I explain how we can appreciate the nuances by incorporating in our thinking the notion that there is no pure instantiation of good or evil. All that we are dealing with is in a state of admixture. What makes something “good” or “bad” is a matter of degree, relative to an inertial frame of reference.

Couched in those terms, I discuss the mechanics of conflict: it breaks a given status quo. As such, it has in it the potential to undo a given state of affairs which, in turn, may give way to something new.

By interpreting the world through its nuances, we move from the mode of judging to the mode of describing and of adapting accordingly. There is no opt-out from the things we do not like in this world.

As part of the presentation, I elaborate on why the Greeks think that the concept of “god of war” is appropriately descriptive. Though I also note that this is not a religious matter, but a view to how we make sense of phenomena.

The first big topic is about the distinction of “street smart” versus “book smart”. I explain how the experiences of one’s life influence or condition their perspective. In this context, I introduce the idea of basic powers, which I mention again in various parts of the video, as I connect the dots.

The second is the distribution of competences in society and how people are different. This relates to how some tend to be more interested in spirituality than others. I note how this is a fact of life. I explain, in this regard, how elitism is misguided.

The third issue is about personal responsibility and the more general idea of embodying the change you wish to see. I provide relevant examples.

The fourth and final point is on giving people what they need, though not necessarily what they want. I elaborate at length, while drawing connections to other thoughts I expressed.

Suddenly, a white wolf came out of the nearby forest. Nobody knows where it lived before. Its name was “Argie”. Argie had no friends and was feeling lonely. It noticed the sheep having fun and went close. Argie wanted some company.

The sheep saw Argie in its white coat and thought it was one of them. Once they looked closely, they started laughing. “You are such a strange sheep!” they noted while pointing out Argie’s thin hair and sharp teeth. “How can you even chew on vegetables with those fangs?”, they said and kept laughing.

“No-one wants to play with me”, thought Argie. “They are right: I should become less strange” was its plan. And so the white wolf sat in a corner, carefully observing the behaviour of the sheep. “I will learn to do what they do and then I can make friends with them!”, concluded Argie.

The sheep minded their own business. Some would mock Argie, while others would simply ignore it. Argie had a clear idea of what to do. It started to copy the moves of the sheep. Its skills caught the attention of the flock. “Argie, you are such a good dancer!” observed some of the sheep. The others nodded in agreement and they all started playing together. Argie thus joined the flock and grew in popularity among the sheep.

The happy days would not last. Problems started to arise. Argie could still not become a sheep, no matter how hard it tried. Whenever they would eat, Argie would finish its meal much faster than the others. “Why are you so quick to gobble up the grass?” the sheep would wonder. “You do not eat like us” they would add.

Sometimes what is not spoken is more important than what we hear. Argie got the point behind those words and learnt to eat slowly. It would always chew on something to look more like the sheep. The charade worked for a little while. None in the flock made any comment about Argie’s apparent differences.

There was more trouble though. Argie moved so much faster than the others. It could twist and turn rapidly. Whenever the sheep would gather to play a game of chase, Argie would always be the winner. “You keep winning; you must be a cheater!” argued the sheep and decided not to play with Argie anymore.

The white wolf was sad. No matter what it did, it could not be like the others. “Fine, I will stop cheating”, shouted Argie, “please forgive me and I will play fairly from now on!”. The sheep believed in those words and let Argie join them for another game of chase. This was the first time Argie had ever lost. It kept losing just to not raise any suspicions.

When the sheep got bored of this game, they switched to play some hide-and-seek. Argie forgot about the fact that its sense of smell was far sharper than that of the sheep. When it was its turn to seek the sheep in hiding, Argie did it with ease: it could trace everybody with precision. The sheep were so frustrated to always be on the losing side and kept calling Argie a fraud.

Again, Argie admitted to foul conduct, even though it had not done anything wrong. Pretending to not be able to follow its scent, Argie lost in all the remaining rounds of hide-and-seek. The sheep were happy to not have any cheaters among their ranks. “Finally, we have fair competition because we do not always get the same winner” was their shared opinion.

Next up was tug-of-war. The white wolf got excited about this new game and forgot it was much stronger than the other members of the flock. The same thing happened: Argie won easily and the sheep protested angrily. “You are a lost cause and cannot redeem yourself; you will always be a cheater”, said the sheep in frustration.

Argie stood alone by the side and cried. “I will never be like them” it said. “Hiding all the time is not fun anymore”, it added, “I cannot keep up the appearances”. And so the white wolf left the flock. It went back to the forest whence it came.

The years went by. Argie never returned. It understood that it cannot integrate with the flock. Its destiny is to roam the wilds forever. This is what wolves do, whether they like it or not. Some believe Argie is still out there, all alone in the woods. Others hope it joined a pack of wolves and lived happily ever after with its kind. What do you think happened to the white wolf?

Go play now. Maybe one day you too will observe that your clumsy friends are just different than you. What you do effortlessly, they cannot do well. And what is natural to them is very hard for you. Accept who everybody is and everything shall be fine. Otherwise, you or them will always feel unfairly treated. Whatever you do, though, remember that none can escape their nature: not you, not the sheep, not Argie.

Why is it so bright? The room is more spacious than before. Did I renovate it last evening? That would explain why I am not used to the increased levels of light. The walls are made out of glass. The entire house is. How? I have no memory of changing my place outright. What I have been doing is incremental refinements. Nothing makes sense here. Yet it feels oddly familiar. Unconventional, yes, albeit austere in its presentation. Were I to draw a design with such a style, I would do it this way. But I did not. Yesterday was just another day of me carrying out my routines. It was the same as the day before and so on as far I can recall. Life is uneventful in these parts. Years go by and all I can say is “more of the same.” The paths I take during my walks are the ones I always tread. The activities I engage in are equally predictable. Even the reply I give to questions about my latest news is increasingly formulaic: “things are stable and I am happy” followed by a smile.

Where we are is the result of where we have been. It is the inevitable combined cumulative effect of our choices and the happenstances we have been subject to. There is no means of undoing what has transpired. A change of direction is the second best alternative. It is what gives us hope and inspires us to try again. Perhaps to be someplace else or to become another, even if only marginally so. If we observe our behaviour we can learn from it and work on the parts we do not like. Yet we do not get to choose what we bear witness to. Equipped with self-awareness, we explore the depths of our soul, unearthing rare minerals, as it were, and discovering unspoken wealth. In our naivety, we have no idea what kind of monsters lurk in the depths. The discovery of whatever glitters incentivises us to continue and to ignore the risks. There always are limits though. Those who defy them suffer the consequences of their inability or unwillingness to stop when they ought to. They should have paid attention to the signs including the most obvious one of the ferocious three-headed hound. Some never do, perhaps because only those who have the mental fortitude to push the boundaries ever get to figure out where those are. We have to avoid digging too deep into our psyche for there lies an enriching world that is not ours; a world whose prevailing conditions grow increasingly inimical to our presence the deeper we reach; a world that is so close to us yet decisively otherworldly; a world that will make us miserable. To know yourself too much is to have seen the parts of it you cannot undo. Hope is the first casualty.

Avoid some preoccupations to be able to channel your energy to the activities you care about the most, but do not eliminate them from your life. Always do something. Create situations that require upkeep and commit to their maintenance. Tend to them with care and return to them with unmistakable regularity. Idleness gives us enough time to direct our focus inward, since nothing out there calls for it. If we are lucky, we will not go too far to where the unspoken horrors dwell and only take back with us some of the wealth available there. Yet we have no map of this domain, no clear idea of where the borders lie. Some adventurers are concealed in the most conspicuous of places. It is not their body that does the exploring, but their heart which longs for states of affairs that differ from the ones they are immersed in. The most competent and daring among them will go farther than the furthest edges. They will only be brought back to us by whatever commitments still bind them to this place. It is those activities we all need to ultimately have a reason to stick around while we can.

A man of ideas is a man who hides in the open. When others find him, he directs their attention to the corpus of theories he has elaborated on and keeps them preoccupied with matters of thought. His fallback plan once the discussion becomes personal is to put up that familiar smile and utter the words “same as usual; good!” Nobody would be interested enough to ask about the details of what appears to be a dull life. Such is the assumption. Hiding like this is a form of wanting to be discovered, except it is more eclectic than merely seeking attention. There is a filter designed to keep the indecisive ones out. Only those who are keen on finding the innermost self will bother to circumvent whatever obstacles they encounter. The rest will not consider it worth their time.

Why would anyone go through the travails? Do those culminate in some supremely valuable reward? Or is the person in hiding mistaken as they labour under the delusion that there is something special about them? Some of us think we hold a treasure deep inside and our unspoken wish is that a person worthy enough will eventually find it. The strategy is to wait indefinitely for that adventurer who will not only look into their own depths but into ours as well. Every so often we peek through the window to check if anybody is approaching. The dirt roads are always quiet, while the boisterous avenues are never about us. With no-one in sight, we go back to playing our waiting game. The most valuable resource we can expend is our moments. To give you my undivided attention is to shower you with that which I have the least of. There is no substitute for it, no memento nor gift that will ever be as worthy. Whomever spends their vitality searching for you is essentially making a sacrifice. Their effort is proof of their commitment. Alas, time is not kind to those who live in waiting. It relentlessly defaces everything that finds currency in our world. Whatever worth we think we have is, at best, short-lived and less important than we make it out to be. If we guard it too well, we all but guarantee it goes to waste.

We can fear success just as much as failure. This happens when we grow accustomed to the state of our inertia. To wait is to not take the initiative and to hope that the world will deliver all we think we deserve. The uneventful life is at once a regret and an achievement of the highest order; the regret of not having tried to introduce a change; the achievement of tolerating, indeed befriending, boredom. For those accustomed to waiting, the challenge is whether their regret remains such or turns into guilt and then despair. All that happens is a matter of timing, of being in the right place at the right time. Such is the intersection of choice and fortune which inevitably opens up some possibilities while ruling out others. Certain places are simply too far away even if they can be conceived of as the “right” ones for us. We will not be there when it matters. Patience cannot hold back the effects of time. Some gaps are unbridgeable. Whenever we cannot recognise them, a couple of decades apart will help us see how far off the mark our target is. The fear of success grips us each time we desire to break the cycle but cannot muster the courage to try what we understand is necessary. Our potential despair is that we do not know how to get rid of what we have become. We have assumed as our own a version of our selfhood which is content with feeling unfavoured and ignored.

The hidden man who is not prepared to make the requisite changes will probably panic if somebody gets close to his true location. He may have the skills to venture off all alone into the murkiest depths, yet therein lies his weakness and strength: solitude is his only long-term companion. He never had to have a partner in his excursions. Perhaps he never dared to try. To be with another requires that you slow down. Did he never want it though? Or was his adventure nothing but a flight from the attempt? Is each new trip of his but an excuse to not remain still out of a concern that his position has been compromised? When the heart does all the work, the body forgets how it is to act. Success inspires fear just as much as failure because both will upset the status quo. Some belief will be proven wanting, inviting another to take its stead. In remaining hidden so well for so long, the man has turned invisible, which condemns him henceforth to never be discovered. When he figures it out, it will be too late for him to become another.

What am I even thinking? These thoughts are not mine. Just like the very place I am standing in, they have somehow been thrust upon me. Yet I cannot dismiss them as alien. They do feel familiar. Maybe they are manifestations of long suppressed feelings or the inklings of what is to be elucidated. Recollection or premonition? Is there even a difference in a world that never starts and ends? The thoughts do not stop and I am powerless to withhold them.

To be found, to be recognised, to be noticed… all express the same yearning for a connection, for partaking in an experience, for saying nothing as you communicate everything. Forget the grand events. The little things suffice. How nice would it be to observe the birds while resting under the shade of the oak trees! A moment in eternity is enough when it is sincere. Is that too much to ask for? And then, as the sun sets and the nightingales sing, to express heartfelt gratitude for having been there together. At that very place we discovered the space where our separate lives were indistinguishable. To find a fellow traveller requires that you are journeying. Not to the depths though. Stay above ground where the rest are. Some paths converge only to split off into divergent directions again, while others remain united as far as the eye can see. We cannot foretell which will be the road we meet on and end up with: it will all be with the benefit of hindsight. The meeting is more likely to occur if we share the same disposition to roam the open vistas while accepting serendipity. So what if there is nobody there? We keep going. It just has to happen once. Within glass walls there is nothing but stasis. Only museum exhibits are kept there, for every passer by to see but for none of them to touch. Once you escape the room, you can at least tell yourself that you did your part. Will it matter if it comes to nought? You will only know if you try.

As these ideas turn into words, I feel compelled to exit this place. Why would I ever stay in a transparent room? Is this the logical continuation of my eagerness to live in accordance with my precepts? Am I now supposed to prove that hiding in the open is tenable? I am here already so it seems I have no choice in the matter. Let me then suspend my disbelief as to how this came to be and take on the challenge. To find the others. Surely this is not too hard.

Oh, I am naked! Where did I even leave my clothes? There is no furniture in sight. Nothing beside this bed. No sheets. Just a mattress. It too is stripped down to its essentials. Anybody can see me now for who I actually am. There is no more pretending I am not an animal. Or can they? How would they be able to discern the person within the body by observation alone? Is this not how anyone can hide in the open by giving others an impression which ultimately brings to the surface their preconceived notions? The naked ones will be judged, sure, and will be called mean words. Witnesses will all have an opinion about the spectacle. There will be a lot of talking regarding propriety that will engender heated debates. Yet none of it will be about who the person is. All such talk revolves around an avatar, the idol of a human, that which is pictorial and representational in its nature. The specific body then becomes but a proxy for all possible bodies. Despite its quality as a particular, it reveals the universal it partakes of. It is the latter we all discern only to then turn to our own particulars. First impressions can be wrong and thus make for unreliable final conclusions. We know. Though I wonder who cares the most about getting a second chance in this regard. Do we even establish that first contact which creates the conditions for more of them. How will anybody get past the surface level if they have missed that to begin with?

I cannot recognise my surroundings. They are not how I remember them to be. I must have been extra productive yesterday. The whole area is cleared from all vegetation. I also flattened the land it seems. I feel no pain though. None whatsoever. Doing all this with my trusty pickaxe would have surely placed tremendous stress on my muscles. I seem alright and feel at the peak of my strength. At any rate, I have to do something about this situation. Clothes or no clothes, I must work with the information available to me. I am naked in a see-through room. How embarrassing! I need to dress up and figure out where I am. Then prepare for my return to the life I had. I even am fuzzy about that right now. What was it like and what would I even do with it? If the place we are is the result of where we have been, if past actions have led me to this point, then returning to the prior state is surely going to either lead me nowhere I want to be or put me in the same predicament as this one. Scenaria! There are too many of them. I shall act and figure it all out as I go.

What are those cypress trees doing there? They must have been growing for decades. The ones I planted are less than two years old. That trail to their side leads to what appears to be a sports complex. At its other end is a workshop dealing with heavy machinery of some kind. I will head rightward as I can see people playing tennis. It is humiliating to approach them in this condition, but I have no better option. They might know where we are. Maybe they will even be kind enough to offer some garment to a fellow athlete. Even a towel is better than nothing. “Hello folks! I just need the name of this place.” I am speaking as loud as I can. They are absorbed in their game. Seems fun. “Not to bother you. It is not important anyway. Cheers!” Tennis must be an engrossing activity. They both seem to have not noticed me. Probably I need to be more forceful. At least I tried.

Opposite the court is a kiosk. I can discern five lads forming a circle. Whatever it is they are talking about, they will surely spare a few seconds for me. “Good day fellas! I am a tourist visiting your beautiful country. I think I lost my way. Perhaps you can help me get back to my hotel?” They speak in a foreign tongue. I cannot make sense of it. The topic must be too important to them given how animated they are. I will pretend nothing happened. “Oh, silly me! My phone has a maps app. I can be so absentminded sometimes… Not to be a burden though. Bye!” What am I even saying? I carry nothing with me. More importantly though, why is nobody responding?

Third time is the charm. The workshop is probably where I will find some help. The mechanics are good at solving problems and tend to have situational awareness. They will offer me the hints I need to press on with my quest. One of them is working with a battery, while another checks an exhaust pipe. “This is a fine piece of machinery you got there mate. I remember how exhilarating it was to drive my motorcycle to distant lands.” Engineers require focus to do their work properly. I am aware that interrupting them is not nice. Probably not acknowledging me is their way of communicating how busy they are. “Was on my way out. Take care!”

Having not found any answers, I am left where I started. What I have learnt in the meantime is that the people here do not interact with me. I can come up with several reasonable explanations, though none matters. The point is that whatever I do, I have to do it alone, hoping that one of my attempts will produce a different result than what I have been getting. It is all trial and error. Sometimes we withdraw from the world only to find out the world withdrew from us.

4 Whenever you are about to start on some activity, remind yourself what the activity is like. If you go out to bathe, picture what happens at a bathhouse—the people there who splash you or jostle you or talk rudely or steal your things. In this way you will be more prepared to start on the activity, by telling yourself at the outset: “I want to bather, and I also want to keep my will in harmony with nature.” Make this your practice in every activity. Then, if anything happens that gets in the way of your bathing, you will have the following response available: “Well, this was not the only thing I wanted; I also wanted to keep my will in harmony with nature. I shall not do that if I get angry about what is happening.”

At its core, to live in harmony or accordance with nature is to have a bigger picture view of your life and of the cosmic life in general. It is to appreciate the place while being mindful of the space.

The balanced view

In Greece we have a saying that comes to us from antiquity: “nothing bad not intermixed with good” (ουδέν κακόν αμιγές καλού). A liberal translation is “there is no pure evil in this world as everything we find that is bad always has some good mixed into it.” The opposite is also true, namely, that all good things have some bad inherent to them.

This is a worldview of balance. Phenomena are neither good nor bad once considered holistically. The cosmos as such is neutral. Or, when looking at the particulars, the degree of good or bad matters as do the prevailing conditions which together constitute the case at hand.

In our everyday affairs we tend to think of actions in terms of the binary of good and evil. It is how many of our world’s religious precepts are framed. However useful this classification may be for day-to-day events, it is not helpful outside the narrow confines of human institution; of the process of enacting rules by which we regulate our shared experiences.

We may call a tsunami “bad”, for example, due to all the loss it brings about. Though there is also one or more lessons to be learnt about how best to cope with the challenges we face on our planet: where to build settlements, how to monitor relevant indicators in order to improve our preparedness, what is the significance of solidarity in the face of such calamities, and so on. These may be considered “good” once we zoom out from the immediate emotional reaction to the catastrophe.

By the same token, drinking water is “good” for each of us as it sustains our life. Though it is not purely so, as we can actually harm ourselves by drinking too much of it too quickly. That would then make it “bad”. It is no coincidence that the symbol of medicine since antiquity is the venomous snake: the difference between poison and remedy is one of degree.

Thus, the ancient wisdom of the world as admixture readies us for a life of moderation. When so-called “good” things happen, we are content but do not lose sight of how the world works. When the “bad” things occur, we may feel sad though, again, admit that sorrow is not all there is.

Couched in those terms, we may consider the diversity among people. Some will be polite and friendly, other noisy and rude, and others still will seek to harm us. Everything is possible out there and everyone will be different depending on the particularities of their situation. If we expect everybody to be strictly benevolent or malevolent, then we do not recognise what nature teaches us: it is mixed, it is nuanced, it is ever-changing in its particulars.

It is in this spirit that we may consider the Delphic maxim “nothing in excess” (μηδέν άγαν), which would loosely translate as “nothing in deviation [of the middle way].” Whatever we do, we must be of the mind that it can be inwardly corrupted or turned into its opposite if done to a degree that is not appropriate in the given case.

The organic view

In nature things happen when they are meant to. Consider how trees blossom when their spring arrives, bears hibernate during winter, rain drops when there are clouds, and so on. No phenomenon can be decoupled from its fundamentals and, by extension, no event can be independent of the totality of phenomena. The same is true for the human condition, though we may lack that kind of patience in our deeds to see how some eventuality is the result of dynamics that build up over time.

A person may only be ready when the conditions are right. A boy is a man when he is physically mature. A musician can perform skilfully after years of practice. An athlete may compete at the top of their sport when their fitness is optimal. One cannot simply wish for something to happen and it is just made manifest, no matter how much they believe in it: the prerequisites must be satisfied.

This is particularly important for our outlook. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, as outlined in the previous section, by obsessing about a specific outcome, while not considering the propriety of the moment. For example, to tell ourselves “I only want to do THIS in order to be happy and nothing else matters” where “THIS” is the item of our desire. It is narrow-minded because it assumes the object of the wish to be necessarily good: it sees it in a vacuum. As such, it also labours under the belief that it knows more about the case than it actually does, as it has stripped it of its details. And, finally, it is emotionally negatively disposed to the workings of the world which are independent of our plans yet whose eventualities we may ultimately like.

I remember when I was a teenager how all I wanted was to become a professional football (soccer) player. Nothing else mattered to me as a career path and I had what it took in terms of talent and work ethic to realise my dream. An injury combined with the financial situation forced me to quit, which I did not like at the time though eventually grew to appreciate the value of: I took a completely different path that I had not anticipated but which ultimately brought with it fulfilling experiences. In the grand scheme of things, the injury was neither good nor bad. What I learnt in the process is that nature shows us how little we really know about ourselves, our plans, and our ability to make them happen. To become knowledgeable in this regard is the sign of wisdom.

By taking an organic approach to life the way plants grow when they must, we are grounded in the bigger picture view of the world as one of admixture. It then is more likely that we do not get disturbed when our ambitions are not realised, for we have already internalised the relevant lessons and admit to our relative ignorance. What we desire the most may ultimately be what we do not like or indeed need: let the world reveal as much.

In this light, we can think of the Delphic maxim of “certainty is beside ruin” (εγγύα παρά δ’Άτα), which literally means “assurances stand next to Ate (goddess of ruin)”. If we are convinced that we can force things to happen, if we do not pay attention to the prevailing conditions, if we overestimate our ability to enforce our will in the moment, and, if in other words, we do not recognise how our immediate milieu is constituted, we are going to harm ourselves (or others).

The adaptable view

The Greek word for “nature” is “physis” (φύσις) which refers to things that grow. They develop organically, as noted above, and have a life of their own that is couched in terms of the cosmic continuum of life: they are all coexistent and interdependent. To live in accordance with nature, then, is to go with the flow of the prevailing conditions, else to be adaptable. When trees cannot grow directly upward because some obstacle is in their way, they grow sideways, circumventing the problem.

Compare this to the attitude of forcing things to happen, of declaring our wants, and trying to implement them regardless of the prevailing conditions. If the tree insists on only going straight up, then it will perish. Same principle for humans. What would my life be like had I insisted on becoming a footballer and did not show the requisite adaptability to try new things and to ultimately find value in them? I would probably be miserable the whole time, as I would be fighting against forces I could not overcome, never to realise my goal, and never to have the necessary openness to take in what the world was showing me.

In this regard, any specific plan is not worth clinging on to: let whatever transpires happen in its natural life cycle. There can be a general direction of the balanced life, in accordance with the aforementioned, though not of a series of prescribed experiences that necessarily have to unfold within predefined boundaries. This goes for individual projects and relationships. They all come and go.

Adaptability is the flip-side of sustainability, another quality of nature. Things not only happen when they are meant to happen, they also have a cycle that is not self-annulling. If we force things to happen, we will not only fail to meet the prerequisites, but also risk harming ourselves in the process.

Suppose we want to improve our fitness. The sustainable option is to make small changes with regularity, whose cumulative effect will be that of fitness. The unsustainable and likely self-destructive approach is to, say, try to run a long distance at full speed. The stamina is not there, the muscles are not ready. Therein lies injury or even death.

Sustainability makes us think of the bigger picture from a different perspective: that of being committed and patient as well as relaxed. We are not haphazard and opportunistic, nor are we oscillating between the extremes of excitement and disappointment, as we switch from one task to another, one wish to another, without paying attention to the balanced and organic aspects of nature.

Against this backdrop, the Dephic maxim of “know yourself” (γνώθι σεαυτόν) is a reminder that we have to be mindful of who we are in relation to what our immediate surroundings make us be. The self cannot be decontextualised and considered without its environment, for the cosmos is a continuum, where each form of life is in the presence of all the rest of life. Those who does not know who they are will also violate the other two core Delphic maxims that I mentioned previously. To live in harmony with nature is to have those three maxims as the foundation of your conduct.

Returning to the quote from the Enchiridion what Epictetus is telling us is to (i) remember that the world had good and bad things to it so do not get disappointed by having false expectations, (ii) that things happen independent of your volition and you must thus recognise you are not the epicentre of the world, so, do not have false wants, and (iii) that no particular project is necessarily viable at all times, and your ambitions must thus be kept in check while you operate with adaptability.

There is the alarm. A new day begins. It is half past five. The city is coming alive once again. I better get going. Someone might report me if they spot me sleeping here. I slept for about an hour. Not much but enough to give me the requisite energy to walk to the bus station. My ride is leaving in an hour. I must head back to my town and then prepare for the long one-way journey abroad. Well, “abroad” is a figure of speech: I have no permanent residence here either. A migrant is all I am. I have not lived in Western Europe before, though I have worked and cohabited with many individuals from different parts of the continent. We are so much alike.

My bones are ice cold. I cannot think of something more real in this moment. If they ever ask me to swear an oath to the highest being I believe in, it will have to be this. Nobody said the park would be a comfortable place to stay. I had no such false impression. I came here because it was the only option. We never learn the stories of those who end up on the streets. They are just there, withering away at the margins of civilisation. Most do not even pay attention to them, as if they blend into the backdrop, perhaps as some quirky piece of the decor. Some may think these homeless fellows did it to themselves and deserve to live in misery. I have my doubts, even if the brunt of the blame on certain cases falls on the given person. Choice cannot be the sole determinant in a human experience that is contingent on happenstance. There are wars, economic recessions, structural poverty and crime, drugs, epidemics, and ignorance. Personal agency as such is too simplistic of a metric.

I am not homeless, though I have been close to it already. It disheartens me to live like this. There is a part of me that feels ashamed for my financial predicament. “You should be doing better”, I often tell myself. Then I cry, as I have no answer as to how to reverse the downward spiral. I am pushing against the boundaries. What else is there other than to go down the slippery slope of illicit conduct? On the other hand, I understand that issues are systemic and that attributing everything to negligence, or idleness, or lack of creativity, or whatnot, is to blame the victim, at least partially. Apart from disappointment, I am also angry with myself. This is not made manifest as resentment. It is not of a destructive sort. Rather, it is the fuel that drives me forward, to hustle as hard as possible, to persevere with my head held high and to be as resilient as I can.

Visiting the capital was a tough choice. I wanted to join my friends for a last reunion and this was the only way to afford it. I do not own a car. I must rely on public transportation. There is no intercity connection after 9 PM. Nor can I pay for a hotel room. So here I am… I wondered around all night until I could not stay awake anymore. My friends organised the party for me. Everyone is happy about my future prospects and they have all helped me prepare for what is to come. Nicole paid for the plane ticket with her credit card. Bless her. I am bankless and could thus not carry out the online transaction myself. I gave her the money back in cash. Leo gifted me this warm jacket he got a couple of years ago. It looks nice and effective. In exchange, I helped his parents with some renovations they were doing at their house. I do what I can to be helpful, even if it is not much.

The financial meltdown hits the hardest those at the lowest parts of the income distribution. People like me who perform manual labour for a living. Many employers turn the crisis into a business opportunity, by using the economic headwinds as a pretext to erode labour rights with impunity. The government is complicit in this offensive. It is rolling back its expenditure, which leads to a cascade of effects including fewer opportunities for work and a weaker or non-existent social safety net. Meanwhile, prices for basic goods and accommodation remain sky high. Job security is absent, landlords may force tenants out in short notice, and savings are depleted.

In the news they talk about the economy as if it is a realm of reality that is distinct from what happens to people every day. The recession is, in fact, a reconstitution of personal lives. Most are forced to change their routines and to suffer in silence. For me, it has amounted to a crisis of identity. I have realised how the notion of a homeland is not necessarily innocent and how governments will resort to the use of inane patriotic palaver once the age-old policy of bread and circuses becomes untenable. Shameless politicians intensify the jingoistic rhetoric as they rave about some ahistorical glorious past. In their self-righteous, yet utterly pretentious and fabricated, world-view “we” hold the moral high ground that other ostensibly lesser peoples want to take for themselves. Then they start blaming immigrants, refugees, or those mysterious “external actors” for their own policy failures. It happens every time like clockwork.

That is what is unfolding at the macroscopic level. The micro side of this reality takes the form of shallow conventional wisdom in interpersonal matters. Many times I tried to explain the phenomena I am intimately aware of, I got told to “be a man”. There was no thought put into the systemic magnitudes as if those do not exist at all and each of us operates in a vacuum where only their manliness, or whatever, matters. When I asked them politely what exactly did they mean with such an exhortation, they told me to be responsible and tough. I already am responsible. I have been earning my keep since my early teenage years: they simply do not know what they are talking about. Besides, I expect everyone to be mindful of their deeds and to take care of their affairs, to the extent possible. At any rate, the salient point of accountability is not bad, even if it is insufficient. Though the advice to “be tough” is at best naive and at worst disingenuous because it does not find any fault in the perpetrators of injustice. If I say that it is not right for my employer to keep me every day at work for two more hours without extra compensation and to threaten me with dismissal if I dare raise an objection, they reply with the moralistic trope about “real men”.

Patriotism for the masses, machismo for the individuals… A toxic cocktail throughout. Then, when all that shadow play and bellicose language leads to the inevitable armed conflicts, people like me who are physically fit and cannot afford to relocate to some haven will receive a formal letter calling them to the front lines. The authorities will be appealing to each person’s sense of duty: “the nation needs you” becomes the prevailing narrative. I would be willing to fight tooth and nail for a country that is there for us when we need it. That is an honourable cause. But not for this. To be marginalised, ridiculed, and then converted into cannon fodder. A nation that does not value us and only treats us as expendable matter is not one I will ever defend. No.

The economic downturn has been enlightening in this regard. I have learnt more about the world and understood subtle yet crucial points that formal education blithely ignores. Still, I cannot avoid the fact that these are the prevailing conditions and my power to affect them ranges from limited to none. Even joining a mass protest with some trade union is a luxury when I cannot afford to not get paid for that day. It thus becomes a personal matter. Precarity is a condition that extends far beyond household economics. I feel unsafe every moment of the day. It engenders in me a visceral fear of imminent catastrophe. One tiny misstep or some everyday event like a small accident that sidelines me for a couple of weeks and I am on the streets or in prison. This is life on the precipice; a life where my availability is the only force that guarantees my continued presence. Even if I were the toughest person physically and mentally, I know that I would still not be robust to the slightest shock. What disempowers me the most though is the feeling that I am trying as hard as I can. When I work two jobs, when I do not respond to my abusive employer because I absolutely need the paycheck, when I count the pennies at the end of the week to buy a loaf of bread… when I do all this while living in a basement, I know that I am being honest with myself regarding the effort I put in. This is not a rationalisation to explain away my laziness or whatever. I am trying as best I can, but it is not enough. It breaks my heart.

I would normally not have joined my friends at the party last night. I could have saved the money I spent to get here and then at the restaurant. Those meals make me uncomfortable with how much they cost. 30 euro may not be a lot in absolute terms, though it is a sum well above the rates I am used to. Whenever I buy groceries, I check the price of everything and only pick the essentials. It makes it hard for me to enjoy the food when I know that the cost of one serving would cover the needs of an entire week, if spent more diligently. Still, I could not let this mental block deny me the chance to see my friends for the last time. I have not been as close to them as I would have liked, though they matter to me. There were many instances when I turned down their offer to join them on a trip to the countryside or a night out. Such a lifestyle has not been financially viable for me, but I still feel guilty about not doing as much as I should. Maybe I am wrong in this outlook, as it is burdensome on my conscience, though I know that it is one thing to consider something rationally and another to embed it in my habits.

The people who are close to me remind me that it is not all doom and gloom. We can still help each other out in overcoming the challenges. I want to reach a point where I never prioritise another task over spending time with friends and family. It is not about being wealthy, but having a modicum of stability. I would then make room in my daily agenda for ample sociability, to tend to the needs of those I care about and to meet others that can enrich my life. I may then figure out what sort of activities are within my budget, but I will not suffer through this agony of radical uncertainty. Community is the antidote for the emotional impact of precarity. It is the closest thing to a panacea that I know of, however imperfect it may be. The connections between people combined with their proximity and availability form the milieu that lets each of them operate with a greater sense of safety. When I am in that environment, I trust that there will be others around to join me at the kitchen table, spend time with me without having any ulterior motives, hold me accountable if I say something inconsiderate or act recklessly…

Community is all about having faith in people. This is a quality I often lacked, as I was too absorbed in my own troubles. Even though I was in a social setting, I had no community because I did not have the right mindset and accompanying disposition to be part of a group. Faith and trust come about organically through continuous exposure to each other and with shared activities. I think back to my days as a child when all of us in the neighbourhood would play football until nighttime. Most of us did not own a ball. We would instead visit the doctor’s house and ask if our friend there could come play with us. If he was studying and could not attend right away, his mother would offer us the ball. There was an ethos of sharing resources and expressing solidarity towards each other. I cannot recall a single case where the response was “go get your own ball”. That would have ran counter to the very worldview of our society. There is an implicit commitment to personal responsibility even in such a communal context, which is that each member of the group does not abuse the commons and that every one lives in accordance with the same norms. It is all about fair play.

Migrants who are uprooted in one way or another cannot easily recreate this social reality, though it still happens in multicultural countries: individuals tend to cluster in places where more of their kin is located. I think this is the side of tribalism that is benign. The key is to not treat it as a closed club. Exclusivity combined with a sense of superiority is what inwardly corrupts the propensity of humans to congregate. I can tell that I am missing this from my life and I know that it is not a yearning to pick sides in some grand “us versus them” confrontation. The need for others is not in contradiction with the capacity of an individual to improve their self. Only if I am a better version of myself can I be of service to others. It means that I try to reach a position of relative peace where I can provide for those I care about. If I am struggling to survive, then I cannot satisfy anybody’s needs as I will be putting my survival in jeopardy. Nobody is better off in such a scenario. It also implies that I learn more about the differences between people, tolerate diversity, show compassion, be wise in what I say and how I communicate, and remain open-minded.

Communities are unlike clubs. The latter form around some common belief or activity. They are more homogeneous in that regard. In a wider social setting, there are individuals with different traits and trajectories. I do not need everybody to be a replica of me in appreciating the same things I do. Each is their own person and I have the attitude to learn more about them and be amazed by the bottomless potential of this world. The mind requires minds to discover the cosmos. The more varied those are, the richer the experience will be. We all have inherent to us a need to make connections, be it with other humans or life at-large. Being too inward looking and selfish is thus a recipe for loneliness or sociopathy. It will either be ruinous long-term for the person that experiences loneliness or disastrous for everyone else who has the misfortune to be in the sociopath’s way.

The bus is here. Not much else remains for me to do here. I had a good time at the party, despite struggling against those money-related inhibitions. I know I will probably not meet my friends in the foreseeable future, even though I saluted them with a “see you soon”. This is a déjà vu of what happened all those years ago when I had to leave my place of birth. I have always wanted to rejoin my mates, but I could not. How are they doing? Did any of them make a family? How is it to have kids? I do not know anything about them and it saddens me how things turned out. There is no fixing the past though. All I can do is learn from what has transpired and apply those lessons to the present at the earliest opportunity.

Julie asked me why I was not especially enthusiastic last night. “You are going to a better place”, she exclaimed. There is some truth to that, in the sense that I will be earning more than the minimum wage for the first time in my life. Though it also means that I am once again making a sacrifice out of necessity. The people I care about will not be with me. I am yet again starting from scratch as a stranger. It is as if I enjoy being a riddle, an unknown quantity, a mystery figure that remains disengaged from the fray of the action. This is not who I am. Will I ever see Julie’s pale face and grey eyes? Will we have the opportunity to sit together again at the cafeteria and talk for hours on end about the topics of our mutual interest? There is the written word, yes, and I can text them. It is not the same though. I do not feel anything special when I read a message. I cannot sense my correspondent’s intent, I cannot feel their warmth. There is no human connection there.

I have learnt to go with the flow and adapt to evolving circumstances. I will likely benefit from what is to come. All I can do now is hope that the conditions will one day be favourable to set my base somewhere. All this toil is pointless if there is none out there to share its fruits with. Like when I was a child, I want the people and the ball to play some football. My aspiration is for a day when I will not be building on shifting sands. I shall then do my best to nurture a community that I am a part of. I am ready to put my faith in others. I do not know how or with whom, but I will try in earnest.

May everybody here fare well. They know I love them even though I never told them.

“Veronica! Go to your home, dear. It is already twenty minutes past your shift.” I see her smiling, as if to remind me of her previous answer. She already said that she will stay a bit longer to help me wrap up the party. What she does not realise is that this will go on for at least another hour. I hope she is up for it. At any rate, I appreciate her camaraderie. Let her do as she wishes.

My colleagues are a hard-working bunch. I would run through a brick wall to defend them. Our bonds are strong and we show solidarity towards each other. Though this is not how they were introduced to me by the director. His words were unflattering. “They put in the minimum amount of effort and never waste an opportunity to fool around. Their heart is not into it”, he remarked. I could sense a racist undertone, as he did not say the same thing for the locals who are employed in the other departments of the hotel. How likely is it that all the lazy ones ended up working in the same place and are all of different nationalities?

People will change their behaviour based on their social milieu. I have noticed this phenomenon everywhere I have been, from school, to extracurricular activities, and the various jobs I have done. It is up to the leading figures to instil a culture of excellence which, to me, goes hand-in-hand with being generous and a team player: be fair to everyone, remember that you are not above the rules, and let your deeds set the standard. I never tell anyone what the desired level of performance is. Instead, I am the living embodiment of it. When I am working, I do not try to cheat or pretend that I am trying. I do everything properly, to the best of my abilities. And when it is time for a break, I relax, satisfied with the effort I am putting in.

I am the head bartender. This is a seaside hotel by the harbour. It hosts thousands of tourists throughout the season. It has three pools, two restaurants, a beach bar, a pool bar, and a terrace bar, which is this place I manage and where most of the alcohol is sold. I have worked at this establishment in years prior, though I used to do only morning shifts. I was thus eased into the role, learning all the requisite skills without assuming too much responsibility too quickly.

I am held accountable for everything that happens to the terrace bar. It only operates in the evenings. We do not prepare milkshakes here, nor do we have the brassware to brew traditional style coffee the way they do down at the pool. Guests are expected to be well dressed and to enjoy their night as they listen to our live music. The animators who put up the show are a wonderful group of talented people from around the world. French, Brazilian, Angolan, Bulgarian… They consist of many nationalities and I have learnt many things from them. Capoeira looks cool, for example, but I will need a community around it to appreciate its profundity. Doing it on my own will only be a simulacrum of the real thing.

