Many people who consider themselves anti-authoritarians seek out oppressed people and try to help them. As always with human behavior, beneath the uniformity of appearance, different spirits are at work seeking different aims.

Person A, humiliated by subjugation, takes issue with the character with the subjugation. Perhaps it is exploitative, or cruel, or destructive, or otherwise immoral. Person A gives to charity, does volunteer work, perhaps makes a career as a social worker, or distorts some other profession into a form of social work. (90+% of teachers today have no idea that they are not educators, but social workers specialized in skills training. “But how is that not education?” Exactly. As I said: no idea.) But beneficiaries of all this benevolence will never be helped enough to reciprocate, nor to gain enough power to challenge the benefactors. In fact, what is happening is Person A is subjugating weaker people, but in a nicer (or otherwise morally superior) way. Person A gets to regain lost respect by getting to play the part of the (moral) subjugator for a change. And so it goes down the line, until there are no more layers of socially sanctioned subjugation. So the very bottom layer subjugates through child abuse or crime.

Person B has a very different motive. Person B seeks the subjugated and marginalized in order to find allies against the subjugating power, which has become oppressive, or ugly or boring or otherwise objectionable. Person B wants equals and is willing to invest individual power in collective power.

And Person B hides half a zillion sub-doppelgangers, as well. Is it any wonder that every political union, however unified and dominant it seems, inevitably factionalizes, fragments, decays and finds itself in the place of the marginalized, powerless and must relearn the art of appealing to others to make alliances…

The convection current of history (I will draw this one day):

1. The rulers of an order gradually forget how they came to power and being to attribute their power to their own innate natures. They forget the art of dialogue as they perfect the art of dictating to silent and powerless subjects.
2. The subjugated, meanwhile, learn how to find unity within diversity through dialogue, and are able to form ever deeper and stronger alliances. They begin to combine individual power into ever deepening common cause.
3. The rulers hit their peak of power and begin to decay into squabbling factions, each unable to see the others point, having lost the capacity for dialogue. The rulers lose power without even noticing it.
4. The subjugated seize power from the rulers. The subjugated become the rulers and the rulers become the subjugated.

The process repeats.

*

To authentically help a person — to equalize power — is to put oneself at the mercy of the other. And people who have been powerless for a long time often have no idea how to use power responsibly. Often the newly empowered person will exercise new power against the benefactor, not out of “evil” but out of sheer disorientated exuberance.

It’s easy to do arithmetic. It is difficult to link numbers to meaning.

Heaven help the bean counter who knows nothing about beans.

*

Often hyper-analytical folks use the formal mechanics of thought as a red herring to distract attention away from the poverty of their thinking, or to overwhelm or dazzle or intimidate anyone tempted to question their conclusions. They’ll present their arithmetical correctness, logical facility, copious metrics as representative of the whole, when if fact the whole is assembled piecemeal, with many exclusions and omissions at just the critical points where the strongest links are needed.

Look closer: how do all these numbers and models and arguments link up with lived reality? Often what you will find is a facile reductionism: what is treated as relevant is limited to what can be effortlessly measured.

Quantification is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must know what to measure and how to measure it. This means rooting quantities in qualities.

*

The mania for quantifiability can lead some “hard-bitten realists” to exclude precisely the aspects of reality most crucial to their success.

Consider this: Isn’t the “soft” and “squishy” aspects of business in fact the true substance of economy? Isn’t every dollar a quantum of desire? Not that we can run businesses without mathematical rigor, it’s just rigor, while indisputably necessary, is not sufficient for running a successful business.

And education was, until very recently, seen as the cultivation of human beings, of citizens capable of political responsibility — not about ability to perform particular tasks (i.e. training). Not that skills-training is dispensable — training is necessary in education, but not sufficient.

But perversely, often in the name of realism, the very reality — the cornerstone — of these pursuits is rejected. As if we have to choose between formal, objective rigor or qualitative judgment, but can’t have both!

