"Temet nosce, tibi fide" (A personal lesson in self reliance)

It's always interesting to collaborate with others.

At first you begin thinking about all the great possibilities that exist when you get the best effort of others to achieve a common goal. It makes you think of grandiose scenarios, where your dreams are within your reach, and simply a matter of continuing on that diligent path. It's a beautiful thing when several people can visualize the same outcome and work together to achieve it.

But more often than not, it changes. What was once a shared goal becomes several different versions of the same thing, each with it's subtle nuance, each tinted by the perspective of the person who is unknowingly (at least in most cases) molding the original vision into their personal aspiration. And that's where it all goes sour. Communication breaks down, tempers flare, expectations are left unmet, and what once was full of possibility and hope, dies a painful memory. Kinda stating the obvious here.

But there's an aspect of ourselves that is often lost or diminished in the process of collaboration. It's self-reliance. Recently i've experienced this on a couple of my endeavors, both as a music producer, and as the founder of MTB. In both situations, there was a clear vision when I started, and a collaborative effort that in principle was solid, but as time went on, the concepts that led to the collaboration in the first place diverged until both endeavors became a mix of personal agendas, unmet expectations, and rancor. Oh it's been quite the shitstorm over the last week, I won't lie. After a long series of arguments and debates, I am the last standing member of MTB, and my music production business has been downsized to it's original staff (i.e. Me).

You would think that this would be upsetting, but oddly enough, it's been quite the opposite... Yes, there's been some sad/angry moments in both cases, where i wish things would've worked out better, felt disappointed in people, etc... But then hope crept in, followed by an amazing feeling of calm. For all that had gone wrong, standing by myself looking over the rubble of what had essentially been my life for the last year, I felt inspired, like I was more hopeful of these failed attempts being possible if I just relied on myself to do what I set out to do.

So today I tried my hand at writing some music again. I reminded myself there was no one else to work on it with me, that I was on my own, and that it was entirely up to me to make the best music I could. And I wrote. Better music than i've written in years, and more of it than I did in the entire 6 months I was trying to collaborate with another producer. Not just a bunch of 20 second riffs, but actual songs, with lush arrangements, and sounding pretty good without even having mixed them yet. It's like not having that 2nd person around unlocked a flood of creativity that had been repressed for the sake of collaboration.

To cap off the night, I read an article about Rick Rubin (the iconic music producer who I think embodies everything a producer should be), and it was the perfect close to an incredibly rewarding day. Now don't get me wrong, I am well aware I have a long way to go before reaching that kind of status, but reading about how he sees music, how he distinguishes between what's good and what's not so good, and how he marries professionalism with creativity, it restored my confidence in my approach to the work side of things, and in my ear for things, something that I had admittedly doubted through the course of collaborating with the other producer.

Obviously MTB will take a lot more to rebuild than a good day of writing music, and a pleasant article, but I take solace in this feeling that it will be ok as long as I stay true to my vision. Even if it's a few years to build this project back up, I've realized it's up to me to fulfill the promise of what MTB could be, and instead of bemoaning having to take a few steps back, i'm happy taking on the challenge of doing this by myself for the time being. In time, there will be new bandmates, new songs, and new opportunities, but for now i'm glad to just bring this back to it's essence, and rely on myself to build it back up better than it ever was before.

"Temet nosce, tibi fide"

(Know yourself, trust in yourself)

White Snuggies in Utopia (A comment on majority rules)

Is "majority rule" an acceptable way to govern? As some of the more avid readers of the MTB blogs may have noticed, this is a prevailing question. It's a topic that's been often debated whenever talking about the IRP, even internally among us who are working on it.

To begin with it's a difficult concept to define, because in human history, we have never really seen a true "majority rule" scenario. Even the most democratic of countries usually hand power back and forth between a privileged minority, and even if the occasional social-progressive/revolutionary rises up from the ranks of the common citizens to win a benchmark election, they are usually quickly invited to join the privileged minority, or join the martyr club. I'm sure you get the metaphor.

So based on the lack of real data to examine, the question of whether to follow majority rule or not is a purely hypothetical question: If we could ever manage to figure out a way to have verifiable knowledge of what majority opinion is, would things be better or worse?

Let's assume for the sake of this particular discussion that the IRP is the tool that allows us to finally have a factual majority opinion. We wake up one morning, and suddenly we all know if we're in the majority or minority on any given issue that we care about. Majority rule is suddenly not just a loose concept but a tangible reality.

Does that mean that we all don white Snuggies and live in Utopian harmony for all time?

Not a chance. The majority will make many mistakes, simply because people make mistakes. So if that's the case, why bother with something like the IRP? Don't our representatives speak for the majority? In my eyes, no.

When we legalized bribery in congress (that's what lobbying is folks, a legal way of bribing legislators), we planted the seeds of a puppet government, one where representatives are in place to play on the passions of constituents, all the while furthering the agenda of the wealthy few that keep them in the money. The recent Citizens United ruling only made this worse.

It's a broad generalization, but most of our representatives are in fact corrupt, and I'd be willing to bet a public flogging that if someone were to hook up all of congress to polygraphs, the vast majority would splatter the page on most, if not all, questions regarding misuse of power.

So given this sad truth, is our representative system a real democracy? And here we get to the essence of what democracy is. Democracy IS majority rule. By definition, democracy is: “a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them”. But if those that the body of citizens elects are, or become, corrupt, then are we really being represented? Or is it just the illusion of being represented, while in reality they work for their financial benefactors?

When a privileged few are in control, change and reform come at the pace they feel is necessary (if at all). Public well-being is secondary to wealth and power, leading to government of the wealthy, by the wealthy. What "trickles down" (thanks Ronnie) to the common citizen is essentially what those privileged few feel they can spare, which is in most cases much less than what the rest of us need to prosper. How do we improve things like health care and education for the general population, when it's up to the approval from those who only stand to lose from reform? In this country it roughly breaks down to 10% of the population defining what's good enough for the other 90%. Is this really a democracy? Or should we just call our government for what it is, a subtly disguised oligarchy?

If there's a tangible, relevant way to gauge public opinion (such as the IRP) putting the majority truly in control, this problem is resolved. It's not that education and health care immediately improve for the sake of following majority rule, that would be a foolish assertion. It's simply that we can improve these things as most of us see fit, when we see fit. It forces reform to be built for the common man and woman, centered around what the majority needs in order to prosper. No one person's agenda is above the others, no revenue stream is above the public good. The privileged few still have a voice, just not louder than anyone else's. And our representatives are forced to represent us, for we can finally know when they are working for us, and when they've been bought off.

Can the majority make mistakes? Absolutely. Even in this hypothetical world, there will still be bad laws, bad programs, and bad ideas that become public policy. But it's in these bad ideas that the brilliance of true democracy would shine brightest, because when most of us realized something wasn't working, we can simply vote to change it, without having money laden lobbyists and self serving Supreme Court justices derailing what the majority decides.

For me, it's simply the choice of oligarchy vs. democracy. I believe in majority rule because I believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people.