My duty is to make sure that everything is in order here. I am entrusted with the keys, control the cashier and report to the accounting department, fill in the forms for the requisition of supplies, and make sure everybody fulfils their duties while also enjoying equal rights. I coordinate with my colleagues to keep the fridges full, ensure that we have clean glasses at all times, maintain tidiness behind the bar, and serve drinks. Because of all these, I am the first to come, last to go. And I take my role seriously.

This has been an extra long day. There was a wedding with over two thousand guests. Now we are at the tail end of the wedding party. On paper, they should have left an hour ago. But here we are, ready to prepare more drinks. My experience tells me that we will stay open at least until 3 AM, two hours more than our usual shift. Papers only matter when you are in a position of strength. Ordinary workers either accept the working conditions as those arise or risk being dismissed at the earliest opportunity. We are expendable. There is always someone ready to take the job. Maybe the more competent labourers are harder to replace, though the dynamic is the same for everybody.

My shift normally starts at 4 PM and ends at 1 AM, though today I am on a double shift. I arrived at nine in the morning to set up the tables with the champagne and then to serve the drinks. The wedding ceremony was at noon. Time flies when you are having a good time. It is not busy right now. I have prepared only a couple of cocktails in the past hour and Veronica served one table. The guests are tired and worn down by the countless beverages they have had. I know I can handle it on my own from now on. It was half past eight when I left my apartment. I do not feel tired because of all the adrenaline. Though I know I am not unbreakable. All this work does take a toll on me. I will need to rest as much as possible until my next shift which, thankfully, is back to my usual afternoon schedule.

Here is this girl again… Now she has brought the groom along with her. These people do not know when to quit. “The lady asked you for a drink and you refused to serve her. Why’s that, son?” Such are his words as he struggles to maintain his balance. “Your friend is clearly pissed, my man, and I will not poison her with any more piña colada. She should go to bed now. Just look at her and show responsibility!” I appeal to his common sense. That girl has had about half a bottle of rum, plus the extras, and she clearly cannot tolerate any more of it.

I get these encounters from time to time. People may be aware of what they ask, but they do not necessarily have the clarity to discern what they need. This is one of those cases where the person’s desire runs counter to their immediate wellness. I have witnessed a man die from liver failure and I will not let that happen on my watch. This woman is at risk of serious damage if she continues with such unbridled habits.

Alcohol consumption is deeply ingrained in our culture as a form of socialisation. A couple of drinks can loosen you up and make you enjoy the company better. This is probably because it lowers your self awareness and thus focuses your mind on the relatively fewer functions you can still do well. The less we think about our self in a social setting, the more easygoing we tend to be. But there is a fine line between relaxing a person’s social reflexes and giving them the tools to forgo control of themselves. The latter is usually what happens in these situations as people do not know when to stop. If your friends are still drinking, you do it too. The cycle invigorates itself. Some will be more talkative while intoxicated but otherwise will not become an immediate threat to anyone but themselves. Whereas those who are more assertive may get dangerous. It is such a tricky situation to be in. Thankfully, we have had no instance of violence at the party. They are just too drunk to string together more than a few coherent thoughts.

It seems Veronica is not the only one around. I guess my stubbornness is contagious… “Hey, Andy! You are still around, big guy? I told you to go home already. I can tell you are knackered.” This is a special event. My colleagues have all shown extraordinary commitment even though it was not asked of them to do more than usual. I appreciate it. “Come here, mate”, I urge him. “Is there anyone you fancy at the party? I will call them here.” I gently turn his attention towards the animation crew. He smiles and is blushing. Here is this strong man with an innocent heart. Such an endearing moment! “Fine, I am teasing you”, I reassure him as I pat his back. “You can leave now. I will take care of the rest. Remember to take it easy. No problem; no stress!” I take out a bottle of water from the fridge and pass it to him. “Be careful and leave some for the rest of us, okay?”

The animators are packing up. They will be gone in ten minutes or so. I see Veronica just standing there, waiting to take an order. I think it is over now. I wave at her. She notices me and walks towards me. “Since you are not leaving on your own, I will have to figure out an alternative. We will shut down everything together. What do you think?” She is quick to respond with a reassuring “okay”. We count the number of guests and take out as many water bottles from the fringe. Then I make the announcement. “We are closing shop folks. There is a bottle of water for each of you. All numbers win!”

Veronica helps me tidy up the place and pull down the shutters. “Thank you! I respect your ethos. Good night and see you tomorrow”, I tell her. “Bye”, she says and leaves. Her room is ten minutes on foot from here. My relationship with all my colleagues is friendly yet clearly professional. I never ask anything about their private affairs and know very little about them in general. In return, they know nothing about my background and life outside of the current setting. This is how I prefer it. Having done seasonal jobs before, I am aware that we all come and go. The ones here are immigrants like myself. I will probably not see them again once the season is over. I thus prefer not to grow attached to anyone because it will hurt me when our paths diverge.

I recall how I befriended a tourist girl when I was twelve. Tania was her name. Our friendship lasted a grand total of four days, though it felt like we had known each other for an eternity. We were just playing around and talking. “I don’t speak England very best”, was among the first things I told her, and then laughed out loud. She smiled back, so I guess she found it charming. Formulaic pickup lines are either a recipe for disaster or the conduit to a superficial affair. You have to be your true self and behave casually. It also helps you not to stereotype people and think they must respond in this or that standard way. Let yourself be surprised. These are insights I have developed over time. Back then I was just a kid with a childish demeanour—which was fantastic!

There was this coin-op machine with a Pacman game installed. Tania would consistently beat my high score. My excuse was that the game is punishing me for giving it smaller coins. “This Pacman dude has taken all my money”, I exclaimed. “And I suspect he likes you more!” Again, I was being facetious. Only one type of coin could operate the machine. The day she left with her parents we both cried. It taught me how we can be close to someone when we are authentic. We do not need to know them for years. This is why I am reluctant to have a repeat scenario with any of the people I meet here. They will leave in a few weeks. I am sure they are fine and we would have a good time together, but I am not willing to suffer again. Maybe one day I will realise my folly and internalise the notion that nothing lasts forever, anyway. It is not about the duration, but the quality. I might grow to appreciate things while they are, for as long as they occur. But I am not there yet. I still labour under the illusion that I will build connections that last a lifetime and must thus avoid the ephemeral ones.

There is a part of me that knows this is a mistake. I do not regret the time I spent with Tania. The fact it was a brief encounter is irrelevant. Perhaps it was even better this way. Though I cannot make a case for the counterfactual. It does not matter if we know something at the rational level. I can recite all the sound advice I have heard, but it has no consequence in my life if I do not implement it. It is not our claims that matter, but our actions. This is how you understand a person: check their behaviour. There is a hard-to-bridge chasm between theory and practice. We have to apply whatever precepts continuously to eventually embed them in our conduct. I can, for example, have a friendly chat with Veronica. It is easy to do and there are plenty of opportunities each day. Though I prefer to keep it professional, perhaps as an excuse to cling to my old ways. Undoing established routines takes time and requires courage; courage you must muster to step out of your comfort zone. Only then will you render yourself available to new opportunities. This might be the default outlook of my self in his thirties if I start putting in the effort. But I am not there yet.

Most of the guests are heading to their rooms. Everything went smoothly today. It is a major achievement, though we are not going to see any extra money at the end of the month. The tips are too few to matter. They are about the same as usual. The executives will receive a handsome bonus for the wedding. It is always the same and I know it is not fair. Sure, they did their part but everything here would easily fall apart if all of us were indeed fooling around. It is well past my shift yet I am not done here. I do it because this is how things should be done. Nobody will reward me though. Integrity is about your quality, not your performance in light of certain incentives. I still have to compile the receipts for the accountants. Then I must write the requisition and file it at the storehouse. It is mind-boggling how much booze we sold. Tomorrow will be more of the same.

I do this job to save money for my studies. I pay all the tuition and living expenses out of my pocket. My parents cannot afford to help me. When the school year starts in October, I will be doing other jobs. The specifics vary, though the everyday interactions with people are broadly similar. I am in good terms with everyone. There have been cases where some middle manager with an inflated ego thought too highly of their role, though I have learnt to mind my business. I do not want to fix anyone and am committed to my goal. I wish to get my degree and then move on to the next phase in my life. I have no clear plan of what that eventuality will look like, though I imagine it will be unlike the current one.

There are people who have their aspirations sorted out from an early age and do not deviate from them. Good for them, I guess. I remember many of my classmates in secondary education already knowing what they wanted to become as adults. How could they have figured it all out? Was it by their own volition or were they conforming with their parents’ wishes? Maybe my parents did try to nudge me towards a certain direction, but I was too unruly to pay attention. I had to do things my own way, learn from my mistakes, and mature accordingly. What matters is the kind of person you become, not how you started. If you are honest with yourself, are a dependable teammate, and remain down to earth, then you are fine in my view. But if you are some obnoxious egoist who thinks that an academic title or a high social standing makes you special, then I have no respect for you. Sod off!

I do not feel sleepy. I will take a walk by the coast and then head to my friend George’s place to salute him. He runs a family business by the seaside. It is a small club that plays music until the early morning hours. I expect to find him there. But I will savour this moment first. I always take off my shoes when I walk along the beach. The sense of the waves touching my feet engenders in me a uniquely relaxing feeling. It puts me in a contemplative mode. The sea holds the potential for a wide range of experiences. When it is calm, you feel safe. When it is stormy, it reminds you of its latent dangers and of your powerlessness in the face of cosmic processes. At all times, it triggers in you a sense of wonder. How can this all be? Can we learn anything by shifting our attention away from the trivialities of our quotidian affairs towards the nature all around and within us? What will happen to our attitude if we manage to live in accordance with our natural rhythms? I have no answers. All I can do is try and figure something out after decades of commitment.

Humans have sailed the high seas for millennia. Some did it out of necessity. Others out of greed or in pursuit of glory. And others still with an inkling of hope that they would finally discover that which eluded their conscience. There is something that compels us all into action. Such is the constant of our experience. How we rationalise it or explain it as part of our larger lifeworld is another matter altogether. We do have a narrative about it or, at least, a rudimentary way of framing it. Sometimes, we do not change it and let it condition our future decisions. But there are moments when we see through the veil to recognise that there is scope for your remaking, at which point you venture off on the adventure of becoming what effectively is another person. Like the waves that come in contact with my feet, each expression will be different, each case will have a unique constitution in how its factors are arranged, and every one can mean something special. Thinking back to Tania and the potential of liking or loving someone, moments are all we ever get. The sooner we learn to have presence in our present, the lighter our life will be.

Buffalo soldier is playing in the distance. George is a force to be reckoned with. “Hey, big bad wolf! I love the moustache you are rocking.” I say loudly as I approach him by the DJ set. I have known George for a couple of years. We call each other “the mafia lord”. This is a joke that came about as we were remarking that we could be specialising in another profession instead of tourism. “For an intelligent guy like you to be working here, it means you are hiding some lucrative business you do at the docks”, he told me once while smiling through that thick facial hair of his. “I shall funnel the proceeds through this morally unimpeachable establishment of yours”, I added.

With George you have to always assume he is high on some of that good lettuce. Otherwise, he must have fell in the pot with the magic sauce when he was a baby, like Obelix. I never saw him with a frown on his face. Nor have I ever met another person with such a seemingly bottomless enthusiasm for what he enjoys. “You are still awake, you little bastard? Did some mermaid pull you out of your slumber?” I laugh without giving him an answer. I then explain how I am just passing by, but will not be staying for a drink. He inquires in a more serious voice about my day. I give him a thumbnail sketch of it. “Now the real work starts at the docks”, I say in jest and wave him goodbye.

There is no substitute for the experiences you gather through everyday interactions with people. You become acquainted with a diversity of personalities, tastes, and perspectives. This is what makes somebody street smart as opposed to book smart. Ideally, we need both to have a rounded appreciation of the finer points. I believe that I would not pay as much attention to the plurality of our condition if I was to only read about it. When I now think of the differences between us as well as our shared nature, I bring to mind the image of George, Tania, Andy, and Veronica. These are instantiations of a common thread that runs through all of us. I can identify what is constant in the multitude of our interactions, without discounting the elements of individuation therein. I cannot connect emotionally with a book and make jokes with it. There is no hugging or kissing it and feeling your emotions reciprocated. Will I ever stand up for it the way I would for my colleagues? Books will provide you with knowledge that is decoupled from any given person or, at best, introduce you to an idol that you piece together in a controlled fashion.

People here do not believe that I am a “real introvert” because they witness how eloquent and relaxed I am when around people. I do not seek to be with others: I enjoy my time alone, though I also have no problem in the company of someone. What they do not realise is that an introverted person is not necessarily shy. Nor is this personality trait a prerequisite for social anxiety. We feel awkward when we are forced to do something we do not like. We also are uncomfortable when we keep pretending to be someone we are not. I have met many an extrovert who are shy and who struggle to keep a conversation going. Their mistake is to play a script in their head that consists of certain rehearsed steps and which must meet concrete performance targets to qualify as a success. The notion of it being a performance is what undermines their efforts. You do not have to impress the person you fancy with some spectacular demonstration of your skills. Imagine bumping into someone and within the first few sentences you flex about the long articles you write. It feels overdone and insecure. Moreover, it shows you are not focused on the moment and the person in front of you but are too obsessed with yourself.

The understated qualities you have are reserved for those who are interested enough to discover them. Advertising them on your forehead will only make you look silly. The kind of person who is invested in learning more about you is the one you ultimately want to be with long-term. Show the same towards them and go with the flow. If you are uncertain that your truthfulness is not yielding results, then ask whether you will be better off in an alternative scenario. I can only imagine that drunken girl from earlier, who was asking for something that she would deeply regret afterwards. Show faith in the world by not making certain wants unconditional. There are opportunities for fulfilment outside such boundaries. Developing tunnel vision will only make you oblivious to them.

There is something to learn from the little things. I notice Veronica’s patience and kindness. Nothing seems to upset her. I want to be like that myself. Andy’s sheer strength inspires me to stay fit. He never misses a day of training. I wish to do the same. While George’s charisma tells me to not take myself too seriously. Being street smart makes you less prone to project your biases unto others. You will have a fairly accurate frame of reference to assess when something is too far-fetched. Whereas a virtual view of people can skew your expectations accordingly. You might think in terms of stereotypes, like the tired old meme “all men/women are the same”. They are not and this kind of mindset is not helping you deal with the peculiarities of real people. Spend some time out there. Suspend judgement and give others a fair chance. Then you will believe in the results.

Assuming a persona is the worst thing you can do to yourself. Imagine someone falls in love with what you are showing. What do you do next? Do you keep the charade indefinitely? You will probably be exposed sooner or later. Or do you reveal your true colours, which will most probably make the other person feel deceived and ensnared? There is this inane concept among some of the more insecure guys I have met, which prescribes how they should be a “real man” who is strong above all else, keeps his girlfriend/wife at bay by being dominant, and stuff like that. They may include some common sense points, like being responsible, but there is nothing inherently gendered about those—are there no responsible women, for instance? I then think of George and his family of six to quickly realise how preposterous all this role-playing is. George is neither strong nor domineering. He is as sweet as it gets. What I think his wife Yolanda likes about him is the same quality a friend is drawn to: his authenticity and all that is predicated on it.

A friend and a romantic partner are fundamentally the same in this regard. You do not befriend others through conquest. Using brute force will only yield servants or accomplices to some unscrupulous cause, but none of those will care about you as a person. You as a conqueror will remain deeply isolated while being in the midst of your flunkies. This shall be your punishment. Why would you then get a partner that way? And why would you ever want to be a tyrant towards someone you should be loving and receiving love from? It is fine to be indomitable and have the stamina to operate as a one-man-army, though what matters the most is the person you are. Show respect and you will have it reciprocated in spades. Be a bully and you shall always suffer profoundly as a victim of the deep-seated insecurity you never chose to confront. Make no mistake: these are gender-agnostic magnitudes. Let not the appearance of success deceive you. Money or fame are no substitute for peace and the stability it brings.

I guess I am on a roll now. Maybe they should be doing more of those weddings! I am not far from my apartment. This introspection has been benign. I think it paves the way for encounters that require such preparatory work. It all boils down to the “no problem; no stress” outlook I told Andy. There may not be literal mermaids out there, though those mythical creatures are our way of recognising the mysteries this world has in store for us. We cannot pretend to know everything and, above all, we must not assume that our desires, the way we can formulate them in present time, are necessarily the only ones that can yield us what we need. These are my thoughts as I feel the breeze on this peaceful night. The sea is never the same. Even if you have visited every shore, there is always something new to be learnt; something awesome to be experienced; something special to be acquired and something, still, to be left to its own fate. There may come a day, friend, when you meet someone your dreams have not anticipated.

“Amber will arrive soon. Her job is to paint the furniture you have been polishing.” This is how I first learnt of Amber. An expat with a care-free personality who chose to work for fun. Amber’s family were well-off and she grew up having everything she had ever asked for. She was not spoilt though, much to my surprise. Her relaxed demeanour was profound, although I was initially sceptical of it. I suspect she had the kind of experiences that show you how absurd your entitlement is. Or, perhaps, having all your wishes granted teaches you how to be more selective with what you are voicing as a desire… I cannot tell.

I had always had a negative view of rich kids. The ones I met in my formative years were obnoxious and maladjusted. They would ruin our games and make it all about themselves. What Amber taught me through her deeds and outlook is that my impression was wrong: correlation is not causation. Those kids were indeed rich, though it is not necessarily their materially comfortable upbringing that turned them into bullies. It could be that they were neglected by their parents, who were too busy raising the company’s stock instead of spending quality time with their children. Or they had been overly protected as little kids and did not socialise with us common folk, making it hard for them to eventually fit in. It is so easy to pass judgement on someone. It saves us from the hard work of giving them the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging that our information about them is incomplete.

My first encounter with Amber gave me mixed feelings. She appeared friendly though I did not think particularly highly of her. My bias was strong at the time. I mistook her attitude for the kind of ne’er-do-well that is glorified in American TV series. You know, those where the protagonists are only good at spending papa’s money on vanity projects. She seemed arrogant to me, as if she was saying “I work for my entertainment, while you work to survive, losers!” Those were just my thoughts. Amber never behaved with smugness nor mistreated anyone. Yet all I could imagine was how she would reveal her deep-seated contempt for us bread-winners.

One’s prejudices say a lot about their own person. In my case, I was fundamentally ashamed of my financial predicament. Here I was, a metic with no place to go and with no end goal in life. My friend, Craig, took me in at his place, guaranteeing shelter and food over the short-term. I could stay for three or four months, while building up the skills necessary to go my own way in this country. I did start learning the local tongue and was confident that I could make the next step. I proved as much when I did several weekend-long gigs for Peter, the guy who ran a restaurant that served soup to hikers. I made myself useful by doing a lot of the donkey work around the establishment and then as a waiter. Same for my attitude towards Craig. On weekdays I was working for free to renovate some of the rooms at the house. This was my way of paying for the food and accommodation I was receiving.

This was an old building. The walls were badly discoloured, the wallpapers had to be replaced, and the floor needed to be broken and redone. My experience in construction work proved to be a valuable asset. Instead of just doing some minor tasks here and there I ended up assuming most of the workload. I was labouring non-stop from early in the morning until late in the evening. And because I only eat a meal a day, I did not pause for lunch. I did it with alacrity out of a sense of duty towards Craig; duty that was ultimately not reciprocated.

Early on, my friend showed signs of hostility towards me. One day I worked extra hard, wielding heavy machinery for many hours. Holding those power tools exerts a lot of pressure on the body. You almost feel paralysed afterwards. The one I was using was especially tough for the forearms. I did it without complaint, as usual. The added toll on my body meant that I needed plenty of food to recover. Craig told me there is some pasta ready for me upstairs. “You can have it all”, he reassured me. And so I did, devouring what probably was a generous serving for two people. I ended up regretting it, when my friend became passive aggressive about it: “wow, how am I supposed to feed you!”, he exclaimed while insisting it was a joke. It was not meant to trigger laughter though: I noticed more of these kinds of remarks as time went on, but I fainted ignorance. I knew our dynamic was no longer the same. I would leave peacefully.

It is why I had decided to abort this plan and start anew in a place that would allow me to begin from scratch. I had had enough with my pathetic attitude of tacitly seeking the validation of others. Instead of them recognising my hard work, they would routinely underappreciate it and ultimately abuse my strong sense of loyalty towards them. Not anymore! If one person mistreats you, they probably are a bully, but if everybody does it, then you are the problem. Such was the conclusion I had arrived at. This time, I was poised to make things work my own way.

With great sadness I had learnt that circumstances change and people are not who they used to be. The Craig I once knew and spent long hours with was no more. It had been years since we had last met and a lot had happened in the meantime. He got married to a woman he did not fancy, yielding to pressure from his family. I could tell that he was not happy. The natural enthusiasm he had was snuffed out. He had become a husband and father, whose sole concern was to make money; money which they did not really need as they already had plenty, with no outstanding debts whatsoever. I never blamed Craig, though I knew it was over for our friendship. It had reached a natural terminus and an amicable one at that.

This may also be why I did not want to give Amber a fair chance. I needed to withdraw, to not be vulnerable to anyone anymore, to make an exit before I would grow to love someone again. Those who are traumatised develop a sense of ownership towards their wounds. They identify strongly with them and cling on to them without realising it. This was my situation. I was not prepared to let go of who I had become and was thus choosing to remain a victim. Change takes time; time which I did not have back then to share it with those in my midst..

The tickets were booked: I was flying on a Tuesday. I paid for them with money I earned while working for Peter. The restaurant was a busy place. It attracted locals from the surrounding regions as well as tourists from other countries. The hill it was located on was picturesque. There was a river flowing at its base, crossing a dense forest. In the distance, there were taller mountain peaks, which were covered in snow while I was there.

Peter would venture into the forest frequently to collect mushrooms or hunt big game, depending on the season. He was a man of action and seemed to know lots of survival skills. I used to have a negative opinion about hunters, thinking that all they did was recklessly kill wild animals. Peter was conscientious though. He never bragged about his exploits. “I do it because I have to”, he told me once, “nature made it such that we have no choice but to consume life for sustenance.” I was about to interrupt him, to point out that we do have a choice about the types of food we eat, but I let him complete his train of thought: “plant or animal, both are life, and all we do is decide where to draw the lines of what is acceptable.” I remained silent in the face of his wisdom. It is those real-life scenaria you do not learn about in academic circles. Would I be right to pontificate that his rationale was misguided, given that I had never eaten anything non-living myself? What even is non-life? I could not tell. I recognised that plants are living organisms as well. The more we experience in this world, the better we understand that our simplistic model of good versus evil distorts what the reality is. Things are nuanced. Those who are quick to judge are consistently proven to be ignorant.

Peter was a man of discipline and hard work. He expected excellence from his peers, which I admired about him. There was no idle moment at the restaurant. We would start work at six in the morning, when it was still dark outside. Peter had shown me how to wield an axe. I would use it to cut wood for the fireplace. He would prepare the kitchen and then we would both set up the tables. The first guests would arrive at around eleven o’clock. Other than soup, we served cheese, sausage, and fruit, as well as a wide range of beverages. At noon is when it would get really busy. People were hungry and we were running up and down to serve everybody as fast as we could. Peter was a one-man-army: he would prepare the soup and then serve the tables. The work was over once the supplies ran out. Peter was thus confirming he was not greedy. He did not want to toil all day just to earn a little bit extra. The goal was to earn enough to make ends meet, yet still preserve a reasonable work-life balance. This is a rare quality in people. Most will rationalise their obsession with money and overwork themselves to death or chronic illness. Or, if it is not out of obstinacy and inertia, they are forced to do it because of their indebtedness towards some banking institution. At any rate, it is not nice.

I could not put my communication skills to good use at the restaurant. I did not know the language yet, though I had picked up a few words. Some basic expressions and plenty of gesticulating will often suffice. I could make sense of what was being conveyed and was aided by the fact that our menu was straightforward. People are alike regardless of cultural and individual differences. Our evident diversity does not run counter to our shared nature. We value peace, love those close to us, feel connected to some place, and wish to have a good time doing leisurely activities while expressing our self in earnest. If we do not have those, we seek them. Else we suffer in uneasiness. Each of us needs a place to call “home”: a safe space for authentic expression.

I told Peter I was leaving the country. He seemed bewildered, given how nicely I had adapted in such a short time. The locals were kind to me and I was helpful to them, always smiling and eager to improve. “If you stay here, I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities for you. Someone with your work ethic cannot get lost. My door is always open if you ever return.” Those were his words. Perhaps he was right, though I had already made up my mind. “Sometimes we have to take a step back in order to move forward”, I pointed out while thanking him for the trust he had put in me and for the good moments we shared together, busily feeding the mountaineers. We shacked hands and I left, never to see him again.

Life moves on. All we can do is be in the present. There was a week left. I learnt about Amber shortly after I had bought the plane tickets. She arrived at the place the next morning. We had until Monday to finish the renovations. It was an ambitious deadline, though we were confident we would meet it. I introduced myself to Amber without revealing much about my background. I was just the labourer who would handle the heavy duty tasks. She told me about herself and her family. It was then when I learnt that she was not working to earn a living. “Was she fooling around? Is this some peculiar form of irresponsibility?” I wondered in confusion. The model of reality I had was proving to be defective. But I needed to learn more before I could figure out what was amiss.

“Which colour do you prefer? I fancy the pink one. Just imagine it with a touch of gold on the sides. So pretty!” I was not sure why the painter would ask an amateur like myself about such a technical issue. Back then I was of the opinion that only specialists are entitled to an opinion on their subject matter and everyone else should remain silent. I now consider this inaccurate, incorrect, or outright dangerous, depending on the subject. “Pink feels too opinionated to me. I would opt for this faint green instead. It blends nicely with the white colour of the walls. Add that dark blue if you need an accent. They give a more neutral vibe, like the nearby woods.” I had never painted anything, but spoke my mind fearlessly without hedging my statements. She seemed to appreciate it, contrary to my expectation that she would take offence at someone challenging her expertise. In truth, it was not a challenge at all, but a different perspective. Amber was asking the question exactly because of her profound knowledge of the craft: colour is subjective, which makes its truth more complex, though not less truthful.

She ended up implementing my preference, adding her own spin to it. She had brought with her a comprehensive collection of pigments, from reds to magentas, blues, and greens. There was a bit of everything. I saw her match olive green with teal, yellow with turquoise, and some variations on the combination I had suggested. I was impressed when I discovered that she did not use pink at all. She seemed so excited about that colour scheme! It takes courage to change your opinion. Amber showed she had that intellectual capacity. I was expecting her to act like a spoilt child, due to my bias against rich kids, but there she was proving how magnanimous one can be.

The first day of our collaboration, if I may call it such, was largely uneventful. I was handling some power tool and barely uttered a word all day. She was in the other room, painting a piece of furniture. At noon, she interrupted me briefly to ask if I would join her for lunch. I explained my one meal policy and thanked her for the offer. In truth, I was just hiding, protecting those traumas like a prised possession. A couple of hours later, she called me again to ask if I wanted to take a coffee break. I kindly declined it, citing that I was in the process of an extremely demanding task. Again, this was but an excuse: I could put the tool down for thirty minutes and resume what I was doing later. But no, that would make me vulnerable by potentially getting to like this person.

The next day was basically the same. I started work before she had even gotten out of bed and was done long after she had left for dinner. I told her again that I am okay without lunch and how those coffee breaks come at inopportune moments. In hindsight, I have a clear idea of what I was doing, though in the moment I was believing those words. Though there were some cracks in that hardened carapace I had developed and I could begin to sense that something was not right.

The third day went largely the same way, as did the fourth one except for its night. A friend of Amber had ordered pizza dough and all the accompanying ingredients. We were to make our own pizza for dinner. Although I would rather not join in the fun, I was starving and really needed a full meal. Pizza is not healthy, when prepared the usual way, though I could salvage it in this case. The portions were enough to provide for one large pizza per person. I was confident I would eat mine without issues. As I was preparing my serving, Amber asked me if I was willing to share my meal with her. Why would she pose such a question, given there was plenty of food for everyone? I agreed to her offer, mixed in the ingredients she preferred, baked it, and then sat down with her for the duration of our meal.

At the table we got to know each other. It started with her telling me how she was not hungry and wanted to not waste any food. I found that laudable and silently admitted to myself that I was wrong about her. I knew how poor people tend not to be eclectic about what they eat, as they are well aware that beggars cannot be choosers. But for this well-off woman to treat resources the same way I would was unexpected. My prejudice had conditioned me to think that she would rather make a lavish dish only to realise she did not want to eat it, after all, and then throw it away without hesitation. Perhaps we judge others because we do not want to pay attention to our condition. By pointing a finger at them, we take it away from our person. In the process, we assume to be faultless as arbiters of morality and appease our conscience accordingly. Such is our dissonance.

I could not tolerate the injustice I was bringing upon her. “I have to make a confession”, I said. Her eyes sparkled in curiosity, as if to acknowledge that there was more to me than a silent worker. “I misjudged you. When you said you are not working to make a living, I thought you were being childish. Such was my narrow-mindedness. Now I have learnt that you are pursuing your passion.” With a grin on her face, she noted how she was understood: “yeah, I do this because I love it. Plus, I get to meet interesting people and visit new places.” She did not comment on my initial value judgement. I guess this was her way of passing it off as part of the process towards understanding others. We will err many times before we eventually figure out how to interpret phenomena and deal with the actuality of the case.

“I have travelled around the world. Everywhere I go, I discover something new about myself. Recently, I developed a keen interest in old artefacts. There are many at the cemetery nearby. I even found this rusty shield in the fields. Farmers unearth them every now and then. It must be several centuries old, probably from a skirmish that took place here.” She kept revealing more about her personality and interests, as I listened attentively. “Do you want to join me one of these days? I will show you how many cool things we can find!” I was taken aback, as I had never expressed any desire to learn more about her penchant for archaeology. “Let us finish what we are here for and then we will see”, I remarked as we carried on with our dinner. “It sounds intriguing”, I added.

I did not disclose the fact that I had booked a one-way flight and was about to leave. Amber was turning out to be a fine person, though I was still afraid that I might actually change my mind about my departure. I had to leave to become who I needed to be. Feeling a connection to Amber, to Peter, or anyone else would upset my plans, possibly condemning me to many more years of non-self-actualisation. I could no longer afford this state of victimhood. I was ready to sacrifice any potentially fulfilling relationships to remake myself.

The half pizza was not sufficient to sate me, but I did not complain about it. I was happy to meet this multifaceted person and to be proven wrong about my assumptions. I did not want to waste food either. As soon as we were done, I wished everybody a pleasant night and retreated to my room. I went to bed uncertain and troubled about my immediate future. I was about to perform a huge leap of faith. All I could do is trust that I had made the right choice and would not come down crashing. Knowing that everything was set in motion, I did not think it further. What is to happen, shall happen. I readied myself for another day of intense work. And so it was.

Amber tried to approach me many times after our shared meal, but I kept avoiding her, giving her just enough attention to not appear rude. Maybe I was impolite despite my best intentions, but I had to maintain some distance. Were I to befriend her or, worse, fall in love with her, I would regret it for the rest of my life. Perhaps I was just too pessimistic about the potential of others to be instrumental in my process of self-discovery. However, I knew that counterfactual reasoning was not going to be helpful. I could only pick a course and commit to it unequivocally, learning whatever secrets it had in store for me. Whatever regrets I could have had, I did not let them grow and take hold. I would not be led astray.

The morning of my flight, Amber had woken up earlier than usual, as if she knew the end was near. Could Craig have told her? She was already having her breakfast while brewing a cup of coffee. I could not avoid her this time. It was the one and only case we had a drink together, despite the numerous opportunities on each day. “Where are you going?”, she asked as soon as she noticed my suitcase. Typical of my behaviour towards her, I responded in a cryptic fashion: “I have important business to tend to”. Then I smiled and changed subject: “wow, this coffee has such a rich aroma!” There are many reasons why people smile. One of them is to hide their suffering and obfuscate their inner conflict. Amber must have known this all along. She never took my behaviour as a personal insult and remained friendly towards me. “Indeed, it is a nice blend”, she said as she smiled back at me. We can be self-absorbed at times, oblivious to the woes of others. I would no longer think that I am the only one who is struggling. Each person has their own troubles. That smile may have been a facade, like the one I was displaying. I will never know.

“We cannot force things to happen. You will only be available when you are ready. Until then, all you can do is wish for the best and try what you can. I had hoped for a different outcome.” These were her words. I could sense she was disappointed, either in me or in the prevailing conditions that compelled me into action. But I could not understand why she would care about a vagabond like myself. I had not given her the attention she deserved, did not treat her as a friend even though I could, and did not tell her where I was heading to. Nobody knew that important detail and I would not trust her with it either. So why would she even bother? I did not have the courage to verbalise that question. I knew then that all would be over in an hour. Our paths would diverge and I would find a new beginning away from everything I had grown accustomed to.

“I forgot to tell you that pink and gold is a pretty combination. I would actually experiment with some deep magenta as a third hue. Or a shade of red to produce a striking impression!” I uttered those words out of an appreciation for her commitment to the activity that fulfilled her. “I will remember this for my next project”, she noted. “Good. There will be more of them”, is all I could add.

Perhaps Amber could tell by the way I stared into her eyes that I was holding something back. In a different world, I would have expressed my feelings in earnest. Yet there is only this world to be lived, this trail to be traversed, and these moments to be experienced, with or without others. The people and situations we like the most may not be available when we are. Such is our predicament. There is no rewind button for us to replay events. Nor is there a script editor, where we can modify some parameters to have everything arranged the way that best suits our whimsy. We learn from our choices and, if we are lucky, we will get to choose again. Pain is benign and formative in this regard. It helps us reach clarity about what our needs and wants are. By pushing against our limitations, we might discover that it often is our mindset that holds us hostage, partly or fully, to states of affairs that are unfavourable to our being. We may then trust in our devices to start anew. Sometimes, this means begrudgingly boarding that plane in order not to lose sight of the goal we have set for ourselves.

Ever the professional, I extended my hand, ready to bid her farewell. She extended hers, without saying anything. We shacked hands and, after we let go, we spontaneously hugged each other. I did not establish eye contact afterwards, out of fear that I would jeopardise everything I was committed to. My plane was waiting for me. I had to write my own destiny. I turned my back to her and headed for the door. Craig was waiting for me at the threshold. He would drive me to the train station, which was five minutes away. The rest was up to me. “Take care”, I said out loud, “keep adding colour to your life and that of others.” At the train station, I hugged Craig for the last time. I forgave him, even though I knew we could not be friends anymore. Just as I had to act a certain way, so was he restrained by the prevailing conditions.

I wish to believe that Amber hoped for the same thing I do: that we experience each other unencumbered by grand schemes and peremptory rules. Will this ever happen?

• Avoiding the trap of overthinking. We want to be acting and be learning things that we have a use for.
• How to do things in earnest and try to be the best version of yourself.
• What it means to be the embodiment of your values, instead of merely advertising what you believe in.
• Comments on honour and credibility.

• How art captures patterns of everyday behaviour to turn them into archetypes. Those help us understand profound insights in a relatable way.
• Discussion about the archetype of Achilles: the champion who fought in the Trojan War (reference to the relevant art).
• How Achilles is as relevant as ever with regard to discourses about masculinity and how men “should” be.
• We can find the Achilles type in the form of the influencer who prompts his audience to be forceful.
• Why exceptional skills do not justify one being arrogant and intolerant towards others.
• Achilles is not the only type of man. Even within a single gender, there are many types.
• The case of Odysseus, another hero of the Trojan War, and how there can be different types of man.
• How modern-day narratives discount the diversity even within a single gender. This encourages once group of men to bully other men.
• Comments on how Odysseus differs from Achilles in terms of dealing with challenges. Sometimes you do not just power through; sometimes you have to work around.
• The case of Odysseus and the Cyclops. This is an example of not trying to solve everything with brute force, as that is foolish.
• There is nothing wrong with being strong. The problem is when we are trying to create a monoculture among men.
• Instead of recognising how things stand, we are quick to judge them.
• I don’t think there is anything wrong with some elements of advice, such as exercising. But if we make that the be-all-end-all of manhood, there starts the problem. It breeds intolerance towards the fact that there are other activities as well; other types of man.
• Personal stories where men try to play tough.
• How being pretentious is bad for you and your relationships.
• Connecting the dots in all the aforementioned.
• Explaining discipline as opposed to obedience and conformity.
• The archetype of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and what it symbolises.

Some of the highlights:

• The slow-paced experience is juxtaposed with and contrasted to the fast-paced life we have. The rhythms of the workplace, the news cycle, the pace of social media keep stimulating us but we are not a participant in their world.
• It is too fast. We are disempowered because what we do is a mile long but only a millimetre thick. There is no depth to it, as we are forced to shift our attention to something else.
• Story about me not listening to background music anymore. I also wrote a journal entry on the matter about the “music all around”: https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2024-04-12-the-music-all-around/.
• Why I wanted to do things with intent, to be more intentful with my choices. To be a participant instead of a spectator in my subjective reality; to feel that I am doing something that has meaning for me, even if it does not matter in the grand scheme of things.
• Instead of trying to multi-task, I focus on what I have given my attention to. I do it with intent and commitment.
• How I want my sensations to be consistent with my immediate environment. Paying attention to things makes me feel I am a member of my world.
• Other relatable stories about events that made me think critically of the fast-paced life I was living.
• How the slow-paced experience allows me to do things without feeling burdened by them.

