Minoan fresco in the House of Women in Thera — Akrotiri, today’s island Santorini; 1600 b.c.e.
LAST WORD
Why doesn’t the devil
drop in anymore
to chat with me at bedtime,
a little heart-to-heart?
“Positivity,” he tells me —
no longer the depressive’s
pure chant of
“Give us this day
our daily stone”;
no more broken necklace
of hope’s false diamonds,
no drinking from the chalice
of holy fool’s gold.
America has ruined you,
he tells me. Self-improvement —
as if the labyrinthine
self could be discarded,
and my large sunlit bedroom
was the prize I’d won,
believing my last years
will be my best, my life
as usual upside down.
My best years now,
so close to exit time?
Not without my chats
with the Clever One —
(an angel after all,
fallen or otherwise)
“You have the most beautiful
angel I have seen!”
a New Age angel-spotter
one time gasped out loud.
But that was him,
my quantum Belshazzar,
who knows every word
I’m going to say,
including the last one.
Have mercy, Belshazzar!
He knows my last word,
and it won’t be love.
~ Oriana
This is an echo of Baba Yaga, who in the end defines herself as
a woman with two hearts —
one of which doesn’t
need love.
At some point I realized that my greatest need was to develop a vocation that would free me from being a slave to romantic love and wasting myself on hopeless men.
“Love and work,” Freud said when asked to name what is most important in life. Young women understand the love part. Alas, the “work” part is an abstraction to many. “How can I choose my major when I don’t yet know who I’m going to marry,” one female college freshman said in an interview. She saw her role, and the role of her education, as being of use to her husband’s future career.
Maybe it’s become a remote past, that era when women saw themselves chiefly as playing a supportive role, without any true interests and passions of their own. For me it’s just yesterday, the past that isn’t really even past.
*
HANNAH ARENDT AND THE PLEASURES OF SOLITUDE
~ In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the center of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the polis. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.
In 1961, The New Yorker commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s actions were evil, Eichmann himself – the person – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.
Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognized that ‘a person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.
‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude.
What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically only if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.
But what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In The Republic (c380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.
Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’
Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.
But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’.
Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves. ~
https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Paleologue:
There’s a deep perceptual divide between only children and children from large families.
I was born into a quiet house and had to build my own world. I only found out about other kids at a later date. And that has informed my worldview to this day. Today I live alone, and solitude is my default state. If I want a bit of hustle and bustle, I have to get in the car and look for it.
Kids from large families, on the other hand, can only find comfort where there’s an incessant hubbub. Their ability to keep up a constant stream of chatter about nothing very much has always been a source of wonder to me… they are literally always talking. Or, nowadays, texting. And since they go for small, inconsequential comments rather than big ideas, the tweet is their perfect medium. For me, a thought is usually around one page, typed.
I’ve never been good at chitchat, small talk. Before I can say something I have to put a thought together, let it take form and then put it to words. In the course of conversation, I find that by the time I’m ready to issue forth with a considered opinion, the conversation has moved on. My thought has already reached its sell-by date before my mouth even opens. So as a result, I’m known as kind of a quiet, thoughtful person. One who doesn’t say much.
I like it in here. I can take my time before speaking my mind.
Oriana:
As an only child, I felt drawn to the concept of “perceptual divide” that “Paleologue” describes — until I started thinking of the various people who have been important in my life. Yes, some were only children, but not the majority. Maybe the love of solitude and quiet is more “natural” to an only child, but I’ve met soulmates who came from families of all sizes.
Patrice Ayme:
Arendt attributed Eichmann’s immorality – his capacity, even his thoroughness, to commit crimes – to his ‘ thoughtlessness ’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder. Actually, studying Eichmann’s life leads to the exact opposite conclusion. Eichmann took lessons of Yiddish , to better understand his prey. He paid a Jewish girl to do so. Eichmann also had a very close Jewish friend who ended up at Auschwitz. He tried to get him out, and Himmler had to explain to him they couldn’t make any exception, except, well, OK, in this case. The friend was not send to the gas chamber (he died mysteriously later).
Did Eichmann shun Socratic self-reflection? Well, so did Socrates: Socrates, like Eichmann, was sentenced to death for committing evil acts which helped a murderous dictatorship.(Oriana: ?? The official charge against Socrates was atheism; he was allegedly corrupting youth.)
Arendt miserably argued that Eichmann had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.
Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Simply, “Good and Evil” in Naziland, was upside down, in many places.
‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’
Au contraire, my dear Arendt: many a soldier would be most honored to be friend to one who has killed many. And “doing wrong” is in the eye of the beholder. Eichmann thought he was doing right when he was getting rid of the Jews.
S.B.:
I suppose I don’t agree with Arendt’s analysis of the moral landscape. Was it really Eichmann’s “inability to stop and think” that permitted him to participate in mass murder? This judgement strikes me as naive.
J L Rheinhart:
Ms Arendt spoke of Eichmann’s lack of ability to be introspective, but she didn’t speak of imagination. I wonder if one is predicated on the other. I found it’s not enough to have an imagination to enjoy being alone, but it helps. A lot. I have an imagination, but I learned late in life my mother did not. I took care of her near the end and it shocked me to realize that all my years before I never had cause to learn of her deficit.
I can’t even imagine what not having an imagination would be like, no pun intended. She was brain-damaged at birth. Her deficits included much more than just a lack of ability to project possible scenarios into the future, but this one deficit shocked me the most, probably because I never saw it until she was in her 80’s. I wondered how I could’ve missed it?
I also learned watching her that you could be blissfully happy not knowing or understanding or caring about much of what was going on in the world, but I also realized I could not be happy not knowing. Solitude is my default state where I renew, but I can’t imagine not living in the world. I can be alone, a majority of one, and still be part of the human race, and part of the vast unimaginable universe. I don’t think she ever thought about it. It sounds like Eichmann didn’t either.
Oriana:
Eichmann and various other top Nazis make me think of religious fanaticism. Their behavior is best explained as those serving a cult, ready to die (but preferably to kill) for the holy cause. Hitler was of course a cult leader. Some people seem to crave blind faith.
Mary:
Oriana:
Many years ago I heard someone say, "Living alone spoils you rotten." Now I know it's true. Any thought of collective living is abhorrent to me. In part it's because I am (or rather: have become during my years of solitude) what some might call a "control freak": I decide when to get up and go to bed, what to eat and when, and other things along those lines. And there is no one to criticize my choices.
But there are also those deeper gifts of solitude, and that's indeed the freedom to think and daydream, to go deeply into reading or writing knowing that I won't be interrupted by having to attend to the needs of another. Solitude is my greatest luxury.
I just learned that it was Saint Bernard who used to say, "O beata solitudo, solo beatitudo!"
*
WHAT ALL ANGRY MEN HAVE IN COMMON
~ When Dr. Thomas J. Harbin published his seminal work Beyond Anger: A Guide for Men in 2000, it was a simpler time. Sort of. Anger, especially among men, was a widespread problem, but it was hardly so communicable as it is today. Now, anger travels like a virus, transmitted from the individual to the masses with the tap of a touchscreen. As he writes in the prologue to a new edition of Beyond Anger, the social media age has proven “perversely liberating” for angry men.
“They don’t have to deal with the consequences of angry diatribes and don’t have to fear retribution,” he writes. “They can say whatever they want to whoever they want and get away with it. They can rant and rave, call people names, make false statements about people, start or contribute to rumors, and sometimes ruin lives — and forget all about it when they walk away from the screen.” This behavior, he concludes, is nothing short of cowardly.
A clinical psychiatrist practicing in North Carolina, Dr. Harbin has spent decades working with angry men and their families, teaching them to come to terms with and control their anger. In that time, he’s come to a robust, nuanced understanding of anger, where it comes from, how it works, and how people can deal with it. We spoke to Dr. Harbin about what he’s learned, why anger is so present today, and what men can do to manage theirs.
For readers who might be unfamiliar with your work, could you briefly outline a working definition of male anger and how you think about it?
I think that male anger is probably like everybody’s anger, only that men tend to express it differently than women. Men tend to be more physically aggressive than women, men tend to be more verbally aggressive than women. But I think in general, anger is anger.
And how did you come to specialize in anger?
The first aspect of it was trying to deal with my own anger as a young man. So I started putting some of my thoughts down on paper. I’m a clinical psychologist, so in dealing with some of my angry male patients, I wanted to have something that they could read. There weren’t any books out there at the time that I really thought fit the bill, so I started writing a few chapters here and there and then decided to expand it to a book.
