Category Archives: Politics

Design leadership legitimacy crisis

Design, Politics

TL;DR — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

Design is, at best, a poorly understood discipline, but more often a systemically misunderstood one.

Design has its own “designerly” ways of thinking, doing and valuing, which represent a completely different and incommensurable social paradigm from that of managerialism. Design knows this; managerialism cannot.

Managerialism, by its very nature, is unable to conceive anything beyond itself. It naively believes its own given truth is absolute. Viewed philosophically, it is locked inside a quite stunted ontology that it believes is reality itself, an epistemology it understands as its sole access to true truth, an ethic it mistakes for morality, and so on. But managerialism famously does not give two shits about philosophy, because it is about action, not speculative dreaming. It cares about what it cares about, and what it cares about is resources it can leverage and utilize to achieve its own quantifiable outcomes.

Design, on the other hand, cares about a plurality of ways of approaching, understanding and shaping the world — what could be called enworldments. This should include managerial worldviews, but it should not include managerialism, the -ism suffix signifying ideological closure that accepts nothing above or even beside itself.

As design is very much and emphatically not managerialist, managerialism does what it does, and reduces design to what managerialism takes it to be. It subjects design to a smug, objectifying, degrading condescension analogous to — and perhaps more than analogous to — that smug, objectifying, degrading and unwarranted condescension to which testosterone-drunk adolescent boys at their worst subject their female counterparts. And similarly — and perhaps identically — when protests are made by these misunderstood, objectified, degraded counterparts, and, inevitably, these protests make little sense to the objectifying, degrading, degraded objectivist minds of businessboys, the protests are jocularly dismissed as nonsense rather than as failures to understand.

Note another -ist. Degraded objectivist minds are an active ingredient of managerialism. To a managerialist, “objective” is a synonym for “absolute.” Reality itself is objective. Subjectivity is only a distorting or blurring or occluding interference to objective access to reality. Managerialism is incapable of apperceiving its own subjective imposition of this objectivism, which is its essential limit. This is a limitation design does not share, but managerialism is oblivious to this truth because managerialism is oblivious to anything it cannot objectively comprehend in its own objective mode of cognition.

Anyone familiar with metacognitive incompetence (popularly known as Dunning-Kruger) will recognize my accusation: I am diagnosing managerialism with ontological metacognitive incompetence. And essential to its metacognitive incompetence is a stubborn refusal to think beyond the strict limitations that are the very source of its malady. It won’t think about how it thinks because this is idle philosophizing and a waste of time. If it did, however, condescend to philosophize, that moment of meta-thinking would destroy its delusions of privileged access to objective reality, starting with the painful insight that objective reality is a naive and manifestly foolish subjective hallucination. Subjectivity objectifies, and reality itself is something that largely escapes objectivity’s comprehending grasp. Designers understand and respond to this reality in ways managerialists cannot.

To say it again, design is a radically pluralist, poly-centered and polycentric social paradigm incommensurable with the managerialist paradigm. Design can and should understand and collaborate with managers, engineers and any other pluralist enworldment. That is what we do. But pluralism is also an -ism — albeit a higher order -ism, a meta-ism — and it must insist on pluralism from its fellows, lest it tolerate aggressive intolerance, and allow its metaphorical “bill of rights” to become a metaphorical “suicide pact”.

Managerialism has all the power in the practical world. It controls business, for sure. But it also controls the state. And worse, it controls most alternative visions of governance. Leftists point at managerialist abuses and call it “capitalism”, while remaining pristinely unaware that their own dreams of seizing technocratic control of society are managerialist through and through. If they manage to get their way their system will generate the same life-sucking nihilism. And indeed, every radical leftist success has repeatedly demonstrably generated horrors and nihilistic despair. Leftist revolutionaries only seek to annihilate one form of managerialism with another, because, being managerialist, managerialism is all they can know. The leftist radical’s self-assessment of radicalism is too shallow to register the sameness of their vision and that of their enemy. They lack anything deeper with which to make a comparison of relative depth. For them, too, reality is objective, which is why they can construe the material mechanisms of history, devise a way to deconstruct the current social order and logically reconstruct a system to replace it. But enough about that — back to business. Back to design.

What concerns me at this moment is a question of legitimacy. How did our design leaders gain their “design leadership” status?