• A relatable story about a smoker who sets an unrealistic target on how to change their habits.
• We cannot just set our mind to something and it happens. We have to act on it. Deeds matter.
• Without deeds, we do not have anything to build on. We lack the capacity.
• We build stuff little by little, including our powers. We know this already from our everyday experiences. We do not just bring things into being. There is a process.
• My suggestion to help the smoker set an actionable goal. Nothing Olympic; nothing fancy.
• What really builds up capacity is consistency.
• I call them “basic powers” because they are not flashy and do not capture our attention the way superpowers do.
• Comment on superheroes and how we want superpowers without putting in any effort.
• We do not need superpowers. Those are nice for the spectacle but are otherwise a distraction.
• What we are toiling against in our everyday life is this tendency of ours to let things degrade and to not put in the work to maintain them.
• A basic power like consistency goes unnoticed by those who are not trained to recognise it. All they see is you doing your tasks. But they do not realise how difficult this is.
• To be consistent requires perseverance and this means that it is rooted in patience. You acknowledge that whatever it is your are doing has a process and that you not being the finished article at the outset is part of this process.
• Patience is about having a sense of the here-and-now in light of the longer term magnitudes: how you keep the goal in mind while not losing track of the immediate issues.
• The desire for the magical solution is not just wrong; it is that it serves as a rationalisation of your victimhood and entrapment in that state that you do not like. By bringing your ambition to something you can actually achieve, you can no longer tell yourself how you are trying to quit but cannot do it because the basic goal is unreachable.
• The standard has to be tailored to your particularities. There cannot be a one-size-fits-all. Find something that works for you; the minimum you can accomplish. And do it consistently. Once that becomes second nature, then you can increase the intensity.
• Story about the Karate Kid and how the process is about building character. Without the requisite character, there is no foundation for the specific techniques.
• It ultimately comes down to our wellness; to how we feel about ourselves.
• Example of how disorganised I used to be as a young adult and how a chaotic life feels disempowering. Minimise your exposure to garbage to eliminate the sense of dread from your life: what you experience will feel connected to your volition because the work you put in is having an impact.
• Comment about the modern pursuit of “being productive” and the nonsense of the “10x” employee.
• Comment about not seeking the “second brain” when we should instead be trying to maximise the effectiveness of the “first brain” and the “first body”. Then, even if you do use a second brain/body, you will be empowered to use them properly.
• Example of a case where I recommended a basic workflow instead of whatever hipster software/method.
• When we are in the flow of doing something, however basic, we (i) gain capacity to do it better and (ii) we develop insight into what we need to improve. So we learn more about the task at hand as well as ourselves. Again, no one-size-fits-all. Discover what works for you in particular.
• Comment about wasting our time pursuing the magical solution instead of doing something basic in the meantime.
• Remark about how when we are doing something, we have a better sense of its difficulty and our ability to cope with it. Whereas when we are outsiders to it, we tend to underestimate it while overestimating our abilities. Start small and keep doing.
• Note about my creative method, such as in my videos, where I produce them in one go with no edits that try to flatter me.
• Comment about the prettification filter of the Internet.
• Story from the time I was a football player about people whose words do not match their deeds.
• What goes together with the basic powers is the attitude of not saying much; of not talking big.
• This also makes us compassionate, because we know what it takes to do something. So when we see another person trying, we do not try to bring them done. We say “well done for trying” as we can relate to it.
• Basic powers go with basic decency. Treat yourself kindly and the best way to do that is to set realisable goals.
• Final thoughts to wrap it all up.

Previous episodes:

• Comments on Dao #1 (Cosmos, Logos, Tropos): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-06-comments-dao-1/
• Comments on Dao #2 (on moderation and Delphic maxims): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-09-comments-dao-2/
• Comments on Dao #3 (governance by sages): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-12-comments-dao-3/
• Comments on Dao #4 (noetic presences; the living universe): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-04-14-comments-dao-4/

• The story of Sisyphos in brief and how it is a metaphor.
• Why I think what happens to Sisyphos is not punishment. He is doing it to himself in his ignorance.
• We do not let go of what we treasure the most because we identify with it. We consider it an extension of our self.
• The self is not immutable. It is not constant. It changes and does everything around us.
• What comes to our possession or, generally, what we associate or interact with, does so by coincidence. We can still not identify with it.
• We are like travellers who paths converge only to eventually diverge.
• The concept of non-ownership, which I describe with the Greek word aktisia (ακτησία).
• How difficult it is to let go as it requires courage and magnanimity.
• We can start with small and inconsequential things. This way we can practice and develop the capacity it takes to let go.
• A story about how Atlas, my dogs, has learnt to let go. We can do the same.

• What is the myth of Procrustes and what we can learn from the practice of applying one size to all.
• Do we want a world of uniformity or is diversity acceptable?
• How societies promote homogenisation and why there is a trade-off between security and freedom.
• Freedom is limited in the state of nature and can be bestowed upon us within structures that create predictable conditions.
• We are too quick to judge those who are not like us. Perhaps we need to learn how to withhold judgement and tolerate the diversity all around us.

• Past choices frame future options, meaning that even if we have perfectly free will, we still operate within confines that cannot be undone.
• There are moments where we must rise to the occasion, effectively becoming someone we were not. Never underestimate someone who has no other choice but to fight.
• The prevailing conditions make the person. They compel one into action.
• Mental fortitude depends on one’s patience and understanding of the bigger picture. It is about how one can preserve their unflinching commitment to the cause.
• Story about mental fortitude and the ancient Spartans.
• Commentary on the subjectivity of experiences and the illusion of factual objectivity.
• Why narratives matter to us in our everyday life and why our outlook is important.
• Faith is inescapable. We rely on beliefs to cover for the imperfect information at our disposal as well as our lack of perfect insight.

• There are similarities between modern attitudes towards AI and how ancient folks would treat oracles as authoritative and infallible.
• Story about the Oracle of Apollon in Delphi and how it would provide non-answers to questions that could not be reduced to a “yes or no”.
• Explanation of how we must think about complexity and what our attitude should be towards presumed oracular wisdom.
• Oracles or AI are neither good nor bad. It depends on how we deal with them. Discussion about being gullible or not.
• Story about Prometheus, the know-how of fire, and whether tools are good/bad for us.
• Avoiding extremes by trying to be less presumptuous about our capacity for good/evil.
• Switching gears to individuals affairs. Talk about feelings of expertise; of setting goals and accomplishing them.
• There is value to be had in mastery, in not copy-pasting answers, but in actually understanding things in-depth.
• Talk about how prior notes/work frames and limits our creativity. AI can do the same if we get in the bad habit of not putting in the hard work.
• Connection between these insights and what I covered at length in my presentation about “productivity, honesty, and accountability structures”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-02-21-productivity-honesty-accountability-structures/.
• Do not underestimate your potential and how you can feel inexorable when you put in the effort.

• We have a propensity to discount or underappreciate what we have. Instead, we have a longing for magical solutions—the golden fleece—that will elevate us to great heights.

• We let go of what we have in pursuit of the unattainable. As we fail to attain that, we ultimately feel bad about ourselves, rationalising our failure as inadequacy and worthlessness.

• I draw a parallel between the golden fleece and the incessant pursuit for the killer app, using Emacs as a case in point.

• When we do not know exactly what we want, we cannot get it. Even if something can read our mind, it still needs to find a mind that is clear. Otherwise we have “garbage in; garbage out.”

• Lengthy commentary on impossible standards that govern our life. I explain the scope of application and how we must be aware of it when particularising an abstraction.

• I am interested in the multifacetedness of the human condition to find precepts that work for humans, not exalted beings.

Previous episodes:

• Comments on Dao #1 (Cosmos, Logos, Tropos): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-06-comments-dao-1/
• Comments on Dao #2 (on moderation and Delphic maxims): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-09-comments-dao-2/
• Comments on Dao #3 (governance by sages): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-12-comments-dao-3/

The ethos of hard work is prevalent here. Check in earlier than mandated and be the last to leave. Only then are your contributions recognised. Praise is an ephemeral token. The next day you must earn it again, else you have to toil extra hard to revert to what you had. You feel validation when you are trusted with another big project. So what if you were supposed to leave in thirty minutes? You cannot jeopardise your achievements.

It is twenty one hours now. Those thirty minutes turned into four painful hours. You showed grit and earned another “thank you”. Find solace in it: it will save you from crying yourself to sleep.

A meal would be nice, but all the places are packed with people. Do not repeat the same mistake. Colleagues may be dinning in one of them. Avoid coworkers as they will inevitably bring the discussion back to the same topics. It is important to disconnect, empty the mind, and allow yourself the chance to aspire to higher affairs.

Your pub of choice is around the corner. The high society avoids this place. They are too good for the rest of us. Here you are at home. You and the other stray souls. Perhaps they are all drunks, exchanging their late years for another round. Or maybe—just maybe—they are finding refuge in this putrid neighbourhood.

You know how it is to seek an escape. Nightmares involve evictions and dogged pursuits. The wheels are falling off of that suitcase, yet it is always with you. There is no one giving chase. What your fear personifies is a set of arrangements of power that disempower you. The “who” remains elusive. It is institutionalised, woven into the fabric of this world and thus removed from the foreground. It is always there, framing your actions and conditioning your behaviour.

Bars are excellent hideouts. Low light, loud music, and dejected strangers aplenty. Those who engage in conversation with you are barely making sense of their surroundings. Such is the effect of alcohol. The rest are ignoring you. Their own pain is too burdensome already. There are no Cinderellas in sight, no handsome princes. The little cuties are aiming high: they have no interest in you. You are among fugitives; people who try to escape from their odious quotidian normality.

You did well to offer fifty euro to that lad earlier this morning. He asked for ten, just so he could afford the train ticket. The rest was to buy a sandwich and perhaps afford the jump to the next stop. Undocumented migration is illegal, though the lines feel arbitrary. Documentation is a privilege. The migrant can, in fact, be a refugee whenever migration is not a matter of choice. Let the conventions stipulate what they want. The administrivia are for bureaucrats.

That man’s predicament is akin to those nightmares. It has parallels with what you witness here. Flee to live another day. No place is safe. No community is available to make you feel secure.

We accept terms of employment under duress. No, the immediate boss is not holding anyone at gunpoint. It is the institutionalised violence that puts us in that spot. They will tell each of us that we always have options. To start a business, for example, as if we can do that without initial funding. “You should charge double” or “just get the needed certificates.” Were it so easy!

There is a distinction to be made between options and the realm of possibility. What you can do under the prevailing conditions is governed by the interplay of specific factors. It delineates the scope of the realisable within the confines of that case. Whereas what might happen is removed from the particularities. It exists at a more abstract level. Our life is not theoretical though. We cannot feed off of possibilities. Unlike characters in a thought experiment, we need immediate solutions.

You will think again about your options. Maybe it will be while the power is off or the landlord comes back knocking at your door. Ten years go by in an instant. You may be more refined, but your rigorous training cannot affect the instituted reality that envelops you.

Your time here relaxes you, despite the noise and your hunger. Deep thoughts are interrupted by a tap on your shoulder. Who is this black hooded fellow? To your surprise, it is another authority figure from your milieu.

She asks for a seat. You do the pleasantries while trying to suppress your stress. Why here? Why now? What sort of disgusting place will you have to go to next time when you seek peace?

Authority does not belong to the person. It is found in the role as such. It is reified by the value assigned to that office. Those who wield power operate with a sword over their heads. Their wellness is forfeit the moment they make a mistake. Swords only hover over those we can name. Not institutions though, not ideas that are embedded in conventions, shared values, and patterns of behaviour. Those are taken for granted. They provide substance to the dominant narrative of the culture. Such as that you have lots of options and are choosing everything freely. She is not the real problem. Another will eventually take her stead. It is the hierarchy that will persist.

When the actor wears the mask, they have to behave in accordance with what they show. It is no different for all of us in our day-to-day affairs. Those in power must conform with the expectations associated with their role. You too are skipping your meals to meet the lofty standards of the hard worker. Shapeshifters all around. We adapt and hope for the best.

It is hard to trust those with power over you even when they seem to care about you. Whatever information you disclose can be used against you. It has happened in the past when you naively opened up to your boss and considered them a friend. The sense of duty towards your ostensible comrade made you labour for even longer hours and accept to be paid the regular rate for a full shift of overtime and for no breaks during holidays. You had the option, of course. Do a favour for a friend and help them get through this tough situation or lose your job amid the economic crisis. Well, you lost it anyway because loyalty is not mutual in business.

She followed you here. She demands answers. Why are you avoiding those restaurants? Why take a turn for the shady parts of town? She asks you to join her group at the place nearby. They were having dinner and saw you walk by, jaded and broken. You find the words to awkwardly turn down the offer. It is difficult to say “no” when you are an agreeable person. Though you muster the courage to do it. You have to. You cannot revolt. It is why anger turns into sorrow and tears give way to desperation. Options are for those who pay extra for tiny portions. To be bossed around all day, to be told that you are doing it freely when you know what the reality is, and then to be belittled by their pity. No.

You can tell she is not here for you. We all have a keen eye for deviations from the norm. Authorities are no different. Those who do not do the expected at all times raise the alarms, no matter how hard working and obedient they otherwise are. Irregularity introduces an element of uncertainty. If you appear different, they will ultimately cast you to the side. You are inconvenient, despite your skills and work ethic. You will become unemployable as every employer will figure out you are a loose cannon, provided the right triggers.

Those who seek an escape show a capacity to fight back or, at least, to not fully submit to the status quo. What the powers that be want in this instituted reality is for everyone to persist in a state of uncertainty while feeling no need to pursue alternatives. Else one is a potential revolutionary even while they are fully complying with the etiquette of their position.

She is not happy. Your negative answer disturbs her. It is one of those deviations from the norm. Who knows what else you are capable of if you repeatedly do not fall in line for trivial things. Those who have served in the army know that obedience for petty issues is highly significant. The soldier must show unconditional respect to the immediate authority figure. There is no nuance there. No reasonable discussion to be had. Sincere debates are between equals. In such a robust power structure, one enforces the rules and another follows them to the letter.

Soldiers tolerate the ordeals out of duty towards their homeland. Duty—a key concept. Children are told from an early age how great their country is and how glorious all those historical victories were. When the time comes, a new generation will bask in that glory, throwing its youth to the fire. The soldier is not getting a fair deal out of this. Homeland is the place where you are treated fairly. Everything else is one large sweatshop, the fiefdom of a ruling elite that has no interest in your wellness.

The ethos of the hard worker is the parallel of that patriotic spirit. We are loyal to our bosses and do not complain about the increasingly invidious working conditions. They will tell us to fall in line and stop feeling entitled. “Life is tough” they will add. Except that life is not difficult for everyone. Those at the fancy restaurants you skipped earlier are not living life in hard mode. You do the difficult work and they get to present it as their own. Then they have the temerity to tell you how much they like you and care about you.

Duty also manifests as commitment to one’s social standing. One’s reputation as a hard worker gives them the creditworthiness they need to keep going. We are thus conditioned to obey and to persevere the apparent injustice. It does not even register as injustice because we are indoctrinated in the narrative of unfettered free will: we have plenty of choices and are doing everything to ourselves with no structure ever informing the particularities of our agency.

She leaves you with a passive aggressive remark: “it’s okay if you do not like us”. It’s you and the fugitives again. What most people with authority fail to understand is that they are insignificant in their capacity as a person. Take away the role and what is left behind is just another human. Their power comes ex officio. It is the office that matters, the institution as such.

You say nothing. Let her live her delusion. You harbour no hatred towards them. Their power fantasies will not last for long. They fail to realise it, identifying with the role in the process. One day they will learn that the office is not theirs. Escaping into this pub is your way of recognising that the problem is systemic.

When we subject the conventional wisdom to scrutiny, we notice that it is not as innocuous as it seems. Behind the romantic heroism of individuals who achieve what they want against the forces of nature, there exists a brutal yet sophisticated apparatus that exerts supreme authority over every aspect of life. We have the tokenistic freedom of expression, though complete control over the media of expression rests in the hands of a tiny minority. We have the freedom of commerce and can assume the concomitant risk of bankruptcy, while some businesses are too big to fail. We have the freedom to resort to the justice system, but few can afford the exorbitant fees involved for anything non-trivial. To think that the platformarchs and the rest of us enjoy equal rights is to fool ourselves. The narrative is all about working hard and making the right choices. The individual without reference to their environment—such a convenient abstraction!

You leave the place. The drunks have treated you well. They too are dead inside. They know what precarity means. Perhaps they are still hiding something out of fear, though you can tell that they are honest about their status. It is what you also saw in the eyes of that fellow this morning. The same visceral helplessness. Maybe he is in a relatively better place by now. One can only hope. Though for every success story there are thousands who perish crossing the desert or drowning at sea. Others persist as empty shells in multinational corporations, knowing that they are disposable.

Your room is far from here and you are still hungry. Perhaps an apple will do for the time being. You will have to find something else tomorrow. A full meal to take you through another difficult day. “Life is hard”, after all, and you will continue tolerating the intolerable out of necessity.

Previous episodes:

• Comments on Dao #1 (Cosmos, Logos, Tropos): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-06-comments-dao-1/
• Comments on Dao #2 (on moderation and Delphic maxims): https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-09-comments-dao-2/

The previous episode is “Comments on Dao #1 (Cosmos, Logos, Tropos)”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-03-06-comments-dao-1/

I also mentioned my video “Comfort zone and impostor feelings”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2023-02-11-comfort-zone-impostor/.

The previous video on this topic, titled “Yin-Yang, Dao, and ‘dragons’”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-12-09-yin-yang-dao-dragons/.

What I covered in outline:

• There is no one-size-fits-all that works for all of us. It is important to factor in the subjectivity of the person who will be applying the method and using the tools.
• Explanation of my bad experience with “Getting Things Done” (GTD), specifically how it was triggering my completionist mode and made me feel intimidated by the sheer size of corpus of tasks I had accumulated.
• I made the mistake of rationalising my inability to work with GTD as me being defective. Eventually I realised that I was assuming away my subjectivity. I was not inherently broken. I simply had to find methods and tools that work for me.
• One has to be honest about their strengths and weaknesses. Don’t try to mimic another person. Instead experiment until you find what is appropriate for you.
• For me the cost of productivity is what I call “austerity”. Namely, the recognition that my intellectual curiosity has to be strictly moderated so that I do not yield to the temptation of seeking more information than I can actually process.
• Accountability structures are arrangements that we design to amplify our strengths while minimising our weaknesses. I have several such structures, which I describe in the video.

• I started thinking about the comfort zone and impostor feelings after I received an award from the Free Software Foundation for my contributions to Emacs and free software.
• How can someone with my non-technical background make contribute to a technical milieu?
• How can someone get out of their comfort zone and basically declare in public “hey, I do not actually know this!”?
• The basic idea that helped me overcome my fears is to entertain the worst case scenario. What could possibly go wrong if I am incompetent in my technical endeavours? The answer usually is that nothing major will happen and we are misjudging the extent of the issue.
• Explanation of the tension that arises between our actual imperfections and the pretences on faultlessness that we have.
• At its core, we base our conduct on the lie that we can be something other than a human: a fallible being.
• The comfort zone can be a prison cell. We may be treating the realm of the familiar as the realm of the good.
• To escape from that cage is to allow yourself the chance to learn more about who you are and what this world has to offer.
• To start working against our inhibitions we must lift the burden of perfection from our shoulders. We admit to our humanity, to our actuality, and thus accept that mistakes and omissions are part of what we do.
• No-one who has ever said or done anything has been perfect. No expert is omniscient. If we were to take the view that we need to be perfected before doing something, then we will all do nothing.
• Talk about my caricature of the world into introverts and extroverts and how that funny yet truthful insight helped me stop overthinking my fears.
• Change happens in a stepwise fashion. We have to take it slow, focusing on the immediate task at hand and not worrying about the end goal.
• Ultimately, we must put faith in the process.

• An explanation of what “hedonism” means. It comes from the Greek word ηδονή (hedony, pronounced as “ee-thó-nee”).
• Practical example of what “presence” is using my unscripted video presentation as a case in point.
• Presence lets us break the cycle of overthinking by acting.
• Action is actual: it always happens in the here-and-now.
• Presence is about recognising our humanity’s limited resources. Our time is finite, we always face opportunity costs (we face trade-offs), and we also are not omniscient. We fathom all eventualities in all possible scenaria: we thus act under these constraints and cannot afford to reach perfection before doing so.
• Extensive commentary on these questions
  1. If you are always present, doesn’t that make you always react to stimuli?
  2. If you are always reacting to whatever comes your way, won’t you be mindlessly engaging in the pursuit of pleasures (hedonism)?
• Having presence does not mean that we lose our knowledge and sense of direction. We still carry out purposeful actions. We thus are not reacting mindlessly to phenomena.
• “Pursuing pleasure” is framed as something inherently bad: basically, you just let your body dictate all aspects of your experience. This is a misconception.
• Why is the pursuit of pleasures equated with mindlessness?
• Examples of pleasure, such as enjoying the awesomeness of the great outdoors, and blotting out all the noise and irrelevant emotions induced by social media.
• Introduction to the concepts of “Apollonian” and “Dionysian”.
• Explanation how those set up a false binary.
• Long discussion on the multifacetedness of the human condition. We are body and mind, we have emotions and spiritual needs.
• We cannot deny our reality, such as to pretend that we are purely spiritual while being embodied.
• Connecting the threads between hedonism, presence, multifacetedness, and a moderate disposition.
• Closing thoughts with a real story about an introvert who wanted to be a sportsperson in their late twenties. I published that on my website’s “commentary” section: https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2023-01-02-re-play-football-introvert/.

I apply with my own philosophy and concepts to understand the first statement of Dao De Jing:

The Dao that can be articulated is not the eternal Dao; the name that can be named is not its eternal name.

The translator explains that “Dao” is interpreted in other cultures as “God” and variants thereof and how Lao Zi uses it to mean the “Mother of all”.

My points in brief:

• Analysis of the Yin-Yang symbol. Specifically, a comprehensive take on how black and white are opposites but also how they can be understood as the same.
• This analysis provides insight into what I call the scope of application, namely how the given level of abstraction substantiations the concepts/words.
• The scope of application makes us reason about—and always account for—the way in which something is, else its modality (mode of being) or Tropos.
• More analysis of Yin-Yang using the new concepts.
• From there we understand how Tropos has multiple strata; how there exist many levels of abstraction in each of which there emerge phenomena that are specific to the given level. I call this the stratification of emergence.
• Examples of the stratification of emergence, such as how happiness and sadness are different at the stratum of the conscious person, but are the same insofar as they both are biochemical phenomena.
• Explanation of the idea that concepts exhibit a triadic relations between the instances and their greater abstraction. By finding the common in the multitude between two instances at a given level of abstraction we arrive at the third magnitude, which is that which they have in common.
• That which can be named is that which can be described and that which can be described is that which has Tropos.
• The Dao, which I explain in the video as “Being”, is that which is common to all, hence that which necessarily has no Tropos. If it has Tropos, then it is the same as all other presences that have Tropos, insofar as they have Tropos.
• Long comment on Confucius’ famous quote whether Lao Zi is a dragon (I mentioned the quote in the introduction and this long exposition served to answer the question). In short, no Lao Zi was a human to whom we can relate. His wisdom is not a secret because we can understand it. All sages are human and treating them as “dragons”, as decisively alien, harms both us and them.

• About “sorry for being a burden”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-31-sorry-for-being-burden/.
• On the meaning and purpose of life: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-11-02-meaning-purpose-life/.

It is not necessary to watch the previous two, as I summarise the points relevant to dignity. Though you may still want to watch or listen to them as they contain lots of ideas.

Overview of what I talked about today:

• I made a mistake for saying that “today is Thursday”. It is Friday, 4 November 2022.
• Explanation of the underpinnings of “sorry for being a burden”. In short, it consists of (i) selfcentredness, (ii) obsession that turns into a bias that reduces others into the opposite of what the object of obsession is, and (iii) a rationalisation that self-loathing or self-hatred is a virtue because the person only does it for the good of others.
• Self-loathing masquerading as altruism is not really altruistic because it still contains misanthropy (misanthropy==hatred of humans) for someone: the self.
• Note what “meaning” in life is. Basically, it is a subjective evaluation of experiences in one’s life that keeps them going. When we find meaning in things we do, we continue doing them.
• I decouple “purpose” for meaning for reasons that I explain at length in the aforementioned presentation. The gist is that we can have meaning without it.
• Dignity is the inherent worth of someone. Loss of dignity is a subjective affair. A state of mind where the person assess their worth and concludes that their life’s experiences no longer have meaning.
• I don’t think we can say anything about the subjectivity as such. If a person thinks they have no dignity, that is for them to say (this point is revisited and explained further in the video). Though we can still comment on matters surrounding the subjective evaluation as such.
• Consideration of examples that cover matters of tunnel vision, the balance in one’s life experiences when seen holistically, and the dynamism of the case (basically, the lack of a person’s omniscience and how that relates to hope). I essentially ask the person to set a high bar and not take this issue lightly.
• Comment on matters of euthanasia and suicide in reference to the movie “Mar adentro”. In short: there comes a point where the person is stating in full conscience that their life has no meaning to them. We should acknowledge their agency, the dignity inherent therein, and accept their decision.
• There cannot be an objective, one-size-fits-all criterion because that contradicts subjectivity. What a person thinks of their own self is no longer relevant if some committee/authority decides on their behalf. Generalising this means that dignity cannot exist, as each individual’s inherent worth would be cancelled through the denial of their agency and capacity to know what they feel.
• More comments on suicide and how it is narrow-minded (i.e. wrong) to dismiss concerns for dignity as merely one seeking attention.

At several points in the video I show some breathtaking vistas and use them as metaphors for our life. We may be walking on a dirt road, thinking that it is like all other dirt roads we have traversed before. But we do not know what we might find at the next turn.

• An explanation of what I mean when I claim that no-one is special: our shared humanity and co-existence with all forms of life.
• Why not being special makes life simpler. We accept that not everything is a function of our volition.
• Explain how this affects the binary of reward and punishment and why our life becomes easier.
• Start with the point of what is purpose and what is meaning. The former is the ulterior end for which something happens. The latter is our evaluation of a state of affairs: how we feel about it.
• Discuss how I proceed from the little things. How, for example, the colours I see and the warmth of the Sun engender certain emotions—I add meaning to those experiences.
• Elaborate why the purpose does not need to exist. We then develop a transactional outlook of not actually caring about the experiences. We only cater to them to the extend that they bring us closer the end goal. We are not genuine. Also see my talk about “Forgiveness and hubris”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-25-forgiveness-hubris/.
• The purpose denies us our presence.
• Comment on how the absence of purpose pertains to reward and punishment. We do not need to ground reward and punishment in some greater authority for them to work.
• Remark how mere knowledge of ultimate reward/punishment (heaven and hell) does not instil in us a sense of doing what is right.
• Continue with the argument of not needing a purpose by using more examples of applied rules.
• Expound on the same argument, but in theistic terms. Explain how omniscience precludes experimentation and that a perfect God does not need to test anything, for that contradicts omniscience.
• Propound the view that in the absence of consensus regarding theist matters, our only takeaways is that we are not sure. So we should not project our perceived need for purpose as God’s need for purpose.
• Connect those points to social matters: beauty, fame, power. Also watch my presentation “About ‘sorry for being a burden’”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-31-sorry-for-being-burden/.
• Talk about the experience of meeting a “fabulous” person at a restaurant and how their purpose was detracting from the meaning in their life.
• Tie it all together.

• We start feeling like a burden when we are coping with some difficult situation. We think that others are doing well, while we are not.
• We do not want to bring others to our misery, so we avoid them.
• Not wanting to externalise our negativity in this way comes from a good starting point: we consider the wellness of others.
• An explanation of how this apparent altruism is biased both against us and against the others. We think we are worthless while they are impeccable.
• When we think we are a burden, we develop a sense of egocentrism even though we do not want to. We do it by obsessing about our condition.
• Our obsession turns into a misplaced sense of exceptionalism as we think we are special in our agony: “I am special because I am the only one who suffers”.
• There is a “transmission mechanism” by which this ostensible burden can be distributed. Explanation of how this relates to the communicative aspect of the human condition.
• We cannot opt out of our humanity. To be sorry for being human is pointless. We always communicate.
• When we communicate with others, we open ourselves to their positivity. In general, we remove the obstacles that worsen our condition.
• Explanation of moderation, of finding a middle way between the extremes.
• More comments on the perversion of self-hatred that masquerades as altruism.
• Practical ways to gradually escape from the overthinking loop. We break the cycle by acting. Also comment on one’s physical condition and how idle energy is contributing to the problem.
• We live in a world where we forget to be human sometimes and are absorbed in our little bubble—practical step to avoid that.
• Example with how we do not control how others perceive our messages and why we should not blame our self or them.
• Don’t judge and be patient.

• Story about me when I was younger, which illustrates how I had the appearance of discipline without a solid grasp of the “why”
• Continuation of that story, delving into my bad habit with alcohol consumption. The gist is that I overestimated my ability by believing in my own narrative of how disciplined I was—a mistake.
• How can we have self-restraint without a good understanding of our self and of our limits?
• Discussion on the introspection—the search for the “why”—that made me understand the reason I was behaving in that bad way (where alcohol was the facilitator and enabler of certain experiences).
• Tie it all together in an exposition about not talking big and not overestimating our abilities.
• Comment on three more stories that further explain these and related ideas.
• In short: be patient, take it slow, do not assume that you are special, do not talk big, have a sense of purpose that is consistent with your actuality, put yourself to the test in order to learn who you are (what you can and cannot do).

Related videos:

• Forgiveness and hubris: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-25-forgiveness-hubris/.
• On self-improvement: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-21-self-improvement/.
• Loss, entitlement, and presence: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-10-17-loss-entitlement-presence/.

The contents in brief:

• Real story of a person that would not let go of something trivial that happened more than 30 years ago.
• Link it to the mistake of appreciating forgiveness or anything pertaining to self-improvement only with regard to its ultimate rewards. This also relates to the previous entry on self-improvement.
• The practical aspect of forgiveness in the here-and-now is that we keep ourselves free from useless burdens, else garbage. We can then focus our limited resources on something more useful.
• Talk about the myth of Sisyphus and how it essentially describes the struggles of the person who does not let go.
• Comment on the theme of non-ownership, though it is not the focus here. I talked more about this in loss, entitlement, and presence.
• Explain another story of me not becoming a priest and how it relates to this case.
• Talk about the misplaced ritualistic view we have of certain precepts. Basically, we miss the point as we cater to the appearances while disregarding the essential teachings.

• We sometimes think of self-improvement only as a means to an ulterior goal, such as money, fame, sex.
• Use the example of climbing to the top of the mountain in hope of finding those “rewards”.
• Elaborate on the connection between the transactional view of self-improvement and the concept of entitlement. The latter was also covered in my previous talk about loss, entitlement, and presence.
• Explain that self-importance is okay but how it can go awry. A relevant theme was covered in my talk about On self-importance and elitism.
• Discuss how philosophy helps us overcome the self-centric view. We do not expect rewards.
• Talk about expectations and entitlement, with a view to how they can make a person turn their disappointment into a weapon that is used against others.
• Remark how philosophy helps us remain calm and not go to extremes.

In this entry, I walked in the mountains and talked about developing the right attitude for dealing with matters we do not control. The main points:

• A story of mine about remaining open to new experiences after misfortune strikes.
• You do not control all the factors. If you assume the blame, you imply that you do control those factors.
• If you think you are a god, you will always overestimate your abilities. You will then desire to achieve that which you cannot. The disconnect will make you suffer.
• An explanation of non-ownership with specific examples.
• Elaboration on the bad habit of dithering, delaying, and postponing. You think you control time, again overestimating yourself.
• Overthinking and overanalysing is to your detriment. Fundamentally, you make the mistake of assuming that the perfect is attainable.
• Thinking that the perfect is attainable means that you expect your actions to be perfect. But to act is to do so in imperfect circumstances, with incomplete knowledge.
• To act is to perform a leap of faith. There is faith in acting.
• More examples that tie it all together.

Some of the other videos of mine that I mention here:

• On meditation, walking, and acceptance
• On self-importance and elitism
• Practicality, honesty, and patience

The main points I covered:

• There is a distinction between showing off and demonstrating something, but in practice it is hard to draw clear lines.
• I am an Internet stranger to you (and you to me), which means that you have no means of verifying my claims. This adds to the problem with the unclear lines.
• In turn, I cannot control how you perceive of what I consider “demonstration”—you may still think it is me “showing off”.
• Explanation of the perils of overthinking. Life is practical, not theoretical.
• My corpus of work—such as this video of me walking and talking—is a demonstration against overthinking. It proves that I managed to overcome a major problem I had.

• A consideration of the practical aspects of my philosophy, such as the unity between mind and body (talking and breathing, walking, etc.).
• Honesty and introspection are the basics of philosophy. We start doing philosophy when we develop an awareness of what we do (mindfulness).
• A case study on dating. Being honest about our humanity helps us avoid the trap of being disappointed the whole time.
• How honesty helps us overcome our ego and be more considerate, empathetic persons.
• I understand why one is sceptical about the practicality of philosophy because (1) it is broad in scope and (2) there is a communication problem, including the pretentiousness of certain intellectuals.

The main points are:

• I am not judgemental and do not issue edicts or rant about the state of the world. Everything I say is a suggestion; an appeal to your reason.
• I am okay with video games. There is nothing inherently wrong about them.
• There exist problems which have to do with business practices. We have those in all industries.
• Whatever your hobbies or activities, try to find a balance in your life. It makes you more rounded and you can understand others better.
• When we all try to keep an open mind, we have a more harmonious society. We communicate better and avoid the extremes.
• I am a regular person. Try not to assume too many things about me or anyone. It helps with maintaining the right disposition and being tolerant of the diversity of humans.

This entry builds on my talk about meditation, walking, and acceptance. Though it is no necessary to watch that as well.

Also watch some related recent entries:

• Interpretation of “The pain of Heracles” by Labis Xylouris
• Perfectionism, insecurity, and improvisation
• On thinking, living, acting
• Harmony, tranquillity, non-ownership
• The fast-paced life and magical solutions

Also watch some related recent entries:

• On thinking, living, acting
• Harmony, tranquillity, non-ownership
• The fast-paced life and magical solutions

Also watch some related presentations:

• Who can be a philosopher
• Harmony, tranquillity, non-ownership

People are afraid of large dogs. When you walk with one on the street, passers by will try to establish a safe distance: they may move to the opposite side of the street or take a detour.

Children are excited to see a large dog, but they too are cautious not to get close. The dog is larger than them and considerably stronger. The children’s parents are scared. They see the animal and think “oh my goodness, this beast can easily kill me, let alone my child.”

The more athletic the dog is, the quicker it is on its feet, the more graceful its gait, the higher the chance that others will fear it. It looks imposing, self-assured, threatening.

Does the large dog deserve the impression people have about it? Did it actually pose a threat to anyone? Is it really an aggressive animal? To all these questions, the answer is negative. No, the dog does not deserve its reputation. It simply is larger than average. Size has nothing to do with aggression.

The large dog can be a gentle giant. It is friendly towards humans and does not attack other animals. The handlers of the large dog know this. They tell others that their canine friend is a sweetheart. To make their claims believable, they even kiss the large dog in front of others. This is a docile creature.

Few are those who will look past the dog’s appearance. In their mind, they have the notion that large means dangerous. They will not let go of that bias. They are not prepared to give the large dog a chance. They are not ready to challenge their own prejudices.

The animal is peaceful, but there is nothing it can do to change the opinions of others. When people are negatively predisposed, they are likely to cling on to their beliefs. They become defensive and will seek ways, however ridiculous, to justify their position. They will come up with excuses such as how they once heard of a dog that was aggressive and dangerous. To them, one instance or even a few among millions is enough to make sweeping generalisations. The specifics do not matter anymore. They will not ask why that case of aggression happened, what where the contributing factors, if something else went wrong. No. To them it is the perfect data point to do what they would have done anyway: judge the large dog on the basis of its looks.

The large dog will try to make friends. It will wag its tail and get closer. Those who are already fearful will only see this as an act of aggression. “Hide, it is coming our way!” The poor canine is powerless in this situation. No matter what it does, it is condemned to have no friends for as long as people are biased against it.

There are those who are prepared to reconsider. They keep an open mind and will not be held hostage to whatever hesitation they initially had. If they see the large dog wagging its tail, they will eventually want to pet it, only to discover what was always the case: the dog is a gentle giant and simply wants to play.

In our life, we may experience events through the eyes of this peaceful large dog. We will know how it feels to be judged and discriminated against. Sometimes it is due to our appearance. In other cases it has to do with our mental attributes. Like our canine friend, we can do nothing to stop it and feel lonely because of it.

Now, you the reader may be wondering what does a philosopher know about all this. You might also hold the view that I, in my capacity as philosopher (and “Greek philosopher” no less, as if that means anything), represent the culmination of Western civilisation or some exaggeration along those lines. “Isn’t that a good thing?” I hear you saying. No, it generally is not a good thing. Being placed on a pedestal dehumanises the person: they will suffer the consequences of the role imposed upon them.

When people always talk to you with the proviso “but I do not know and maybe I am stupid”, they are implicitly admitting a fear. They are basically saying that you are a large dog to them and you could easily undo them. But you never harmed anyone and never had anything bad to say about someone based on their intelligence or any other feature for that matter. It is a baseless opinion about you and you are reminded of it wherever you go.

Those who can let go of their prejudices see the truth. The rest are afraid of the large dog: they let their fears govern their conduct.

Also watch some related videos:

• Cosmos, Logos, and the living universe
• Who can be a philosopher
• On insecurity, confidence, and aloofness
• [When I started recording without a transcript…] Perfectionism, insecurity, and improvisation
• False binaries and the continuum
• On thinking, living, acting

Table of Contents

1. The meaning of Ecos and Polis
2. The instituted reality of the polis
3. The quasi-permanence of institutions
4. Rules, roles, and expectations
5. Politics will find you
6. The false dichotomy of individual VS collective
7. Balancing the good of the place and the space

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In this video I will talk to you about philosophical themes that relate to private and public spheres. I will try to explain what those are and how each of us may understand their selfhood within their boundaries.

The reason I cover this topic is because some of my recent presentations have revolved around matters of subjectivity and individuality. I have always mentioned the social and cultural magnitudes, but I never explained in clear terms how politics is relevant in this regard. I want to help you better understand what I have already covered and, hopefully, give you some new ideas to think about.

Before we go any further: my concept of “politics” in this context is theoretical and abstract. I will not dwell on what politician X did and how journalist Y reported on it. While this sort of information is useful in certain situations, it is not needed to understand the bigger picture of our human condition. Philosophy is all about this general appreciation of things; of finding the common in the multitude.

The key insight from this presentation is that we cannot fully withdraw from politics and live in our own little bubble. There has to be a balance between private and public affairs.

The text I am reading from is available on my website. If you are watching this on the video hosting platform, you will find the link in the description: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-09-09-private-political/.

The meaning of Ecos and Polis

Let’s start with a couple of Greek words that apply to this topic and which I will be referencing throughout my presentation.

• Ecos, or oikos, or oekos (Οίκος): It literally means one’s home. This is the root term we find in words such as economics, ecology, ecosystem. All those retain the original meaning of “home”, “habitat”, or “household”.

  Consider how eco-nomos, where “nomos” (νόμος) means “rule”, is the set of rules—and implied mechanics—that ultimately apply to the management of the household’s affairs. In economics, the “household” can denote a number of things. We would normally classify it as a private actor at the microscopic level, such as an individual or a business, as well as a literal household. Though we could also think of macroscopic matters as pertaining to our “habitat” at-large, such as how inflation, which is an economy-wide phenomenon, is affecting each of us in our “house”. So the meaning of “ecos” is conveyed correctly.

