In 1697 Jean Bernoulli posed a problem that stumped ordinary minds, some great minds, and some brilliant minds. It did not stump one particular mind. That mind’s solution to the problem was in itself a declaration of the author, for only one person was smart enough to solve the problem in a flash.

Bernoulli’s problem dealt with two points and a question. What is the curve along which a particle could fall from the upper point to the lower one in the least time? The Royal Society gave the problem to Isaac Newton in the afternoon, and he gave the solution the next morning, reportedly having solved it before retiring for the evening.

When the Royal Society sent the solution to Bernoulli without the name of the person who solved the problem, Bernoulli supposedly exclaimed, “Tanquam ex ungue leonem,” an expression that means “as the lion is known by its claw.” Bernoulli recognized Newton in his work, acknowledging the great mathematician’s reputation: The hand of Newton was in his work.

What if you didn’t sign your work? What if you went about quietly solving problems for others? No fanfare, no awards, and no breast-beating? Would we recognize you in your work?

Obviously, the cosmos is a bit too much to take in. Just about everyone argues some point about the exact nature of its origin, makeup, extent, and end. The arguments are, for the most part, extraneous to everyday life. Most people probably don’t think the nature of the cosmos plays much of a role in their personal lives.

But somewhere in the back of all consciousness lies the thought that the individual is in a place, and the place is in the cosmos. It’s the context for all that is personal. So, how do we deal with this background? We replace it. We focus on microcosms. We make our own worlds, worlds that we can understand. Some are relatively simple, like arenas where the dramas of sport play out in defined principles and laws. Some are relatively complex, like social intrigues. Are the microcosms distractions from the larger encompassing entity? Yes, but they serve a purpose.

Microcosms are the only worlds we can deal with in totality. The larger cosmos, the Background of Everything, is indefinite, if not infinite. Finite beings have difficulty with infinities and with the undefined. Microcosms of any kind allow us to frame worlds we can see in total and ones that we can influence or even change in some way.

Look at the microcosms you will enter or originate today.  

Abraham Maslow, to the delight of Introduction to Psychology professors and to the sadness of freshmen undergraduates assigned to memorize his work, labeled five basic human needs and put them on a pyramid. Psychologists no doubt find Maslow’s Five useful, but in more recent renditions, they add qualifiers. I announce today a different set of needs for freshmen to learn, a simpler one that involves just three needs and doesn’t use a pyramid, eliminating some steps in the memorization process.  

So what are my basic three needs? They are Place, Peace, and Power. The second of my needs ensures that the second Maslow need, safety, is met. The third ensures the essential self-actualization and esteem that Maslow puts at the top of his pyramid. And the first? Well, we are obviously bound to place of some kind, but with the assurance of Peace, then the place where we are meets our physiological needs. See. I’ve simplified the system with no disrespect to Maslow’s followers.

“No, you haven’t,” you say (because you are someone who just made an A in psych class or because you are someone with yellowed notes you’ve recited to a couple of generations of students). Maslow’s hierarchy lists subcategories, and then there are those versions of the hierarchy that contain even more needs, such as higher levels for aesthetic and transcendence needs (art and charity, in short).

I respond humbly, “But doesn’t Power give us the ability to do as we will, to create art and to be altruistic? You know, for now I’m sticking with just the three ‘Ps,’ and if you want subcategorization, then the ‘Power to maintain Peace of Mind, Body, and Place.’ Of course, I don’t expect my three Ps to get into a freshman psych book at any time in the near future. That would require having the power to inject thoughts that might disrupt the peace of those in their special place atop the pyramid."

The story of the Great Depression is familiar even to those who did not live during decade after October 24, 1929. Articles, books, and films have depicted the crash of the stock market and the subsequent economic downturn that affected the world. Word of the crash spread rapidly. The tickertape machines could not keep up with the burgeoning sell-off, and by 11:30 a.m. many people had lost much of their wealth. People took the crash personally, as 11 suicides in New York alone on that day attest.

