(2023sep28) whiteboard thread
I think the main big picture is the question of wretchedness in our modern times. I roughly define wretchedness as a complex of despair, emotional and muscular tension, knottedness. It’s also simultaneously ‘a way of seeing’ (c/f Berger).
For most of us, this is intermediated by our modern media landscape. a person who is wretched will basically end up using their devices (universal cursed artifact) to self-harm. Specifics of causality, blame, responsibility are murky.
Some of us have the opposite experience. we’re skilled chaos surfers who possess a strong sense of sovereignty, social skills, media savvy, vocab, and we’re able to use our cursed artifacts to luckmaxx: find friends, build relationships, enjoy economic opportunity, upside, etc.
a substantial part of my body of work so far has been me self-reporting my own journey through this mess, and a lot of what I’m trying to do is to help others with it – but even that is a little tricksy, I think it’s best done obliquely, indirectly. A question that comes up is: how do you make yourself (and others) comfortable when the context is collapsing?
(side thread here about how modernity has brought about wave after wave of context collapse via technological n cultural advancements, both good and bad).
The future will only get more chaotic and so chaos-surfing is going to be an increasingly important skill. A lot of this stuff is me restating things that others have been saying for decades, centuries. Here’s McLuhan quoting Pius 12 ~ saying we gotta be stronger than the 📱: Pope Pius XII in 1950: “…the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part of the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”
here’s some of the essence of chaos-surfing in relation to reality not having fixed frames – this stuff was hard even before smartphones: feynman chaos
what Jung is talking about here re: de-individualised persons is what I’m talking about re: sovereignty, self-sense. people who are drowning in chaos will cling on to tyrannical order in desperation
my first two books address major parts of the puzzle– still trying to condense them into ~3k word essays– and/but there are still missing pieces re: culture and media. Bunch of book overviews I wanna do. Been feeling a lil guilty for taking so long with it but so it goes
feel like part of why I’m taking so long is I haven’t clarified for myself what I personally mean when I want to talk about culture and media. they’re such broad and abstract concepts in mainstream parlance. Let’s try…
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[3:39 PM, 5/21/2023] @visakanv: have i told you about the blessed/wretched thing? it’s another one of my long-stewing pots. its tied up with a lot of other things. this sense that, in mainstream pop psychology, and in ways that’s hard for anybody to escape, people have this sense that someone is either blessed or wretched. most people are both at the same time to varying degrees in different contexts/domains, and celebrities/public figures get put through media narrative cycles. the wild thing is how this is like a full-stack theatre production that runs through a person’s inner psyche and affects their self-belief, self-image, sense of agency. a good parent, boss, spouse, etc set of relationships is a clear blessing. and people who grow up without that can spend their whole lives feeling wretched, chernow’s bio of alexander hamilton seems to suggest he felt that way
like abandoned by god, abandoned by the community, never truly accepted. a lot of insults etc can be interpreted as “you’re so wretched” with a couple of layers of disguise. like say someone says “they’re so insecure lol”. well why are they insecure? they had a shitty childhood? were bullied? etc? is that their fault? nobody has the patience/time to lay out the entire web of causality. another way of framing all of this is that society is very victim-blamey, even if each individual says “we shouldn’t blame victims”. and so victims are quite ‘right’ (or rather it’s understandable why they would be) afraid to reveal weakness, having been bullied, etc because the dominant dangerous question is “what did you to do deserve that”. when the answer can often be “nothing, life can just be shitty for no reason”
not sure where i’m going with this exactly. part of it is realizing we should be careful to withhold/suspend judgement where we can, be kinder, etc. but there’s something crazy about it. about very old culturally-ingrained assumptions about wealth and power and deservedness, it’s baked into language itself. there’s a bit in campbell’s hero’s journey where he talks about old folklore where people say things like “oh he’s smart/good/kind because he’s a prince” or something. and it kinda makes sense that in feudal contexts, only a prince had the luxury of being that. while all the peasants were basically in terrible poverty conditions, with the associated mindsets
a lot of our received wisdom about being good/kind etc social norm stuff is so context-dependent. but knowing that doesn’t change the fact that uh, you should watch your stuff when you’re in an unsafe neighborhood. doesn’t kill you any less if you get stabbed by a poor wretched junkie
i remember once i was doing a staycation at… shangri la hotel i think. and i was struck by how lovely the environment was, all these wealthy people being polite and civil, their children playing etc. and i felt a bit mad lol. like contrasting that with how noisy and abrasive heartland environments can be. and all of this is in singapore which is itself a privileged bubble in the world. and like with my clients for eg – my best clients are wealthy and happy to pay $$$ and they’re so nice. and i think back to when i used to get into the most stupid shitfights with other broke mfs. i guess i want to write about this entire thing in a way that tells the truth but also challenges people to be kind and try to do better. and hopefully we can bring more and more people into healthy high functioning bubbles
tbc
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Vibes
Some people have bad vibes, and they know it, and they want to have better vibes. Part of the solution, simplistically, looks something like “immersion in good vibes”.
But not everyone with good vibes is a good vibe mechanic/doctor/therapist. a person with bad vibes can ruin some fragile good vibes. everyone kinda knows this. a lot of the lifecycle of scenes is basically “we accumulated too much bad vibes and don’t know how to handle it so we’re basically filing for vibe bankruptcy.”
So the problem statement becomes something like, “how do we immerse a bad viber in good vibes without causing unwanted/unnecessary disruption to wider vibes?” – and the answer here seems to be something like a containment process. there’s a whole ecology to it. you need some people who are able to identify what the badviber needs…
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