Transformation of Things

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Taoism

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

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

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

Therefore, it was the butterfly who dreamt Chuang Chou.

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

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

What is meant by the Transformation of Things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am Proggo Chai

Politics

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

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

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

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

Progressivists are essentially political ventriloquists.

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

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

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

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

Tell your Progressivist friend “Am Proggo Chai.”

This goes for any other identity.

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

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

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

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

Fighting fire with fire in a burning building

Politics

I just read Matthew Yglesias’s piece “I’m sort of ‘against polling’ too” and was struck by some “saying the quiet part out loud” moments in the article.

If you look at Schumer’s book from 2007, “Positively American,” it’s a deeply political book that’s all about sketching out a set of positions for Democrats that can win a big national supermajority. But it barely cites any issue polling; it’s a very intuitive book.

The core frame of the book is Schumer’s imaginary couple, the Baileys, who are meant to be emblematic of boring middle-aged suburbanites who have mixed feelings about partisan politics. Every few years some internet leftist or other will rediscover some of Schumer’s old statements about the Baileys and their reaction is almost always sharply negative, because “make Democrats more appealing to boring middle-aged suburbanites” is not something that left-wing intellectuals are interested in. But that was the point of Schumer’s exercise, he knows that the kinds of people who work in Democratic Party politics care what left-wing intellectuals say and do and he wants to get them to think more about the kinds of people who don’t care about left-wing intellectuals.

At any rate, that was the old pre-empirical politics — it leaned heavily on the idea that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals and that a large majority of the electorate is white so you are basically always bending over backwards to appease the sensibilities of culturally conservative white people. The data revolution in Democratic Party politics was the discovery that issue polling could reveal specific topics on which the public’s view really is quite left-wing. There was actually an opportunity to go beyond the Baileys and use empirical science to identify winning progressive issues and stake out a more left-wing profile for the Democratic Party. This unfortunately became a kind of Goodhart’s Law situation where once you started moving left when issue polling told you to move left, you created an incentive for advocates to pollute the epistemic environment by flooding the zone with skewed issue polling. Outside of time-series (how has the answer to this question changed over time) or cross-sectional (how do men and women answer this question differently) analysis, it’s very hard to know what to make of issue polling, which is often heavily influenced by question-wording or has the public expressing contradictory ideas at different levels of generality. But in practice what happened is people commissioned issue polling to “prove” that Democrats should shift leftward on climate, guns, immigration, etc. after Obama’s reelection.

So here we have it.

The Progressivist Democrats do have a clear idea of what they really want — and what they want is far left of what the electorate wants. It is not only left of what the electorate wants, it is left of what most citizens will accept.

Progressivists know that the electorate does not want what they are selling.

But, even more, Progressivists know they are right. They literally cannot doubt that they are right. They do not even know how to doubt it, because every alternative they hear makes no sense. And why would they work at making sense of it, when they already know it is immoral, irrational, oppressive and violent?

(Indeed, it is easier for a Progressivist to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to anticapitalism!)

Therefore, false advertising of their intent is not only OK, it is an ethical imperative. Consequently, they see democracy and liberalism as necessary evils to work around and manipulate in pursuit of its higher goal of social justice.

“But!” say the Progressivists, “that is how everyone is! Everyone has a secret agenda! Liberal-Democracy is always a ruse, and whoever isn’t a secret Marxist is a secret Fascist!”

And therefore, of course, it makes total sense to assume the worst of so-called centrist Conservatives and to confront them as the Fascists they really are. In fact, they are even worse than Fascists, because they sneak around, pretending to be moderates, when they are, in actuality, radicals. They must be undermined, fought and annihilated “by any means necessary.”

And old-school left-liberals who actually believe all that old liberal nonsense — and worse, actually believe the liberal rhetoric of Conservatives — are dangerously naïve fools, who, for all practical purposes, are useful idiots to the right.

So, in this way, the left “projects” its own bad faith onto its enemies and then becomes the very thing it claims to oppose.

And then, by some perverse sense of entitlement, the left quotes their arch enemy Nietzsche to their enemies:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

But what is this abyss? Who even asks this, anymore?

It is the abyss of an amoral reality, beyond good and evil, beyond true and false. It is a reality of pure will, where everything is constructed by power, where might makes right. It is the abyss of taking what transcends our understanding as lacking reality. It takes what our understanding cannot grasp and therefore grasps as nothing for absolute nothing. Is is a confusion of Infinite Absolute for a human-all-too-human zero. It is nihilism.

