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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

When the absurd is contained within the boundaries of one’s own mastery — that is, when the absurdity is situated and contained within an understood whole — the absurdity is laughable, and the relationship is comic.

When the absurd breaks into the boundaries of our own mastery — that is, when absurdity overwhelms understanding, and submerges all involved in perplexity — and reason is no longer a reliable guide, the relationship is tragic.

*

With levity one has rises above a tragedy, gets over it, gains a higher perspective on it, is no longer caught up in it.

We are no longer subject to the absurdity. We’ve become detached, gained critical distance, and see things more more objectively. From the new perspective, the absurdity is no longer such a threat. Now we can look back and laugh.

*

Comedy can mask tragedy. We try to rise above painful situations with black humor. People affect superiority by laughing at things that make them anxious or insecure —  things they don’t understand, and hope never to understand.

Mockery treats a matter as understood to be not worth knowing.

Mockery of a person means that their perspective does not need to be considered. We only consider other people’s perspectives when we need to — either we need a new perspective (rare), or we wish to share perspectives, or the other person is in a position to force us to consider their perspective, or we know the other person’s actions will affect us, and we need to understand how they see things so we can predict or influence their behavior.

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Jack Handey: “It takes a big man to cry, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.”

What of a scene is known through perspectival change? — Look at the scene from different standpoints and perspectives. Circumspect. Circle the scene and look from multiple standpoints and notice what is concealed behind. Move closer and further. Particular objects enlarge and recede, individually but always in obedience to the whole. See what is so subtle it is invisible from a distance. See what must be taken in from a distance to be seen at all. See how one perspective shifts into another as you move.

What of a scene is known through illuminative change? — Illuminate the scene with different lights and at different angles, or with several different lights at several different angles. Diffuse the light, direct it. Concentrate it and spotlight particular regions. See what features of the scene stand out, and how the scene as a whole is affected by how it is illuminated.

What of a scene is known through manipulative change? — Move the objects in the scene around. Decompose. Dissect. Disassemble. Analyze. Recompose. Hold objects in your hands and inspect them. Take objects apart and see how they’re made. Put it all back together.

What of a scene is known through intermediary change? — Looking at the view through a different lens. Look through different diffracting, diffusing, distorting, focusing and coloring filters. Compare. Take in less, take in selectively, and take in more.

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Seeing from multiple perspectives gives a person a different perspective on perspectives. Seeing in different lights illuminates illumination. Manipulation decomposes compositions into composed composable elements. Intermediated vision interposes an intermediating awareness of intermediation that can never be completely removed.

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Perception always adds and subtracts. It is precisely these modifications that distinguish perceiving something and staring into chaos.

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If the scene is known strictly in terms of the objects that compose it, what is lost? What sneaks in?

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Imagine a stationary spectator observing the scene. What could you show him of the scene that he doesn’t already have?

We could bring him different lenses to look through.

We could carry certain objects to him and allow him to inspect them.

We could spotlight certain parts of the scene, show them in different colored lights, or illuminate the whole scene as evenly as possible.

We could hold up a mirror and show him how the scene looks standing at various standpoints.

What exactly gets shown in each of these examples, and what remains hidden?

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What do scientists show us? Poets? Painters? Friends? Authorities? Philosophers? Novelists? Researchers? Biographers? Autobiographers?

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If you hold up a mirror to show the spectator a view of the scene that includes himself observing it, what does the spectator learn? What does he learn about the scene, about himself, about being a spectator, about observation?

When he looks at the scene in the mirror, does he see the scene as he would if were observing it from the mirror’s standpoint?

The unknowable and the as-yet-unknown are experientially identical. Both are experienced as nonsense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in making known, what is knowable is shown to be knowable in its becoming known.

The understood and misunderstood are experientially identical. Both are experienced as sense. The essential difference lies entirely in trial – in questioning, what is known is shown to be not known in its becoming questionable.

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To be clear, it is not isolated facts that are knowable or unknowable, understood or misunderstood – it is the taking of facts together with the rest of our knowledge, so the whole is organically integrated. The act of trying to understand is alternating between analysis (from Greek analusis, from analuein ‘unloose,’ from ana– ‘up’ + luein ‘loosen’) synthesis (sunthesis, from suntithenai ‘place together’), until the idea is understood as a concept (from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take’), which means not only that the parts of the idea are rendered known (related to the rest of one’s knowledge), but they are related in familiar modes (tacitly through analogy or explicitly through categories or logic) to the rest of one’s knowledge and made familiar in part and whole.

