Making Nobody Happy

I have been reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae with a great deal of annoyed delight.

I say delight because it is wonderful to find someone talking openly about so many of the things I have been thinking about for so long. I’m annoyed because it’s so frustrating to always be discovering that someone has already written the book you wanted to write, and rather better than you could have written it.

I think it was C.S. Lewis and his love of classical art and archetypes that first set me on a similar path to Camille. Or rather, nature itself did. My earliest fascination was with the mystery of woman, which was quite intense in me even at my earliest remembered age. There were deep cthonic secrets to be discovered, hidden away in plain sight in the hidden recesses of half the ordinary population.

Lewis united my Apollonian understanding with those heathen passions and provided a bridge for understanding. His love of Greek poetry gave me the language. G.K. Chesterton and Charles Williams took me deeper into that realm, people I read largely because of their association with Lewis. Orthodoxy taught me about the romance of the ordinary, the mad divinity of the commonplace miracles we’re surrounded by. Chesterton also had a certain perverse wit that delighted in overturning apple carts and toppling walls of safety, leaving you exposed to the raw miracles and terrors of daily life. He was engaged in restoring the romance and mystery in the hearts of men, that the impulsive, tawdry affairs and technical power and understanding of modern man had stripped from the world.

Between Lewis and Chesterton, they put the cthonic mysteries back on their proper divine pedastal, and then raised God even higher above them, bringing order on top of mystery. As I believe Chesterton said, Paganism was the biggest thing ever, until Christianity. Both he and Lewis did not see in paganism a goddess humiliated by the church, but rather elevated and transfigured through being wedded to it.

Charles Williams took things a step further, although his direction was less clear. I remember two of his novels in particular. One was Descent into Hell, a psychological novel in which the innate underlying selfishness of humanity, moderated by art, swallows one of the main characters into the abyssal depths of his own inner hell. He paints a picture of an endless, dark pit we each carry around within us, and into which we can descend into inky, velvety pre-consciousness and pre-morality, if we allow ourself. Life is lived on a rope up which we climb, hanging over an infinite dark abyss of time and unawareness, the lack of sight. The journey into the self, rather than leading to freedom or revelation, simply leads back to the freedom of premoral, animal unconsciousness and solipsism, a world without vision or value beyond the walls of the self.

The second book of his I read, I don’t remember the title, was about the victory of dark, bloody, shamanistic mysticism over an anemic, Apollonian modernism, grown weak and indecisive in its technological superiority and decadence. It was the triumph of the wtich doctor over the scientist. I wasn’t sure what to think about it. It was weird. Especially to a rural high-schooler reading it in the 1980s. It was a fantasy designed to make you rethink the strength of the hidden power of the dark and mystical currents that lie at the bottom of human history and human experience. That perhaps the nice, tame power of the professional academic, even at its apogee, wielding all the knowledge and powers of the modern age, was less than it imagined itself to be and more subject to vulnerability and reversion than it believed. That the dark and rotting roots from which civilization reached to the heavens had not been fully left behind for more airy and self-supporting vistas.

Dune is another book that helped me walk down that path, imagining a future where human nature had not been tamed or subjugated, but rather had reasserted itself. At some point in the past the consequences of sacrificing our own strength for its incarnation in technological means became too dire. The sacrifice of our responsibility and power for the sake of a technological servant to manage those duties for us caused it to become more human and more divine, and us less and less, until it became a humiliation and abdication we could no longer countenance. Dune pictured a future where we evolved, instead, to bring more of our power and technology into ourselves, into our innate capacity, rather than fixing it in structures and machines around us. Which is frankly far more realistic and true to the actual biological history of humanity. We always became our greatest powers.

For many years my own mystical journey came to a halt. But it was restarted by Jordan Peterson, whose Maps of Meaning explores much of the same territory that Camille Paglia does. At the same time, my own personal interest in understanding myself and my wife as sexual partners drew me into a number of pieces of personal and philosophical exploration. I wanted to understand why I felt the way I did and why things had the meaning they had and where the blood and power and terror in my relationship with my wife came from. I was a worshipper of my wife, a devotee of our relationship, and I wanted to explore the mysteries of how and why that should be.

All that led me to Camille Paglia. Reading her has been a treat, another step in my journey of understanding. It’s useful to have a feminine perspective. She’s an atypical woman, but I think that’s part of what makes her able to talk about women so well. She has insight from the inside but stands a little bit outside. And I think I’m a bit like that as a man. I’ve always lived and operated at the fringes of typical masculinity, but it’s never bothered me. I’ve always felt confident in my own identity as a male, even if I often struggled in the company of other men. Being on the inside but at the edges helps you have a bit of perspective.

Being close friends with many women throughout my life has helped me understand them better than many men and have sympathy for their position. And women have helped me see and understand myself as a man better, too. Getting married is about the most masculine thing you can do, and being married has masculinized me. You become more yourself when you don’t have to be other things, and you become more what you are when you experience it in contrast to something else.

I’ve been the primary caregiver for my kids, done the majority of all the cooking and housework, and I buy most of the clothes and jewelry and makeup and hair products and accessories in our home. Those aren’t typical roles for a husband. But even as I’ve taken on more and more of those duties, and accepted them and invested in them more (because it didn’t happen all at once, and not all as easily as some), it hasn’t made me feel less manly. In fact I feel far more masculine now than I did before I was doing all those things. It’s not easy to quickly explain why. But I did them for masculine reasons. And my wife accepts them as me performing my duties as a husband, and that makes me feel very manly. Abdication of responsibility, impulsive indulgence, and petty conquests may make you feel good, but they don’t make you a man. They make you a boy, an adolescent. A woman, a wife specifically, makes a man out of you. You enter into the fullness of sexually mature development. You become more than just a single human. You develop into part of a functioning, larger pair that were made for one another. And that does make you each develop more along that path. You specialize.

Even when, as in my family, the wife takes up typically masculine duties and the husband typically feminine ones, the underlying dynamic is still there. You can do masculine things for feminine motivations and even in feminine ways, and you can do feminine things for masculine reasons and in masculine ways. It isn’t typical. The average is the average for a reason. Usually because it’s what easy and fits people’s natural inclinations and interests. But even the tail end of a distribution is still part of it. I may be a more maternal man, but I’m still a man and do things like a man. I can’t recommend our situation generally because it’s very specific to us and who each of us are, it’s not a pattern. It’s not the case that anybody could have done it, that anything can be changed in hwo sexual relationships wo without it mattering. But we were able to do it. Because of the specific sort of people my wife and I are. Even then it wasn’t easy. And it might not be how we do things forever. And occasionally you run into things you can’t change and obstacles you can’t overcome, or even just areas where you know you’re going to have to take a loss.

My wife and I aren’t typical, but that doesn’t change the fact that women don’t like it when their partner earns less than them, and that includes my wife. You can deal with that, you can get used to it, you can compensate for it, but it’s always going to be something you have to struggle against. You can’t assume that it won’t matter, that it’s arbitrary. Women have certain needs, desires, and expectations; and men have certain needs, desires, and expectations. How you express and fulfill them can be done pretty creatively. But it’s wrong to assume they won’t need to expressed or fulfilled.

Anyway, to return to realm of mysticism and sexuality, I’m still figuring out exactly I think about Sexual Personae. I think Camille has a very good perspective and I have a lot of learn from her. There are some things I think could be added to her perspective. As much as I like how she perceives things and elaborates the dichotomy between nature and sky god, between Cthonic and Apollonian, I think it’s worth noting that both forces and both instincts are actually part of overall supernature. It’s together that they generate everything we perceive of as the world. Camille has a great perspective. It’s very balanced. But it is a feminine perspective. And it has an absent counterpart. Something very close, but from just over the other wise of the fence. She might enjoy hearing a fringe masculine perspective that mirrors her own work as a fringe feminine perspective. I don’t think I have the education or the skill to fill that role. But I am a great admirer of her work.

One thing you learn if you grow up in a good church is about the dangers of Pharisaism. If you don’t know who the Pharisees were, they were the best people. Social leaders, influencers, educated, active in the community, obsessed with being ethical, respected, innovative. They had ethical living down to an absolute science, always said something, and were ready to educate anyone who committed any microtransgressions. They were also the guys who had Jesus executed. You can’t get everything right.

The Pharisees are often held up as example of religion, but more generally, morality and moralism, gone wrong. Their faith had become all about rules and offenses and performance and keeping score and public displays and public denunciations. They make for a relevant example today because this problem, this tendency for ethical and moral concern to drift toward self-righteousness, is a perennial problem that has cropped up again and again in Judaism and Christianity. And if you happen to take a look around, you’ll realize that it has been a recurring problem in every religion, and even in non-religious ideologies and endeavors.

The Bible has a lot of chapters devoted to criticizing this exact kind of behavior, so it’s a particularly dire (although common) offense to use the scriptures to build such a faith. The fact that the Jews and Christians were at such pains to record and decry the problems with letting morality become a social performance is a service in humility they performed for our benefit. Because it didn’t always make them look good. Often some of the highest and most important leaders in both traditions get taken to task for it. But we don’t seem to have taken the lesson to heart. If anything, in today’s media-driven world, we’re more performatove than ever.

