Daniel Goldin

Addiction's Secret Ingredient 'X'

2011-02-18T16:56:43-05:00

In 1972, large numbers of combat troops began returning to the states from Vietnam, many of whom were dependent on heroin. Alarmed at the prospect of flooding a nation in the grip of a crime wave with lifelong addicts, President Nixon hired Lee Robbins, a leading light in psychiatric epidemiology, to study drug abuse among the returning soldiers. Lee Robbins studied 400 returning soldiers, all of whom reported themselves as addicted to heroin, all of whom shot, smoked or inhaled the drug on a regular basis and all of whom experienced physical withdrawal symptoms upon stopping use. In 1974, Lee Robbins published her surprising results. Two years later, only 12 percent of these soldiers continued to meet the study's criteria for addiction. ¹

How do we square the notion of addiction as "a chronic, relapsing brain disease" with such overwhelming evidence of spontaneous recovery? And what caused 350 soldiers to use heroin compulsively in Vietnam and to stop when they returned to the states?

The secret ingredient X that is the sine qua non of addictive behaviors in humans has as much to do with the mind as it does with the brain: it is our sense of time. The addict trades feeling worse in the future for feeling better in the present, a bad deal made in order to override immediate, overwhelming emotions. Unsolved problems inevitably get worse, and the addict, by systematically falsifying with drugs, the feelings his body reports to his brain, gets worse at solving them. But he can always rely on the same desperate solution: He can operate directly on his emotions by taking more substances. Soon the solution is the problem. The future shrinks around the addict, measured in minutes and hours instead of days and years.

All humans tend to discount future over immediate rewards, choosing, say, $5 today over $10 next month. But this tendency, known in economic models of behavior as future or delay discounting, is far more pronounced in those who have patterned their lives around addictive behaviors. Among heroin users, studies have shown that the future discounting rates are about twice that of control participants.

So what might have happened to our troops in Vietnam to produce a state of temporary dependence on heroin? When faced with a threat to our immediate survival, we sacrifice reflection for speed of response. We do not dwell on our feelings in order to string the events around us into a narrative, but feel and act simultaneously. We remain oriented entirely to the moment. No one thinks about their college education during a firefight. In short, hostile, uncertain environments such as Vietnam, greatly increase our natural tendency to devalue the future. When our Vietnam veterans returned to the states, their sense of time opened up again. Feelings for family and career; "big picture" feelings gradually took precedence over immediate regulation of emotions, and heroin lost much of its draw.

But what about the 12 percent of soldiers in the study who continued to use heroin compulsively? Interestingly, the percentage corresponds almost exactly to the percentage of combat soldiers who experience significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress. In ordinary life, we recall sequences of events by re-experiencing in a mindful, minor-key way the emotions connecting them. Traumatic stress reactions cause us to relive, rather than remember our past horrors. We experience these horrors not as sequences in a narrative from which we emerge intact but in the same intense, uncertain, bodily way that we experienced them originally, and with a similar bias for the moment over the future. It is not surprising that between 25 percent and 50 percent of those who seek substance abuse treatment regularly experience intrusive thoughts, nightmares and somatosensory flashbacks around trauma cues.² It may be that many of the veterans who continued to use heroin remained in the perpetual present tense of Vietnam.

How do those who struggle with symptoms of post-traumatic stress and those who battle a thirst for substances (often one and the same) widen their temporal horizons? By telling their stories. Functional MRIs have revealed that the same brain regions involved when one considers the past are activated when one projects into the future. ³ One must look backward to see forward. To accomplish this double process, one needs to be able to reflect on one's feelings, as all sequential recollections are glued together by an awareness of internal states. For an individual who has spent years suppressing emotions by taking drugs, it is useful to have the support of a reflective, elaborative listener who can provide some of the internal glue. It is no accident then that two mainstays of AA are the sharing of stories and the forming of mentoring relationships.

1. Robins, L. N., Helzer, J.E. Hesselbrock, M., & Wish, E. (1980). Vietnam veterans three years after Vietnam: How our study changed our view of heroin. In L. Brill, C. Winick (Eds.), Yearbook of substance use and abuse. New York: Human Science Press.

2. Marion Solomon, Daniel Siegel, Healing Trauma: Attachment, mind, body, and brain, W.W. Norton and Company: 1999.

3. Donna Rose Addisa, Alana T. Wonga, and Daniel L. Schactera, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, United States. Received 1 July 2006; revised 26 October 2006; accepted 27 October 2006.

ADHD proven to be a genetic disorder! Well, maybe not.

2010-12-06T13:41:02-05:00

Medical News Today recently ran a headline stating "ADHD Is A Genetic Neurodevelopmental Disorder, Scientists Reveal." They drew this headline from a recent study published in The Lancet, which analyzed the DNA of 366 children diagnosed with ADHD against a much larger control group. The study in The Lancet concluded that 15% of the ADHD sample had chunks of DNA missing or duplicated compared to 7% of the control group. This is a significant result, suggesting a probable genetic predisposition for some children with problems with inattention and impulsivity.

But it hardly justifies the headline nor the statement by Professor Anita Thapar, lead investigator of the study:

"Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children."

In fact, if one looks closely at the numbers, a more accurate headline begins to take shape: "85% of ADHD cases found to have no genetic basis." Admittedly, this is an over-simplification, as there may be other, hitherto undiscovered genetic markers implicated in impulsivity and inattention. However, if you consider the fact that the investigators in most studies of ADHD are more rigorous in their election process than clinicians, who often diagnose and prescribe stimulants for "subclinical" cases, the percentage of nongenetic impulsive/inattentive behavior is probably far higher than 85%. Not to mention that the headline and Professor Anita Thapar's conclusion ignore the complex interaction between environment and heredity at the heart of nearly all psychological diagnoses. The fact that 7% of the "normal" population have the same genetic markers and no diagnostically significant symptoms suggests that DNA abnormalities are just pieces in a larger puzzle.

