Philosophy
Clowns in Cars on the Information Superhighway
The act of driving our cars, in the real world, whether in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, or anywhere else, is a collaborative act. Whether we are driving in straight lines, on curved roads, or even negotiating roundabouts. Which, before I go much further, are not my personal favorite.
But I digress.
The infrastructure of roads is simple, from the paving to the stoplights to the sidewalks for pedestrians. The problems really come with the cars and other vehicles on the road. And, of course, the drivers. Every driver in every vehicle is doing their own thing: Some are driving attentively. Some are distracted by their phones, or the radio, or the conversations with other passengers in the vehicle. And some are driving angry. In a rage about a circumstance that happened before they decided to pilot a 2,000 + pound vehicle collaboratively on the road with other people.
Why am I building up talking about driving, the roads, and vehicles?
Well, because on the Internet, what we used to euphemistically call the Information Superhighway, we have drivers with vehicles. Their vehicles might be social media accounts, email accounts, business accounts, blogs, or other services, but the users are driving their vehicles with a variety of mindsets, attitudes, and approaches. And while it is appropriate to urge people to behave better and drive their vehicles more conscientiously, the fact of the matter is that there are many cars on the information superhighway that are full of clowns.
Those of us who aren’t clowns shouldn’t be surprised when we get into a fender-bender on the Information Superhighway with one of these clown cars, which are usually garishly outfitted, and that when we angrily jerk open the door, clowns inevitably fall out.
Clowns aren’t ever there to help another person.
They may be there to entertain, to gaslight, to troll, or to creep an observer out, but they aren’t there to help. And, as humanity approaches fifty years of this glorious communication infrastructure known as the Internet, people would do well to modify their expectations of clowns' behaviors. And get better at spotting–and avoiding–both the clown cars and the wrecks they create.
Honestly Seeking Truth
We are over two thousand years on the other side of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and the question that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus in His sham trial still echoes down to our time: “What is Truth?” This ironic question, of course, is a variation of the deceptive question posed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis to the woman, Eve, “Did God really say…”
Are we honestly interested in Truth, or are we comfortable with making assertions that sound as if they have the weight of argument behind them, but are really a million miles wide and about an inch deep?
This is a question worth pondering the answer to before communicating–whether online, offline, in real life, or even just with ourselves. If we are not interested in discovering, refuting, examining, or advocating for the Truth, then we are probably wasting everyone’s time with publishing our thoughts.
A marketer once pointed out years ago in his blog that, “When everyone can publish, everyone will,” and a blogger more recently made the point in her blog that, “Some thoughts should die indoors.”
Choose wisely after you’ve decided if you’re honestly seeking the Truth.
The Tone Police
The communication patterns between people in real life have gradually come to resemble more and more the ways in which we communicate online, mostly via social media platforms. From ghosting behavior all the way to trolling, people are transforming themselves to resemble more and more the digital platforms they use on a daily basis.
One of the more pernicious habits is the policing of tone. Tone, of course, comes across in how you as a reader–or a listener–either read or hear the words I and others write, or say. Tone itself is a weird combination of word choice, affect, and volume. Tone attendance combines all of those ingredients with the tendency of humans to make other people into avatars in their own brains. And then to proceed to project themselves and their reactions onto the avatars they have made in their own heads.
Avatars, of course, that resemble the people who are writing or talking, not even a little bit. Sure, in a personal, intimate relationship, tone policing probably makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the peace and prevent small issues from becoming larger conflicts. But in the impersonal, distant, and unknowable interactions we have with the avatars of people in online communication, tone policing makes little sense. Because you don’t know the person on the other end of the interaction. As a matter of fact, it might not even be a person. That interlocutor might be a bot, an AI, or even a hired hand from another country.
This method of communication behavior monitoring is now spilling over increasingly into the real world, in real interactions, between real people. Of course, the difference is that, in the real world, if people attempt to monitor and correct the tones of other people with whom they are not in a relationship, or in the thinnest of relationships, conflict is sure to result. Particularly when those who will not be policed meet those who do the policing.