Weaponized, performative, political moralism, even compassion, is a very duplicitous beast. Our culture, it should be obvious, has become all about outward-facing, statement-based morality, rather than any kind of private control or internal character. It’s a status game you play with and against other people much more than it is anything to do with your own heart. And unfortunately the global history of such moralism is pretty poor. The sages of almost every society are agreed. Morality isn’t a matter of saying or not saying the right things, or supporting this but not that. Those markers only show off the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of such public moralism. It doesn’t point the way to any real solution to the problems of mankind. It doesn’t generate real kindness or honesty or justice or restraint or generosity or love. We can sense the lack of authenticity in it, because we can feel the fear.

The problem is, if you’re spending all your effort trying to keep from drowning in morality and keeping up appearances, you’re not going to have any capacity left to make any real moral choices or develop any true personal character. You’re going to be too busy worrying about your outward appearance and obsessing over tiny actions and infractions like the Pharisees, who literally counted their steps to make sure they were keeping holy. You can drown in moralism without ever contemplating or acting out any true vision of morality.

A moralism founded in statements of tribal identity and opposition and litmus tests and performative rituals is an act of theater, not virtue. It’s a social and polilical morality. And social and political morality always runs the risk of degenerating into a social and political status game. It’s no wonder this kind of morality generates inconsistent and confusing and hypocritical results; it’s almost inevitable.

No one catalogued the problems of this kind of moralism like the Jews. They have book after book in their scriptures talking about how their morality was constantly degenerating into a performative, hypocritical, political, and social religion of status and accusation and kowtowing and pharisaism. It’s a serious problem, even for those who are genuinely (at least as far as they can tell), trying to be “the good people” and trying to following the right path. Our failure to attend to the humiliations of the Jews, which no culture ever catalogued with such detail and brutal honesty, means we are likely to repeat them.

I’ve taken some time to think about this from different perspectives. It’s true, in a way. A persona is a kind of appearance. And it emerges out of our collective interaction and negotiation. It is a practical social tool. But it’s also more than that.

The persona is what emerges out of us in response to the extended social being of other humans. It floats atop whatever it is that we are, but because part of what we are is essentially hyper-social, it has its own kind of reality. It’s an honest expression of our collective being and collective interaction, even if it’s false to our individual being, and even if our collective being is pathological. It’s a metaphenomena.

You have influence over your persona. It’s something you need to become consciously acquainted with, because it’s a kind of another you. Not a false you, but a you that emerges out of a collective interaction and negotiation. And you need to know it and see it and actively manage that process. You need to cultivate that relationship in a way that benefits both aspects of the complete, multidimensional you.

I think trinitarian metaphors are actually helpful for understanding these levels of being. Christians posit the strange idea of a God that exists at multiple levels of extension. As a sort of abstract, unfathomable entity, as an embodied particular entity in history, and as the presence of that entity as a motivating spirit within us. God out there, God here, God in us. This conception isn’t entirely unlike the idea of the self, persona, etc.

If I had to pick any analogue, and I’m not sure yet if there is one, the persona is like the Spirit. It’s something shared, but expressed individually. It’s a collective spirit, the action of the unifying transcendent in us that brings us together into some larger spiritual or social body. Not unlike the persona. We are moved by the spirit. It’s isn’t exactly us; it inhabits us, or perhaps we inhabit it. It isn’t us in a purely individual, monistic sense. It’s us in communion with the spirit of the transpersonal reality.

The tricky thing about the persona is that it’s hard to tell what is us and what is the spirit. And we can fool and confuse ourselves and betray one or the other, or both. And unfortunately, the transpersonal spirit to whom we are joined may not quite reflect the perfect image of God. In which case the spirit we’re inhabited by may be a false one. It might even be a devil, in which case we have been possessed. In general, being inhabited by any spirit other than the spirit of the highest totality of goodness, truth, and beauty has chance of becoming a kind of possession. Because anything less than that will make something less of us than what we are or could be, reducing us to a mere puppet.

That, I think, is why it is so important to know the persona, and also to know the self, or God. That way you can make sure you’re appropriately connecting the two in the most effective way possible. You cannot be inhabited by the holy spirit if you do not seek to understand God, and you can’t express God if you won’t be inhabited by the holy spirit.

We stand in the position of the son, who is like the elder brother, the example, the template, as a personal, tangible, embodied being of a particular time. He is the perfect example because his persona is one with the self; there is no distance between him and the spirit and God. All the planes are aligned.

In a way, until we can achieve the same alignment, and until the spirit to which we connect is the proper spirit, the spirit of the body of the divine, our persona will always be a false appearance. We will always be inhabited and inhabiting and expressing imperfectly, falsely, and we will always be inhabited and inhabiting and expressing something imperfect and false. But that doesn’t mean that it is corrupt so much as corruptible, or corrupted. And our life’s labor is to make it less corrupt.

If you like this blog but want a different format, it’s available on Substack now. https://mnobody.substack.com

In the future I’m hoping to provide some podcasts and read alongs, which will be accessible from that page. But if you want to latest published articles, the WordPress site is, for now, the best place to get them.

At any given time, I’m about four months behind in publishing what I’ve written. I have to go back, pick through things I’ve written, decide what should go up and what shouldn’t, and do some editing before I can publish anything. I know, it probably looks like I hardly do any editing at all! But I do almost all my writing off the cuff, sometimes by dictation in the car with no punctuation.

I don’t write for an audience, I write to get my thoughts sorted out in my own mind. But because my blog is public, even though I haven’t told anyone about it, particularly not anyone who knows me, I feel a certain obligation to add paragraph breaks, punctuation, and some semblance or order for theoretical readers. I wish I could maintain a quicker turnaround, but life at the moment makes that impossible.

I think people misunderstand how experimentation works on a social scale. Innovation doesn’t render up its results immediately, it renders them up on a generational time scale.

When you run an experiment, when you genuinely innovate with the structure of society and truly try something new and different and disruptive and progressive, you cannot tell what the results and value of that change is in two years, or even five, or ten. You need about two generations. For two reasons: first, there have to be enough people involved in the experiment. In order for a social experiment to take place you need a large sample size, large enough that it affects the overall basis and structure of the society. That takes time.

Having enough participants doesn’t just mean having the popular consent or general momentum to push some change into the culture. It means you need to erode enough of the previously existing structure and get enough people into the new one. Not just as an innovation, but as the new status quo. You don’t need everyone to convert or be replaced, but you need a critical social mass that has assimilated to the new status quo, sufficiently to be able to take it for granted and not be living in or off of the old structure.

Second, you need time to collect the results. Real social changes don’t just affect you in one moment or one phase of your life; they affect the whole social fabric, which encompasses children up through the elderly, all the people living at one time. So you need to see the experiment played through the generational span. That takes time too. Especially if you’re messing with something big, deep, consequential, or fundamental to the structure of human society. Like, for example, sex.

The truth is, we largely made up our minds about the sexual revolution sixty years ago, but the actual data is only just beginning to come in now. Meanwhile, we haven’t held still, we’ve kept innovating and experimenting and radically changing the mechanisms of social activity through immense technological innovation at a rate never before seen.

That makes it pretty hard to understand the results of our actions. Previous societies had tens of thousands of years across which to test ideas, in an environment that really challenged and tested them back, but in which social conditions were relatively stable and you had immediate access to the generations previous and following to observe the effect of any changes.

For all that we moderns pretend to scientific sophistication, previous generations were more careful and patient in their experimentation and took judging the results very seriously, because they knew with a keenness that we lack that their lives depended on what they were experimenting with. They lacked academic objectivity because they lacked the protections of academic distance. If their experiments failed, they paid the price in quite tangible and painful returns. That taught them a certain respect for caution and conservatism. In a world where most innovation results in failure, and failure often means death or poverty, not for some subject but for you personally, you learn to take experimentation seriously. Those of us who stand today as the inheritors of all this struggle and achievement are so drunk our own own present technological power, though, that we think we can do anything and wield our power with a lack of cautiousness that argues for immaturity and carelessness rather than sophistication.

The sexual revolution isn’t something that is over and in the past and settled, it is something that has only just now arrived and can begin to be viewed properly. Lord only knows under what conditions our current experiments will one day be reviewed. Like light from the furthest stars when the heavens are altered, it takes time for great deeds to travel and for the changes to be seen.

It’s silly to talk about wanting equal value for all endeavors or cultures or lifestyles, although it’s a perfectly ordinary sentiment to express these days. We all say it, but no one really believes it; we really just want equal recognition for us.

I think children are the most instructive example for figuring out what we actually do want and do mean by saying that we want justice and equality. No child actually wants equal outcomes for everything and everyone, however much they may complain about wanting things to be fair. Fair, to a child, means “I get the same benefits as you.” Children have no interest in equal shares in punishment or poor outcomes. They also have little desire for others to share in any benefits that they specially earned, and only a mild interest in sharing designated benefits.

