However, this time, Quinones clearly has two purposes: to inform as well as to encourage. As he says, during his tour supporting the first book, he received many invitations to speak far and wide about the nationwide crisis being hushed up by embarrassed family members. And at many of these places, people asked him for hope. Was there anywhere that had figured out how to handle the addicts? How to handle the radical shift from chronic addiction of yore--where the addict stayed housed, employed, and provided, however imperfectly, for a family--to the new world of bombed-out, toothless addicts committing an endless stream of petty crime to support their habit living on the street?

To that end, he documents many examples. Not nationwide, top-down programs but bottom-up, hyper-local ones that slowly spread county to county as news of their success travelled. Counties opening drug courts as diversion programs, churches with dwindling attendance finding new purpose, and prisons opening dedicated units to those wanting to stay on the path to recovery.

Along the way, he also documents and tells the story of the phase change in the drugs themselves hitting the market in the months after his previous book was published: the change from heroin derived from field-grown poppies to lab-synthesized fentanyl (discovered in a Belgian lab 40 years hence) and of the change in meth production to evade legal crackdowns on ephedrine that began creating and distributing a product, cheaper and more addictive than ever, that also caused psychosis and hallucinations.

All of this crashes against the shores of post-industrial red states. The decriminalization and "harm reduction" strategies of blue cities and states are mentioned briefly near the end, once enough stories of crushing and often fatal addiction make it subtextually obvious that such approaches would be doomed from the start, as well-intentioned as they may be. But this is not a book of pointing and laughing at isolated incidents. Instead, it is many stories of quiet desperation in working-class towns trying to solve the seemingly intractable.

Reflecting on the book as a whole, Quinones rarely sermonizes or posits a thesis. He has one penultimate, obligatory chapter where he also somewhat haphazardly tries to weave in larger topics like climate change and gun control, but the whole thing has a sort of perfunctory tone. Instead, he leaves it to the reader to derive a thesis, which I would phrase thusly: the epidemic of fentanyl and P2P-meth addiction is fundamentally unlike previous naturally-derived addictions like alcohol, sugar, nicotine, old-school weed, and even heroin. They thoroughly hijack the human brian, having been iteratively perfected to do so by the fast-moving anything-goes black market, that the reliance on typical criminal justice reform strategies based on self-preservation and rational consideration of long term interest just fail.

Addicts to these drugs ease their way into a destroyed life and are left with no way to dig out as an individual. They have nowhere to stay, no bank account, no options for employment, and hijacked brian chemistry that takes 3-9 months to re-regulate. If they can detox (such as during a short jail sentence) and stay clean for months while slowly rebuilding a life, they have a path out. But that path is heroically difficult to complete alone, once someone reaches the phase of having no home, estranged family, and a contact list containing only other users and dealers.

The government does not have to solve this problem, but they must at least not stand in the way with counter-productive sentences that just continue the cycle of reoffending. Communities must come together and support initiatives to help addicts stay clean and build a new life, because sentencing them to prison will not. When you keep trying the old way and it doesn't work, it's time to try something different. This book isn't a blueprint for what works, but tries to provide some ideas and start the conversation, and show there is some hope.

Skipping the consideration spoils it. Harboring resentment spoils it. Feeling forced to do it spoils it. Feeling guilty spoils it. Rushing to just get it over with spoils it.

It does not have to be something other people would praise you for; it only matters than you know you made the right choice. It can be whatever you want, as long as it's thoughtfully, intentionally chosen.

Almost everything we do is chosen for us, even leisure is mostly dictated by algorithms telling us what to watch, read, or listen to. We rarely get recommendations from friends anymore. When you seek harmony with the universe, be careful about trusting your success to a machine.

Done properly, you must balance measuring progress toward a goal and also be perfectly content with doing what you're doing forever. This is impossible to do perfectly; you must try anyway.

When you get it right, minutes feel like hours and hours feel like minutes.

In parallel, one of the surprising things I've learned becoming a father is realizing how very much it is a choice, at least in the modern era. Going through the process of deciding when to start a family, you realize how easy it is to put off one more month, one more season, one more crisis. How much it is a choice to start the long chain of events that culminates in a live birth, and only then does being a parent really start. And that choice really is a leap into the unknown, trusting that what you're doing is the right thing. All you have to guide you are principles and faith.

Looking back on it now, I see that it's easy to take for granted that someone is a parent after it's happened. Growing up, almost everyone you know who is a parent has always been that way, and so it takes on the feeling of being an intrinsic characteristic. They are a parent because they have always been a parent.

