Author: Jeremy Hadfield

To End All Wars?

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date November 12, 2018

About four years ago, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque on a Sunday in November, a lot like this one. It was painful. Paul (the “protagonist,” if there is one) is a brutal narrator. Reading most of the book in a day made his story more real, rushed, and urgent. I remember reading certain parts and shutting the book out of horror. Crying wasn’t rare.

During most of high school, I would say All Quiet was my favorite book. I’m not sure why. Not because I ‘enjoyed’ it. Only a sadist could. Maybe because it immersed me, and Paul’s voice had been inscribed on my mind. His story was more concrete and rattling than any history I’d learned before. While it is a novel and Paul did not exist in a literal sense, millions of people experienced his story. As shameful as it is to say, these millions had just never been real to me. As Camus, who lived through WWII in France, wrote:

“But what are a hundred million deaths? … Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague, pg. 4.

Reading the book made these deaths more than just a puff of smoke; or at least, it made a few of these deaths real. Remarque turned them into ink on paper, which became thoughts and memories ingrained in neurons in my brain. Once-empty phrases gained powerful meaning: “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world” (All Quiet on the Western Front, 46). If only the generals and political leaders of WWI were able to read this book during the war. Then again, most of them experienced the nightmarish inspiration for All Quiet firsthand, and most were still able to dissociate it from their actions and continue the war.

I feel intense anger at the generals who tossed away countless lives mindlessly. They had an attitude similar to Napoleon’s:

“You cannot stop me. I can spend 30,000 men a month.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, Letter to Klemens von Metternich

Human life is the currency of war. The WWI generals were spending it. They poured hundreds of thousands of human bodies into Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, the Marne, like they were depositing piles of cash into the morbid bank of war. The supreme commander of the Allied forces in 1918, known for being reckless with human life during the Flanders, First Marne, and Artois campaigns, said something reminiscent of Napoleon’s quote:

“It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.” — Ferdinand Foch (source: Nine Divisions in Champagne by Patrick Takle)

Doesn’t it sound like he’s quoting a price: we could train this general, but it will cost us 15,000 lives? Is that all the Great War was to these generals? A storm of prices, budget allocations, necessary costs, spending decisions? But behind each number was not a dollar but an individual, usually a man around my age, torn away from life and drafted into the process of destroying it en masse.

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ch. 10

I find it hard to imagine that these people were the same as we are. Were people just different back then? Their generation went through horrors we cannot imagine, and then went through them again in the Second World War. Could my generation survive the trenches? Could we slog through the mud of Passchendaele, our minds broken by the beating of artillery and the sight of death, and continue to fight? I think the answer is yes; but I hope we never get the opportunity to prove it.

No one would like to think they are capable of atrocity or extraordinary violence. But this belief disregards history. Many of the people who reported the Armenian genocide during WWI, who decried the Ottomans for their brutality and inhumanity, were German military officers operating in Turkey. They thought they were fundamentally different from the monsters they condemned. Twenty-one years later, some of the same people would be involved in committing Holocaust. We all have a capacity for barbarity. Only by recognizing its existence and working against it can we prevent repeating history.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

We failed to make good on our ancestor’s promise that WWI would be the war to end all wars. It has been one hundred years, and this planet has been scarred by more atrocity, violence, and mass destruction. Perhaps more than even veterans of the Great War could imagine.

Now, we live in the most peaceful time in history by most metrics. There hasn’t been a direct confrontation between great powers since 1945. But our peace is almost as fragile as the “concert of Europe” before World War 1. Almost all of the world’s major powers could obliterate life on Earth with a nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter. Global military spending (the combined defense spending of every country) is at an all-time high (source). Seemingly minor movements, like China’s expansion into the South China Sea and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, reveal the tension underlying the global geopolitical order.

And nationalism is making a resurgence globally. About a week ago, Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil. This is a self-proclaimed nationalist who has said things like “I’m in favor of the military regime,” “it’s all right if some innocent people die. Innocent people die in many wars,” and “The only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing” (source). Our president has said “I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word” (source). Far-right parties are gaining momentum in Europe. These trends should worry anyone who has read about the first half of the 20th century.

I remember hearing that the last WWI veteran had died, when I was 13. I didn’t understand this much, but I had listened to my grandpa’s stories about Vietnam. I was wistful and even heartbroken I would never have the chance to hear about WWI from someone who was actually there. Assuming I survive for a while longer, I will probably also live through the death of the last person who fought in WWII, and the last person who experienced the Holocaust. I have a friend who is an international student from Rwanda. His parents lived through the genocide. He told me that they constantly remind him to tell his children their stories, for when the generation who remembers an atrocity disappear, the atrocity once again becomes possible. Hopefully I can be one of the minds that remembers these horrors and helps prevent them.

There are twenty-seven years until the centennial of World War II. These years should be treated as a test for humanity, everyone alive today, and our global political system. Have we overcome global war and permanently ended it? Have we finally decided to prioritize peace, human well-being, and the survival of the human species over geopolitical power games, tribalism, and the relentless struggle for limited resources? Or over these two decades, will we simply repeat what happened in the last century?

Note: Over the past month, I’ve listened to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon podcast about WWI. It’s amazing. It has a perfect balance between historical fact, primary sources, background info, and his personal analysis. And it is free! People (including me) pay thousands for college lectures that are far worse than this podcast. Yes, all parts combined it’s about 15 hours long. But it is important and worth it, and strung out over a few weeks of listening while driving, running, walking, etc, that isn’t that much time.