Almost no one really wants equal, equivalent, value placed on all activities. If all choices were that equal, it could only be because they were equally meaningless. We want complex, appropriate value to be assigned to all endeavors and lifestyles. We want them to be given their due. That’s justice. But we don’t want to have to argue about what those appropriate values should be or admit that the there is any discussion that needs to be had. We want to be able to assume our own prejudices and values so we don’t have to think about them. We want to be able to assume that everyone values what we value and ignores and views as unimportant what we ignore and see as unimportant, and that whatever we think is actually dumb or bad is dumb and bad. No one really believes that all their value judgements are purely arbitrary except the man who ruled the universe. Everyone else secretly thinks they’re right from day one.

So when we say “don’t judge” we don’t really mean “don’t judge,” we mean “don’t judge differently from me; don’t make me have to think about or defend my judgements”. We don’t believe that making value judgements is really bad, we think that anyone not agreeing with our value judgements is bad.

Equivalence isn’t justice, for the simple reason that diversity is actually real, meaning that there is more than one possible way of being and more than one possible outcome in life. Differences exist, choices exist, therefore you have to learn to recognize and navigate them. Brains are required. And that kicks back our problem to a far more complex issue than we don’t want to tackle, the question: “What then should be value?”

If your framework tells you that your own individual power, particularly your economic power, exceeds all other goals, then sure, maybe all other values and even all diversity of desires, capabilities, and ends, should be sacrificed to it. If you’re not getting all you can get now, for you, according to the prevailing metrics, you’re an idiot and a loser.

Or maybe that’s #$&@ing stupid and virtually every society is rife with wise people who have been trying to explain that and you’ve just been dumb to listen. Value isn’t simple. It doesn’t matter if you’re oversimplifying it into mere power and wealth because you’re a violent, predatory, unbalanced, hyper-masculinized society or because you’re a progressive, revisionist, equalitarian, deconstructivist society. It’s wrong and stupid, regardless.

Even the vikings knew the value of motherhood. Even the Egyptians and Greeks and a host of others made a mother the queen of the gods. They did not set the god of the blind pursuit of wealth or the mere exercise of arbitrary power at the head of the divine order. No truly great ancient culture was that dumb. And those who did set the mere exercise of power over others as their supreme value generally died by the sword they lived by. Their rule was unstable, like most tyrannical rulerships are, even in the animal kingdom.

Motherhood shouldn’t be valued equally with every possible option. But it should be as valued as motherhood is valuable. It should be exactly as great a god as it actually is. So how great is it? It co-rules the universe with fatherhood as one half of the supreme value dyad. Everything depends on it. So yeah, it’s pretty valuable. And any society that can’t see that is more foolish than virtually any society that has ever existed.

Does valuing motherhood mean mothers should earn more money than CEOs? Probably not, since the goal of motherhood isn’t to produce money, and activities are rewarded in terms of what they seek to produce. And since a good 49% of the human race is capable of being a mother, that would present some economic challenges.

Motherhood produces value, for sure, but not usually through some mediated stand-in like money. It produces a whole host of goods and types of value, many of them very direct and tangible that don’t require mediation by money, and whose value may not even be easily reducible to such terms.

The problem with us is that our value horizons are so short and so simplistic that we don’t even know what value motherhood possesses or produces. So we don’t know how to value it. We’re even afraid to value it. And we should be. The goddess of the hearth is far more powerful and ancient than the gods of wealth and political power. She doesn’t hold a sword or a fistful of coins, but she wields an almost inestimable amount of power. Keeping her asleep and unknown is the only way to suppress her power.

Knowing our foolishness, of course the only worse mistake we could make other than stripping the supreme goddess of her divinity would be to divide her from her partner and lover, the divine father. By isolating her and leaving her alone, we cripple her and make her part even harder and more thankless and less stable, while claiming to honor and elevate her. We leave her without her counterpart, her counterbalance, and without half of the support she had, nor half of the work she had to do.

If we weren’t going to ruin motherhood by stopping it of its due honor and value, we could ruin it by stripping it of half of humanity, the masculine half of parenthood. That’s a crime against fathers, a crime against mothers, and a crime against humanity, just as the denigration of the divine mother is an insult to the divine father and all their children.

I don’t mean to over-mythologize. Mythology is just a very convenient way to encapsulate value hierarchies that might otherwise remain tacit and inarticulated. They’re there, in the back of our minds. But the symbols of value, the worship, the honor, the disrespect, the empty altars, those can be hard to see when they aren’t made so tangible and iconographic.

Motherhood obviously still has many devotees. The cult of the father, however, has been largely wiped out by cultural fiat and by a lack of prophets. And people are currently chiseling the name of the mother off her statues and representations. Maybe there is some instinct that drives some people to feel that if they can’t have fatherhood (for whatever reason, they are incapable) that they will take motherhood. It’s at least worth wondering if that is part of our motivation, since we so often don’t really know what it is that we’re really doing.

There is a sense, I think, in which only the mother can save the father, and only the father can save the mother. You can’t just assign yourself value. Someone has to recognize and validate it. And there is also a sense in which you are less likely to go wrong defending the value of someone who is in opposition to you than you are defending your own. My wife can defend me better to my own children than I can. And I can do the same for her. We need an advocate.

I’m not ashamed to say that men need women like this woman to help them and advocate for them, to love them and defend them and challenge them. We don’t have the kind of power women have (and I do mean kind, not amount). Amount assumes an apples to apples comparison, but one reason we can’t sacrifice everything for traditionally male power structures is that that’s not the only kind of power there is. And there may be others that are just as essential to human flourishing and our overall essential power as a species.

You don’t just lose a lesser portion of the same sort of power when you lose the power of the mother, you lose an entirely unique and essential and opposing or complimentary type of power. You don’t lose some degree of what it means to be human, like losing some portion of height in exchange for more height; you lose part of what it means to be human, like losing your legs in exchange for more arms. And the relevant question is, how much can you afford to lose your legs and be all arms, really? You’re not an octopus.

Last night was a night of historic firsts at the Oscars. And among those firsts the most memorable is sure to be the onscreen pairing of Will Smith’s hand and Chris Rock’s face.

Everyone seems to want to talk about this incident. And it’s perfectly understandable, even with all the other crazy news going on in the world. It was simply so shocking and unexpected.

Context plays a large role in how we react to things. And although nobody is a fan of wars with Russia, we know that Russia is the kind of country that starts wars. But nobody expects the winner of the best actor award to violently slap and verbally assault one of the presenters in the middle of the Oscars broadcast. That’s new, and so it’s news.

Most people will condemn Will out of hand. A few might excuse him as a man defending his wife’s honor, or a virtuous man using his priviledge to defend an innocent woman from the microagressions of an entitled and abusive male. If this insult had happened at a dinner party or a gathering of friends, I might have understood Will’s reaction more. It would have been more callous and personal in that context and might provoke a more callous and personal reaction.

But this wasn’t a personal occasion. It was the Oscars. A gala event for industry insiders giving awards to themselves. Hosted by comedians who make their living off of teasing people. It’s particularly to be expected at such events that the subject of much of the teasing will be the attendees themselves. It’s fun, the audience connects with the material, and by showing that you have some good humor about being teased you deflate some of the self-importance that’s baked into the event.

Hollywood has been progressively losing its sense of humor lately though, and the Oscars are no exception. These are people who take themselves very seriously. And ever since Ricky Gervais tore into them a few years back they’ve had a rocky relationship with their hosts. But still, the job of the hosts is to tell jokes to and about people in the industry.

Chris Rock isnt exactly a fresh face. He’s been doing his shtick for decades. You know what you’re going to get if you use him as a presenter. If you hear your name mentioned, he’s probably not going to compliment you. He’s going to tease you. That’s his job, that’s what he does. He’s a comedian with a well-known track record for getting in your face. He’s putting on a show.

The Oscars is also a pretty formal occasion. Peoole dress up nice and put on their best faces. It’s televised in front of millions. It’s an incredibly and almost painfully staged affair. Frankly, my one compliment to this moment is that it was one of the least staged personal interactions I’ve seen from the Oscars in years. At an event filled with people whose whole lives are about putting on a performance, Big Willy was keepin it real. I genuinely appreciated that. It broke the illusion for a moment that all the plastic smiles and makeup and ten thousand dollar dresses maintain, that these people are somehow different or better.

So as a personal act, it was pretty dumb of Will to do that. As a person receiving an award, he hit someone who was acting as an employee. He’ll be lucky if he doesn’t lose his award over this. But as a moment in television history, I kind of appreciated it. It broke a carefully cultivated illusion. It injected some authenticity into a carefully planned morality play about the spectacular artistic and personal virtues of the Hollywood celebrite’. And someone finally out-Kanyed Kanye. He’s done a lot, but he’s never slapped or threatened anyone. I think he might be too sensible for that, and that’s saying something.

https://pulpitrock.com/resisting-complacency/

I came across this article, and I really love the spirit in it. Life is a struggle. The world is pulling us in a hundred ways so hard, so quickly, that learning to sort the signal from the noise is one of our biggest problems. You have to be calm and quiet and centered to hear that still, small voice and respond. It’s so hard to do that these days.
The only thing I would add to this article is that I’m not sure that God is looking for people who want to remake the world in his image. It’s easy to find people who want to remake the world in the image of their God. It’s been the source of much tyranny and hypocrisy, as you see in the minor prophets.
God is looking for people to remake themselves in his image, which is a much harder demand. It’s easy to wield the sword of righteousness against the world, very hard to wield it against yourself and bring your own life into alignment with God’s goodness. People who have been changed will change the world, because the world is us. And us is the thing we can control and have authority over.
This might seem like a fine semantic point, but Christianity and Judaism’s biggest historical failing has always been the corruption of their message, losing it in a performative, social, religious, or political externalization. A system of righteousness, instead of a heart of righteousness. Inquisitors and conquistadors were very good at answering the call to remake the world, and very bad at remaking themselves.