Projection should only happen in a movie theater. Assumptions of motives without sufficient understanding of the other person in a communication interaction will inevitably lead to attempts to police the tones of others, while resisting policing of their own tones. The solution to all of this lies in putting away social media and cleaving to real relationships with real people in real life.
Leading in the Post-Literate West
Much of my career, such as it has been, has consisted of teaching, writing, training, researching, and thinking about what makes people leaders, why we follow people in the first place, and once we become leaders, how we can become better. It’s not exactly the sexiest career, but it pays (some) of the bills.
For me, thinking, reading, and writing sit at the bottom of every act a person who leads commits to. Decisions can’t be made, and choices can’t move from idea to practicality without those three acts. Followers can’t be ethically guided, and enemies can’t be accurately identified, confronted, and, in some cases, defeated. Without a robust practice of thinking, reading, and writing, leadership becomes a buzzword and a marketing term rather than an act that changes people and can change the world.
However, in America, and the West overall, I suspect, we have either entered, or are entering, a post-literate world, as defined by Rose Horowitz of_ The Atlantic_ in the long excerpt below:
“For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a ‘niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’ And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.
“Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.
“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.”
Here’s my harsh prediction: In a post-literate America, both leaders and followers will struggle not only with comprehension of hard ideas, but also with being unable even to ask the types of questions that lead to formulating the initial hard ideas in the first place. Combine this fact with evidence of the Iron Triangle of Arrogance–where people not only genuinely believe wrong information and facts, but also shout them at louder and louder decibels via every channel they can broadcast them, because correction would require a change in identity, rather than just a change of mind–and a post-literate, American electorate will be fooled often and taken for a ride frequently.
Future leaders will not only be literate–they will be able to read the words on the page of those hoary old relics called books–but they will also know what the words mean, what the author meant, and what those words mean for their post-literate followers. Followers who will have a lot of text in their brains, but very little comprehension or wisdom in their hearts.
Behold, what a brave new world we are entering, folks, and behold all the people in it.
The Sandlot Problem
There is a moment in the 1993 film, The Sandlot, where one of the characters declares a pause in the shenanigans the young men are embarking upon in order to retrieve a baseball that has landed in the yard opposite the sandlot where they play pickup baseball every day.
He declares, with all the weight of an exasperated grown-up, “I think we’ve gone off the rails here. I really blame myself.”
And of course, the reason the line works as a joke is that no adult ever says that, much less thinks it about themselves when a project “goes off the rails.” The other reason it works is that every adult thinks this about another adult and blames them when a project “goes off the rails.”
It takes the innocence of a child to call a pause, take on some accountability, and return to the drawing board.
In every project you’ve ever been on, there have been opportunities to engage in the way that Tommy Timmons did in that iconic film, and there will be more in the future.
All you have to be is brave enough to say the words out loud.
Pursuing Happiness
We used to understand that the pursuit of happiness entailed the possibility that you very well might not get happiness.
You might be disappointed, frustrated, discouraged, defeated, or wind up rejected by the very system in which you were attempting to pursue happiness. And that system could be a family, a church, a neighborhood, or any community.
Most of the systems were known to be flawed. This was accepted. The people inside the systems were known to be flawed. This was also accepted. We used to call this the “tragedy of human existence.”
In our time, though, abundant material prosperity has fooled us into believing that we have defeated the fallen nature of the world, the systems in it, and the people operating in those systems. This belief leads to frustration, disappointment, discouragement, and feelings of defeat because material prosperity doesn’t equate to psychological and spiritual happiness.
That’s still something we will most likely not achieve perfectly, on this side of reality.
By all means, continue to pursue happiness. But acknowledge the ceiling.
Sports Metaphors With a High Batting Average
Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.
Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.
The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.
But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.
Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.
One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.
However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.
A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.
In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.
