Any service designer will tell you that value exchanges (or cocreation) are our core concern. At every point in the unfolding of service, value is exchanged or generated among those receiving, delivering and supporting that service. If the value exchange is solid, the service feels worth it to everyone, and everyone plays their part. If … Continue reading Systemic gift-rejection
The problem with technicity is not that it interprets purposeful action in terms of instrumental chains of in-order-to. In even the best circumstances, most action is instrumental — performed in order to make it possible to do some other thing. The problem with technicity is that the in-order-to never terminates in positive intrinsic value. It … Continue reading The gift-rooted organization
I’ve talked about stealing gifts. Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a … Continue reading Gift thieves
I’ve been told by people I trust that if you’re too generous, people don’t value your gifts. Excessive generosity cheapens giving.
I’m giving a designer friend of mine a beautiful, perfect gift, and it’s got me thinking about gifts, again. I just looked up my old posts on gifts, and two of them have held up pretty nicely. Designs and gifts Don’t steal gifts
Design is like gift-giving. How? When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways: The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it. The giftis good to have in one’s life, because it makes life easier, more pleasant or more meaningful. The gift contributes to the … Continue reading Design as gift (edit for 10ke)
I was looking through the gratitude quotes in my wiki and saw this: Nobility and gratitude. — A noble soul will be happy to feel itself bound in gratitude and will not try anxiously to avoid the occasions when it may be so bound; it will likewise be at ease later in expressing gratitude; while … Continue reading Thanksgiving chord: gifts and gratitude
A listener who is considers his listening a gift is a shitty listener. Listening is only a gift if it is a genuine acceptance of a valuable gift. But, what if the gift of what is said really is not valuable? When a speaker ignores the listener and just talks about whatever it is that he … Continue reading Listening as gift
When I offer my service, this necessarily includes my time and my effort. My services, however are not reducible to time and effort. The most important element of service is something beyond time and effort and is the cornerstone of service. Unfortunately the homo faber type — the industrialist temperament — knows only a world … Continue reading Gifts of service
When given a gift, accept the gift. Do not steal it. * To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property is to betray the spirit of gift-giving. A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object is … Continue reading Don’t steal gifts
In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts. * Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive … Continue reading Designs and gifts
To the degree a people system harnesses and serves felt and motivating value, that system will depend upon design methods for its success. To the degree a people system is driven by coercion, that system may be socially engineered. Most organizations are somewhere in the middle region, maybe 61.8% toward the social engineered side. These … Continue reading Distillation-in-progress
Part 1: The Hidden Costs of Carrot and Stick Management Most organizations, as mechanically efficient as they aspire to be, motivate people very wastefully. Instead of understanding people’s natural intrinsic motivations — their sources of meaning, fulfillment, inspiration, resilience and endurance — they rely on artificial extrinsic motivations. These positive and negative external motivations are … Continue reading Knitbone manifesto
As promised, I letterpress printed my ASCII Mercury sigil. Good thing, too! — because after writing “Creation redescription” I was startled to discover that my divine Boolean operations map with uncanny barnumite neatness to this configuration: Plus, divine Andness. Zero, divine Notness. Open parenthesis, divine Orness. I decided to print the sigil as the oblivion … Continue reading Letterpress magic trick
The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open … Continue reading Polycentered declarations
Philosophy is a design discipline whose material is language, whose medium is enception (capacity to take as given what is given), and whose goal is actualization of ideal enworldment: inhabiting reality freely received as an infinitely valuable gift.
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own: “The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the … Continue reading Scholem on originality and tradition
When a person loses their soul, the very soul who could intuit the loss is absent. All that is left is unreality feeling the unreality of unreality. I’ve quite a bit on ethnomethods — those mostly intuitive behavioral conventions that permit us to participate in some particular social setting. To belong to a culture is … Continue reading Lead… then gold!
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. … Continue reading Alembic
For thirty-four years I inhabited one world as one self. I say inhabited, but I dwelt nowhere, in an unreality of habitual inhibition. I was a pious heretic, an obedient radical, dedicated to satisfying the criteria of being a good person — and, even more importantly, of avoiding being a bad one. School had equipped … Continue reading Another meditation on meditation