The problem is that spin in medical journals has a huge effect on clinical practice. You can be sure that pharmaceutical reps have incorporated the headlines, rather than the numbers, into their talking points. And how many pediatricians and psychiatrists look past these headlines to the nuanced results? CHADD, the largest ADHD patient advocacy group (largely funded by drug companies), now states in its website, without referencing specific studies:

"There is little question that heredity makes the largest contribution to the expression of [ADHD] in the population. "

The belief that ADHD is determined by genes invariably means that a child will be treated with stimulant medication rather than therapy. You don't use words against a brain abnormality. The numbers bear this out. Global sales of ADHD drugs increase 8% year on year and are forecast to reach $4.3 billion by 2012. For the parent who consults with a doctor about a child's impulsive behavior, caveat emptor.

The Limits of Neuroscience

2010-11-04T18:37:41-04:00

When I set about becoming a writer in my twenties, I felt I needed to understand the nuts and bolts of language. I compiled lists of words and learned their etymologies. I broke down the sentence structure of books I admired in the hope of discovering a particle physics behind their greatness. One day I came upon Tolstoy's response to an accusation that he used language in an ordinary way. "You don't need beautiful bricks," he wrote, "to build a beautiful building."

When I entered the field of psychology, I felt I needed to understand the inner workings of the brain. The 1990s promised that we were edging ever closer to Freud's dream of uncovering a "nerve" basis of the psyche. The DMH demanded "evidence-based practice," looking to a reductive medical model imported from the physical sciences. In county clinics, I watched psychiatrists educate patients by referring to diagrams of the brain, pointing out how ADHD arises out of deficits in frontal-lobe processing and PTSD from dissociation of limbic areas from higher cortical regions. I struggled to memorise the specialisations of brain areas. I learned about myelination and action potential and absorbed Daniel Siegel's definition of mental health as brain integration.

But psychotherapy seemed to me to happen on a different dimension. Consider the case of a 20 year old client who came to me with "presenting problems" of ADHD and a strange phobia toward motes of dust. He demanded to know exactly what was wrong with his brain and how I could fix it. It turned out that behind the urgency of his desire for a "brain" explanation was a fear that his symptoms proved that he had been cursed by God for his thoughts and behavior. If only his problems could be understood as physical instead of moral. My client lived at home, under the rule of a father who followed a dogmatic religion and discharged his anger by violently punishing family members for violations of biblical rules. My client's greater difficulty turned out to involve separating out his anger at his abusive father from the much-valued spiritual beliefs he had inherited from him. His phobias and impulsiveness persisted, but as we felt our way toward a larger understanding of who he was, they mattered less. Patients often initially ask for concrete brain-oriented explanations, but they tend after awhile to reject attempts to wrap a species template over their unique adaptations to the world. The natural course of therapy seems less reductive than expansive, moving from symptoms to meaning to narratives of the self in relation to the world. If our subjective experience boils down to chemicals squirting through the brain, why this fundamental human quest for expansive explanations?

Roger Sperry, who won the Nobel prize for his work with split-brain patients, provides the most credible hypothesis. In his view, feelings, ideas, values and other mental states are emergent properties of the physical brain, irreducible entities that depend on but cannot be explained in terms of their interacting parts. Furthermore, these mental states exercise a controlling influence over the physical components that give rise to them. In this model, "mind is in the driver's seat in the brain, in command over matter."

The notion of the whole exerting "downward causality" on its parts is best understood as happening in two mutually influencing dimensions. Imagine a rolling wheel. Its molecules obey all the usual laws of molecular physics. But if we consider the fate of those molecules through space and time, the rolling wheel is a more important controlling factor. Furthermore, we could no more predict the rolling wheel by considering its molecules than we can understand the meaning of this sentence by examining the individual words and letters that comprise it or understand a person's thoughts, feelings and ideals by analysing the play of neurons in his brain. This is not to say that medication, which intervenes on the level of the brain, has no place in treatment, only that it will never make the kinds of higher-order changes that emerge when two minds connect in the service of one -- not until we invent a pill that understands people.

Deconstructing the ADHD "Epidemic"

2010-02-15T14:41:19-05:00

In 2000, The American Academy of Pediatrics stated that ADHD is an epidemic.

8% of school-aged children were reported to have an ADHD diagnosis by their parent in 2003.

Diagnosis of ADHD increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006.

The production of stimulant medications Adderall and Dexedrine increased by 4,516%, while the production of Ritalin also increased by 375% from 1993 -2003 (U.S.D.E.A., 2003).

A few years ago, the Ecuadorian mother of a boy I was treating told me that her son's teacher wanted her son tested for ADHD for talking out in class. My client's mother wanted to know more about "this ADHD." I brought out the DSM IV statistical manual of mental disorders and showed her the entry for ADHD, which describes multiple "behavioral" symptoms of inattention and impulsivity, using phrases such as "often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly," "often blurts out answers before questions have been finished" or "often has trouble waiting one's turn."

The mother seemed to be in a state of culture shock. "This is a definition of children," she said.

The mainstream scientific response to this mother would be that ADHD is a spectrum disorder pathological only at the far-end of the continuum. But when we are close to placing 10 percent of our children at the far end of this continuum, one begins to suspect that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder is overly inclusive or that it is simply being misdiagnosed -- or both.

To understand the true origins of our current ADHD "epidemic," we need to look at the medical history of ADHD as it dovetailed with the rising influence of the pharmaceutical industry. Hyperactivity was originally associated with brain damage. In 1940, scientists discovered that amphetamines improved the behavior of brain-damaged hyperactive children. The 50s and 60s witnessed the explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry and the deployment of increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques. By 1970, what had been thought of as a hyperactivity brain-damage syndrome morphed into a developmental neurological disorder and got the new name Minimal Brain Dysfunction. Drug companies had already cooked up 31 amphetamine preparations, were now producing billions of pills a year and funding expensive research studies. By 1997 we had an even less stigmatizing name, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, with a new type (inattentive) and an extension of the age-range into adulthood. By the new millennium, mainstream science firmly decided that ADHD is a hereditary neurological disorder best treated with stimulants.

If we consider the history of ADHD, we cannot help but note an expansion of the criteria defining the illness running parallel to the discovery, and later the marketing, of an amphetamine treatment. Since doctors are not constrained even by the DSM's loosened protocols, there is little doubt that children on the unimpaired area of the spectrum receive the diagnosis. This expansion of market-share for the drug-companies should come as no surprise. They had the perfect pitch, true or not, for over-worked, guilt-ridden parents. "You are not to blame. Your son simply has an hereditary neurological disorder best treated with stimulants." And who doesn't feel at fault for their child's misbehavior?

