Nuance Porn
Hey lovely people,
I hope your weekend was good.
The Stoic Hustle is back this week on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This is a modality where we work together in silence via Zoom. It is a fun and powerful way to be productive. RSVP here.
This upcoming week’s events:
Marx's Epicureanism and Peterson's Stoicism w/ Conrad Hamilton. June 16th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Raw Sexuality: No Filter w/ Caveh Zahedi. June 16 @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Playing the Infinite Game During the Meta-Crisis w/ James Carse. June17th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Emotional Dojo w/ Kira Kroger. June 19th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Dangerous Space w/ Arielle Friedman. June 20th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 14, 2020
When COVID arrived, people said the virus broke woke. Now it seems woke broke the virus. I have not been reading or watching the news, but I went for a walk this morning and listened to the recent Sam Harris podcast which a few people recommended to me. I also did some reading on what is happening in America yesterday, and how legacy media is reacting.
I used to be really plugged in to the culture war stuff a few years ago, and I felt I had a keen sensitivity of what our fragmented collective mind was thinking, and what memes were being weaponized and how they were being weaponized. Consumption of culture war noise was actually my main form of procrastination for a few years.
I felt some pressure to give my take on what is happening here, but I have no desire to do that. I do not view myself as a public intellectual and it is above my paygrade to state what I think are the descriptive and normative realities of the situation. I do sense there will be more public nuanced approaches, like Harris attempted, but that is not going to stop the woke memes from spreading roughshod throughout the noosphere. I imagine a strong countervailing reactionary response will come online soon, and this polarization will get extremely ugly.
In the podcast Harris kept saying we have a choice between “conversation or violence,” this feels nice to hear, but most of the woke tribes, and lots of the reactionary and conspiratorial ones, are memetically structured to not have conversations with opposing views. If they do it is done in a simulated way, with foregone conclusions. Shaming these tribes, or engaging in nuance porn, is not going to change their views of the actuated momentum of their thought.
I appreciate those who risk thinking in public, but I sense there needs to be a space where people can think in private, in a way that is both extremely challenging and extremely loving. I think if you lack those two conditions then thinking in private will become dangerous, as memes will fester into ideologies that will prop up the unindividuated aspects of one's internal reality.
I billed my disbanded group, Intellectual Explorers Club, as the “Switzerland of the Culture War.” I thought the performative agnostic essence and frame of the group would afford me to play chess with cancel culture while still being able to talk about important things. However, I do not think we are in a culture war anymore, as there seems to be no culture to fight over. It seems the only culture we share now is one of culture warring.
Instead I think we are in a liminal war, which is a state of radical uncertainty, coupled with intense memetic warfare for our minds. This is where the memetic war can quickly turn into a kinetic war. This is also an opportunity for Stoicism. I do not think being Switzerland is the right move for The Stoa, rather I think it should be a refuge from the liminal war, where we can Stoically practice actual thinking, and actual conversations, without fear of speaking what we believe to be true.
I have had past guests at The Stoa, one on the progressivist side of the political spectrum and one on the reactionary side, warn me not to platform their ideological opponents. Their argument was identical: you will get memetically colonized by these tribes if you allow them in. Maybe, but maybe this advice lacks imagination, and they have been hardened and biased by a game theoretical analysis of memetic warfare.
I do sense The Stoa needs to adopt a philosophical prepperism, with three games in mind. The short game is about the survival of our sanity. The medium game is preparing to think well in public by practicing thinking well in private. The long game is about developing a “Benedict Option” for the Socratic spirit itself so it could live on if the noosphere becomes colonized by simulated thinking.
Whatever the game, I sense The Stoa needs to go semi-underground, and have a private face along with its public one.
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