Playing Chess With Cancel Culture
Hello friends,
I hope your weekend is going well. :)
Tomorrow’s events:
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful w/ Jared Janes. Every Sunday @ 12:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
Mediation Campfire w/ Jason Snyder and Jared Janes. Every Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.*
Oxytocin Party w/ Raya Sun. Every Sunday @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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May 9, 2020
First thing in the morning, with a loyal double espresso close by, I sit down to write to myself. I usually have a clear sense of what I will write about, and most days it feels like the writing writes itself. Writing these entries often feels like channeling. Today I felt like I could write on multiple topics, but none felt fully alive. Then I went on Twitter, and I got annoyed.
Twitter is actually a great place to practice one's Stoicism. This morning, multiple tweets annoyed me for different reasons, all of which would lead down different avenues of intrapersonal explorations. The tweet I want to focus on relates to cancel culture.
I tweeted out a quote from yesterday's entry, on me loving virtue more than any woman, and somebody replied with this: "Why the opposition between virtue and women? There is no competition between those things. It sounds more like a masculinist thought."
Annoyance started creeping through my body, along with anger. To qualify, at its peak I was only 25% annoyed and maybe between 5-10% angry. Why was I annoyed? Besides propositionally disagreeing with his framing, I am not quite sure. I want to unpack it here, and then pivot to share my thoughts on cancel culture.
I sense my annoyance is not towards the man who tweeted this, as I think he is coming from a curious place. I sense if we had a long-form conversation, we would both learn from each other. My annoyance is not towards the man, or his question, but the medium of Twitter.
Overall, if you take my quote out of context from the rest of these letters—and, more importantly, away from the spirit of how I am writing them—then you will rightfully get interpretations that I do not believe to be true, or things I will not believe to be true after careful consideration. And I am the type of man who gets turned on by careful considerations.
This is that culture war shit I have written and talked about so much in the past. The culture war fossilizes you, and dehumanizes you, by reducing you to disembodied propositions, which of course are always wrong, or evil. For new readers who may not be aware of my previous writings, I recommend that you read my white paper called The Memetic Tribes Of Culture War 2.0, or watch the Rebel Wisdom video where I discussed some of its arguments. I think my understanding of the culture war, both from a meta and a felt-sense perspective, influences my annoyance here.
I understand how things can get weaponized on social media, especially on Twitter. I am not interested in fighting, or winning, the culture war. Nobody can win that war without a Pyrrhic victory, like my former therapist intimately knows. Besides, I am here to win the liminal war. David Fuller and I often discussed playing chess with cancel culture, which is a delicate game to play.
To be honest, I have not been tracking the memetic warfare that has been happening since COVID too closely. I am too busy building The Stoa and publicly having a spiritual crisis.
David's Rebel Wisdom co-founder, Alexander Beiner, talked about the formation of two new memetic tribes during this pandemic in his article "Traversing the Underworld: What Myth Can Teach us During the Pandemic":
And it is also, as Peter Limberg has pointed out, a place where the next great war may be fought for the soul of our culture. He refers to it as ‘the liminal war.’ Right now, I see two memetic tribes forming around this war. Those who want to go back to business as usual, and those who want to use this as an opportunity to birth something new. I will call the former Ghosts, and the latter Voyagers.
I think he is right. In one corner, there is team Chronos, the Ghosts, who want to return to normal. In the other corner there is team Kairos, the Voyagers, who view normal as an illusion that would be detrimental for us to try to return to, and who want to seek out a new world together. I am on the latter team, and I think this is the memetic tribe that has the chance to birth embodied tribes, and that is where beauty is found.
I am becoming freer and bolder in my thinking, since my careful days of mapping the culture war in the spirit of performative agnosticism. I have a desire to fight now, to find my tribe, and to put an end to my existential loneliness once and for all. In essence, I want to fully know what it means to be in love.
I am writing all of this to caution myself. Dude, stop tweeting out your journals with the most provocative line you can find in them. You know that this gesture is one of narcissism, and displays your thirst for attention.
I will also ask a favor of you, dear reader. Please do not share these journals with just anyone. Keep them as your personal secret, and share them only if you deeply sense the person you are sharing them with has a ready heart.
I paused writing this entry to have a conversation with Jared and Jason, about our Mediation Campfires sessions we are having at The Stoa. We talked about how to approach upcoming sessions. This memetic mediation project feels really alive for me. I shared my latest thoughts on it in an upcoming piece for Adam Robbert's The Side View called Memetic Mediation: The Hard Problem of the Culture War.
It may be hard, but I also find it deeply fun, and it is time for me to double-down on playing chess, as wisely as I can. You should not expect anything less from a Stoic.
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