How have cultural understandings of or approaches to anger changed throughout history?
I think that public recognition of some of the behaviors that we used to accept is no longer there. While we are a long way from dealing with a lot of the anger-related problems in men, there’s at least, now, a recognition that physical aggression is usually not acceptable, that yelling and screaming at family or co-workers or other people is not acceptable. So I think the acceptability of a lot of traditional angry male behavior is starting to erode.
Other than your own work on the matter, do you have any sense of what the drivers are of those norms changing?
The last couple of generations of men — well, the two generations after the World War II generation, so baby boomers and then the generation after that, have really been caught. In former times, the definition of a man was you went to work every day, you worked with your muscles, you brought home a paycheck, and that was about it. And now women can do most of the work that men can do. The definition of what it is to be a man now is in flux, and I think that’s unsettling to a lot of men now. We don’t really have a hard and fast rules for what it means to be a man and a successful man. I think that causes a lot of dissatisfaction that gets expressed as anger.
A lot of angry men have what I call a core sense of inferiority. They feel like they don’t measure up. And then there is an idea that a Dr. [Michael] Kimmel has put out there in some of his book which he calls “aggrieved entitlement.” And that is a lot of men, especially white men, feel like other people are getting stuff that I’m entitled to and I’m not getting it. So I think it’s a complex that has changed over the last 20 or 30 years.
Can you talk about that core sense of inferiority and what its root are?
Well, physical abuse. That teaches a boy that he is not a person, that he is an object, that whoever is abusing him can do whatever he wants with him — especially hitting on the head, that’s a humiliating thing that leads to feelings of inferiority. I think, again, the confusion as to what it means to be a man these days contributes to that. We’ve had some significant financial down turns in the last 20 years — the dot com bubble in 2001, the big recession in 2008. I think all of those challenged a lot of men’s self-confidence and caused them, a lot of times, to have to reexamine their identities as men.
How have your own views about anger and attitudes towards treating and addressing anger changed over the years, as you’ve practiced?
I am concerned. I think over the last 10 or 15 years or so a lot of aspects of our culture have gotten increasingly aggressive. There is an acceptance of humiliating trash talk in sport, many of our political bodies sit and scream at each other instead of getting anything positive accomplished, I think a lot of people value belligerence in and of its own self, so that belligerence is now a virtue. I think there’s a lot of disturbing trends in our culture in the last 20 years.
Angry young men are in the news a lot these days, between men’s rights activists, the Proud Boys, so much of the alt right. And that seems to intersect so much with social media and the ways we live online. I’m curious what you make of that, or what you’ve learned about that in dealing with your patients?
I think the echo chamber has done a lot to exacerbate and perpetuate male anger. Guys can go online and find thousands of other guys that are just as angry as they are and they bounce it back and forth, getting angrier. I think that there has been a great reduction in civility and reasonableness over the last couple of generations, and I think that you’d be wrong to blame social media for that entirely but I certainly think that social media contributes to it. It used to be that if you wanted to get a bunch of people together to complain about something, you had to make some sort of telephone or mail contact, you had to arrange a place to be. And now people can just go ahead with a few clicks and they’re connected to thousands of people that are just as angry as they are.
What tips or recommendations would you give to a parent worried that their child might have anger issues?
I think that there needs to be consistent discipline. By that I don’t mean punishment, I mean that there — I think of my brother as being almost the perfect father, in terms of training his kids. He would say this is what I expect out of you, this is what will happen if you do what I expect, this is what will happen if you don’t do what I expect and then follow through with it. And he rarely had to raise his voice, because his daughters knew that if they did X or Y then it would happen.
So I think consistent discipline is a good way to raise kids that are not angry. I think that by and large when parents hit their kids, they’re teaching them that that’s the way to solve problems. So I think a de-emphasis on physical punishment, and I think kids just need to know what the rules are and what will happen if they don’t follow the rules.
And suppose you’re talking to a father whose is worried that they themselves might get angry with their kids, who feel the anger bubbling. What do you say them to deal with that?
The first thing I would say is that anger is not bad. Anger is not bad, anger is not good, it just is. And it is for its own reasons. What we worry about, or at least what I worry about with my patients is: What does it take to get you angry, how angry do you get when you get angry, what do you do when you get angry? Those are the things that I like to focus on.
But if a parent — let’s say a father — feels as if he is going to get out of control with his kids, the first thing he’s got to do is walk away until he cools off. Later on, maybe he can learn more sophisticated ways of dealing with his anger, but the first step is to get out of that situation so you don’t do anything that you’ll regret later on. ~
https://www.fatherly.com/life/anger-management-expert-why-men?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Back when I taught creative writing in prison, I somehow learned the statement, "Anger is the emotion of a victim." I remember at least one inmate on whom those words made a deep impression. Up to a point, one can choose not to perceive oneself as a victim.
Mary:
*
THE SOVIET UNION WAS NEVER A COMMUNIST COUNTRY
~ It was a party-state dictatorship. It was controlled by a bureaucracy, the nomenklatura, not by the workers. It was, in addition, in an underdeveloped agrarian society which had no serious capitalist or working classes outside a few major cities. Less promising grounds for a proletarian revolution could not be imagined, except perhaps for China, where the situation was even worse. Marxist communism was supposed to be developed on the basis of advanced capitalism by the working class. In the Soviet Union, and also in China, in the working class had to be more or less invented.
Lenin, for one, and most of the old Bolsheviks, knew this was a serious problem. They counted on a German revolution, which would, they hoped, bring Soviet Russia into alliance with the advanced industrial base developed by capitalist Germany and with a revolutionary German working class. The German revolution occurred, but was crushed by its former social democratic comrades and right wing death squads.
Before he died in 1924, Lenin helped institute what was called the new economic policy, NEP, expressly described as state capitalism, to create the conditions for Socialism and communism in the new Soviet Union. Even this was kind of a Hail Mary pass, because Socialism in one backwards country, which was all they had, wasn’t not what Marx anticipated, nor particularly promising as a project. But even this long shot was aborted by Stalin, who adopted Socialism in one country as state policy, and embarked on a disastrous and murderous policy of forced collectivization. At no point in Soviet history did the working class, which, by Stalin’s death, had developed into the majority of Soviet citizens, control the government or the economy.
To get an idea of what Marx would have thought of the Soviet system, Stalinism, you can read his short piece, Critique of the Gotha Program, where he prophetically denounces, for example, “setting the state free, as in (Czarist) Russia.” Central to Marx’s conception of communism was the abolition of wage labor, which was never even attempted in the Soviet Union.
Marx did not say much about communism, being averse to “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” The bulk of what he wrote was about capitalism, including his magnum, opus, Capital, and contemporary politics. There were perhaps 50 pages about communism, in the 50 volumes of his and Engels’ collected works.
But that little he wrote makes it incredibly clear and that his communism was nothing like the Soviet “communism.” Marx envisaged a “free association of producers,“ where “the free development of each” would be “the condition of the free development of all.” Indeed, he used “free association” as a synonym for communism.
He anticipated that workers would control production and plan the society together on the basis of recallable delegates based in working class organizations and communities. He was utterly opposed to the idea of the state as an entity imposed on society from without, and barely mentioned the party, which he viewed not as a vanguard organization of professional revolutionaries that would substitute for the workers or act in their place, but as the most advanced sector of the workers themselves.
Stalinism was and is opposed to Marxist communism on almost every point. China started from where Russia did, but even further back. The Soviet Union existed, and was a model for its development, and initially an ally, but not a model of Marxist communism. When people say that real, that is Marxist, communism has never been tried, that’s not an excuse. It’s just a fact. It wasn’t tried and then betrayed or diverted into Stalinism. It wasn’t tried AT ALL. It couldn’t have been in Russia or China. The conditions — advanced capitalism and a developed working class — didn’t exist.
But they do now, there and here. ~ Justin Schwartz, Quora
Oriana:
I remember my excitement when I read Misha Iossel’s verdict: “The Soviet Union was never a communist country. It was always a fascist country.”
We should remember this about Russia: more than anything else, it has always been a dictatorship -- but never the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Trotsky in his saner, younger years observed, "There can be no dictatorship of the proletariat. There can only be a dictatorship OVER the proletariat."
And the current war confirms that that Russia has also always been an imperialist country — with colonies not across oceans, but adjacent to its core territory. (And "adjacent" is an understatement when we consider the size of Siberia.
