Behind every explicit thought is tacit know-how: knowing how to think this thought.

How do we learn to think a thought?

Through confrontation with thoughts we do not yet know how to think.

What does this confrontation feel like?

Anxiety. It is the anxiety of an alien poem.

What do we do with this anxiety?

We evade, invalidate,  or vivisect the thought.

Evasion: We try to avoid the confrontation altogether. Learning to think a new thought is voluntary. We cannot avoid a recognition once we’ve recognized it, but we can refuse to resolve it, and leave the recognition in suspense until it fades and is superseded by the next thing.

Invalidation: We turn the confrontation from the thought to its source, and make an ad hominem attack on the thinker to justify (or distract attention from) our refusal to confront the thought itself. “This thought is a trap, and it is tripped by being entertained. I will not take the bait, but instead expose the trap and attack the trapper.”

Vivisection: We take the unthinkable thought apart and confront it in tiny pieces that we do know how to think, and behave as if this constitutes a true confrontation. “I fought this wild animal with my bare hands and triumphed. First I fought its left hind leg, and I tore it to pieces. Then I fought its right front claw, which I took down effortlessly, without sustaining a scratch. Then I seized its head and threw it to the ground.” This is how we fight ideas we don’t understand.

Or we can do philosophy, which means to try and fail a hundred times to think what is yet unthinkable, until somehow we make an intellectual movement that allows things to fall into sense.

This always requires revisiting old, settled thoughts, and uprooting and breaking them. We cannot approach the acquisition of  by any set procedure. Procedures, methods, processes, systematic practices — these are themselves old, settled thoughts coupled with old, settled know-how. Methods work within what they know: they fill in gaps, they self-refine and self-reinforce. The power of procedures is this: what we know how to do confirms what we know, and what we know affirms what we know how to do.

As Wittgenstein said: A philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way about.

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Business is well-protected against philosophy.

It created an ethos about as hostile to philosophizing as could be imagined — and this is precisely why it is now so susceptible to philosophical disruption right now.

Let’s look at how it protects itself:

1. Avoidance: Business is fixated on conventions. It establishes processes, protocols, formats, best practices — anything that determines an outcome a priori. The more rigorous the method, less it can produce anything new. Methods and their outcomes are a circular logic that seals the horizon shut against the contamination of anxiety, and and seals in predictability. If you follow Six Sigma, nothing new can possibly happen, which, if you’ll recall, was precisely its point: eliminate all variability. Six Sigma reduces variability in manufacturing processes very effectively, but this pales in comparison to the wonders it can work in eliminating variability in thought processes. This is basically procedural Newspeak. Of course, leveraging linguistic Newspeak doesn’t hurt either. The requirement of always using “plain language” — familiar vocabulary used familiarly — ensures that anything new is nearly impossible to say.
2. Invalidation: Make people prove themselves, before giving them a voice. And proving yourself should entail having nothing excessively new to say. First, force youths — already notoriously hungry for unconditional allegiance — work very hard for credentials. The harder it is to gain entrance into the guild the more membership will be valued: allegiance is guaranteed. Then, exalt and enforce professionalism. The more one submits to the standard of professionalism, the more exhausted, distracted, harassed, and homogenized one becomes — and the less one can think a really new, difficult thought, much less vigorously advance it. New thoughts are to be done in one’s spare time, which never lasts more than an hour or two. Only a thought capable of surviving constant interruption and resumption will ever be thought by a consummate professional. That is, the professional will think up novel refinements to the same-old. That brings us to the last point.
3. Vivisection: Make it rude to speak too long. Make it acceptable to interrupt. Place the full burden of communication on the communicator, and require no consideration from the listener. Make it presumptuous to expect to be listened to for any length of time. Impose Fox News conditions on the workplace. If it cannot be said in a 15 second soundbite, it has no right to be said at all. And celebrate executive O’Reilly shout downs and mike cuts. Around the C-Suite speak sea-level language, neither exalted nor deep — just plain, flat facts, spoken in C-student English. No technical detail. Certainly no poetic imagery. If you really must resort to metaphor, you can score a slam dunk by using sports imagery. Accept all interruptions… No, flatter interruption by treating them as flashes of executive insight. Exalt the elevator pitch, the executive summary, the napkin sketch, the briefest expressions — and ridicule whatever is difficult to say as permanently bungled. Also vivisect teams. Isolate innovators, and make them develop an idea fully before giving them any support, emotional or material. Meanwhile, keep them very busy and very bored and as nervous as possible.

An idle mind is the devil’s playground. An idle mind can quickly become a rested mind, a vigorous mind, an open mind, an independent mind, a disruptive, rebellious mind… an unruly, inefficient, disobedient, useless mind.

This, by the way, is why we need to keep our children busy at all times. When kids play they create a world that suits them, and these worlds are rarely shaped like tiny cubes or cells in a spreadsheet.