I’ve noticed I’ve become repelled by the “post-” prefix. I know it has its uses, but it has been overused too frequently, by the wrong people, with too much enthusiasm, for too many problematic purposes, and now it is musty, backwards and part of an oppressive orthodoxy who still hasn’t noticed it is the furthest thing from what it imagines itself to be.
I declare this trend not only dead, but long-dead and rotted away to wet putrescence, the furthest point from both life and rebirth.
This article builds on two previous articles, “The Click” and “The Philosophical Click”. It also builds on my murmuration articles — my “murmurata”.
Any click is the rapid change of stability in an order, from one stable state to another. It is almost as if stability under stress builds up static energy that discharges itself in an instant of recrystallized stability.
There are many kinds of multistable orders, each with its own kind of click.
The gestaltists observed perceptual multistabilities. The phenomenologists and hermeneutic philosophers (I believe) observed conceptual multistabilities, which form not only our understandings but our spontaneous interpretations of whatever we encounter. The postphenomenologists focused on equipment-mediated multistabilities. Depth psychologists observed psychological multistabilities, and called them complexes. I do not know if ethnomethodologists speak of multistabilities, but they should. (Socially, we act within the rules of an ethos to make sense to others and to understand the actions of others — and we navigate the hazards of multistability to attempt to avoid misunderstanding or being misunderstood. We can take (perceive, conceive) any given action “the wrong way”, a way other than intended.) Then there is the world of cybernetics and systems theory. Adaptive systems have responsive multistabilization abilities. They are, what Koestler called holons, whole-parts existing and subsisting within a holarchy.
All these multistabilities are crucially important to designers. Designers work with (and often against) multistabilities. We try to stabilize systems of participation, where a person spontaneously takes the system as given (as intended) and responds in a way that supports that system. The response is often — and ideally — not explicitly thought about. Often people barely notice their interpretations and responses. They respond with natural instinct or second-natural habit.
Our various options for participating in social systems can be viewed as practical multistability. We can work support systems as they exist currently by cooperating and contributing to their stability. Or we can undermine systems by destabilizing them, perhaps in order to dissolve them and reconstitute them in a new stable order.
Radical pluralists cultivate awareness of all the kinds and possibilities of multistability. Whatever seems to us a given truth is always a function of what we can take (-ceive), and what we can take — further constrained by what we will take — is a matter of the myriad stabilities surrounding us and within us.
One nugget of wisdom I try to pass along to younger designers:
Your job is to inform judgment, not to impose it.
Paradoxically, judgment becomes less arrogant as it matures, improves and becomes genuinely superior.
I learned this lesson the hardest way. I’ll be paying down my debt for the rest of my life.
Anaximander:
Beings must pay penance
and be judged for their injustices,
in accordance with the ordinance of time.
There is a type of person everyone will recognize.
Everyone recognizes him because there is one of him at all times in every social circle.
This kind of person wakes up one day and realizes that this truth and this reality which seems so spatially, temporally, metaphysically capacious is the slenderest experiential thread, fed through the tiniest eye of a needle: I, here, now.
This allegedly infinitely capacious and enduring universe, filled with so many people, places, things and events, is just a film reel, and at each moment, the entirety of reality is confined to one celluloid square made entirely of mind. We watch square after square after square, and our memory creates a vast world of space, time, truth and history.
As tiny 6-year-old kids we go to school and sit in desks, and are trained to perpetually remember (re-member) a world where brains are the organs of mind, where history happened in the past, where science and mathematics precisely describes what actually exists and how reality actually behaves, where some actions, beliefs and attitudes are bad and other actions, beliefs and attitudes are good, and so on and so on.
The thread glides through the needle’s eye. The celluloid squares are projected upon the screen. Soon we are fixated and immersed in a story that is so real to us that we stop noticing our own role in that story. We lose ourselves in an infinite eternity of reality.
Inevitably this person we all know gets really excited, starts talking loudly and rapidly and obscurely, striking prophetic poses and their company becomes intolerable* — and this goes on indefinitely, until that person finally realizes that this happens all the time to huge numbers of people, and each one of them is the first to whom it has happened in the story they are living.
