Believing in an institution empowers it, making it more credible. As you turn its edicts into dictates, you further enable its authority.
A reversal occurs: for the sake of our goals, we are captured by the thing we created, aligning ourselves under it, renouncing our agency to shape it, and proclaiming it should shape all.
Tag: change
- Theme: Self
Captured by our creation
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Systems
Science doesn’t need your belief
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1–2 minutesBy stating science as a matter of belief or faith one shifts the empirical to the subjective, opening the indisputable to the option for disagreement.
In wanting to profess commitment people unwittingly democratize (shift into the realm of popularity) and politicize science’s process into its opposite: a platform for affirmative declaration instead of contingent falsification.
Science does not need your belief. Instead, it is actively harmed by the adherent’s myopic misunderstanding, like most religions.
- Theme: Growth
Access robs the sacred
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1–2 minutesIn art, ideas, or porn the access and commonality do not make it less amazing: access makes normatively banal, which shifts the sacred into the passe. This is obviously a deception: it merely shows that we value rarity, novelty and exclusivity to an extent that these traits conflate value with sacredness.
- Theme: Growth
Guided by Fantasy
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1–2 minutesTo change the character of the world you must envision it and let it guide you.
To manifest the change you must forego the comfort of the idealistic fantasy and undertake to meet the demands of the growth your previous self desired.
from Bataille - Theme: Growth
Disruption through embodied inversion
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1–2 minutesWhen you’re fed up and want to break the system, introduce and perform what is lacking.
Our current capital-driven system praises intelligence and polite compromise.
To counter it, you can manifest an inversion tactic that embodies disenfranchised values (for instance) by effectuating emotional irrationalities and unwavering integrity. - Theme: Growth
Destruction for Difference
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1–2 minutesIndividualism is not building-up-towards or revealing-the-self, but destruction of the common, which translates as novel difference.
The seduction of new knowledge is arcane insights, which dissolves social norms for self separation. The knowledge -an alchemical agent for change- need not be new, merely distinct.
(Those who do not destroy the common are conformists, hence not individuals in this sense.)
- Theme: Growth
Concept Creep
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1–2 minutesConcepts change their meaning over time, both vertically and horizontally.
A vertical expansion extends the term’s definitional understanding: trauma used to refer to a physical wound incurred during a battle, but now can mean psychological heightened states.
A horizontal expansion extends the context: Once bullying was exclusively top-down abuse (status or physical dominance), yet now it has shifted to be used in a bottom-up context where an employee can bully a boss.As the concept opens (creeps into society and expands) previous instances can be named, and thus we can attend to them. Yet, the promiscuity of the term allows for abuse as well.
"the art of manliness" podcast – the dangers of concept creep
- Theme: Growth
Enemies become cheerleaders
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1–2 minutesAll you have to do is hang on. We all change, and familiarity may breed contempt, but it can also motivate grace.
One day, to your utter surprise, your enemies will become your cheerleaders. - Theme: Self
The dangers of the path more traveled
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1–2 minutesWe can turn on auto-pilot when walking familiar terrain, but when even one condition changes, the common becomes doubly treacherous due to assumed familiarity.
Upon recognition of one variable askew, slow down, engage the novel, and do not berate yourself for caution.
- Theme: Self
Things break at the worst time
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1–2 minutesThe worst time is the most necessary time: the situation with the most reliance is also the situation with the most to lose.
The fact you rely on something is its value. Equally, no matter how robust, everything under stress eventually breaks. And it will always happen at the "worst time," as the failure designates the time as "worst."All that is left is to predetermine how to react after the break.