The whole lesson of the Old Testament, including the minor prophets, is that ultimately you can’t make people good with the law or embody God’s will in the form of a political state. Because even the Mosaic law, even the chosen state of Israel, couldn’t bear the image of God. Only individual people can.

The heart of the gospel is personal salvation and transformation. Everything proceeds from that foundation. That doesn’t mean that the world stays the same; it’s a simple question of putting the horse in front of the cart. You can’t change the world if you won’t be changed yourself; you may even make it worse if that isn’t your first priority. It’s so easy to get lost in externalizing sin and righteousness.

There aren’t any verses where God says “I want you to remake the world in my image”. But there are many about how God wants to remake you in his image.

Women, sympathy, and violence (Part 1)

In my life, I’ve found women to be unusually sympathetic. But I think there is one group that women, in general, find it very difficult to have any sympathy for, whose sufferings don’t really matter to them.

Men.

Women can sympathize with other women and with children unusually well; they are uniquely gifted at it. Even when their subjects make it hard for them. Most women want to sympathize with you; they invite you to be worthy of their sympathy. Only, not men. Actually, let me qualify my earlier statement…women can sympathize with men, if they can see them as children. But if you are identified as a man (not just a male, a man), you are, by your nature, excluded from their sympathies.

I think there is an adaptive reason for this. Men exist to be selected against, to be thrown into the ash heap of history. Men exist to be fired like arrows at the world, to be lost and not recovered, only sparing those who hit the mark. So humanity needs some capacity that lets women, a group that is especially sympathetic, be able to do this. They need some psychological trigger that puts their attitude in a very different mode. A mode that allows them to view men as something else that does not arouse sympathy.

Of course this lack of sympathy isn’t complete, and doesn’t apply evenly to every woman any more than it is applied evenly to every man. But women require a battle mode, like that which men go into when facing an enemy, that allows them to dissociate from the humanity and sufferings of those who must suffer. And while men trigger it in one another, men also trigger it in women.

This is why it is so uncontroversial when, on the eve of a war where everyone involved will be deliberately avoiding harming women and children, and where men are being forcibly prevented from leaving so they have to stay and fight, I heard a public commentator opine that in all such conflicts, the “real victims” are the children. Not to dismiss the suffering they may endure and how sympathetic the suffering of children is to us all, but I’m fairly sure that men also make up a decent portion of the “real” victims in a war.

And yet how easily we dismiss their suffering and deaths as somehow not counting or justified or tolerable. How little respect or sympathy we owe them, those brutal monsters who are collectively, even those fighting to defend us, part and parcel of the same inhuman group. How easily we imagine men sitting back and relaxing securely in their strength, forgetting that their biological function on a species level is to die by the masses, both actively through suffering and death and passively through selection, leaving us with an acceptable remainder.

We rarely mourn the missing half of all male genetic lines that have perished through the centuries. Women least of all, because from our standpoint they deserved to perish. It was necessary. The survival of our species depended on it, the happiness and safety and provision of women and children depended on it. The unfit and unacceptable didn’t deserve to be perpetuated. The competitors and threats needed to be removed. The perpetual genocide of half the species is the price we paid to have things as good as they are.

Far from resisting this urge to purge, men embrace it. And women support and expect it and even demand it, while also lamenting and despising it. Men that they can come to view as extended children, helpless dependents, can earn their sympathy. But that will only turn them the harder against those other men they see as predators and oppressors of their adopted children. No mercy or understanding will be reserved for them.

I don’t blame women for this lack of sympathy. The species needs it to survive, just as the lack of sympathy men have for one another and the sympathy both sexes have for women is a survival instinct. We may resent it, but we can’t easily avoid it. It’s built into the meaning of the sexes. It’s pre-conscious, it’s pan-mammalian (and to some degree pan-animalian).

In just a handful of generations a population of genetically compromised fruit flies can purge their impurities and stabilize their genome. They do it with a single trick: they select heavily against the males. By allowing only the desired males to live and letting the rest die off, they redefine the future of their species, with minimal impact to the overall population.

Humans engage in this process, as with so many things they do, on a more abstract and multidimensional basis. But the effect is the same. You can change the future by who you kill and who you let die and who you choose to perpetuate into the future among the males of the species. Whether you do it militarily or economically or socially or in the realm of ideas, the marketplace is an arena where some rise and others fall, fighting for the future of humanity.

Women too create change, and not only through the power of their selection and demand, the conditions and expectations they set. But there is no change like the change you can bring by living or dying. Women change the future most powerfully by perpetuating life, by nurturing it and conserving it. Men change it most by ending it, and by risking being ended in themselves. And in this way we’re really not so different from the flies.

All you need this strategy work is some capacity in both sexes to tolerate such genocidal engineering for the sake of the species. And both sexes, absolutely both sexes, have that capacity. Men make it necessary. They can’t be men without it, it’s part of the reason why the male sex exists across all species. Women, too, make it necessary. They can’t fulfill their sexual role of stability and conservancy and productivity properly without it. They want men to compete and die for the future; they need them to. And men, for all their faults, are happy to oblige.

There is a profound callousness in accepting, and even demanding, such a gift. I don’t expect men or women to recognize it any time soon. It’s a necessary blind spot we are all born with. We may forget about it in times of luxury and safety, but it is always present in the great mass of undesirable men that are shoveled away into prisons or into social and sexual exile. And our prejudices of sympathy are constantly revealed through our prejudices of blame and advocacy, and it’s not at all clear that they’re wrong.

You can have innate prejudices for very good, very necessary reasons. If there wasn’t any utility to them, you probably wouldn’t have them. We all fear and hate men a little. We all want to see them judged, to see the worthy preserved and the unworthy and dangerous perish or be exiled. Women don’t want it to get too messy or disruptive, but it’s definitely what they want and will even demand as a condition of their acceptance of whoever remains.

I have seen this genocidal anger on the face of many women, raging against the depradations of men. I have seen this callousness written large in the faces of many women, who barely even see the unworthy and exiled men as existing, the sooner forgotten the better. They do it all very elegantly, very nobly, with all the best reasons in the world. They are no worse than the noble knights who go to do their duty against the vandals and brigands, but they are also no better. They may not cut many throats themselves, but they make the cutting necessary.

The value of a crisis of faith and assumptions about it. 

I recently heard someone give a talk about having a crisis of faith. And their conclusion was that it’s not a bad thing. It isn’t a problem. It’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person, in fact it means that you’re a good person, someone who is willing to question and struggle with their faith. So doubt and crisis means that you’re actually a great Christian, maybe even a better one than people who are secure. Which to my mind proves the age-old principle of accomodation.

    People tend to assume that whatever position they’re in is the right one and the good one, whatever it is. And when people change positions, often the lesson they learn isn’t humility or socratic ignorance, it’s how to accommodate and make themselves comfortable in any position they happen to hold. 

    It a mistake to think that a crisis of faith is necessarily a bad thing and that no good could come from it. It’s also a mistake to think that a crisis of faith is necessarily a good thing, and that no harm can come from it. Neither guilt nor innocence is guaranteed by either. The reality, for both, is that you don’t know if it’s good or bad, and wisdom consists in ridding yourself of the assumption that you do, so you can actually engage in some genuine thought and labor of the soul. 

    You can’t know at the outset whether your crisis is good or bad because: 1. You don’t fully understand your own reasons and motivations, 2. You don’t know what the end result will be. You’re down in the valley; you’re outside the place of clear vision. And in that place it’s very hard to make judgements, positive or negative. The very mechanism you use to produce and assess those results has been arrested. 

    Figuring out your reasons and motivations and considering where they are heading is the whole point of taking time to think and giving yourself some space in a crisis of faith. After all, what is a crisis of faith? It is when you take a stable, functional structure, the foundation of how you act and understand and react to the world, and suddenly put in on hold and put it under examination because you need to examine or work on some of the fundamental underlying assumptions that make it work.

   Maybe your worldview it isn’t producing the results you expected. Maybe you see something else you like more or that seems to work better. Maybe there was a catastrophic breakdown, maybe it failed to predict and interpret something terribly important that you should have been able to see coming. In some way your psychological machine failed, at a level you can’t just dismiss as chance, forcing you to halt and examine and reconsider fundamental elelements of its design. 