Note: I call this phenomenon “metannoying”. See what I did there? Metanoia + annoying? I need to submit this word to my nonexistent newsletter dedicated to disseminating newly minted words of this kind. The newsletter is called The Reportmanteau.
Once upon a time there was a man who no longer existed in time.
He experienced only the manifestation of eternal archetypes in what, within the limitations of mind occur in time, but freed from mind, eternally was-am-will-be.
He did not always experience things this way. As a small child he was, like the rest of us, caught in the universal time-delusion. He, like the rest of us, lived his life as if it were an unfolding personal story.
But then, one day, an epiphany came to him, eternity irrupted, and from that moment to his death, time was no more.
His friends, still imprisoned in time, witnessed his temporal exit with uncomprehending awe. None of their lives would ever be the same — never again.
His life, however, liberated from time, had always been the same, and always would be.
“The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man
Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?
The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.
No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.
That is how things actually go down.
Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.
This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.
If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.
Susan and I went on a short road trip this weekend, and spent some of our time in the car together listening to a lecture by Martin Shaw. Shaw is a storyteller and mythologist, a sort of reflective practitioner of mythtelling. His speech is poetic, and uses rhythm and repetition in a way that reminds me of James Dickey.
This talk was about a great many topics, but they all orbit around how mythical stories can reconnect us with fugitive parts of ourselves. They can help us find our way back to what he calls a “wild integrity.” If that expression makes your heart race slightly, you should definitely listen to his whole talk. The talk is filled with beautiful and consequential phrases, which Shaw always gently repeats and surrounds with just the right amount of silence. These little incantations do some of the same inner-reconnection work he describes myth doing.
Shaw is interesting not only as a source of information, but also as an exemplar. He manages to come off as primordially timeless — but, somehow, at the same time, Gen-X to the bone. In doing so, he offers something that art in its routine pastichery has forgotten. He offers an enworldment — a new way to inhabit our lives — a practical vision that we can enter and live from. This is what all great art offers us when it emerges and renews our sense of meaning. This was the true gift of the Ramones. What Shaw offers really does feel like a home.
Listening to him I realized how much I prize myth as a creative genre. Myth is a style of narrative abstraction, meaning that it discards all but a certain kind of truth. My favorite Borges stories have it. Casares has it. Asimov’s “Nightfall” has it. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, especially the prologue, is mythic. Dylan’s best songs have mythic lyrics. My inner-eye spontaneously visualizes all these stories in the same style, and this style is a reliable earmark. If my imagination responds to something I read or hear with this style of image, that something is mythic.
But I want to return to the enworldment question. I want to read some of Martin Shaw’s books, and so I did something I’ve been doing a lot of lately: asking ChatGPT to play librarian. “I’m interested in Martin Shaw. What should I read by him?”
It gave me a list. I won’t copy and paste it, because I’ve realized that hearing about other people’s AI adventures is even more tedious than listening to their dreams. ChatGPT asked me why I wanted to read him. And because I believe what ails our time is a crisis of inspiration I responded “I’m interested in myth as a way to reconnect with the desirability dimension of design — especially design of one’s own enworldment.”
And it then asked “Would you say your interest is more in personal enworldment (crafting how you experience reality) or shared enworldment (shaping the desirability of collective systems)?”
My own answer surprised me: “It has to be both! We need modes of self-determination that relate us — not alienate us — from others.”
In this overdue book stuck inside me — one that I now refer to constantly while reading almost anything else — where I play a tilted vision of philosophy, design and religion against each other like chords… In my overdue book, this opening-out and relating quality is what religion brings to philosophy (saving it from solipsism) and to design (saving it from empty production for empty consumption). The name of this saving relational power is Keter.
Inner and outer self-determination that deepens, strengthens and intensifies our relationships — with each other, with the world around us, with all of ourselves (tame and wild), and, most of all, with this radically shocking infinity who surrounds us and saturates us, in whom we live, in whom we participate, who wants something from us. Hineini.
When children engage in repetitive play, it generates habits of personhood. It is important to be patient and allow them to be repetitive, however tedious it might feel after the zillionth repetition. I find it helpful to meditate on what kind of adulthood might grow from whatever habits form in various kinds of repetitive play.
