Service trio

Design, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

Service design focuses on human participation in service systems. In order to do their job well, a service designer must work with others focused on business viability and technical feasibility and find that golden overlap at the heart of the Venn diagram.

To put it in terms of IDEO’s feasible / viable / desirable model, service design has primary responsibility for desirability.

To use another famous IDEO model, service design is “T-shaped” with broad familiarity with feasibility and viability (horizontal crossbar of the T) and specialized depth in understanding people and what motivates them to participate in a service, and what might prevent them from doing so, (the vertical column of the T).

For years now, I have been observing that every design discipline has its engineering counterpart.

Design systems by definition are composed of both human and non-human components.

The engineers occupy themselves with purely objective sub-systems, while designers concern themselves with humans who might participate in the system and support it to some degree, or to abandon or undermine it. If engineers do their job, the thing being made functions as intended, and designers do their job, the functioning thing is something people want to purchase, try, adopt, keep using, increase their use of, spread the word about, etc., and the thing gets used in real-life.

And sneaking around the edges are business people who figured out how this thing, once functioning and in use, helps their organization flourish, mainly by making or saving money.

So there you have it: desirable, feasible, viable.

The problem with services, though, is that few organizations understand them.

Most business-as-usual organizations remain essentially atomistic in orientation, and assume that a satisfactory assemblage of satisfactory parts automatically amounts to a satisfactory whole.

So they fixate on managing the individual pieces and parts. Product managers fixate on their product. Marketing fixates on its messages. Customer service fixates on helping customers looking for help. Everybody’s in silos, and nobody is working on how the parts hang together, much less thinking about ways the parts could form into something whose whole is greater than the sum of stuck-together ad hoc parts.

For at least a decade and a half, service design has lacked its engineering counterpart. And maybe because of this, or maybe causing it — or probably both — service design as it is currently practiced attracts a type of person who finds it relatively easy to flow into that vacuum, and to try to perform the roles of not only designers, but also engineers and business consultants.

They’re not really “service engineers” but then again, neither is anybody else, so nobody has anything to compare them unfavorably against. Few of them know enough business management to be sophisticated “service managers”. Maybe Service-Dominant Logic experts could do this role if any of them ever wandered off campus to do useful work, but they don’t. So service designers do that, too.

These two awkwardly massive jobs inevitably overwhelm the experience design part of the job, which is also considerably more complex than most other forms of experience design (such as visual design or UX).

Where most design disciplines focus mainly on one person, and are monocentric (user-centered, customer-centered, employee centered, etc.) service design is pluricentric, understanding complex interactions among a plurality of people, each of whom sees the service differently, like in the famous fable, “the blind men and the elephant”.

This plurality of experiences and roles cashes out in different behaviors, which are distributed throughout the system and collectively determine its collective behavior. This kind of distributed agency makes service design systems polycentric.

Service designers must understand the pluricentric experiences and polycentric behaviors of design systems together and arrange them in ways that are mutually beneficial to each participant. (I’ve called service designers “win-win engineers”).

So what we call “service design” is actually three overwhelming jobs.

Each job is not only too much work for one person to do, but also too much expertise for anyone to know, too many skills for any one person to master.

But worst of all, each of these activities demands a different, incompatible mentality. And of these mentalities, design is the hardest to maintain, the least recognized and therefore the first to be chucked out once things get stressful.

Service design tries to cover non-design activities with the design umbrella, but then strands design out in the rain.

Service designers end up least of all… designers.

As it stands service design looks, sounds, acts and smells more like management consulting than design, and the people attracted to the profession seem more interested in constructing logical systems than understanding human beings and their loves, fears and hopes, and crafting things that might matter to them.

Service design will only mature as a profession when it differentiates roles, and like product management forms a close-knit trio of a manager-strategist who focuses on viability (analogous to product manager), an engineer who focuses on feasibility and a service designer who focuses on desirability.

Rise to equality

Ethics, Politics

A person who judges you as deficient creates intolerable inequality between you and them.

