CPTPP Starts Today

Today the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership of 11 Pacific Rim nations takes effect. Canadians seem happy with the deal, particularly with the idea that Canada saw a good thing that the USA abandoned. A lot of Canadians see Trump as an idiot. This giant impetuous child who does foolish things. Not this Canadian. Yes, Trump is impulsive almost beyond belief, but he is canny. You don’t get to where he has gotten through stupidity.

The USA doesn’t need free trade with Asia. The USA doesn’t need tariffed trade with Asia either. In short, the USA doesn’t need trade with Asia at all.  Nor with anyone else. The USA is a pretty self-sufficient economy. It can basically produce its own consumption. It is the only major nation that could go it alone without a big reduction in living standards.

The odd thing is that the USA is the only nation who could reasonably absorb the exports of the world, and this has happened at a time when it doesn’t really need them.  I think we are going to see growing insulation of the USA from the World economy. I suspect that eventually, the USA is going to tire of spending money projecting power around the world and will leave the other nations to fight out their differences. That’s going to be a tough time for the rest of the world. The global unity thing that is going on now is at risk.  Maybe multi-national corporations will hold the sea lanes open. I suspect not.

Japanese Military Growth

There is a discussion in the National Post about growing military mights in Asia (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/david-j-bercuson-why-japan-is-building-its-military-fast). I don’t think it is widely known that Japan is the military powerhouse of the region. People tend to focus on China building artificial islands. Japan has real admirals that were trained by real admirals. Japan knows they cannot rely on the USA to defend Japanese interests. How could they think otherwise? Trump’s rhetoric is not designed to make people think that the USA wants to be the world’s policeman, at least not without substantial charges to the rest of the world. Plus the USA no longer has a strategic need to play that role, and it hasn’t since the fall of the Soviet Union. 

The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1947, as Peter Zeihan is fond of pointing out, was an American agreement to facilitate safe passage of goods on the oceans for countries that sided with the USA against the Soviet Union. This was particularly useful since the USA was not self-sufficient in various materials and needed these countries to be able to ship to them. But today the USA is the least dependant on imports or exports of any developed country in the world. Something like 10% of its GDP is exports, and a huge chunk of that is with Mexico and Canada. The USA does not need the rest of the world. The world can break down in chaos and it isn’t a big deal to America.

Japan’s growing military, and especially China’s, are no threat to America. The USA has 10 aircraft carriers. Any one of those carriers with accompanying equipment has more fire power than all the non-USA navies combined. And these carriers are now being scrapped…..and replaced with more powerful ones. The USA has China hemmed in by a string of military bases stretching from Australia to Japan. China’s navy is going nowhere without American permission.

Japan has an aged demographic….it’s population pyramid is top heavy, even as is China’s. The differences include that Japan’s is educated and Japan has learned how to produce without a labor force: Japan is highly automated.  In what other country are there robots visiting and caring for elderly patients in nursing homes?

Jordan Peterson on Suffering

I sometimes quip about the millennials, many of whom seem adrift and aimless, confused by the chaos of life. The Canadian clinical psychologist and educator, Jordan B. Peterson, has made it his mission, and his business (and a lucrative one at that), to help such people straighten out their lives. He may well be the best followed of today’s pop intellects, a cadre that includes Ben Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake and Sam Harris. I like Dr. Peterson. I suspect that he must have been a very challenging child; my expectation is that he was precocious, sassy, enquiring, and manic. He certainly thinks….and thinks. I find him to be an engaging speaker and a sharp and voluble intellect. Most of his following seems to be millennial males, and I am glad that there is someone like Jordan Peterson to challenge these young men and redirect their attention to new perspectives. 

Peterson points out that life is tragic, full of pain and sometimes malevolence. He seems to say we should embrace the suffering because that is what gives us depth. He says our goal should not be happiness. Yet he urges his listeners to make better decisions that will help them reduce their suffering and that of the people around them, and I find that contradictory. It’s a bit like the people who claim that heaven is this great place to where they really want to go when they die --- way better than life here and now --- and yet they fight to hang onto this inferior life. If heaven is so great and you are going there when you die, why resist death? Put your money where your mouth is. Likewise, if suffering is the richness of life, why try to reduce it?

I have not, so far as I know, heard Peterson explain what he means by “depth” when he says that it comes from suffering. Does he mean depth of understanding? Or, does he mean emotional intensity? Or something else?

Hindu philosophy seems to me to say that what we reap in this life is consequential to what we sowed previously. One would think that we should help people in distress because this would mean better rewards later, but No, to help relieve someone’s suffering means to be thwarting karma. If they are suffering, they are reaping it as they are supposed to, and we are not to be interfering with that. It’s a contradiction even as Peterson’s teaching seems to be.

I disagree with Dr. Peterson: we should aim for happiness. Our suffering comes from our rejection of our here and now. This rejection is characterized by emotions that don’t feel pleasant: boredom, anger, frustration, despair, and so on --- emotions that we feel when we do not like what’s going on. These are painful emotions. And they distract us from doing the wise thing. Or they sap the energy we would otherwise have for doing the loving thing. Or, as in the case of anger, they unleash energy that often is channeled into doing the harmful thing. Happiness gives us an equilibrium --- a balance or centeredness --- that allows us to focus on doing right.

I agree that someone who has never known much suffering is shallow…and yeah, I know I am not defining that. Suffering does teach us something for sure. But it is not productive to have it continue. That doesn’t mean that it is not productive to have the circumstances continue, for it is not the circumstances that produce the suffering: it is our response to the circumstances that yields the pain. The suffering can impel us to reprogram our minds to respond differently. I have long remembered what I heard Ken Keyes Jnr. say years ago when he declared something like “now being in this wheelchair would be a problem for me…..IF I wanted to walk.”