The analogue for adults is ritual. Rituals can be intentional, such as religious observances, or secular (or semi-secular) routines like exercise or other practical self-maintenance activities. Or they can be accidental, like habitually consuming certain kinds of media, playing games or performing routinized work tasks.
Prayers are verbal-mental rituals. They bring us back to a way of understanding the world along with the emotional attitudes that naturally attend that understanding. Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are a kind of involuntary prayer. Reading challenging books and having challenging conversations can also be prayer.
We also have social rituals that shape our collective existence. Ethnomethods are the meaning-making social habits we use to be understood and to understand others in any given social setting. Nearly all ethnomethods function unconsciously and recede into the background of social life, unless they are not followed, at which point things become awkward or tense. Ethnomethods are a little like well-designed tools, which disappear in use. (Design researchers who know the history of their craft know that much of what we do is rooted less in anthropology than in ethnomethodology, the systematic study of ethnomethods. Lucy Suchman pioneered thinking of physical artifacts as social actors woven into the ethnomethodic social workings of their use contexts. It is sometimes very helpful to think of design flaws as a kind of ethomethodic breach objects commit. Maybe it would be better to reverse what I said. Well-designed tools disappear into the background like ethnomethods, because, in fact, they are materialized ethnomethods,)
Ethnomethods are also verbal and mental. To participate in social sense, we adopt a certain collective vocabulary and logic, and this becomes the conventional wisdom of the group.
I’m flaky enough to believe ethnomethods (enacted by humans and nonhuman) enable distributed cognitive processes that are a conscious being of a group. This seems less far-fetched, once we observe and take seriously how each person’s own mind exhibits intellectual polycentrism among factions and alliances (complexes) within one’s own mind, but that somehow this polycentrism creates a nebulous center who is each person’s I. What shouldn’t this same intra-self consciousness-generating social dynamic be possible between people and generate consciousness that transcends any one of us? I think it is not only possible, I experience it as actual.* (If you like this line of thought, see the extra-extra-flaky note below.)
These verbal and mental ethnomethods are enacted in official communications of organizations; in these cases, they function like group prayer. The mental ethnomethods are repeated in popular news and entertainment media, and then we repeat them in our own conversation. This same vocabulary and logic is, more often than not, adopted by individuals, made habitual through repeated use and internalized as truth.
Like all ethnomenthods, if a person does not participate in verbal and mental ethnomethods, and insists on using idiosyncratic or disharmonious vocabulary or logics, they will create confusion, awkwardness and strain. Severe breaches of verbal and mental ethnomethods have been treated with hemlock.
Our deeply-engained ethnomethods and personal babits are self-generating activities. Whatever we repeat shapes our first-person being — let’s call it first-personality — which in turn shapes our third-person being — our third-personality, or persona — and how we perceive it.
And I’ll disclose right now — I’m feeling reckless, so why not? — that as service designers, we are intentional shapers of social arrangements within organizations. We attempt to create stable, mutually-beneficial interactions among people through modifications of physical artifacts (touchpoints), processes, policies and social roles.
This means that, whether we know it or like it, we in the egregore summoning business.
I got ever-so-slightly recognized (and I mean almost not at all) in some service design circles for pointing out that the essential medium of service design is organizations. An organization as a discrete social entity. As a disciple of Bruno Latour, I define “social” very broadly, and include within its scope not only humans but everything that supports a social order. Anything social is a human-nonhuman hybrid.
The medium we work with is social — organizations. But what do we actually aim to produce when we design in an organizational medium?
Monocentric designers (UXers, visual, interaction, communication, product designers) often say that, whatever medium they work in, the goal is to produce experiences — individual experiences.
Polycentric designers produce collective experiences, in which each of us partakes as participants, each with their own individual experience.
Right now, service design is heading into a new formalistic phase. It is probably necessary. But we must not lose the inward and qualitative whole as we focus on quantifiable parts.
Jeff Maurer has been nailing it this year. I might really have to buy a subscription to his substack.
Today’s headline and preview expresses my own exasperation, but clearly and hilariously:
Why Have We Gotten Bad at Recognizing Bad Guys?
