Category Archives: Autobiography

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

Waa waa waa

Autobiography, Philosophy

An internet rock-tumbled quote attributed to William James:

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.”

The entire point of getting credit for a new idea is to win credibility.

Think of it as increasing your intellectual credit score. With a high intellectual credit score we can ask people to lend us some patience or effort to understand what is not easy to understand.

With credibility, we earn the right to be taken seriously when we say something that seems untrue or unimportant — before it turns into a truism that everyone retrospectively knew all along.

But credibility simply doesn’t happen with most people. After a brief flash of recognition, the novel insight fades into the background of truth. “It was there all along, and now that I think about it, I kind of saw it, too. And it is just as mine as it is yours, now. In fact, I know more than you, because here’s some stuff I figured out with this new insight of ours…”

“…But this new thing you keep going on and on about? It is not true, and, anyway, it is not important.”

In the realm of ideas, it takes ability and effort to remember ignorance and to maintain gratitude.

Many intellectual gift thefts are innocent, but those who steal gifts innocently are not intellectuals.

People are happy to listen to you, but only if you do a good job of saying things they already know.

Folks who consume ideas others hand-feed them just help themselves to whatever’s served up on the steam tray.

If you dump your ideas onto a steam tray — if talk or blog at whoever is around — your credit score will suck and your loan applications, however small, will be declined. Folks are preoccupied with their own worries. They won’t notice and can’t focus.

Your fabulous pearls of wisdom are as painful as Legos when someone steps on them.

Serious thinkers read and are connoisseurs of ideas. They know the before-and-after of oblivion and revelation. They live this transformation every day. They live for it. This is where to build credit.

Waa waa waa.

Radical mid

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Philosophy, Star

Periodically, I follow a line of thought so far that I lose touch with my point of departure.

That is, in fact, my goal — my “point of failure” as bodybuilders call it. A touchstone quote from Nietzsche brings me back:

The two principles of the new life.

First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon.

Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

What is most certain for a human being is the middle.

Voegelin called this existential middle the metaxy. The metaxy is the threefold present I-now-here.

Between the beings (beyond) who superscend and comprise us and the intuitive sparks (behind) who subscend and constitute us is a tension called I. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite living oblivion, spirit.

Between the future (beyond) which draws us forward into its indeterminate possibility and the past (behind) which constitutes our time is a tension called now. And it extends indefinitely into an infinite temporal oblivion, eternity.

Between the distances (beyond) which stretch outward interminably and substances (behind) which constitutes our immediate environment is a tension called here. And this extends indefinitely into an infinite material-spatial oblivion, apeiron.

For each of us, metaxy collects in mesocosm, suspended between microcosm and macroscosm.

Husserl called this mesocosm in which each and all of us lives lifeworld.

In this lifeworld there are myriad ways to make common sense of things, some better than others.

We make personal common sense across our senses, by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting “the same thing” in our environment, understanding it synthetically as the common object of our sensory experience.

And we all make interpersonal common sense by talking about and interacting with common objects among us — things we experience together.

As we make sense alone or together, we, ourselves, are shaped. Our objectivity shapes our subjectivity. Or, more accurately, our subjectivities are shaped, and learn to cooperate within a single, multifaceted subject. We learn to understand (to varying degrees and predominance) via all the subjects we learn in school, plus many other, far more local subjects, like the subject of the inhabitant of our home, city, region, nation and internationality.

These subjects and supersubjects are not objects and cannot be known objectively. They are who does objective knowing. The tree of subjectivity is known solely by its objective fruit. Trying to have the tree by possessing its fruit everts being. We compulsively evert being. It is how we are.

Some of these subjects are harmonious with one another and can be used simultaneously and integrally, and some conflict and can only be used serially. The latter are the ones that make us feel self-estranged. We are one person at work, another in public, another with friends and another at home.

But our souls are expansive. We want to extend our I to wider scopes of we. And we want to go deeper to involve finer and finer, subtler and subtler sparks of intuition. We want to integrate with and without, to be self-possessed but to belong. We want to concern ourselves with more varieties of materials networked across greater expanses. We want to come to understand and come to terms with our personal past and the past of our peoples and of our species, of life and of the universe, and we want to see beyond the horizon of the future and anticipate what is in store for us.

As we dilate our souls toward spirit, eternity and apeiron, structures of meaning emerge.