By demonstrating overconfident inferior judgment on matters you know best of all, such a judge reveals blindness and double-blindness.

The blind judge is both ignorant and ignorant of their ignorance.

The blind judge’s faulty judgment applies most of all to their conceit of fitness to judge.

The blind judge is oblivious not only to what they are oblivious about, but of the ineradicable (non)presence of oblivion; and that kind of ignorance descends beneath the realm of knowledge into moral failure.

The blind judge cannot rise to the condition of equality. And this creates a terrible tension in any sovereign being who prefers equality and respect among fellow sovereigns. A painful paradox: “If you are not up to the difficult task of meeting me as an equal, I regret that I will be unable to relate to you as an equal.”

A new way to hear: Judge not, lest you be judged.

Choose your nothingness

Exnihilism

Choose your nothingness: pregnant nihilitude or dead nihilism. The choice is halo or hood.

No factual belief is good or bad. Who cares what you believe or disbelieve? But the faith who does and feels the believing is not only moral or immoral– it is morality per se.

How you believe and Why you believe is a moral matter.  

What you believe is an ambiguous symptom of Why and How, from which — from whom — belief content grows and lives and bears practical fruit.

To say it more plainly:

One chooses a holy and eternally pregnant nothingness from which creation and revelation irrupts ex nihilo.

Or one chooses a blankly nonexistent nothingness into which all things come to naught.

Depending on which nothingness you choose you will live in exnihilism, or undie in nihilism.

One’s everything follows from one’s choice of nothingness.

Gone native

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Hermeticism, Philosophy, Trefoil

What does it mean to “go native”?

According to Karen O’Reilly, “The term ‘going native’ refers to the danger for ethnographers to become too involved in the community under study, thus losing objectivity and distance.”

She (or whoever writes her abstracts), continues:

Going ‘native’ as a derogatory term associated with the rhetoric of colonialism. The continuing problem of what is now termed ‘over-rapport’. The lure of acceptance and its implications for lack of distance. ‘All but the dissertation’: the problem of never getting enough distance to be able to write it all up. Balancing distance and empathy, and the role of reflexivity in the participant observation oxymoron.

Design has its own ways of experiencing, understanding and participating in human life. It differs, often radically, from other ways of experiencing, understanding and participating — for example the ways of a business executive, an engineer or a marketer.

Let us call these ways of understanding and participating “enworldments“. Enworldments extend far beyond perspectives or “worldviews”, because they are practical, material, instrumented, environed, linguified, and, perhaps above all, ethnomethodic.

Participation in an enworldment reconfigures our own sense of reality, and it can temporarily change us as people. This is why in some settings we feel natural and say things like “I feel like myself”, where in others we feel subtly off, or awkward, or unnatural, or even estranged from ourselves. We feel this way until we return to a more comfortable setting. Sometimes we are born into an alien enworldment, and find our place — and with it, ourselves — later in life. A lot of romantic longing is for a person with whom we feel at home. But even if we do find a home, if we go back to our alien place of origin, we can re-lose ourselves within hours, and find ourselves once again the pissed-off alienated adolescent we worked so hard to outgrow.

Enworldment is a powerful force, and if we are insufficiently aware of enworldment and its uncanny workings, it is almost automatically overpowering.

This is why I spend hours every morning reading weird philosophical books instead of chasing industry best practices in design journals and Harvard Business Review.

I do this because I have a strong sense of the importance of design’s own enworldment. By understanding it deeply, thoroughly and extensively, I can hold it more firmly and preserve it even when I immerse myself in other enworldments, as I must in order to work effectively as a designer.

My philosophical work prevents me from going native and forgetting why I do what I do.

It prevents me from going native in the corporate world, even if the leaders of my own organization, or even the thought leaders of my whole industry go native in the corporate world and forget the whole reason design matters.

For indeed, this has happened to service design, and much of the rest of the design world.

Service design has gone native. Service design is now as soullessly corporate as every other corporate function.

