ecosystem they can be breached by a maximizing species or variable within. Susan Gunelius points to a few of the ethical “rules” that can act as constraints via pressure from other bloggers.

Spam can be interpreted as economizing or power-aggrandizing forces that fail to respect the normative "rules" of the internet society. Comment spam, for example, utilizes a useless or irrelevant comment-posting simply to self-promote (i.e., to economize) through links. Post-spam reduces a blogger’s own post to an otherwise content-empty medium advertising the blog itself or someone else’s product in exchange for samples or money. Both of these kinds of spam are unethical because they operate under a subterfuge (i.e., promising to be something other than what they are). The underlying selfishness fuses with theft (i.e., stealing other bloggers’ time and effort in reading), and thus manifests passive aggression. In other words, it is a “taking” beyond that which the spammer is entitled to take.

As another example of the mentality that has a difficult time with limitation, some bloggers steal the bandwidth of other bloggers. According to Gunelius (2010, p. 69), bloggers and website owners can be charged more if the amount of time that their content is accessed increases dramatically, “such as when other bloggers use images without saving them to their own hosting accounts first.” Gunelius claims that a blogger should copy and save the picture (assuming fair use) before inserting the image in the post. Otherwise, the excess power-aggrandizing steals more than time and effort.

In describing excessive economizing and power-aggrandizing in blogging beyond ethical, or “ecologizing,” constraints, I have sought to bring out the element of passive aggression. The anger that bloggers feel toward the “cheaters” is not only due to the unfairness in the manipulation; the response is also to the passive aggression. If the responses go beyond what is proportionate, however, excessive power-aggrandizement is involved in the victims as well. Such anger “over the top” is also evinced in comments that are hateful or otherwise attacking. It is the sheer excess in the anger that strikes me as being in need of further explanation.  

Generally speaking, the bloggers who subscribe to normative constraints in the blogosphere recognize the existence of excessive power-aggrandizement and economizing forces in blogging. The theft and anger elements in the excess are particularly onerous. While the law cannot effectively sanction such elements, “societal” pressure can. However, lest the latter become self-righteous, it is important not to label as spam anything that is inconvenient.

For example, commenting (or tweeting) to someone on topic and including a link to one’s own post can be a legitimate part of an effort to start a conversation on a mutual topic—as long as there is content on that topic in addition to the link. You might tweet on Obama and Libya. I might send the following reply: “yeah, but Obama waited too long. So his motive is suspect. See link.” My reply was on the other’s topic and added content as well as a link to my posting on that content. To treat my tweet as cold-calling would be to overreact simply out of the mistaken belief sending out a tweet should not occasion tweets. In such overreaction is an element of presumptuousness in addition to the excessive power-aggrandizement. In other words, excess can manifest where it is least expected.  

Source: Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2010).

On ecologizing, economizing and power-aggrandizing forces applied to business and society, see: William C. Frederick, Values, Nature and Culture in the American Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Inconvenient Truths

When I was a student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis, we can expect that history being written by the victors proffers a corresponding warping rather than objective historical reporting. What we in the twenty-first century glimpse of Nazi Germany has undoubtedly been warped akin to how the fabric of space-time is bent by the gravity of an object having a large mass in space. 

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

Clearly, history leaves important things out, and perhaps even covers them up. Those pesky inconvenient truths are all too easily relegated to see the light of day; someone who happens upon them may display the jewels, but by that time, the knit story is so engrained that the little gems may hardly register. So what if Hitler was happy at times; what he did to his own people was much more important for us to know. So what if Roosevelt didn’t want to get involved in Germany’s internal affairs; he won the war. I think history is generally gray rather than black and white.