How exactly did they rise to prominence within their organizations and win that coveted seat at the executive table? How do they keep that status? Or better: Who gave them the power and at whose pleasure do they keep it?

Were they raised to leadership by fellow designers who felt that they epitomized designerly virtues, pursued designerly goals and helped their fellow designers excel at their craft? …Who, if dissatisfied, will choose another representative?

Or were they fingered for the position by managerialists who thought what they were saying about design made clear, objective sense, who saw how design might be leveraged to achieve their managerialist aims — and who consequently bought what these design leaders were selling? …Who, if dissatisfied, have absolute firing and hiring authority?

Even a cursory glance makes it crystal clear who answers to whom.

Design leaders often claim their primary role in their organization is to translate design and design’s value into business language, as if these were just two vocabularies for expressing the same ideas and for achieving shared goals.

But they are not. They are incommensurable, clashing paradigms.

Consequently, something must be lost in translation.

What is lost is design itself.

Designers, it is time we interrogate those who claim to represent us.

We must ask them what exactly they think that they are representing when they represent design.

Because it is far from clear that they represent what we do.

Do they represent design to nondesigners on behalf of designers?

Or do they misrepresent design to designers, on behalf of the managerialist order who butters their bread?

Again — Designers are being gaslighted by their own “design leadership” and are being made by these leaders to labor in ways contrary to design’s own ways and ideals — and this is why designers feel that the meaning of their work has become worse than meaningless.

I’m not telling designers to take up pitchforks or torches or start assembling Molotov cocktails or anything — but if designers were to stage a mostly peaceful revolt against managerialism, they’d be wise to hold elections among their own kind to decide who leads them to the ramparts, lest the movement be superverted and snuffed by yet more of the same mutiny from above.

This will be compressed and intensified in later iterations.

It is threatening to become a manifesto.

Collective anosognosia

Autobiography, History, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentered design

Of the several truly odd things I have come to believe, perhaps the oddest is the scalarity of self. I believe an individual person is only one scale of selfhood. And an individual is far from indivisible; it is, in truth, a society of intuitive centers whose habitual, ritual, complex and frequently disharmonious interactions produce a personality, and whose episodic conflicts and shifting alliances produce moods, some enduring.

I also believe that our relationships with other people (in pairs or small intimate groups) literally produce new transcendent selves, in whom we participate and from whom we receive meaning. Every individual self is suspended in a web of transcendent selves, and all of them influence the inner intuitive order of each person. Let us call this “intersubjective being”, or maybe “intimate being” would be better.

And we also participate in collective personhood. This is encoded in explicit social norms — epistemic, valuative, behavioral, linguistic — and in implicit ethnomethods. These can strongly condition intimacy and individuality. This also has (or so I believe) self, and when we participate in this kind of collective selfhood, this also affects our individual selfhood and the intimate selves to whom we belong.

Martin Buber famously differentiated these two forms of super-individual being. He called the former “interhuman” and the latter “social”.

One pragmatic consequence of scalar being is that anything that can go wrong with an individual mind can go wrong with a collective mind. I picked this up from Nietzsche:

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

And I believe we are living in an age of collective anosognosia.

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Hubris of dissent

Ethics, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics

It is truly hubristic for anyone to believe he has a right to dissent — to disagree with one’s supposed peers and alleged superiors that what they call true is sufficiently true, and what they call good or just is actually good and just.

But I am not alone in my dissent. I am backed by some of the most notorious characters ever known — including a madman, and a treacherous coward, and a lineage of sketchy mystics whose vague mumblings clearly confirm my dearest priors.

Yet, here I stand, and here is my witness: the faith of our overclass is perverse; and that is why this faith holds manifestly false ideologies to be true, unprincipled exploitation of principles to be just, and glaring evil to be righteous. And this perverse faith grasps itself as epitomizing truth, justice and righteousness.

I can represent the overclass perspective only by standing on their vacuum of presumptions and method acting their nihilistic logic. And indeed, I often must, in order to avoid incessant social conflict and economic ruin. I know this faith, its language and its moves inside-out, as well as outside-in, and, for this reason, I understand it better than most of its own adherents, certainly better than anyone around me. I can steelman their own views better than they can. But they are incapable and unwilling to do the same, because, despite their claimed empathy monopoly, all they have is a bullet list of synthetic compassion recipes. If technik is your hammer, every Why is a nail to hammer with expert technique.