It’s not like bad guys have gotten subtle
It’s strange that some people can’t figure out who the bad guy is in the Russia/Ukraine war. For starters, I thought that “Russia = bad” was nestled deep in every American brain; for years, the three groups that could be blasted to hell with no repercussions in movies and video games were zombies, aliens, and Russians. But more importantly, Putin’s invasion was so egregious that it was almost refreshing; in a world of complex conflicts, it was kind of nice to see a war that made you think “Well, obviously you can’t do that.”
What’s doubly strange is that this is the second time recently that some Americans haven’t been able to recognize evil when it’s practically grinding its pelvis in their faces. The number of people who took Hamas’ side in the Israel/Hamas conflict was shocking. Of course, practically no-one would admit to “taking Hamas’ side”, just as Trump claims that he’s “on the world’s side” — what a hippie! — as he does literally everything that Putin could ever want him to do. I don’t want to over-simplify these conflicts, Ukraine and Israel both have profound flaws, and I don’t want to be the asshole who accuses anyone who disagrees with him of being “on the enemy’s side”. But on the other hand: Come the fuck on. Some people are clearly Team Russia or Team Hamas, and I think an interesting question is: why?…
Another one:
Why Doesn’t Hitler McFuckface Like Us Anymore?
Why won’t this garbage-faced pile of ass cancer do what I want him to do?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced big changes at Meta. The content moderation policies favored by many on the left are out, and the company is rolling back DEI and cozying up to Trump. Zuckerberg also recently went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to criticize the Biden administration and decry the lack of “masculine energy” in the corporate world.
Like many liberals, I’m shocked by this pivot. What happened to the Mark Zuckerberg who, after the 2016 election, kowtowed to progressive lawmakers? Where is the guy who backed left-wing causes and clashedwith conservatives? What’s causing this? Is it something in his personal life? Craven pandering to the new administration? Or is there any chance that it has something to do with more than a decade of people on the left calling him a corrupt plutocrat who might be the biggest pile of shit in the cosmos?
It’s hard to trace the roots of Zuckerberg’s falling out with the left. Maybe it started in 2011, when the guy from The West Wing wrote a big, award-winning movie about how Zuckerberg is a total asshole. That doesn’t happen to most people — it’s really just Zuckerberg and former Oakland A’s manager Art Howe. After the 2016 election, some on the left blamed Facebook for Clinton’s loss, and Cambridge Analytica ended up on the Rachel Maddow show more than Rachel Maddow. In 2020, progressives demanded that Biden take down “new oligarchs” like Zuckerberg, which led to Lina Kahn hunting Zuckerberg with the tenacity of Javier Bardem’s character hunting Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.
And then there’s this one addressing Musk’s emails, demanding agency employees list five accomplishments from the last week:
All Substack Writers Must Send Me Five Delicious Pasta Recipes by 5 P.M. Friday or Be Shot Out of a Cannon
No YOU’RE being unreasonable!
Of course, I have serious disagreements with him on many topics. But I agree with pretty much nobody, anymore. Interesting and productive disagreement is now brings tears of gratitude to my eyes. Honestly, any symptom of a functioning intuition and independent intellect is a precious shock.
Organizations live or die by human behaviors.
If the leaders of a company behave in a way that inspire, encourage coerce or otherwise motivate behaviors within the organization that efficiently and effectively motivate partners and customers to behave in ways that support the organization’s goals, that organization will flourish.
If leaders motivate the wrong behaviors or fail to motivate the right behaviors, and if behaviors within the organization fail to support or undermine an organization’s goals, or if they do so inefficiently or ineffectively, and if, consequently partners and customers stop engaging with the organization, that organization will fail.
Service design begins and ends with behaviors. It begins with what people are currently doing, and it inquires into why people behave the way they do. It ends with systems of behavior that cause an organization to flourish. And it looks for ways to make people want to behave in organization-supporting ways, and to willingly and spontaneously support it because that organization supports what they want.
The best service design inspires genuine loyalty.
I’ve called service design “win-win engineering”.
The USA cannot imagine a world where we must make appeals to another superpower. This world is coming so fast it might have already arrived.