A day before I spoke with the veteran, I met a retired librarian who was still working on gay history. Could such a history be written and viewed objectively? I wondered.  He told me of the huge police presence in the weekend’s Phoenix Gay Pride festival and remarked that police in Tucson had physically attacked protesters outside a Trump rally during the campaign. I replied that I had been in the venue, where I saw Donald Trump looking on as a muscular military man was stomping on a protester being led up the aisle by one of Trump’s hired security men. I had wondered why people at the rally were so emotionally angry at “the protesters,” as if they all stood for one thing. Anger at people without any personal contact (the protesters were outside) had stunned me at the time. I leaned over to two undecided women seated to my right, and observed, “This feels like what a Nazi rally must have been like, with people angry at the Jews.” The two women agreed. Then we witnessed the stomping and Trump saying to the protester, “You’re disgusting” over and over as she was being stomped. Then it really felt like a Nazi rally. To the gay historian, I said, “The Germans had been mad at the Jews for a reason; Trump’s supporters at the rally had shotgun anger at an amorphous group of protesters. The Germans were annoyed because the Jews did not consider themselves Germans and thus many rich Jews held back in giving to German causes during the hard times when Germany was paying war reparations from World War I.” The gay “historian” quickly looked at his phone and discovered he had somewhere else to be. So much for objective history. I did stress that the Nazis took the resentment way too far, and that I had no idea whether the wealth Jews in Germany in the 1920's really did constrict giving out of a belief that they were not Germans and therefore had no obligation to help them in hard economic times, but the “damage” was apparently done. I should add that I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the German professor. Unlike the historian of famous gay men, the professor was open to inconvenient truths, for he acknowledged a friendly Hitler many decades after having been forced to go to Hitler Youth. I doubt either the protesters or the Trump supporters at the Tucson rally would tolerate inconvenient truths.

Perhaps as the West has secularized, the belief that truth can be (or is) partial has gained credibility. By implication, inconvenient truth can be regarded as heretical and thus rightly intolerable. To be sure, Christian sects in the West have historically gone to war over contending partisan (i.e., partial) truths even though such things can be regarded as inherently oxymoronic. In this essay, I have probably written something for everyone in the sense that everyone can probably find some statement to be offensive or even provocative. In a world that has outlawed inconvenient truths, I would expect no less. Am I for Hitler just because I report here that he could be happy and even friendly? Am I anti-Semitic because I report that they may have limited their charitable giving to other Jews living in Germany during hard times? Am I a gay-basher because I am critical of the gay historian’s lack of tolerance for the inconvenient truth? Am I against Democrats because I include the veteran’s report of Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to help the European Jews under German control? Am I against Trump and all his policies because I report having witnessed his enabling of violence at a rally? Such assumptions evince a lack of education, given the over-use of reason involved in taking the assumptions to be facts. Just because someone reports something does not in itself mean he or she ideologically believes in the content. For instance, that Hitler was happy visiting the kids in Hitler Youth does not mean I believe in him, his conduct, or his ideology. 

Rather, I believe that history is inadequate where inconvenient facts are omitted for ideological purposes. Admitting inconvenient truths into the history may be assumed to stem exclusively from valuing knowledge, but I think toleration must also be valued. Indeed, that truth goes beyond partiality and convenience must be held as an assumption. I am for inconvenient truths as a matter of principle as well as scholarship.

Improving the World Cup: A Matter of Thinking Outside the Goal

Two things stood out for me in the wake of the World Cup of 2010: the sheer number of low-scoring games and the number of bad calls. The latter was the easier to fix. FIFA could have relaxed its opposition to instant replay even though it was not feasible technologically or financially for every game in the world.  The organization could have simply stated that every game in the World Cup would be subject to instant replay. The problem of low-scoring games, which has plagued other World Cup tournaments, is seemingly more intractable, but actually quite easy to solve if practicality is allowed some wiggle room in an otherwise fixed notion that the game not only should not be reformed, but also can not be changed.  
One "possible" solution would be to elongate the goal area so it is more difficult to defend.  If that doesn’t work, the area could be heightened—then it would be a matter of skill in kicking the ball in the added area above the defending players’ reach. Either way, a typical game would see more scores, thus adding excitement. 
The problem lies in the hegemony of the status quo, which takes on a life of its own especially in sports. Even though low-scoring games can be insufferingly boring, some people might object that too much scoring would become boring as well.  There would be a solution for that too, however, as the goal area could simply be retracted if it it has been set too large. 
In fact, a twenty-first century technology-driven way of approaching the problem would be to have the goal parameters movable within a game by means of a computer program that enlarges the area if there is little or no scoring and retracts it if there has been too much. Such changes would presumably only be made when the score is tied so not to disadvantage the losing side.  

