A company that figures out the value of sustained attention, and how to articulate this value, and how to support sustained attention in its management processes will have a competitive advantage over companies unable to sustain its attention long enough to ask, much less answer such questions.

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Short bursts of attention yield ingenious tweaks to the attributes of existing products, viewed in the conventional way.

Sustained attention is required to seriously challenge the conventional vision and discover rival visions capable of producing differentiated sustainable advantage.

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Is there anything in our culture that is not trending toward greater fragmentation? Of time, attention, mode of thought, ethic, persona?

A company that figures out the value of sustained attention, and how to articulate this value, and how to support sustained attention in its management processes will have a competitive advantage over companies unable to sustain its attention long enough to ask, much less answer such questions.

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Everything in our age fragments attention.

At work it is expected that resources will multitask, switch between tasks, and wear multiple hats. Look at the average Outlook calendar. It is a mosaic of presentations, reviews, check-points,  updates , ramp-ups, stand-ups, walk-throughs, all-hands, face-to-faces, dog-and-ponies,  debriefs, postmortems, brainstorms, daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annual meetings. And we have emails and texts beeping in on us constantly, which we cannot not check, not to mention the compulsory peeks at twitter, facebook, stock prices and news.

It is now far ruder to expect someone to listen to you for five minutes than it is to interrupt an conversation or to permit an interruption when the other is trying to talk.

Book after book celebrates brevity — at length. These books all started out as blog posts, but were subsequently expanded into presentations, then articles, then through endless repetition of the same basic point and reams of redundant examples, overinflated into books of which nobody reads more than the first third. But no great loss. These rambling books teach the wisdom of impatience.

How do we get our news? Snippets and soundbites. Debates are just launch-pads for zingers. Candidates don’t even address one another, because nobody remembers the substance, only stumbles, flashes, general impressions of confidence or fumbling. Dialogue is nonexistent in politics, because it is a liability. It will be picked apart into damning evidence of belonging to this or that stereotype, or believing in this or that stereotype.

And, of course there is the celebrated brusque ADD of our C-level executives, which we indulge with executive summaries, elevator pitches and filtering. Are they distracted because they are busy, or is it actually the other way around?

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Facts can be broken down, chopped up, pureed and liquified.

We can know what we’re prepared to know at a glance or, in complicated cases, in a sporadic series of glances.

But to understand in a new way: that takes sustained effort, desire and faith.

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Next time the world seems to have played itself out, that pop culture seems to have fallen into a cycle of recycling, where you cannot remember the last time something surprised you with newness and freshness and potential, ask yourself: Facebook! Twitter! iPhone! Email! Text? Squirrel!

None of what is going on in business or education or government is anyone’s fault.

Nobody has decided things should be this way.

But then again, nobody has decided they shouldn’t be this way.

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Whenever we talk about “holding people responsible”, “finding out who is responsible”, “taking responsibility” — it all has a punitive tone.

Who is responsible for this?

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I keep thinking about the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. From inside the logic of the situation nobody was doing anything wrong. To take responsibility here meant to transcend the logic of the situation, and take responsibility for the perverse sense of responsibility that had overcome all parties involved.

Until we look behind the actions, and behind the actors, and into the situational dynamics, whatever responsibility we take will be irresponsible and moved by forces we do not know.

Our actions are practically active, but morally passive.

We know not why we do. We know only what we do, and how it ought to be done.

We go along with the best practices of business, with the standards of education, with the procedures of government. We are programmed with our nam shubs, or if you prefer, with the way things are.

(It’s been a long time since I read Snow Crash. I’m not sure if I’m using the term “nam shub” right. The right term might be a “me“. I need to educate myself on Sumerian mythology.)

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.

We label an analogy, and the analogy is now a category. Analogy: A is like B. Category: A is like B, and this likeness is named C.

We label an articulate perspective and the articulate perspective is now a concept.  Perspective: impossible to speak of apart from reporting on its objects (for example, A and B) in relation. Articulate perspective: A and B look like this together, from here where I stand. Concept: When you stand here and look out (and see, for example, A and B together) this perspective, seen from this standpoint, is to understanding by way of concept C.

There’s something wrong with this conception, but I can’t say what, yet. It has to do with the fact that there is more to a perspective than seeing from an angle. There is also a schematization of what is seen from this angle. But, I think that schematization is what is meant to be analogized by the perspective. There’s a point where optical analogies break down, and that’s where my own limits might be. But my whole orientation is to fight these limits.

