The service drive and inward economy

Design

I have been working on an article for several days about a very simple idea. It keeps diverging and losing its essential simplicity.

It is about one of the core ideas of service design, value exchanges. This core idea is the locus of my hopes for the future.

My hope is based on a premise. Some people have embedded in their souls an impulse to serve in some very specific way. Their lives are animated by this very particular service drive.

If we give people opportunities to serve in their own way, they inject limitless energy into their organizations and social environment.

If they are prevented from doing so — often due to interference from other services they are forced to provide — they lose their motivation. They can even sometimes start sucking energy out of their organizations.

Two examples.

  1. Educators, or at least the best educators, live to teach. If they are supported by their leaders and allowed to focus on teaching they bring inspired energy into the classroom, and their students learn. If, on the contrary, administrators demand endless processes and documentation from teachers, to prove that teaching has been executed correctly as specified and that learning has occurred, teachers no longer focus on teaching, and all the processes and documentation harm the outcomes they are supposed to measure.
  2. Nurses, or at least the best nurses, live to care for their patients. When they are allowed to focus on care, the best nurses work tirelessly to ensure their patients have everything they need for their comfort and recovery of health. But when nurses are required to attend to the business and administrative side of healthcare, it demoralizes and distracts them. They become disgruntled and burn out.

Perhaps not all people have a service drive. Perhaps some have service drives that are more general or more specific. That’s a quant problem.

Qualitatively, I know it exists, because I have it myself, most of my friends have it and a great many people I have met in the field while conducting design research have it.

I believe the myriad service drives are as powerful an economic resource as money, machines or material resources. These “outward economy” resources are necessary, and they always will be. But they are not sufficient — far from it. The service drive, the resources of the “inward economy” must flow in, in order to ensoul our institutions. Positive outward motivations like money, perks, competition and prestige (or negative ones like fear or shame) can only supplement the inward ones. They cannot replace them. When we neglect or squander the resources of inward economy, and rely too much on outer resources and control mechanisms to compensate — we get that repellant quality we call “corporate”. It might be old-school cubicles-and-chinos corporate, or it might be the new phony bring-your-whole-self, west-coast-quirky corporate, but it is all manifestly soulless and impossible to love. This, I believe, is why so many people are unhappy in the workplace and unhappy in general. I believe it is one root cause of the collective depression the western world seems to be suffering.

But we lack language and justifications to stop it, and reverse it. It doesn’t fully occur to us that we can or should. We look everywhere for the source of our despair than the cause of it, which we take to be an innate and inalterable feature of reality and work. If work were something we did for the intrinsic value of doing it, we wouldn’t need to be paid to do it, would we?

My admittedly pollyannaish mission as a service designer is to fix our deeply broken value exchanges, so we can inject new sources of energy into our organizations, economy and society. We can shape and cultivate organizations that are animated as much by the inward service drives of the organization’s members as by its outward goals. In such organizations, we can can extend our roots deeper into our psychic soil, down to where we can find new sources of inspiration and motivation, and draw them up from the depths to the surface, to bring new nourishment to this meaning-depleted world. If our organizations enable our innate service drives to find real use, they become something we care about — something worth serving and sacrificing for.*

Note: And organizations do require sacrifice. Obviously, not everything we do is intrinsically meaningful. Most things are not. Even the most inspired and rewarding career will be three-quarters chores. But when meaningless chores serve our true service, they are given purpose, and that purpose infuses them with new importance. They are no longer onerous and soul-draining tasks; they become worth doing for the sake of service.

Atrocity accountants

Politics

Last year I started reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Radical Evil. A passage rang true to me, and it keeps coming back to mind:

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

Since the publication of this book in 2002, nearly every “educated” person has adopted the general worldview of Bernstein’s philosophers and political theorists. Most people think exclusively with words. Whatever they cannot say, they cannot think. If the language of evil has been dropped, for wordworlders, evil is just an imaginary artifact of propaganda past.

Because they have been equipped with pre-fabricated ideas and language — notional slogans — to recognize, process and respond to injustice, human rights, ethics and cognitive biases, this is where the average mind channels its passionate intensity.

