I know your feelings, and I certainly went through them. It took me several years in my post-partisan path to figure out how to describe myself. What I recognized in 2008 was that an identitarian populism had taken over American politics and I wanted no part of it. So I started getting healthy instead, which is somewhat easy for me as a Californian, with my "body as message" closer to my personality.
I find it interesting that you disclaim the politics (and should the optics) and emphasize the process of thinking. This is a brilliant observation. My fallback to Reebokism was second nature as was my continual investment in philosophical thinking - adjunct to my profession in business intelligence. So while I was doing burpies, learning Ruby and searching for better processes of delivering my public spiritedness, I did one more thing that was healthy. I started hanging out with hackers and first responders. In both ways I decided that I didn't want to be in the belly of a beached whale. I saw that no banks were ringfenced. I saw that Obama didn't make us post-racial he amplified the national obsession by confessing "I am Trayvon Martin". I say without irony that he and Trump contributed to today's essentialisms. All of this was tolerable until the triple witching hour of Evergreen's "No Whites Allowed Day" in which my distrust of institutions, my expectation that politicization of anything just makes it worse and my comprehension of the failure of calm reason hit a crescendo.
But I was healthy. I learned how to bandage the wounded, find network security holes and submit an administrative case to the FBI. I joined for a time, that strata of Americans that put out fires, break up fights, and otherwise get cracking when others are on crack and crack up. These were my new tribes. And they included the Intellectual Dark Web, and the stickmen. But these are all transient memberships. I didn't find my *kind* of people. I found my *sort* of people. Then I re-sorted myself into other tribes. When the Trumpists and the MeToos marched into town, I could not be positively identified as the Enemy. That's because I determined that I didn't need a home and a family on the left, on the right, in the middling middle. I didn't need to care and make my care known. I simply adhered to the best practices, the continuous process improvement. My humility became my process. I didn't need to exploit any skill at an existential level. It wasn't about be. It was about do.
One day while playing Assassin's Creed, I reached a level in which I became a 15th century Italian lord. I owned a castle, ate fresh fruit and vegetables, and cared for the security of local shopkeepers, pig farmers and mud collectors. I realized they could all be Constitutional Peasants if they bothered. And I realized as a 21st century gamer, that I needn't be bothered with 21st century politics, religion or philosophy. I wound up searching into the Western Canon, started with Epicurus and wound up with the Stoics. I imagined myself in the dirty feet of Diogenes giving Trump the finger. That worked.
Finally I discovered in Karl Popper that my attention to process and my willingness to be corrected (in fact my need to have all my code debugged) was central to the reality of science and essential to the open society. This is the transparency that saves us all, and the sooner more of us stop gauging ourselves by anything the news comedians emanate, the more of us will survive the degradation of society. Open source wins in the end. The parties are proprietary and it comes as no surprise that Fox, for example, tell the masses the precise lies they want to hear.
The hubris of today is massive. I don't want to burn it all down, but I will watch dispassionately if it does. If COVID had crippled me, I might be a bit more fearful. But there remain within the belly of America, practitioners who keep practicing. So I'm not surprised that the right stuff can be produced. Then again, you should be building aircraft carriers 10 years before you desperately need them. I don't know what exactly is going to hold American society together, but humans have survived through worse. The apocalypse isn't exactly here, but it's fairly easy to identify the zombies and robots. I hope I don't have to wear the uniform.
Hi Michael, first I want to say how good it feels to read your words (and, as you'll have seen, I'm inspired to sign up for more). To know that one isn't alone in noticing certain category differences that are so effectively hidden by the brain-jacking structures of media, natural mimesis and good old fashioned non-grounding in any traditions beyond liberalism and the Enlightenment. 'I know what's true and I know what's good and I will make you see and if you don't see, you can f**k right off' appears to be the inevitable end state of the current fashion in thought, which poses as a modern 'philosophy'.
My other observations could be made in a further piece that you're inspiring. Would you permit me, please, to cross post your comment as the basis for another RC article? You touch on so many things that this newsletter tries to be about.
"Smartphones seem to me to be a scapegoat for cultural currents that create unhappiness. Because these devices are the conduit, they get the blame. It's easy to talk about phones, though. Those bad phones."
I'm going to have to disagree with this, just because I think smartphones are probably the most destructive invention since the atom bomb. They have destroyed so much of what it means to be human: I have friends visit who I haven't seen in years, and they still can't take their eyes from the phone; I visit family, and meet my cousins' children, who I could barely pick out of a lineup and no ZERO about, because they are never not on their phones (and think of all the great stories I could have told them about the lives of their parents and grandparents); I go to a music show or a sporting event, and can barely see through the sea of raised phones, not to mention the large mass of people who attend yet never take their eyes from the phone; last summer I went to the beach and while the sun was setting beautifully, I watched person after person walk by with their eyes glued to their phones.
Not to mention the larger political and social aspects: Smartphones, constant internet access, and social media are the greatest tools of social conditioning and mass-opinion control and formation ever invented, they have created a digital panopticon of docile anxious conformists constantly monitoring each other for social miscues or deviations from orthodoxy, all happy to report each other to the authorities for social credit and virtual virtue points.