Why do we sometimes say “bear with me” as we begin a story? Why do we sometimes ask an audience to hold their questions to the end of a presentation? Why is it important in some instances to communicate without interruptions?

Or is it because we want to reach the conclusion of the story as efficiently as possible? Is it because we know we are about to tax the attention of the audience, and feel a need to ask for their patience, indulgence or forgiveness? Are we trying to avoid distraction or derailment that might cause the audience to forget some of the points? Sometimes one or all of these are true. However, I think there is often something else going on in these situations — something more important and also more interesting: many times when we say this what we are trying to convey is a holistic idea. Intuitively we understand this calls for special conditions around our communication, and it is these conditions we are requesting.

What is holism? According to Wikipedia:

Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning “all, whole, entire, total)” is the idea that all the properties of a given system (physical, biological, chemical, social, economic, mental, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave.

The general principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”.

Normally, when we try to understand something new, we come to the understanding one step at a time. At each point, despite the fact that the understanding is incomplete, what has been learned so far is clear. We can also break down the idea into its smallest parts, and this kind of analysis can clarify it considerably. These ideas are atomistic, or reductionistic. Wikipedia says this about reductionism:

Reductionism is sometimes seen as the opposite of holism. Reductionism in science says that a complex system can be explained by reduction to its fundamental parts. For example, the processes of biology are reducible to chemistry and the laws of chemistry are explained by physics.

Holistic ideas are much harder to convey than reductionistic ones. In the course of conveying a holistic idea, the idea might make little sense until the end, when it suddenly all crystallizes at once, in a  flash of insight. Until the “ah ha” moment comes, it is hard to see where it’s going. The whole is not assembled as a synthesis (syn- “together” + -thesis “place”) as reductionistic thoughts, but rather taken together, all at once, as a concept (con- “together” + -cept “take”).

To pull off communication of this kind, the parts must somehow be retained by the mind despite the fact that they are not grasped as a unity, so at the moment of clarity all the pieces can crystallize.

For this reason, the idea must unfold at the right velocity, maintaining flow, rhythm, tempo and momentum, until the understanding resolves. If something impedes the flow, if the delivery is broken up, if the pace is slowed or rushed, the meaning can fragment. And if someone jumps in and tries to complete the thought themselves but takes it in a different direction, or introduces a line of questioning that derails the line of thought, the communication of the concept can be severely disrupted. It can take a lot of effort to get things back on track.

It’s a somewhat like music. If you play someone all the different notes of a piece, one after the other, but disconnectedly, the music does not come across. Playing it very fast or very slow, or at a constantly varying tempo distorts it. Or if you break into the music after a few notes and develop the melody in a different direction it can completely change the experience of the piece, even after it the original music is resumed.

To ask someone to “bear with me for a moment” puts a fence around the idea until it unfolds and matures to viability in the minds of others. Then it can be considered as a concept, and not as a misunderstanding or a smattering of parts.

Reading Irving Kristol’s Neo-Conservatism: An Autobiography of an Idea, it is apparent that while Leo Strauss might have been a profoundly insightful man, he may not have been the most prudent.

The irresponsibility of publicly exposing the esoteric-exoteric distinction is demonstrated by Irving Kristol’s insider winks to his insider readers, disclosures that he “knows what Strauss was really up to.” Is there any person on earth motivated enough to learn what esoterism means that would not automatically consider himself an initiate?

A sample of Kristol’s esoteric wisdom:

The main priority of a sensible criminal-justice system — its first priority — is to punish the guilty. It is not to ensure that no innocent person is ever convicted. That is a second priority — important but second. Over these past two decades, our unwise elites — in the law schools, in the courts, in our legislatures — have got these priorities reversed. (Page 362, “The New Populism: Not to Worry”)

Thank God these unwise elites were finally ousted and replaced with Bush’s much wiser elites, who were able to stuff Guantanamo with possible terrorists. Given the sample size, can we doubt there were terrorists among these prisoners? Justice triumphs.

And another:

The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism and economic growth. Of these religion is easily the most important because this is the only power that, in the longer term, can shape people’s characters and regulate their motivation. (page 365, “The Coming Conservative Century”)

Where do you even start with that list? Economic growth: alright, whatever. But religion as a pillar — and as a means to regulate motivations — in the U.S.A.? Really? And nationalism, in 1995, five years from the end of the bloody 20th Century — after Nazism, after Fascism, after the Khmer Rouge?

