Cajole Them Into the Spirit of Truth
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Shadowplay w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. Every Friday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Newly posted events:
Stoic Hustle: Brain.fm Edition w/ Peter Limberg. January 25th @ 6:30 AM ET. Patreon event. 7 hours.
Stealing the Culture with Dialogos: Collective Shadow w/ Lubomir Arsov, Uberboyo, Chris Gabriel (MemeAnalysis), and Arran Rogerson. February 1st @ 12:00 PM ET. Patreon event.
***
January 21st, 2021
My first coaching session in the “Coaches in Resonance” series starts today. Since this was announced on Monday, 30 people have booked sessions already. Wow. I do not know what to expect from this really. I recognize some of the people, but most I do not. Surely modifications will be needed for this, but it is an experiment, and I am looking forward to the wildness of it.
The Stoa has some interesting people who agreed or expressed interest in visiting: the cool kids from Squad Wealth, Jacob Lund Fisker from Early Retirement Extreme, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, who recently wrote this provocative article called, Everything is Broken, which I imagine will resonate a lot with us. I am hoping the latter will be a part of a new “article club” series I’d like to launch.
I like the seeming randomness of The Stoa. The above names would not be found together on any channel. Only at The Stoa. The cross-pollination that this affords, and the idea sex that will occur because of it, will be unexpected, and fucking delicious. I want to keep doing this. I have a list of well over 100 people to invite here, and there is a sense of randomness, but it's also consistent with The Stoa’s je ne sais quoi.
There is partly a novelty bias at play here of course, which I do not think is a bad thing. A part of this daemonic project is to get people comfortable with uncertainty, especially in the memetic realm, and to get memetic strangers comfortable around the same digital campfire, so they can begin to talk.
I am launching a new series, which I may call “Stealing the Culture With Dialogos.” I am somewhat hesitant in running with the “stealing the culture” phrase further, and with the dialogos term, because I do not want them to start feeling cheesy. I am happy with the right amount of cheesiness though.
Ah fuck it. I am going to unapologetically lean into the cheese. I sense a cheesiness phobia prevents a lot of people from trying new things. Three upcoming dialogos sessions are going to be around female rivalry, collective shadow, and awakening.
Raven Connolly suggested the first one, and the panel will consist of Maybe Gray, Tarn Rodgers Johns, and Aella. As Raven accurately pointed out to me, female rivalry is something that is often present in female dynamics, but is something that is rarely spoken about, especially amongst four attractive young women. Feels knife’s edgy, in the right way.
The other one is on the collective shadow, which will feature our very own Arran Rogerson, Chris Gabriel from MemeAnalysis, Uberboyo, and my dear friend Lubomir Arsov, who I co-created The Cancel God piece with, and who created the In-Shadow: A Modern Odyssey. In this session, we’ll all watch In-Shadow together, and the four of them will engage in a dialogos with one another.
The last one will be about awakening, or something around that topic. Daniel Ingram and Frank Yang agreed to be in conversation with one another, and I am sensing who would be best for the other two panel seats for that discussion.
The challenge right now is this: focus. I sense the right move for The Stoa is not to have an explicit telos, which could superordinately explain all the seeming randomness to new-comers. I want the telos to be following the daemonic whispering, because this is where aliveness is for me.
It is also strategic for The Stoa not to have an explicit ideology, given where this daemonic spirit is gesturing towards. If somebody tries to capture the agenda of The Stoa via ideology and their fragile sense of knowingness, the bait-and-switch will occur, and they will fall into the antifragile aporia trap. Sowwie!
But yeah, you are welcome.
Kierkegaard said we must: cajole them into truth. I think it is better to say: cajole them into the spirit of truth. Cajole them into a process, not into truth claims. Cajole them into a way of being together, and not into a propositional understanding of being. Is a cajoling explicitly stated, really a cajoling at all though?
All of this being said, the time does seem right to consider having explicit projects for this place, that people can orientate around, which are ideally short-term, and produce some kind of artifact. The rough daemonic sketch is this: some short series that serve as research projects, around an attractor such as power literacy, communitas, meta-sangha, meta-crisis, etc. I considered a lot of these potential projects already in my previous Finding the Expiration Date entry.
The project lead can interview big names who have subject matter expertise on the subjects, perhaps with an adjacent book club and metagame mastermind. The resulting goal could be a newly developed psychotechnology and/or white paper. Something that is open source, and freely available for others to use and iterate on. If The Stoa tenuously lives in three-month intervals after March 21st, as suggested in a recent entry, then those months can be packed with purpose.
I am hoping the patron-only session this Sunday will help me consider all of this.
***
Support stealing the culture: patreon.com/the_stoa
Receive coaching from Peter and other facilitators at The Stoa: thestoa.ca/coaches