Poppa Neutrino: 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps

Poppa Neutrino was born in 1933 as David Pearlman in San Francisco. Twenty one years ago a dog bit his hand in Mexico, causing a two-year sickness so bad he thought he would die. Doctors were unable to diagnose his affliction. Finally recovered, he had changed, feeling so different that he decided on a new name. Poppa Neutrino is the first that came to him.

He explains a neutrino this way:

According to science, neutrinos are subatomic particles that exist throughout the universe, are in constant motion, invisible but ever-present, and act as a sort of balancing factor to all visible matter. When we first read about neutrinos, no one had ever seen one, yet scientists were certain that they must exist. The human soul or spirit is also something that most people claim never to have seen, and so think does not exist. But if neutrinos exist and can't be seen, there must also be many other things that exist and can't be seen.

Like himself, a neutrino is intinerant, its movement random, its course subject to its relationship within the system. In his seventy two years, Poppa Neutrino has not lived in one place over a year. With his "Floating Neutrinos," wife, children, and others, he set a trans-Atlantic record in a raft made of scraps. It was the first of its kind to make the voyage in the late 1990s.

With his dog, he now plans to cross the Pacific, also in a raft made of scraps. He recently left San Felipe, Baja California, bound for Peru, where he will attempt the voyage, done in 1948 by Thor Heyerdahl in a balsa wood raft.

His life is guided by a world-view he explains as Triads. Of them, he has this to say:

The basic premise of this plan is that from the time you are born, you are being constantly programmed by outside forces - your parents, teachers, friends and relatives, and the society and culture you live in, through the media and the demands of school, work and laws. Most of these outside forces are acting on you in a mechanical way, giving pretty much the same programming to everybody. The programs of society, for example, are designed for the preservation of the society itself, not for individual self-fulfillment.

More on Poppa Neutrino can be found here and here.

Happiness & Public Policy

Not all people would say that happiness is the highest good, Some would instead assert that a meaningful life is more important. Still others would posit different values. A thoughtful consideration of the matter does reveal that happiness, broadly construed, best serves the public weal. To benefit a nation, policies must define the public good and provide instruments for implementing it. This is not easy in part because people are widely adaptive to bad situations. They can ignore smog, accept TV schlock, endure traffic jams, shrug off global warming because that’s the way things are. This acceptance is rather akin to a frog in a pan. Dump it into boiling water and it will immediately jump out. Place it in luke warm water, then slowly turn up the fire, and it will cook to death. We are cooking as I write.

Happiness has recent history as public policy. In antiquity Aristotle wrote of happiness for the individual amidst an elite. In the Nineteenth Century John Stuart Mill espoused a system to promote it. As a classical empiricist in a society with slaves to do the work, Aristotle maintained that happiness was inseparable from leisure and that labor was a vice. On the cusp of the British Industrial Revolution, Mill proposed Utilitarianism--the greatest good for the greatest number--as public policy.

World-wide surveys repeatedly reveal that people regard happiness as indisputably desirable. It consistently ranks at the top in surveys all over the globe. Whatever the values of various societies and cultures, humans almost universally grade happiness as an extremely important value.

In the United States, William James and others developed the philosophy of Pragmatism, which evolved out of the ideas of Mill. Both Utilitarianism and Pragmatism did not aim at happiness for the individual in particular but for society in general--happiness as part of public policy. Broadly speaking, in the United States such policy is a feature of liberal agendas, which conservatives roundly curse while favoring dollar democracy. In Europe, the notion of public weal has remained as a larger feature of public policy, although economics and government belt-tightening challenge the policy.

If surveyed, most people would endorse public policies that promote happiness for the greater number of people. Implementing such policies would not be easy. Planners must agree upon sources and causes of happiness. Having done that, the devil follows in the details. How to implement a public policy for happiness? In the United States, liberal policies have been increasingly deconstructed by conservatives who have called them failures, although a scholarly study of the matter reveals an equal share of intellectual muddle on both sides, liberal and conservative.

