let's THiNK about it (Ryder Richards)

Gambling has grown, as has gambling addiction. With technology improvements driven by behavioral science, gambling is more addictive than ever. While it may be your choice to gamble, the cards are stacked against you, and more gambling addicts commit suicide than any other addiction group.

Exactly how do we get addicted, why do we begin gambling in the first place, and if it is a flaw in our society why do we persist in thinking of it as a personal psychological failure? How does our culture’s decree to find your “individual freedom” lead to a circumstance where the only path seems to be death? And perhaps that niggling doubt you have about libertarianism choice and free markets at the heart of the Las Vegas experiment is key to understanding how we got here.

We look at Matthew Crawford's "The World Beyond Your Head" and Natasha Dow Schull's "Addiction by Design." 

In this episode of Let's Think About It, host Ryder Richards examines the relationship between truth, reality, and abstraction. He proposes reality filters profound ideologies like religion and science, which rely on belief, from superficial falsehoods like marketing propaganda that obscure reality. Richards argues both sides undermine truth, but marketing inflames desire and bypasses reality altogether. Using quantum physics and art as examples, he shows how we use weighty abstractions to escape reality's limits. Ultimately, Richards says our tendency is to use fantasy to disregard reality, envisioning catastrophe to then deny it through rigid universal rules that validate our desires.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-80-transcendent-escapism/

Richards begins by reminding us that while seeking transcendent truths, religion and science require belief, making them vulnerable to subjectivity. Next he discusses how marketing contains truth but uses it to inflame desire and promote amnesia. From here Richards explores how quantum physics appeals precisely because it hints at being free from reality's rules. He shares an anecdote about artists citing ungrasped quantum concepts as justification for unrelated work. Finally, Richards applies Slavoj Žižek's ideas about imagining catastrophe to then envision rigid orders that deny reality. Our escapist visions allow necessary blindness to humanity's failings but spawn dangerous universals.

0:00 Truth, abstraction, and manipulation. 
4:22 Reality, science, religion, and marketing. 
7:57 The relationship between science, reality, and abstraction. 
11:50 Epistemology, science, and art. 
15:44 Escaping reality through abstraction.

🗑️ Garbage represents the concrete universal of waste.

🎨 Picasso's art exemplifies the concrete universal through different periods and works.

🌌 Failures and contradictions can lead to transcendence.

🎭 Art expresses both expression and concealment simultaneously.

🔀 Concrete universalism combines the concrete and the abstract into one concept.

💡 The concept of concrete universalism challenges fixed definitions and highlights the dynamic nature of objects, people, and ideas.

🔄 The concrete universal constantly expands, while the defining object fails to fully capture its totality.

---- TIMING/CHAPTERS----

0:00 Welcome back to the show.

• Fiction is bleeding into reality and confusing.

1:34 Relating to god through the son.

• How god was impossible to relate to.
• Concrete universalism and the food processor.

2:53 How can something be concrete but applicable to everything?

• Concrete universalism vs abstract universalism.
• Kantian antinomies or even Hegelian antagonisms.

5:04 The apex of the movement is the definition.

• Overcoming the other side, overcoming their limits.
• The movement has an extreme peak, which defines it.

7:20 A new more robust form of universalism.

• New universalism founded on a very real thing, trash.
• Example of concrete universalism, garbage.

9:02 Definition of the concrete universal.

• The concrete universal and the black sack of trash.
• How to use the concrete universal.

10:53 The central problem of art.

• The central problem of art, referencing Picasso.
• How art expresses the inability to clearly express.

12:33 The antagonisms in Guernica.

• Back to the concrete universal in the case of Pablo Picasso.
• The antagonisms in Guernica.

14:18 The problem with the object definition of the universal.

• Deification of objects, people and ideas.
• The parallax gap.

0:00 How violence is provoked by fantasy.

2:31 The balcony and the revolution.

5:14 How far does mimetic desire go?

6:54 Most things happen twice: the story, then reality

9:41 Post-terrorist architecture.

12:40 Turning the desire into a blueprint (simulation to be de-simulated)  

14:37 Recognize that the world is f***ed.

16:43 The parable of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

18:55 The desire to be the simulacra of man. (oh, to be a machine)

21:43 The black mirror of capitalism. (Amazon and the state)  

In this lecture, Ryder Richards, an artist currently based in Fort Worth, explored the intersection of art and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically focusing on a project that reimagines Salvador Dali's "Alice in Wonderland." Richards delved into public fears and misconceptions about AI, emphasizing a lack of understanding about how AI algorithms function, including generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models. By showcasing AI-generated images and discussing the differences between various AI platforms like Dolly, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, he illustrated AI's capabilities and limitations. Richards highlighted how each platform has its strengths and weaknesses in creating art, the humorous mistakes they can make due to misunderstandings, and the importance of understanding these tools to navigate the burgeoning field of AI art effectively.

The lecture further ventured into the implications of AI in society, touching on concerns of dependency, the impact on human skills and creativity, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding AI-generated content. Richards presented a nuanced view of AI's role in art, arguing that while AI can facilitate the creative process, it also raises questions about originality, authorship, and the value of human touch in art. Through the lens of his project, which attempted to fuse AI's capabilities with the essence of Dali's work, Richards explored the challenges of using AI to replicate human creativity. He concluded by discussing the broader societal and philosophical questions AI raises, including the potential loss of human agency and the importance of storytelling in preserving humanity's unique attributes. This reflection underscored the complex relationship between technology and human creativity, suggesting that while AI can be a powerful tool, it also prompts us to reevaluate the essence of art and creativity in the digital age.

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

Part 1: The Mouskedoer

Crawford tells this story about watching the Mickey Mouse channel, and on the show they have these segments where, say, 4 objects are in a grid, and a river shows up on the screen. 

Do you use the bridge, the ladder, the hammer, or the banana to cross the river? Did you guess banana? That’s a common mistake. Smart mouses ask for help! Let’s do it on 3, 1,2, 3… it starts with a br and ends with an idge. And if you get all 4 you are declared a “mousekedoer.” Hooray! 

 In early cartoons, objects such as hammers and nails and springs seem to have an identity and a contrary will of their own: they were somewhat threatening. A Spring will bounce back at you or a rubber band with snap-on your hand or your eye: all tools misbehaved, even clocks would spin backward or slow down to taunt you. Today on the Mickey Mouse show, all problems are solved swiftly with Assurance, if only you ask for help. 

Even the questions on the little quizzes they prompt make you feel as if you’re solving a problem, but before any frustration can set in one of your four choices automatically fits its designated role, so a bridge will land over stream of water, or a ladder will fall into place, but there is a magical sing-along chant to ask for help and the solution will arrive 

The contrariness of reality, the hazards, and overcoming have been removed: all solutions are at hand if you submit to asking someone else to take care of it for you. 

Congratulations, you are a mousekadoer who did nothing. 

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

Part 2: design, dials, and free will 

We have a problem today: part of it goes back to that Cartesian Net Alan Watts was talking about: the grid we throw over the world in order to measure dissect and parse the inter-related complexities of the world. We can also refer to this as the Techno-rational mindset, where we reduce the world into smaller, isolated metrics to try to figure out what’s going on, rather than gauging it holistically. We look for a bolt or o-ring that caused the problem. This is real, and it works, but it also generates more left-brain-centric solutions: limited solutions that cannot account for cascading environmental variables. 

In short, today, we design out vital feedback. We are pulled out of our environment and our bodily connection to sensory information is impoverished. 

Adrienne Cussins says we can know how fast we are moving through our sight/body/perception, but we now have an abstraction that tells us: this is the speedometer. 

When I was first learning to drive, I remember my dad telling me to stop looking at the speedometer, that I could judge how fast I was going just by gauging the rapidity of telephone poles passing, or basically, by looking around. And, bonus, besides just ‘feeling’ your speed it is safer because it keeps you from “chimping” at the dashboard. 

• “chimping” is what photographers call checking every photo on the little LCD screen on your camera.

But the speedometer, this additional information about how fast you are going is conveyed in numbers or a dial with numbers. It is an abstract substitution for sensory information. It interferes and pulls you out of sensory reality into an interface. 

Don’t get me wrong, the abstraction has utility and purpose. Just like the abstract sounds that make up our language, it helps us communicate, and if we leverage this information we have a tool that maximizes utility. 

What I mean by this is that abstraction is a reductive model, necessarily, but it allows us to communicate in more fixed terms, these agreed-upon terms are a new fulcrum that bypasses the messiness of the subjective, experiential terms… 

> “really officer? 110? But it only felt like I was going 50” 

Feelings are subjective and slippery, so abstract measures have utility. But also, reliance on the measurement tends to drift into reliance on the dials. The more complex a machine the more we delegate understanding to gauges, which are reductive mediations for reality: we reduce our understanding of reality for the short-hand of the dial.

(This is similar to Goodhart’s law, where we replace the actual thing being measured with the metric we measure it with.) 

For instance, We now offer “attention assist” for drivers, and “blindspot assist” and auto-parallel parking, and even self-driving. We now “idiot-proof” driving, and yet there seem to be more idiots on the road. Like the guy who was sleeping in the back of his Tesla while it drove him home. 

This is peculiar… it is as if handing off our situational awareness stems from (is caused by) handing off the steps of mechanical understanding. The less we understand the process between function and dial (reality and abstract notification) the more we are psychologically prepared to hand over perception itself… leaving us alone inside our wonderfully sound-proofed car, inside our wonderfully isolated heads.

“Those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.” 

Matthew Crawford

 It is, to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy in the Counselor, as though we think we can move through this world and yet not take part in it, not have it affect us.

What a strange ethic, what a strange philosophy. 

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

 Part 3: VR as Morality

But, after all, this is the ultimate dream, right? A type of severance? To pass through the world untethered and untouched. To rule the body as a submissive subject, only allowing pleasure, muting pain. And thus, we gravitate towards a dream of Virtual Reality, where the difficulties of reality morph into abstracted difficulties of mind. 

Perhaps in VR we have a new morality with unpluggable consequences, yet it is completely designed by others: thus our morality in VR is not autonomy, it is not agency or freedom, it is heteronomy, which is our morality defined by an outside other… something alien to us, perhaps a machine. 

The larger issue here, because don’t forget we are somewhat of a philosophy podcast, is as Crawford says, Our WILL, the human will, is looking for how to guide itself, and when it finds itself governed by the laws of objects, it tends to follow the “object’s desire” as if it is our own. 

The object outside of us is, as Immanuel Kant says,

“an alien interest, and you should not administer to it’s purposes” but instead your will should “manifest it’s own sovereign authority as supreme maker of the law.” 

Immanuel Kant

This is a bit over the top. 

Crawford points out that for Kant, “to be rational is precisely not to be situated in the world.” ~ and when we cease to engage with difficult objects of the empirical world, the WILL becomes freer in a rational world without restraint, without grounding. 

And does this not seem like the goal of VR, virtual reality? 

Kant wanted the will to be outside influence, to be a law unto itself ~ but this also reduces agency, especially in a Newtonian sense: if you remove the will to a separate realm it can have no causal affect in this world. 

the fantasy of autonomy comes at a price of impotence. 

Matthew Crawford

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

 Part 2: Breather

So let’s take a breather for a second because that was a lot: to go from speedometers into morality and alien control of our will through objects which rob us of autonomy, yet, also, to remove our will from conditions of the world, like an escape to moral Virtual Reality, isolates our will in an untouchable realm, which also robs us of autonomy and agency. 

Once again, “you cannot move through this world, yet not take part in it.”

So this is a breather, and I wanted to give a shout out to my buddy Eli Walker, who reached out after the last episode. We texted about the body and design, and he mentioned this amazing video where Keith Haring, the artist, walks up to a wall mentally Maps it out and in one shot completes a total mural with no spacing issues. 

Which is nearly impossible. 

And, as Eli said, is proven by our inability to even write out a Wi-Fi password on a scrap of paper without having to scrunch the text at the end, much less tackle an entire wall. 

So when we were talking about embodied cognition: our body’s ability to perceive space is phenomenal, yet we don’t live in a culture that employs this. Instead, we now have apps that measure out rooms for us, yet I know men who can look at a wall and say that’s 19 ft 6 in. and be spot on. I know people who can pick up a screw and say that’s a number 6, 1 5/8 in, can bend conduit pipe without measuring, quilt without patterns, or plow a field in a straight line with no Satellite guidance. 

We have, over time, through flattened screens, lost our basic orientation through kinetic physicality, which we discussed last time: moving through space is how we perceive, relate, and cognate. And this lead us back into our podcast, where we now design reliance where we once developed skill. 

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

 Part 3: concept prep 

In the last episode, we discussed the human body as a perception mechanism gathering information and reacting to it rapidly through sort of subroutines that never reach our conscious brain. Like feeling the slip of your bike tire, or feeling the wood about to splinter. Or, even when we walk, the ground is rising, step higher. 

By moving we find the affordances our environment offers. Unfortunately, some situations have to be learned: you proabably didn’t know your body could map out a whole wall for a mural, and you probably don’t know that a banana peel is slippery to step on until you have seen 37 slapstick cartoons. 

In the book “the upper half of the motorcycle” Bernt Speigel says “one simply has to know about some situations before Behavior can be adapted on the basis of this knowledge.” 

This is fascinating: essentially you have to have a concept in order to recognize and attune your body to the unique coalescence of factors that create a situation. 

For instance, if you are told what black ice looks like, that it looks like pavement and the best solution is do nothing it is counter intuitive, or maybe if you are in a desert and know a mirage looks like an Oasis, you can restrain yourself from punching Noel Gallagher. 

But if no one tells you a banana peel is slippery you will be unprepared: we need the concept to recognize the situation. ~ And this comes from others, from the community. 

Once recognized, we adopt a posture that allows us to react, to mirror our forecasting of the situation that may occur. Our body prepares for the possible, and what this does is reduce our reaction time: we don’t want to have to involve the computation of the brain: it is too slow, too taxing. Use the body. 

Instead we perceive the situational affordance through embodied sense making. This requires attention. 

Attention, which is distracted and stolen by staring at a speedometer. Or a phone. 

I keep referring to driving because Crawford does, and it is a good vehicle for the ideas: it is a relatable mid-ground between the self’s agency and larger systems… it embodies the individual will, yet is social, physical, and made possible through complex machinery that amplifies our actions. 

But concept prep and environmental awareness can also work for craftsmanship: As a matter of design, to reach a skill level of mastery, we want to reduce the cognitive leaping about, the projecting and forecasting of several hypothesises (hypothesi?)… that are interfering. These small mental ramblings are like mosquito bites, stealing your attention. 

We need to design an environment that sets us up for embodied flow, relieve the mind of it’s anxieties, and reach a zen state, a flow state, as Crawford says, as state of “Alert watchfulness, without meddling” 

— YET, this does not happen unless you are involved. “involve your ass, your mind will follow.” 

converse: “free your ass, your mind will wander” 

But here’s the deal: it takes work and risk and a bit of danger: John Muir, author of ‘how to keep your volkswagon alive’ says “we must have skin in the game” 

If we drove cars strapped to the front, like an Aztec sacrifice, we would be much more cautious with our driving. Safety design actually alleviates awareness and caution, or circumspection: it reduces the need to attend and negotiate. 

John Muir

When people do not have to consider, then “being unaware” they behave recklessly to undermine the very design that is protecting them. Amplify this for each iteration and more safety equals more reckless nonconsideration. 

This implies it may be impossible to idiot-proof, and even more concerning is idiot-proofing, safety, leads humans to be unable to navigate the world without themselves becoming idiots… we become mousekadoers, unable to tolerate frustration and always asking for help so we can retreat back to the safety of our own minds. 

And by idiots, Crawford previously defines idiota from the Greek: meaning a private person detached from the implications of how we move through society or the world.

To be an idiot is behaving as if we were in private when we are actually in public: To assume your preferences take precedence.

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

 Part 4: A rebuttal to the rebuttal

Is Crawford saying idiot-proofing is encouraging us to behave like idiots? Is he saying that safety features make us less safe? We are, after all, protecting and helping through design. The forethought of engineers saves lives.

It is easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to this, and start saying things like “oh you want to remove speedometers from cars? Why don’t we just get rid of speed limits, Mario Andretti? What’s next? Getting rid of the stop signs and right of way?”

 And interestingly enough, Jeff Speck in “Walkable City” talks about a concept called Naked Streets. The idea is exactly to remove signage and right of way, narrow lanes, and get rid of crosswalks. Where this has been implemented it decreases traffic accidents and the severity of accidents. 

The “common sense” approach is to widen streets so that people have more visibility, but that only encourages people to speed up since they can see further. We put in stoplights and stop signs, which tell people “you have the right to go now.” And speed limits tend to be reinterpreted to “drive 5 mph faster.”

These environmental mediations through abstract symbols, a green light or a red light or a sign with a number, tell you how to behave without the necessity for you to truly address your environment. Someone has predetermined consideration, so you don’t have to. You no longer negotiate with your environment or others: you have the “right of way” and off-load the responsibility of cautiously, attentively, navigating the shared public realm. 

This lead us (finally) to the concept of design and agency. 

Human agency is our ability to affect change -to consider a situation, make a choice, and feel the power and responsibility of that decision. Rules and nudges that direct our behavior (through hijacking automatic responses) also rob us of our agency of self-determination. (There is no decision to be made, thus no autonomy.) Over time we trade our agency for legal certitude: a right/wrong binary and social guide based laid out as a cartesian abstraction. 

Similar to dials that convey reduced information by requiring no attentive negotiation to a complex reality we free our minds to daydream, our hands to twiddle on phones, and a once public ballet of interaction becomes isolated, individual bubbles colliding. 

So far we have focused on how mediating through design reduces primary sensory input to the human, actually detaching them from the environment and world. 

Yet there is a kind of design, like “naked streets”, that feels like anti-design: removing the over-designed mediation as a means of reconnection and returning agency to the human. A literal human-centric-design philosophy, where insight bolsters human flourishing, not just parading ergonomic door handles as the lever to freedom.  

Step 57: Design facilitates Agency

Part 5: the world without maps 

the world is it’s own best model 

We talked last episode about robot design, and how brute-force computation is costly and slow, while physical design and haptic feedback is much more efficient and elegant as a solution. And of course the best models of this come through Evolution and the world itself. 

Yet here we are talking about how designs mediate reality into an abstraction, a dial that tells us how fast we are going, or a sign it tells us how fast we should be going. 

These are symbols, and symbols are granted meaning by society, thus grounding them in a universal language, which has great utility. And we now want to create symbols to ground all things. What is fascinating about skipping the symbol and returning to the embodied representations, is as Arthur Glennberg says 

“embodied representations do not need to be mapped onto the world to become meaningful because they arise from the world.”

Arthur Glennberg

 That is if your body derives information directly from the world we do not need to encode and decode it: it is uniquely instantaneous. We do not need a map of the world when the world is its own best model. indeed the map is not the territory. 

And reducing the encoding-decoding process to experience the world directly also allows us to learn more rapidly. This is because multiple senses are bound together, coupled, in the learning process. this is called cross-modal binding. 

Not only do we glean information through multiple senses, sights sounds and feelings and location, but we bind those experiences to a shared commonality – time. 

These experiences all occur simultaneously, co-occur, and coordinated into a Time locked stream of information. The upshot of this is our brain binds from various senses a coherent sensory pattern of time signatures, this timestamp becomes “the thing in itself” 

When all of our sensory data is mediated, it is an abstraction, and and when we turn that abstraction into a falsification, such as the sound of a V8 rumbling engine now running through your speakers because the car no longer sounds that way, we have falsely informative information. 

We are now going to Great Lengths to create the exact opposite of reality as a substitute for reality, pretending to stand in for the truncated reality. 

And suddenly we’re back into talking about the simulacra, from steps 38 and 39, a false reality that forgot it’s purpose. 

What is our means to counteract this? 

On the most simple level, it is to actually do something physical. To move. 

Not only is Locomotion indispensable to learning, but only self-motion can accomplish this, not VR or flat screens. It also begins to provide true options, not simply choices. 

Most online environments and even much of our built environment have pre-existing choice architectures, paths already prepared for us, and over time we conflate choosing with doing. 

We literally think we can only go right or left, who we are as a person is defined by the 4 color choices for our car. “what does that red say about me as a person?” 

It is so impoverished and limited. And we are back to being good mousekadoers. 

“if choosing replaces doing for the mouse-clicking mousekedoer, it figures that such a disengage self should be especially pliable to the “choice architectures” to get installed in public spaces.”

You do not find yourself merely by choosing, you find yourself by doing. And it is frustrating and painful to encounter the real world that has an objectness and will of its own, unlike the mickey mouse challenges, unlike the models in our heads, but engaging the real world is also real overcoming, and a step closer to genuine self-reliance and a truer form of autonomy. 

Ryder consumed over 50 books and about 200 podcasts in 2021. Walking through concepts of the origins of bureaucracy and how the protestant work ethic shaped corporations and consumer behavior, he moves into healthcare related to liberty, how to solve many problems on our way to utopia, and a model for transitioning away from capitalism into a nature-based economics.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-52-best-of-2021-review-by-books/

My two favorite books

“Moral Mazes” and “The Culture of the New Capitalism“

Both of these are sociology books about how the world has changed. They both reference Max Weber, discussing how bureaucracy came out of the military and in America the Protestant work ethic became conflated with capitalism and eventually led to conspicuous consumption and wealth as a signal of virtue: $ = wisdom and salvation.

Moral Mazes, by Robert Jackall, focused on the life of middle managers in large corporations, and how the politics needed to survive do not align with the professed values: hard work does not pay off, but appearing to be a tam player while brutally shifting blame and burning through company assets means you are a go-getter, with gumption and grit. Equally, Jackall maps out how middle managers hide behind jargon, because they can’t appear to not know what they are talking about (can’t look weak), which is bad for the company… but also, considering legal repercussions, they learn to use vague, coded language so as to be able to shift positions: never be caught with a strong opinion, while always seeming to decisive with strong opinions.

These are the guys/gals who make decisions with their “gut,” which means they keep perpetuating the same behaviors and stereotypes, but are crafty at the optics of appearing fair or sympathetic.

Richard Sennett follows up on this offering broader examples of how capitalism effects the working class, the brain-drain on talent for dumb factory labor, and discussing things like why a nurse may stay at her job, despite the terrible hours and mistreatment: people don’t work for jobs, they work in a place where they can make a difference… they need to know where they fit in the world and have relevance.

But they go to factories because they need a steady paycheck so they can get a mortgage from the bank, which means a competition to take the best from the labor pool, then put them to work doing mind-numbing labor: companies do not want innovation, they want subservient, blind loyalty from you. But they reserve the right to have no loyalty to the employees. Even the business owners now distance themselves, and hide at the first sign of responsibility and accountability, pushing it off onto subordinates and use technology as a distancing mechanism.

All in all, we have come to embody the whole “rational actor” of economic theory, which promotes selfish, transactional relationships rather than community. It rewards sociopathy.

Say you are a well-intentioned millennial, then you have been taught not to give voice to discontent: your mental health is more important than job frustration. You simply exit. “Exit over Voice,” as Sennett calls it. Old people argue, which makes them a pain when a company demands unwavering, un-considering loyalty and any question is interpreted as dissent. Institutional memory and wisdom are liabilities, so companies hire those who will just move on without a fight, which means they only get task completion instead of deep consideration from their employees. We all become mercenaries, who scream about politics, but (wisely) are afraid to lose our jobs because survival is not guaranteed in our country.

What both books point out is that our society is cutting itself off at it’s own knees, and feeding on them. It is like auto-cannibalism, where to be successful you must take risks, upending the stability that made our nation profitable (successful) in favor of destruction and precarity, just so you can prove “you have what it takes” or are as amoral as the leadership team you aim to join.

We burn down the world our great-grandparents built, and we do it behind a gold-plated mask of jargon. Faced with the specter of uselessness, we market and promote meaningless differences as highly important.

Philosophy books?

Honest to god philosophy: William James and Baudrillard

I read a lot of small snippets about philosophers or their viewpoints, but sitting down and actually working through multiple books? Only two authors this year. Though I did read some Deleuze, Nietzsche, Zizek, and Lyotard as well.

Reading Pragmatism by William James was great. We can argue about things all day, but he discusses moving beyond ideological or semantic quibbles into a practical reality, not being a slave to your position, but grounding ourselves and carving ourselves. Providing space for spirituality he says, swim up, touch the divine, and get some spiritual energy to direct your path.

Coming up with increasingly obtuse theories isn’t helpful. He was really pushing back against monism, or the notion of one fixed universal truth, and equally he wasn’t a fan of the notion that everything could be measured and figured, a type of determinism. He spoke a lot of a middle path, a middle road, a central corridor from which doors into other ideas can branch off, but you needn’t stay cloistered in there.

I think Baudrillard would suggest that these philosophies are fooling themselves. He might propose that they wouldn’t even know it. His work on the idea of simulacra and simulation would say we have lost the plot, lost the purpose, we are “a man adrift without a shadow,” and we can only keep simulating achievement.

But what if we have not lost the plot, but the story has already been written and we are merely enacting our roles? The memes and ideas of the world are moving us to claim “liberty” and “freedom.” We have none, no direction, so now simulate liberty, acting out of libidinal desire without understanding.

The most optimistic?

“Utopia for Realists”

It is nice when someone spends the time to look at things like Poverty, or Universal Basic Income and says… wait a second, this doesn’t make sense… the world we live in keeps saying “pull yourself up by your own boot straps”… taking a handout is a moral failing, or it is a lack of character to be poor. We need to punch through these moral myths that keep us imprisoned in pain as we end up with deaths of despair and the opioid crisis wiping out those who have been isolated in this competition where everyone loses, even when you win.

Rutger Bregman proves multiple times over in “Utopia for Realists” that the government helping and protecting its citizens, (instead of profiteering) would stabilize the population at a lower cost than the current system bears. Which would help business, government, education, and other institutions.

Examples provided show Universal Basic Income, eradicating poverty, and making healthcare free you both grant human dignity and “it is cheaper” than the long-term costs of prisons, emergency room visits, rehab clinics, diabetes, police, etc… We should cut the well-fare system, too. No hoops to jump through to prove you are deserving of a handout: just give people cash. The simplest solution works: eradicate poverty not with systems, but with money. The vast majority of people will not take advantage of this, but will better their own lives.

The darkest?

Our Malady

As we just mentioned healthcare and human dignity, one of my favorite authors nearly died in 2019 or 2020 because of inept health care systems motivated by money over human concerns. Timothy Snyder’s Our Malady walks through how our inequality as a society leads to needless death, despair, and division. He also discusses the need to fluctuate between solitude and solidarity.

As a contemporary historian, his books walk us through how our fragility becomes a breeding ground for corrupt officials and corporations to continue abuse: when your health is at risk (or your family) you are a serf or slave, who can never voice dissent.

And so, when our journalism turns into an untrustworthy shit-show, and we rely on social media for news because we can’t trust anything, this is a symptom. If you can’t be honest because you will lose your job, and your insurance, then fear and survival win out over principled moral obligation. This is simply the logic of free-market capitalism’s “rational actors” or “economic agents” fulfilling the shallow logic of the market, eroding trust and long-term stability, opening our nation up for abuse and corruption: making us susceptible to tyranny.

The best economic book:

Sacred Economics

Charles Eisenstein does a great job of reorienting us away from the faulty logic of the neoliberal capitalist myth. Pros vs cons… there is a cost to everything, and we need to look at this neoliberal capitalist train and wonder if the engine up ahead, where we can’t see it, has fallen into the ravine and is just dragging the rest of us into a fiery explosion. Is there still time to bail? And what does that look like?

Eisenstein maps out 7 steps, an interlocking system to ascend from our self-administered despair, using the bones of capitalism in which we sheltered to grow up… but I am simplifying it into 3 steps.

1. realign money with natural decay (negative interest)
2. alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, and
3. letting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation towards enriching a sustainable commons.