If you come to see reality as meaningless, and absurd and only arbitrarily meaningful, you become part of that reality. You become a nihilist realist in a nihilistic reality.

And then reality must be that way, for if it is not, you are monstrous.

You — you, personally — are a monster in a meaningful, moral universe.

It matters not one bit how many people around you have chosen monstrousness. You stand alone, naked, guilty. And you stand as a coward, because you preferred standing guilty in a herd to standing righteously alone.

So now it is existentially crucial that liberals and conservatives are all just like you. Duplicitous, nihilistic, self-serving, vicious.

But they are not.

And they — not you — know something important that you refuse to know.

Years ago, a good friend of mine started swirling in the toilet of European New Right illiberalism. He said he was doing recon on a new movement that “had mojo”. He read it obsessively. I warned him that overconsumption of this content would consume him. He dismissed my concerns. He knew himself better than I possibly could, and he was immune to this kind of thing. He needed to understand it to oppose it. But as he researched it, he began to see its validity. He recognized how naive and misinformed he had been. In fact, he now knew how disinformed he was, and how dangerous and powerful these disinformers truly were. They needed to be stopped at all costs, liberal democratic niceties be damned.

I told him that if he is wrong, he becomes the very one who must be fought with fire.

He is now, of course, a citizen of the sewer underworld, QAnon.

I tell Progressivists this story and the nod along, shaking their heads with disbelief.

“See? We must fight them with fire.”

Illiberalism is four-sided duplicity — an evil heart that pumps bad blood.

What do liberals know that illiberals do not?

Liberals know that each of us, at best, knows a small part of an incomprehensibly vast truth. We do not already know better. Far from it!

Liberals know that a truth we arrive at together in good-faith will be inconceivable until the miraculous moment of conception — and only then we will see things differently. Those who believe the scales have already fallen from their eyes, that they were blind but now they see, and that they were asleep but now they are awake have fallen into a dream of awakenness within a dream. And now they have to wake up twice to join the waking, ever-waking world.

Liberals know that every one of us finds it difficult to believe he is not right about all his moral convictions, and that when we succumb to this conviction, we trade morality for moral feelings righteousness for self-righteousness.

Liberals know that we are morally obligated to operate this way, and that anyone who believes that the quest for justice exempts them from this morality holds an immoral misunderstanding of morality and an unjust misconception of justice.

Liberalism is not naive compromise. It is the cornerstone rejected by every illiberal builder of world-systems. It insists that no one already knows the truth, that justice emerges only in good faith collaboration among fellow citizens, and that certainty of righteousness is itself the path to corruption. That humility is the radical heart of liberalism.

Dark Progressivism

Politics

I think what separates me from radical leftists is that I believe that there are forms of evil beyond mere greed and bigotry — and that these forms of evil are far worse than injustice.

But many leftists see a world where the ultimate evil is injustice — usually motivated by bigotry or greed or both. That is where the moral spectrum terminates. For them, it’s justice, injustice… and justifiably violent reactions to injustice. After long, egregious oppression, the oppressed feel intense righteous anger, and it is understandable that they sometimes express it violently.

I see this as a deeply stunted conception of morality, and that people who are stuck inside that conception are susceptible to unwitting participation in the worst forms of evil.

Far worse than injustice is a desire to make a person or group suffer for no other reason than hate. This kind of hate is not mere anger. It is an enduring desire to inflict suffering and annihilation not as a means to some other goal, but for the intrinsic sadistic gratification of inflicting it.

My diagnosis of Progressivist support of Hamas is they think Hamas was driven to sadistic violence by injustice, because, according to such Progressivists, it was an act of opposition to injustice, and the expression of their feelings of oppression, the violence — even the exuberant cruelty of that violence — was understandable and justified.

And I think there is a profound darkness in this understanding and justification of radical evil.

I suspect that the darker Progressivists feel this same evil in themselves toward others who have treated them unjustly, people toward whom they feel enduring resentment, people they would like to punish and humiliate. At some submerged semi-suppressed level, they relate to Hamas — sympathize (feel-with) — and revel in witnessing them act on their hatred and actualize real bloody, sadistic revenge.

For Dark Progressivists, feelings of profound hatred and desire to inflict suffering and annihilation on those they call unjust are the primary animus of their “social justice” mission. They are evil and they don’t even know it. Or as one famous Jew put it, “they know not what they do.”

This is what I intuited in the souls of Progressivists even before they gave over en masse to Dark Progressivism in the summer of 2020 — and before their latent antisemitism came to light in 2023.

