Category Archives: Politics

Eternal effigicide victims

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Jew-haters, antisemites, anti-Zionists have diverging reasons for hating what they conceptualize variously in religious, racial, historical, political, ideological terms.

The ontology shifts about according to the faith and doctrine of the ones doing the hating. But the emotion — angst expressed as hate — and the target of the hate is constant: Am Yisrael, the People of Israel. It is Am Yisrael and our perpetually evolving, disrupting, regenerating, self-transcending tradition, dedicated to the ever-expanding transcendent One beyond being.

Am Yisrael is the radical other who stands in for the radical Otherness of the transcendent. When it is impossible to annihilate reality and reality’s transcendent ground, but one needs to vent infinite hatred somewhere, however impotently, the best lightning rod for discharging one’s angst is whoever loves what one hates.

And when effigicide is directed at Jews, it is rarely confined to Jews for long, for the simple reason that Jews are not the only people who offend ideoidolators.

Effigicide is the violent expression of angst toward the supraformal absolute directed at someone with living form.

Ancientspeak

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Orwell famously invented the idea of an artificial language semantically engineered to destroy the possibility of thought beyond a set ideological horizon.

For a Newspeaker, any notion with potential to interfere with total cooperation with Ingsoc would be mentally inconceivable. Such an idea would require no suppression. Not only would it be impossible to communicate to other people, it could not form as an intelligible concept in the first place — even a concept requiring rejection and condemnation.

As I have said before, realia we can intuit as relevant, but which we cannot conceive and understand within our overall understanding (our metaphysic) induces perplexity and intolerable dread. Such realia stands at the outer edges of intelligibility and threatens the shimmering migraine mirage membrane separating us from infinite annihilation.

Within this membrane of intelligibility is everything — the totality of the known and knowable universe.

Beyond the membrane of intelligibility is unspeakable evil, toward which one feels inexpressible angst, hatred and terror. Such angst is radically objectless (as Heidegger noted in Being and Time) — and this lack of object itself creates yet more angst, because the very concept of angst stands beyond the membrane of intelligibility. Such angst always finds an object, into which it can discharge itself and find temporary relief. Ingsoc wisely provided such objects and occasions for discharge (Two Minutes Hate). Emmanuel Goldstein (an all-purpose political villain) or some enemy state or another were provided as lightning rods to direct this hate along politically useful channels, producing a sort of cathartic post-coital devotion in its exhaustion.

A Newspeaker indoctrinated in Ingsoc would live inside an intentionally, systematically narrowed horizon of intelligibility, surrounded by intense, pervasive evil, which was conveniently embodied by enemies, who stood in for any reality or idea unthinkable in Newspeak. Who isn’t precisely with us, is absolutely against us. Docility within. Hostility without. Two sides of the same totalitarian existence.

Of course, the above account blends Orwell’s thought with my own.

I’m presenting it Newspeak as an antithesis of an opposite ideal, that everts every feature of Newspeak.

The angst of transcendence is interpreted not as inexpressible evil deserving infinite hatred but as ineffable goodness inviting and emanating infinite love. The language is not centrally engineered but organically developed polycentrically across a community of radically non-uniform unique individuals among whom wisdom is distributed.

Of course, whoever speaks and things and exists in this language would be a special target of totalitarian hatred. It wouldn’t be discharged in a mere Two Minutes Hate. You’d need something closer to a Two-Thousand Years Hate.

Despite the risks, though — and these do exist even in an intellectually expansive free society like ours where young people are trained to think critically and unanimously embrace the value of diversity (“diversity is conformity”) — I would very much love to learn such a language.

The justest kid

Fables, myths & parables, Politics

A group of kids gathered in a playground after school every day to play and wrestle and do kid stuff.

The two strongest kids were bitter rivals. They fought almost every day.

One day the slightly stronger of the two kids had an epiphany.

He was tired of wasting his strength fighting his rival. It was not only pointless and destructive; it was immoral.

From now on he would use his strength responsibly — against strength itself. He would impose a regime of justice in the playground, where nobody could be stronger than any other.

So the strongest kid announced to the weaker kids that he would no longer be the strongest kid. From now on he would give his strength away. Whenever the weaker kids found themselves in a power disparity, his strength would be theirs. He would jump in and help the weaker kid prevail over the stronger one.