The point is, we don’t need more trinkets: we need a planet, a world, that works. We need to stop being selfish children or adolescents. We need to behave like responsible grown ups. Eisenstein brings up 2 great parables, the eleventh round to show how usury and the tragedy of the commons to show how “individual rational actors” destroy communion and solidarity.

A key point is that money is not evil, it is a technology. But we let it have unnatural properties and try to apply it to the natural world. We need policy that will realign money with nature, society with people, and make nature our capital that we depend on instead of extracting from.

Race?

“The Racial Contract” by Charles Mills

It spoke to me in a way White Fragility didn’t. And even the fact that Mills had to couch his arguments and ideas in academic terms to get through to people like me is brought up in the book. Thanks to L for the recommendation on this one.

Self Help and Behavior books

“Awareness” by Anthony DeMello

Best book maybe ever, but I didn’t podcast on that. I still hold it in too much reverence.

I read some self-helpy, achievement books like Atomic Habits and Judson Brewer’s The Craving Mind. Along with more behavioral science books like Noise by Daniel Kahneman. The most career oriented were So Good they can’t ignore you and Range, which fall into a kind of Malcolm Gladwell type of book, but less expansive, more like a field guide to creating an interesting career and life, not getting trapped.

But the stand out in this strange field of “make yourself better by having knowledge of knowledge” is How to Take Smart Notes which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to actually make use of their reading, wants to write or publish or podcast.

My favorite episode to make:

Free guy

Free Guy was great because I got to really dig into pop-culture that seems very shallow as a way to discuss pretty profound ideas of desire, identity, and Artificial intelligence as a type of government or state apparatus. We touched on Arendt’s work, action, labor distinctions, where the subject is turned into a cog… but we need differences for change, not similarity… one way to manifest “difference” is through radical repetition, which invokes the transcendence of Nietzsche’s eternal return.

Bonus section!!

Fiction

I finally finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this year. hooray. That took like a decade. Worth it, but I now feel like I need a book club or philosophy class to decipher all the depth and strangeness of it.

My favorite  was The Overstory. It is long, but really worth it. The book reshapes the flaring human desires and personalities, their companionships, against the backdrop of ultra-long-lived trees under threat.

If you are looking for something fun, check out the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. If you want some good fantasy, check out N.K. Jemison’s stuff.

A type of Conclusion

Through the podcast these books are tools that I can use to widen my perspective and let me come to a better understanding of how we ended up here. In a type mirroring, having past knowledge also sparks ideas of how we can  escape (or move beyond) the current predicaments we are in.

Or not, because humans are messy and things are complicated, but at least with this knowledge we aren’t subjected to basic binaries… we have graduated to advanced binaries. hooray!

Doing the show, over the last nearly two years, I feel a little bit better prepared to engage the world, to offer alternatives rather than nod along. Questioning long held assumptions is the podcast goal, and reading is the tool. None of these ideas are my own, they are just cobbled together from the wisdom of others. For the first time in a long time, I feel I am working towards a version of wisdom and richness of life, and I would like to thank you for spending some time with me on this journey.

Pulling from Isaiah Berlin's Positive and Negative Freedom, Ryder looks at the "social contract" and the tacit promise of safety (Freedom From) in exchange for taxes and good citizenship. There are no conclusions reached, just a framework for thinking about freedom and the nation/state's responsibility to uphold citizen rights. 

The Will to DIY website has references: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-11-the-social-contract-freedom-to-freedom-from/

1:43 When I was growing up facts would lead me to truth, but Isaiah Berlin points out the contradictions of logical reasoning. 

3:30 Freedom is a broad term, but it helps to consider what you are "free from" and what you are "free to" do. 

4:50 Your free speech has limits in a society, jackass. 

5:32 The social contract provides "freedoms" but at a cost to "freedoms"

8:00 Representative democracy: is the social contract still alive? 

Part I: Isaiah Berlin's notion of Freedom From/Freedom To and how that relates to the social contract in a way that shows you really are not all that free. Your body and life actually belong to the state, so they can mandate your behavior for the common good. 

Part II: Jurgen Habermas syas that many of the Ends/Means problems with Enlightenment Rationality are not considering the balancing effect of the Public Sphere where people follow principles of Communicative Rationality (and Action) to reach agreements. A key tenant is that the person speaking must believe what they say and use rational logic, otherwise the conversation is not worth having. 

Part III:  Jonathan Haidt discusses how since 2007 (the advent of the like and retweet) that social media became performative public display, not authentic conversations. If this is the new public sphere, then it has been instrumentalized.  When presented with new information we have started asking "Do I have to believe this?" with the answer being "no."  Thus, there is no longer an agreed upon source for truth. 

Part IV: The contradictions inherent to politicized beliefs. When does your Freedom To not wear a mask impinge on someone else's Freedom From disease? Why does belief in God, politics, or your rights as a citizen allow you to harm others? It seems a small thing to ask strong people to moderate their behavior. 

(all music courtesy of Ryder's mouth)

The Will to DIY website has references: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-12-the-social-sphere-and-communicative-action/

0:32 A man walks into a bar: I should be "free to" get a drink and "free from" harassment.

4:55 The Social Contract: You are not "free from" being offended... unless you live in a Mad Max world.

6:15 A man walks into a bar, a conversation ensues: how do we handle the drunk guy in the corner? 

12:30 A blue donkey walks into a red elephant bar, and gets kicked out. Team identity wins and people lose. 

19:32 The last man walks into the bar: he is brave and claims to love his community, so he carries a gun, but won't wear a mask to save those weaker than him. 

Gut Decisions

“The core of the managerial mystique is decision-making prowess” 

Robert Jackall

So, if decisions were easy, they would be made by someone else, so it is only the big money, big risk decisions that are looked at to determine your prowess. 1,000’s of jobs and the future of the division are on the line. How do you make the call? By your gut.

The rules of a manager are :

“(1) Avoid making any decisions if at all possible; and

(2) if a decision has to be made, involve as many people as you can so that, if things go south, you’re able to point in as many directions as possible.”

You have heard of that moral dilemma thought experiment developed by Utilitarians, such as Peter Singer: the trolley experiment?

In the corporate version, no one takes action: 5 people are hit by the trolley and then everyone blames everyone else for not jumping. Another great day at the office dodging responsibility. 

So, your primary GUT DECISION for your survival in company: Who is going to get blamed?

 BLAME TIME

 For managers, to be BLAMED is to be injured verbally in public. And since we know that “image is crucial” this is a serious threat. The wise manager knows it has nothing to do with facts or the merits of a case, but is a socially construed manifestation born largely of being in the Wrong place, at the Wrong time.

As Jackall says: “Bureaucracy expands the freedom of those on top by giving them the power to restrict the freedom of those beneath.”

 ON THE FAST TRACK

 The goal here is to outrun your mistakes! Jump up the ladder, then when the person who replaces you inherits your screw-ups, you blame it on them and fire them.

A manager can defer costs for short-term profits or gains. This sets up what Jackal calls “probationary crucibles” in which managers are tested under extreme pressures, reshaping them to make decisions for short-term expediency, for their own survival. In the end, the games played for a manager to “look good” and “meet the numbers” actually cost the company: it is a parasitic relationship that drains the company rather than keeping it healthy.

There is a natural selfishness… people want to make the system work for themselves. And when they get to the top, they can’t criticize the system that got them there.

Manager in Moral Mazes

Flexibility, & Dexterity with Symbols

 As you climb, the rules of the game are, you never publicly criticize or disagree with one another or the company policy. You just wear an agreeable face and use ambiguous language. But when blame time shows up, everyone has already built defenses and set up scapegoats.

 Jackall says the higher you go in the corporate world, the better you need to be with manipulating symbols without becoming attached or identified with them. Thus “truth” takes a backseat for the imperative of appearances, which champions adroit talk requiring moral flexibility and dexterity with symbols.

And what happens when there is definitive proof of your mistakes? You say you were in accordance with the rules at the time, claiming that risk is necessary to make money, while you personally avoid risk by hiding in a bureaucracy. 

As Jackalll says

You socialize the risks and harms of the corporate industry, while privatizing the benefits.

THE BUREAUCRATIC ETHIC

Jackall shows the contrast from the original protestant ethic: an ideology of self-confident, frugality, and independence. It championed stewardship responsibilities, where your word was your bond. But it also signaled success as God’s favor, and that was used to explain away the misery of the poor and unlucky.

What has happened is that bureaucracy

“breaks apart substance from appearance, action from responsibility, and language from meaning.”

Robert Jackall

With survival tied to such a fickle, mercurial fate corporate bureaucracy erodes internal, and external, morality. It generates its own rules and moral standards, primarily through social context: what is fashionable becomes true, since everyone is looking at each other for moral cues, but to rise in the ranks the only virtue to be found is self-interest masked as company loyalty.

2008 The Great Recession

Jackal has a 2009 essay added to Moral Mazes. It proves his 1988 book prophetic. Corporate Culture and Bureaucratic ethics expanded into a societal consciousness of short-term profits with super shady logic, yet everyone was doing it so it became conscionable. And it broke our economy.

This is an egregious example of “socializing risk and privatizing profit.” It proves the protective power of bureaucracy, and encourages future recklessness.

Moving through the psychology of guilt vs Shame, and onto the societal implications of a shame-based or guilt-based culture, invoking Max Weber's "Protestant Work Ethic" as roots for our meritocracy, Hannah Arendt and Timothy Snyder's texts on the Nazi occupations and how people not only obeyed in advance, but used words to distance themselves from reality. This is linked to the American South, and the desire to avert shame or guilt of self through cultural constructions that benefit some while shaming others. 

https://letusthinkaboutit.com/step-22-guilt-shame--group-think/

2:48 Social pressure uses Shame/Guilt to normalize behaviors, which is better than more laws.

5:01 Protestant Ideals: "Your Wee wee is from the devil"

7:23 Down with the Hierarchy! Don't obey him, obey me!

10:03 Shame leads to Rage: "it is not people that have passions, but passions that have people." 

11:58 groupthink belief machine

16:06 "Their ideology ruined their relationship with reality"

18:02 Driven into toxic social groups through guilt, shame and a lack of forgiveness, people offer unwavering loyalty for guilt absolution.

20:44  Guilt and shame isolate people, for acceptance they pledge loyalty to toxic tribes.

Part 1: Jggy wit it

I personally do a lot of woodworking, making cabinets or entertainment centers, I'm currently trying to build a window. I have tools that help me, such as a table saw is great, but sometimes there is a finicky cut in a difficult spot and you need a handsaw. 

The hand saw has a downside to it: I'm not skillful enough or experienced enough to make sure it cuts it a perfect 90° angle while staying parallel to the edge and lined up on my marks. One trick is to clamp another board on the line you're cutting, and use that board as a guide, making sure that you stay 90° perpendicular and you're cutting straight back and forth. This is a very simple version of a "jig."

 Crawford talks about experts making things easier for themselves by "partially jigging" or "informational restructuring" the environment. So as you're working, you start setting things up around you interacting with your environment, this can be information in the digital space or production in a workshop. 

Perhaps consider the workflow of a chef in the kitchen. Not only does structuring your environment help you to be better at what you're doing, it reduces cognitive effort, so you're not having to re-solve your problems or waste steps... instead you jig up a workflow, keep your attention on point, and also restrict the freedom of your wandering mind. This is how you build an environment that allows you to get in the Flow State. 

The dark side is of course slewing into the opposite extreme: we now use "over determined jigs" which replace the skill... and the mind along with it. 

“Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in the toolbox” 

Matthew Crawford 

 This is similar to Christopher Schwartz who wrote The Anarchist's Workbench and The Anarchist's Design Book : If it's a choice between buying a jig or learning a skill, learn the skill. The goal is to move between autonomy and the assembly line.

"Advanced cognition depends crucially on our ability to dissipate reasoning"

Matthew Crawford

To think complex thoughts we need to unburden our limited capacity brain from having to consider everything, allowing us to use more bandwidth to focus deeply on a specific task. The great achievements of knowledge that came before us and practical wisdom are now embodied in complex structures: the structures of linguistics, politics, society, and institutional constraints. These are huge, complex jigs that are often invisible to us. Yet, we can focus on our daily job or current task because we have outsourced some daily reasoning (mental bandwidth or cognitive load) for some structure and stability. 

Step 55: Cultural Jigs

 PART 2: Cultural Jigs 

Max Weber, the German sociologist who wrote The Protestant Work Ethic, pointed out that there was a change in the way the church perceived wealth. We went from the "camel through the eye of the needle" thing about the difficulty of rich people getting into heaven TO accumulating wealth is a sign of God's favor. The status of your soul was visible in your portfolio, conspicuous wealth was proof of election to God's elite. This ideology ran deep in America, conflating being a good Christian with thrift and freedom. 

"Be Frugal and be free."

Benjamin Franklin

Today we have reversed "Be Frugal and be free," not back to "blessed are the poor," but to "be free now, pay it off later." 

It is now moral, neigh virtuous, to carry debt. "Consumer credit" with a good FICO or "credit score" requires a credit card and a mortgage: proof of debt carried long term. We even have "good debt" now: home mortgages and student loans are encouraged. 

This is not a moral judgment, but a cultural change over time: we have dismantled the moral cultural norms held previously, and now the "non-thinking lazy individual" is looking for a jig to guide them. Today, they are "nudged" by administrative actions. 

There is a book called "Nudge" about how policy can be made to make up for lazy human bias. Crawford relates this to “choice architecture,” the policy that structures your available decisions. 

 For instance, in "Nudge," if you start a new job with a retirement package they find that people are often so lazy or blase that they will not check the box to opt-in, even though it is in their best interest. So, the administration sets it up to auto-enroll you. Then people won't even check a box or make a phone call to opt-out. There is nothing but default behavior.

The problem here, as Crawford describes, is one of "character."  Character seems to come from habit, which we have discussed previously as a predictable or reliable pattern of responses developed over time to solve specific problems. 

habit seems to work from the outside in; from behavior to personality"

Matthew Crawford

Your behavior is shaped by your environment, through cultural norms, which then form your "character." The circumstances that shape us are often through administrative and cultural nudges. 

The ramifications are: if you were auto-enrolled in your 401k and you never unenroll, you have never really faced down anything, made a decision, or confronted temptation (should I save for the future or have more money now?) You have only allowed the virtues of the current system to be further stamped into your personality, and you have fallen deeper into the rut in which your stereotypical life is laid out for you. 

Without the friction of making decisions, we don't develop character, we are developed by external design. 

Our acquiescence, our inaction, allows our attention and priorities to be managed by others. This is the manipulation by attention pirates we mentioned in the last episode. 

Living by "default mode" means being adrift on the current, readily swayed and shaped, nudged, or herded into place. The administration says, “relax, we will take care of you” while the corporation, with no accountability to the common good, says “you have been softened up, now let us take advantage of you.” 

  “Choice architecture will happen. We just need to be aware so we can choose our architect. “ 

Matthew Crawford

Step 55: Cultural Jigs

 Part 3: How did we get here? 

In behavioral economics, they do studies in isolated environments to control variables. The tests show on average, we have little skill at practical reasoning. So we outsource it. Living in a "capitalist representative democracy technocracy" (a few of our cultural jigs) we have been habituated to hand over decision power to sciencey specialists, or really anyone. According to behavioral economics, we can't be bothered to think too much about it. 

Historically, after WWII "the left" started a project of liberation. They busily unmask and discredited “cultural Authority,” which means dismantling our inherited cultural jigs. These jigs, things like churches, family, and trust in government, provided coherence for individuals. 

This lack of coherence means that individuals are at a loss for how they fit into society. This is exactly the same problem Otto von Bismarck solved in 1871 by applying military bureaucracy to the German state: individuals were running around in packs, terrorizing each other, and upending stability for everyone. For a society to work you need stability, shared goals, and a sense of contribution to those goals. 

The project of Liberation led to a new unencumbered self. 

Into this void of meaning (dismantled cultural authority) steps "the right." They offer up the idea of the "rational actor" who is reasoning and maximized profit. A sciencey/economic solution to a cultural problem. Cultural authority's role is to regulate society, as much as to provide a framework for stability, so who regulates this ideal economic, reasoning man? Free markets.

As we know from the 1980s free markets deregulate everything. Our increased liberation has de-regulated us. This means we now have to spend more time, energy, attention self-regulating. In this time of the individual as their own authority, you have to have self-discipline. 

But all solutions are increasingly economic. We can relieve the burden of self-regulation by payment for "cultural jigs." 

Consider paying an accountant so you can relieve the burden of taxes, which in turn can make you more irresponsible, less self-regulated. By paying them you can avoid going to jail, and if you have enough money they shelter your wealth from taxes, allowing you to get richer while being less responsible. Double this class luxury of outsourcing self-discipline to paying for tutors, chefs, and fitness trainers: we pay for others to nag us, feed us, and make us smarter. 

Earlier we talked about dismantling cultural authority for liberation. This was done by both "the left" (dissolving cultural, traditional, and parental authority) and the right (de-regulating state authority in favor of markets), yet it seems the "disciplinary functions of our culture" still exist. 

Crawford says there remains a cultural cost for not having discipline: If you can afford a therapist to help save your marriage, help you raise your kids, and get them into pedigreed schools it passes social capital forward (as well as the financial capital) which allows the next generation to pay for their offspring to regulate their discipline: this ensures a dynastic succession through affording better cultural jigs. 

In the 50s and 60s, you had Protestant thrift, parental authority, and cultural shaming around gluttony. These were not great models in all respects, but they were available to everyone. The need for discipline around finances, behavior, and consumption has now moved from readily accessible churches, parents, and friends to privately paid life coaches, therapists, and personal trainers.

 Discipline has been privatized in the space left vacant from the culture wars.

Step 55: Cultural Jigs

 OUTRO: human flourishing

Crawford brings up the example of a chef cooking in a kitchen, who gets into a flow state, just chopping and spinning, and handling five tasks at once with impeccable timing. He is savoring his own human excellence, he is a human flourishing within the carefully modeled constraints of the kitchen. He can improvise, he is wholly absorbed and connected to his environment. 

"Living skillfully requires that some things be settled." 

Crawford wants to remind us that "the ideal of freedom from external influence doesn't capture all the elements that contribute to an impressive human performance." 

On a larger level, this episode is questioning the ideal of the “free” individual, pursuing their internal desires, and over-indexing the world inside their head. Crawford is asking us to look at the external conditions that shape our character. 

 So, our next episode will be looking more at the individual human - what exactly happens when we become skilled because there is a type of freedom in undertaking the discipline to hone your skills. How does our cognition shift when we are skilled? And what exactly is embodied perception or embodied knowledge? 

Intro

Check Step 46 for a history of how money developed from sacred origins into “a force for evil.”

Part 1: Separation and Oneness

This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.” ~ Charles Eisenstein

 He goes as far as to say to bring forth generosity and love and all dimensions of life, “we must dismantle the systems of domination that perpetuate the illusion of separation. Most notably the neoliberal system of Economics but also religion and politics.”

The difficulty is, we are perpetually bombarded and distracted by the reinforced narrative of individual sovereignty and freedom (liberty) with no discourse on social morality or what we owe each other. 

 Eisenstein says we must disengage from this system, not oppose it. To do this, we need a new story. Not the age of separation, but the story of Ascent. 

Part 2

Systemically we need policy in place that align wealth with the sacred.  Eisenstein brings up negative interest. This is when money circulates and investment continues, but the original capital loses value. These would lead us to “value” the capital less than the products or services. With positive interest, there is an incentive to hoard money (pull it out of circulation) and be rewarded through stockpiling, which encourages stagnation, otherwise known as a recession.

 In 1906 Silvio Gesell proposed “ the natural economic order” where a stamp of a small percentage was periodically pasted onto paper currency, this maintenance was a fee on the currency. 

 If wealth is instead measured through happiness and well-being, it will be linked with intimate connections and communities, mutual benefit and attentiveness, which also provides emotional stability, and can generate it’s own economies.

Part 3

But what about land use, property, and ownership? 

The consumer citizen has increasingly been distanced from the means of production, and nature, to remain focused on the separated individual self. We become “rational actors” or “rational optimizers.”

The tragedy of the Commons is an economic parable about how “rational actors” optimize individual wellbeing at the cost of the entire community, destroying the equilibrium to thrive for self-interest. Our current model exacerbates or encourages extraction, or commodifying the commons into private wealth, which leads to increase wealth consolidation and extractive damage. 

As the myth of perpetual growth become obvious, we need a support system, which is why Eisenstein recommends a social dividend: call it UBI or welfare. 

You may ask: where will the money come from, because with negative interest the money supply would continue to shrink?

We will develop a “Commons backed currency” to generate new money and align it with preserving nature. If the land was in a public trust, a social shared resource that could be lent (leased) to corporations for a limited amount of time, the lease would be our social dividend, capital, and currency. 

This is a three-pronged attack to

1. realign money with natural decay,
2. alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, and
3. letting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation (and community) towards enriching a sustainable commons.

0:00 The contradictory injunction of double binds.

• The contradictory injunction in double binds.

• The binary trap in cyberpunk.

2:15 The death drive of determinism.

• The death drive of determinism.

• How to transcend the binary.

4:44 How the capitalist system capitalizes on our stress.

• The capitalist system surprisingly capitalizes on stress.

• The anxious revolt is fuel for the bureaucratic nightmare.

6:33 Intro to the show.

• America and political symbolic winning, and camouflage.

• The wild west of America.

8:55 Virtue signaling to win elections.

• Virtue-signaling to win elections.

10:58 Trump's anointed tool.

• Trump as an anointed tool of the Christian right.

• Winning dignity is absurd.

12:54 How symbolic acts can function in reality.

• How the symbolic act can function in reality.

• Culture of honor, reputational honor.

14:30 Protecting your reputation through overreaction.

• Protection through overreaction

• The reversal of the reversal.

16:10 You become what you fight you become.

• The unseen aspect of antagonistic opposition in step 65.

• Respect for native americans over time.

17:47 How we grasp and use models.

• Mimetic desire to dissimulate thoughts into the real.

• Symbolism as a faulty translation.

• Symbols can become an affectation.

• The danger of the symbol that is mistaken

Intro

Today we continue considering “the world inside of our head” as quite narrow versus “the world of your body”, pulling heavily from Matthew Crawford, but also Iris Murdoch and Iain McGilchrist.

We are going to look a bit at the mind/body split that became the “my self is the voices in my head” problem. And hopefully cast some doubt on the intellect as a lone arbiter for decisions, and reintegrate the right brain and body. This is difficult because at our most foundational (linguistic) attitudes we consider the self as the intellect: Alan Watts says we often say “I have a body” when we ought to say “I am a body.”

We tend to think the “I”, or “me”, is somehow located in the head: a “little man or woman or homunculus or demon” is watching out of our eyes and giving orders. The body is an extension that reports to and enacts the brain’s commands at will: a type of machine that is controlled from on high. Yet, today, we can contradict this saying that ‘somehow’ the body constitutes the self, and in many ways is more reliable than the little man/woman/demon between our ears who pretends to be in control.

Matthew Crawford has shown us that living out of our heads, the ole Descartes dictum “I think therefore I am,” privileges the little man between our ears, who produces mental constructs that we start to identify with. This creates personal identities but is layered on top of deep subliminal cultural ideologies as well. Crawford shows us that our concepts, our mental models, morph easily and allow us to be manipulated. Especially through cultural indoctrination and advertising. (Step 53, Step 54)

The problem is “inside of our heads” is the same place we go to do logic-y and math-y things, so going there for answers feels like rationality… it feels like we are making or finding the truth.

A caveat: we need more rationality in a lot of areas, and overall it is fantastic (I am pro-rationality), but being truly rational is also realizing we are not always rational. We tend to cloak our non-rationality as rational (and over-indexing on logic), which leads to its own brutally reductive and efficient characteristics that (in many ways) are detrimental to humans. When I talk about “rationality or logic,” I am mostly referring to the cultural tendency to champion what Allan Watts calls the Cartesian net. This is a way of thinking where we throw a net or grid over the world, dividing it up so we can quantify, measure, and abstract the messy reality we encounter. And we do this internally to ourselves to borrow the gravitas, solidity, and cache of seemingly infallible objective truthiness of logic and math and science.

“Truth was never high on the agenda for humans.”

Yuval Noah Harari

Step 56: Embodied Perception

Part 1: How we got here

The strength of humans may be our ability to communicate and share knowledge, and the biggest illness we may have is getting locked inside our own thought processes. “I think therefore I am” leaves us alone, thinking, which is how we end up with crazy people. Yet, somewhere along the way objective rationality won and we split the human into parts, categorically speaking, not literally.

One split was the rational self and the will (or moral drive).

Here’s how it worked: you observed facts (a banana peel on the street), bring the data into yourself, make a determination (if I step on it I will slip), and then act (avoid the banana peel or pick it up so no one else slips on it). The action, observable to all, was your morality on display. (what kind of person are you, you selfish peel dodger?)

Notice, nothing of the body in here, except to be observed enacting your virtues? The body is, if anything, not rational and historically maybe even evil, or at least lustful. (And who wouldn’t be with all those banana peels laying around?)

But more importantly for today: Notice how this determination of “who you are” parallels a type of scientific method: first, we collect data, then develop a theory, and finally test it with observable reaction.

“Philosophy in the past has played the game of science partly because it thought it was science.”

Iris Murdoch

She said this back in the 60’s and pointed out that philosophy and psychoanalysis are not science, they are broader and about human nature, but they tend to borrow from science some of the security of logic. But, Murdoch says philosophy and psychoanalysis cannot preclude the “inner self” or morality: We are born humans long before we become logical scientists.

Step 56: Embodied Perception

 Part 2: Problem 1

In Step 54 we discussed that through fMRI scans scientists can tell that when we “pause to deliberate” before making a decision our brain is only producing electrical chatter: not actual thought. This points to the notion that the decision is made either before we even began deliberation or made in some way not related to the brain. This is either scary or free-ing, but the implications are profound.

Fascinatingly enough, in the philosophies of existentialism and surrealism, both acknowledge that when we’re making difficult decisions there seems to be a “void” at the moment of choice, an “emptiness” when it is time to make the decision. Existentialists claim that “emptiness” is a sign of freedom to make a choice, while surrealists say that emptiness means there are no reasons, it is all chance.

Iris Murdochsays when we have to make a difficult decision mostly we are enacting the behavior of thinking. We have learned to pause, stroke our beards, squint our eyes, and perhaps look upward with an out-of-focus gaze. We adopt the posture of deliberation, learned by watching others pretend to think.

Murdoch says the “deciding” was already done previously: day by day in a piecemeal fashion we assemble who we are and how we will react through little habits and interactions.

She says you are “free” – you have freedom- in the small seemingly inconsequential actions of your daily life. But when the big moral choice comes and you enter this strange state of “emptiness”… it seems like your “will” moves of its own accord.

Problem 1 is that under stress, big decisions made at the moment, do not really look to rationality: It just happens. The right brain is nowhere to be found.

 Part 2: Problem 2

Iain McGilchrist wrote an amazingly thick book that I purchased and have not yet read called “The Master and the Emissary“. But, I did listen to some podcasts where he talked about the left-brain right-brain split.

But, as a caveat, Robert Sapolsky, who wrote the book “Behave,” says the left/right thing is overplayed.

The Right-brain is the “master” who let his “emissary,” the Left-brain, do the talking. Now the ‘rational’ LEFT brain begins to think it is in charge. so it talks all the time, and won’t listen to the Right brain. Imagine a pompous King Author shooing off Merlin because he’s in the middle of a real knee-slapper.

“not now Merlin… and that’s when he stepped on teh banana peel! haha”

Now, the Left side of the brain (which controls the right side of the body) handles math, facts, sequence, logic, and articulates language, even though the right also understands language. The Right side of the brain handles feelings, intuition, and holistic thinking, often seen as creative.

How do we know this? There have been experiments, conducted around 1960 by Roger Sperry with humans who had their corpus callosum cut to prevent epileptic seizures. (The Corpus Callosum is the bundle of nerves that connect the Left and Right hemispheres.)