But for the same reason, because they have no cognitive tools for evil, evil can operate undetected — and flourish.

Anyone who wants to commit evil in plain sight can do so by using magician’s tricks, misdirecting attention to matters of justice, human rights or ethics. The only reason people would behave in an evil way is if the injustice of more powerful people drove them to such acts. See what you made them do?

Or they can use quantification to de-thicken human action, and morally flatten it into statistics. They count bodies, and whether these deaths are intentional murders or accidental deaths no longer matters. 1,139 eyes for 1,139 eyes. 1,139 teeth for 1,139 teeth.

Which brings me to another point. It gives me chills to notice how automatically most people assume war is an act of pure vengeance. That Israel is entitled to some number of Palestinian deaths, at which point enough is enough? The punishment must be proportionate to the crime?

Are you fucking kidding me? That is actually an evil logic.

The purpose Israel’s war in Gaza is not to balance some magical atrocity spreadsheet.*

The purpose of the war is to ensure October 7th can never happen again. Which is the diametric opposite goal of Hamas, which explicitly stated that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the first of many. Hamas would launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until Israel is annihilated. And observe the social justice magician’s trick, as the same Hamas official continues on to say: “We are victims – everything we do is justified.”

But according to the atrocity accountant’s calculations, after Israel has extracted its due pound of flesh, it must consent to a ceasefire with an enemy whose entire raison d’etre is its annihilation, and hope it doesn’t ever succeed.

This is how “good” people think, now. This is how “good” people not only tolerate, but support and encourage evil.

We are dying of stupidity.

Note: Incidentally, this atrocity accounting is the logic behind “antiracism”. The best way to balance the justice spreadsheet is to subject oppressors to equal humiliation, or rather allow the oppressed to savor the joys of sadism until they have finally gotten their fair share of this sublime delicacy. It is a disgusting way to understand the world, but it appears it is the only way many “leftists” know how to process moral questions.

This is, of course the opposite of what Martin Luther King advised. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Today’s smug hate-mongers claim time has proved MLK naive. He is now, according to them, obsolete. But these same people were around during MLK’s time, and interfered constantly with his mission. The last half of his last book argues against the misguided “black power” approach. They are nothing new. The resentment-mingers are always there, always tempting good-willed people to succumb to their violent impulses, always calling good “naive”.

And this atrocity accounting is also the opposite of the Dhammapada: “The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified. Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.”

How ironic is it, that the same set who condemns “cultural appropriation” appropriates Buddhist meditation techniques, while embracing resentment politics and identitarianism, which is profoundly anti-Buddhist. And they support the most virulent and bloody cultural appropriation of all time, the wholesale appropriation of the Jewish religion by Islamic supercessionists, who incidentally spread their religion through imperial expansion and colonized the region as settler-colonists. No group could possibly be more anathema to the principles Progressivists pretend to care about than the Islamists theocrats who seek Israel’s annihilation. But of course Progressivists have no principles — only ideas they “leverage” to justify seizing more and more dominance. Only an overwhelmingly powerful group could be this unaware and unbothered by their own profound hypocrisy. Their accusations against those categories of person they hate are projections of their own worst characteristics. If you can’t see it yet, someday you will, and you’ll convince yourself you always saw it, and were never a part of it. But I remember, and I will never forget any of this. I’ll listen and listen, but I will hear right through you, hypocrites.

Neocons, proggos, now MAGA. Y’all are all exactly the same. You are different only to yourselves — and that is what makes you alike. Keep pointing at each other, though. Keep on pointing.

Content-container distinction

Enworldment, Murmurations, Philosophy

A quote attributed to Jung has been circulating in the digital aether for the last several years: “We don’t have ideas; ideas have us.”

It turns out that the real quote is from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche:

Everyone knows nowadays that people have complexes. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

This difference makes all the difference: A complex is not an idea or a set of ideas. Complexes are that by which ideas — and pre-ideational intuitions — are experienced. What I call “enception” is synonymous with “complex”.

But complexes are not ideas. They are not content. They are better understood as containers for content.

The content-container distinction is a necessary shift in understanding esoteric truths.

