They're Trying to Wash Us Away
Russell Briscoe
Fractional CRO; GTM Advisory; Philosopher; I help sellers find their philosophy by closing deals and opening careers | MBA
I'm just returning to my home in sunny St. Petersburg, FL, after ten days relaxing in the British Virgin Islands. I know. It's a tough life. I go from a Caribbean holiday filled with beaches, boats, and rum back to my life on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, enjoying much of the same. Just less rum, marginally.
But it turns out, "all that glitters is not gold."
As we discuss in this week's Philosophy on News, a looming crisis is lapping on the shores of my fair State and smoking in the underbrush out West. Why do we live in places on the train tracks of hurricanes, fires, floods, and earthquakes? Is their beauty worth the intrinsic risk of catastrophe? And if it is, as Randy Newman sang in this beautiful song about a cataclysmic flood hitting Louisiana in 1927, are they still "trying to wash us away?"
Prima Parte : Philosophy on News
What responsibility do we have to ensure that people living in areas prone to natural disasters are protected by affordable insurance coverage?
Our country's largest home insurance providers are withdrawing from areas prone to wildfires and hurricanes, among other calamities, forcing homeowners to take state-created "last resort" coverage.
[Disclosure: I am a forced customer of Citizens Insurance, a "last resort" insurer mandated to insure my humble 1970s concrete block abode in a Bay-adjacent neighborhood. And the premium? Ouch.]
The tightening of insurance availability on "the residual market" (programs backed or chartered by individual states) comes with real insurance-affordability issues for many buyers, reverberating adverse effects in the broader housing and mortgage sector. The Consumer Federation of America estimates that between 2017 and 2022, home insurance premiums outpaced general price inflation by 40 percent. By no coincidence, the five states experiencing the steepest premium increases – Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and Texas – are all vulnerable to hurricanes or wildfires.
Further darkening the circumstances, most states do not know where the funds ultimately would come from to cover "last resort" insurance losses (i.e., FL could suffer $525B in losses, and CA roughly $300B).
Homeowners' insurance availability and cost are in crisis in America.
What would Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 - 1914), a bonafide multidisciplinary genius whom Bertrand Russell (no dullard himself) once called "certainly the greatest American thinker ever," say about the tightening and skyrocketing of homeowners insurance for nearly one out of every five Americans (roughly 60M people live in the aforementioned States)?
He'd disagree on mathematical, logical, pragmatic, and philosophical grounds with insurance providers' social Darwinistic impulses to not cover the entirety of the market for our national benefit.
Here's a little story to animate his answer.
Joe is home in Kansas City, MO, watching his favorite team, the Kansas City Chiefs, play in Superbowl LVIII in Las Vegas, NV, on February 11, 2024. He's a longtime State Farm customer who pays $3,000 in home insurance premiums yearly.
Jill is in her home in San Francisco, CA, watching her favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers, play in the same game. She was once a State Farm customer but now must buy her home insurance from California's "insurer of last resort," The FAIR Plan (nice name, eh), since State Farm stopped writing policies for homeowners in her area. She pays $12,000 in home insurance premiums yearly for a home similar to Joe's.
Although thousands of miles apart, Joe and Jill watch "Jake from State Farm" advertise to them both during the same State Farm commercial, laughing at the same wacky premise before the same ritualized half-time show during the same game.
The only difference is that State Farm is partitioning Jill from Joe in the marketplace, pooling them differently based on their immutable geography, and no longer offering a product to our 49er fan.
Although State Farm may have the right to sell its business products and services to anyone it chooses, the United States legal system generally holds that individuals should not be discriminated against based on immutable characteristics.
Is one's geography being in the path of natural disasters immutable?
Quoted from "The Doctrine of Chances" Popular Science Monthly (1878):
"It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle."
Peirce was always preoccupied with the idea of insurance. He did deep work on the coexistence of randomness and patterns, specifically how patterns help to navigate randomness in our lives.