This faith cannot see from any perspective other than its own. It will “do the work” anywhere but where it is most needful. Were this faith to transcend itself, it would risk experiencing itself from an exterior position and become a witness to its own false nature and collapse in disillusioned self-disgust. In the words of Edwin Muir “He is the Lie; one true thought, and he’s gone.”

If I am wrong — and if I am, I would be the last to know — I will have to accept responsibility. I will give a full reckoning of my wrongdoing, ask forgiveness, and and start again on a better path.

But from here, now, I cannot ignore my intellectual and moral conscience, just because it was outvoted by the innumerable others who turned over their own consciences to the anonymous consensus.

I see things that demand witness, not in order to achieve some goal, but because Why requires it.

Here is the full poem:

He walks, the enchanter, on his sea of glass,
Poring upon his blue inverted heaven
Where a false sun revolves from west to east.
If he could raise his eyes he would see his hell.
He is no spirit, nor a spirit’s shadow,
But a mere toy shaped by ingenious devils
To bring discomfiture on credulous man.
He’s the false copy where each feature’s wrong,
Yet so disposed the whole gives a resemblance.
When he’s in anguish smiles writhe on his lips
And will not stop. His imperturbable brow
Is carved by rage not his but theirs that made him,
For he’s a nothing where they move in freedom,
Knowing that nothing’s there. When he forgives
It is for love of sin not of the sinner.
He takes sin for his province, knows sin only,
Nothing but sin from end to end of the world.
He heals the sick to show his conjuring skill,
Vexed only by the cure; and turns his cheek
To goad the furious to more deadly fury,
And damn by a juggling trick the ingenuous sinner.
He brings men from the dead to tell the living
That their undoing is a common fetch.
Ingeniously he postures on the Tree
(His crowning jest), an actor miming death,
While his indifferent mind is idly pleased
That treason should run on through time for ever.
His vast indulgence is so free and ample,
You well might think it universal love,
For all seems goodness, sweetness, harmony.
He is the Lie; one true thought, and he’s gone.

Watch setting

History, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

I heard someone say something darkly true: “Anyone more religious than you is fanatical; anyone less religious than you is profane.”

This same principle can be applied to just about any attempt at balance. Wherever we set our mean is the zero point between deficit and excess.

I say “set our mean” but in most cases, the mean is set for us. However far our group drifts, there we are. We read the news to calibrate our sense of normal. For the average intelligent citizen of wherever, whether that paper is the New York Times, Berliner Tageblatt or Pravda is purely an accident of place and time.

Poetic vs ideological license

Art, Politics

The problem I had with Nolan’s Odyssey had little to do with accuracy. Artists often take poetic license and say true things using deviations from facts, traditions and norms. But to me, it seemed that the license Nolan took was not poetic license, but rather the opposite — ideological license. He spoke phony truisms badly in a way that has become depressingly common.

Continue reading Poetic vs ideological license →

Shit Theory Handbook notes

Design, Judaism, NOTA, Politics, Shit theory

Announcing a new shit: Horseshit.

Horseshit is whatever horrible shit the far left and the far right can find to agree on. It is called horseshit because it collects between the converging extremes described in horseshoe theory.

With horseshit, we are now up to three kinds of shit, because there is also bullshit and chickenshit.

We are no longer limited to giving two shits about anything.

This post, which began as a rant appears to be developing into a textbook.

To catch everyone up, here’s some foundational Shit Theory, to help everyone keep their shit straight:

According to Shit Theory, “chickenshit” is tedious nonsense — all the formalities, procedures, reports, busywork and minutiae that ruins everyday existence — that seem like it ought to add up to something important but never does.

In contrast, “bullshit” is meaning-mongering nonsense — notions that seem overflowing with promise, benevolence and idealistic intention — but which can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

And now “horseshit”. Let us formulate a provisional technical definition.

“Horseshit” is malevolent nonsense — artifacts of ignorant, paranoid resentment meant to answer the eternal question “who can we blame for this shitshow?” This question drives ignorant but urgently inquiring minds to extremes of left- and right-wing politics. But by some diabolical antimiracle these theories all converge in a negative common ground of suspicion and hate. And, 100% of the time, as if by cosmic law, smack in the middle of this common ground is always and inevitably The Jews.