Despite this wrangling, a major question is ignored in public policy. Do degrees of happiness consistently correlate to income or do they depend on societal, cultural, and individual situations?

This wrangling partly occurs because in America money is confused with happiness. The conditions for individual happiness are identified by that which is believed to support it, which in the United States is almost exclusively the dollar. American studies of happiness reveal high incomes as correlated with happiness. People associate more money with a better life. Elsewhere on the globe, this association does not occur as noticeably. To be sure, people everywhere agree that happiness is difficult in extreme poverty, but definitions of poverty vary, and high income is not universally ranked as important. Indeed, in Western, materialistic, societies, happiness is associated with greater "stuff." Those who have things are presumed to be happier. And there is some truth to this. Some, but not all.

Global surveys continue to reveal that although the rich are significantly happier than the poor, average happiness levels change very little in index to people’s incomes.

War-ravaged Japan was still reconstructing in 1960 when surveys were taken to determine the average level of happiness. By 1988 Japanese per capita income increased four times above its 1960 level. People had more cars, shoes, clothes, cameras, stereos, washing machines, and yet the average happiness remained constant with 1960. This pattern was not unique to Japan. It repeats itself in other countries.

Other elements of happiness polls suggest something about human nature--that people don't really know what is good for them. Put differently, they may say one thing and do another. * Higher incomes do not necessarily promote greater happiness, why, then, do people want more money?

* ( In some circumstances, this is labeled as blatant hypocrisy, but often it reveals that people don't understand the workings of their own minds, or have not sorted through their conflicting beliefs.)

A related question--in order to buy more stuff and reduce tax burden, is steady, persistent per capita income growth desirable in terms of happiness?

In Daedalus, (Vol. 133, Issue 2, spring 2004) Robert H. Frank (author of Luxury Fever) casts an interesting light on the subject. He offers two scenarios, one with a people living in 4000 square foot homes, totally isolated from another people living in 3000 square foot homes. He calls each Society A and Society B. Because separated from one another, each people is equally satisfied and do not question the square-footage norm. Further, the larger houses do not provide advantage in terms of longevity or health.

He observes that "it takes real resources to build larger houses." The difference between 3000 and 4000 square feet implies a difference in resources. His question: "Are there alternative ways of spending these resources that could have produced lasting gains in human welfare?"

Society B (smaller home) residents use saved resources for the commonweal. They spend the money and material to promote specific changes in their living conditions. ". . . cost savings from building smaller houses are sufficient to fund not only the construction of high-speed public transit, but also to make the added flexibility of the automobile available on an as-needed basis." (Frank) In short, they don't need a car but can drive it if they want to. They simply don't have one thousand additional feet of floor space.

Because all income goes toward stuff, Society A residents have no excess resources for improvement of their situation. They cannot fund pubic transit and must depend on the automobile. Their cars continue to cause traffic gridlock and high stress levels. Although nicer to live in, is the larger home more valuable in the context of longer commute times, traffic jams, and traffic noise?

These are factors demonstrably correlated to reduction in happiness. When a new, noisy highway was opened, people living next it were studied. Shortly after its opening, 21 percent said the noise did not bother them; a year later, the figure dropped to 16 percent. Prolonged exposure to noise elevates blood pressure lastingly. Auto commuters are subject to various noises. Things are out of their control. They cannot predict bottlenecks or accidents. They get cut off by drivers even more tense. "A large scientific study documents a multitude of stress symptoms" from daily commuting. The stress is known "to suppress immune function and shorten longevity." (Frank) This is aside from the risk of accidents or the inhalation of carcinogenic exhaust fumes.

Frank points out that a rational person would choose Society B in order to promote his own happiness. Americans, in pursuit of happiness, still do not turn from the norms of Society A. In the meantime, we frogs are in the pan and the water is becomingly increasingly uncomfortable . . . .

Notes on The Relationship of Capitalism, Happiness & Leisure

These are just some random thoughts, and I jot them down as a reminder to myself and readers of what we already know—as a reminder because we make our way in a world that remains largely ignorant of the values within the thoughts.