Essays Politics Uncategorized

LDS Doctrine is Silent on Homesexuality

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date November 11, 2018

Who am I to write about LDS doctrine? I’m not a leader in the church. I’m not even a member of the church. But I’m interested in understanding the doctrine, and I’ve spent a large part of my life attempting to understand it. And I have a question: why is it an overwhelmingly common belief that LDS doctrine forbids homosexuality?

To be clear, I’m not a conspiracy theorist who denies that leaders in the LDS Church have declared that having “homosexual relations” is a sin. For example, Gordon B. Hinckley said exactly that in his statement Reverence and Morality:

Prophets of God have repeatedly taught through the ages that the practices of homosexual relations, fornication, and adultery are grievous sins.

But, as it is said very often in the church, there is a crucial distinction between doctrine and policy, and between doctrine and the words of well-intentioned and righteous men/women. Doctrine is fixed and unchanging. It is defined in canonized works of LDS doctrine, especially the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. It’s my understanding that unless a principle is made permanent and unambiguous in these works of doctrine, it is subject to change. I’ll cite the old and tired examples, and some fresh ones: polygamy, black people receiving the priesthood, the length of church on Sundays, the age missionaries leave. All of these things were declared as revelation by Church leaders, but are not immortalized in doctrine. They are not absolute; they may be wrong, and they certainly may change.

Imagine that you lived in the early days of the Church, before 1978. Would you have objected to the racist policy of excluding black men from the priesthood? Almost every modern Mormon would say yes to this question. Maybe they would have issued an impassioned criticism of the practice. Maybe they would have protested against it. Maybe they would have practiced civil disobedience, ordaining black men despite the words of their church leaders.

But in reality, only a miniscule, extremely select group of people in the church did anything like this. An overwhelming majority followed the policy for the century of its practice. While we understandably want to believe that we would be part of the minority, that is just statistically unlikely. Most people accepted and followed the incorrect revelation. You would have to be a very rare person to disobey it, using a different thought or revelatory process than everyone else in the church. This leads me to ask a critical question: If you, as a member of the church today, want to minimize your chance of practicing incorrect church policy, what would be the best approach?

To me, the answer seems clear: rest your beliefs and actions on personal revelation and on a deep and thorough understanding of the doctrine. If you followed this process, you are far less likely to follow incorrect policy. You would have been a conscientious objector to the racist practices of pre-1978 Mormonism. Nothing in the doctrine says anything about denying black people the priesthood. And it seems unlikely to me that a benevolent God would reveal to you that this practice is okay or good.

My argument is simple: there is nothing in LDS Doctrine that condemns homesexuality or declares that homosexual relations are a sin. Therefore, members should determine for themselves, through a personal revelation process, whether they should follow the policy of the church.

The Book of Mormon does not mention homosexuality anywhere. Neither does the Pearl of Great Price. This is a negative claim, and so can be disproved by a single instance — if you find an example of homosexuality being mentioned in these works, feel free to let me know and I’ll change my belief. But the Topical Guide, the official index of topics in the scriptures, has a section on Homosexual Behavior, and it exclusively cites verses in the Bible. Many of these verses are vague and only very tenuously connected to homosexuality.

After all, the Bible is not clear on homosexuality. All of the most commonly-cited proofs that the Bible condemns it are not actually about homesexual relations. For example, there’s the case of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, where the men of Sodom seek to rape two male visitors (who are in reality angels sent by God to see if the city contains any righteousness). God subsequently obliterates the city of Sodom. So God must hate the gays, right? Uh, no. It seems clear to me that the problem here is that it’s rape. Why would you make the conclusion that God condemns homesexuality? The more sensible and humane conclusion, based on the text, would be that God condemns sexual violence and rape.

Another case in the Bible is Leviticus 18:22. They say that a man lying with another man instead of his wife is an ‘abomination.’ But this is a man committing adultery with another male. We already know that adultery is a sin and abomination according to the Bible. Why would we assume that this case is about homesexuality either? It seems more clear that it’s another condemnation of adultery. Also, I’d be cautious attaching too much meaning to the word ‘abomination.’ The Bible uses it very loosely. Things that the Bible says are abominations: Egyptians eating with Hebrews, sacrificing your child to Molech, eating pork, wearing mixed-fabric clothing, interbreeding animals of different species, and trimming your beard. You’ve gotta believe and do some weird things if you believe anything declared an abomination in the Bible is wrong.

Not to mention that if you’re a Mormon, the Old Testament is almost definitely not the highest-ranking thing on your “list of books that matter.” As far as I’ve seen, members think of The Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, New Testament, and the words of modern prophets, in roughly that order, as more accurate (closer to the word of God) than the Old Testament with all its quirks.

The most important text on this topic is probably the The Family: A Proclamation to the World. While I’m not sure if it is Doctrine, the Proclamation is a key document, signed by all the members of the presidency, cited constantly as doctrinal support for church policies on homosexuality and gender. And yet even this document is not clear about homosexual relations being a sin. Here are the relevant lines:

solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God

This is not an exclusive statement. It merely says that marriage between men & women is ordained; not that marriage between men & men or women & women is not ordained. If you interpret this statement as exclusive of all other types of marriage, polygamy is also wrong — after all, it’s marriage between a man and multiple women, not a marriage between “a man and woman,” as it seems the Proclamation requires. Does that mean it’s not ordained of God? But it clearly was ordained of God in the past. Therefore, the question is still open.