Does an empire have to keep expanding, the way a shark has to keep moving? The fact that we can discuss Russia’s imperialism as its most menacing aspect right now shows that the question of communism have ceased to be relevant a long time ago.
Fascism and imperialism, however, remain profoundly relevant.
*
THE INFLUENCE OF CRIMINAL CULTURE ON RUSSIA
~ In the absence of civil society (i.e. a public space between the state and the ordinary household, in which people can independently debate and take political action) in the USSR, for most of the 20th century, the criminal world remained an escape hatch for many of those who didn’t like the Communist project. Between the wars, thieves were considered “socially close” to proletarians: they didn’t possess private property like the bourgeois class.
In the Gulag, criminals had a lot of privileges compared to political convicts. Which is why in the darkest days of the Great Purges a lot of generally law-abiding citizens went for petty theft in the hope to go below the radar from the threat of being arrested by the secret police NKVD.
After the death of Stalin millions of inmates were released from the Gulag and from exile settlements deep in the provinces. They brought into the mainstream society a subversive cynicism of the underworld that had known no party cells or Marxist study circles. The cool gangsta jargon and mannerisms swiftly spread among younger generations that a few decades later brought us Vladimir Putin.
According to Putin’s own accounts from his childhood, the criminal subculture was prominent across Leningrad (St Petersburg) in the 1950s and 1960s. Hence, his affinity to martial arts, the locker room humor, his indirect yet colorful style of threats, his habit to scowl when speaking if he is irritated. In the moments of silent triumphs and self-congratulation, he sometimes drops his usually straight posture and assumes a blatnói (“gangsta”) slouch in combination with a low-key vindictive grin on his face—the mark of a successful, self-assured “thief-in-law” who is used to score good points one after another, but has been around long enough not to flaunt his fart (“criminal luck and skill”) too much.
None of his predecessors in the Kremlin, including Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the two men of proletarian provenance, have displayed the same flair for criminal mannerisms. This must have played a considerable part in Putin’s public appeal. In the 1990s, the old Soviet elite became saturated with newly-rich criminals who totally changed the face of our culture. They didn’t like the stiff, conservative old-timers on top shaped by the progressivist, “cultured” Soviet education. Putin, with his hands-on pragmatism, respect for money and the apparent street cred of a seasoned secret operative was a breath of fresh air for the new generation. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
*
TO UNDERSTAND PUTIN, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE CRIMINAL WORLD
Russian foreign policy, Igor Eidman says, “consists of a bizarre mix of the traditions of a corrupt bureaucracy and a criminal world.” Europeans and others in the West need to recognize this; otherwise, they will discover that how they understand Putin is very much at odds with how he understands himself.
“One and the same thing has for the Kremlin and for Europe diametrically opposite meaning,” the Russian sociologist and commentator of Deutsche Welle says. That can be easily seen if one considers several examples:
Case 1: “Putin is systematically late and forces his foreign colleagues to wait for him.” Europeans view him as “uneducated, not a businessman and simply a lout.” But he and Russians more generally are certain that “a boss is not late but only delayed. If world leaders wait for Putin, that means he’s tough. By being late, he has symbolically denigrated them and shown he’s on top.”
Case 2: “Putin systematically lies and deceives his Western partners.” For Europeans that means he is a liar and his word cannot be trusted.” For Putin and other Russians, in contrast, it means that he is “simply an intelligent man who treats his enemies as suckers. Were he to do otherwise, they would overwhelm him.”
Case 3: “Putin threatens and blackmails his partners. Europeans think he is “insane,” but for Russians, that means he is “a tough guy” because “in the world everything is decided by strength and let them all fear us.”
Case 4: “Western politicians are inclined to compromise and try to reach agreements with Putin.” For Europeans, those who try to do so are good guys because “politicians must be flexible and willing to compromise.” But for Russians and Putin above all, that means they are “weak and cowardly” because “to make concessions is to be weak. We will never retreat.”
According to Eidman, “Europeans do not understand” that Putin is seeking to defeat them by confusion, disinformation, fear and so on. And they clearly don’t recognize that “if instead of waiting in humiliation for Putin to show up, they would simply have a photograph taken without Putin being present.” That alone would “prevent him from using that humiliating tactic again.”
In short, the sociologist concludes, “Europe needs to study the customs of the Russian criminal world. Without that, it is impossible to understand the Kremlin’s policy and learn to stand up to it. It is necessary that Putin constantly be publicly hit in the face. Only then will he respect his foreign partners and take them into consideration.” ~
https://euromaidanpress.com/2018/11/25/to-deal-with-putin-west-needs-to-study-russian-criminal-world-eidman-says/
Dima:
"Criminal convicts during Stalinism spent their term in Gulag in much more lenient conditions than political ones.
In the shadows, there were no party cells and no need to sing praises to Soviet rule. The criminal business also assured much better living standards than being a collectivized peasant."
No wonder Putinist Russia has such a distinct affinity with criminal subculture.
*
STALIN WAS AWARE OF ORWELL’S 1984
He he certainly was aware of 1984, and predictably, he quickly grew to hate the novel for its political themes and views. Also predictably, Stalin ordered that Nineteen Eighty-Four be banned throughout Russia. He was one of the very few people in the country to own a copy.
I don't know George Orwell's reaction to this but I'd wager he was secretly proud, in feeling he had achieved the one thing by his novel: for the Russian government to feel the writer's unflinching political attacks.
Thomas Snider:
I think the book Stalin would really hate would be ‘Animal Farm’ since it was all about the Bolshevik Revolution, and how Trotsky was the real hero, except with pigs and other barnyard animals. Did Stalin have a copy of that book too?
Edmund Pickett:
Stalin’s NKVD agents tried to assassinate Orwell in Spain in the 1930s. Orwell was tipped off that the hit squad was coming and he escaped. Stalin would not have known Orwell’s name, since in Spain he went by his real name of Eric Blair. I would say that Orwell got his revenge but it’s unfortunate that it was posthumous.
*
“DAD, YOU ARE MY HERO”
~ A Russian single father whose daughter was reported for drawing an anti-war picture has been given a two-year jail term for discrediting the army.
But Alexei Moskalev, 53, was not in court in Yefremov for the verdict. The court press secretary said he had escaped house arrest.
"I don't know where he is," his lawyer Vladimir Biliyenko told the BBC.
His daughter Masha, 13, was sent to a children's home in early March when the criminal case began.
Moskalev was accused of repeatedly criticizing the Russian army on social media and had appeared in court the day before.
He is only the latest Russian to be given a jail term for discrediting the military, but his case 320km (200 miles) south of Moscow has attracted international attention because of the authorities' decision to remove his daughter from their home early in March.
"I'm in shock," Yefremov town councillor Olga Podolskaya said. "A prison sentence for expressing your opinion is a terrible thing. A two-year jail term is a nightmare.”
"When I heard that Alexei had gone on the run, that was the second shock. We hope that Alexei is OK and that nothing has happened to him.”
The family's problems began last April, she told the BBC, when Masha Moskaleva's school told the police that the girl had drawn a Ukrainian flag with the words "Glory to Ukraine", rockets and a Russian flag bearing the phrase "No to war!”
Alexei Moskalev had contacted Ms Podolskaya last year to tell her about the pressure he and his daughter were coming under. Masha's mother does not live in the area and is estranged from the family.
Moskalev was initially fined for a comment about the war made on a social media network last year. But after his flat was searched in December he was charged under the criminal code because he had already been convicted of a similar offense.
He has been recognized as a political prisoner by human rights group Memorial, which has itself been banned by Russia's authorities.
Moskalev was not allowed to communicate with the BBC during a visit to his building earlier this month. However, his lawyer said Moskalev was very worried that his daughter was not with him.
Social services in Yefremov have officially been tasked with looking after the girl. The local Juvenile Affairs Commission had already taken legal action to restrict her father's parental rights. Last week he wasn't allowed to leave his house arrest to attend a preliminary hearing.
Ahead of the verdict on Tuesday Vladimir Biliyenko visited the children's home where Masha has spent most of the month.
The director told him that the girl had gone to a children's cooking festival and passed on two drawings she said Masha had done for her father, as well as a letter she had written him. Mr Biliyenko told Sotavision that Masha had written the words: “Papa you're my hero.”
He later spread the drawings on a table in court.