 Of course, the stats-oriented fans would object to the problems terms of the consistency of records. In the case of a one-time reform of the goal-area, scoring stats would not be comparable with those before the reform. Even if the goal area is movable within a game, the scoring stats once the innovation begins would not be comparable with those before the commencement of the reform. Interesting, as every game would be under the same reform, they could be compared. 
I contend that improving the enjoyment of the game is worth the cost in terms of impaired comparisons with pre-reform tournaments and games.  Sadly, change itself, even to improve something, often faces and up-hill battle even against the sheer gravity of foregone comparisons. Strictly speaking, comparing the stats of World Cup tournaments separated by decades is not accurate, given the improvements in nutrition and targeting muscles in weight-lifting.  Perhaps the illusion of perfectly valid comparisons is the underlying hindrance. In other words, the fixity in a sport's rules and specifications may be needlessly valued. To be sure, tradition has its rightful place even in terms of practicality, but the former should not necessarily have a veto on improvements in the latter. 

Ivy-League Exclusivity: Political Ethics in The Yale Political Union

When I was a student at Yale, I was a member of the Party of the Right (POR) in the Yale Political Union (YPU). I was pretty much a libertarian back then, and the POR consisted of libertarians and Burkean traditionalists. The Burkeans dominated the positions, and they had their little club within the club to protect their prerogative. John Kerry, who would go on to be a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate, had been president of the YPU in 1968.  At least as of my student years at Yale, the YPU has consisted of several “parties,” which are really little debating/drinking societies spanning the ideological spectrum.  This is merely the surface, however. Beneath, Yale's culture of exclusivity reigned and undoubtedly still does. Getting into Yale is just the first of several levels of greater and greater exclusivity. 

At least until the year I graduated, the POR had a secret society, which through the nineteenth century at least had been a Southern literacy society. Continuing the society's tradition, POR's secret society was only open to men while I was at Yale.  So much for the women in the POR!  They have been (and, I believe still are) ineligible for membership in the party’s secret organization. I didn’t like that exclusion even though I am not a woman.  However

To be sure, the unfairness wasn’t limited to women.  The only guys who were invited into the secret society were those who were in leadership positions of the POR--in effect, Burkeans. This didn't stop the party's chairman from inviting women (even those who had risen to the party's leadership ranks) and the rank and file generally to watch the special few get tapped for the secret society. I was out, I presume, because I was a student at the Divinity School. Although the M.Div. degree is undergraduate in a divinity school, it was easy for undergraduates in Yale College to view us as graduate students (the same goes for JD and MD students, as they seek the first degree in their respective schools (i.e., undergraduate). To make matters worse for me, I was in my 30's when I attended Yale, after having earned two masters and a Ph.D. degree elsewhere.  

So I was surprised, when in the year that I joined the party, the party's chairman invited me to a Friday night party, which was being held in a room half way up Yale’s bell tower. He told me that the new members of the POR who are men would be inducted into the secret society, so I should come.  So I canceled my other plans and attended. Actually, he wanted all the party members to be at the party to serve as an audience for the two or three guys in the party’s leadership who were to be tapped for the secret society. 

Here lies Yale's rank underbelly: It is no fun for the extant insiders to select others to go to the next level of exclusivity if none of the excluded were around to watch it. As much as I detested this squalid mentality, I was most upset that the chairman had lied to me. When I confronted the chairman, he (and his friends in the leadership) denied that he had told me that the men who were new members of the party would be inducted into the secret society, formerly a men's Southern literary society. Only now does it occur to me that the guys controlling the access were themselves Southerners. At least one of men occupying the chairman's position of the party was from Kentucky--close enough. With the exception of some of my Quaker ancesters, who fled North Carolina in the 1830s as those Quakers were stanch abolitionists, I don't have a Southern bone in me. Plus, I was older than the students studying for their first undergraduate degree. 

The usual means of protesting the leadership of the party was, in my time at least, to address the party before one of the weekly debates (held in the residential colleges, with a full bar) and formally hand the chair a letter of resignation. I think those protestants overestimated the impact of their “act” of defiance.  I did not resign; no, I simply ignored the party’s leaders on campus and did not attend any more POR functions.  I think that annoyed the leaders more than had I resigned in voiced protest, for the leaders were used to that. So even today, I suppose I am a member of the POR, in spite of the fact that my ideology has become much more independent. In hindsight, I wish I had joined the Independent Party. The lesson I learned back then from the POR was how easily people in power can lie. That is a tradition that even the staid traditionalist Burkeans can give up.