Our minds are attuned to objective understanding. I do not mean “objective” in the vulgar and naive realist sense (that a truth claim is free of subjective distortion, and therefore a true truth about a real reality). When I say objective I am speaking only about form, not about its veracity. An objective idea claim is a defined, comprehensible, given bit of information. But for that objective idea to be taken as given, it must have a corresponding container — a subjectivity capable of receiving it — a subjectivity with an enception suited to the idea’s conception.

If we lack this container-content distinction we will constantly evert and distort subjectivity into yet more objectivity and make the deepest category mistakes.

One of the worst examples I see of this today is confusing that first-person subjectivity who we actually are — to whom objective truth is given — with data about our personas and the categories to which we assign our attributes.

Likewise, religious faiths — and ideological faiths — are not beliefs. To view religions as belief systems is to confuse doctrinal or theological content with that by which these beliefs are understood and felt to be true. We confuse wine for wineskin.

Maybe I really should focus on making my Everso book.

What is a container? An object which contains content? Yes. A wineskin, for example, is a container for wine. But a container may also be a subject — one who contains.

A container is a subject who does the containing of some form of objective content.

J’accuse

Ethics, History, Judaism

I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.

I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.

Allow me to explain.

The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.

The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.

They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.

Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.

But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.

And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.

No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.

So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?

Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.

And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.

And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.

And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.

During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.

And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.

Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.

And this is why Israel must exist.

And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.

So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.

Mutuality, again

Biography, Ethics, Politics

I will say this again, because it is relevant to at least three imploding relationships I am currently witnessing:

When a relationship lacks mutuality, it cannot be repaired in any normal mutual way, nor can it be destroyed by mutual consent.

Trying to reach an agreement with someone with an inert understanding, who lacks motivation to seek the validity of alternative understandings is futile — and the pursuit of mutuality where mutuality is impossible is a participation in the brokenness.

Someone who refuses to listen to what you have to say, will listen even less to what you have to say about their refusal to listen.

It doesn’t matter why they won’t listen. They might believe they already know. They might believe they have a right to not hear you. They might think you are so deluded or stupid that their understanding must replace yours. They might think you are consciously or unconsciously motivated by wicked motivations, called bias or demons based on whether they prefer to express the same concept in secular or religious jargon. They might think they will be harmed by listening. They might use emotion or moral outbursts to make communication impossible. But in all likelihood they’ll just find ways to perpetually delay conversing. They’re very, very busy. An urgent matter requires their attention,right now,at this decisive moment.

Whether they cannot listen or simply will not does not matter. Listening will never happen.

I’ve learned to stop trying.

I learned it with individuals. Now they are no longer my friends.

I am learning to do it with collectivities. Ideologies whose members to refuse to hear dissenting views lose their rights to reason.

I can’t find an old post, so I’ll rewrite it:

A: There is a problem with our friendship.

B: I disagree.

A: And that is the problem.

And while I am repeating myself:

Ethics are the rules of participation in an ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Peace requires mutual commitment to peace.

That so few people understand this is profoundly telling.

May your wanting… wait, no — letterpress

Biography, Design, Letterpress

Rabbi Jeff Roth taught my wife a blessing: “May your wanting be wiser.”

This is something very much worth letterpress printing.

I do not see how I can go on without a printing press.

Some other things I want to print:

  • The Pragmatic Maxim: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception — and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception. — Charles Sanders Peirce”
  • The full Shema prayer in Hebrew and English. Basically, I want to print the full text of a mezuzah, but printed and with translation.
  • Rabbi Simcha Bunim’s two slips of paper: 1) “I am a speck of dust.” 2) “The world was created for me.”
  • Shabbat prayers chapbook
  • Pesach Seder chapbooks (this is ambitious. I will design these specifically to “wear it well” — bearing the patina of wine and food stains with grace, like a yixing teapot, an oriental carpet, a well-used lugged steel bicycle, one of Christopher Alexander’s clay garden path tiles, or an old family Bible. We need more things in our lives who gain, not lose, value through wear!)
  • “For the Last Wolverine” by James Dickey. (I already typeset it.)
  • The Emerald Tablet. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • Phi (the Golden Ratio) to the 10,000th decimal place. (I already typeset this, too.)
  • My weird little snakes and trees poem, which I’ve been rewriting since the early 2000s, and I believe accurately anticipated the absurd metanaivety of now, a time when fancy folks using fancy jargon naively accept at face value their theory-infused perceptions of other folk’s naive perceptions, without a twinge of irony. A gorging ouroboros, starving as it stuffs itself on itself.

