“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –“

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I am going to shelve these works together:

• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo
• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Strauss
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• The Sorrow and the Pity: A film by Marcel Ophuls (the book + the video)
• Management of Organizational Behavior: Leading Human Resources by Paul Hersey, Kenneth H. Blanchard, Dewey E. Johnson

A common theme connects them. Each time I encounter this theme I feel a familiar sensation.

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“The cross on which I suffered was not that I know human beings are evil – instead, I cried as no one yet has cried: ‘A shame that their most evil is so very small! A shame that their best is so very small!’“

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I’ve taught my daughters this: If you do not actively work to be morally responsible and conscious human beings, you will be nothing but another psychic jumble (another zero) tossed about in the social medium, one day this person and the next day that.

Being human is a choice. Human being is a constant action. Stabilizing and harmonizing one’s instincts — cultivating and maintaining a soul — takes conscious effort.

I’ve told my daughters that I am raising them to be Kick-Ass Women who use charm and force together in concert to control their environments, and that they will secure their power by inspiring the gratitude of their followers. Genuine gratitude is the only security.

Surrogates for gratitude such as overt coercion or moral manipulations work until they suddenly fail.

One more thing: gratitude is either spontaneously felt, or it is moralistic bullshit. Where gratitude is demanded, or where ingratitude is made shameful or immoral — chances are, someone is unconcerned with your true interests. At best, they are tricking you. The more likely scenario is much worse: presumptuous, ignorant, lethal benevolence. Such benevolence feels no twinge of conscience as it sacrifices you to its own ethic, manifested as knowing with certainty what your best interests ought to be.

*

“One has been a bad spectator of life if one has not also seen the hand that in a considerate fashion — kills.”

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The antithesis of akrasia (passive being-tossed-about by circumstance, changing perspectives and personalities and ethics and opinions depending on what’s going on) is hubris (moral solipsism, the invalidation  of all incompatible moral claims for the sake of remaining inert). Hubris is no better than akrasia, though it is a lot more fun. Akrasia means to inhabit a world of other subjects, for whom one is an observed object (in po-mo terms, under the Gaze), and in traditional religious terms it is considered the “feminine principle”. Hubris means to inhabit a world of observable objects contained within one’s own subjectivity, taken phenomenologically, and that is the “masculine principle”.

These two can, in modern style, be averaged and neutralized into a grayish compromise nothing that sort of sticks to certain rules in order to not be bad. It’s boring, and in some important ways it is worse than akrasia or hubris. At least akrasia gives you something to act upon and hubris gives you something to fight. Sexless androgyny is neither masculine nor feminine and it barely feels human. Just glimpsing it makes me tired.

Then there’s narcissism, which is a wildly contradictory mess of wanting to be seen as one who doesn’t care about anyone’s point of view but one’s own, but sees oneself as someone seen, and is constantly caught up in projecting and feeding on external perceptions, which are dismissed as irrelevant once consumed… It’s all fucked up. When I smell narcissism, I back way away.

But then there’s another androgyny of full masculine and full feminine in tension, symbolized by the hermetic Androgyne, and the yin and yang, and I’d argue also the Star of David, and which is mentioned in some way in many religious texts in terms of inner-outer (“making the inner like the outer”, “within-you-and-without-you”, etc.)

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One more Nietzsche quote:

Artist’s ambition. — The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art; and thus Aeschylus and Euripides were for a long time unsuccessful until they had finally educated judges of art who assessed their work according to the standards they themselves laid down. It is thus they aspire to victory over their competitors as they understand victory, a victory before their own seat of judgment, they want actually to be more excellent; then they exact agreement from others as to their own assessment of themselves and confirmation of their own judgment. To aspire to honor here means: “to make oneself superior and to wish this superiority to be publicly acknowledged.” If the former is lacking and the latter nonetheless still demanded, one speaks of vanity. If the latter is lacking and its absence not regretted, one speaks of pride.

(All quotes above in italics are also from Nietzsche.)