And romantics unwittingly play into the either-or antithesis, and compensate for excessive quantitativeness with rejection of quantification. The conflict is not one versus the other, but one-versus-other versus both together in meaningful relation.

Quantity and quality understood together as a related whole — that is what is needed. But this is exceedingly difficult. It requires a well-constructed team, and real leadership.

*

The tendency toward quantitative reductionism is destroying business and education.

A particularly ludicrous example: To assess writing proficiency, elementary school students are asked to write an essay on some topic. The essays are scored by counting the number of words. The ones who write the most words are the most proficient. I am not kidding.

The logic is this: who is to decide what is and is not “good” writing? At least we can all agree on a word count. Never mind that absolutely nobody can really agree that verbosity equals good writing. That kind of question is too rarely asked.

*

Very few individuals can cover by themselves the full range of quantitative and qualitative factors relevant to the life of an organization.

This is why it is so important for people with very different sensibilities to be able to converse and share and complement one another. The desire of leaders to encompass within their own minds the entirety of an organization’s intellectual scope leads to organizational mediocrity. In a sense a leader who is humble will be greater than the leader who exalts himself as intellectually superior to his organization. A mediocre leader only knows how to lead the like-minded. An inferior leader reduces everyone to his own limited terms.

Every organization needs to acquire the core capability of authentic dialogue.

*

(That opening remark “heaven help” is a Chinese allusion.)

Level 0 — No communication: Both parties are talking at cross-purposes. One or both parties feel that communication is impossible. Dialogue is not happening, despite the talking.

Level 1 — Preexisting understanding: Both parties feel they are coming from the same place, and are able to communicate what they wish to say to the other. There are no barriers to communication, so understanding is flowing freely.

Level 2 — Barriers to understanding overcome: Both parties feel that they’ve reached a common understanding. One or both parties feel they have learned to understand from a different perspective. Barriers to communication have been overcome, and understanding is flowing freely.

Level 3 — Synesis discovered/created: Both parties realize that they are learning new ways to understand as they speak. There is an unmistakable sense that what is happening in the conversation could not have happened otherwise. The conversation is having itself through the participants. A shared understanding arises from the dialogue itself experienced by both parties as superior to their original understandings.

Sketchy thoughts which might not make sense without the full context…

Once again I’m thinking about Buber’s distinction between the social and the interhuman.

I think the essential difference between the two is this: In an interhuman relationship two participants are involved, and through dialogue the participants can directly influence the relationship that binds them; where in a social relationship the relationship that binds two exceeds the direct reach of dialogue, and so the relationship that binds them together (that of a larger community) exceeds the limits of their direct influence.

I’m not convinced the interhuman relationship is necessarily confined to two people. I’m more inclined to place the interhuman and the social on a continuum. If three or four people are able to meet in dialogue and take full responsibility for their shared being, I’d say this is an interhuman relationship. If three or four people are bound in a dynamic that can barely be influenced through dialogue, or cannot be influenced at all, that relationship is more social.

Then there’s the question of a community arranged around a single personality who is in dialogue with each member of the community, but the members are not in dialogue with one another. A social order can arise among the members, but it all hangs on the hub-and-spoke structure of interhuman relationships radiating from the central personality.

Of course, all interhuman relationships exist within the context of a larger containing social relationship. It might be the case that a relationship is best understood in interhuman terms when the situation at hand be addressed through dialogue, but when the situation cannot be satisfactorily addressed the relationship takes on a social character.

This way of thinking might also be applied fruitfully to the individual versus the interhuman. One involves the other party in an interhuman relationship if when one cannot come to terms alone with a situation involving both.

I suspect I’m rethinking established sociological thoughts.

Speaking of sociology, I got a copy of the Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change by Randall Collins. I keep looking at it on my shelf, feeling a mixture of kinship, loathing and excitement.

I’ve written quite a bit on what I view as the twins roots of moral inadequacy, hubris (closedness to being beyond the self, and akrasia (lacking any enduring continuity of self, often translated “moral incontinence”).