They are not coming from a wholesome place — despite their idealistic and impossibly aspirational rhetoric. To anyone with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, and most of all, noses to smell it, it is manifestly obvious that what animates their hearts, souls and efforts is not good, but in fact, infernal.

They call for a perfectly just world, first, to make unfavorable comparisons between an impossible worldly paradise and this existing flawed world. And second, to justify violent dismantlement of this flawed world — allegedly as ground-clearing for paradise, but in actuality, for the sake of the sadistic annihilation itself.

Concerning passwords…

NOTA

My password-protected posts are really password-veiled posts.

Password protection is my version of a trigger warning, meant especially for folks with religion allergies who suffer from ideological “neurodivergence” (aka ideoconformism).

Behind the veil, you can expect direct, undiplomatic and undiluted expressions of truth as I understand it. There will be flakiness, aggressiveness, weird joy and extended stretches of bad writing marred with typos.

If you choose to look, you are responsible for what you see.

Scalar being

Extended Self, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Once we accept the existence of collective beings, and we understand that these beings can suffer the same psychological problems any individual person can have, or isolated complexes within an individual persons can have — the world looks radically different.

Nietzsche clearly saw being as scalar in this way, observing:

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

And

Morality as the self-division of man. — A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it. The girl in love wishes that she might prove the devoted faithfulness of her love through her lover’s faithlessness. The soldier wishes that he might fall on the battlefield for his victorious fatherland, for in the victory of his fatherland his greatest desire is also victorious. The mother gives the child what she takes from herself: sleep, the best food, in some instances even her health, her wealth.

Are all these really selfless states, however? Are these acts of morality miracles because they are, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “impossible and yet real”? Isn’t it clear that, in all these cases, man is loving something of himself, a thought, a longing, an offspring, more than something else of himself; that he is thus dividing up his being and sacrificing one part for the other? Is it something essentially different when a pigheaded man says, “I would rather be shot at once than move an inch to get out of that man’s way?”

The inclination towards something (a wish, a drive, a longing) is present in all the above-mentioned cases; to yield to it, with all its consequences, is in any case not “selfless.” In morality, man treats himself not as an individuum, but as a dividuum.

Even in his notorious attacks on people (Wagner, being the most famous), Nietzsche was attacking representative agents of collective beings:

I never attack people, — I treat people as if they were high-intensity magnifying glasses that can illuminate a general, though insidious and barely noticeable, predicament. This is how I attacked David Strauss or, more precisely, the success of an old and decrepit book in German ‘culture’, — I caught this culture in the act… And this is also how I attacked Wagner or, more precisely, the falseness, the half-couth instincts of our ‘culture’ that mistakes subtlety for richness and maturity for greatness.

And of course, for those with ears to hear it, Nietzsche’s famous concept of Übermensch obviously referred to a collective being, not some solitary hyper-ambitious dark-triadic wannabe Caesar or Jesus figure.

So when I read Progressivist analysts and commentators scratching their heads over the latest Wall Street Journal poll, showing that Democrats are at a 35-year popularity low, trying to understand how it it is possible that any sane, moral, semi-informed person could possibly hate the left —

…seeing that no group of people in the history of humanity has ever been this benevolent, this sensitive to the plight of the vulnerable and marginal, this concerned about this planet and its living inhabitants, this self-aware and attentive to its own biases, blindnesses, privileges, power imbalances, this obsessed with justice and ethical conduct, this independent- and critically-minded, and this courageously determined to make the most radical changes to the world…

— I marvel at how they miss the possibility that they are caught up in a collective narcissism.

But nobody can tell any narcissist — individual or collective — anything they don’t already believe. The groupthink of the left summarily dismisses the views of anyone who challenges its own self-conception and self-image — its vision of its own exceptional moral, intellectual and technical character — and in fact lashes out in a classically narcissistic way at anyone who refuses to see it as it wishes to be seen.

So Progressivists as a group, and as individuals insofar as they think, speak and act as Progressivists, are hated the way all narcissists are hated — while they themselves collectively experience nothing but persecution from vicious, stupid, inferior people who misunderstand them and fail to appreciate their unbelievable, mind-boggling awesomeness.

Note: Progressivism isn’t the only insane collectivity out there, of course. Everyone these days — and in every time, for that matter — is caught up in some collective being or another. It seems the most prominent collective beings active today are contemptible in differing ways. I’ve been caught up in several of them, myself. Nobody is immune. But that is the point: Nobody is immune! Progressivism thinks it is exceptional and immunized, thanks to its special awareness and its mitigating techniques. This conceit makes Progressivism a zillion times more self-oblivious and meta-uncritical than it should be, given its pretensions and aspirations.