For instance, if the Left hand (which is controlled by the Right-brain with feelings and imagination and holistic thinking) is put into a box and the person is told to grab an object. Let’s say the left hand (controlled by the right brain) grabs a hammer… when asked what the Left Hand is holding, the person will say something, like “a banana”… this is the Left side of the brain talking. It controls the speech centers. The left brain pretends to know, to be in control… so it lies.

To make this even stranger, the Left hand, with the “hammer” will reach over and start trying to help, to show the other side (show the Left side of the brain) it is holding a banana. But the Left side of the brain will deny its help and continue lying, proclaiming it has been deceived.

“Merlin tricked me again!”

Problem 2: The left side of your brain lies. This is the logic side, which coincidentally is also the self-deception and confabulation part of the brain.

Culturally, through science and philosophy, we have given control to a liar, who is great with focus, logic, and math, but maybe we should restrict his “authority” a little and put some checks and balances in place.

Step 56: Embodied Perception

 Part 3: Embodied Perception

Embodied knowledge: the body has its own knowledge that is quicker, and more embedded than rationality.

Embodied perception: the body collecting sensory data from your environment by engaging with it, moving through it.

Have you ever moved before you knew something was wrong? Did you act without thought? Perhaps you just “felt” something that later turned out to be wise, but at the time you weren’t thinking at all? This can be considered embodied perception. Your body’s autonomic systems, your automatic nervous systems, pick up on cues before your rational mind can process them, and you react without the intervention or judgment of your brain.

How far does this perception extend?Matthew Crawford discusses how our brain ceases to differentiate between a tool and our hand, the tool merely becomes an extension of our perception, an extension of our hand. Overtime, through familiarity, our perceptual range can extend, and our environmental range expands to new sensitivities. A primary point Crawford makes is that:

“Perceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. “

Matthew Crawford

This counters the assumption that the mind interprets perception: the body does it through action and movement, which means we perceive THROUGH the body, and it is filtering knowledge.

About a year ago I listened to The Philosopher’s Zone podcast on “Neurophenomenology and Sensemaking”. We aren’t going to cover all of that, but in our techno-rationalized world, we tend to look for the one bolt that caused the problem: it is a reductive and isolationist way of thinking that fails to account for systemic variables and multiple cascading failures and reactions.

But your body is built for holistic environmental sensemaking and holds knowledge that often supersedes what your logical brain can tell you. Speaking of Neurophenomenology, Brad Roberts quotes a guy named Claxton, who talks of

“the human body as a massive, seething streaming collection of interconnected communicating systems, that binds the muscles, the stomach, the heart, the sensors in the brain so tightly together that no part especially the brain, can be seen as functionally separate from or senior to any other part.”

Claxton

One of the examples given by Roberts, who has written his PhD thesis on sense making, is the Piper Alpha Oil Rig explosion where 167 people died, and 62 survived. Those who survived reacted to the felt heat and flames and jumped in the ocean, those who perished were insulated from the heat and waited for rescue. Those who perished had an impoverished perception of the environment: their physical sense of direct data was limited.

Another example is Cpt Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who saved all those people by crash landing in the Hudson River, was reacting at the moment to an emerging situation, but after years of flying and practicing belly landings he knew the correct glide path: he had already mastered the technical proficiency which allowed him to react instinctually.

This is interesting because it “sounds” like rational thinking in hindsight: I have the skills and knowledge, I recognize the situation, make a judgment, and react. YET… Crawford says

at High speeds judgment is not the right word because reaction is too fast, cognitive activity is costly and takes time ~ you literally feel the situation to process the data.

To examine how the body computes versus intellectual computation Crawford discusses robot design.

A robot has to interact with its environment. The old-fashioned way to do this was to compute all the variables before and during and after movement… it is grossly inefficient, all that computation. And as we know from behavioral economics and evolutionary science, thinking takes a lot of energy and we were designed to run in passive mode as much as possible. Robot Designers are now following an evolutionary (morphological) model. They find that the right design imparts feedback more efficiently than computation.

for instance, With a bit of gravity on a downhill slope, a human can walk with virtually zero energy. Each step imparts more information through the movement: it tracks incline through increased or decreased gait, terrain through resistance, etc… Apply this evolutionary design to a robot and the mechanics impart information at low energy and reduced computation.

To further underline the importance of locomotion as a means of cogitating or perceiving, Crawford says sight and movement are connected. He has cited some developmental examples with kittens on a merry-go-round. The brunt of it is: We perceive three-dimensionally through movement. Our awareness and cognition are through mapping the environment, gauging what the environment provides, and from there we are afforded possibilities.

“When we perceive, we perceive in an idiom of possibilities for movement.”

Alva Noe

So, when your motorcycle slips on that ever-present banana peel, you are gyroscopically correcting: it is almost as if the bike is your body. As you move through your environment, perceiving possibilities, you realize you can’t correct the left without hitting oncoming traffic, and your body accounts for this through environmental awareness, without spending time rationally considering it. All of this is to save the ole noggin, which was dumb enough to get onto a motorcycle.

Or, on a larger scale, taking into account the possibilities our environment affords, such as knowing the Hudson river is up ahead and being familiar enough with the plane to do a belly landing, allows Cpt Sully Sullenberger to save 155 people.

Step 56: Embodied Perception

 Part 4: Recap

We are casting into doubt the over-reliance on internal logic. Because it is quite messy the way emotions and instinctual behaviors interact with your brain: it’s not purely rational.

Once again, we are a seething communication system. So tightly bound, the body and brain are really inseparable. Yet, of course, we keep trying to separate them to make sense of them. Sure, your “I” or identity, your “you”, might be influenced by reason. But at that vital moment, your logical rationality may either choose to take a backseat (disappear and shut up), or when it’s really confused and scared, it might just start lying.

We know that philosophy is often pretended to be logical and scientific, and it attempts to ascribe these features to us. And of course, we also like to appeal to rationality as a guide so we are not contradictory or culturally estranged. But maybe we aren’t actually being rational when we attempt rationality.

Our societal championing of logic has led us into these cul de sacs of harm. We’re often plagued with bureaucratic inefficiency, the reduction of people into functions, or tools that are abused. Our behavioral economic knowledge is often used for propaganda and manipulation. And of course, if we’re left alone in our heads, constructing stories, we become fragile, and racked with insecurity.

We can say that the fault stems from “logic” tainted with capitalism or human urges: we just need more logic to fix it. Thankfully, that is slowly happening, but it is an uphill battle because we have made a society based on efficiency and utility. And there’s very little incentive to study things that cannot be measured and monetized and made useful. Things like movement without action, deliberation without decision, morality and virtue that isn’t for sale.

Fortunately, science has progressed and with more sensitive instruments, scientists and neuro-physicists are now investigating these discarded phenomena, such as “the instinct that saves lives” or the “moment of choice.” This draws them back from this edge, this kind of superstitious hocus-pocus area into more valid concepts.

However, the research shows that there really isn’t anything that looks like thought on fMRI machines whenever we’re deliberating a big decision, which leads us to reconsider what’s happening at the “moment of choice.”

Some options:

1. You can declare your will acted of its own accord. This implies that the real you is your unthinking “will” -your inner urges- and it’s enacting your morality or values. But it’s definitely not beholden to reason, because your reason just disappeared during the moment of choice. So this means the real you is irrational.

2. Through embodied cognition, your body made the decision. And we can call this an instinct. Once again, this is kind of irrational from a classical understanding of reason, or logic.

3. You might take this left brain, right brain discussion, and consider a different conclusion: That a more holistic nonlanguage, part of you is weighing in. The Master might actually be taking over from the Emissary.

It’s not that this part cannot be fooled or be wrong. It is, after all, evolutionarily adapted to maybe a savannah and not really a dense urban population where there’s a lot of driving while on cell phones. And of course, they didn’t have a whole lot of banana peels on sidewalks back then.

But perhaps we have let the little demon between our ears maybe he’s been doing too much driving. Perhaps we have not actually set ourselves up for mastery and flow, which is bodily and right brain. Let’s consider integrating some other forms of knowledge: use your embodied perception, use your whole self. Sure, keep your reason but supplement it with the rest of your being, expand your cognition through your body, and get to know the right brain version of yourself.

This may actually end up expanding who you are and how you relate to the world. And at the same time, it might ground you in a richer reality than your illusory mental models can ever devise.

(This is part four of several episodes on “The World Beyond Your Head”)

Rutger Bregman’s book, Utopia for Realists, maps out how Universal Basic Income was nearly real in the 70’s. Coupled with increasing automation (robot uprising) and prospects of joblessness (along with a growing confusion of what is “work” without “labor”) we should also consider the role of humans in a world of plenty.

Providing proof for that disarms our culturally conditioned biases, the text allows us to dream about ways to reverse the increasing inequality, pain of industrial age factory mindsets, and reminds us that not only is a utopic dream worth pursuing, but it might be the only way to save ourselves from the systemic psychopathologies of capitalisms.

INTRO

Ryder goes on a little rant about Christian values and “Make America Great Again.” His confusion is when Christianity is conflated with the Republican Party, causing a reversal into wealth and away from aiding the less fortunate. Ryder discusses them a values “captured by an apparatus” that puts them to an alternate use, an old historical trick that is 180 degree reversal from America in the 1970’s, in which we nearly had Minicome.

And of course, the nostalgic right’s turn to the 50’s and 60’s often conveniently forgets to include that the highest wealth taxes were also during that period: less social and economic inequality that creates the utopia comes from minimizing economic inequality.

Part 1: 15 hour work week

In 1930’s Henry Ford reduced his employees work hours from 60 to 40 per week. He found them to be happier and more productive, not less.  In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we’d all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. With smart phones, there are studies showing people work an additional 8 to 11 hours a week, 6 or 7 days per week.

“Yet nowadays are biggest challenges are not Leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty.”

Rutger Bregman

First off, let’s talk about Robots and automation: Roughly half, 47% of American Jobs and 54% of European jobs, are at risk of being automated. 

So, in a society reliant on employment, we have developed technology to unemploy people.

it will take a smaller and smaller number of elites to profitably and efficiently run society.

David Ricardo

So, we educate all these people so they can get jobs, then there are no jobs to get, because we are so smart we have developed technology to displace them. It is more than farming, it is also creative endeavors such as journalism.

1- what are we going to do with the 50% of the population that becomes unemployed?

This reminds me of the Milton Freidman story, where when touring China they employed people to build dams, not by using tractors (which they had), but by having people manually excavate with shovels.

If it’s jobs you want to create, then take away their shovels and give them spoons!

Milton Freidman

2- what does it mean to “work?”

What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? 42

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Douglas Adams

We should de-couple labor from work, and focus on productivity (and cognitive work) now that robots can do labor and “brain-deadening work.”

In a survey, ½ of the professionals say their job has no “meaning or significance.” While only 13% of people in 142 countries like their job, but perhaps we don’t care about what people “like.” It’s work. 

Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”

Wesley, Princess Bride

However, if you care about efficiency and productivity more than happy employees: then what about the 37% of people polled say their job shouldn’t even exist. So, we have unhappy people working pointless jobs, or jobs they despise, for what? To survive? or the opposite?  

working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.

Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Part 2

All money is a matter of belief.

Adam Smith

TIME IS MONEY. Well, no, it’s not. Time is time/Space, while money is an abstraction that stands in place of promises. 

Time was money when it was based on factory labor, hand labor, and now on robot labor, but it is the best metric for cognitive, creative human labor. So, realistically, how long can your do “creative labor?”

“Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day.”

Bregman is asked, “if we worked less, what would it solve?” He reverses that to ask: “Well, what wouldn’t it solve? “

Bregman has examples of how it would solve stress, climate change by cutting pollution in half, accidents that lead to death or financial disaster, unemployment through work-sharing, emancipation of women and recalibration of men through paternity leave, an aging population could work again without the 40 hour drudgery, and economic equality since the rich tend to work more since their time is “more expensive.”

In the 1800’s the wealthy worked less, now they work more as a status symbol_._ Work is entangled with hobby and identity. Even your leisure time is curated as work: Netflix time is now a type of cultural, social work, carefully curated and indulged to enable future conversations.

There is a false narrative at play, or as Friederich Engels might say, “false consciousness” that traps the “proletariat.” For Engels, the working class was trapped in religion and nationalism, which kept them from seeing their value. Except now, the people at the top have had their Vision clouded: their consciousness is trapped by all the zeros on your paychecks. You feel you must be producing something of Great Value because you earn so much, right?

For instance, let’s look at managers, what do they produce?

I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people!

We need to manage ATTENTION, not hours. 

If your boss says, “instead of 8 hours a day, if you complete your tasks in 4, and get everything done by Thursday, I will give you Friday off.” That’s a 16-hr work week, nearly our 15 hour work week. Would you, instead of socializing and wasting time on slack or email chats, would you knock out the vital tasks through optimal focus, peak attention, and flow state?

Flow state is about 500 times more productive than normal state, but at max can only be maintained for about 5 hours. In experiments, an office reduced the work day to 9-3, implemented flow state practices, and saw no decrease in productivity.

However, people liked to break the day up a bit more. Darwin spent two 90 min periods in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. Hunter/gatherer research suggests a 3-5 hour work day as well. So, really, this is not revolutionary: we are advocating a return to our biological norm. 

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”

Naval Rivikant

It takes leisure, relaxation, and entering certain states to be highly functioning. This optimized self breaks apart the “time = output, or “time=money,” notion of continually staying busy.

Can’t flow? how about the Pomodoro technique? The short breaks help you concentrate better and fight cognitive boredom, which also reduces errors and mistakes. It has been proven to cut a 40 hour work load into about 16 hours.

The answer is not more hours, it’s less bullshit.”

Jason Fried

However, this kind of self-optimization towards productivity is a red-herring, a misplaced focus: arguments can be made that we have enough global resources and productivity to take care of everyone… and that the need to self-optimize just internalizes the factory practices of Taylorism. We have become the factory, going to work within ourselves, become the mental equivalent of Charlie Chaplin riveting faster and faster, lest the machine overtake us. 

If we extend Naval’s knowledge worker as athlete metaphor: only a few elite athletes ever make it to pro status. Most of us will not be knowledge workers in the upcoming utopia. We will not be the Lebron James or Stephen Hawkings, we will be something else.   

Value ends above means, and prefer the good to the useful.”

John Maynard Keynes

Part 3: Be realistic, demand the impossible!

This is not really about the 15 hour work week. It is about the illusion of scarcity we live under and have internalized, it is about the imbalances capitalism in our democracy has amplified, generating social inequities that demand revolution.  Throughout Bregman’s book he takes the Keynesian notion of wealth redistribution, mostly by taxation on financial transactions (like wall street speculation) and enforcing a progressive tax on the wealthy. These would be used to eradicate poverty, provide the stability of UBI, and open up our borders.  

We have to save capitalism from the capitalists.

Thomas Piketty

For an example, last podcast I mentioned Apple and Tax havens sheltering something like $15 billion, and overall not paying something like $26 Billion. 

This week, ProPublica scrutinized IRS data and tax returns, focusing on the 25 richest people. 

• In 2018 they were worth $1.1 trillion.
• How many average wage earners does it take to match that $1 Trillion? 14.3 Million ordinary American workers.
• How much did the top 25 pay on their $1 Trillion in wealth? $1.9 billion. Or .2 %
• How much did those 14.3 Million workers pay on their $1 trillion? $143 billion. Or 14.3%

The rich use their wealth to shelter their wealth… legally. Our government set this up for them, and continues to allow it. These 25 people, or almost anyone in the 1%, should pay 37%. Which, by the way, is $370 billion: enough to eradicate poverty twice over at Bregman’s $175 Billion estimate.

Taxes are a kind of collective sacrifice. No one loves giving their hard-earned money to the government. But the system works only as long as it’s perceived to be fair.”

Probulica

Our state, enmeshed with capitalist values, seems more and more distant, closer and closer to collapse through injustice, inequity, and value vs. fact confusion. The wealthy tend to “pass on the costs to the consumer” or get bailed out (2008 recession) or can opt-out of pain in luxury (COVID Pandemic).

People are now concerned with no one wanting to work, because the unemployment checks are “too big.” Have we just sustained an artificial market on wage oppression and enabled over-saturated markets for so long we think it is normal for people with a full time job to live in poverty? Even Henry Ford paid his employees more and gave them more leisure time, because how else were they going to buy and enjoy his cars? 

Paying people more also equals more spending, despite some costs rising, but perhaps what really bothers us is when we have to look up from our cheap goods and realize there is a person suffering on the other end. Our commodities and services are linked to people, money is just the abstraction that gets between us, that blinds us. 

Politics is the art of the possible.”

Otto Von Bismark

 To go from ideal to real is the path of politics, but Bregman clarifies, and this goes back to the intro, we need a politics not of RULES, but of REVOLUTION.

Not about the art of the possible, but about making the impossible inevitable.

Rutger Bregman

It is not about reaffirming the status quo, but making todays unrealistic ideas tomorrow’s taken for granted and causally assumed rights. 

For example: Privacy is a fairly new idea, maybe 150 years old, and yet, we now think of it as an inalienable right. Let’s do the same with human welfare and thriving. Let’s make taking care of people tomorrow’s basic common sense.

Ryder discusses some of his recent paintings of pliers and snips, and all these dangerous, specialized tools as a simplistic metaphor for how we access and handle the world.

Tools are force multipliers, and when force is applied for personal reasons to an ideology (be it free-market economics or a notion of justice) it can be destructive to more than the individual, just like using a hammer because you don’t know what to say.

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-2-pliers/

0:41 Artists who paint and use tools in their work

1:04 "to throw a wrench in it" metaphorically speaking

1:19 Tools are force multipliers, to shape the world around you.

2:27 Access to knowledge to prevent damaging the world: sandboxing things

3:05 Wielding ideology (tools) as weapons for "destruction" rather than "construction." 

Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud, offers a way to live without relying on our weakness, trauma, and our passive guilt tripping of others to get our way. In short, how to be a good person. 

It reveals that most of us are in the midst of using our pain, inflicting and manipulating others, and just generally not doing the DIY work on ourselves to get past our past. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-5-inferiority/

Part 1

 Is the culture of new capitalism, and our capitalist economy creating a New Politics?

Yes, of course. Increasingly, there is a divide between the wealthy workers who are, as Robert Reich calls them, the SKILLS ELITE and the stagnant middle class. These achievers, these skills elite, the "symbolic analysts" in the new institutional model are not provided with a life-narrative or promise of security in the public realm.

As mentioned in the last episode, a successful capitalist technocracy will need fewer elites, yet as they take home the dragon's share of wealth, without security or a life-narrative, they hoard it, making the inequality visible: it produces ressentiment.

Under this deep rage, Sennett says, religion and patriotism become weaponized tools of revenge. The material stress of inequality pushes those without into seeking symbolic power.

THE WALMART EFFECT

In 2004 WALMART employed 1.4 million workers, generating 2% of US GDP. 

Everything has been put under one roof, there is a lot of it, and it is cheap and low quality. The salesman, the mediator, has been removed. The consumer is "empowered" to rely on their ability to suss out truth from the globally manufactured marketing packages. Due to it's planned obsolescence, we also make temporary decisions, throwing away the products and moving on.

So, this is perhaps a bit flippant and simple, but as Sennett says,

just as advertising seldom makes things difficult for the customer so the politician makes him or herself easy to buy.”

And yes, while Walmart has certainly oppressed it’s workers, and destroyed small businesses, nothing is entirely that simple:

“Only a snob could look down on cheap products; should we then look down on “cheap” Politics? 
The political version of the Megastore could repress local democracy but enable, as advertising does, individual fantasy; erode the content and substance of politics but stimulate the imagination for change.” 

Sennett

VOTING

Now, back to putting everything under one roof at Walmart, a classic idea from the Athenians: separate your economics from your politics. Plato says that economics operates on need and greed, while politics should operate on justice and right.

Yet, we now conflate the two. And as Marx and Engels discuss, as the consumer becomes distanced from the means of production, we lose the knowledge and life experience to make informed decisions. All that is left is to rely on the packaging.

DESIRE

https://youtu.be/DiTy5-RC1-4

“A desire is never simply a desire for a certain thing, it is always also a desire for desire itself… The ultimate melancholic experience is loss of desire itself.”

Slavoj Zizek

To be fulfilled is the saddest world we could imagine. 

Marx, Lukac’s and Balzac talked about desire: How capitalism would produce an increase in desire. More cheap stuff, more desire. Yet, this does not explain the subsequent withering of pleasure in possession.

One claim is “marketing” did this to us, molding our desires, and another claim is manufacturing and “planned obsolescence” did this to us. There has been a break in how we relate to commodities: all objects are disposable, newer is better, we seek novelty beyond functionality. 

And none of this is to imply we can or should return to the old way of doing things, the cat is out of the bag so to speak with desire unleashed: it is merely a way to see that appearances, desire, and the “symbolic” function at a higher level than utility or need. 

BRANDING 

Sennett points out a distinction: branding is pretty straightforward and attempts to make something seem distinct. Yet most of the time the product is blandly identical to other products, and to disguise the homogeneity, you must make an artificial distinction. 

Sennett says manufactures call this “gold plating”: the small difference and the brand must seem to the consumer to be more than the thing itself. 

So a car or computer may share 90% of the industrial DNA with another car, but sell for a 100% price difference… this is, of course, manufactured value through “gold-plated” differences.

Sennett brings up that The Craftsman or engineer may look at this, and not be swayed by the gold-plating realizing the utility value, “the thing does what the thing should do” value, versus the inflated prestige value. They may know the boring backstory.

Yet, this is more about how we consume in a world of global capitalism: with excess, marketing, and decreasing pleasure in fulfilling desire.

Guy Debord brings up that tourists travel from city to city, but visit the same gift shops buying the same crap, and the important stimulation for them is not the items bought, but the process of moving, of moving on. This is the planned obsolescence of experience: to be consuming them and getting new experience is the desire. The important thing is the spectacle, to shift your desire is to change, and feel yourself shifting. We are the gold-plating in this scenario. We step in, and become the small difference that we overvalue, and in this way, our commodity fetishism is self-consumptive: we are autocannibalists abandoning everything.

Yet, what Sennett brings up several times is the invitation to imagination that advertising promotes in us. And to sneer at someone imagining a better future, a new politics, and a shared fantasy for change would be callous indeed.

CITIZEN CONSUMER

“Today the consuming passion has a dramatic power: possessive use is less arousing to the spectator-consumer than to the desire for things he does not yet have; the dramatization of potential leads the spectator-consumer to desire things he cannot fully use.”

“Politics is equally theatrical, and Progressive politics in particular requires a certain kind of rhetoric. It deploys a willing suspension of disbelief of citizens and their own accumulated experience.”

So, stick with me on this one: The consumer-spectator-citizen now actively enters their own passivity. 

To believe in hope and change, you have to imagine a future, suspend belief momentarily of your ‘accumulated life experiences’... you have to want a thing you don’t have.

The illusions we are fed as consumers, the “dramatized potential we can’t even use,” allows us to imagine the potency will be conferred upon us. These illusions are exhausting, and paradoxical, often undercut by our lived experience, which drains us of our progressive hope and our stamina for change.

Much like the cars, maybe the Chevy or Ford debate, our political platforms resemble products. The political parties sound very different, but it is all gold-plating, it is all user friendly, and there is always a new product, an upgrade for sale: once politicians are in office they perform almost identically… Righty Reagan for instance, ran up Keynesian deficits while expanding bureaucracy and befriending the soviets, while Lefty Bill Clinton, grew businesses but not the minimum wage, and like Obama continued military actions. Right, Left, Ford, Chevy. The difference is superficial. It is consensus politics. 

No one seems to care about a politicians record while in office: that is too boring. Instead let’s focus on their hair, their tastes and preferences… let's focus in the glittering package, pay no attention to the obfuscated history.

This gold-plating tendency is what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences" in which we lose the realistic value, the purpose, of what’s at stake. And it opens the door to preference judgement extending into prejudice. 

And in so doing, in believing the gold plating, we divorce Power from responsibility.
Charisma and packaging don’t take responsibility, they don’t work for you: they manipulate you. 

Sennett says we need a community beyond superficial human connections to reassert mental and emotional anchors. We don’t want to become ghosts, or zombies, or hitmen… we need anchors to remain human.

We need a culture that re-asses if power, privilege, and work are worthwhile. And a culture that provides us with a narrative of forward movement beyond the dehumanizing effects of the Culture of the New Capitalism. 

PART 1: the path for the 2 to become 1

the 2 is 1, linked through exclusion

in the last season of “peaky blinders” Tommy Shelby is a socialist forced into plotting with the fascists… In one scene he says people think of opposing sides as two end-points as if they are on separate tracks. 

But Tommy says he finds it to be a circle, where the two sides start diverging. As they escalate and become more extreme, separating distance, they begin to arch back toward each other, sweeping around the central axis, as if in an orbit. 

As they extend further they gravitate back to a shared commonality: the goal of revolution and change unites them, making them uneasy allies. 

It is as if, after fighting for so long the only people you understand or respect are the other extremists. One way to think about it is that you “bind yourself” to your opposition as tightly as your cause… In the process of rejection, you tie yourself to that thing. 

As Anthony DeMello says, the priests who come to talk to him can only talk about what they have given up: sex. And the prostitutes that talk to him only speak of God. So, whatever you forego is what you bind yourself to. Your choices of exclusion, the distance you feel from the thing, relate you even more closely to it. 

Today, if we look at the most extreme fringe on each side of the political spectrum, let’s take the ultra-woke and the anti-woke, they appear to want opposite outcomes, yet on closer inspection, perhaps they are fighting for the same thing: 

According to David French, they both want an end to liberalism and pluralism. Which means they need dominance over the center. Not only do they share a battlefield, but the battle is to dictate behavioral norms.

Upon closer inspection, we can see that both extremes stem from a contradictory ideology of the individual’s rights. “I want this, or this is my right,” to which the other side responds, “no, that infringes on my rights.” To fight for your rights, you dictate the rights of others. French says both sides have legitimate grievances against the other, which they are unwilling to forego or forgive. 

And in this way, in this very basic dialectic, by mapping out the antagonism and tactics, and considering the meta-motivation, the two begin to appear as one bound together in a deadlocked dance: hurt and enraged opposites react to the moves and cues of the other, mimicry to maintain a stalemate, leading not to victory but to a perpetual divisive communion. 

PART 2: The circle into the mobius strip 

3 antagonistic motions: convergance, rotation, flipping sides

What we have looked at is a stalemate, where an impasse determines opposition or sets up and compounds antagonisms. Let’s return to thinking about this dynamic in terms of geometry, or shapes: 

To start, let’s look at the circle of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail. The snake’s movement goes in one direction, with the swallowing creating an eternal movement. This is like an eternal cycle or wheel of time. 

But we have talked of oppositional sides, so the one point of intersection where the mouth gulps the tail only represents one point… we need another snake. We need the danger doubled to represent two antagonists. 

Tommy Shelby, once again from Peaky Blinders, suggests the opposing points move in opposite directions, starting in the south, branching apart from each other, only for their goals to align at the North pole despite their mutual disgust. 

But, that is not our deadlocked dance… that is relatively easy 2 becomes 1.

How about if our savvy antagonists are both reacting to each other, rotating clockwise, always maintaining distance? In this movement, a type of reactivity maintains their separation and thus their identity: they can never bridge their difference because there is no intersection. 

What if each argument can be flipped so it becomes its mirror opposite? Not jumping across the circle, but somehow the point itself inverts to its opposite?  Can we use the circle, the topology of the argument, the battlefield if you will, to alter the antagonists? What if we take our two-dimensional repetitive, boring, deadlock dance on the circular path, and by twisting the path we flip each side into its opposite? 

The [[The Möbius Strip]] does this: It is a mathematical object, a one-sided surface that twists in space, a non-orientable topology. If you have ever looked at [[M.C. Escher]]’s art, you have likely seen one. 