These structures are sacred. They link us to subscendent and superscendent transcendence, which is our source of being. It is a trellis to hold us firm as we extend ourselves, entwine ourselves, ascend beyond the I-here-now point.

Religion is a trellis.

Now I am back in the middle, rerooted in what is closest, most immediate and real.

Treatment for mistreatment

Autobiography, Ethics

I just capped my Wimbledon Hooligans fable with a nice, pat moral:

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

My mistake has been moralizing respect.

Respect is an ethical principle, not a moral principle.

I prefer respect, of course, because I flourish only in a respectful ethos. But this is always where the moralizing vice strikes. “What is good for me defines what is good.”

The world as it is right now has very little genuine respect. We have only the remains of respect — vestigial manners. Manners have degraded into behaviors having nothing to do with establishing or maintaining mutual respect. In work settings, manners are instruments of professional depersonalization. In social settings manners are class performances. In corporate-political life manners govern socially-acceptable forms of petty sadism — subjugation, humiliation, recreational coercion, etc.

So be it.

The new program:

  • Do not cheapen respect by throwing it on the street like shriner’s candy. Do not run around expressing every admiration you feel. In the market, oversupply cheapens.
  • Exchange respect with the precious respectable few, who are capable of receiving, valuing and reciprocating respect in kind. Treat the rest with cheerful dispassion. It is nobody’s fault that they have become whatever they are, but it is also not to their credit.
  • Just as liberalism is an ethic at home only in a liberal ethos, respect is an ethic at home only in a respectful ethos. Do not follow the rules of a game nobody else is playing, and then resent them for not playing along. Mutuality is for the mutual.
  • The world is what it is. The world is not obligated to conform to your ideal or bow to your judgment.
  • Lower daily dose of vitamin B, and start loading up on vitamin N.

Symptom or perception?

Autobiography

My wife is worried about me.

She says I sound crazy, running around blaming the whole world for offending me with subtle and overt signs of disrespect. She is especially worried that I am no longer suppressing my offense. For instance, I have been ending conversations without warning whenever I have been disrespectfully talked over.

Shit’s getting ugly and awkward, and I am 100% ready to make it even worse.

My wife is an insightful, reasonable woman, and her concerns are grounded in the best sense.

First, as a general rule, if a person has problems with the entire world, we should not only hypothesize but fully assume the problem is with the person, not the world. We will rarely go wrong following this rule.

Second, I was born into a respect vacuum. My psyche knows and detests this kind of disrespect ethos and fears being sucked back into it. There is every reason to expect that my mental malfunctions will take disrespect as a theme.

Third, I am battered beyond belief by the work I have been forced to do for the last several months. I am not well. It is indisputable that I am crazy to some significant degree. The question is how much of the disrespect I perceive everywhere is real, and how much of it is craziness.

All I can say in defense of my perceptions is that history teaches us that there have been times and places where respect has, in fact, broken all the way down. Entire generations have come to biological adulthood without training or cultivation of mutual respect — or even exposure to it. These generations have felt no respect for the past, for the institutions that hold their life together, for anyone who wishes to preserve or defend these things that still work, however imperfectly.

This kind of radically disrespectful generalization destroys civility on their way to destroying civilization.

I believe we are in such a time and place, facing a disrespect pandemic.

To feel human, I need exchanges of respect, but in a world where people only know domination, submission, cynical suspicion and revolt, this need will not be met.

So, that is truth as I know and perceive it, laid out for judgment. Judge away.

Wimbledon hooligans

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

A horde of rioting football hooligans burst the gates of Wimbledon and flooded onto the courts, mid-match.

The officials instructed the players to play on.

“Yes, the game is more challenging with drunken louts milling about on the courts, vomiting on the grass, shredding guitar solos on snatched tennis rackets and hanging the players from the rafters by their tighty tennis whities. Quite challenging, indeed.

“But,” the officials reasoned, “many of these people have never experienced the great sport of tennis. If they see the game up close, played by the best players, perhaps they will be won over to tennis. Maybe they will become the most passionate tennis fans of all!”

So the tennis players did their best to play around the active and occasionally brutal interference of the hooligans, and tried to win the conditions required to play tennis by playing even better tennis, by the rules of tennis.

Ethics are the principles that sustain an ethos.

Loyal members of an ethos appeal to and honor these principles.

Ethics are not binding beyond the ethos, even for the most principled member. In fact, to meet an existential threat to an ethos with ethics is unethical.