The market is a model of groupthink. Something initiates a downturn (or upturn), and suddenly people are jumping to join in the trading. Individuals can lose their identities and wealth as they conform to the movement du jour. “This is not a fair assessment!” you exclaim. “All those people had a very personal and individual stake in the trend of the market on that bleak October day. Each was acting individually to save his investment; each tried to avoid loss.”

You are correct, of course, but that is only part of the story. The loss of individuality came as not in the form of just one or a few people, but rather as a large group that thought the same way. By 11:30 a.m. their thinking had undercut the market so much that not even J. P. Morgan and other bankers—who subsequently had injected money into the system to stop the damage—could prevent the larger crash. Think about that. By 11:30 a.m. a large segment of investors acted in unison and panic.

Groupthink works very fast on a vast number of people. And today, with our more sophisticated interconnectedness, it spreads both emotions and ideas more rapidly and more extensively than anyone reading tickertape back in 1929 could imagine. Groupthink here is groupthink there in minutes. Place is irrelevant when one joins the group.

Of course, there are those who recognize a particular instance of groupthink as it occurs, and they enjoy some freedom from mob decisions. But to some extent all of us are like those in a rapid sell-off before 11:30 a.m., people who think and act because others, nameless others, are thinking and acting. Do we individually act with the group as a matter of self-preservation? Is it a matter of passive conformity? Is it just a matter of taking generalizations and applying them specifically? And how do we know when our thinking isn’t groupthinking?

Forget stock market economics for a sec. Acting to save your money is prudent, so when a financial crisis occurs, regardless of the number of people involved you have to take self-serving steps even when such steps are imitative. But consider any aspect of your life, such as whom you follow, whom you disdain, and whom you praise. What can you do to separate yourself from groupthink? Do you even care that what you think might be a manifestation of groupthink? Do you respond as the group does by 11:30 a.m.? You can be in the group’s wrong place at the wrong time or in the right place at the group’s wrong time. 

Often what we observe is an altered form of something hidden. We know, for example, that underlying active and dormant volcanoes a plume of hot molten and mushy rock matter extends deep underground. But we never directly observe these plumes or magma “chambers,” as they are called. Instead, we see magma in its altered states: Either as surface fluids we call lavas or, after cooling and crystallizing, as hard igneous rocks, such as granite.

As magma pushes toward Earth’s surface, pressure on it decreases, and gases like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide once held within the magma escape like the bubbles of carbon dioxide you see in an opened carbonated beverage. The extruded fluid that emerges to form volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens and widespread lava flows like the Columbia River Plateau is different from the source matter.

Like magma, our hidden character lies within and under great pressure. We can’t let it surface, or everyone will see our underlying composition. Some of that composition is dissolved in the underlying matter of our being. Even in outbursts of anger, ejected like lava during an eruption, we show the world something different from what lies hidden, something different because it can’t contain all that we secretly are. The extruded lava of personality is different from the magma of fears, insecurities, and desires.

Each of us might give some hints to our basic composition in our daily extrusion of emotions and behaviors, but generally, what lies below doesn’t surface as the same substance. Draw this analogy: On any planet the release of those hidden components affects more than just the surrounding rocks and local ecology. Earth’s entire ecosystem can be affected by big eruptions. The giant eruptions of super volcanoes like Yellowstone and Toba altered climate and life over large regions.

Typically, any release of our own hidden components can influence others. Those components, long hidden in the depths of our psyche’s chambers, can, upon being brought to the surface, alter our own lives as well, but possibly for the worse.

Magmas differ in composition, so not all lavas are the same. Some magmas exit the ground as fast-flowing and copious basaltic lavas like those in the Hawaiian Islands. Other magmas exit as pasty, viscous matter that is often associated with explosive eruptions like those of Mt. St. Helens in the USA and Pinatubo in the Philippines. Note something else: Magma chambers are themselves complexes of different components capable of producing different lavas during different eruptions. So also, psychic magmas exit as different compositions, either explosively or fluidly. In both instances, what appears at the surface is an altered form of what lies beneath.