A great many people who lack the audacity to indulge their narcissistic impulses in their own individual self will instead gratify them by identifying themselves with a collective narcissism, and “selflessly” giving over to it. You see it often with parents who hyper-protect and privilege their own children over the reasonable needs of other people, we see it in historically oppressed groups who claim special status with special benefits to compensate for past wrongs. We see it in religious fanatics who imagine themselves as having special relationships with “God” with inside knowledge and a special duty and destiny.

Observing the Golden Rule, interpreted ever-more radically, at ever-deepening meta-levels, is the hardest thing a person can attempt. Most of us fuck up and mistake the self or the collective with whom we identify with God.

Why? Because.

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion

Technicity’s Why is always asked as: “What is it for?”

And this technic Why is reflexively answered with a Because of a specific form: “…in order to…” — in a long and unending chain of in-order-tos.

Technic Why means: “What is its use?”

This deformity of meaning is the valid impulse behind our indignation at calling the person for whom a design is intended the User.

Fundamentalist “religion” is the technic reduction of intrinsically good life-toward-the-Absolute to a system of Why-Because rules one must observe in order to earn magical rewards and in order to avoid magical punishments. It is technicity pristinely alienated from Earth, Man and Heaven, with all technicity’s negative trade-offs and none of its advantages.

Absolutism-Pluralism dialectic

Metaphysics, Philosophy

We know — and cannot avoid knowing — that there is one Absolute beyond plurality. When we assert the relativity and plurality of truth, it is precisely toward the existential truth of that one Absolute that we reach.

But this reaching toward the Absolute exceeds all grasping. We apprehend an essentially incomprehensible truth. This apprehended, uncomprehended truth — the existential acknowledgment of an Absolute transcending relativity and plurality — contains, envelops, permeates and involves our being, entirely and without remainder.

We cannot grasp this truth We situate ourselves within it and participate in, in awareness of our relationship to it.

We can no more comprehend the Absolute and have it as an object of thought than we can see sight or hear hearing. You can stare into a mirror for years or decades searching for your I, but all you will ever see is your Me. You can scour the universe and history in search of the Absolute, but your very search is an ontological absurdity.

The Truth of the one Absolute cannot be known objectively or contained in language.

There is capital-T Truth, but that Truth is not an objective truth.

So pluralists and relativists are right, and dogmatic absolutists are wrong, if relativists mean: All objective truth is relative and plural.

But absolutists are right, and radical relativists and pluralists are wrong, if absolutists deny that all truth is relative and plural. Only objective truth is relative and plural — and not all truth is objective.

Here is where absolutists and pluralists can sublate their antitheses and philosophically transcend to something truer: That to which objective, relative, pluralistic truth must relate — always, inescapably and without exception — is the Absolute.

Any idea or argument that attempts to deny this relation is wrong in every possible sense of the word.

The future of Service Management

Design
Posted to my company slack. I’m posting it here so I can be on record in case someday I want to say “I told you so”:

I’ve said this a bunch of times but I’m demented and repetitious and do I’ll repeat my reckless prediction, while y’all roll your eyes:

I think Service will go the same general direction, and adopt the same rough division of labor that Product has…

  • Service Managers or Journey Managers will be the analogue to Product Managers. They’re the 24/7/365 worried-about-every-aspect-of-every-detail people, interfacing with executives, designers, researchers, marketers, customers, front-liners, and everyone. They’re the CEO-track psychos who live, breathe, sleep whatever service they own.

  • Business Operations people will take on a more hands-on engineering type role. They’ll start driving more of the service blueprinting and implementation, with service designer’s support, mainly from the experiential behavioral motivation side. I’m guessing more and more operations folks will be fully absorbed into service management. It would be cool if COOs became CSOs, with operations execs under them.

  • Service Design will be pushed back into a sort of service-sensitive polycentric experience design — just as UX designers have lost some of the control over product vision they at least aspired to in the early days of proto-UX. Service designers need to understand JM/SM and operations, but that’s part of their horizontal T. The depth and expertise of the T’s vertical is polycentric experience design.I’m confident enough this is the future shape of our industry that I’ll bet up to $100 on it. Preferably less.

I’ve had this prediction dismissed enough already, that I’m pretty keen to say it at least once before it becomes common knowledge, and everyone thought it all along.
As William James didn’t say:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

I might even be too late. If do you think this is a stupid prediction, please, please go on record now, so I can prove the obviousness of this prediction was only retroactively so.

