I’m starting to want to get rid of all my books. I never regretted getting rid of my records.

According to Eric Voegelin (in Order and History Vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age) during the epoch spanning the rise of Persian empire and the fall of the Roman Empire the nature of religion changed radically. Faced with the scale and sheer power of great expanding empires, no individual had sufficient power to change the course of political life in his community to any significant degree. As political activity became synonymous with unfreedom, new religions arose which offered private freedom for individuals and small communities who withdrew from public life and lived subculturally. Prior to this religion and politics were inseparable, but afterwards, religion and politics were separate on principle.

Like it or not, this was the origin of Christianity and it is deeply at odds with what happened to Christianity when it became the official religion of Rome, the most powerful and public-minded empire that ever existed. The outright contradictions introduced in this development still dominate our culture. This is why Christian nationalists require armies of theologicians to help them comb out the abundant knots and tangles from the simple words of their founder, whose meaning is clear if one is prepared to accept their consequences. But lawyers are all about avoidance of consequences, not by avoidance of legal knowledge, but through such great mastery of legal knowledge that they can be unwoven and rewoven to suit the desires of the client.

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The most powerful and rapidly expanding empire in the world today is western corporate capitalism. The power of this new world order dwarfs that of Rome. This new empire’s rule is so universal — so widespread and so deep — that there is no room even in the privacy of one’s mind to evade it. It imposes its strict though often unwritten laws on all human activity, not only on how one behaves, but even on the types of ideas a person can think and how those ideas are thought. This tyranny is enforced in the name of sound method.

So now, even the unprecedented narrowing of the sphere of personal autonomy introduced by the Ecumenic Age religions are breached. Further, the ways of life permitted for modern ascetics — academia and boheminism (and even of entrepreneurship) — are also constricting or evaporating. They’re allying themselves with the empire, “getting cut”, or drying up, as fewer and fewer desire anything outside of the empire. There are fewer places to hide. The remaining few ascetics live in their ghettos reassuring one another that things have gotten as bad as they possibly can.

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Alienation, like parenting, has become an extravagant luxury afforded to fewer and fewer people. Despite the abundance of material goods, contemporary life demands constant feeding of every man and woman and child’s total store of time and energy. Corporate capitalism is a jealous master who requires shows of contempt for all rival powers — and that contempt manifests as a denial of conflict between the conflicting powers. In an argument, what could be more contemptuous to deny the fact that the other’s point conflicts at all with one’s superior point?

To live one must participate in trade, and to participate in trade requires direct or indirect participation in corporate life, and that demands the entirety of one’s mind, one’s body, and one’s heart.

I’m considering subbing this for the staircase illusion in my “Dialogue presentation”.

I’m also thinking about including Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit.

A friend of mine says she heard of a word for this kind of mental shift, but she can’t remember it.

Many of us try to overcome near-sightedness with far-sightedness.

Antitheses are rarely antidotes.

An atom is more myopic than an amoeba, and an amoeba is more myopic than a bird. An employee is (generally) more myopic than a CEO. A whole human being is less myopic than his brain alone, and a human being in society is less myopic than an isolated individual. It is possible to conceive of a god as the least myopic being.

Borges:

The too-human gods attacked by Xenophanes were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one god, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variously estimited number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes), on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form the so-called Hermetica. In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, because the subject and predicate negate each other. Possibly so, but the formula of the Hermetic books almost entitles us to envisage that sphere. In the thirteenth century the image it reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the Speculum Triplex encyclopedia. In the sixteenth century the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them.

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The first person perspective is concave.

The third person perspective is convex.

The second person perspective is not so easy to characterize.

Continue reading Pascal’s sphere →

As the breadth of usefulness of an observed pattern increases, and the pattern becomes detached from any one specific situation (or to put it differently, attachable to a large number of otherwise dissimilar situations), the pattern will more and more be conceptualized as a principle.

Because the best means of increasing breadth of applicability of a pattern is abstraction, it can appear that principles are purely abstract, which is true in a sense, but not in the commonsense sense.

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It’s funny that the etymology of the word “principle” comes from the Latin word principium ‘source,’ from princeps, princip– ‘first, chief.’ This suggests that a principle comes first, and this is certainly how we tend to interpret principles. However, in truth what appears to come first actually comes last, and what seems to command the behavior of phenomena actually follows.

It is hard to recognize the forgetting of tacit knowledge, especially when the tacit knowledge is knowing how to think certain thoughts. When we are able to recall all the facts but don’t know what to make of it anymore, that’s a strange feeling we don’t know how to talk about.

Some people are born knowing “what” they are. Some have no such “what” — and consequently must resort to thinking in terms of “who”.

When I was younger I had a set of friends to whom I “brought home” new ideas. Until I shared it with each of them, a new idea was not fully real to me.

You can’t know another person’s outer edges or inner content unless you assume that they know things you do not know — not only in matters of fact, but also in matters of insight. You have to put the other in the role of teacher, and assume the role of student.

This is the single most powerful method I know for learning from people, for learning about people, and also for losing their respect.

The expression “with respect to…” connects problems, questions and other perspectival entities with other perspectival entities.

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You cannot paint a perspective without painting objects in perspective.

Relationships are impossible without concrete situations.

First 9/11, now Oslo. When is the world going to understand that all denominations of Fundamentalism — “Christian” or “Islamic” or whatever — are dangerous sociopathic perversions of the religions they claim to epitomize? Fundamentalism is a single religion of universal conflict over infinitely proliferating points of irreconcilability which split groups into ever-tinier, ever-angrier warring denominations.

Continue reading Fundamentalist disease →

Any obligation you feel toward another person can be dissolved with thought if you desire to be free of it. It requires only a little intelligence and an absence of love. The presence of such desires signify lovelessness.

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At some point I realized a simple principle: the very need to figure out why something really matters is a symptom that it no longer really matters.

I want to design human-world interfaces: Ways human beings can relate to the world to make whatever of it that’s relevant to them useful, usable and, above all, desirable.

My own personal human-world interface, which I designed for myself, employs a metaphor of interface. And of course, interfaces are built on metaphors.

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The relevant question in research is less “Is x true?” than “If this group of people accepts x facts as true and interrelates these facts by y perspective, and interprets z situation according to this truth, will this group be able to respond to z situation more effectively?”

The active ingredient of a placebo is delusion.

To catch site of the delusion is to destroy the placebo’s efficacy in reality.

The disease, however, remains real and continues to demand treatment.

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Some placebos take this form: your disease is a figment of your imagination.

People tend to think that if you admit you were wrong about something it means you were 1) wrong about everything, and 2) that if you disagreed with them on what you admit you were wrong about, this means that they were right all along.

This though made me recall a passage I read years ago:

If one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only where one does not agree… To be able to allow oneself this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but rather among men whose misunderstandings and mistakes amuse by their refinement — or one will have to pay dearly for it! — “He praises me, therefore he acknowledges me to be right” — this asinine method of inference spoils half of the life of us recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighborhood and friendship.

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We can — and invariably do — use our own errors as leverage against other errors.

To recognize that we were erroneous only means we need to discover new fulcra if we are to continue our work.

“I’m concerned with the performativity of method. … There’s a performative argument here. This is that methods tend to produce – though often in unanticipated and contradictory ways – the worlds they claim to be describing.” – John Law