Drug companies continue to push the message hard. They now spend 20 to 30 thousand dollars per American physician on junkets, free meals, trips, trainings, cash rewards to "high-prescribers" and free samples. It is now nearly impossible to find a researcher who advocates stimulants for ADHD who is not on a drug-company's payroll. The most famous case involved Harvard psychiatrist and stimulant-treatment guru Joseph Biederman, who admitted to congressional investigators that he had failed to report 1.6 million in payments from drug companies. Even the brilliant Dr. Russell A. Barkley, who wrote the book on executive function and ADHD, acknowledged receiving 24 percent of his income in 2007 as a speaker/consultant for Eli Lilly Co., Shire and Novartic, the makers of Strattera, Vyvanse and Ritalin respectively. It is hard to imagine how these researchers can remain objective when their self-interest leans toward a particular finding.

Even more sinister is how pharmaceutical companies have begun to infiltrate patient advocacy groups. CHADD, the largest ADHD patient advocacy group in America, receives almost 26 percent of its funding from drug-companies. CHADD appears to be a neutral patient-centric organization offering information, support groups, classes for parents, conferences, even a free "CHADD discount prescription card," but in part also functions as a conduit of information between the drug-companies and the public, going so far as to produce with Ciba-Geigy money a public service announcement advocating the Ciba-Geigy product Ritalin.

In part due to CHADD lobbying efforts, the Department of Education in 1991 issued a memorandum mandating that students with ADHD receive special education and/or related services. Many believe that the DOE memorandum was responsible for the explosion of ADHD diagnoses in the 1990s, as frustrated, easily blamed teachers now became major referral sources.

So here we are in 2010. We have a research establishment at least partially co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry, reluctant to question assumptions about the hereditary nature of ADHD and the long-term effects of stimulants. We have a sizable number of pediatricians and psychiatrists paid to receive pharmaceutical company talking points. And due to the work of CHADD and other seemingly neutral groups, we have a population of parents and teachers open to interpreting impulsive behavior and spaceyness as symptoms of a brain disease.

It is my guess that only a small percentage of children are correctly diagnosed with ADHD -- meaning they have biologically driven delays in frontal lobe development that prevents them from thinking before acting. Many of the misdiagnosed are probably mistreated children, as the behavioral symptoms of trauma and neglect are almost identical to ADHD. The well-known trauma researcher Jennifer Freyd, Phd. recently published a study indicating that teachers, responsible for the majority of ADHD referrals in the US, frequently identify children suffering from maltreatment and neglect as exhibiting ADHD symptomatology. The study goes on to warn that "we have a responsibility to investigate whether we are medicating abused or neglected children for misdiagnosed ADHD." The rest are no doubt children who lie in the mid-range of the spectrum, difficult, fidgety children with maybe more of a present-tense bias to their temperament, but unimpaired.

The Death of a Nonprofit

2009-12-13T22:44:36-05:00

I had been working for the last few years as a therapist at BHS Hollywood Family Recovery, treating "dual-diagnosis" clients in an outpatient drug program. BHS had been in trouble since the economy tanked in August, with County contracts gradually drying up during the course of the year.

After several rounds of layoffs, the CEO Henry van Oudheusdenhad, MSW, sent out a global email describing the millions lost in the last month. He ended the letter with an assurance that we will all band together and move forward as one. A few days later, Henry showed up to meet with our group at Hollywood. He looked haggard and stressed, and he perspired when he talked, which was his way. He was a heated guy. He talked breathlessly about how difficult this is, his love for this program, and how he didn't want to lose the program altogether but that it would be "reset" at ten percent of its current capacity. Then he went on, oddly, to praise the strength and flexibility of BHS even in the face of great adversity. Afterward, he spoke with each employee separately. He told some to pack up immediately and asked others to stay a few weeks to help transition clients to other agencies, which we all knew would be impossible.

BHS Hollywood recovery is in the heart of Hollywood, on Sunset and Highland, just across from Hollywood High School. We got gang-bangers with neck tattoos, fallen porn stars, Hollywood hopefuls who had come to LA to be closer to their dream, not to achieve it. The ones who ended up in therapy tended to have histories of horrendous child-abuse, which left them prone to emotional storms and an incoherent understanding of the past and the future -- Addiction's ideal habitat. I grew attached to my clients, which seemed to help them, and some got over their addictions and got better. It was a good feeling when that happened. Others "went out," or relapsed. I thought "went out" was a strange way of putting it at first, but I came to appreciate its descriptive power. When you call a client and get a message that his phone is no longer in service, you know that he has sold it along with his watch and his computer, that he has disconnected himself from the grid and gone out.

Ex-addicts run BHS. One of the top executives is supposed to have walked Sunset Strip during her using days. They are known collectively as "Corporate" and operate out of a grim stucco-sprayed structure in Gardena, also known as "Corporate." I remember my first corporate Christmas party. On the walls a few plastic Santas competed half-heartedly with giant matching wooden "scrawls" of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. A line of BHS employees -- most of them ex-addicts -- snaked around those walls toward another room. In that room, Corporate stood behind a table in white aprons, ladling out "barbecued" turkey and mashed potatoes. Most of us were embarrassed and a little spooked to be fed, literally, by Corporate.

After the recession, Corporate preached about increasing productivity, which meant more billable hours. The two therapists at BHS Hollywood were already seeing up to twenty clients a week and the chemical dependency counselors 30 or 40. We were being asked to sacrifice quality for quantity but didn't fully feel the pressure because of that word "productivity." It was hard to see talking intimately to people as a "product." Halfway through the year, corporate sent out a mass email with the headline, "BHS is going green!" This turned out to mean that Corporate would no longer supply plastic plates and cups. I wondered how Corporate could quantify treatment and yet be so misty and euphemistic about cost-cutting.

Around the same time, Corporate started "letting people go." Before the recession, people only got "let go" at BHS if they "went out." After the recession, every month brought rumors of sweeps. They're going to be closing a facility or firing 10 percent of the staff, we would hear. And then people would disappear. One day a co-worker just stopped showing up and we learned after the fact that he had been let go last week, along with thirty other employees at 6 separate facilities. In August, Corporate instituted furloughs one Friday a month. In September, a rumor began to float that Hollywood was on the cutting block. We were a small site with relatively expensive rent -- not cost-effective, expendable. It was just a matter of time.