I’ve also written about the fact that the being of an individual and the being of a collectivity are not as dissimilar as we think. The dynamic that allows an individual achieve spiritual integrity is the same as that which helps a group accomplish the same thing. We are whole as individuals — that is, we have a stable soul — by virtue of inner dialogue. Without dialogue we’re a tangle of conflicting spiritual impulses, writhing, biting and crushing one another in the effort to dominate the entire self.

Dialogue is the practice of teaching and learning that allows the various impulses/instincts/spirits within us to communicate, harmonize and work together toward an order universally experienced as good.

*

Here is a visualization of hubris, akrasia and dialogue:

*

We are sane because we talk to ourselves — and recognize that it is our own self with whom we talk.

This is true for each of us (as individuals), and it is true for all of us (as communities).

*

“Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

*

Human beings have learned to integrate their individual selves in such a way that they are neither hubristically closed, nor akratically unstable, but both stable and open like a spiral. Collectivities of people have not learned this art, and still fail to recognize the obligation to be moral like we expect individuals to be.

Instead we find either the oppressive, closed stability of authoritarian organizations, or we find nebulous, “free” and reactionary organizations that change their story with every change in circumstance.

My belief is that organizations must learn to avoid hubris and akrasia, and and earn the right to loyalty — just as every individual must, if he wishes to have lasting friendships or a functioning marriage.

It is impossible to be friends with someone who is hubristic because you do not exist to him as a fellow-subject. To such a person you are a thing with a use. But we have no problem forming relationships with hubristic organizations. In fact we sort of expect organizational hubris. Is it wise to commit ourselves to an organization that doesn’t recognize us as subjects who participate in its being, but instead regards us as objects to utilize for its own purposes?

It is equally impossible to be friends with someone who is akratic, because that person is a different person in every situation. There’s no enduring other to be friends with. There’s a different story every day, and her role, your role, and your relationship shape-shifts to fit the new narrative. But we act like organizations have a right to be akratic — it’s just “responding to conditions.” Is it wise to found our lives on an organization that doesn’t acknowledge any responsibility to serve as a steady foundation, but who arbitrarily changes the terms of the relationship based on mood and circumstance whenever it seems convenient?

It’s a quite a shift to view organizations in terms of human being (v.) — to believe in corporate personhood — but once you make that shift, the moral double-standard is conspicuous. Organizations behave in ways we would never accept from an individual, because we sort of expect it.

*

If we wish to have community we must revaluate our ethics. We must demand certain ethical standards from our organizations — from our selves, to our marriages, to our friendships, to our social circle, to our businesses to our governments — and this means we must also hold ourselves responsible as agents of organizations. We cannot constantly shift roles, one minute a representative of an organization, and the next minute an individual who cannot answer for his organization’s behavior.

We need language for an ethic that does justice to the insights of social psychology. Most people are dispositionalists — behavioristic atomists who assume that the behavior of a groups is determined by the individuals that constitute it — not because they’ve given the matter any thought, but because they’ve never noticed they’ve adopted dispositionalism as an assumption. We barely even notice the interpretive violence we do in force-fitting social phenomena into individualistic psychologies and moralities.

*

What is great about capitalism is that we are all empowered to establish our own little states, each its own ethos and ethic. We can experiment and see where things go in practice, without danger of violence. Every company is a little political laboratory.

It is easy to agree on objective matters.

When an object is viewed by a group of people it is rare for any individual in the group to disagree on the fact that the object exists and possesses specific physical properties. The status of a “thing” and a “property” is easily understood, perhaps because they are so often discussed and agreed upon.

When we wish to understand something abstract, we reach for the metaphor of object, but we are so accustomed to this metaphor we fail to recognize it is a metaphor.

Many, many of us have only this one metaphor — the object with properties — for understanding everything. For such people truth and objectivity are identical, and when someone attempts to communicate a different truth-form, the content is reduced to things-and-properties, and often the meaning is entirely lost.