  Same principle for ecology, the discussion about our habitat, and ecosystem, the interconnected factors that are relevant to our living space. Ecos, then, is not limited to the physical house, as in the actual building that we currently occupy. It is the place we live in as well as the space within which our existence is made possible.

• Polis (Πόλης): This literally means “city” though it also describes the affairs that people have in common in some structured way in a given point of co-location. We can infer as much from the fact that the city is indeed constructed by humans to serve as their habitat. The origin of the city consists in some kind of intervention and deliberate action to bring about a state of affairs that differs from what we would get in the jungle, for example.

  The city is structured not just literally but also figuratively as a bundle of rules that govern how phenomena within its boundaries are to unfold. There are provisions for every aspect of life within the city. Which are the working hours and for what kind of professions. Whether there are roads and what sort of code of conduct applies to their usage. The organisation of labour and the concomitant distribution of resources.

  We then realise that the polis is a blend between the physical dimension of actual buildings and roads and such designs as well as normative or intangible systems that inform, frame, condition, or otherwise determine the context-specific behaviour of relevant classes of people.

  It then is no surprise that we have derivative terms such as politics and polity. The former describes the matters of the polis, while the latter signifies the instituted order that pertains to a given phenomenon or state of affairs. The polis, thus, encompasses the meaning of ecos. It adds to it this important qualification of being a human-made construction and of embedding all those inventions we call norms.

Both ecos and polis imply the notion of space. They are not strictly private and cannot be realised in a vacuum. Our natural habitat, for instance, does not have a standalone presence, even if we live on our own in the most rudimentary way possible, such as on a tree. There always exists a wider system that envelops our own milieu. What we have is a subsystem of this supersystem. We call it the ecosystem, which is a system of systems.

All living organisms affect, in one way or another, how our life will be. The trees, the insects, the birds, the forests, the mountains, the oceans, the moon, the sun… they are all relevant to our actuality. We cannot live without trees, for example, and trees rely on mycelium, insects, and birds, and so on. Our existence in our home is one of co-existence with other forms of life. Our presence in this world is a joint presence. We are all interdependent. Again, the ecos is the space, not just the place, not just “rugged individual me” living in a cave at the end of a goat trail in some mountains.

The space is more clearly expressed through the meaning of the polis because here we understand that we are dealing with connections between people and with phenomena that involve classes of individuals. The polis is not limited to what happens within one’s own walls because of this broader dimension it has, though I shall tell you how even your own locality is not strictly private. But more on this later.

To be clear, emphasis on the significance of the space is not some hippie theory of someone who goes around hugging trees. Talking about the ecosystem and understanding those matters of coexistence and interdependence has always been part of the discussion about the ecos is.

The instituted reality of the polis

The word “institution” is a noun with a dual meaning:

1. It refers to what has been set up as a node in the political order.
2. It describes the process of establishing such a node.

Nodes are major points in a network of connections that influence specific affairs. For example, family is an institution. Each society or culture, has a specific understanding of what constitutes a family and which are the relevant rules for it.

Institutions are products of human conduct and invention. They are not natural laws. In one culture, people may consider private property sacrosanct. In another culture, private property is thought of as misguided egoism. It does not matter who is right and who is wrong based on which criteria. When we are doing philosophy and notice that there are disagreements or points of deviation, we can only express with confidence the view that we are not sure about it and that whatever state of affairs is relative to certain factors. In other words, we remain inquisitive and dubitative.

The polis and, by extension, the affairs of the polis—politics—are always framed in accordance with institutions or take place as part of a process of institution, of setting up nodes in the political order. Everything in the polis is instituted as such. What it means to have a certain gender. Which is the age of adulthood. Who governs. How is work organised and who gets what out of it. Which rules are relevant to the household, the workplace, the park, and so on. All these are institutions throughout.

Institutions are implemented to codify certain beliefs, values, or functions as quasi-permanent. Think, for example, about the institution of the parliament. It is a physical building but also a figment of the legal order. The parliament has specific duties and a certain role in the governance of the country. Though it also embodies values and opinions, such as the normative view that this polity should operate in such and such ways. The “should” is, as I said, not an objective reality. It is substantiated in the given culture.

An institution is quasi-permanent because nothing in politics is absolutely permanent. Everything that is instituted can be re-instituted. This is part of what I explained at great length in my presentation about “Conventions, relativism, and cosmopolitanism”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-21-relativism-cosmopolitanism/. There I introduced two concepts, namely pragmata and chremata, which help us better understand what is subject to institution and what is not.

The point for us now is that institutions are, strictly speaking, relative. In the image of an institution we discern a set opinions, concepts, aspirations of those who brought it into being or, anyhow, contributed to its current state. When we examine the institution of the parliament, for example, we identify therein the principles of the separation of state functions and of checks and balances (among others).

Institutions cannot be value-free. They cannot be objective in the way a natural constant is. Because if they were objective it would be pointless to institute them as such. For instance, it makes no sense to declare that the Sun must rise from the East, that the Earth must have a specific orbit around its star, that the speed of light must be a given number, and so on. We do not control those magnitudes.

Now, relativism is a loaded term with negative connotations. The “relativist” is a bugaboo that triggers a fearful reaction in people. They think that if we dare recognise something as relative, as a product of institution, we necessarily labour towards its abolition. This is simply wrong. When we philosophise, we learn to listen to what the other person is saying, and we jointly assess what the state of affairs is.

Notice how dispassionately I am describing institutions as relative. I do not mean to suggest that “relative equals bad” or that we should go to some extreme end of tearing apart all institutions and then living in a world without order whatsoever. That would most likely be an untenable situation. All I am saying is that there is a distinction to be made between (i) magnitudes that exist regardless of human convention and (ii) those which exist because of human convention. It is simple.

Money, property, family, gender roles, the parliament, the monarch, the police… they are all institutions. They have a certain character, else specific attributes, that are developed through the history and traditions of the given polis. We can interpret institutions as codes which encapsulate what people believed to be true or practical for a particular issue, during the applicable period of time. Put differently, an institution reads as “these beliefs frame our conduct right now”.

As societies change and are exposed to new information and realities, so do their values, even if only incrementally. A few decades ago, women were not allowed to vote in free elections, for example. Now this is considered normal. In the future, we may have a different arrangement, such as teenagers being allowed to vote. The gist is that institutions are never truly permanent. They can be rendered obsolete, amended, reviewed, abolished… Relative, then. It is a matter of fact.

The quasi-permanence of institutions

Institutions are relative, though they are conceived and implemented with the intent of introducing a certain degree of predictability in the order of the polis. There is a paradox here. That which is relative must be embedded in the conscience of people as seemingly objective.

Think again about the institution of the parliament. If someone says that we should abolish it, they are faced with fierce opposition because such a course of action would usher in an era of uncertainty and instability, among others. It would disturb the delicate balance that the current instituted reality engenders.

There are good reasons to keep institutions in place, as I already noted, though observe how institutions serve as points of reference. They are the criteria with which every pertinent rule or pattern of behaviour is assessed. For instance, those who will defend the parliament are, in effect, arguing in favour of parliamentarianism and all relevant beliefs. Furthermore, they are of the view that those ideas are good for the polis at-large: they have worked before and ought to be respected for the ongoing well-being of the political whole.

Institutions can only work as quasi-permanent; only when they are presumed as permanent. It is impossible to incorporate relativity in very making and presence of an institution. Again, please understand my dispassionate use of the notion of “relative” and its derived concepts. Institutions can be refashioned, yes, but that does not mean that they must be in a state of constant review. When institutions are contested on a continuous basis, there can be no political order. It will implode with potentially bad consequences for those involved.

To treat institutions as quasi-permanent is a matter of practicality. The polis has to have a degree of stability so that people can go on with their lives. The polis is our ecos, after all: the space within which we all operate.

The quasi-permanence of institutions imprints them in the conscience as authoritative. While the immediate utility is obvious, there also is potential for misunderstandings where people became dogmatic in their support of the status quo. Think, for example, of the person who hears about “relativism” and immediately associates it with all that is evil in this world. They believe that those mischievous relativists will undermine all that is noble and worth having.

Take the institution of property rights as a case in point. Private property is the cornerstone of the current economic model. It is a foundational belief, so changing it is no mean task: whatever tweak will have far-reaching implications. Though tweaks can happen and we should not be afraid to have such a discussion when we are trying to solve certain problems. Why should, say, billionaires exist? Why can’t we shave off a bit of their wealth and use it to improve the living conditions of the vast majority of the population? Why must a handful of individuals hold more wealth than the rest of the planet combined? This is not a law of nature. It is a convention that, for whatever reason, has been instituted in place.

If we take the practical quasi-permanence of institutions as normative and then convert it into a dogma, we are effectively alienating ourselves from the products of our creation. We are falsely treating conventions as natural constants and we forget how they are all-too-human in their character and very presence.

This alienation from our own works effectively reduces us to hostages of a dead intellectual. We treat the beliefs which are codified in an institution as the word of some deity and we dare not recognise the reality before our eyes; the reality that those beliefs were conceived by humans in a specific historical context in pursuit of certain ends that made sense to those people at that time.

When we recognise that institutions are products of convention, we do not do it to pick a pointless fight with history. We cannot change what has already transpired. All we want is to have a sincere conversation about the actuality of things. If an institution becomes alien to us, if it is removed from our capacity to institute and re-institute, it performs the function of enslaving us to the past.

Imagine if all your choices in life were foreshadowed by your grandparents and you were indoctrinated to think of those decisions as the word of God. Perhaps what your grandparents would have to say is interesting and useful. Though this cannot be presumed to be the case, nor can any one opinion be exalted to the status of divine command.

Consider when a politician utters the dreaded phrase “there is no alternative”. For example, in an economic crisis they say that the government should increase taxes on the people while reducing social spending. The excuse is always that such policies are the only course of action that is possible. Those claims are predicated on the tacit alienation from our own institutions. The politician thinks that there is no alternative, because they do not want to consider the possibility of touching certain institutions. Why not roll back the generous benefits towards bankers? Why not prohibit tax havens? And so on. Of course there are alternatives! We just have to stop being dogmatic.

Rules, roles, and expectations

The instituted reality of the polis is made up of rules. There are rules with a general scope and others with a particular one. For example, the institution of fiat money as legal tender, as the only official way to pay your taxes, is a general rule. Whereas shaving one’s facial hair while doing their military service is a particular rule.

Rules are stated preferences or directives on the intended mode of conduct. They are linked to a criterion of conditionality and are enforced by a certain arrangement of power. In other words, rules tell people how they should behave in the given situation.

Rules are not targeted at specific individuals. Instead, they create and/or delimit roles. A role is an abstraction that applies to a class of individuals who fulfil certain criteria. For instance, the unconditional rule to take off one’s hat while entering a specific building abstracts away the subjectivity of the person: it covers anyone wearing a hat.

You may think that there are rules which are about individuals, such as what the president of the republic has to do. Though here, too, the rules envisage a role. They pertain to whomever assumes control of the institution. They are still abstracting away the subjectivity of the person.

Roles always have an implicit scope of action. They define who the agent is and what they can do. The role of the president of the republic comes with all the duties and powers of that office.

Remember that institutions are relative. Rules and roles remain open to interpretation. When, say, a new president comes to power and breaks certain traditions, they are effectively remaking the role by changing some of its facets. Whether this is good or not, desirable or not, is beside the point. What matters for us now is to understand that roles come with certain expectations. These expectations are either explicitly stated in the conditionality of the rule, or they are implicit in the minds of relevant people.

When a person conforms with expectations, they are operating in line with their role. They are not fully expressing their subjectivity. A soldier who is wearing their uniform is doing what soldiers must do. It’s not that those clothes necessarily are their favourite ones.

Now what does that imply for one’s personhood? If rules are everywhere around us and we are always conforming with them, who are we, really? When we see someone behave in certain ways, are we observing their actual preferences or their conformance with expectations?

To re-use an example from my last presentation on “The presumptive idol of you”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-30-presumptive-idol/. Picture this acquaintance of mine who was acting in accordance with the stereotype of the “alpha male” while in the presence of women. He was pretending to be tough, dominant, unflinching, emotionless. Was he though? In reality, there is no such person. It’s a dangerous lie.

Expectations condition the behaviour of situational agents of action. When we always do what the role says, we effectively are denied of our subjectivity or are making it a copy of what others want.

The person who only conforms with roles is basically playing a game. They become the avatar of the applicable expectations and they do only what the rules of the game permit. Their goals are foreshadowed by the game’s world. There may be benefits, sure, though they come at the cost of one’s honesty.

Such a role-playing fellow is denying their reality. They may ignore or suppress their emotions for the sake of winning in this little game. They might become obsessed with proving to others how good they are at this role. They do it because they are misguided. It is how they are conditioned to think. Or they do it with the ulterior motive of gaining the rewards this game has for its participants.

Whatever the case, expectations, roles, and rules have a profound effect on one’s selfhood. They influence or outright determine who the person is and what they are doing.

This is where we observe the connection between ecos and polis. Recall that I explained how they both have a meaning of the wider space within which one’s presence is made manifest. They are not limited to the place. Not even one’s own house. Think about the gender roles in a traditional family. Those come from the culture, from the rules of the polis. Yet the persons who conform with them are made in the image of the role and are behaving in such ways even within the confines of their house. They embody the roles.

When we think about private affairs, then, we should keep in mind that the people involved do not have a decontextualised presence. They are always immersed in a given milieu, they are framed by it, and they learn how to not express what they truly want. At least not always.

Politics will find you

What I just described blurs the distinction between private and public spheres. Let me offer you a personal example and you can generalise it from there. I had a deeply religious and prejudicial distant relative. I met her when I was a young adult. She would make comments about my appearance; comments which had value judgements built into them. You see, I have been able to grow a full beard since I was a teenager. So I would get constant remarks such as:

Why didn’t you shave? Do you want the girls to think you are a thug?

Imagine you find yourself in a room full with such people or in a town where everyone is like that. They will not consider the specifics of your case. There is no respect whatsoever for what you think is a private matter. Your very appearance is political; your body is political. They have an opinion about it and they feel entitled to be vociferous in their conduct. They will demand that you become who they expect you to be. In this case, it is the stereotype of the “good lad” which is enforced through peer pressure and outright bullying.

You may think that I am exaggerating. I could keep a clean shave each day. It would appease the girls for not having a thug in their midst. Sure. Though I would also be confirming their baseless view that some inconsequential facial hair defines the person. So I preferred to tell that relative and those girls to sod off. Simple though often costly.

We cannot escape from politics. You may not want to be involved. Fine! But they do and they will. And you shall suffer the consequences.

I am giving you an example with facial hair on purpose. I could have used something more egregious. I do it this way to illustrate how even something as trivial as a bit of hair is made into this major issue that we are supposed to be highly concerned about. In reality though, you know all-too-well that people judge others not just for facial hair.

When I was a child, the boys in my neighbourhood were allowed to go outdoors and play. Football, basketball… whatever. The girls were subject to an altogether different treatment. They were forced to remain indoors at all times. Why is this? Were they not children? Did they not want to play as well? Why was such a double standard in place? Did anyone really benefit from it?

The gist is that you are always judged. You are always expected to conform with the relevant roles. Your self, insofar as what you want and what your subjectivity is, is irrelevant. Unless you make a stand and assume agency, you simply are an avatar in this role-playing game. You are reduced to a hypocrite who suppresses their real wants in order to win some inane reward in this little game. You are dead inside.

What I want you to understand from this is that politics is pervasive. There is no ecos that exists in a vacuum. There is no way for you to live as a social animal yet remain outside the instituted reality. It will be there no matter what. The only choice you have is whether you try to do something about it if you care. To reinterpret the roles. To reform the rules. To enact institutions that respect and safeguard the diversity of the human condition.

Remain apolitical if you want. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that politics will not come after you sooner or later. It will, for sure.

The false dichotomy of individual VS collective

To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should abolish all rules and just do whatever we want. That would not be sustainable. There is a good reason to have some sort of structure in place. Otherwise we operate in an environment of radical uncertainty; an environment that is no longer conducive to all sorts of benign activities.

We will not outgrow politics while remaining human in the way we currently are. The key is to find a balance between competing priorities: the good of the place and the good of the space. This can be framed as the individual versus society. You may think it is an easy choice. Perhaps you are an individualist who believes that “only the individual exists” and that there are no so-called “collectivist” entities of any kind. You would be labouring under a falsehood, taking for granted the dichotomy between the individual and the collective.

There is no individual in abstract. There is no individual in some decontextualised nothingness. Every person is brought into a world that predates them: their parents, their neighbours, their language, their customs, and so on. Every person grows up experiencing stimuli through filters that are not of their own choosing.

The construct of the individual is analytical, as is that of the collective. “Analytical” means that we discern a pattern in the cosmos and treat it as if it had a standalone presence. We do not mean that it actually exists on its own in a vacuum. These are aspects of a singular reality. The microscopic level is that of a single person, treated with a degree of abstraction. Whereas the macroscopic view is that of the interplay between those persons and the emergent phenomena to be discerned therein, also with a degree of abstraction.

The choice between the individual and society is not an easy one because the line dividing the two is not clear. It is a singular reality, as I said.

Forget about whether society exists as some collectivist magnitude and just think about climate change. Our ecos, our habitat, is being eroded. An individual who lives right now may not care about it and, indeed, most people do not really think about the environment. They do not care as they assume it is not their problem. Whatever consequences will be felt by future generations, right?

Think about the concept of “future generations” for a moment. Is this a thing that exists? No. Is it sheer fantasy? No. It is a potential of our condition. There will be humans who will be born into a hostile environment, especially if those of us now do not think about them in the future. The concept of “future generations” thus hints at a potential subject and this subject is collective. It is a class of people who are defined by their age relative to us. It is a group that will most definitely experience the calamitous effects of our choices.

To dismiss the concept of “future generations” as some preoccupation of a fringe group of misguided collectivists is a pernicious folly. You cannot afford to ignore this magnitude, for you too have been determined by previous generations. Your language, your culture, the institutions in your midst: they are not of your own making and they do predate you.

So please avoid this sloppy thinking of treating analytical constructs as if they are actual. It is fruitful to perform an analysis, yes, though we must do so with the requisite self-awareness. Otherwise we are prone to errors in the very method we are employing.

Balancing the good of the place and the space

There is a proverb, which might be of Greek origin, though I am not sure and it does not matter, anyway. It states that:

A society grows when elders plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

This is another take on the false dichotomy between the individual and the collective. It is a profound insight into the singular reality that contains both the individual and the collective. Whatever distinction between the two is analytical. And whatever we have as institutions, rules, roles, expectations, and the impression of selfhood is, in one way or another, defined intersubjectively. It does not exist in a vacuum of nothingness. It does not have a standalone presence and cannot be properly understood in its own right without reference to its supersystem.

We thus return the problématique of managing politics, the affairs of the polis. We need to tend to the integrity and overall quality of our instituted reality. We have to preserve a modicum of structure and order so that we may enjoy the stability that allows us to pursue all those endeavours we sometimes take for granted in our life.

To this end, we have to recognise that the institutions are not alien to us. They are made by us for our needs. An institution is a human invention, a product of our ingenuity and practical reasonableness.

Treating institutions as taboo or as gods or, anyhow, as magnitudes that we cannot affect only works against us. The same with all stereotypes or beliefs that we dare not question while we partake in all those role-playing games. Value judgements that go unchallenged tend to keep us hostage to a view of the world that is dogmatic.

What is human in origin, all the chremata—to re-use a term I mentioned before—, can be fathomed in a new light. We can re-institute the institutions. We can remake the rules and redraw the boundaries. Not for the sake of making changes. Not because of some frivolous desire to prove a point. No. We must not forget that our polis is indeed ours. This way we know what to do when we have to tweak certain aspects of the instituted reality in order to contribute to our ongoing shared wellness.

I am not telling you all this to nudge you towards joining a political party or becoming a revolutionary. I am merely showing you the bigger picture of our reality. We are political no matter what. This is not to say that day-to-day politics is interesting or nice or whatever. It most likely is not. There is filth, corruption, conspiracy, treason, and war. It is an ugly place. But such is the human condition. We do not live in an angelic world because we are not angels.

Not all is bad though. Think about that proverb I mentioned a few minutes ago about the elders who plant trees whose shade they shall never sit in. Imagine how your grandparents and their grandparents took care of you and tried to make the world a better place for you to have a decent chance in life. There is cooperation and solidarity among our species. Again, we want to avoid simplistic binaries and false dichotomies.

And some final words on this notion of keeping politics out of our life. I have talked with lots of competent people who are experts in some field of specialisation: scientists, engineers, programmers… Some live in a bubble and don’t realise that politics is pertinent to them.

Take the scientist, for example. To do science one needs laboratories, equipment, a group of specialists, and lots of experimentation. All this requires money; money that the scientist will most likely not have. Science depends on funding. Where do funds come from, exactly? In most cases, they are directly or indirectly provided by the government or some private actors which are predominantly businesses. Funding always comes with strings attached even if those are implicit in the form of incentives. The scientist must compete with other scientists for those scarce resources. They must peddle their research programme in order to get the money and do the work. Yes, there is the ideal of finding the truth, though it is driven by practical considerations with their implicit political or economic calculus.

Same principle for what happens at the workplace. The prevailing conditions are not the product of some law of nature. Those too are instituted as such. They are political throughout. What you think about politics is irrelevant. The rules still apply to you and you continue to be subject to the roles and expectations that go with them.

I understand the salient point to “keep politics out of this”. Indeed, there are technical matters that have to be treated with the requisite precision. My plea to you is to not forget about the bigger picture. There is a whole world outside whatever technical domain; an instituted reality; a polis that does not draw an indelible line between private and public spheres. You cannot opt out on a whimsy. If you do not speak, others will. And you will not like it.

That’s all for today, folks. Thank you very much for your attention!

You leave the office on a Friday at 14:00. This is much earlier than usual. It was quiet for whatever reason. Yet you feel exhausted, overwhelmed, depleted. As you take the usual 40-minute walk back home, you receive a message: “Plans for tonight? How about a gin-n-tonic?”

You don’t reply. You can’t muster the strength to explain why you don’t want to go out. It is not the other person’s fault. Who doesn’t like a drink in the presence of nice company? It’s not even that you quit drinking alcohol: a mere long drink is nothing compared to what you are used to. And the place is not that bad, either. What gives?

After 20 minutes, you pick up the phone and text back: “I can’t. Will tell you later”. You then switch off the device and change course. Instead of going home, you are heading to a forest on the other side of the town’s outskirts. If you are to hide, you might as well do it properly, right?

You are overburdened by troubling thoughts. The responsibilities of the model professional have taken their toll on you. There is this people-pleasing propensity to help everyone out, usually at your own expense. You provide assistance to them to receive some validation that you too are good at something. It is a token of recognition. Perhaps they might even like you!

Though there is something else: the growing sense of emptiness stemming from the realisation that nobody knows you. How is that even possible? You have literally hundreds of acquaintances plus all those who tell you how your “fame precedes you”. Please! Yes, there are those who work with you, drink with you, fuck with you… So what? They don’t know you. It’s all a trick of the moment.

No-one knows you because you don’t know yourself. What you show is an act. You have been leading a life of role-playing. Behold the “good worker” and “reliable colleague”! Everyone calls you when they need a good worker and reliable colleague. They aren’t asking for you, though. The call is for someone who fits these criteria, an avatar of the relevant expectations. You? You are only relevant insofar as you identify with that avatar. Otherwise you are replaceable, disposable, irrelevant.

How can you know who you are when all your experiences are contingent on that initial lie? You please others to feel better about yourself. Deep down, you are scared, afraid that no-one likes you and that if you dare answer negatively they will have no reason to ever be with you. You dread being rejected. It is not loneliness per se, it is the dismissal that brings about this eventuality. That is what you cannot face up to.

Come Monday, you have no plan to return to the office. You know they can and will replace you swiftly with another one of those “model professionals”. What’s the going rate for a dozen, anyway? You’re being torn apart by that false duty to please others, while your nucleus of self-preservation still urges you to quit.

Your dutiful part would like it to be just another Monday. Everybody goes to office at 09:00, but you are there at 08:00. Others leave at 17:00, while you stay until 18:00 or at least wait for everyone to leave first before making it to the exit. The secret desire is to be seen; to have someone think “now this is professionalism!”

What do those accolades give you? Comfort, of course. They feed into your narrative of selfhood. It is presumptuous, as it starts from the baseless belief that you are ugly and find no approval among your peers. It is biased: it conditions you to behave in a manner that seeks to win everyone’s approval. Hence the people-pleasing attitude; hence the insecurity of confronting the possibility of rejection.

A Monday like all others is yet another sacrifice to the altars of hypocrisy and self-denial. You keep performing the same ritual over-and-over as it provides a solid basis for your operations: a stable income, a fancy job, a decent apartment. It could’ve been much worse. You’ve been there and experienced as much, like those days you were begging to work for a second 8-hour shift just to break even. This sort of stability is worth the cost, it seems.

In truth, you persist on your routines as you harbour the hope that you will be discovered. The gem amidst the dirt, no? Your behaviour conforms with the tired trope of the powerless damsel who can only wish that the knight in shining armour saves the day. You keep acting to play it safe, to preserve this otherwise eerie stability, while secretly waiting for your own saviour: the “special one” who will have the clarity of mind to see past your charade and understand that there is a troubled and misunderstood person under all this apparent eagerness for work.

Many Mondays have gone by. Summer gave way to winter multiple times over. You dare not make the first move as there is always the chance of being rejected. Instead, you wait. Your 18th birthday was long ago and you insist on waiting. You are closer to your hair turning grey. But you are stubborn. Such are the boundaries of your comfort zone: please others, fill your actual emptiness with the placebo of superficial validation, and keep the delusion alive. The special one is right around the corner.

This walk is unlike the others: there will be no Monday after. It ends here at this forest. You left the office for the last time. Until this morning you were still thinking that there exists a more suitable workplace or some other milieu that will welcome you better. What does “welcome” and “better” entail? Perhaps to do more of the same with a greater degree of effectiveness?

Those fancies quickly fade away. You imagine the beautiful eyes you’ve never seen before yet already fallen in love with and think what you would do for them. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever! Cowards don’t just do stuff. You still fear rejection. Imagine being enamoured with someone you’ve never met, seen, or heard, and still fearing you will be turned down. What will that expose, really? This puts an end to your daydreaming… The eyes vanish. Their colour is one with the pond on this clear day.

You are no coward though. You have never hesitated to mark your own path. The problem is comfort, too much comfort. You mistook this stability for a benign equilibrium in your life. The money, the sociability, the “friends with benefits but come Monday I pretend to not know you”… Connected bodies in an experience akin to a drive-through. Superficialities! It was not going anywhere. You managed to fit in by mutilating yourself.

Now you know. You toss it all to the wind and discard the phone you just broke into pieces. There is no country in this world that will welcome you as somebody else. You will always be taken for who you appear to be, even by those with sincere intentions. Who are you, after all?

The plan has changed. There will be no Monday. It is time for a new beginning. You have no answers. Any such attempt is an exercise in prejudice, in claiming to know more than you actually do. Instead, you remain honest and thus silent. Your talking henceforth will come from a position of knowledge. You have no notion of what is to come. You just know that your life hitherto has been an elaborate lie. In this hour of crisis you have found what you always lacked: the fortitude to persevere in the face of uncertainty.

There is no land to escape to; no home to save you. Of course! How can the milieu be at fault for something that you have been carrying inside of you all this time? The dread of rejection, the insecurity of being alone. Whatever exit you make is simply a means of physically removing yourself from the Mondays. There is no delusion that you will find solace in some miraculous mountain.

The poison in the mind is what is making you this peculiar brand of coward: all those biases you have taken for granted, all these unfair views about yourself that you have woven together into a coherent narrative. They are biased and unfair because they are based on nothing but your aggrandised fears. This forest is where it all begins. The grand cleansing, the thoroughgoing reform, the remaking.

You are on the move, though in a deep meditative state. You know this is possible. It has happened before and will probably become the norm going forward. You are tearing down all monuments to the truth you had constructed. You shall learn to say “no” and will stop acting as selfless the whole time, for you are not self-less.

The insecurities are not yours. Now you recognise it. They are a learnt disposition, a burden you had accumulated through the years of denial. The insipid poison is the belief that you own this burden. There is a misplaced sense of duty towards it: to live up to the challenge of carrying it, to be strong, and to just do what you must. “Duty”, “must”… Who even decides those? To take them for granted is the sign of foolishness; foolishness of the highest order. Now you know that none of this is yours. The travels, the acquaintances, the kisses, the lies… Nothing belongs to you. It is alienable.

You still lack strength to conduct yourself in a way that is consistent with those thoughts. You threw away the phone and will not report at the office because you cannot take it all at once. That’s okay. The key is to take it slow and start small. You are now in the process of deconstructing all those edifices you had laboriously set up over the years. These are the products of a bygone era; an era of heteronomy (rule by another).

You are no longer searching for a promised land. It all happens here. The burdens will come with you if you keep carrying them. Abolish all such property, stop being invested in its preservation, and you shall find peace.

You are now home and are packing the essentials. One of the perks of having enough savings is that you can implement change rapidly. This Monday you will be far away from your usual location. Though not because you think of your destination as your salvation. No. The change comes from within. It consists in an altogether different disposition. You plan to be remade.

You are still weak and fragile, albeit with a newfound inexorable determination. Will there ever be another gin-n-tonic? No, not if it emanates from the same place as the last ones. No more drive-throughs! Any new event will either be rooted in honesty or it will not transpire with your consent.

Table of Contents

1. What are idols
2. Misunderstanding an idol
3. The relativity of idols
4. How we are made into idols
5. We do not control narratives
6. The invisible person
7. The invisible and lonely person
8. The right attitude of honesty

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In this presentation, I want to talk to you in philosophical terms about how we are perceived in interpersonal relations. What other people think about us and how their thoughts may differ from our actuality. We want to learn more about this possible disconnect and figure out how we may cope with the relevant challenges.

As you can tell from the title I have chosen, I will elaborate on presumptions and how our self is perceived in light of them.

This entry expands on some of the themes I have covered in other recent presentations. I list the most relevant below for your convenience. However, you do not need to check those to understand what I am about to tell you. This is a standalone publication.

• Expectations, rules, and role-playing: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-03-expectations-rules-roles/

• On selfhood: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-31-selfhood/

• On insecurity, confidence, and aloofness: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-25-insecurity-confidence-aloofness/

If you are watching this on the video hosting platform, the text I am reading from is available on my website (check the video’s description): https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-30-presumptive-idol/

What are idols

The word “idol” is derived from Greek (είδωλο). It refers to a representation or image of something. An idol is a simulacrum of a certain presence. A symbol that neatly describes some pattern.

Idols necessarily are simplifications. Even the most faithful representation still is a snapshot of whatever reality it captures. Think, for example, about a photograph that depicts a mountain range. We can see pine trees, goat trails, snowy mountaintop, an eagle flying in the distance, and so on. The photo is faithful to what was happening in that moment from that perspective, given the camera hardware’s capabilities. Though the contents of the picture still are not the actual phenomena that unfolded then and there.

An idol, then, should not be taken in a negative sense. We use symbols practically all the time: in language, in our own thinking, in art, and so on. Idols are part of our capacity to discern and subsequently abstract patterns from the totality of all presence, all experiences, all stimuli.

“Idol” became a smear term that was and is employed by intolerant fanatics. Think, for example, about “idolater” and “idolatry”. What kind of negative emotions do they evoke? They speak of a person who worships falsehoods. These negative connotations are self-righteous, for they imply that the non-idolaters are the ones who know the truth and are, perhaps, justified to carry out certain acts of intolerance.

I don’t use “idol” in this strictly negative way. For me, the term has the original meaning of an image, a representation, a simulacrum, or a symbol. This is how I will be using it throughout this presentation.

Misunderstanding an idol

While faithful idols serve as good approximations of what they symbolise, we often have to deal with idols that do not correspond to the underlying reality they depict. Consider, in simple terms, that a filter is applied to the camera. It tints everything towards the blue side of the colour spectrum. Suddenly all we see in the picture is blue-ish. Though in actuality, we cannot see all this blue: there is no blue! It is a distortion produced by the filter and thus captured in the photograph, else idol, of the scene.

Suppose now, that someone who does not know anything about the contents of the image has to learn about them through the image. That is the only source of relevant information they have. They will then be justified in thinking that everything in those scenes is indeed blue. The point is that idols have the capacity to distort reality.

Imagine a classical Greek statue. It is an idol of Athena, the Goddess of wisdom. Please remember how I use the term “idol”. There is one person who goes to embrace the statue in the hope of gaining wisdom. That person misunderstands what the representation is as well as what wisdom is. They think that the marble is wise and that touching it will somehow transfer that quality of wisdom to the person. It won’t happen!

Whereas another fellow sees the same sculpture and recognises in it an artistic genius, a cultural trope, a historical artefact that might give us insight into an ancient civilisation, and so on. It is the same statue, though it is perceived in profoundly different ways.

We thus realise how symbolism is subjective. It does not have an intrinsic meaning that is impossible to misidentify.

The relativity of idols

Symbols can have a mostly objective meaning or, at least, an underlying objectivity to them. For example, when a photograph is a realistic depiction of a given scene. Though an agreed-upon meaning is also possible through culture or some other kind of institutional arrangement, such as a state edict, or a convention between people.

Think about flags. Any flag you want. It has a certain pattern and uses some colours. In one context, the flag is perceived as normal and expected. In another situation, it is treated as a sign of protest or pride. In a third scenario, it is taken as a matter of aggression or insensitivity. It still is the same pattern and the same arrangement of colours and shapes. But the meaning is a function of who interprets, the prevailing conditions, and relevant factors in their interplay.

Notice how an idol has narratives associated with it. When considered holistically, the idol means so much more than what it represents. It is a bundle of actual and potential meanings. Those narratives are beyond the control of any given person. For example, the artist who produced the sculpture of Athena cannot dictate how others will perceive of that work of art. The artist cannot even determine that others will treat the statue as a work of art. There is a possibility that someone sees it as the embodiment of wisdom, or another as some kind of offence against their own values.

The gist is that the meaning of idols is intersubjective and specific to the context. It is relative even when we can all agree to some objective qualities of it. We can all tell, for example, that Athena’s statue is made out of stone. But whether we like what we see or not, is open to debate. The representation remains subject to interpretation.

How we are made into idols

To idolise is to produce a representation out of a certain presence. We tend to use “idolise” in the sense of “worship”, though I am here employing the term in its literal meaning: to make an idol, else symbol, else simulacrum.

We produce an idol out of who we are when we behave in a manner that conforms with expectations. We project an image. We want to look in a certain way and to be treated accordingly.

Let’s consider a practical example, which also shows how the context matters. I had a heterosexual male acquaintance who, in my presence, was an easygoing and funny person. We would go for drink and have a relaxed experience. But, if there were any females around, he would act as a different person. No more jokes, none of that cool attitude. He wanted to look assertive and dominant. He would even change his favourite beverage for something more so-called “manly”.

This fellow was idolising himself in the template of the “alpha male”. It is this quasi-scientific stereotype of a sociopath who is supposed to have leadership qualities and to be sexually attractive to whatever target gender. The wannabe alpha males of this world are fundamentally insecure about their condition. They need to maintain a facade about how great they are. They basically hate themselves. They do not want to show their actuality.

So this acquaintance was projecting an idol of himself which, in this case, was designed to be a misrepresentation of who the underlying person was. Even the choice of drink was an elaborate lie.

I am not blaming anyone who conforms with such stereotypes. There are many prejudices and you are well aware of them. It’s not just the alpha male. We have the “good student”, the “fine lady”, the “hard worker”, the “obedient soldier”, the “true patriot”, the “nerd programmer”, and so on. It is not necessarily your fault. Chances are that you are the victim of those stereotypes. You are being objectified and dehumanised, for it is not the real “you” that people care about, but only the version of you which conforms with those beliefs. So the idol of you. All you want is to fit in. To be a part of the group. You desire attention, recognition, success. It is how humans tend to behave. Deep down, you may just want a hug, assuming your intentions are sincere.

At any rate, what I am saying here is that there is a mechanism in effect by which a person is turned into a representation of the underlying human being. This acquaintance of mine was one type of character with me and another person altogether when in the midst of women. Why was he doing that? Because he was a coward and a fool. He did not want to challenge the status quo, to question the propriety of those roles. He was not prepared to assume agency in earnest because he didn’t know who he really was. He had not yet discovered himself. He was still operating on the basis of certain prejudices in the hope of finding that one hug everybody needs.

Now think of this scenario from the perspective of the females this guy wanted to attract. The alpha male is a stereotype that some women are indoctrinated into liking. Suppose, then, that my acquaintance did not behave like a macho man and was instead funny and relaxed. He would still be dehumanised in the eyes of those women who dismiss anyone not in conformance with the alpha male idol. Perhaps, they would think of him as childish or as a weakling. You know how these things work.

We do not control narratives

The point, then, is the same as with all idols. They are relative. There is an interpretive aspect to them. We are not in control of the narratives and we cannot determine how other people will think of us or whatever other phenomenon for that matter. To their eyes we always are a combination of what they see and what they evaluate.

My acquaintance is a victim either way. If he conforms with the alpha male idol, he is making a fool of himself. If he is funny and relaxed, others will judge him accordingly. The judgement is always there. What matters then, is whether we attach value to it or not.

When we want to fit in, we really care about what others think. We want to be in good terms with them, because that is the conduit to our perceived comfort and apparent happiness. If we do not live up to those expectations, we lose the relevant benefits. It is a transaction, a cost-benefit calculation.

Trying to fit in is difficult. The opinions of other people are not in our control. From our perspective, they are variable. They are exogenous, as they originate from the exterior and then enter our immediate milieu. We cannot set their value. As such, when we always try to conform with the norms, we subject ourselves to the vicissitudes of public opinion. Now a certain view finds currency. In the past, there was a different view. In the future, it may be something else altogether. Maybe we think we will go with the flow and hope for the best. The problem, though, is that we cannot always adapt to those shifting narratives. There are cases where we will not fit in and will stand out as misfits, as failures in some regard, even when we are not openly criticised for it.

Let me tell you about views that we cannot just adapt to on the spot. I walk a lot with my dog. More than 2 hours per day. People see me and they recognise me. Sometimes one will try to talk with me. They are curious to learn a few things. It’s common, as this wider region has small, sparsely populated villages. Everyone wants to know who the members of their community are. So what do they ask? It’s always personal like “Where is your wife?” and “How many kids do you have?”.