Just as volcanologists sample hot lavas to ascertain their magmatic composition, we take samples of our extruded psyches to interpret the nature of the hidden, dissolved components. We can get a good idea of what lies below, but we have to do some extrapolating. As long as we understand the nature of our Self-understanding we can find the sampling somewhat, but not absolutely, useful or true.

Just about every philosophy is like a swivel chair. With our basic thoughts we can stay in the same place while we take different positions. Take a typical stand on protecting the very nature of the places where we live as an example.

We want clean water, clean air, and clean land. But then there’s that troubling stuff we call garbage, the excess of what we acquire, and the old worn out stuff, the once-useful-but-now-useless material that clutters our lives. We just can’t keep it around. It gets in the way of the new stuff we acquire. Also, there’s that stuff we need to produce energy for travel. We burn it, but in doing so, we produce something else for which we have little personal use, the particles and gases released during combustion. Even if we think that driving an electric car makes this “stuff” a personal nonissue, we have to face two basic questions: Where does the electricity come from? Where do the old batteries go? We can argue that we want to get around, that super-mobility is the mark of modern civilization. The pollutants are just a necessary evil. Take, too, our position on what it means to be a “civilized people”: We pride ourselves on personal hygiene. Cleanliness is next to… well, it might not be next to godliness, but it certainly allows us to be next to one another. What should we do with that water we used? We want clean water, but, except for a few who go through great expense and effort, we don’t really know how to use water and clean it within the confines of our properties. Our philosophy of a “sustainable environment” runs up against the necessities or the practices in our daily lives. Entropy tells us that we can't use something and still have it, but our philosophy of place is that complete sustainability is a reasonable and achievable goal.

Yes, we swivel. We stay in the same place intellectually, but change positions with regard to our own actions. Let someone else solve the problem, someone on a fixed chair. Trouble with that reasoning: Everyone is on some kind of swivel chair with regard to a philosophy of any kind: Environmental, educational, or axiological.

Swiveling isn’t necessarily bad, of course. It might be the only way we can philosophize about anything. No system is perfect, and, as others before me have noted, many philosophies are contradictory if they are carried out to their logical end. But even if we believe we have a great philosophy to sit on, one that is as substantial as the steps of the Parthenon, we find that putting our beliefs into action, into behavior, suddenly changes our position in some way.

Swiveling might even be a necessary aspect of human intelligence that ensures survival on an ever-changing planet. We might, quite by accident, turn the chair to a perspective we never had, one that seems to make sense until we swivel again.

In 1911 Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger, and Ernest Marsden used flashes of light emitted by a zinc sulfide screen to study atomic size particles deflected by gold foil onto that screen. In short, their famous Gold Foil Experiment established that atomic nuclei were very tiny, about a thousand million millionth of an atom’s total volume. Although unable to see tiny atomic nuclei directly, Rutherford and company made an important discovery by examining the effects of the deflected nuclei off and through gold foil.

Isn’t that method the same one we use to detect the nucleus of someone’s personality? Tiny sparks in the surrounding layer of humanity reveal where we affect people both directly and indirectly. Something we do or say bounces off, is deflected by, or passes through another and strikes someone else who is not necessarily the direct target of our words or actions. That person then makes a judgment on the nature of our nuclei, the core of our being, of our character.

Each of us elicits unintended responses. We throw what we have at the target we know, the gold foil. The foil, now beyond our control, sends words or actions off in directions we could not predict. We hit a target we never intended to hit. When it happens with helpful words and actions, we do unintended good. When it happens with hurtful words and actions, we do unintended bad.

When you speak or act, know that either or both will somehow be deflected and terminate in a ZnS coating on nearby humanity. Someone will probably see the flash and estimate (or judge) the nature of the particle that caused it.    

At his hanging, Edward “Ned” Kelly of Australia said, “Such is Life.”