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Unacceptable interruptions

Autobiography, Ethics

Jews famously interrupt a lot. It’s just how Jewish conversations go.

And apparently, even healthy married couples constantly interrupt.

Many interruptions happen in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and I barely notice them.

But there are three varieties of interruption that I will no longer tolerate.

  • Aggressive interruptions. You know it is an aggressive interruption because if you keep talking through the attempted interruption, the aggressor continues. It is a conversational stare-down. I’m not having that. And I will not be in a relationship with a person who does that. It is a sign of low arrogance.
  • Disregard interruptions. The partner just does not value what is being said, has no curiosity about where it is going, and feels too little respect for the speaker to ignore whatever they’re saying to the end of the sentence.
  • Apprehensive interruptions. These happen when a conversation presses against the comprehensibility limits of one of the partners, and they try to divert them conversation back to safe regions. The interruptions are self-defense against aporias.

I am not fucking around. If I feel disrespectfully interrupted, I might give one warning and I might not, before I bring things to a sudden and awkward close.

I’ve already ended several meetings both in and outside work.

I have accumulated too many people in my life who have made me doubt their respect. Part of the problem is they have never learned to signal respect. They have also never been taught to refrain from inconsiderate behaviors. I have too little time and patience to allow people like this in my life.

I don’t command respect. But if someone withholds respect from me, there will be no effort to establish respect. I will remove myself from the source of offense, or remove them from where I am.

The Medium

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

I have connected design and gifts for a good while.

When I understand the core service design concept of value exchange in the clear light of gift exchange, so that it includes, but also transcends, transaction, and enters the domain of freely given gifts, service design gains importance and universality.

Let us define transaction as any exchange of goods that is purely functional and impersonal. Neither party has any reason to feel any bond of solidarity. All parties performs their respective functions precisely as specified, without deficit or surplus. A transaction leaves a sum of zero in the accounts ledger.

Exchange of gifts is qualitatively different. First, it is bad taste (for it indicates bad faith), to quantify or even sharply calculate the value of any gift exchange.

This is because, (second), gifts always, necessarily and essentially carry an indeterminate, intentionally obscure, surplus.

And that indeterminate surplus goes directly into a mysterious qualitative fund belonging to the relationship itself. The surplus fund of the relationship is felt in various ways by the members of the relationship. It might be felt as gratitude, love, respect, trust, wonder or awe. But it will be felt as some sort of voluntary solidarity.

A relationship is not only, or even primarily, a formal arrangement or social status.

If it is a real relationship, it has a being of its own that transcends the being of any of its members. It is that transcendent third being who “owns” the surplus of any gift exchange.

A person in a relationship who aspires to perfect fairness is a person seeking transaction rather than gift, and that person will be incapable of forming real transcendent relationships with others. They will suffocate inside their own isolated tit-for-tat ingratitude and stinginess.

This does not mean that gift-governed relationships should be unfair or unbalanced. What it means is that the standard for its balance is not calculation.

The standard is an intuition of whether the relationship feels “worth it” to all involved. And that “worth it” is signaled by a feeling of solidarity, connection, goodwill, loyalty, identity and most generally, love, which is what value is.

I had a wonderful talk yesterday morning with one of my oldest, dearest friends. She is working on her brand, and has been preparing a brief for a talented designer who is working on her visual brand identity. She had this brief in mind, as we spoke about how she serves her teams and helps them serve organizations.

We agreed that the kind of brands people care about and feel connected to are collective persons with independent being that transcends particular members. Living brands are egregores.

Egregore is another name for a collective person. They are collective beings in whom we participate, from whom the world is received as given in some particular way.

An engregore enworlds some patch of reality in some specific way, and carries with it explicitly stated beliefs about being, truth, action, morality and maybe even transcendence. Each has its (Nietzsche once asked if gods philosophize, and the answer is, of course, yes — but to varying degrees. Most gods are like people, spending most of their time spontaneously perceiving and acting, and only stopping to reflect and articulate when some bit of their enworldment breaks.

An organization that can only work by stacking up words and calculations and other constructed systems, who rejects the philosopher’s stone of transcendent being, who tracks its transactions in a pristinely balanced ledger, and organization that sells precisely as high as it possibly can a buys precisely as low as it possibly can in order to shunt all surplus into the pockets of anonymous shareholders — that organization might (or might not) have some kind of collective being — but if it does have personhood it will not have be one anyone can want. Whether soulless or mis-souled, the organization don a phony persona and try to run charisma moves on whoever gets involved in it. It will be corporate.