We put so much effort into learning the world of business management and engineering, and the management of engineering and the engineering of management that we have forgotten design’s transformative mission and we have become part of the machinery that grinds humans down into fungible resources. We have forgotten design so thoroughly, we are oblivious to the fact that we are just business consultants with briefcases full of new management methods. We just know we don’t love our jobs anymore, and that we have little besides fear and duty driving us through each joyless, dispirited man-day, and man-month between this calendar date and the terminal milestone, retirement.

We no longer even have an inspired alternative to offer.

We no longer provide ourselves the conditions needed to do design work. We work long hours, chop up our days (and souls) into the same tiny 15 and 30 minute chunks, juggle the same inconceivable mass of disparate details, glue the disparate details together with the same logical and logistical glue, talk the same endless talk as any other cog on the Chaplin machinery.

And deprived of conditions to design, we stop designing. We talk and talk instead of doing iterative trial and error . We write long reports instead of prototyping. We adopt a QA model of quality, and think we have done something right when no nitpicker can accuse us of doing something wrong. Consequently, our outputs are nothing anyone could love. We construct vast systems of parts with totals that any accountant or procurement officer must admit equals precisely the whole.

We are hired to grind with higher efficiency and effectiveness, because that is how we sell ourselves when we meet our clients where they are. We call what we sell “design”. But we are no longer judges of what is or is not design.

Service design has gone native. We are corporate.

Our only remaining contact with design is with an emptied word.

And the forgetful shake their heads knowingly at those of us who still remember who we are and why we design.

When a field goes underground, it does so like a seed under winter soil. The kernel preserves itself alive under snow, frost, frozen mulch and decay, until conditions for growth return with the spring.

It is easy to store and retrieve What. It is documented fact.

It is a little harder to record and reactivate How, if know-how is lost. But How can be relearned step by step.

But Why, once lost, is nearly impossible to summon back to life, when feel-why is lost.

Why must be cultivated, kept alive, matured, propagated, and at times hidden and protected. When we lose Why we also lose our ability to sense its absence, except as phantom ache where love once was.

Navel gaze

Autobiography, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Letterpress

A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.

Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.

Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.

It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.

It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.

And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.

Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.

This can happen to anyone at any moment.

The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.

(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)

I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.

Idea execution

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

I have spent my entire design career laboring to bring ideas to life.

When I use the expression “bring ideas to life” I do not mean this metaphorically.

When “bring ideas to life” is said metaphorically, which is exactly how most designers say it, it means the opposite of what I mean. It means bringing ideas to their execution.

Any organization that thinks as a means to execution will have no use for me or my kind.

Please excuse the apocalyptic excess, but here’s you a vision: The crown of the glass tower is studded with chieftains, busy officiating over executions. The tip of the crown pierces a heaven level with the sea. An artery runs through the tower, connecting the crown’s seven heads to the heart of the structure; this artery pulses with sticky pitch. The sap goes up, lifted high, consumed; it returns to the ground sapped, depleted. Ten-thousand rowers are arrayed in galleys below, rows and columns of cubic cells, stacked to the basement. They buy none of what comes down from on high, but none of it is sold for purchase, so on they row, on and on, to the end of their shelf life.

Where was I?

Exnihilism, Hermeticism, Philosophy

A subjective gestell shift effects an objective gestalt shift;
being eternally anteceding and transcending subject and object shifts;
being, subject-object, subject and object, dissolves, coagulates, recrystallizes;
the dissolutive-coagulative span, however, is masked by oblivion of chaos;
now sublimates as now, with nothingness between.

(From the depths of this oblivion, by the way, a meditator does not decide to observe that next breath. And now, where was I?)

Ears to hear

Philosophy

Those with ears to hear, let them hear.

We listen differently and hear different things if we assume we already know what another person is trying to say.

We listen differently and hear different things if we assume that another person saying something irrelevant.

We listen differently and hear different things if we assume that another person is wrongheaded.