Through understanding, we integrate particular facts into the whole of our knowledge. Exterior facts are drawn into the interior of our intellects. We chew on them, break them down, analyze them into intelligible bits — which can be absorbed within our own body of knowledge. We analyze in order to synthesize.

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Some facts and ideas we find distasteful, and we refuse them. Other facts and ideas we find very agreeable, and we consume them almost without thinking. Some people have definite tastes in knowledge. Some don’t, and have no sympathy for picky eaters.

Some facts and some ideas are inedible to certain people. They simply cannot digest them at all without disrupting their whole system. Others find all-too-digestible facts bloating and painful. They need something to raw and rough and unprocessed to break down or they go into a stupor, lose their appetite or even need to throw up.

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The Truth. The facts. The Way Things Are. Realism.

This attitude toward knowledge nearly always means forced membership in the intellectual Clean Plate Club. Eat what’s before you. But what’s before you is a meal someone has served up. How was the food chosen?

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We stabilize our total sense of things — what has been called a meaningful totality — which is not a mere sum of known facts but also the understandings by which facts are known, which means knowing in principle — through treating the as-yet-unknown as unknowable and the possibly misunderstood as obvious and unquestionable.

We stabilize our meaningful totality by acting on the belief that whatever is knowable is in principle already knowable and everything else is either pointless speculation or nonsense. Of course, we will never know every fact, but that’s no problem. What matters is that we are equipped to understand things in broad outline, and ready to understand and respond to whatever comes our way.

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What does it feel like to question something familiar and obvious and discover its uncanniness? What does it feel like to confront something uncanny but unmistakably relevant to us? Not-yet-understood, but demanding understanding?

It fills us with anxiety. When we try to understand beyond our limits we get a taste of what makes infants cry in their cribs: chaos.

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The impatience of the executive is how he maintains stability of totality. He intimidates those around him with his aggressive brusqueness, and prevents anyone from saying anything to him that he cannot digest effortlessly. He is never confronted with his own limits.

The elevator pitch. The executive summary. These forms flatter the philosophical limits of the business world.

To make yourself perfectly understood in under 5 minutes means to operate within the limits of the easily known.

The etiquette surrounding executives preclude anything new being said. And that is entirely the point of the etiquette. (– and perhaps of all etiquette?)

CEOs are like kings surrounded by flattering courts, who don’t exactly lie, but don’t tell the complete truth out of fear of offense. And, again, it’s not the fear of disclosing particular unpleasant facts — that is actually valued by CEOs, because this allows them to demonstrate openness. What is impermissible is embarrassing a CEO with anything beyond his intellectual horizons, which is the shared horizon of the business world.

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“Don’t waste my valuable time” actually means “Don’t remind me that I am not god.”

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The old business horizons are breaking down rapidly. The old shared vision of modernity is no longer inspiring. The high hopes of postwar America are a joke to some and a matter of piety to others, and all that separates the two is whether one instinctively  ridicules or worships the senseless. Modernity and its objective realism has become boring and tedious and it has thoroughly worn out its welcome in our lives. And boredom, far more than refutations spell the end of a thing. (Nothing bears scrutiny except that which we do not wish to scrutinize.)

Intuitions are, in regard to thoughts, often arrogant.

When an intuition encounters an articulate thought, it sees only the engendering intuition, not the accomplishment of articulation. It treats the articulation as superfluous, and arrogates the thought as a whole as one it has had, too. The expressible thought is redundant.

But intuitions, until they are articulated (in word or form) are mute. How can any intuition signal its existence to any other intuition, when it is locked in silence? Perhaps the same mute intuition sits undetected side-by-side in uncomprehending darkness in myriad minds until it is illuminated with words. In the moment of illumination it glimpses what appears to be its own reflection.

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Articulating intuitions is a thankless task — unless you articulate intuitions who have grown so painfully lonely that they’ve striven for form and struggled for recognition and company, and consequently have come to appreciate the difficulty of saying what hasn’t been said.

When a thoroughly lonely intuition is given words, it welcomes them with deep, binding gratitude.