The former strongest kid, having renounced strength, would now be known as the justest kid.

The weaker kids loved this idea, and immediately rose up against the second-strongest kid. With the help of the justest kid, they beat his ass, and brought him down to their level.

And whenever the second-strongest kid — or whichever of the kids who became a little more powerful than the others — tried to attack the justest kid, they all viewed this as what it truly was: an attack on justice itself.

Indeed, wherever things became even slightly unequal or hinted at injustice, the justest kid stepped in and gave away his strength, and with the enthusiastic cooperation of the other kids, quickly reestablished perfect equality and justice.

And the justest kid’s plan worked.

Everywhere he looked, he saw only justice and equality.

And the kids discovered that they too loved equality and justice, and preferred it greatly over the brutal and abusive struggle for power that formerly dominated their playground.

They had reasons, too

Ethics, History, Judaism, Politics

People also thought they had good reasons for hating Jewish people in 1933. And in 1821. And in 1894.

The reasons change.

The name for it can only be used once before it must be abandoned in disgrace, and a new one coined.

But the target is constant.

The justifications always look reasonable, or at least convincing from the inside, but they are obviously distorted when seen from outside that fact-bending, standard-doubling field.

The cycles start hot with resentment and hate intoxication. They mellow into thoughtless conformity. (“If every person I respect has this anti-judaism/anti-Jew/anti-Israel/anti-zionism attitude, it must be a respectable attitude to have.”)

People thought they had good reasons for hating zionists (or vaguely sympathizing with zionist-haters) in 2023-2025.

They will all want to pretend you resisted this. But, right now, in the present, I only know a few non-Jews with the humanity, moral integrity and intellectual honesty to look at this situation and say what it is. Everyone else tries to blur, qualify, equivocate, squirm into conformity with the illiberalism they are in bed with. They want to reserve their right to “criticize” so they can remain in good standing with their morally bankrupt peers.

I am observing this blurriness with the sharpest eyesight.

I am watching and learning.

I will never forget how each and every person in my life behaved in this crucial time.

Most do exactly what most people did in 1821, 1894 and 1933 did: Stand quietly on the sidelines trying to look exactly as indifferent as they truly are, harboring a lukewarm mixture of confused conflicting opinions in their loose minds.

Whatever they try to blur, they will never blur the sharp resolution of my memory and of my understanding.

Hiroshimite genocide

Politics

The bombing of Hiroshima was clearly a genocide of the Hiroshimites — the indigenous people of the land of Hiroshima.

The population of this land was tiny — only 350 thousand — to America’s 140 million.

By 1945, Hiroshima had already been militarily degraded to the point of defenselessness. This is why American bombers could fly in and release their payload with impunity.

The attack was entirely unnecessary. Only a few hundred thousand more American deaths would have sufficed to win a ceasefire.

Worse, to this very day we do not know how many of the Hiroshimites were loyal to Hirohito and how many were innocent victims. But we can be almost 100% sure the support was far short of universal — especially when we count the children and women who always only want ordinary, peaceful lives, like you and me.

But if you look at a spreadsheet and calculate the death ratio between Americans and Hiroshimites, the objective facts speak louder than anything else. Virtually no Americans died in this operation, compared to nearly 140,000 Hiroshimites.

That is approximately 40% of the Hiroshimite population — just wiped out.

If you compare this to other genocides, for example to 66% of the the European Jewish population who died in the Holocaust (while Europeans either joined in on the killing or low-key prevented Jews from escaping), or the more recent genocide in Gaza where 3% to 4% of Gazans were killed in treacherous urban warfare (where Hamas did everything it could to get their own population killed so they could photograph them and use the images to emotionally manipulate know-it-all progressivist ignorami), you can see that the Hiroshimite genocide sits squarely between the 4% and 66% of two of our most paradigmatic genocides, and is therefore, quantitatively, objectively genocidal.

So it was an unnecessary, deadly and indiscriminate attack on a tiny population perpetrated by a much larger and better-armed power. Those who perished might have included dissenters and unenthusiastic supporters of Hirohito. These Asians were allegedly killed to prevent the death of Americans, whose lives were considered more valuable than Hiroshimite lives. This was true not only of Americans, but Europeans, most of whom were white. And there it is again: race. It’s always there if you look for it with eyes capable of seeing only that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it, unless you learn other ways to understand the world.