Body and soul

Judaism

In the lowest realms we experience subjectivity as within objects. Souls (or minds or psyches or awareness) seem to inhabit bodies, and express themselves through them.

But at exalted moments, boundaries of within and without can blur, shift or vanish, and we can feel ensouled within and animated by something larger. For instance, musical or theatrical performances or dramatic public events involve us in collective experiences that blur inward and outward. Well-told stories — whether written or filmed — immerse us in alternative worlds, and we find ourselves caring intensely about the fates of imaginary people in imaginary situations in realities radically different from the reality we inhabit. When we travel we feel the spirit of a different place, feel permeated by that spirit, and experience our selves differently. At home, sometimes we can feel the currents of zeitgeist changing our tastes and sensibilities. We notice new palettes, forms, colors, attitudes we never perceived before, or what was drab or repellent becomes fascinating. When we see old pictures of ourselves or hear a song that brings back the past, we experience a contrast in spiritual climate between then and now. And of course, love, for those still capable of feeling and giving over to it, puts everything in a new orbit around a shifted center, and everything changes, all at once, and becomes otherworldly, enchanted and enchanting.

Of course, if we prefer to preserve our ontological topology, we can do so with theories and language that hold everything in place. We can say we resonate (“vibe”) with an energy or vibration around us, or that something inside us is stirred or inspired by something outside of us distinct from us. We can reduce it all to biological dynamics, and so on.

This realm is discretionary, and nobody can force you to think any way you choose to reject — as long as you are actively noticing, selecting, accepting and rejecting.

People who consume truth passively — people who inform themselves without taking active responsibility for their own understandings, who trust by default and make no conscious choices — end up with souls shaped by others. The in-formation with which they in-form themselves, inwardly-forms them, and primes them to notice and accept only data formatted to reinforce their self in its current form. In Soviet Russia, information consume you!

This collective and individual self-formation is normal. It is only problematic if the collective understanding is manipulated to a degree that alienates it from concrete, intuitable reality and from awareness of their situatedness within a reality that transcends not only their comprehension, but all comprehension. Then reality itself appears to be a construction. We are free to invent it as we wish, without constraints, or with purely arbitrary constraints.

There are realms, however, even higher than soul. These are not discretionary. They are not only unchosen, they are of a nature that we are no more able to control than we able to control our own sight as we see, or our own hearing as we hear. Here there is intention and will here without any intending or willing object.

At this point, a dramatic eversal was is and will always be — of within and without, of subject and object, or action and reception, of container and contained, of reflected and reflector. Every relationship reverses, all at once.

Pascal’s Wager 2.0

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Pragmatism

I’ve always considered Pascal’s wager somewhat and stupid and crass. The basic argument is this:

  • If God does exist, and we live in accordance with God, we enjoy eternal life in Heaven.
  • If God does exist, but we live as if God does not exist, we suffer eternal damnation.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does, no harm done.
  • If God does not exist, but we live as if he does not exist: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

But let’s imagine this same wager, but with a fundamentally different attitude toward religion.

Let us approach religion, not as an onerous obligation to follow a canon of divine rules in order to win an infinitely desirable wonderful reward and avoid an infinitely horrible punishment, but instead as something we permit ourselves.

Let us approach religion as how we live when we treat morality as metaphysically real. By morality I mean everything that has intrinsic value to us, because it is good or beautiful or true.

Of course, we all have faith that morality is real. Very, very few of us feel and behave as if moral concepts are just imaginary. In fact, most of us care far more about moral ideals than anything else.

But those of us who go purely atheistic, treat morality as a useful evolutionary accident. Humans evolved morality as a means to cope with our biological, physical conditions. We evolved to feel love, guilt, anger and so on because these have helped our species survive. Some atheists permit ironic indulgence in moral experience. We suspend disbelief so we can participate in human life — or we acknowledge that we have no choice but to do so — but officially, we know better.

Religious people (or you can call it “spiritual” if you are allergic to “religion”) differ from atheists in that we give full dignity of real existence to these moral attitudes and experiences. We hold on to a belief that morality is not just an epiphenomenal experience, but is, in fact, a perception of something real. Its importance transcends our experience of its importance.

But notice: why would we assume some perceptions are perceptions of something more real, where other perceptions are mere epiphenomena? These choices are just as much wagers as the one Pascal made. And if, as Nietzsche so sharply noted, importance is illusory, on what basis do we commit ourselves to truth as opposed to other considerations?