*

We’ve come to the point where we believe agreement is possible only where agreement is nearly effortless. But what if the most important agreements are difficult to reach and depend on mutual trust? What if objectivity is only the foundation of truth, not its essence?

*

The subjective, reduced to object-form, becomes one’s private feelings and opinions about particular things, confined to a person’s own mind, which is understood spatially to exist in one’s own head.

But really: what object isn’t known through experience as experience? Isn’t our knowing also experienced? In a sense, our objective universe is contained entirely within our own experience — our mind? Religious Perspective 101. The first line of the Dhammapada: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

But before we go nuts (as everyone seems to the first time they grasp the significance of this completely irrefutable fact), and proceed to reduce the entirety of existence to exclusively spiritual terms (aka succumb to idealism), consider the question of whether you really love anything/anyone for its phenomenal properties. Do you not throw independent existence behind the apparent being of all your loves? Can we love our sensory experiences, with all alterity (otherness) subtracted out?

The spiritual person knows the future and past are enfolded in the present, the other together with one’s own passions is really only ego, and all the things in vast space is the interpretation of appearance. The ego “dissolves” into all that is, because the I and all are the same. The religious person differs from the spiritual person in desiring the unprovable existence of the Other for the sake of love.

Spiritualism prefers isolation to the risk of impingement. Religion prefers the risk of impingement to the certainty of isolation.

Spiritualism only seems exotic in contrast to materialism. In fact it is the subtraction of all transcendent being from one’s interpretation of existence. It is a preference for denial of otherness. It is a reductive denial of the reality of the constant experience of otherness, a reality which does not have the form of objectivity, but is, nonetheless, a reality.

*

To have truth, we have to take seriously the importance of experiencing the entirety of what is, understanding each entity on its own terms, being willing to be shown, and being ready to show. Synesis, aletheia, logos.

*

Faith knows that sometimes we need to be shown before we see.

Faith is fulfilled when what is shown is actually seen.

But there has to be a genuine expectation that one will see, otherwise the faith is misplaced and cannot do its work.

My oldest daughter used to wake us up every single night with her nightmares and anxiety. I didn’t even know what Skinnerism was, but I did know that if I rewarded this behavior it would continue, and probably get worse. The policy was to order her back to her bed.

One night she was so distraught I was moved to abandon good sense, and to try to comfort her. We sat in a rocking chair talking about her fears until the sun came up.

By some miracle she didn’t wake us up, anymore.

Huh.

*

We’re bloated with unexamined, self-torturing bullshit.

The worst assumptions are the ones we don’t even know we’ve made, and so we cannot know to question.

The more damaging assumptions are, the more they run us down, and the more run down we get the more pessimistic we become, and the more pessimistic we become the more we cling to our assumptions and shut out everything unfamiliar… because things could always be worse, couldn’t they?

Think of money as blood and the economy as the circulatory system.

Every organ in the body needs its share of blood-flow to serve the rest of the body.

*

Do some organs deserve more blood than others?

Do some organs need more blood than others?

The brainless morality of deserving and not deserving need to be questioned into oblivion.

*

Should all organs be forced to pump blood before they perform their specialized functions?

Standardization is vile. The ideal of well-roundedness is wasteful.

It takes a hundred times more effort to do what is against one’s nature, it is a hundred times more painful, and it is a hundredth as satisfying. AND it denies another person whose nature it is to serve in this way his opportunity to serve in his way.

Maybe some people have no particular preference of work. Perhaps their service is proving humankind some flexibility. However, they should not be allowed to demand that their own flexible excellence be imposed on all.

Seriously, can we stop trying to standardize our own virtues to put everyone else at a disadvantage? Let your virtue be your unique service, your currency — to be used in exchange of service with others.

*

Many of us try to become self-sufficient so we can protect our individuality from the encroachment of others. We do not want to be enslaved to other people’s expectations  — which have everything to do with what they want and nothing to do with who we are. No?

I think this strategy is self-defeating:

What if self-sufficiency and individuation are fundamentally at odds? What if our choice is EITHER to individuate OR to be self-sufficient? Doesn’t it require the support of a lushly diverse social environment to really refine oneself as a unique individual?

