To put it crassly, magic is the craft of soul hacking.
Category Archives: Philosophy
The gift-rooted organization
The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to.
In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing.
The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It either continues on and on and eventually peters out in futility, or it forms a closed logical loop, or it reveals only negative goals.
Technicity asks leading Why questions. It asks Why with an expected instrumental answer: Because. “Because” means “in order to.”
But ultimately, Why is not a question answered with because. The reverse is true. Because is answered with Why.
Unless the instrumental in-order-to terminates in a Why with no because other than itself, a person is morally ungrounded. Why is only “Because I love it.” Why is only “Because I am here for this.” Why is “When this Why is present to me, I am who I am.”
Why is spontaneously felt value. Why is intrinsic. Why is experienced as answer, not question. When Why is present, we have no reason to ask why. If we are moved to ask why, this indicates that whatever we are doing is ungrounded from Why. When Why is present we say “This is why…”
Much of our Why is rooted in some kind of giving that we are born to do. Why do I exist? I exist to give specific kinds of gift to people who value it. The Why is only actualized when someone values what we give, and receives it as a gift.
The rest of our Why comes from receiving gifts from others, which in turn activates their Why.
Why is actualized in such exchanges of value.
Now some of these exchanges are purely instrumental. This is unavoidable, and not even a bad thing — as long as the instrumental chains are grounded in Why.
This grounding can be analyzed. This is what we are trying do when we ask ourselves “Why am I doing this activity?” or “Why am I doing this job?” or “Why am I working for this organization?” And sometimes this analysis succeeds and reconnects us with our Why. We close the circuit, and feel the flow of Why moving through us again. All the instrumental in-order-tos receive a charge of “worth it”. But we must do this analysis this outside the enframing of technicity, or we must at least allow it to lead us beyond technicity, to a meaningful terminus where Why is an answer, not a question.
Value exchange is the medium of service. But at the very root of value is essential gift: the terminal Why of each person, which is the true taproot of everything good in this world.
Organizations which tap into people’s essential service — which provide opportunities to people to give their gifts and find people who will value and receive them — who will provide their people with services they need to support the giving of their gifts — where they receive other people’s gifts and in valuing and receiving them actualize them as who they are as people — such organizations become infused with value. They are beloved, charismatic, charged with meaning.
But this is unusual. Such organizations are rare, and they must cultivate, maintain and grow their networks of value exchange, and take seriously their moral grounding — their rootedness in gift. When designers discuss design ethics, this should be front and center. This is the very core of design ethics.
But most designers are as technicity-dominated as their masters. Most “design ethics” is concerned with using design methods to achieve the standardized set of technocratic objectives, unusually avoiding unfairness, injustice, oppression or ecological disaster.
Designers have a deeper positive goal. To arrange and shape our shared world so that we naturally, spontaneously want to serve, protect, repair, enhance, honor, ornament, love this world like our own child.
To fix the myriad technical problems of the world we must first love our world enough that we want to fix them, and cannot abide leaving the world broken.
Designers are responsible for treating our general societal nihilism problem.
Because nihilism is the inevitable result of ungrounded technicity.
This is why designers are morally obligated to transcend technicity, even while working within it.
If designers “go native” and adopt technicity in order to function better in technicity-dominated environments, we have not only lost our meaning as a profession, but we are betraying our collective and individual Why. Our lives will become utterly meaningless and the world will become worthless.
We’ll become mechanics who fix and tune behavior extraction machines, and we will generate nihilism, instead of meaning.
Indeed, we currently suffer a nihilism pandemic. This mass nihilism is caused by ubiquity of technicity, and mass service to behavior extraction systems.
Let us now look at Business as Usual organizations, not only as the root cause of nihilism, but also as commercially unwise, from a business perspective.
The less people are given opportunities to give their own essential gift to others who need it, want it, value it, love it, the less they are themselves in a world in which they belong. They become alienated from the people and organizations who reject their essential service while extracting from them behaviors that have nothing to do with who they are.
That kind of behavior extraction is expensive. It requires constant monitoring. The behaviors are ones the person does not want to perform, so they are likely to stop doing the specified behaviors if they can get away with it. They require surveillance to ensure the behaviors are produced in the right quantities and within specified tolerances.
This kind of monitoring is expensive. Doing work in a way conducive to monitoring introduces overhead. At minimum the work must be “instrumented” for generating behavioral measurements. But generally, a monitored human resource is also required to spend much of their day providing “visibility” to those to whom they report. They produce activity reports of various kinds. They must demonstrate value in progress reports, self-assessments, periodic performance reviews and other meetings. and create appearances that suggest productivity to anyone watching them.
