Category Archives: Metaphysics
Protected: Rejohanine rejoinder
Scholem on originality and tradition
A somewhat lengthy passage from Scholem’s Major Trends, interspersed with comments of my own:
“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay, “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics… And the importance of cosmogony for mystical speculation is equally exemplified by the case of Jewish mysticism. The consensus of Kabbalistic opinion regards the mystical way to God as a reversal of the procession by which we have emanated from God. To know the stages of the creative process is also to know the stages of one’s own return to the root of all existence. In this sense, the interpretation of Maaseh Bereshith, the esoteric doctrine of creation, has always formed one of the main preoccupations of Kabbalism. It is here that Kabbalism comes nearest to Neoplatonic thought, of which it has been said with truth that “procession and reversion together constitute a single movement, the diastole-systole, which is the life of the universe.” Precisely this is also the belief of the Kabbalist.
Yes! We know what creation ex nihilo means because, if we are alert to workings of oblivion, we can catch revelation ex nihilo in the act. And if we understand the relationship between time and eternity we can see that the distinction is only immanently relevant and not nearly as distinct as our language suggests. With an adequate conceptual repertoire and language to support it, it all manifestly instauration ex nihilo.
But the cosmogonic and the eschatological trend of Kabbalistic speculation which we have tried to define, are in the last resort ways of escaping from history rather than instruments of historical understanding; that is to say, they do not help us to gauge the intrinsic meaning of history.
Really? I detect a hint (remez) of irony here.
There is, however, a more striking instance of the link between the conceptions of Jewish mysticism and those of the historical world. It is a remarkable fact that the very term Kabbalah under which it has become best known, is derived from an historical concept. Kabbalah means literally “tradition”, in itself an excellent example of the paradoxical nature of mysticism to which I have referred before. The very doctrine which centres about the immediate personal contact with the Divine, that is to say, a highly personal and intimate form of knowledge, is conceived as traditional wisdom.
Kabbalists differ from those whose explosive insights break their bonds with their people (or, redeem them from what they mistake for bondage), in that Kabbalists maintain gratitude for the tradition that brought them to where new givens may be received, and they also reinvest what they receive back into the tradition, revivifying it. Others smuggle that irrupting life out by rebottling it in novel containers.
The fact is, however, that the idea of Jewish mysticism from the start combined the conception of a knowledge which by its very nature is difficult to impart and therefore secret, with that of a knowledge which is the secret tradition of chosen spirits or adepts.
It is arcane knowledge. It is inconceivable to a person unprepared to receive it, so even if it is given in the most direct way, it is taken wrong — mistaken.
Jewish mysticism, therefore, is a secret doctrine in a double sense, a characteristic which cannot be said to apply to all forms of mysticism. It is a secret doctrine because it treats of the most deeply hidden and fundamental matters of human life; but it is secret also because it is confined to a small élite of the chosen who impart the knowledge to their disciples. It is true that this picture never wholly corresponded to life. Against the doctrine of the chosen few who alone may participate in the mystery must be set the fact that, at least during certain periods of history, the Kabbalists themselves have tried to bring under their influence much wider circles, and even the whole nation. There is a certain analogy between this development and that of the mystery religions of the Hellenic period of antiquity, when secret doctrines of an essentially mystical nature were diffused among an ever growing number of people.
It must be kept in mind that in the sense in which it is understood by the Kabbalist himself, mystical knowledge is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind.
Yes. Here at the radical depths to be radically original and to be radically innovative diverge radically. (Sadly, this is not my original insight. I learned it years ago from a friend.)
To use the expression of the Kabbalist, the knowledge of things human and divine that Adam, the father of mankind, possessed is therefore also the property of the mystic. For this reason, the Kabbalah, advanced what was at once a claim and an hypothesis, namely, that its function was to hand down to its own disciples the secret of God’s revelation to Adam.” Little though this claim is grounded in fact — and I am even inclined to believe that many Kabbalists did not regard it seriously — the fact that such a claim was made appears to me highly characteristic of Jewish mysticism.
This may look like sacred charlatanism, but it is what Charles Stein calls configurative truth. The only way Adam can be is through our own configurative acts of knowing.
Reverence for the traditional has always been deeply rooted in Judaism, and even the mystics, who in fact broke away from tradition, retained a reverent attitude towards it; it led them directly to their conception of the coincidence of true intuition and true tradition.
And those who did break with tradition — those who stole the gifts of tradition — were left with an incomprehensible debt “they know not”, and though they have obsessively tried to drown their guilt it with blood — figurative, transfigurative and, all-too-periodically, literal blood — they cannot wash the stain from their thieving hands.
ASCII sigil
The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.
+0(
- “+”, plus sign: the four directions. Earth.
- “0”, zero: positive absence, enabling finite cyclical life. Man.