We further declare that God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

You might think this one is abundantly clear. After all, it contains the key word: “only.” But it’s actually a tautology: the “sacred powers of procreation” CAN only be employed between men & women. Gay sex is not reproductive or procreative. This is a fact of biology; human reproduction through meiosis requires sperm and an egg, which can be naturally produced only in male and female reproductive organs respectively. So this statement doesn’t prohibit homosexual relations either or declare them a sin.

Maybe you could conceive this statement as prohibiting two Mormons in a gay marriage from having kids through surrogacy or in-vitro fertilization, as then they would be using the “sacred powers of procreation” with someone outside of their marriage (the surrogate or sperm donor). But then this would also prohibit an infertile Mormon man or woman in a straight marriage from using IVF or surrogacy either.

Also, slight loophole: gay people can adopt. They don’t have to use the “sacred powers of procreation” to have kids.

Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan.

Same case as above; this is not exclusive. Marriage between a man and a women is essential; that doesn’t mean other types of marriage aren’t also allowed or essential.

Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.

Gay people can do all of this. They can be fathers & mothers; they can honor marital vows with complete fidelity; they can have children within the bonds of matrimony (through adoption, IVF, surrogacy, etc).

My argument is not that LDS Church leaders are definitely wrong about their own doctrine. My argument is that is a possibility. It has precedent. Members should not by default accept the statements of leaders. And I think it’s clear that nothing in the established, canonized LDS doctrine prohibits homosexuality. It is silent, or where it speaks, it is vague and open to multiple interpretations. This cannot be an accident — after all, for members of the church, the doctrine is revelation from God through His prophets. Is it likely that God would just forget about homosexuality, and fail to make a clear and unambiguous stand on this critical issue? Or is it more likely that it is not mentioned for a reason? What might that reason be?

I cannot answer these questions, only ask them. I cannot decide for members what their religion believes. I can only argue for caution and carefulness in following church policy without a thorough reading of the doctrine and an analysis of its interpretations. I hope that all church members undertake this reading. I would also hope that all church members use personal revelation in their decision-making process, including attempting to understand LGBT people through direct conversation, reading, and research.

If it turns out that after going through this entire process, LDS people find a doctrinal or personal-revelatory basis for treating homosexual relations as a sin, so be it. I’ll be surprised but interested. Please let me know what this basis is.

Science Uncategorized

Is Running Bad for You in the Long Term?

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date June 3, 2017

I have been running recently and I’m spooked.

All too often, I’ve heard that running is devastating to your joints, causes long-term problems, causes muscle deterioration, and leads to purple tumors on the left side of your knees. How valid are these rumors? For this investigation, I won’t simply accept the typical answers of “I read a study…” or “there’s an article that says…” or “I promise there’s evidence.” Instead, I’ll dive into the actual scientific examinations of the long-term impacts of running. I need some clear evidence to soothe my psychological fear that I’m killing myself while running. It feels like it.

Running and the Cardiovascular System

A famous 2014 study followed 55,000 adults for over 15 years, and found that around 50 minutes of running each week correlates with a 30 percent drop in all-cause mortality risk and an average increase of three years in lifespan (source). These results were controlled for all types of running, regardless of intensity, distance, or speed. Persistent runners “had the most significant benefits” with 29% lower mortality from all causes and 50% lower mortality from cardiovascular illnesses. In another massive study with 156,000 subjects, researchers found that men running at least 40 miles a week were 26 percent less likely to develop coronary heart disease than those running just 13 miles per week (source). In general, the consensus is fairly strong that running even small distances regularly reduces mortality due to heart disease.

However, there is some evidence that intense endurance training – and by intense, I mean Olympic level – causes health harms. For example, athletes participating in the Olympic games between 2002 and 2008 reported an 8% prevalence of asthma (AHR), which is close to the prevalence in the normal population (source). However, significantly higher rates of asthma were recorded in endurance sports like cross-country skiers (17.2%) and triathlon athletes (24.9%). This correlation indicates that maybe intense endurance exercise increases the risk of asthma. However, if you’re not exercising at the intensity of Olympic athlete, you probably don’t have to worry too much about the results of this study.

Another investigation declared “long-term excessive endurance exercise may induce pathologic structural remodeling of the heart and large arteries” (source). Researchers found that after intense cardiovascular activity like marathons or long-distance cycling, the right atria and ventricle experience overloading that prevents the heart from functioning as well. Normally, these negative effects on the heart disappear after about one week. But after years of repeated stress, long-term defects like patchy myocardial fibrosis and other arrhythmias may appear in the heart. However, as the researchers admit, “this concept is still hypothetical and there is some inconsistency in the reported findings.” When viewed from a lifetime perspective, it’s well-established that consistent runners have better health outcomes and lower mortality rates than those who don’t engage in frequent intense cardiovascular activity.

Impact of Running on Muscles, Bones, and Joints

Many are concerned that if they run too often, the constant impacts and force on their legs will ultimately lead to arthritis or other joint and bone-related issues. In some cases, this is a legitimate concern. The more you weigh, the more force is applied to your joints when you run. Experts advise that new runners start out slow and work up their mileage as their body sheds weight and adapts to running (source). Additionally, if you have a problem that affects your gait, you can harm your legs and joints by running. People with excessive pronators or hyperextending knees are less able to absorb shock through their legs, making running less healthy.