When we say “I don’t understand,” that can be a confession: “I am, so far, still unable to understand.” Or it can be an assertion “I don’t understand because it is nonsense.”
If we are powerful, we get to decide which way to say it. Are we feeling charitable today? Let’s dialogue and be good listeners. Or is the master feeling impatient and disinclined to suffer fools? We call it like we see it. We scoff at it. Or we angrily send it away. It is entirely our choice. We cannot even imagine a world where it is not we, but someone else, who decides what gets heard or dismissed.
And we have forgotten what it is like to be on the other side of this dynamic.
If we are weak and vulnerable, the decision is far less discretionary. Our leaders might be stupid and boorish or even crazy — but if we don’t get inside their heads and figure out how they see the world, we will be unable to make persuasive appeals to them, or anticipate their next action. And we cannot appear presumptuous, which means to believe our judgment is equal to that of theirs. We must act out their truth to their satisfaction, or suffer consequences. And we cannot rely on public support for our truth. We must learn to make sense of the world to ourselves. The powerful can take shelter in consensus. Everyone knows.
In this way, the weak get smarter, more insightful, more resourceful, and grow stronger, and the strong get more and more complacent and stupid and grow vulnerable.
–x–
–o–
I can’t understand how anyone could think that.”
“I can’t understand how this nonsense is so persuasive to so many people.”
“I don’t understand how I lost power.”
“I don’t get to decide everything, anymore? I must do the persuading?”
“Perhaps there is something I was averse to understanding, and refused to notice and consider.”
“Oh! I understand now.”
“Here is what we must do to change this situation.”
*
I’ve encountered at least four pluralisms in the past week.
The first is an old-school postmodern pluralism. In this kind of pluralism each person has their own truth, and they don’t have to reconcile it with anyone else’s. They might not even be able to.
The second pluralism is a typological one. In this kind of pluralism there is a schema of types, each with its own valid way of understanding the world. But behind this pluralism is an implicit monism. A typological pluralist will be quite comfortable with a plurality of truths within their system, but they are often averse to viewing their own typology as a product of one of a plurality of truths. The typology itself is privileged as somehow transcending the pluralistic order. It functions almost like a metaphysical foundation for the typology. Personality typologies like Jungian / Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are psychological examples of this form of pluralism, and progressivist identitarianism is a political example.
The third pluralism is one that seeks to situate itself as an equal in a plurality of views. It aspires to view the world as constituted of I-points, each with its own truth, all of which are the center of an otherwise centerless reality. It differs from the first pluralism in that it wishes to understand other truths besides its own. It differs from the second pluralism in that it is aware that its own way of understanding other truths (for example, in a typology) is a feature of its own truth that does not transcend itself, but rather is intrinsic to it. Consequently, a belief that one’s typology has a metaphysical reality that transcends one’s own truth and self is a covert self-privileging. A well-meaning pluralist can renounce one’s identity all day, but if one does this while exalting one’s identity schema and theory, this is only a trick for exalting one’s own truth over that of others. The third pluralism sees this clearly, where the second pluralist remains trapped in unconscious meta-absolutism.
The fourth pluralist builds on the third pluralism and tries to learn from other perspectives in order to create a less naive version of what the second pluralism has, namely, a way to conceptualize pluralistic difference. The fourth pluralist attempts to maintain awareness that however persuasive their schematic conceptualization might be to them, it remains their truth, and that this truth can and should continue evolve with learning. But it tries to accommodate more and more difference, which includes more and more divergent accounts of difference. This fourth kind of pluralist, for example won’t argue over which personality typology is more true, but instead tries to understand what each typology includes and excludes, and what this pattern of inclusions and exclusions allows it to do. It doesn’t deny the relative reality of social or political identities, but it looks at what this way of viewing social and political situations reveals and conceals. And it does all these things tentatively.
I think my intense reaction to anti-Zionism has multiple sources.
My positive tribal loyalty only accounts for some of it.
