Unknown White Male

I just watched a fascinating documentary that I have to share. It is called "Unknown White Male". The story goes like this:

Early in the morning on July 2, 2003 some guy opened his eyes in a subway car and did not recognize the landscape passing him by. He had never seen this terrain before. That can be disturbing in any situation, but he had more to be disturbed about. He could not remember where he was going. Then he tried to think of where he was coming from, but couldn't retrieve that data either. Finally, he tried to figure out who he was, where he lived, and what he could do next. To his fear and bewilderment, he had no memory of his name, his life, his past, or anyone who could help him. All he had was his body, the clothes he was wearing, and a backpack.

If this was Hollywood, the contents of his backpack would have been a 9mm Beretta, a 3 carat diamond, and a stuffed animal. If it were my backpack, there would have been at least a wallet with IDs and a cell phone. His backpack had a set of keys, a vile of medicine, and a "Lonely Planet Latin America Spanish Phrasebook". This guy was a blank slate, and he had no idea how to proceed. He played it safe by finding a police station.

The police took him to a hospital. There was no explanation for his memory loss, and only one lead on his identity. Inside the book in his backpack was a name on a slip of paper. He called the person, but they weren't sure who he was and they could not come see him at the hospital because they were caring for an elderly parent.

At some point, he was asked by a nurse to sign a document. Without thinking, he scrawled out his signature. It was almost completely illegible, but it proved that there was still some piece of him left. It also told him that his first name started with a "D".

The person whom he called has a daughter. She told her daughter to check this out and see if it was someone she knew. The daughter called the hospital and after speaking with him for a minute told him his name was Doug, he lived a great life, and she would come get him in 30 minutes. And that is where Doug Bruce began a fascinating journey.

As it turns out, Doug lived in New York, in The Village in a large, nice apartment. He was in his thirties, apparently came from money, and had retired after making his own money as a stockbroker for several years in New York. Doug began to videotape his experience as he rediscovered his life all over again. As fortune would have it, he had a friend who made movies and wanted to make a project out of Doug's experience. The two of them together made a fantastic documentary.

The movie explores some basic existentialist, philosophical problems. When Sartre or Camus discuss Existentialism, they are speaking in theoretical or fictional terms. Doug Bruce examined existentialism, epistemology, and every other category of philosophy firsthand as he examined life itself and who the historical Doug Bruce was with a blank-slate mind. In the movie, they compare him to a newborn baby with a mature brain.

Doug re-experiences snow, fireworks, and the London "Changing of the Guard", all of which he had no recollection of. Early in his experience, as he began to question who he was and where he came from, he wondered about his family. He discovered he had a Father and two sisters who were very loving. Unfortunately, he also discovers that his mother passed on some time ago. He had already mourned his mother at the time, but with his memory loss he was forced to mourn his mother's passing again. Of course, now he was mourning someone he had not known. I guess he was mourning that inherent desire in all of us to have a loving mother.

He meets all of his old friends, a network that is large and spread across the globe. He sees old movies of himself. He examines his keepsakes and reads letters he wrote. Nothing jogs his memory, but it helps him develop a fascinating perspective on life.

Everyone who Doug meets expects him to act like the old Doug. Most of the people I know guide their lives by other people's expectations. Almost everyone I know has made major life decisions such as where they live, their occupation, their spouse, their religion, and their political affiliation based on the expectations of their parents, firends, co-workers, employers, and the prevailing zeitgeist.

However, he is approaching life with a blank state and treating it as an opportunity to discover the axiomatic truths of life. Over a year after his memory loss, Doug tells an old friend that he does not feel pressured to recover his old memories. It is apparent that he is comfortable knowing that the old Doug was successful and loved by many people; therefore, the new Doug can be successful and loved too. If anything, it seems that memory loss has propelled Doug closer to the pinnacle of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Without the burdens and pressures built up over thirty years of life, he is free to take his possessions, wealth, friends, and inherent skills to a point of self-actualization.

Doug was lucky in some ways. He did not have to worry about a spouse and offspring, which freed him to take an adventure rather than desperately recover and fit back into the old mold. He also had wealth, so he did not need to worry about how he would eat and pay for electricity and retire--that was all taken care of. He also did not have to come to terms with being an asshole in his former life, as Hollywood loves to portray in Amnesiac movies. He simply had to take life in, let life happen, and draw his own conclusions.

Was he still Doug Bruce? Could he be held responsible for the bad things he had done (if any)? Was he obligated to like the people whom he had been close with in the past? Would he still have the same interests and preferences?

To boil it all down, Doug is an experiment in how much of our character is chemical/genetic and how much is shaped by environment. His friends and family did not get to hold a funeral for the old Doug, but since his molecules were still walking the earth with his voice and features, they never had to experience total loss. Two of his friends mentioned how they were quickly forgetting the old Doug and getting used to the new one.