- “(“, open parenthesis: Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.
The dome of heaven is even faithfully everted!
It is a static symbol, articulated grammatically, and, at the same time, a symbol sentence, collapsed into a gestalt. It is true and authentic ASCII sigil.
This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.
Protected: Note to self (and probably only myself)
Protected: As aleph, so tav
Ontological membranes
Nihilitude is the active ingredient of relevance, or, rather, of irrelevance.
And so nihilitude is also the essence of abstraction, of focus, of all selective attention of thought.
Why suppress what is real but irrelevant? Why selectively focus (and filter) attention? Why read abstract order into (or, more accurately, leave myriad alternative orders unread from) the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of chaos surrounding us?
It is a necessity of maintaining finite being. An anomalogy: To hear any signal in radio frequency noise, we must tune a radio receiver to one narrow band of frequency, instead of listening to the white noise of the full range of frequencies and enjoying all the signal simultaneously like some kind of god. We do it for the same reason living organisms have skin, and organs have membranes. Any being that desires duration encloses, shelters, clothes, envelopes itself within semipermeable boundaries, holding itself in dynamic balance between openness, closure and carefully controlled disclosure — between dissolution, consumption, digestion, dissipation and insularity, stagnation, isolation, starvation, asphyxiation. (Tif’eret, the principle of balance, the spinal essence of being within greater being, linking sole with crown).
Nihilitude is ontological membrane. It is the horizon, the far side of every object, the receding undersurface, the back of one’s head, the thing you’ve never noticed, and the imperceptibility of your own perception.
An enworldment is what emerges when some finite aspects of reality emerge from nihilitude. The enworldment “projects” (through subtraction of all else) a schema or template of definite beings. Nihilitude flows between each definite thing, each object of experience, a “not”, against which it is defined — literally, de-finitized.
Whatever prevents the schema from crystallizing (finitely manifesting its continuity within infinitude) is coated with nihilitude, and drowned in irrelevance — tuned out, set aside, downplayed, explained away — or submerged in nihilitude, and is so irrelevant that it is never noticed. It drowns in oblivion.
Nihilitude makes possible a holistic organic understanding needed by a living being. A soul, in order to persist as a soul, must spontaneously perceive and conceive real entities (givens) as whole units – gestalts — and spontaneously perceive and conceive these given wholes as themselves belonging to higher order wholes. Simltaneously it also perceives and conceives these units of being as constituted of lower order whole units, not only objective (third-person) entities, but also first person subjective beings within and exceeding that of one’s I or another’s thou. Sketchy genius Arthur Koestler called this kind of order of nested wholeness “holarchy”. Souls are holarchic.
But souls can, with effort, non-spontaneously connect whole entities with others in order to construct truths. It can argue, figure out, analyze and construe knowledge. This is what is called “constructed truth”. The basic units of such knowledge remain spontaneously perceived and conceived ideas, but the way these givens are combined are not.
Constructed knowledge must be memorized and recalled in order to be known in any particular moment. When they are not in active recollection the knowledge exists as data and rules of recombination. Constructed truth laboriously rebuilds bridges across gaps of nihilitude, linking fragmentary clusters of knowledge with one another. Sometimes construction links objects in ways that obscure rather than illuminate their continuity. The more the construction obscures rather than reveals the continuity among given entities the more force of will and artifice is required to sustain it. It is a the kind of artificiality that gives the word “artificial” its connotations of unnaturalness.
But sometimes constructions reveal, rather than obscure, continuity. Something “clicks’ and a layer of nihilitude clears away, admitting new givens traced out by the constructions.
These are not only intellectual motions, like what we do when we dance along with a philosophy book or choreograph ideas of our own. They can also be physical movements — physical dances, moving from some steps to feeling the rhythm and grace in response to music — or perceptual pattern-finding — like perceiving the animating beauty in art or noticing natural patterns or forms in nature and suddenly experiencing continuity between one’s own nature and the environing nature to whom one belongs as a natural creature. Between two people it can be finding rhythm flow and rapport, and becoming swept up in a literally animated conversation. This is the intimate congeniality of thought and life beyond thought.
This heterogeneity is one reason why the? term enworldment is preferable to worldview or perspective or other ontologically-limited or reductive terms — even ontology. Enworldment concerns the entire field of being, not only thoughts or thoughts about being.
Being rises from oblivion and shows itself, often reconfiguring what is spontaneously given, smashing artificial constructions, submerging (de-emphasizing) givens that had been relevant, and pushing irrelevant given into the foreground. And this also often requires new constructions capable of bridging gaps in this new reconfigured landscape — this new ontological archipelago rising from an ocean of oblivion, new faith-moved mountain ranges. This is the experience of conversion.
