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 →

Look inside the C-Suite. There’s a Chief Officer of Finance, Operations, Information. And above it all is Execution.

These things are very important, but they are not the highest things.

Finance, Operations, Information, Execution. These are the concerns of administrators. They are all qualities of mere objectivity, of techniques, of technology. They are the qualities of the successful industrialist.

The titles say it all: these are people oriented by What and How. They lack insight into Why. Taken as a collective mentality, they tend toward autism, toward living in a world of utility, resources, objects. If they cannot measure it, it doesn’t exist to them. They’re Six Sigma, to the sixth degree. Repeatability with the least variance.

The C-mind is too impatient to listen to anything they can’t grasp in the space of an Elevator Pitch, or an Executive Summary, or the back of a napkin. And no new insight can be conveyed in that space. So it has been years since they’ve known a new insight. They’re still stuck in the Industrial Age worldview. It’s been over 150 years since this worldview was revolutionary.

Strip out the Annual Report fluff, and their highest purpose is one thing only: profit for its own sake.

Is it any wonder that when they say “vision” — all they can produce are images of the future or plans to get there? In other words, Whats and Hows? They don’t even know what vision is.

And that in itself is okay. There is nothing wrong with people who think this way. Business cannot function without this kind of mind.

But it is increasingly clear that business cannot continue to merely function. It needs to take moral responsibility for its own fate. But with the C-Suite mind at the top, function is all business will ever do. It will operate like a big mindless machine.

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The best minds of business obsessively watch its own EEG — stock market fluctuations. They jump and jitter and panic or celebrate with each movement. Business confuses the movement of EEG with its mind. No wonder the economy just does whatever it does. No wonder the stock market seems to follow its own irrational logic of fluctuation, oscillation, mania and depression. No human mind is behind it. It’s pure subhuman reflex.

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We need to keep the C-Suite intact, with all the people who inhabit it. But above the C-Suite we need to build an A-Suite of minds directed by Why — by minds who understands the importance of profits, but who understand the purpose profits serve. We need minds who recognize that both part and the whole to which it belongs must be maintained and cultivated.

We need minds who understand both subjectivity and objectivity leading minds who know only objectivity, who cannot on their own constrain their own mastery, who  stunt, degrade and enslave the world in all innocence. They know not what they do, but this is not a matter of reward or punishment. They know not what they do — that means they don’t know what they’re doing — and that means they need to be reassigned to a more suitable position in ranks of our culture, and that is certainly not where they’ve been: first place.

And who goes in the A-suite? The last people you’d ever imagine.

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The Industrial Revolution is anything but revolutionary now. The whole industrial worldview has grown so stale and boring and depressing that it’s ripe for revolution.

But this revolution will be nothing like a Marxist revolution. Marx was himself caught up in the industrial worldview and was only an antithesis to the thesis, not the synthesis he imagined. That is why communism failed. Like all antitheses it is even crappier than what it opposes. The cure is worse than the disease.

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It’s stupid to blow up a bridge when you are in a position to capture it.

Prometheus Socialized: a myth is gestation. – The tale of a titan overcoming the titan’s autism – who suffered the pain of imprisonment, then the mania of release, who was finally escorted by the escort of souls through the blind oblivion of the underworld to the heights of Olympus and inducted into the empathic fold of pantheon.

If you try to make the complex simple by moving in a straight line from complexity to simplicity, you will only succeed in making the complicated simplistic.

Lacking the question is not the same as having the answer.

When you hang out with ingenious people you realize something: Really quick, really inventive people find it easier to sense where someone is going and jump to the end, than to listen and recognize when something unexpected has been said.

Some people are so smart it is impossible to tell them anything they don’t already know.

Two different approaches to seeing differently, which at first glance look the same:

1. “What questions can I ask of this situation, which might bring forth a new answer?”
2. “How do I wish to see this situation, and I choose to see it this way, who can refute it?”

1) What is the surest way to distinguish a misunderstanding from an understanding?

2) What is the surest way to distinguish non-understanding from nonsense?

The answer to both: Someone tells you that you do not understand.

If the fact that you already understand proves to you that you understand, this is proof that you do not understand understanding. If this sounds like nonsense to you, you’ll just have to take my word for it that there is something here to understand.

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If you trust your gut, the world divides into two parts: stuff you already know and bullshit.

The convection current of history: Intelligence makes people more powerful. Power makes people stupider.

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The powerful don’t have to listen. They dictate terms. They do the talking.

The powerful don’t have to understand anyone. Everyone flatters their misunderstandings. Everyone fears straining their patience or embarrassing them. The powerful invest their power in forcing the world to assist their decline. They forget how to respect, and gradually become contemptible in the presumptuous belief that any challenge to their perspective is presumption.

They already know what needs knowing. They stop listening and stop learning. What they forget they cannot replenish. They forget what they’ve forgotten, and nobody can remind them.

At points they become vaguely aware of what is happening to them. They try to augment their intelligence with advisers. By now, however, they have become too imperious to be advised. They dictate what they will be taught. They demand that everything flatter their atrophied perspective. If it is difficult to learn, it isn’t worth learning.

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The powerful will learn a fact, but will not suffer an insight. An insight that is not yours doesn’t make sense until you come to understand. The powerful always already understand. What makes sense to them makes sense, and what doesn’t make sense to them is nonsense.

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Only vulnerability can cure the stupidity of power.

Only vulnerability to an other can reawaken the intellect.

The need to know how to evade or influence a powerful other leads to the pursuit of insight.

Pursuit of insight is very painful — we only do it when we have to.

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Individuals, couples, cliques, organizations, companies, classes, parties, nations — every unit of every scale of human culture is vulnerable to hubris.

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A different kind of stupidity afflicts the weak: moralism.

Moralism praises us for not asking the most basic questions about how we ought to live. One simply behaves as one should behave, which is selflessly, altruistically — against one’s own strength, in favor of the interests of the powerful.

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A horrible thing to witness: As the powerful become increasingly decadent and stupid and base,  the upper and lower elements of society become less distinguishable. Suddenly the moralistic weak find the powerful easy to identify with. They imagine catching a game and enjoying a beer with their powerful buddy who’s just like them, except he’s worked harder and maybe been luckier.

Then, instead of awe for a distant and unattainable ideal, the weak masses adore and idolize a reflection of themselves. The powerful soak up this adoration, and swell up with the inrush. They strike bold poses and make declarations. Crowds cheer, mandates are declared, action is taken, etc.

The whole thing explodes into a narcissistic fireball of self-worshiping mob idiocy.

When humble learn to shed their humility through the miracle of mob, all sorts of world historically terrible things become possible.