Category Archives: Philosophy
Fertile overlap
I work in the overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them.
Design is the intentional formation of hybrid systems — systems of interacting objective parts and subjective participants. While an engineered system of objects is complete prior to human participation, a hybrid system of subjects and objects is incomplete until the subjective participants actively take part in the system.
Philosophy is one species of design intended to transform a person’s capacities for various forms of givenness. It enables a person to perceive, conceive or receive as given, what otherwise is imperceptible, inconceivable or otherwise submerged in oblivion.
Religion is the attempt of a finite being to fully participate as a finite being within infinite being.
The overlap between design and philosophy and religion as I understand them can be called enworldment.
Protected: Abnormal is the new normal
Material, medium and goal
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.
Lead… then gold!
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 to know how to produce and how to interpret a repertoire of meaningful behaviors. We learn how to understand other people’s behaviors and to make ourselves understood by them; then we adopt them as habits; then we internalize them and they become second-natural, and eventually we forget them entirely and they recede into nature.
Many ethnomethods are never explicated. We learn them mimetically — by direct intuitive mirroring. We just pick them up.
Very few people can deliver a lucid lecture on the ethnomethods they use. Nor can they be relied upon to talk about them, mainly because it would not occur to an interviewee to bring them up, since they operate outside of linguistic direction. Understanding ethnomethods — a sociological approach known as ethnomethodology — requires direct observation and experiment.
But also, and I am sure I am nowhere near the first to say this: language is ethnomethodic. Cultures adopt a shared active vocabulary. And they speak in certain ways about their shared world. This relationship between words, communicative behaviors, referenced realities and speech acts produce mental ethnomethods. Through ethnomethods, people adopt cognitive behavioral habits, and become “inwardly” likeminded through their outward conformity to the intricately inter-related heterogeneous outward norms.
Why do I bring this up? Several reasons:
- Ethnomethods are the meaningful substructure of organizations, and organizations are the material service designers shape. When we do this shaping, ethomethods are a huge, elusive and difficult part of that shaping.
- Scholars who have studied how designers work and teach new practitioners (like Nigel Cross and Donald Schon) have observed that design practice differs in distinctive ways from other professions. When these practices are taken up by communities and become a disciplinary field, and are intentionally transmitted through education, training and apprenticeship they become an ethnomethodic tradition. Cross invented an adjective for indicating belonging in the repertoire of behavioral, linguistic and cognitive ethnomethods: “designerly”.
- Design practice has, since the pioneering design research work of Lucy Suchman, adopted ethnomethodic practice — but ironically has adopted and transmitted it purely ethnomethodically! Very few designers have any explicit knowledge of where our methods came from. Ethnomethodology is embedded in many of our methods, and when we use those methods we function ethomethodologically. If the ethnomethodological tools happen to cycle out of our work, the ethomethodological ethnomethods disappear with them. And designers, who are nine-nine parts technician, and maybe one part intellectual, are ill-equipped to notice.
- Service design, as a field, has its own evolving set of ethnomethods. Of course, like all fields we have our methods (tools) and our methodologies (systematic use of tools), and when people ask us about how we work, these are what we talk about. But beneath all this is a layer of ethnomethods that guide how we do our work and even how we think about it. I suspect many service designers see themselves as more intellectual than other designers. It is partly because we are required to explain ourselves, our value and our methods to so many different stakeholders. And it does require a degree of articulateness beyond that required of other designers. But this is not intellectual articulateness, but, rather, a technical articulateness.
- And, perversely, for this very reason, I think service design has lost almost all its designerly ethomethods. It started with “meeting business halfway” and learning the language of business in order to communicate the value of service design in meeting business goals. Then it became mastery of that language and fluency in speaking it, which means learning to think in it. Then it became immersion and active participation in business practices. Then it became learning new methods and approaches to managing journeys and products within journeys. Designers began meeting business halfway from the previous halfway point. And then halfway from that… then that… then that, until eventually, Zeno-paradoxically, our service design stopped being designerly at all.
