...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.
Moats and Deltas
In business, particularly in startups, there is an idea that a business must possess a significant enough moat in order to stave off potential competitors in a crowded marketplace. Often attributed to investor Warren Buffett, moat, is a term used to describe a company’s competitive advantage. Like a moat protects a castle, certain advantages help protect companies from their competitors.
The same thinking can be applied to our work world, where there are two kinds of people using our LLM tools. One type uses LLMs like fortune cookies or magic 8-Balls. They ask an average question they would have used search to answer four years ago, and instead of generating a collection of search results that they would have had to parse and critically examine, they get an LLM regurgitated version of a mediocre answer.
These people are coasting along right now, using Chat GPT, Claude, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and on and on for entertainment, planning their next trip, flooding the attention zone with AI slop, or just lurking about, wondering what to do with these tools next.
The second type of person uses LLMs to examine assumptions and to level up what they are already doing at work. They are interested in prompt engineering and search for context inside the LLM’s answers to queries, and when the answer is average–like an answer from a fortune cookie–they push the tool past its limits. These people know and understand how language, persuasion, sales, negotiation, and conflict work at deeply interpersonal levels between people in the real world, and they employ critical thinking because they have mental and emotional discipline.
They are building a bigger and bigger moat, one prompt at a time, that eventually will transform into a delta; that is, a concrete, measurable variable of change between two states: those who have a large moat, and those who don’t.
As the delta between these two groups increases, and one group declines while the other one ascends in the economy of the future we’re building the rails for now, which one of these two groups do you think will have a more defensible moat in their job, their career, their financial situation, and even in their cultural life in America, as we breathlessly outsource more and more of our average outcomes to these new machines we’re building?
And here’s another question while you’re pondering the answer to that one: Which group of people will complain–or advocate if you will–for more fairly distributed outcomes as rewards begin to accrue to one group over the other economically and socially?
My advice to all of you reading: Expand whatever moat you’re working on right now into an ever-growing delta.
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.
Hitting the 'Record' Button
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t hit the ‘record’ button on the videoconferencing software. As a result, the conversation I would have turned into a podcast episode was not recorded.
And yet, the person I was talking to and I both acted like it was being recorded. We behaved as if the cloud were absorbing our thoughts. We watched our words, monitored our tone, made our points, and when we disagreed, did so respectfully.
Did we already have great behavior, or was our tendency to be respectful with each other mediated, informed, and censored by the fact that we believed the interaction was going to be part of posterity?
At least temporarily on the Internet.
The tools that monitor and record us are changing our behavior as much as we are molding the tools to work with us. It’s a symbiotic relationship rather than a dictatorial posture, no matter what the marketing folks who work for the technologists would want you to believe.
The Myth of the City
According to the writer and creator of the show, Yellowstone, he was told repeatedly by Hollywood executives when he was initially shopping the pitch of creating a show where most of the action occurred on a ranch in rural Montana, that, “We won’t pick up a show that pitches stories from rural areas. It’s been that way since the 1970s. We only pick up stories that we can market to the urban areas of the country.”
If this is an accurate anecdote, and memories of pitch meetings in Hollywood are notoriously full of holes, and Hollywood hagiography is its own form of storytelling, what it means is that for at least three generations in American popular culture, the myth of the city as the only place where “the action is” has been actively marketed over the reality we all live with in our lives.
That’s not to say that urban stories and myths aren’t part of the fabric of the American myth. They clearly are, all the way back to the Boston Tea Party. But it does open the door to thinking critically about how much of the post-modern mythos about the sexiness of urban living is just really marketing by Hollywood executives with a directive to follow from their immediate bosses.
The Singularity Appears
According to the prognosticators and breathless technophiles, the singularity, a point where artificial intelligence begins improving itself faster than humans can monitor or control, has apparently arrived.
The singularity hasn’t arrived, of course, in your daily life.
You know, all the places where the “intelligence on silicon” has been around for a while, but its impact is hidden from you directly, like in the navigation apps on your phone, or in the algorithms that show you more of what you click on in a social media feed.
The singularity hasn’t arrived, of course, in your relationships with other people, which remain messy, fraught with conflict, and unpredictable. Nor has it arrived, of course, in the myths you tell yourself and others, that continue to allow you to get up in the morning and go to work.
But, make no mistake: The singularity has arrived.
Ok.
And now that the singularity is here, soon, very soon indeed, “intelligence on silicon” will consume, overwhelm, and subsume “intelligence on carbon.”