When the blow came, the receptionist and most of the chemical dependency staff were "let go" immediately. Ex-addicts with felony convictions, they would not find new jobs in this economy and were looking at unemployment and welfare. The program director, myself and the remaining CD counselor were given a month "to transition" clients either to BHS' Boyle Heights facility or to another agency. The problem was Boyle Heights could only take a fraction of our clients, and most of the other agencies had either closed down or were full. We were a county-contracted agency with the usual government make-work that goes along with that, but we also helped a lot of people no one else would touch and formed strong bonds with them. Three of my clients began to talk about suicide. A few others "went out." Some left my office in tears or anger. I thought about my clients constantly during that last month but had no words to inspire security. On my last day, Corporate assured me that my clients would "be taken care of," but not one had been placed anywhere.

A few days before I left, I had a dream that I was smoking crystal meth with a client. Having been "let go," did I identify with "going out?" Or did I simply share my client's desire to extinguish emotions that had no solution or object? After all, who even to blame for this catastrophe? Corporate for their callous kow-towing to the bottom-line? California for cutting services to those whose minds and bodies most depend on them? The media for not attending to the plight of people at street level. My greatest fear is that our disappearance will seem to make no difference. Our clients might "go out" or kill themselves, but who will notice?

Booktopia

2007-02-20T14:30:06-05:00

Last week, The New Yorker ran an article on Google's ambition to put every book ever published onto an online, searcheable database, in other words, to create a complete, infinitely expandable library. The article focused on copyright challenges to this so-called "universal digital library" and on the possibility that a logjam around interpretations of "fair use" might produce an unhappy settlement and an incomplete database. But I'm sure the kinks will get ironed out. It's like putting a man on the moon. If we can do such a big thing, it will get done.

As I day-dreamed about having all of human knowledge at my fingertips, I typed the word "library" into the Google search box and clicked on the 6th result, the Wikipedia entry for "library". There I read about clay-tablets in ancient Sumer and temple records on papyrus in Egypt. I wondered if the ancient Sumerians sunk into their cuneiform to feel connected to their ancestors the way I do with print in libraries. I looked at pictures of an ancient, chained book at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and at an anonymous stacks, with aisles of books shooting to a vanishing point. This last image brought me back to feeling overwhelmed in college, so I made a quick escape by back-browsing to the Google results page and clicking on the third result, The New York Public Library. After declining a pop-up survey, I found myself watching a slide-show alternating between sleek ads for library events and a flat logo based on the famous stone lions flanking the entrance. These quick motion graphics did not seem to represent well the largest marble structure ever attempted in the United States, a Beaux-Arts behemoth meant to appear timeless rather than timely. I wondered who else was visiting this site now, fifty people maybe, all reacting to the same thing. I was having a public experience in private. The real New York Public Library offered the opposite: a private experience in public.

A few years ago, I took my older son to see Ray Bradbury speak in a library in Studio City. The author remembered out loud about his early days as a struggling writer and described his pleasure writing in libraries, "surrounded by my loves."

When I was little, my mother used to take me and my brother to the library two evenings a week. I went to the humor section, where I'd pick out books by Art Buchwald, S.J. Perlman and James Thurber. Every once in a while, I would find evidence of previous readers in these books: a dog-eared page, a phone number in the margins, a squashed bug or smudge or some unidentifiable indication of the book having been read. It was a warm feeling knowing others had been in these mental spaces before me. I think what Ray Bradbury meant by "surrounded by my loves" was not just the feeling of being surrounded by books -- and by extension their authors -- but of being close to the readers who left traces of themselves inside them. This sloppy human connectedness will not survive the universal digital library. I can't wait to be able to find any book I want on the Internet, but I'm afraid I'll lose my need to go to the library and that feeling of being with people in the past.

An In-Body Experience

2006-12-05T09:45:52-05:00

Yesterday my older son complained about his anthropology professor's Power Point lectures and the awfulness of being hammered by bullet-points at 10 in the morning. He quoted a vengeful line he put in his most recent paper: "Scientists and apes make perfect companions because of their similar linguistic and artistic abilities." I thought it was funny in an untrue way but not a smart line to put in a paper. I let it go though. I'm pretty sure he didn't really include the line, and I admired his hubris in mocking science. He is young enough where he doesn't have to worry about it biting him in the ass.

I believe in scientific explanations, but day to day I'm fine with the illusion of intelligent design and the sense that some eternal spirit lives in me. I even have shadow conversations with God. It's an indulgence, but a harmless one. I'd bet on Richard Dawkins, but I keep hoping Deepak Chopra will find the clinching argument.

Meanwhile, I try to keep up. I like reading books by scientists, particularly neurologists, partly because they appeal to my sense of the perverse with their phantom limbs and men who mistake their wives for hats. Science is so fantastically counter-intuitive. Recently I enjoyed an article in the New York Times about researchers in Zurich who induced out-of-body experiences in epileptic patients by zapping multi-sensory processing regions of the brain, such as the angular gyrus. The researchers theorized that out-of-body experiences were the mind's way to account for a conflict between the body's actual position in space and it's felt position, in this case distorted by electrodes.

Recently, I think I've suffered from an opposite problem: an in-body experience. It happened at a visit to a cardiologist after a bad blood-pressure reading.

In the echocardiogram room, I got to watch what I'd always thought of as a metaphor convulse and beat on a video monitor. A few minutes later, my cardiologist returned and explained that my heart walls were
thicker than they were supposed to be. A garden-variety problem, manageable with blood-pressure medicine, but I'm getting some of that good old-fashion true materialism.

As we get older, we come to rely on science, even if we only paid lip-service to it most of our lives, much as an earlier generation felt it had to face God. Hopefully I won't get to the point where I'll make a good companion to an ape.