And this brings me to the thesis I have been working and reworking, which I just summarized to one of the few service design intellectuals I know:
I’m coming to you with a growing suspicion about the field of service design that I think cannot be discussed by most practicing service designers.
I believe that the tacit philosophy that underlies and unconsciously shapes and animates service design practice has never been fully adequate to the problems service design is meant to address. The whole field has always stood on a shaky intellectual foundation, and this has weakened our disciplinary praxis.
But in the last several years, I think even that foundation has eroded away, until that now service design has devolved to total submission to that tacit philosophy that shapes and animates business management — a vulgar subspecies of what Heidegger called technik.
The intellectual foundation upon which service design was erected needs to be dug out and re-laid, so service design can bring design to the business world.
As it stands, service design offers nothing to business that is not new-and-improved business management consulting. And it is this non-designerly sameness that sets dull eyes aglow with recognition when service design gurus speak their language. Service design now sees eye-to-eye with business because it is no longer design, but utterly safe, unchallenging, non-disruptive business as usual. It is no more revolutionary than corporate progressivist activism, and just as phony.
Service design has gone native in the world of business. It has, in the process lost its soul and cannot even sense it.
A methodological note:
I’ve joked that brimstone is my fossil fuel, and that rage is my muse.
I’ve waxed bad-poetic about my daggerscalpel. Something bothers me dreadfully and gets me all murderously angry. I grab my dagger and lunge at it with full intent to kill. But as the weapon tip plunges toward the heart of the matter, it changes midair into a surgical instrument of healing. And now I know something that releases me from resentment.
Most recently I’ve spoken humorously about my philosopher’s stone as a bludgeon — I smash it into some leaden stupidity and watch it transmute into golden insight.
And so on.
Let me see if I can transmute all this ragey negativity into something beautiful.
Design is a very different way to enworld our world. It is not meant to replace other enworldments, but does retune them so we can all collaborate in harmonious difference to solve shared problems.
Design wants to solve these shared problems in some distinctive ways.
It wants to bring things into existence that people value, and which makes life in general more valuable. That is, it wants to offer things that people freely choose and want to have in their lives.
It wants these things to be beneficial to all involved. In the case of a service, the service should not only be beneficial to those who receive the service but also those who deliver that service on the front lines, or who support the service behind the scenes. The service offers opportunities to serve and to be served in ways that are meaningful and rewarding and make people thank their lucky stars that this service exists.
It wants this rewarding involvement to be true of its own services. Anyone who gets staffed to a service design project should immediately feel a palpable change for the better. Anyone who works as a service designer at a service design agency should feel this as well. They should feel that they are bringing a gift to their client. If they do not feel this in their hearts, the designer and the agency need to look into the design of their own service and get right with their craft.
It wants to do what all design does: make things that are useful, usable and desirable. Useful is the easy part. It is about what the design does for whoever uses it. Usable means we can use it intuitively, without massive cognitive effort. It means working with simple gestalts and purely intuitive interactions. And desirable means reinforcing a person’s values and overall sense of value. It means inviting relationship.
It wants to shape a reality that can be enworlded but shared in a variety of ways by a variety of participants. Each participant approaches the artifact in a different way, experiences it differently and responds to it, interacts with it, and changes it from their own point of participation. The single reality is actualized by the distributed agency of participants, each of whom experiences the reality in their own way. In Christopher Alexander’s words, a service is a semilattice experienced by a plurality of participants, not a tree-structure experienced in one way.
Design wants to create a world where a diverse range of people who might inhabit the same world very differently all feel at home and grateful to be here together.
This is why I design.
Protected: Ramified shallows
Service trio
Service design focuses on human participation in service systems. In order to do the 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
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.
Gone native
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.
Where was I?
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
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.
This is not a tree
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 text is not a tree, nor is a religion.
