Wisdom Full of Roguishness
Tomorrow’s events:
Bioenergetic Workout w/ Devaraj Sandberg. Every Second Saturday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
The Glass Bead Game w/ The Metabeaders. Every Saturday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stealing the Culture With Clubhouse w/ Peter Limberg, Tyson Wagner, and Michael Sillion. February 27th @ 6:00 PM ET. Clubhouse event.
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February 26th, 2021
Saint Christoph sent me a voice message, saying it is time we smoke some cigars, and get into wise trouble. I like that phrase: wise trouble. I am incapable of saying no to the saint of thumos, so I will probably buy a plane ticket soon to Vancouver so that we can smoke some cigars together, while being at the knife’s edge of some dionysian adventure.
Christoph’s phrasing reminded me of when Nietzsche hyped up Socrates as a badass, which I first saw in Pierre Hadot’s “Philosophy as a Way of Life”:
The pathways of the most various philosophical modes of life lead back to him... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul.
I do not completely agree with Nietzsche here, but I do like his phrasing: wisdom full of roguishness. Yeah. One must get into trouble, and be wisely roguish. I was always a trouble-maker in school. I probably had a “learning disability,” which was coupled with me being the kind of boy who did not listen to anyone. This often got me in trouble at school, and teachers hated me. I probably never listened because I intuited that what was being taught was bullshit, and rebelled accordingly.
I discovered the work of Piotr Wozniak recently, the guy who developed SuperMemo. He is another one of these “live player” thinkers who gives zero fucks about chasing status, hence I am obviously trying to get him on The Stoa. He is an advocate of educational reform, writing such things as: The present system of education must die.
He has this quote that made me go “wow” and “duh” at the same time, which usually happens when I come across something that is existentially delicious: Good learning is inherently pleasurable, and without pleasure there is no good learning.
I had this belief that learning has to be unpleasurable, and when I did not do well in school, there was this belief that I was a stupid boy, who also happened to be a bad boy, because I did not listen. I actually felt pretty useless for a long time, and felt incapable of learning things.
Coming across Wozniak’s distinction between the “learn drive” and the “school drive” really clicked for me. The learn drive is our inherent curiosity that drives learning, while the school drive is the reward and punishment mechanism that the schooling system implements. You can traumatize a kid by pressuring him to learn shit they do not need to learn.
I did not realize how much trauma is still here with me in terms of learning in general. Just being introduced to that “good learning is inherently pleasurable” quote, and the learn/school drive distinction, felt cathartic. I have held myself back from learning basic things for so long, because of this false sense that learning sucks.
Learning done wisely is pleasurable. What a good frame to have in mind. I sense there was a benefit to my being potentially traumatized by the school drive though, which is that it forced me to learn through the cracks. I got by somehow, and I even studied at the top-ranked university in Canada. It was not because I got good grades. It was because I found loopholes in the system, and found a way in. I found a way in because I was capable of being roguish.
I could be wrong, but I sense that those who excelled at the school drive, and are successful within the existing system, are not the ones that will be at the forefront of midwifing a new world. Maybe this is too self-congratulatory, but I do sense it is us fuck ups who will be the ones the daemon asks to bring a new world into life.
I wrote the following call-to-arms in one of my very first journal entries:
To all my fellow weirdos who may be reading this, my message is: it is time for us to be deployed. We never really fit into the previous world. We are not good bullshiters, we cannot bootstrap our will to the 9 to 5, and we get terribly bored and awkward in polite company. In essence, we did not want to play that game.
I still think this is true. As our girl Ria Baeck wrote, “the gift is in the trauma.” It is wise to listen to her, and to our Shame Educator, so we can stop shaming our trauma, and start seeing it as a gift that will allow us to give our gift. So yeah, let us continue to be fuck ups, in a way that will allow us to wisely fuck shit up, because that will be the way Socrates would approve of.
He knew he knew nothing, and he was cool with that, and this indeed afforded him a wisdom full of roguishness.
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