I am not exaggerating. A stranger sees me walking towards a mountain trail, hits the brakes on their vehicle, and tries to confirm what they are already assuming as true. “Of course” I have a wife. “Of course” I have kids. Plural, mind you—lots of them, not just one! In case it is not obvious, I am being sarcastic. The answer to those questions is negative. Though notice what the expectations are. These questions start from a certain position. They take some things for granted.

If we have the wrong attitude, we will feel disturbed by those intrusive questions. We may describe them as insensitive, but merely giving them a name does not make us any less prone to their effects. With the wrong attitude, when we do eventually get those type of questions they will make us feel inadequate, unfulfilled, manqué. We will start thinking that their tacit judgements are correct and internalise the view that we are flawed in some major way. We may then experience self-denial which culminates in self-hatred. Our selfhood will revolve around those ideas.

We cannot afford to be upset about thoughts people have, because then we will suffer every time someone holds an inaccurate view. We will be annoyed, though still powerless to stop it. We can try to correct a person’s thoughts, but we simply cannot do that for each and every opinion in circulation. We must ultimately admit that we are not in control.

The invisible person

The examples I have already provided show that at least a part of our self and out subjectivity is not ours. It belongs to the minds of other people. They interpret what they perceive and they assume things that may or may not correspond to our actuality. Even when these assumptions are wrong, those folks still substantiate our personhood in their thoughts.

For example, the local resident who asks me about wife and kids already considers me husband and father, respectively. To their mind, this is an integral part of who I am. Extend this to all facets of our selfhood, to everything that is a characteristic of us, either through its presence or absence. Whether it is or isn’t—and the manner in which it is or isn’t—defines us.

The fundamental constraint we have of not controlling the narratives has a flip-side. Some parts of our self become inscrutable to others. They are inaccessible to them. This is because they already believe in certain ideas which obscure whatever we could exhibit. Our reality, then, can easily go unnoticed. The more presumptuous people are, the more elusive our actuality is for them. They live with the presumptive idol of our self and they treat us on the basis of that representation.

If we add together all the presumptions that others have about us, then we are already starting from a position of undoing beliefs and asking people to learn things from scratch. In essence, our truth is invisible to them and we must make an even greater effort to reveal what we can. This effort though, cannot be one-sided. The others need to have the appropriate disposition of wanting to learn more and, therefore, of keeping an open mind. This is not always a given. As such, any unilateral measures will prove futile.

Let’s consider a scenario so that I don’t speak in abstract terms. There is this person who is very attractive. Everybody has a crush on them. This person is judged on the basis of their appearance. Yes, good looks have their advantages, which I do not need to elaborate here as you all know about them. Though what about the disadvantages? This super attractive person is also invisible, because everyone’s opinions revolve around the surface-level features. It’s all about appearances.

One’s looks then can produce this paradoxical phenomenon where they capture the attention of others while simultaneously rendering the underlying person obscure. There is no consideration about what that human being is like beyond appearances. It’s just a pretty face or whatever. Every view follows from there. And the same for appearances in general. While they are all about visuals, they actually conceal things behind layers upon layers of presumptions and biases.

Imagine that this fabled beauty of my example here is actually not interested in all this attention. They would like some quietude. They cannot simply be relaxed and do how they feel, as everyone treats them inhumanly as nothing but a pretty face, not as a fully fledged human being. They are an object of admiration or desire. Emphasis on “object”.

The real person can suffer greatly from the presumptive idol of their self. I mention beauty to show how these things work. Our culture places a disproportionate value on appearances. We are conditioned to think that “good looks”, however defined, are a blessing. Nothing bad can come out of them. In truth, they can be a curse. Not because there is anything wrong with one’s appearance. It simply is due to how we do not control the narratives. Others will make judgements and we will be at the receiving of them, either we like it or not.

Continuing with this theme. You may have heard the term “catcalling”. It describes the act of verbal harassment and sexually suggestive comments that are made in public towards another person. Females usually are the targets of such catcalling.

Imagine this. A female walks down the street and random strangers call them names, whistle at them, make intrusive or threatening comments, and so on. You know what I am talking about. Did this female ask for any this? Or are others being presumptuous and are perhaps feeling entitled to acquire certain things?

This too is a case where the presumptive idol comes to the fore to haunt the person. Not because the person wants. They are not, by themselves, in control of the narratives. You see how this works? It is not just about some weird philosopher in the mountains who gets asked about his ten kids while walking along goat trails. Everyone is subject to prejudice, to inane expectations, unsettling standards, inconsiderate beliefs.

The gist is that the real person is lost to all this cacophony. The female who gets catcalled is reduced to an object, with no personality, no feelings, no interests, no aspirations, nothing! Whatever sincere sense of self remains invisible and may, ultimately, be crushed by those ignorant narratives.

I thus ask you to be more considerate with people. Don’t judge. Keep an open mind. Assume you are wrong. Tell yourself not to be fooled by idols. Recognise that representations are just that and they may be deceiving. Admit that the idol of a person is not the actual person. The world will be a better place with those tweaks to your disposition.

The invisible and lonely person

Let me now tell you about loneliness. We have already discussed how appearances obscure whatever underlying sense of self. They turn the person into an idol. But it doesn’t stop there. One can remain invisible even when others do not judge them on the basis of their looks. This can be due to one’s status, for instance.

The “good soldier” is just obedient and, basically, a killing machine or fodder for the cannons. The army, the nation, the homeland, or whatever impersonal agency may be invoked, does not care about who the soldier is. It does not want to know whether the person has emotions, talents, or whatever. Within the confines of this narrative, the “good soldier” is not a human. It’s an instrument in the hands of an establishment, the means to an ulterior end, a pawn in the stratagems of a political elite.

Again, we have the same mechanics at play. Expectations condition how people behave and how they are treated. The person who is a victim of their presumptive idol, the person who experiences this “invisibility” at a deep level, starts to feel marginalised and alone. Not because they hate society or that they are awkward and too shy about it. No! They may be perfectly happy to be around people. They are simply forced to the side by inconsiderate beliefs that beget intolerance, inflexible standards that deny diversity, and inane stereotypes that twist the minds of people.

Loneliness is not the same as isolation. One can feel alone in the vicinity of others. Or, even, especially when they are with other people.

Consider my case. I don’t get any attention for my devilish good looks, or for my ugliness. People do talk to me though, but they still do not know who I am. I am not hiding anything, it’s just that they are not looking for what I can provide.

Here’s how it goes. They start a conversation with me. I go along with the flow. At some point, I will mention something that is conceptual and does not revolve around my private life or whatever. It is just a topic that you don’t normally get in small talk. What I want to do is to tell the person about who I am. I am amiable and would like to be friends with that person. But the “who I am” is a problem as it does not correspond to what the other person is expecting.

When your actuality contradicts expectations, others will tend to take a step back. In my case, this means that they change the subject. It is as if they are running out of oxygen all of a sudden and need to catch a breath. They do not engage with what I tell them about. Not because I use difficult words or allude to some niche concept that no-one has heard of. I never do that! I might be talking about responsible handling of dogs in our neighbourhood, for instance, yet the way I do it requires thoughtfulness; thoughtfulness that others are not used to.

It’s not that they are not smart. But they suddenly feel unsettled. They belittle themselves as they worry I might judge them or that they may say something stupid. I get this a lot with emails as well. People will message me and have an introduction which goes along the lines of asking me to forgive their ostensible ignorance and stupidity. Please don’t do that. I don’t know things and don’t pass judgement. The reason I say that you can call me “Prot” is to keep things simple and make you feel comfortable. I am as relaxed and stress-free as it gets.

Still, the reality is that people do not always believe in themselves. They have deep-seated fears that something terrible will happen if they dare speak their mind in earnest and reveal their true colours. So they don’t do it. They remain at the surface level where things are thought to be safe.

For me, however, this results in loneliness. Every face-to-face exchange I have must be limited to generic chit-chat that never goes anywhere. So even though I am perfectly fine to share more about me, my thoughts, my interests, my views… I just can’t. It is not possible. There is no-one ready to listen and to converse with me.

I don’t feel sad about this state of affairs because I have no expectations whatsoever. Though I do want to understand it better. There must be idols in effect: these presumptive idols of who I am. There may be this stereotype that philosophers talk in a language that others do not comprehend. Perhaps they also think philosophers are judgemental and will dismiss anyone who cannot think like them.

None of this is true and I am trying to prove as much through all my publications. Sure, there are some difficult concepts and cases where we need to think about lots of different magnitudes. Though this applies to everything in life that involves a degree of sophistication. At some point things are a bit more challenging. Though there is no intent to use language as a way of showing off. And there is none of that pretentiousness to appear smart or to fish for compliments. These are behaviours that are inconsistent with philosophy: they contradict wisdom.

But I do not control those narratives and I cannot reach people who do not have the right attitude of overcoming biases. Hence my loneliness.

The right attitude of honesty

Let’s return to some of the previous examples and I will tie everything together with what I just explained about loneliness.

Think again about my acquaintance who wanted to be an alpha male in the presence of women. In truth, he was being prejudiced about what a woman even is and what this imaginary figure wants. Isn’t this the same as someone worrying that they are not smart enough to talk with me?

Consider once more that person who is too beautiful and who has to suffer the consequences of appearing attractive to everybody else. That person is, as I already explained, a victim of the prevailing narratives. There is a presumptive idol of self made out of their appearance and this idol takes on a life of its own. That person can feel lonely, as well.

Though change the parameters a bit. Suppose you talk to your crush. To this uniquely attractive person. Is your behaviour the same as with everybody else? If not, why not? Perhaps because you have also made an idol out of your crush. You have a representation in your mind which your imagination has moulded in certain ways. For as long as you are not aware of this process of idolisation, you are not really searching for the fully fledged human being that is concealed behind all those simulacra.

Extend this principle: imagine that what you are doing by misunderstanding your crush, is what everybody does. You then realise how harsh this reality is on that person.

Loneliness comes from being misunderstood and misjudged. How exactly we are treated does not really matter for the disconnect to happen. The mismatch between our actuality and what the current views about us are, keeps us in stasis, in a condition that we cannot really escape from.

There is a balancing act to be made between the competing priorities of expressing ourselves in full or perfectly aligning our conduct with social norms. Where that balance is depends on the individual and on the prevailing conditions.

We are fighting an uphill battle where we constantly need to dispel presumptuous views. Though as they keep occurring, we realise that we are powerless to stop them. We cannot disentangle ourselves from all those associations that are made about our idol. We are essentially trapped in a situation where we are condemned to never share who we really are. No-one is prepared for that eventuality, it seems.

Can we fix this? How do we remove the pressure of conformity with all those standards and expectations? It’s not going to be easy. We have to acknowledge that this is an interpersonal phenomenon. Whatever change has to come about through concerted action. It cannot be done unilaterally because no single party owns and controls the narrative.

Unless, then, we can join some kind of movement for raising awareness or for enacting the requisite reforms, we really cannot do anything to change what people think. We must then learn to live with the reality of no control and be honest about our case.

Honesty is not the same as those exhortations parents tell their kids about not lying. It primarily is an inward-looking attitude of recognising how we operate in evolving states of affairs. For example, can you admit to yourself that you are idolising your crush? Are you prepared to face whatever truth may be hiding behind this little lie of yours?

Honesty involves awareness of one’s condition. It must be conducted consistently, in a spirit of dubitativeness and inquisitiveness. In other words, it remains open-minded. It does not stay at the level of performances; at that initial stage of not “telling lies”. Instead, it has the rigour and concomitant resolve to delve into the specifics and to examine the underpinnings or triggers of relevant phenomena.

Honesty consists in discipline. There isn’t a supreme authority, some boss, for instance, that tells you how things ought to be done and compels into action. There is none of that. In one’s private sphere, honesty can only reveal what the person is willing to discover and what is rendered perceptible by this very willingness.

It is entirely possible for someone to be formally honest, in the sense of not telling any lies. Yet they can still withhold some aspect of the truth from their self. This happens by never exiting their comfort zone.

The person always does what has worked for them and never questions their behavioural pattern and sense of self derived therefrom. As such, their experience is conditioned by their comfort zone. In turn, the feedback from those actions is proof of the comfort zone’s presumed significance. Too much comfort may be the sign of complacency, else a pernicious delusion.

To be honest in this disciplined and consistent fashion, one must ultimately be prepared to disturb their own truths. We must check and double-check that whatever presumptive idol of self we have created is not distorting our reality. Just remember those photographs with the blue filter. There is no blue! It’s all an added effect.

I am being schematic with the photographs to cut the long story short. We want to focus on our disposition: how we approach things. On the one hand, we cannot afford to have this cult of personality where we think we are perfect and everybody else is a fool. On the other hand, we cannot simply presume that others know better and what they say about us must be true. There has to be a balance, hence the significance of being dubitative, of questioning things, and inquisitive, searching for things.

Through life experiences we learn that what we once took for granted is now revealed to have been ephemeral and coincidental. Maybe you grew up as a cool, popular kid. You moved countries and suddenly no-one thinks of you as cool. What you once believed to be a part of you, was but an illusion of ownership. You have to recognise that and challenge your sense of self. This is a life-long process.

It is not possible to undo through our own subjectivity what is done intersubjectively. We have to recognise what the boundaries are and to not be emotionally invested in what lies beyond that terminus. Much like my loneliness in this place. There is nothing I can do to change the innocuous albeit presumptuous attitudes of people. I can try to persuade maybe one among them, but even that presupposes some degree of prior open-mindedness, which simply isn’t there for what I am looking for.

Idols will exist, as will all sorts of presumptions. The key, insofar as one’s subjectivity is concerned, is to maintain the right attitude of patience and honesty. We eventually learn to remain aloof and observe phenomena in third-person view, just as with my case here.

Though we cannot stop there. Intersubjectivity necessarily brings in matters of culture and politics. If we believe that all those idols are harming lots of people, we need to think about collective action. We do not exist in some bubble of subjectivity where we simply disconnect from the views of others and find solace in our aloofness. There are situations where such a state is not possible.

Consider again the example with catcalling. Can I really tell the victim that they will philosophise and suddenly all abuse and harassment will disappear. No! That’s nonsense. Everyone can benefit to a degree from a philosophical disposition, yet the environment must also be conducive for such an outlook.

Next time you find yourself in an interpersonal situation, try to think how the other side feels. What are the expectations they have to meet and did they ever have a say in that matter?

Make an effort to let go of your fears and prior judgements. People will always be invisible to those who are not ready to see. It takes a lot of courage to be honest and to give the other person a chance to reveal their humanity.

Take it easy.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions
2. Self-doubt, expectations, and ideals
3. Misused idealism and insecurity
4. Selfhood, ownership, and insecurity
5. Selfhood and the comfort zone
6. Be careful with ideals

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In this presentation I want to talk to you about matters of disposition: how we conduct ourselves in a social setting, what is our sense of self, and how we can cope with the relevant challenges.

The idea is to use practical examples and connect them to abstract concepts. Studying everyday scenaria makes it easier for us to understand the meaning of those abstractions. We can discern them in facts we are already familiar with. We go from the particulars to the general, while from the general we can better comprehend the combinations between the particulars: we start thinking in terms of relations and systems.

As always, the text of this presentation is available on my website: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-25-insecurity-confidence-aloofness

If you are watching this on the video hosting platform, there will be a link in the description.

Definitions

I will use two Greek words in this presentation, so I must first explain what they mean:

• Aktisia (ακτησία): non-ownership, else the state of not having possessions.

• Ataraxia (αταραξία): non-disturbance or tranquillity, else a state where one is not moved or pressured by evolving states of affairs.

Hints to—or mentions of—these concepts can be found in my previous videos on philosophy (and other works). As a starting point, check this section of my website for entries with the video tag: https://protesilaos.com/books.

Though you don’t have to, as I will explain everything here.

Self-doubt, expectations, and ideals

Self-doubt is when you question yourself. You want to have a healthy dose of scepticism and do a reality check from time-to-time. This is fruitful: it ensures you do not get absorbed in your own subjective narrative of selfhood and all the misunderstandings that may go with it.

The tricky thing with self-doubt is that it can easily be mishandled. If done carelessly, it turns into self-denial. This is a state of mind where you refuse to give credit to yourself. It no longer manifests as a questioning attitude or a form of criticism. There is nothing fair about it. It is a polemic, an attack against everything you do.

Self-doubt turns into self-denial when we set unrealistic expectations about our self. For example, we notice this in people from a young age when they develop issues about their body image. They see all those highly edited pictures in magazines or TV and they get this idea that they are ugly. Then the self-denial moves from a perception of ugliness into self-loathing and self-hate. The person feels worthless.

While beauty standards are an obvious case we can all relate to immediately, they are not the only one. In society, we have standards for everything. How we should express ourselves, how we are perceived as professionals at the workplace, what our income or status says about our character, who we should have relationships with, and so on.

Everything we do has a standard. There is an ideal made out of it. Whether this ideal is correct or not does not really matter for our immediate experience with it. For instance, we may say that modern beauty standards are inhumane, but that does not solve the problem for people who are already feeling the pressure to be so-called “beautiful”.

Ideals are not inherently wrong. I am not saying that the reason we develop self-hate is because we have ideals. No! I’m hinting at the need for a balanced approach in understanding what an ideal represents.

Ideals are mental constructs. They are representations of patterns we observe in the world. We trace the common in the multitude of various phenomena and we turn that into a concept. We basically keep a perfect version of the pattern in our head.

Think, for example, how we derive the notion of Dog. We observe all sorts of specimens. Small dogs, large dogs, service dogs, catch dogs, and so on. There are many breeds, landraces, and mixtures between them. Our abstract Dog then must not have specific attributes, because those will not exist in all actual dogs. If, say, the ideal Dog had long hair then we would have to rule out all short-haired dogs as a different species. That would be wrong. So the Dog concept needs to be abstract and sufficiently generic to cover all specimens.

All ideals are generic in this way, otherwise they remain open to review. Since I mentioned beauty standards, think about the ideal of Beauty. We cannot limit it to how humans look, because then we can’t admire a sunset by saying “oh, this is beautiful”. We also can’t see the beauty in a piece of art or in an elegant program, and so on. As such, Beauty has to be generic as well. And the same for all ideals.

Strictly speaking, generic representations are not actual in our world. Everything we have is instantiated with specific attributes. There is no such thing as a generic dog with no particular skull size, for example. It has to have a head with a certain bone structure. The gist is that the actual cannot be ideal; the ideal cannot be actual.

We can thus infer that ideals do not exist directly. They do exist as patterns in this world, which are discernible, but they do not get to be experienced as such. We can only understand ideals through their instantiations. For example, we get what Dog is because we have seen or interacted with all sorts of dogs, so we have a pretty good idea of what the abstraction of those would be. The more we know about the particulars, the finer and more generic our ideal will be.

The point, then, is to appreciate the role that ideals play in our everyday life. We cannot become the ideal student, the ideal professional, the ideal friend, the ideal philosopher, and so on. We can only ever have approximations of those mental images.

To use ideals properly, we need to avoid the common mistake of thinking that they can exist as such. Imagine that you will only settle for the ideal lover. Well, I have bad news for you… You will always be disappointed as such a person cannot exist. Our ideals are perfect and generic, but everything that is an instantiation of them has to be imperfect and specific by comparison. Humans are imperfect throughout. All of us.

Ideals are used correctly when they are our guides to action. We want to have a criterion that helps us decide in any given situation which among the alternatives is the closest to its perfect form. We do this with knowledge of the fact that we live in a world of imperfections. The ideal thus serves as the proxy of the good; not as its enemy. It is here where self-denying folks commit an error. And this includes me from a few years ago, so I am not blaming you out there. The error is in believing that we can have ideals in our life. Perfectly honest people, genuinely cooperative colleagues, pure intentions, and so on.

When we have this notion that ideals can exist, we necessarily operate with the expectation that they should exist. We wait and wait until we find them. Though as the years go by and we don’t get ideals in our life, we start to grow anxious and become unsettled. We are disappointed. “Why can’t people just be perfect?” we wonder.

These sort of unfulfilled expectations can then turn us into naysayers. We become unfair with things and this makes us dogmatic. It is how we end up hating our self and the world at-large. We see that we cannot have perfect beauty, so we go to the other extreme of insisting that we are absolutely repulsive. Idealism thus begets negativity and frustration. It leads to the propensity to dismiss the worth in things.

The person who is an idealist has to be able to distinguish between what they want and what is possible. I am speaking in conceptual terms here. By “possible” I do not mean what is politically expedient or appropriate in the given cultural milieu or institutional order. I am referring to the impossibility of ideals ever being actualised, as I already said.

It is fine to have ideals. We want to have them. The key is to learn how to use them properly. They help us aspire to our highest. But they must not be used against us or against the rest of world. We want the ideal to empower us to go from the available, to the good; from the good to the better; from the better to the best. We do not want ideals to be used as a reason to punish ourselves and to dismiss everything this life has to offer.

The self-denying and ultimately self-hating fellow must be understood as an idealist who applies ideals incorrectly. It is an imbalanced method; a method that is not informed by wisdom.

Misused idealism and insecurity

Let’s return to the example with the issues people have about their body image. I am using this because it is relatable to all of us. These people have developed—or been indoctrinated into—an idealised notion of what it means to be beautiful which they use to belittle and ultimately reject what they have. For whatever reason, they do not acknowledge that ideals cannot be instantiated as ideals.

Idealists who are misguided in this way are dogmatic in how they take the ideal for granted. They do not criticise it. They do not try to think that maybe—just maybe—something is amiss. Television, marketing, social media all reinforce certain stereotypes which are misconstrued as objective ideals. I say “misconstrued” because they are not sufficiently generic, as ideals ought to be. They are inane standards.

People are not at fault. When seemingly everyone out there holds those views, we become intimidated in even questioning them. It takes a lot of courage to say “hold on a moment, this is a lie!” Most people will not do that because they are inclined or conditioned to go with the majority and play it safe. So a cultural construct appears in the mind as a universal constant. The thinking is that “this is what beauty is, full stop” and it does not tolerate any counterpoints.

Due to the way it is framed, the misguided idealist is prone to develop tunnel vision and intolerance of alternative views. They will judge everything on the basis of their narrowly conceived ideal. For example, they will assess the worth of a person based exclusively on their looks. They won’t care if the person is nice, knowledgeable, has a sense of humour, sensitivities about art, or whatnot. It is an all-or-nothing kind of deal based on appearances alone.

The false ideal and its inconsiderate application thus inhibits the person from experiencing the world as it actually is, with all its flaws and imperfections, with its complexity, and with the multifaceted reality of its beings.

Society with its culture plays a catalytic role in how we think about our self. I have explained this point in greater detail in a previous presentation about selfhood: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-31-selfhood/

The gist is that we use the opinions of others about who we are as (i) confirmation of our thoughts or (ii) we try to become who others think we should be. Either way, our selfhood is not a strictly private affair. It emerges through intersubjective modes of behaviour.

We can already get a sense of this intersubjectivity by thinking again about how ideas that find currency in our milieu influence the behaviour of individuals. Societies establish rules which define roles for classes of their members. If a person has certain characteristics or is in a given situation, they have to act in accordance with the requirements of the role. It is no longer about the person as such, but rather about the institution, the role carried out by the person.

When we take those roles for granted, we become the institution. We are who the rules of the game demand that we ought to be. And this is where the line between one’s notional “true self” and their culturally instituted self is blurred. We cannot really have the person in a decontextualised state to determine what comes from their environment and what doesn’t. So we have to take selfhood as this subjective narrative which, at the very least, has strong intersubjective influences.

But let me be practical here as I may be becoming too vague. I want to help you follow my line of reasoning and see how philosophy is a practical affair. I don’t need to tell you about all the falsehoods we find on the Internet, though imagine this caricature of the social media influencer. They will post what is considered a “hot” picture with the caption:

Be yourself ❤️

Contrary to the salient point of “Be yourself”, they will take a hundred shots to find the one that flatters their figure the most. They will likely heavily modify the photograph to remove blemishes or, perhaps, add more emphatic curves here and there. You know how it works.

The issue is that those who are already misusing ideals do not critically assess this sort of publication. They don’t notice the disconnect between what is shown and what is stated. Instead, they get feedback that reinforces their already dogmatic attitude and feeds into their growing insecurity or warped expectations. They see an influencer showing off what so-called “beauty” is supposed to be and they are, well, influenced to think accordingly and to propagate those beliefs.

As for the meaning of the message to “be yourself” in such cases, it is but idle talk. Honesty is here sacrificed to the altars of social validation, instant gratification, and outright hypocrisy. There is nothing substantive about it. I am not blaming the influencer though, as they too are a victim of those very standards they vindicate and embody. But more on this later.

Extend this mechanism to all cases where standards and concomitant social expectations are involved. The person who is misusing idealism gets the message that this is how things ought to be and, due to their wrong mindset, due to their dogmatism, they conclude that those are the reasons why they are worthless as a person.

Insecurity comes from self-consciousness of one’s perceived limitations as seen from the imaginary social eye. This is key: the belief that there exists an omniscient and ubiquitous judge “out there” that will punish us for our every misstep. Of course, this is not limited to the example I have used with beauty standards, though that gives us a fairly good indication of how things work.

Insecurity is fuelled by the belief we have that we are not good enough. We are conditioned to assign value to all those lofty targets and we ultimately feel inferior to them. Even when we find ourselves in a new situation, we assume that those standards still apply or that something relevant is in force. Thus our self-impression is that of the impostor. Deep down we have this self-doubt that pushes towards self-denial, as we think we are incompetent and start hating who we are.

We do not question the presence of this “social eye” as we are used to it in every situation. We know that people judge others for everything. We would rather not find ourselves in that position. We wish to be loved or, generally, to feel safe. We are extra careful. Yet there is a fine line dividing caution from prejudice and relevant self-fulfilling prophecies. If we truly believe that we are an impostor, then all our actions will be defined by this pervasive sense of insecurity. We will look insecure and, consequently, appear incompetent exactly because that is how we operate.

Selfhood, ownership, and insecurity

I believe that at the core of insecurity lies the intuitive belief we have about ownership. We think that every critique is an attack on our person. As we are of the view that our self has specific attributes that we cherish and want to hold onto, we perceive criticism as an attempt to deprive us of those things we think we own. For example, if someone says that we are wrong, we become defensive because we fear that our intelligence, or pride, or something related, is under threat. We do not want to lose what we think is ours.

Do we own anything though? The belief in ownership is deeply embedded in our conduct. We take it for granted. You may be thinking that this question I just asked is some kind of trick. But I do not play games: I am serious and want you to think about this topic very carefully. Do we own anything?

We think we own stuff due to the association we make of their joint presence or correlation. For instance, our sense of self involves the notion of how good our memory is. We take this as a definitive characteristic of who we are. Though it is not truly inalianable, meaning that it can be taken away from us. Under certain conditions, our organism as a human may develop in ways that do not include this attribute. You slip, hit your head, and sustain an injury that causes a permanent condition. You no longer have what you thought was yours…

Consider your appearance, your beauty, or whatever else. You really care about it. It defines who you are. Is it yours though? Who owns what? Can you truly hold on to it, no matter what? You cannot. You definitely cannot. Whatever you think is yours, is so by coincidence. It is not a necessary relationship.

We need to understand how the universe works and accept what is transient as just that. Our presence and all of its attributes are ephemeral and coincidental: they are contingent on a multitude of factors. We tend to think of our self in a vacuum. Even the expression I just used of “presence and all of its attributes” is an analytical construct: a product of thought. In practice, those different names do not exist as standalone magnitudes that can be neatly separated.

We do not consider the intersubjectivity of selfhood that I already explained, but we also forget about the natural order. Our presence in the cosmos is always—always—framed, informed, conditioned, influenced, or otherwise determined by factors beyond our control. What our actuality is, is not simply a function of our volition, else free will. We cannot be whomever we want, no matter what. The prevailing conditions delineate a horizon of possibilities.

The main insight for us right now is that ownership is an illusion. We do not own anything. Not our looks, not our brains, not our self. Whoever you think you are, there is always a chance that you are refashioned into someone else, given the right triggers or modifications in the constitution of the case; in the factors whose interplay affects your presence.

Everything we think we own is alienable, meaning that it can be taken away from us and be rendered alien vis-à-vis our person. We understand this point with possessions, like our phone or clothes, even though we have an elaborate legal-institutional order that envisages and safeguards property rights. We know that property is conventional and that it does not exist without the instituted reality that enables it. We just extend this principle to what we consider our internal world.

We thus arrive at aktisia, the state of non-ownership. We acknowledge that owning stuff is an illusion. It is based on the instinct we have for self-preservation which establishes in us a bias in favour of certain beliefs. We assume we own our self, our body, our possessions, simply because this helps us survive. That’s perfectly fine. Though when we do philosophy, we start developing what I have explained before as the mystical side of our being.

[ Read/watch: Ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-16-ataraxia-moderation-mysticism/ ]

Mystic, mysticism, mysterious, and related concepts have to do with initiation in a corpus of knowledge or way of thinking. If we encounter something we do not know, we think it is mysterious. Though this merely indicates our ignorance. The subject matter is not inherently unintelligible or incomprehensible. It is just unknown to us, as we have not been initiated in the relevant school of thought or discipline.

Our mystical side, the one that is informed by wisdom, is the least developed of our facets, as opposed to instincts. But as we cultivate our mystical qualities, we begin to overcome the built-in prejudices we have. This happens organically. It is the product of a life-long commitment to philosophy. By understanding things at a deeper level, we no longer have this impression of selfcentredness: we do not think that the whole world revolves around us and that we somehow are special. We ultimately do not even operate on the basis of our ego.

Aktisia, however, is a profound realisation that requires a lot of work. It is not something we learn over the weekend and then carry on with our routines. It changes our life.

When we do not admit to aktisia, we assume that we own our self. We then think that we also own everything that is an extension of our self. For example, we are emotionally invested in our projects or ideas. We want them to succeed and be proven right. This is a way for our ego to find fulfilment. We defend them as if we were fighting for our survival, exactly because we take them as our own possessions, as a part of who we are.

This links back to insecurity. When we labour under the prejudice that we own stuff which are alienable, we fear that we might lose them. And as we associate our selfhood with them, we are afraid that a loss of this sort constitutes a diminution of who we are. Insecurity, then, is fuelled by the justifiable albeit mistaken presumption of ownership.

Here I will say something you may find strange. Confidence is just like insecurity. They are two sides of the same coin, for it too is an attitude that is predicated on ownership. Confidence also requires that we have things we can cling on to; things which define us as unalterable and give us this seemingly unflinching resolve.

Both insecurity and confidence are fragile because they spring from a baseless belief of owning our self and all of its apparent extensions. Given the appropriate stimuli, these thoughts can be exposed and be undone, leading to the collapse of everything built on top of them.

Admitting to aktisia thus helps us overcome such a dichotomy and its precarious state. We all want to be confident. Confidence is the best thing possible, or so we believe. Though confidence presupposes commitment to an illusory state of affairs, which is reducible to the claim that what we have is inalienable and permanent.

This leads me to the next point. The illusion of ownership comes with another presumption: the belief in permanence. However, our life and every aspect of it is impermanent. Our notion of self evolves over time from our teenage years, to adulthood, and as we grow older. It depends on our experiences and social interactions, among others. Our appearance changes as well, as does our “inner world”, and all else.

We know about this. We are readily aware of it. Though we do not think deeply of impermanence as doing so would challenge our view of ownership. There may be a built-in resistance there. Though it is not insurmountable. Once we get past that initial hesitation and admit to impermanence, we also notice how what we take for granted in our life is contingent on a multitude of factors beyond our control. And then we ultimately arrive at the admission of aktisia.

When we reach that point, we are finally freed from the biases that fuel both insecurity and confidence. There no longer is a fear that we may lose something, or an aspiration that we might gain something else, as we already know that we cannot truly own anything.

Aktisia is a state of mind. It is not that suddenly we have no self, no appearance, no recognisable attributes. We are still human. It just means that we are not attached to those qualities or their derivatives. We are not emotionally invested in them. If we have something, we are okay. If we lose it, we are okay. In other words, we remain indifferent.

Such is a state of ataraxia, else tranquillity. We operate with aloofness. There is no fear, no desires, no past or future. There is a lightness to our being, where we merely operate in the here-and-now unencumbered by all those burdens we would otherwise carry on our back.

Selfhood and the comfort zone

Ataraxia changes how we live our life. We are no longer going through a constant struggle of trying to maintain our happiness, to accumulate more things, or to fight for what we consider as rightfully ours. Through aktisia, we overcome the bias of egocentrism. The ego is like an insatiable monster that keeps asking for more. But once we escape from its grip, we simply accept what happens to be the case.

This brings me to the topic of one’s comfort zone. We often hear or may even say it ourselves that we need to relax and just be comfortable with who we are. “Be yourself”, right? The idea is to practice self-love and to not try to conform with whatever inane standard. If we think about the examples I provided earlier, such as with the beauty standards, this advice is fecund. It can help people avoid the suffering associated with the impossibility of conforming with an unrealistic criterion. That’s good.

However, to be yourself does not guarantee that you start walking on the right path. It might be that you remain misguided, driven by cultural norms, instinctive biases, and so on. There is nothing in self-love that ensures emancipation from fear and desires. It is better than a living hell, sure. Though it still is problematic in its own ways.

I have said before that sometimes the comfort zone is but a prison that we have gotten used to and thus consider a cosy environment. It makes us feel good superficially due to our familiarity with it. Though this may well be a case of “the evil you know is better than the one you don’t”. I am sure you have heard this expression before or at least something like it. It basically captures the view that familiarity is giving us a sense of comfort even when it is not really good.

The problem with trying to practice self-love and to “just be yourself”, is that your selfhood is likely to be predicated on years of experience and conduct that are biased in major ways. Think about someone who has always been insecure. They have the propensity to guard themselves from getting exposed, by planning everything ahead of time. They tend to have a prefigured response to every stimulus or social interaction. And when they are caught in an unfamiliar situation, they tend to panic.

This is an older version of me. I am not blaming anyone. I used to operate in ways that would allow me to be in a controlled environment. This would help me figure out all possible outcomes and decide in advance how best to react. Though this seldom works, as life is complex and our neat schemes tend to not correspond with the state of affairs. Hence the anxiety and panic attacks.

Now, if we tell such a person to simply love who they are, we are not doing them any kind of favour. We are, in effect, encouraging them to stay in their prison. It is like we are saying, “oh, but your cage is so pretty”. Whereas what we really want, when we conduct ourselves with wisdom, is to help people overcome their own worst enemy: their fears, their desires, their expectations, their ego.

And this applies to all folks, not just those who are insecure like past me. It is the same for the person who appears confident or even for that social media influencer I mentioned earlier. They all are under some kind of pressure to conform with standards: they are victims of expectations. And they all dread losing what they think they have: their beauty, their popularity, their success, their social circle, or whatnot. What happens if the influencer gets zero attention? Are they okay? They do not admit to aktisia and, therefore, cannot attain ataraxia.

Be careful with ideals

In conclusion folks, let me return to the theme of what ideals are. We don’t want to get into the mindset of wanting or hoping for some ideal to be actualised. This cannot happen. Ideals that are formulated with wisdom are our guide in life. We use them to make practical decisions and deal with specific circumstances. But we know where they belong.

Furthermore, remember what I covered in my previous presentation on “Who can be a philosopher”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-07-who-can-be-philosopher/. The key to philosophy is patience. We cannot have wisdom without being patient. We cannot achieve sophistication in haste. We cannot be profound while remaining at the level of superficialities. And so on. Please check my presentation if you need the details.

The point is that aktisia and ataraxia are concepts that can be misused as well. We are imperfect and tend to seek the course of action that requires the least amount of effort. We should not commit the error of thinking that all of sudden we will become an absolutely immovable object that subsists in perfect harmony. This is not realistic.

Similarly, we should not have a ceremonial or tokenistic understanding of those ideas. If, for example, you throw away your phone you do not necessarily reach that point of embedding aktisia in your modus vivendi. Maybe you are working towards that direction, though you need to be mindful of what the substance is and not remain limited to the appearances. What I am saying here is not a glorification or rationalisation of poverty or the simple life. To lead a simple life is but a side-effect of the recognition that we do not own anything. But we must get the order right and understand what comes first.

In practical terms, let me share a few things about myself, the insecurities I once had, and how I now operate with aloofness. Not confidence, mind you, but aloofness. Very different.

I used to be afraid to speak in public. I thought that everyone around me was a preeminent expert and that somehow I had cheated my way into their company. I felt I was an impostor. I dreaded speaking as I believed it would expose my presumed charade and that everybody would then laugh at me for how ignorant I truly was.

It was the same with written communication. I had to read an email over and over again to check for typos and to painstakingly explain every inconsequential detail. Why? Because I thought my language skills were not up to par. Also, because I did not want to expose what I considered to be my ignorance. Again, this feeling of being an impostor.

I only managed to overcome those impediments with my transition to philosophy. I became a philosopher through trial and error in life experiences. Not books, not formal education. The short version of the story is that it was a painful transition, after which I was effectively remade.

Compare the fearful me to the attitude I have now. For example, I started using Emacs three years ago. In case you don’t know, this is a special program that looks like a text editor but actually is an integrated computing environment. I was not a programmer, though I was indifferent about it and thus had neither fear nor desire. I was free from all the burdens, so I started using Emacs and eventually learnt to be good at it. Now I maintain all those programs for Emacs. You see how this works?

Same principle for these philosophy videos. I am doing them not because I think I am the foremost expert on any of the topics I have covered. In fact, I don’t have any formal qualification as a philosopher. Previous me would have been intimidated to ever do this, out of fear of being branded as a charlatan. Such is the bias of ownership, of losing something we think we have.

Yet here I am, aloof with a lightness to my disposition. I have nothing to prove, nothing to gain, nothing to lose. I am merely sharing those words as others might find them useful for their own life. And, if they don’t, well… I didn’t lose anything.

To the question “who do you think you are?” I blithely reply with “Protesilaos, also known as ‘Prot’—nice to meet you!”

All this is simple, perhaps deceptively so. Same as with what I said before about patience. That too sounds easy. But it isn’t. It takes a lot of work and requires commitment. Though this is a case of doing the basic things right. It’s not some deep secret that only the “special ones” or some elite knows about.

I thus ask you to reflect on your condition. Think carefully about your insecurity or your confidence. Your achievements, your personhood. Consider all those things you take for granted. Are they yours? What are you afraid of, really?

That’s all for today, folks. Thank you very much for your attention!

Table of Contents

1. About the terms “philosopher” and “wisdom”
2. Everyone can be a philosopher
3. The key to philosophy is patience
4. Patience in interpersonal relations
5. Patience and the right attitude
6. Philosophy is for everyone

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In this presentation I want to talk to you in plain terms about the broad theme of what philosophy is, who can be a philosopher, and why that is useful in practice.