One of the oldest rules of political science is that (1) human beings come together to keep alive. (2) Then they stay together to live a good life. In the United States people have never budged from number one. As a society, they still behave as if they had a wilderness to conquer.

A motto found on an ancient Roman sun dial: Horas non numero nisi serenas; the hours don’t count unless they are serene. Western society rejects leisure, mistaking it for free time, but it rejects what it doesn’t understand. Leisure cannot exist when people don’t know what it is, and it is not recreation—not movies, not TV shows, not rock concerts, not water skiing.

In his Politics Aristotle pointed out that the Spartans were secure so long as they were at war, but collapsed when they acquired an empire. They didn’t know how to use leisure with their peace. They didn’t understand that war is waged to gain peace, which in turn is used for leisure.

In his Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle argued that wisdom is a virtue that can only be obtained in leisure. Scholé is Greek for leisure, whence the English word scholar, as well as school. For the Greeks scholé implied freedom, both freedom from and freedom to. From: it meant that one did not have daily struggles and worries over food, shelter, and clothing. To: that this security enabled him to develop himself.

Aristotle would disagree with modern materialistic society on the truly valuable. He would not regard anything useful as the highest good. Utility merely provides a means to gain something else. The highest good does not point to anything beyond itself. It is a good for its own sake. Happiness is not useful. It is a good unto itself. People want to be happy. Full stop. It is a highest good and as such has no utility in it.

For Aristotle, happiness can only appear in leisure. The happy person looks upon the world with no schemes, no intrigues. The unhappy person engages in work in order to avoid boredom. The happy person is not bored.

With the advent of Christianity, the view toward leisure changed because the idea of work altered. Work became a means of self-purification, of repentance, and through it one had hope to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Max Weber’s (1864-1920) classic The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism helped explain religion as an engine of the Industrial Revolution and a free market society.

Happiness Anyone?

In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce provided a definition of happiness: "An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.'' I can imagine Jay Leno saying of the definition that maybe it explains why the Founding Fathers guaranteed the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself. A nation of perfectly happy bastards and bitches would be a miserable nation indeed.

People say they want to be happy. But do they? Why, then, do they hurt themselves? Why do they kill one another and wage war and, even torture others? Some might argue that all this occurs because they want to be happy. Perhaps they think that happiness comes with a sense of power over others, which they confuse with a greater sense of control over their own lives. Physically hurting themselves can be regarded as a form of dominating psychological pain; hurting or killing others can also be seen as a desire for domination. Thus with domination they unconsciously associate removal of obstacles to happiness.

In last month's Psychological Science researchers describe their findings that angry people make more negative evaluations when judging members of other social groups. This is news? Well, no, but they found the same to be the case with happy people. The happier people are, the more bigoted their judgments of others. A minority group member is guilty of something or other because he is a minority group member. Researchers speculate as to why this phenomenon occurs and have several hypotheses, one of which is that happy people tend to be complacent, which does not promote analytical thinking. It's easier to shove opinions into pigeon holes--to stereotype people.

This presents a difference with the writings of Martin Seligman, who argues that happiness is imbued with a rational perspective because it is optimistic. Seligman says that optimists take problems and set-backs as temporary and local rather than permanent and universal, unlike pessimists. Optimists don't say "It's all my fault," while pessimists tend to do so.

In the United States, the pursuit of happiness is a god-given right and Americans have a document that tells them so. Perhaps that is why Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn left the states to return to his native Russia. He regards happiness as a shallow and selfish goal. In Psychological Science, the researchers might agree with him. Their findings suggest that, in some way not yet fully discernible, happiness may be bad for society.

Seligman has another approach. In the last few years he has been looking at how mentally healthy people think, and has turned away from relieving mental misery. As he would put it, he wants to help people move from +3 to +6 rather than from -5 to -3. His concern is with methods to promote happiness, as inferred from those who are happy. He wants to develop the condition rather than study its effects on interactions within society. I mention this because an unanswered question remains, To what extent is happiness good for the well-being of society? Some evidence suggests a kind of selfishness in those who are happy; consider the research associating bigotry and complacency with happiness.