We listen differently and hear different things if we assume that another person is deceptive.

Most prejudice lives in the ear.

Those with ears to hear, let them hear.

Broken value exchanges

Design

The only thing that keeps me interested in the excruciating field of service design is that its essential function is to summon collective being through ideal arrangement and mediation of value exchanges.

Service design directly addresses the worst pain our society faces right now: few people can find opportunities for their service calling. Every person is called to some particular kind of service, and each person needs to be needed in that particular way. To have our service calling rejected, and to be “utilized” for some other function alienates us from our sociocultural fabric.

Our cultural value exchanges are utterly broken, and this is one of several causes of our nihilism pandemic.

This is not a tree

Design, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

Since rereading Christopher Alexander’s A City is Not a Tree a couple of weeks ago, I am noticing semilattices wherever I feel life.

I’ve long suspected that chaos is not lack of order, but too many simultaneous orders.

Artificiality, though, is paucity of order.

Alexander explains how in the golden mean between chaos and artificiality, lives the semilattice, the trellis of natural order.

The semilattice is the overlaying of a multiplicity of actual pluricentric orders, unfolding polycentrically into a shared reality.

So many things are not a tree.

A city is not a tree.

A service is not a tree.

An organization is not a tree, if it wishes to live and to matter to its members.

Leigh Star’s map is not a tree.

History is not a tree. No event speaks univocally as it unfolds, or even after it unfolds, because history’s unfolding never ends: all history belongs to an unfolding present.

A culture is not a tree.

A text is not a tree, nor is a religion.

The Tree of Life is not a tree.

Alembic

Philosophy

I am grateful I never had to meet Nietzsche the man, and only know the being who wrote and was written — the being who thought his way into my own living soul.

Nietzsche stands in for so many other flawed people who wrote books which brought authors to transhumous life in my own life. I am grateful to have known only their authors.

Who is the “real person” behind the author? Wrong question! Who is the author who enters a crippled actor to make of him an inspired actant? Who is the author who pours their being into their vessel in order to be poured out into so many others?

Whoever says “the author is dead” performs a contradiction, and proves the opposite. Only an author truly lives.

And a golden ball in flight condenses across the alembic: a throwing gift.

Nearing all

Religion

Young: “I can’t see how I could possibly be wrong, therefore I must be right.”

Old: “I can’t see how I could possibly be wrong, therefore I must be ignorant.”

Nobody feels their shortcomings more than a moral person. Likewise, or identically: When we become sensitized to the divine ground, we feel more acutely that remaining shimmering veils of nihilitude who shelters and sustains our finite being.

Thus “the lonely man of faith”. The thinner the separation the more keenly it is felt.

Services are hyperobjects

ANT, Design, Philosophy

Years ago, a cynical friend remarked to me that when organizations hire companies to come in and implement enterprise software, what they are really buying is redesign of their operations. That is true, but let’s not lose balance: without enterprise software, redesigned operations will sink back into chaos.

In the future, service design will iteratively develop one hypercomplex deliverable.

A service is a hyperobject. A service is a multidimensional lattice laced so densely along so many vectors that the designer’s primitive tomography of “visual communications” cannot capture its being, or even do justice to its kind of being.

You could stack printer plots of experience maps and service blueprints and ecosystem maps higher than the stratosphere, but the more complete the documentation, the more unmanageable the towering edifice of knowledge grows, until it collapses into incomprehensible paper rubble.

Early last week Susan asked me if I could sense what is next in design. I told her no. For the first time in my career I had no signal. By the end of the week, I had a strong signal.

Any form of pluricentric design (including service design) crafts hyperobjects (objects of more than three dimensions).

Only now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, can we approach hyperobjects as what they really are and design them accordingly! Human minds are (possibly with rare exceptions) confined to thinking in three dimensions within unidirectional time. With four, we are outside human intuition, and must work very differently.