His journey to the gallows in 1880 started when he shot Constable Fitzpatrick, an officer who was attempting to arrest Ned’s father for stealing horses. Ned was supposedly also angry that the constable was romantically pursuing his sister. So, there was Ned, now a criminal of his own making, on the run.

With some friends he fled into the bush, where four policemen encountered him at Stringybark Creek. Ned killed three of them. The killings made him both infamous and famous. For the upper class, Ned was a common criminal and murderer. For the lower class, he was an incarnation of Robin Hood, a guy who defended his family. Like Robin Hood who fought the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and who fled into the forest, Ned and his followers posed a threat from the bush.

The story even turns a bit more medieval-like. Ned fashioned some iron armor to wear. However, in a gun battle in the town of Glenrowan, his armor failed against bullets, and Ned was captured. Ned stood trial, was condemned to death, and was hanged. That’s when Ned uttered his, “Such is life.”

No, Ned. Life doesn’t have to be “such.” Yes, there are extraordinary circumstances; sometimes we encounter what we would ordinarily avoid. But, Ned, we make life—that is, we make “a life.” Maybe you should have said, “Such is my life.” You pulled the trigger. You fashioned the armor. You became the criminal. Such was your life.

We don’t have to be folk heroes and outlaws like Ned to say to ourselves, “Such is my life. What am I making it?”  

What if there were insurance against loss of morality? What if the entire world were required to have the policy? You know, group insurance.

What would the premium cost? Who would indemnify? What would the payoff be? How would those who lost morality be compensated?

Would there be a policy that would cover “prior immorality” or one that would cover “terminal immorality”? What if all the insured were just scammers waiting to collect? Insurance fraud might be a problem.

Covering everyone would be difficult. Some might never apply for the insurance. Some might want coverage for “collision” only just to protect themselves from liability for damage to others. Some might choose only minimum coverage. How do we cover the uninsured?

Let’s make you the insurer. You decide the parameters of the policy and the coverage. You decide the premium, and you adjust the claims. Before you take the job, you should know that the entire world is borrowing against the policy. That can’t be good for the insurance company.

Would the policy change from place to place because of actuarial morality tables, that is, because one person's or culture's morality is another's immorality? What if the world is not a moral place to begin with? What if a “moral world” is an illusion? Is universal coverage a myth?

Have you encountered a Moriarty? Moriarty, if you recall, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s clever and ruthless villain in two of his stories about Sherlock Holmes. Moriarty is an opponent equal in abilities but opposite in intention to the famous detective. His existence is independent of Holmes’s profession. That is, Holmes bears no responsibility for the rise of Moriarty. The bad guy just appears on the scene, and Holmes has to deal with him.

Sometimes a Moriarty just appears in our lives. We do nothing to enhance the villain’s rise to power. We just happen to be there when Moriarty comes along and in some way invades our space. The frequent intrusion of a Moriarty has pretty much been the way of the world for the past, hmmmm, 200,000 years. While minding their own business for millennia, innocent people have found and still find their lives disrupted when a stray Moriarty crosses their paths.

The reality is that over those 200,000 years, humans have had little success in predicting the intrusion of a Moriarty. And today, we have, as our ancestors had, the same intrusion into our peace and security. I know, that’s not an encouraging thought; it doesn’t breed hope. So, try this: There’s no reason for any guilt on the part of the innocents. They did not then nor do not now bear any responsibility for the rise of a Moriarty. What innocent people do is not a cause of evil. But, like Holmes, once a Moriarty disrupts life, the innocent have to deal with him.

The trick is not to deal with our Moriarty the way Holmes dealt with his. In “The Final Problem,” Holmes and Moriarty lock in mortal combat above the gorge of Reichenbach Falls, where both fall to their deaths.

Want some advice? No one can anticipate every possibility, but through some foresight, everyone can have a set of plans for an encounter with Moriarty. One requisite for safety: No plan should include a conflict that casts an inordinate risk on the innocent. In short, get Moriarty to fall off the cliff by himself.