Alembic
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.
Services are hyperobjects
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:
- Touchpoints along channels – line
- Omnichannel motion across channels – plane
- Delivery operations – volume
- 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
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.
Protected: Careericide notes
As opposed to
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.
Successful design
What a world-spanning miracle a successful design is.
A successful design has successful engineering. Myriad components (physical and logical) are assembled into an elaborate system that functions together in concert as a unit.
But a successful design has more than just successful engineering. Design focuses on human responses to engineered things. Where an engineered system works objectively, building objects out of objects, design concerns itself with subjects in relation to objects. Subjective beings experience, respond to and interact with engineered objects, and, in their participation, complete the design. Design instaurates hybrid systems of subjective participants and objective parts.
But human beings are not solitary. Human beings are profoundly social. For one thing humans swim in shared linguistic meaning. Our heads are full of words. Words enter through our ears, words spill out through our mouths, words swirl about in thoughts, inner dialogue, imagination, poetic inbursts, looping self-talk, babbling. But our environments are overflowing with signs, signals, symbols, meanings, most of which were molded by and for human minds, hearts and hands. Most of what we see around us is only heard and read, but the best of it reaches through the words and touches or strikes our hearts. Our hearts. First person plural. We share our loves, concerns, cares and cultivate, protect, honor, repair them together. When we lose these things we let the world around us deteriorate and decay. We might even want to help it along. A successful design gives us a shared object, inspires shared concern, draws us together, condenses us around common love, gives us shared being with whom, in whom we identify. Without common objects of love, identity devolves into mere typology, classification systems, schema, categories, criteria, reified imaginary constructions.
But best of all, successful design requires us to leave the insular certainty of our own expertise and mastery. Design demands that we let go of what we know and how we know it, so we can expand our understanding to accommodate how truth and reality is given to others. We must, again and again, pry apart the grasping fingers of our all-knowing minds, force open our own comprehensive omniscience, and expose our tender palms to what is not yet graspable. To “open the hand of thought” is not a gentle release. It is a terrifying sacrifice, entailing the loss of everything our hand death-grips as its own possession.
Only in this opened state does our hand momentarily apprehend the incomprehensible vast richness of being, and it does so by allowing itself to be held in its openness. Vanishingly few can allow this at all, and almost none of us can do it for long — but this unfolding of comprehension is the one thing needful for inspired, inspiring design work.
And this is why the world is overflowing with unwanted garbage, forged in the closed fists and hard skulls of technical masters of design — experts in convincing heard-headed executives to build useful things, spray-painted with desirability, calculated to achieve measurable business goals. These design experts might complete many successful projects, but they do no successful design, and so, despite their best intentions, whatever they construct drains yet more love and care from the world.
Protected: Instaurational outburst
Respiratory cycle
In oppressive times, disorderly culture breaks bonds, loosens constraints and opens possibilities.
Disorder, having won freedom, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over order per se, until “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
In anarchic times, orderly culture offers bonds of belonging, defines generative constraints and narrows the field of possibilities to a focused mission to actualize.
Order, having secured Pax Imperium, carried by pure momentum, seeks total victory over disorder (including destabilizing alternative orders), and proceeds to dominate, constrain, suppress or destroy any possibility of alternative to itself.
Every extreme hates its opposite, even in trace amounts. A microdose of the detested essence is a gateway leading inevitably to deadly overdose. So attack it with excessive force in the cradle before it has a chance to toddle about as a minidose or walks confidently as a mezzodose, because we foresee where it is headed.
The true enemy of extremism, whether an extremism of excess or deficit, is temperance.
Someday temperance may discover that its golden mean and golden rules for maintaining that mean is not a mere averaging of extremes, but something of its own
Someday temperance may discover that its centrism is not a mediocrity between two forms of inertial unreason, but principled centeredness.
Extremists will sneer at this and feel wise to it. There is a word for this conceit of feeling wise to wisdom.