One interesting thing that bridged his two lives: He had left Wall Street to learn photography. He had two years of school under his belt prior to the memory loss. Now after the loss, he wished to continue his studies. Legally, he was the same person and therefore was entitled to claim his transcripts. However, even though he paid for, attended, and completed the courses in his transcript, he no longer retained most of that knowledge. Therefore, his school required him to either prove he had the skills of a third-year photography student or begin his studies again. Within two months, he was able to re-learn two years of skills and enter the third year of photography studies.

One of his professors discussed how Doug demonstrated that much of his knowledge is contained under the surface, somewhere. He also talked about how Doug was now a more serious student and a more profound artist behind the camera. I suspect that they could have filled 90 interesting minutes just with Doug's re-introduction to photography and his transcendence of his former abilities and passions.

I can't say that this movie will change my life. I am not sure any movie has. However, this movie did something that is rare among movies: It excited by brain and made me consider new thoughts. For me, that is often the best way to spend a couple of hours. Just the process of thought can be invigorating. If that process leads to a new conclusion or idea, then all the better. Sometimes, it is nice to belly-laugh and suspend rationality. However, a movie that makes you think can make you feel like you accomplished something while being entertained.

Here is a trailer to the film:

Dreams vs. Memories

I cannot stop thinking about what I read in Chapter 15 of "The World is Flat" (Release 2.0, 1996). Author Thomas Friedman is discussing "The Curse of Oil" and near the end of the section, on p. 564, he says "When you have to make things with your hands and then trade with others in order to flourish, not just dig a well in your own backyard, it inevitably broadens imagination and increases tolerance and trust." After that grabbed me, I reread an earlier section of the chapter where, starting on p.553, Friedman discusses, "Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?" He says that if memories are emphasized over dreams in a company or culture, and of course in an individual, "the end is near."

The need for imagination and dreams is a deep part of the American culture, and has been since our inception. The need for imagination and dreams is what brought almost everybody here (those us who came here willingly.)

Today in the American culture, among people who have been Americans for several generations, you can see a similar divide. The people who have no imagination, no dreams, and who cannot or will not trade their services in the market place are usually the trouble makers, regardless of their location, race, and creed. I have seen people come from a poor ghetto, country, or trailer-park atmosphere, dare to dream, and went on to make something of themselves. It seems all that these rags-to-middle-class-or-better people needed was the audaciousness to dream (despite the laughter and maliciousness of family and peers), and an imagination to develop their competitive advantage.

In a global context, I see the dynamic that Friedman talks about as well. The U.S. has oil, but not enough that we can rely on it for our needs. We require imagination, innovation, and elbow-grease to feed our people. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates realized that they will soon no longer be able to rely on oil profits, so they imagined an indoor ski hill in the middle of the desert, and man-made islands in the form of palm trees.

I wonder about Russia. They are desperate to fix their economic problems, crumbling infrastructure, and demographic problems. They have oil, natural gas, coal, iron, diamonds, gold, and a plethora of other resources to sell. Luckily, those resources are not enough to run the worlds largest nation, because Russia has the cultural tendency to run rough-shod over its people and suppress imagination. However, non-renewable commodities are currently the primary fuel of their economic engine, and without those resources they would not be a blip on any economic radar.

When you read about Russia suppressing freedom and violating asset ownership it usually has to do with harvesting natural resources--but not always. There is also the problem of the Russian Mafia, which many people say is unavoidable at some point of doing business in Russia. The smaller municipalities have had a tendency to allow western companies to bring in imagination, technology, and capital, and then allow a local company to take over the operation. We all have seen the former KGB officer who somehow ingested a poisonous level of a radioactive substance, and the journalists who were critical of the Kremlin and somehow ran into freak, fatal accidents.

I see two Russia's. In both, the memory is long. However, in one Russia the memory is of the horrors of the Soviet Union and the Czars, which inspires a larger set of dreams for the future. In the other Russia, the memories are of "the good old days" of the Soviet Union when everybody pulled together, hard decisions were made for you, the problems were swept under the rug, and the politicians had absolute power. Here, imagination is dead. Which one rules Russia? Which one is in the hearts of the majority of Russians? Have all the Russians with dreams and the capacity for imagination left already? It would be a shame if the "Brain Drain" not only sucked out knowledge and experience, but drained away dreams, imaginations, hopes, and aspirations of a culture.

I am left wondering how we can inspire nations like Iraq and Afghanistan to dream, rather than remembering what Abdul did to Ali in 1322 A.D. I am left wondering how to replace or prop up dreams that have left the American poor, Russia, and elsewhere. And I wonder if the next generation of terrorists will come from imagination-challenged nations like France and Russia (or the American trailer-park and inner-cities), rather than Egypt and Saudi Arabia.