So – not only are services not trees, but they are also not semi-lattices! Nor are they anything as tame as three dimensional semilattices. They have at least four dimensions I can count:

  1. Touchpoints along channels – line
  2. Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
  3. Delivery operations – volume
  4. Actor – tesseract (since all three dimensions are duplicated by each actor, yet share the same hyperobject)

And woven through this 4D space (the word hyperloom comes to mind) are innumerable threads gordian knotted into a dense hypermesh:

  • Value exchanges among actors
  • Qualitative and quantitative data about actors
  • Measurements of various events within the service
  • Nonhuman service actors (ironically ANT’s flat ontology might only make sense in information hyperspace! Entities like data stores might end up making most sense inside of the actor dimension… hmmmm)
  • Team/-member responsibilities for shared opportunities, shared outcomes, implementations, etc.

I’m going on record. You heard it here first.

Services are hyperobjects.

Because services are hyperobjects, they cannot be adequately rendered by any amount of planar expression.

Until we learn to model, document, develop and manage services as hyperobjects — something only now possible thanks to AI — service design is an exercise in futility, doomed to partial success at best.

Material fate

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Participatory know-how precedes and embodies theoretical know-what.

Existential know-that and moral know-why precedes both, providing material and motivation of embodiment.

Know-what is not the paradigmatic knowing, and to take it that way demonstrates impoverished knowing.

Our being streams out through our senses and limbs, through our tools, into our materials, crafting the enworldment through whom reality is given in this momentary way.

In a speech to Parliament in 1943, concerning the design of the rebuilding of the space where MPs themselves met and confronted one another in debate and deliberation, Winston Churchill famously said:

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

This is one of the wisest things any sensitive consumer of design has ever said about design.

Had Churchill done any of this shaping work himself his insights into shaping — or to put it more neoplatonically, formation — he might have extended and deepened his insight even further:

As we form our materials, our materials form us.

In his magnum opus Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer observed how in dialogue, we become participants in a conversation who transcends us; the conversation has itself through its participants.

Craft is material dialogue.

In craft, our being merges with our tools, our materials, and the forms emerging through the craft. The craft reveals-creates itself through us and our materials and our tools and the forms.

Craft instaurates (reveals-creates) craftsman and craftwork.

From Charles Stein I learned the word “artifex”, the alchemist participating in alchemical transmutation, and this affords a prettier formulation — pretty enough, perhaps, for an alchemical text:

Craft instaurates together artifex and artifact.

To be alive to craft is to be alive to world.

In craft, the dense and surprising reality of the world and the dense and surprising reality of one’s own self attune and atone to one another.

We once again belong to the world by taking part, and participating in its being.

For a designer, choice of materials is choice of the self one will become.

In service design, our material is organizations.

Some organizations are people serving other people, circulating value, sharing life.

Some organizations are corporations with nothing but dry dollars in their veins.

Heaven help the designer who attempts to craft such a material, for that designer will fuse with it. When the designer’s crafting hand touches the corporation, the corporation touches back. The corporation touches the designer with its own transmuting corporate touch, and a designer is now human resource, incorporated, corporate. The world is now given in quantities, words, abstractions, techniques, agendas, opportunities, dollars.

Hermetic design is just a truer name for human-centered design, and human-centered design is just a truer name for design.

A Service Is Not a Tree (rewrite)

Design

Many design students are assigned Christoper Alexander’s classic “A City is Not a Tree”, a 1965 essay about how urban designers unintentionally produce cities that lack the richness of cities that develop organically.

He offers a structural diagnosis. The planned-out cities that feel artificial are organized around function. Each part of the city has a clearly-defined purpose and is optimized to perform its function well. Alexander’s complaint, though, is not a functional one. It is how these cities feel. They feel artificial, he explains, because, in the effort to optimize functions the system is abstracted into a clean hierarchy — a tree — where each element of the city has one set of functions to perform, which each sub-component supports. This kind of order is efficient, easily thought out, understood and managed, but devoid of life and hard to love. Alexander calls these “artificial cities.”