Some conversions convert the converted soul to a metaphysics where conversion and its revelations ex nihilo are an ever-present possibility, especially when this possibility is inconceivable.
Let us name this conversion to permanent possibility of conversion, irrupting precisely from the inconceivable oblivion of nihilitude. Let us call it exnihilism.
…to be continued… refinements, exrensions… application to design…
Metaphysical 3D glasses
Before 2016, I characterized my religious attitude as exoterically (ethically) Jewish and esoterically (metaphysically) Taoist. Then I began studying Kabbalah, and learned “esoteric Hebrew”, carefully translating it into “esoteric Chinese”.
Now esoteric Hebrew has become second natural to me. It is so second-natural that I now understand in it without any need to translate back and forth. I think in Kabbalah.
However, I still sometimes find value putting on my esoteric 3D glasses, with one lens Kabbalistic-colored, the other Taoist-colored, so I can look at ideas common to both traditions, and enjoy the parallactic special effects of exaggerated depth.
All this rambling preamble, just to say:
In Assiyah are ten-thousand things.
In Yetzirah are ten-thousand everythings.
In Beriah are ten-thousand traversable nothings, dividing everything from everything.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude.
Removing the 3D glasses, and speaking more compactly:
In Assiyah are myriad objects.
In Yetzirah are myriad subjects, each an enworldment.
In Beriah are myriad traversable oblivions, dividing enworldment from enworldment.
In Atzilut is infinitesimally articulate infinitude, the source of all oblivion and enworldment.
Common senses
Below is one — perhaps idiosyncratic — common sense account of the Olamot, presented from the first-person:
Common sense of Assiyah: each of our senses gives us the world in some sensory mode — a world with reality understood to transcend each of our senses and all our senses, but gains reliability through sensory testimony. What we see and touch is assumed to be real. What we see, but cannot touch is assumed to be a hallucination.
Common sense of Yetzirah: each of us is given the world in a specific way, but our own way shares much in common with others of our community, and this commonality — this consensus understanding — is our most reliable access to the reality of the world. What all of us understand together is assumed to be real. What only one of us understands is idiosyncratic, less real, possibly delusional. What other communities take as common sense, but which are clearly false or nonsensical, might be delusional groupthink.
Common sense of Beriah: from moment to moment, age to age, the common sense of solitary persons and the common sense of communities changes, and testifies to different experiences and understandings. Reality and truth clearly can be given quite differently to different people in different places in different times. What is common across them, and how can they differ? The commonalities and differences are always given to the threefold present, according to what can and cannot be received in this particular I-here-now. All this is what existentialism (and its myriad siblings) pursues, and in response it receives ciphers, interminable questions, aporias, shocks, terrors, ecstasies. Light, dark, rippling oblivion.
Common sense of Atzilut: our various attempts to account for the givenness of the real points to a reality beyond questions and answers, beyond defined objects and defining subjects, beyond sense, within a commonality so all-inclusively common, so inescapably, so infinitely common, it is beyond comprehension.
On the matter of Nietzsche
The first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil — the most electrifying in all of philosophy — proposes a thematic question:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then?
I have incessant asked and re-asked this line for over twenty obsessive years, and today I ask it like this: Supposing truth, of all things, is a woman?
When Nietzsche asked this himself, in 1885, what was the matter with him? Or better, where was the matter for him?
Some hints from the preceding book: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
And another:
Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.
“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”
Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.
And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.
For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?
And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”
When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”
Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.
If only Salome had accepted Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. The painful lessons she could have taught him!
It took a decade, but my own wife taught me this: She cannot be reduced to who I imagine her to be. She is perpetually surprising. We will never stop defying my understanding, and if I confuse her for my understanding, the defiance might not be polite.
From this I know that matter is not who physics theorizes her to be.
Supposing reality is a woman — what then?
Supposing truth is marriage —
Ontological veils
The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.
Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.
Darkness conceals visibly.
Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.
According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from
revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.
If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.
My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.
The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.
In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.
Designerly metaphysics
Before any beginning is infinitude.
Pure infinitude. Ein sof.
Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.
At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.
Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.
Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.
For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.
From within finitude, piercing of the cloak occurs ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.
Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.
Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.
Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.
Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.
In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.
The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.
The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.
The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.
And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.
Emanation?
If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.
Notes on design esoterism
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Gnostic epistemologies
I see very little difference between the far left epistemology of emotion (feeling as fact) and far right epistemology of faith (intuition as truth).
Both commit a sin of antisocial gnosis, claiming privileged access to some preexistent given truth that can be accessed like a datum. The very making of such claims performatively contradicts the claim that one knows. The move demonstrates ignorance of what truth is and how it comes to be known. We approach truth collaboratively with others, and refusal to do so shows that we are mistaken about what truth is and what it does and how we relate to it.