   From a functional standpoint, that’s what a crisia of faith is. Life is always throwing monkey wrenches at the machines we have built to navigate it. A good system is designed to handle those inevitable bumps in the road and get you safely through them. But some bumps hit us harder, and some roads start to shake your composure apart mile by shuddering mile. The problem, when things go badly wrong, is that it’s not immediately obvious whether the problem was some flaw in your system, or whether it was just some chance disaster, or whether it was the result of malevolent interference from outside forces, or whether there was a serious flaw in your own adherence to and embodiment of the system (pilot error).

All you know if that you’re in genuine distress. A psychological collapse has been provoked. Is that because you’re tired, or lazy, or old, or young, or under attack, or deceived, or confused, or unlucky, or hypocritical, or underinvested, or underinformed, or misunderstood, or sick, or being manipulated, or being shortsighted, or being insensitive, or being too sensitive, or reading into things, or failing to read into things, or one of a hundred other possibilities?

You don’t know. You might be taking a genuine and honest look at things you’ve needed to look at for a long time. Or maybe it’s a dozen other things that are causing all this. You can’t assume that you know. That’s the whole point of a crisis of faith, to realize that you’re not sure what it all means. And you can’t be sure even of your own motivations, because your machine has broken down and you’re in the valley of uncertainty. 

   It’s not great to be in the valley of uncertainty. People need to be functional to survive. So you can’t really afford to take your whole mechanism for living and for psychological stability apart many times in your life. You may end up with perpetual post-traumatic stress if you do.

Your faith, whatever it is, is the basis of how you regulate and moderate your pcyche and its parts into something approximating a functional, stable personality that can actually identify and pursue goals. It’s how you regulate all your psychological subsystems and keep them in place and working for your instead of pulling you apart. When the system does fall apart it’s a threat to your whole being, your whole world, and your whole sphere of endeavor. That governing system is what lets you see and understand the world, yourself, and how to operate in it. You can’t kick the foundations out from under it without experiencing some trauma. Even for a good cause.

    So a crisis has very negative effects, it produces trauma. And you can’t afford to have too many, or your life falls apart and you fall too far behind to recover. It places enormous psychological and physiological stress on you. But, for obvious reasons, you can’t afford to never accept such trauma. Sometimes the machine really is broken and needs to be fixed. Sometimes that’s the only way to avoid the pain and disaster of trying to push ahead with a broken system, by admitting that it’s broken and taking the time to figure out how and why.

    By leaning into the pain and trauma you pay the price of the shutdown, with the hope of producing something better on the other side of it. If there wasn’t any hope of this outcome, then there would never be any good argument for bothering with corrective measures. But if the system truly could be better or worse adapted, more or less stable than it is, then it’s worth working on. Sometimes you can make small refinements and adjustments on the fly without too much pain, iterative changes. A crisis occurs when the problems are too deep to be handled this way, when you need to get at the heart of the engine. And that takes either a lot of pain, a lot of insight, or a lot of courage to push you into embracing and realizing that moment. 

    So is a crisis universally good or bad? In a way, it’s both, and neither. It’s dangerous. And you may not, in fact you can assume you don’t, fully understand what it means or why it happened or why you’re going through it. It may rest on very bad justifications or very good ones. Either way, it’s dangerous. You’re very vulnerable, like a bird gone to ground. You’ve been seperated from your pack, you’ve lost your sense of direction. You’ve slowed your movement. You’ve stopped and you’re looking around. And that makes you vulnerable to capture.

    It’s not a coincidence that the methodology of cults–political, personal, and religious–often depend on seperating your from your intimate connections and confusing the foundations of your stabilizing social and psychological mechanisms. They need you to be in the valley of doubt. If you’re going to be captured, it’s the easiest time for someone or something to do it. You’re vulnerable, you’re needy, you’re passionate, you’re isolated and confused.

If you’re going to get snapped up by something, this is when it will most likely happen. Your fear, your resentment, your pain, your desire for comfort, your anger, your isolation, your outrage, your curiosity, and even your insight and courage can be used against you, to draw you in with the promise of something that will solve your problem and stabilize your structures and offer you what you want. 

    If you walk into a crisis of faith failing to realize how vulnerable it has made you, that you could end up embracing something even worse if you haven’t truly learned to take care, then the chances that you will fall into something worse in a moment of need (even legitimate need, need for justice or vengeance or meaning or comfort) is greatly increased. And that is the crux of what I’m saying. We don’t know if doubt is good or bad, whether a crisis of faith is good or bad, because we don’t yet understand the reasons for it and we haven’t seen the results. Doubt is necessary. It’s dangerous–we can never forget that–but it’s necessary. Many dangerous things often are. 

     So as much as I would like to offer comfort, telling you that faith is always good and doubt is always bad, or the reverse, I cannot. I can only offer wisdom. Doubt is necessary. We have to learn to manage it, and we have to respect it, both for its power and for its hazards. Without it, we have no hope for learning. But it carries a heavy responsibility, as all powerful things do.

   You can get lost in doubt. It can snare you. You can’t treat it like it’s merely an evil and you can’t treat it like it’s a virtue, and least of all like it’s nothing. It’s part of life. It’s common. But it’s not banal, because life isn’t banal. Doubt matters.

   So treasure it and fear it, as you treasure and fear living. To live is to be vulnerable to doubt. To think is to risk being wrong. And to act is to risk failure. But without those risks, we have nothing, we go nowhere. So be kind to yourself, be honest, and be skeptical and be on your guard. Face the danger, but don’t pretend that it isn’t there. Take the adventure, but be careful of where your steps could lead or be led.

    Always pursue honesty. And never pursue doubt for its own sake. Doubt that doesn’t seek something isn’t doubt, it’s indecision and temerity, it’s lukewarm and aimless. You may not know what the truth is, it is well to doubt that, but the point of skepticism is to seek truth and know it better. And at some point you have to live, have to stake your life on something, or be nothing. Because life doesn’t last forever, and it doesn’t hold still. Doubts or not, we all must live. And to live is to stake your life on something. 

What do we do about social values? This is a very difficult question. We see that there is a problem, but many intelligent people are uncertain about what to do about it. Perhaps this uncertainty is more of a reflection on the uses and limitations of intellectuals (they’re not great at execution, they’re thinkers) than it is something unconquerable about the problem. Nevertheless, it’s a very tricky question, and one that can leave you feeling helpless and overwhelmed.

   Although it might seem impossible to enforce new (or old) norms, or to create or restore taboos, it really isn’t. There’s nothing arcane about it; it’s a perfectly natural part of the business of being human. The instinct to assign taboos is innate. It doesn’t go away, it just gets redirected. So it isn’t gone, it’s just gone somewhere else. Which means that it can be found.
    We have all kinds of different positive and negative prejudices today in our country that differ in their details from those of other generations and cultures, and they are changing constantly with the situation and with history, and they can be changed deliberately. That’s how we got to where we are now, how everyone got to where they are or were, now and at every point in the past.
     The question is merely one of wisdom and leadership, teaching people to fear what is fearful and love what is loveable. Defining social values all comes down to where you decide the danger and the safety are and where the profits and the costs lie. And then you explain that story to people in some compelling way and they get on board. Those arguments can be made and they are being made and they will be made and they have always been made. So we don’t need to create or recreate social values and virtues and taboos ex nihilo, only to transmute them or redirect them. We need to find them and restore them. We need to craft a treasure map that new generations will want to follow.
    We do face the problem of the sinful preacher, the problem of hypocrisy and moral authority. How do you impose a rule that you yourself have broken and benefit from ignoring? How can you extoll a value that you yourself have violated, without being guilty of hypocrisy? Who are you to tell anyone what they should do, you throughly flawed and imperfect bastard?
    This problem is greatly overstated in its complexity. But just because the answer is very simple–value isn’t valuable and virtue isn’t virtue because I’m so great, but because it is–doesn’t mean that it’s easy to practice. We all make a bargain to hide from virtue, lest it shine a poor light on our own deeds. So we escape our shame by avoiding raising any ideal higher than our own lives.
   But that’s the point of an ideal. To learn to be better than what we happen to be. You can hate it for how it judges you, but you’ll never be anything else, and no one will, if you won’t admit that there’s some limit to virtue greater than your own life and deeds. Avoiding the challenge it would present to your ego saves you from judgment and responsibility, but all it purchases you is a life of immaturity that forgoes reflection or aspiration. 
    Until a people are willing to be judged, they will never be transformed. Any good parent knows this about their children. And a good parent helps their child to understand that although it is disagreeable, judgment must be faced, and that it is for their own benefit and understanding; an act of love, not an act of cruelty. But that act takes a kind of terrible courage, and is very hard to do alone, and it is hard to balance love and judgment in one heart. Which is another reason why we have two parents.
    Any good parent also knows that it’s virtually impossible to maintain an ideal for your children that you won’t submit yourself to. In order to have any validity, your ideal must be as applicable to yourself as it is to your child. But as childish adults who want to have our own way now that we are grown, we don’t like being put in that position. But you can’t maintain any household rule if you won’t apply it consistently.
   People often make the mistake of thinking that we can’t risk having any values that we don’t perfectly personify. And that’s just foolishness. If you read Berenstain Bears you will notice that the father often proves the value of the rules by his example, not because he follows them so well, but because he runs afoul of them so often and is willing to admit it.