The most popular image is a bunch of ants on what looks like a 3D infinity sign, some are walking clockwise yet not never encountering the ants walking counterclockwise even though it seems like they should. 

What is unique is that in a purely flat 2D realm an object traveling on the outside of a Mobius Strip will move through this mathematical twist appearing on the inside: it will be flipped to become a mirror of itself. If it is right-handed, all of a sudden it will become left-handed. Right becomes left. 

And even in a 3D realm, the points would move from interior to exterior, creating dynamism instead of a boring, repetitive state. 

To bring this into context, Remember Herbert Marcuse’s the one-dimensional man? This person is caught up in a totalizing system that reduces them, and any real rebellion or complexity is co-opted back into the system until the person has no substance left. They are essentially flattened, even their rebellions are reduced to slogans turned into cheap t-shirts or bumper stickers. 

In consideration of this, the points of antagonism in our society are likely reduced as well, making them easier to flip. 

In the last episode, step 64, Piccone would say they are “artificial negativity,” not real, and only staged simulations. As well, Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” points out the contradiction in forcing people to be tolerant. When the good is bad and the rebellion strengthens the hegemony, what do we do? 

Well, let’s talk about these opposites, these antagonistic extremes that fundamentally can never agree… Individually, they are trying desperately to manifest their goals, to fully realize themselves. Just as you and I are. (or I assume we are.) On their path, they sweep outward to the furthermost point of differentiation to break free.  

But, unfortunately, they are ultimately incapable of fully becoming. 

Don’t worry, this isn’t as sad as it seems: nothing can ever fully be itself. When you consider it, as many philosophers have, this transcendent self fully becoming has lots of problems before we even get into the foibles of subjectivity. First, everything is made up of subsets, and subparts with their own wills and prerogatives, so no definition could ever be complete. That is, no definition of fullness could take into account the sum of the parts to explain the complete self. (Lacan would even say that to be whole, you must include the “exception to the rule,” otherwise, it is not a complete definition, it is non-total, or non-all encompassing. )

There is another reason no one can ever fully become: Zizek says everything has within it a fundamental failure that denies the harmonious nature of its parts. It’s not only the broader system thwarting you while comprising you, but more importantly, your constitutive parts have been created to be in a fundamental contradictory deadlock. 

Take as a non-human example the state, as in the nation-state: it functions and still exists despite its deadlock… in fact, it seems to only exist because of the inherent contradictions in itself combat itself. Its becoming is precisely its embrace of its contradictions, its incompleteness: its totality is always caveated, contingent, and deferred, and yet always an immanent process of becoming without ever reaching it. Simply because it cannot be fully itself is not a reason to scrap it, we would never want it to become fully itself: total state domination, which is total stagnation. 

So, back to it: we have a Mobius strip, with two points racing around, reaching for extremes of difference, yet inevitably pulled back to the center, flipping over, changing polarity, and collapsing into each other: they fail to achieve their full becoming because of an inherent contradictory failure.

We can say the path they are on is made to thwart them, that is the path of the Mobius Strip where the oppositions cross without ever coming into contact.

Zizek calls this a crack, gap, or void because it is an insurmountable, unbridgeable opposition within us, and within the universe, that does not let us cross the horizon into transcendence. But he says this constitutive gap motivates our motion. 

That’s right, our failure to become -our inherent flaw- drives us. 

PART 3: Going Down to Get Through 

mining the ground, going through, donuts

With these Hegelian antagonisms or even Kantian antinomies, we are mapping the oppositions and the shape of their movement. 

This is brutally simplified, but here we go: For Kant, the idea was to point out how we could never perceive the really real world, the thing-in-itself, as it really was. But the goal for Hegel is to recognize these seemingly insurmountable polarities and in so doing sublate them to ascend up a spiral staircase of overcoming. 

This two-sided oppositional struggle is somehow considered ONE thing, one problem or category, to be overcome. 

But Zizek says not to think of this challenge as a “smooth becoming,” not as dialectics that you overcome, but rather we should think of them as “blocks and stoppages” that keep you from fully becoming. It is a never-ending battle, finding the two and sublating them to one, and in doing this repeatedly you may feel despair. A sort of [[sysiphean]] exhaustion. 

Last episode I brought up that if Hegel used donuts as a metaphor more people would consume his philosophy, so maybe it’s my turn to take us back to donuts, but this time specifically the donut hole: this is the void through which we must pass… enough of this circular orbiting: let’s go through.  

What if, instead of Overcoming, which is pictured as upward motion tackling bigger and bigger antinomies, this kind of existential Donkey Kong where the levels get harder and harder, what if we consider becoming as mining? More like Dig-Dug with a pinch of Fight Club. 

This would be a more [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] downgoing. But, sure, we can throw in Hegel’s notion of the ground as well, it’s just going beyond the ground. In our down-going we encounter the ground, where each blockage stops us, requiring us to chip away. 

Once the two sides are far enough apart we have created new unity, a hole or void, that is an absence ringed by a circle. 

Perhaps we have allowed the problem to expand. Given what we know of antinomies, they are fighting to stay apart, to differentiate each other, and are spending vast amounts of energy in this attempt… as they widen from each other, the sides of our hole will expand, opening up. 

We know that gravity or entropy will inevitably lead to the circle collapsing because nature abhors a vacuum or void, but for the moment, the energies of the extremes have opened a way through. And as we go down, we move from shallow to deep, further isolating ourselves in the darkness of the unknown. 

This would take bravery, not the group think conformity of choosing sides; this expansion into the beyond breaks foundational blockages, it goes through the metaphysical ground, like a prison break.

PART 4: The Knot (tying it up, 2 is not 2, failure as the path)

José Ortega y Gasset and Heidegger sort of say, this is life: it is not actually a binary, and your battle of contradictions is to battle the artificial binary, the game. 

To do this is to live, and it is a heroic undertaking. 

We are constantly enticed back into the black-and-white game, but remember, this is a process that cannot be separated from the context and circumstances you are in. 

“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.” 

José Ortega y Gasset

Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others”

Alan Watts

Now, considering this, it is not the individual, upward overcoming we should be focused on. That is just another binary. 

We have a failure within us, we are built with contradictions inherent to us: that is the exception inside us that -in a bracketed sense, sort of odd way- makes us dynamically whole and offers us the path. 

Slavoj Žižek says that failure is the path through: the uniquely human trait is not our addition of language or intelligence, but our ability to embody the very failure of the universe: we are inscribed with the impossibility of transcendence, and in embracing the failure as satisfaction we move outside or, beyond, the subject/object relation 

Zizek brings up here the example of the difference between humans and apes, where an ape is presented with an object Beyond reach we’ll give up and move on to something accessible, say a less attractive sexual partner, while I human will remain persistent and transfixed on the impossible object. 

He says this is why a person is hysterical: they pose ultimate happiness, delight, and ecstasy (jouissance) as an absolute, true goal. They make ultimate delight into unsatisfied desire. The very unsatisfaction with the goal is their joy. 

He says “such a subject is capable of relating to a term that is outside the limits of the game,” they support themself through their relationship to that which is “out-of-play”. 

By installing a point of impossibility as ultimate joy, you are hysterical, you are utterly human: our flaw is to find delight in the impossible, which is also our means to move beyond the binary oppositions that plague us. 

0:00 Intro _ the Gods of Technology (Deus ex Machina)  

3:56 Part 1: some context  _ the capitalist trap, double binds, and looking for an escape, reality vs. abstraction

11:27 Part 2: the futurists_ from industrialization to deregulation to cyberspace, 1909 manifesto, praise machines and war, but scorn for women

17:41 Part 3: the accelerationists _ the 2008 crash, bailout, failures and no foreseeable changes, humans slow down tech progress, we have lost imagination and are dying anyway

23:33 Part 4:  the death drive and the implications, breaking the machine, following capital  

29:54 Outro _ next episode on Malign Velocities by Benjamin Noys

Part 1: The Aggregation of Marginal Gains

Habits are really about identity change. Behaviour change is simply the means to get there (the feedback loop).

What are atomic habits? They are the smallest possible habits, tiny little things that you can begin doing easily for remarkable changes.

Example: The British cycling team wasn’t doing so well until their new coach, Dave Brailsford, implemented very small, incremental changes: things like trying out different tires or massage lotions to increase recovery time.

They did not see immediate results, but the gains accumulate over time. This known as the aggregation of marginal gains.

The idea here is if you only get 1% better every day in a specific task by the end of the year you are 37% better. Which is great, but the real magic comes when you multiply the effect across years.

“Small habits don’t add up. They compound.”

James Clear

Dave Brailsford and British Cycling, as of 2018, won 5 of the last 6 Tour de France events with 3 different riders, capturing dozens of gold medals, and setting many Olympic and World Records in the process. Their system works.

Note: the optimization apparently continued outside of the parameters into the gray zones… and now it’s sort of Lance Armstrong all over again.

Part 2: Slow Burn

it’s not about getting what you want, the power of habits is the change who you are. Or who you want to become.

James clear’s analogy for the challenge of change is the Ice Cube. If the Ice Cube is in a room at 23 degrees, and you heat up the room by 1°, nothing happens. This is like me being on a diet for one week. But you could heat up the room 1 degree eight or nine more times (and maybe you should consider that eight or nine years) but when it hits that magical 32° the ice begins to melt.

The lesson that Clear and other authors articulate is that it takes between 5 to 8 years to become an overnight success. And during this time, pretty much no one will see a difference, but suddenly, there will be a state change.

To describe this, he introduces The Plateau of Latent Potential & The Valley of Disappointment.

We are getting 1% better every day. We expect that arrow on the chart to keep pointing up with steady lineal progress, but Clear says that it is actually more like a plateau before we rise exponentially.

He cautions where you place your emphasis: outcome metrics will vary, but if your process is good, such as showing up every day and staying on a schedule, the results will show up. It just might take another 3 or 4 years… If my system is good.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

James Clear

Having big goals is normal… everyone has a dream, but having big passion alone will not get us there. It is the daily systems we put in place that get us there.

But to do this, we must also be aware.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

James Clear

Do you remember the story about the Elephant and the Rider? Where the rider (ego) thinks they are in control, but the unconscious is an elephant… and if it decides to walk left, we tend to pretend we (as the rider) are in control and rationalize the direction saying “yes, I always wanted to go that direction anyway.”

To change your path, you must be aware of your unconscious patterns and behaviors.

The insight here is that we tend to think our habits help us achieve a goal… but really, habits are behaviors that determine our identity.

your identity feeds your habits, and your habits feed your identity, forming a feedback loop.

So, this is not about just collecting hacks or forming odd habits: focus on the big goals, learn to embody your values.

One thing you can do when looking for the path to manifest your values is to ask yourself: what kind of person writes a book? What kind of person has success in this space? You hear that Hemmingway started writing at 5:00 AM everyday and wrote for 3 hours no matter how hungover. If you take on this habit, your identity will change: you will become a writer (but hopefully not a heavy drinker.)

One way to consider all of this is to both PUSH and PULL yourself.

Set the goal and let it PULL you forward: let that dangling carrot inspire you and drive you. Let the habits PUSH you. It may feel odd to enact behaviors (copycat or mimicry) that you do not fully comprehend at first, but sometimes merely performing the action can lead you to the insight and benefits, which over time can manifest a change in interior motivations as well.

Part 3: Habit Stack

your habits are just the automated solutions that solve the problems your brain faces regularly.

James Clear

We can hack our environmental awareness to stack things together, making a mutually reinforcing chain of behaviors, or habits.

To form a new habit, we have a cue that triggers craving, which prompts a response, and then we get our reward.

But the “cue” can be developed, we can hack it, according to Time, location, or even by a preceding event, so you can trigger cues to link or stack habits together ~ potentially driving out old bad habits and replacing them with potentially good habits.

Simple Habit Stack: Every time you close your laptop, do 10 pushups.

Mental Habit Stack: In a more complicated version, [[Tom Bilyeu]] from[[impact theory]] says that after meditating you have just reduced a lot of cognitive distress and anxiety. During this kind of super open and calm state anything you do afterwards should be more focused and your brain should be more receptive. So for instance you would stack meditation and journaling future goals together. Or meditate, then read, allowing your mind to absorb the content without the typical daily cognitive anxiety.

Physical habit stacks: When you workout your body becomes super absorptive of protein or anything else you put in your body… for about 20 minutes post workout. This is a peak window that you should take advantage of for gains and decreased soreness and inflammation.

This “knowledge of knowledge”, knowing when you can maximize your efforts with a little stack allows habits to interlock and become routines.

Part 4: Environment

“Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.”

James Clear

But what about bad habits, temptation, and will power? The latest science shows that will power is like a battery charge: if you use it all up, you have to go to sleep to re-charge and get more of it.

I did an episode, Step 19: Breakdown of Will on a book by George Ainslie, where he shows how understanding temptation (and reward paths) can also lead us understanding how willpower functions.

We need to change our thinking, we need to consider will-power and discipline as a limited resource, not a character trait. Then we can begin to set up your life to not only avoid temptation, like food or procrastination, but also we can make our environment serve us by limiting bad distractions, and planting good ones.

Small behavior hack: if you don’t drink enough water, simply put bottles or glasses of water all around you when you start your day, so you no longer need the willpower to walk all the way to the fridge to get water every so often.

This is modifying your environment, which can be part of a habit stack: when you enter your office gather the empty water bottles from yesterday and fill them all up again and disperse them, before you let yourself get a cup of coffee. Or if you need a reward habit stack, flip it: every time you drink a cup of water you reward yourself with a cup of coffee, or you get to check Instagram for 5 minutes. whatever your drug is, but be careful of these REWARD Stacks… at the end of the day we don’t want to train ourselves to be entitled to a reward for doing something so mundane as drinking water.

Clear says, your environment is an “invisible hand” that guides your behavior.

“What often looks like a lack of willpower is actually the result of a poor environment.”

James Clear

Right, but how do you do this? If you know you have limited willpower then early in the day (while you are still fresh and full of discipline vigor) you can set up your environment to aid that weak willed ninny that you become in the afternoons.

If you suffer from checking social media, then early in the day you set a software to block it until after work.

If you eat too much at lunch, pre-pack your lunch into a smaller Tupperware container. Like Odysseus tied to the mast, take the decision away from the future you.

“Winners often win because their environment makes winning easier.”

James Clear

Given the recent news of Hong Kong's protests being squashed, the "China Question" looms larger. As no expert, the best way to learn is bring someone on the show who has been podcasting about the multi-facted and historical complexities involved as China pushes it's way center stage. 

Jason Szeftel writes and speaks on the politics and economics of China. His podcast "China Unraveled" covers in depth the complexities of Hong Kong, and other issues China faces today. 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-69-memetic-desire/

0:00 Intro

1:22 What is mimetic rivalry? memtic desire.

2:48 Mimicry as an internal set of neurosis.

5:05 What we want is the attention and control that someone else wanted first.

7:14 If somebody else wants something, our survival depends on us getting to it first.

9:47 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

11:28 Accelerationism is a means to break out of the deadlock of capitalism.

12:56 All of our focus is now embodied in winning the object.

14:46 If the system is good enough, it will disperse the energies.

16:37 How capitalism fits into all of this.

Part I

We are in the era of "treat yo' self" and "you deserve it," which is at odds with the attitudes and behaviors of many successful people.

What is will power? Ryder maps out three types of will found in psychoanalysis and how they relate to time. Freudian can be considered the "will to pleasure" based on your past, Adlerian is the "will to power (or superiority)" based around the present, and Frankl's logotherapy can be seen as the "will to meaning" based in part upon your future self.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Will itself can be seen as motivations transformed into incentives, these incentives turn our choice into actions, and that in turn become our behaviors. These actions/behaviors show our values to the world, and thus it becomes who we are.

Part II

So, why do we do what we don't want to do... instead of doing what we say we want to do?

Ainslie discusses the Utilitarian and Cognitive camps to talk about 'satisfaction models'. A key point is to think of your internal desires as an internal marketplace, with different factions jockeying to win their reward. This follows the same principles of an army or corporation, any large group, where commands can be issued, but it is up to the managers to motivate the underlings, and an underground economy is formed that actually determines what gets done.

Utilitarians tend to think in logically: we do what rewards us. Yet, there are several instances where we hurt ourselves, or do not follow logical principles. It is as if the current temptation is stronger than our ability to delay gratification.

This brings up the "survival function" where we discount the future for the present, complicating rewards by discounting their value over time. Humans, and animals, tend to pick the more immediate, and often poorer, reward rather than wait for the long-term reward that would allow us to achieve our stated goals.

This invokes the "pleasure principle" that is built into humans, and we must consider the role of reason vs. pleasure. If reason only exists to fulfill our desires, then we can't rely on it to thwart our desires... unless we weaponize our desire. We must have a bigger, better, stronger desire that allows us to displace the short-term weak rewards we crave.

As well, we can, with forethought, plan around our future failures. If we know we will be tempted, we can, like Odysseus, plan around our temptations, but this does not work when temptation or instinct is sprung upon you.

Part III

Taking a closer look at why we function the way we do, Ainslie points out "exponential discounts" versus "hyperbolic discounts." Humans tend towards hyperbolic, but someone like a banker looks long-term and realizes that if rates stay steady the long-term game wins. The banker can then take advantage of the hyperbolic person who values something strongly in the immediate moment without planning ahead.

The banker is an example of a long-term rewards thinker, and the hyperbolic is the rest of us reacting to our immediate need. Ainslie brings up that rewards and pleasures are not the same thing. Rewards are behaviors that you repeat, and they may be painful, while pleasures tend to be desire fulfillment.

Consider the instinct of a mother bear to protect her cubs: this is behavior does not produce pleasure for individual, but it does reward the species. Similarly, humans have a list of behaviors that can be hacked and are not good for individual welfare, but play a role in gene propagation. Nature tends to make these species rewards "pleasurable" so that we undertake hoarding food or having sex. So, why has nature not figured out the hyperbolic behavior can be taken advantage of by the banker on an exponential, logical curve?

We end on two analogies for how to consider long-term v. short-term rewards. One is perspective where we understand that the building at the end of the block is larger than the one we are standing next to, even though the one we are next to looms larger, taking up more attention. Rewards function this was as well: the nearer reward demands attention, blocking out the ability to stay focused on the long-term reward in the distance. The other is a "chain of predation" where small fish are eaten by progressively larger fish... but with rewards it functions in reverse where the small reward (the current itch) eats the larger rewards (mid-range goals) until we never get to the big long-term reward.

0:56 Why does will power break down?

3:29 Will and 3 schools of Psychoanalysis tied to Past/Present/Future

6:49 Procrastination and Chunky Monkey: Who am I?

110:01 Illogical Decisions or Survival Discounting?

15:05 physics for the mind: weaponize your desires

17:09 Outwit your self: Odysseus

19:38 Pleasure for survival: instinct vs. logic

23:45 Rewards Perspective and the Reverse Chain of Predation. 

PART I
The art world is a complicated place with diverse motivations, bizarre criteria and social norms, yet it also offers profound friendships and solidarity through community. Ryder speaks of the psychology that drove him to choose art as a form of self-help therapy versus a more stable career path,  but also his ridiculous tendency to apply "salvation through works" to his art practice. 

PART II
A story about farting in church, followed by Ryder's current drawing of business people asleep, levitating through farting. With lots of dumb humor Ryder also brings up the psycho-pathologies of cognitive capitalism that capture, shape us, and determine our existential ennui. For long-time listeners you will see the references to Max Weber, Robert Jackall, Michael Sandel, and even Baudrillard, Gamsci, Mark Twain, and William James. 

Returning to Michael J. Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" we tackle how the college system establishes a sorting machine based on credentials. Sandel shows how the attempt at equal opportunity through education and standardized testing has allowed the wealthy to, once again, rise to the top and form a hereditary aristocracy.  However, the winners feel that they deserve their success due to the  struggles and challenges to achieve,  lending them little pity and much hubris and disdain as they look down on those less fortunate. 

As we discuss the genesis of the SAT and how it has been gamed, we also look at college entrance scandals, and how the process is traumatic for the winners and the losers of this increasingly expensive credentialization. Even those who do manage to rise, though statistically small, must deform themselves and their values to gain the dignity offered through a diploma. 

In Part IV, we look at Sandel's suggestions to balance out the tyranny of merit coupled with wealth by reintroducing luck, or chance, to humble the winners while taking pressure off of them to play the soul crushing game of resume stuffing. He also looks at alternatives to education for knowledge, civic, and moral discourse, while asking us to reconsider how we value labor. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-21-tyranny-of-merit-pt-2/

2:08 Merit: earning what you deserve

4:56 Intelligence over the Protestant Hereditary Aristocracy

7:38 We can only be proud if you have an Ivy League Degree

9:36 The richer you are, the better your SAT 

11:14 Educational Sorting has created a Meritocratic arms race

17:00 College is the training ground for moral flexibility

18:53 Do we value upward mobility? 

20:00 Meritocracy has reverted back to wealth

23:40 We spend less on technical training than on prisons

The most obvious problem with optimization is "who (or what) are you optimizing into?" First you must know yourself, then have a mission with little goals along the way allowing you to hack productivity. But if you are in a rush to gain career capital for survival or to earn freedom, your mission is likely not your own, thus requiring disciplined willpower to pursue. This opens us to problems with willpower and subjective truth shaped objective relations. More problematically, optimization reduces for efficiency, in which case there may be no space left for the messy ambiguity of the human soul. 

0:00 Intro (Recap of the last 3 episodes) 

5:03 Bildung, career capital (David Epstein, Cal Newport, Richard Sennett, Robert Jackall) 

8:54 the fickle self, marshmallows, and unreliable willpower  (George Ainslie, Daniel Kahneman) 

15:58 Just the tips: Zettelkasten (Sonke Ahrens, Niklas Luhmann) 

18:23 Stoic vs. Epicurean 

22:11 Subject/Object, Over indexing, and ambiguity as human (Simone De Beauvoir, Douglas Rushkoff) 

We first pick on Rene Descartes for championing internal reasoning as a way to know yourself, instead of community, objective reality, or some form of morals and ethics. In Matthew Crawford's "Shopclass as Soul Craft" he mentions this division as he draws our attention to subtle distinctions about how people relate to the world. Primarily, how does one make a choice and act on it when "desire" drives our rationalizing? 

We discuss  "disposition" in your job, and the flaw of being an "idiot" by being your private (internal) self when in a public role (your job) and confronted by external problems. 

One problem is the internal reasoning where a model of the world exists in your mind, but does not function well in reality. The intellectual model cares not for the particulars of reality, and is ASSERTIVE whereas someone engaged with the external world and it's subtle nuances must be ATTENTIVE. 

The "stochastic arts" are not necessarily to create or PRODUCE something, but similar to a doctor or mechanic, they receive a complex thing (something which can never be comprehensively known) and must attend to it as a forensic investigator to PROMOTE the thing to a better state of being. This is at direct odds with self-involvement and narcissism... at least it is if the doctor or mechanic is good. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-17-stochastic-arts-the-cure-for-narcissism/

3:36 The Wild West of "desire" driving" action.  

4:49 "Brave New World" mistaking ends/means for progress: morality is a fart 

6:11 Why is someone an "idiot"? They are being private while in public.

8:19 The lure of "easy intellectual mastery" over the messy particulars of reality 

10:09 The stochastic arts: to promote (not produce) requires humility and "attentiveness" which may be the cure for narcissism.

Welcome to the problematic realm of perspective framing. Ryder Richards will be your dubious guide through this profound exploration of self-awareness and understanding. Central to our journey is the parallax view, a powerful method of finding our place in the world by establishing reference points by Slavoj Zizek. But first, we must challenge hegemonic narratives and reconsider Hegel’s notion of negation, as breaking free from (or subsuming and overcoming) conventional beliefs allows us to envision new possibilities.

As we progress, we’ll examine how psychology analysis, meditation, and Buddhism provide tools to reshape our perspectives and alleviate societal discontent. Psychoanalysis will offer unique insights into the human psyche, highlighting the potential for multiple points of fixation as normalcy which creates markers to allow a fixed identity.

Moreover, we’ll consider all of these topics related to the “desiring self” and its role in identity. Most pointedly, we will look at Christianity’s perspective on sin related to desire, and how desire is necessary to align with God.

Stay tuned for the next post, where we will dive deep into the intricacies of the Parallax View, a possibly revolutionary approach to subjective positioning that allows understanding without always negating the negation, as deconstrcutionism does.

0:00 Introduction of the parallax view.

• Introducing ryder richards and the concept of the parallax view, which is a means to find a position by establishing points of reference.
• The next episode is all about the next episode.

2:19 Breaking the power of hegemonic narratives.

• Post structuralist or deconstructionist. All of their arguments today can arguably be post-structuralist or post-deconstructionist, where brains are trained to be creatively destructive.
• Hegel's notion of negation, the ability to negate impact or power of something.

4:28 We must retain the positions we've just cancelled.

• Hegel makes his point that cancellation preserves the positions that were just cancelled, but that there is a need for a visual goal to position ourselves in society.
• Hegel argues that every cancellation is a new position, so every cancellation adds more gravel to the pile.

6:44 Why we need to break traditional beliefs.

• How modernist thinkers broke traditional beliefs to avoid the totalitarian narrative and nationalistic mindset that was sweeping through Europe 100 years ago.
• Two dispositions in the rubble of the rubble.

8:47 How to choose a new perspective.

• Society is more unhappy, anxious and despairing than it was in the past, according to the studies.
• Psychology analysis and therapy are tools for relief from the society that we live in and what we feel we deserve, and help pull us out of instant reactions

11:23 Psychoanalysis is more about sizing the psychotic subject than the ego.

• Zizek, Lacanian psychoanalysis is more about hysteria sizing the psychotic subject. To be non-psychotic is either to have multiple points of fixation or never know exactly who you are.
• Buddhism and meditation.

13:41 How to become an individual subject without ego.

• CBT therapy and meditation help reframe how you fit into the world and how you see your position in the world. It allows you to prioritize your desires differently.
• Buddhism is ridding yourself of attempting to desire anything at all.

16:18 To sin is to miss the mark.

• To sin is to position yourself further away from god, to miss the mark, and to be aligned with god to grow near the object of desire.
• Christianity uses desire rather than negates it.

18:44 Reframing the problem into parallax.

• Walking us through the conundrum of the desiring self and the methods of reframing it and positioning in it.
• Instead of the negation that is a deconstructivist rubble that has created an apocalyptic landscape, there might actually be a solution that is apparent here.

Drawing from a great article, "Economy of Life?," Ryder discusses some thoughts on how people make decisions based on emotion instead of intelligence. (Yes, Ryder is aware, the 'economy or life' distinction is hyperbolic.)

He discusses how the economy has become a religion with associated rituals and dogma and the politicians are priests. The problem is, when a storm hits praying for rain isn't gong to help, and politicians doubling down (fixing capitalism with more capitalism) is simply a preacher telling you to pray more and have faith. 

Ryder also mentions the American history of risk for beliefs, and how this trend is nothing new. It probably doesn't mean they are idiots. Maybe. 

0:55 The two camps of Coronavirus: Economy of Life

1:58 Humans are heuristic machines, not logic machines: we tend to react for short-term benefit rather than think

4:02 Prognostication: The Economy is more like mysticism than a science, requiring "faith" to survive. 

5:50 Contradictory injunctions from leaders: stay home and go to work. 

6:50 Our leaders worship the economy, making citizens sacrificial to "the greater good"

 https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-63-the-one-dimensional-man 

Part 1: Captialism absorbs everything: even your rebellion against it becomes a published book, which feeds capitalism, and generates pro-capitalists books. In a dynamic system, each tactic has a counter, and this generates (cleverly) more capitalism. A famous example is of Che Guevara’s rebellion sold as a cheap t-shirt: a purchasable identity of rebellion. 