Against red oil

Design, Politics

I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.

Dreher, Slezkine, Idel smush-up

Judaism, Politics

Just days after I noticed how little I care about modernity, suddenly I care again!

I was reading an alarming article on Rod Dreher on the advanced state of decay and alienation among Zoomer right-wingers, that has recently come fully to light, but which was not only predictable, but explicitly, repeatedly predicted. Oh, I know. Progressivists claimed to be wise to this evil strain within the right from the very start, and used this to justify persecuting everything right of itself, including liberalism, in order to extirpate “fascism” before it could rise up and dominate. But by treating everyday normal people as abnormally vicious, it alienated the liberal middle — including myself — and set conditions for this self-fulfilling prophesy that it can now claim to have foreseen. We now have a split Overton — the window pane is cracked into two entirely incommensurable narratives, each controlled by its own illiberal, extreme pole — each antisemitic in its own style.

Dreher mentioned a book by Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century. One takeaway:

…the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions. In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are … and today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it. Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world.

Jews, thanks mainly to Christian anti-Jewish policy, were subjected to conditions that eventually produced modernity. Jews “enjoyed” a head start, and developed skills needed to thrive in a nomadic cranial labor economy. Centuries later, when the rest of the world found themselves in the same unhappy conditions Jews had learned to manage, and needed an explanation and villain to blame for it, guess who played the eternal scapegoat.

Strange coincidence — I have been reading Moshe Idel the last few mornings. One of his core theses is that the history of Kabbalah is an interplay of two primary tendencies or trends. One is theosophic and nomian and the other is ecstatic and anomian. I immediately connected it with Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian framework for understanding tragedy, which was/is the fusion of the two. I have always viewed this Janus-face fusion as Hermes.

Yuri Slezkine called the Jewish people a Mercurial people as opposed to the Apollonian nationals who play fickle host. And then I came upon this passage in Idel:

A proper understanding of the last major Jewish school of mysticism, Hasidism, must take into consideration the merging of these two mainstreams, which had competed with each other for more than a millennium and a half: ecstasy and theurgy, or anthropocentrism and theocentrism. The result was a synthesis that, on the one hand, attenuated the theurgical-theosophical elements and, on the other, propagated ecstatic values even more than previously. Or, as we shall see in a passage from R. Meshullam Phoebus, classical Spanish and Lurianic Kabbalah were reinterpreted ecstatically. This emphasis on individual mystical experience may be one of the major explanations for the neutralization of nationalistic messianism in Hasidism. Although the aftermath of Sabbatianism could also have prompted interest in a more individualistic type of mysticism and redemption, we can envision the emergence of the Hasidic type of mysticism as part of the dissemination of religious values crucial for the ecstatic Kabbalistic model.

Idel and Slezkine merged in a terrible insight.

If Jews were the proto-moderns, and antinomian totalitarianism is a kind of disorder of modern shock — is it possible that Sabbatianism / Frankism was a proto-totalitarianism?

This is a super-sketchy, reckless, unsupported suggestion — not even a hypothesis. But I want to note it here as something possibly worth digging into later.

Truce logic

History, Politics

By the logic of today’s incredibly compassionate, well-educated, thoroughly-informed and self-aware international overclass public, because there was some unknown number of innocent Germans and Japanese (at minimum, the children!), we shouldn’t have fought Germany and Japan to defeat and unconditional surrender. To stop the bloodshed, we should have fought to a truce, and left Hirohito and Hitler in power.

I need to dig around and see if anyone has written alternative history fiction on this scenario.

I can’t think of any scenario where a person of the contemporary “left” would will a military victory and surrender of any power willing to fight to the death. And the main obstacle to this would be belief such powers exist. Because, as I’ve said, this kind of mentality cannot comprehend radical evil, cannot comprehend that anything might exist that transcends its comprehension, therefore denies what transcends its comprehension, therefore denies the existence of radical evil, therefore becomes the banal servant of radical evil. They’re just keeping their heads down, doing their job, saving for retirement: la la la la.

Mechanocracy

Politics

If you accept James Burnham’s theory of managerialism, it is clear that AI is bringing that social order to an abrupt end. And changes in social order bring revolution.