Stepping Into the Path of Pain
Some acts are easy to commit to, and others are hard. Most of how we categorize the “hardness” or “easiness” of a particular act comes down to our own individual temperaments.
We rarely address the factors involved in structuring temperament, except in a psychological sense. And even then, we do it rarely and poorly. This is because temperament is highly individualized and particularized to how identity is structured, from our biology all the way to cultural influences. The structure of individual temperament also involves examining inputs that exist down deep inside of people that we don’t like to talk about at polite cocktail parties.
Determining that which is hard and differentiating from that which is easy is a category problem in and of itself. One that requires returning to individual first principles and questioning personal bedrock assumptions in ways that emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually cause mental pain. Unfortunately, we are deep into an era of individuals avoiding, mitigating, and side-stepping all kinds of pain, from emotional pain to mental pain, in favor of doing more of that which is perceived as easy.
Figuring out, as an individual in this era, how to step directly into the path of such pain, in order to categorize and differentiate “hard” tasks from “easy” tasks, is probably the primary challenge of our denatured times.
Weight to Carry
One of the more damaging features of the cultural, social and political chaos we’ve experienced in the past twenty-five years, has been the placing of psychological, emotional, and spiritual weight onto institutional structures not designed to carry the load. Family, tradition, neighborhoods, used to be the places that carried the psychological, emotional, and spiritual loads for individuals when they could no longer carry the weight for themselves. But over the course of the last few decades–at least two generations and maybe even three–those places have eroded. Eroded in power. Eroded in prestige. Eroded in importance.
The problem, of course, is that individuals don’t just stop needing help in carrying the loads they bear, and so, the carrying has shifted to institutions that were meant to be the last resort to carry such loads: the workplace, the government, or even the society at large. But the workplace isn’t a substitute for the support of family and friends. The government can take from one person (or group of people) through redistribution and give to another person (or group of people), but it can’t do so fairly and equitably. The society can’t take up an individual’s personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems while at the same time adjudicating everyone else’s unique issues.
This is the deep reason that all the interventions we’ve tried as a culture and a society, from the Great Society programs of the 1970s to the therapeutic language and social identity policing we do today, have not worked to produce outcomes of unity, stability, and social peace. They have instead produced chaos, disunity, and a fractured moral order.
Here’s a great irony: The people who were always emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically relegated to the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhoods, the people who always felt suffocated and “put upon” by social strictures and structures, don’t believe they’re doing great now. They moved their personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems from the edges of family, traditions, and neighborhoods, and successfully “centered” those problems in institutional spaces like the workplace, adjudicated them through government power, and talked about them endlessly in societal discourse. And the outcomes haven’t been what they long desired. Weirdly enough, there’s more social suffocation, the more open every privately held problem has become.
The solution to this is a trade-off. And a brutal one at that. Social pressure to reprivatize the personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems that people experience at the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhood is gradually and imperceptibly increasing. Over the next twenty-five years, the pressure to societally swing back towards what folks on the edges call “suffocation and compliance” and what the rest of us call “the center” will be enormous.
But such a swing will allow the institutions to heal from the damage of attempting to carry weight they were never structured to carry.
Selling Someone Out
Betraying a person’s confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you are doing it and what end it serves, is where the erosion of trust begins.
And once trust in a high-trust society, bound by traditions, family bonds, and the surety of community, is riven by such erosion, the beginning of social chaos is not far behind.
But a society that is eroding in trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether by individuals refusing to play the game of selling out their principles, their values, or their relationships. It’s a lot of psychological, moral, and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is fraying, tearing, and breaking.
But it’s only the act of buying in that works to preserve, not what was in the past, but the circumstances–fragile though they may be–for a different, and potentially better, future. Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of “all against all” breaks out and then nothing worth preserving remains.
And it’s monstrously difficult to cobble together a high-trust society again out of nothing.
The Word 'Secular' Means Now
The word secular comes from a root that means “age,” “generation,” or “lifetime.” When it is put in front of another word, it indicates the power of the present and the immediacy of now.