Part 2: The On-dimensional man is a book by Herbert Marcuse in the mid-60’s about our wealthy industrial nation orienting citizens into consumerism by developing “false needs” which we pursue. This drains our energy for cognitive activity as well as our desire for rebellion, which is channeled back into social status through material goods. This is a tactic of control by the affluent (the 1%) who increase luxury and comfort only to pair it up with increased exploitation. The dynamic of flattening values to a universal is that we no longer have polarity or dialectic controversy, which is the ultimate form of control. Marcuse says we don’t even question “technological rationality” anymore. 

Part 3: Cybernetics is a theory of how systems moderate themselves, taking in feedback and adjusting. Philosophers use these ideas to discuss capitalism in terms of “negatives” and “positives”: the negatives are the check valves or regulating systems that contain or diffuse the positive energy that can get out of control and break things. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the negatives as “territorialization”, such as a fence or limit, and the positives are efforts to “deterritorialize”. Mark Fisher says capitalism now instantly reterritorializes deterritorialization. This is just some vocabulary to help us move forward. 

0:00 Intro 

1:46 Part 1 capitalist absorption 

3:39 Part 2 the one-dimensional man 

7:20 Part 3 cybernetic systems theory 

10:11 Outro

Part I: Protestant Work Ethic

Max Weber has a phrase: “secular ascetism” where you subjugate your impulses to God’s will, through “restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling”. This entangles religious values (hard work, self-reliance, frugality) with work values and success, but over time the religious trappings slipped, opening up to conspicuous wealth and consumer culture. So, while frugality disappeared, self-reliance, gumption, and a foggy notion that morality is linked to success/wealth remained in the workplace. 

Yet, also the workplace was becoming industrialized through Taylorism, supercharging bureaucracy. This new bureaucratic structure took those once human/religious virtues and built them into the workplace through regularized time-schedules, work procedures, and administrative hierarchies.

We don’t need to know your character, we have spreadsheets. 

This system of bureaucratic industry spread into government and private sector, needing clerks, technicians, and myriad levels of managers to maintain it. A new class emerged: the big salaried man completely dependent and devoted to the corporation. (So much for self-reliance or dedication to God or even family.) 
As Jackall points out, is not just being IN the organization, but OF the organization. 

PART I: Pyramid Politics

Corporations centralize authority in the CEO (the King) while decentralizing it through Presidents, VP’s, District and Regional Managers. Reporting becomes a “web of commitments'' tying people to goals and reinforcing fealty relationships.

To issue a command from the top triggers a cascade of downward pressure to achieve an improbable task, especially when bound by a bureaucratic system. Hence a willingness to sacrifice or bend rules to achieve the King’s whims is championed as “loyalty,” and CEO’s tend to promote those who have the “capacity for creative problem solving” … which is usually shady.

But you must be loyal in the right order: The rule is, you should be loyal to your boss directly above you. Equally, part of your job is to protect your boss from embarrassing themselves or the company. 

“symbolically reinforce at every turn his own subordination and his willing acceptance of the obligations of his fealty.”

Robert Jackall

Credit and the King

details are pushed down and credit is pulled up

Bosses give vague instructions, purportedly to encourage subordinates autonomy. But really it is a cover your ass method, 1) because they don’t understand the details, or 2) they need a fall guy and deniability.

Credit or praise is a currency, not to be casually bestowed, it is to be used at the boss’s prudence.

This type of sagacity is especially egregious around the CEO where managers engage in irrational budget expenditures to appease a perceived preference, a wish, a whim. Jackall talks of repainting a whole building to impress a CEO, or dropping $10k on a custom made book… and the justification is, if you don’t appease the capricious king or queen today, your head could be on a pike tomorrow. 

One tool in a CEO’s chest is the “shake up” where they reorganize the whole company. 

This does a number of things: it reorganizes existing fealty or alliances, breaking up plots or troublesome dissenters. It also hides mistakes, as now no one is sure where the blame should land when things go badly. And it makes the Board and Wall street think you are aggressive. Meanwhile, it promotes anxiousness and stress throughout your company, often reinforcing the perception of needing to cater to the CEO's capricious moods, lest you be fired.

PART II: Success and Failure

Striving for success is a moral imperative in America. 

Once you become a manager, you have proven competency, and beyond and it becomes much more about social factors, where you must align yourself with the “style and ethos of the corporation.” 

So… if you want to rise, you have to re-make yourself into what they company desires by staying attuned to social cues. This is known as Self-rationalization or self-streamlining, and it sounds a bit sociopathic, but we probably all do it to a certain extent: 

Such a manager “dispassionately takes stock of himself, treating himself as an object, as a commodity. He analyses his strengths and weaknesses and decides what he needs to change in order to survive and flourish in his organization. And then he systematically undertakes a program to reconstruct his image ...” (p.59) 

1. Appearance: indeed, the clothes do make the man. 
2. Self-Control: Control all emotion behind a mask of amiable blandness, never lose your temper, never reveal a secret.
3. Be a Team Player: Convictions of any sort are suspect:
   “To me, a person can have any beliefs they want, as long as they leave them at home.” 
   Managers want team player who will agree with consensus, even though they personally disagree. 
   “Someone who is talking team play is out to squash dissent… The troublemaker is often a creative person, but creative people don’t get ahead. Dependable team players do. In fact, bosses don’t want to hear the truth.”
4. Style: Be witty, charming, affable, articulate, with an indefinable sophistication when you give reports and mingle.

PART III: Social Performance

So, I know it’s hard to believe that being a chameleon good at team play with some lucky connections is all it takes: you have to hit your numbers most of the time. But even if you are hitting your numbers all the time, but lacking the right personality or team play, you will never rise. 

When there is no longer an objective standard for success, it isn’t your performance that breaks you, it is other people. 

Managers realize, more than most, that there is a capriciousness to their advancement, often based on organizational contingency, luck and timing. And that is internal to the company, but there are also external factors that disrupt the workplace and market. 

Managers are very very aware of the ‘optics’ - it might actually be the key point to survival - and they realize the only thing they can do to better ensure their fate is to be seen working hard, putting in the hours (even though productivity may not help), and better streamlining yourself, wearing the right masks, practicing the vocabularies of discourse, knowing the right people, and subtly self-promoting. 

Our conversation ranges from daily routines, gut health and probiotics, taking supplements, being in therapy, meditation practice, physical fitness as part of a daily routine that produces chemicals to help our mind-body balance, and setting up structures that don't rely on willpower. Oh, and naturally, we talk about reducing our media intake, or at least not watching the news. The topics are a bit personal stories, a bit self-help, some wellness, and a lot of taking action, or "doing the work."

Zack has asked a chapter in the book on mindset. He has graciously offered to send the chapter to anyone who request it. zacksrutledge@gmail.com

For the podcast's first interview, L and I read William James "Pragmatism" as well as a few other texts. We are mostly concerned with how objective and subjective truths or beliefs intertwine, at once having a framework to gauge and judge truth and it's use in the real world, but wanting to maintain a pluralistic notion that allows space for fallibility and individual experience.  

The Ukrainian revolution brought 1 million people to the Maidon for months, and involved citizens fighting their government because they believed in law and a better future. 

This is amazing, and it is DIY citizenry at it's best. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-4-ukraine/

Full episode in writing as well as video at:

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-66-cybernetics--capitalism/

0:00 Intro 

1:56 Part 1: cybernetics _ machines, feedback, and cascades 

6:22 Part 2: one-dimension of capital _ Marcuse, consumerism’s false needs, subjecting justice to capitalism

9:55 Part 3: deterritorialization _ Deleuze and Guattari, positive/negative energy, decoding the regulation valves

14:00 Part 4: reterritorialization _ Mark Fisher, immediate recapture, mark fisher, refusal as lack of feedback 

23:26 Outro

This is the first in a set of episodes on chores and labor, and our relationship to them. During the quarantine, the DIY list suddenly seems of vital importance, and the dreaded chore has become a challenge to be productive. 

Referencing Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer" Ryder discusses the attitude change between work and play, eventually considering the dread of chores as a dread of learning, thus a willingness to be duped. 

PART I : 
Rage

Snyder brings up feeling “rage” … lonely rage while lying in a hospital bed. Before COVID hit, he was in 3 hospitals and each one misdiagnosed him, or flat out ignored his desperate efforts to show them paperwork for previous hospital visits.

A bit about Snyder:  Snyder is a historian at Yale specializing in Russia, Germany, and Eastern Europe, and he has a brilliant way of spotting the patterns that lead to authoritarian, facist movements, and breaking them down into clear lessons. 

A book you should buy right now is “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century.” My intro to him was “The Road to Unfreedom.”  He shows how the anti-communist, nationalist, fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyn set up a playbook for how to take over the government and disassociate the populace from “truth” and relieve them of their freedoms. It is what Trump tried to do in America.

“Our politics are too much about the curse of pain and too little about the blessings of liberty.” 

Timothy Snyder

Snyder predicted the Trump coup attempt in October. How? He has studied this stuff and the signs were there. But he asserts it isn’t that history repeats itself, because that sounds like a "politics of inevitability" and we know people can change, but patterns emerge, and if we see them they can be counteracted.

So, to find that this amazing, brilliant man nearly died of something as simple as a burst appendix, due to systematic incompetence… well, RAGE is justified.

Snyder talks of the motivating quality of rage, and he makes this insightful point: RAGE, while allowing you to see yourself and to motivate you, should not lead you, but as Aristotle says, “one should only take it to be a comrade in arms.”

Health, to be healthy, is in many ways a matter of being together. Moving from the “solidarity” of friends and family, back into “solitude”... but from that solidarity, you can return to a solitude of tranquility. From here he found another emotion: “empathy.”

PART II 
HEALTHCARE as a HUMAN RIGHT

“The virus is not human, but a measure of humanity.”

The COVID pandemic… the handling was botched, in an all too predictable way.  Snyder says it was “dealing out pain and death rather than security and health” and it granted “profit for a few rather than prosperity for many.” What is alarming is that smaller, poorer countries handled the pandemic better than us.

We, the USofA, repeatedly fail in our “measure of humanity”.  consider our other problems:  opioid deaths, prisons, suicides, newborn deaths, and now mass graves for the elderly. Once again, other smaller, poorer countries do better than us. 

Here, in the “land of the free” we are increasingly unable to pursue our values or desires. While our government, along with commercial medicine and insurance, tout “freedom” and “choice” what we find is that our choice is very limited, and the costs exorbitant. 

We are becoming powerless, losing our ability to make meaningful decisions that could allow us to remain free and healthy. Snyder warns, this is the path where Democracy becomes oligarchy.  “When money becomes the only goal, values disappear.” 

There is a condition that has been created, where a President can lie about a virus and because we are isolated (we have outsourced our news to major, distant networks) and have nowhere to turn (no local news or doctors we can trust), we are confused when presented with lies from the highest positions acting out of self-interest.
Without access to truth, or at least consistent facts, we become powerless, not knowing how to react or to whom we can rely. In our isolated, vulnerable state, we are also unfree. 

If we look at the history of tyrants and unfreedom, we see that RIGHTS are dismissed from citizens and hoarded for the ruling class. Snyder says, To maintain a Right, it must be FORCED upon the ruling class to validate it. 

The slide into unfreedom starts with a lack of truth. And, suddenly, the professed truth of “all men are created equal” is not legitimate, and we look for the real values that drive change: money and prestige. Knowing our lives may depend on status and wealth, because preferential treatment is the only way to get good care, this leads us to feel anxious and disenfranchised, precarious, and of course, it makes racism very dangerous.

This has turned health (and health care) in our country a privilege. 

PART III
The SYSTEM

“We pay a huge premium for the privilege of dying younger.” 

While Snyder points out several flaws of doctors and nurses, he doesn’t necessarily blame them. They are caught in a system, a machine of protocols getting between the patient and the doctor. This is because health care is competitive.

The doctors and nurses seem to hate the logic of the corporate system too, but to push back, just like in any corporate job, is to risk your own survival.  It is an unfortunate system of employees caring, while getting over worked and gagged by red tape. 

Henri Bergeson came up with the notion of “the mechanical encrusted up on the living" to explain humor or laughter, but I would also apply it at dark scales to rage: To no longer be recognized as human, to be reduced to a cog, is the darkest humor: it is beyond tragedy.

The solution?
Snyder offers anecdotes of Austrian healthcare, where doctors are attentive and holistic, and probably too chatty and prying, because they are treating a person as much as a symptom. To return to smaller systems of doctors and caretakers, where it is a calling instead of a churning bureaucracy hamstringing medical workers from exercising their own judgment... it would provide relief for both doctors and patients. 

PART IV: 
Politics and Society

Snyder brings up that America, after WWII, helped Japan and Germany establish Health as a protected Right… and now their citizens are healthy than ours.

In America, we seem to have a death wish. As a culture We work through the pain, we deny solidarity in order to be a “self-made man” who “stands on his own 2 feet.” To admit Weakness somehow makes you lesser, which leads to a silent epidemic of opioid addiction. 

Opioids cloud our mind, not letting us properly connect w others, isolating us and reducing our empathy. This manifests politically: the best predictor for Trump votes comes from the degree to which the community is wracked by opioid abuse. Paired with Sandel's stats on the undereducated voting for trump, we find Trump garnered “votes of desperation” easily relatable to “deaths of despair.” 

Snyder speaks of the small town farmers, and the demolishing of the American dream, saying “The welfare state, meant to compliment the solitude of ambition with the solidarity of support, has been taken apart.”

“The downward spiral from pain to desperation, and from pride to resentment, is something politicians like Mr. Trump understand and accelerate.” 

Timothy Snyder

When we are sick, undereducated, unemployed… we don’t see a future, and “in the land of opportunity” where all you have to do is “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”... it is hard to see how you fit in society or are valued at all. From this dark place along comes a politician peddling pain and feeding your rage. This politician extends a hand of faux-solidarity: “you are one of us, hate with us, break with us, your pain is useful.” 

And this works on the right and left. 

To combat it, we need the stability of health, so that people know they can make decisions from virtues beyond rage, fear, hopelessness, and survival. And we must push for truth in all things. 

“Since the truth sets you free, the people who oppress you resist the truth.”

Timothy Snyder

Following up on Arendt's 'active life' we discuss how watching mastery has become a replacement for learning or doing yourself. This leads to other issues, such as decreased time to participate in the real world, leading to further frustration or inadequacy in the real world. 

Boris Groys bring up the contradiction that movies are not about moving; they promote action on screen, but only at the cost of you sitting and being passive. The removal of your action, motion, and even contemplation (as you must passively absorb the narrative) frames a world in which low-risk passivity is preferred to actual risk, action, or uniqueness. 

The Will to DIY website has references: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-9-the-passive-life/

0:36 Watching people build things online: provides the emotion and illusion of competence

2:07 Observation over doing: the time watching prevents the fantasy from becoming reality.

4:00 The contradiction of the "active life" versus the "contemplative life" in movies

5:29 Tokyo Drifting: From "Activity" to "Activity worship" 

6:35 Spectatorship as Identity: a path towards nothing? 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-45-free-guy/

Part I

This week, we were offered a story of an NPC, non-player character, in a video game called Free City. And what happens when Guy, played by Ryan Reynolds becomes sentient. He is triggered awake by seeing a girl. Shocker right? He becomes a sentient algorithm, able to see his desires, take action, and even judge the relative value and merit of his actions. 

Well, the backstory is, the two programmers, a girl and guy, develop an AI, artificial intelligence engine, that allows characters to grow and change without human input or interaction. 

Naturally, the programmers are maybe in love, but are maybe too immature to know how to express it. A totally rad, bro capitalist buys the AI and scuttles their “pure and sweet dreams”, basically an AI “garden of eden” terrarium.

NOTE: two young, awkward genius programmers, who can’t get out the words to get someone out of their pants, frustrated, make a petri-dish to grow life in… so, yeah, they made a baby making machine, because they couldn’t get past their emotional immaturity to make their own baby… so now, we have sentient NPCs crying in the garden to two clueless parent/gods. 

Long synopsis even longer: The female programmer falls for the NPC, of course, and eventually has to tell his creator he is simply “a love letter from the author.” 

Yuck. Gross. Bleh. 

FIRST THING: The moral

Romance and Capitalism. The moral?  pursue Noble Passions, do not cave to the temptation of the base and mean, though it surrounds you. 

The reward is beyond money, and will reward you more deeply for longer, and who knows? maybe you will get the girl, or guy, or hunky algorithm… or the dopey, buff algorithm. 

SECOND THING: Work, Labor, Action

Why do we need an AI? (This is answered at the end, but given “human idiocy” making anything like us is bound to be a failure.)

To comment on the story and AI, we will borrow Hannah Arendt’s terms for WORK, in which she distinguishes between the drudgery of labor, the productivity work, and the self-becoming of action.

• Labor is the NPC without sentience repeating tasks over and over. This is like a robot making the same widget over and over or humans having to get food and eat it over and over… then poop over and over.
• While work is the effort to create a new AI engine, or make a factory, something that will outlast you and supersedes nature.
• And finally, action is to engage in the world in such a way that you create a story of yourself in the world. ~ SO, this is kind of the notoriety Guy receives in the movie, moving from repetitive, endless labor of the NPC into work to level up and get the girl, into being a Contender, which affects the world and alters other people’s understanding and actions.

The AI is a challenge progression: from robot labor to creative work mimicking human behavior to self-aware action… to create something that can meta-cognate and make value distinctions.

We are just attempting to leap the uncanny valley, and hoping the artificial grass is greener. 

Ryder

But, what if we get past anthropomorphization?  If the AI can see that Goodness, Love, and Purity are really our Kryptonite… then when you dangle some lovey, attractive cuddly thing in front of us we go stupid. The best way an AI could get protection is to exhibit cutesy love. And, of course, this is the plot of many sci-fi books and movies, such as Ex Machina or Vivarium, where the true test for an intelligent machine or species is to prey on the human weakness of emotions and love. 

This is that ugly deep sea fish, the angler, with the little dangling light it uses to attract the other fish. The little light is the dangling Ryan Reynolds… 

THIRD THING: Differnce

Pursuing Desire (once you have it, generally from discontent) takes work and action . To create your own story, where your actions effect the world is your will to power. A negative (discontent) moves us from our Contentment, that banal sameness that produces nothing new. however, difference… difference produces change.

This where in Nietzschian terms we begin to move beyond good and evil, because the fascinating thing is, negative and positive are both forms of difference, they actually mirror and contain their contrariness in each other, they are just categorized by degree and distance. The more difference, the more transformative it becomes. 

Sameness, contentedness, can be when we are subservient to the same illusions… it is not really being alive, it is merely enacting historical, conservative values repetitively: these are phantasms. That’s what movie projectors and shadows on cave walls are… They are the flattened, inverted forms of life.

To escape this flattened category is to increase the difference, negate the sameness, even if it is through radical repetition.

We thought we had an identity before… but this big “D” Difference is beyond the lame-ass category of identity: by enacting such a difference, we break the category… we approach transcendence, we manifest the beautiful soul, and enter the Eternal Return. 

In Free Guy: The hapless coders produce an AI, the crooked capitalist produces douchery and employs tons of people, and the awestruck NPC levels up to get the girl, then transcends that ~ all of them go to extremes of difference, they power through, and to each there is an affirmation. We are talking about Action, and Difference… about being aware, being motivated and taking action. We are talking about breaking the script. 

At the end of the day, why are we trying to make an AI that is sentient or aware?

Because we lazy humans would like to stay at the WORK level, never taking the  ACTION to become AWARE ourselves. We will build a machine, an AI, to achieve enlightenment for us. 

Call now, and for a limited time we can get ship you three cans of Deleuzian Difference Spray. Stand out. Smell difference, be difference. and watch her eternal return to you…. 

Now, we mentioned caves and movie projectors… These are Representations of the world, the re-presentation of the same. These re-presentations mediate everything.

Adding more, an infinite repetition of forms with infinitesimally tiny differences, keeps us trapped in the same point of view. It is the logic of the simulacrum, with no grounding, fractally expanding and dispersing with no purpose. Capitalism and the market feed us small consumable changes: over-valued, over-marketed. This incepts (or coopts) our desire to move beyond the sameness, feeding us infinite multiplicity as novelty. It is saccharin, artificial fulfillment.

As Anthony DeMello says, “We must wake up.” Drop your illusions.
As Deleuze says. Quit becoming the Representation, become an experience. (pg 51?) 

THING 4: Leviathan

Let’s talk about the state, or the government. People set up these frameworks that are meant to serve the citizens, yet they are rife with contradictions: the state has coercive power over us, yet it allows us liberty. This is Isaiah Berlin’s Positive and Negative Liberty.

Setting up an AI and a State have similar problems… namely intentions and the blind spots of the authors.

The NPC in FREE GUY is constrained by the limits of the game… the limits of the state… and in this way, government limits and shapes us, because even when we enact our highest state of Action, self-actualizing within the community, that happens under an umbrella of the state, in response to the state, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. 

The state is the story in which our story begins. It is our terrarium in many ways.

Thomas Hobbes, who wrote Leviathan, is one of the earliest ideas of a modern state, a state that recognizes individuals wanting freedoms rather than a sovereign’s dictates determining people. It uses artifice, a bit of deception, to constrain and balance for human brutishness, but overall, it’s goal was to serve individuals. So… the key innovation here is individualism.

Hannah Arendt, seeing what the Nazi regime perpetrated, despised Hobbes’s “mechanistic” reduction of the citizens turned into subjects… and the subjects turned into cogs. Because she saw the evil a cog, a bureaucrat like Eichmann, could perpetrate. Her notion of how the state could serve individuals was radically different.

We now have Representative Democracy here in the US, and a fascinating idea is not to think of “Democracy” as the key point, but “Representation” as the key point. This points out that the founders were quite fearful of true democracy, the “tyranny of the majority” as Tocqueville says.

When our founders built the political AI engine, that we call a constitution, it appears to be based on premises of “equality” and “liberty” that actually never allowed for equality or freedom. The contradictions within the system means that as it evolves, particular points increase in prominence and divergence. These points come, in part, from author bias.

conclusion

One thing I have not discussed too much, but is key: for Arendt, to take ACTION is to manifest your story in public. Not private. The path should be open for you, but it often isn’t for many people. 

There is a friction here, often between the Story told (individualism and freedom) and what will be tolerated (reality, law). There exists an interstitial GAP between the story and the law, society and privacy, spaces that some people occupy and work to expand. 

As GUY found out in the game, as an “NPC” his actions were not explicitly denied, because they were new… never considered. He was not considered, because he was not a “he” or any type of human. This gets into some concepts I recently learned from Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, where colonizing imperialists saw indigenous people as “sub-human” thus not human.

The logic is, someone like Kant, the Western world’s preeminent moral philosopher, could be extremely racist because his morality only applied to “civilized men” which were by default posited as “white men.” His categorization blinded him. 

So will it be with Artificial Intelligences. 

The NPC is a soft entry to this concept of how we treat the sub-human.

In the movie, Guy the NPC, due to not being “seen” as sentient or intelligent was at first unrecognized, then written off by incurious system admins. This allowed a modicum of Freedom, wiggle room in that interstitial space, until his difference became so pronounced that people had to take notice.  As he took action, his “difference” became excessive, beyond the category of NPC, which at first is negative for the game but affirmative for him, and as Deleuze and Neitzsche may say, “The extremes of difference are productive.”

And thus, we fall back into capitalism: Excess production is a value to be captured. 

Recognize, extract…. Love produces excess, and in this case, frustrated love produced a new type of sentient being, that is now not only producing love in the world but introduces a novel untapped resource to be colonized for the capitalist. 

Capitalism collapses love back into a category, rather than BEING. We tend to allow capitalism to stimulate and feed our DESIRE for Love: It multiplies and reflects back desire but without the Love itself. 

But, to wrap this up as a Hollywood Ending:

The warmth of new love, in this story anyway, created something new in the world… the reciprocal feedback loop of difference between two people made something new rather than replicating suffering. And capitalism itself, with its infinite multiplicity of redundant permutations is really a shambling zombie, merely feeding on the products of frustrated love, but unable to produce anything itself.

Our identity is multifaceted, but people love the simplicity and tend to reduce people to a singular trait, which objectifies them. This reduction leads to violence, in part because it allows an "us vs them" narrative. Amartya Sen points out the ramifications in his book "Identity and Violence". 

To consider it personally, we look at Martin Buber's "I-thou" to show how most of the time we are in an "I-it" relationship to the world, and must "self-surrender" to have an "I-thou" whole relationship, and not objectify others. 

Ryder closes out with David Foster Wallace's "This Is Water" in which to be a better person we must be attuned and aware, even imaginative. Matthew Crawford counters that unfortunately, even Wallace remains stuck in his had manipulating mental models to relate to the world as a good person. The solution, says Crawford, is to take action in reality by engaging with others and the world.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-58-identity--violence/

0:00 Intro

3:56 Part 1: reductive Identity

7:38 Part 2: I-it, I-thou

11:57 Part 3: Mind Games

17:09 Outro

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-64-artificial-negativity--repressive-tolerance

Part 1: Hegel, antithesis and sublation, the spiral, and the ground. 

Part 2: Paul Piccone & Telos

Piccone was the editor of Telos, a journal. After being disenchanted by the "exhaustion of the left" he drifted from a Marxist/Hegel leaning ideology to embrace the ideas of the right, through the more totalizing illiberal  Carl Schmitt. 

Artificial Negativity (Piccone and Lake) asserts the Herbert Marcuse's idea of the one-dimensional man was the final control necessary for totalizing control through consumerism. The elites allow for negativity because any system has excesses it must recalibrate towards (cybernetic theory), thus negativity is managed simulations, not organic but artificial. 

Repressive Tolerance (Marcuse) asserts that Tolerance can be used to repress people into conformity, thus denying actual tolerance in the name of tolerance. Used primarily by the Left, Piccone made use of this type of logic to squash critiques of artificial negativity. 

The Particular must be saved to save individuality and diversity. Yet, since we have all become the one-dimensional man, any organic negativity that can break the capitalist/consumer system must be grown from the outside. The particular rejects totalization. Piccone thought powerful authority was the only way to save the particular (diverse groups) from becoming flattened, but that smacks of totalitarianism, which negates all difference. 

Part 3: Outcome

Piccone's movement from left to right hints that his rebellion did not find the true ground to sublate the antithesis. However, the ideas are interesting and useful. Unfortunately, we must keep in mind that negativity and staged displays, even the managerial new class, serve a function for the poor and disenfranchised and allow dissent against war. 

After discussing the social contract and the balance of "Freedom From/Freedom To" Ryder looks at another form of social power dynamics that stem from ideological prison design, grow into institutional and workplace behavior modification, and eventually spread to the public internalizing self discipline and punishment, and participating not only in surveilling other citizens, but directing their gaze and attention to re-affirm and verify the authority of the state. This episode introduces Jeremy Benthem's prison design, a limited version of Michel Foucault's ideas from both Discipline & Punish and Power/Knowledge texts, as well as a brief extrapolation of Tony Bennett's "exhibitionary control." 

The Will to DIY has a list of links and commentary: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-13-the-panopticon/

Many thanks to Mistah Lisa and Jonathan Whitfill. 

1:40 Benthem: Guarding prisoners with "visible, but unverifiable power"

4:11 Foucault: Our escaped prisoner walks into a real bar, and gets committed to an asylum. 

6:56 The manager's "surveillance discourse" instills "normative behavior" 

9:00 The Reflective Intelligence Meter: measure your intelligence now! 

11:42 Our escaped prisoner escapes the asylum, and is declared a "genius" in the art world for pointing his eyeballs. 

In Part I we recap some of Foucault's panoptic implications, and then begin to consider some critiques of his ideas, with a heavy emphasis on Gilles Deleuze and how the controlled environment and "productive soul training" of Foucault is no longer a primary means of power how power moves, disperses, and obfuscates itself.

In Part II Deleuze discusses the multiplicity and fragmentation of the corporation, and thus the individual, who can now be seen as a password or code, a set of behavior patterns  to be controlled at access points rather than restrained and trained. Control tasks and access to desires, and a corporations short-term goals can be achieved, yest the power is so dispersed (rhizomatic) and motivations obfuscated that we seem to be fighting against ourselves when we push back. 