We have a strange tendency, perhaps inherited by Marx, to omit questions of collective character from macrosocial analyses. It is almost as if we think the persons who constitute overclasses are interchangeable tokens. It’s just a quantitative difference ranging from zero power and total innocence to absolute power and absolute corruption.

I would say, though, that those who ascend by military prowess, those who ascend by risking and winning wild bets, those who ascend by forming interpersonal relationships, and those who ascend with pure engineering brainpower will form entirely different ruling classes who will dominate society very differently.

We are about to witness a return to genuine capitalism, after a hiatus we didn’t even realize had happened.

The means of production are being re-seized by a technological elite, who win, not by understanding people, but by rigorously excluding personal considerations. Theirs is an objectivity through elimination of subjectivity — or at least all subjectivity beyond their own hyper-technik subject.

These new technologies not only manufacture things, but information, analysis, insights, beliefs and souls. And they manufacture new technologies that invent technology-inventing technologies. And they manufacture weapon systems that no force of human warriors however large, skilled or brave can battle longer than a single afternoon.

Every age has its apocalypse. We have these apocalypses because each of us will die, and to our little selves, when we die the world dies with us. We feel it coming: nothingness.

We rummage in the dirt for what meanings mean.

2016, explained

Politics

I can’t believe I never posted this. I’ve been repeating it for years.

Who you voted for in 2016 is almost entirely a matter of who you hated more as a kid: the teacher’s pet, who took your name and made you stay in from recess, or the bully who atomic-super-wedgied you on the playground.

Reflexive rehabilitation of “diversity”

Politics

In my understanding, the importance of critical theory is not primarily in its methods of critique but in the focus of its critique.

The critique of critical theory’s objects of criticism are meant to afford us access to our critical own subject. The ultimate aim of the effort is to critique ourselves as interpreters, understanders, actors — and critics.

In other words: Critical theory is meant to be reflexive.

My objection to the recent identitarian turn (documented in Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap) is total loss of that reflexivity that gives critical theory its value and humanity. In identitarian critique the critic self-objectifies their own critical subject as a category (or constellation of categories) that serves as its object of criticism. But the identitarian object of “self critique” is a decoy self. The decoy self redirects attention away from the first person critical subject and focuses it exclusively on third person objects of criticism. This keeps the subject who does the criticism — (again, the critical focus of genuine critical theory) — concealed in the background, unperceived, unconscious — unconstrained by critical self-awareness — and releases it to perform all the abuses of power it prohibits on principle.

We act out a critique of objective self-categories we claim to be (an identity or intersectional identity complex), while sparing the most powerful, self-serving, most incorrigibly biased identity of all, the subject who compulsively performs the identitarian critique, and mistakes it for “objective” history, morality and reality.

Sartre famously called this self-objectifying move bad faith. In bad faith a person adopts a defined social role in place of our more protean, responsible I.

Reflexivity attempts to catch oneself in the act of delusion, distortion, neurosis. We try to notice what we imaginatively superimpose upon phenomena, what we try to ignore, or what we selectively exaggerate, suppress and distort. We actively seek out where we have been shown wrong, where our predictions have failed, where others object to our accounts and characterizations.

And we do this not for them, or, at least, not only for them. We do it because it allows us to develop better sensitivity and understanding of what is given around us — and what transcends our own minds.

This helps us be better more respectful, responsible citizens of the world — but it also enhances our understanding of the human condition — of how we, as humans, are situated within reality.

Our own experience of the world is enriched immeasurably. We can feel the mysterious ground behind mundane life. We can feel a depth of possibility, where before there was flat factuality.

All this being said: I have grown (or shrunk) to despise Progressivist identitarianism so intensely that I’ve become disproportionately, neurotically averse to its core symbols, some of which are core to my own ideals. One of these ideals is “diversity”.

I am re-embracing this word, and reaffirming my commitment to it.

Of course, my commitment to diversity is far more radical than Progressivism’s. In fact, I believe our institutions will only flourish again when Progressivism itself is subjected to its own standards of diversity in the institutions it dominates.

Progressivism, like every other power should be confronted and challenged, most of all by itself — reflexively. Progressives should be critiquing Progressivist-dominated institutions and asking what policies, practices and unacknowledged biases perpetuate, conceal and justify its abuses of power.