The new science of happiness looks at causes and their signatures, some of which are satisfaction with life, and episodes of joy. Perhaps not so surprisingly, among the causes are genes and good marriages. Having children does not correlate well to it, nor does money. Religious people are happier, probably because of support from church and friends they make there. ( I have friends who say they are not religious but attend church because of its social connections.) Men become happier as they age; women, less so.

Certainly happiness has physical effects. Research evidence indicates that it buttresses the immune system, lengthens lives, and buffers stress.

Novelist Aldous Huxley's happy folk take a drug, soma, which, in his Brave New World, makes them complacent, dim-witted, and indifferent to the suffering of others and certainly to the totalitarian state that controls them. Yet, they are happy, so they believe.

British psychologist Richard P. Bentall puts the matter of happiness in another light: "There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others." Bentall proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.

This fits with much research that finds pessimists as better judges of situations. Rather than looking through rose-colored glasses, they tend to see darkly, yet see face to face. The optimist acknowledges that disasters happen, but only to others. Pessimists feel that the deck is stacked against them, that if something is to go wrong, it will likely befall them. They are more realistic in the sense that they prepare themselves for misfortune.

Vanitas vanitatum, says the pessimist--vanity of the vain, all is vanity. Death renders our best efforts as futile. The pessimist perhaps lives more safely than does the optimist who risks more, his expectations subject to frustration. Still, the optimist gives meaning to his life by his efforts in trying to make the best of it. Further, to the extent they are depressed, pessimists compare reality to a happiness that is out of reach, which deepens depression and leads sometimes to suicide.

In The United States, a widespread and unrealistic view of happiness contributes to depression. Happiness became bound up with possession. An unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness? Well, this was code for the so-called natural aristocracy in which Thomas Jefferson believed. John Locke had a different phrase, from which the Founding Fathers borrowed. His was akin to the pursuit of property, if not that precise phrase. Property was a bit too blatant, because many of the colonists had none. By this means, the conflation of ownership with happiness crept into the culture.

Happiness has remained tied to materialism. To acquire is to be happy. The most acquisitive are the happiest, so the culture teaches. And blessed are these, for the happiest among them are corporate executives in their mansions.

Aristotle would not have accepted this view. In his Nichomachean Ethics he holds happiness as wedded to virtue, not possessions. The virtuous man is not bigoted nor complacent. He does not find satisfaction in the misery of others. He exercises his mind and enjoys its philosophical fruits. He is bound to be happy because he holds the highest good, the integrity between his happiness and his virtue.

Today we have Doctor Feel Good and his pharmacopeia as well as his many prescriptions for our well being. Rather than asking themselves, people take his mood-level tests to find out if they are happy. Happiness becomes gauged in relation to other people. They consider whether they are better or worse off than others are, then tell him how they feel.

Somewhere in his writings, Seligman makes a very good point. He maintains that true happiness derives from meaning and no drug, no personality test, can provide that. Meaning does not come from pleasant feelings. It derives from a life given to something bigger than the ego and making money. The pharmacist cannot be the attendant for meaning. It must come through the development of integrity, character, sense of control, and efforts on behalf of a cause greater than oneself. Even if one is no Mother Theresa, it can be built, this meaningfulness. No matter where we end up, the starting place is always where we find ourselves. We begin through doing any job with honesty, helpfulness, and concern for others.

Nature Versus Nurture, II:Of David Reimer, & A Man Who Tampered With A Human Being For The Sake of His Career

(See the earlier article for the first part.)

The tragic story of David Reimer can be traced to one man, John Money, who put career, ideology, and dogmatism above any real concern for a human being. He wanted to prove that nurture could prevail over nature and used Reimer as his guinea pig, trying to make the boy think like a girl, messing with his mind, and generally making a wreck of the lad. "For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate experiment to prove that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation—an experiment all the more irresistible because David was an identical twin. His brother, Brian, would provide the perfect matched control, a genetic clone raised as a boy."