Haggerty and Ericson's notion of the "surveillant assemblage" and how the dispersed recording machines work together to generate a "data double," with the ability to predict events and behaviors leads us into Surveillance Capitalism. 

The Will to DIY website has references: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-14-post-panopticon/

1:05 Control Corp is looking for new members to join our familteam! 

3:40 Corporations as a "control society" with their own desires, abstracting individuals into passwords. 

5:19 Trouble at the DMV confirming you are who you say you are? Become a Certified Clear Connect Verified Consumer* today! 

8:31 What is a "dividual"? You being fragmented until corporations can build a "data double" of you. 

11:25 Strutting your curated self on social media still hands over data (on you and your viewers) to companies who obfuscate thier intent. 

Drawing from ideas in "Marginal Revolution" and "Sapiens," Ryder discusses some ideas on how our society is formed through tribes and stories. The internet and social media have thrown a wrench in social cohesion: after we became quite good at deconstructing all the narratives that held a society together, now we promote madness and contradiction. 

In an attempt at a path forward, Ryder draws from Matthew Crawford's "Shop Class as Soul Craft" to discuss how iterative oscillations towards an objective goal differ from deconstructing societal problems both in form and what they return to the individual. He discusses two thoughts from Douglas Murray's "The Madness of Crowds," namely the lack of forgiveness on the internet and current internet politics primary goal of spreading doubt, announcing a clear trend towards group think and illogic warned about in Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny." 

For sources: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-16-madness-and-oscillations/

3:16 To overcome the Dunbar limit we need shared narratives, which social media is destroying

4:43 How did "deconstructing grand narratives" open the way for the "dark side" of Sith Lord absolutes? 

6:36 Objective truth: you can't bullshit your way out of bad craftsmanship. 

7:26 I have deconstructed the world, but I am still left with my pain looking for more targets to deconstruct. 

8:44 There is no space for "forgiveness" on the internet: it's goal is to perpetuate doubt

PART I : Time travel is a technology that allows us to fix mistakes, to rewrite our failures. This gives us more agency and less humility. WE begin to relate to our agency more than people. In the movie "The Fountain" the doctor spends his time searching for a solution rather than spending time with his love. 

If tech amplifies your desires and will (speeds them up), but we cannot control our desires we are doomed to become monsters. The series "Dark" on Netflix explores this morphing of compassion and agency into goals that rationalize betrayal and murder... for the greater good, of course. 

PART II: In the West science, chemistry and tech solve everything, yet we are less happy now than 50 years ago. We have no way to make suffering meaningful, so it is shameful. Eastern religions and ancient wisdom offer alternatives for how we should approach the world. 

PART III: Sci-fi in the 60's and 70's played with training humans to become super-human, where biology and discipline become the technology by which to change the world. In movies we still see increased biological power in superheroes and mutants, who fight against the fate of the world (an alien attack or asteroid). 

In the Dune series, people are the technology: bred to enhance computer-like or prescient tendencies. But, with people as a weapon, they are trained to be rational and not cave to their animal instincts. "Fear is the mindkiller." To be human is to not react like an animal, following your impulses. 

The key questions are 1) can you control your desires, because they shape your will? And 2) technology amplifies your agency, allowing you to act rather than learning from suffering, so you achieve your desires faster, but have less control over what you desire. With technology we may become more animal than human. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-18-time-travel-fate-will/

01:11 Time travel morality: Baby Killing

03:07 Captain Agency: Trickle Down Love

7:54 We have the means, but no meaning

9:05 Time Travel: Benefit Velcrosnatch

12:01 Will & Fate: Fear is the mind-killer

Mapping out how we got here, and why Baudrillard's ideas of the simulation and simulacrum can explain much about how our institutions and ideals have lost touch with their original motivating force, falling into simulating previous goals.

"After the orgy" is an essay on the post-modern plight that Ryder briefly reads through in Part 3.

 1:32 Part 1: Where we are at, and why Baudrillard can help 
A walk through the 4 or 5 books, from education to capitalism, and why the world doesn't make sense. More distressing is that when crisis hits, we have no new ideas but keep following the same playbook. This is (arguably) because our institutions and ideals are simulacra. 

14:25 Part 2: Simulating, Dissimulating, and Simulacrum in the Art World
a short story about an art talk where Ryder simulates having knowledge, while smarter people dissimulate, and seemingly no one knows what is really happening. 

18:58 Part 3: After the Orgy, essay by Baudrillard
A bad dramatic reading of parts of Baudrillard's essay, After the Orgy, where he discusses achieving the goals of modernity, the liberation of all things, and the plight of not knowing what to do after. What happens when sex or money or politics are just an act, and the results precede the event? 

Series overview

There is a mystical power to self optimization, to becoming better. With all the Behavioral Science, behavioral economics, psychology, neurological studies, and FMRI tech we have figured out how to make you “better.” Yet, according to movies and myth, attempts at control or better living through science cascade into tragedy.

From the 80’s man now considered toxic, to the perfect housewife now considered repressive, the timing of the societal idea of “better” shifts. And let’s not even get into the tragedy of eugenics and that deadly trap of “progress.”

Optimization (for this series of podcasts) is along the lines of “better habits to make a better man or woman.” Woven into our bootstrapping cultural ethos and perpetuated in early sci-fi and dangerous stereotypes, the notion has a desperate appeal, especially in a society that creates insecurity. There is a dream of morphing into the Übermensch, of overcoming and maximizing potential.

Optimization offers a formula of productive competence, and along with that comes achievement and self-confidence. For some this turns to the cockiness of being a bro, or bro-ette, yet equally that is something else cultural as well. But with this quasi-scientific-self-help-behavior-hack culture on the rise, we should look at not only why it is rising, but also look at the hidden downside: As Zander Nethercutt says

We are optimizing ourselves to death… In a hyper-productive, work-obsessed world, we’ve become acutely aware of any opportunity for optimization.”

Yes, we are obsessed due to our cultural precarity, due to the systemic fear-inducing threat of being left behind.

Yet, there actually are some real benefits to having knowledge of how knowledge gets formed. Being able to retain information just a little bit better, or being able to sleep just a little bit better, or (most beneficial for me) working on a regular basis to prevent depression, rumination, and ennui are all goals worth pursuing… in moderation.

The Lure of Self Optimization

We all dream of the magic elixir of being “awesome-sauce amazing.” It is a mythological archetype to imbibe and thrive. It is a hope preyed on by snake-oil salesmen and sold to Kings as the Fountain of Youth. With modern science we have reduced the myth to pill form and invented conspiracy theories.

However, there really is a modern science of chemicals that increase brain function: neurotropic drugs. The most popular example is Bradley Cooper in the movie Limitless, where are a neurotropic drug allows for increased focus, cognition, and neuroplasticity, which is of course like a superpower in a society the champions intelligence over anything else. Well, maybe we champion money more… or no, maybe it is beauty, or maybe power… anyway… I digress.

One popular drug for focus and attention is Ritalin. or speed. Amphetamines are heavily abused today by students freaking out about taking exams. But most neurotropics are not speed or a silver-bullet: they offer you marginal gains at best, and often involve taking several pills several times a day to keep a lot of chemical levels at optimal Peaks.

But, for such marginal gains, perhaps you could just as easily set up something more tangible and more measurable: adjust your workflow for Peak Performance to hit Flow State.

JUST THE TIPS

TIP 1: KanBan

One tip to help you achieve flow state is to set yourself up for success. By using multiple interlocking strategies that reduce stress and increase focus, it is easier to slip into flow state. One of the setups recommended is Kanban. 

The Kanban technique is really a productivity system: a list making technique that is the inspiration for the software Trello.

One problem we suffer from is our brain is constantly remembering small nagging things we have to do, which keeps distracting us from complete focus.

First, you write down everything you need to get done, all the goals, all the steps onto “cards”. Second, you organize them into #todo #active #paused and #compelte categories. Finally, with everything in easy to see visual system, you keep pull up one “card” from the active category and focus on that.

This reduces the cognitive drag of your brain trying to multitask and worry, increasing productivity.

Tip 2: FLOW STATE

Now that your workflow is more efficient through Kanban, you need the right frame of mind to hit flow state. This is different for everyone, but the right music helps and you can look up a list of “flow triggers” here to see what else might help you

Note: the task must be sufficiently difficult but not too hard, hitting your ‘zone of competence’. Easy enough for you to see results and feel in control, but difficult enough to keep you fully absorbed and engaged.

At this point, you lose identification with “self” or the ability to “self-monitor.” That’s right: you are your most productive self when you stop thinking about yourself.

moths to the flame

Why would you want to be 5x more productive?

I would hazard to say the lure of efficiency, habits, and productivity feed into a notion that you can take control of your life, find more agency and autonomy, and feel more secure in a precarious world.

However, Schopenhauer may be right:

A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.

This begets the paradox of rational instrumentality, where we can rationally make a plan and we can follow that plan, but without asking if the our underlying desire (the thing we will) is in itself rational. Have we been considering greater productivity beneficial without considering why?

Productivity is a tool. A very seductive tool, just like rationality, but productivity at its worst cases can lead to OCD and can become a supplemental crutch to actual living. You can be so busy being productive you forget to live. You are, at that point, an automaton protecting yourself from the ambiguity of living. 

Jurgen Habermas (whom we discussed previously on episode 12) says our rationality should be “communicative rationality” which would come out of successful communication… not our own demented echo chambers.

In a healthy society you could choose to be hyper-productive just because, to test yourself, but it would not necessarily make you more secure or more valuable: your validation of yourself would be internal and through your connection to others, not as part of a competitive survival strategy.

However, we live in a capitalist world leaning into oligopoly while consumerist extremism shapes our psychology into pathology. Due to the system we are in, and maybe our evolutionary nature, we desire external validation and wish to climb the social ladder. The lure of optimization is to provide rungs for our climb. The science of optimization allows self-bootstrapping through measurable efficiencies, thus offering a semblance of control and forward momentum or positive, constructive change.

This is not bad, in fact, it is great. Perhaps it is even a vital survival strategy today. Given that our society preys on precarity, turning those that fall behind into serfs and wage slaves, maybe reshaping ourselves is the only option until our society ascends into a healthy utopia.

My cautioning consideration is in terms of moderation: We must keep our priorities in sight, and hopefully they are beyond materialist consumerism. If we become hyper-productive what if we spent our remaining hours resting, relaxing, and bonding with friends and family?

SHOW NOTES at 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-54-the-world-beyond-your-head-pt-2/

0:00 intro

2:11 part 1: environmental suppression

5:31 part 2: the illusion of the self

8:35 part 3: situated self & ecologies of attention

11:17 part 4: autonomy  vs heteronomy

14:33 part 5: the current cultural narrative

19:16 part 6: freedom!

21:16 part 7: the ideal self as projection

Eisenstein asks “Why is money a force for evil in the world?” When did money, once a sacred promise and gift, become a means to separate individuals from each other and nature, to create competition, extraction, and hoarding? 

Key takeaways from Eisenstein's book "Sacred Economics" 
1: We are ungrateful teenagers: the earth nurtured us into adolescence, but we won't become responsible adults. 
2: The parable of the Eleventh Round. 
3: Negative interest. Instead of money accruing value… what if it lost it? 

We discuss the origin of money, how it developed as a sacred trust and could enrich lives and community, but through Interest (usury) and the parable of the Eleventh round we see how it destroyed community and the environment through unsustainable growth (capitalism) built into it's design. 

We also discuss the Tunnel Effect, and how it leads to the problem of solving capitalism's problems with more capitalism. Primarily this is a doubling down into existing systems and ideologies when under stress, which -of course- is manufactured by capitalism. 

0:00 Intro (Ryder's 3 takeaways) 
8:23 Part 1: Getting stuck 
11:47 Part 2: History of money (potlatch into trade) 
18:09 Part 3: The Eleventh Round 
28: 19 Part 4: Transition from The Hedonic Treadmill 
31:36 Part 5: Outro 
 

0:00 Introduction to this episode.

1:53 In 1879 there was a horrible train wreck: the promise and cost of technology

4:27 A cautionary tale about the influence of the machine on communism.

6:53 What is the frame of Capitalism? (Marxism into desire) 

12:17 The problem with capitalism is not just the machinery, but also our social and libidinal economy.

15:04 Our desires are shaped by society, work, and culture, which are not easily overthrown altogether. 

17:52 How do you manifest the spirit of man at his boldest while denying him his rude desires?

23:33 Accelerationism as a “sadistic” approach to crisis: rush towards death. 

25:49 Barbarism is the only way to get to socialism: nihilism of values. 

27:53 Accelerationism grasps misery: The world of work is confronted as one of future horror. 

Christianity operates through a lack: we cannot know God, so a “gap” must be filled between God and Humans. Christ is God splitting from 1 into 2, allowing us to identify and get closer to the mystery of God, but in so doing, Christ was subjected to the filth of this world. (Zizek) 

The reversal of the one God splitting into two (only to mysteriously re-unify us) is the process of poop: taking all values and reducing them into one homogenous, non-mysterious pile. (Bataille) 

Growth can occur from this filth (otherwise known as manure), producing roses. Beauty from secular waste, rather than an excessive effort towards mysteries that only slip away as you approach them. (Hegel) 

{{This is a continuation of Step 74: Symbolic Victory}} 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-75-holy-to-holy-s/

---

0:00 Introduction to this episode.

• Introduction to the episode.
• How symbols create a mystery which drives us.

1:16 Limitations of the self and the symbolic unknowable.

• The gap between being human and achieving the transcendental.
• The symbolic unknowable and god's sacrifice.

3:41 How we identify with the filth and alienation. 3:41

• God forces himself to become a fragment of himself.
• The shape of conflict.

5:30 The fragmentation of the monolith.

• Division creates a distance in the one god.
• The holy nature of shit.

7:30 Moving the sacred to the secular.

• Moving the sacred to the secular in pop culture.
• Non-mysterious, non-motivation unification.

9:39 Solving the mystery leads to more mysteries.

• The attempt to resolve the mystery is the point of failure.
• Mimetic desire, scapegoating and sacrifice.

12:16 How mimetic desire works.

• Mimetic desire and the hedonic treadmill.
• The steam valve of society is sanctioned murder.

13:41 Moving from the real to the symbolic.

• Moving from the real to the symbolic for stability.
• The egyptians and their claims to permanence.

15:29 We shun the real shit and believe bullshit.

• We shun the real shit and believe the bullshit.
• The beauty of the poop pile.

Part I

We all know we are addicted to our phones, but can it really be a bad thing to think all the time? Yes, it can. The stories we tell ourselves trigger a little a dopamine buzz, activating part of the DMN (Default Network Mode), which means we increasingly live in our own head listening to our own stories. The problem becomes compounded when the PCC (posterior cingulate cortex) is activated, since it often signals thoughts of obsessive control, rumination, induced morality, guilt, and depression.

All of these activities close off our ability to to see reality, increasingly letting us spin in a world of our own making.

I had done earlier research on the "observer effect" where we literally lose the ability to observe ourselves (self-perception) when our attention was highly active or we were doing a novel task. Equally, meditation and mindfulness practice have been shown to reduce PCC activity in the brain, allowing us to reduce the narrativizing tendency of the brain.

You are subject to sorrow, fear, jealousy, anger, and inconsistency. That’s the real reason you should admit that you are not wise.”

~ Marcus Aurelius

Part II

What does this mean in realistic terms?

People who play the psychology test, The Ultimatum Game, often get angry or disgusted at the perceived unfairness of offers. Often blowing up just to prove a point, even though they are playing against a computer. This righteousness doesn't hurt the computer, but it does hurt the subject, proving that we will hurt ourselves to prove a point.

Meditation or mindfulness practitioners seem to be able to de-couple or distance themselves from the negative emotions, taking them less personally, and thus reducing stress through empathizing with the other position. As well, they see little reward in hurting the other side, even if it is a computer.

This research shows that our cultural norms, our common sense and beliefs, may be harmful to us and others, and to engage in empathy without taking things personally points towards a universal human ethic.

Part III

Ryan Holiday put out a podcast that considers our addiction to thinking as a negative, harmful tendency that might be making us stupid and miserable. When we assign our role as a smart thinker, then we form opinions, not letting ourselves be open to new ideas or other people. As well, we do a disservice to those around us but thinking for them and not allowing them to take the exciting journey the world offers.

We need to remain open, and empathetic, moving out of the Nietzsche stage of a camel, hording knowledge, on to the lion, slaying our values, and embody the child creator. Which is so much more fun.

0:57 Dopamine and Daydreaming

2:35 Give your ego a break

3:26 You made your own story, and you are sticking with it

4:40 Hurting yourself for the principle of the thing

6:16 How do you halt your self-destruction?

8:30 Your cup is already full

0:01 Why camouflage is like a rhizome.

• The complexity of camouflage and abstraction.
• Why camouflage is a better survival strategy.

2:44 The servant as master.

• How to become low like water and remain powerful.
• Master as servant - martyr. 

5:16 The boss who tries to also be your best friend.

• The parent who guilts you. 
• Undermined core self: camouflage needed for shame concealment. 

6:56 The ubiquity of repetition and mass media.

• The ubiquity of marilyn monroe as a sex symbol. (Andy Warhol)
• Society normalization disperses desire: at once object and landscape. 

9:18 Desire has become decentralized and dispersed

• Mimetic desire has become decentralized and mimetically dispersed. 
• The role of libido in camouflaging.

12:13 The decentralization of the self.

• Camouflage through subject, context, confusion or dispersal at scale.
• Decentralization of self: the self or desire as a rhizome.

14:45 Disguise is the facade that shelters the self, but also enables psychopathic killers. 

• The digital world lacks trust, artificial intelligence, and the travails of insecurity.
• Crowdsourcing wikipedia is a battleground.

16:57 We no longer trust the image.

• The attention economy and the loss of trust.
• The destabilization of America, 

19:28 Do you still have the power to focus or just act?

• Focus is the only thing that can determine who we are.
• Hunker down and live dangerously. 

THE PUNISHER, is a comic book character who is an ex-military, badass vigilante. He is all dark and broody, and smashy and gunsy.

In 2019 the Punisher death’s head skull logo became conflated with the police movement ‘blue lives matter’ and ‘the thin blue line.’ What we want to do, is not only recognize where this comes from, but how it works in our society, despite it’s myriad contradictions.

PART I:
becoming the punisher

Did you know that baby birds, shortly after their eyes open, instinctually know the shape of a predator bird’s silhouette? They are born with this knowledge. When a non-predator flies over, they just keep on chirping and pooping, but the second a predator’s silhouette comes into view they shut up and scrunch down. This is called the Hawk/Goose effect.

Now, police, once wearing brown or light blue, have almost uniformly shifted to black. Pair this up with bulky body armor, sunglasses to prevent reading the eyes, monosyllabic encounters, and a utility belt laden with human submission tools, and we see the shaping of a predator. 

Here, we begin to engage with the aesthetics, the construction of symbols and a form that signals something… in this case power and violence. 

In his comic Strip, “About Face,” Nate Powell maps out this transition of the militarized “eternal warrior” as “forever innocent,” linked to fighting for “lost causes” of the past, like Vietnam or the Confederacy. This misspent youth fighting other men’s wars means they are ultimately innocent, and used. 

Upon returning home from an unpopular war, they bring back the military signs as “a shield against shame and trauma.” As Powell says, with the cooptation of punisher’s death head logo “power lay in its apolitical mass appeal, cool stuff to buy, while functioning to normalize a paramilitary, proto-fascist presence.” … equally, the flag is rebranded, as the “thin blue line”, now a

“fully masculinized militarized icon, eager to make way for an authoritarian future.” 

Nate Powell

Stripped of symbolic color, it’s black and white redesign, remarketing, and re-branding… some might say desecration… asserts any spectrum is weakness. It now signals “allegiance” (or a higher moral code) that is aggressively above the rule-of-law.

PART II:
bureaucracy 

Now, the real gift of a vigilante, is he gets things done with none of that fussy red-tape of bureaucratic legalization. 

Red-tape? How does you paperwork hold up to my tactical knife? 

Equally, people have lost their place in the system, and the future is moving beyond them and their skills. To take action, to get results, is to be USEFUL. This dream of action is a dream of freedom.

But when the bureaucracy in place is to prevent coercion and abuse by civil servants, yet the police see themselves as warriors and sheepdogs embrace the contradictory vigilante symbol… one must pause and consider the implications of this desire portrayal.

What we see is that those promoting the punisher flag align with a morality and allegiance ‘beyond the law’ and are merely shackled by the law, not servants of it. With the darker implication being that once the shackles are removed… dissenters are in for a world of hurt.

PART III:
empty symbols

This a more Baudrillard conception of the world.

The world since modernity has exploded, or broken apart the complicated rich histories of all things. It can now travel lighter, and faster, but the means to get that speed was to remove the cumbersome baggage linking it to authentic ideals. The ‘process’ is liberated from ‘meaning,’ thus the process is a simulation without governing ideals, leaving it in a state of indeterminacy or uncertainty. 

From this place, any meaning can be attributed, but equally (now that it is not weighed down with all that meaning and ideals that you have to reference) the symbol moves faster, dispersing outwards to proliferate, maintaining only the superficial aspect. In this simulated state Baudrillard shows that “evil” and “good” coexist, losing meaning as well without difference.

Anything that has lost it’s idea is a man without a shadow. Disconnected from reality, and running ahead with rampant virility.

So, when you see a punisher skull, with a thin-blue-line flag, with trumps hair or a MAGA hat, saying ‘blue lives matter’ all smashed into one thing on a cop car…  ~ well, the accumulation of multiple effects is actually a disappearance of causes. (similar to good and evil coexisting.)

Through an excess of functionality, it is rebranded with a murderous vitality. Still, devoid of clear ideology, it manifests a rebellious urgency and the need for movement, progress, and affiliation… this is drawn from the most superficial levels and now manifested as the deepest motivation, an allegiant belief. 

In short, its contradictory messages empower an anti-logic, an obstinate rejection (abreaction) of the status quo and the rules of communication. It signals, like a dark superhero, a willingness to win through pain and loss… a sacrificial dark knight tilting at windmills. 

What does matter is it clearly bonds wide swaths of our population. The punisher+think-blue-line mash-up is the culmination of reductionist superficial appearances over functional, idea driven processes, like policy reform.

Yet, that comes from somewhere: a failure in the system. The bricolage ethos manifest in allegiant loyalty and vigilantism expounds a moral truth “beyond the rule of law,” and it speaks of a dark desire rising and swelling. 

Beware paramilitaries. The next step is the authoritarian state. 

Timothy Snyder

In his interview, we discuss Tom's book. While speculative fiction, it is based in a realism that predicts a chain of events leading to a more and more despotic, tyrannical presidency by Trump. While somewhat dystopian, it is lively, and shows a number of flaws and strengths in our democratic process. During the show we discuss Trump, facts as stranger than fiction, and how this becomes a difficult problem when writing. We discuss Putin and Russia, China, and the overall thorny problem we find ourselves in. 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-37-trumps-second-term-tom-fischgrund/

In this episode Ryder discusses how ideas become pervasive. We accept that technology is progress, and the thing we created, now controls us under the guise of being essential or more efficient. And essentialism is at odds with human needs and society. 

Ryder walks through how online surveillance to enhance products also captured 'exhaust data' which tracked users behavior. Eventually google figured out how to capitalize on this data, turning it into a revenue stream, but at the cost of user security and consent. 

While many people claim not to care, Ryder maps out a few examples of how this path is leading to negative results and manipulation by Facebook, Tinder, Pokemon Go, and Walmart. He also discusses the tech and techniques developed and pioneered online being used by China to control citizens through social credit scores and facial recognition for tracking and abusing ethnic minorities. 

The Will to DIY website has references and sources: https://thewilltodiy.com/step-15-surveillance-capitalism/

2:18 Technology as the new religion: removing human agency for the sake of "progress"

5:00 Your tears were lost, but now they are found. And Google will use them to manipulate you. 

8:59 Control Corp's happy familteam loves their tracking devices!

13:27 "Lure Modules" via Pokemon Go: pre-determining your behavior 

15:49 "You really hurt your Uncle Walmart" the panopticon of time

19:30 China's social credit system: the "trustworthiness score"

We walk through the dreamland of Cockaigne, and our small utopic dreams. Bregman reminds us democracy was once a dream, and slavery was once unthinkably common. 

We nearly had UBI in the 70's, because all the data proves it works, but morality, economics, and conservatism have re-written our notions of what is possible or responsible in ways that only exacerbate wealth inequality. Bregman walks through programs on Minicome, the Cherokee nation, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and the failures of large institutions and charities in attempting grand plans that fail. 

The proof is there: the only thing that makes poor people poor is a lack of cash. The easiest, most effective way to solve the problem is a direct influx of cash. Not expensive, misguided projects, celebrity endorsements, or more counseling. 

On a broader note, the US ranks highest in GDP, but is also highest in social ills. The Netherlands, by contrast, have equally high per capita income, without the social ills. Similar to other, poorer countries, like Portugal, the US has vastly unequal wealth concentration, which tends to lead to social disruption through violence and rebellion as a means of redistribution. But, at the top it is also problematic: the international monetary fund states that wealth inequality increases depression, paranoia, and unhappiness in the rich. 

PART 1: militarization of society

Tracing back to Max Weber’s insights, Sennett talks about the “iron cage” of the militarized bureaucracy is mapped onto society by Otto Von Bismarck.

This does 2 things: it gives everyone a place in society, so they won’t rebel, and it creates “rationalized time.” That is regimented time you can plan around, which develops agency for citizens. For the first time, you could plan for what should happen, instead of worrying about what might happen.

Part 2: The Fresh Page

The “fresh page” theory is that as pyramidal, bureaucratic stability crumbles around us, this is not a return to a previous age, but instead a new page in history.

Sennett maps out how in 1962, the Port Huron statement asked for the dissolution of large companies and social frameworks that held people in a rigid, iron grip. Part of that happened: we lost jobs that employ people for life and the ability to plan our life around stability as the corporations dismantled the structures that gave people a place in society and a future they could envision and narrate their lives around. These were not replaced with the communal, sympathetic negotiations and strong social structures, as the authors had envisioned.

Instead, we have a “fresh page” where “relations” have been replaced with “transactions.”

The characteristics of the unique individual who can survive on this fresh page are 1) people who can function in short-term time frames (with no long-term life narrative), 2) a person who can mine their talent for potential rather than becoming a craftsmen at one thing, and 3) they must surrender to their sense of self, over and over.

On the ‘fresh page’ free from rules, many meet failure, and are left drifting alone.

“Alone, they suddenly discovered time- the shapeless time, which before had exhilarated them, the absence of rules for how to proceed… Their fresh page was blank. In this limbo, isolated , without a life narrative, they discover failure.”

Richard Sennett

Part 3: Social Capital

The “iron cage” taught delayed gratification. Where people internalized their desire fulfillment to the extent that they could never arrive at fulfillment, and thus made the cage their home. The psychological trap became very rigid, producing drones and automatons, people who behaved like the machines they worked around.

Sennett wishes that Max Weber had a little more insight into the military to realize this pyramid hierarchy has some built in features of personal autonomy through the negation and translation of messages: each level gets the chance to interpret the order to fit conditions on the ground.

Feeling this sense of agency, to be able to “make a difference,” is an illusion that people need to proceed with an adult life.

Part 4: Capital

With the replacement of the local banker by a global merchant banker and the introduction of leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers, the corporations themselves became the capital.

This destabilized them as previous associations and processes were broken apart and loyalty (along with employees) was shed. This faster, more ambitious, more cut-throat organization served capital, not people, because investors with “impatient capital” wanted short-term rewards.

institutional solidity became an investment negative… stability was a sign of weakness… the willingness to destabilize one’s own organization sent a positive signal.

Richard Sennett

This stripped down, de-layered version of the company was also changed by technology, such as e-mail communication. Now, instead of passing a command through managers (requiring interpretation and granting agency) a CEO could send an email directly and document their compliance… to the letter. So, email cut that layer out.

