AJ's Blog

I am listening to a professor of mine lecture on the environment and sustainability. He is middle to late age, balding and Indian. He’s professional and Americanized, but as all first generation immigrants, still holds his culture obviously.

And I wondered at what point that he fell in love with environmental study. He may have plenty of evidence now, reasons that sustainability is an important area of study and that he can’t imagine not thinking it important.

But in the beginning - it was art that moved him. It had to be. I haven’t asked him, but at some point each of us needs a physical image or emotional image to convey understanding of a principle that results in changing the way we view the world. Art is moving image to representation and representation to impact of a viewpoint.

And I hate going to museums to stare at art. It’s not my gig, but somehow I think that all things of passion must begin with art. At some point, a person had to see something tangible that moved them to embracing a new view that is different than there past. Something is idyllic and representative and iconic for them - “when they got started” and the like. Think CEO’s with paper routes. Think Muhammad Yunus and encountering beggars on the streets of Chittigong. Think an animal rights activists first visit to a slaughter house. Or a Olympic equestrian witnessing their first event in dressage - watching grace and beauty unfold. Or curling or weightlifting or pinewood derby. It doesn’t matter - some encoutner started it. That encounter was art.

An exciting topic I know.

But what if we built a company to take care of them? What if they were in that middle place where they couldn’t do all the home repair themselves, but couldn’t afford to get ripped off? What if you started a service so the old people paid maintanence, employed qualified contractors and had them on call to take care of old people’s houses? Pay the bill and a bit more - the costs are lower because you opt in to the network, they have to advertise less and can afford to charge less. Just an idea.

I spent some time tonight with an angry friend. He is typically classified as ‘homeless’ and only gets really angry when he hasn’t had anything to eat for awhile. Understandable in my mind.

But sitting with him for awhile allowed me to measure the results of anger - and in many ways, as an economist might consider it, the cost of anger.

To get to anger, you give up a lot and remaining angry means that you have made certain sacrifices.  Sacrifices of judgment. Sacrifices of kindness, compassion, understanding and generousity. Sacrifices of patience. Sacrifices of perspective. Sacrifices of power in believing that there are other options. Sacrifices in the people who can be around you - so society bears a cost as well, bearing the externality of the discomfort you cause through your anger.

Anger costs a lot socially, emotionally and eventually physically. It costs a lot in the term of hope and belief in life as being good or people having decency. It costs a lot in terms of robbing someone else of dignity or learning that expectations were misplaced.

In fact, I wonder if anything costs more than anger. Anger leads to hate and hate to murder and murder to genocide and genocide to war crime tribunals trying to figure out how we didn’t get them to stop at anger.

Societe Generale hasn’t lost as much money as we have in the costs of anger.