Egoic Capture
Tomorrow’s event:
The Glass Bead Game w/ Laurence Currie-Clark. September 12th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Memes: Virality and the Occult w/ Chris Gabriel (MemeAnalysis). September 28th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to get excited about:
Depolarising Conversations w/ Richard D. Bartlett and Ronan Harrington. September 15th @ 10:00 AM. Let on the image below to RSVP.
Richard Bartlett and Ronan Harrington visit The Stoa next week to test out a workshop designed to hold tense conversations skillfully.
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September 11, 2020
I don’t want to stroke your ego, but I’m really enjoying your posts. I’m feeling some kind of zeitgeist-y synchronicity with the different subjects you’ve been covering lately.
Somebody wrote that to me yesterday, in response to a previous entry. Another person wrote this a few months back:
I checked out a bit more of your writing, holy shit it is a lot! What I admire about you is something like, purely on your own terms you've just rejected the 21st century definition of what a neurotypical human brain is supposed to be engaged with and decided to do it a better way, just go balls out there expressing yourself, and charismatic enough at it to draw some followers.
A few days ago I received this one:
Perhaps you hear this often, but you’re a great writer with a distinct voice that speaks to me. There’s heat resonating off this project, that is lighting me up in ways I haven’t felt in a while.
This morning I read another, which was a reply to the “Let Men See” entry:
I guess by now you’re well aware of this, but this article was balm to the soul for me and must have been so for many other men (as I imagine your filled inbox must testify).
He ended his email with this:
It’s easy to get blinded and lost when you put yourself out there.
I would say the inverse of this is also true: it is easy to get blinded and lost when you do not put yourself out there. Many people do not put themselves out there, and they are lost. I know I was lost when I was not putting myself out there, and I am still lost now putting myself out there. The main difference now is that more eyes are on me.
I hesitate to write this entry, and my ego is shouting at me: what if you are making people self-conscious of giving me compliments now, and the compliments will dry up! Stop you fool, before it is too late. Fuck it though. Let us continue this weird adventure of public truthfulness.
The individual who wrote about being blinded is probably gesturing at something, and I think that something is egoic capture: getting kidnapped by your ego, which muffles the daemon's voice. I am receiving lots of emails about these journals. I read them all, and try to reply to them all. I might have to stop this soon, because I am a slow reader and writer, and there are lots of things to do. There is also a risk of being egoically captured.
This project is still small enough, and my sense is that the honeymoon phase of most online projects, especially ones that have some life to them, starts with positive encouragement. After some threshold of attention is received, the negativity starts rolling in. On a psychic level, here is my speculation as to what occurs:
The jealous, trollish, and narcissistic —the hungry ghosts Andrew warned me about—will start taking a big existential poop on the project, simply because other people find it beautiful. The person on the receiving end of being pooped on loses their discernment, along with their ability to suss out good-faith criticism from bad faith criticism. They conflate both, and lose the capacity to acknowledge criticism altogether, hence lose their capacity to learn from criticism.
To avoid the unpleasantness of the negativity, they indulge in the positive comments they receive, which is dangerous, not to mention addictive. Their ability to tell the difference between genuine words of support and sycophantic ones becomes blunted. They then have become egoically captured, and find themselves a leader to an online cult, or have become “chieftains” of their own memetic tribe.
I could be wrong here, but I sense something is true here. I see this happen to Jordan Peterson. When he was my therapist for two years, we talked often about culture war stuff that was happening on the University of Toronto campus, where we both worked.
At the time he was very hesitant to express his opinions about the pathological aspect of woke culture in public, and I sense he really wanted his word to be aligned with a noble intention. After entering the culture war, and becoming a culture war lightning rod, his default state seemed to become defensive and combative, and the psychic algorithm I mentioned above got enacted.
I am not here to judge though. I do not know how I would respond under the amount of culture war bullshit he experienced. He was going through a lot of personal hellish stuff as well, and currently still is. I sense there are lessons here, for us being truthful in the spectacle, and the adjacent culture war.
My sense is that being truthful with one's word—while arguably the foundation of everything—is not enough on its own. An ecology of practices is needed, to keep one sovereign, and I think somatic practices are especially important. This is the capacity to check in with your body, and the emotions that arise, along with the capacity to translate them into words.
This is helpful because it affords one to process their emotions, and avoid getting “triggered” (and yes, all memetic tribes get triggered). Being triggered is what Daniel Goleman calls the “amygdala hijack”, which is an overwhelming emotional reaction that overrides any “System 2” thinking. This weakens one's sovereignty, which increases the likelihood of egoic capture.
This is why Stoicism is secretly beautiful, and underrated in our amygdala hijacking culture. It is the antidote to the amygdala hijack. I am not claiming I am a good Stoic, but I want to be one, and I have entered an arena where it is important to be one.
Otherwise I will be egoically captured, which is a boringly unoriginal thing to be.
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