Irving Kristol’s entire life, his writing, the stunted son he produced, the enthusiastic testimonial on the back cover from “Dick Cheney, Former U.S. Defense Secretary” who praises Kristol and calls him “a thoroughly admirable human being” (it takes one to know one), the last decade of national decline, and the continuing failure of the Republican Party to pull itself back down from its presumptuous, delusive, cloudy heights and plant its feet back on this solid, factual, exoteric earth  firmly enough to see its own obvious failures and to correct them — all of this is an object lesson in why the esoteric-exoteric distinction is esoteric knowledge.

Leo Strauss of all people should have known better.

For me, it is a point of pride to converse with others as if I have something to learn from them.

If others interpret this to mean they have nothing to learn from me, I learn something more.

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An inclination to respect is the most respectable thing.

To respond to any sign of humility with redoubled pride signals disinclination to respect.

We teach children that they’re not the center of the universe, and in doing this we make solipsistic animals into human beings. But wouldn’t it accomplish the same moral goal, but with less intellectual violence, to teach them that they’re not the sole center?

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To attempt universal decentering as a means to socialization sets up a situation nearly as dangerous as universal solipsism — an akrasia epidemic. Akrasia is like gasoline vapor, one spark of really strong solipsistic personality and up it goes in a fireball of fascination and blind obedience. Akrasia feels the void at the center, and fills it with whoever is bold and charismatic to take it, preferably aggressively.

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One of the worst things about using objectivism to decenter a person is it makes real friendship, real marriage and real religious life impossible.

Under objectivism, everyone lives as an object among objects, everything sitting side by side in peer relationship. Truth is looked at, not entered, not participated in, not looked along. The mind lack conceptual tools for understanding kinds of being that bind without enslavement: community, marriage, friendship, communion, atonement, metanoia, myth, dialogue — and the newcomer, brand.

Not that the objective mind goes around confused. Nobody is more certain of everything than objectivists. Objectivity not only knows everything perfectly — according to itself, it knows better. It translates and remaps all religious notions into psychological, sociological, procedural, scientific or antiscientific-objective terms and is done with them.

An objective mind must either be atheistic or agnostic or pantheistic — or become the vacuous opposite to atheistic: fundamentalist. (Fundamentalists accept the scientific vision of reality, but reject its rigor, and therefore its reason — its logos, and replaces this with personal emotion, and renders reality undiscussable. You feel vehement agreement, or you feel vehement disagreement.) But authentic religious vision is out of the question.

And whatever resists this translation is dismissed as “nonsense”.

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The problem with solipsists is not that they believe they are the center of the universe. The problem is that they think only they are the center of the universe. They cannot yet conceive of being beyond self that includes and involves self. This violates the rules of discreteness of things. If they are the center, then how can something else be the center, too? This is a logical contradiction. Etc.

The problem with akratics is not that they believe they are not the sole center of the universe, they think the center of the universe is somewhere in space… until they think the center is in some powerful person or another.

There will always be a few incurable solipsists or akratics, or even small clusters of akratics with a solipsist at the core (a.k.a. cults) — the problem only arises when a society starts breeding itself for universal akrasia. Then you end up with national or racial or class cults, and terrible, terrible shit happens.

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We can temporarily tame ourselves with vulgar objectivity, but taming and civilizing are not the same thing.

Intelligence governs our relationship with the knowable.

Wisdom governs our relationship with the unknowable — both, the unknowable-on-principle and the as-yet-unknowable.

You can’t know what you don’t know, because much of what you don’t know is not what you can’t know.

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We can become able to know, but only after we know what it means to be unable to know.

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It is not the unknowable-in-principle that bothers us: it is that ring of as-yet-unknowable between the solid ground of the knowable (with all its knowledge) and the unknowable that makes us anxious. Of course, it is only that ring that shows us what unknowable-in-principle really means. To most people unknowable-in-principle, is not a principle but permission to ignore.

Reading the Washington Post’s report “Top Secret America” through the lens of distributed cognition from a phenomenological angle — holy shit.

We are a collective distributed mind too large, too fragmented on principle and, worse — too concealed on principle — for any individual to morally assess, much less take moral responsibility for.

Let’s play with the notion that this distributed cognition is not a metaphor, but a literal truth. Let’s imagine for a minute that when we individual human beings talk to one another, we are voices in the head of a larger mind. If we get published, and become part of the national dialogue, we are an audible conscious thought. If not, we are part of the unconscious or semiconscious workings of this mind.

