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Tag: learning

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    Swimming in Paradigms

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    1–2 minutes

    We understand the world through epic themes that encapsulate us: epistemes, ideologies, and paradigms are the water in which we swim.

    Most of us are only vaguely aware of the contradictions and motivations that mobilize us, but we are the support system that feeds and maintains the framework. The better we grasp its trajectory, the more efficiently we can empower it through enhancing its programatization or destroying it by posing alternatives.

    Counterintuitively, the systems we serve tend to create impersonal claims for their self-perpetuation instead of our service. We gladly serve, abide, and are contentedly entrapped, furthering our servitude, which provides us a sense of directed agency, empowerment, or survival as it simultaneously endangers us.

    Yet, I doubt it can be avoided: to evade capture by these frameworks would require a complete non-engagement, but to move in the world requires framing. Escaping one of Plato’s caves only creates another, and jumping from one of Magritte’s painted canvases lands you in another.

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    Retroactive Insight to Real-Time Self-Construction

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    1–2 minutes

    Once, things could only be figured out after they occur: retroactively.

    This means the traumatic kernel that influences the behavior that creates the event is latent, and can only be witnessed (and examined) after the action.

    However, pattern prediction can map likely outcomes, foreseeing consequences. In therapy one may imagine a future based on current behavior, not like the result, and change to align with a preferred outcome.

    Yet, we once created the self both by practicing in private moments and performing socially. Today, technology (an external mediator) tells us who we are in a tightened feedback loop as we self-report to aid algorithms in shaping us. We no longer look to the traumatic kernel, we no longer must unearth the hysterical event that created our unique reactions; we are maintained in an ever-becoming state with little need to look back.

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    manufactured meaning

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    1–2 minutes

    The quest for meaning or purpose is misguided.

    Meaning is intertwined with intellect and rationality spawning from the mind’s attempt to comprehend. (What is the meaning of this?) In truth, what we seek is experiential.

    Joseph Campbell’s advice, “Follow your bliss,” suggests that genuine meaning emerges from attentive interaction, not through logical construction.

    This exemplifies the error of mistaking an outcome for an attainable objective, of intellectually fabricating a resonant motivation arising from engaging with the world. Such artificial self-development leads to dueling schizophrenic difficulties, paradoxically producing the necessity for therapeutic intervention and realignment.

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    The hero and the dark side

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    1–2 minutes

    To be a hero is to encounter a system and learn through trials. The journey changes your consciousness.

    Joseph Campbell reminds us that the brain is a secondary organ. Leaning too heavily on one’s intellect is to separate oneself from nature and one’s humanity, effectively enslaving oneself. This is the “dark side,” which is powerful but stunts and warps us: it keeps us emotionally larval.

    The hero’s task is more difficult: they must recognize the system and maintain their humanity amidst pressures to be locked into a routine that the consciousness and body decry. Gradually, finding itself captured, the body will rebel against the will of the mind, forcing a schizophrenic split.

    The hero is the one who can maintain their humanity while guiding us through the system. The maverick (rebel) is one who rejects the system but has perhaps not found a way to sublate and reconcile the system with remaining human.

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    The Modern Medieval

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    1–2 minutes

    The Enlightenment championed the democratization of knowledge, emancipating society from the information monopoly of the clergy. This heralded a new era of freedom.

    Yet, in our contemporary, information-saturated world, often basic knowledge (like a specific component’s dimensions or materiality) remains elusive. We’ve supplanted clerical gatekeepers (the human compendium) with intricate systems of knowledge (the digital table), bureaucratic formalities and complexities, and capitalist-driven reductive efficiency.

    These layers obscure direct access to information, ironically mirroring the medieval period’s hierarchical information control. Our ‘hypermodern’ society re-enacts the constrained knowledge dissemination of the medieval.

    {from Matthew Crawford}

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    Considering Violence

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    1–2 minutes

    Violence, often dismissed as puerile, is a fundamental aspect of human nature.

    The urge to violence plays out as high-risk competitive learning, both social and physical, as a means of domination or a swift corrective for injustice. Beyond establishing pecking order or encouraging cleverness-over-might, humans also have a horror fascination for destruction. When this grizzly aspect is folded back into the culture we establish voyeurism, acclaim, and romance centered around risk; a strategy providing the dare-devil access to both manly comradeship and sexual partners.

    The attempt to shame or train violent impulses out of humanity has a complex risk/reward problem: we can (and do) set up regulated channels (violence outlets) and we can sublate (transference) violence into economic and academic ambition. But to mediate or pathologize can lead to repression, and to invoke authoritarian intervention as the only corrective is to rely excessively on de-humanizing bureacracy.

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    Nihilism: All wood is potentially firewood

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    1–2 minutes

    An aspect of natural entropy is denied by our creative impulse: our construction, crafts, and myths expand and grow more complex. Surrounded by complex fabrications denying reality, there is a subversive pleasure in returning to materialistic reality.

    To resurface “the real” is oddly considered nihilistic, in part because it denies the abstract ideological prisons that drive so much behavior: the dreams society is built upon are more powerfully dominant than physical matter.

    Given the pervasive culture and economic underpinnings, perhaps the only way nihilism can exist is to become a structured corporation that burns its own money.

    Unfortunately, such sardonic insight is precisely the state of current reality, hence our reactive desire to burn the complexity down, reintroduce physicality as a return to humanity.

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    Navigating the Authenticity Dilemma

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    1–2 minutes

    What path do you take when your authentic thoughts and opinions (your unique point of view) will alienate your audience?

    The predicament feels binary: stay true to yourself and risk being ostracized, or compromise yourself to maintain the audience and personal relationships. Any no-win scenario becomes a tautology. Compromising or silence is equally non-authentic, and thus not creatively productive.

    This seems to be the goal of a double-bind or double-blackmail: to regulate through loss.

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    Desire is a memory of happiness

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    1–2 minutes

    “desire is a memory of happiness, fear is a memory of pain” Buddhist proverb

    Yet, according to Lacan, we often desire what we have never had: it is the object of our desire that causes us pain by our inability to possess it completely.

    The separation from our supposed happiness is our pain, and our fear is the loss of this painful striving: without pursuit we lose purpose, our greatest fear is losing ourselves.

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    abandoned by your narcissism

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    1–2 minutes

    Narcissism is an internal protection, a selfishness that paradoxically closes others out while demanding from them.

    To encounter one who somehow dismantles the walls to provoke genuine concern becomes the narcissist’s scariest moment: to care is an infinitely more difficult a journey.

    From Walter Kern

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