In a truly meaningless universe, why not indulge in whatever affords us a better life? Why not experiment with beliefs, and keep on interrogating and destroying whatever belief makes our lives seem meaningless, and then protecting those beliefs that make life seem worth it? Why not use curiosity and incuriosity in concert to optimize our experience of life?

So I would like to frame a new wager, but this one between a world where moral meaning is taken as given by reality, and one where we take meaning as epiphenomal and without real significance.

  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live in accordance with that moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives that are as good as we believe.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, but we live as if it is not, we deprive moral meaning of its full dignity, and do things that are metaphysically wrong in ways we refuse to acknowledge
  • If moral meaning is not metaphysically real, but we live in accordance with a moral meaning, we enjoy meaningful lives in error — but that error has no importance or significance.
  • If moral meaning is metaphysically real, and we live as if it is not, and choose to live nihilistically: congratulations, genius. You were right. But so what?

I guess if this were an alternate universe where I could say things simply, I’d just say:

Nihilism is a performative contradiction. In a nihilistic reality, nihilism is no better than delusion. Nihilism conceals an unacknowledged faith in the metaphysical value of truth.

This, of course, is lifted directly from Nietzsche.

Here is an example of how Nietzsche wrote about this:

To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?

I still consider my shattering encounter with Nietzsche in the wee years of the new millennium to be the most important event of my life. The things that happened to me and to life as I knew it, resulting from urgently and wholeheartedly asking the questions he posed — letting these new questions live and letting old assumptions die under their scrutiny — and then struggling with the expanding and ramifying consequences of new answers I found — this encounter turned meaning inside-out for me, destroyed the nihilism that dogged my youth, and restored to life its full importance and mystery. I still do not know what Nietzsche “really believed”, but given his readiness to see so many of his heroes, like Socrates, as secret ironists, is it so far-fetched to suspect him of the deepest ironies? At times, and his best, he certainly seemed to take our “delusions” as more important than our factual knowing.

I had a polymer plate made with a quote from one of C. S. Peirce’s earliest essays:

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

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it…

Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

I will be making letterpress prints of this quote in the very near future.

“Doing the Work” of liberation

History, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

Reading the passage below from Federico Campagna’s Technic and Magic, a constellation of thoughts hit me in rapid succession. I will try to recreate it.

Here is the passage:

Understanding the essence of Technic as related to the instinct for violent appropriation and domination of the ‘beast of prey’ (which, coherently with his misinterpretation of Nietzsche, he deems as ‘noble’), Spengler unveils both the fundamental connection between Technic and Western modernity, and the former’s essential tendency to uproot and rewrite reality.

Both these aspects of Technic, and particularly its violence, were witnessed first­hand by one of the most eclectic German authors of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger. A volunteer in the ranks of the assault Shock Troops, Jünger barely survived the ‘storms of steel’ of the First World War. In the trenches on the Western Front, he had a chance to experience the cataclysmic power with which Technic can literally uproot the reality of the world, unleashing its power like an ‘elemental force’ capable of rewriting what humans believe to be the unchangeable substance of the world. As it was immediately clear to the then young author, the First World War was the dawn not just of a new kind of ‘warfare of materials’, but of an altogether new kind of reality. From the murderous flood that had buried the reality of old, a new cosmic order was about to emerge — and the experience of this passage left Jünger at once utterly paralysed and strangely exhilarated.

. . .

During the interwar period, such ‘demoniacal lightness’ didn’t abandon Jünger, as he attempted to distil his early intuitions of the new spirit of the age in his 1932 book Der Arbeiter (The Worker).

In its pages, Jünger developed an exalted, apocalyptic vision of a new world reborn as a product of Technic, and centred around the totalizing principle of Work. This was no mere ‘work’ as we commonly understand it, but Work as a fundamental principle to which every social form and structure was to be adapted. As Technic would vanquish any previous form of reality and all remnants of the old and feeble values, Work would transform the innermost aspects of all things, and particularly of humans, as if by rewriting their whole genetic code. The actualization of the prime symbol of Work would then amount to a thorough mutation of the existent, that would be at once metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic.

One of the features of a fundamental creative energy is the ability to petrify symbols into an infinite repetition which resembles the process of nature, as in the acanthus leave, the phallus, the lingam, the scarab, the cobra, the sun circle, the resting Buddha. In worlds so constituted a foreigner doesn’t feel awe but fear, and still today it is not possible to face the great pyramid at night, or the solitary temple of Segesta, sunk in the sunlight, without being scared. Evidently the human type which represents the form of the Worker is moving towards such a kind of world, clear and closed upon itself like a magic ring; and as it grows closer to it, the individual increasingly turns into the type.

