Post #1 was pretty freakin' lame. I was working on it on and off for three weeks, reading all about the High Middle Ages trying to form one grand narrative. But, I already knew where I wanted to end up. I had already written (a version of) the final part before I started out on the research. If you already know where you’re going to end up before you go, is there really any point in going at all?

It’s the height of arrogance to make the story of some past time conform to your agenda in the present. Being the “wise man,” the “judge,” the one who has done the “research and inquiry,” the one who “knows” and then, based on such expert knowledge, calling people to action is the essence of human cooperation, of collective delusion, the most beautiful and most dangerous part of our species. I don’t think it’s bad (or good) to buy into such a delusion or to create or espouse it yourself, but, at least by my standards, fully — body, mind, and spirit — buying into such a delusion is where one loses perspective, begins viewing history and reality as something predestined, linear, and static rather than cyclical and dynamic with infinite potential.

The point is that when someone says at the end of their essay or speech or news broadcast: “this is what we should do!” — someone who is even slightly enlightened should get a whiff of bullshit, should smell in such a call-to-action that this person is either (consciously or not) beholden to some special interest or is captive to their own ideals, moral framework, and beliefs.

Now, it’s not such a bad thing to be a bullshitter. Bullshitters built this country. They built civilization (just ask Yuval). But it’s these BS-ers who separate the good from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the democratic from the autocratic, the civilized from the uncivilized, the clean from the dirty, this from that—they claim to be the most “human,” above instinct, rational, objective, mind > body, and yet in all their artificial unnaturalness, in all their creations and establishments they are doing the most natural human thing there is—deluding themselves—and therefore far more resemble monkeys defending this hierarchy or food-sharing practice than any kind of omniscient deity.

But what the hell do I know. Maybe I’m just doing the same thing as them. Maybe I think I’m starting to get above it all but I’m just a dove stupidly leaping from the top of a tree trying to fly higher into the empty ether destined only to grow tired and have gravity suck me back down to the earth. But maybe it’s worth it to try, to get high enough to look back at the earth and see not a bunch of lines in the dirt, every inch sectioned off and divided, everything in its place like a perfectly ordered prison cell, but see this river flowing into that, this mountain eroding into the field and the grasses growing from the fertile runoff only to have the moisture evaporated and rise back to the mountain to fall and begin the erosion again, to see one people moving from one place to another, one nation conquering another only to be conquered by some other, for one order to form only to disintegrate, to see across past and present and effortlessly connect one story tying into another, one people one knowledge fusing defeating another only to disintegrate a few decades later; to without judgment, without some universal economic framework, not just look back at history but live in each period to flow through the past like I’m on a lazy river with a piña colada in my hand—that’s the goal.

Still, a person who attains this kind of intellectual rigor can maintain that peak of enlightenment for so long. Certainly at every peak of perspective, they will sink back into self-doubt or succumb to some seductive ideology or morality; but what’s important is the overall trend, that these natural cycles of intellectual growth and decay trend towards the higher. Most consider education, study, intellect a linear affair: one grade, one degree to the next, stepping stones on the stairway to heavenly enlightenment. There’s something unnatural about all that to me, and I fear that many of these people who think themselves climbing higher are in reality stepping down an escalator into delusion. There’s gotta be a rise and fall — a Peng and a Kun — for true intellectual growth to take place.

As for my writing, I’d like it to be a little more Wu Wei. Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to “get it right;” they worry about how what they say will be perceived, how some essay will affect their reputation and credibility, they establish their expert status but then imprison themselves within their own ideas. I would not care to go to ideological prison, so I’m just gonna let my thoughts flow.

It’s not always the time for such a nonchalant approach (certainly there are times when a more zealotous or headlong approach is more useful, and even natural) but in our time — one marked by a great deal of cynicism, disillusionment, and a certain anxiety of looming chaos, like when you see the skies darkening on the horizon and you’re not sure where you’re going to take shelter — I figure this perspective could be quite useful. When there is a major historical pivot events don’t just happen in a purely logical, linear, and predictable way (as they’re often portrayed in the textbooks): there are vast permutations of which direction society will go in, and the one people consider the least often is that the concept of one unified society, one civilized world, one humanity can fragment and the trajectory that was once shared successively bifurcates. In that world there is not one common set of goals or one notion of what is good, no utility maximizing function that applies in every corner of the globe. Things get a bit more complicated, perhaps a bit more interesting, but those who stubbornly hold onto those old beliefs in the oneness of things in a time of the many, they are not being very Wu Wei, they are not riding the along the lazy river of history but making themselves quite tired and miserable trying to swim against it.

To put it another way, it seems to most people there’s a storm rolling in. You can curse at it, howl and wail and hope it goes away; you can cower on your knees and bite your nails, wishing the damned thing would just turn some other way; or, you can accept its coming, take a breath, and start doing something to prepare: find/build some shelter, maybe get working on an ark, or just high-tail it out of there. People have done it before, and they’ll do it again; it’s nothing to get too worked up about, it just is. That mindset, that ease of mind, that Wu Wei in the face of great turbulence and change: that’s the sort of perspective I’d like to cultivate.

Then, once the storm passes and it’s time for building again — time for establishing new delusions, atomizations, and standardizations — it’s easy enough to free-fall back into whichever delusion feels right and use it to the end of ushering history along. Down and up. Out and in.