North-Pole Air in Illinois: An Effect of Global Warming

Lest I be too concerned as a native Illinoisian that while I am living in Phoenix in Arizona, climate change will increase the number of 115 plus days during June, July, August, and September in the urban heat-island that is expanding nonetheless, today that city is comfortably 90 degrees (F) warmer than it is in Northern Illinois. The respective highs today are 73 and -15 degrees (windchill at -35, so there is a 110 degree difference in how the temperatures feel). I have experienced -40 degree wind-chill (combining the effects of the temperature and wind speed) early on two mornings in Northern Illinois; today that wind-chill will be for at least 24 hours. Minnesota has been experiencing -60 wind-chill (and Montana, -70!). Records, all. 

Why? differential climate warming (more at the arctic than at the equator) reduces the Arctic jet stream's energy. Like a tired rubber-band, the circle of air becomes wobbly, and this in turn allows the frigid air at the North Pole to escape southward. So both more 115 and 120F days during the summer in Phoenix and more belching of Arctic air in the northern Midwest of the U.S. (and in the northern E.U. too!) are henceforth more likely. 

So in reading about Arizona and Illinois, you would naturally conclude that the extreme temperatures in BOTH directions are among the most notable ways we can tell that climate change is underway. The extremes already before 2020 should be understood as taking place while the oceans are continuing to absorb 93% of the increased warming of the atmosphere due to carbon and methane increases. Just think what the volatility may be like once the oceans have sufficiently heated that they will no longer absorb the excess heat!

Related Essay: "Hidden Warnings of Climate Change."

Climate Seasons and Astronomy Confused: A Societal Blind-Spot

In the Northern Hemisphere, in the Northern E.U. and U.S., it is ludicrous to claim that winter begins not until December 21^st. If we go by the claim, the Christmas season is in the fall—joined by Halloween (and Thanksgiving in the U.S.). Similarly, September sports autumn cooling off rather than three more weeks of summer. In many areas, leaves turn fall colors well before September 21^st. As a matter of fact, “Climate scientists define summer as the three months from June 1 through August 31^st.”[1] Why, then, do meteorologists on television, at least in the U.S.—that vaunted superpower—announce that fall officially begins on September 21^st. They even show “fall begins” on the day of the 21^st on the week of weather. Similar, the fools show “winter begins” just four days before Christmas, on the winter solstice. That solstice is in the winter—not the beginning of it.

Just for added confusion, astronomers use the names of the meteorological seasons for the four quarters of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. These quarters are loosely related to the climatic seasons. The “winter” quarter begins on December 21^st, the “winter” solstice, when the perpendicular rays of the sun hit their most southern “line” on the Earth; the “summer” solstice, well into summer on June 21^st, occurs when the perpendicular rays are furthest north in the Northern Hemisphere. On September and March 21^st, the perpendicular rays fall on the Earth’s equator. The solstices are thus associated with daylight extremes, whereas the equinae suggest balanced day and night.

In short, to conflate meteorology and astronomy is a logical error, which is bound to lead to errors and confusion. It surpasses comprehension why weather folks on television apparently do not know that climatically winter in the Northern Hemisphere is in December, January, and February; spring comprises March, April, and May; summer runs from June through the end of August, and fall’s months are September, October, and November. At the very least, the weather “personalities” should be familiar with weather recording. It makes absolutely sense to announce on, say, September 10^th that the previous summer had overnight lows much above average, and then say on September 21^st that fall has begun. Such a “feat” contorts human nature itself, and yet the blind-spot has unfortunately endured.

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1. Doyle Rice, “Can’t Sleep on It: Nights Are Hottest on Record,” USA Today, September 7, 2018.

11/11/11

In Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate on 11/11/11 in 2011, costumes were the norm in the evening as revelers celebrated the numeric convergence. I suspect that unlike the Chinese, the Europeans were struck by the convergence itself, rather by any good luck attached to the numerology. I myself was struck by the convergence alone. Both at 11:11am and 11:11pm, I was surprised that other Americans around me seemed to be either ignorant of the alignment or utterly indifferent to it. It occurred to me that just as a given time-date system is artificial, so too are human cultures—which include political and economic values that are stitched together by leaders who peddle meaning to the masses. Both our systems and our ideologies are all too limiting, yet we can find meaning in them. Perhaps this is ultimately why we have them and the leaders that trumpet them or suggest new ones. I contend that 11/11/11 too plays into the human instinct for sense-making, especially in terms of visual and cognitive symmetries.