Although Moskalev had turned up the day before, court press secretary Olga Dyachuk said he had escaped house arrest overnight and should have been taken into custody after the verdict.
“To say I'm surprised would be an understatement," Mr Biliyenko told the BBC. "I've never seen anything like it. No client of mine has ever gone missing like this. I don't know when he fled, or if he has.”
It's an initial hearing known as "a conversation" with the judge. Lawyer Vladimir Biliyenko says Alexei had wanted to be here in person. However he hasn't been allowed to interrupt his house arrest to come to court, even though what's at stake is access to his child.
In the courthouse corridor an activist unfurls a poster.
"Return Masha to her father!" it declares. A police officer tells her to take it down.
The Juvenile Affairs Commission has yet to respond to our request to comment on the case of Alexei Moskalev and his daughter Masha.
One of Alexei's supporters, Natalya Filatova, believes the story of the Moskalev family reflects the crackdown on dissent in Russia.
“Our constitution proclaims freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, total freedom for citizens to express their opinions," Natalya tells me. "But now we're forbidden from doing that.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65015289
Oriana:
That freedom of expression is not allowed under Putin is not anything new. What I find inspiring is that people keep trying. Sure, it’s an unusual person who is heroic enough to act, but at least there are such individuals. And that means a lot.
News update: Alas, Alexei Moskalev has been apprehended in Minsk. He used his cellphone, forgetting that it can be used to trace his location.
But let us remember his name so that we remember that yes, there have been indeed those Russians who recognized from the start that this is Putin's war, not any kind of patriotic defense war. And with unbelievable courage, many of those Russians found ways to express their opposition -- even if they may be reduced to writing, graffiti-style, on the walls. All acts of resistance count; all question the attitude that might is right, so let's just imprison and/or kill anyone who dares to think differently.
*
WHO WAS MORE CRUEL, LENIN OR STALIN?
~ There are different types of brutality. Lenin would give orders to kill “the enemies of the proletariat”, which was a political statement, a direction toward harsher treatment of the “useless classes”.
In September 1917, in his work The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It, Lenin wrote:
“... without the death penalty in relation to he exploiters (that is, the landlords and capitalists), any revolutionary government can hardly do.” V. I. Lenin writes in his letter to G. Zinoviev on June 26, 1918:
“Only today we heard in the Central Committee that the workers in St. Petersburg wanted to respond to the assassination of Volodarsky with mass terror, and that you ... withheld. I object strongly! ... This is impossible! The terrorists will consider us rags... We must encourage the energy and mass character of terror against the counter-revolutionaries... Lenin was almost apologetic in requesting the death penalty for class enemies.
Most of his pre-revolution time was a political journalist and theoretician. Then he becomes a head of a Soviet government, but still directs most of his energy toward writing. Killing is not his main focus, just a necessary steps to reach the ultimate goal — “Building the new type of “progressive future”, the society of workers and poor peasants.
Joseph Stalin (Djugashvili) had a different background. He was a member and organizer of the “actions”, or “expropriations”, i.e. armed robberies. In 1907 he was one of the terrorists bombing the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire during the transportation of funds between the post office and the State Bank on a horse-drawn carriage. Many people, including some bystanders have been killed. So, when he started his purges of the party and military, he was not bounded by the conscience or oversensitivity. He created a Kafkaesque machine of death. He became a butcher.
But you know what? It seems like he knew his people better than his critics. Look how popular he is in today’s Russia. Killers for hire (“kontratnik” — means contract soldier) became the heroes of Today’s Russia. Lenin’s ideas are dead and forgotten, but Stalin’s methods are alive and well.
Dimitry Kuzmin:
Stalin simply applied Lenin’s teachings to a new reality. He was a student of Lenin and believed in revolution of the proletariat and all that nonsense. But he also knew he was a leader of Russia and in order to be a leader of Russia Stalin needed to become a new tsar. So he became a tsar similar to Ivan the Terrible. But a tsar who was also an ultra-left revolutionary fanatic like Lenin.
R. Kumar:
Stalin’s methods will never fade away unless someone more brutal and efficient comes.
Regardless of fascism or communism, imagine you are a head of a state and you want to deport ethnic minorities, arrest opponents, and consolidate power.
No one in history had a more efficient method to do these things than Stalin. Stalin is the Einstein of black office government work. Dark things happen regardless of left and right, and Stalin did these things better than anyone.
As long as there is hatred and competition, which there will always be, Stalin will be alive.
Even a hardcore fascist who let's say wants to eradicate communists but what if the commies have 90% support in the country, the fascist will look to Stalin for answers, not Hitler, because no one did this stuff better than him.
Someone who wants to destroy ethnic minorities will always look to Stalin instead of Hitler because it has been now proven that putting people on a long journey without critical supplies is more effective than throwing them in gas chambers.
*
“EH! THE ROADS” — A BUMPY JOY RIDE ON THE WAY TO OTHER TOPICS
Resident of the town of Votkinsk, Udmurtia recorded a video with her friends and neighbors with an appeal to Putin (who else?) about the poor state of a road. “Public officials have been promising us to repair the road for more than 35 years,” residents said holding posters.
After the video was posted on social media, Nina Krivoschekova was visited by officers from the Center of Battle Against Extremism.
A protocol was filled out about violations of rules of conducting public meetings.
In Russia, meetings meet you.
Summary: The United States just need to persevere — Russia is defeating herself. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
Oriana:
It’s Putin and the Forty Thieves — yes, we can count on them to keep on destroying Russia.
Not that I wish for some impossible obliteration of Russia. Demilitarization would be enough. Well, dream on . . .
*
CHINA IS ALREADY DEVELOPING SIBERIA
~ For many years, China has been developing Siberia. For this they do not need to go with the war. China is using soft power. So.
1. Here in Siberia, the government leases land to the Chinese for 49 years. With the possibility of extension. That is, forever.
2. Chinese managers and Russian workers work on these lands.
3. Here, in the Siberian forests, there are a lot of Chinese sawmills. The timber is exported to China. The sawmills are not small.
4. Mining and processing plants are being built here, which export ore to China. Chinese shareholders.
5. The same picture with other minerals and natural resources. In particular, clean water from Lake Baikal.
6. There are many, in particular in my city, Chinese scrap metal collection points. And all the metal is exported to China.
7. There are markets with Chinese owners.
8. Cafes and restaurants with Chinese owners.
9. Lots of Chinese students. Most of them stay here after their studies. Integrates and invites other Chinese.
10. A lot of Chinese farms and fields. And hence, products in our stores.
11. Many Siberian enterprises have Chinese shareholders. And so on.
The Chinese don't have to wait for a weakened Russia to take over Siberia. They are already here. ~ Sayan Zokirtuev (lives in Siberia), Quora
***
Vorkuta, voted the most depressing town in Russia, previously the site of Vorkuta Gulag.
*
SOUTH KOREA’S DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS
~ In South Korea, the fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman in her reproductive years — is now 0.78, according to figures released by the Korean government in February. It could be years before the country can reach the 2.1 rate that experts say is needed for a country to maintain a stable population without migration.
South Korea is far from alone. In 2020, the United States saw 43 states register their lowest fertility rates in at least three decades. And the U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2034, people 65 and older will outnumber those under the age of 18 for the first time in U.S. history. In January, China also recorded its first population decline in decades.
The drop in fertility rates has left countries facing a future of aging populations and shrinking workforces. Fewer young adults working means slower economic growth, which will make it harder for governments to care for older people as they continue to make up a larger share of the population.
South Korea has moved aggressively to stem the decline in births, and its actions provide a model for steps other governments can take to address the issue. But its ongoing struggles also illustrate the complexity of a challenge that is only becoming more salient around the world.
South Korea has invested heavily to stem what is now a seven-year decline in the national fertility rate, but it hasn't made much difference. President Yoon Suk Yeol said in September that the government has poured more than $200 billion into programs to support new mothers in the past 16 years alone, only to watch the fertility rate drop more than 25% in that time span.
At the center of the government response is a pledge to increase the stipend given to parents with a child under the age of 1 from 300,000 won per month (about $230) to 1 million won ($765) by 2024.
The country's child care policies are also among the best in the world, according to UNICEF, and continue to expand. The government announced plans in January to increase the paid parental leave period from one year to a year-and-a-half. The U.S., by comparison, has no national paid leave plan, and only about 35% of workers are employed at companies that offer any paid parental leave.
So why does the fertility rate continue to drop?