What I am about to explain at length might surprise some of you. I am of the opinion that anyone can be a philosopher. I shall elaborate on this statement, so please don’t think I am exaggerating or am playing games with you. I mean what I say and I don’t like gimmicks, anyway.

This presentation is a continuation of my last entry in this series. I explained the significance of remaining focused in the here-and-now:

• On learning and being present: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence/

As always, the text of this presentation is available on my website. If you are watching this on the video hosting platform, there is a link in the description: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-08-07-who-can-be-philosopher/

About the terms “philosopher” and “wisdom”

Before discussing who can be a philosopher, we need to understand what the term denotes. The word is of Greek origin. It is composed of “philos” (φίλος), which means “friend”, and “sophia” (σοφία) which is “wisdom”. A philosopher is, quite literally, a friend of wisdom. Philosophy, then, is friendship with wisdom.

In this sense, anyone can be positively inclined towards wisdom just how anyone can show openness and eagerness towards art or sport. In case you are curious, there are words for those as well, but they are not common in English: philotechnos (φιλότεχνος) and philathlos (φίλαθλος), respectively.

So what is wisdom, anyway? Wisdom is the quality of clear judgement. We understand the bigger picture of a situation and know how the specifics must fit in. Wisdom is what enables us to chart the right course of action, given the available evidence.

Wisdom applies to all sorts of fields of endeavour or activities. For example, an artist with an impeccable technique and a special style has profound insight into their art. A scientist who does not get fooled by statistical artefacts or shortcomings in a given method exercises wisdom by remaining true to the spirit of the scientific enterprise.

The philosopher, then, is not a professional with a given expertise. There can be specialists of this sort, such as an academic who teaches a class in philosophy. But those cases do not exhaust the possibilities of what “friend of wisdom” entails, as the examples of the artist and the scientist already hint at.

Philosophy is an attitude. It is the disposition of staying true in our friendship with wisdom. We always want to understand it better and apply our findings to every aspect of our life. We are committed to this friendship and are genuine about it.

Everything benefits from wisdom. The way we conduct ourselves, how we treat other people, the manner in which we coexist with animals and other species, our quality as a friend or romantic partner, and so on. When something is couched in terms of wisdom, it is done in a better way than when it lacks an understanding of the bigger picture and the specifics of the case.

We can think of it as the distinction between being mindful and being reckless. Would we ever trust a reckless surgeon over a mindful one? Would we want to be friends with someone who doesn’t pay attention to our needs or would instead prefer a person who actually understands our condition?

Wisdom thus manifests as thoughtfulness. We like people who put thought into what they are doing. They are better at their art, mindful of their responsibilities, deliberate in their actions, responsible in their operations, consistent in their pursuit of correctness.

In other words, thoughtfulness enriches our life. Wisdom is as practical as it gets. It is not some vague abstraction somewhere in the sky that has nothing to do with our quotidian affairs. Wisdom can inform every facet of our existence and underpin all patterns of behaviour. It is relevant in every situation.

Everyone can be a philosopher

Wisdom appears to us as thoughtfulness and thoughtfulness applies to everything we do. We can all be more mindful of our condition by reflecting on it, contemplating its particularities, and trying to understand how we can perfect our modus operandi as well as our modus vivendi.

You may be conditioned to think of philosophy as some exclusive club reserved for academics with a penchant for discussing obscure topics. I do not blame you for this misconception, because education generally does a poor job of presenting philosophy as a practical affair. It is a lifestyle. It does not require of you to be a unidimensional philosopher and nothing else. Such is a pernicious caricature which does a disservice to all of us, as it keeps us away from wisdom.

The reason education does not present philosophy properly is because it is pedantic about trivia. We have someone who has put zero thought into it asking us to write what a specific passage from some ancient text means. I remember, for example, how the Greek education system had a course where students where expected to memorise and recall what some interpreter had to comment on Plato’s Protagoras. Instead of studying Plato’s general points, they were wasting time with secondary commentary. I also remember at college when I took an introductory course to Ethics. Don’t ask me what I learnt, because I had mentally checked out. The most boring class ever. Screw that!

I want you to stop being intimidated by formal education. Do not let anyone bilittle you into thinking that you cannot be friends with wisdom. You can. Those who think otherwise lack perspective or have ulterior motives.

“But”, I hear you saying, “I am not a genius…” This too is another harmful stereotype which only excludes people and segregates them. It creates an elitist club whose arrogant members pretend to be better than everybody else. Screw them too! Arrogance, exclusive groups, and the concomitant pretentiousness have nothing to do with wisdom.

To befriend wisdom we only need to be friendly towards it. In practice, we are open to the idea of thinking about our condition. We want to be more contemplative, more deliberate, more careful—and we commit to the cause. This has nothing to do with how smart or creative we are. Perhaps those can help us be more effective, but they are irrelevant to the disposition of friendliness per se.

I repeat, do not internalise all those narratives and excuses which keep you away from wisdom. They disempower you. They deny you of the opportunity to have more profound experiences and insights. They hold you captive in a state of superficialities where you are just “faking it” without ever committing yourself to anything in earnest.

I am not saying this because I am some “self-help guru” who is here to flatter you and show you how great you are. Not at all! I live philosophy everyday and have been doing so for years. I am telling you this because it is what I have experienced and genuinely believe. I don’t care about boosting your ego and will not congratulate you for nothing. On the contrary, I would argue that you are not good enough in whatever it is you are doing if you are not philosophical in your disposition.

As for the ego, it is something you will learn to overcome. More on this a bit later.

The key to philosophy is patience

It is not peerless smartness or ingenuity that is a prerequisite to becoming a philosopher. They are nice to have, but not absolutely necessary. There is only one quality we need to start befriending wisdom: patience. Patience is the foundation of a lifelong commitment to philosophy. It is at the root of everything we would consider as “philosophical”.

Let’s examine this in practical terms. We want to be thoughtful. To do so, we need to pay attention to what is happening. To actually focus on the events, we must take the time to discern and decode them. To be able to interpret the data, we require time and effort. To go through all this, we have to be patient.

We cannot be thoughtful without patience. We cannot pay close attention to things if we are in a hurry. We cannot discern patterns, let alone decode them, if we cannot stop to put in the requisite work. We cannot interpret any datum if we have no time for it. In other words, we simply cannot achieve anything sophisticated with impatience.

Without patience we remain limited to superficialities. We do stuff at the surface-level. We have no depth, no profundity, no solid grasp of the subject matter. We are not as good as we could have been. We do not give the issue the attention it requires.

To connect to the theme of my last presentation, impatience means that we lack presence. We are not giving the here-and-now our undivided attention. Our mind wonders away into other worlds and is “pulling us”, so to speak, in that direction. We thus feel unsettled: we do stuff clumsily, awkwardly, incompetently.

Patience slows things down and puts us in control. We have to imagine it like driving a car through the countryside. If we go at breakneck speed, we miss out on all the sites. We don’t see the flowers. We don’t appreciate the trees. We don’t take a moment to breath some fresh air. We don’t even notice the sun as it sets on the horizon. We are just driving like crazy.

By slowing things down, we gain a whole new perspective. Suddenly this trip to the countryside has so much more to show us. It is a rewarding experience. Now we spot the flowers. We can see them blossoming. We also observe the playfulness of the bees, the birds, and everything. There is the majestic forest and the colourful sunset. They take our breath away. The whole scene is brimming with life. Wow! None of this could register before. It was always “there”, but we did not have the right attitude towards it. We were impatient.

Patience puts us in control because it removes the bias we have for doing things quickly. It is a cliché nowadays that people have no time. Unless they are physically trapped in some sweatshop for all their waking hours, unless they are victims of tyranny, they do have time. They just assume they don’t have time because everything is incessantly calling for their attention. They simply cannot focus on anything. They are drowning in overstimulation and have ceded control.

If we want to do a million things, then of course we will not manage to fit everything into our routine. We try to do a bit of everything but as we are running out of time, we do not go in-depth. We can only give each item a quick look and move on to the next one. This is a vicious cycle. It makes us think we cannot manage our life as we are always short on time. We are driving at breakneck speed without realising it.

Patience gives us control because it reminds us that our time is finite. We must not allow ourselves to be compelled into action by every stimulus out there. Advertisements, social media, constant notifications on all our “smart” devices with a sound that is optimised to keep us hooked to them, apps that track all the minutia and keep nagging us to do this or the other, et cetera. With patience, we become more eclectic. We learn to pick and choose what we truly like. We find the signal and seek ways to blot out the distractions. All the noise means nothing to us.

Suppose we find ourselves in a crowd. Everybody wants to talk to us. But there is one person among them we want to spend some quality time with. If we are in the mindset of answering every call to action, then we will accommodate everyone in the crowd and necessarily miss the opportunity to dedicate ourselves to this special someone. Whereas if we are patient, we will tell others to wait just like we do. First we offer our undivided attention to this one person and then we move on to the next task, again giving it the time it requires.

By being selective, we stop being accommodative. We cannot please everyone and we cannot be physically present everywhere. There are inescapable trade-offs. By recognising this insight, we are empowered to act. We no longer have a false sense of duty to respond to whatever is out there. It is impossible to do that. We have to impose some structure and set priorities. In other words, we must assume the initiative. We become active as we stop living life from the sidelines. We stop being merely reflexive. We assume agency. We become who we want to be and we slowly work towards that eventuality.

This all starts with patience and is sustained by patience.

Patience in interpersonal relations

Patience engenders thoughtfulness. It is the key to everything. This also applies to human relations. Now, you may still have some leftover biases and are thinking what does philosophy have to do with actual people. “Isn’t it all about concepts and abstractions?” I hear you saying. No, it is not. I already explained that we want to be friends with wisdom and that wisdom applies to everything we do. Let’s think about it with practical examples.

Someone is talking to us. If we are impatient, we will interrupt them. So we will not actually listen to what they are saying. We will make assumptions and jump to early conclusions. But we are not offering them the chance to elaborate. Or, we may be compelled by contract or some institutional arrangement to remain silent, in which case our impatience pushes our mind to lose focus and think about other things. Whatever the specifics, we are not really “there”.

Perhaps you think this is a forced example. I ask you then how good of a listener are you? Can you actually let someone talk and then respond to their points? Do you have the empathy to recognise that the other person needs to express themselves? By the same token, if you are the kind of person who talks all the time, do you have the capacity to slow things down and allow others some space to show their individuality?

Being an attentive listener or considerate speaker is the same as being a keen observer. Remember the example with the trip to the countryside. By taking it slow, we pay attention to the little things which together contribute to a whole new understanding of what is “there”. When we listen, when we speak and see, we do it with patience and we learn from it. Else we let important information slip away.

If two people in a conversation are patient, then we have a wonderful coincidence of attitudes. They both take the time to listen to what the other fellow has to say and they both treat each other with respect. Whatever the topic of the discussion, it is more profound and rewarding than if they were effectively competing with each other over who gets the most time “on stage”; who attracts most of the attention.

Patience makes us respect our own time and, by extension, helps us develop empathy so that we respect others as well. In turn, patience puts us in the right frame of mind, as we no longer seek the fake token of attention: we want to go further and understand things at a greater depth. What the topic of our inquiry is does not matter. It can be art, sport, science, a craft, or another being that we care about.

When we understand something better, we begin to realise that our self is not the only one who is important. For example, when we acknowledge that other people need time to speak as well, we see in them the same need for individuality that we find in us. We are compassionate and, thus, considerate. As this insight develops further, we recognise that our ego is not important. It is a false god that we worship only in our ignorance; only when our impatience prevents us from experiencing in earnest all those wonderful presences “out there”.

Patience broadens the scope of our perception. We let go of the private cult of personality we have. We admit to the presence of others. We are in control of how we experience phenomena, as we now are more competent at tracing patterns and making sense of them. We do not let distractions interfere with what we are doing. We effectively have a different world-view than our impatient self ever did.

Again, I must stress that this is all philosophical. Consider this example where we went on the trip to the countryside and experienced nature in full. We gave it our undivided attention. We allowed it to enter our space and enrich our life. We could do it only because we were patient. We were actually focused on the moment and had no pressure to be somewhere else. We were not in a hurry.

This same approach applies to how an intimate relationship would unfold. If we are not focused on the moment, we are faking it or simply not making the most out it. And the same for every field of endeavour. If we do not put it the endless hours of hard work, we will never have the skills for it. A foreign language, programming, playing the guitar… Whatever it is, it has to be done with the understanding that there is no magic way to learn it in an instant. We must be patient.

Patience grants us perseverance. It gives us a special kind of endurance as we are not phased by the lack of short-term gains. Just as with a foreign language, we do not expect to be fluent in it from day one and are content with the slow and incremental improvements to our skillset.

Perseverance is what we need when we venture on an uncertain path. Imagine the scientist who formulates a hypothesis. They have to put it to the test, evaluate the findings, prepare more experiments, and more hypotheses, and theories on top, until they eventually make a discovery. It is a long and tedious process. Humanity largely benefits from it. None of that is possible without perseverance.

Patience and the right attitude

Patience which is now expressed as perseverance sustains our inquiry into whatever it is we are doing. The scientist who goes through the rigours of experimentation remains true to the more general idea of discovering the truth in the given case. The artist who practices for hours on end is committed to the aesthetic experience. The romantic partner who actually cares cherishes the relationship. And so on.

When we persevere in this way, we learn to deal with a degree of uncertainty and/or a sense of curiosity of what is to be revealed. We then have a disposition of being curious and an outlook of not taking things at face value. Why? Because we do not rush to conclusions. We are not in a hurry to call it a day.

Patience, then, trains us to be inquisitive and dubitative. We inquire about the world, about the subject matter, and we always maintain a healthy dose of doubt about our findings. Our patience has taught us that there are things out there we have not noticed yet. There is always something that intrigues us even when we are experts in our field. Those who think they know everything are simply impatient and are lying to themselves.

Inquisitiveness and dubitativeness are fancy words, aren’t they? The equivalent in Greek, which exist in English as well, are zetetic (ζητητικός) and aporetic (απορητικός), respectively. But we do not need to know such technicalities to actually conduct ourselves in the spirit of inquisitiveness and dubitativeness. All we need is patience. The rest follows from there organically, because patience entails commitment in the face of uncertainty.

You may recall from my previous presentation the notion of parrhesia. I explained it in detail, just as I am doing now but here is a quick summary to refresh your memory.

Parrhesia is the attitude of speaking plainly. No tricks, no gimmicks! When we express ourselves in parrhesia, we do it with honesty. We have no intention to fool anyone, no ulterior motive to flatter them, nothing of the sort. All we want is to speak our mind and express what we consider to be authentic in that very moment.

Patience is at the root of parrhesia as well. This is because we cannot have a sense of sincerity and of its truth if we are distracted all the time. And, if we try to fake it, by masquerading our ignorance as confidence, we are simply not speaking in parrhesia. We are charlatans!

Patience helps us overcome our ego, as I already mentioned. When we exchange views with someone, we do not try to out-compete them. Such is an expression of egoism. Instead, we collaborate with them in pursuit of a common cause: to jointly emancipate ourselves from falsehood; to jointly discover some finer point of sophistication; to jointly partake in the knowledge of a more profound insight. If I have this attitude and you show me how I am wrong, I will be very happy because you have done me the great favour of freeing me from a misconception. There is no pettiness involved; pettiness which is concerned with “winning the argument”. That is what the enemies of wisdom care about: the appearance of winning when they are actually losing.

From ancient Greece, we know that this attitude of discoursively approximating the truth is called “dialectic”: a word which relates to “dialogue” and means “through words” or “by means of discourse”.

Dialectic is a fancy way of saying that we exchange views in a spirit of honesty. A “position” in Greek is a “thesis”. One side posits their own thesis. Another side propounds a different thesis. As this other thesis is presented in juxtaposition to the original one, it counts as an “anti-thesis” (antithesis). Both sides may converge to a position somewhere between those two, so they have found a “syn-thesis” (synthesis). Or they may simply not find anything, in which case they will continue searching. Dialectic is all about patience. There is no ego involved. No feeling of out-competing the other side. The “I” gives way to the “we”. We want to figure it out; we want to help each other grow and develop further.

Let’s consider an example that shows how dialectic is also practical. Suppose we are now learning English. We just got started. We want to try it in earnest but know our limits. So we blithely say:

I don’t speak England very best! 😀

Some kind fellow corrects us. They do not do it to tell us how foolish we are. They are genuinely eager to help. And we accept their advice since we are not attached to our position. We do not want to win some inane argument. We only want to learn the language and accept our ignorance. We happily admit to our error and try to improve therefrom.

This aloofness is philosophical throughout. We have the patience to learn and exhibit the requisite selflessness. We don’t let our ego take charge and tell lies. We exhibit parrhesia, we remain inquisitive, we are dubitative, and we operate dialectically.

Patience gives us four virtues of character that we would associate with “philosophy” even in the conventional sense: parrhesia, dubitativeness, inquisitiveness, and dialecticism. We do not have to memorise such technicalities. All we need is patience. I am just mentioning them so that you can see how far this goes. But wait! I am not done yet.

Patience is the gift that keeps on giving. Consider again this simple example of learning a new language through trial and error. We are not committed to our thesis, to that which we state. What we really want is the truth which, in this case, is to learn how to properly express ourselves in English so that we may communicate effectively. This means that we do not cling on to our current knowledge or ability. We do not make the mistake of considering it an extension of who we are. We are happy to let it go. We understand that it is not ours: it is alienable, meaning that it can be taken away from us.

Patience teaches us that many things we take for granted are, in fact, alienable. In case you watched my previous video, you may have noticed one such example: my beard—now it’s gone! When we have those qualities of character I just mentioned we develop an understanding of non-ownership. The expression “my beard” is just a construct of language. It is not truly mine because I can exist without it or, more generally, I can be conceptualised without it.

I lost my beard to an accident. It caught fire, so I had to shave it off. I shaved again this morning because short facial hair is more difficult to maintain in the summer. The philosophical point is that I didn’t really lose anything because it was never mine by necessity. If I were to cling on it, I would be lacking parrhesia: I would not be recognising the fact of non-ownership. That would make sad about the loss.

Patience gives us the perspective of the bigger picture. Just as how we overcome the “I” and become “we” through dialectic, we no longer see indelible lines between what is and isn’t ours. We understand that everything is interconnected. Why? Because we take the time to observe how things stand and we notice that nothing has a standalone presence.

There is no decontextualised self. There is no “I” in a vacuum. Everything that exists in some way, exists so in relation to other presences. Every presence has an environment, which comprises other presences. We already learnt about this through the example of our excursion to the countryside. While we were impatient, we could not see anything. Our experience was centred around a very narrow conception of personhood. It was all about our ego. But as soon as we slowed things down, as soon as we assumed the initiative, we began to notice the flowers, and the bees, and the trees, and the sun, and the sky. We noticed how they all coexist.

Patience then gradually provides the profound insight that nothing exists on its own and nothing truly owns its attributes as there are environmental or contributing factors at play. Patience thus leads to the realisation that even the impression of self is not truly ours. We sense this the moment we escape from our ego. As always, it starts with the little things, such as when we recognise how another person needs to express their individuality, or when we stare another deep into the eyes and acknowledge how we are not the epicentre of the world.

Just as we escape from the pull of our ego in those moments, we can overcome it completely. That is the point when the notion of non-ownership is fully embedded: our self is not “ours”. But we have to start small. Just as with learning a new language. Patience is key.

Philosophy is for everyone

Let me reiterate this point: philosophy is not a closed club for eccentric intellectuals or academics with obscure interests. Those exist as well, but philosophy does not belong to them. Wisdom is for everyone and applies to everything. You don’t have to do presentations such as this one to qualify as a philosopher. You do not need to communicate in a certain way to be a philosopher. All you need is to remain open to wisdom.

Philosophy is not about abstractions that exist “in the heavens”, so to speak. It can be, though not exclusively. With wisdom we change how we behave in daily affairs. We do everything thoughtfully. All those little things that your pedantic philosophy instructor at school would not count as “philosophy”: they are all philosophical throughout.

The philosopher who considers the abstractions is not limited to them. Such a person can translate those insights into practical advice. Think, for example, about non-ownership. We can talk about it in the most abstract ways, but we can also just relate it to facial hair. Both methods are equally good so long as we remain rooted in those qualities of character that sustain our friendship with wisdom. Do you think I am fooling around when I tell you that “my beard” is not mine? I am serious.

Thoughtfulness ultimately comes from patience. When we are patient with consistency, we are more focused, more considerate, less egocentric, less arrogant. In short, patience makes us better people. We all appreciate a friend who can listen to us and who knows us, a doctor who is actually leading a healthy lifestyle instead of merely pontificating about it, an artist who puts their heart into their art. We like thoughtfulness and people who don’t let distractions lead them astray.

Patience liberates us from all sorts of misconceptions. We are all well aware of this prevalent notion of doing everything hard and fast. People are peddling easy solutions and make promises that cannot be realised. They tell us how we can learn this super complex topic in only a few hours. Others guarantee immediate results to have the “perfect body” just in time for the holidays. Everyone is in a rush to go somewhere. Where exactly? They do not know.

We can listen to all those distractions and waste years of our life labouring towards unattainable goals. Or we admit to the need for patience. We have to impose a structure and set priorities. We must pick something and stick with it for some time in order to evaluate it better. We have to let go of this opportunistic attitude of remaining at the surface-level. With superficialities we will never be happy with ourselves because we will always be trapped in a cycle of constantly chasing after stimuli that call for immediate action. The reason we cannot be happy is because these are infinite. No matter how hard and fast we go, we will never be fulfilled.

There are things in life which involve a degree of sophistication. We have to give them the attention they deserve. Notice the word here: “sophistication”. Does the “sophi” prefix sound familiar? It should, because it is the same sophia I have been talking about all this time. Sophisticated is that which is characterised by throughtfulness; that which is done in wisdom.

There is no magic trick to give us wisdom. There is no shortcut that we can take to become wise over the weekend. No acid, no mushroom will do it either. Substances may help us break free from certain falsehoods, but the rest comes from patience and the commitment it entails.

An aside here on the term “sophistication”. You will find its etymology to have negative connotations as it is traced back to the Sophists. The Sophists were sages of antiquity. We know from Plato’s works about Protagoras and Gorgias, both of whom were thoughtful individuals. I call them “sages”, meaning wise people, because that is what they were. But for whatever reason, due to differences of opinion and perhaps political conflicts or other such pettiness, Sophists have been misrepresented as charlatans. There is the pejorative term of “sophism” which signifies trickery and deceit. This does an injustice to what the leading figures of that tradition stood for, which was not an exercise in dishonesty.

This is similar to how “cynicism”, another important school of philosophy, has been systematically derided through the aeons to the effect that “cynic” and its derivatives are used as a very bad words nowadays.

These are historical prejudices that have no place in a discussion that is conducted with the qualities of character that spring from patience. Remember that we develop dialectic to listen to what the other side has to say. If all we do is be bellicose or, as the ancient Greeks would say, eristic (divisive or causing discord), we are not being honest. Instead, we assume a position that we exalt as the single source of truth and then fight everyone who disagrees with us. We are not conducting ourselves with parrhesia as we pretend to know more than what we actually do. We are being dogmatic.

Patience allows us to take a deep breath. It lets us disengage from the fray. We do not want to merely react to stimuli. We need to have composure and thus presence and honesty and all of that.

As I said earlier in this presentation, do not let anyone belittle you. You too can be a philosopher. You start by learning to be patient. You figure out how to take things slowly. You observe but refrain from passing judgement. You cannot yet be sure. You have to wait. By maintaining this disposition, you gradually make a habit out of being honest. You do not lie to yourself, such as by pretending that you are somehow special. Eventually you develop skills that make you more thoughtful. You show compassion as you recognise the subjectivity of others. You give your full attention to what you are doing. You stop being an egoist. You become more reliable and gain the trust of others.

You may still have reservations though. It is understandable. You pick up some book that a philosopher wrote and do not understand what the subject matter is. Do not be discouraged. As with everything, there are those who are good teachers and those who are not. And there are topics which are for more advanced practitioners.

Do not make the mistake of conflating the main idea of “friend of wisdom” with expertise. All you need is to be more thoughtful in your life. You do not have to be a sage. It does not matter. Just imagine how much more rewarding our experiences would be. Have you ever talked to someone who payed attention to all of your words? Didn’t that make you feel respected? Don’t you want to have more of that in your life? Wouldn’t it be better if we all were more patient?

Wisdom is not a finite resource. Remember that we do not really own anything. Befriend wisdom and you will notice how you start partaking in wisdom in practical ways. You will be wiser than before. More thoughtful, more sophisticated. Please take it slow: one step at a time. How slow? Don’t worry about it. It is the attitude that matters.

Table of Contents

1. About parrhesia and dialectic
2. Sincerity and presence
3. Our attention is finite
4. The commodification of our attention span
5. Knowledge starts with presence
6. Quality over quantity

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. Today I will talk to you about a broad theme that covers how we experience the world and, by extension, the manner in which we accumulate knowledge. As always, the text of this presentation is available on my website: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence.

There are two main parts to this video. In the first one, I cover the general themes of sincerity and presence. These are prerequisites to a favourable disposition towards knowledge and learning. In the second part, I tackle the more specialised topic of taking notes. I explain what I consider the difference between a task and a note and discuss what constitutes a high- or low- quality entry to our knowledge base.

This video comes a few days after a detailed demonstration I did on a programming-related subject: I developed a note-taking package for Emacs that is focused on simplicity and portability. I do write a lot. I do publish frequently as well—just check my website. I thus want to share my views as a writer, thinker, and coder.

The core message for you at this introductory stage is that there is no “killer app”, no “life hack”, no effortless way to improve yourself. You have to earn it, by starting with your mindset. The choice of technology comes second, together with the technicalities of the method you choose to implement. Don’t get distracted by lofty promises of a “second brain” that magically does the work for you. Valuable notes are the product of your rigour and discipline. Focus on the one brain you have. Whatever extensions to it will follow from there.

About parrhesia and dialectic

There is only one English word you may not be familiar with and needs to be explained at the outset: parrhesia (παρρησία). It is borrowed from Greek.

Parrhesia literally means “all that is being said” or “all that is put into words”. In practical usage, parrhesia refers to the disposition of speaking in earnest, of telling things as they are. No tricks, no gimmicks.

We can see the connection between “saying everything that can be said” and being honest. With parrhesia, honesty acquires a meaning where telling the truth is a sign of standing up to the authority of conventions. To have parrhesia is to prioritise the pursuit of truthfulness over any given arrangement that may grant power, social status, popularity, and so on.

In terms of our selfhood, which I covered in the previous entry to this series, parrhesia is what we need to recognise who we are in the moment; who we are as that subjective narrative of self that draws linkages between different contexts and evolving states of affairs.

[ On selfhood: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-31-selfhood/ ]

We best understand our self amidst the totality of the world with parrhesia. Whenever we hold back on “what is being said”, whenever we deem some words ineffable or consider certain aspects of our selfhood off limits, we necessarily distort or foreshadow our perception of self.

What does honesty about one’s selfhood have to do with the broad theme of accumulating knowledge? How does it relate to the particular topic of learning by writing notes?

It is relevant because it determines how you, the subject who seeks knowledge, interprets the phenomena. If you cannot be honest with yourself, if you cannot discern the truth in that which is most intimate, what makes you believe you can reliably find any other truth?

Parrhesia is a matter of disposition: how we conduct ourselves. When we make a habit out of speaking the truth, we necessarily acknowledge the need to seek the truth, remain open to it, and be ready to revise our views in the face of compelling evidence and/or cogent counter-arguments to those of our own. In other words, we do not stand for our truth but the truth, even if it runs contrary to our beliefs, which we must promptly and blithely revise. This means that we are not attached to the narrative of our selfhood we have hitherto developed. We admit to our variability, to the potential of change or evolution.

Parrhesia is the other side of inquisitiveness and dubitativeness. We cannot be genuinely inquisitive if we are afraid to elucidate the truth. We may not be dubitative if we only ever provide assent to that which is expedient or which happens to find currency in our milieu. Sometimes our comfort zone is nothing but the prison we have rationalised as cosy.

Parrhesia, then, involves a special brand of courage: that which has the capacity to challenge the cult of personality we develop about our own self. When we are honest, we know how to contain our cockiness, escape from our egoism, remain grounded, and see our self as yet another node in this distributed network of universal life that is the Cosmos.

Parrhesia is not about recklessness. One must recognise the specifics of the case to know where the virtuous balance is which, ipso facto, is a matter of understanding how things stand. Furthermore, parrhesia is not a dogma of truthfulness, a holy war of sorts, where we take it upon ourselves to demonstrate to others how they are wrong. No!

We must understand that values are ideals. They are analytical constructs which exist in a perfect world. In our actuality though, we must exercise practical reason, “common sense” as we say. The truth is an ideal as well. As with all ideals, it has no instantiation that is equivalent to its absolute form. What we have in practice are approximations of the ideal, which is the case for everything. I cannot offer you harmony, for example, but only instances of it such as a melody or a shape. Even if I put together all melodies and shapes I am still giving you instances of harmony, not the ideal of it.

Parrhesia thus requires that we acknowledge the actuality of our subjectivity; the truth that what we learn is a function of factors whose interplay contributes to states of affairs. We do not deal in absolutes. Our methods are imperfect and our judgement fallible. To speak in earnest, then, requires that we recognise our limits. The most practical way to do so is to be dialectical.

Dialectic, in its original meaning, is about discourse, dialogue, what happens “through words”: an exchange of views. Because of parrhesia, because of its concomitant inquisitiveness and dubitativeness, engaging in dialectic means that we admit to the possibility of changing our thesis (position) either to an opposite one, an anti-thesis, or a new view that might blend the two, a syn-thesis, or simply a new thesis that supersedes all previous ones.

In summary, we have four connatural qualities of character which underpin this truth-seeking view of the world and disposition thereof.

• parrhesia is sincerity in elucidation;
• to be dubitative is to doubt, which manifests through the recognition that the truth remains elusive;
• to be inquisitive is the attitude of questioning and seeking the truth;
• dialectic is encapsulated in the spirit of openness and selflessness with which we carry out the above.

When we have these, or at least work towards making them part of our everyday life, we start perceiving things differently. For example, someone at some point in the distant past insulted you. By being honest, you understand that the insult is inconsequential and that your past self does not necessarily determine your current self. Matters such as pride are ephemeral and situational. You then realise that by letting go, by no longer attaching value to something that has none and which is not pertinent, you free yourself from its grip.

Ideas can create robust constraints. When we are in the mindset of pursuing the truth, we are neither attached to—nor bound by—any given arrangement of concepts. There is a lightness to it, as we always emancipate ourselves from falsehood; falsehood which may appear as obsession for something unattainable, the pettiness of “winning the argument” for the sake of winning, and all those desires to play a role in order to accommodate social expectations, often to our detriment.

[ Expectations, rules, and role-playing: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-03-expectations-rules-roles/ ]

Sincerity and presence

I already alluded to this notion of “letting go”, of not being attached to an idea, some project of ours, or particular view of our selfhood. When non-attachment becomes the norm in our life, we necessarily live in the moment. The present enjoys our undivided attention. Our sense of self is no longer contingent on any of those concepts we would otherwise cling to.

Let me be concrete here. If I were to prepare this presentation with the ultimate goal of amassing Internet points, such as likes, comments, subscribers, I would be creating an idol of myself—an avatar—who lives and dies in the domain where this video acquires those points or not. If then, I do not have the sincerity to understand that I am not the idol of myself, which I created by mistakenly attributing value to certain constructs, my immediate experiences will revolve around this distorted reality. I will become a victim of my own desires or, rather, my desires will take on a life of their own and exert control over me, alienating me from what I do and rendering me heteronomous (I described “heteronomy” in the previous presentations—it is the “rule by another”, the opposite of autonomy). I will continue to be physically “here”, but my thoughts will be in that imaginary world where the avatar operates in.

By recognising the truth, I understand that Internet points do not change me. With this recording I already say everything I want to communicate. What happens afterwards is outside my control, as it is, for instance, subject to the vicissitudes of some algorithm. I thus am not attached to this project, I do not draw up a corresponding idol and do not get trapped in that mini-game of accumulating of Internet points.

Consider this scenario which you can all relate to either through personal experience or via your acquaintances. You brew a coffee or prepare some tea, walk to the balcony to have your drink, and post on your social media page something like the following:

Enjoying the moment! 🫖☕🤗 #motivation #happiness

Instead of actually savouring the moment, you keep your computer device within reach and constantly check for updates. You are not “there”. Your mind travels to where your avatar is. It wonders in that domain where you acquire validation through how others react to your post about your experience. You are not simply enjoying the moment as you claim.

As you obsess over your status update, you do not open yourself up to the possibility of experiencing the world that unfolds before you. Did you observe the patterns in the clouds? Are there any birds around? How does the breeze feel right now? Do you even pay attention to the drink you purport to enjoy? Maybe you think you have seen it all. “Everyday is the same”, you say. But what if you believe in this sort of constancy exactly because you have a warped perception of things, which is governed by the idol of you and your idolisations in general?

Why did you post that status update? Will you lose your friends if you don’t? Are they that fickle? Will a 100 likes make the drink taste any better? What if you get no likes at all? Does it ruin your day? Why make your experience of the moment contingent on the performance of an avatar? Why confer that much power to a notion; power which will be used against you, such as when you get sad that no-one liked your post?

We often hear people lament how they are a failure in life because they could not realise their dreams or live up to a certain standard. Are they right? Did they truly fail as human beings? Or did their avatars not fulfil their purpose within the confines of whatever mini-game? Instead of belittling ourselves, why not consider the possibility that the dreams and aspirations we have are, at times, falsehoods. Why beat ourselves into submission when there is a good chance we simply lacked perspective? Maybe we were misguided and had the wrong goals.

When we are in the mindset of seeking the truth, we develop the skill of observing our behaviour in such moments instead of jumping to early conclusions. We assess our condition and, with parrhesia, with courage and plain-spoken-ness, ask the difficult but necessary questions:

• Why am I seeking social validation for a private affair?
• Is not my appreciation of the moment sufficient?
• Would I want my enjoyment to be ruled by popular vote?
• Do I have a personality or am I merely doing what others want?
• Is my selfhood limited to the performance of an idol of mine?
• Why hurt myself by assuming that my ideas were correct in advance?
• Who is this all-knowing judge, anyway, who brands me as a failure?

There is so much that can be said about the trappings of our imagination and how we tend to consider them truthful without further consideration. We escape from the moment, we lose ourselves, we cede control to some avatar, and eventually feel helpless when things go awry.

By practising parrhesia, we find the courage to stand up and take the initiative. We do not allow our self to be reduced to an idol, to a figment of a convention or role-playing game. We are more than that.

Think again about this otherwise innocuous act of posting a status update about your drink. You might think now, “Why would philosophy even bother with such details? Is not philosophy about abstract magnitudes and academic discussions?”

Philosophy is ultimately realised through quotidian life. We do philosophy. We don’t merely preach it or study it. As such, we can draw a general point from a particular phenomenon as we couch it in terms of its wider context.

To continue with the example here, by tackling this seemingly trivial issue with the help of philosophy, we learn that we can enjoy the moment without the performative aspect of tokenising the minutia of our life. By “tokenising” I mean that we convert our experience to something that has transactional value in a certain domain, which we then trade in a market in exchange for popularity and validation.

We have to take a step back and assume agency. Let the moment have our undivided attention. There is no longer an idol or avatar that yearns for those tokens of short-term stimulus. The idol has no power over us. It cannot affect us. There are no troubling thoughts about what our peers might think of our experience in the here and now. None of that bothers and burdens us. None of it. The moment just is: we recognise it as such.

We practice being present in those seemingly “small things” because it is easier to start with them than with more complex phenomena. We can track our progress and notice how a more deliberate disposition is achievable. We practice in small increments, one step at a time, until we learn to remain present consistently, no matter the specifics.

Our attention is finite

Why do we need to focus, anyway? What is the reason for being present? Why not allow ourselves the apparent freedom to wonder away and pursue everything that comes our way?

Quite simply, our time is finite. We only have a few hours each day during which we are productive and can stay active on a given task. In the grand scheme of things, we have but a few years to live. Our humanity makes it impossible to experience what the world has to offer in its totality. We must learn to pick and choose among the innumerable stimuli that affect us and trigger us into action.

Everything out there has an effect on us. The colours, the figures, the sounds, the ideas we have about them or because of them. Everything. By being in the world, we necessarily are contextualised. Who we are and what we do is framed, informed, influenced, conditioned, or otherwise determined by all those magnitudes, large or small, that apply to us. We cannot understand our presence in a vacuum, in some notional state of nothingness where we exist as a decontextualised mind, or conscience, or soul. To be, is to be part of the Cosmos.

Action and reaction, the very idea of a feedback loop, implies language. Something happens, which we can describe as the transmission of a message, and something else occurs in response to it, which may be the reply to this message. In its most basic form, this universal language is binary. As we know from computers, binary language builds gestalt forms of incredible complexity and detail. Do not underestimate how the seemingly trivial mechanism of cause and effect leads to elaborate structures.

As humans, we have mechanisms for processing and filtering this cosmic language. A lot of what happens to us never even registers in our conscience, such as how exposure to sunlight helps our body synthesise a certain vitamin. It has a profound effect on our organism, yet we do not actively engage in its making through our purposeful actions.

Other mechanisms of ours involve conscious participation. This is the part of the universal language we do interpret. It is where we can implement changes and work towards improving ourselves. Consider, for example, the case where you are sitting somewhere and after a few seconds you pull out your smartphone to check for status updates. There is no pressing reason to do it. You already checked your phone a few minutes ago. Why do you have this seemingly irresistible urge to take your focus away from your surroundings and shift it towards that mini computer of yours? Can you spend five minutes without that gadget? Look around you. Is the decor good enough? What are your thoughts about its prevailing colours and patterns? Would you change them? How?

The point is to admit that your attention span is finite. If you constantly get drawn away from the moment by your avatars, you will not have enough time for activities that can enrich your life. A meaningful conversation. An evening of reading. A hike in the nearby mountains. These can be fulfilling only when you partake in them wholeheartedly. Imagine forgetting what you just read. Not nice, is it?

If you do not become considerate about how you use your time in those aspects you do control, you can never gather the energy to stay focused on what you want to do in the moment. There will always be some distraction denying you of anything profound. You shall then remain confined to superficialities and be left with that feeling of emptiness.