I think it may be possible for people whose lives did not straddle pre- and post-punk to gain an understand what made punk what it was. It was not merely energy, nor rebellion, nor an accessible DIY style. It is not reducible to comprehensible terms. Many, many isolated people desperately needed punk and suffered from that need without knowing why, then, out of the blue they had punk. Without awareness of this experience, punk is just a stylistic option.

Anyone who doesn’t get it but wants to ought to see End of the Century – The Story of the Ramones.

*

Business needs a punk revolution.

Objective knowledge is that which is taken toward it-alterity, an other that does not possess language, which is observed from a distance. The mind can wrap its fingers around what is objective and comprehend it. (com– ‘together’ + prehendere ‘grasp.’)

Transcendental knowledge is that which is taken toward thou-alterity, an other that does possess language, with whom we are involved within a situation that contains us. There is nothing here that the mind can comprehend, though comprehension nearly always accompanies it. Understanding places the understander in an intellectual (aka spiritual) relationship with something that exceeds the reach of its fingers. At best we touch it.

Practical knowledge is knowing what to do in a situation. What is a situation? It is being placed in the midst of manifold alterity. Practical knowledge responds, sometimes with words, sometimes with actions, sometimes listening, sometimes observing. It responds to the things of the world in knowing them objectively, and it responds to its fellow thous by learning and teaching.

Somehow we inhabit a world infinitely larger than any and all of us, while at the same containing the entire world inside each of us and all of us — and all the while, here we are among one another speaking and listening and responding.

Prozak is the new hemlock.

Oh, wait, no: Prozak is soma. “Better a gram than a damn.”

From Ecce Homo:

In all these matters — in the choice of nutrition, of place and climate, of recreation — an instinct of self-preservation issues its commandments, and it gains its most unambiguous expression as an instinct of self-defense. Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close — first imperative of prudence, first proof that one is no mere accident but a necessity. The usual word for this instinct of self-defense is taste. It commands us not only to say No when Yes would be “selfless” but also to say No as rarely as possible. To detach oneself, to separate oneself from anything that would make it necessary to keep saying No. The reason in this is that when defensive expenditures, be they ever so small, become the rule and a habit, they entail an extraordinary and entirely superfluous impoverishment. Our great expenses are composed of the most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting things come close, involves an expenditure — let nobody deceive himself about it this — energy wasted on negative ends. Merely through the constant need to ward off, one can become weak enough to be unable to defend oneself any longer.

Dialogue is the mode of relation between people. It is the sharing of meaning through speech. Acting upon (manipulation) is the mode of relation between a person and an object.

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Issuing a command (or obeying a command) might involve use of words but it is the furthest thing from dialogue. It is a verbal form of acting upon (or being acted upon).

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Regardless of the benevolence of one’s intentions, to act upon another person in the absence dialogue is to relate to a person as a thing.

To break off dialogue with another person while continuing to relate in other modes (however benevolently) is dehumanizing.

*

Someone breaks off communication, but continues to acts upon us from a distance, but does not speak with us. We feel that something is deeply wrong. The answer we are given: Have faith that the other’s intentions are good and that you will eventually benefit.

The popular ethic only understands interests: 1) Does this silent person intend to help or harm, and 2) will he successfully actualize his intentions? The popular ethic knows no objection to benevolent dehumanization.

Who cares about malevolence and benevolence? I’d rather be hated as a fellow-human than be loved as a tool or possession or mirror.

*

Someone might take loving care of his property, but do we want to be someone’s property?

Was slavery wrong only because some slaves were mistreated? If all slaves were well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed and not physically abused, would it make slavery acceptable?

What if slaves could opt to change owners? Would slavery then become acceptable?

What if a slave is permitted to change owners at will and is also given a generous allowance?

At what point does the slave become a free person?

What is essentially unacceptable about slavery?

*

Before an infant has come to identify things as things, she has learned to expect a response when she cries, and she has learned to respond to the response she receives.

Dialogue is the first relationship to emerge from the chaos of birth.

Relationship with things and self come later.

(Each relationship threatens to eclipse that which came before.)

*

It is not enough for an organization to benefit its employees, partners and customers.

Similarly, it is not enough for a parent to be only a provider.

The Objective is  a kind of being which I observe and act upon.