*

Life naturally evolves toward unified diversity.

The movement away from unified diversity to uniformity is the process of death.

“When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

But nails look like nails.

Skepticism can be just as stupid as credulousness.

*

The world is suffering from its philosophical poverty, but it is too unphilosophical to recognize it. Metacognitive incompetence, the curse of the liberal arts, strikes again. The sciences have the material plane to serve as its police force. The liberal arts have no law enforcement, only free appeal and recognition.

*

When we learn to distribute our philosophical wealth, maybe we’ll figure out how to distribute our material wealth.

*

Philosophy has much to learn from the new field of user experience.

User experience has much to learn from philosophy.

So many nails to hammer!

Everyone I know craves community so badly, the minute it seems to exist it is savored to death, framed into a vignette and preserved for memory.

Nobody seems able to make these little scenes endure or even repeat.

We blame our wills.

Is it our wills?

My opinion: Until we clarify our understanding of individuality and community and come to general agreement on ends, our debates around means will be fruitless and we will only dream of community.

The first thought of the day. — The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

*

Which philosophy society is always in need of. — The pillars of the social order rest on this foundation: that everyone cheerfully regards that which he is, does and strives after, his health or sickness, his poverty or prosperity, his honour or insignificance, and feels as he does so ‘I would not change places with anyone.’ — He who wants to influence the order of society has only to implant into people’s hearts this philosophy of cheerful rejection of changing places and absence of envy.

*

Everyone superior in one thing. — In civilized circumstances, everyone feels superior to everyone else in at least one way; this is the basis of the general goodwill, inasmuch as everyone is someone who, under certain conditions, can be of help, and need therefore feel no shame in allowing himself to be helped.

*

Gardener and garden. — Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

*

Refined cruelty as virtue. — Here is a morality which rests entirely on the drive to distinction — do not think too highly of it! For what kind of a drive is that and what thought lies behind it? We want to make the sight of us painful to another and to awaken in him the feeling of envy and of his own impotence and degradation; by dropping on to his tongue a drop of our honey, and while doing him this supposed favour looking him keenly and mockingly in the eyes, we want to make him savour the bitterness of his fate. This person has become humble and is now perfect in his humility — seek for those whom he has for long wished to torture with it! you will find them soon enough! That person is kind to animals and is admired on account of it — but there are certain people on whom he wants to vent his cruelty by this means. There stands a great artist: the pleasure he anticipated in the envy of his defeated rivals allowed his powers no rest until he had become great — how many bitter moments has his becoming great not cost the souls of others! The chastity of the nun: with what punitive eyes it looks into the faces of women who live otherwise! how much joy in revenge there is in these eyes! — The theme is brief, the variations that might be played upon it might be endless but hardly tedious — for it is still a far too paradoxical and almost pain-inducing novelty that the morality of distinction is in its ultimate foundation pleasure in refined cruelty. In its ultimate foundation — in this case that means: in its first generation. For when the habit of some distinguishing action is inherited, the thought that lies behind it is not inherited with it (thoughts are not hereditary, only feelings): and provided it is not again reproduced by education, even the second generation fails to experience any pleasure in cruelty in connection with it, but only pleasure in the habit as such. This pleasure, however, is the first stage of the ‘good’.

*

The realm of beauty is bigger. — As we go about in nature, with joy and cunning, bent on discovering and as it were catching in the act the beauty proper to everything; as we try to see how that piece of coastline, with its rocks, inlets, olive trees and pines, attains to its perfection and mastery whether in the sunshine, or when the sky is stormy, or when twilight has almost gone: so we ought to go about among men, viewing and discovering them, showing them their good and evil, so that they shall behold their own proper beauty which unfolds itself in one case in the sunlight, in another amid storms, and in a third only when night is falling and the sky is full of rain. Is it then forbidden to enjoy the evil man as a wild landscape possessing its own bold lineaments and effects of light, if the same man appears to our eyes as a sketch and caricature and, as a blot in nature, causes us pain, when he poses as good and law-abiding? — Yes, it is forbidden: hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good — a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone! — As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty: and many of them have not yet been discovered.