It will take the rise of Nazism, the death of his son in battle, the collapse of Germany and, most importantly to Jünger, the invention of the atomic bomb, to swerve him off the path of a heroic embrace of Technic’s coming reign.

Here is the sequence of thoughts:

  • “Arbeiter” as Jünger conceived it is a clear expression of what Eric Voegelin identified as the essential characteristic of political gnosticism in its various forms. “The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order… the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being — the murder of God.” The goal of political gnosticism is to make the eschaton (a reality which is essentially beyond time) immanent within history, which is impossible.
  • In the Jewish religion, the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods besides Me.” This means observant Jews refuse to acknowledge the man-made gods of political gnosticism. They are a fly in the ointment of every totalitarianism, if not a monkey wrench thrown into the machinations of the social constructors who wish to be or make or imagine a divine counterfeit. As Dara Horn said, “I think there actually is a complete intertwining between the history of the Jewish people and anti-semitism — and I don’t think you can understand one without the other — because it goes back to the Passover story. The foundational concept of Am Yisrael, of the people of Israel, is monotheism, belief in one God, rejection of idolatry. And today we see those things, and it sounds like religion. We think of that as like a spiritual idea in the ancient Near East, that’s a political idea, and you see it dramatized in the Passover story. In other societies in ancient Near East, like ancient Egypt, they’ve got lots of gods. And one of the gods is the dictator. The Pharaoh is considered one of the gods. The whole story of the Exodus is a showdown between the God of Israel and the Egyptian gods, especially the Pharaoh. So when the Jews in ancient times said that they don’t bow to other gods, what they actually were saying is that they don’t bow to tyrants. This is an anti-tyrannical movement since ancient times. … An anti tyrannical movement is always going to piss off tyrants.”
  • Then I recalled the most famous use of the term “arbeiter”: over the gates of Auschwitz. “Arbeit Macht Frei”: “Work makes one free.” Reading this slogan in Jüngerian light is horrifying. And when I recall that one of the slogans of “antiracism” is “Do the Work” and with a goal of spiritual liberation, it all comes into focus. Attacking Jews, whether in the name of Nazism, Marxism, Progressivism, or political Islamism — this is something every totalitarianism eventually does. Of course a camp that literally annihilated Jews, in order to annihilate the Jewish people and its stubborn covenant with God, in order to annihilate the reminder of God’s presence in the world would bear the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

No, reality is not constructed.

Only some kinds of truth — objective truths — are constructed. These truths are pluralistic and relative, and it is wrong to treat them as absolute.

But higher truth is given and revealed to those who will receive it. This truth — a relational truth — acknowledges an Absolute reality that is beyond construction and comprehension.

And this Absolute and the truth that testifies to the Absolute morally binds us in crucial, undeniable and unavoidable ways.

Walk good.

Pluralism

Esoterism, Ethics, Metaphysics, Philosophy

I agree that many moral and theoretical ideas historically treated as absolute were more relative than their adherents realized.

I also agree that such relative beliefs — being approximate and contextual — can be true in their own way, with different trade-offs — even as they conflict.

But I no longer believe that all truth is relative or pluralistic. Some truths transcend relativity and pluralism: to deny them in thought is wrongheaded; to defy them in practice is immoral.

We can debate where the boundary lies between the relative and the absolute.

But if you argue that no such boundary exists — why are you arguing?

Practical fantasy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Philosophy

Back in the early 2000s, my brother and I developed a “practical fantasy” vision of bicycles.

Scott ran a bike shop. Over the years, conversing with many customers, he began to notice that everyone who cares about bicycles carries in their soul some ideal image of themselves within the world, and they project that ideal image onto their bicycle, onto themselves as rider, and onto some ideal riding scenario.

A gearhead is one such archetype. He owns the lightest, most advanced technology. He imagines the awed envy of fellow cyclists when they see how his bicycle is specced out and how light it is… Wannabe racers imagine themselves bursting ahead of their rivals… Wannabe couriers snake through dense traffic taking insane risks, scoffing at the certainty of gruesome injury and likely death… There are tweedy retro fetishists, transporting themselves from home to cafe to studio to bookshop. (Who me?) … Rugged all-terrain riders, carrying their survival gear into the wilderness… Ultralight nomads Eurail from country to country with their foldable, carrying only what fits in the knapsack… We defined a small set, but the full list is extensive.

Scott wanted to decode those practical fantasy archetypes, so he could equip the subset of cyclists he liked and served to fully actualize their fantasy.