The Subjective is a kind of being with whom I converse.

*

The Objectivity provides me knowledge about things. I stand back and apart.

The Subjective shows me a different world. In seeing it, my world — self and all — is transfigured.

*

If I view another person objectively, there’s no need to speak with him. I have expectations and what I observe will fall into place.

If I engage another person subjectively that means he is speaking with me and my expectations are in flux. In hearing him, things that have fallen into place before might shift, might open up new space, might make room for things that have never belonged anywhere before. In doing so, we make room for one another in the world. We share the world.

*

To already know what another person is going to say… to believe you understand despite protests that you do not… to ignore pleas to listen, to declare that further conversation is unnecessary — this is the luxury of the invulnerable.

To make use of another person without needing to speak to him… to subjugate him and render him an object to observe, act upon and to utilize — this is the luxury of the powerful.

Luxury makes a person complacent and soft. He relaxes into obliviousness of everything beyond his domain of mastery. At the height of his complacency, at the apex of his power, he innocently believes subjectivity is an attribute of a certain species of object, a person. The fall is near.

*

The convection current of history:

Being vulnerable makes a person deeper.
Being deeper gives a person intellectual force.
Intellectual force wins power.
Power permits the luxury of deafness.
Deafness makes a person unteachable and ignorant.
Ignorance makes a person lose power.
Loss of power makes a person vulnerable.

*

To be a silenced, silent tool of another… whether escape or resistance is truly impossible or only unchosen… what sort of person are you if you believe you are obligated to cooperate?

What do you call a man who was born with such intelligence and innate intuitive wisdom that he’s never been able to find a teacher who could show him anything that he did not already know?

An arrogant dumbass.

*

Do you realize how many people are walking around thinking they’re blessed with this sort of natural insight?

Do any of them grasp how commonplace this conceit is? … and worse how unoriginal and artificial the ideal underlying that conceit is?

*

Many people in the world see intelligence as a matter of “who already knows”…

They might let you finish speaking out of politeness, but in their head they’re thinking “yada yada yada” or they’re preparing their condescending retort that shows they already knew what you were going to say.

Can we please start calling these people out? They — most of all have something to learn — starting with their deeply ignorant ideal of intelligence.

After they’ve mastered that fact, we can introduce them to the concept of wisdom, the inverse of knowledge-as-mastery.

*

This modern ideal of intelligence is bound up in what the Greeks called episteme and techne — of mastery of fact and method.

The Greeks considered these modes of knowledge to be common — easily mastered by anybody who puts forth the effort.

But what else is there, really, besides these? Subjective opinion and feeling — that is, “wisdom”?

Exactly. There’s more, and it’s up to each of us to find it.

*

The most original thing a person can do is to recognize the value of non-originality, of being open and able to learn from another, to learn to value precisely what we are not in the Other, to wish to exceed oneself through participation in the supra-individual. But first, you need to have some idea of what supra-individual is and means and how it is experienced — and that means you’ve got to overcome romanticism.

Once more: Most of us are complacently content with the romanticism we’ve passively and unreflectively absorbed and so we do not question the importance of being independently “enlightened” through our own intuition and intelligence.

Thesis: The sensus communis is unreflectively conventional, morally mechanical, ethically irresponsible and intellectually unjust — but this is just how life is, so like it or not one ought to accept it and work according to it.

Antithesis: The sensus communis is unreflectively conventional, morally mechanical, ethically irresponsible and intellectually unjust — and therefore the sensus communis ought to be disregarded, renounced, or even explicitly critiqued or  combated by those who see through it. One should ignore the sensus communis and “think for himself.”

*

As always, an unconscious commonality underlies this thesis and antithesis. What they share is the conceit that when we embrace or reject the sensus communis, that we’re somehow doing so from a perspective outside the sphere of the sensus communis.

Fact is, it is just as uncritically conventional to “drop out” and zen yourself into some sort of beatific indifference to the rest of the world as it is to conform. To stop participating because you do not love it is to succumb to the love-it-or-leave-it false dilemma that sustains it and keeps it on its brainless course.