*

What we are at liberty to do. — One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves — indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

We think we hate unsolicited advice.

In fact, what we hate is schadenfreude disguised as benevolence.

Schadenfreude does not need to be asked; it leaps at every opportunity.

*

Unsolicited advice that is genuine, respectful, intended to help, carefully considered, delivered with caution and open ears — which provides you with something you really can use to resolve a painful problem… Doesn’t gratitude follows automatically with no conscious effort?

Thoroughly good advice, solicited or not, is extremely rare and precious. The most reliable litmus test of the quality of advice: the gratitude or irritation of the advised.

*

If you run out of gas in some uninhabited region of west Texas, what you need is some gas.

What you’ll get is detailed driving directions to the nearest gas stations, the closest being 60 miles away.

You’ll get people with full tanks of gas pulling up beside you, saying “Follow me, and I’ll lead you to the gas station.”

You’ll get people telling you about the gas station you passed hours ago where you could have and should have gotten gas, despite the outrageous prices.

You’ll see people zipping by in hybrids or on motorcycles or bicycles, shaking their heads at your stupid choice of vehicle.

You’ll get all kinds of driving tips.

*

A policy: Whenever gratitude is expected, default to suspicion; when gratitude is demanded, default to hostility.

*

When your own advice is rejected or reluctantly accepted with ingratitude, resist the temptation to demand gratitude, or to explain away or otherwise invalidate the response. Instead try asking: “How much of what I am doing is motivated by goodwill, and how much of it is pure self-gratification?”

*

Gratitude and love cannot be directly willed. There is not point in demanding them. Yet, they are eternally demanded.

The same is true for belief, and even disbelief. You cannot decide to believe something. There is not point in demanding that someone believe some fact, theory or doctrine.

You also cannot decide to doubt something.

“Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – C. S. Peirce

*

What can we decide and directly will? What can we ask of another person? What can we legitimately demand?

We need to get clear on what is ethically possible and what is mere fantasy, what is beneficial and what is harmful, what is a reasonable appeal and what is a lever of manipulation.

My generation’s virtue (often maligned as vice) is that we never learned to force ourselves to be committed or even to fake being committed to anything that didn’t seem relevant and valuable.

We learned morality from punk, or maybe punk expressed the only morality we found credible, or maybe it was both, developing together in a living feedback loop.

Maturity brings new questions, though. Many of us know that the ideals that were thrust in our faces in our childhood and youth were suspicious and definitely not compelling.

Does that mean that ideals in general are not compelling? Denial becomes tedious after several decades. What can we authentically care about and sacrifice to? Can we avoid picking something at random for the sake of having something to care about and sacrifice to?

99% of my friends will say “Community!”

I worry that community impulse might be an example of the random sacrifice-for-its-own-sake cause I just mentioned. If we want community that sustains us rather than drains us, something we participate in, and not just a cozy scene we set up to admire with one another, we have some serious philosophical detoxification and reconditioning to do. Everyone I know has this overwhelming urge to exclaim, “Look at us, all here together!” every time we’re all here together.

We need to rethink the relationship between individual and community.

*

Individuals have the capacity to speak to one another, to show truth to one another, to make appeals to one another and consequently to become participants in a unified, diverse, manifold being, with no loss to their own selfhood.

Examples:

1. Collaborating in a team environment, you find ideas being drawn out of you by the situation, superior to anything you could ever conceive alone. It is your idea, because it is everyone’s. Somehow, regardless of who speaks the idea, everyone had a part in its generation.
2. You are in an intense and good-willed conversation with another. You notice that you are speaking, but you do not know what you will say next. You are more a learner than a teacher. Where are these thoughts coming from, if you are not drawing from your own preexistent knowledge?
3. Something shifts in your social environment. Your entire world changes, the color shifts, the themes shift, the possibilities close in on you, or they unfold and open. You change with it. Or does it change with you?