Bond 6.0 -- The End of Heroism

2006-11-21T18:31:25-05:00

Shortly after 9-11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, whose name sounds like it belongs in an Ian Fleming novel, declared an "end to the age of irony." A few weeks later, Time magazine turned the phrase into a battle cry. Then NPR (which is the opposite of Vanity Fair) insisted that irony was still alive. And now we have a new, highly un-ironic James Bond to keep the debate going. Gone are the smirks and the double-entendres ("Just keeping the British end up, sir," said Roger Moore mid-sex-act). Instead we have a guy who looks like he's spent way too much time laboring in a gym, a guy who bleeds, who feels pain, who gets dewy-eyed when his girl dies. Gone is Bond's trademark unflappability in the face of danger. This last loss makes me worry not just for irony, but for heroism -- at least the kind of movie heroism Bond stood for.

What compelled EON Productions, after 40 years, to overhaul the hero of the world's most profitable entertainment franchise after "Star Wars?"

If 9-11 ended irony, George Bush ended heroism.

My first contact with James Bond came at a Rosh Hashana dinner when I was about 8. One of my older cousins brought along a James Bond 007 Shooting Attache Case, which contained a shell-firing pistol with stock, scope and silencer as well as a secret message decoder and a booby-trapped code-book. Wait, that's not all. A dagger slid into a hidden pocket in the side of the case, and you could booby-trap a hinge to fire a cap if opened incorrectly. I didn't know who James Bond was or what he looked like but I was hooked. A year or two later, my parents took me to my first Bond movie. I don't remember which one. I don't even remember which Bond -- Connery, Moore or the other guy. What I do remember is Bond dancing with a gorgeous girl. Suddenly a neat, round red hole appeared on the girl's forehead. A sniper got her from the balcony. Bond treated this moment as just another obstacle to brush aside on his way to saving the world from Armageddon. It is telling that I cannot remember which Bond. All the Bonds were pretty much interchangeable. They went after grandiose terrorists. They used high-tech gadgets. Nothing rattled them. They didn't negotiate. They stayed the course.

You see where I'm going with this.

The fantasy of James Bond depends on adults remaining in charge of our real wars. As long as we had grown men in office practicing realpolitik, we could run around shooting our secret weapons against the forces of evil, all in good fun. I'd be willing to bet that deep in some White House closet is a 007 attache case, maybe even a matchbox Aston Martin from "Thunderball" and a projectile-firing watch. Bush is the first president who seems to have made policy decisions by wondering, what would Bond do? Now that the smoke has cleared from our laser-guided smart bombs, I don't think we'll be seeing many unflappable, smirking action heroes in our movies. Not if we want the audience to buy the happy ending.

The Worm in the Coffee Bean: Starbucks' Union-busting, Greenwashing Tactics and the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

2006-11-14T13:05:39-05:00

A few days after putting up my post "Starbucks and the White Whale" -- a reflection on Starbucks' ambition to become a cultural taste-maker -- I received an email from Daniel Gross, a Starbucks union-organizer in New York, pointing out some facts I had got wrong. I had said that "most of Starbucks' employees work part-time." In fact, all of Starbucks' retail employees work part-time (the company includes management in its statistics), with no guarantee even of the twenty hours needed to stay on the company's part-time worker health plan. I had compared Starbucks favorably to WalMart, but a little research revealed that in the area of insurance Starbucks fell short of WalMart, insuring only 42% of its workers (this figure also includes management), against WalMart's 47%.

Even more alarming is Starbucks' union-busting policies. Starbucks new CEO Jim Donald hails from -- you guessed it -- WalMart, as well as Safeway, companies famous for playing hard-ball against unions, and he seems to have imported similar hard-scrabble tactics to the running if Starbucks.

The IWW recently won a settlement against Starbucks from the National Labor Relations Board in response to charges against the company for illegal union-busting policies, including firing workers for union activity. In this agreement, Starbucks admitted no guilt but agreed to the following:

"NOT TO issue adverse performance reviews or deny pay increases to our employees in order to discourage them from joining or supporting Industrial Union 660."

"NOT TO provide employees with free pizza, free gym passes and free baseball tickets in order to encourage employees to withdraw their support for Industrial Union 660"

"NOT TO create the impression among their employees that their union activities are under surveillance or engage in surveillance of employees."

It is not hard to read between the lines of this settlement to figure out what the company did do. It is also not hard to understand why. The presence of a union hurts Starbucks' "progressive" brand by implying that its workers have grievances. The company's official line is that it is already committed to the well-being of its "partners." Why join a union, it tells its employees, when we're looking out for you?

This "noblesse oblige" argument that a corporation can internalize a feeling of obligation toward its workers -- as well as toward the environment -- and regulate itself, is at the heart of the "Corporate Social Responsibility" movement or C.S.R.. The gigantic turnout for the Social Responsibility Conference in New York last week shows just how mainstream C.S.R. has become. The conference included representatives from Chevron, J.C. Penny, Pfizer, McDonalds, Ford Motor, Exxon Mobil and, of course, Starbucks.

Starbucks has long been at the forefront of the C.S.R. movement. The company donates to military personnel, offers community building programs, claims a commitment to sustainable agriculture and to the rights of foreign workers. "More than our logo is green," goes the slogan. Critics complain that Starbucks engages in "green-washing," offering only a minuscule percentage of certified Fair Trade coffee -- and only after public lobbying from human rights organization Global Exchange -- and an even smaller percentage of coffee derived from sustainable coffee farming. They bring up union-busting and low wages. The company's supporters bring up insurance and the fact that the company supports fair trade at all, which goes against its bottom line. They say Starbucks does what it can, balancing a desire to be socially responsible with a need to compete in global markets.

Who's right? Is Starbucks a good corporate citizen -- or a lousy one?

To understand this notion of corporate citizenship, we need to consider the history of the corporation. The first corporations were chartered by the government to accomplish public works requiring pooled capital. The Massachusetts Bay Company was one of these, charged with colonizing the New World. By the early 19th century, American corporations formed to build factories with no long-term goal beyond the accumulation of wealth. The Supreme Court, under John Marshall, protected these new capitalist collectives against state regulation by invoking the "obligation of contracts" clause in the constitution, which states that "no state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts." 1886 brought a landmark decision that still affects our thinking about corporations. In the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific railroad, the court defined corporations as "persons" and ruled that they deserved the same protections of "life, liberty and property" accorded citizens under the 14th amendment. The legal metaphor persists to this day under the term "corporate personhood," and contributes to a confusion in America between democracy and capitalism.