Romantic asceticism is a mechanism of our culture’s immune system. We self-exile, self-quarantine and prevent ourselves from corrupting our culture with alien meanings.

*

Synthesis: The sensus communis is currently outlived and needs to be changed and made habitable through philosophical activism. We need to stay inside the system, preserving our own radical otherness, and seek opportunities to effect deep changes. The ideal: Be a committed and responsible subversive.

To say it as simply as possible, everything dreads its eventual nonexistence.

The most concrete example of this fear is fear of biological death, but everything that has consciousness fears its end and wishes to preserve itself forever.

This includes nations, religions, social institutions of all kinds, integrated philosophical systems, individual beliefs, notions — even moods.

I’ve come to regard all anxiety as a signal that something I am associated with, either some psychic element of myself or some collective form of being I belong to as a participant is feeling impending nonexistence.

From Gadamer’s essay, “Hermeneutics And Historicism”:

Let us then consider Strauss’ defense of classical philosophy from a hermeneutic point of view. We will consider one example. Strauss shows very well that the I-Thou-We relation, as it is called in modern thinking, is known in classical political philosophy by a quite different name: friendship. He sees correctly that the modern way of talking about the “problem of the Thou” is based on the fundamental primacy of the Cartesian ego cogito. Strauss now thinks he sees why the ancient concept of friendship is correct and the modern formulation false. It is quite legitimate for someone who is attempting to discover the nature of the state and society to consider the role of friendship. But he cannot talk with the same legitimacy about the “Thou.” The Thou is not something about which one speaks but that to which one speaks. By taking the function of the Thou as a basis, instead of the role of friendship, one is missing the objective communicative nature of the state and society.

What is completely absent in the business environment, and what causes it to suffer akrasia (moral incontinence) and what prevents us from holding collectivities to the same standards as we hold individual persons (despite the fact that corporations are extended legal personhood!) — is that we do not grasp the fundamental difference between an I-It relationship (also known as the “ontic”) and an I-Thou relationship.

Heidegger saw angst as Dasein’s response to the certainty of death, conceived existentially but corresponding to biological death. That is certainly the surest of deaths, but it is not the only possible death that Dasein can undergo. Dasein feels angst in the face of every possibility of deep change.

All things wish for perpetual life, even a mood. Even a mood fears its own death.

The more subject you are to change the more acute your angst.

*

Ideologies are attempts at artificial existential immortality.

*

I could see where the most intellectually impoverished, expired and pointless mode of consciousness could recognize its plight in Terri Schaivo.

“Even a human vegetable with no consciousness or hope of recovery deserves an iron-lung. Keep the biological mechanism alive even if it knows not what it does,” shrieks the collective intellectual vegetable with no consciousness or hope of recovery, in a desperate attempt to inhale some spirit from artificial controversy — and it has no idea at all what it is doing or why… it wants to postpone death. “Not yet!”

Come on, Republicans… give up the ghost. Open your hand and let go. It is ok. As Nietzsche said: “Only where there are graves are there resurrections.”

I need to go back and read Buber and see if he denied the validity of the I-It relationship.

If he did, I disagree with him. As important as I-Thou is, I-It cannot be reduced to a mere corruption of I-Thou.

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I-It is what mediates our I-Thou relationships.

In my view I-Thou deepens in the permanently expanding transfiguration of I-It to We-It. That transfiguration is synesis.

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I-Thou is the relationship I have with one who speaks.

I-It is that which I speak about.

If that which I speak about speaks, I must permit him to speak to me.

I must hear him and see for myself what he says about the world.

When he tells me about the world, much of what he shows me is I-It.

I must hear him as one who says something valid that may change my world.

If I accept the validity of his words, his I-It and my I-It gives way to We-It. More and more we speak out of a shared understanding and my world is drawn beyond itself.

If I deny his words validity, I withhold I-Thou from him. He is a talking, behaving object wholly contained in my world.

*

Business wishes to establish an order where leadership has no reason to hear. It already knows.

Business wants I-It resources, not human beings. It wants the predictability of physics, not the insight of conversation.

Why the dehumanizing language? Resources, utilization, overhead… At minimum it is suspicious.