Now, let us explore practical applications of Shit Theory.

The origins of the discipline were practical, which is why Shit Theory is not, like most theory, pure bullshit.

It was developed to diagnose and treat a common and deadly strain of shittiness found in most organizations. This shittiness is known as “corporate”.

Corporations are terrible at integrating meaning and practice. Integrating meaning and practice means committing to a difficult, qualitative, nonlinear and not-entirely-predictable process called “design”.

Design does not suit the kind of technocratic ndbf administrator who thrives in the upper half of glass towers. This type generally leans soulless, and is reliably numb and deaf to genuine meaning. They are more into efficiency, productivity, measuring things and evading blame. But their whole job is to make human resources produce maximum productivity. But for temperamental reasons, inspiring people to work together to achieve a common goal is out of the question. Their workaround is to coercively micromanage each isolated resource to construct some isolated bit of a complicated and entirely uninspiring system.

These bits, once built, can be bolted and hacked together to more or less function, or at least to check a box and evade blame for any larger scale systemic malfunction or dysfunction. The hacked-together lump is then sent off to creative, who try to repair, patch and sand the lump to inoffensiveness, before applying several coats of artificial charm to its surface. Then marketing pumps phony meaning onto it. Then the inoffensive, artificially charming, phony lumps are boxed up, loaded onto trucks and off it all goes for consumption.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

And, unfortunately, so do most governmental agencies.

And so do non-governmental organizations (NGO), who are normally founded by ndbf technocratic administrators who are so amazing at corporateness they’ve become zillionaires whose egos have grown in inverse proportion to their infinitesimally shriveled souls.

They have big empty ideas about how their deep expertise in chickenshit, combined with the unlimited coercive power and scale of government could help produce bullshit of epic proportions and beneficence.

So the corporations and the government and the NGO zillionaires with great billowing bullshit ostentation, gather to have top-secret chickenshit meetings about the future of the entire world.

Of course, it is all bullshit that will result in nothing more than yet more chickenshit. But to those poor paranoids who don’t know jackshit about the realities of corporateness, it looks like some seriously sinister shit is probably going down.

Thus horseshit, in copious quantities.

I’ve been writing about bullshit and chickenshit for many years now, but I have never recorded the august ancestry of these two concepts.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

So there we have it. Bullshit. Chickenshit. Horseshit.

Isn’t it funny, too, that the latest deluge of horseshit is a reaction to institutional bullshit and chickenshit?

If you can fight fire with fire, why not fight shit with even shittier shit? All this shit flinging, by the way, proves conclusively that we are descended from apes.

And this is probably our best theory why everyone has suddenly gone apeshit.

Apeshit is the frantic nonsense we start flinging when the world has gone to shit, and the material we have available around us is shit and more shit. So that is what we throw at each other.

And so here we are.

We are up bullshit, chickenshit, horseshit and apeshit creek without a paddle. No, it is worse. These creeks have risen into rivers, and the rivers have swelled into an ocean.

A shitflood is drowning the whole world.

And Shit Theory is the Ark to help us stay afloat of it.

As opposed to

Philosophy, Politics

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.

Respiratory cycle

Ethics, Politics

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.

Accusation in a mirror

Politics

According to wikipedia, accusation in a mirror is “a technique often used to incite hate speech, where someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries.”

If I ever planned to pull this move on my enemies, the first thing I would do is accuse them of doing it.

Axial myth

Fables, myths & parables, History, Politics

Axial Age as theory-myth (presented magisterially, with ascholarly recklessness):

In the period of the Axial Age, civilizational technologies (material, military and social) evolved to a point where those tribes who acquired these technologies earliest, were able, first to overwhelm their neighbors militarily, and, after, to manage and control conquered peoples, and to extract the resources of conquered territories. The Axial tribes that gained first-mover advantage transformed themselves through their own rapid spread and acquisition of power into empires of unprecedented scale.

These vast empires centrally managed peoples and resources through technocracy. The technocratic logic abstracted culture from society, two institutions that had, prior to this, been essentially identical.

The opportunity: how might an empire invest the least power and resources to conquer and control a territory, in order to extract the most power and resources, or order to accrue surplus power and resources to invest in further expansion — all resulting in exponential growth of territory, power and wealth.