Or maybe I should just write and print my Enworldment book one chapbook at a time.

My very next project, though, is re-printing the Sefirot on a variety of papers (some hand-made) that are wandering their way across the country to my door. And hopefully, a third plate will also arrive from the die-maker soon, and unlike the first two, will be unblemished. I’m doing all these with the magical glow-gold ink I used on the 2025 pi posters.

I really need a printing press.

Pi poster 2025

Biography, Design

In 2022 I made a poster for Pi Day. It was pi to the first 10,000th place, color laser printed on a 10.5 x 17″ sheet of some kind of fancy paper and each digit was color coded.

This year I did a follow-up project. Even in 2022, I originally wanted letterpress print the poster. I sent out for estimates, but it was too expensive. But now, I have access to a letterpress studio, and have begun relearning the craft.

And so I spent the first two weekends of February 2025 with master letterpress printer and print studio owner Bryan Baker and my old friend Brian McGee cranking out the Pi Day 2025 poster on letterpress. It is the same size as before (so it matches the first edition), but is now printed for real, with proper Gutenberg technology, with each digit inkily mashed down into the paper.

Behold!

Continue reading Pi poster 2025 →

Praxis? — or apology?

Design, Philosophy

Instinctively I’ve always designed a particular way. I have always looked for a clear and simple inspiration to animate my design work and to invest whatever artifact I design with life. My philosophy only articulates my intuitive practice. My philosophy is probably useful only for others who already work in an intuitive way similar to how I work and who need concepts, reasons and language to explain and justify it. My philosophy won’t enable anyone to design any differently than they normally design.

(I realized I’ve lapsed into believing that my philosophy guides or shapes my practice. It doesn’t. Philosophy is primarily my defense against interference.)

Persons, subpersons, interpersons, superpersons

Enworldment

Once again, I am studying collective personalities.

Personality is an old interest of mine, rooted in two sources: 1) a pathologically obsessive study of Jungian personality theory, and 2) a practice of Vipassana meditation.

From these sources, I learned to question our conventional notions of personality as a unitary, essential, unchanging, stable, enduring mind-being (soul) that neatly zips into a person’s body. I came to understand and experience most souls as non-unitary, contingent, changeable, unstable, ephemeral and mostly independent of bodily boundaries.

A unitary, unchanging, stable, enduring soul is almost miraculously exceptional. Such souls not essentially this way, but a hard-won accomplishments of cultivation. And such personalities almost never stay inside the frame of a human body, but rather radiate beyond the originating person, crystallizing whole communities into living cultures that last centuries or millennia.

(I say “I came to understand and experience” this truth. Another way to say it is that this idea of personhood became a given truth for me, once I learned to perceive and conceive it this way. It was not merely a theory or belief. It was not part of a belief system that could be applied. It is an intuitively self-evident feature of my enworlded reality.)

One of my early experiences of direct perception of this phenomenon came in the late 90s, when I observed personalities forming across individuals — personalities composed of semi-autonomous fragments (at the time I misused the word “homunculus”, but I could have called them “complexes” or “sub-persons”) within individuals, merging to form new emergent “inter-persons”, who possessed more energy, integrity and coherence between them, than existed within either individual. The remainder of each person outside this new shared interperson had no influence over this new interperson, nor did any friend of either of the scrambled former persons. When people fall madly in love, friends can be estranged.

This is just one example. Another can happen on a much grander scale. Moods can overtake entire societies. (This is the phenomenon of zeitgeist.) Or societies can have total personality shifts. Or, as Nietzsche (a man supremely attuned to the workings of superpersons) observed “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.” Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda in 1994 are examples of collective madness, where self-perceived victims of other groups turned murderous.

Today, though I’m thinking about personality shifts in disciplinary fields. I think my own field of service design is shifting. Perhaps the whole field of design is shifting. And because Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is still fresh in my mind, I decided to reread this passage, because it explains some of the very unmystical social mechanisms that bring such collective personality changes about.