Socializing risk using evidence-based patterning and like experience data is central to the insurance business. The main questions follow: For whom should the risk be socialized, and at what price?
For Peirce, it is logically imperative to pool insurance among the widest net of collected citizens at a spread of equitable pricing for the betterment of society. When we begin to partition populations and suggest that risk shouldn't be pooled, we as a society are saying that those people we exclude are not similar enough to the main body to conjoin. That statement goes to the core of who we are as a people and as a country.
In disgust, he pointed against "The Gospel of Greed," famously saying, "We are all insurance companies."
Seconda Parte: Your Philosophy is Your Business
Your boss assures you that you're setting yourself up for a long-desired promotion by hitting specific metrics and delivering on a critical project. You're working harder than ever—taking on this workload means long hours and increased stress. Instead of being inspired, however, you catch yourself ruminating on "what ifs" and worrying about potential setbacks.
"What if I muck this project up?"
"If I don't deliver on these numbers, I'll never reach get promoted."
"And there's no chance I can meet these goals if x, y, and z happens."
"And, of course, knowing my luck, those things probably will happen."
Several schools of philosophy have produced scores of brilliant philosophers who offer excellent and varied advice on handling worry and stress in the workplace.
The Stoics, the Pragmatists, the Existentialists, and the Buddhists all offer perspectives on how to align your mindset with the right action to regain control of tranquility in the face of uncertain outcomes.
Five hundred years ago, one of the most significant humanist philosophers of the French Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne, simply said:
"My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened."
Montaigne's humanist philosophy, beautifully written in his "Essays" (1580) on "some traits of my character and of my humours" gives us his take on a school of skeptical thought called Pyrrhonism.
The goal of Pyrrhonism is ataraxia, an untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul that results from a suspension of judgment, a mental rest owing to which we neither deny nor affirm anything.
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Who knows if lousy luck will stumble me on this promotion-path? Before I think about whether or not I can or cannot hit these metrics, let me rest my mind, knowing there's no way I can be sure one way or another right now. It's all speculation. Let me find peace and focus by suspending judgment.
Montaigne's quote has made people laugh for five centuries, but worry is no joke.
Worrying about our jobs and workplace performance can induce serious health problems. Stress hormones that worry dumps into our brain can fire a slew of scientifically proven triggers for physical, mental, and emotional issues in otherwise healthy adults.
And if you're not in a Montaigne mood, take it from Seneca in his thirteenth letter, "On Groundless Fears:"
"There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
Parte Terza
Here's a list of my current reading, art, and media with a short commentary:
Books:
Art:
The Museum of Fine Arts St Petersburg will soon begin a live conservation project! (March 16 - June 23, 2024)
This small, intensive exhibition will showcase the restoration of this gilded, painted, and carved tabernacle made in Northern Spain during the mid-1600s.
I’ve seen such tabernacles first-hand on my Camino de Santiago de Compostela and excited to witness the rehabilitation of one right here in my own town.
Media:
I love the FX series Shogun, which is currently airing on Hulu. I now want to read the James Clavell novel Shogun (1975) and watch the original miniseries Shogun (1980) starring Richard Chamberlain. I'm fascinated by the true history of William Adams, a ship's pilot who was shipwrecked on the shores of Japan in 1600, later to become a Western Samurai and advisor to the Shogun of the time.
I recently signed up for "History Hit." HH is a digital media company and online platform founded by British historian Dan Snow (I'm a big fan). It provides a wide range of historical content, including articles, podcasts, videos, and live events, covering various topics and periods of history. I'm looking forward to watching DS's continued series "Crossroads of History," which profiles Ancient Jordan. For a taste of the content, select videos can be found on YouTube.
Parte Quatra
Parte Quinta
What Has Happened Down Here Is The Wind Have Changed.
Clouds Roll In From The North And It Started To Rain.
Rained Real Hard And Rained For A Real Long Time.
Six Feet Of Water In The Streets Of Evangeline …
Riferimenti