The trick was to change conquered peoples as minimally as possible — to leave as much intact, especially those aspects of tribal life most valued by its members, so they would not revolt. This unchanged element became, under the abstraction of technocracy, culture. What was changed, and in fact, dominated by the empire, was society.

And this brings me to my point: Religion as cultural institution was an artifact of technocracy. Initially, tribal “cosmological” religion was a preserved remnant of tribal life under the domination of empire. But later, new self-contained, inward Axial religious forms developed. They grew out of these remainder religions, but they shed the cosmological roots, renounced all “worldly” ambitions, but compensated with universal spiritual aspirations.

Axial religions were less new limbs or outgrowths of the old plant than they were sprouted cuttings — rerooted traditional ruptures. They were born resigned to coexistence to empire.

Yet, paradoxically, these Axial religions proved ideal for empires. If an empire adopted an Axial faith, it could now replace native cosmological faiths with a state religion, which further eased technocratic burden. Conquered peoples could be dominated body and soul.

The next wave of empires were post-Axial empires, fervent to spread a universal religion as universally as possible. Islam is sometimes classified as the youngest of the Axial religions, and this is radically wrong. Islam was not an inward, unworldly Axial religion developed under dominance of an empire (later adopted by an empire) but rather a post-Axial empire fitted with its own hyper-worldly, universal, imperial religion.

Later still, in response to domination, first by Axial empires and then by post-Axial empires, the pre-Axial remnant religions evolved new depths of inwardness. They were still cosmological and tribal, but they also developed their latent esoteric universality, precisely that same heartwood life that was cut and rerooted in the Axial cuttings.

Post-Cosmological religions — Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, and I will anomalously include in this series a book, the I Ching — these have a cultivated commonality. Sophia Perennis is a theology concerned with heartwood faith. I share the Perennialist faith, but reject much of the theologic of tradition.

Now, today, everything is changing rapidly. Somehow, all these layers of Axial, Post-Axial, Post Cosmological and Perennialist religion coexist in a global social order — a new form of order radically different from tribe or empire — that is no longer compatible with any existing religion.

What is truth?

Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

The Roman governor of Judea (Jew-land), Pontius Pilate, is famous for asking “What is truth?” and then for washing his hands of responsibility after being made to do something he didn’t want to do by people under his dominion.

The Romans later drove all but a few of these people out of Judea, and renamed Judea “Palestine”.

Three hundred and some years later, the Romans began to worship the man Pilate was not responsible for executing. They were very, very angry at those people who forced Pilate, against his will, to murder him. How could they have done such a thing?

Having taken the land of the Jews, they took the scripture of the Jews as their own as well. Apparently, they were so taken by this scripture they decided they wanted the covenant described in the scripture to be theirs.

Another three hundred and some years later the land was conquered by Arabs in the name of another religion that claimed to replace Judaism. They Arabs also took the scripture of the Jews as their own, and, of course, the Jewish covenant.

Since the expulsion and diaspora of the Jewish people, they have been oppressed, persecuted and murdered by those who claimed the land, scripture and covenant no longer belonged to the Jews but to them, and them alone.

The Holy Lands are now contested by three different faiths, each with an equally legitimate claim to the land.

But back to where we began: What is truth?

Who fucking knows? Go ask Michel Foucault. He’s the epistemetheologian of critical theorizing radical left — the same radically critiquing left, unsparing defenders of justice, who demand that Palestine be restored to its indigenous population, the Arab conquerors.

(Naw, it’s all just too complicated. We don’t even know what to believe, really. But surely the left consensus can’t be entirely wrongheaded, when it is so righthearted.)

Jew hatred as affirmation of Judaism

Judaism, Politics

Hatred of Am Yisrael — variously expressed throughout history as anti-Judaism, antisemitism and now, anti-Zionism — is a reliable earmark of evil.

In the 20th century we have in the lineup some of the most distinguished villains of history: Nazis , Bolsheviks and Klansmen. In the 21st century the new lineup includes Islamist theofascists, the alt-right and progressivists.

I have been unable to find any credible secular explanation for this one and only point of agreement of so many horrible people, the destination reached by so many dark, snaking, spurious paths.

What feels most credible to me is that evil instinctively hates whatever is holy. Each evil being hates according to its own contorted logic and distorted lenses, and produces novel ideologies and justification for the hatred, but invariably each seeks in its own way to do the same thing — to displace and replace the covenant.