We can make mistakes, even terrible ones, and survive, and so can our ideals. When King David slept with Bathsheba, he violated his own ideal. But it wasn’t the end of David or of his ideal. He was called out for his hypocrisy, repented, and his deeds were recorded and remembered by his entire culture for the rest of time. His sin and his admission of sin.

David didn’t try to eliminate his ideal. He didn’t try to write a new verse that said stealing other men’s wives and murdering them was a valid social behavior. He reinforced his belief in his ideal by admitting that he himself had violated it. And he was still regarded as a great and wise king, a man after his God’s heart. Not because he was perfect, not because every action he took reflected God’s heart. But when the chips were down, when it reflected very badly on him, he was on God’s side, even against his own actions and short-term ego interest and identity. It was ultimately more important to maintain the glory of God’s law than it was to maintain his own. And that is what God demands, not perfection.

   We often overstate the value of our own sins. They’re not really so rare and creative as we give them credit for. Often they’re quite ordinary and ubiquitous and common. They’re just the sort of things so many people have done, or would like to but haven’t the guts or the means to do. There’s nothing particularly special about them. They’re not even specially dysfunctional.

But there are things that are specially, creatively functional and productive, states we aspire to even if we don’t embody them except in our obvious inadequacy. Those things are worth holding up. Plenty of us would like to steal our neighbor’s treasures and remove our enemies and competitors. That’s nothing unique. Admitting that we want to do something, or even have, but shouldn’t or should have because we believe in something better, that’s worth talking about. 

Few people drift into or are easily seduced into virtue and accomplishment. Everyone knows how easy it is to fall into degeneracy and fall short of your goals and ideals. It’s so common as to be completely banal. And yet we like to paint a dramatic picture or make elaborate excuses for why we ended up doing the most obvious and easy thing. Anyone can fail. It takes some real skill and creativity to hit the target, and some real courage to admit then we’ve aimed and missed.
    You don’t have to be a religious believer to take in the lesson from David’s story. God represents the highest ideal, a standard of good that exceeds ourselves. And you can’t honor an ideal that you won’t submit yourself to or pursue any goal if you won’t risk your own skin in the endeavor. That doesn’t mean that you have to perfectly achieve or embody that ideal, or that you are worthless and craven if you don’t. You just have to be honest about its claims on you, and even about your own shortcomings.

For any ideal worth pursuing, it will always be a bit further away than you can reach, so there’s always something to aspire to and learn from. It just needs to be clear enough that you can move toward it from any position. In this kind of system, trajectory matters more than position, and your relationship to the ideal matters more than your particular list of successes and failures.
    If you won’t have any relationship to the ideal, then you reap the cost of losing whatever it could have taught you and made of you. You lose what you could have been and secure forever what you are. And for many people that’s a worthy victory, and a loss that lacks much sting.
    The question is, how much of who we could be can we really afford to give up? And how much of who we are is really so precious that we’re willing to pay the price of carrying forever the burdens of our own immaturity? Are we really willing to bear the weight of all our childishness forever just to spare ourselves the harshness of assuming adult responsibilities and judgements?

Moreover, what happens if the world pushes back on us and we aren’t everything we could be? What happens if others come for us who have more courage and fire in them than we do? The world isn’t a static place, nor only a cradle. It is littered with the bones of a thousand dynasties. In this kingdom, everyone must run as fast as they can just to stay in one place. If you won’t even allow yourself to see what it means to run and to fall, what hope do you have to keep up?
   In the end, the failure to maintain an ideal, or to have a sufficiently high ideal, is a self-correcting problem. When enough pain and failure piles up, people rediscover the source of their strength where it has always been. But the price you pay in learning the lesson is steep. 

    To put a fine point on it regarding the subject of the video listed above, no one needs to be forced into marriage to make this problem better. People just need to learn to love it again and to appreciate what it was doing for us. You can learn that positively, by seeing and responding to its beauty and strength, or you can do it negatively, by losing it. But it can be learned. And it will, one way or another.

I want to talk about this clip. This is a very confrontational statement for Jordan to make. I know he’s famous for being confrontational, but generally he’s takes a more clinical approach, the approach of a therapist; listening and sympathizing, but ready to question and challenge. 
   This statement is a refusal, an indictment, a declaration, a warning. He’s not trying to cross barriers; he’s drawing lines. Which means that he’s decided that the situation merits and demands this sort of reaction. That partisan encroachment and escalation and armament have gone far enough to demand such a shift in approach. 
    And that’s not great. Fighting and confrontation is costly. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes necessary, but it’s very costly. And it changes us and changes our tactics in ways that present an immediate danger to ourselves and to others. We make ourselves and our actions more dangerous, presumably because we must, because there is a justifiable danger to be confronted that cannot easily be defused by less confrontational means. Violence isn’t only an evil, it is also a limit on evil. It draws a definitive line across a projected future and says, I won’t let it happen, and I’ll fight for it if necessary.
     This development doesn’t please me. The disagreeable side of me that sees the need to confront immanent danger may be pleased, but the more agreeable side that wishes to preserve what we have and move it all in a better direction together knows what drawing such lines means. A war can be just, but is no less terrible for all that. And both to desire and embrace war and to hate and refuse it are dangerous commitments.
    In this kind of struggle, the real battle will be to divide identity from identification. The great wisdom of America in the Civil War and in World War II was the decision to be as committed to fighting the battles that had to be fought as we were to caring for and restoring the very people that we were fighting against. Without giving us too much credit; to seek to do this at all is such a rare decision that even if our efforts were limited and imperfect, they were nevertheless exceptional.
    We ultimately didn’t destroy the South or the Germans or the Japanese. We made them our friends, or at least tried to, with some success. We did it because we seperated their identity from their identification. The people of the South were our brothers and sisters, fellow Americans. They weren’t defined at an ultimate level by their identification with the Confederacy or the things that it stood for, any more than the Germans or Japanese had for all time and completely to be defined by their identification with the Nazi party or Imperial Japan. When the battles had to be fought, we fought them, and we fought our enemies. But when the battles were won and decided, we made the restoration of our enemies to their proper place beside us one of our key priorities. We didn’t give in to vengeance and perpetual retribution. We pursued reconciliation.
    This is the wisdom of seperating the sin from the sinner. We struggle against the sin, we seek to save the sinner. Why? Because we are sinners ourselves. We seek to be reconciled because we are, at heart, the same, subject to the same weaknesses and mistakes. We have the same potential for good and evil. And the mistake of identifying ourselves with goodness just because we fight against dangerous evils or pursue good by some happy accident, is just as toxic and hazardous to our souls as confusing our enemies with their mistakes.
    Correction often spills over into pathology when we forget that our goal is to clear the disease from the patient, not cleanse the patient themselves with our treatment. That isn’t medicine, it’s culling. But it isn’t people that need culling in our society, it is harmful and pathological ideologies. It is not against flesh and blood that we fight, but against the powers and principalities.
   But the only possible way to do that is if you are able to seperate identity from identification. If you are able to draw some line between what people think or do and who they are in their deepest essence. Identity politics is so dangerous in large part because it makes such seperation impossible. It leaves us no options but the struggle of life against life, because we are, in our inmost being, identical with our politics and race and sexuality.
    The great temptation in this struggle will be the same as what we faced in our previous conflicts. The temptation to use the same weapons and methods as our enemy, because we have misidentified the true enemy. Japan and Germany and the Soviet Union had no plans to make friends or equal companions of their enemies. And they didn’t hold back. They saw no division between sinner and sin. It seems to be to our disadvantage to hold back and not use the same methods, and it is a very costly and risky prospect to propose to care for and rebuild people who had been our enemies. But America did it in the past. We paid the price. And it was a good call. We were stronger, not weaker, because of it.
    We will be tempted in this conflict to forget to seperate sinner from sin, identity from identification. We will be tempted to identify goodness with ourselves and evil with our opponents, instead of recognizing our own proclivity for evil and our opponents’ potential for good, and fail to fight the true enemy. We will be tempted to use the same tactics and weapons and words as our opponents, the same ruthless and shallow identitarian psychological tactics. 
    We will be tempted to see the world through the same lens as our foes and enter into a conflict of us against them and wage a war of flesh against flesh, when the real battle is with the powers and principalities and ideologies that endanger us all and that all of us are prone to collapse our beliefs into. We will be tempted to give up the very things that make our position worth defending. We will be tempted to commit the very errors that we are attempting to correct in our opponents. And we will risk losing what is worth saving in our opponent’s perspective what needs to be preserved and treasured, not only for their sake, but to save us from our own proclivity for pathology.
    I understand the need to make this kind of call to arms, and I agree that the need is there. DIE is becoming more and more visible and more and more entrenched in parts of our lives that can’t be avoided. It has to be dealt with openly and opposed openly, and that will carry a cost, not least of which is being cut off from the goodwill of those who support it. Among which there are many manipulative and resentful and deluded people, but also many manipulated, coerced, mistaken, well-meaning, and deceived people. We aren’t out to stop them, we’re out to help them, and to stop what DIE would do with and to them. We are in this to save all of us, because we are all the same and all at risk and all in need of protection. 
   We love the sinner because we are all sinners. We show mercy because we were shown mercy. We confront and dispel lies because we were confronted and freed. 