Except, of course, carbon-based intelligence has gone pretty far in the last 5,000 years or so. And the people who are interested in a competing intelligence–those prognosticators and breathless technophiles I already mentioned–are usually the same people who devalue, dismiss, and disbelieve in the ongoing symbiotic relationships between intelligence, consciousness, and relationships among and between humans and machines together. They aren’t exactly fans of man.
To quote from a recent review of the book (…I know, I know…) The AI Paradox by Virginia Dignum in The Nation, “The more AI can do, the more it highlights the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence." She (Dignum) writes, " AI is good at certain tasks, such as “data analysis, logical reasoning, and linguistic processing.” Yet it struggles with others, especially those involving creativity, empathy, “moral and ethical discernment,” the “capacity for complex reasoning,” and the “ability to reason about relationships between concepts.”
Huh. How about that? And Ms. Dignum has been working with “intelligence on silicon” since at least the 1980s.
The singularity is here. Right on time, it appears, to reliably, meet its ceiling in the form of the humans who made it.
Most People are Terrible Negotiators
Most adults, for better or worse, are terrible negotiators.
This is for many reasons, but the two primary ones are, one, adults don’t know how to ask clearly, concisely, and consistently for what they want from other people. And two, adults aren’t honest enough and vulnerable enough with themselves to know what they really want in the first place.
Case in point: Three-year-old children are really good at negotiating with adults and other children. They know what they want, and they ask for–or demand–that which they want clearly, concisely, and consistently from other people. They are also radically transparent, vulnerable, and honest with themselves about what they want. Adults tend to view how a three-year-old expresses their needs and desires as immature, selfish, and naive, but adults, for all of their social sophistication in masking their needs and desires from other adults out of fear of being taken advantage of, aren’t any less immature, selfish, and naive.
When adults know what they want and dare to express those needs and desires in a way that other adults can hear and respond to, they become better negotiators. They also become less fearful of outcomes and consequences. Both of getting what they want and of not getting what they want.
The social sophistication adults demand of others in a negotiation is really, at the bottom, just a deep desire for those other adults to be as confused and misdirected as they are. Because the kind of direct clarity that successful negotiation requires scares adults with its power to change status, change social games, and change culture. Continuing a pattern of confusion and misdirection through terrible negotiation leads to increased conformity, preserves fragile status games, and allows the myth of an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society to continue. Which is what adults are really negotiating over all the time.
If those fragile, egalitarian, and non-hierarchical structures are the psychological, social, and cultural constructs we’re bent on preserving as adults with our terrible negotiations, then let’s just be honest with each other about it. And let’s not act surprised when a moderately sophisticated negotiator who has radically different desires comes along and upsets the apple cart of our carefully constructed, yet terrible, paradigm.
Fan of Man
Being a fan of human beings has always been a difficult proposition. However, in the era of seemingly instant transmission of information, the speed with which human beings can transmit gossip has never had human precedent before.
Sure, human beings can, and do, transmit good things about each other–praises, kudos, claps, and positivity–but the flood of negative gossip is overwhelming. And consuming, observing, and commenting on that flood is designed to be both corrosive and addictive.
Because “if it bleeds it leads” and no entertainer, huckster, influencer, grifter, magician, or marketer (but I repeat myself endlessly) ever went broke underestimating the unending human appetite for negative gossip rooted in envy, pride, lust, vanity, covetousness, and jealousy.
This makes it hard (but not impossible) to argue against the materialist reductionist mindset to human behavior. It makes it hard to argue that “intelligence on silicon” isn’t a better option. Human beings' behavior undermines the argument before it even leaves the mouth of the human making it.
But…
Man wasn’t created to be in a relationship with silicon. Man was created to be in relationship with the natural world, and the other, perpetually messy, people in it. The ceiling of our clean, unmessy, and artificial creations will eventually hit, is the ceiling of relationships.
That’s worth being a fan of man in order to defend.
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.
Thinking Clearly
The question of our biologically overstimulated and psychologically anxious times is this one: How clearly do you think?
Clear thinking is a product of mental discipline, calm, and, of course, accurate comprehension of whatever it is that you are seeing and hearing. Clear thinking comes before critical thinking. But we tend not to separate those two functions in our minds and self-conceptions, but we should.
The level of heightened diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, anxiety (personal and social), and other mental health maladies is typically attributed to external factors, such as the effects of interpersonal trauma, abuse, diet, entertainment, and social-technological changes. Of course, the primary solution for addressing the impact of these factors on people’s mental health (and thus their thinking) invariably involves a pharmaceutical or therapeutic intervention.
Maybe that’s the correct approach. Maybe that’s the way to guide people back to the type of clear thinking, comprehension of reality, and critical thinking we all need at scale in order to survive the endless whiplash of societal changes we all seem to be moving through and having imposed upon us.