To be clear, we cannot avoid all distractions simply by using our brain. It is not enough, at least not without intense training. There are many types of stimuli which take the form of an addiction: we can’t just unthink them and move on. Addiction requires therapy, which always depends on the specifics of the case. In general though, when we find that something has a physical pull on us, we must try to disempower it by not giving in.

As a first step, we can escape from those impulses by removing ourselves from their reach. Is your smartphone the source of your distractions? Shut it off and seal it away for an hour. Give it to a person you trust and ask them to leave the premises with it. Do not take it with you everywhere you go. Try to impose a schedule in your daily life where you disconnect from the Web, literally and figuratively. Do whatever it takes to put a distance between yourself and the source of your distractions. Once you learn to live without them physically, you will gradually practice how to control yourself mentally.

Parrhesia here means that we do not deny the fact that stimuli have an effect on us. Remember that we are always subject to the cosmic language. Lying or pretending does not solve the problem. Parrhesia is to admit the potency of those magnitudes and seek ways to deny them the space they need to grow inside of us. Do not assign value to them. Refrain from becoming invested in them.

Just as we are not attached to our own narrative of self and the aspirations associated with our projects, we must practice not to be governed by those dependencies either.

The commodification of our attention span

Notice that many offerings we are exposed to are free of cost. The so-called “social media” do not charge us any money for using them. They just trigger us into engaging with their platform multiple times per day under the pretext of checking the news or learning what our friends are up to.

Similarly, many of the video games we have on our computers follow a free-to-play model and expect us to achieve progress through endless hours of grinding out repetitive tasks in pursuit of some “achievement”.

Even technical websites, such as GitHub, are now introducing a gimmick of showing off tokenistic accomplishments. If they push on with that initiative, they will be incentivising us to put up a performance of gaming the system instead of focusing on the substance; a performance like that status update we make about our morning drink.

In a generic economy, all those businesses would be competing for our money, at least as a point of entry. But if they do not want to be paid for their goods and services at the outset, what could they possibly be competing for? Our attention, of course. Our attention is valuable because it is finite.

Businesses are commodifying our attention span. They want to keep us active on their platform for as long as possible. The time we spend with them is time not spent on other activities. This becomes, in itself, an exclusive domain. The dominion over our attention span, the oligopoly built on top of it, can then be monetised in various ways. As such, products are designed to be addictive, especially when they have no upfront monetary cost though not only.

It is not just digital goods that do this. Consumables, such as processed food are no different. You must have heard practically every doctor warn against the harms of junk food. Yet consumption of it remains prevalent. Why? Because it is addictive. All those intense flavours, all the additives, are part of a concerted effort to extract value from this finite resource of ours: our attention. They want us to keep coming back.

Have you ever spent the morning thinking about the meal you will have later in the day? After you consume your lunch, do you still keep it in your mind, such as by raving about how tasty it was? How would you describe this phenomenon? Is it not a means by which you lose presence? Instead of focusing on the present, you obsess about some dish in your immediate past or future.

Again, we notice how little things such as the intensity of the food’s flavour can inhibit our focus on the here and now. It is all those small things we need to account for and we must train to not give into them if we want to consistently remain present.

As everyone competes for our attention, marketers need to find ways to make their products stand out. For productivity solutions, this typically involves promises along the lines of making us a “10x” of whatever it is we are. Or they peddle something that appeals to our inability to focus over prolonged sessions, such as a shortcut to efficiency, a conduit to wisdom, and so on.

An app on its own cannot rescue us from all the distractions. We need to approach matters with sincerity, with a spirit of openness, and start doing what is necessary, mentally and physically, to gain or regain control.

Knowledge starts with presence

Now we move to the note-taking part of this presentation. While I cover the case of written notes, what I am about to say applies to mental notes as well, mutatis mutandis.

Let me start with a distinction I make between tasks or reminders and notes.

• The former are actionable items that target an activity, such as a TODO entry to record this presentation. Tasks or reminders can be used as part of a workflow for building a knowledge base. For example, when we are reading a book, we might want to record a reminder that something important is referenced in page 10.

• By contrast, notes are the constituents of our knowledge base. Each of them encapsulates what we have learnt about the given topic. They contain valuable information that tells us something which can stand on its own about a phenomenon or state of affairs.

Both tasks and notes are at their best when they are precise and sufficient. Precision means that they are communicated without ambiguity and have clear start and end points. For instance a reminder to “read the Emacs manual” is imprecise and not very helpful. Should we read it from the beginning until the final page in one go? Are we looking for something specific or is this supposed to be a pastime activity? What is the ultimate objective of this task? A better reminder is to read a given chapter in the manual in order to learn about a specific piece of functionality.

Same principle for notes. We want them to be self-contained.

Continuing with this theme… Here is the anatomy of a bad note:

Today I watched Prot's presentation.  Good stuff!

https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-06-25-knowledge-presence

This is the kind of information that has no profundity. It states a fact, records the superficialities of an impression, and provides a link for further reading. If we take this note on its own, we cannot extract knowledge from it. We do not know what the allusion to “good stuff” entails. What caught our attention exactly? Is there something specific we gathered from the presentation? Did it change our mind about something we were already doing? If so, how? Did we have any disagreements and which were they precisely?

The idea is to apply what we learnt about parrhesia and presence. We do not want to reduce note-taking to something akin to that frivolous status update on social media I mentioned before. This is not a popularity contest, not a performance to regale our social group. We want to focus our attention on the activity of explaining, in our own terms and as best we can, what the subject matter is.

A good note focuses on the elucidation of one point. If there are any asides or tangential remarks, they can be turned into their own entries. Why? Because the practice of focusing on one discrete thing helps us stay in the flow of parrhesia and presence. We can always combine different threads once we get better at staying focused. The key is to start small and build from there.

An easy way to test if a note can stand on its own is to either record it on a piece of paper or imagine it is printed on one. We want to have the most low-tech version of our material. No links, no previews, none of the fancy stuff that technology enables. Once we get that, we can better assess the usefulness of what is written.

• If our note does not say much on its own, it is not good enough.
• If our note includes too many links without sufficiently describing them or explaining what the connection is, we are putting ourselves in the process of having to hunt down the snippet of knowledge we wanted to record. Not optimal.
• If our note requires special software to be accessed, we might lose it in the long-term which again detracts from its value.

The general idea is that we want to take notes carefully. Capturing our thoughts is one part, but it is not enough. We ought to read and re-read what we have. The goal is to try to anticipate if our future self will find the record helpful. We do not want to burden our future self with incomplete thoughts and fragmentary information. When we retrieve our note we should not have to go down a rabbit hole of clicking through links in order to eventually discern the thread running through our entries. That might cause frustration and lead to distractions.

We can do better by focusing on the here and now. The key is to take as much time as necessary to substantiate one thought as best we can in that moment. If we have doubts or if there are any lacunae in our knowledge, we must admit them then and there. The note is not supposed to be perfect—this is not about some performance for the public eye. It just needs to be an honest representation of our current ability.

Another way to anticipate a bad note is to assess its potential worth. We get better at this as we gain experience.

Suppose I stumble across a website with tips and tricks about scuba diving in the ocean. I am not a diver, I live in a mountainous area, and may never find an application for this kind of information. If I am not selective with what I want to focus on, I will create a bookmark.

Later, I will find another site which provides insight on hunting techniques. I am not a hunter and will likely never be one. Again, if I do not impose any kind of restraint, I will store yet another bookmark.

Then there will be a third website which discusses the most effective techniques employed by basketball players. I am not playing basketball and likely never will, so again I have no use for this. Without much thought, I will impulsively add a third bookmark to the list.

Before realising it, I will have accumulated all this garbage which pretends to be valuable knowledge. I cannot do anything with it. For me, all these trivia are useless. If I am in the habit of creating records that have a high noise to signal ratio, I am doing myself a disservice. Instead of setting up a knowledge base I can rely on, I am creating yet another major distraction.

The old adage of quality over quantity applies here as well. With parrhesia, we impose order to our chaotic propensities as we pick and choose those items that are likely to give us the most value.

We must never forget that our attention is finite.

The other way to avoid a bad note is to be aware of the motivation behind it. Does the creation of the new record come from a position of control or is it a selfish reaction to something?

Suppose we are taking notes about an insightful video we are watching. We pause every couple of minutes to write down what we think. Sometimes this is helpful, though it can also work to our detriment, as we lack context. We have not heard the whole presentation yet and cannot be sure if there is some more nuance to it or if an initial concept is expanded upon further into the video. As such, those in-the-moment notes may simply be capturing our prior thoughts, not what we learnt from the source material.

With parrhesia, we take a step back and tell ourselves: “Am I being honest here? Do I really need to rush to early conclusions? Who am I trying to impress, anyway?” By doing this, by maintaining our presence and focus on the moment, we keep the right mindset of not allowing premature notions to masquerade as high-quality notes. Instead, we can use tasks or reminders which we will revisit after watching the whole video.

We thus allow ourselves the possibility to remain open to new ideas. This is not about openness for its own sake, as I already explained the importance of being selective. This is where the dialectical side of our disposition comes to the fore. We engage with the source material with the understanding that we are interested in approximating the truth. We thus give it a fair chance in a spirit of selflessness. Remember that we do not stand for our truth but only for the truth. If we have to let go of our thesis, so be it: the review emancipates us from a falsehood.

Quality over quantity

The broad theme of this presentation is to conduct ourselves in a manner that is purposeful and considerate. We want to retain focus in order to perform at the best of our abilities. We wish to be honest to omit or avoid the superficialities that have no longer-term value in our life.

Our goal is to be present, otherwise we misuse the finite resource we have at our disposal, which is our attention span and, by extension, our time.

Rather than let ourselves be held hostage by our own idolisations or avatarisations, we diligently approach matters with a critical eye. The intent is to put an end to any tendencies of showing off, of calling for needless attention, of doing something for the sake of the performance in the confines of a social mini-game.

I am of the opinion that we are successfully building up our knowledge base when we can describe its individual items in our own words. When we put in the effort, when we spend quality time substantiating our thoughts, we practice the skills of knowledge retention.

By contrast, whenever we introduce too much automation and too much reliance on technological pampers, we risk becoming lazy and complacent, because we no longer put in the requisite work. If, for instance, our notes consist of an excerpt and a link to the original source, we encounter the problems I already mentioned: the notes do not help our future self extract valuable insights from them.

Knowledge has to be accessible, both conceptually and technologically. Bad notes are inaccessible at the level of their content. Yet there is a strong case to be made that even good notes can become bad ones when the underlying medium is not conducive to longer-term storage. If we can only access our notes via a specialised app or an online service, the chances of data loss are quite high. Our knowledge base thus lacks resilience. It is not portable and our future self may not be able to benefit from it.

Too many features often burden us with “mental dependencies”, with cognitive load, especially if we are not well trained in parrhesia and in maintaining presence. Instead of letting us focus on the task of writing, featurism seeks our attention. Perhaps to add some markup that is not really necessary, or to make certain syntactic constructs look a bit prettier, or even to use that technologically impressive but ultimately useless gimmick that would surely impress our peers.

Just as we ought to be selective with the information we gather, we must to be mindful of the tools we use. Too much convenience may come with the hidden cost of occupying our attention span. We do not wish that.

In conclusion, we start by taking care of the one brain we have. We want to develop the disposition of openness, dubitativeness, and inquisitiveness. This disposition is a prerequisite to knowledge and learning. We also need to improve our focus, to always be present. We do that by removing distractions, curing our addictions, and being honest about our choices, actions, and goals. The technology we choose must be consistent with those qualities. We want it to be an extension of who we are, not an arrangement that holds us hostage to the interests of some business or, generally, that forces us to deviate from our path.

Table of Contents

1. Nature and nurture on the matter of selfhood
2. The true self
3. Selfhood and consistency
4. Self-denial and the self as a role-play
5. Openness and sincerity
6. Selfhood and the comfort zone
7. The self is not a dogma
8. Annex with the lyrics of “The life of others”

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. Today I will do another presentation on philosophy. This one is about selfhood, this notion of “who am I”.

On the face of it, the issue seems obvious. You may be thinking right now “Well, of course I know who I am! Is this some kind of trick?”. There are no tricks here, no gimmicks—just ordinary talk. I will explain how things are nuanced and complex.

Unlike my previous four entries in this series, I will share some personal details about me when I bring up examples that help with the analysis. The idea is to tell stories that are relatable and couch them in terms of their wider context. While I will not elaborate on this here, these sort of experiences provided the impetus for my transition into philosophy: it was not a formal setting, but everyday life that made me think about how I should live.

Bear in mind that the first section covers a general theme and might be a bit difficult as a result. I promise that the rest of the text has a greater focus on the matter at hand.

Nature and nurture on the matter of selfhood

The perennial problem of nature versus nurture is also identified in the formation of the self. There is a side to selfhood that appears to come from nature, such as whether one is neurodivergent or neurotypical: this has to do with how one’s organism works, how it processes stimuli, and the manner in which it connects the so-called “internal” to the “external” world. Whereas nurture pertains to the aspect of the self as realised in its milieu: the experiences and beliefs, the learnt behavioural patterns and modes of interaction, and the impressions that are shared between members of the social group that are all considered typical of the given person.

The dichotomy between nature and nurture is hard—if not outright impossible—to identify and substantiate when considering the specifics. We cannot draw an indelible line between the two magnitudes and study them in isolation. Unlike analytical constructs, which exist in ideal circumstances in our mind and which we can reason about in vitro, selfhood is made manifest in vivo, in states of affairs that necessarily blend the analytical extremes of nature and nurture.

Nurture has a continuous effect on nature and vice versa. When someone learns or does something, they affect their organism by stimulating specific subsystems and by engendering the relevant feedback loops. These, in turn, create cascading effects which bring about an eventuality and, perhaps, prepare the relevant mechanisms for more of the same. Every stimulus has an effect on the organism, meaning that whatever is deemed natural for matters of selfhood will either have to be framed as a temporal construct that describes the distant past, an origin story as it were, or be formulated as dynamic.

Maybe, then, the distinction between the two is a matter of origination, not actuality? If nature belongs to the past, then its impact on selfhood is a one-off event and what remains is part of nurture. If, however, the nature magnitude is dynamic then one must wonder what is left for nurture: if evolving circumstances are still reducible to underlying natural responses that are personalised and are thus part of nature, then the concept of nurture does not help us much.

Does this make things simpler? Can we neatly separate the two? No.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that the distinction between internal and external worlds is also complex. Every presence exists in relation to other forms of life and is continuously exposed to stimuli which engender feedback loops. There is no such thing as a standalone presence: a being as such.

Note that “feedback loops” describe the interplay of the notional internal and external factors. The same stimulus can elicit profoundly different responses from individuals at the given scope of application or from the same individual in a different context (i.e. “the same” is a figure of speech).

If, then, nature is treated as a temporal construct which pertains to the origin of the self, we must wonder whether at that imaginary time zero the organism had a standalone presence or not: was it immersed in an environment and was it influenced, framed, conditioned, or otherwise determined by the relevant factors? If it had a standalone existence, how did it grow in nothing and with nothing, and how did it transcend the boundary between that supposed decontextualised domain and the one we occupy which is one of co-existence and inter-dependence?

The answer is that there is no time zero where some true nature can be discovered independent of whatever we would describe as learnt, as externally induced, and the like. Thus the nature magnitude cannot be a temporal one and cannot belong to the origin of selfhood.

If nature is dynamic as an ever-present condition that underpins the self, then nurture is reduced to nothing. Whatever we deem as external or as a matter of upbringing also springs from its own dynamic nature. They are all part of a universal continuum. Moreover, if nature is dynamic we cannot identify with “a nature”, as that would be a snapshot in an evolving process and thus an abstraction from the actuality of the self.

As such, we shall not rely on the dichotomy between nature and nurture to inquire upon matters of selfhood. At least for our purposes, the two are unhelpful: they blend together and it ultimately does not matter if we can discover the origin of a given trigger or state of affairs in vitro.

The true self

Since we cannot neatly tell apart nature from nurture, we have a problem of determining what the real self is. We often utter expressions such as “be true to yourself”. Can we really say anything precise with those words? Perhaps we labour under the assumption that the true self is that aspect of selfhood which comes from nature: the original one, we might think; the one which is not influenced by the circumstances. Yet we already discussed how such a tidy arrangement is untenable: we cannot differentiate between the circumstantial and the originary, for the latter is also a matter of the circumstances. We can reason about those magnitudes in analytical terms, but not in relation to evolving states of affairs: to selfhood in vivo.

Maybe we think that the self is circumstantial but still has a frame of reference which is constant. It might be a point in the evolution of the person that defines them for the rest of their life, such as who they are in adulthood. However, this view can only deliver a snapshot of selfhood which then conditions everything in relation to it. Why should, say, the adult self be the true one? And which adult exactly? The one at 18 or 30? There are so many questions, which indicate that we might be searching for the wrong answer and an identity of the sort may not exist after all.

What is the self then? I consider it a subjective narrative. We essentially create a story that describes who we are in relation to the world. It distils the experiences we have had, the noteworthy stimuli we have been exposed to, the patterns we discern in those, and the predictions we make based on these patterns, to arrive at an abstraction: the common in the multitude. The true self, then, can only ever be conceived as an approximation.

Still, we have a problem of finding the truth. Every phenomenon will have to be assessed in relation to past phenomena to determine whether it is consistent with the established patterns or deviates from them. This favours the past over the present: any deviation is seen as untrue to the self. Is it though? Are we certain that the past forms our true self and that the future must always be a continuation of it? What if the future holds the truth and the past was untrue? How do we even tell the difference between truth and non-truth in this case?

We can already sense how tricky these issues are. Let me then share some personal information to make this problématique more relatable.

As a little child up until the age of 6, I had two definitive features: (i) I was very shy and (ii) was hyperactive. By “shy” I mean that I did not disclose what I really wanted and did not open up to people. As for my hyperactivity, I was wild, always on the move and innately curious about the world around me. For example, I would turn the furniture upside-down and re-arrange it in such ways as to resemble, in my imagination, hideouts and caves. I would climb up on road signs and trees, play with mud, jump on my bed, break practically everything you can imagine, et cetera.

Somewhere between the ages of 6-12, I was still very shy and had only one friend. Though I was no longer hyperactive. I was fairly easy to manage, played with my toys at home, and was good at school.

In my adolescence, I stopped being shy and became hyperactive again: I could play sports all day, I did not pay attention in class, would not listen to my teachers, challenged authority, and generally was unruly and contrarian. What I mean by no longer being shy is that I could make more friends, be much more sociable and ‘loud’, state what I wanted, and started playing association football as part of a team. This meant that my social circle expanded considerably and I was always engaged in outdoor activities: virtually everybody knew me!

In my early adulthood, I continued to not be shy though I no longer was hyperactive. Instead of expending my energy on outdoor activities and being impossible to manage, I became more balanced. I could focus on my university studies, get first honours, be agreeable, think things through, and generally remain focused on intellectual matters without, however, forgoing my propensity to be physically active.

We can already tell from these descriptions that any notion of self will be imperfect. If my early childhood self was the shy type, can I claim that my adolescent self was not true? Or is it the other way round, with the adult being true and the kid non-true? Perhaps then, we must not rush to draw such arbitrary distinctions. We are missing something.

Selfhood and consistency

Selfhood is an evolving narrative. It changes over time or in relation to dynamic phenomena. There is no “true self”, in the sense that any one snapshot does not necessarily equal another, so whichever we pick gives us distinct findings. None of them are false either. Whatever we understand as the self is a thread that runs through varied states of affairs: the common in the multitude.

Rather than expect the self to have a pattern that is always present, let us allow for the possibility that there are incompatibilities between different phases of the self. Consider the representation of my case:

Obviously, the table is simplistic: it only considers shyness and hyperactivity, though I was much more than those two. The point is that we get an indication of how things change. Maybe not all of them, maybe not to the same degree, and maybe not at once. Instead of trying to formulate a narrative of selfhood that encompasses all these phases, it is appropriate to postulate that each phase has its own particularities which may or may not be present in other phases.

This, in turn, frames how we think about consistency: it has to remain limited to each phase. The notion of a “true self” is misleading if we insist on achieving consistency between all phases of the self. It is a falsehood predicated on the misunderstanding that the self must be a constant despite the prevailing conditions. Rather, the self is a variable with phases during which it is more-or-less fixed. Or, perhaps, its variability occurs within the boundaries of an overarching constraint.

Consistency then, need not be inter-phasal, meaning between phases. But what about intra-phasal, within a given phase? Can we discern a “true self” in that case?

An intra-phasal true self sounds plausible. When we are at a given phase in our life, chances are that past behaviours or feelings will be repeated in the immediate future. We know how we will respond to a situation-yet-to-unfold and can thus develop a sense of self that captures those patterns.

The problem is that we do not know in advance when one phase ends and the next begins. This is likely to be a gradual process with no clear markers or turning points. Though there can be exceptions, like major events and crises. “Crisis” is an interesting term, as it literally means “judgement”: a moment in time when we have to take a step back to rethink our condition very carefully.

How can we be sure about the future when our past tells us that things are subject to change? What if, in our attempt to remain true to ourselves, we are being biased in favour of our current phase and are working against a possible future phase? What if we discriminate against the new by treating the old as the only one which can ever be the true self? If we never put ourselves to the test, we cannot know who we may become. Being open to the possibility of change does not mean we will necessarily change. It just is a matter of not precluding something relevant.

Let me then share another personal story. One day a colleague at work asked if I would be interested to accompany them to the cinema. I explained that I normally do not watch movies, but I would be fine to join them. My thinking was that I would try something different and see how it goes. We sat there for more than an hour. As soon as the film was over, I could not recall its plot: I had mentally checked out. All I remember is that it was a James Bond movie. This is consistent with who I am: I need action and have trouble staring at moving pictures for a prolonged period of time without doing anything or without already being invested in the show.

I remained open to the possibility, I tested myself, and realised that I had stayed consistent with myself in this intra-phasal sense. Whereas this consistency was not inter-phasal: for example, I did watch the Dragon Ball series as a child and still remember everything about it. There was a time when I could sit in front of the TV and enjoy the show.

Continuing with this theme of selfhood and consistency… The “true self” is an elusive concept if we insist on an identity. We have a good sense of who we have been and can anticipate who we might be, but we are not absolutely certain. We go through phases during which we discern constants; constants which are not necessarily present between those phases. Consider, once again, the simplistic representation of myself:

Was I always shy, or can we interpret the fact with the benefit of hindsight? What if I simply had trouble communicating my feelings and what if that was perceived as shyness? This would explain why I stopped being shy as I grew up, presumably because I learnt how to express myself with greater precision and/or others figured ways to understand me better.

How about hyperactivity? Can there be an explanation for this back-and-forth we observe in the table? I think so, provided we do not limit it to outwardness. If we include inwardness, like being busy with thinking things through, then I always have been highly active. That would explain why I cannot sit at the movie theatre and enjoy the show if I am not already invested in it.

Contrary to what I have stated thus far, the table will reveal inter-phasal consistency once we critically assess its data. I have always been largely the same, though not exactly the same. Whatever differences and changes are found in details which concentrate around a predictable set of patterns. There is variation, but no interruptions. This goes to show that the “true self” is an approximation even when differences between phases are small.

Don’t search for a single point which describes everything. Find the threads running through the narrative.

Self-denial and the self as a role-play

At some point in our life, we are confident that we know who we have been and are likely to operate in a manner that is consistent with that impression. Remember though how I discussed the difficulty of differentiating between nature and nurture. If we obstinately insist that we know who we are and who we will be, we effectively refuse to consider the dynamic element in our life: the possibility of change.

Dogmatism of this sort can devolve into a role-play, where we seek to prove that which we have already assumed as present. For example, if you are the kind of person who likes to speak out and lead others, you may consider yourself an “alpha” in your group. If you ignore the situational specifics of this status, you might always act in accordance with the perceived features of an alpha even in cases where it is not relevant: you might conceal your weaknesses and suppress your emotions.

In other words, role-playing is when we create a caricature either out of ourselves or another persona and use it as a substitute of what could have been. What do I mean by “another persona”? Simply when we pretend to be someone else, such as by modelling our behaviour after an archetype or someone we know. We might do it to fit in to a social group, or to cater to the interests of another person, or conform with the demands of a job, and so on. We behave in a manner that contradicts who we are or, at least, deviates from our established patterns.

Role-playing is something I covered at greater length in my previous presentation on “expectations, rules, and role-playing”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-03-expectations-rules-roles/. It has to do with the social setting, which enforces all those rules about how people should behave. Rules establish roles. I gave several examples in my presentation, such as what constitutes “lady-like behaviour”, who is the “manly man”, and so on.

Sometimes conditions are such where we cannot avoid assuming a role. But when we always conform with the social expectations that are fastened upon the applicable rules, we effectively give up at least a portion of our self. By trying to fit in, we neglect our needs and suffer the longer-term consequences.

Recall that story where I went to the cinema with my colleague. I only wanted to be friendly, to be a part of the group, which is why I accepted the invitation in the first place. Instead of admitting that I had mentally disconnected from the event, I pretended that everything was fine. I thought that enduring such experiences was a necessary cost: I would not be treated as a weirdo and people would like me.

The case with the cinema was not an isolated event. I was accommodating everyone’s demands, such as by doing part of their work or attending their parties, despite my preference to the contrary. I was not making an exception for this one colleague and had no particular interest in them. I was just being open-minded and receptive to new experiences. At least that was my rationale. This, however, ended up being a twisted conception of open-mindedness. I was effectively acting as the carpet that others paraded on. It is as if I had no personality of my own and was just assuming the role of the generic good boy and friendly coworker. All for the sake of fitting on.

My self-denial was driven by fear; fear of losing something that was never mine: the beliefs of others. My mistake was that I did not appreciate what I had and was instead valorising what others seemed to consider important, such as popularity among the group. Eventually, I realised that attainment of such a status was worthless for me and indeed detrimental to my sanity, as I had to go out of my way to achieve it.

Sometimes we try to be someone else without realising that we risk losing what is ours. There is no point in living the life of another, as we can only ever do what our condition renders possible and optimal. Here is an example. A friend of mine fancied a woman. This friend had a pronounced emotional side—he was a sweetheart, as we say—and was generally interesting to talk to. Instead of recognising what he had, he was telling me how he should work towards becoming an “alpha male”, as that is what women ostensibly want. I explained how this is all misleading and pernicious once generalised, how human relations are complex, and how different people are attracted to different things. I encouraged him to stop pretending to be someone else and simply show what he had to offer. As the saying goes, the grass is not always greener on the other side and one should be careful what they wish for.

When we find ourselves in a situation where there exists a disconnect between our role and selfhood, we start feeling pressure. There is tension, friction, conflict, which manifest as stress, lack of confidence, and ultimately develop into more severe conditions such as depression.

The gist is that faking it is not sustainable. Others do notice. When we fake it, we know what we are doing and dread getting exposed. We are conscious about our every move, which typically leads to anxiety as otherwise trivial issues get magnified in our mind as major problems.

Another example from my past is in order. I used to think that my writing was not good enough and people would belittle my apparent idiocy or ignorance. When I was answering an email or a text message, I would read through it maybe ten times, no matter how lengthy my reply was. Just to be sure I used the correct word, explained everything about the topic, did not miss a comma, and so on. The feeling you get from that sort of experience—from that baseless sense of inadequacy—is like trying to navigate through a minefield, where you know that a single mistake will lead to disaster. Except it is an illusion.

At some point I realised what was going on: I was being in denial of myself and was letting my fears cloud my judgement. I took a step back and reconsidered things very carefully and dispassionately. For instance, I would read texts written by others and notice that they were not much different from my own: there was nothing to worry about. I met people whom I once considered popular—and thus successful in my simplistic world at the time—and realised how they were facing challenges of their own. They were not better off. We were just different. I also figured how others were faking it, each in their own way, so I reasoned there are systemic factors at play.

This is how I became a philosopher, after all: through trials and errors. I discerned the patterns in my experiences, generalised them, developed theories, and drew insights therefrom which informed my actions. I eventually contemplated whether conformity with a role was worth my self-sacrifice. The answer was negative. I started changing my outlook by being honest and all my woes disappeared.

Openness and sincerity

Even bad events have something vital to teach us. I understood the importance of communicating my feelings in plain terms. It is okay to live new experiences and remain open to the possibility of change, though not at the cost of our health. Openness should not be misconstrued as plasticity. Trying new things does not mean that we forget who we were the moment prior. We might gain something, but we might also lose a little bit. The key is to remain honest and anticipate when to proceed or recede from a given position.

What does honesty entail, in practice? That we muster the courage to explain to our peers what our needs are. This is particularly difficult for people like me, who are introverted. Or for people in demanding roles. It is necessary though. Otherwise no-one will speak on our behalf. There is no hero who will save the day, no knight in shining armour who will rescue us from the predicament we find ourselves in. If we do not speak and if everyone like us does not utter a word, then the social structures we all operate in will remain the same, the rules will stay intact, the roles will not be revised, and systemic suffering will continue wherever it occurs.

To explain our needs we have to talk about our emotions. Doing so is not a weakness and does not imply we are defective: it takes mental fortitude to appear vulnerable and others will ultimately respect it. There are some people who, like a previous version of me, operate under the delusion that they are purely rational agents. I have explained before, such as in my presentation on “ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism”, that we are fully fledged human beings and must embrace our humanity for what it is while trying to lead a virtuous life: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-16-ataraxia-moderation-mysticism/. The gist is that we should not pretend to be unidimensional, not lie to ourselves, and not live with the falsehood that we can ever be a non-human human.

Roles still matter. If, say, you are a cisgender male or in some other role that demands ‘toughness’, you may find it difficult to be honest about the fact you have emotions. It is not your fault: such are the prevailing views. Remember though that rules are instituted as such and can be re-instituted. Do not be afraid to speak up and enact reform.

Selfhood and the comfort zone

Which brings me to the point of the comfort zone. This is a metaphor which describes those patterns or phenomena we are familiar with and know how to handle. The comfort zone is related to selfhood in that we develop the narrative of who we are as a series of comparisons that delineate a space of familiarity. Whatever falls within that space is considered part of our self. For example, if I say that I am the silent type, you can infer that I am outside my comfort zone when I have to talk all the time.

The comfort zone is neither static nor predetermined. We can infer as much from my previous comments. What one finds comfortable changes based on their experiences and outlook in relation to the given context.

• About experiences, consider an example. You delivered a presentation but did not get a warm round applause. You obsess ever since about the worst-case scenario and are afraid to do another presentation. Your comfort zone has been influenced by this event, as you now try to hide from any audience.

• As for the outlook, it is how we approach a given situation. Suppose you are an introvert who dislikes small talk. Instead of thinking that you are weird, or a misfit, or even defective for this preference of yours, rely on your honesty to assume the initiative. When people try to engage in small talk with you, tell them you are naturally inclined against that type of interaction and would prefer something more meaningful instead, else to be left alone.

• Experiences and outlook affect the comfort zone. The other magnitude that matters is the constitution of the case: the specifics of the situation. To re-use the example of me being the silent type: right now I am talking non-stop and I do this whenever I need to expound on a theory, record a video, and so on. This context differs from, say, a social gathering among strangers where no-one has any notion of who the others are. I would rather not attend such a gathering, let alone be at the centre of the discussion.

We may thus have a plurality of comfort zones.

The comfort zone is not necessarily good though. As has been the theme in this presentation, things are nuanced.

If we are sincere with ourselves and others, we are able to operate within the space that genuinely accommodates our needs. We can then claim to be true to ourselves, notwithstanding what I discussed earlier about the concept of a “true self”.

If, however, we develop a fear of the unknown such as by hesitating to try new things and by remaining closed to the possibility of change, then this space actually confines us and condemns us to our past. We refuse to acknowledge the potential of another phase in our selfhood.

If we only ever live inside our little bubble, we will not know if what we have is indeed what we need and what is genuinely ours. Just imagine for a moment that your comfort zone is nothing of the sort. Perhaps you grew up in conformity with social roles, never questioned anything, and internalised those norms as your own. You identify with your role as the “manly man”, the “lady”, et cetera. Is that truly who you are? Or behind that facade hides another person that just needs the right trigger to be exposed? Can you fathom a world where you try to suspend the role, drop the appearances, only to realise you are not who you always believed to be?

This is the other side of doing philosophy. You do not employ it just during the “bad times”, but also for the “good” ones. As humans, we are inclined to avoid suffering and are generally capable of enduring hardship. What about pleasures though? Our defences are much weaker, as we tend to give in to them wholeheartedly. Those too can lead us to ruin, yet we fail to think about the bigger picture when a pleasure reveals itself to us.

To connect the dots here, my point is that the comfort zone you are occupying might be a lie about your selfhood; a lie which consists of a series of rationalisations. It might not emanate from an inner impulse and a position of knowledge. Are you sure it is yours then and is it consistent with what you need?

The self is not a dogma

The central message I have tried to convey in this presentation is that even though we can have a pretty good idea of who we are, we should resist the urge to pretend that we know more than we do. There might be instances where we will surprise ourselves.

Here too we ought to recall the teachings of the ancients, as inscribed in the maxims found at temple of Apollo in Delphi, specifically: (1) know yourself, (2) nothing in excess, (3) certainty brings calamity.

We cannot know who we are without experiencing the world. There is no standalone presence. We exist in relation to other forms of life in the totality of the Cosmos: humans, animals, plants, microbes, forests, oceans, planets, and so on. Our actuality is influenced, informed, framed, conditioned, or otherwise determined by a myriad of factors. Just as the body changes over time while still exhibiting features that are recognisable, so does the narrative of the self.

Whether you decide to stay in your comfort zone or remain open to the possibility of change, exercise prudence and avoid the extremes. Wisdom is not the same as reason: the singularly reasonable person knows how to discern and follow a given set of rules; the wise person also knows when to suspend those rules and how. Sometimes you will have to trust your feelings and instincts. At other times you will need to rely on reasonableness to overcome unfounded fears or obsessions. There is no one answer to life. Whatever the specifics, remember that you are a fully fledged human being: nothing more, nothing less.

These require the right disposition. You cannot afford to be dogmatic and pretentious. Cockiness, here manifesting as overconfidence in your abilities or knowledge, will be your downfall. Approach your selfhood in a spirit of dubitativeness and inquisitiveness. When something new comes along or when you have to cope with the consequences of your inquiry into the world, rise up to the occasion and meet the challenges head on.

That’s all for today, folks. Finally, a small bonus. In the annex I include the translated lyrics of a Greek song which I think is relevant, as it talks about those who want to live the life of others.

Annex with the lyrics of “The life of others”

Listen to it here: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=r3lHmCxs35A.

First the Greek version, followed by my translation.

Η ζωή των άλλων

Οι τοίχοι γέμισαν αλμύρα
τα κλάματα σου είναι παντού
Κάτι σου είπα για τη μοίρα
και μου 'πες η ζωή είναι αλλού

Σε παίρνει πάλι η θάλασσα των δυνατών σινιάλων
κι εγώ σου λέω πως αλλού είναι η ζωή των άλλων

Πάλι μιλάς για ξένους τόπους
λες κι έχεις κι άλλη μια ζωή
Πάλι χαμένη μες στους τρόπους
να γίνονται όλα απ' την αρχή

Τα φώτα μη σε κλέβουνε των πλοίων των μεγάλων
αυτή για μας είναι η ζωή, η άλλη είναι των άλλων

I added some annotations in square brackets.

The life of others (Βασίλης Παπακωνσταντίνου - Η ζωή των άλλων)

The walls are filled with saltiness
your tears are everywhere
I told you something about fate
and you told me life lies elsewhere

You are taken again by the sea of strong signals [i.e. the delusions]
and I tell you that elsewhere is the life of others

Again you talk about foreign lands
as if you have another life
Again she is lost in the fashions/modes [referring to life]
all happening from the beginning. [they happen again because we never learn]

May the lights of the large ships not steal you away
for us this is life, the other is the others'

Table of Contents

1. Definitions
2. Banal expectations as predictions
3. When value judgements are relevant
4. Cultural expectations as rules
5. Roles and their impact on selfhood
6. Expectations, stereotypes, and selfhood
7. The dynamic between structure and agency
8. The act of role-playing
9. How to handle cultural expectations
10. Propitious growth starts with minute changes

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In today’s presentation I will talk to you about philosophical themes that apply to our everyday social interactions. This covers notions such as peer pressure, conformity with rules, and stereotypes.

We want to learn how they affect us and whether we can do something to cope with them. The idea is to understand what expectations are, how they influence our sense of self, focus on the downsides that may trouble people without implying that there are no upsides, and then discuss how we may deal with them.

The present entry builds on what I talked about in my last two publications in this series. In particular:

• Ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-16-ataraxia-moderation-mysticism/.

• Conventions, relativism, and cosmopolitanism: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-21-relativism-cosmopolitanism/.

I encourage you to study what I have already covered, though it is not strictly necessary for understanding what I am about to elaborate on. If I make a reference to a concept that I have elucidated before, I will try to briefly explain it in context.

The text of this presentation will be available on my website: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-05-03-expectations-rules-roles/.

Definitions

These are terms I will be using throughout the presentation. It is important to clarify what I mean at the outset in order to avoid any misunderstandings.

• Expect/Expectations: To expect is to hold views, opinions, hopes about the outlook of a given state of affairs. Interestingly, the corresponding Greek verb (προσδοκώ==prosdoko) consists of pros meaning towards (or “outlook” more broadly) and doko which is related to loanwords in English like doxastic and dogma, which all involve the meaning of belief, opinion, perspective. Similarly, the Latin etymology for exspectare contains the meaning of “spectate”, which can be interpreted as a view or perspective and, by extension, opinion and belief.

• Autonomy (αυτονομία): Self-rule or self-determination in the sense of setting an order for oneself. Here the “self” is not necessarily an individual as groups can also govern themselves collectively through concerted action. Note that the “-nomy” term pertains to the word for law (νόμος==nomos), which connotes human affairs via a distinction between law and nature. In my last presentation I employed the term chremata to denote things with a use-value as opposed to pragmata—things as they are. I think this is language is better as it helps us avoid formulations like “law of nature”, which would otherwise be confusing.

• Heteronomy (ετερονομία): The opposite of autonomy. It means rule by an other (hetero==other, opposite, different). The “other” in this case can be an outside force, individual or group, or it may even be one’s own order which is perceived as having an external source or dimension. If, for example, a government enshrines in its constitution an immutable provision about its expenditure, it effectively becomes heteronomous with respect to said provision by alienating its authority from the law it created: when conditions demand that expenditure be increased, the government will not be able to revise its own law, as that would technically be illegal.

• Agent [of action]: One who acts or who has the capacity of action. A person or group thereof with the potential of initiative.

• Agency: Encapsulates everything that pertains to the agent. It can also imply a normative view of what “initiative” denotes: such as action that is never controlled by another entity and is thus autonomous. As such, one is said to “assume agency” when they are thought to escape from a state of heteronomy.