This work can and should be done under the banner of diversity.

Mass synchronization

Politics

My friend Zellyn tells me that one GPT can train on another and mysteriously absorb its characteristics.

I hope I’m getting this right. Apparently, coders can tweak the ethical coding of a GPT to make it less scrupulous and more biased. A second GPT that trains on the output of this first vicious GPT will absorb these same vices — even if the content it trains on is not related to the vices in question.

This did not surprise me at all. Faiths are multistable things, and the structures that grasp our perceptions and conceptions of the world also structure our moral reasoning.

If you consume content from vicious ideologues, you’ll start thinking like a vicious ideologue without noticing because you’ll share their worldview. This is how the best propaganda works. It encourages the same naive realism, including naive realisms that have beliefs about naive realism and a belief that this belief immunizes them from naive realism. If that confuses you, just think about how Christians sometimes believe that their beliefs about Christianity immunize them from anti-Christian attitudes. It’s not only like that, it is the same belief structure.

This is how I explain the creepy synchronization of belief and even the words people use to express their beliefs. They are conditioned to produce the same “spontaneous” observations and thoughts as those who share their conditioning. To them it looks like independent verification, but it’s just shared faith doing what shared faith does.

If you don’t want to get synchronized, you have to expose yourself to thoughts, practices and experiences others around you are not thinking, doing and experiencing. If you are not actively trying to be an individual, you’re probably the unwitting agent of some collective. And if that collective imagines itself to be made up of radical thinkers, bold individualists and independent moral reasoners — dissenters, in fact! — you’ll think you’re one of those — despite your lockstep ideological conformity.

Metaskepticism

Philosophy, Politics

It is time for the unexamined tacit assumptions behind skepticism to be examined and challenged. Early in his career C. S. Peirce showed the way.

Skepticism assumes a sort of tabula rasa of belief, a default blank canvas upon which we can freely posit beliefs. But this blankness is sheer philosophical fiction. Truth is, we all have many beliefs that we are unable to disbelieve, even as we disingenuously formulate theoretical doubts:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

To put it bluntly, a great many skeptics refuse to take their own real practical beliefs seriously. They argue frivolously, paying no attention at all to what they take to be real in their own practical lives.

For this kind of skeptic, philosophy is a delightful recreation — a diversion — that does not touch on real life in any significant way — conceptual concoction play, unencumbered by any obligation or consequence. And this would be fine if they would confine themselves to their conceptual playrooms.

But this is where fun-time skepticism shows its dark underside. The replacement notions constructed to replace skeptically refuted actual beliefs are seductive, and inevitably become fanatical fantastical politics — ideologies — which leak out from the private study, into the classroom, and, from there, into the offices and cubicles of the practical world.

These conceptual concoctions and theories and formulas are highly brittle, and vulnerable to reality. (Nietzsche says “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.“). Ideologues must defend themselves, most of all, from genuine belief of those who are stubbornly loyal to the givens of reality.

Dishonesty becomes the cost of membership in this kind of movement — dishonesty or total self-alienation, where the partisan sincerely no longer knows what they believe or disbelieve, due to habitual self-doubt and terror at being exposed as biased or prejudiced, and is ready to conform to those who seem credible. But whose judgment seems credible to such self-alienated judgment? They say, “so it seems to me, but how can I know given the unreliability of my own perceptions and understandings? Things are never as they seem. So I should trust the best and brightest around me…” But these best and brightest are also self-alienated. The blind lead the blind into ideological ruts, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, power is weakness, truth is false, up is down, left is right, conventionality is revolution, superficiality is radical, openly sociopathic totalitarians are freedom fighters and those who defend themselves from Nazi are the new Nazis.

The famous universal acid of skepticism does not only dissolve beliefs. It also dissolves persons. And before we get all armchair Buddhist, and pat ourselves on the head for thinking non-self, anatta, this acid dissolves our relationship with reality beyond form and beyond being. Nothing could be less Buddhist than addiction to recreational deconstruction.

This kind of habitual skepticism in fact enlists us in Heidegger’s famous anonymous public, the They. It makes us an intuitionless, de-centered, unselfed political unit. It makes us, in Nietzsche’s words, a zero: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

The spell of skepticism, however, is broken if we become honest with ourselves, and recognize that we do have an implicit faith behind our professed beliefs.