Sadly, much more of it is a negative reaction to other tribes. More specifically, it is a bad reaction to the collective mind of these tribes — as it manifests in the personalities of members of these tribes. It is not even in the content of their beliefs, as expressed in opinions or ideological stances. The collective mind is most influential in in how thinking is thought, not what thoughts are produced or what facts are believed. The What is symptomatic of the How.
I don’t like any of the biggest, strongest tribes at large today who concern themselves with Israel, for or against.
And of course, Israel is always an object of intense concern for precisely the worst tribes. The tribes who claim to be the true heirs of the Jewish covenant are always a powder keg, even when they seem momentarily friendly. Their benevolence can always reverse in an instant, and with little warning.
And those latterday puritans who mistake themselves for secular, who imagine themselves above religious disputation, will have no god apart from their own ideoidol. To them this ideoidol is just self-evident, commonsense truth and morality, and not even an ideology at all. It is to be obeyed, not questioned.
There are other things going on, too. But watching so many people around me get picked up by these mental tornados and spun into generic strangers has been unpleasant and upsetting.
And those whose feet are still on the ground have done so through the magic of compete, alienated indifference.
One other thing I am anxious about. The more right-wingers make Israel their own cause, the more the enemies of the right will make hating Israel their cause. Zionism and anti-Zionism will become another signifier of tribal allegiance, like wearing an N95 mask, getting a vaccine, adopting new pronouns.We should not cultivate prejudices for and against different categories of person, but when we proudly adorn these prejudices as tribal emblems, no good can possibly come of it.
I have been working on an article for several days about a very simple idea. It keeps diverging and losing its essential simplicity.
It is about one of the core ideas of service design, value exchanges. This core idea is the locus of my hopes for the future.
My hope is based on a premise. Some people have embedded in their souls an impulse to serve in some very specific way. Their lives are animated by this very particular service drive.
If we give people opportunities to serve in their own way, they inject limitless energy into their organizations and social environment.
If they are prevented from doing so — often due to interference from other services they are forced to provide — they lose their motivation. They can even sometimes start sucking energy out of their organizations.
Two examples.
Perhaps not all people have a service drive. Perhaps some have service drives that are more general or more specific. That’s a quant problem.
Qualitatively, I know it exists, because I have it myself, most of my friends have it and a great many people I have met in the field while conducting design research have it.
I believe the myriad service drives are as powerful an economic resource as money, machines or material resources. These “outward economy” resources are necessary, and they always will be. But they are not sufficient — far from it. The service drive, the resources of the “inward economy” must flow in, in order to ensoul our institutions. Positive outward motivations like money, perks, competition and prestige (or negative ones like fear or shame) can only supplement the inward ones. They cannot replace them. When we neglect or squander the resources of inward economy, and rely too much on outer resources and control mechanisms to compensate — we get that repellant quality we call “corporate”. It might be old-school cubicles-and-chinos corporate, or it might be the new phony bring-your-whole-self, west-coast-quirky corporate, but it is all manifestly soulless and impossible to love. This, I believe, is why so many people are unhappy in the workplace and unhappy in general. I believe it is one root cause of the collective depression the western world seems to be suffering.
But we lack language and justifications to stop it, and reverse it. It doesn’t fully occur to us that we can or should. We look everywhere for the source of our despair than the cause of it, which we take to be an innate and inalterable feature of reality and work. If work were something we did for the intrinsic value of doing it, we wouldn’t need to be paid to do it, would we?
My admittedly pollyannaish mission as a service designer is to fix our deeply broken value exchanges, so we can inject new sources of energy into our organizations, economy and society. We can shape and cultivate organizations that are animated as much by the inward service drives of the organization’s members as by its outward goals. In such organizations, we can can extend our roots deeper into our psychic soil, down to where we can find new sources of inspiration and motivation, and draw them up from the depths to the surface, to bring new nourishment to this meaning-depleted world. If our organizations enable our innate service drives to find real use, they become something we care about — something worth serving and sacrificing for.*
Note: And organizations do require sacrifice. Obviously, not everything we do is intrinsically meaningful. Most things are not. Even the most inspired and rewarding career will be three-quarters chores. But when meaningless chores serve our true service, they are given purpose, and that purpose infuses them with new importance. They are no longer onerous and soul-draining tasks; they become worth doing for the sake of service.