The structure of “natural cities” so beloved by Alexander (and so many other connoisseurs of urban life) is a semi-lattice. In a semi-lattice each element serves multiple overlapping functions. Alexander gives an example:

In Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day’s papers are displayed. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait.

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people’s pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system – they all work together.

The important thing about this complex overlapping of purposes, though, is that it is conducive to social life. He makes what I would call a “pluricentric” observation: Each person who experiences a part of the city sees it according to a slightly different schema — their own personal tree structure, their own mental model. A patch of city with semi-lattice structure can accommodate a range of such structures. But if a designer has imposed a tree structure, there is only one way to see it. Every person conforms to the designer’s own perspective, and we do not sense the presence of many personalities, who inhabit our shared world in a variety of ways, we just that one monologic that ordered this place.

Rereading it today, it is striking how much a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers also try to force services into tree-structures, for the same reasons as urban planners, and with the same kind of result.

In an effort to make work manageable, we adopt structures like Teresa Torres’s Opportunity-Solution Trees, meant to help us clarify problems, focus on solving those problems, and then track how well our solution solves the problem and addresses the opportunity. At the scale of a single product or touchpoint, this approach is effective, which is why it has been so widely adopted.

But at the scale of services, this causes a kind of team siloing, and encourages each touchpoint to address different discrete sets of opportunities, just like what happens in Alexander’s artificial cities. And the result is services that work well, and perhaps even without gaps or glaring inconsistencies, but which lack life. Instead of the kind of service that creates emotional connection, the organization remains generic, impersonal, anonymous — corporate.

In a world of broken services, an artificial-feeling service that is not infuriating is probably sufficient. It will not repel customers. But it also won’t keep them. It will not create positive emotional memories or inspire loyalty in the long-term.

What do we do instead? How do we provide services that feel organically coherent and alive?

One obvious way, of course, is to give frontline employees the support they need to relate  to customers as human beings. Unhappy, stressed-out, overburdened, micro-managed, micro-measured and thoroughly dehumanized employees cannot provide human interactions that create strong relational bonds. They create an impression of an impersonal or deteriorating or tyrannically controlled organization. But allowing employees to flourish as human beings is expensive. Most companies are under pressure to prune staff to the bones, and wring maximum productivity out of each remaining human resource. For many organizations a humane treatment option is largely off the table.

Another way is to reweave multiple touchpoints — which, for the sake of efficiency, speed and accountability have been combed straight into siloed teams — back into a rich interconnected fabric that shares opportunities across touchpoint teams. Teams focused on implementing their discrete part of a service, must perform their design work in a broader context, collaborating across teams to orchestrate complex solution systems that address opportunities over time across multiple touchpoints.

This will require developing new methods and infrastructure for bringing together the right people across teams to collaborate and share accountability for their contributions to service experiences. The first step toward this goal is kicking the “divide and conquer” mentality. Never forget the origin of this often mis-used expression. It was advice to conquerers wishing to defeat, subdue and control a population by undermining their solidarity and preventing them from responding in a coordinated and effective way. A divided, siloed organization aids and abets its competitors, not itself or its customers.

The alternative to divide and conquer isn’t a softer, blurrier “more human” version of the same strategy, nor is it more collaborative workshops. It is setting different and more ambitious goals, that address not only customer pain or functional needs, but aims at relationship, emotional connection and specialness. And it involves asking different questions. Instead of asking “who owns this part?” we need to ask “what are we trying to do?” with an expectation that the answer convene people across teams and solutions. And last, these cross-team collaborations should be small and frequent, part of the rhythm of every workweek.

Services that feel alive will be dense with these kinds of overlapping opportunities to serve and complex semilattices of collaborators, and at every scale. The opportunity to serve is not achieved through mere touchpoint connect-the-dots. It’s in weaving and reweaving these connections among dots and people, into rich lattices of service.

Cutoff

Autobiography

The problem with narrow genius: Everything you try to say divides into two categories: the already-known and the not-worth-knowing.