I realize (and mostly agree) that all this could be solved by some self-control and self-denial, but 1) those things may be the most unAmerican traits of all; and 2) we wouldn't serve crack to middle-schoolers, have them smoke crack rock between classes, and then ask why they've all become crackheads.
I kind of agree, as you'd expect. But all the familiar things you describe are behaviours. Like consuming too much alcohol or killing other people by driving cars dangerously. And firing off guns, obviously (in your country).
When we conflate the categories of *object* and *affect* it's somewhat comforting. You might just be able to do something about the object. The vulnerabilities it exposes are just too much like hard work to address.
If I look in the mirror and I look like shit, I don't get rid of the mirror. I'm somewhat thankful that the mirror suggests I ought to be doing something about looking like shit.
I thought this when the Instagram thing kicked off, with that supposed 'whistleblower'. Here's a chance to start a conversation about the priorities of young women in this world. But I'll bet the conversation never moves past the light source, rather than what's been illuminated. And I was right. It never does.
My intuition is that the smartphone (as a conduit to the wider culture and an exploiter of neural vulnerabilities) is a gift of insight into the modern human condition.
Also, please remind me of that version of the Tao you recommended. I thought I'd noted it down, but I was probably stupidly swiping instantly to the next interesting thing on my Samsung S22 and can't find it now. Silly me!
"My intuition is that the smartphone....is a gift of insight into the modern human condition."
Yikes! Looks like all this time I've been insufficiently misanthropic. Humans really are a herd of apes who will do or say anything as long as all the other apes are doing the same, and that their interests extend no further than Me, Myself & I. Just when I thought my level of skepticism was excessive...time to crank it up!
I think I recommended you check out some Chuang Tzu, either Thomas Merton's poetic version or the Penguin version, which provides more historical and philosophical context.
I think that there's an interesting tension in all of this. About how we might react to the disappointment of knowing that not everyone is as wonderful as me & you. I share your discombobulation about applying appropriate levels of misanthropy. It's certainly a test of my compassion muscle, which was too long underdeveloped.
Shall we start a religion? I see they're all the rage.
I've been trying to think of a new angle. Best I could do was something about saving us from ourselves. I laughed, because this is actually just Christianity haha!
I know your feelings, and I certainly went through them. It took me several years in my post-partisan path to figure out how to describe myself. What I recognized in 2008 was that an identitarian populism had taken over American politics and I wanted no part of it. So I started getting healthy instead, which is somewhat easy for me as a Californian, with my "body as message" closer to my personality.
I find it interesting that you disclaim the politics (and should the optics) and emphasize the process of thinking. This is a brilliant observation. My fallback to Reebokism was second nature as was my continual investment in philosophical thinking - adjunct to my profession in business intelligence. So while I was doing burpies, learning Ruby and searching for better processes of delivering my public spiritedness, I did one more thing that was healthy. I started hanging out with hackers and first responders. In both ways I decided that I didn't want to be in the belly of a beached whale. I saw that no banks were ringfenced. I saw that Obama didn't make us post-racial he amplified the national obsession by confessing "I am Trayvon Martin". I say without irony that he and Trump contributed to today's essentialisms. All of this was tolerable until the triple witching hour of Evergreen's "No Whites Allowed Day" in which my distrust of institutions, my expectation that politicization of anything just makes it worse and my comprehension of the failure of calm reason hit a crescendo.
But I was healthy. I learned how to bandage the wounded, find network security holes and submit an administrative case to the FBI. I joined for a time, that strata of Americans that put out fires, break up fights, and otherwise get cracking when others are on crack and crack up. These were my new tribes. And they included the Intellectual Dark Web, and the stickmen. But these are all transient memberships. I didn't find my *kind* of people. I found my *sort* of people. Then I re-sorted myself into other tribes. When the Trumpists and the MeToos marched into town, I could not be positively identified as the Enemy. That's because I determined that I didn't need a home and a family on the left, on the right, in the middling middle. I didn't need to care and make my care known. I simply adhered to the best practices, the continuous process improvement. My humility became my process. I didn't need to exploit any skill at an existential level. It wasn't about be. It was about do.
One day while playing Assassin's Creed, I reached a level in which I became a 15th century Italian lord. I owned a castle, ate fresh fruit and vegetables, and cared for the security of local shopkeepers, pig farmers and mud collectors. I realized they could all be Constitutional Peasants if they bothered. And I realized as a 21st century gamer, that I needn't be bothered with 21st century politics, religion or philosophy. I wound up searching into the Western Canon, started with Epicurus and wound up with the Stoics. I imagined myself in the dirty feet of Diogenes giving Trump the finger. That worked.
Finally I discovered in Karl Popper that my attention to process and my willingness to be corrected (in fact my need to have all my code debugged) was central to the reality of science and essential to the open society. This is the transparency that saves us all, and the sooner more of us stop gauging ourselves by anything the news comedians emanate, the more of us will survive the degradation of society. Open source wins in the end. The parties are proprietary and it comes as no surprise that Fox, for example, tell the masses the precise lies they want to hear.