One problem is that the government's approach is a "Band-Aid solution," said Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for East Asia Policy Studies.
"The child care subsidies, the leaves — these are all things you can visibly see and argue 'Yes, we are making these attempts,'" he said. "But dealing with the structural problems that aren't directly related to fertility, that's a big ship to turn around.”
Among the thorniest issues is the lack of affordable housing — particularly in major cities like Seoul that have been drawing growing numbers of young people from the countryside with prospects of better educational and job opportunities.
People in their 20s and 30s often say, "I'll have kids once I have my own place," according to Jessica Ryu, a 27-year-old Korean citizen who is pursuing a postdoctoral degree in communications in the U.S.
But with so much competition for an apartment in Seoul — where 18% of South Korea's population is concentrated — young people are finding it difficult to afford a place of their own, and subsequently, start a family.
Ryu recalled a conversation with her older cousin about her struggles to raise two children, 5 and 7 years old, in Seoul.
Her cousin said she would rather the government set up more day care centers than give her a couple of hundred dollars a month, which she said is not enough to cover essentials like diapers and food.
South Korea has one of the longest workweeks of any of the 38 member nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). If the country wants to improve its fertility rate, officials need to start by addressing what economist Lyman Stone calls an overarching culture around “workism.”
Stone has studied global attitudes toward work and found that countries where people place a high importance on work and derive more personal value from their job are associated with lower fertility rates.
"There's a sense [in South Korea] that, particularly for men but increasingly for women as well, that your contribution in the office is really what makes you a person of status and standing in society, even more than in America," said Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
But in Korea, where women hold only about 21% of managerial positions and 5% of executive posts, experts say it is not only harder for women to ascend in leadership, but to also survive in the workforce when they have a child.
Yeo said some women may feel averse to taking leave in fear of making managers and co-workers resentful about how that might lower productivity, given the country's hyper-competitive business culture.
"If you've been gone a year-and-a-half, people may not treat you the same way," he said.
"Women who take time off may not necessarily return to work, or if they do, they may feel a stigma.”
For Ryu, she said having children is not worth sacrificing her career.
"The reality is that one of the parents has to resign from work or take a long break, but the problem is, it's almost always the female or the mom who has to take a leave," she said.
The entrenched patriarchy has set expectations for women to bear the brunt of child rearing and household chores, Stone says, making the idea of raising children even less appealing to many women in their 20s and 30s.
While Ryu hopes to get married one day, Kim said she has ruled out both marriage and children. She blames deeply rooted gender roles in Korea that leave many women sacrificing more of their personal life in marriage than men.
"My mother had three children in her early to mid-20s and I hated seeing her struggle just to take care of us," Kim said. "The family culture in Korea is still very patriarchal, and based on the reality I saw, everything incurs a loss [for the woman] and I don't want to do that.”
Anti-feminist sentiments in South Korea are further complicating the fertility issue, according to the journalist Hawon Jung, author of the #MeToo movement book Flowers of Fire. She says that Yoon's anti-feminist stance, including his plan to abolish the country's gender equality ministry, are exacerbating the gender war in South Korea and countering efforts to solve the fertility issue.
"Although no previous governments in South Korea managed to reverse the downward trend in fertility rates for the past decade, the current government's policies could make it even more difficult to tackle the issue than it already is," she said.
The declining marriage rate can be seen as one result of the extreme workism culture, coupled with ongoing gender issues in Korea, experts say.
"[The Korean government] successfully discouraged nonmarital fertility, but they've also very successfully discouraged marriage," Stone said.
And stigma against having children outside of marriage has left Korea with one of the lowest out-of-wedlock birth rates in the OECD. Korea saw 2.5% of births outside marriage in 2020; the U.S., by comparison, recorded 40.5% of births out of wedlock that year.
FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE
While falling fertility rates have become the norm in most developed countries, experts say there are still important lessons to take from nations that have managed to avoid dramatic declines.
France boasts the highest fertility rate in the European Union at 1.8, while Denmark continues to see fertility rates more than double that of Korea at 1.67.
Driving that success, experts say, is a crucial interplay between attitudes about work and family.
France and Denmark have long been touted for gender egalitarian attitudes that make them more forgiving places for working women who also want to have children. Both countries were among the top 10 countries for working women in 2022, while Korea ranked last, according to The Economist magazine's glass ceiling index. The U.S. was 19, below the OECD average.
Work hours and overall attitudes toward work in Denmark and France are also far more lax than in South Korea, according to Stone. OECD data shows that only 6% of the Denmark workforce and 10% of the French workforce work more than 50 hours a week, compared to 19% in South Korea.
Then there's Latvia and Hungary, where fertility rates have risen more than 20% since 2010.
Latvia's case shows how sometimes improving the fertility issue requires some luck. The Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia has attributed the increase to a generation born during a baby boom in the 1980s that has now reached the typical age of marriage and childbearing.
But not all countries with historically high fertility rates are finding it easy to avoid a steep decline.
Denmark's Nordic neighbors of Finland, Norway, Iceland and Sweden have seen some of the largest percentage drops in fertility rates since 2010, according to an analysis of OECD data. Stone said the drop is associated with attitudes also becoming more work-centric.
By addressing work cultures, Stone believes countries with declining populations can boost fertility rates. And nowhere is that more crucial than in Korea, he says.
"[The Korean government] successfully achieved some of the fastest economic growth in human history and the price has been that there isn't a next generation to inherit it," Stone said. ~
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1163341684/south-korea-fertility-rate?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I keep suspecting that “we” [i.e. people I know, and the people they know] have become too hedonistic to give up the pleasures of a child-free lifestyle for the unavoidable sacrifices of parenthood. These sacrifices are obvious, while a parent’s pleasure in taking care of the children is rarely obvious to outsiders who may be contemplating whether or not to have a child.
My answer is quality childcare centers. It’s not a perfect answer, but we’ll never have perfection. Somehow we need to move from the position of “having a child is the most difficult thing in the world” toward the perception of more joy.
And the mother needs to know that she is not alone — help is always available. It should always be available, 24/7. Don’t press me about the details — no, I don’t know how to put these ideas into practice. But humanity will have to decide, at some point, if to continue its existence as a species. And I suspect that policies enacted by male government leaders who never even thought of consulting with women are doomed from the start.
*
LICHENS AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
~ “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” the great naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote a century later as he considered the meaning of life. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”
Because of this delicate interconnectedness of life across time, space, and being, any littlest fragment of the universe can become a lens on the miraculous whole. Sometimes, it is the humblest life-forms that best intimate the majesty of life itself.
Take, for instance, lichens.
Lichens — which are not to be confused with mosses — are some of Earth’s oldest life-forms: emissaries of the ocean gone terrestrial. For epochs, their exact nature was a mystery — until an improbable revolutionary illuminated that they are, in fact, part algae.
In the final stretch of the nineteenth century, Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter punctuated her writing and her painting with a series of experiments with spores, demonstrating that lichens — which Linnaeus considered the “poor peasants of the plant world” — are in fact not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae: living reminders that the supreme vital force of life is not competition but interdependence, that we survive and thrive not through combat but through collaboration.
Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature.
Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:
The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning.
Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.
Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” In their biology lies a poignant metaphor for how we think of the relationships that surround us, lacing our human lives:
Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life.
“Alone” is not an option… Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand.”
But the most beguiling manifestation of lichens’ gift for the art of relationship is found in how they acquire their haunting otherworldly color:
Blue or purple lichens contain blue-green bacteria, the cyanobacteria. Green lichens contain algae. Fungi mix in their own colors by secreting yellow or silver sunscreen pigments. Bacteria, algae, fungi: three venerable trunks of the tree of life twining their pigmented stems.
The algae’s verdure reflects an older union. Jewels of pigment deep inside algal cells soak up the sun’s energy. Through a cascade of chemistry this energy is transmuted into the bonds that join air molecules into sugar and other foods. This sugar powers both the algal cell and its fungal bedfellow. The sun-catching pigments are kept in tiny jewel boxes, chloroplasts, each of which is enclosed in a membrane and comes with its own genetic material. The bottle-green chloroplasts are descendants of bacteria that took up residence inside algal cells one and a half billion years ago.
The bacterial tenants gave up their tough outer coats, their sexuality, and their independence, just as algal cells do when they unite with fungi to make lichens. Chloroplasts are not the only bacteria living inside other creatures. All plant, animal, and fungal cells are inhabited by torpedo-shaped mitochondria that function as miniature powerhouses, burning the cells’ food to release energy. These mitochondria were also once free-living bacteria and have, like the chloroplasts, given up sex and freedom in favor of partnership.