But for most people, running does not negatively affect the bones or joints in the legs, and it does not cause osteoarthritis. Despite the frequent impacts during running, researchers calculated that “the impact forces and stresses acting on cartilage, bones, ligaments, and tendons during running are typically within an acceptable range” (source). A large meta-analysis of studies of osteoarthritis in runners concluded that “long-distance running does not increase the risk of osteoarthritis of the knees and hips for healthy people” who do not have any preexisting medical conditions in the legs (source). One of the highest-quality studies in this analysis compared 504 varsity cross country runners to 284 varsity swimmers. The researchers wanted to know whether the runners had a higher prevalence of arthritis after 25 years. In the end, long-distance running was not associated with higher incidence of osteoarthritis of the hip or knee. In fact, long-distance running might even have a protective effect against joint degeneration, because it increases circulation through the joints and strengthens muscles that prevent joint stress.

Conclusion

This post is very insufficient. I just wanted to do some research and then collect it in a place where I can reference it later. I feel pretty okay with running now — especially trail running.

Essays Philosophy Speech

This is Not Philosophy

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date May 26, 2017

Valedictorian Speech for Maeser Prep Academy Class of 2017

I am honored to give this speech, I really am, almost as much as I am under-qualified to give it. My speech will be kind of like high school: the best part is when it’s finally over.

Street philosopher and leader of the free world, Drake, once said “Came up, that’s all me, stay true, that’s all me. No help, that’s all me, all me for real.” I just have to say, those lyrics are the opposite of how I feel right now. I am inexpressibly grateful for the people who have shaped me, inspired me, forgiven me, and helped me in endless ways.

First, my parents and family. Their patience with me is inexhaustible, and there is almost nothing that they haven’t done for me. I’m sorry I don’t appreciate you enough. I’m thankful for my friends and fellow students; you almost certainly don’t expect it, but I look up to so many of you. You have made high school an exciting, enlightening, and sometimes strange experience. And of course, our teachers. We have the most inspiring teachers the world has ever seen. There are so many teachers here who could give better advice than I ever could.

Thank you to Mr. Watabe for teaching me that math is simple, and more importantly, life is simple. If you put in the effort, you will get faster, you will get better, and you might even learn calculus.

Thank you to Mrs. Plott for making me realize that velocity is more important than speed; what direction you’re going matters more than how quickly you’re going.

I am grateful to Mr. Dowdle for redeeming humanity despite the horrors of our past, for your effortless humor, and for your life-changing analysis of literature. I’m finally in uniform, by the way.

Thank you to Mrs. Frampton, for showing me that without art, writing, and even poetry, we cannot understand the sacredness of life.

Thank you to Mrs. Martinez, for encouraging us all to be more compassionate. Through her character, she showed us there is no qualification, no skill, and no aspect of your resume that is more valuable than the effect you have on others.

And Mr. Simmons – ah, what can be said about Mr. Simmons that he has not already told in excruciating detail to his freshman Socratic class? Thank you Mr. Simmons for demonstrating the meaning of education as sacred, and for your genuine dedication to your players and students.

Thank you to Mrs. Slade, for showing us the wonder of the natural world, the miracle of the human body, and the power of human potential.

Thank you so much to Mrs. Sidwell, who isn’t here today. You introduced me to the sound of my own voice. The impact you had on my life cannot be underestimated.

I can’t list all of my teachers and mentors, but I have been changed by every class I took at Maeser – yes, even Financial Lit. Especially Financial Lit.

Maeser is one of the at the best high schools in the state. Honestly, it is easy to feel intimidated and inadequate in a school of stars like Maeser.

After all, not all of us have Logan Norris’ relentless determination;

Not all of us are as kind as Morgan Millet;

Not all of us have James Johnson’s flawless ability in acting;

Not all of us have the perfect calves of Felix Resendiz.

Few of us are as fearless as Bennett Felsted and Jared Drake,

None of us can do as many pull ups as Jacob Radmall,

And David Van Horn isn’t here, but few of us are as mature, contemplative, or understanding as him.

Not all of us are as ready to give compliments as Brittany Oveson.

None of us can beat Taylor Brand’s scoring record;

Few of us have the constant cheerfulness and optimism of Ben Hailstone or Maliana Corniea;

Few of us have the easygoing attitude of Braden Christensen;

Few of us have the quiet wisdom of Tashara Muhlstein;

None of us party as hard as Dakota Clubb;

None of us work as hard as Lia Joo;

We can’t all jump as far as Sammy Windley, sing as high as Varia Aird, or play the piano like Anastasia Felt.

None of us can parkour like Olle Hansen.

Few of us have the resilience of Mustafa Hamidi;

And even fewer of us have the hope and strength of Sophie Cannon.

I could keep going, I promise you.

But despite the fact that we can’t compare ourselves to the people around us, each of us has an opportunity – no, an obligation – to share our unique and powerful selves with the world. Growing up with you all in the last few years has been an incredible experience. Because of this, I will ask that you remember one thing after this speech: never think you have nothing original to say, never think you have nothing important to do, and never think you have no purpose.

Often, our endless routine overwhelms us like the numbing smell of burnt popcorn in the cafeteria microwaves. The beating repetitiveness of everyday life causes us to reduce ourselves to just another student, just another worker, just another brick in the wall.

People often say things like this: “I don’t have time for philosophy. I have bills to pay.” If you have not yet said this, then just wait – in college, you will say it or at least think it. How do I know this? Well, I don’t, but I’m up here making sounds, and that’s the important thing. That’s what I’m here for.

But honestly, it is easy to become swallowed up by the mundane parts of living. We should all be terrified that without even noticing, we will slip into a trivial life of grinding for grades, working for mere money, depending on empty praise, obsessing over flimsy worries and meaningless stresses, becoming something we aren’t to impress people we don’t like. Unless we watch closely, the ordinary will consume us. Unless you pay attention, your purpose will disappear like quicksand. Smooth and natural. With barely any sign you can notice or suspect. And you walk on it easily. When you’ve noticed your purpose is gone, it’s too late.