*

Frankly, I don’t think one discrete person ever sacrifices for another discrete person.

People sacrifice for some form of selfhood. The question is: how is selfhood understood?

Some see the self primarily as an observable person in the world, seen by others and admired or despised. If such a person sacrifices himself to whatever cause — he sacrifices his life to his image-self. This is narcissistic martyrdom. My suspicion is that most religious martyrs have been narcissists or narcissists’ tools.

Others see the self spiritually, as pure consciousness, within which one’s world (or at its extreme, the entire world) is contained. The self is the one who experiences. This kind of self will sacrifice self as one kind of experiencing being to a future not-yet-experienced form of experiencing self.

Others see the ego-self and the greater self as related but different. The ego is a manifestation of greater self. Greater self can be understood in a variety of ways, too, and this will affect the character of the sacrifice. This kind of self will sacrifice his individual selfhood to the source of his selfhood, which produced what is good in him, and will continue to produce it, like a tree produces fruit.

These three can resemble one another and are easily confused, especially by self-sacrificers.

I’m not only talking about great sacrifices. I’m talking about sacrifices of all kinds of things to all kinds of beings — of happiness, of convenience, of material wealth, of freedom, of safety, etc. — to God, or god, or religion, or nation, or party, or company, or ideal, or principle, or spouse, or friend, or colleague, etc..

*

A soul is instincts in dialogue.

I don’t know how it happens. Somehow language articulates silent or inarticulate reality into a unified, diverse manifold.

Dialogue unites that which is separate and alien and dialogue differentiates that which has been been reduced to sameness.

When two (or more) speak with one another in the spirit of dialogue, when all hear and are heard by a Thou, and when all are prepared for profound surprise — a new being arises among them and each participates in the life of this being.

Analogously, when we allow a suppressed spirit within us to finally speak (and as a rule such marginalized spirits are rough and ashamed) — when the person we think we are finally hears more of himself… a new being arises among the instincts and each instinct participates in this new being: a new, renewed I.

*

A person who speaks to himself is not insane, if he is aware that it is to himself he is speaking. He is insane when he speaks to some alienated element of himself as if it does not belong, as if it is something outside of himself.

In fact, a person is sane only if he does speak to himself.

Analogously, humanity itself is sane when it speaks to itself as itself — when individual people speak to one another as fellow human beings.

Humanity is insane when it delegitimatizes some part of itself by excluding another person from the dialogue that constitutes humanity.

*

Does humanity have a purpose, or a trajectory, or a wish, or a possibility to become a universally integrated humanity of all, in whom each and all participate, beyond each and all, comprehending and incomprehensible? A sane humanity that neither ostracizes nor reduces? A humanity of knowing finitude, living toward greater finitude, living toward an infinity that cannot be mastered by any means?

*

The more a soul outspirals into wholeness the more its ear can hear the fullness of the human voice. And also, the more one outspirals, the more fully one’s soul integrates. The integration without and within are the same movement. This is the positive reason for listening.

This outspiraling dialogue is my “ought”. (At its best) it wants to be a positive, desired ought. (At its best) it knows it cannot be demanded. It cannot live in condemnation of its opposite.

Nobody should feel ashamed for not yet wanting dialogue.

Faith: Things can be better.

*

Articulate: from Latin articulatus, past participle of articulare ‘divide into joints, utter distinctly,’ from articulus ‘small connecting part’.

Zip! Zoop!

Bullshit – Meaningful, inspiring ideas that that seem to promise something, but that something can never be fulfilled through any practical action.

Chickenshit – Practical activity that seems like it ought to serve some meaningful purpose, but in reality is pointless busyness.

Bullshit is meaning without practice. Chickenshit is practice without meaning.

If you can bring together meaning and practice, so your meaning is a positive something that can be realized and your practical actions are a means to a meaningful end then you are The Shit.

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

*

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.

*

“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!’“

*

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.”

*

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.)

*

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.