Egregores organize themselves by assembling persons who serve the organization as organs. The life of the organization is a distributed throughout its organs and their relationship, actualized in value exchanges and the givens they receive in common as an organizational common sense. An egregore in its transcendent being can be understood as a materialized faith that receives givens (qualitative and quantitative data), responds in particular ways and instaurates and evolves ethomethods for regulating its internal organ system.

All that.

Engregores form around my friend.

She draws together designers (“creatives”) of various kinds — each with a unique ideal value exchange — and brings them to collective life, exchanging their best gifts with one another, in order to gift clients with their best work. She is weirdly good at this.

Whenever she leaves an organization, people cry. They cry hard. They are grateful to her for giving them the rare opportunity to meet their deepest need in the practical world: the conditions needed to give their best gift.

But clients don’t see this value. The value is concealed as the indispensable subjective container of the objective value it contains and pours forth. The client sees only the objective outputs: the deliverables. Tangible things is all they are willing to pay for.

I told her this reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s cryptic aphorism: “The medium is the message.” Medium, as opposed to what? As opposed to the content conveyed by the medium. According to McLuhan engaging a medium changes the enworldment of a consumer far more than whatever the medium conveys in the foreground. You can watch hours of Howdie Doodie or Masterpiece Theater, and either will transform you into a TV viewer. In the early 20th Century the new medium of radio created a new kind of mass man, which could be molded into egregores of unprecedented size and aggression. Folks who doomscroll all day become doomscribes.

My own experience with a medium being the message was my encounter with Nietzsche. In order to make sense of the content of Nietzsche’s thought, I had to learn new ways of thinking it, and that way of thinking applied far beyond the scope of his books. It didn’t matter what facts he asserted. The message was the medium of thinking in a Nietzschean way, and that message changes literally everything. Pragmatically, what follows from my utterance of “everything” is different from what follows from yours. Everyone knows everything, but everythings vary in size.

This is when I brought up the branding classic, The Hero and the Outlaw. This book is about using Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to find potent brand archetypes upon which, allegedly, living brands can be modeled.

The Medium is the message. A medium who channels talent and converges it in order to summon the perfect team for a design problem. Medium!

I suggested she look for something approximate to “The Medium” — the summoner of collective being.

I also suggested that the brand itself is not an archetype. The archetype is one organ in a brand’s organ system, not a representation of the whole brand. Brands are not spectatorial, they are participatory. And the brand invites a customer (or employee or partner) into the living brand as a fellow character in the drama.

Often the brand archetype is not even the hero of the story. Sometimes the customer plays the hero.

I used to be obsessed with branding.

Gift thieves

Autobiography, Enworldment, NOTA

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 gift is the bond of gratitude.

When a gift is received as if it is a mere ownership transfer from one person to another, with no sense of gratitude, that gift has been stolen.

Material gifts can be stolen.

Ideas can also be stolen.

But the easiest thefts are the worst thefts: the theft of supraformal gifts.

The hardest part of such a theft is perceiving the gift in the first place. But if someone gives you the gift of experiencing the gift as real and valuable, then there it is — there for the taking. Nothing but decency prevents you from grabbing it for yourself and cutting all the “strings attached” that bind both it and you to the giver of the givenness.

Ingratitude says “You gave me an idea.”

Gratitude says “Thank you for teaching me.”

Ingratitude says “This belongs to everyone.”

Gratitude says “Thank you for showing me what is ours.”

Ingratitude says “We are the supercessors. What was yours is now ours.”

Only ingrates who know nothing about relationships think gratitude is about a craving for credit.

It’s as dumb as the belief that jealousy is thwarted lust for owning another person.

Young people know all kinds of new things, or at least know how to query ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to generate some knowing — but I’ve met next to none who understand what a relationship is, or know how to move around in the world of relationship.

Metanoyance

Autobiography

I forgot my coinage “metannoying” until need brought it back to memory.

This magical word transforms something infuriating and alienating into something properly comical.

Metannoying is what happens to a soul when it experiences its first comprehensive conversion (metanoia) and it wakes up into the center of a new world as an all-intuiting sage and starts babbling crypic oracularity as if nobody has ever heard such profundity. “No, no! You’ve been saying things you don’t really understand. Hear me and heed my meaning well, for I am the knower of unsayable knowing, who can refill these words with my overflowing wisdom,” and so on and on and on.

