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Tag: motivation

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    Liberation via descent

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    1–2 minutes

    While the death drive is an urge to descend and abandon the structures that confine you (self-obliteration as liberation), new and alternate options emerge for you once you hit bottom.

    Innumerable negatives can lead to new ways of being: lines of flight to escape the current system open through painful distortion. This suggests that common sense (the logic of social conformity) can trap us in limiting behaviors (domestication), requiring illogic to chart new avenues.

    While nihilistic escape may not guarantee anything beautiful, it appears to be a deviation many humans desire—a novel existence unrestrained.

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    Animism drives capitalism

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    Animism lies at the heart of capitalism – not rational calculation, but an untamed force of ‘animal spirits’: raw desire unbounded by erudition—natural desiring drives.

    Look to children as harbingers of the future. Their natural animistic worldview reveals the direction capitalism must follow. Play, pettiness, or perturbations of youth trace burgeoning desires. Capital merely follows, tracing the contours of desires and converting them into the vital energy it demands. Paradoxically, the mapping of desire simultaneously manufactures our wants, further enflaming our animal spirits.

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    freedom from desire

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    1–2 minutes

    We tend to consider freedom as the positive ability to fulfill our desires. This means we can identify more fully with the object of our desire, and over time, we consider ourselves (our identity) to be those desiring actions, those drives.

    According to Lacan or Slavoj Zizek, we are "desiring subjects" captured before inception with ideology. So, our desires are programmatic and not unique. They may be "individual" or "subjectively felt." Still, they are not authentic, meaning we are manufactured to feel individually free in our pursuits, but that very pursuit is your training in action.

    So, what if freedom is not the fulfillment of your desire but a negation of desire? By dissolving desire, like a Buddhist, you create the potential to encounter your authentic self (if that exists), not tarnished with pre-programmed base desires or complex transference.

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    Paradox of Desire: universal uniqueness

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    1–2 minutes

    Naturally, people desire and struggle to pursue those desires. Manufacturing desire (programming and targeting specific desires, objects, and ideas) is a means to unite people: we all want the same thing. And yet, it is divisive as solidarity shifts to bitter competition and mimetic jealousy.

    Curiously, today, we all want uniqueness. It is our universal desire, which is paradoxical, to say the least.

    Not only are selective channels (archetype scripts) prepared in advance for your journey, but to actually be unique removes (excludes) you from the universal desire, the communal pursuit.

    That is, the goal (unique individuality) must not be achieved if one is to remain a relatable participant in society.

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    Technocrats Reshaping Sovereignty

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    We are witnessing a shift in political power. Sovereignty is moving away from traditional democratic systems and into the hands of a new elite, what might be called a "Humanitarian Party." This entity consists of "technical experts" and "moral authorities" from corporations, universities, media, and NGOs, who use their influence to reshape governance. (aka the "managerial elite.")

    Their legitimacy is based on the idea that they protect vulnerable groups—racial and sexual minorities, the immunocompromised, and others—whom they elevate as mascots of social programs driven by compassion. While these programs claim moral high ground, they centralize power in the hands of technocrats and bureaucrats, eroding common sense and traditional practices.

    As a result, the majority’s voice is increasingly sidelined in favor of the expert-driven rule, which expands managerial control and concentrates authority in a sprawling parastatal network.

    Like any infestation that becomes destructively parasitic, this transformation risks undermining democratic accountability while advancing a biased vision of moral superiority, which disguises self-serving motivation, all confounded with technical and linguistic arcana.

    from Matthew Crawford
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    The Image Bias

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    A question I have repeatedly heard about Trump or Biden is: “But how does it look? Can you see that person in charge?”

    This usually appears when you have gently dissuaded or countered a few hyperbolic statements with opposing facts. When we run out of reason and facts we appeal to aesthetics: what you believe is how you feel about the image.

    Attacking the image is a root instinct to attack the symbol: if the person does not appear presidential/fatherly/powerful, it insults my aesthetic pride.

    Despite our layers of logic obfuscating core motivations, we are very visual and socialized animals reacting to appearances far more strongly than we know.

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    you are more than you

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    1–2 minutes

    Kant used the term "noumena" to oppose "phenomena": the noumenal you is inherently you despite the phenomenal appearance other people may see.

    Zizek says the "noumenal core" of you is the unfathomable "x," the je ne sais quoi, the charismatic core. Drawing from Lacan, the petit objet a* creates your noumenal core, the desire that cannot be fulfilled, that drives you and bleeds out of you, which is experienced as charm, danger, or drive.

    In this sense, you are more than you: you are your "x"—your excess. Beyond the phenomenal experience of "you," your noumenal core exudes and expands to become the undefinable "you" to which people react.

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    Motivation: The why

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    1–2 minutes

    Anyone, any team, can perform a task. But to do it well repeatedly, they must care, and that comes from belief.

    If the leader doesn’t believe in or effectively communicate the strategy, the project will fail, no matter how talented the people.

    You must know and believe your “why” to motivate and lead.

    from Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

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    Incentives frame your outcome: surveillance data

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    The questions we pose are driven by specific incentives: complex queries empower problem-solvers, commerce-driven inquiries explore market potential, but to foster awareness, we ponder the absence of problems.

    Surveillance capitalism, with its unsettling lexicon—harvesting, exhaust, extraction, akin to industrial strip mining—suggests that behaviors extracted are merely responses to the intrusive questions posed. Thus, the behaviors, and consequently the data, are manufactured at the moment of inquiry, not passively mined. This process is not a zero-sum game.

    The core issue with surveillance capitalism lies in its data collection focus, which is narrowly aimed at consumer profiling and sales rather than gathering data that could contribute to more meaningful or transformative outcomes: global ecology or meaningful biopolitics.

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    Beyond Binary Flips: duty and pleasure

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    1–2 minutes

    Considering the “binary flip,” where oppositional stances converge into their antithesis, we must remember this is not always the case.

    The flip (reversal) theory says that persistent engagement with an ‘enemy’ can lead to adopting their traits. However, Zizek offers the example of the voyeur, who steals the secrets of others, and so remains secretive, yet they will never be the original party with the same motivations. Similarly, a prohibitive father or an analyst remains separate from their subjects’ desires: the “father” must not become a sex object.

    Zizek reminds us that the transformation into what we oppose is not inevitable. The crux lies in differentiating “duty’s pleasure” from “pleasure’s duty,” highlighting a pivotal divergence where doing your duty may cause pleasure, but to take pleasure from your duty is to pervert it, extracting reward as pathological motivation.

    from Slavoj Zizek