Leveling Mechanism
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. February 9th to 12th @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 3 hours.
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.
Newly posted events:
The Pneuma of The Stoa: Why Breathwork Will Save the World w/ Steve Beattie, Jesse Coomer, and Chuck McGee. February 24th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Making Friends Like Our Lives Depend on It (Because It Does) w/ Visakan Veerasamy. February 25th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Psychedelic Sensemaking w/ Alexander Beiner. March 1st @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shadowplay: Myth, Ritual, and Rites of Passage w/ Michael Meade. March 17th @ 5:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
AllSides: Balanced News for an Unbalanced World w/ John Gable. March 18th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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February 11th, 2021
Go ahead steward, write what wants to be written, and break the spell. Okay ...
I am enjoying life right now.
There is a feeling of discomfort after writing that. I do not know why exactly, but I am guessing that I got used to a trend where when I enjoy life that enjoyment soon goes away. There is also this clinging feeling here. A neediness for that enjoyment to stay, and a desire to figure out a way to engineer a way for this feeling to stay forever.
I am Eastern European—of Ukrainian descent—on my mother’s side, and as I wrote about before, it is a beautiful culture. It is thick with a panentheistic religion and still has that pagan-esque vibe about it. A byproduct of this is that it has lots of superstitions as well. I am sure some of these superstitions are common for those of us who have European or Middle Eastern ancestry, such as knocking on wood after making a boastful claim or after discussing the possibility of something unfavorable happening.
Another one is a concern of the evil eye, which is very prevalent amongst my Greek Orthodox brothers and sisters, and us Ukrainians have this concern as well. The evil eye is said to happen when someone curses another, via an envious gaze. I recall seeing nazar amulets at my babushka’s house, which are amulets that are meant to serve as protection against the evil eye. I was often advised not to say good things about what is happening in my life to others because of this superstition.
When I was a kid, listening to my babushka, I accepted all of this stuff as a given: oh yeah, people have superpowers to make your life horrible by just looking at you, that sucks. The existence of this belief partly seems to be serving the function of what cultural anthropologists call a “leveling mechanism.” This is a social practice that enforces social equality, by keeping all of the egos in check.
The most famous example in anthropology comes from Canadian anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee when he hung out with the ǃKung of the Kalahari Desert. The leveling mechanism here is called “shaming the meat.” As outlined in “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” Lee gave the ǃKung a meaty ox as a gift, which to his surprise they proceeded to insult. He eventually found out why when one of the ǃKung told him the following ...
Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.
Another leveling mechanism is the “Law of Jante” from Nordic culture, which is summed up as: You are not to think you're anyone special, or that you're better than us, which is expressed via a common attitude amongst community members that results in putting people in their place if they become too showy about their individual success.
Leveling mechanisms seem like cultural codes that do indeed keep the ego in check. I sense we need mechanisms like this in place, but they’ll need to become more sophisticated, because crudely implemented leveling mechanisms will stunt individual potential.
What did believing in the evil eye do for me when I was young? I never fully examined this, but I think it made me quite fearful of putting myself out there, on an unconscious level. Hearing stories of people who got cursed and were subsequently fucked over by the envious gazing, made me shy about adventuring out into the world. Somehow I broke out of the maladaptive aspects of this thing, but I still feel it tugging.
There seems to be a sloppily enforced leveling mechanism in North American culture, and it is quite broken. On one hand there is some “crabs in the bucket” stuff going on, which refers to the phenomenon of putting a bunch of crabs in a bucket, where an individual crab can easily escape, but their efforts are hindered because as a collective the crabs keep pulling each other down. Nietzsche’s quote comes to mind: You pass over and beyond them: but the higher you ascend, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. But most of all they hate those who fly.
On the other hand there is also this escape velocity egoism occurring in our culture: people can easily develop narcissism and cultivate temporary autonomous mini-cults around their personalities. The incentive landscape of social media and the attention economy it situates in encourages this to happen.
I think these leveling mechanisms can have a good utilitarian benefit, and my sense is that the ideal situation is this: have a wisely designed leveling mechanism that keeps the egos in check in a culture, while also having an ecology of practices that allow the community to transcend their egos, so they no longer need to rely on the leveling mechanism. I do not think anything like that exists, except maybe in monastery cultures.
What does one do in-between worlds though, outside a monastery setting, with a broken leveling mechanism writ large, that risks holding back people from their potential while allowing certain individuals to cultivate temporary autonomous mini-cults? In order to give one’s gift during this transition between games, we have to play a game that wants to corrupt us, and we have to play it in a way where it does not corrupt us.
Not everyone’s gift is the same though, and some gifts will get more attention than others, rightly or wrongly. The problem happens when one equates getting attention as always bad. That kind of leveling mechanism is the kind that stems from deep envy, and which tries to prevent others from giving their gift. It is also plain wrong, sometimes one needs to be in the spotlight, not because they want the spotlight for its own sake, but because having the spotlight is a necessary condition of giving their gift.
I also think there might be some legitimacy to the evil eye claim, beyond the leveling mechanism function it may serve, and that is regarding its magickal element. Magick here is contrasted to magic, to distinguish the art of manifesting one’s will via esoteric means from performance magic. While my skeptic hat is never too far away, I am open to things like chaos magick and other sorts of occult praxis that can have manifest results without us fully having a scientific or coherently rational understanding of such things.
If the spellcasting stuff has any validity, I do feel protected. This might be wild to say, but I feel deeply embedded in the holy gravitas of my tradition, and it feels like God has my back, or maybe it is better to say that I have his back. The caveat of course is that I have to stay in the spirit of truth. I also feel your loving eyes reading these journals, and they feel protective, like spiritual armor, readying me to help lead people into their own leadership.
I sense some generalized advice for all of us here could be this: there is a narrow way, between being kept down by the envious crabby spellcasters and accidentally creating a mini-cult around one’s ego via getting seduced by the broken incentive landscape of our fucked up culture.
This narrow way is going to shake out differently for each of us, and its manifestation will be bespoke to our situation. There is no template for any of us to follow here, and we’ll have to openly stumble around before we collectively figure out how to install a leveling mechanism as training wheels that set up the conditions for a community to transcend ego together.
This is that knife’s edge stuff, and the daemon wants us to be at the knife’s edge right now. Let’s go there. Let’s get this. Let’s allow the spirit of truth to speak through us, because that is exactly what will protect us.
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