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon….

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic, ” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

And it was.

I think times when personalities are not cultivated, where independence of thought is rare (yet, everyone unanimously and uncritically believes that their unanimous uncritical beliefs are independent and critical thought!), where each person is taught deep self-mistrust (cognitive bias!) and excessive trust in expert authority and techniques for calculating perspective-neutral truths and ethics — that bundles of subpersons who mistake themselves for persons can be conveniently subsumed and used by superpersons who care nothing about anyone but their collective, solipsistic superself.

What I have called enception is the substance of personhood at all scales.

Cave empire

NOTA

The fundamental crisis faced by members of the professional-managerial class (a.k.a. “proclassers”) is not, as they believe, difficulty managing the profuse data they abstract from reality, but, rather, keeping those abstractions in contact with any directly intuited relationship with reality.

They are alienated from reality and inhabit a world of secondhand abstractions rooted in yet more abstractions. In normal dealings with real people, they have been taught to mistrust their perceptions, intuitions and emotions and to replace whatever they experience and intuit directly with less biased, more objective conceptualizations based on categorizations and calculations of power relations, by which they can determine the correct mode of interaction.

But intuition alone gives reality its heft, solidity and depth. And it is only intuitive participation in social life that can give us any felt identity.

Life in an information simulation can offer us only social categories, deductions, calculations and executable actions. This is also a participation of a kind, but one that gives us only one identity — a right-thinking, right-acting pro-classer, who is essentially a job-holding professional with pro-social progressivist beliefs — even if that one identity encourages us to adopt secondary identities based on its schema of social categories. It is all done for the sake of the one, essential, unnamed identity, erased to preserve the illusion of objectivity.

It is all so boring, insubstantial, tedious… unreal. Such is advanced alienation. Meanwhile the meaty, dirty, visceral, hands-on world beyond the abstractions is summoning itself to catastrophe. How can a time be so simultaneously stultifying and momentous?

Once upon a time, news was an uninteresting chore, and our personal lives were fascinating.

Standing united against

Politics

A little more than a decade ago I saw a horrifying documentary on ISIS. Unexpectedly, I was struck by a comforting thought: While Americans disagree on many important matters, we can all at least agree on what we oppose. Theocratic Islamist extremism is something we stand united against, even if we sometimes find it hard to stand united for anything.

Totality : Infinity ::

Esoterism, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Some ideas alive and other ideas are not.

Nonliving ideas are mere content components. These content components can be combined with other content components to construct larger and more complex content component systems.

Living ideas are not mere content. Living ideas generate content.

Some living ideas participate in infinite being and others do not.

Transcendent living ideas are aware that they are organs of infinite ultimate being, and it this awareness that allows them to participate in being that transcends their comprehension.

Comprehensive living ideas believe they are themselves the totality of ultimate being, and whatever they cannot comprehend is, to them, nonexistent.

Levinas named his magnum opus Totality and Infinity. This book could have been given a very different title.

Etiquette is not morality

Ethics, Philosophy

I just replied to Matthew Yglesias’s substack article, “Defund the Language Police”:

The last decade has confused etiquette with morality.

This does not mean that etiquette is unimportant, but it does mean that it is neither all-important nor absolute.

Happy Holocaust Remembrance Day!

Politics

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today, we are invited to remember the six million Jews who senselessly lost their lives and to ask ourselves how it happened. Many people who believed themselves good supported the persecution and killing, while myriad others stood by and allowed it to happen. As we reflect on this past crime, we must confront a painful question: How do we avoid being complicit in such a crime in the future?

To this end, we should take a moment to reflect on our own personal vulnerability to collective delusion, at the core of which is the conceit: “Had we been there, we would never have gone along.”

The belief in our personal immunity from mass madness — the notion that our own innate decency makes it unnecessary to take active measures to maintain independent judgment against the conventional wisdom of our time — makes us especially vulnerable to mass madness.