Sadly I know this phenomenon inside-out from firsthand experience. I, myself, was the most metannoying person who ever lived for at least five years, until I toned it down with felt irony and humor. Then I became maybe second or third most metannoying person until… — I don’t know… – until I die, maybe? But competition is heating up. The youngsters have rediscovered mysticism, and they know All like only the freshest convert can. So if you’re a seeker of wisdom, go fetch your little golden wisdom cup and get ready to drink deep. Here comes the deluge.

I estimate it will take cheerfully forbearing at least a generation and a half of metannoying youth to pay down my debt to the cosmos. But I think I’ll do as much of that forbearing from a distance. This is a slower route to solvency, but it is what I can afford.

Me being leftist

Autobiography, Design, Ethics, Politics

A job offer should include not only salary and benefits but a service-level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing conditions conducive to effective, rewarding work.

This is especially important for “labor of love” professions, which are typically lower paying.

For such professions, the instrinsic reward of the work is more than half of the value exchange that makes the work feel worth it..

These professions often attract “empathy workers”.

Empathy workers are typically terrible at negotiating decent salaries. A person seeking a good faith win-win will fare poorly facing off against a bad faith opponent seeking a win-lose.

But tragically, empathy workers are also terrible at resisting unreasonable demands and pressures that cheat them out of the non-money half of their value exchange. They are, by nature, agreeable, flexible and accommodating. and this makes them the perpetual path of least resistance for workaday psychos looking to stampede and climb over and crush whatever is between them and the top of whatever hill they trying to be king of.

So empathy workers end up with lower salaries and depressingly impossible work conditions that burn them out and make them even less able to push back on the assholes who mercilessly squeeze, exploit and immiserate them.

Seen, heard

Autobiography

A few times in my life I’ve met someone who hears what I say. They laugh at the humorous irony I lace into almost every sentence I utter. They feel the significance of what I am always trying to say. They might even be intrigued by some of it. My reaction is always shock and happy relief. Then I get in a big, bitter fight with them, because I can’t get along with the other kids.

Temperance

Autobiography, Kabbalah

The essence of tradition is practice oriented by keen awareness that others have gone further than we have.

We can always situate I within All, but that All is situated within Nothing. All is perpetually All-but-not-All-enough, and this is wisdom learned the hardest way, by being right, not not nearly right enough, over and over and over again, painfully, until temperance develops.

Whatever I say about Kabbalah is provisional and personal. My words are meant as testimony, not verdict. Whenever I make proclamations, I do so provisionally with concern bordering on dread.

This might go without saying, but I’ve learned the hard way that what goes without saying cannot go without saying and must be repeated forever, like a prayer or declaration of love: Check your own trusted sources and your own experience and exercise your own self-sovereignty.

Tricky life

Autobiography, Chord, Design, Philosophy

The Trickster persona maintains an ironic dual focus.

The second focus is the workaday foreground we all share with our peers and collaborators.

The first focus — the one that really matters to to the Trickster — is the uncanny background of all activity, the formless formational forces who move, shape and illuminate and obscure the unfolding of events for each person involved.

The Trickster moves in a world inhabited by mono-focused beings, who, lacking that second vision, lack parallax and, therefore, depth-vision. The one-eyed live in a flat world where everyone, even Tricksters, are flat.

Tricksters are tricky because they constantly try to remind the one-eyed that there is much more to life than matter-of-fact flatness. The Trickster winks, to remind people that they still have that first eye that they closed, perhaps to protect its first-eye innocence, one sad day at the dawn of youth.

When the Trickster winks, it is the second eye that closes. The first eye remains open, bathing the beheld in magical sight. If the beheld has any vestigial intuition vital enough to penetrate the workaday flatness, this hermetic winksight is experienced as the opposite of an evil-eye. Most of the time, though, it is experienced as inefficient creepiness.

And now, as always, I am recalling a Nietzsche quote — which always ripples out into a blessed recollection and re-membering of Nietzsche himself:

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ — said John Stuart Mill: as though it were necessary to beg for forbearance where one is accustomed to render them belief and almost worship! I say: let us be forbearing towards the two-eyed, great and small — for, such as we are, we shall never attain to anything higher than forbearance!