With an eye to the ancient union of bacterial genes that gave rise to all modern DNA, Haskell considers the elemental and existential role of symbiosis in every life, including our own:
We are Russian dolls, our lives made possible by other lives within us. But whereas dolls can be taken apart, our cellular and genetic helpers cannot be separated from us, nor we from them. We are lichens on a grand scale.
~ https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/03/25/lichens/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Mary:
Lichen on a beech tree, the Ho Rain Forest.
*
LAST WORDS; WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY BEFORE THEY DIE
~ Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.”
When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.
During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.
Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.
Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.
To assess people’s “mental condition just before death,” MacDonald mined last-word anthologies, the only linguistic corpus then available, dividing people into 10 occupational categories (statesmen, philosophers, poets, etc.) and coding their last words as sarcastic, jocose, contented, and so forth.
MacDonald found that military men had the “relatively highest number of requests, directions, or admonitions,” while philosophers (who included mathematicians and educators) had the most “questions, answers, and exclamations.” The religious and royalty used the most words to express contentment or discontentment, while the artists and scientists used the fewest.
MacDonald’s work “seems to be the only attempt to evaluate last words by quantifying them, and the results are curious,” wrote the German scholar Karl Guthke in his book Last Words, on Western culture’s long fascination with them. Mainly, MacDonald’s work shows that we need better data about verbal and nonverbal abilities at the end of life. One point that Guthke makes repeatedly is that last words, as anthologized in multiple languages since the 17th century, are artifacts of an era’s concerns and fascinations about death, not “historical facts of documentary status.” They can tell us little about a dying person’s actual ability to communicate.
Some contemporary approaches move beyond the oratorical monologues of yore and focus on emotions and relationships. Books such as Final Gifts, published in 1992 by the hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, and Final Conversations, published in 2007 by Maureen Keeley, a Texas State University communications-studies scholar, and Julie Yingling, professor emerita at Humboldt State University, aim to sharpen the skills of the living for having important, meaningful conversations with the dying.
Previous centuries’ focus on last words has ceded space to the contemporary focus on last conversations and even nonverbal interactions. “As the person gets weaker and sleepier, communication with others often becomes more subtle,” Callanan and Kelley write. “Even when people are too weak to speak, or have lost consciousness, they can hear; hearing is the last sense to fade.”
I spoke to Maureen Keeley shortly after the death of George H. W. Bush, whose last words (“I love you, too,” he reportedly told his son, George W. Bush) were widely reported in the media, but she said they should properly be seen in the context of a conversation (“I love you,” the son had said first) as well as all the prior conversations with family members leading up to that point.
At the end of life, Keeley says, the majority of interactions will be nonverbal as the body shuts down and the person lacks the physical strength, and often even the lung capacity, for long utterances. “People will whisper, and they’ll be brief, single words—that’s all they have energy for,” Keeley said. Medications limit communication. So does dry mouth and lack of dentures.
She also noted that family members often take advantage of a patient’s comatose state to speak their piece, when the dying person cannot interrupt or object.
Many people die in such silence, particularly if they have advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s that robbed them of language years earlier. For those who do speak, it seems their vernacular is often banal. From a doctor I heard that people often say, “Oh fuck, oh fuck.”
Often it’s the names of wives, husbands, children. “A nurse from the hospice told me that the last words of dying men often resembled each other,” wrote Hajo Schumacher in an essay in Der Spiegel. “Almost everyone is calling for ‘Mommy’ or ‘Mama’ with the last breath.”
It’s still the interactions that fascinate me, partly because their subtle interpersonal textures are lost when they’re written down. A linguist friend of mine, sitting with his dying grandmother, spoke her name. Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and died. What that plain description omits is how he paused when he described the sequence to me, and how his eyes quivered.
But there are no descriptions of the basics of last words or last interactions in the scientific literature. The most linguistic detail exists about delirium, which involves a loss of consciousness, the inability to find words, restlessness, and a withdrawal from social interaction. Delirium strikes people of all ages after surgery and is also common at the end of life, a frequent sign of dehydration and over-sedation. Delirium is so frequent then, wrote the New Zealand psychiatrist Sandy McLeod, that “it may even be regarded as exceptional for patients to remain mentally clear throughout the final stages of malignant illness.”
About half of people who recover from postoperative delirium recall the disorienting, fearful experience. In a Swedish study, one patient recalled that “I certainly was somewhat tired after the operation and everything … and I did not know where I was. I thought it became like misty, in some way … the outlines were sort of fuzzy.” How many people are in a similar state as they approach death? We can only guess.
We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb. But if you wanted to know how language ends in the dying, there’s next to nothing to look up, only firsthand knowledge gained painfully.
After her father died, Lisa Smartt was left with endless questions about what she had heard him say, and she approached graduate schools, proposing to study last words academically. After being rebuffed, she began interviewing family members and medical staff on her own.
That led her to collaborate with Raymond Moody Jr., the Virginia-born psychiatrist best known for his work on “near-death experiences” in a 1975 best-selling book, Life After Life. He has long been interested in what he calls “peri-mortal nonsense” and helped Smartt with the work that became Words on the Threshold, based on her father’s utterances as well as ones she’d collected via a website she called the Final Words Project.
One common pattern she noted was that when her father, Felix, used pronouns such as it and this, they didn’t clearly refer to anything. One time he said, “I want to pull these down to earth somehow … I really don’t know … no more earth binding.” What did these refer to? His sense of his body in space seemed to be shifting. “I got to go down there. I have to go down,” he said, even though there was nothing below him.
He also repeated words and phrases, often ones that made no sense. “The green dimension! The green dimension!” (Repetition is common in the speech of people with dementia and also those who are delirious.) Smartt found that repetitions often expressed themes such as gratitude and resistance to death. But there were also unexpected motifs, such as circles, numbers, and motion. “I’ve got to get off, get off! Off of this life,” Felix had said.
Smartt says she’s been most surprised by narratives in people’s speech that seem to unfold, piecemeal, over days. Early on, one man talked about a train stuck at a station, then days later referred to the repaired train, and then weeks later to how the train was moving northward.
“If you just walk through the room and you heard your loved one talk about ‘Oh, there’s a boxing champion standing by my bed,’ that just sounds like some kind of hallucination,” Smartt says. “But if you see over time that that person has been talking about the boxing champion and having him wearing that, or doing this, you think, Wow, there’s this narrative going on.”
She imagines that tracking these story lines could be clinically useful, particularly as the stories moved toward resolution, which might reflect a person’s sense of the impending end.
In Final Gifts, the hospice nurses Callanan and Kelley note that “the dying often use the metaphor of travel to alert those around them that it is time for them to die.” They quote a 17-year-old, dying of cancer, distraught because she can’t find the map. “If I could find the map, I could go home! Where’s the map? I want to go home!” Smartt noted such journey metaphors as well, though she writes that dying people seem to get more metaphorical in general.
(However, people with dementia and Alzheimer’s have difficulty understanding figurative language, and anthropologists who study dying in other cultures told me that journey metaphors aren’t prevalent everywhere.)
Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people’s fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients.
End-of-life communication will only become more relevant as life lengthens and deaths happen more frequently in institutions. Most people in developed countries won’t die as quickly and abruptly as their ancestors did. Thanks to medical advances and preventive care, a majority of people will likely die from either some sort of cancer, some sort of organ disease (foremost being cardiovascular disease), or simply advanced age. Those deaths will often be long and slow, and will likely take place in hospitals, hospices, or nursing homes overseen by teams of medical experts. And people can participate in decisions about their care only while they are able to communicate. More knowledge about how language ends and how the dying communicate would give patients more agency for a longer period of time.
But studying language and interaction at the end of life remains a challenge, because of cultural taboos about death and ethical concerns about having scientists at a dying person’s bedside. Experts also pointed out to me that each death is unique, which presents a variability that science has difficulty grappling with.
And in the health-care realm, the priorities are defined by doctors. “I think that work that is more squarely focused on describing communication patterns and behaviors is much harder to get funded because agencies like NCI prioritize research that directly reduces suffering from cancer, such as interventions to improve palliative-care communication,” says Wen-ying Sylvia Chou, a program director in the Behavioral Research Program at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, who oversees funding on patient-doctor communication at the end of life.