A confusion Starbucks exploits when it invokes its good intentions against a need for oversight. Corporations are not people, despite the court's attempt to personify them. A corporation does not have feelings or good intentions, or a conscience, for that matter. It lacks empathy, and no P.R. department or Corporate Responsibility program can substitute for this quintessentially human check on selfishness. Corporations are not evil. But they are not good either. Moral terms do not apply because corporations are not human. Is Starbucks a good corporate citizen? Of course not. It is not a citizen at all. The argument that Starbucks' workers do not need to unionize because the company has their interests in mind presupposes that it has a mind in the first place -- which it doesn't.

Corporations are powerful engines of growth, but we make a grave error when we assign human qualities to them. C.P.R. programs prove that external pressures work. But they do not indicate some intrinsic corporate goodness that should encourage us to let up our guard.

The Character Issue

2006-11-06T11:01:27-05:00

Last week, Bush joined other notable members of the GOP, such as John McCain, in bashing Kerry over a botched joke that inadvertently linked intellectual laziness and lack of education to getting stuck in Iraq. Kerry had meant to lambaste Bush, but his slip struck fertile soil. Many soldiers do join up because they lack education, or health insurance, for that matter, and risking a tour in Iraq is the price they pay for these benefits. Attacking Kerry for a remark he didn't mean about a predicament exacerbated by the GOP's own failure to address gross economic disparities in this country is sickening in its perversity.

It is also a tactic: Deflect the truth.

Two weeks ago, Bush signed an enormous military authorization bill, which contained an obscure provision to terminate his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a Republican who has worked courageously to expose corruption and incompetence in the Iraq reconstruction effort.

Tactic #2: Suppress the truth.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was reorganizing its public affairs operation "in an attempt to influence news coverage." Assistant Secretary of Defense Dorrance Smith describes a mission to "more aggressively challenge articles and broadcasts deemed inaccurate and make better use of podcasts, blogs and other new outlets." With 103 American casualties this last month, the Pentagon focuses on its marketing department.

Tactic #3: Spin the truth.

The election this Tuesday is not just a referendum on Iraq. The strategy of Deflect, Suppress and Spin that got us into this war and keeps us in it has been the president's approach, if you can call it that, to all manner of problems, from torture to Medicare to Katrina.

Bush has a character problem.

By this I do not mean a moral or sexual weakness but a psychological defect that is dangerous to America. Bush does not like oversight, neither internally in the form of self-reflection, nor externally in the form of a questioning branch of government. His solution is to control the flow of information, both to his own brain and to the world. Deflect, Suppress and Spin are tactics to support this dangerous habit of mind.

Luckily we have a legislative branch of government designed to provide oversight. Unfortunately, the Republican rubber-stamp congress has functioned as an extension of Bush, deflecting, suppressing and spinning its way through one of the most corrupt legislative tenures in this country's history.

The result: a president and a congress who are one. In short, a deluded government.

November 7th is about restoring checks and balances. You don't have to be a liberal to vote Democrat in this election. Thoughtful hawks should not tolerate an administration that goes to war in a state of
denial. It is not good for the war. Fiscal conservatives should not support a president who can tuck a 900 billion dollar deficit in some never-to-be-peeled-back fold of his brain. It isn't good for the economy.

We live in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world. We need our president to take reality into consideration before he acts, and if he can't review the truth, we need congress to do it for him -- something the current congress has steadfastly refused to do.

This election is about Bush's character problem and the urgent need for oversight.

Starbucks and the White Whale

2006-10-31T10:52:14-05:00

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article chronicling Starbucks' strategy of positioning itself as a purveyor of high-end culture. The company has already enjoyed great success promoting compilation CDs, original albums, such as Ray Charles' "Genius Loves Company," as well as the movie "Akeelah and the Bee." Now you can buy Mitch Albom's "For One More Day" with your latte, and soon Starbucks will open "media bars" in most of its chains, where customers can browse the 200,000 songs in the Starbucks library and burn them on CDs for a price.

This is all part of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's grand plan to make Starbucks a "third place" in people's lives, a caffeinated Ever-Ever Land between home and work. Schultz talks about leveraging Starbucks trusted "editorial voice" and relationship with its customers to become an entertainment destination. "We talk to our customers all the time," he explains. "Focus groups, exit surveys, things of that nature. Because we own and operate all our own stores, it's very easy for us to have intimate conversations with our customers."

I like going into Starbucks. The coffee isn't great but it's reliably good. I like the smell of a fresh stack of New York Times. The decor, covered with distressed fonts, hieroglyphics and wood-cut-like imagery, might have been thrown together by an imaginative small business owner. But something in me rebels too. I resent Starbucks success in replicating on a massive scale the one-of-a-kind sensibility of a neighborhood coffee shop. If I allow myself to be tricked, it's because I have no choice. They've put the real thing out of business.

The world's first coffee shop Kiva Han opened in Turkey in 1475. After traders brought coffee to Italy, the drink quickly developed a reputation as a subversive drug. Pope Clement VIII's advisors wanted it banned as "the bitter invention of Satan." Legend has it that instead the Pope converted the drink to Christianity in a bizarre baptismal ceremony. Coffee houses soon became a haven for disgruntled intellectuals, called "Penny Universities" in London. Charles II wanted to close them but chickened out in the face of popular sentiment. The Boston Tea Party was hatched in a coffee shop. By the 1950s, coffee houses became the favorite hangouts of the bohemian chattering class, launching Bob Dylan and the folk protest movement of the 60s.

In pre-Starbucks New York, I got my coffee in two places. The first place was the deli downstairs, where carafes of steaming coffee couldn't get their smell past the meatballs under the heat-lamps. The coffee was bad but good with a cigarette. The second place was run by an Hungarian and featured naive artwork by the owner's brother. Coffee was either a drug to be bought on the quick or to be savored in a behind-the-iron-curtain kind of place that seemed to favor subversive conversation. It was either a morning routine or a nightly act of sedition -- until Starbucks merged the two.

The name tells us something. Starbucks was the first mate of the Pequod in "Moby Dick," a Quaker known for his integrity and unromantic, mercantile instincts. Significantly, he was the one sailor aboard the Pequod who argued against fighting the white whale.