Feelings are data. Spiritual and intellectual intuitions are data. Perceptions are data. Any datum can be mistaken. Only by forming, testing, reforming, retesting, iteratively and forever tentatively can we arrive at truth. Data can give us very compelling leads, but they are the start of possible truth, not conclusions.
The process of developing possible truth and seeing some succeed and some fail, and others succeed for a long time only to fail later, or to see two conflicting possible truths each succeed for a long time, or to see one truth yield to another without ever fully failing, or best of all, to experience the surrender of one truth to accommodate another, and discover an even more successful truth… this experience of the plurality of truths and their interactions opens up a yet higher level of truth, but with radically different character from the ones that revealed it.
Gnostic epistemologies are elaborate category mistakes.
Tetragrammaton lesson
Two realms of truth, one above soul in the realm of absolute truth, the other below soul in the real of objective, relative truth — converge in the highest understanding.
Olamot
I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.
What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.
What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.
What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.
What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.
Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.
Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.
Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.
Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.
Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.
Karl Schwab, monopolarchist
I just listened to Yascha Mounk’s abortive interview with Klaus Schwab, and it dovetailed with eery ease with the line of thought I have been pursuing this morning, which, of course, means I’m insane.
I have two comments, the first cynical and the other bizarre.
First, anyone who has been a stakeholder in “stakeholder capitalist” corporation will instantly recognize what Schwab expects of citizens in his political order.
Our role is to “buy in.”
We are to go along with what our leaders have already decided it’s going to happen, and pretend with them that we have a choice in the matter.
Schwab wants the entire world to be one massive multinational corporation and for all its citizens to be its employees. Except that we cannot quit and work for a different corporation, because WEF is the Corporation of corporations — the only meta-employer on earth. You can change jobs all you want, but you’ll always work for the Boss of bosses.
Schwab, though, is innocently, pristinely naive. His faith in his entitlement is total. He doesn’t know he is a totalitarian. He thinks technocratic rule by business elites is the natural order.
Schwab is a monopolarchist. And most “leftists” I know are just like him, except they are not on the top floor of this order.
We are to buy into the rule of our elitest elites. We are to buy into their version of history and truth. We are to buy into their value priorities. We are to buy into their selectively attentive, selectively evasive and blatantly contorted version of what is happening today, aka the news. We are to buy into the politics that naturalizes their dominance, through the management of their “selfless”, self aware deputies, the professional-managerial class.
Except a growing number of people no longer buy in.
And confrontation with this refusal to buy in makes folks like Schwab melt down: Does not compute! He genuinely perplexed and seized in anxiety. It has been decades since anyone has been in a position to make him justify himself from any position, other than the one he naively assumes is the only one. The very notion of elites negotiating power and truth with dirty, ignorant, superstitious, backwards underclass bigots? Inconceivable!
And this brings me to my second point — the bizarre one. Klaus Schwab and his zombie army of stakeholders believe that they are secular. Most of them are either atheists or “believers” whose faith serves the same ideal as Schwab’s global secularism. They think they are the vanguard of a post-religious humanity. They think they are among the first who have outgrown the religious compulsion to worship. They are deeply, deeply mistaken.
Protected: Divine organization
Materialized magic
A service is a collective, intelligent being.
A service exists polycentrically as a being with multiple agential centers whose interactions generate a new agential center who cannot be reduced to any one of its constituent centers.
Yet, at the same time, each of the constituent agential centers continues to experience and participate in the service, from its respective center. So services are also pluricentric.
The pluricentric experience motivates and directs various forms of participation in the service, which affects the polycentric being of the service as a whole, and ripples through the pluricentric experiences and responses of each participant.
A simple example to demonstrate how these terms complement: A marriage, like a service, is a polycentric collective being. The marriage has its own being, irreducible to the being of either spouse. However, the marriage is also pluricentrically given to each spouse. (And if the couple has a baby, the polycentric being of the family shifts its center to embrace its newest agential center, and this shift is experienced pluricentrically by each spouse. The marriage itself has changed, and effort is required to maintain its continuity.)
All people have experiences of polycentric and pluricentric being, but very few people can conceptualize it or navigate it as the kind of being it is. Many of us use vague romantic terms like vibes or spirit or feel or mood or culture to indicate an ethereal presence within a group, organization or region.
?Esoteric types believe they can interact directly with this kind of ethereal presence, bypassing its materiality. ? I believe this has drastically limited the effectiveness of the esoteric arts. But ignoring supraindividual polycentric being has also drastically limited the effectiveness of subject-blind social engineering — or at least its effectiveness in producing anything fit for human participation.?
I need to wrap up, so I will conclude with Kabbalistic abbreviation:
A good service lives across worlds:
Assiyah makes a service materially actual and effective.
Yetzirah makes a service alive and meaningful.
Beriah makes a service serve good.