Post #1 was pretty freakin' lame. I was working on it on and off for three weeks, reading all about the High Middle Ages trying to form one grand narrative. But, I already knew where I wanted to end up. I had already written (a version of) the final part before I started out on the research. If you already know where you’re going to end up before you go, is there really any point in going at all?

It’s the height of arrogance to make the story of some past time conform to your agenda in the present. Being the “wise man,” the “judge,” the one who has done the “research and inquiry,” the one who “knows” and then, based on such expert knowledge, calling people to action is the essence of human cooperation, of collective delusion, the most beautiful and most dangerous part of our species. I don’t think it’s bad (or good) to buy into such a delusion or to create or espouse it yourself, but, at least by my standards, fully — body, mind, and spirit — buying into such a delusion is where one loses perspective, begins viewing history and reality as something predestined, linear, and static rather than cyclical and dynamic with infinite potential.

The point is that when someone says at the end of their essay or speech or news broadcast: “this is what we should do!” — someone who is even slightly enlightened should get a whiff of bullshit, should smell in such a call-to-action that this person is either (consciously or not) beholden to some special interest or is captive to their own ideals, moral framework, and beliefs.

Now, it’s not such a bad thing to be a bullshitter. Bullshitters built this country. They built civilization (just ask Yuval). But it’s these BS-ers who separate the good from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the democratic from the autocratic, the civilized from the uncivilized, the clean from the dirty, this from that—they claim to be the most “human,” above instinct, rational, objective, mind > body, and yet in all their artificial unnaturalness, in all their creations and establishments they are doing the most natural human thing there is—deluding themselves—and therefore far more resemble monkeys defending this hierarchy or food-sharing practice than any kind of omniscient deity.

But what the hell do I know. Maybe I’m just doing the same thing as them. Maybe I think I’m starting to get above it all but I’m just a dove stupidly leaping from the top of a tree trying to fly higher into the empty ether destined only to grow tired and have gravity suck me back down to the earth. But maybe it’s worth it to try, to get high enough to look back at the earth and see not a bunch of lines in the dirt, every inch sectioned off and divided, everything in its place like a perfectly ordered prison cell, but see this river flowing into that, this mountain eroding into the field and the grasses growing from the fertile runoff only to have the moisture evaporated and rise back to the mountain to fall and begin the erosion again, to see one people moving from one place to another, one nation conquering another only to be conquered by some other, for one order to form only to disintegrate, to see across past and present and effortlessly connect one story tying into another, one people one knowledge fusing defeating another only to disintegrate a few decades later; to without judgment, without some universal economic framework, not just look back at history but live in each period to flow through the past like I’m on a lazy river with a piña colada in my hand—that’s the goal.

Still, a person who attains this kind of intellectual rigor can maintain that peak of enlightenment for so long. Certainly at every peak of perspective, they will sink back into self-doubt or succumb to some seductive ideology or morality; but what’s important is the overall trend, that these natural cycles of intellectual growth and decay trend towards the higher. Most consider education, study, intellect a linear affair: one grade, one degree to the next, stepping stones on the stairway to heavenly enlightenment. There’s something unnatural about all that to me, and I fear that many of these people who think themselves climbing higher are in reality stepping down an escalator into delusion. There’s gotta be a rise and fall — a Peng and a Kun — for true intellectual growth to take place.

As for my writing, I’d like it to be a little more Wu Wei. Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to “get it right;” they worry about how what they say will be perceived, how some essay will affect their reputation and credibility, they establish their expert status but then imprison themselves within their own ideas. I would not care to go to ideological prison, so I’m just gonna let my thoughts flow.

It’s not always the time for such a nonchalant approach (certainly there are times when a more zealotous or headlong approach is more useful, and even natural) but in our time — one marked by a great deal of cynicism, disillusionment, and a certain anxiety of looming chaos, like when you see the skies darkening on the horizon and you’re not sure where you’re going to take shelter — I figure this perspective could be quite useful. When there is a major historical pivot events don’t just happen in a purely logical, linear, and predictable way (as they’re often portrayed in the textbooks): there are vast permutations of which direction society will go in, and the one people consider the least often is that the concept of one unified society, one civilized world, one humanity can fragment and the trajectory that was once shared successively bifurcates. In that world there is not one common set of goals or one notion of what is good, no utility maximizing function that applies in every corner of the globe. Things get a bit more complicated, perhaps a bit more interesting, but those who stubbornly hold onto those old beliefs in the oneness of things in a time of the many, they are not being very Wu Wei, they are not riding the along the lazy river of history but making themselves quite tired and miserable trying to swim against it.

To put it another way, it seems to most people there’s a storm rolling in. You can curse at it, howl and wail and hope it goes away; you can cower on your knees and bite your nails, wishing the damned thing would just turn some other way; or, you can accept its coming, take a breath, and start doing something to prepare: find/build some shelter, maybe get working on an ark, or just high-tail it out of there. People have done it before, and they’ll do it again; it’s nothing to get too worked up about, it just is. That mindset, that ease of mind, that Wu Wei in the face of great turbulence and change: that’s the sort of perspective I’d like to cultivate.

Then, once the storm passes and it’s time for building again — time for establishing new delusions, atomizations, and standardizations — it’s easy enough to free-fall back into whichever delusion feels right and use it to the end of ushering history along. Down and up. Out and in.