‘Let us be forbearing towards the great one-eyed!’ appears to refer to an essay by Mill on Bentham:

The truths which are not Bentham’s, which his philosophy takes no account of, are many and important; but his non-recognition of them does not put them out of existence; they are still with us, and it is a comparatively easy task that is reserved for us, to harmonize those truths with his. To reject his half of the truth because he overlooked the other half, would be to fall into his error without having his excuse. For our own part, we have a large tolerance for one-eyed men, provided their one eye is a penetrating one: if they saw more, they probably would not see so keenly, nor so eagerly pursue one course of inquiry. Almost all rich veins of original and striking speculation have been opened by systematic half-thinkers: though whether these new thoughts drive out others as good, or are peacefully superadded to them, depends on whether these half-thinkers are or are not followed in the same track by complete thinkers.

Nietzsche had much more to say about one-eyed being. Here is where my wiki bears fruit. From Human All Too Human:

The cyclops of culture. — When we behold those deeply-furrowed hollows in which glaciers have lain, we think it hardly possible that a time will come when a wooded, grassy valley, watered by streams, will spread itself out upon the same spot. So it is, too, in the history of mankind: the most savage forces beat a path, and are mainly destructive; but their work was nonetheless necessary, in order that later a gentler civilization might raise its house. The frightful energies — those which are called evil — are the cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity.

Another quote is from from Assorted Opinions and Maxims. Please note the “true-but-not-true-enough” winking acknowledgement of the one-eyed by the two-eyed, which was performed by Mill toward Bentham:

Cult of culture. — To great spirits there has been joined the repellent all-too-human aspects of their nature, their blindnesses, deformities, extravagances, so that their mighty influence, that can easily grow all too mighty, shall be kept within bounds by the mistrust these qualities inspire. For the system of all that which humanity has need of for its continued existence is so comprehensive, and lays claim to so many and such varying forces, that humanity as a whole would have to pay heavily for any one-sided preference, whether it be science or the state or art or trade, to which these individuals would entice it. It has always been the greatest fatality for culture when men have been worshipped: in which sense one may even feel in accord with the Mosaic Law which forbids us to have other gods beside God. — Next to the cult of the genius and his force there must always be placed, as its complement and palliative, the cult of culture: which knows how to accord to the material, humble, base, misunderstood, weak, imperfect, one-sided, incomplete, untrue, merely apparent, indeed to the evil and dreadful, a proper degree of understanding and the admission that all this is necessary; for the harmonious endurance of all that is human, attained through astonishing labours and lucky accidents and as much the work of ants and cyclops as of genius, must not be lost to us again: how, then, could we dispense with the common, deep and often uncanny groundbass without which melody cannot be melody?

Here is an apparent Jew-eyed wink at Jesus. Blessed-but-not-blessed-enough?

A Christian friend of mine one quipped “Jesus converted you to Judaism.”

Yes, true. But whose Jesus?

In my early days as a Nietzschean-on-fire, I thought Nietzsche was a crypto-Christian. But that was only because Judaism was still too far out of reach for me. I lacked landmarks for situating my new self in this new landscape. “Christian” was the closest available match, but it was not close enough. <— wink wink wink. Judaism has depths that supercessionists desperately need to truncate with aggressive incuriosity. And pogroms, if necessary.

Misapotheotics, especially, experience Jewish winksight as burning. This is the true origin of hatred of Am Yisrael, whether it the animosity is religious, racial, social or political — or some new expression, like the newly fashionable antizionism, adopted en masse by every independent-minded, politically-active, self-aware, NYT-believing nyet. Another Nietzche zinger: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –” Tell a million zeros they are independent thinkers, and they will all believe it in unison.

Another passage is from The Wanderer and his Shadow: and seems to affirm Mills’s forbearance of the one-eyed.