Last year I started reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Radical Evil. A passage rang true to me, and it keeps coming back to mind:
What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?
Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.
Since the publication of this book in 2002, nearly everybody has adopted the general worldview of Bernstein’s philosophers and political theorists. Most people think exclusively with words. Whatever they cannot say, they cannot think.
Because they are equipped with pre-fab ideas and language to recognize, process and respond to injustice, human rights, ethics and cognitive biases, this is where the average mind channels its passionate intensity.
But for the same reason, because they have no cognitive tools for evil, evil can operate undetected.
Anyone who wants to commit evil in plain sight can do so by using magician’s tricks to misdirect attention to matters of justice, human rights or ethics. The only reason people would behave in an evil way is if the injustice of more powerful people drove them to such acts. See what you made them do?
Or they can use quantification to de-thicken human action, and morally flatten it into statistics. They count bodies, and whether these deaths are intentional murders or accidental deaths no longer matters. 1,139 eyes for 1,139 eyes. 1,139 teeth for 1,139 teeth.
Which brings me to another point. It gives me chills to notice how automatically most people assume war is an act of pure vengeance. That Israel is entitled to some number of Palestinian deaths, at which point enough is enough? The punishment must be proportionate to the crime?
Are you fucking kidding me? That is actually an evil logic.
The purpose Israel’s war in Gaza is not to balance some magical atrocity spreadsheet.*
The purpose of the war is to ensure October 7th can never happen again. Which is the diametric opposite goal of Hamas, which explicitly stated that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the first of many. Hamas would launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until Israel is annihilated. And observe the social justice magician’s trick, as the same Hamas official continues on to say: “We are victims – everything we do is justified.”
But according to the atrocity accountant’s calculations, after Israel has extracted its due pound of flesh, it must consent to a ceasefire with an enemy whose entire raison d’etre is its annihilation, and hope it doesn’t ever succeed.
This is how “good” people think, now. This is how “good” people not only tolerate, but support and encourage evil.
We are dying of stupidity.
This is, of course the opposite of what Martin Luther King advised. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Today’s smug hate-mongers claim time has proved MLK naive. He is now, according to them, obsolete. But these same people were around during MLK’s time, and interfered constantly with his mission. The last half of his last book argues against the misguided “black power” approach. They are nothing new. The resentment-mingers are always there, always tempting good-willed people to succumb to their violent impulses, always calling good “naive”.
And this atrocity accounting is also the opposite of the Dhammapada: “The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified. Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.”
How ironic is it, that the same set who condemns “cultural appropriation” appropriates Buddhist meditation techniques, while embracing resentment politics and identitarianism, which is profoundly anti-Buddhist. And they support the most virulent and bloody cultural appropriation of all time, the wholesale appropriation of the Jewish religion by Islamic supercessionists, who incidentally spread their religion through imperial expansion and colonized the region as settler-colonists. No group could possibly be more anathema to the principles Progressivists pretend to care about than the Islamists theocrats who seek Israel’s annihilation. But of course Progressivists have no principles — only ideas they “leverage” to justify seizing more and more dominance. Only an overwhelmingly powerful group could be this unaware and unbothered by their own profound hypocrisy. Their accusations against those categories of person they hate are projections of their own worst characteristics. If you can’t see it yet, someday you will, and you’ll convince yourself you always saw it, and were never a part of it. But I remember, and I will never forget any of this. I’ll listen and listen, but I will hear right through you, hypocrites.
Neocons, proggos, now MAGA. Y’all are all exactly the same. You are different only to yourselves — and that is what makes you alike. Keep pointing at each other, though. Keep on pointing.
A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”
It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:
Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.
This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.
But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.
The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.
Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.
If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.
One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.
Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.
Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.
What is a container? An object which contains content? Yes. A wineskin, for example, is a container for wine. But a container may also be a subject — one who contains.
A container is a subject who does the containing of some form of objective content.
I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.
I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.
Allow me to explain.
The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.
The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.
They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.
Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.
But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.
And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.
No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.
So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?
Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.
And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.
And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.
And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.
During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.
And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.
Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.
And this is why Israel must exist.
And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.
So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.