But growing up, seeing your friends become parents, and then becoming one yourself gives you a greater appreciation for the fact that this did not have to come to pass. The world we live in, with the parents and children in it, could just as easily not happened, due to fear, or delay, or distraction.

But luckily for me, my parents made the choice, and Stephanie's parents made the choice, and we have now made the choice. All different choices, at different times, in different circumstances, and yet in some essential way, the same choice. To create a world that didn't have to be.

Thanks, Dad.

If they knew better, they would do better.

Instead, challenge yourself. "What would it take for me to reach my limit of this? Am I already at it? Can I go five minutes without showing a sign of weakness? Five minutes after that?"

We kept drilling down into examples and use cases, and each of us found more reasons to justify our position.

Eventually someone asked a question in the opposite direction. Instead of looking at more and more minute details, he looked at the big picture. He roped in an outsider to provide their perspective, which totally shifted the discussion.

In particular, what the outsider said knocked out one of the premises of my position. Of course, it was tempting to stick to my guns and dig in deeper and refuse to change my mind. But as that flashed across my mind, I knew immediately that would be letting ego win.

Instead, I said clearly and explicitly that the discussion resolved and we would go with the other guy's solution.

It was an opportunity, a deposit for the future. A chance to show that when I was in the wrong I would admit it and move forward without a grudge. Hopefully that builds the idea in my coworkers that when I don't give in, I really have a point. I'm not just digging in because I can't admit I'm wrong.

I saw the moment for what it was, an opportunity to admit being wrong, and took it.

Part 1

I was talking to a friend recently, and discussing the fact that he's managed to stick with one hobby (learning Japanese) while having another hobby that used to consume much of his time go untouched for years (recording music).

What I realized as we talked, and what I said to him, was that we don't really do things because we want to, or because we have goals. We do things because we want to be consistent with the identity that have of ourselves and we put out into the world.

In his case, he'd mostly given up the identity of being a musician to his friends and family who previously would listen to his recordings. But to the people in his Japanese class, he hadn't given up the identity of him being a student of the language.

Each of us is an overlapping tapestry of identities: one to family, one to your spouse, one to you coworkers, one to your shooting buddies, one to your Facebook friends. And virtually everything we do is motivated by trying to live up to the identity that we aspire to or want to maintain.

You eat right and exercise to maintain your identity as someone taking care of your body. You show up on time to work to maintain your identity with your coworkers as being reliable and hardworking. You put the dishes in the dishwasher to maintain your identity with your spouse that you listen when they ask you to do things. You grind away in practice even though nobody will see you do it, because you hope the results will show up in the results when the match day comes.

Part 2

For a while now, one source of cognitive dissonance for me has been this feeling of inconsistency with one of my identities: that of being a podcaster. I just wrote up the history of my shooting podcast over on my shooting blog, but the short version is that in 2018 I recorded 44 consecutive episodes in a year, and felt I had proved that I could do it if I set my mind to it. Once I'd proved that, I lost the fire and motivation to record, and have done it only sporadically since then.

But I never let go of the identity to my few-hundred-odd subscribers that I Was A Podcaster. It was part of my image, and one that I fell short of every day I didn't record a podcast. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but as I start to lay that burden down and let go of it, only by its absence do I sense its weight.

It's fun to announce the beginning of a new identity: starting a family, starting a new job, starting a business, starting a podcast. Deciding when to announce the end of an identity is harder. Often there's no clear-cut reason not to put it off one more day.

But you can only be so many things. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, the things you say no to are actually more important than the things you say yes to. If you have too many scattered identities, you fail at all of them in rotation. You feel paralyzed and unable to act. You have no clear priority system to organize your day (work, exercise, eat, write, read, sleep). Instead your subconscious decision-making algorithm reaches a deadlock, so you do nothing and instead scroll on social media or watch autoplay video after autoplay video on Youtube.

If you find yourself in this position, examine your identities. Figure out which ones are in conflict, or which ones you most fear giving up. Typically they are the ones that are the most tenuous and which you feel the need to maintain psychologically because you do not actually embody them regularly.

You will dread giving them up, feeling like you've declared failure. If you can, review your history, as I did with the shooting podcast, and find the narrative that shows you actually did what you set out to, but now it's time to move on. Once you come to grips with letting the identity go and tell one person, you'll start to feel better. That's the sign you're on the right track. Keep telling people until everyone knows. By the time you do that, you'll be wondering why didn't do it sooner.