The democratization of Europe is irresistible: for whoever tries to halt it has to employ in that endeavour precisely the means which the democratic idea first placed in everyone’s hands and makes these means themselves more wieldy and effective: and those who oppose democracy most on principle (I mean the spirits of revolution) appear to exist merely to impel the various parties ever faster forwards along the democratic path through the fear they inspire. Yet one can in fact feel anxious for those who are working consciously and honestly for this future: there is something desolate and monotonous in their faces, and grey dust seems to have got even into their brain. Nonetheless, it is possible that posterity will one day laugh at this anxiety of ours and regard the democratic work of a succession of generations somewhat as we regard the building of stone dams and protective walls — as an activity that necessarily gets a lot of dust on clothes and faces and no doubt also unavoidably makes the workers a little purblind and stupid; but who would wish such a work undone on that account! The democratization of Europe is, it seems, a link in the chain of those tremendous prophylactic measures which are the conception of modern times and through which we separate ourselves from the Middle Ages. Only now is it the age of cyclopean building! We finally secure the foundations, so that the whole future can safely build upon them! We make it henceforth impossible for the fruitful fields of culture again to be destroyed overnight by wild and senseless torrents! We erect stone dams and protective walls against barbarians, against pestilences, against physical and spiritual enslavement! And all this coarsely and literally at first, but gradually in a higher and more spiritual sense, so that all the measures here indicated seem to be an inspired collective preparation for the supreme artist of horticulture, who will be able to apply himself to his real task only when these preparations have been fully carried out! — To be sure, given the great length of time which lies between means and end, and given the very great effort of mind and body, an effort spanning the centuries, needed even to create or procure each one of these means, we must not hold it too much against those who are working on the present-day if they loudly decree that the wall and the trellis are the end and final goal; since no one, indeed, can yet see the gardener or the fruit-trees for whose sake the trellis exists.

There is no contradiction between these two attitudes toward one-eyedness. It is a paradox of ironic two-eyedness. In fact, all paradox is the speaking of two views in one utterance — either a lower and higher perspective, like this one, or two lower ones dialectically subsumed in an implied higher perspective that sees them together, unified yet still differentiated.

Soelling it all out: Forbearance between one-eyed and two-eyed is not a mutual arrangement.

It goes one way. It is an unrequited and unrequiteable gift.

Let us not forget: “free gifts” injure.

And this is true even when a gift is stolen.

Supercessionism is mispotheotic ingratitude. It is not enough to steal the gift. The giver is a living insult for ever having what was stolen.

I have got to do something about this rage.

On to the next one-eyed passage. We are going in chronological order, by the way. This one if from the Gay Science:

Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters opens up for himself an immense field of work. All kinds of passions have to be thought through separately, pursued separately through ages, peoples, great and small individuals; their entire reason and all their evaluations and modes of illuminating things must be revealed! So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law or even of punishment is so far lacking entirely. Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? Do we know the moral effects of foods? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The incessantly erupting clamour for and against vegetarianism proves that there is still no such philosophy!) Has anyone collected people’s experiences of living together — in monasteries, for example? Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship? The customs of scholars, businessmen, artists, artisans — have they found their thinkers? There is so much in them to think about! Everything that humans have viewed until now as the ‘conditions of their existence’ and all the reason, passion, and superstition that such a view involves — has this been researched exhaustively? To observe how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate — that alone involves too much work for even the most industrious; it would require whole generations, and generations of scholars who would collaborate systematically, to exhaust the points of view and the material. The same applies to the demonstration of the reasons for the variety of moral climates (‘why does the sun of one fundamental moral judgement and primary value-standard shine here — and another one there?’). Yet another new project would be to determine the erroneousness of all these reasons and the whole essence of moral judgements to date. If all these jobs were done, the most delicate question of all would emerge in the foreground: whether science is able to furnish goals of action after having proved that it can take such goals away and annihilate them; and then an experimenting would be in order, in which every kind of heroism could find satisfaction — an experimenting that might last for centuries and eclipse all the great projects and sacrifices of history to date. So far, science has not yet built its cyclops-buildings; but the time for that will come, too.

Now we see a call for a bifocally directed cyclopeanism.

This reads to me, not like a description of the future, but of the recent past. It reads like a description of Cold War academia, before the West lost its best frenemy and collapsed into lassitude, which then deteriorated into the casually suicidal nihilsm of our denatured, dispirited, anomic proclass.

The last quotation is from Beyond Good and Evil:

Pity in a man of knowledge seems almost ludicrous, like sensitive hands on a Cyclops.

I will conclude this quotation chord with an aphorism of my own,

Conflict divides the world into four halves.

Or two halves, if you are a cyclops.

Often in qualitative design research we will talk about how we thicken the What with insights into the Why.

The classic example we give is the difference between a blink and a wink. The former is a physical thin description. The latter adds thickness of the meaning behind the eye movement. Thickness is an attempt to say depth without all the spiritual and psychological pretensions.

The cyclops just wants the certainty of blink counts. And this counting necessary. But is not sufficient.

With this work I’m being forced to do, which occupies all my time and daytime headspace, it takes an entire morning to remember who I am.