For a genius of this kind, listening is torture.

Either he already knows where you are going, and waiting for you to get there yourself is unendurable. None of what you are saying is new, and waiting for you to arrive where he’s been (for years now!) strains his patience.

Or you are going in the wrong direction and waiting for you to reach the wrong conclusion is unendurable. None of what you are saying is relevant, and listening to you pointlessly ramble on is a waste of time.

Either way, what you are saying is less than unimportant.

You will be cut off mid-sentence.

I am bleeding from ten-thousand cut-off sentences.

Another problem with narrow genius: The knower is in love with his own knowledge and the intelligence by which he knows it, and he hates whatever defies his intelligence and stands outside his knowing.

Such a person is averse to mystery.

But we humans are, above all else, mysteries to one another.

An aversion to mystery is an aversion to the reality of people.

The Midas touch of self-infatuated smarts values only what it can transmute into cold, gold, self-reflecting mind-treasure — but it cannot touch anything living without stiffening it into mind and mine, me and my I.

As opposed to

Philosophy, Politics

Over the last decade, I have observed a pattern in political thinking concerning comparisons.

In this pattern, some real object of criticism is compared unfavorably to some counter-ideal.

But the counter-ideal is never sampled from reality. It is always a concept whose function is absence of whatever is being condemned.

The West. The gross unfairness of the real, nearby world is contrasted with a distant world free of this exact form of unfairness. The citizens of totalitarian regimes, for example, do not suffer from inequality, because every person has exactly the same status under the state. And the pervasive hate we hear about so much in the West is unheard of outside the West. If such prejudices exist far away where we have never been, we haven’t experienced it, so why would we assume it is existent?

Capitalism. The injustice of Capitalism is contrasted with non-Capitalism in faraway lands or times, conceived as life elsewhere that is probably lived in such and such a way, all so hazily conceived that just about any tantalizing utopian form can be discerned in its billowy rorschach clouds. I hear from a well-informed internet researcher that medieval peasants enjoyed short workdays interspersed with holy, frolicsome dance and play, similar to the life Cubans enjoy — or would enjoy if imperialists would stop meddling with their prosperity.

Wars. We look at images of atrocities, served to us by sources everyone around us assumes to be true, mainly because everyone they know assumes the same, and we can see plainly that this war is infinitely worse than all the other wars we have inspected with similar appalled fascination. This war is obviously a genocide, otherwise the images of dead and injured women and children wouldn’t be shown to us by disinterested parties who simply report the facts on the ground. But what we hear from the enemy is propaganda.

Marriages. This partner I’m stuck with is a neglectful, insensitive, selfish, farting, quarrelsome human-shaped mass of irritations, nothing even in the ballpark of the charming, engaging, self-sufficient tower of strength and integrity I deserve.

These times. Past generations had it so much easier than we do. They did not suffer the exact things that make our lives terrible.

Pain. You do not suffer the exact indignities I must endure. You cannot understand my lived experience.

No reality can compete with an ideal — least of all an ideal conceived for the purpose of unfavorable comparison.

When we love such counter-ideals it is only “love” of a negation of a negativity. And that is not love. That is hate flipped inside-out.

But also, ideals cannot be loved. Love transcends self. Nothing is more self than an imagined fantasy. Our ideals, beliefs, notions of what can and should be have more to do with ourselves than the reality they allegedly represent.

Only real beings can be loved.

And real beings are flawed.

But real beings are also mostly beyond our comprehension. What we think about them barely touches their reality. Reality surprises at depths we cannot suspect prior to shock. And these shocks can sometimes reveal the flaws in our own notions of flaw and perfection, our own capacity to judge, our own self-assessment as judges.

But all this is pure complacency to those still omniscient enough to believe that they can use their limited range of experience and logical faculties to model out reality as it is and as it should be. In most cases, a little more life brings a few more shocks and a bit more wisdom and caution toward making grand judgements about realities we barely know — and instinctively avoid knowing, because knowledge destroys counter-ideals.