Pep Rally.

In a time of universal techno-hypnosis, believing in the human brain is a revolutionary act.

I'm blessed or cursed with curiosity and a love of learning.

I'm voracious, in fact.

There's hardly a field I'm not piqued by.

And it's all fed by my reading habit and my wide field of vision. 

I see a lot. I read a lot. I curious a lot.

Ergo, and apologies to Descartes, I am a lot.

Friday is the day new book reviews come out in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. 

Yesterday, I read, shared and ordered these five. 

A fairly typical Friday for me.

I won't read them all. 

No one could.

But I've been invigorated, I've learned, I've been curious-ized and made more "me" by each review, each book, and each rabbit-hole I triumph down.

Here's the Pep Rally part.

Apocryphally, George Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Whether he said it or not, the statement is still grand and still worth thinking about. 

One of the things I love about the quotation or fauxtation above is how adjustable it is. The in a time of part can be changed to encompass just about any thing, and the action part (telling the truth) can be similarly changed.

In baseball for instance, a wily manager might say, "In a time when pitching has the upper hand, slashing line-drives is a revolutionary act." In advertising, "in a time when everyone is chasing after the latest trend, basics are a revolutionary act."

You get it.

Today and every day, I get about sixteen calls and emails and texts and lacrymotic episodes about the descent of man, the dumbness and the evil of amerikkka and the machine take-over of nearly everything that used to be human. 

I had one yesterday, a long one with H, my friend and business director. H is an optimistic person. But yesterday she was as gloomy as a sump pump.

I went to the Orwell above.

You know, H, I said Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." let's revise that for today.

In a time of universal stupidity, reading, thinking, sharing, learning is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal stultifying machine-lead bureaucratic bumbling, helping people, being a human is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal cutting of costs in the name of efficiency, doing something by hand is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal deaf ears, listening is a revolutionary act.

I grew up during a period of historiography where the contrast between the glory that was Rome, the eventual Renaissance and the in-between Dark Ages was regarded as light and dark.

As if the Dark ages had no light.

Yes, life might have been nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes said in his book "The Leviathan." But there was also laughter, loving and learning.

It might not have fit the historical narrative but it was there.

Always and forever, laughter, loving and learning are revolutionary acts.

Laughter, loving and learning are our revolutionary acts, H. I vehemented. 

No matter what the crazy measles-loving, algorithm-adoring, profit-perverts do to our lives and our world, we can

Laugh, love and learn.

If we do that, I'm sorry--optimism, George--WHEN we do that, we cannot be defeated.

As Faulkner said, our voices may be puny.

They may be overwhelmed by graft and money and theft and sick Lucullan plutocratic foie-gras-goose like self-bloating, but we have our souls.

We have our laughs.

Our eyes.

Our hands.

Our minds.

Our souls.

I ran into this poem yesterday, by a doctor called Harold T. Meryman, a cryobiologist who saved millions of lives because he figured out how to freeze blood so it can be stored and shipped to people who need it. He wrote this, in part, to explain what he does

I also read this, by a fourth-grader by Isobel Cooley, who wrote this poem as a school assignment.

These are not the products of sophisticated AI systems backed by trillions of dollars of R&D and data centers.

They are joy and laughter. 

Again to Faulkner, when he accepted his Nobel, as the world faced nuclear obliteration in 1949, he wrote,

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Props and souls with which we will feed as we feed our worlds as best we can with laughter, loving and learning.

Sure, I'd rather have millions in the bank, economic fairness, justice, honor and universal healthcare, but those aren't right now on the muskian-agenda.

We have ourselves and each other.

We don't have to buy the story-line of the inevitable undoing of humankind at the "hands" of super-powerful, super-brilliant machines. We don't have to buy the narrative that the trillionaires are forcing down our throats for their further enrichment. 

You, I, your brain, my brain has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates). We can out-work, out-play, out-think, out-love, out-silly, out-solve, out-out anything ever created or anything that ever will be created. And the next hype cycle and the next.

What's more, we have laughter, loving and learning.

And that's enough.