Everyone wants you to engage. Engagement is the traffic of and goal of the internet. Engagement produces currency. Either social currency or literal currency. So that’s why everyone wants it from you; it’s what the internet is designed to mine. At any cost, by any means, your engagement. Engagement is success, success is value, value is currency, currency is power, power is flourishing.

    It doesn’t make much difference if it’s literal or social currency that you are seeking. You aren’t better or worse because you’re after one or the other. Money is just a marker for value. I pay it to you or you earn it because someone says, “I value what you did. How much? In relation to what I have and what value I earn and possess? This much.” We exchange it for something else because we value that thing.

   Money is just an incremental token for human valuation. We’re trading in psychological judgements. Money is a proxy, but in the end social currency, the value of something to some people, for some purpose, to some valued end, is all there is. You can go for it directly, or you can go for it by proxies.

    Some people are better at going for it directly. Some people need the proxies, especially when they aren’t as good at playing the direct, interactive social game of getting people to do what they want and give them what they want and value what they want and impugn what they want.

    Men seem to be a bit better at the indirect game, at playing with proxies, the abstraction and localization and taskification and objectification and simplification of value in some tangible object or action or proximate goal. They’re better in the sense that they’re less good at the artistic, holistic, undecomposed, unspecialized, unabstracted, unlocalized, unobjectified, direct social game. In general. Some minority are very, very good at it. But a lot of men seem to need something smaller and more defined and less personal to focus on. 

     Women, I think, are better at playing the direct value game. If they were sides of the brain, men would be the left brain and women would be right brain. The left looks for tangible, actionable, single points of focus, while the right takes in a more prismatic, decentralized view of the landscape. You really need both to have a properly functioning human mind, so we’re not here to pick winners. They have complementary functions.

    We all share in and benefit from that interrelationship in our individual minds, just as we do in our collective social mind. The structure at the base of individual human function scales up through the whole social structure. And differences in personality become avatars in the social mind for the sub-personalities that express and wrangle and conflict and demand within our own individual persons.

    You aren’t just one singular value or valuer even within yourself, you contain a community of sub-valuees in a dynamic environment; some rising, some falling, some dominant, some resistant, some influential, some covert. They all demand engagement. Engagement is their lifeblood, their currency. The more you engage with them, the stronger and more developed and realized they become, the more their values are expressed, the more their goals are pursued and realized. 

    Social media and the internet are a forum, a platform, for the social mind and its function, this same interplay of value and currency. But it’s a means for the expression of the social mind that is radically different from the most fundamental assumptions and parameters that the social mind was originally designed around. It’s an artificial version of the social mind, a technological simulation of community, the means by which the social mind exists and exchanges, the body which the community inhabits. It’s a cybernetic body we have uploaded ourselves to, not an organic body like that we were born into. 

   So the rules, the way the system works, the currency of value, and the material, the things that compose it, human personalities and sub-personalities, remain the same; but the platform, the world in which they exist and interact, has been radically changed. It may not be immediately obvious because the first two haven’t. The questions to be asked are, how different is this new platform, and how much do the changes it imposes matter? And, as a followup, what are the consequences? 

    

One of the strange abilities the human race possesses, that is responsible for the proliferation of thousands and thousands of different cultures across time, is that we have the ability to catalyze an identity around anything. Even things that are purely fictional, like Star Wars. We can very easily form collective identities around shared narratives and beliefs.

The key here is identitization. If I take something I care about, or some belief, some story, some behavior, and build my identity around it, it becomes who I am. It becomes a garment or badge that I wear, a community that I inhabit, an essence that I embody. And in a culture that protects our essential identities, that belief becomes unassailable, because it becomes identical with who I am. You can’t interrogate being, it just is.

Modern activists for various beliefs and behaviors are very sensible and very aware. They’ve noticed that the key for many other groups to getting attention, recognition, sympathy, and protection was developing those beliefs and choices into an innate identity. Into a culture, a way of being. An innate or natural embodiment of an existing spirit.

And so these other groups want to emulate that success and build their own identities around their particular thing. By doing so they hope to enjoy the same benefits. And it’s not clear why they shouldn’t. Unfortunately, these neo-identities may find that already-established identities are not so eager to give up the spotlight or its benefits.

Since attention is always focused on the edges in a progressive society, any movement toward the center may result in a loss, not a gain, of status. And it’s also possible that newer identities may contain elements that contradict or challenge or supplant or criticize existing cultural forms of life. In a kingdom where everyone must run as fast as they can just to stay in one place, it doesn’t benefit one to fall behind. And there is always the pressure to discover new forms of life in the petri dish of society.

I think life presents a problem in general about all human endeavors and how we judge them. We all have very fine ideas and intentions, but we’re all human, so the reality of our actual lives rarely comes close to what our principles and intentions aspire to.

If we were all to truly take stock of one another, and of any time, place, people, person, or idea, we could easily find enough in them to criticize and dislike to condemn them all. If each man had his just desserts, who would scape whipping?

That’s the primary insight of Judeo-Christian religion. All fall short. We all fall short of the glory of our principles, our intentions, our ideals. We all fail our own and each others’ tests. Our grand plans constantly go wrong, we constantly violate our own standards, we are constantly being two-faced and hypocritical, we are constantly making things worse that we were intending to improve.

There is just so much in everyone around us, and in ourselves, to be disappointed in, that it could easily swallow up all our purported goodness, patience, kindness, and hope, all our fine intentions and words and ideas. We could easily condemn everyone and everything and become terribly resentful and cynical, or become seared in our conscience and simply learn to ignore and forget them.

It’s not just big-ticket items like slavery or racism are popularly abhorred in the cultural moment. It’s everything about how everyone is treated. You don’t have to dig very deep to find corruption and disappointment lurking everywhere. Everyone is a victim or a victim in waiting, and everyone is either a perpetrator or a perpetrator in waiting. We are a snake always ready to swallow its own tail.

   The question is, what can save us from such a trap, if the evil cannot be ignored or avoided? If there is no one who isn’t subject to the same weaknesses, no unstained people. If ignoring evil only lets it thrive, what hope is there? We have no untouched islands to escape to, no people that can be trusted.

Even our attempts to confront evil often go terribly wrong and redound upon us. We can’t ignore it, can’t escape it, can’t defeat it. Because it is nothing more or less than us. We can’t defeat, ignore, or escape ourselves. So how do we live with hope, when history gives the lie to all our best intentions? 

Tyrannical femininity expresses itself through an invitation. Tyrannical masculinity expresses itself through a confrontation. Both have similar ends. Both are trying to $#@& you over. They just have different ways of doing it. 

   In the feminine power structure, if you don’t make yourself pleasing, if you don’t come in and make yourself fit, you’ll be cast out. You’ll be denied access to the promised comforts, security, belonging, pleasures, companionship, kindness, and provision. If you do make yourself pleasing, you’ll be accepted, but you’ll also be devoured. You’ll be possessed. It is an invitation to an open mouth, to perfume and kisses. It won’t meet you at one point or from one direction and confront you, it will take hold of you from all directions, soft and yielding, but complete and encompassing. You can’t force your way through it; you can only retreat to escape, abandoning your position. 

   This is a tool, a power, that can be used for tyrannical purposes. It can’t be taken away from women, because the feminine possesses it by nature. All you can do is learn to wield it well yourself, teach others how to use it for good uses, and teach everyone how to resist it when it is being used tyranically. There are systems we can put in place, ancient wisdom and current practices, as well as natural checks and counterbalances, that can be used to help confine and direct and channel this power into its most virtuous and productive and beneficial embodiment. 

    I think the most important question about borders is permeability. You need borders because you want to select what crosses them.

    The state is like a living organism. Living organisms have cell membranes and cell walls. That’s one of their defining, necessary features. And there’s a selectivity that allows certain things in and certain things out, intelligently, based on what the needs and conditions are for life within that organism. Having a purpose, having a distinct nature, means there’s a responsibility to maintain stewardship over that process.

    When a cell loses the integrity of its membrane, it ceases to exist. It is invaded from without and devoured, and its internal contents disperse in an uncontrolled manner into its surroundings. It ceases to be. It has no ability to maintain its biological distinctiveness.

   Superorganisms like states are no different. You can argue that you need to adjust the permeability of the membrane, that there is some useful nutrient in the surrounding environment and that it would be helpful to adjust the gating mechanisms to allow in. And cells have special internal structures that facilitate transport across the membrane. They don’t just allow things in by self-selection. They have mechanisms to restrict transport (passive and active), and they have mechanisms to facilitate transport.

   This is the pattern of life, and it applies across all levels of life. So we should look to the design of life for sense and learn to find balance. Borders are reasonable. In fact they’re necessary for life to exist. An absolutely impermeable border will keep everything out and everything in, but will bind and starve the cell. A completely permeable or non-existent border is useless and means the end of the organism.