For instance, the terms “secular traditions,” “secular morality,” or “secular thinking” are all indicative of traditions, morality, or thinking that is focused on the present time, without reference to the past.
If we are doyens of progress, and most of us, even the most religious of us, are, then usage of the word “secular” shouldn’t give us that much pause. But if we are doyens of tradition, family, community, or of ideas, themes, or myths that are from the past–and that have proved to be useful regardless of which time they come from–then perhaps our language should shift away from secular terminology and toward language that is more eternal.
Old Ideas
There are old ideas—and “old” just means “ideas we don’t think will ‘work’ in whatever cultural, economic, or political ordering is in vogue now”—that sometimes need new traction.
Ideas fall out of favor for a variety of reasons that reflect cultural evolution. When this evolution reaches a standstill (or when going forward seems scarier than standing still), old ideas from the past tend to return.
Unfortunately, the speed of the Internet has convinced humanity (at least in some places on the globe) that the speed of cultural evolution should match the speed with which an individual can order a latte from their phone. That’s never happened. Cultural evolution may seem to be faster in our time because of the ever-present nature of Internet communication, but in reality, cultural adoption of new ideas still takes at least twenty years. Or, the time it takes for a new generation of people to be born, raised, and mature enough to begin to assert themselves on reality.
Here’s a list of some old ideas that are still relevant, regardless of how quickly we all may think that society is culturally evolving:
Love your enemies.
Do good to (and for) those who would seek to do wrong to you.
Practice humility and grace.
Live your life according to a set of values, ethics, and morals that you can explain when the rubber meets the road.
Help others who are not as fortunate as you to get what they need to live..
Be interested, open, and caring about another person’s story so that you can grow as they grow.
Listen more than you talk—either with your hands or your mouth.
There are a few others, but you get the idea. When an old idea returns to prominence, we often say that it is “an idea whose time has come.”
Of course, for ideas as old as the ones above (and many others, I’m sure that you could think of), their time never really left.
Universal Basic Conflict
Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.
Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.
A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:
“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight
In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.
This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”
Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.
Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.
This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.
Wizards Searching for Backdoors
The wizards, diviners, and soothsayers of the ancient world were invited into royal courts, penned scrolls that held the keys to gnostic knowledge, and were placed at the center of ancient societies. Many of them were hired to educate the elite of their times.
As the Middle Ages closed, and the rationality project at the core of the Enlightenment really took hold of the imagination of the West, the magicians, diviners, and soothsayers were pushed to the edges of the culture (eventually to be joined there by the various religious types, but that’s another post altogether). And–to add insult to injury–their lofty claims to being able to open spiritual backdoors into a mystical world were deemed to be the irrational ravings of “humbugs,” “scammers,” “con artists,” or even “marketers.” Case in point: recall the character of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. He was eventually exposed as just a flim-flam dude pulling levers who couldn’t make his hot-air balloon work well enough to get back to Kansas, where he came from.
In our technological era, though, the atheist rational materialist technologists have won the day. They’ve defeated the natural world, backburnered the spiritual world, and declared, hubristically, that “we will build our own gods” by building backdoors into reality and making epistemological claims without acknowledging–or even realizing–that they’re making those claims in the first place. They continue to pursue the same gnostic path of attaining secret knowledge that their forebearers attempted through spiritual means. And of course, they all declare that they’re going to get to the same place as their forebearers–for the good of humanity–through manipulating “intelligence on silicon.”
All that lands for me like a whole lot of humbug from a bunch of flim-flam dudes at the center of the post-modern royal court of attention.
Moral Clarity in Confused Times
If we begin our thinking about an issue with what objective things we can know, the seduction of moral subjectivity is reduced in rhetorical power.
But, when we are bereft of moral clarity about what constitutes a lie, we are unable to individually, much less collectively, determine whether it’s a lie worth confronting (a big lie) or a lie worth letting slide (a small lie) for the sake of social lubrication.