Central to this practical fantasy vision was a goal: Transform the fantasist into an actual rider. Liberate the bicycle from its garage imprisonment, and liberate the cyclist from their skull imprisonment.

When I recall this vision, it is just one application of a general theory of design.

The same dynamic applies in every situation where a user of some designed instrument extends their own ideal being into the world through that instrument — enworlding and self-actualizing themselves — making themselves at home in a world they partially shape to their own ideal.

Reminder: Philosophies are one such instrument.

Belimah

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics

Chaos is relative to an order-comprehending mind.

To comprehend, a mind must have a capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) a given order within increasingly comprehensive comprehensions of order. All these interrelated, inter-comprehending comprehensions are themselves ordered within a grounding and orienting relation to absolute reality. Metaphysics is what we call any grounding, orienting relation to absolute reality — again, within which all comprehensions occur.

Where the capacity to receive (conceive or perceive) order-within-order is lacking — where an enception is lacking — only chaos can be apprehended. We cannot comprehend what the chaos is, only apprehend that the chaos is.

(((Incidentally yesterday I leaned a new Hebrew word, used in the Sefir Yetzirah: “belimah“. According to Daniel Matt’s footnotes:

The word belimah, also obscure, can be read as two words: beli mah, “without what.” It appears once in the Bible in the book of Job (26:7): “He stretches the north over chaos and suspends the earth over belimah,” meaning apparently “emptiness” or “nothingness,” the cosmic void. The sefirot are without whatness, they cannot be grasped. A few paragraphs later, we find belimah followed immediately by the imperative belom, “bridle, restrain”: “Ten sefirot belimah. Belom, Bridle your mind from imagining, your mouth from speaking.” The phrase sefirot belimah conveys a sense of concealment and mystery.

I will translate belimah as whatless or whatlessness. It is any reality that defies objective understanding. And if to you understanding necessarily entails objectivity, and if to you objective and real or objective and true are synonymous, I’ll say it plainly: You are missing an entire class of enceptions. This condition is analogous to spiritual blindness and deafness, lacking “eyes to see” or “ears to hear” certain crucial religious truths. Your religious common sense is missing a dimension, but you are as unable to miss it as a birth-blind person is unable to miss sight. But I will also say it plainly: if you find a way to allow these religious sights and sounds to become visible and audible to you, it will be the most glorious shock of your life. You will feel like a new person in a new, infinitely meaningful world. And I know you cannot believe me, but that does not make it any less true. “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice there is.” You will see.)))

The intuition that real order is present, but intellectually inaccessible, generates apprehension. This apprehension intensifies with the intuited importance of the intellectually inaccessible intuited reality. A crucial whatless thatness inspires excruciating apprehension, a minute spark of the dread of the infinite, which to us is Ayin, nothingness. This nothingness is the outer surface of myriad surfaces concealing Ein Sof. The Kabbalists call these concealing surfaces garments. Ein Sof is clothed in Ayin, and if it were otherwise, our finitude would exfinite into the infinity to which it belongs and we would be whatever the eversion of annihilated is. I suppose “exnihilated” is as good a word for it as any.

How can we account for enception? Enceptions are determined by possibilities within a comprehensive conception.

Enceptions crystallize from the multistable possibilities of soul.

Some possibilities of soul harmonize essential orders essential to human existence and relate them to what surpasses all understanding, but at the cost of practical competence. Other possibilities of soul grasp the objects of scientific understanding at the cost of understanding social or biological epiphenomena like love or morality. Other possibilities permit deep attunement to people and groups, but at the cost of clarity and self-confidence.

When we understand one way, within one metaphysic and one comprehensive comprehension, it enables some enceptions and disables others. It produces a distinctive vision with its own regions of intuitive sensitivity and oblivion, and its own way of filling in oblivion with its own imaginative productions.

Some metaphysics give us unshakable certainty about a great many unimportant matters, leaving us free to fill in the vast void of truth with our own constructed ideas. We can freely invent whatever reality we wish to inhabit. The only cost is that we are haunted by the whatless thatness of the absolute, and almost everything induces excruciating apprehension. We are disoriented, ungrounded and gripped in anxiety, neurosis and depression. Love is impossible, because other people intensify our angst — to the degree they are personal and non-identical and refuse to cooperate with our language games. But at least we are masters of our own domain, free to construct according to our whim. “Neither God, nor master.”

Truth circulates only when the ladder of Yetzirah stands firm on the rock of Assiyah and penetrates the heavens to Beriyah.