   Somewhere in between lies selectivity, facility, purpose, growth, adaptation, and intelligence. If a single-celled organism can figure it out, so can people.

P.S. I have always found this video strangely fascinating and poignant.

https://youtu.be/4bj6SqgT4SQ

When I first had kids, I was really looking forward to when they would be a bit bigger and could do more activities, play more games, and watch movies with me. Share the fun things and be playmates. I was never very interested in babies and was eager to have eight to ten-year-olds. But now that I have them at those ages, I miss having little kids so much. They really grew on me. They were so silly, such strange creatures. Small children aren’t quite like normal people. There is a lot they can’t do. But they’re so silly and weird. They say things wrong, move wrong. They’re always so funny and surprising. And they’re so passionate and excited and unfiltered. They’re a unique kind of adventure.

I wish I had something clever and insightful to say about all this, but I really don’t. Except perhaps for the reflection that life is full of surprises, and new joys and new trials await us around every corner. I never expected to miss having young children. And it’s not as if it was an easy part of my life to get through. But I don’t know if there’s any part of it that I will look back on with more fondness.

Since you can’t exactly prepare for what you don’t expect, I can’t distill that into any kind of advice for anyone following in my footsteps. Don’t close the book on what you may come to value, especially when it comes to children and family. Often the experience is what teaches the value; you don’t arrive at the table already seeing it and knowing what joys await you. No more are we born with all the wisdom and insights that parenthood, and our own mistakes and failures, will provoke in us.

I’ve always been someone who was attracted to a variety of fields of study, and so I have always appreciated your (Jordan’s) efforts to synthesize and connect knowledge across multiple domains. And I wanted to share a story about an unusual domain you have helped connect me to. 
    In my own life, I have subject to a few strange experiences, moments when I suddenly understood something, or more accurate, saw them. The experience was much more like a vision, of being suddenly lifted into an airy perspective, than it was like achieving a particular insight. The trigger was usually the same, walking and thinking, looking at a subject from many angles, trying to get a hold of it and figure out just what it was I was dealing with. And then, all of a sudden, wind, the clouds part, and for a brief while I suddenly see farther down the path than at any ordinary human moment.
   In those moments, I’ve sometimes had access to writing materials, and recorded a storm of shorthand notes as quickly as I could, the terrain and it’s details unfolding much to fast to properly slow down and focus on any single thought. And then eventually the experience ends and my vision reduced back to its narrow and dim focus.
   I’ve had this experience maybe four times, and have always been too embarrassed by it to ever mention it to anyone. I’m a generally skeptical and analytical person, with a strong but hidden emotional and creative side. And I’ve never felt comfortable revealing that hidden side of my experience, especially in contexts like, say, the academic world.
    Listening to you (Jordan) has given me some renewed confidence though. Even just hearing another person talk about Jung and about creative and transcendental visions outside the context of drug use (which I do not indulge in) opened up new horizons for how I could understand and analyze my own experiences (which mostly happened before I ever encountered you). I am religious, but I’ve always resisted the mystical and emotional elements within the religious tradition, because so often they have descended into absurd emotionalism devoid of any rational challenge or understanding.
    I’ve also always been especially skeptical of dream interpretation, but after learning about it a bit, first from you and then from Jung, I began to dip my toes into it. I even did some dream interpretations for some of my family members, and discovered that I was indeed able to easily discern information about their unarticulated knowledge, fears, and desires in their dreams.
    I was especially interested in the concept of lucid dreaming as a means to intellectual exploration. And I so opened my mind up to the possibilities. One of the results of this is that I’ve actually been able to figure out a way to maintain a form of lucid dreaming with much greater frequency (maybe once every couple weeks). In this state, which is generally confined to the hours closest to morning, I can wake up, set my mind onto a problem, go back to sleep, and carry with me into my resting state my analysis of the issue.
    I’ve found that this is a very interesting way to explore intellectual problems. The secret is to focus on a question, and only a question, or some sort of simple statement. That seems to be about as much as I can take with me. My rational mind seems to process fairly well in this state, but I do have an increased ability to free associate and pull things out of unarticulated vision and instinct. And I make a lot of progress and figure a lot of things out. If my usual rational process is a bit like taking slow, carefully steps, this feels more like taking vast leaps between footholds, bootstrapping up the path by vaulting suddenly from one previously unanticipated ledge to the next. 
    The problem is that remembering it when I wake up is a bit of a challenge, especially since there’s always so much going on in the morning (I have two young children). And especially because the ground being covered is being taken in such unconventional strides (at least for my usual way thinking). But even when I don’t have any time to jot down what I learned, the knowledge still seems to be there on an unconscious level, waiting to uncovered and reexplored in more careful detail. When I next encounter that subject, it begins to come back to me, and begin the long process of retracing my steps. 
    Anyway, this is a long way to say thank you for the opportunities and insights and encouragement, intended or not. As much as I remain radically skeptical of mystical knowledge and visions, which so often are merely projections of our own unchallenged desires and prejudices, I have learned to crack open this book a little and see some of what it has to show me. Thanks. 

Is being nice to women weakness? That’s a question that came up in a discussion about being a simp. If you don’t know what being a simp is, it’s basically a guy who does things to please women but gains no reward or respect for it. He’s simply being exploited. He sucks up to women with the hope that it will get them to notice him, but they take the benefits and focus on other, less pathetic and groveling men. Why bother giving him any status when you’re already getting what you want from him?

So a simp is a kind of extreme. He’s a chump because he’s never going to get back anything for all he’s putting in. He’s giving value, but not maintaining any. He’s the male counterpart to a woman of loose favors who never gets any respect or status or commitment from any of the men she gives herself away to.

And this raises a general question among some men of how you preserve masculine value. Is being nice and giving women what they want a kind of weakness, a disadvantage? And here is what I think.

Being nice, or overly nice, is a kind of weakness, not morally, but from the standpoint of negotiation. If you’re willing to give up everything, but demand nothing or have no reasonable expectation of reciprocation, you have no bargaining position and therefore no value in any negotiation.

Let’s say that you’re a particularly generous and chivalric man, accommodating, eager to please, and ready to give. In the current dating market do women feel they have a moral or social obligation to do these sort of things for you, for men? They don’t. Why not? Well, partly because women have never felt any need to be chivalric and indulgent toward men. Men are big and dangerous. Women have never felt they needed to open doors for them or fight and die to protect them or put them on the lifeboats first or lift heavy loads for them or give them extravagant gifts. That doesn’t mean that women haven’t done anything for men, far from it. But they haven’t felt any obligation to treat men the way men feel obligated to treat women.

And in the current dating climate, which is pretty fearful and hostile and uncertain, more and more women especially feel no obligation to be indulgent to men. “I don’t need to be nice to men because they’re men, and men suck. I’m a woman and we deserve to be indulged and they don’t. So I’m justified in getting mine.” That’s a very cynical attitude, but it’s perfectly common and perfectly understandable.

When relationships sicken and the terms upon which they are conducted break down, exploitation and hostility emerge on both sides. Attractive men no long feel the need to commit to women and freely exploit them, and attractive women feel free to exploit men for their benefits, including through institutions like OnlyFans. Both side are wary of giving anything up, wary of being taken advantage of, and would prefer to be independent and secure and let someone else take the risk.

The question about simps is a question about being nice. Women want men to be nice. But in being nice to them, are you just giving them what they want and letting the exploit you? Should men take a more defensive position toward women? Because being nice isn’t their default, it is a special effort and a kind of deferent payment, a tribute to earn good standing with a hoped for return of approved status. So why do it if there’s no hope of gaining that status?

   Men don’t do these things for each other, or for everybody. This is a unique kind of indulgence and sacrifice, and one that often is pretty costly to their own personal status and wellbeing. But they’re doing it as an investment, or rather as a kind of entry fee. This is the price women make you to pay be considered worthy of their attention, worthy of doing business with them, worthy of being in the running. It’s the fee you pay to be allowed to enter the Indy 500. It doesn’t mean you’ll win, but you’ll at least be able to be in the running.

Being a simp is like having to pay all the entry and membership fees, but they won’t let you race. So you just keep sending gift baskets to the commissioner, that he might be giving out to other racers he likes, in the hope that some day he’ll indulge you enough to let you take the wheel and show him what you can do. That’s not being nice, that’s being exploited. And some people, some women, do feel like they have a right to exploit you.

Plenty of guys feel the same way. They think they have a right to just get what they want because they deserve it. It’s not that men or women are worse, but they do have different ways of being exploiters and of being exploited, of taking advantage and giving it. So if you’re a simp, yes, you’re being exploited. Just like a women who give themselves away too easily are going to be exploited.

But that doesn’t mean that the whole game itself is nothing but exploitation, or that being nice is fundamentally a suckers game, unless all women are absolutely corrupt. And both men and women who have been exploited have come to that conclusion. Watch a few episodes of Judge Judy and you’ll see plenty of fights between former lovers. And a vast number of them conclude the case by stating that they’re done, respectively, with men or with women. Their experiences have made them cynical about relationships, and no wonder. Plenty of men and women have lost enormously to the other sex.