This faith is as given as any other reality. We cannot freely invent it any more than we can freely invent the physical world around us. This faith is actual — we reveal it through our actions, which are based on what we assume is real and true.

To articulate this actual faith is to be philosophically honest. To hold a faith that wishes to express its actual beliefs — a faith that wishes to be honest about itself — is a good faith.

To invent beliefs that are not actual — that we would not bet our lives in, if it came down to it, is to be philosophically dishonest. A faith that needs this kind of dishonesty is a bad faith.

All we can really do with our faiths and the beliefs our faith articulates is question them and test them. Through this process, I have changed my own faith. And when my faith changed, the beliefs I articulate change. — But not before!

Consequential philosophy is not always, or even often, delightful. It is not something we do only for fun, and prance away from when it gets unpleasant or tragic. It is as different from recreational philosophistry as scientific investigation is from fiction writing. And if we abandon our hard questions as soon as the going gets unpleasant, it doesn’t even gain the depth of literary fiction — it is just easy conceptual entertainment that is easy precisely because it reinforces the habits of the status quo, however “daring” it pretends to be. And the status quo today is frivolous skepticism, and of course, frivolous cynicism toward anyone who believes anything substantial.

What are some things I know are true?

I’ve been listing them a lot lately, but I’ll list them again:

  • Morality is real and it matters. We know there is better and worse, and we are both guilty and ashamed when we do or are what is worse.
  • There is an absolute. Certainty about the absolute seems impossible, but we know that this absolute determines the truth and falsehood of our “constructions”.
  • The absolute transcends our understanding. When we equate reality with our beliefs about it, we know that this is an immoral and false denial of the absolute. (Metaphysics is something that must be overcome? Says who? Show me a skeptic who is skeptical about automatic anti-metaphysics!)
  • The Golden Rule is universally binding. At its most radical, the Golden Rule means that we must treat our fellow I’s as equal, and approach them with the dignity every I deserves.
  • How we treat others and how we approach the Absolute are inextricably bound. Exercise of the Golden Rule is our most reliable method for approaching the Absolute. If we take the faiths of others around us seriously, and exchange teaching and learning with our fellows, we increase our actual certainty through improvement of our own faith and the faith we share with those around us.

These are things I cannot currently doubt. And, more, I believe in my heart that we must not pretend to doubt them, or even make an effort to overcome belief in them. I will not trample on them with boots of any kind, whether muddy boots of cynicism, shiny jackboots of ideology, or antigravity boots of alienated skepticism.

Leadership and respect

Politics

Natural leaders are talented at giving and receiving respect.

No self-respecting person accepts a leader who does not respect them.

If you disrespect until respect is “earned”, you have not yet earned the right to lead.

Exchange of respect is everything. It should not be rare.

Beyond contemporary mysticism

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Contemporary mysticism, like all contemporary popular thought, reserves all conceptual clarity and precision for material reality alone. Mysticism is a misty, nebulous remainder, hovering above and glowing behind material reality — an opalescent swirl of vague hopes, of insinuated meaning, of faint underwritings of morality.

I have chosen to distribute my own clarity and precision more broadly — across infraformal material, formal psychic, and supraformal spiritual realities. This choice is informed both by my everyday experiences working among humans and nonhumans as a designer, and by my mornings spent reflecting on these experiences and on my past reflections — integrating, clarifying, iterating.

We all need this expanded clarity, but we cannot even articulate the need, precisely because of our truncated clarity. We have optimized our understandings to account for physical phenomena, but we wave away the immediate matters at the heart of our lives — love, beauty, meaning, relatedness, belonging — as someday-to-be-explained epiphenomena.

We placed the particle at the center of our persons, and set these human matters in orbit around it. And now we must do the most complex calculations of epicycles within epicycles before we can calculate why our families matter to us more than life itself.

Last night Jack asked for the musical instrument “you blow into”. I didn’t know what he meant. Each wrong guess made him more visibly desperate. So we went to the instrument box and started rummaging. We found a pitch pipe tuner, and he was able to say that “it is like that.”. When we found the harmonica, his relief was instant and total. It was obvious, though, that most of his pain and subsequent relief had more to do with his need to communicate than with his need for the harmonica. The two needs were bound up together and compounded exponentially.