"How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

Ahab explains: "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

But Starbuck will have none of this metaphorical nonsense: "To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

The history of the chain gives us some more clues. In 1971, two teachers and a writer opened the first Starbucks in Seattle as a boutique shop offering premium dark-roasted coffee. Like the original Starbuck, the three were obsessed with integrity and getting the job done well, and the business prospered. New York businessman Howard Schultz joined the company in the 80s, added to the odd-ball, detail-oriented shop an unlikely sense of scale, and eventually bought the place.

Do we have a formula yet? I think so. Take something unique that connects to people in a direct way, shave off its rough edges and scale it up massively. The original logo of a "split-tail siren" with exposed breasts and navel gradually morphed into a contemporary new-age maiden, and the tiny idiosyncratic store grew into a vibe-in-a-box stretching from New York to Bangkok.

Starbucks has its champions and its detractors. Some say the company exports a "monoculture," much the way McDonalds does. Others argue that Starbucks has managed to keep its heart and its aesthetics even
as it rakes in billions. The truth lies somewhere in-between. As an employer, Starbucks is good but not great. The company pays its full-time "barristas" okay, but most of its employees work part-time, and its much-celebrated health-benefits for part-time workers don't compensate for salaries a few dollars above the minimum wage. Starbucks offers just enough in cash and perks to ensure a middle-class ambiance for its customers, but not enough to provide a middle-class life-style for its workers. But it beats Wal-mart, so don't complain, right?

As a cultural taste-maker, you can be sure Starbucks will seek its own kind, off-center artists who have righted themselves and are ready to scale up, to exchange real intimacy for the intimacy of the focus
group. Starbucks will not "strike through the mask" or go after any white whales. The company that rejected Springsteen's "Devils and Dust" for the saucy content of one of its songs means not to trouble
the mind too much. Ironically, this means the company will probably never offer "Moby Dick," from which it draws its name.

Is Bush Evil or Stupid?

2006-10-24T13:28:15-04:00

It is a sign of the times that writing this post makes me nervous about my future. Could it come back to haunt me when Bush turns Utah into a Gulag? Of course, I don't really believe this will happen, but an irrational part of me worries that it might, and if the blogs on HuffPo are any indication, I'm not alone. Paranoia is in the air. Bush has been such a disastrous president, we can use shorthand at this point to describe his failures: Iraq, Katrina, Corruption, Global Warming, Deficit. In America, we expect that the voters will eject the strategists behind such a pile-up of failed policy. The elections in November promise as much. But then there is the business of Bush's much-blogged-on smile and his persistent happy talk about a Republican route to victory, which inspired the New York Times to call him "Optimist in Chief." Maybe it's just a morale-boosting ploy, but to me the man really does not seem concerned. The paranoid circuits in my brain spin conspiracy theories. Can Bush steal congress even in the face of overwhelming public disapproval? Or is his confidence just more what-me-worry obtuseness? Does the smile mean he's capable of anything or just incapable? Is he evil or stupid? The fate of the world seems to hang in the balance.

"The best plan for the facts to be are is by somebody who spends time investigating it." Can the man who said this be anything but stupid? I feel some relief reading these words. Bush is more like Charles the 1st than Napoleon. You might remember that Charles the 1st made extensive use of the Star Chamber, which allowed testimonies extracted through torture and offered no due process, but his clumsy over-reaching led to the loss of his head. Then I look back at the march to war in Iraq. Bush was politically deft in turning 9-11 into an after-the-fact Reichstag. Rove begins to look like Goebbels in this light, and I begin to fret about Diebold Election Systems and martial law. Bush's indifference to reality -- "Brownie, you're doing a heluva job" -- is a quality we are accustomed to seeing in dictators like Kim Jong II, crazies who want to exert power not only over their people but over the facts, yet Bush pulls it off with a kind of numb Chauncey-Gardener befuddlement that keeps the question spinning in my mind: Is he evil or stupid? Our president's unilateral approach to international affairs might indicate a tyrant's need to go it alone or a fool's inability to collaborate with others. Is the Detainee Act the first pull toward unraveling the constitution or the work of a man who simply cannot understand the point ofhabeas corpus? That Bush managed to persuade 65 senators to back him on this suggests some political ability and seems to tilt the equation toward evil.

Proverbs has a great passage that has stayed with me since I read the bible in college: "As the whirlwind passeth so is the wicked no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation." The idea that evil contains the seed of its own destruction has been said in many different ways over the centuries. In Looking for Spinoza, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio considers ethical philosophy in the light of recent findings in psychology and neurobiology. Each human being, he argues, has a biological imperative to preserve itself by preserving others. "We must love one another or die," was how the poet W.H. Auden put it in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland. In Darwinian terms, evil -- which involves cheating and selfishness -- offers inferior survival value.

Evil or stupid? In the case of Bush, there may be no difference.

My Luddite Fantasy

2006-10-16T10:20:35-04:00

According to polls conducted by Democracy Corps, a strategy group run by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, Americans view dependence on foreign oil as the number one national security priority. Given the current news obsession with Foley, this is both welcome and surprising. The current wisdom on both sides of the Democratic/Republican divide is that voters fixate on moral questions, getting red or blue in the face over issues like gay marriage, leaving politicians free to serve their corporate task-masters. But it turns out voters are looking away from their neighbors' bedrooms into the future.

We've been hearing doomsday predictions about energy since the oil embargo of the 1970s. By the most optimistic reserve estimates, we have 32 years of oil production in the ground. And yet we depend on oil for 75% of our energy needs. The irony is that corporate America, so obsessed with its shiny logos and new technologies, secretly runs on decayed animal and plant matter that is hundreds of millions of years old, a life-blood that comes largely, as we all know, from the Middle East, and is dwindling.

When considering the end of oil, two fantasies come to mind. The first is a Jetsons fantasy of "freedom cars" powered by hydrogen cells, of biodiesal converted from bio mass, of satellites mining helium-three in the outer reaches of the solar system. I've sat in a Prius. You press a button and don't hear anything. The Jetsons' fantasy is of a silent future, clean and very cool.