"Just shy of a month ago, I got a call from David Reimer's father telling me that David had taken his own life. I was shocked, but I cannot say I was surprised. Anyone familiar with David's life—as a baby, after a botched circumcision, he underwent an operation to change him from boy to girl—would have understood that the real mystery was how he managed to stay alive for 38 years, given the physical and mental torments he suffered in childhood and that haunted him the rest of his life. I'd argue that a less courageous person than David would have put an end to things long ago. . . .

David Reimer was one of the most famous patients in the annals of medicine. Born in 1965 in Winnipeg, he was 8 months old when a doctor used an electrocautery needle, instead of a scalpel, to excise his foreskin during a routine circumcision, burning off his entire penis as a result. David's parents (farm kids barely out of their teens) were referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, home of the world's leading expert in gender identity, psychologist Dr. John Money, who recommended a surgical sex change, from male to female. David's parents eventually agreed to the radical procedure, believing Dr. Money's claims that this was their sole hope for raising a child who could have heterosexual intercourse—albeit as a sterile woman with a synthetic vagina and a body feminized with estrogen supplements. . . .

The reality was far more complicated. At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In school, she was relentlessly teased for her masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She complained to her parents and teachers that she felt like a boy; the adults—on Dr. Money's strict orders of secrecy—insisted that she was only going through a phase. Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide; her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the neglected Brian eventually descended into drug use, petty crime, and clinical depression. . . ."

David Reimer, 1965-2004

After David's suicide, press reports cited an array of reasons for his despair: bad investments, marital problems, his brother's death two years earlier. Surprisingly little emphasis was given to the extraordinary circumstances of his upbringing. This was unfortunate because to understand David's suicide, you first need to know his anguished history, which I chronicled in my book As Nature Made Him:The Boy Who Was Raised As a Girl.

David Reimer was one of the most famous patients in the annals of medicine. Born in 1965 in Winnipeg, he was 8 months old when a doctor used an electrocautery needle, instead of a scalpel, to excise his foreskin during a routine circumcision, burning off his entire penis as a result. David's parents (farm kids barely out of their teens) were referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, home of the world's leading expert in gender identity, psychologist Dr. John Money, who recommended a surgical sex change, from male to female. David's parents eventually agreed to the radical procedure, believing Dr. Money's claims that this was their sole hope for raising a child who could have heterosexual intercourse—albeit as a sterile woman with a synthetic vagina and a body feminized with estrogen supplements.

For Dr. Money, David was the ultimate experiment to prove that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity and sexual orientation—an experiment all the more irresistible because David was an identical twin. His brother, Brian, would provide the perfect matched control, a genetic clone raised as a boy.

David's infant "sex reassignment" was the first ever conducted on a developmentally normal child. (Money had helped to pioneer the procedure in hermaphrodites.) And according to Money's published reports through the 1970s, the experiment was a success. The twins were happy in their assigned roles: Brian a rough and tumble boy, his sister Brenda a happy little girl. Money was featured in Time magazine and included a chapter on the twins in his famous textbook Man & Woman, Boy & Girl.

The reality was far more complicated. At age 2, Brenda angrily tore off her dresses. She refused to play with dolls and would beat up her brother and seize his toy cars and guns. In school, she was relentlessly teased for her masculine gait, tastes, and behaviors. She complained to her parents and teachers that she felt like a boy; the adults—on Dr. Money's strict orders of secrecy—insisted that she was only going through a phase. Meanwhile, Brenda's guilt-ridden mother attempted suicide; her father lapsed into mute alcoholism; the neglected Brian eventually descended into drug use, pretty crime, and clinical depression.

When Brenda was 14, a local psychiatrist convinced her parents that their daughter must be told the truth. David later said about the revelation: "Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn't some sort of weirdo. I wasn't crazy."