Re + member. <— wink wink wink wink wink

Value exchanges, sahib

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Etymology, Love, Philosophy

I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.

In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.

At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.

As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.

To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.

To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.

I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.

I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.

I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.

When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.

“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.

But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.

(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)

Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.

And value? Value is just some portion of love.

Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.

Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.

We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.

But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.

If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.

Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”

Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:

Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.

When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.

Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.

Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.

And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.

It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.

But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.

Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.

Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.

Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.

This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.

Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.

And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.

We all need this so much more than we know.

Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.

Silicon tabula rasa

Autobiography, Fables, myths & parables

“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk

I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.

According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.

It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,

In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.

Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.

Hifaluphemisms

Autobiography

Why excuse poor behavior, when you can romanticize it? Some hifalutin euphemisms:

  • “I abide in eternity.” (I am bad at time management.)
  • “I can’t get along with the other kids.” (I quarrel way too damn much.)
  • “Brimstone is my fossil fuel.” (I have a productive relationship with pain.)
  • “I have an industrial strength philosopher’s stone.” (All my best ideas are inspired by feeling like shit.)

Making me feel like I’ve never belonged

Autobiography, Philosophy

When I was four or five, my parents gave me my first album, Beatles Revolver. One of my favorite songs on that album, and possibly my favorite song ever, is “She Said She Said”.

Strangely, all my life, until quite recently, I misheard the lyrics. Even now, if I don’t pay attention I still hear it as:

And you’re making me feel like
I’ve never belonged

That has been the dominant feeling of my entire life.

Enneagram experts tell me I am a five wing with a four wing. I’ve wondered if I might not be a four with a five wing. Five, for me, is how four expresses itself. I’m almost a four with an everything-else wing. I cannot get along with the other kids.

Part of my belonging problem might be that my judgments are very much my own.

On all important matters, I know exactly what I think. It is a direct result of effort. If I find myself at a theoretical, practical or moral loss, that loss becomes a philosophical problem. I have processed mountains of lead into gold with my industrial strength philosopher’s stone.

Further, I have paid close attention to what I admire (even when others disparage it) and what I experience as contemptible (even when others praise or “normalize” it).

I take my own judgments far more seriously than those who have not put effort into forming their own personal opinions, but who, instead subscribe to general expert-certified opinion, as if it were another cloud service, like Spotify, NYT or Netflix. I find the streaming beliefs of the people around me to be wrong at best, and more often vapid and embarrassing. The worst of these beliefs are the beliefs these subscribers hold about their own personal virtues. Self-awareness. Critical thinking. Empathy. Justice. Questioning of authority. Radicalness. The belief that they epitomize these things is pure metacognitive incompetence.

For this reason, whenever I am praised to condemned, I don’t think any better or worse of myself.

But that does not mean lame beliefs, stupid political attitudes, negative judgments or failure to appreciate my contributions do not bother me. They bother me a lot.

But they do not bother me as judgments of me as a person.

I experience them as evidence that I will never belong to groups who subscribe to such nonsense.

And it subscription nonsense, by which most groups are defined. The subscription medium, not the steaming content, that is the message.

I experience it as the hopelessness of ever having a place.

In times like these, we are forced to choose between social alienation or self alienation. Most take the road of self alienation.

They’re making me feel like
I’ll never belong.

Confessions of a hedgehog

Autobiography, Design

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel — a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance — and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.

Its been over a decade since I read this essay, so I cannot remember, but wikipedia assures me that Isaiah Berlin said Tolstoy was, by nature, a fox, but by conviction a hedgehog.

Maybe I need to reread it.

I wonder if he offers any examples of poor souls who were, by nature, a hedgehog, but by circumstance, the foxiest of foxes.

There is a fine and blurry line between cognitive impairments and a sense of purpose in life.

Behind one species of hedgehog — let’s call it the involuntary hedgehog — there is a small set of highly developed abilities, organized as a methodology. Part of the methodology is seeing the world that reveals applications for the methodology.

This hedgehog can do all sorts of things with this methodology — as long as he is allowed his methodology. Take the methodology away, the hedgehog’s quills are plucked and he looks like a shaved runt fox. Tragically, one of the methods in the methodology is not providing itself the conditions needed to apply the methodology. If the hedgehog’s quills are plucked, the hedgehog cannot defend itself long enough to restore or regrow them.

I can use design to solve all kinds of problems — but only if I have conditions to design.

If I am prevented from designing, I am well and truly fucked.