So when you find yourself saying “I don’t have time for philosophy,” remember that this is not philosophy, this is life. You don’t have enough time to not think about it. With every day, you should consider the fundamental, the deep, the sacred, the truth beyond the mundane. Otherwise, why wake up each morning?

Clear away all the debris that separates you from that essential, bright, illuminating part of yourself – that core that is much deeper than personality – your soul, your life-force, your chakra, or maybe it’s just your appendix or something. Avoid the things that reduce you and make you trivial, and look for those things that make you passionate, deep-thinking, and full.

Lin Yutang said that “Those who are wise won’t be busy, and those who are too busy can’t be wise.” Reject the idea that you can afford to merely fill or kill time; your busyness will prevent you from seeing beyond routine.

Well, as Dylan Armstrong said, I’m sorry Maeser, but I’m breaking up with you. Luckily, I’ve already set someone else set up so the rebound will be quick. She’s kind of out of my league, so I proposed to a bunch of backups in case she rejects me. Also, I’m going to need her to pay me like 50,000 dollars or it’s not going to work out. That’s basically what applying to college is.

I’ll eventually forget about my times with Maeser, but I will remember what I learned from the relationship. After all, it lasted four years, and I have done so much with Maeser – my sweat is on her field, my tears are on her desks, and yes I admit it, my popcorn is in her microwaves. I learned that the pursuit of truth, the process and journey itself, is always worth it – even if that truth is as difficult to find as a high-quality meme on Facebook. I learned to always remember my real purpose. To live beyond the mundane. To be inspired by those around me.

Now is the time to put these principles into action. As Epictetus said, “From now on, whenever you encounter anything, remember that the contest is now: you are at the Olympic Games, you cannot wait any longer, and your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.”

And most importantly, pretend my last line was super funny.

Speech

Last Lecture

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date May 16, 2017

“Somebody once told me the definition of hell: On your last day on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.” — Anonymous

What if a demon slithered up to you after your graduation, and forced you to relive all of highschool?

No, not just the dances and the weekends, but every single moment. Would you scream, fall to the ground, and curse the demon? Or would you call him an angel and plead to do it again? Are you ready to walk down the middle school hallway an infinity more times? Are you willing to put on a polo every morning until Maeser’s logo is permanently stuck to your chest?

Along with the joy, are you willing to reenact the routine, the broken relationships, the depression, the rejection, the failures, the boredom, the ugliness that comes packaged with every beautiful experience? I don’t care if you’re a senior or a 7th grader – could you affirm your life so far without a doubt? Could you live it again and again until each second becomes familiar? Do you want this – all of this – again, and countless times more?

If not, then start living so you can say yes to every single moment.

How can you live this way? Well, as usual, the answer you need is not what you’d like to hear: Don’t be yourself. Be more. Dare to reach outside of what you normally call yourself.

For most of highschool, I was exactly what others expected of me, and what I expected of myself. I was never anything but my usual self. But I needed to let go of those comfortable habits that are wearing away at my potential; I needed to I stop being me and start being more.

Stop wandering the halls aimlessly, thinking of people in terms of stereotypes and first impressions. Stop looking at a person and assuming you know who they are. Start learning names and seeing eyes.

Stop walking past the teacher’s door, glancing in, afraid to enter. Start building relationships with these spectacular people who can be your inspirations and your mentors.

Stop ignoring your Socratic books and stop skimming sparknotes the day of the test. Start learning so passionately that you can’t remember what the assignment was.

Stop listening to to music you don’t love because you feel like you should. Stop pretending you’re a baller because you wear joggers with fake yeezys. Stop thinking you’re edgy because you use words like ‘edgy.’ Stop bragging about how much you’ve procrastinated. Stop thinking that you have enough time. Stop being yourself, and start being more.

In every typical suburban Utah house, right in between the picture of six kids and the religious painting, there’s a cute little sign that says: Remember who you are. But in some ways, that’s bad advice. So much joy can come when you who you’re supposed to be just slips your mind.

Some of your greatest moments will come when you forget who you are. The only reason I tried out for the soccer team was because I forgot I was supposed to be the awkward kid who reads philosophy books and talks too much in Socratic. Because I stopped being myself, I suffered through hours of sprints and San Diegos; weeks of stinging turf burns and soreness; food fights and brawls on a cramped bus; the painful inadequacy of missed passes. At the end of it all, I found unexpected strength and friends I never would have had otherwise.

The only reason I took AP Calculus is because I forgot I’m bad at math. I barely kept up in Math One; I was mocked in elementary school for fumbling at long division and staring blankly at equations. For me, watching people manipulate numbers was like chasing cars on the freeway; I couldn’t possibly keep up. But eventually, I decided to stop being myself, and I signed up for Calculus.

Do what you can’t. Whenever there is something you are afraid of, something you would love but you know you’ll never do – that is what you need to do. You know what I’m talking about. The girl. The performance. The adventure. Stop avoiding them. Start scaring yourself every day. If you jump off the cliff, you have no need to explain yourself to those who stand and watch.

Don’t be yourself.

Stop ‘discovering yourself.’ Stop waiting to stumble upon who you really are. You are more than just you; who you are striving to become. As Nietzsche said, “your true self does not lie buried deep within you, but rather rises immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be yourself.”

Stop looking for yourself and start building yourself.

Prose and Poetry

Moving Out

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date May 16, 2017

Never again will I have to bear

the shrill of screams

As some pitiful sibling endures a bath.