Now there will be those who object. They will point out that “sin is sin, and a lie is a lie,” but these are the same people who don’t get invited back to Aunt Ruth’s house because they pointed out her obvious goiters and the warts and missed the larger importance of just hanging out and keeping silent. They confuse pointing out objective truths to elide truth from lies with what, in more polite times, would have just been called rudeness.
The liar always hates and fears one person most of all: himself. This is why he can’t keep his lies to himself. He has to share them with others. He also has to build a society based on lies to survive. The people who want blanket statements of truth in all circumstances also hate and fear themselves, but for reasons other than a lack of moral clarity. They simply lack moral critical thinking.
Free speech, moral clarity, and candor are the disinfectants for the scourge of lying in our times. But the tools have to be used to disinfect the culture of viruses while leaving behind the good cultural bacteria.
Liars' Poker
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a deeply pessimistic Russian writer with a streak of Orthodox Christianity that he could never reconcile with the 19th-century ideals of a mythical European rationalist utopian project, was also an inveterate gambler. This habit gave him a unique view on risk, loss, victory, and the thrills that can only emanate from the depths of resentment, envy, and anger. It also gave him insight into how individuals lie, how we lie to each other in social relationships, and how even the apparatus of the state can be corrupted by lying.
Dostoyevsky wrestled with all of this in a time before Freud’s insights into human psychology really got a hold of the Victorian mindset. His writing was positioned during a transitory era in the mid-19th century, before what we now know as “the modern world” began truly seeking the transcendent. Mostly self-published, Dostoyevsky was the anti-Tolstoy, penning The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and, notably, Notes From Underground.
The problem Dostoyevsky put his finger on in Notes From Underground, a rambling volume profiling the resentments of a dyspeptic and unreliable narrator, is that, while the individual liar needs a society to operate in (1984), a series of distractions to fool and narcotize himself and others (Brave New World), and the totalizing force of the state to ensure no one gets out of line and maintains the absurdity of the lies (Invitation to a Beheading), the liar can never fully escape the one person he hates and fears the most—himself.
And, since the moral courage to face himself is lacking, the liar–gambling on escape, social control, or command structures to do the work he cannot fully do himself–instead of abandoning his lies, spins the roulette wheel of philosophy and lands on nihilism, existential dread, or even a species of pet rational cynicism. Dostoyevsky knew that moral courage was the antidote to despair in a modern rationalist world, but he couldn’t figure out how to get people from the comfort of their intractable lies, or their adoption of alternative facts to soothe their moral turpitude, to the uncomfortable place where ultimate, knowable Truth resides.
We have the same problem with liars playing poker in our era. Except the liars are playing poker at a technological, social, and cultural scale that would be unfathomable to Dostoyevsky. And the problem can only be solved by each of us, individually, adopting the moral courage to say the Truth. The economist, author, and researcher Thomas Sowell once noted that, “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites. ”
There’s no surer way to spread panic among a multitude of liars than to bet on the Truth.
...Can Tell You Everything Except What it Means
Rationalism, the idea that the material world can be understood in terms of the way objects and people behave without an appeal to the authority of a cosmic presence, has brought humanity a lot of good things: clean water, cleaner air, longer life spans, technological achievements our ancestors couldn’t have dreamt of, and better functioning systems of governance.
But rationalism has drained the world of meaning in a cosmic sense. When a society or civilization can’t hold on to the meaning of the acts it has accomplished, that civilization fails. Sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes with a whimper. But either way, civilizational failure is on the docket. This is because meaning is not imbued in the things we have as human beings, or even the life spans we live, or the systems we construct.
Meaning exists at a cosmic level and then filters down to us. It doesn’t start at the bottom and then rise up.
Being able to peel a layer from the great block of stone known as reality and figure some things out makes human beings arrogant and full of hubris. Pushing the materialist boundaries of reality further and further, and ignoring opportunities for finding and making meaning.