But then behaviors must be controlled. First and foremost, they must be motivated externally, through various positive and negative factors. — “carrots and sticks”, as they say, referring to donkey driver methodologies. This is a euphemism for bribes and blackmail, which motivate by fear and greed. Many companies (most?) rely on money to motivate desired behaviors. This is an expensive way to fuel an organization. So socially-acceptable intimidation and bullying supplement the positive motivation. Market forces establish not only fairly consistent pay across employers, but also consistent levels of intimidation and bullying. Teachers, for instance, as a profession, expect a higher level of systematic abuse than designers. But most people expect some reasonable amount of surveillance and coercion from their management. It seems normal.
(If all this sounds totalitarian, that is because BAU orgs are miniature totalitarian states. At heart, totalitarianism is technicity taken to extremes of purity and magnitude.)
But again, why shouldn’t an organization selfishly choose to be totalitarian?
Because such organizations are repellent. They are manifestly meaningless. Nobody chooses them unless they are deprived of alternatives, or are trapped (“locked in”) or are forced to.
Organizations rooted in value — let’s call them “gift-rooted organizations” are inspiring within and without, attractive, radiant. They have genuine brand value that goes far beyond mere brand recognition or just trust.
Dang. Out of time.
To be continued.
Cosmic collapse inspo
I have momentarily shifted attention from Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to Dodd’s Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. Both books discuss the human condition after the fall of the Second Temple, in the years between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine. This was also the time when ideas emerged that would eventually converge, coalesce and crystallize into Kabbalah.
Why this book? Because that time feels uncannily similar to now. It was a time of political instability, social dissolution and personal alienation. It was a time of intense, pervasive anomie. Public life could no longer serve as a source of meaning. The few who sought meaning, sought it within themselves and in small communities of others who did the same. The rest lived lives of quiet, noisy or violent desperation, delusion or predation.
This was the time that developed new forms of religious culture which have become so second-natural to us that we find it difficult to conceptualize religion or culture any other way. It dominates even our imaginations. And I think this time resembles that one in that both are ends of apparently eternal orders suddenly revealed as mortal, fragile, rapidly expiring. The main difference is that what is ending now, is what started then. I am — at least in my own imagination — recollecting our cradle from our deathbed, remembering how that cradle was, too, a deathbed. The books I am reading now are intellectual histories of that time, that give samples of how some of the seminal geniuses of the time experienced, interpreted and responded to a cosmos in collapse.
I suppose you could say I’m collecting cosmic collapse inspo and “best practices”.
Protected: Common ground for debate
Protected: Triad trouble
Fertile overlap
I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.
Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.
Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.
Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.
The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.
Protected: Abnormal is the new normal
Material, medium and goal
Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.
Protected: Ramified shallows
Gone native
What does it mean to “go native”?
According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”
She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:
Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.
Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.
Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.
Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.
Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.
This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.
I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.
My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.
It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.
For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.
Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.
We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.
We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.
We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.
And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.
We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.
Service design has gone native. We are corporate.
Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.
And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.
When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.
It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.
It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.
But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.
Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.
Where was I?
A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.
(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)
This is not a tree
Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.
I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.
Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.
Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.
The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.
So many things are not a tree.
A city is not a tree.
A service is not a tree.
An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.
Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.
History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.
A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.
Alembic
I am grateful I never had to meet Nietzsche the man, and only know the being who wrote and was written — the being who thought his way into my own living soul.
Nietzsche stands in for so many other flawed people who wrote books which brought authors to transhumous life in my own life. I am grateful to have known only their authors.
Who is the “real person” behind the author? Wrong question! Who is the author who enters a crippled actor to make of him an inspired actant? Who is the author who pours their being into their vessel in order to be poured out into so many others?
Whoever says “the author is dead” performs a contradiction, and proves the opposite. Only an author truly lives.
And a golden ball in flight condenses across the alembic: a throwing gift.
Services are hyperobjects
Years ago, a cynical friend remarked to me that when organizations hire companies to come in and implement enterprise software, what they are really buying is redesign of their operations. That is true, but let’s not lose balance: without enterprise software, redesigned operations will sink back into chaos.
In the future, service design will iteratively develop one hypercomplex deliverable.
A service is a hyperobject. A service is a multidimensional lattice laced so densely along so many vectors that the designer’s primitive tomography of “visual communications” cannot capture its being, or even do justice to its kind of being.
You could stack printer plots of experience maps and service blueprints and ecosystem maps higher than the stratosphere, but the more complete the documentation, the more unmanageable the towering edifice of knowledge grows, until it collapses into incomprehensible paper rubble.
Early last week Susan asked me if I could sense what is next in design. I told her no. For the first time in my career I had no signal. By the end of the week, I had a strong signal.
Any form of pluricentric design (including service design) crafts hyperobjects (objects of more than three dimensions).