I abduce a hidden, unconscious, occult motive. Whatever and whoever wants to be God hates whatever reminds them of what they are not.

Anomie and misnorms

Design, History, Politics

I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie.

I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more historically important than it is freshly relevant to the anomic situation we face today.

To summarize, Durkheim’s diagnosis of anomie is that, at the individual level, without external societal constraints human desires are unlimited and lacking form. Society, by imposing limits, gives us norms, goals, defined desires and milestones for assessing the progress of our lives. When society stops providing this structure, we lose our bearings, and we are lost in a horizonless chaos, where motion is just arbitrary difference without any reference point by which biographical progress can be experienced.

Though now, just in the process of writing this summary, it is starting to feel freshly relevant.

In the spirit of showing my work, I am changing the original thrust (which was to expand anomie beyond Durkheim’s conception) to seeing how much I can find within it.

For years, I have played with a term, “misnorm“. Think of misnormality as a cousin to anomie. A misnorm is more or less a social category mistake. We misunderstand the essential nature of some domain of activity, and misjudge the behaviors that sustain it. We have a false image of how things happen, and so, when things go as they should go and must go, we judge that things are going wrong. And if we are in a position to control the situation, we will force it into conformity with what we think should happen, thereby making things impossible.

(Misnorming happens to designers all the time, and most of my career has been spent battling them, in order to win conditions for good design work. Someone who expects design to work linearly, with steady progress toward a straight goal, without moments of confusion, doubt, conflict and intense anxiety, in complete and polished iterations does not know what design is. And if such person attempts to lead design projects, he literally does not know what he is doing. Such a person is likely to misrepresent design to his organization, or accept misrepresentations of design, and sets himself and his team up for a truly traumatic failure. Either the design team will insist on doing design the way design is done and fail to conform to the wrong expectations of the ignorant leader and his ignorant stakeholders. Or the design team will try to work under impossible conditions within impossible constraints and fail to deliver good design, which is, frankly the fate to which most designers are damned. Either way, the project will fail, and it will fail because, once again, the leader failed to win conditions where success is possible. No amount of demanding, or bullying, or bullshitting can change this fact. And, by the way, this failure is even more a failure of leadership as it is failure to understand design: such people also suffer from misnorms of leadership. They confuse leadership with tyranny.)

Misnorms cause us to compare the human condition to a fantasy norm, and to misjudge something normal and relatively good as something atrocious and deserving destruction, or, as today’s timid radicals put it: dismantled.

Today’s misnorms are fed by fictional images produced by our media — news, entertainment, and the blending of the two in the propagandistic missions of various political movements. This propaganda projects misnormal ideal positive images into the world, in comparison to which everything real is distorted as inadequate, and ideal negative images blamed for the inadequacies. And at the theoretical level, we have ideologies and weird theologies which purport to enlighten us to what’s really going on, but in fact dysilluminate the world with false clarity, which always “reveals” the world as hopelessly corrupt, irredeemable and irreparable, requiring nothing less than total ground-clearing and rebuilding from scratch. It is hard to avoid wondering if all this need for rebuilding from scratch doesn’t just serve as justification for sating an insatiable appetite for destruction.

And so a great many people wander around interpreting everyday, ordinary frustration as evidence of something extraordinarily bad, while misinterpreting disproportionately violent responses, and corrosive policies meant to correct nonexistent problems, as good and necessary. And it all makes conditions of normal life increasingly impossible. And it is very difficult to maintain, repair and improve something that is being undermined, bombarded, and demolished from within, so the critiques gain credibility through their own negative outcomes: the deterioration of what they critique.

And so, today, instead of experiencing lack of references, orientation and sense of progress, as with anomie, we have impossible and deeply phony references and perverse misorientations and rapid regressive velocity.

Anomie : misnorm :: nonunderstanding : misunderstanding

Karl Schwab, monopolarchist

Metaphysics, Politics

I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.

I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.

First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.

Our role is to “buy in.”

We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.

Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.

Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.

Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.

We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.

Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.

And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!

And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.

Hineini void

Judaism, Politics, Star

The irresponsible cannot be held responsible for anything but they are guilty of every neglected call to respond.

“Where are you?” . . . Nowhere, never, nobody.

Non-present.

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