In 2004, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article which, among other things, explores why there are hundreds of varieties of mustard, but only one type of ketchup. (I first encountered it in the printed collection "What The Dog Saw" which is, I think, Gladwell at his finest. Freed from the burden of an overarching narrative, he can tell interesting stories 30 pages at a time.)

Part of the story is a meditation on the soul of ketchup: what it is, how it functions, and so on. The basic idea he lays out is that ketchup manages to capture all five of the elements of taste: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. With respect to flavors, it is a complete sentence; it needs no augmentation.

This has the interesting consequence that kids love ketchup for the very specific reason that it is tasty and it goes on everything. Instead of having to taste a wide variety of strange flavors on their plate at dinner each night, if they cover it in ketchup (with the help of bottles specifically constructed to be used by the children), they never have to learn to like new flavors.

(This is, of course, obviously trading off long-term growth for short-term comfort, which should be avoided as much as possible.)

I happened to be out in public this past week, picking up lunch from a restaurant. My order was delayed, because it was noon and everyone, both online and in-person, was ordering right then. My immediate reaction was to find a spot out of the way and stare at my phone until my order was ready.

But the store was (as much as anything ever is in the age of COVID-19) bustling, with people coming and going, picking up orders. Perhaps there was nothing interesting in what was going on around me, but I had no way to know if I shut it out and stared at my phone.

Meanwhile, what was on my phone was completely separate from this time and place. Anything I would read or watch would still be there hours or days later, whenever I got around to looking. In no way was it urgent. In contrast, whatever was happening around me would only ever happen exactly once, and if I ignored whatever there was to observe from it, there was no way to capture that and learn the lesson later.

And so I found myself thinking about Malcolm Gladwell and ketchup. And how our phones have become the ketchup that we pour over everday life. Nobody is ever truly bored waiting anymore because you always have a portal to infinite limbic stimulation in your pocket. The individual textures and flavors of the places we go and the times that we encounter them are submerged in the consistent, comfortable, addictive flavor of digital ketchup.

What's wrong with ketchup, you ask? Nothing. It's fine. It will never be terrible, but it will also never be excellent. You will never remember a meal or hunger for more because of the excellent ketchup. It is always, consistently, inexorably, fine.

The problem with ketchup is that it will never be more or less than ketchup. If you go to a place and try the local cuisine, some of it will be disappointing, and some of it might be surprisingly good. But if you cover it in ketchup, it will only ever taste like ketchup.

My advice, and my goal for myself: do not cover up the flavor and texture of the world around you with digital ketchup any more than is necessary.

The best way I can describe it is synchrony. Things feel to be happening at approximately the right time in various areas of my life. I don't feel like I've waited too long to start anything, in part by charging headlong into each phase: getting married, paying off debt, buying a forever home, starting a family. The Red Queen was right when she said you have to work as hard as you can just to keep up.

And so I'm filled with a sense of gratitude today. I never really felt that the world owed me anything, and yet I have such richness, that it feels like more than I deserve. And these two are a big part of it.

They, and the future they portend, are the best present I could ask for.

Eric Hoffer's The True Believer was published in 1951, six years after the end of World War II and two years before Stalin's death. Yet it presaged the current moment of identitarian tribalism (both on the woke left and the MAGA right) better than anything else I've read. Pardon the extensive quotes, but properly setting the stage of the problem to be solved is necessary to understand the solution below (emphasis mine):

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap. [Section 6]

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat. [Section 10]

The reason that the [failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one] can exert a marked influence on [a nation's] course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking--hence their proclivity for united action. [Section 18]

[A mass movement] appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.

People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find worth-while purpose in self-advancement. The prospect of an individual career cannot stir them to a mighty effort, nor can it evoke in them faith and a single-minded dedication. They look on self-interest as on something tainted and evil; something unclean and unlucky. Anything undertaken under the auspices of the self seems to them foredoomed. Nothing that has its roots and reasons in the self can be good and noble. Their innermost craving is for a new life--a rebirth--or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. [Section 7]

The book is a compact 165 pages, yet it thorougly maps the joiners of mass movements, the mechanisms the movements use, their life cycles, and so on. It reads like it was written yesterday.

Yet reading the book, there is no attempt offer solutions or strategies. It grimly details reality and does not even broach the question of what the reader is to do with this knowledge.