Only now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, can we approach hyperobjects as what they really are and design them accordingly! Human minds are (possibly with rare exceptions) confined to thinking in three dimensions within unidirectional time. With four, we are outside human intuition, and must work very differently.
So – not only are services not trees, but they are also not semi-lattices! Nor are they anything as tame as three dimensional semilattices. They have at least four dimensions I can count:
- Touchpoints along channels – line
- Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
- Delivery operations – volume
- Actor – tesseract (since all three dimensions are duplicated by each actor, yet share the same hyperobject)
And woven through this 4D space (the word hyperloom comes to mind) are innumerable threads gordian knotted into a dense hypermesh:
- Value exchanges among actors
- Qualitative and quantitative data about actors
- Measurements of various events within the service
- Nonhuman service actors (ironically ANT’s flat ontology might only make sense in information hyperspace! Entities like data stores might end up making most sense inside of the actor dimension… hmmmm)
- Team/-member responsibilities for shared opportunities, shared outcomes, implementations, etc.
I’m going on record. You heard it here first.
Services are hyperobjects.
Because services are hyperobjects, they cannot be adequately rendered by any amount of planar expression.
Until we learn to model, document, develop and manage services as hyperobjects — something only now possible thanks to AI — service design is an exercise in futility, doomed to partial success at best.
Material fate
Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.
Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.
Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.
Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.
In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.
Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:
As we form our materials, our materials form us.
In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.
Craft is material dialogue.
In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.
Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.
From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:
Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.
To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.
In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.
We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.
For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.
In service design, our material is organizations.
Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.
Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.
Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.
Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.
Protected: Careericide notes
As opposed to
Over the last decade, I have observed a pattern in political thinking concerning comparisons.
In this pattern, some real object of criticism is compared unfavorably to some counter-ideal.
But the counter-ideal is never sampled from reality. It is always a concept whose function is absence of whatever is being condemned.
The West. The gross unfairness of the real, nearby world is contrasted with a distant world free of this exact form of unfairness. The citizens of totalitarian regimes, for example, do not suffer from inequality, because every person has exactly the same status under the state. And the pervasive hate we hear about so much in the West is unheard of outside the West. If such prejudices exist far away where we have never been, we haven’t experienced it, so why would we assume it is existent?
Capitalism. The injustice of Capitalism is contrasted with non-Capitalism in faraway lands or times, conceived as life elsewhere that is probably lived in such and such a way, all so hazily conceived that just about any tantalizing utopian form can be discerned in its billowy rorschach clouds. I hear from a well-informed internet researcher that medieval peasants enjoyed short workdays interspersed with holy, frolicsome dance and play, similar to the life Cubans enjoy — or would enjoy if imperialists would stop meddling with their prosperity.
Wars. We look at images of atrocities, served to us by sources everyone around us assumes to be true, mainly because everyone they know assumes the same, and we can see plainly that this war is infinitely worse than all the other wars we have inspected with similar appalled fascination. This war is obviously a genocide, otherwise the images of dead and injured women and children wouldn’t be shown to us by disinterested parties who simply report the facts on the ground. But what we hear from the enemy is propaganda.
Marriages. This partner I’m stuck with is a neglectful, insensitive, selfish, farting, quarrelsome human-shaped mass of irritations, nothing even in the ballpark of the charming, engaging, self-sufficient tower of strength and integrity I deserve.
These times. Past generations had it so much easier than we do. They did not suffer the exact things that make our lives terrible.
Pain. You do not suffer the exact indignities I must endure. You cannot understand my lived experience.
No reality can compete with an ideal — least of all an ideal conceived for the purpose of unfavorable comparison.
When we love such counter-ideals it is only “love” of a negation of a negativity. And that is not love. That is hate flipped inside-out.
But also, ideals cannot be loved. Love transcends self. Nothing is more self than an imagined fantasy. Our ideals, beliefs, notions of what can and should be have more to do with ourselves than the reality they allegedly represent.
Only real beings can be loved.
And real beings are flawed.
But real beings are also mostly beyond our comprehension. What we think about them barely touches their reality. Reality surprises at depths we cannot suspect prior to shock. And these shocks can sometimes reveal the flaws in our own notions of flaw and perfection, our own capacity to judge, our own self-assessment as judges.
But all this is pure complacency to those still omniscient enough to believe that they can use their limited range of experience and logical faculties to model out reality as it is and as it should be. In most cases, a little more life brings a few more shocks and a bit more wisdom and caution toward making grand judgements about realities we barely know — and instinctively avoid knowing, because knowledge destroys counter-ideals.
Successful design
What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.
A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.
But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.
But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.
But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.
Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.
And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.
Protected: Instaurational outburst
Respiratory cycle
In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.
Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.
Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.
Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.
The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.
Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own
Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.
Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.