As well, automation stripped a layer of the pyramid at the bottom. Now people have to outpace machines to keep their jobs. They no longer have a place in society. Which in Otto Von Bismarck’s bureaucratic pyramid is a failure: the whole reason it existed was to stabilize society by giving everyone a place and role.

Today, the new workers are ashamed of dependency, and “worry about a loss of self-control.” We have reinvigorated and institutionalized the traumas of the unstable past, breaking community and social bonds, a sense of self, and communal history along the way.

Part 5: MP3 Player

Sennett compares the new system to technology: the corporation acts as an MP3 player. The laser shines from the center, playing one track (function) at a time. The workers are hired, perform their function, then are discarded with no loyalty of consideration. Now the workers must self-govern and educate for a changing future, offering no stability. But the companies suffer as well without formal or informal trust: they have lost formerly institutionalized knowledge of what works and the adaptability of people with agency, often making hubristic mistakes.

Leaders today no longer think critically of their employees, choosing instead to outsource anything painful smacking of responsibility of authority. They divorce power from authority, and hand it over to “consultants,” who know little about a company, and whose actual job is often not to be honest, but to shield leadership from the hard or dirty work.

loyalty is dead

90’s leadership guru

We are still hammering on Tom Sawyer as the cognitive laborer, but also discuss how insidious cognitive labor can be. We talk more about the mind/body or mental/physical distinction by bringing up Hannah Arendt's "Active Life" and "Contemplative Life," and pointing out the ways categories are used to create hierarchy and simplify information into rational frameworks that allow for ease of understanding and distinction in our lives. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-8-vita-activa/

0:57 Dream time as work time: working for the "man" while you sleep

2:14 Hobby time is the only time you are authentic

4:18 Vita Activa: how community is made, how individuals are distinguished.

5:53 The danger of ideological toxins: new categories as "positive pressure."

8:33 An Example of how you become indoctrinated, and move through the 3 categories of the Active Life

Introduction  

- Recap of previous episodes on the mimetic desire.

- Rene Girard's model of scapegoating.

2:33 How do we prevent mimetic desire?

- One way to solve mimetic desire and scapegoating.

- The dispute plan to prevent future luxury.

4:42 What do you do after the revolution?

- Government ineptitude and bureaucracy is what the people actually want.

- What to do after the revolution, or after the orgy.

- The French army became the first to create a dedicated camouflage unit.

- Art as an artificial art.

8:54 Fiction is artifice that becomes truth.

- Imitation is natural to man from childhood.

- Art is the lie that makes us realize truth.

11:17 Three ways to hide; camouflage in nature, military and politics.

- The three main purposes of camouflage.

- Three ways to hide camouflage via nature.

- Blending or hiding in nature, military and politicians.

- Blending in politics.

16:02 Dazzle Camouflage.

- Dazzle in the animal kingdom.

- Trump is a dazzler like AOC.

18:53 Dissembling and dazzle.

- The third type of camouflage, obfuscation, is dissembling and dazzling simultaneously.

- Obscure and dazzle.

21:28 Mimicry of the actor.

- Mimicking a skunk to endear yourself with someone unlike you.

- Mimicry and mimicry.

- The pantomime of the mime, mimicry of the mimic.

- Art vs art.

26:15 Camo as a symbol of confusion.

- The role of camo in the city.

- How camo has evolved in the modern world.

28:40 Turning camouflage into a threat.

- The reversal of utility in camo and dazzle.

- A densely packed spiral of signals and motivations.

30:44 Simulating media into the real.

- The seduction by aesthetics and ideology.

- Camo as a tactic for minimal distance

PART 1: 
grand truths

We have become really good during our post-structuralist, deconstructionist era of pointing out the flaws in broad concepts of truth or good. Instead, we now champion individuals over collective identity… unless that collective identity is for individuals. 

So, big generalized broad-brush truths usually give way to individual truths: my truth is not your truth, my good is not your good. And if your truth is not my truth, then is it actually TRUTH? Not in the classical definition of being in accordance with fact or reality.

Using "Hot Fuzz" as an example, when we agree upon a single version of the good, it becomes a tribal moral imperative. Yet, the only thing that lets us build massive dense cities and have national goals and interests is, as Yuval Noah Harari says in "Sapiens," is a shared ideology... or some might say, a shared truth, or a shared "good."

But shared truths have led to the inquisition and National Socialist Germany and White Supremacy. Philosophers have worked hard to chip away at these "common sense truths" by showing how bias determines outcomes, and we have developed this hard work of deconstructing "truths" or "power" into a social prestige game.

And now, we are feeling the effects of this clever ability, as our stability erodes.

“The thing about civilization is, it keeps you civil. You get rid of one, you can’t count on the other. People are tribal. The more settled things are, the bigger the tribes can be. The churn comes, and the tribes get small again”

Amos Burton in "The Expanse" 

So, societally, we are in a conundrum of needing a big truth to keep the small fractious tribes from ripping apart civilization. We can try for "fighting climate change" but so far that has only gained marginal success over 30 years having to battle against individual desire and corporate growth.

Interlude

I did an art show called “The Idyll” in 2015, where the premise was Science & Math as a religion. The take away is that we don't understand science, yet declare it as truth, outsourcing our belief to others, and championing a set of goals and believing aesthetics of intelligence.

PART II: 
some history

I heard a youtube video where Ray Monk gave a breakdown of the Philosophy of math, but it really looked at notions of truth and objectivity. We walk through Pythagoras, his mystical math cult, the problems with arithmetic, and how geometry became the Ideal Forms according to Plato. And, of course, how our world is a lame shadow compared to the perfect realm, which can be approached through logic and reason.

This realm is objective and determines our flawed world, but Aristotle refutes this idea of math as coming "before" reality, saying we apply it to objects in reality, as it is a "property" of the objects. Yet, this is declared "subjective" by Frege, as he says we choose how to apply it.

Eventually, Kant comes along with analytical propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic statements are true by definition, it is necessarily true, such as “all bachelors are male” versus synthetic statements where you pair things that are different. Kant generates another way of knowing: A priori and a posteriori (before or after). But "math" is an odd "synthetic a priori" … there are charts on the website you can find to help explain this. 

So, all this work, and we are back to a SUBJECTIVE TRUTH, where we filter the world through our 'lens' of truth or math.

The reason I find all this important to understand TRUTH is because we are witnessing a pendulum swing of positions: 
"It is Absolute and Objective." 
"No, it is Subjective and applied to the world by people."

PART III: 
Pragmatism

One fascinating aspect of the TRUTH that we should keep in mind, is almost no one cares what Kant or Plato or Aristotle say about anything. Truth is built mostly on consensus and intersubjectivity. So, while people will argue about God all day and say it is "Truth," it definitionally can't be true if it is arguable.

Inconceivable! 

Vizzini, Princess Bride

 Yet, this has a precedent: Plato invented this realm of the absolute with perfect FORMS, and over time this attempt to prove an absolute realm as the source of TRUE. This occupied and warped some of the most brilliant thinkers in the world, especially when it got conflated with God. Just look at Hegel or Heidegger. (Honestly, it is just too smart for me.) 

Rationalism worked to prove that there was the absolute, an all-knower. William James, was a pragmatist, and leaned more into empiricism, pushing back against rationalism. When speaking of the “absolute” or “religious experience” he didn’t deny it existed, he instead offered a metaphor for what it actually does, how it works in reality.

He tried to find a middle ground to focus on what works in our daily lives. What good is ivory tower philosophy when it can’t be instrumentalized? What good is Heidegger? At what point have we descended into “vicious intellectualism”? 

James says we come laden with lots of “common sense” truths… that aren’t true. These are handed off to us by parents and society. But overtime we grow, “grafting” the new truth onto our existing beliefs, assimilating them by rationalizing them.

James, also a psychologist, says TRUTH is part of a thought pattern that must be validated and verifiable... and it must be put up for scrutiny. 

Truth: 

1. Must be fact,
2. It must have Relations to provable ideas (such as math), and
3. prove useful to our reality and “lead to useful consequences.”

So, while your ideas must work in reality, you don’t get to make up your own truths. Your ideas must be practical, useful, and have utility. 

And this is key… these ideas you hold, even if not useful, may not be immediately harmful to you, but they are not of the “good.” He says Truths are “good” because we can “ride” on them into the future without being unpleasantly surprised. 

The benefit of truths is they

lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking”

William James

Why this orange? Co-opted governmental authority is now purchasable and branded. The citizen who spends money can now be an authority, or at least feel empowered, but perhaps this small rebellion is signalling something else. Considering blue-collar stereotypes and groups like the Sovereign Citizens, Home Depot offers a starting point for a conversation about division and voice and the appeal of simplicity. 

Ryder also discusses some of his early works using home depot orange and how clamps are both comedic and sinister. Yet, when put to work properly, they become mute. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-1-home-depot-orange/

0:35 Labor as invisible and voiceless

1:20 Home Depot Orange: from Government Authority to Consumer Authority

2:23 Home Depot as Ground Zero for tiny Rebellions

5:33 Simple solutions (brute force) for Complex Interpersonal Problems

4:42 Clamps have Jaws and Teeth, but when active they become mute.

Part I

In a reaction to the previous podcast, step 23, my wife and I discussed the problem of tyrants, or mini-tyrants, who practice repressive tactics based on fear, coercion, and cronyism, and how reducing guilt and shame may not be helpful in combatting them.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.”

Carl Jung

The notion that is hard to fathom is that they are getting their rewards from somewhere, either their base or at home. Typically, shame or guilt socially would ameliorate their behavior, but when being shamed becomes a badge of honor, these tactics no longer work, and we must consider where they are receiving their rewards from to continue their behavior.

And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

Jordan Peterson

Part II

Considering how irrationality and groupthink produce a culture, then promote one of their own, we must consider how this culture of nonsensical “Common sense” is perpetuated.

If you ain’t first, you’re last

Ricky Bobby

Looking at Antonio Gramsci‘s work, a neo-marxist, we can see that the Cultural Hegemony (or cultural hierarchy) works to keep the bourgeoise (or capitalist ruling class) in power by aligning the Base (the working masses) with an ideology that reinforces their irrational allegiance to a system that keeps them in chains. He discusses a Superstructure of intellectuals (law, philosophy, education) as Shapers, who shape culture and the Base, while the Base maintains the Shapers, creating a loop.

However, cultural “common sense” is refuting many ideas from intellectual circles (the Shapers). This maintains the existing cultural hegemony, in part because both the workers and people in power are raised in a society that educates them with blind-spots and bias, creating an inability (at worst) or reluctance (at best) to be genuinely critical of the institutions surrounding them.

“Thank you sir, may I have another.”

How this manifests is multi-faceted, and considering the power/politics games involved we can only point out a few things to keep in mind:

• leaders use their position to remind you of hierarchy, and your role to follow
• leaders use economic coercion for alignment
• leadership is performative, utilizing clichés or truisms while ignoring other “truths”
• decisions are made to seem impersonal: it is the way the world works, like gravity or hurricanes
• bearing the burden of hard decisions evokes sympathy or honor, yet is a justification for “making the big bucks.”

All cruelty springs from weakness”

Seneca

Part III

If the mini-tyrant or leader is a singular individual, without the polis/oikos split from the Greek city/state, and he/she takes work criticism as personal criticism, then we have a leadership problem that turns reactionary, or self-saving (contractive) rather than open collaborative, organizational, or rational.

When all recourse to discourse, guilt, and shame are exhausted, we turn to the judicial branch, which tends to favor those in power due in part to the financial burden of the legal realm. This is a failure on multiple levels.

So, do we continue to fight on ideological principle? It is good to know you are in the right, but you will be battered for your principles. Is it easier to just give in rather than destroy your job and home life with the stress and pain? It is a “free country” so we can vote with our feet and leave, but this seems to be giving up the “good fight” when your society has somehow internalized and thrived on a dark morality.

3:14 Stop cornering people into a "join us or die" irrationality

5:21 Acting out to get your itch scratched

7:09 Man up and punch a girl, Ricky Bobby!

9:32 A banjo in the hand is worth 2 in the bush!

12:22 Speaking out against common sense

14:30 Leadership Tactics: economic coercion, cherry-picking truisms, injustice is a natural law

Ryder Richards builds on thinkers like Kant, Rorty, and Baudrillard in this podcast to argue that reality can filter problematic abstractions. He proposes reality as a net separating transcendental truths and superficial advertising. Without reality's grounding, these abstractions reinforce each other's weaknesses.

Part 1 - Reality as a Net for Abstractions

Richards lays out the idea of reality as a net dividing two types of abstraction. On one side is a transcendental ideology or truth claim, such as religion or science. On the other is superficial simulacra like advertising. Usually, reality forces these to grapple with concrete pragmatism. But as reality's power fades, these abstractions intertwine dangerously.

Richards relates this to Plato's cave - the shadows are lies, but the light of the exterior, truth itself, can also be an abstraction. Modern thinkers like Rorty argued truth and reality are separate. So, going from cave to light just shifts one abstraction for another.

Part 2 - Disneyland as an Example

Richards uses Baudrillard's concrete example of Disneyland as an abstraction slipping into dangerous territory. Disneyland pretends to be fiction but reveals a desire for moral truth. However, this yearning abstracted into blind faith leads to fanaticism and policing "outsiders." The virtues represented become ways to enforce arbitrary hierarchies. In this case, the morality play of virtuousness, combined with fictional advertising, exemplifies Hofstader's 'hyper system," or tangled hierarchy, without referencing reality. 

Part 3 - Lowering Abstractions' Power

To counter abstraction's excesses, Richards offers two main methods:

Way 1 - Communicative Rationality

The first way is Isiah Berlin's communicative rationality - agreeing on language, intent, and logic tied to reality. This raises the "net" by grounding thought in the concrete.

Way 2 - Meditation

The second way is meditation, recognizing our physical body to quiet constant abstraction. This reduces reactivity and teaches us to filter manipulations.

Conclusion

In sum, abstraction untethered from reality breeds instability and vulnerability to facile beliefs. Reality anchors us against these excesses. In future episodes, Richards will continue exploring pragmatism, AI, and the limits of language.

Ryder takes a walk, and ends up musing about his neighbor's Xmas decorations, the lack of participation, and if that means anything. Expecting a conspiracy he researches the use of Xmas lights and a short history leading back to the White House and Thomas Edison.

Eventually he discusses the movement of all things from physical to virtual space. Pulling form the classic text "The Sacred and Profane" by Mircea Eliade, the question is raised that our portal to both is now the same.

This was a delightful conversation with Rebecca Coffey, author of the book "Science and lust" available on Amazon, or wherever you buy things that make you smarter.

We cover a lot of ground, while primarily remaining focused on our shared heritage with apes and our evolutionary basis for behavior. We discuss Freud, Darwin, Morris, natural selection and how culture and sexual selection modify our behavior. We talk about how women can be choosey and men indiscriminate, technology, romance,  Japan, polygamy, incels, and mice wearing polyester pants. 

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-81-kant-and-the-rise-of-subjective-realism/

Reality, belief, and the apocalypse. 0:00

• Ryder Richards discusses the demotion of reality in favor of subjectivity, exploring the tension between science and religion, and the consequences of refusing to acknowledge the apocalypse.
• Kant's false dichotomy between freedom and determinism is questioned, with a focus on the historical context of Thomas Hobbes and Galileo's views on a mechanical reality.

Kant's philosophy and its impact on understanding reality. 4:10

• Kant introduces philosophy that squares God observation conundrum.
• Kant argues that objects in reality interfere with self-governance, leading to a moral argument that demonizes reality.

Kant's philosophy and its implications. 8:46

• Ryder Richards argues that our perceptions are limited to appearances and cannot account for reality, leading to the idea of a "noble realm" beyond our understanding.
• Kant suggests that this inaccessible realm, the "nomina," contains the truth of objects beyond what we can know, but is beyond physical laws and changeable.
• Kant argues that autonomy and free will are possible despite determinism.
• Transcendental ideologies promise freedom and understanding but also introduce contradictions and limit rational contemplation.

Free will and agency in Kant's philosophy. 15:43

• Kant's philosophy on freedom vs. determinism challenged by Matthew Crawford.
• Crawford proposes meaningful choice emerges through attentive interaction with realities, not abstract visions.

Kant's philosophy and its impact on modern society. 19:45

• Ryder Richards critiques Kant's moral philosophy, arguing that it leads to self-entitlement and diluted agency.
• Ryder Richards argues that society's tendency to believe in self-important truths can lead to scapegoating and denial of implications, despite the appearance of novelty and esotericism.
• Ryder Richards argues that Kant's philosophy led to overconfidence in transcendent visions without evidence.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-62-the-double-bind/

PART 1

Ryder discusses Alan Watt's interpretation of the "tough-minded" and "tender-hearted" as "prickles and goos" that need each other, yet are confused by each other and lash out. 

Of course, like Alice in Wonderland, we can refuse to play the game: the competitive rules laid out by another in a grid, but Watts says to remember that life is a game... when our ego gets involved we tend to forget and become serious and demand "off with their heads." 

Using Buddhist insights may not help. It tends to be a meta-move, like a kid trying out some Marxism to attack their dad. It may be true, but will likely not change anything. Yet, what the kid is doing is practicing the utility of ideology: now a Pawn can check a King. It is local practice for the global revolution. 

PART 2

The double bind is being told to "act natural": a paradox forcing performative conformity. Thus our identity is shaped by society. 

Slavoj Zizek cites the Paris riots of 2005 as a double blackmail, where the ghettoized citizens are called animals and treated as animals, thus in rage, they burn cars and part of their homes. To some this reinforces their barbarism (they can never be integrated into Paris society)  while to others it is an anguished cry or rage that is all too human. 

Capitalism and Bureaucracy tend to these double binds: where to be famous like Elvis, you sell out your rebellious rage. Capitalism utilizes and capital-izes on energy, converting any attack into sustenance for itself and punishment for you. 

It is claimed to be a hydra, but more accurately - as Foucault has said of power and its dispersal - it is amoeba-like slime with no head to lop off. 

PART 3

Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" has many examples of contradictory, nonsensical paradoxes in the military making it into a dark farcical comedy. 

The primary paradox is you cannot escape the military: if you want to save yourself you are sane (it is sane not to want to fight or die) so to be declared insane you must want to stay and fight... in which case you would never claim you are insane. Eventually, the main character does go insane, and the military rewards his bravery. 

Insanity is the preferred outcome. 

In Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cockoo's nest" Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) trades prison for the mental ward, only to find by declaring insanity his welfare has been turned over to Nurse Ratchet, a petty tyrant who works to break this spirited man.  Her target: his head. 

As Foucault has stated, the body can be imprisoned in circumstances, but the goal now is to have you internalize the contradictions until our shared insanity seems sane. 

the escape: off with your own head

The Hero Story 

Perhaps there has always been an effort towards optimization, and it generally looks like technology. When speaking of self optimization, or overcoming , we are speaking of the hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell. Campbell spoke a lot of the parallels of the external journey and the internal journey… the external circumstances gave the individual the opportunity to react and grow.

In the 50’s-70’s there was a wave of belief in unlocking human potential through psycho-science-type things like intensive practice hypnosis and subliminal training… or just LSD. Some of these practices were previously used in religious awakening, but we wrapped them up under the guise of science, and then they were abused by programs like MK Ultra.

During this time, people thought of the human as a blank slate that could be written, molded or shaped. (optimized?) An example of this is Laszlo Polgar, born in Hungary, and with an idea about raising children, ended up getting married and having his first child in 1969. He and his wife Clara, raised children around the idea that they could create a genius through specific narrow focus. They had three children, the Polgar sisters, who all excelled at chess, reaching amazing heights, and were declared National Treasures. 

In fiction, chess is too boring, so the blank slates are in the genre of assassin Killers: examples are Kill Bill, Atomic Blonde, or Leon the Professional where they are trained, usually for revenge or duty. On the darker side you have children raised by handlers or governments as weapons, like in John Wick, Black Widow, Hannah, or Kate. 

So what if instead of being a badass with Kalashnikovs and stilettos you’re a phenom with golf clubs? This is the Tiger Woods story, a history of brutal authoritarian parenting generating mental resiliency and overcoming. A lot of success, but a lot of trauma.

Physically, many of us are not capable of such heroic heights: we cannot optimize enough to overcome our genetics, despite how much protein we consume. Enter science to the rescue as the mythical augmented man: Perhaps the Six Million Dollar Man or the darker side of Robocop, more of an automaton cyborg. Talk about efficiency: just turn the man into a machine.

 We are culturally conditioned to accept this is the way of the future as far back as cartoons like Inspector Gadget: the bumbling doofus with all sorts of extensions and rockets and wheels that both saved the day and naturally lead to slapstick pratfalls.

Backtrack: This takes us back to an earlier podcast, step 28, in which I mentioned Henri Bergson, and his summary of what makes something funny, which is “the mechanical encrusted upon the living.”

Of course, the real warning: when we lean too heavily into external power, technology, optimization (or even habits and productivity), we cease to be human in a certain way. We trade in the hard path of “overcoming” for the easy path of instant power, and in that substitution, we lose something. 

Yet, an alternate form optimization technology exists: Arcane Magics. I’m going to suggest, this path of learning the secrets of Arcane magics of habit stacking and personal productivity is the most alluring current path to be super, to achieve your potential. 

From Fiction to Fact 

While I have been talking about science through fictional stories, in many ways it has stepped into reality.

You want to see something insane: look up clips from the 1920’s Olympics compared to todays Olympics: Over 100 years the science of optimization and dedicated practice works… physically at least… until they turn into that unhinged balance beam killer super model from “The Spy who dumped me.” 

In America, we seem to live in a society that links success and progress and achievement with wealth and appearance. This is the manifest destiny of self-actualization woven into the Protestant work ethic, capitalist, American Mythos… and technology is often the vehicle and the key.

But dedication to science and technology is problematically deterministic and class eugenics can spring up from it, as played out in the movie Gattaca. The secret to tricking an unjust technocracy? Keep secrets, and work harder than everyone else.

But in this age of the internet we need to know exactly how: what was his diet? What drugs was he on? Boxers or briefs?

And this is the trap we are in today: there are so many paths laid out before us by the millionaires and self-hacking crowds that we have a myriad of paths to successful optimization. Yet when someone, like in Gattaca, has an overpowering, all-consuming goal to be more… or in Kill Bill to kill more… we find their dedication and focus grants results. 

This can be called “dedicated practice” and myths of a 10,000 hour rule to mastery circulate around it. The beauty of it is that maybe we don’t need neural implants and bionic arms. Maybe the new magics are habit stacks, routines, the mystical arcana of time-blocking and flow state. 

The only thing left is to find an all-consuming, overpowering desire that we can shape our life around… and that is not so much hero stuff, as a very old question of all of mankind: what is my purpose? What is my mission? 

The Superman, the Ubermensch, Nietzsche 

How can we do an episode on superheroes, and overcoming without at least bringing up Friedrich Nietzsche. He popularized the concept of Übermensch or Overman or Beyondman… now most commonly seen as Superman.

(By the way, this concept is affiliated with the Nazi party due to Nietzsche’s sister misusing his texts.)

The Overman is really a man of overcoming… and to confuse it with physical power as the Superman warrior is quite superficial. In our society many people appear superhero, overcoming physicality, but staying in vanity. The hero’s journey is ultimately a journey towards self-integration, towards wholeness, and as Jung said “individuation” through the unification of opposites.

In Nietzsche’s book thus spoke zarathustra the prophet Zarathustra, who comes down from his mountaintop to share his knowledge with masses is spurned by the people. 

He attempts to tell them of the Ubermensch, but they reject this hard life of overcoming. All spiteful and disappointed, Zarathustra decides to prophesy the disgusting concept of Last man: a lazy decadent person, born of a civilization incapable of standing up to challenge or hardship, only interested in comfort.

 The last man takes no risks, preferring security. This is the soft and secure rationalist who has forgotten how to dream and everything the Ubermensch would do appears as illness, or madness.

Intentional hardship? Are you crazy? 

So, how do we push back against the zombie conformity of security that seems so rational? It seems – indeed – to be illogical to try. Isn’t it in our best interest to protect ourselves and stay comfortably in the middle of the herd? Yes, for survival maybe, but what about thriving? What about self-actualization?

One way is to find something external to ourselves that is more important, someway we can help: A hero uses the challenge, the tension and hardship, to manifest creativity, to innovate. 

Are scientists and technologists our superheroes, the innovators or our time? How about the optimizers, the overcomers?  The guys and gals hitting flow state, or testing intermittent fasting: testing, and testing, and suffering, and sharing all this data with us. Are they climbing the mountain and coming back down with the mountain-top insights? Perhaps. But what if their motivation is internet rewards, or just a whole bucket full of hacks? That would be a less than noble goal.

Experimentation can happen culturally, too. Can we not appreciate the heroism of the alternate lifestyle?

The real challenge, the wisdom handed down to us through some religion, philosophy, and myths is to blend all opposites: overcome and move beyond dualities of good and evil, conscious and unconscious, spiritual and earthly… this is how you become an individual.

Most of us are what is called a “dividual”, not undivided, as an “individual.” We are the divided self. Fragmented. We have not overcome or transcended, or as Hegel would say “subsumed.” 

Sure, we might be fit, we may look like the image of the superhero, but is maintaining appearances more like the act of the lastman? I am not saying they cannot coincide, but the motivation is a vital distinction to understanding conformity and overcoming.

What I do know, is we -in our society- are really good at superficial appearances… placing the signifier before the signified. 

 The point, I think, is that to become a real human, a whole and integrated self, is a harder and a more heroic a journey than scientific shortcutting or following formulas that guarantee results. Sure, science/tech is great and helpful, but it shouldn’t do the overcoming for you: you have to do that. 

Also, the hero is often portrayed alone, the monk ascending the mountain to find enlightenment or Superman in his Fortress of Solitude after keeping secrets, but you do not have to do this alone. Sure, you will have to work and push back against mindless conformity, but take the journey with others and avoid the solipsistic individuality of the shallow villain. 

Part 2 playing with the Tom Sawyer parable, where work can become play. Ryder jumps into how we identity ourselves through our leisure time, only to feed a capitalist machine. Then he swings into amusement and learning, criticizing edutainment, but more concerned with choice and attitude in how we approach hobby, labor and learning.

Tom Sawyer and Learning

Why would anyone want to escape from Freedom?

Psychologically freedom is a tremendous burden, especially in a competitive society commoditizing your individuality. Erich Fromm in “Escape from Freedom” maps out three means to escape the anxiety, isolation, and doubt of the Modern Age: Sadomasochism (aka authoritarianism), Destruction, and Automaton Conformity.

The burden to be uniquely you within a society demanding submission or conformity leads people to want freedom, and one response is “negative freedom” which is like a man on an island, free from external restraint, governments, or social life. However, if his goal in life is to be beneficial to others, he must re-enter society while finding a way to maintain his individual integrity and find the means to realize his goals. This is “positive freedom,” or internally motivated agency.

People often want both positive and negative freedom, but in a society, the freedoms of others constrain your freedoms. As well, positive freedom often takes the path of libidinal desires being liberated, but if we are manipulated by mimetic desire, then our desires are not truly our own.

In short, how can an individual be assured they are authentic and thinking genuine thoughts, instead of pseudo thoughts? And how do we protect democracy from those escaping freedom? Fromm says it is through integrated individuals practicing spontaneity.

1: Attention as a cultural problem

“Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, but we really have is an attentional economy, if the term economy applies what is scarce and therefore valuable.”

Matthew Crawford

Crawford goes further because if capitalist corporations seek our attention, the easy way to get it is to stimulate us: to poke and prod our attention centers. To say fully present and to own our own attention we must apply tremendous effort.

“The contents of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question what is worth paying attention to: that is, what to value”

Matthew Crawford

When you don’t know what to pay attention to (priorities) you don’t know what to value. And when you don’t know what to value -when “all distinctions are leveled”- then “meaning” is reduced to “information”… and our inability to distinguish value is often seen as an individual moral failure.