The hubris of today is massive. I don't want to burn it all down, but I will watch dispassionately if it does. If COVID had crippled me, I might be a bit more fearful. But there remain within the belly of America, practitioners who keep practicing. So I'm not surprised that the right stuff can be produced. Then again, you should be building aircraft carriers 10 years before you desperately need them. I don't know what exactly is going to hold American society together, but humans have survived through worse. The apocalypse isn't exactly here, but it's fairly easy to identify the zombies and robots. I hope I don't have to wear the uniform.
Hi Michael, first I want to say how good it feels to read your words (and, as you'll have seen, I'm inspired to sign up for more). To know that one isn't alone in noticing certain category differences that are so effectively hidden by the brain-jacking structures of media, natural mimesis and good old fashioned non-grounding in any traditions beyond liberalism and the Enlightenment. 'I know what's true and I know what's good and I will make you see and if you don't see, you can f**k right off' appears to be the inevitable end state of the current fashion in thought, which poses as a modern 'philosophy'.
My other observations could be made in a further piece that you're inspiring. Would you permit me, please, to cross post your comment as the basis for another RC article? You touch on so many things that this newsletter tries to be about.
Yes of course. Keep on using my words until you use them up, brother.
"Smartphones seem to me to be a scapegoat for cultural currents that create unhappiness. Because these devices are the conduit, they get the blame. It's easy to talk about phones, though. Those bad phones."
I'm going to have to disagree with this, just because I think smartphones are probably the most destructive invention since the atom bomb. They have destroyed so much of what it means to be human: I have friends visit who I haven't seen in years, and they still can't take their eyes from the phone; I visit family, and meet my cousins' children, who I could barely pick out of a lineup and no ZERO about, because they are never not on their phones (and think of all the great stories I could have told them about the lives of their parents and grandparents); I go to a music show or a sporting event, and can barely see through the sea of raised phones, not to mention the large mass of people who attend yet never take their eyes from the phone; last summer I went to the beach and while the sun was setting beautifully, I watched person after person walk by with their eyes glued to their phones.
Not to mention the larger political and social aspects: Smartphones, constant internet access, and social media are the greatest tools of social conditioning and mass-opinion control and formation ever invented, they have created a digital panopticon of docile anxious conformists constantly monitoring each other for social miscues or deviations from orthodoxy, all happy to report each other to the authorities for social credit and virtual virtue points.
I realize (and mostly agree) that all this could be solved by some self-control and self-denial, but 1) those things may be the most unAmerican traits of all; and 2) we wouldn't serve crack to middle-schoolers, have them smoke crack rock between classes, and then ask why they've all become crackheads.
I kind of agree, as you'd expect. But all the familiar things you describe are behaviours. Like consuming too much alcohol or killing other people by driving cars dangerously. And firing off guns, obviously (in your country).
When we conflate the categories of *object* and *affect* it's somewhat comforting. You might just be able to do something about the object. The vulnerabilities it exposes are just too much like hard work to address.
If I look in the mirror and I look like shit, I don't get rid of the mirror. I'm somewhat thankful that the mirror suggests I ought to be doing something about looking like shit.
I thought this when the Instagram thing kicked off, with that supposed 'whistleblower'. Here's a chance to start a conversation about the priorities of young women in this world. But I'll bet the conversation never moves past the light source, rather than what's been illuminated. And I was right. It never does.
My intuition is that the smartphone (as a conduit to the wider culture and an exploiter of neural vulnerabilities) is a gift of insight into the modern human condition.
Also, please remind me of that version of the Tao you recommended. I thought I'd noted it down, but I was probably stupidly swiping instantly to the next interesting thing on my Samsung S22 and can't find it now. Silly me!
"My intuition is that the smartphone....is a gift of insight into the modern human condition."
Yikes! Looks like all this time I've been insufficiently misanthropic. Humans really are a herd of apes who will do or say anything as long as all the other apes are doing the same, and that their interests extend no further than Me, Myself & I. Just when I thought my level of skepticism was excessive...time to crank it up!
I think I recommended you check out some Chuang Tzu, either Thomas Merton's poetic version or the Penguin version, which provides more historical and philosophical context.
Cheers!
Yay, thank you. I've made separate note.
I think that there's an interesting tension in all of this. About how we might react to the disappointment of knowing that not everyone is as wonderful as me & you. I share your discombobulation about applying appropriate levels of misanthropy. It's certainly a test of my compassion muscle, which was too long underdeveloped.
Shall we start a religion? I see they're all the rage.
"Shall we start a religion? I see they're all the rage." !!!
Hey, I live in Cali so if all else fails I plan on getting into the guru business.
Maybe once my misanthropy goes around the bend and transforms into radical acceptance, I'll be ready for my close-up.
Cheers!
I've been trying to think of a new angle. Best I could do was something about saving us from ourselves. I laughed, because this is actually just Christianity haha!