The mess of a house tearing at the seams,

The grateful hugs of a fragile sister.

Nights cut short by a sharp curfew,

Brothers wrestling as dirt flew,

And you know no one will ever hurt you.

Parents give unwanted advice, incessant

Always treat you like an adolescent.

Home falls far short of ideals.

Less than perfect homemade meals,

Every bedtime raucous with squeals.

Floor festooned with debris, never clean

But at least it’s never empty.

Every week another crisis,

Mom stressing about rice prices,

Laughs absorbed into yellowed sidewalls

Stepping on the floor where a child sprawls.

How can I walk out a door I’ve always walked in?

Where I’ve slept every year since birth,

Where I know every edge and margin

Where six placentas are buried in the garden.

Someday soon I’ll come home,

To walk again the hills I once would roam,

To see if the cracks in the ceiling have moved,

And show somehow my worth I’ve proved.

To meet with my moth-eaten bed so old,

And test if its springs still recognize my mold

Someday I’ll walk as always,

through the same hallways,

Look in the same eyes and see the same worries,

But it won’t ever be the same.

Updates

Teaching Philosophy to Elementary School Students

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 21, 2017

Essays Philosophy

A Kierkegaardian Approach to Philosophy: Replacing an Objective Career with a Subjective Relationship

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 21, 2017

Update three years later, 5/14/20: I wrote this before going to college. I had never studied philosophy in an academic context. After spending 3 years studying philosophy, I think this post is too cynical. Academic philosophy is better, more impactful, and more personal than I expected. I still agree with many of the ideas & sentiments I express here though.

Philosophy has been firmly and comfortably institutionalized. It exists primarily to teach useful, marketable, career-building skills, buzzwords like critical thought and complex reasoning and clear writing. Philosophers are another cog of capitalism, mass-produced in university departments to either join the economy or perpetuate the academic study of philosophy. Like physicists and biologists, they are judged by their ability to produce original, peer-reviewed work. Philosophy is a specialized field along with the sciences, practiced in research institutions.

Any ‘serious’ philosopher is found solely in the university; no longer can philosophy be practiced by any audacious questioner. Measured by gross product, philosophy is more successful and productive than at any other time in history. Thousands of philosophers throughout the world produce well-researched, logical papers that engage with the traditional problems. Many of these papers are ingenious marvels of philosophical reasoning. Who can deny the brilliance of Slavoj Zizek’s cultural criticism, John Searle’s philosophy of mind, the late Hilary Putnam’s rigorous analysis, Saul Kripke’s brilliant philosophy of language?

The institution of philosophy.

And yet perhaps we are missing something in this Cambrian explosion of philosophical activity. Philosophy has gained a permanent place in the academy. To paraphrase an introduction to “Socrates Tenured” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, philosophy has its own arcane language, its hyper-specialized concerns, a network of undergraduate programs, and an ecosystem of journals. Like Bertrand Russell, I wonder whether institutional philosophy is “anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.”

The goal of philosophy is no longer to guide individuals on their attempt to become paragons of wisdom and virtue. Its purpose is not to assist the philosopher in reconciling the absurdity of the world, nor can it instigate the creation of meaning out of this nihilism. It is not meant to be related subjectively to the individual who is actually living the philosophy and experiencing its effects. It is meant to produce knowledge. An honest, valuable task – yes. But it is not enough.

After all, this knowledge is produced in the typical academic fashion. It is based on rigorous, ‘impartial’ research by graduates trained in cleverly analyzing arguments. This research is then applied to produce objective knowledge that has no moral impact. I mean: the knowledge is not meant to make one a better person, but to be used as a “de-moralized tool” for civilizational progress (source). Throughout the process, the producers of knowledge remain separate from the knowledge they produce. It is sterilized, abstracted – without impact.

The philosopher argues passionately for his/her thesis, employing every art of logic available. But what if the thesis is true? No matter. It will not change the philosopher’s life nor anyone else’s. It is merely another postulate verified until refutation, another step on the track to tenure. As Kierkegaard wrote, “not until he lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate for him.” It is ridiculous to imagine the philosophers living by their theses.

All this production and institutionalization is merely disguising a catastrophe. We are facing the same problem in philosophy that Kierkegaard faced in religion: the demise of the subjective relationship. We have lost the duty to philosophy that Socrates felt and in some ways died for, the intimately personal, individual relationship to the content of our study. At his final Apology, Socrates said “as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy.” He had so fully embraced philosophy that any other form of life was “not worth living.”

Philosophy is not merely a set of practices and shared academic norms. It is a way of living. And if it fails to be a way of living, all its academia will be unmasked as hollow. Then could Nietzsche’s madman declare with certainty that along with God, the Philosopher must be buried as well – “We have killed him — you and I. We are all his murderers” (The Gay Science). Divorced from the lived experience of the philosopher, how can philosophy be meaningful? If philosophy is to have any value, it must be “through its effects upon the lives of those who study it” (Bertrand Russell).

Perhaps no one but Kierkegaard has articulated this problem in all its scope. In his Truth is Subjectivity, he wrote:

Our discussion is not about the scholar’s systematic zeal to arrange the truths of Christianity in nice tidy categories but about the individual’s personal relationship to this doctrine, a relationship which is properly one of infinite interest to him. (source)

To be a philosopher, one must take a radical leap. It is like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, the jump into the abyss. Namely: one must be willing to live by one’s conclusions. After all, philosophy claims to both describe and prescribe reality, the ethical life, the social sphere. If this is the case, then how should we live differently because of it? If Plato is indeed correct about the immortality of the soul, what then should we do? Every philosophical premise, when carried the full length, has an ethical conclusion. They dictate what should be done.