*

At Auschwitz the Jews were not permitted to refer to Jewish corpses as “bodies”. They were to call them “puppets” or “shit”.

The Khmer Rouge taught the children to say to the urbanite New People: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”

And don’t forget Rwanda:

The director of the human rights organization, African Rights, Rakiya Omaar, was following the events from northern Rwanda.

“In Rwanda they referred to Tutsis as cockroaches,” explains Omaar. “They were not human beings. This is very important to understand, [there are] very close parallels to what happened in Hitler’s Germany. [They said,] ‘Don’t worry, you’re not killing humans like you. You are killing some vermin that belongs under your shoe. You’re killing cockroaches.'”

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If you believe Nietzsche, there is also a “benevolent” form of dehumanization.

Think about the people who love the helpless and seek them out in order to serve them… Are they connecting with them as people or as objects of benevolent feeling?

Much “service” in politics, business, education, religion, charity is just another form of reduction of human beings to I-It: helpless, mute, beloved objects. Neither love nor hate affects the fact that I-It is not I-Thou.

This is why Nietzsche had no respect for pity. Often, it is just one more mode of dehumanization, but one that allows the benefactor to have his cake and eat it, too. You can exercise power over a thing, but feel like you are doing something wonderful for a “person”.

*

If you worship a man as God, proclaim the truth of his words, love him as your savior, but you don’t try to see his words as valid to you, in this time and place, within this everyday reality that you know as real haven’t you reduced him to I-It? To expect some magical end-time or after-life where the words become valid… isn’t that just a way to postpone understanding and applying until it is too late?

Worship dehumanizes. Superhumanizing deprives the object of affection of human meaning.

Exaltation is a defense against relationship.

As far as I am concerned the world divides into that which speaks and that which does not.

The spiral is the synthesis of closed circularity and open nothingness.
It has a containing form, but it can move beyond its limits without losing its form.
It overcomes limits and it preserves.
My new favorite shape: the outspiral.

Modernity over-ripens into post-modernity and starts rotting as anti-modernity.

The most virulent forms of anti-modernity pose as pre-modernity: fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is a form of mass-relativism. It originates in breakdown of tradition.  Every fundamentalism is founded on radical, alienated skepticism which dissolves all obligation to maintain ties with the dominant tradition. It no longer wishes to reach agreement with anyone outside of itself. It then invents a fictional past and believes in it. It exploits the helplessness of the past, by projecting itself over the past and making the past the history of itself. It does this in order to attain the credibility that comes from having a history. And all those who join up agree with one another, and never tire of agreeing with one another, and most of all on the fact that people outside of the group are not worth talking to because they will never understand, and don’t want to understand, etc. for various despicable reasons.

Perennialism is esoteric fundamentalism.

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The Perennialists steal from modernity, project it onto ancient religious forms — then reject modernity ad hominem. Modernity is ignorant. Modernity doesn’t recognize that it’s discovered nothing new. It hasn’t innovated anything. We need to stop trying to innovate, and get back to the root of wisdom.

They’ve got intellection. If you disagree with them you lack intellection. If you lack intellection, there’s nothing to discuss. If there’s no discussion, there’s no way for anyone to show them their error. But there is no error, because intellection protects them from error. If you already had intellection you would know this.

There’s nothing more postmodern than rejecting contemporary conceptions of truth and returning to ancient traditions. What is truth? Go skeptical — then find your own circular system and excuse yourself from further discussion. Sit alone, wiser than hell. Postmodernism is about fragmentation of culture into a zillion little perspectives, each thinking it contains all the others.

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The crux:

Is it that modernity hasn’t discovered anything new?

Or is it that Perennialism hasn’t discovered anything old?

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Postmodernity is hard to define because it is not a belief one adopts but rather a cultural condition within which thinking is done, whether one accepts postmodernity as its condition or not. Postmodernists are those who believe in this condition, and they are enraging because, rightly or wrongly, they reserve the right to see postmodernity especially where postmodernity is denied.

I do believe in postmodernity, and I see Perennialism as a consequence of postmodernity. It preys specifically on those who suffer most from postmodernity and wish it to not exist.