However, without individuals standing athwart their own mental confusion and self-declaring, “Stop,” the solutions currently proposed will remain, at best, catch as catch can.
The Twilight of the Novel
The book, as a technology for transmitting information, ideas, and concepts across time, is probably one of the top five inventions human beings have ever created. Included in that august list would also be indoor plumbing, penicillin, capitalism, and the internal combustion engine. The book–for all of the handwringing about its position as a technological influencer in Western culture right now–in its current modernist (or post-modernist form, if you will) is not on its last legs.
The novel, a variation of the liquid of ideas the container of the book holds, may indeed be on its last legs, however. The reasons for the death of the novel are many, including the following:
1). Human interiority and curiosity about the internal psychology of other people built the novel, and the deconstruction of that curiosity has led to its destruction.
2). The length of a reader’s attention spans and an audience’s cultural connection to historical material and social references across time go hand in hand. That chain has been breaking for at least the last thirty years.
3). The supremacy of other, more visually compelling media that get across the primary message of interiority to an audience better, e.g., film, TV, and of course, video on the Internet, has combined to beat up the novel.
But remember, even with all this, a novel is just a story placed in the format of a book. From Don Quixote to As I Lay Dying, and from Play It as It Lays to the current list of popular, AI-produced novels featured on Goodreads, the novel has probably gone about as far as it can go within the confines of the medium of the book.
This fact doesn’t mean that stories themselves are dead. Humans have been telling each other stories since the beginning of creation and will continue doing so until creation is wound up. It means that the types of content a book can contain will subtly shift.
Over the next 125 years of the book, the medium won’t die. It’s too resilient for that. But what will happen, I think, is that brave creatives, not trapped by the assumptions of the last 300+ years of Enlightenment novelization and cultural storytelling modes, will take the book itself in completely different directions.
Perhaps even, back to the future to a past–a pre-modern place populated by the works (but not novels) of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, the Old Testament authors, Tacitus, Seneca, and Saint Augustine–where we haven’t been as readers, in the West, in a while.
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.
Apocalyptic Anxiety
In the Western world–and by that term I mean the countries that are heirs to the promises of the 18th Century Enlightenment project, including most of the countries of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and, of course, Japan and South Korea–anxiety about everything, everywhere always being in a state of dismal decline and ignominious ending is a common theme.
If we’re honest (which usually we’re not, as self-absorbed and blinkered as we are), such anxiety about an “always on the come” Apocalypse–whether personal or corporate, whether from Mother Nature or the Almighty God–is “baked in” to the behavioral pie of people of the West. From the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 to the current battles over whose politics get to rule the Internet, people in the West temperamentally love an argument, love having anxiety about conflict, and love the dynamism of not getting along with each other.
Even all the way to the point of an externally delivered, near Armageddon. Or at least, whatever will do until that Armageddon actually shows up.
And at the last minute, when the psychological barbarians are decamped at the gate, and the physical structures are about to be torn down by the literal barbarians, we people in the West, weirdly enough, come together, make a decision, and then proceed to move like white lightning, rampaging over all of the authoritarian, theocratic, non-Western, and, of course solidly unified “others.”
The strange thing is, we in the West have been engaged in that pattern of intercivilizational behavior for at least the last half a millennium with no foreseeable hitch in our step.
The fact of the matter is, the battle of Armageddon is always there to be joined. The Apocalypse of the righteous and the unrighteous alike is always upon us. The “end of all things” always shows up, like clockwork, in the minds of the anxious, the impatient, and the dissatisfied. What appears from the outside to be a state of endless chaos, fractious disunity, and an exploitable weakness, always–just in the nick of time usually–provides people in the West with the dynamism, unpredictability, and raw courage, at the tip of the spear, to do the thing that needs to be done, when all hope seems to be lost.
And then to return home–physically, psychologically, and even spiritually victorious–only to start bickering amongst ourselves yet again.
I don’t see the next 75 years of people in the West having any different pattern of behavior than they have exhibited in the last 500 years.
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.
Social Shame and Embarrassment as the Friction that Develops
The use and presence of our AI tools in business and organizations will be used as an excuse to stop developing junior employees because, well, “AI can do it better.”
The first generation of college students who have been exposed to ChatGPT for the last four years are graduating from college this June. They enter a work world where they will automatically have agency from organizations and employers to build slop, believe in slop, and advocate for slop arguments. And, to make matters even worse, the work world represents the final iteration of a social and educational world that has validated their every thought and assertion, right or wrong, since they were in kindergarten.