But thinking more about it, some of the sections contain within them, by negation, an antidote. In particular, I was considering section 9 recently:

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

In a world of participation trophies and children's soccer matches where no score is kept, no child can claim excellence. When playgrounds are constantly monitored for unfairness, and conflict is immediately remedied by ending the game, not by adjudicating a resolution, why play competitive games? In a world where mediocre biological males can compete in womens sports and take first place, why invest blood, sweat, and tears in claming excellence for yourself?

If we want a strong society, Hoffer points the way. We need individuals who each have a legitimate claim to excellence for their own self. Of course, not everybody in a society needs to play the same game, but everybody needs to play at least a few games, and by excelling in at least one domain thereby gain the sense of self-worth that makes joining a mass movement implausible.

Social media makes this harder. Jonathan Haidt points out that you may have once been been considered attractive among your high school class, but now Instagram compels you to compare yourself to the most attractive people on Earth, enhanced beyond reality by filters and selective editing. The internet has, for all of its benefits, collapsed a great collection of small, regional games in one, global mega-game, and in so doing made claiming excellence without self-deception harder.

Personally, my claim to excellence is practical shooting. IDPA and USPSA, timed competitions to balance speed and accuracy on constantly-changing courses. I've managed to achive the highest skill classification in both sports, roughly comparable to a black belt--although like a black belt, achieving the rank is just the beginning of the path of true mastery. I too compare myself via YouTube to be the best in the world, but the sport is small enough that high-end competitors are a fairly close-knit community. And when I go to local and regional matches, I usually lose, but I do so to people I find admirable because I trust their sportsmanship and the fairness of the rules under which the contest is fought.

I try to promote the sport by my videos, podcasts, and blog posts to help others who themselves want to learn and grow.

There have been dark times in my personal life and difficult chapters in my career where I had a lot of doubt about my self-worth. Because writing software is almost never a solo endeavor, it's impossible to determine an objective score of your quality as an engineer. You may think the code you write is the best it can be, but if it's a part of an otherwise unreliable system, how do you distinguish the quality of your work from that of the entire project? Obviously trying to objectively judge self-worth based on your career is a fraught endeavor; everyone thinks they are good at their job.

So it gives me a real bedrock on which to base my personal strength and independence when I have this sport as a fair refuge, a place where nobody has an incentive to flatter or expel me, where I can see with my own eyes if my performance is being judged fairly, where I can feel a sense of accomplishment when things go well, and a sense of motivation to improve when I know I could do better.

But in some ways I only ended up practical shooting competition by luck. I never played a single sport growing up, and it wasn't until I was 20 that a friend invited me to come check out IDPA--and I had never seen a gun shot in real life much less owned or shot one myself at that time. But at some level I knew deep down competing in this meant something. It wasn't just horsing around on the weekends. Around 2014, I basically stopped playing video games which had been my main hobby (including a 20+ hour/week schedule in a World of Warcraft raiding guild for months or years at a stretch). And looking back that decision, I wouldn't change it for anything.

So how do we get back to people being able to claim excellence for their own self, and thereby being more resistant to joining mobs calling for the cancellation or persecution of someone on the right or the left? How do we build people who identify more with their own name than by which groups they list in their Twitter bio?

We do it through competition, with fair rules and scores and winners, where participants compete as individuals or as members of small teams where individual contributions are relatively easy to distinguish. Practical shooting, CrossFit, jiu-jitsu, ultimate frisbee, bowling, ping pong, billiards, basketball, skateboarding, you name it.

It should be something with a consistent community, where you can make friends and build social bonds before and afterward; the scenario of a video game where you are matched against strangers you've never met and will never meet again is to be avoided.

It also needs to be something that exists in the real world, not a video game where some newly released patch can change the whole game, or where simply playing for longer (or worse, paying money or getting lucky) unlocks better weapons and abilities. Something that involves interacting face to face with other humans, sweating to improve, travelling to other cities and regions to compete if you choose, and above all, fair rules and fair scoring.

Every individual needs to know that if they work hard, they can improve. People who have never done this are easily taken in by the idea that the only way to improve the society is mass action, subsuming the self behind a hashtag or a slogan. For whatever reason academic achievement does not fill this role; ideas of why that is could be an entire separate post. But the healthy person requires the confidence that comes from being excellent, the pride of achievement by individual hard work. If every member of a society experienced that, and in so doing became less susceptible to mass movements, then the society as a whole would flourish.