When a toddler begins to melt down we sometimes say “use your words.” This does two things. First, it teaches them to begin with communicating their needs before expressing their frustration. But second, the very act of communicating calms and stabilizes them.

Imagine a world where adults feel inexpressible frustration at having their most fundamental human needs unmet, but are, at the same time, unable to articulate their needs and account for why those needs matter.

A toddler with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs throws himself to the floor and screams and kicks and demands Froot Loops. An adult with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs riots in the streets and makes political demands.

We must rethink our metaphysics. At the very least, our civilizational survival depends upon it.

Transformation of Things

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Taoism

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.

Chuang Chou did not know whether he was Chuang Chou or the butterfly.

But the butterfly had no doubts, which means he had certainty.

Therefore, it was the butterfly who dreamt Chuang Chou.

This is the logic of ideological butterflies, who cannot conceive how anyone might disagree with them.

Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

What is meant by the Transformation of Things?

Most of us spend our lives flitting and fluttering through existence, conforming to norms, nonconforming and dissenting within the acceptable norm-supporting range. As long as we cooperate, we remain who we’ve become within a world that is simply what it is. Today’s world, though, is universally acknowledged to be socially constructed, distorted by cognitive biases and shot through with blind spots.

But very, very few people think to question the rock-solid critical metaworld behind the constructed world, and to wonder if that critical metaworld is not just as constructed, blind and corrupt.

And this is the sublime joke: the critical metaworld, not the “constructed world”, is the world where everyone actually lives today. That alleged constructed world, the object of critique, is just a decoy. (Same with self. Most folks who “do the work” of self-scrutiny, scrutinize a decoy self. The critical metaself evades notice and operates behind the scenes with one hundred times the bias, blindness and self-serving logic as the decoy identities it so theatrically renounces.)

Today, when everyone seems to have learned to “question everything” fewer people than ever before actually question anything real. They don’t even notice the critical metaworld from which “the world” is questioned, critiqued and challenged — which cloaks and protects it from all question, critique or challenge.

If you do manage to find the critical metaworld, though, and if you do choose to interrogate it, you will find that this metaworld dissolves under scrutiny.

When it dissolves, deeply weird things happen to you. But those weird things manifest as changes to the given world — so weird they make magic seem mundane and paltry in comparison. Everything and every thing transforms in the most inconceivably uncanny way.

Now we have a before and an after. Before we had only lack of doubt. Now we have profound doubts.

Between after and before there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

Am Proggo Chai

Politics

If you are Progressivist and identify as some other identity or combination of identities, please understand something: you are no longer the identity you once were.

You now have one identity, and only one identity and that identity is Progressivist.

You are like a naturalized citizen of another country who still proudly carries around your expired passport, and uses it as a prop for your new persona. This might impress your new neighbors, but those of us who still live here at home see you as the foreigner you’ve chosen to be.

You chose another nation, and you no longer speak for ours. You are not an ambassador.

Progressivists are essentially political ventriloquists.

Progressivists renounce their own people, and then loudly speak on their behalf, putting Progressive words into their mouths.

Do not even say, “speaking as a Jew” and then talk as a Progressivist. You only speak as a Progressivist, for Progressivism. You do not represent Judaism or the Jewish people. Technically, you are a Jew and nobody can take that away. But please don’t pretend to speak for Jews. You do not.

And if you are a Progressivist with a Progressivist friend who “speaks as a Jew” against Israel, do not even dream of using them as evidence that some perfectly reasonable Jews are antizionists. Your friend agrees with you because you both belong to the same people: the Progressivist people.

Your self-loathing, antizionist, antisemitic Jewish friend speaks for you — and that is why you like what your Progressivist friend says and want to throw their words in my face.

Tell your Progressivist friend “Am Proggo Chai.”

This goes for any other identity.

A Progressivist black person does not speak as a black person on behalf of black people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist woman does not speak as a woman on behalf of women. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist gay person does not speak as a gay person on behalf of gay people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

And a Progressivist POCs and BIPOCs? Latinx? Invented genders? Self-diagnosed mental malfunctions deployed as identities? These aren’t even existent enough to have a point of view to represent. Utter nonsense — all figments of the collective Progressivist imagination.