At 11:11am on 11/11/11, I limited my “celebration” to sending out some emails to some friends and a general tweet to mark the moment for posterity; curiously, the people around me did not seem aware of the convergence. At 11:11pm, I was at a bar/restaurant listening to a band of old geezers play classic rock (and, sadly, a few Jimmy Buffett songs) from the 1970s. The only convergence in the 1970s was inflation and unemployment in the double-digits. In spite of my protestations, even the people I sitting with seemed utterly indifferent to the coming convergence—even as I took off my watch for emphasis! Still nothing—like watching a train go by on its own momentum. A few people across the room were checking their cellphones and blackberries, but, alas, for more pedestrian purposes than to keep an eye on the coming cosmic convergence. As I rather blatantly went to the lighted doorway to better see my watch at “the moment,” I felt utterly alienated from my own people. It was a case of the one and the many.

When the moment came, as I watched the five numbers on my digital watch all briefly display “11,” I felt like I was on Mars enjoying the thrill of my own private “Earth” moment while the Martians continued to sip their red brew. No, I was not drinking so I did not really think I saw aliens (they are all in Arizona, after all). Rather, I was struck by the divergence in values even amid the convergence in numbers. There wasn’t even a clock in the room! Had I been the manager there, I would have tried to arrange a date-time digital “clock” on a screen. Would the people have counted down the seconds? Would they have paid any attention to it? Walking back to my seat, I wondered whether I wasn’t some reincarnated European reborn in the Midwest as some bizarre joke from Descartes’ divine deceiver, or perhaps I was over-estimating the Europeans’ interest in the convergence. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m too innately unique—a man destined to forever be without a country.

About thirty minutes after 11:11pm, I was chatting with a middle-aged man who had been fired as a band teacher at a local high school. Our conversation came around to political economy. “Greed is good,” he stated in perfect seriousness with his eyes as though bullets aimed directly at me. I reacted as if I had been stunned by a taser gun. No wonder the guy’s students obeyed him. As for the gaping inequality in wealth in the U.S., he insisted that people should be allowed to accumulate without limit—even when they already have tens of billions of dollars. “That’s what America is all about,” he nearly shouted above the din of the band. How dare this even be questioned! The man was indeed voicing values held by enough Americans that he was expressing a major strand of American culture that I could not dismiss as an aberration or quirk. When I claimed that representative democracy itself could be at risk if private wealth gets even more concentrated in a few hands, he replied that the rich would never let America be ruined because they have a vested interest in the system. “The rich created this system,” he reminded me. Sure enough, the delegates at the U.S. constitutional convention in 1787 were creditors deeply concerned over Shays’ Rebellion over debt that had just occurred in Massachusetts a year earlier. That the debtors had fought in the war without being paid yet they still had to make payments on their farm debt made no nevermind to the “Founders.” Was American founded by selfishness and greed? The former band teacher replied, “Yes, of course” as if there were no a thing wrong with that. I was absolutely stunned. I felt like I had been transported to Mars. I countered that even if a bunch of rich guys founded the United States, greed can result in people acting against their own self-interest, paradoxically as they are narrowly obsessed with it. “America can collapse from its own weight on top,” I added as though it were a fact. As I said this, I had already concluded that I was horribly at odds with a major plank in the American lexicon—namely, that economic liberty should not be limited, even at hundreds of billions of dollars being held by one person. In fact, the lack of limit, even when a constraint would be for the good of the system itself, is held by many as a virtue—something to be proud of. That a signature of greed is its lack of limitation is no problem because greed itself is a virtue. I found myself as though I were visiting another planet, though this time without even my own private amusement in watching 11’s match up on my watch. Beyond the cultural ideology, I saw in the leader of the band a sordid selfishness that could only be utterly unapologetic given its nature. All I could say was, “Well, we just disagree. Have a good night. Nice to have met you.” I wondered if the rest of the world had come to say the same thing to the American “tourist” (i.e., ideology) even while admiring our political stability and wealth.