Most of us just follow the rules of this mind, even though we don’t know who it is, or even if it is healthy. When we oscillate wildly right, wildly left — refuse to accept the validity of who we were a decade ago or a year ago, because then the other party was in control — aren’t we suffering from akrasia? And don’t we also suffer from attacks of hubris as well? Whoever we are, we seem sketchy. We’re legion impulses, acting themselves out by their own writhing logic.

We are failing to take moral responsibility for ourselves, individually and collectively.

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The first rule of moral responsibility is to live so you can control yourself. It is this ground-level moral pragmatism that gives us the “moral universals”, which, frankly, are not morality per se, but the prelude to moral life.

In Buddhism, these grounding moral basics are called sila: “good conduct”.

Higher than sila is samaddhi and higher still is panna.

But we Puritans — we’re not practical enough about morality, yet, to get beyond the fundamentals. No. We idolize and worship the fundament and fail its purpose, transcending to authentic morality. And so, we don’t even live up to the basics, because we’ve taken the means for the end.

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Distributed cognition must go mainstream. The individualism of our worst collectivists is preventing us from taking collective control of ourselves.

When we are subjected to misery, we object.

When we subject others to misery, we become objectionable.

When we subject ourselves to misery, we become objectionable to ourselves.

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When our own subjectivity subjects us to misery, we objectify our subjectivity, and try to rise above that misery. We take ourselves as personae, and become spectators. In this way, we create distance from what is painful.

A self-afflicted I prefers to be a me — forgets itself as a me.

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If the skin of your own subjectivity is thin and you involuntarily sympathize with others — which is not an act of imagination, but a direct transmission of subjective experience — you might find objectivity helpful. To distance from the other is to distance from oneself. This is the time to call on Apollo.

Objectivity creates barriers between your self and yourself and other selves. The blessing of Apollo is distance and skin.

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A comedy is a tragedy turned inside-out.

Tragedy immerses us in its situation. We are situated inside — in the middle of it with the protagonist. We are subjected to his horror, to the very end.

With comedy, we situate ourselves outside, where we can forget ourselves laughing at those who can’t.

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“A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

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“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.'” — Nietzsche

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“It takes a big man to cry; and it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man” — Jack Handey

“Meditation in a Toolshed” is my favorite piece by C. S. Lewis. It is an entirely non-priggish introduction to the perspective on subjectivity and objectivity that I take to be the point of departure of genuine religious thought. (Note: I believe fundamentalism is pseudoreligious, because it fails to see start from this perspective, and remains trapped in the distinctly modernist habit of taking objectivity as primary, while continuing to adhere to the “objective truth” of scripture, which can only mean extreme intellectual violence.)

Continue reading C. S. Lewis – “Meditation In a Toolshed” →

Scotoma – (noun) a partial loss of vision or a blind spot in an otherwise normal visual field.

Derivative: scotomatous (adjective)

ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (denoting dizziness and dim vision): via late Latin from Greek skotoma, from skotoun ‘darken,’ from skotos ‘

My friend Fish wrote an interesting piece on the decay of language, inspired by the miniseries The Tudors. What impressed him most about the show was the language – how the courtiers spoke with such elegance and precision, and how much more they were able to communicate. He found himself feeling conflicted: he would love to speak more like them, use his whole vocabulary to get more of his meaning across, rather than speak within the limits of the common work vocabulary — but to do so, he would have to use unfamiliar words, and suffer being understood even even less precision that if he’d stuck with crude, everyday words.

He’s stuck with a choice: speak precisely and be understood with no precision at all, or speak imprecisely and at least be understood a little.

The paradox: The more precisely he speaks, the less precisely he is understood.

He then goes a little deeper:

There is another paradox, however, that fascinates me even more; how language is at once the vessel to new rational understanding and the horizon that bounds our ability to conceive. It is both the device of perception and the blinder.

… The very construct that we use to break through our boundaries and create new communicable understanding is also the barrier that we must break through if we are to mature our intellectual capabilities as a species.

This is probably my favorite problem in the whole world. Luckily, it’s a very popular problem. I’ve put a lot of work into studying other people’s responses to it, and tried answering it myself, looking for clues in my own experience that point to new ways to ask the question that might yield even clearer, more productive answers.

Continue reading Xenophobia →