Roman emperor charging into battle to face certain death is meaningful only in a setting of honor and institutions. It is folding your current hand so that the next guy that takes your seat will have a fresh start and a strong hand. It only works if your sacrifice, transmitted via the public, transfers to your successor. Without that the incentives are to bankrupt the country by playing your own hand until the bitter end.

Feels very relevant right now.

Self-sacrifice only makes sense if you feel that you're a part of a group that's more meaningful than yourself. The peaceful transition of the Presidency is important only to someone who sees himself as an American, a member of the group which means more than the individual.

For all the harm that identity politics has done, there is a kernel of virtue in the idea that by identifying with a group or a tribe or a nation and acting to serve it selflessly, you can lay down your own life in a way that will benefit the group after you're gone. Or consider the stonemason in the Middle Ages working on the cathedral that was begun before he was born and will be completed after he has died. But he knows it will stand as a testament to God for centuries.

It was a very good book, and I both enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit from its 790 pages. This is clearly a book that took the better part of a lifetime to write. I don't know enough about Vietnam to say whether Sheehan got the analysis of the geopolitics exactly right, but certainly the through-line that he draws makes sense.

There were two moments in the book that were particularly illuminating for me.

The first was the realization that the way the US operated in Vietnam was a complete consequence of the prevalence of helicopters. Of course Sheehan covers the standard list of mistakes: unbelievable quantities of bombs and rockets used against an enemy that figured out quickly how to tunnel and dig to protect from them; taking of territory to abandon it days later; displacing the populace from their traditional lands so they had to choose between joining the VC or being a beggar; and so on.

But Sheehan also paints a striking picture of a South Vietnam made up of district and regional capitals under US and South Vietnamese control, surrounded by rural expanses where the VC operate unopposed. Attempts by the US military or the ARVN to chase after them were largely ineffective as the VC avoided conflict or retreated until they got to a location they liked and decided to fight.

Meanwhile, supplies and personnel had to be brought in by helicopter. The VC only had to lay one booby trap or dig one trench anywhere on the hundreds of miles of road that connected one district center to another, and they could ambush at will. So the roads were given up and air transport used instead.

The picture in my head of the North fighting the South with front lines that advanced or retreated as armies moved forward and back, like something out of the American Civil War was just wrong. Instead of resembling the traditional battle lines on a map in a textbook, the map of South-vs-VC-held territory would look more like a county-by-county election map of the US. Splotches of one color around cities, and much of the rest a sea of the other color.

Luckily in America, Republican counties don't set up roadblocks and ambushes for city folk commuting from one metropolis to another. But you can imagine that if they did, the city folk would start taking airplanes and helicopters instead. And in Vietnam, that's what was happening.

Perhaps we thought it was a technical marvel to be able to zip around the country on the wings of American airpower. But if the US had not had the crutch of helicopters, perhaps it would have been harder to ignore what was actually happening at ground level for so long.

The second big takeaway for me was this passage:

To make attrition work in his favor, a military leader must be able to force his enemy to fight, as Grant could force Lee to fight when he had Lee locked into a defense of the Confederate capital of Richmond [...]. Thayer's findings proved that Westmoreland was unable to force his enemy to fight, because the Vietnamese had an overwhelming grasp of the initiative. The Vietnamese controlled their own rate of attrition.

(Also, implied but unstated by the quote: the VC didn't have any strategic cities to be captured. They could set up camp wherever they liked and move in supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The US and ARVN were pinned in place by the duty to defend cities, but the VC had no such constraint.)

In retrospect, it seems so obvious: you cannnot wear down an enemy if you cannot strike at them on your time table instead of theirs. As long as your enemy has the ability to withdraw at will and gather their strength, you can never push them past a breaking point.

Such a simple idea, but one that unlocks so many of the ills of the American war in Vietnam.

On the whole, the book was worth the read. As you understand by the end, John Paul Vann was clearly a troubled man with a dark side, but in many ways it seems that his sense of living on borrowed time freed him to do things few other careerists would.

And, compared to a much more personal memoir like About Face, A Bright Shining Lie provided quite a bit of history of the French occupation, backstory on Ho Chi Minh as well as the Diem family, including why they were concerned with a coup and how avoiding one became an obsession. Except perhaps for Westmoreland, none of the people profiled come off as sheer bumbling idiots, but instead each one as a cog in their own machine, with incentives and ambitions and fears they are constantly weighing.

I look forward to reading it again one day.