Make the leap!

But even here we encounter a problem. We are supposed to live by our conclusions, yes, but we are also supposed to live by the method of philosophy. And yet this method questions every conclusion. How can we live by a conclusion that can be called into question and invalidated the day after? Philosophy is built upon the dialectic, the constant shift in thought and relentless doubt of each and every premise. An objector might claim that the dialectical is fundamentally antithetical to the meaningful, as a life cannot be built upon an ever-shifting foundation.

Perhaps, then, Kierkegaard’s approach is only sensical in religion. After all, religion is not dialectical. It remains solid, and thus a subjective relationship can be built. A subjective relationship to religion builds a bridge between rock-solid cliffs; a subjective relationship to philosophy builds a bridge between wind and tossing waves. One must be able to stop somewhere if a meaning of life is to be built, and religion provides the stopping-point.

Philosophy, however, is not incapable of providing meaning. It has merely been so often misapplied that it seems impossible to truly live by. The solution is this: one must be willing to set a direction for the dialectic. Kierkegaard himself did not set a rock of Christianity and declare “now, build a relationship with this!” His project was to advance, not end the dialectic. His intention was to “create difficulties everywhere” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript). He sought to push individuals to recognize the flaws of dogma, and through this to create their own relationship with Christianity independent of the traditional Nicene doctrine. But this dialectic was not unguided: its goal was to become a Christian.

This aim, in a somewhat paradoxical sense, could only be achieved by first negating it: recognizing that I am not a Christian now. Thus, the dialectic became essential to the process. The creation of a true relationship with Christianity was made possible only through destruction – through eliminating the bromides and dependence on institutions.

This same process of guided dialectic applies to philosophy. By focusing on a specific end goal, our dialectic gains a foundation. New information does not destroy the foundation. Rather, it clarifies and polishes the foundation and assists in its construction. For example, I may decide my end goal is to become a virtuous person. When I discover that one of my practices was not after all virtuous, this does not destroy my ability to live by my philosophy. After all, my end goal is not called into question. I still aim to be virtuous. But my process has been refined, as I now know one more thing that I should not aim for.

Therefore, we now have a basis for developing a personal relationship with philosophy. Before anything, an aim must be set as the goal of all dialectic. Then, we must live by this aim, constantly seeking to refine and expand it. The aim cannot be called into question. This aim is the fundamental, subjective truth, one that is lived by the individual so intensely that it cannot be invalidated. It must be of infinite significance to the individual. It should not be taught in universities, but pursued by the individual.

We must assume the end goal in order to justify the process itself. After all, if we open up our end goal to justification – and therefore criticism – how can we truly be devoted to it? It becomes merely another premise among many, one that may be quickly invalidated by a new paper in an academic journal. Only through the powerful, subjective force of faith can we believe in the end goal. (To clarify, I do not at all mean faith in the religious sense. You’ll catch my meaning as I develop the idea.)

Have faith enough, at least, to make the leap.

Faith, after all, is inevitable in life. Over the centuries, the most powerful trend in philosophy has been skepticism. We have certainly not completed Aristotle’s task of classifying and demonstrating everything, but we have made tremendous progress in Socrates’ task of calling everything into question. In a philosophy where there is no convincing demonstration of the possibility of knowledge itself, how can we claim to have a comprehensive system that eliminates the need for faith? Rather, we have merely shown the overwhelming need for faith.

Faith is a teleological suspension of doubt in the face of uncertainty. The need for this suspension derives from three fundamental and undeniable aspects of existence. First, we are uncertain at the most basic level, and unable to make a decision based on the process of systematic reasoning. Second, despite our uncertainty, we must make a decision. Third, and too often ignored, we have ends, desires, dreams – things that we feel we must accomplish or at least strive for. We may know objectively that these dreams are irrational, unjustified – and yet every individual feels a need to search after some aim. In the face of this telos, it is unacceptable to merely deny agency and revoke our ability to make a choice, and it is unacceptable to choose arbitrarily.

How can we reconcile these three facts of our existence – uncertainty, agency, and the telos? Only through faith. We ignore our uncertainty, and make the decision based on the telos, the goal. We decide our ends and believe them by faith. Every decision must be directed by this touchstone. It is constantly refined through the dialectical process, but the telos itself is never subject to the dialectic.

In his Existenzphilosophie, Karl Jaspers wrote, “Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.” The philosopher should be intimately engaged with the philosophy; it should not be an object of study, but a way of living that has infinite impact. The goal of philosophy must be reexpressed in Kierkegaard’s terms, as the search to “find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live or die.”

Politics

The Fetishization of Individuals: From Hitler to Ken Bone

Post author By Jeremy Hadfield
Post date January 20, 2017

Humans have a relentless tendency to treat individuals as microcosms for the world. If we can identify a certain individual who fits into a group, we generalize this individual and make him/her representative of the group or concept as a whole. When we speak about these concepts or groups, we are implicitly thinking of these fetishized individuals. Thus, the ‘philosopher’ becomes Plato; the ‘drug lord’ becomes Pablo Escobar; the ‘autocrat’ becomes Hitler. These people that stand as concrete symbols for entire ideas are what I call ‘fetishized individuals.’

There is a constant political battle for control over these fetishized individuals. If someone humanizes and normalizes Pablo Escobar, they successfully humanize and normalize the drug trade as a whole. They take control of the image of the drug trade – the vivid, personalized, and individual representation. Then, when someone thinks of the drug trade, they think of Pablo Escobar – the friend of the poor, the anti-corruption, anti-communist activist, the family man.

