Beautiful Choices
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath: Sunrise Edition w/ Steve Beattie. Every Monday @ 6:15 AM ET.RSVP here.
Metapsychology w/ Zak Stein. September 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th. 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
The Pandemic of Groupthink: Jung and the Collective Shadow w/ Uberboyo. September 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Memes: Virality and the Occult w/ Chris Gabriel (MemeAnalysis). September 28th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Flowing With Unknowingness w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Monday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
An event to get excited about:
Prerequisites for Communitas w/ Miriam Mason Martineau. September 29th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP by clicking the link below.
Miriam Mason Martineau visits The Stoa to discuss the inner-work that is needed in order for us to get some of that delicious communitas.
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September 27, 2020
I am oscillating between excitement and gratitude for what I am doing, to mild annoyance for personally lacking “discipline.” Besides doing stuff at The Stoa, I have other projects on the go, like releasing my book, writing the Dale Carnegie white paper on “pandemic incivility,” and basic life tasks I have been putting off.
I do not know if discipline is the right word here, maybe agency or sovereignty would be better. In one of his conversations Jordan Hall said sovereignty is: your capacity to take responsibility for the choices you make in the world. I and I alone am solely responsible for the choices I make, and the first choice I am going to make is the choice to get better at making better choices.
The Stoics talk about choice as well, and to quote Epictetus, my favorite dead man to quote: If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be. Beautiful choices make beautiful people, and beautiful people make a beautiful world.
The Stoics and Christians alike try to uphold four cardinal virtues—prudentia, fortitudo, temperantia, and iustitia. Okay, I totally used the Latin words because they sounded cooler, in English they are prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.
I see sovereignty as the state you earn when your fortitude and temperance game is pretty tight, which is to say you are playing them well. Back in my “mastermind group” days—when I was setting goals, pursuing them, and being held accountable to them—we had three main categories of goals.
The first category was “outcome goals,” these are outcomes you want to achieve, e.g. land a new job. The second category was “process goals,” these are bounded activities you wanted to do on a regular basis, e.g. meditate for 30 minutes in the morning. The third category was “negation goals,” these are things you wanted to stop doing, e.g. stop drinking alcohol.
To hone in on the process and negation goal categories, I would say these map over nicely to the virtues of fortitude and temperance. Fortitude is about doing things you reason you should be doing. These are the things you may not do, because they are difficult. Temperance is about not doing things you reason you should not be doing. These are the things you do, because they are difficult not to do.
Being a sovereign actor in the world is about having the capacity to do things that are difficult to do, and not do things that are easy to do, yet which are addictive and seductive. These are both informed by the mother of all virtues, prudence, or practical reason.
You need to be sovereign in order to get into true communitas. Otherwise, if you are practicing these intersubjective practices, without being sovereign, what you're going to get is enmeshment, herd mentality, or worse, a cult.
Predatory capitalism, and all the sociopaths winning within, do not want you to be sovereign, and they do not care about your longing for communitas. The memetic tribes fighting in the culture war do not care either. They prefer you to stay unconscious, and disembodied, and they want their unprocessed trauma spread to you via their broken narratives.
The good thing about Stoicism is its strong focus on the reframe. Through the reframe, you can alchemically turn shit to gold. Everything is an opportunity to practice one’s Stoicism, including all these actors not wanting us to be sovereign individuals who have a chance at communitas.
It comes down to choice, and I sense the most beautiful choice is wanting a beautiful world. This world is not going to come without making beautiful choices though—beautiful choices towards becoming sovereign, and towards arriving at communitas, which I hear is a beautiful place to be.
That being said, I want to refocus on solidifying my sovereignty. We are ramping up our communitas offerings here, and launching a new series at The Stoa called “Communitas Club,” where we invite practitioners of existing relational methods to The Stoa, and have an opportunity to practice them together. Maybe a “Sovereignty Club” needs to emerge as well, where we review and practice various tools for sovereignty.
There are a lot of good tools out there for this, and the productivity and self-help industry is rampant with them. There are some smart people in this industry who I can invite to The Stoa, but most are oriented towards building a brand and selling products, and are susceptible to what Andrew Taggart calls “Total Work,” which is a way of life that instrumentalizes everything towards work.
The original purpose of the “Metagame Mastermind” we had at The Stoa was to spread sovereignty far and wide. It did not have the punch needed to pull this off, so we put the sessions on pause. I sense they will need to eventually come back.
I am reminded of this Thai commercial which I quite like, where a man suddenly exercises his temperance muscle and stops drinking, and then his life radically improves, becoming an upstanding member of the community.
Now the video was a tad ridiculous, and I am not saying the “clean your room” ethos is going to solve all of the world's problems, but we do have a series of choices in front of us, and some of these choices will lead to a more beautiful world.
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