Philosophy
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.
Feeling Invisible
Everyone feels invisible to someone at some time. It’s part and parcel of the human condition.
But the path to becoming visible doesn’t go through other people. It goes through the agency and the autonomy a person gets for themselves.
And then it continues, secondly, by negotiating with other people in the world who typically have their own emotional and psychological events going on in their heads.
Autonomy and agency don’t come from the presence of external markers or via external validation from other, equally flawed, people. Autonomy and agency are confirmed by external markers second.
Eliminating invisibility always begins with the hard work people must do internally.
And if a person’s internal north star is pointed in any direction other than at the highest, most transcendent reality, there’s going to be inevitable trouble, confusion, chaos, trauma, and despair in achieving such internal visibility to themselves first.
It’s part and parcel of the human condition.
Under Pressure
Pressure is a valuable state. It focuses and sharpens concentration, creates friction inside an experience, and it encourages the growth of resilience under stress.
Pressure creates diamonds along with heat and time in the geologic realm. In the psychological realm, pressure creates stress and trauma, along with emotional heat.
Pathologizing stress into trauma and encouraging avoidance of pressure rather than acceptance of the fact of pressure leads to creating not diamonds, but pieces of coal with stress fractures that, when heat is applied, burn and fade.
Anonymous Verification
The marketer and author, Seth Godin, made a point years ago, in either a book of his or on his long-running blog site, that sets the table for my observations today, “No society ever survived anonymous feedback.”
He was right, of course.
And as our national and global public discourse has declined into tribalism, violence, and polarization, calls for identifying people verifiably as people for the purposes of policing online discourse have increased.
The problem with verification of “humans as humans” and not “humans as bots” is not a “free speech” smothering problem.
People are free to speak (or write), but they have never been free from the consequences of such speech or written words. That’s why the 1st Amendment in the US Constitution is followed closely by the 2nd Amendment.
The problem with the verification of “humans as humans” for the purposes of making humans behave in their online communication is that humans have been shaped in their behaviors, communication patterns, and appetites by the Internet, as much as the Internet has been shaped by them. Problems with anonymity were just the tip of the iceberg in human communication and behavioral challenges with this new technology.
I am not opposed to human verification to police toxic commentary on the Internet. But I am opposed to verifying humans as humans as a shortcut to the hard work of mitigating behavior that is as much psychological and spiritual as it is material and emotional.
The problem lies not in the Internet, the trolls, or even the bots, dear Internet Commentator, but in ourselves.
And if we want society to survive, neither anonymity nor verification is going to serve well as cudgels to get humans to behave and communicate more humanely.
Knowing the Path
We can know objective truth, and we can defend it. . We can’t know people’s feelings about objective truth. So, we have a moral responsibility to put those subjective feelings in their appropriate place, and behave sincerely and with principle, while walking out objective truth.
Unreliable Narrators
Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.
Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.
Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.
It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.
Secret Kings and Their Marketing Teams
No one is convinced that the social reformer, regardless of ideological, political, or social position, is advocating for all of the “social reform” they’re advocating for, out of some sense of humane magnanimity.
Just as no one is convinced that the businessman, regardless of commitment to sales, investing, or making profit, is advocating for all of the “capitalism” they’re selling and marketing for, out of some desire to destroy, despoil, or ruin.
However, because creatives tend to be socially minded rather than business-minded, they tend to get the last word in describing, defining, and making the myths that the audience believes about not only their motives, but also the motives of their opposites.
Olestra, GLP-1's, Nietzsche, and the Continued Search for a Chemical Solution to Human Nature
Two things occur to me:
1). People in online popular culture no longer talk about “body positivity” now that GLP-1 drugs are readily available and have proven to be somewhat effective. However, I remember the coming and going of Olestra, so I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
2). There is never going to be a chemical solution to the pile of psychological, emotional, and spiritual factors that cause the differing disorders, pathologies, habits, tendencies, and tics that humans experience as a result of living in a fallen world.
Of course, I am trade-off positive rather than solution positive, because the abyss of human nature is as deep and dark as the abyss Nietzsche rhapsodized about in his various mad warnings.
Absurdity
Sure, the social interactions between people, between people and institutions, and between institutions themselves are absurd.
But pointing out the absurdity doesn’t mean that you’ve solved the problem. It doesn’t even mean you’ve accurately identified the place of trade-off and negotiation. It means you’ve observed like a child, using adult terms to describe your observations, and have decided that serious effort to address absurdity just isn’t in your emotional or intellectual makeup.
Pointing out absurdity is nothing. Presenting the trade-offs as alternatives to absurdity is everything.
Warfare, Terror, Murder & Bloodshed
“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…” - Orson Welles, The Third Man