Pablo Escobar as a criminal – the negative fetishization of a drug lord.

Pablo Escobar with a child – the positive fetishization of a drug lord.

When another representation is introduced, it is considered in the context of the existing fetish. Thus, it is extremely difficult to argue that El Chapo is terrible to convince someone who has internalized a positive version of Pablo Escobar as the representation of drug lords. Any logical argument is subordinate to their personal ideology-based ‘experience’ of Escobar. Perhaps a poor man heard Escobar gave out money in the streets and built schools for the impoverished; this gives them an emotional attachment – a fetish in a non-sexual sense – to the narrative of Pablo Escobar.

Modern political conflicts have begun using fetishized individuals in more obvious ways than ever before. The most clear example of this is Hitler, for he is the most completely fetishized person in the world. For almost everyone with an elementary education, mentions of autocracy, fascism, dictatorship, and genocide generate immediate images of Hitler with arm raised. One cannot win the ideological battle of making autocracy acceptable until one has made Hitler acceptable.

The first ideological step of neo-Nazis, therefore, is making the fetish of Hitler positive. This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, the extreme right-wing and anti-semitic site Rense.com published a series of images of the ‘hidden’ Adolf Hitler. Using these images of him – holding children, walking in gardens, smiling – makes it much harder to imagine him other contexts. We find it conceptually difficult to unite the many disparate aspects of a person into a single unified identity. How could the same Hitler that ordered the Holocaust also kiss babies? Psychological research shows that cognitive dissonance like this causes tangible pain. The drive to eliminate the dissonance, then, leads some to fetishize Hitler in a wholly positive way.

A positive fetishization of Hitler

The Netflix original Narcos powerfully represents our difficulty in categorizing individuals. You see Escobar in a variety of contexts – at home with his family, in drug labs, on a farm working, and at war. It becomes difficult to remember his horrific crimes when he is watching clouds with his young children. We can’t really conceptualize a ‘whole’ person – only the person we are seeing at the time. Uniting all the different Escobars into one unified individual is almost impossible. Ideologies take advantage of this inability to unify, and summarize individuals by a single aspect. For some, the need to resolve cognitive dissonance means forgetting Escobar’s crimes to enable a positive fetishization of his figure.

In the most recent presidential elections made fetishization a key aspect of political strategy. In 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher asked Obama a simple question about small business tax policy – almost instantly making him a key symbol of the presidential election. He mentioned something about wanting to buy a plumbing company, and the McCain campaign leaped at the chance to relate to an ‘ordinary American.’ They coined his new name – Joe the Plumber – and repeatedly used him as an example in campaign rhetoric. McCain used the symbol of Joe the Plumber to show that Obama was ‘out of touch with the average Joe.’ It didn’t matter that Samuel wasn’t really a plumber and his name wasn’t really Joe. Throughout the campaign, writes Amarnath Amarasingam, “A fictional plumber’s false scenario dominated media discourse” (source).

In the modern election, it seems that the myth of the ordinary Joe has taken hold even more firmly. America has a need to believe in the normal citizen, a 9-5er who wants only find his dreams, stick to his moral standards, and support his family. And yes, this citizen is a he – we seem unable or unwilling to use a female figure as a symbol of American life.

Why do we feel a drive for the ordinary? After all, we are obsessing over the nonexistent. There is no ‘ordinary Joe.’ Every citizen has quirks, mistakes, sins, hidden lies, and extravagant dreams that prevent them from being ordinary. Joe can only exist as an idealized symbol, not a concrete individual. And yet the idea of the ordinary citizen is permanently entrenched in our minds. In some way, many people aspire to be average. This aspect of the psyche creates political battles over the ability to protect the ordinary individual, who stands as a metaphor for the whole American citizenry.

Thus, Ken Bone was created. He was a symbol of an ordinary person – appropriately but not excessively involved in politics, working the day job, dreaming small dreams, providing for the family. He was 2016’s version of 2008’s Joe the Plumber. He represented simple authenticity, the everyman – as his Twitter profile proclaims, he is merely an “average midwestern guy.”

He did not decide to become a meme. The media did not make him a meme; they merely capitalized on the attention once Ken Bone had already gone viral. He was not mass-produced by campaign offices and political propagandists. In an act of near-randomness, he was dubbed a meme by the distributed irrational network of sensation-seeking individuals we call the Internet. The random series of viral creations in 2016 revealed that memes are fundamentally uncontrollable. After Harambe, damn Daniel, Ted Cruz the zodiac killer, how could we be surprised that Ken Bone was crowned a meme?

Ken Bone could not even control what he himself symbolized. He attempted to control his own signifier by consistently exhorting people to vote and make their voices heard. But all his efforts, for the most part, failed. Ken Bone does not symbolize democratic participation. After all, memes are inherently dehumanizing. To become a meme, an image must be dissociated from its reality and turned into something else. In linguistics terms, it’s a sign whose signifier is malleable — the image’s meaning, thus, is created by those who share it. The meme itself has no power over its meaning.

This is the danger of living memes – they are tossed around by the whims of the Internet. And when these whims turn sour, the person suffers. Ken’s slightly quirky reddit history was revealed, and he was painted as a monster.

I expect this process to continue endlessly: an individual becomes a sign that stands as a placeholder for a piece of political ideology. The individual is the object of immense attention, and then is tossed out like discarded trash. We should be careful that our memes do not make us think this is what people truly are. And we should not be surprised when the myth of the ‘ordinary citizen’ is shattered by the reality of the individual’s life and being.