°
Since Aristotle, becoming fully human meant closing the gap between what we are and what we could be — through reason, habit, and cultural formation.
Modernity severed telos from ethics: success now substitutes for virtue.
Those who bypass the moral scaffolding to reach the summit are parasitic on the civility others maintain. The result of this approach is to digest the host’s energy (social values and trust) until we are left with only a transactional society of grifters.
°
The transition between spheres matters as much as the spheres themselves. You cannot walk from a sacred ritual straight into work without losing something. The silence between is load-bearing. Rushing from work to church profanes the sacred. We need thresholds — time and space to process before proceeding.
°
Modern logic dissects identity, objects, and institutions into modular components, treating humans like platforms—interchangeable, upgradable, and regulated only in parts.
This mirrors broader societal shifts: tradition collapses into individualism, the individual into traits.
Restriction (authority) becomes futile when the core is undefined (permanently shifting) and the periphery endlessly adaptable.
Guns, services, genders, ideas—once coherent wholes—are now modular systems evading fixed meaning: the smaller specific can be swapped, decohering the definitional whole into infinite, alternate categories.
Yet meaning arises from synthesis, not fragments. The reductionist paradigm collapses into absurdity when it forgets purpose: a sentence parsed into words loses its sense, as do lives parsed into functions.
°
Ritual derives power not from ease, but from ordeal.
Meaning often emerges through boredom or discomfort—through acts that stretch, fatigue, or humble us.
Even joyous rituals, like festivals, overwhelm the senses, pushing participants beyond familiarity into altered states. Pain, effort, and endurance mark thresholds, distinguishing the sacred from the mundane.
In suffering or strain, ritual gains gravity; it inscribes memory and reshapes identity. Transcendence demands more than participation—it requires surrendering our base instinct for comfort, signaling transformation through struggle.
°
Community unites around presence—a shared purpose or goal.
Communion, as Peter Rollins suggests, unites around absence—a shared void, grief, or loss. It is not built by consensus, but by mutual vulnerability, often acknowledged through ritual.
Byung-Chul Han notes our ritual erosion: we’ve streamlined away liturgies that once made communion possible. In chasing efficiency, we lost the slow architectures of mourning and meaning. Without ritual, absence isolates rather than bonds.
What remains is a restless longing—not for connection through achievement, but through shared helplessness.
We lack not only meaning, but the means to lack meaning together: a void we attempt to fill with shallow pursuits.
°
Communication is rarely judged solely by content; delivery often eclipses meaning.
Sarcasm inverts intent, where words have one meaning but tone conveys another. Conversely, gentle cadence can soften even brutal truths, cushioning their impact.
Context shapes interpretation: the exact phrase, spoken kindly or cruelly, can heal or wound.
Thus, persuasion lie less in logic (the technical truth) than in rhythm, tone, and presence. Meaning emerges as much from how as from what, revealing that words are vehicles, but delivery is the driver of human understanding.
°
Narrative coherence arises from the aggregation of distress into a single focal point.
Just as stories clarify viewpoints through conflict (an argument or battle), life’s scattered anxieties coalesce into a definable center—a problem to solve or a burden to bear.
Without such consolidation, anxiety multiplies into paranoid simulations of endless doom. The unending cycle of possibility without resolution mirrors dystopia: no climax, no catharsis.
Meaning is found not in the myriad of troubles but in the moment they crystallize into focus. From there, transformation begins—not through avoidance, but through articulation.
Interestingly, when the anxieties are too great, our ability to appropriately target the center of our distress is skewed, so we often take action in unproductive ways, intensifying our problems as a sort of hyperactive death drive to reach a cathartic obliteration of self.
°
A chain of equivalences occurs when a common opposition links together different groups (or demands). This primarily happens in response to a larger, more hegemonic power. By creating temporary chains of mutual interest, disparate groups can form a broad coalition of significant power despite differences that would usually drive them apart.
Example: In a protest movement, environmental activists, labor unions, and racial justice groups might unite under the shared opposition to corporate exploitation, even though their specific goals differ.
Example 2: A group of parents, teachers, and politicians call for textbook change, such as "the math wars" or critical race theory, in which several smaller groups with separate interests form a unity of purpose that dissolves once the goal is achieved.
Example 3: In Marxism, the notion of abolishing class (the particular) demands the emancipation of the entire society (the universal). In such cases, ethnic or religious differences are suppressed (temporarily) for the commonality of purpose.
This term originates from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mauffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategies (1985).
–
–
–
°
Heidegger claims that Freud had to invent the “unconscious” in order to create a causal link between our conscious (thoughtful) actions and our animal urges, which for Freud were principally libidinal and erogenous.
Žižek claims that the unconscious represents “cuts” in the causal continuity: our trauma or PTSD is a division of causality (the trauma breaks our causal understanding). This requires a fantasy to stitch continuity back together so we may continue in the world.
The insight is to realize that the “disturbed” need a fantasy, a story. (And we are all disturbed.) However, the libidinal animal spirit has always offered a “normal” remapping of trauma, but it fell out of fashion.
The fantasy is the unconscious. Freud provided a name and categorization (psychologizing) that provides a quasi-scientific framework. This mythic scaffolding allows us to normalize the premodern human condition (animalism) in a modern (rational) way.
°
You cannot grieve constantly, consistently: your mind will slip into distraction or action.
Yet, as you purposefully walk across the room, you feel a nagging sensation that you have forgotten something. And so, you pick up your grief again and carry it for a while.