Intellectual and moral independence is not an innate personality trait; it is a hard-won accomplishment, which must be perpetually re-won. The default is intellectual osmosis and consequent conformism. If most of what we know is fed to us from contemporary sources, we are almost certainly conformists — even if everyone around us agrees unanimously that we, they, and all who think in lockstep with us are fiercely independent, critical thinkers.

No, had we been alive in a time when we were immersed in anti-Jewish propaganda—on the news, in entertainment, in casual conversation, in the “everyone knows”—and it had been drummed into our heads that Jews had committed all manner of atrocities and that they deserved to be driven out, in all likelihood, we’d have gone right along with it.

Our minds would have boggled at the very notion that our most trusted sources of information about the world were corrupt. Hearing stories of cruel slaughtering of Jews, even designs to annihilate them altogether, we would likely have shrugged our shoulders and assumed it was all Jewish disinformation. We would have assumed the sneaky Jews were trying to manipulate us with lies, and that the thugs, claiming to be the cruelly persecuted ones, were telling us the true truth.

We wouldn’t have bothered reading the manifestos and charters of these anti-Jewish militants, and we wouldn’t have connected their explicitly stated aims with what they were actually doing.

We would have gone with the flow of all our similarly malinformed friends, with smug conformist confidence, perhaps issuing the occasional condescending scold to those who refused to march in step with the right-thinking, right-feeling progress parade.

And somewhere in the back of our minds, we’d have known that there is safety in numbers. If we were dreadfully, evilly wrong, we’d share blame with innumerable others. Our own share in the shame would feel minuscule.

Know thyselves

Enworldment, Etymology, Existentialism, Philosophy

“Know thyself,” Apollo commands.

Okay. But how? And which “thyself”? — for there is more than one. Two roads diverge before us: the path of self-consciousness and the path of self-awareness

Most take the path of self-consciousness, which tries to know the self objectively. One’s self is taken as an object of knowledge. We call it “reflecting on ourselves”. We look into the mirror, and we are absorbed in the image we see there. We identify with it.

But we can also take the path of self-awareness, and take ourselves as subject, the subjectivity to whom objective data is given, including our objective third-person self.

But self-awareness includes an insight that we are given only what we know how to take, and that changing our way of taking  can change our givens.

We can experiment with our taking (our receptivity) and see how observing from various angles or focusing on various aspects changes our objectivity. Or we can experiment with our conceptivity by asking different questions about what seems objectively true to us. Or we can experiment with our selfhood by participating in new realities, physical and/or otherwise.

What we take “self” to mean makes all the difference in who we are, and who we may become.

Etymological cheat sheet:

  • Conceive = together-take
  • Perceive = thoroughly-take
  • Receive = back-take
  • Data = given

 

Expertise glut

Design

There is no shortage of expertise in the world. Nor is there a shortage of knowledge, or of skill, or of intelligence, nor of diligence, ambition or industriousness. These are commodities. They are crucially important, indispensable commodities — but we have a glut of them.

Where we have a crippling shortage is inspiration and hope.

Untried ideas

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Politics

The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.

The problem of idle thought has nothing at all to do with virtues of industriousness or vices of laziness. The problem with idle thought is that such thoughts are not only untried and likely untrue, but that a great many of them are untriable and cannot even be said to be truth or false, because they are nonsense. They create what Richard Rorty called “theoretical hallucinations”.

This invites a comparison with drugs. We can use drugs for therapeutic purposes. We can also use them ritualistically. And we can use them experimentally. But all too easily what begins with therapeutic, ritual or experimental use lapses into mere recreational use, and from there to recreational abuse and addiction.

People who have zero occasion to put thoughts they consume or think up to practical trial — except to sell or resell them to other, equally idle thought consumers — can become a lot like recreational drug abusers, who maybe deal on the side to fund their all-consuming hobby. The drugs or ideas are for nothing but themselves. A life organized around procurement, consumption and traffic of such intoxicants begins to serve nothing but perpetual intoxication.

Rereading Richard Rorty, I’m realizing I am in a similar situation as when I read Christian scripture. The ideas are amazing and meant to be employed in practice.

But many of the most fervent fans of both of these luminaries just like feeling intoxicated by the ideas. They use them recreationally, but never put them to work in the real world. They’ll memorize words and quote them chapter and verse, but the ideas are their play toys, not their life equipment.