Of course, people can get carried away not only with power and money, but also with convergences such as 11:11 on 11/11/11 in terms of luck, causality and metaphysics. In this respect, American culture is more solid than, say, that of the Chinese. As David Hume argues, we do not understand causality as much as we think. Hence, superstition is as though a perennial temptation—especially in religion, where the lapse is almost always invisible to the beholder. In numerology, the number one represents a beginning or gateway. Having several number ones presumably reinforces the validity of the “beginningness” quality. In other words, the “vibrational frequency of the prime number” increases its power such that its attributes are multiplied.  In the case of the number one, the attributes of “new beginnings” and “purity” are significantly magnified in power in 11/11/11, presumably reaching its zenith at 11:11 (a.m. and p.m., or just once on the 24 hour clock). The fallacy, which I suspect took hold in China, is to say that the increase in power means that there is more apt to be a beginning empirically and even metaphysically. We can resist this temptation to get carried away with even rare line-ups in our own systems, which, after all, are artificial because they are invented and instituted by people. In other words, even though it is a human instinct, sense-making need not over-flow and eventuate into metaphysical significance. We cannot say that acknowledging 11/11/11/ opens up a gateway in one’s life. Rather, a person can actively start something irrespective of the numbers, even if only by spotting and seizing an opportunity.

A numeric alignment can hold its own significance within its own system for the human mind. That is, the significance can be felt even as it is known to be contrived and thus arbitrary from outside the system. As I stood in the lighted doorway waiting for my watch to briefly line up its various numbers to 11:11:11 on 11/11/11 as the rest of the room was fixated on the band (or the walls, or themselves), I presumed no metaphysical significance at all in terms of some beginning about to occur in my life; rather, it was the convergence itself—the fleeting and rare alignment—that galvanized my interest. The sudden turn from 1999 to 2000 was a similar sort of significance in terms of numbers in a particular dating system. People did not need to presume the issuance of a new era or good luck to get excited at 11:59pm on December 31, 1999 about the next minute being so different. Yet was it? Something can be felt as significant even as it is known to be arbitrary, yet such significance can be easily relegated.

Admittedly, it was more difficult to get excited about New Years’ Eve in 2005 or even 2010, given the significance of 2000. Similarly, on 11/11/11, a sense of complacency could have set in regarding convergences of ones. The year 2011 alone contained an extraordinary number of them:

1:11:11 on 1/1/11     

11:11:11 on 1/1/11      

 1:11:11 on 1/11/11     

11:11:11 on 1/11/11     

 1:11:11 on 11/1/11       

11:11:11 on 11/1/11

1:11:11  on 11/11/11      

11:11:11 on 11/11/11 

However, how many of these did the average person observe? I myself completely missed 1:11pm on 11/11/11 even though I was fixated on 11:11am and 11:11pm. I must have been “out to lunch” at 1:11pm. Although it would be 100 years before 11/11/11 would happen again, it would be “only” 10 years and a few months before 2:22pm (forget 2:22am!) on 2/22/22. Technically speaking, missing a “2” (2/ rather than 22/) means that the multiplied power of the “2” will be somewhat less. Trinitarians will have reason to get excited over 3/3/33 at 3:33pm, which will be the day after Ash Wednesday in 2033. However, the number of 3’s is one less than the number of 2’s in 2/22/22. Barring significant life-extending advances in medical science, 11:11 on 11/11/11 in 2011 was the best it could get in terms of the number of numbers in a numeric date-time convergence for those adults who happened to witness that convergence.

That this topic holds any significance whatsoever is I suspect due to the propensity of the human mind to seek and admire order. In terms of symmetry alone, the eye naturally gravitates to 1111111111 rather than 1645564336. The gambling machine that has three windows with a variety of pictures spinning around, we are naturally astonished when the same picture is shown in all three windows. Even so, three lemons does not mean bad luck any more than three apples means good health in the coming year. 11/11/11 is not an alignment by chance, even if the Gregorian calendar itself need not have been adopted when it was. Even so, the planned or arranged alignment, being both of, is inherently pleasing to the eyes and holding significance to the mind, especially if the convergence is rare and fleeting. It is as though everything makes sense, but only for a moment and then it is past. In fact, it is this basic feature of the mind—that which I call the sense-making instinct—that is the basis and appeal of a leader’s vision to followers and an organization or society as a whole. The social reality that is formulated and preached is like a series of ones in a chaotic world of fractal order and disorder.