It is a long way back to meaning from the hubristic victories of materialist rationalism. But it’s a journey back worth making, when a society finally, collectively realizes that it can solve a lot of materialistic problems, but it has lost the words to describe what solving all those problems means at a cosmic level.
You Will be like God
No friction.
A ‘sure’ thing.
“I just want ‘it’ to ‘work.’
Right the first time.
Done to spec.
No problems.
The translation of all of these phrasings, and others, is really a desire for comfort, ease, predictability, and control. Over outcomes, over consequences, over accountability, and over rewards.
The reality of human existence is that friction, discomfort, change, tragedy, and resistance from other people are the primary drivers of growth in a fallen world where the seduction of safety and security is always a lie in the end.
The serpent in the garden, and there are all manner of serpents in all types of our gardens, promised us knowledge. But the serpent didn’t tell the other part: That knowledge always comes with friction, discomfort, change, tragedy, and resistance from other people.
The only place where there is no friction, no discomfort, no change, no tragedy, and no resistance from other people is heaven. And many of us no longer believe in the possibility of such a place.
The Pitch
Everybody pitches.
From the moment we are born until the Grim Reaper comes for us, we are all selling, and buying, everything, all the time. Which is to say, humans are consistently seeking to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of the people around us. And they are doing the same to us. These acts of buying and selling, from the womb to the tomb, are a huge part of what make human beings social animals.
Even in our oldest stories, humans are documented as trying to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of transcendence itself. But why? What is the meaning behind our acts of selling? And why do we struggle to think deeply about what all this might mean at all? There are no philosophers of sales. And there are no philosophy of persuasion courses available on the Internet or via higher education. Sure, you can get all the instructions on the mechanics of selling and buying, but the reason for doing the mechanics in the first place?
Well. The shelf is thin on volumes of books at that end of it.
There are two reasons (among many) why humans don’t think much about why we sell and buy ideas, opinions, perspectives, products, services, problems, and their solutions to and from each other. The first reason is that we fear that thinking too much about the philosophy, the “why,” behind the behavior of selling itself might cause the “magic” of whatever approach we’ve been successful with to go away. This is nonsense. But it’s on par with the object permanence nonsense we genuinely believe when we play peek-a-boo as nine-month-old infants.
The second reason we don’t explore the philosophy of why we are compelled to sell to other people–and why we allow their selling to work, or not, on us–is because we don’t want to think too deeply about how really gullible we are. This is disturbing to us because it puts paid to our deeply held conviction that we have autonomous free will, independent agency, and the ability to make decisions without other people. Now, let me be clear: I believe in free will. And I believe in the power of humans to persuade, inveigle, negotiate, convince, and influence the behavior of other humans to surrender their free will in service of themselves, others, or even something greater than themselves.
Think carefully before you pitch to others.
Anchoring Gatekeeping
Publishing conspiracy theories online isn’t the only way to manipulate and direct an audience’s beliefs.
However, when what we’re reading online doesn’t match what we’re seeing in the rest of our lives, we still have to make a decision about what, or whom, to believe.
We all want our ways of looking at the world confirmed by people, institutions, and even systems. We want that because such confirmation builds trust. And without trust, all that results–in families, tribes, communities, neighborhoods, and even up to the level of nation-states–is suspicion, chaos, fear, and eventually, polarization, conflict, and battle.
Gatekeepers used to exist to maintain trust. In the coming future, where online content will become even more suspect and mistrusted, people who can successfully and consistently gatekeep reality itself will be sought out and trusted. This phenomenon will be less about who is “telling the truth” to power, to an opposing side in an argument, or even to reality itself, and it will be more about who has consistently been proven correct about the dichotomous nature of people, institutions, and even systems.
The people who are going to gatekeep reality in the future must anchor their gatekeeping to the Truth of the work in this fallen world of a transcendent God, in all of His Glory and Might.
Jesus is King. And that’s no conspiracy theory.