Back in 2016, the smarter regions of the proggosphere lost their collective minds over the uncanny prescience of Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. They neatly carved this quote out of its context.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. …members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What is rarely included was even more insightful prescient explanations of how a thoroughly decadent, idle and alienated cultural left would cause this to happen.

If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party — namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell’s Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals — Lind’s “overclass,” the people like you and me.

The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international super­-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere — to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.

Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated — and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.

The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements.

And then Rorty continues on.

These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called “power.” This is the name of what Edmundson calls Foucault’s “haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.”

In its Foucauldian usage, the term “power” denotes an agency which has left an indelible stain on every word in our language and on every institution in our society. It is always already there, and cannot be spotted coming or going. One might spot a corporate bagman arriving at a congressman’s office, and perhaps block his entrance. But one cannot block off power in the Foucauldian sense. Power is as much inside one as outside one. It is nearer than hands and feet. As Edmundson says: one cannot “… confront power; one can only encounter its temporary and generally unwitting agents… [it] has capacities of motion and transformation that make it a preternatural force.” Only interminable individual and social self-analysis, and perhaps not even that, can help us escape from the infinitely fine meshes of its invisible web.

The ubiquity of Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin that diabolical stain on every human soul. I argued… that the repudiation of the concept of sin was at the heart of Dewey and Whitman’s civic religion. I also claimed that the American Left, in its horror at the Vietnam War, reinvented sin. It reinvented the old religious idea that some stains are ineradicable. I now wish to say that, in committing itself to what it calls “theory” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.

Stories about the webs of power and the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideology do for this Left what stories about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad. What stories about blue-eyed devils are to the Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural leftists-the only thing they really want to hear. To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce. It is a world in which all the daylit cheerfulness ofWhitmanesque hypersecularism has been lost, and in which “liberalism” and “humanism” are synonyms for naivete-for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation.

If you buy into this dark, fundamentalist deformation of progressive politics (which I call “progressivism”, similar to “Islamism” and “Christianism” as names for fundamentalist deformations of the religions they pervert) it probably makes perfect sense to you that the occult forces of racism must be coercively exorcised from every institution via “antiracism training”. Doing so might not even seem to be a political act, but a purely ethical one.

One Rortyist (a Rortian can be fundamentalist, too!) appealed to history. His claim was that because the historical fact of racism is indisputable, that the need to respond to this fact is, by extension, also indisputable. So, because the effects of history continue on to the present (which is entirely plausible),  all the disparities progressivists observe and compulsively measure can be attributed to the effects of this history (less plausible), that this effect is concentrated primarily in the institutions where the disparities are seen (institutional racism, which is the furthest thing from indisputable), that progressivists have an effective remedy for this problem (in the form of “antiracist” harassment of employees, which is flat implausible) and that therefore employers have a moral right to use their power to subject employees to cultural political harassment. All this is contrary to liberalism and to Rorty’s ideals, in much the same way that political Christianism is directly contrary to Jesus’s teachings and example.

But back to the original point I was making: “The test of a new idea is not to try it on and see if it makes clear sense and feels right to you. These evaluations are only preliminaries useful for picking ideas to test in practice. Only when an idea is effective in practice should we adopt it.”

What I am saying here is an old thought I’ve been hammering again and again.

John Dewey called his brand of Pragmatism “instrumentalism”. According to instrumentalism, we should understand ideas not primarily as representations of reality, but as tools for responding to reality. A idea that helps us respond effectively in a wide variety of practical challenges can be called true. One that malfunctions can be called false.

I’ve called my praxis, “design instrumentalism“. I think we should evaluate our ideas exactly as designers evaluate their outputs: by Liz Sander’s brilliant framework of useful, usable and desirable. An idea that  gives us a feeling of clarity and reinforces our sense of moral rightness, but which cannot be applied to practical problems lacks usefulness, and in all likelihood, usability beyond clear talk.

Such appealing but  impractical theories are at best, art.

Art is only useful when we take it for what it is — something we experience but do not take literally.

Art that is taken literally and confused with reality is delusional or even psychotic.