Despite the faults of Smartt’s book (it doesn’t control for things such as medication, for one thing, and it’s colored by an interest in the afterlife), it takes a big step toward building a corpus of data and looking for patterns. This is the same first step that child-language studies took in its early days. That field didn’t take off until natural historians of the 19th century, most notably Charles Darwin, began writing down things their children said and did. (In 1877, Darwin published a biographical sketch about his son, William, noting his first word: mum.) Such “diary studies,” as they were called, eventually led to a more systematic approach, and early child-language research has itself moved away from solely studying first words.
“Famous last words” are the cornerstone of a romantic vision of death—one that falsely promises a final burst of lucidity and meaning before a person passes. “The process of dying is still very profound, but it’s a very different kind of profoundness,” says Bob Parker, the chief compliance officer of the home health agency Intrepid USA. “Last words—it doesn’t happen like the movies. That’s not how patients die.” We are beginning to understand that final interactions, if they happen at all, will look and sound very different. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-people-actually-say-before-they-die?
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WHAT NEAR-DEATH OF EXPERIENCES MEAN
~ When Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummeled against the sandy riverbed. What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that’s what they were, were vivid and crisp. Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct. He could “hear and see as never before,” he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe. Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, “There was only darkness,” he said, “and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.”
Gregg Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did. The meeting had been organized by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group’s members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.
Greyson had been hearing of events like these for years. A month into his psychiatric training, in the 1960s, he had been “confronted by a patient who claimed to have left her body” while unconscious on a hospital bed, and who later provided an accurate description of events that had taken place “in a different room”. This made no sense to him. “I was raised in a scientific household,” he says, over Zoom. “My father was a chemist. Growing up, the physical world was all there was.” He felt certain someone had slipped the patient the information. He also thought, “What does that even mean, to leave your body?”
For years, he tried to put the account behind him, but repeatedly he faced heady stories of people experiencing other-worldly events, either when they had been pronounced clinically dead or thought they were close to it, before being wrestled back to life. In the 1975 best seller Life After Life, the psychiatrist Raymond Moody, once a colleague of Greyson’s, labeled these episodes “near-death experiences”, or NDEs, a term that stuck. “It occurred to me for the first time that this wasn’t just one patient,” Greyson says. “It was a common phenomenon.” He became fascinated by the qualities of the episodes and the questions they raised, including perhaps the biggest of all: what actually happens when we die? “I plunged in,” he says. “And here I am, 50 years later, trying to understand.”
Greyson is 74 as of the time of this writing. When we talk, he is at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, waiting out the pandemic in a pressed shirt and tie, kind and affable. Over the years, he has collected hundreds of near-death experiences, he says, either from people who, aware of his research, have volunteered their stories, or from patients who happened to have episodes in hospital. In those cases, Greyson’s process is nearly always the same: he sidles up to the bedside and gently withdraws information. “I ask: ‘What’s the last thing you remember before you blacked out?’” he says. “Then: ‘What’s the next thing you remember after that?’ And finally: ‘And what do you remember between those times?’” Not everyone reacts well to the questions; most people stare at him blankly. “But around one in five will say, ‘Well, you know, I thought I saw my father, who died 20 years ago,’ and I say, ‘Tell me about that’ – and I let them go…”
Greyson presents his research in a book, After, which is bound by a series of case studies. The accounts are mystical, like those we know from TV and books, but there are common themes. After a bad reaction to anesthesia, one patient recalled: “I found myself in a meadow, mind cleared, identity intact.” The meadow, she went on, was “lit with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we’ve ever seen,” and “a gentle, inner glow shone from each and every plant.”
Most episodes involve similar feelings of wonder, mental clarity and bliss, Greyson says. Some people recall out-of-body experiences, or report traveling through a long tunnel; others meet entities they think of as God or Allah or long-dead family members; some feel time bend and warp, as though it were elastic. Once, a policeman who almost died during surgery asked Greyson: “How do you describe a state of timelessness, where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s just all there, and you’re totally immersed in it?” Another person recalled: “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”
It has been Greyson’s role as a psychiatrist to provide a space in which “experiencers” feel comfortable retelling often incomprehensible stories – though even when patients discover the courage to try, they can struggle to find the right language. “When I talk to near-death experiencers, one of the first things they say is: ‘I can’t put it into words. There’s no way to express this.’” A frustrated experiencer once told him that when he tried to recall events, “I always fall short.” Another explained it would be difficult to describe her experience because we live in three dimensions, and what she saw on the border between living and dying seemed bigger somehow. Greyson has found that sometimes people turn to painting or music to recall events, as if true meaning can be shared non-verbally. But even that’s insufficient. A subject once told Greyson that recalling his near-death experience was like trying “to draw an odor with crayons”, which is to say, basically impossible.
Given that near-death experiences happen with limited warning, they are almost impossible to test. “We’re dealing with a very short space of time,” Greyson says. A swimmer is trapped underwater, a roofer falls from a ladder, a bystander, peering down at their phone, is struck by a car. In After, Greyson points out that his career has coincided with advances in brain-imaging technology, including the emergence of fMRI scanners, which help neuroscientists observe thinking in action. But equipment like that requires compliance: an appointment is made, a patient agrees to sit still. What happens when an experience occurs randomly, nowhere near a hospital? How do you capture a moment as fleeting and unannounced as the point of near-death?
When I ask Greyson why he decided to publish After now, after all these years, he explains that “we had to wait until we had enough knowledge about near-death experiences to be able to understand what was going on,” by which he means not that we know what NDEs are, but that advances in science have allowed us to rule out a heap of things they are not. “There are physiological hypotheses that seem plausible theoretically,” he says, but none have stuck. Are feelgood chemicals, like endorphins, released into the body at the point of peril, creating euphoria? Does the brain become starved of oxygen, prompting real-seeming fantasies? Do various areas of the brain suddenly begin to work in concert to create strange, altered states? Nobody knows for sure. “We keep thinking, ‘Oh it’s got to be this,’” Greyson says. “No, the data doesn’t show that. ‘Oh, this then?’ Well, nope, the data doesn’t show that, either.”
At the University of Kentucky, the neurologist Kevin Nelson, who, like Greyson, has spent years recording NDEs as a kind of academic side-gig, thinks of the experiences as “a blending of two states of consciousness – wakefulness and REM sleep – during a time of great physical or emotional danger,” and argues that many NDEs are “dream-like”, existing in a neurological “borderland”. (Fainting, he added, might bring about similar experiences.) Other researchers, including the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, have thought of NDEs as “extremely complex” hallucinations, an idea that, if nothing else, seems culturally accepted.
When Greyson mentions his research to colleagues, he receives “a variety of reactions, from, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ to ‘Oh, let me tell you about my near-death experience.’” To formalize NDE research in the 1980s, he developed a survey, the Greyson Scale, which has been translated into over 20 languages and is still in use. (Did you suddenly seem to understand everything? Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe?) And he has been published widely in respected medical journals. But he can have quirky ideas. In After, Greyson writes: “I take seriously the possibility that NDEs may be brought on by physical changes in the brain,” though he also accepts that the mind might be able to function “independent” of it. There have been reports of people experiencing near-death episodes while their brains are inactive, he says, and “yet that’s when they say they have the most vivid experience of their lives.” This doesn’t make sense to him. Partway though our conversation, he asks: “Are these the final moments of consciousness? Or the beginning moments of the afterlife?”
These kind of theories put Greyson on wobbly ground among neuroscientists, who mostly agree the mind to be a product of the brain. Of the afterlife, Nelson told me: “This claim is the most extraordinary in science, and there is no ordinary, let alone extraordinary, scientific evidence to support it.” (He added: “These are matters of faith.”) Sacks called claims like these “anti-science”. Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist affiliated with the department of neurology at Copenhagen University Hospital, told me that if “people are able to describe and report their experiences, even many years later”, then surely “they have been processed by the brain and stored in its memory centers.” (Like Nelson, Kondziella believes NDEs are somehow related to REM sleep.)
Greyson knows that events in near-death experiences are impossible to corroborate. “We can’t do research on a deity,” he says, drily. But still, he finds it tough to dismiss wackier theories, even if the data isn’t there. When I ask him what his current logical understanding is, he looks resigned. “It seems most likely to me that the mind is somehow separate to the brain,” he says, “and, if that’s true, maybe it can function when the brain dies.” Then he adds, “But if the mind is not there in the brain, where is it? And what is it?”