David soon embarked on the painful process of converting back to his biological sex. A double mastectomy removed the breasts that had grown as a result of estrogen therapy; multiple operations, involving grafts and plastic prosthesis, created an artificial penis and testicles. Regular testosterone injections masculinized his musculature. Yet David was depressed over what he believed was the impossibility of his ever marrying. He twice attempted suicide in his early 20s.

David did eventually marry a big-hearted woman named Jane, but his dark moods persisted. He was plagued by shaming memories of the frightening annual visits to Dr. Money, who used pictures of naked adults to "reinforce" Brenda's gender identity and who pressed her to have further surgery on her "vagina."

When David was almost 30, he met Dr. Milton Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Hawaii and a longtime rival of Dr. Money. A biologist by training, Diamond had always been curious about the fate of the famous twin, especially after Money mysteriously stopped publishing follow-ups in the late 1970s. Through Diamond, David learned that the supposed success of his sex reassignment had been used to legitimize the widespread use of infant sex change in cases of hermaphroditism and genital injury. Outraged, David agreed to participate in a follow-up by Dr. Diamond, whose myth-shattering paper (co-authored by Dr. Keith Sigmundson) was published in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine in March 1997 and was featured on front pages across the globe.

I met David soon after, when he agreed to be interviewed by me for a feature story in Rolling Stone. He subsequently agreed to collaborate with me on a book about his life, As Nature Made Him, published in February 2000. In the course of our interviews, David told me that he could never forget his nightmare childhood, and he sometimes hinted that he was living on borrowed time.

Most suicides, experts say, have multiple motives, which come together in a perfect storm of misery. So it was with David. After his twin Brian died of an overdose of antidepressants in the spring of 2002, David sank into a depression. Though the two had been estranged, David had, in recent months, taken to visiting Brian's grave, leaving flowers and, at some point prior to his own suicide, a note.

David also had marital difficulties. He was not easy to live with, given his explosive anger, his cyclical depressions, his fears of abandonment—all of which Jane weathered for almost 14 years. But with David spiraling ever deeper into sloth and despair, she told him on the weekend of May 2 that they should separate for a time. David stormed out of the house. Two days later, Jane received a call from the police, saying that they had found David but that he did not want her to know his location. Two hours after that, Jane got another call. This time the police told her that David was dead.

Genetics almost certainly contributed to David's suicide. His mother has been a clinical depressive all her life; his brother suffered from the same disease. How much of the Reimers' misery was due to inherited depression, and how much to the nightmare circumstances into which they had been thrown? David's mutilation and his parents' guilt were tightly entwined, multiplying the mental anguish to which the family members were already prone.

In some press reports, financial problems were given as the sole motive in David's suicide. While this is absurdly reductive, it is true that last fall David learned that he was the victim of an alleged con man who had hoodwinked him out of $65,000—a loss that ate at him and no doubt contributed to his despair.

In his final months, David was unemployed—for him, a disastrous circumstance. When I first met him, seven years ago, he was a janitor in a slaughter house—tough, physically demanding work that he loved. But when the plant closed a few years ago, David never found another full-time job. And thanks to me, he didn't have to. I split all profits from the book with David, 50-50. This brought him a substantial amount of money, as did a subsequent movie deal with Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. With no compelling financial need to work, David was able to sit around his house and brood—a state of affairs for which I feel some guilt.

In the end, of course, it was what David was inclined to brood about that killed him. David's blighted childhood was never far from his mind. Just before he died, he talked to his wife about his sexual "inadequacy," his inability to be a true husband. Jane tried to reassure him. But David was already heading for the door.

On the morning of May 5, he retrieved a shotgun from his home while Jane was at work and took it into the garage. There, with the terrible, methodical fixedness of the suicide, he sawed off the barrel. Then he drove to the nearby parking lot of a grocery store, parked, raised the gun, and, I hope, ended his sufferings forever.

From Slate Magazine, 3 June 2004, "Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide?" By John Colapinto.

( John Colapinto is the author of As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine where his original story about David Reimer won a national magazine award for reporting. His 2001 novel About the Author is being developed for the screen by Dreamworks.)