It used to be, up until about five minutes ago, culturally and socially, that the social and cultural shame and embarrassment attached to not knowing facts, ideas, or even the underpinnings of facts and ideas were enough to encourage curiosity. Or at least shame and embarrassment prevented the aggressively ignorant from asserting the wrong things at an increasingly loud decibel level.
But such social and cultural guardrails have been seen for at least two generations as merely limiting creativity and creative expression. And leveraging those tools by mid-career and senior leaders is now associated with delivering undeserved trauma to juniors who are, quite frankly, ignorant. And thus, the use of those tools of shame and embarrassment has been eroded quite significantly.
We are arriving quite quickly at a weird cultural and social cul-de-sac in the world of work. One where the junior employees we are seeking to develop confidently assert facts that are based on AI slop, social media algorithmic feedback loops, and an astonishing lack of practical education. And they don’t have the experience, maturity, courage, or competence to spot the slop, fight the algorithm, or get the education.
On the other hand, we have senior and mid-career leaders who can’t be bothered to employ even rudimentary social norming tools in the workplace because the backlash from leveraging those tools isn’t worth the outcomes they never see. Instead, it’s just easier to pay $100 a month for an AI stack that “Can do it better.”
There must be a way out of this cul-de-sac. Because if there isn’t, it’s going to be a long next twenty-five years in the work world.
A Tweet is not a Vote
Sometimes people on the other side of an ideological, social, moral, or ethical debate have a point. And when they have a point, it’s intellectually principled to acknowledge the point. Though it might be emotionally painful.
Here is the point, once made by a politician, in response to an online activist’s criticism of her political decisions: “A Tweet is not a vote.”
By which she meant: No amount of blogging, tweeting, posting, meme-dropping, or complaining online is a substitute for doing the work of going out to vote, encouraging people door-to-door to vote, or taking people to the polls to vote.
But that work is hard. And just as in so many other areas of the civic, public, and even corporate life of modern Americans, we’d rather perform what is easy than practically do what is hard.
When your ideological, social, moral, or political opponents do the hard, simple, and unglamorous work, they win the power. And all you get in return is the opportunity to complain, tweet, meme-post, or blog more about what they’re not doing right.
Am I My Brother's Keeper?
Resentment and entitlement go hand in hand.
In the Book of Genesis, Cain was resentful of his brother Abel’s abilities and talents, and he was envious of the acceptance of his brother’s sacrifices to a transcendent God. After God–or reality, take your pick–discovered he had killed his brother in a fit of murderous rage, Cain quipped back at reality, “…Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9 KJV).
The remainder of the Bible, from that question all the way through the Book of Revelation, seeks to answer Cain’s rather entitled and myopic question. In our era, we in the West are suffering from the twin cultural, political, and economic sins of resentment and entitlement. Resentment by current generations of those generations who have come before, and entitlement for rewards they have yet to earn.
Of course, most of this resentment and entitlement is being recorded and documented in online forums, postings, and videos. Which renders such expressions of resentment and entitlement somewhat suspect from the beginning. After all, the fervent postings of those “Very Online” types might be nothing more than Iranian, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, or Cuban bot factories posing as real, Western-man, humans.
In spite of not knowing who is a bot and who is not, it is important to note that resentment and entitlement don’t serve to build bridges. Of course, if you don’t care about building and only care about rebellion and deconstruction, then resentment and entitlement will bring you all the way to the clearing at the end of the path, where the repetition of the murder of the Abel’s of the West can pick back up right where we left it off in the mid-20th century.
Disrespecting Your Audience
When you insist–despite all evidence to the contrary–on having a meeting instead of understanding that your meeting could have been an email, you have effectively disrespected the people in the meeting. Not just their time, but also their attention, their focus, and even their mental energy.
While such disrespect can be overcome, it is impossible to stop the erosion of trust that occurs in leadership when even the small things are ignored, or when the small things are made into much larger events than are warranted.
The objection, that “people don’t read the emails,” is facile on its face. Your employees read the emails. They just don’t think that responding to them on your timeline is the most important thing.
Alignment is happening on disrespect from both ends. But the alignment on respect is what’s lacking. To fix this misalignment, leaders must go first.
The Rights You Have
You don’t have a right to the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think you deserve.
You don’t have the right to lecture to the people who have earned the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education you think they don’t deserve, about what they can or can’t do with the fruits of their labor.
If you don’t like the way in which the eponymous “they” earned the market, earned the attention, earned the money, earned the status, or earned the education, then you have two options: 1) Change the systems, or 2) See the first option.
Changing people might feel sexier, but changing systems is the real work.
But if you’re not willing to work to achieve the market, the attention, the money, the status, or the education that “they” earned in the first place in order to outcompete “them, I can see how it would be more attractive to complain about the outcomes of a system that would take work to change.