Example: “If you can’t stay in the present moment long enough to watch your kid play soccer what does that say about you as a person?”

I would bet most of us have felt this shame or tried to keep our attention addiction secret. Crawford does not rush to condemnation but considers where this behavioral conflict stems from: where does this “nihilism of values” begin?

2. Liberation of the Individual

In [[Step 39: After the orgy, baudrillard]] on the podcast, we discussed Baudrillard’s notion that we have liberated ourselves in our modern society. Hooray! We are free from the bonds of tradition, community, and sexual repression. But what do we do now? Baudrillard says we keep pursuing freedom without understanding: it is simply a behavior that has become untethered from its foundational principles.

Crawford also brings up our moment of liberation, but he makes a different point: we have liberated ourselves from social life, liberated ourselves from our parents, the church, and the commons. By dismantling these “tyrannical structures of oppression” we are now liberated individuals, or free, autonomous beings.

The consequence and contradiction we encounter are that we also removed the thick and unique links to the community. But part of being an individual is knowing how you fit into society. In dissolving structures the promise is greater freedom and diversity. However, the dissolution of cultural authority, which gave us shape both in participation and rebellion, may have led to a flattening and homogenization of the individual.

“Our mental lives converge in a great massification, ironically, under the banner of individual choice”

Matthew Crawford

By discovering that freedom of choice and individuality have been shifted over time to make us more similar and pliant they have become the opposite of their premise. Crawford says “We are isolated in a fog of choices.” Bombarded with advertising, we only see the commercial stories that have stepped into the void after we dismantled the cultural authority.

Our liberation from all things left a huge hole. (And yes, many of those systems were toxic and in need of reform.) Yet, once groups are atomized into individuals, there is no longer a collective voice to step into that vast cultural hole. 

Commerce took over. It is now the cultural authority.

Once again, “we are isolated in a fog of choices”: we are stuck in our heads, and when walking down the street we are bombarded, prodded, and needled, by small pleas attempting to consume our attention. This distraction creates low-level anxiety and diffusion of our attention. In response, we learn to protect ourselves, keeping our valuable attention for ourselves. We deny the request for eye contact or a casual wave, because it might pull us out of ourselves and into the world. This world with too many predatory options, and too much risk of transactional manipulation.

To keep our autonomy and to remain free, we imprison ourselves: we choose to stay inside… inside our own heads.

JUST THE TIPS

A small word on freedom from Adlerian psychology.

 If you were a rock, and if you were a rock tumbling down a hill, and you follow your inborn impulses and desires and inclinations (gravity), letting them take you where they will,  that is not freedom. At the end of tumbling down that hill the rock has become a smooth pebble. Would you say that what remains is the core self, the authentic “I”?

“Real freedom is an attitude of pushing up one’s tumbling self From Below”

The Courage to be Disliked

 Most people think freedom is a kind of release: a release from organizations or obligations.  However, that is liberation, not freedom.  Freedom incurs a cost, and in Adlerian psychology, the cost of exercising your freedom is being disliked by others.

3. Modern Life

There is “no basis for us to resist the colonization of Life by hassle.”

Matthew Crawford

In Modern Life the cultural problem goes beyond merely ignoring advertising. We become so distracted we cannot recognize ourselves and have difficulty getting a grip on genuine Joy.

Crawford sites an Onion article, where a man is trying to have beers with friends, and as he finally starts to approach genuine joy he remembers the crushing amount of work emails, and then the unresolved issue with his Southwest rapid rewards account. In this state of perpetual distraction, we miss out on joy because of a to-do list capturing our attention.

This creates an ETHICAL VOID. Attention is so foundational that without it we lose the ability to prioritize, and thus lose morality, ethics, and philosophy.

Just the Tips

On the science of attention and focus Dr. Andrew Huberman shares how focus with your eyes creates a biological response, triggering a signal to the brain area called the Zona Incerta, which can shift our entire brain and body into a mode of focused pursuit.

Motivation and drive can be focused by vision.

This can happen externally: think of advertisements of food that cause us to pursue food. But we can hijack this biological response and use it. By holding your visual gaze on a single location in front of you, your body will initiate some of the exact neural mechanisms granting alertness enhanced cognition.

4. Ethics and the attentional commons

Humans have a survival mechanism; it is an orienting response, you can think of it as “goal-oriented” or “stimulus oriented”. This is called attention.

Attention focuses us on threats, like tigers, or rewards, like food or sex. It can also focus our ambition for goal attainment. External stimuli easily hijack this survival mechanism: a tiger leaping at you or television showing a sexy person covered in food equally get your attention. They distract you from internal goals and ambitions.

If your survival responses are blunted because you’re constantly being advertised non-essential or frivolous items it is only reasonable that we train ourselves to tune out. However, Crawford brings up that we miss something important if we “tune out.” For instance: At an airport, we put on our noise-canceling earphones and bury our faces in books so that we don’t have to see the TV or hear the chatter. We create a mini pocket of private experience. Yet, what happens to the “public world” when we retreat to a multiplicity of private worlds?

In the public world of shared attention, there is 1) a way of knowing yourself through seeing and being seen, and 2) a charged potential, a kind of erotics, that is denied. Instead, attention is turned inward, protected at a mighty cost as we minimize interaction and distraction.

This effort generates a low level of persistent annoyance, partly at your impotence against the advertisements and television. You become exhausted, baffled, annoyed, and then you may ask yourself: why am I so angry? We diagnose ourselves as the problem, turning the external problem inward yet again.

Out “stimulus orientation” is mercilessly prodded, but no one speaks of the ethics of hijacking attention: no one speaks up for the public. It is only corporations telling stories and showing us pictures.

“Man is the animal that makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the pictures”

Iris Murdoch

If “we make pictures ourselves, and come to resemble the pictures” what are we shaped into if corporations tell the story and make the pictures? 

In [[Step 46: Sacred Economics]] we discussed how shared public resources (the commons) were once accessible to all. Yet the commons has been increasingly privatized, taking from the public to generate wealth for private parties or corporations. Our attentional commons, the ability to choose how to use our attention, have become monetized. The “attention economy” has created, as [[Yuval Noah Harari]] calls them, “attention merchants,” which I will call “attention pirates.”

Not only is our commons corrupted and dangerous (roving pirates) but our attention is plundered (pillaged) daily. As Crawford says, there is no “public-spirited voice” pushing back against the privatization of attention. There is instead ingrained pro-business forgiveness.

We all cope by putting on headphones and averting our faces into phone screens. Once again, as polite individuals, we retreat from public space to private sanctuaries, where other companies plunder our attention.

You “pay attention” while advertisers “pay for attention”. If you want your attention back, you have to pay for it.

• You have to go to the business class lounge for silence at the airport.
• Online, you have to pay a premium to avoid ads.

In privatizing the commons, in this case in privatizing your attention, somebody is taking from your mind for their own gain. Crawford says this is not “creating wealth” as market men like to say: it is a “transfer” of your mental health into their wealth.

harrison bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut

Silence and Inequality

Given that you have to pay for silence to maintain your attention, we should consider the increasing gap between the wealthy and middle-class and poor: those who can pay to keep their attention focused on their business get richer while the rest are further handicapped.

Our “right to privacy” should include a right not to be addressed. Regardless of income.

Crawford says this does not include face-to-face interactions, human-to-human, seeing and being seen interactions, because that is how we know ourselves in the world. But no one needs to be addressed by or have their attention harvested and data scraped by obscure faceless companies through mechanized means.

5. Attention is your own

You can declare your privacy as your own, but we live in a society surrounded by others. To do more than survive, to thrive, is to swim through the waters of the world. Going all-in on privacy is the equivalent of sitting in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean while there is a party on the surface with floaties and bikinis. But, of course, today you will be hassled by pirates if you attend the party. 

A person “must know certain things about their surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims”

Iris Murdoch

Murdoch goes so far as to claim there is a moral imperative to pay attention.

When your attention is appropriated in public spaces, someone (some company) is taking advantage by co-opting and subverting the rights of the public space, the rights that we owe to one another. We do owe each other attention and interaction.

This is a crucial point Charles Eisenstein in “sacred economics” also brought up: we have become so individualistic and competitive (often only think about ourselves) we do not consider what we owe to one another as a community and Society. We have retreated from the morality of attention.

“Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention then the flesh has for bodily fatigue. This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate or attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.” #quotes #attention #selfcontrol #evil

Simone Weil

JUST THE TIPS

Do you remember “The marshmallow experiment” at Stanford where researchers taunted children with a marshmallow and then left the room? They decided the children who delayed gratification, by not eating the marshmallow right away, had a higher chance of success in life.

Upon very detailed viewing, we find that these children didn’t just turn on willpower and delayed gratification. The children who were successful in not eating the marshmallow distracted themselves by playing little games. Instead of staring at the marshmallow yearning for it, they distract themselves by tapping their fingers, humming a song, and looking away from the marshmallow. They shift focus creatively: they self-regulate by distracting themselves.

6. ATTENTION IS NOT YOUR OWN

The non-marshmallow-eating kids self-regulate through creative distraction. It is not the true attention Simone Weil speaks of, but it is controlling attention.

The implication is if we cannot direct attention “where we will” we are receptive to “where they will”

In other words, we are ripe for manipulation. They put the marshmallow in front of us and if we cannot redirect our attention we will eat the sugar they put in front of us. And the more of it we eat, the more alike we all become. Puffy Sugar people.

If we only eat the marshmallows, this being the advertising and media news put on our plate and shoved down our throat, there is a homogenization of viewpoints, and we lose uniqueness.

“According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences.”

Matthew Crawford

There’s an insidious little trap here: the conflation of making a choice with freedom.

To make a choice is to pursue your preference, which makes you become an autonomous individual. To pursue your preference is a sign of individuality, and is above cultural scrutiny or judgment. Yet, most of our preferences align with market forces (the marshmallows in front of us.) Crawford calls this “standardized appeal.”

You feel free because you chose to eat that marshmallow … and all the other marshmallows. And you defend your choice as your individual preference. Yet, this is somehow not freedom, a real choice, or individuality.

Crawford says that our critical faculties which we need the most to combat the potent packaging of preference (and the pervasive championing of “the sovereign self as sacred”) are crippled and inhibited by corporations. Especially with big data as the sugar hit.

Our temptations lead us into stupidity, and once there we can’t think our way out: we are too distracted by all the sugary marshmallows, and over time we lose the strength to escape because we lose the ability to be rationally critical.

https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-78-the-parallax-view/

Ryder discusses the concept of Slavoj Zizek's "The Parallax View" in three parts.

Part 1: Ryder defines the parallax view as the convergence of seemingly parallel perspectives. He draws a connection to optical illusions of perspective and discusses how the parallax view involves looking beyond the central focus point. The author also touches on its use in astronomy.

Part 2: Ryder discusses Slavoj Žižek's use of the parallax view in his book and how it reconsiders the traditional Hegelian dialectic of synthesis or sublation. He explains how Žižek's approach doesn't seek to overcome oppositional positions but acknowledges their inherent contradictions as perspectival points. (This involves Lacan, Freud, Marxism, and Levi-Strauss's sociology, and more.)

Part 3: Ryder provides two examples of how the real-life parallax view works. First, he discusses faith and love as a parallax, emphasizing the need to change one's position to understand faith truly. Second, he references a scene from the movie "Guardians of the Galaxy" to illustrate how understanding can shift over time, emphasizing the importance of changing perspectives. He also shares the paralysis that multiple positions can invoke.

Why would anyone want to escape from Freedom? Well, in a complex system, any move will produce countermanding forces, and humans are slow-evolving creatures, and by merely shouting “you are free” we encounter some problems: 1) now what? and 2) it doesn’t line up with the reality of working every day and still falling behind.

While freedom is held up as an ideological holy grail, the reality on the ground is different: People do want to escape from freedom because having to “know who you are” is a tremendous strain when you are supposed to be an “authentic autonomous individual.” The strain to be free conversely leaves us feeling like frauds, isolated and alone, which hurts our socially evolved self. 

Written around 1941, Erich Fromm‘s “Escape from Freedom” compares Socialist, Fascist Nazism and Hitler to America’s Liberal Democracy and the types of people it produces and those, in turn, who produce those systems. But he starts out with some history, so we can see what it looks like to move from (as Karl Popper calls it) a tribal ‘closed society‘ to a free ‘open society’ and why that move causes so many problems. 

In the next episode, Escape from Freedom (pt 2), we will look at these “escape mechanisms” and Fromm’s solution: which is to be a genuine individual, an authentic self, which involves independent thinking (which most of us don’t do) and spontaneity (which I have some arguments against.) But until then, this episode maps a historical path that lays the groundwork for why modern man has so many problems. 

We cover medieval feudal society altering into a competition for middle-class ascendency, contenting between the crown, the tradesman, and risk. This is echoed in Martin Luther's character, as a stand-in for the psychological and social character of the times, and his confusion and hatred giving rise to reformation. The dissolution of the church authority came at a higher cost: the need to lovingly submit to God, giving away your newfound freedom from authority. 

In modern times, we have confused merchants in an industrial capitalist society attempting to find their "self" but viewing themselves as a commodity. This highlights the strain of individuality in a socially competitive world, leading to a burden of freedom and unique autonomy that many people shed, as they feel hollowed out and left behind by progress. 

Mickey Mouse, created by Walt Disney, is an apt character for the times: a tiny creature combating nature and predatory with near escapes. 

Part 2 will cover the psychological escape mechanisms people undertake to justify giving away their freedom. 

Doubling: the creation of an image of self serves multiple purposes, one of mimicry for society, and another as a way to alter the self. 

The image comes first, then follows the forms of society. The garb of society is already formed, and we are aligned to our roles with repetitive actions.

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-3-tools/

1:41 Wanting to be an active do-er versus being a whiney bitch

2:14 Finding your groove (the image of self): embodying the role society sets for you

3:09 The Societal form is the Uniform: perpetuating the self-image as societal archetype

4:42 Doubling as multi-self images: a sandboxing of flawed selves that is deferred (non-conclusive schizophrenia) 

5:35 Participate in the Form, without becoming the Form

During the depression people couldn't find work, so now we get an education, but today we still can't find work, and have lost our place in a society that devalues craftsmanship, stability, and experience in favor of speed, superficial processing, and potential ability. 

Part 1:

SKILL & TALENT

Sennett asks, how does SKILL translate into TALENT? And how does TALENT translate to economic value? Sennett says the answer might be too darn complicated, involving ethnography, sociology, psychology and economics, but he does map out how we got here.

It really starts in the industrial revolution, where there were 6 men for every unskilled factory job. These jobs needed a pair of hands, not a brain. Adam Smith and others called the factory work “brain deadening." So, now we educate people. 

Problematically, David Ricardo points out that due to technology and advances by all these smart people, society may need a smaller, and smaller elite to profitably and efficiently run society. 

So, due to capitalism, it is talked about as a “race to the bottom.” Sennett says this is only half-right.

For instance, Indian call centers require 2 years of university, while most factory workers in MExico are quite skilled mechanics who opted for “brain deadening” work. So, capitalism not only finds cheap labor, but also retrains talent, and in doing so these people now participate in the economy because they have a line of credit. They are regarded socially by their peers as prestigious. 

Sennett shows that xenophobia and racism easily extends from a very real fear that the immigrant or foreigners, with all their talent and skills, with their discipline and dedication, with their cultural and social worth derived from alternative values, may be better equipped for survival in our modern world.

Part 2

AUTOMATION

You know what else creates the USELESSNESS? The inevitability of AUTOMATION. 

Even when the corporation stays in America, such as Sprint, by using voice-recognition software over 3 years, they cut 11,500 jobs while increasing productivity 15% and growing revenue. Steel production, from 1982 to 2002, in America rose by 35% while cutting jobs by 75%.

Originally, the thought was machines would only be able to replace human hands, but in the post-industrial era we are looking to replace the whole human. Tech in general is a paradox where our cleverness (grown from our  education) replaces humans. This is both a psychological and social issue (not just an economic issue), and maybe, just maybe, the virtual world does provide the answer, but we need to be careful not to bring our exploitative practices into the virtual.

Part 3:

AGING

So, another “specter of uselessness” is through AGEISM, or prejudice against age. 

At an advertising agency Sennett brings up that anyone over 40 is seen as “out of it”: set in their ways and losing energy, yet this is not accurate in cognitive labor. 

Sennett discusses “skills extinction”. This refers to the need to re-learn your trade at least 3 times during your life. It is the same for computer repairmen or doctors. Retraining is expensive, and it is easier to hire a bright, desperate new 25 yr old than retrain the stable, self-possessed and judgemental 50 year old.

The experienced worker actually complicates everything with their judgements, while the younger generation just walk out. This is the difference between “exit” and “voice”. Where the young exit, the older (more judgemental) give voice to their discontent.

“The employer’s choice is clear: the younger person is both cheaper and less trouble.”

Sennett

The ideal person, even as they get older, must remain full of “potential talent” and must be able to easily surrender their past experiences, “give up possession of an established reality” or “identity.” 

Part 4:

THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Tying these corporate notions to the public sphere Sennett leans into meritocracy, which we covered fairly extensively in Sandel's book "Tyranny of Merit" ( Step 20 and 21 ), but I want to do a brief recap to show how “uselessness” from lack of work dovetails with social and personal values.

The welfare state is for those in need, for social stability, and we went from the Bismarck’s pyramidal bureaucracy that gave everyone in society a place to be... Sennett brings up how the government decidedly turned a blind eye on the problems automation brought onto the citizens. 

Under the CULTURE of the NEW CAPITALISM, those in need are diminished: corporations just want the talented young who can make us money with no friction or hardship. As a matter of fact, the young resent having to pay for the elderly: it’s not like anyone asked them to vote on it. 

And this signals a decrease in public responsibility as each person is concerned with their own survival. This life is driven by, as Sennett says, “a fear of falling.”

Once one is “let go” from your job, people work vigorously to pursue leads, but they start to become invisible to their community: the public sphere eschews them as it is socially taboo to be useless. To remain visible is to have “use potential”. 

Part 5:

THE MERIT TRAP

So, this is part of the meritocratic trap: when we despised the unjustness of wealth conferring position, we weaponized the notion of ‘talent’. This meant: to be creative or intelligent is to be a person of worth_… that worth becomes _moral value, or moral prestige. In the end, creative or intelligent people have become superior to others. 

The social way this played has lots of examples, but basically, to test for talent, we ended up “objectifying failure”. Failing the test became an internal, personal failing. The negative association was, as Sandel, Sennett, and Michael Young say, more shaping and harmful than the positive outcomes of "quantifying talent."

Maslow and others in their quest to test for “potential” had a bleed over into biological studies, where geneticists said we had capabilities that we had not tapped or used: we all had potential that could be mined. This also equated “potential” with “justice,” in that it theoretically was race or sex or age blind.

But anyone who has read anything about IQ tests or the SAT’s knows this is not true, many problems come down to cultural knowledge and vocabulary. The mistaken notion here is that “aptitude could be isolated from achievement.” 

process divorced from content … this purely operational thinking requires mental superficiality.”

Sennett

And in this way, we train people for PROCESS work, task to task, problem to problem, moving from team to team… operational thinking…

it “divides analyzing from believing, ignores the glue of emotional attachment, and penalizes digging deep.” 

Part 6:

Knowledge & Power

Sennett brings up Michel Foucault. People say “knowledge is power” but really power is not power until it is applied, or used… before that it is "potential power." Similar to “potential ability” or "talent," they are types of knowledge. Sennett says Foucault never focused on “superficial knowledge” as a tool of power, but he did mention that Meritocracy DISEMPOWERS the large majority of those under its sway. 

Foucault brought up how the elite would “get under the skin” of the masses by

making them feel that they did not understand themselves, that they were inadequate interpreters of their own experience of life.”

Foucault

Organizations used the new flexible metric of "talent" or "potential" to judge people. Managers say they can spot potential or talent based on a “gut feeling.”

Your “potential ability” is really a test for a kind of “knowledge” that has power and use today... that knowledge is “superficial processing”...  which is really the art of “superficial ability.”  These people claim “I can work with anyone on anything.”

Sennett says, ability itself has been “hollowed out”... just like “trust” in a corporation or “accumulated experience.” With this “superficial processing,” Sennett says we skim, we don’t go deep, and even reaching “good enough” is probably wasted time… so, we have also “institutionalized impatience.”

Sennett closes this chapter on the question:

how do we find value in someone else's eyes?”

Traditionally you became good at something, you became a craftsman, developing a talent. That path no longer assures stability or usefulness in a constantly shifting, increasingly automated society, that finds cheaper labor and talent elsewhere.

This is a loosely beginner friendly, and broad, look at Baudrillard's notions of simulacrum and simulation. 

Baudrillard is frequently cited in the art world in reference to all things that have steps away from the original, just like any artist using multiples (lots of something) tends to mention Walter Benjamin. Once the simulation, the illusion, or the copy comes into play, we need to start thinking of how that new object (or idea) operates. 

Baudrillard offers stages and steps that map out how we go from 1) "referencing a profound reality" to 2) "masking a profound reality" to there being an 3) "absence of profound reality" and finally, 4) the simulation become a simulacrum when there is no longer any relation to the real. In this case, the simulacra, without relation to it's original sacred drive or purpose, merely embodies or acts out the actions of a simulation without purpose.

The implications of an ungrounded simulacra, such as politics or money, are that they become pure theatre, in that good and evil are equivalent, as are truth and secrecy, where they are working to cover up the fact that there is no conspiracy, or that good and evil are relational values within a play or plot device, and thus equivalent, despite the real world pain and suffering they manifest.

Next week, we will take a look at Baudrillard's essay "After the Orgy" in "The Transparency of Evil." Hopefully, by digging in a bit further, we can understand more about how this equivalence of all things takes place, and consider the folly of fighting a system that punishes clear-sightedness more than crime.

Essay, Deck and Transcript can be found at 
https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-82-art-and-ai/

The Future of Art and AI: Promises and Perils

Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded onto the cultural scene, raising pressing questions about the role of technology in art and society. Artist and thinker Ryder Richards recently gave a lecture analyzing AI through a philosophical lens, exploring its potential promises and perils.

Understanding AI Adoption

Richards began by taking the pulse of AI adoption, finding about a quarter to a third of attendees actively using AI for creative pursuits. With hype swirling, many came curious to know more. Richards set forth to report his findings from the AI landscape.

Weaving history, art, and philosophy, Richards traced how we arrived at this crossroads. He discussed early 20th-century visions of fusing humans and machines, driven by the worship of progress, machinery, and speed. Richards questioned assumptions of human rationality and effectiveness, asking if AI necessarily leads to worse outcomes.

The Allure and Alienation of AI

Richards suggested that while AI promises to democratize creativity, it may also distance us from the personal touch of craft. He demonstrated how artists employ AI to generate variations and select results. While convenient, this process mediates the human-object bond. Richards pondered if submissions lack an imprint of humanity itself.

Reckoning with Bias

Examining racial and gender bias in AI datasets, Richards noted the need to peer inside “black box” algorithms. He considered whether language models actually “think” creatively. While founders exude optimism, their infighting hardly inspires confidence. With AI infiltrating emotional resonance and politics, vigilance seems vital.

The Sentient Machine?

Richards explored speculation that glitches enable AI creativity, just as neurological differences may have sparked human innovation. He discussed AI’s potential for independent evolution, questioning our ability to discern machine consciousness. If the future remains opaque, Richards suggested artists’ role is to absorb and share cultural truths.

Owning Our Creations

Lawsuits against AI companies form growing resistance. But will profit motives trump ethics? How do we balance an accelerating economy with human dignity? As the lines blur between creator and creation, now is the time to ponder what kind of future we want to code.

Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard philosophy professor, questions the assumption that by working hard and playing by the rules you deserve what you earn. This "meritocratic" notion of justice is observably increasing inequality and fostering a winner/loser culture that led to the populist backlash of Trump and Brexit. 

https://thewilltodiy.com/step-20-tyranny-of-merit-pt-1/

Part I: What is Meritocracy and why is the commonly held belief that it is a good thing wrong? COVID has shown us a lot about how our society works, yet over the last 40 or 50 years, our politics and system of merit has set up a dynamic of the "worthy" as "smart" and the underclass as "dumb", assigning virtue and morality through position and advancement. 

Part II: The merit of the market. Our economy of working hard and getting rewarded has failed over half the country. As GDP has tripled, the lower-half of workers have not seen a wage increase in 60 years, allowing all of the economic growth to be concentrated at the top. 
Equally, we look at Hedge fund managers and "Breaking Bad" to consider what the market actually values more than virtue, morality, or humanity. 

Part III: Luck egalitarianism and distributive justice. How do we develop a society where people are compensated by more than the market, where they have a civic and psychological wage of prestige? If you think this is not important for a society, look at the "Deaths of Despair" wherein under-educated middle-aged men's self-inflicted deaths have tripled since 1990. 

Michael Young wrote a satirical dystopian story about the shifting of "equality" from birth or wealth to ability or talent. He foresaw that a society based on merit would morally condemn those left behind even more brutally than a class system. 

Part IV: In conclusion Sandel offers the story of Henry Aaron, where to escape prejudice and poverty he hits homeruns. So we are tempted to applaud merit, but Sandel sys this is a mistake. We should not applaud a system that requires hitting homeruns to escape from a life of poverty and injustice. 

5:32 -Boomerang CEO

9:13 Max Weber: the forunate needs to know he desereves his fortune

10:33 Obama: The right thing, the smart thing

13:10 Our biggest bias: the uneducated

17:01 The finance industry: extracting rent from the real economy

20:07  workers wages have remained stagnant, while the economy has tripled

24:14  Moral Markets, Breaking Bad

32:41 Deaths of despair

34:43 Michael Young: the dark side of merit

35:50 Talent over prejudice: The mistake of meritocracy  

36:56 The prison that deforms you so you can squeeze through the bars

Reversing inner pressure outward requires a scapegoat to sacrifice in order to stabilize society. By discovering the hidden models driving it reveals our motivations, but more importantly, Rene Girard‘s theory accounts for civilizations' cybernetic energies and release valves. Paired with Georges Bataille’s theory of sacrifice necessary due to excess (the general economy) we find explanations for seemingly irrational behavior. 

Drawing from Luke Burgis's "Wanting: Memetic Desire in Everyday Life" we look at the basics of memetic rivalry, hidden models, and mediators before jumping to scapegoating, then we move into Lacan's notion of the "objet petit a" to consider the subject as desiring, and the self as commodified. In the end, we turn to Bataille's "The Accursed Share, vol. 1" to intertwine scapegoating and sacrifice. 

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0:00 Intro:  Mimetic desire and the imitation loop.

2:37 We are programmed automatons who will never capture the flag.

5:00 Introduction of the desire by a mediator.

7:57 Intentional rationality vs instrumental rationality.

12:38 How to relieve the anger?

15:17 Happiness is created by condemning one: scapegoating.  

17:41 Old habits are hard to break.

22:57 Bataille: The general economy of the natural economy is excess.  

25:01 How do you deal with excesses? through sacrifice.

27:28 Violence comes from memetic desire. 

This week, I talk with Zackary Seitz, a doctoral student in Education and Social Studies at Univeristy of Texas at Denton.

We cover how to be a global citizen, especially when our globalized society is composed of multi-national companies, often dominated by them more than by the nation/states with whom we affiliate most often. This neoliberal, globalized capitalism works well for consumers (and those making millions of dollars), but we need to center the people who are hurt by these systems. This requires a new ethics of value, consumption, and desire, or perhaps a new means to measure happiness. 

Seitz and I discuss Marxian separation from processes of labor, hidden costs for ease and comfort, and ethical consumption versus poverty.  Humans behaving as machines, racist protocols and surveillance, and how animals factor into our humanity, and -of course- how we should reconsider our systems of power. We also discuss racial bias in technology. Towards the end of the hour Sietz discusses education, the failures of standardized testing, and the very narrow window of achievement they disproportionately focus on.