Belly Button Lint

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Category: Growth

  • Theme:

    Meritocratic implications on Heaven (utopia)

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    1–2 minutes

    The Protestant & Calvinist notion of working your way to heaven (earning your salvation) positions works over grace. This limits God. No longer omnipotent, His hands are bound by law, by ledgers and weights.

    Consider the meritocratic future: you get what you earn; talent + work grants reward.

    However, systemic privilege pervades society. To get closer to an equal start and better judge true merit, we can eliminate inheritance, good parents and teachers, and the benefits of a supportive, cultivated community. (For a true meritocracy, we can either flatten all to the lowest common denominator or provide grace and love equally to all, the latter seemingly impossible.)

    Born into a meritocracy blessed with privilege is Heaven, a Utopia on earth: grace landed upon you, and sure, you worked, so you feel deserving. Still, humility is required when recognizing the benefits pre-bestowed.


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    the tug-of-war for progress

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    1–2 minutes

    Progress is always already happening: by definition, we are in the midst of progress, making it a bit oxymoronic to label yourself as being for something you can’t stop or start.

    This pedantic insight reveals that Progressives are only for a specific type of movement in a singular direction, which must be spurred on or accelerated. This requires an ideology mapping out the future utopia, which can be used to direct the morally fervent. This type of religiosity is also on the right but progressing backward: they are applying the brakes for a return to known dangers/ills rather than theoretical expansive equality.

    The problem with claiming that “the arc of history” bends progressively or that you need to be on “the right side of history” is that if progress is already progressive, why fight so hard? It is not happening fast enough, so we must accelerate, which creates the conditions for an ideological tug-of-war to slow down the change, burning energy and relationships at both ends.

    (partially from Steven Pinker)

  • Theme:

    positional morality

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    1–2 minutes

    Whether or not your position is right or wrong, forcing it on others is objectionable, if not objectively morally wrong (according to Peter Singer).

    This is how positive moral sentiment moves into a tyrannical position of fascist coercion by dictating “the good” as necessary.

    The role of the authoritarian (parent/politician/priest) is to say, “You are acting against your own best interests, and I will not let you damage yourself or this family.”

    Yet, from which stance is this “harm” prevented by the leader: common sense (popular consensus) or expertise (technical mastery)? Nebulous, unconscious ego compensation (blindly subjective desires, such as daddy issues, libidinal pathology, sadomasochism, or transference)? Or is it legal (judicial)? Technical expertise and judicial knowledge are drawn from academic and regulatory bodies, so they seem more impartial, but they can also be emotively distorted to serve subjective, relative ends.

    Never being coercive or authoritarian is not to find yourself in the right: you are still wrong but in a less visible way. Denying holding a position for fear of coercion smuggles in a more slippery sin: avoiding responsibility is also not of “the good” or “the right.”

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    Expediency vs efficiency

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    1–2 minutes

    Is expediency tied to efficiency? Is doing things quickly for convenience too often misapplied as doing things right optimally?

    Expediency stems from a desire to simplify and act swiftly, cutting through complexity: a brutal chop of the Gordian Knot; there is no time for complexity here.

    Efficiency, rooted in logic, emphasizes timeliness and streamlined action—an unassailable ideal of minimal wasted effort.

    This clarity of efficiency seems truthful and singular, offering a direct, obvious path, which would be sinful to obfuscate with nuance. Yet, in prioritizing speed (a subset of efficiency), we distort the present moment into an inconvenience (along with every other potential expansive revelation.)

    We expedient thing is to compromise the quality outcomes for hasty execution. By over-indexed speed, we destroy the ability to appreciate (to see the value of) quality, the “right” or “holistic” way to do something.

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    warning: limit outdoor activity

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    1–2 minutes

    This public service announcement flashing on the highway may be helpful, but for whom?

    Many people rely on outdoor jobs. Hardcore hobbyists, such as joggers, will keep their training regimen. State mandates may force schoolchildren to remain inside, while white-collar employees are already trapped indoors.

    To announce “limit outdoor activity” as a public health notice is perversely insulting and myopically idiotic. It suggests we have been provided with a way of life that includes options: a liberated self-directed agency (autonomy) that the vast majority of people do not possess.

    Most of us are already in cycles of stress management, joggers with exercise, and the rest of us with chemical addictions, now multiplied by the further exasperated teachers and frustrated parents harassed by pent-up students.

    Obviously, seeing the government’s well-wishing and valid information as a provocation is a sign of my own cynical cognitive distortion. I could take up jogging.

  • Theme:

    Personal and Political: The hard work

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    1–2 minutes

    The hard work is often tediously painful for both the personal and political.

    Digging into ourselves for years in order to hold ourselves accountable and responsible for pains taken and inflicted is work we want to avoid, so we quickly displace our emotions into projection and transference: we blame someone else or fall in love with someone/something else.

    Likewise, doing local election research is tedious, and filling out forms to sway a monolithic bureaucracy is soul-numbing. I would rather vent my feelings or develop insightful, pithy rejoinders to my opponents.

    Yet, the hard work of both tasks (personal and political) examines reality over rationalizations and takes accountability: We damage others because we will not repair ourselves, and our state is a bureaucratic institution little swayed by communal catharsis.

    It is not flashy; it doesn’t feel good, but this is how you make substantive change: patient accountability over decades.

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    leverage and solvents

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    1–2 minutes

    When something is stuck, you can apply force and exponentially multiply your strength by cleverly employing a fulcrum point.

    (In physics, this may be a rock against which you brace a pole; in business, it may be friends or access to capital that allows you to outperform your singular strength.)

    Yet, if things are rusted into place, your muscularity is misused and damaging. Instead, a solvent is applied to soften the bonds and weaken resistance. It takes more time but less effort.

    It requires patience, which is its own type of leverage.

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    The Paradox of Safety: Life without risk

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    1–2 minutes

    We live in a time of state intervention aimed at eliminating harm—no violence, no risk—while socially taboo topics like body shaming, racism, and sexual shaming are culturally policed. Despite this pursuit of safety, anxiety and depression are at record highs, even as crime and violence are at historic lows.

    The paradox is to live in the least violent times, when beliefs have only emotional and social repercussions and seldom physical or property consequences, yet the fragility of people and failure to maintain peace is escalating.

    Part of this results in de-escalating objective, reality-based threats accomplishing an increase in symbolic, ideological concerns, which feel subjectively overwhelming and due to their shifting signifiers cannot be easily mitigated by individual effort. As we shift from physical to ideological harm, we -oddly- inhabit a space where safety is elusive and control pervasive.

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  • Theme:

    blunting old survival strategies

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    1–2 minutes

    The tools we use to get us through periods in our lives can lose their purpose. Once we have moved on, there is a tendency to maintain these practices because if they provided safety and security once, they might do it forever.
    Sometimes, the challenge is not maintaining your edge but letting go of your knives.

  • Theme:

    The more you do…

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    1–2 minutes

    The more you do, the more balls you drop. We often lose our keys when we move to a new city or forget to tend our relationships when starting a business venture. Our focus is on the new, and the common suffers.

    Considered mathematically, the more you do, the more losses and chaos you will suffer as you stir the pot, but you will also encounter more luck and become adept in turmoil.

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