The Deadliness Of Doing
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET.RSVP here.
Chapel Perilous w/ Rebecca Fox and Peter Limberg. Sundays @ 12:00 PM ET on February 28th, March 7th, 14th, and 21st. RSVP here. 75 mins.
Clubhouse Dialogos: Beware of the Sneaky Fuckers w/ Peter Limberg, Daniel Kazandjian, Khalil Martin, and Raven Connolly. March 7th @ 7:00 PM ET. Clubhouse event.
Diaflogos w/ Tyson Wagner. Every Sunday @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 min.
Newly posted events:
Clubhouse Dialogos: Beware of the Sneaky Fuckers w/ Peter Limberg, Daniel Kazandjian, Khalil Martin, and Raven Connolly. March 7th @ 7:00 PM ET. Clubhouse event.
The Multiplicity of Existential Risks: The Rapidly Complexifying Threat Environment w/ Phil Torres. March 16th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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March 6th, 2021
There is this phrase from Michael Oakeshott that I came across a while ago in Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It is a phrase that I am intimately feeling now, and the phrase is this: the deadliness of doing.
How Sullivan described it: our usual, rational, self-interested selves – engaged constantly in wanting, getting, wanting, not getting, and wanting some more.
Since engaging in these embodiment and trauma type exercises, I am feeling more... what is the word? Animalistic. Yeah, that word feels right. I just feel like an animal. This feels kind of stupid to say though, but it does feel true. It is like my mind is tagging along, like a whining baby wanting attention, and my body just is being what it wants to be.
There is this constant pressure to do though. I feel it pulling me, and if I were to translate it, it would say this: Do something! Do what though? It does not care, it just wants me to be doing something. The thing is tightly related to thinking, so “the deadliness of thinking” is a phrase that would fit nicely as well.
Doing and thinking can be great of course, but this pressure is not about that. It has an antsy quality about it. It is this sense that if I do not do anything the end of the world might happen. Maybe this is why I was called to put the word “maybe” in the title of our upcoming symposium: Let Us Maybe Make the Meta-Crisis Our Superordinate Goal Symposium.
The meta-crisis is about this “end of the world” stuff, and maybe this deadliness of doing/thinking impulse is what is responsible for the existence of the meta-crisis. Staying with this impulse, and translating it some more, it says this: do something and figure something out, or else the world will fucking end. Maybe this impulse, which is surely a collective one, is casting a spell on the world. Maybe it is a world-fulfilling prophecy.
I am optimistic though, that other spells can be cast instead. I do not want to do or think from this pressuring impulse. I would rather do and think from a different motivator, and it is basically the daemonic motivator that I have been doing and thinking with for this entire project.
I do not like feeling pulled by this deadliness of doing. Going on Clubhouse makes me feel pulled to be honest. I experience irritation in my body when I am on the app, and I hear the phoniness, from others and from myself. The performative logic of the app seems to be this: scale, scale, and scale. Both with your audience and your ego.
This could be uncharitable for me to say, and even if it is true, a counter-culture can be imposed on the app, and I sense The Stoa is very well positioned to pull this off. I do not want to pull it off though by being pulled to do so in a deadly way.
I want to stay in this animalistic state, and I want to sensemake in a localized way. The title of Tyson Yunkaporta’s last session at The Stoa feels relevant here: Slow Down, Calm Down, Scale Down, and Step Down, which was from a pretty hilarious LinkedIn article he wrote, where he dunked on Ken Wilber’s "clean up, wake up, grow up, show up" thing. Here is Tyson from that article:
Clean up, wake up, grow up, show up? What's with all these ups? You want ups? Then shut up and listen up! Down is the way you need to look now. Slow down. Calm down. Scale down. Step down.
I am not the type of white guy who dunks on “white people” in an apologetic self-flagellating way, but I also do not want to be one of those clichéd disembodied traumatized white guys who is signalling that he is heroically saving the world. That is masturbatory and narcissistic, and I was probably being masturbatory and narcissistic in some of these journal entries.
I am cool with that though, as being cringe is an opportunity to practice one’s Stoicism, and publicly embarrassing oneself—by leaning into certain deadly impulses—is a quick way to reveal one's self to oneself.
My favorite quote from Epictetus still keeps coming to mind: don't explain your philosophy, embody it. This quote is like an old friend for me at this point. I think it is good to tag a corollary to it: to embody your philosophy, you have to have the capacity to be embodied first. That is step one. It is easy to “embodiment signal” your philosophy from a disembodied place, but those with good embodiment game can sniff out the phoniness of this performative contradiction real quick.
I sense I am going to leave the disembodied meta scene behind soon, or maybe I will help transmute it. I do not know. Whatever happens it has been fun. I got off a call with Bonnitta before I started writing this, and we were talking about some of this stuff. We landed the conversation in a good place. I told her this …
I do not know what I am doing. My mind is broken, in a good way. I do not operate with too much intellectual architecture these days. I just want to do beautiful things. I want to create beauty.
I do not care how big the beauty is either. I do not care how much it scales. I do not care if it becomes hype on Clubhouse, even though that deadliness of doing part of me may want that. She told me to let beauty be my guide. I can do that, but I might be a surprise to you if I do. I might even be a surprise to myself.
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