Then there is the Luddite fantasy, where everything falls apart. I have heard it said that by 2050 cars will be a luxury for the very rich. The suburbs and the exurbs will die off like diabetic extremities as the oil stops circulating. Cities will grow vertically again. Local will be the new global.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, my brother and his friends met me at the airport. Despite being jet-lagged, I let them convince me to go straight to a club in Alhambra to dance to a salsa band. I drove for an hour and a half only to discover I was exactly where I had started. The same concrete, 3-tiered, cantilevered parking-lot, the same Arco station, the same 7-11. Los Angeles is a city designed to be experienced through the periphery of your vision as you drive: the man-made landscape is simple, repetitive and easy to read. I can be lulled into a fantasy of a more intimate Los Angeles, with parks and businesses pitched at eye-level and natural pedestrian traffic -- even though I know this is probably not what will happen when the oil runs out.

I think I fantasize because I feel helpless. Like most Americans, I look to the market to solve our fossil-fuel dependency. As the supply of oil drops, prices will go up, and renewable energy sources will become attractive alternatives. But after 9-11, it has become clear that the market is out of sync with reality. The climate is warming, our buildings are burning, soldiers are dying -- and Adam Smith's "unseen hand" just keeps pumping oil.

Carville's catch-phrase "The economy, stupid" should be revised to "Not just the economy, stupid." At last we've begun to look past the market, away from the so-called "wisdom of crowds," to question what we can do ourselves to get out of this mess.

Faith-based Sin

2006-10-09T14:02:10-04:00

According to the New York Times, the prosecutor's office in Los Angeles is considering a criminal case against Cardinal Mahoney, who heads the country's largest Roman Catholic Archdiocese, for moving "pedophile priests from parish to parish in the face of accusations."

Rep. Dennis Hastert has spoken at faith-based summits at the White House, quoted the Pope at the Schiavo hearings and spoken against abortion. Although a great defender of the unborn, he too has failed to protect the living children in his charge, in this case from the advances of congressman Mark Foley, himself a believer who once had the Pope bless his grandmother's rosaries.

"He is using me, all the time, every where..." That's what Tom DeLay said at the height of his influence. Did he really believe he was acting as God's servant when he partnered up with the nearly satanic Jack Abramoff and violated Texas' campaign finance laws? I think the answer is yes.

These are not isolated incidents. Nor is this corruption across the board. There appears to be an epidemic of sin in the political realm that has hit the faithful harder than the unfaithful.

Full disclosure: I am not a believer, although I've made stabs at being one. As a child I went to Sunday School in a reformed Temple on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Next to the Torah was a Protestant-seeming organ, and the Rabbi looked like Charlton Heston. At recess, all the kids would press their backs against the walls of the corridor. New kids excited to be let out of class found themselves flying through the air as someone's leg shot out to break their run. I think I came to associate religion with a fear of falling. My wife and I took the kids a few times to Temple on the high holy days, but all the talk about God just made me overly aware of my body, my stomach growled, my toes pinched, was that a headache I felt coming on? A few years ago, I went with a friend to a 12 step meeting. During the part where everyone holds hands and recites the Lord's Prayer, I found myself noticing the lacings of my neighbor's construction boots.

In times of great stress, such as after my divorce, I wish I had some transcendent belief to go to, but even when the world seems to have failed me, I press my back to its walls.

I have known people of faith. Most of them are naturally kind people, and I envy their ethical sureness. But politicians seem to acquire with faith an ease in overlooking, if not in committing acts of evil. It has always been a hazard of the profession to see people as pieces on a board to be manipulated toward an end. Does that risk become greater when you believe that this world does not matter so much as the next? Is it easier to deny what lies before your very eyes? Believing in what you cannot see is only a knight's move away from not believing what you can see. These are the tricks of faith that led Hastert and Mahoney to disregard the danger of powerful pedophiles in contact with kids, it led to DeLay believing Jesus smiled through his mugshot, it led to Bush dismissing a week's worth of casualties as "a nanosecond" and the Iraq War as "a comma."

Becoming the Enemy

2006-10-03T10:42:34-04:00

A few years ago, The Onion ran a headline, "Drugs Win Drug War." The ridiculousness of the headline pointed up the meaninglessness of declaring war on a product. It also told a twisted truth. If it were possible to wage war on a product, this particular product would be winning.

It is time to run a new headline, "Terror wins War on Terror." As has been noted by others (see Soros), the "War on terror" is a false metaphor. You cannot wage war against an emotion, any more than you can wage war against a product. But if you could... terror would be winning. And at least in part by our own doing. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, enhanced interrogation techniques -- these are ways to increase the stock of terror in the world, not decrease it. The truth is we aren't fighting a war against terror. We are setting up a competitive shop.

Consider what overwhelming terror does to the individual. Terror works its black magic by causing a dissociative response in its victim. Parts of the brain stop speaking to one another. PET scans of PTSD patients listening to descriptions of their terrifying traumas show heightened activity only in the right hemisphere, within emotional centers of the brain, and little or nothing in Broca's area, which has to do with putting experiences into language. An inability to reconstruct what happened verbally seems to spur the victim to try to master his trauma by reenacting it, either by exposing himself to similar traumas or by victimizing others. In this way, terror spreads from person to person and across the generations.

Has terror taken away our words to the point where we have made a false metaphor the basis for our foreign policy? Or has the "War on Terror" just become cover for a compulsion to repeat?

We can look at terrorism as a hybrid of a philosophy and a disease, an ideology that spreads from perpetrator to victim. As a philosophy, it requires seeing the enemy as sub-human, as so other-worldly evil that the rules that govern how we treat our fellow humans no longer apply. As a disease, it transmits that philosophy to its victims. Guantanamo is not a solution but a symptom. Abu Ghraib is evidence of further infection. The Detainee Act shows that the disease has begun to inflict structural damage, working away at our core beliefs.

Without realizing it, we have let the enemy past our borders by letting them inside us. We have cut and run from the principles on which this country was founded when we suspend Habeas Corpus and torture prisoners into confessing. Certainly we must fight when we are threatened, as we have in Afghanistan, but the greater danger comes from within, when we edge closer to Sharia on our own by spying on our citizens, when we begin to doubt our democratic institutions, and when we absorb an ideology that splits the world into good and evil.