Near-death experiences are not a new phenomenon. Socrates had one, according to Plato; Pliny the Elder recorded another (in the first century); history is filled with examples of mountaineers falling from cliffs and experiencing bliss rather than terror. But we seem as enthralled now by their meaning as ever, and they continue to be sprinkled liberally across popular culture.
Often in these screen-based times, we are encouraged to celebrate narratives that promote living the “right” way, which tends to involve appreciating and accepting every moment for what it is, and mindfully placing experiences and relationships above the pursuit of power or prestige or material goods. (Broadly speaking, this is the plot of Soul.) Most of us do not live like that, not entirely, and yet we feel like we should, lest we waste our precious time on this planet. Which is why near-death narratives fascinate us, and why they persist as events of interest in the culture. They ask: “What would you do with your life, if you had another chance?”
To Greyson, the impact near-death experiences have on people’s lives has been his most surprising discovery. “I make a living by trying to help people change their lives,” he says. “It’s not easy to do. But here I’ve found an experience that, sometimes in a matter of seconds, dramatically transforms people’s attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors.” Often, these changes persist over decades. In most instances, experiencers realize they are no longer afraid to die, which “has a profound impact on how they live their lives”, because “you lose your fear of life as well – you’re not afraid of taking chances.” Greyson sometimes asks people to describe their partners before and after an event, “and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, this isn’t the person I married; this is someone different.’” He adds, “They see a purpose in life they didn’t see before. I don’t know of anything else that powerful.”
I ask for an example. “I’ve spoken to people who were policemen,” he says, “or career military officers, who couldn’t go back to their jobs, couldn’t stand the idea of violence.” I ask why. He says, “The idea of hurting someone becomes abhorrent to them.” He shrugs. “They end up going into helping professions. They become teachers, or healthcare workers, or social workers.”
I ask if Greyson’s research has changed the way he thinks.
“I don’t think it’s changed me in terms of my relationships with other people,” he says, “except it’s made me more accepting, more open to unusual ideas.” As a psychiatrist, he remains “aware of what it means to be psychotic”, but, he says: “I’m more accepting of unusual thoughts that aren’t crazy, and it’s made me much more aware of the unknown.
“I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background,” he continues. “And I’m still not sure I understand what spiritual means. I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognize that there is a non-physical part of us. Is that spiritual? I’m not sure. Spirituality usually involves a search for something greater than yourself, for meaning and purpose in the universe. Well, I certainly have that.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-do-near-death-experiences-mean-and-why-do-they-fascinate-us
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SENOLYTICS COULD REVERSE AGING-RELATED DISEASES
We previously demonstrated that the combination of dasatinib and the flavonoid quercetin is a potent senolytic improving numerous age-related conditions including frailty, osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease. The goal of this study was to identify flavonoids with more potent senolytic activity.
Of the 10 flavonoids tested, fisetin was the most potent senolytic. Acute or intermittent treatment of progeroid and old mice with fisetin reduced senescence markers in multiple tissues, consistent with a hit-and-run senolytic mechanism. Fisetin reduced senescence in a subset of cells in murine and human adipose tissue, demonstrating cell-type specificity. Administration of fisetin to wild-type mice late in life restored tissue homeostasis, reduced age-related pathology, and extended median and maximum lifespan.
The natural product fisetin has senotherapeutic activity in mice and in human tissues. Late life intervention was sufficient to yield a potent health benefit. These characteristics suggest the feasibility to translation to human clinical studies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30279143/
Food sources of fisetin include strawberries, apples, grapes, persimmons, onions, and cucumber.
Fisetin is also available as a supplement. At this point, the best dosage is anyone’s guess. Be sure to take it with a bit of fat (coconut oil has multiple benefits besides improving the absorption of various nutrients. Start with one teaspoon of cold-pressed CC oil; if you find that it agrees with your body, build up to a more potent quantity.)
Curcumin is also a senolytic — again, I have found only the Omax brand to show any benefits at all.
In animal models, senolytics have been found to increase life expectancy.
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THE GLORIOUS BENEFITS OF GLYCINE
There is a relatively good evidence that glycine could play a role in stroke prevention and recovery.
People who have higher levels of glycine have better cardiovascular protection. Higher glycine level and lower cardiovascular risk are due glycine's anti-inflammatory and lipid metabolization benefits.
Glycine protects against narrowing of the arteries and reduces platelets aggregation — a mechanism involved in heart attacks and cardiovascular disease risk.
Glycine may also benefit our metabolic health and help people with diabetes. Higher serum levels of glycine are associated with a lower amount of insulin resistance, better insulin sensitivity and less abdominal fat - a risk factor related to metabolic disorders.
Free fatty acids in the blood are not a good thing. Glycine can help by reducing glycated hemoglobin, which leads to poor glucose management in people with type 2 diabetes. Additionally, glycine stimulates glucagon, which helps insulin remove glucose from the body.
Better glucose regulation has profound health benefits for everyone, not just diabetics. An ability to better regulate blood sugar levels throughout the day can benefit our mental and physical performance. Avoid the sugar crash!
The liver is the body’s built-in detoxification system. Its job is to rid the body of toxins by breaking them down, conjugating them to bile, or sending them to the kidneys for excretion.
The body’s strongest, most versatile detoxifying substance is glutathione, and we can’t make glutathione without glycine. Most glutathione biosynthesis occur in the liver, but the body’s stores are easily drained. Benzoates which are a food and soft drink additives - can bind glycine, depleting our body’s valuable glycine stores.
Glycine can be particularly useful to those who indulge in alcohol more than the recommended amount — the amino acid reduces the accumulation of bad cholesterol, free fatty acids, and triglycerides in the blood, liver, and brain. Glycine can also slow the damage caused by liver injuries or disease.
Glycine makes up about 1/3 of the amino acids in elastin and collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body. As we get older, collagen production naturally declines, and with the loss of collagen comes the loosening of the skin, wrinkles, increased cellulite, joint pain, and difficulty gaining muscle and burning fat. Supplementing with glycine makes more substrate available to combat the natural loss of collagen.
Glycine plays a vital role in glutathione formation which in turn helps to maintain redox balance in the body to reduce the risk of damage from excess oxidative stress and associated inflammation.
Lowering inflammation and oxidative stress has numerous benefits including everything from disease prevention to improved mental health and physical performance.
Without glycine, the body cannot create creatine. Bodybuilders use creatine supplementation to gain both muscle strength and mass.
Studies have shown that a high dose of glycine intake can cause a rapid surge in growth hormone release from the pituitary gland - up to 60% - in under five minutes.
A rapid growth hormone boost post-workout can help stimulate protein synthesis, build muscle, and promote faster recovery.
Glycine contributes to the inhibition of muscular deterioration while boosting muscle recovery. Glycine also helps provide cells with energy ramping up production of ATP for working muscle tissues, boosting endurance, strength, and performance. It also has a beneficial effect on hormone production and regulation, contributing to the natural synthesis of steroid hormones that control how energy is allocated for use and regulate the ratio of fat to muscle mass.
Aging and the loss of collagen are some of the causes of joint pain, but glycine may help to address these issues as well as a few others. Glycine is both a prominent structural component of healthy cartilage and connective tissue and a powerful anti-inflammatory.
Glycine deficiency limits our ability to make collagen and connective tissue for bones, skin, hair, and nails.
Glycine supplementation is associated with a reduction of symptoms such as inflammation, pain, and swelling in some people with arthritis.
Glycine doesn't forget about our mind while strengthening the rest of our body. Studies show that glycine can significantly reduce symptoms associated with schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that may help to quell an over-stimulated brain state and reduce stress and manic-like brain activity.
Glycine can help with sleep. Glycine induces vasodilation throughout the body to promote lowering of core body temperature. Sleep and body temperature are intertwined — body temperature decreases before the onset of sleep and continues to decrease throughout the night, reaching its nadir about 2 hours after sleep onset, and gradually rising as a person wakes. Temperature is just one of many 24-hour rhythms our bodies experience throughout the day and as nighttime approaches — the drop is important for initiating sleep.
Oriana:
Food sources of glycine include chicken, pork, red meat, fish, dairy, and legumes.
When it comes to the high dose of glycine sufficient to produce a fast release of growth hormone, that's usually administered intravenously. However, getting glycine in powder form might be a way around it. Still, as with high doses of anything, caution is needed.
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Ending on beauty:
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
~ W. B. Yeats, 1919
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