• Structure: The instituted environment within which the agent operates. An environment that consists of arrangements with an underlying use-value (i.e. chremata). From the perspective of a singular agent, structure is exogenous to them: it cannot change simply by the agent’s own volition or machinations. The “structure” is a metaphor, as it does not reference an edifice. It describes the factors which remain outside the agent’s control, while hinting at their layered or multifaceted complexity. We will see how “structure” can simply reference “other agents”.

• Role: The scope of the agent’s action within the structure. It captures everything the agent can do and everything the agent is expected to do.

Banal expectations as predictions

Each of us has expectations about common things in their life. They are inevitable because we do not operate with complete knowledge and perfect foresight. The human condition unfolds in imperfect circumstances where we must fill in the gaps of our knowledge with estimates, guesswork, hopes, or faith in order to cope with evolving challenges or demands.

For instance, while I was writing this presentation, I was expecting to be able to record and publish it without complications. As I am recording this video right now, my hope is that the power supply will not fail me and I will get the job done. What ensures as much?

Expectations of this sort are justified. They are based on prior knowledge and are specific to a set of data. We are assuming that a discrete pattern is constant or that the chance of it being repeated is high because experience dictates as much. Given the apparent likelihood, we make a prediction about the outlook of what we already know. Continuing with my example, it is normal for my house to have a stable supply of electricity. As such, I hold this will continue to be the case now that I am recording the present footage and later when I will eventually publish it.

There is nothing in the nature of things that renders necessary the prevailing conditions which frame my current activity. What I mean is that my prior knowledge does not guarantee insight into the future developments specific to this state of affairs. The power supply, for example, is not truly a given. Something might happen which will lead to shortages or interruptions: human error, hardware failure, economic hardship, a natural calamity, et cetera. I just hope and believe that the chance of a downturn is marginal, based on what I already know.

When value judgements are relevant

The fact that expectations are beliefs is not bad per se. I am not making a value judgement. It simply is an admission that the human experience involves actions that unfold in sub-optimal circumstances where full knowledge of all factors of the case is not available. In other words, I am not making an appraisal of the fact that expectations exist, because my opinion about it does not alter it.

Judgement calls are relevant for those items whose presence and/or actuality is contingent on the human factor. Otherwise, opinions on what is good or bad, acceptable or not, are pointless: we cannot achieve anything by saying that “it is unacceptable for the Sun to luminate the Earth” since the workings of the Solar system do not depend on our views.

This is related to what I explained at length in my previous presentation regarding chremata (as opposed to pragmata). We want to draw a distinction between items that depend on human involvement (i.e. chremata) and those which are in effect regardless of what humans think about them (pragmata).

With this basic idea in mind, we are better prepared to understand expectations in their intersubjective formulation as social and cultural phenomena. They are chremata, meaning that they have a use-value that can, under certain conditions, be interpreted in a new light or altogether reconsidered and abolished. By the end of this presentation, we will see how this insight can help us cope with the demands of norms that apply to us.

Cultural expectations as rules

The examples I offered earlier concern a person who makes predictions about the future based on the available information or data. Those are empirical observations that are consistent with a scientific disposition. There are, however, expectations which are developed through interpersonal relations in present time and from one generation to the next. Expectations can thus be intersubjective, else cultural. These are not limited to minute data points and are not specific to the particularities of a case. As such, they are further away from science.

Cultural expectations take the form of rules of conduct or unwritten instructions which regulate how agents should behave in a given situation. While they may have a modicum of what appears to be a predictive function, they typically are directives which outline how people should conduct themselves regardless of the underlying dynamics. Such rules are, in this regard, decoupled from the context that led to their original formulation: the link between a datum and an inference is either weakened or lost.

Cultural expectations are geared towards shaping the future instead of merely predicting it, by moulding the behaviour of people. Rules can be enforced through coercion, though they typically take the form of quotidian narratives which impress upon each person a sense of how they must think about their place in their social milieu: how they fit in and what are the qualitative features of their sense of belonging.

For example, what does it mean for a woman to have a “lady-like” demeanour? Why are certain career paths considered “manly” and who is supposed to be a “man” and, conversely, a “non-man” in this scenario? Why is it claimed to be a righteous duty to participate in a war of aggression in the name of the homeland even if the regime which claims the homeland as its own domain is unjust throughout?

These are all constructs which are underpinned by the shared beliefs of individuals in a given culture or community. They are not so much predictions about the future but commands or exhortations on what subsequent states of affairs ought to look like. They thus delimit roles which govern who has agency in a given context and what it entails.

Cultural expectations are sweeping generalisations. They are not based on the merits or particular qualities of the person they are directed towards or apply to. Rather, they prescribe how any person that broadly falls within a certain class has to conform with the applicable cultural construct.

When, for example, a woman is told to act in a lady-like fashion and thus conform with the lady construct, she is not treated as her own person. Her individuality is not accounted for. Her peers do not yet consider whether she has a sense of humour or not, what her hobbies are, which traits of character are dominant in her disposition and how those influence her relations with others and perception of events, what sort of opinions and preferences she has, and so on. None of this matters insofar as the expectation of conformity with the cultural construct of lady is concerned. The woman must behave like a lady, else, the tacit threat is, suffer the consequences of non-conformity with the rule.

Cultural expectations thus have, perhaps inadvertently, a dehumanising function, as they ignore all those qualitative features of an individual which render them who they are. What the rules deal with are classes of people, each of which has attributes specific to it; attributes that are loosely discernible in individuals. Classes can cover factors such as age, gender, career, place of birth, annual income, physical appearance, and so on, or they can be situational such as “anyone wearing a hat inside a building”.

Dehumanisation, or what effectively is the abstraction of individuality, may sometimes be inconsequential. Such as being asked to take off your hat when entering a certain establishment. Though dehumanisation can have invidious effects on those affected, depending on the specifics. In the example of the lady construct, a woman who is pressured to conform with the role might feel disrespected, humiliated, stressed, and generally not well. If conformity with the expectation is inflexible, the dehumanising function is likely to be detrimental to those who are assuming the given role contrary to their will or ability.

Continuing with this theme of cultural expectations as rules…

In contradistinction to expectations with a predictive function, rules try to determine future outcomes through interference with the relevant states of affairs. To press on with my example, for a woman to ultimately behave in a lady-like fashion and be treated as such, she and her peers must be indoctrinated in a given tradition that impresses in their mind the applicable rules of conduct as matters of necessity or utmost significance. This is where the rule-as-narrative is made manifest, for it is normalised through upbringing or initiation instead of being presented as an edict.

Indoctrination, or otherwise the cultivation of a certain mindset, has the effect of propagating cultural norms. Agents who assume their role unwittingly think of their self as embodying that role. Continuing with our example, a woman may not feel pressured to behave as a lady because that has always been her normality. She might even be judgemental of other women who do not meet the implied criteria.

Propagation of cultural expectations has the effect of engendering peer pressure. Put simply, the rules take a life of their own. Those who already behave in accordance with their role influence others to do the same and the phenomenon becomes widespread. Societies thus develop mechanisms for their own reproduction and persistence of cultural constructs: culture has an intergenerational reach where the original connection between some datum and the inferred belief is lost or no longer as relevant.

Roles and their impact on selfhood

If a person conforms with cultural expectations in everything they do, they eventually develop an impression of selfhood which is moulded by those expectations. Their sense of self coincides with the set of significations that are fastened upon the cultural construct that informs their assortment of roles. In this regard, they no longer think of expectations as rules about how people should behave, but as part of what is normal and—a misused word here—natural.

Individuals thus model their conduct after their assigned role. They also gauge their performance vis-à-vis the cultural construct. For instance, a man sets out to “put food on the table”, because manliness may require as much. A man who does not do so or who earns less than his wife might think he is not a “true man” or manly enough. The implications can be devastating for the person but also for their relationship with their spouse.

Similarly, a person in their 30s who is not in a relationship, has never married, and has no children may fall in to a crisis of questioning what is wrong with them. In truth, nothing is wrong. The person might feel defective in some way for not having found their much-touted “other half” and for not possessing what it takes to make a family. The perceived problem stems from the mismatch between the normative state of affairs formed by cultural expectations and the person’s actuality. Because expectations are sweeping generalisations, it is not the person’s fault that their particularities are not accounted for.

The purpose of these examples is to show how cultural expectations have a profound impact on one’s sense of self. When we try to answer the question “who am I?”, we do so in relation—or juxtaposition—to experiences and stimuli, which include those cultural constructs either explicitly or implicitly. Selfhood is neither fixed nor predetermined. It is a variable that must be understood in its given social-cultural context in light of the individual’s particularities. Apart from selfhood though, which sounds abstract, expectations can influence how a person perceives of their appearance. Think of beauty standards: people develop all sorts of insecurities about how they look and become apologetic about some perceived defect of theirs. Same principle.

Expectations, stereotypes, and selfhood

Here is a story about my beard which relates to the aforementioned reference to appearances. Someone once described me as having “North African or Middle Eastern looks”. They followed it up with a remark on my facial hair: “people might think you are a terrorist”.

This is obviously racist, though I want to consider it dispassionately in light of what I have discussed in this presentation. The allusion to these presumably inappropriate looks of mine hints at a stereotype. A stereotype is the substance of an effective rule, as it constitutes a sweeping generalisation that applies to a class of people regardless of their particularities. If you have certain physical characteristics, the thinking goes, you must be this, that, and the other, and ought to behave in such and such ways.

Sometimes it is impossible to avoid the invocation of a stereotype, as we have to operate in imperfect circumstances. In their most basic and innocuous form, stereotypes are mental shortcuts we use to glean information about an individual or group thereof we know nothing or precious little about. Nevertheless, and despite sincere intentions, stereotypes are unreliable and we should be careful with them.

The problems with the reliance on stereotypes become evident when we do not receive the feedback we had anticipated. If someone does not meet our expectations, as informed by the stereotype, we are conditioned to reprimand them with what effectively amounts to “why aren’t you the way I want?”. Kind of how this person was trying to tell me that I must have a certain appearance in order to fit in.

The implication is that failure to conform with the established standards would make others think of me as ugly, or inadequate, or faulty in some profound way. And aren’t we inclined to think that if everyone has the same opinion, it likely is true? Meaning that I could eventually internalise their thoughts and make them my own. From whence insecurities come from. This is a case of compounding expectations: layered beliefs about the outlook of a state of affairs. People hold a stereotypical view and have opinions surrounding it which ultimately dictate which expressions of selfhood are tolerable in their midst.

The dynamic between structure and agency

We have already discussed how expectations can influence the impression of one’s selfhood and how societies reproduce themselves by propagating cultural constructs by embedding them as narratives. Against this backdrop, we can reason about the “structure” I mentioned in my introductory section on the definitions pertinent to this presentation. To refresh your memory:

• Structure: The instituted environment within which the agent operates. An environment that consists of arrangements with an underlying use-value (i.e. chremata). From the perspective of a singular agent, structure is exogenous to them: it cannot change simply by the agent’s own volition or machinations. The “structure” is a metaphor, as it does not reference an edifice. It describes the factors which remain outside the agent’s control, while hinting at their layered or multifaceted complexity. We will see how “structure” can simply reference “other agents”.

Think about the nexus of all the applicable cultural expectations. They have a profound effect on how people lead their lives. For example, if my beard makes me look like a terrorist, employers will be hesitant to give me a job as such an association is bad for business. I might be able to reason with an individual, but I ultimately cannot control the minds of people and cannot convince everyone that their stereotype is a pernicious falsehood. More so if a job application gets rejected on looks alone or, more generally, if I am dismissed in advance.

This is exactly what I mean by “exogenous”. The structure is not a function of a subjective disposition or behaviour: from the perspective of a given agent, the structure is external to them. The agent of action must then make some potentially difficult choices. Either adapt to the structure and operate within its confines, or insist on the realisation of their agency and live with the consequences.

The former option contributes to the reproducibility of culture: people become what the rules demand. The latter choice of marking one’s own path might seem unsustainable and often is, though we must not forget that the structure is a metaphor. When we are dealing with culture and expectations, we ultimately have to do with human beings. Attitudes, preferences, and beliefs are not necessary conditions that never change. They can be considered anew.

While the structure appears as exogenous when seen from the perspective of an individual agent, it is not exogenous to the society as a whole insofar as its cultural dimension is concerned. For the society, “structure” encompasses the totality of agents in their context-dependent roles (actual or potential) and their concomitant expectations.

The structure has a temporal aspect to it which can be discerned at the macro view of the social whole but may be imperceptible at the micro scale of a single agent. Over the short-term, the structure appears as robust to shocks: it is immutable. Over the long-term though, it does change to reflect the set of beliefs that find currency among the members of the society as these relate to the prevailing conditions in their milieu.

This creates an interesting dynamic between structure and agency. For a single individual, the structure includes other people as they are the ones who propagate cultural constructs through their behaviour and the peer pressure they apply to those they socialise with. Yet if groups of individuals with common goals are formed, then the notion of “the other people” progressively loses its weight as a collective agency now redraws the lines of what is and isn’t acceptable.

The collective agency is a macroscopic, emergent phenomenon, which is underpinned by the concerted or coinciding efforts of individual agents of action. For example, if beards become trendy and, for whatever reason, no-one is judged any more on the basis of their looks, the idea that facial hair is the marker of a terrorist will be broadly considered preposterous. Similarly, if women defy the prescriptions of what it means to be a lady, the lady construct will cease to be relevant, at least in its current form. If men stop acting all manly, whatever manliness entails, then the man construct will change. And so on.

The gist is that everything with an intersubjective value—all chremata, to re-use the term from my previous presentation—can be thought of as different. This is not to suggest that change is easy but to simply remark that it is possible.

[ The term “chremata” is discussed at length here: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-21-relativism-cosmopolitanism/ ]

The act of role-playing

As I have already noted, the structure appears as fixed from the perspective of a single agent. This means that there are cases where a person cannot afford to go against the prevailing norms and must instead conform with them.

Every rule delimits the boundaries of a role. Roles typically are predicated on generalisations that do not account for the particularities of the individuals they apply to. Some roles are global, meaning that they hold force in all possible cases, while others have a local scope of being relevant only in a given environment.

As individuals want or need to fit in to their society, they inevitably have to reconfigure an aspect of their agency by assuming roles. Suppose you are an introvert. If your friends call you to parties, you are pressured to accept their invitations even though you do not like such gatherings. The reasons you feel compelled to accept their invitations will vary: it can be because you fear you might be marginalised if you opt for an alternative and/or worry that your friends will become passive aggressive if you always decline their invitations, such as if they tell you “it is okay that you don’t like us anymore”. To avoid trouble, you do something against your inclinations.

In this example, the introvert who would rather do something else must act in a manner that makes them feel uncomfortable just so they retain their acquaintances and maintain the appearance of fitting in to the social group.

Roles can form part of a continuum. For instance, a person who behaves as a model professional may not afford the luxury of being seen as comparatively irresponsible in another context, as that may spill over to their image as a professional. If reputation is important for a certain job, losing it is not a viable option. Roles can thus be compounded to form complex sets of expectations.

Role-playing must be understood as an act that confers privileges but also comes with considerable constraints on how the agent may express their underlying selfhood.

What happens now if an agent is not aware they are performing in accordance with a role? What if the underlying rule is so deeply seated in culture that it is taken to be the natural order instead of some human-made arrangement? Does the person see themselves as engaged in role-playing, or are they simply believing to be who they seem to be?

There is a latent chance that one will behave in a manner that is consistent with a role even after they know that the role is not a natural condition. Rules are not necessarily arbitrary, even though they are sweeping generalisations. There can be a kernel of truth to them which happens to match what an agent is doing. Still, it is possible that a person feels an underlying conflict they cannot elucidate and eventually resolve, as they have yet to realise they are involved in role-playing that contradicts their inclinations.

Consider the case of motherhood. Cisgender women above a certain age are expected to have children. When they are in social gatherings or in a family reunion, they are always reminded about it. Those who do not conform with the cultural expectations may have a hard time explaining themselves. They may not be able to reason with others that a woman is not defined as a baby-making device and, by extension, may struggle to express their individuality in such a milieu.

For another example, think about the conscientious professional who is consistently efficient at their job. Everyone praises them for their ability and, over time, these views calcify as higher standards that the agent must unconditionally meet. If the professional performs below the lofty standard they have set for themselves, they run the risk of being seen as slacking off and may be penalised for their perceived laziness. This shows that role-playing can be developed organically in a given context to cover relative magnitudes and impose ad-hoc conditions on those involved.

How to handle cultural expectations

Sometimes rules are enforced coercively as they form part of an oppressive structure. In such cases, the impetus for thoroughgoing reform can only come from sustained resistance to the established order. Rebellions or revolutions are not easy, though there arrives a moment in history where they pose the only viable alternative to the status quo.

When it comes to non-militant methods of coping with cultural expectations, we start from the recognition that rules are chremata. They are the product of human institution; they are made the way they are and can, in principle, be remade differently. This means that the structure is not immutable: rules are neither definitive nor absolute.

Despite this fact, we still find ourselves in situations where we must make compromises and establish priorities. It is not always feasible to defy the norms and do what we really want, even if that seems reasonable. So what kind of attitude can we assume to deal with these realities without forcing ourselves into submission or going to extremes that could have adverse effects? Below is a non-exhaustive list:

• Learn to pick your battles and not be pedantic. There are cases where standing up for a principle is not worth the effort. For example, you might argue that there is nothing in the nature of things that demands we take off our hat while entering a building. Fighting over such an inconsequential issue only cements your reputation as an eccentric fellow which, in turn, undermines your cause on non-trivial matters as it creates negativity that will be directed against you.

• The flip-side of not being pedantic is to understand what the bigger picture is. Pedantry in the wrong context is the sign of a fool. Try to identify the wider patterns and analyse how they affect you and others in their daily life. A sense of perspective helps you grasp what matters and lets you forward your cause with greater effect.

• Stop being your worst enemy. You are not the centre of the world. Sometimes the peer pressure is not the real problem, as we tend to aggrandise in our mind what is otherwise a minor affair. Whenever you internalise people’s views or dwell on the imaginary opinions of others, answer in earnest: do they really care all that much?

• Do not always prioritise the comfort of others when doing so comes at your own discomfort. Recall the example of our introverted fellow who is compelled to go to parties despite their strong preference not to attend them. Forcing yourself to be someone else does not necessarily turn you into someone else: it leaves you in an awkward state instead.

• Make your feelings known and don’t be afraid to appear vulnerable. If you are concerned that your nature will alienate your acquaintances then question whether they truly are worth having. Being amiable for the sake of amiability can only work against you, as you will never attract sincere friends. Part ways with them in peace, if you must.

• Never apologise for who you are when there is nothing you can do about it. For instance, physical characteristics such as height and complexion are outside our control. When we pretend otherwise, we lie to ourselves and maintain the kind of fakery that attracts impostors.

• There seldom is a perfect moment to flee from an abusive role-playing affair. If you wait for the world to change before you make a move, you will likely live your years miserably in a state of heteronomy.

• Genuine courage is contagious. You might think that everyone is content with their role, though the facade is deceptive. When a person assumes agency, others will do the same. The cumulative effect of such alterations at the micro level will ultimately be discerned at the macro scale as a shift in the structure.

• Champion your autonomy with restraint. Through experience you learn more about yourself and no longer need the validation of others to pursue your interests. If you need to mimic someone else just to fit in, you find yourself in a state of heteronomy. If, on the flip-side, you go to great lengths to prove trivial points (like being pedantic), you are unreasonable and will ultimately not get what you want.

• One’s self is not a dogma nor a cult. Selfhood is neither fixed nor predetermined and should never be a cause for heteronomy. Do not hesitate to revise what you do and who you are. To deviate from one’s past from a position of knowledge is the sign of a person who values the truth; the truth as made available in the prevailing conditions.

Propitious growth starts with minute changes

In conclusion, folks, we need to remain calm in the face of a social order that we cannot control. There are difficulties and there will be moments during which we think that the world can never change. However, chremata are subject to review. Something is better than nothing. What is touted as normal—responsibility towards friends and family, gender roles, duty to serve the homeland which actually is the state, etc.—are all matters of convention. Conventions are not necessarily bad. Though the mere fact of their presence is not proof that they are good either, let alone relevant under the present circumstances.

Remember the triplet of maxims passed to us from ancient Greece, specifically the temple of Apollo in Delphi that I discussed in my presentation about ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism:

• Know yourself;
• Nothing in excess;
• Ensure, ruin follows (certainty brings calamity).

Based on what I have covered today, knowing yourself requires that you take a step back from your routines and consider how your selfhood is informed, framed, influenced, or otherwise determined by the structure that conditions your agency. When you behave in a certain way, is it really your genuine self that is being expressed, or are you merely staging a play in pursuit of some fleeting reward?

Avoiding exaggerations demands that you identify your midpoint by learning more about who you are in relation to the rest of the world. If, for example, you always try to please others at your own expense, you are being an extremist. Same if you are egotistical and never empathise with those around you. There has to be a balance.

A healthy dose of doubt will keep you in check and save you from picking fights that are not worth the risk or trouble. Certainty also implies an overestimation of your own abilities. Be aware of what you can and cannot do. Cultural reforms start with small changes but require the emergence of a collective agency to turn into grand redesigns. If you fail to recognise this insight, if you are sure that you can change the world all by yourself, you will only find ruin.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions
2. Chremata and the extrinsic value of money
3. Chremata and “this is not a pipe” («ceci n’est pas une pipe»)
4. Chremata and the human-measure of Protagoras
5. Relativism and objectivity
6. Conventions and nature
7. Pragmata and cosmopolitanism
8. The utility of ideals

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In today’s video I will talk you about the topic of “conventions, relativism, and cosmopolitanism”.

This is a continuation of my first presentation about the living universe and specifically the profound significance of the words “cosmos” and “logos”. It also complements my second presentation about ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism:

1. https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-05-cosmos-logos-living-universe/
2. https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-16-ataraxia-moderation-mysticism/

I recommend that you study these resources or at least have a general idea of what they deal with (the text of this presentation will also be available on my website).

Today I will draw linkages between the general concepts about the world and our everyday affairs, based on a distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. This means that I will refer to magnitudes such as politics and ethics in light of the view that the universe is alive. We will discuss how everything compares with the insight about leading a life of moderation.

Definitions

Here are a couple of terms that I will use in the rest of this talk:

• Pragma/Pragmata (Πράγμα/Πράγματα): Refers to a thing as it is; a thing regardless of how we would like to think of it. “Pragma” is singular, while “pragmata” is plural. The term relates to the concept of “pragmatism” (πραγματισμός) which is the disposition of a person who takes things as they are. Pragmatism, in its basic form, is about setting aside one’s preferences or notions of how things ought to be, while accepting the prevailing conditions for what they are.

• Chrema/Chremata (Χρήμα/Χρήματα): In everyday parlance, this is the Greek word for “money”. It derives from the root word for “usage”. By extension, chremata are things that attain a value through usage: a use-value or, more generally, an extrinsic value. This is true for all forms of money in the immediate sense, whose value qua money is determined exogenously to them. Money does not have monetary value in itself but only acquires it in the context of how it is used (given the relevant economic and/or legal-political forces). In turn, chremata are all things which can be thought of as different or used in a different way than intended. Our conception of them influences them insofar as the intersection between the human element and the objective reality is concerned. In other words, chremata are the opposite of pragmata.

Chremata and the extrinsic value of money

In the definition of the term “chremata” I explained how it means “money” in everyday parlance and how that extends to the general concept of use-value or extrinsic quality. We may describe “use-value” as context-dependent, else relative. Let us consider why that is with some economic examples before drawing general conclusions.

Suppose you are a farmer who cultivates potatoes. You live in a place where a barter economy is in effect. This means that you must exchange your goods or services for those supplied by someone else. So you can trade, for example, one kilogram of potatoes for a kilo of rice. In this scenario, the monetary value of potatoes is equal to that of rice given the same weight.

Though there is nothing in the nature of either the potatoes or the rice which makes them inherently monetary: for our purposes, their nature is that of plants which we can be eaten. Because of the barter economy, we can think of potatoes and rice in terms of what they can buy—potatoes exchanging for rice and vice versa. Though we can just as well only treat them for what they are to us: food. Them attaining the function of money as a medium of exhange is a matter of the prevailing conditions. And them having a 1:1 exchange rate is also not a universal constant, as it depends on the specifics of the case.

Now you may think that the goods in our example do have something in their nature which makes them suitable as monetary media: they are items which we want to acquire because they are edible. Fine, so how about a form of money which is not clearly valuable in itself such as a piece of paper we call “dollar”, “euro”, et cetera? These are called “fiat money” because they are instituted by state fiat, else edict or legally binding command.

What makes paper money worth its monetary value? Is it its inherent utility as paper? Then why is a five euro bill not the same as a fifty euro bill, given that their production quality is the same?

Their monetary value is, at first, the stamp of authority: its authenticity as defined by the government, the central bank, or related. Then is the fact that it is enacted as the legal form of money: you can only pay your taxes in it and engage in every other legal [and typically taxable] transaction.

We can add more considerations as we consider the uses of money as a unit of account and store of value apart from a medium of exchange, only to realise that we are always dealing with a case of something that has use-value, else extrinsic or relative features.

You might think that gold or other precious metals and minerals are excluded from this description. Perhaps you believe that they have value in themselves, being precious and all that. No, they are not exceptions. What holds true for potatoes and fiat money applies equally to precious metals or any other goods.

Suppose you find yourself in the middle of Antarctica. There is no sign of human presence in the vicinity, you are strangled in the middle of nowhere, and are freezing to death. Suddenly a magical spirit appears. It offers you the choice between a makeshift house and a chest full of gold. The former will save you from certain death as it will provide you with shelter and warmth. The latter can theoretically be exchanged for goods and services, though there are none in the area as there are no humans around. Under normal circumstances, you would most likely prefer the treasure over some basic housing. Yet in relative terms and given the prevailing conditions, you have to opt for the makeshift house otherwise you will die from the extreme cold.

In this scenario, gold has no value because it cannot be used for anything that matters in the moment. Its value is also extrinsic because it comes from its usage in the given context. It could have value, if things were to change.

We should thus not conflate the qualities of a thing, such as gold’s rarity and durability, with how humans may interpret or make use of them in any one set of circumstances. The qualities may be constant, but their function or utility from their intersection with the human agent is not: humans determine what a chrema is and how it is. The context is essential.

Chremata and “this is not a pipe” («ceci n’est pas une pipe»)

We are continuing with this theme of “chremata” as we need to appreciate its extent, which will then lead us to the political or ethical side of things. Please bear with me.

These insight about chremata are not specific to money or economic affairs in general. They apply to every case where human perception is involved. Consider the problématique involved in the famous painting of René Magritte: La trahison des images, else The Treachery of Images.

The painter presents us with the drawing of a pipe accompanied by the caption “this is not a pipe” («ceci n’est pas une pipe» in French). We might think this is some kind of trick. Though Magritte is no trickster: the caption is correct. What we see is the drawing of a pipe, not a pipe as such. Consequently, the picture or pictorial representation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. The caption in the painting is accurate. We could say this for anything, such as a selfie of you is not you. But let’s stick to our example.

If the picture of a pipe is not a pipe, then we surely know what the underlying object is. In other words we can answer the question of “what is a pipe, anyway?”. It clearly is not the painting, though what is the underlying reality presented in this work of art and how do we think of it? We would assume that the real pipe is the physical object of that same name. So some pipe we can touch. And we would be justified in that belief if we were to associate the object with its function of serving as a tool for smoking tobacco or whatnot.

Put differently, we identify the “real” thing by finding the one which fits the role we have already assumed as a given. We have thought that pipe is that which is used for smoking and so anything that is not used towards that end cannot be a pipe. Is that association correct? Is a physical pipe necessarily used for smoking? Is it a pragma—a thing as-is—or might it be yet another chrema? The answer is that a physical pipe is a chrema because it can perform functions that are not related to the original intent behind its design. The original intent is irrelevant in that regard.

Think about the actual pipe that René Magritte used in his studio as a model for the painting. That was clearly not being used in the same way as a smoker’s pipe is. Its value or utility had nothing to do with whether it could hold and filter tobacco. Rather, the physical object served the role of a model—still nature—or, more generally, was employed as a means of artistic expression. It follows that the pipe in Magritte’s studio could also come with the caption “this is not a pipe”.

But wait because it does not stop there!

Suppose that a collector found the physical pipe that was used by René Magritte. This famous item could be exhibited in a museum. Or, in another scenario, it could be auctioned and sold for a sum that far exceeds the price of any other pipe.

You get the idea. Again, we observe the same pattern where the human element makes the difference in how something is perceived in its context.

We can always have the identical underlying thing, Magritte’s pipe in this instance, and still assign to it a different value or utility depending on the situation: (i) a model in some painter’s studio, (ii) an exhibit at the museum, (iii) an asset in the marketplace, and so on. All of them may come with the caption “this is not a pipe”.

So what is a pipe? It depends on the case. We cannot know about it in abstract because it does not have a standalone presence: it does not exist in abstract, in some decontextualised vacuum. We must thus consider the specifics, the factors at play, the constitution of the case as I explained in my first presentation about Cosmos, Logos, and the living universe. Otherwise we are assuming a built-in goal or purpose for the thing, some intrinsic truthfulness, which merely reflects our predispositions.

Chremata and the human-measure of Protagoras

Protagoras was an ancient philosopher who is best known for his dictum that “human is the measure of all things” (πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον άνθρωπος). In the original Greek version, we encounter the term “chremata” (χρήματα), so we must wonder whether “things” should come with a proviso based on what I have explained thus far. Unfortunately, we only have fragments of Protagoras’ work, so I can only expound on my own theories.

First let’s take the English phrase at face value: “human is the measure of all things”. This may sound naive if we take it to mean that everything is relative to us. Is a single human responsible for, say, the Earth orbiting the Sun? Or for the Sun existing at all? If a single human is neither the cause nor a factor in the emergence of these phenomena, maybe humanity as a whole makes a difference? The answer has to be negative: those magnitudes are not dependent on the presence or workings of humankind.

So is Protagoras wrong? Not necessarily, because the ancient philosopher was, above all, not talking about pragmata, about things as they are. He was referring to chremata whose multitude of significations all entail use-value or an extrinsic quality more broadly.

Haven’t we already considered how the perception of potatoes in a barter economy, or gold and a makeshift house in Antarctica, or René Magritte’s pipe are all a matter of the specifics? Didn’t we establish that the context is essential to our understanding of the phenomenon and, by extension, that no valuation can be made in abstract? Those items are all chremata insofar as humans are concerned. We can thus argue that human, be it an individual or the genus of human (humankind), is their measure. A better translation then is that “human is the measure of the use-value of things”.

Then we have the notion of a “measure”, which implies perception not causality. Even if we are talking about something that is clearly not contingent on humanity, such as the attributes of gold, we have to consider the intersection between pragmata—things in the world as they are—and human’s subjectivity: things how they are thought to be. We already covered such examples, like monetary value and Magritte’s pipe: they are physical items, yet how we think of them for our purposes in the given situation does not necessarily correspond to what they are or, more specifically, what we think they should be.

Relativism and objectivity

This raises many problems, because it seems that we can no longer speak about anything with a degree of certainty. If everyone is the measure of things, then how can we possibly find any sort of agreement as to what those things are in an objective sense? Is not relativism leading to absurdity? If you claim that “everything is relative”, does that not annul the proposition itself, since it too would have to be relative and thus not always applicable?

There are so many questions. Though I feel the relativist inferences might miss the nuance in the distinction between chremata and pragmata, which is why I elaborated on chremata at length. It is not that the world has no constants. For example, there is no subjectivity involved on whether the Earth has gravitational pull on us. That is objective. If there is some careless relativist out there who insists otherwise, you can always convince them about the fact by urging them to jump off a cliff in order to test their hypothesis.

Our point is more subtle. When we talk about chremata, we are not denying the underlying reality. Instead, we are highlighting the human aspect of how this state of affairs is brought in to the personal or interpersonal sphere and how it is interpreted in that context. Rather than deny objectivity, we emphasise the importance of the objective magnitudes at their intersection with human subjectivity as that applies to the evolving phenomena.

What the distinction between pragmata and chremata does at the level of how we reason about the world, is to remind us that we should be extra careful and rigorous with how we study the objective magnitudes. Otherwise we fall into traps, where we assume as constant the categories that we already take for granted through our culture or some other deep-seated ideology. Think, for example, how influential the notions of individuality and free will are, given our legal-political order and its prevailing narratives. These are cultural constructs which we need to be mindful of. If we obsess about the individual, we fail to understand how any given person is biologically a system of systems that necessarily exists within a greater system of systems that extends from the person’s immediate milieu, to the Earth’s ecosystems, to the greater beyond of the living universe. In reality, there can be no individual as such: nothing can have a decontextualised—a standalone—presence. The very notion of “individual”, meaning indivisible, is a convention and mental shortcut because it rests on a binary that is analytical: “the human” as such and “the society” as such.

Analytics, as I have mentioned in previous presentations, involve mental representations of patterns which we treat as if they have a standalone presence, though we know they do not.

Conventions and nature

The human experience is organised around all sorts of conventions, such as the near-sanctity of property, social classes and the concomitant stratification of society, the constructs of natural and legal persons, the rights of states, and so on. These are all institutions, meaning that they take effect through tradition, political expedience, sheer force, or anyhow are not a constant like, say, gravity.

There are attempts to ground institutions in natural patterns, such as with the case of Natural Law and its manifestation as Human Rights. Those start with observations about the human condition and ramify to the domain of law or jurisprudence. Such is a laudable effort, though the fact remains that the so-called “Natural Law” is a contradiction in terms, because Law is instituted as such, whereas that which is Natural is not.

Humanity cannot promulgate some piece of legislation which will, for example, envisage that the Sun shall no longer rise from the East. No legal instrument can do that. No institution can affect such a phenomenon. The Sun rises from the East due to a natural state of affairs, which will be that way regardless of how humans think of it.

Again we see the distinction between pragmata and chremata. Why does this matter anyway? Is it not obvious that laws are made by humans for humans? Yes, that much is clear. What is not always apparent is that whatever is instituted as such can be re-instituted, meaning that its claims on necessary objectivity are untrue.

This is not to argue that chremata are somehow bad, that Natural Law is irrelevant or undesirable, or anything along those lines. It is to stress the nuanced point that we should not conflate our subjectivity with objectivity, else we run the risk of falling victim to our own prejudices.

There is no reason, for example, why less than 1% of the world’s population holds 50% of the wealth. This is not a necessary condition of the universe, but a matter of convention: it can be made different if people want to.

There are insights we can derive from nature to inform our conduct, such as what I described in my presentation about ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism. Acknowledging the presence of chremata is all about avoiding potential errors in judgement; not dismissing moral considerations altogether; not trying to justify arbitrariness; not implying that there is no objectivity whatsoever.

Pragmata and cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is kind of a misused term nowadays as it either denotes an ideology of internationalism or it describes a lifestyle of affluence that is not limited to any one locale. For example, people who want the United Nations to turn into a federal system with its own government may describe themselves as cosmopolites or as having a cosmopolitan outlook. As for the lifestyle choice, we hear about how some rich fellow is, say, an American citizen who dines at the finest French restaurants, drinks the most refined Italian wine, is a collector of medieval Chinese artefacts, and lives in several countries around the planet. Then there is also the pejorative term used by some political parties who associate so-called “rootless cosmopolitans” with various perceived evils. Those can have a variety of forms, depending on the specifics of the ideology. The point is that these uses of the term are, in my opinion, not faithful to the original meaning.

Let’s consider the story in brief. There was an ancient philosopher by the name of Diogenis. He is known as “the Cynic” or “of Sinope” referring to his school of thought and hometown, respectively. While in Sinope, Diogenis defaced the local currency, which was illegal back then as it is today. He was thus exiled from the city, rendering him stateless. Diogenis could thus no longer claim to be a “polites” or citizen of any given “polis” (city), as he was deprived of that status. He was an outcast. When people would ask about his citizenship, he would reply that he is a citizen of the world, else polites of the cosmos.

The literal meaning of “citizen of the world” involves a contradiction. One can only be a citizen of a state or, more generally, be the subject of a given legal-institutional order. It is impossible to be a citizen in the absence of a polity, a citizen of nowhere. We thus have to assume, based on Diogenis’ philosophical views, that cosmopolites is a normative claim about how a person’s conduct should be aligned with the Cosmos. Or, as I see it, with the Cosmos, Logos, and the living universe.

In practical terms, we can think of cosmopolitanism as the continuation of the distinction between pragmata and chremata in the domain of ethics/politics. The argument would be that whatever principle governs our conduct must trace its source to pragmata instead of being some arbitrary convention that we take for granted. Think, for example, about the notion of respecting people. We are taught to respect authority, though there is no natural constant that makes such a phenomenon necessary. It is a matter of upbringing, of culture, of convention. Perhaps it is useful and practical, but that still does not make it anything more than a chrema.

On this matter of respecting authority, Diogenis was clearly a contrarian. He was sold as a slave and when asked about what kind of job he was good at, he replied “governing people”. This was an irony, of course, which hinted at the fact that both the slave and the master are instituted as such: their status is not a natural condition.

We can see Diogenis maintaining the same stance towards Alexander, who is most commonly known as “Alexander the Great”. When Alexander met Diogenis and asked him what he wanted from the aspiring despot of the Earth, Diogenis only asked to not be kept in the shadow. This has the literal meaning of wanting Alexander to step aside so as to not obstruct the sunlight, but also has a metaphorical sense of telling the conqueror not to impose tyranny, not to hinder one’s enlightenment.

Cosmopolitanism then, is the call to develop the methods that are necessary for distinguishing between chremata and pragmata in order to find the truth of the latter (otherwise how can you be a citizen of the cosmos if you do not understand what the cosmos is?). Once we learn about the pragmata, we can develop a more informed view of the world, a better morality, a more just polity.

Cosmopolitanism also relates to what I covered in my previous presentation about ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism. Such as the realisation that we as individuals or as a species are not the epicentre of the world. We are but a part of a greater system, citizens of the greater polis, so to speak.

Furthermoe, knowledge of the pragmata is consistent with what I already mentioned in that talk about knowing our limits, avoiding hubris, and leading a life of moderation.

Perhaps we will not be able to fully overcome chremata, because that requires that we remove the subjective aspect from everything we perceive. Is that even possible? Regardless of the answer we can always try to approximate the truth of the Cosmos and align ourselves with it.

Which brings us to the use of the term “polites” (citizen). By studying the Cosmos we want to develop insights which will underpin our laws and institutions. Our citizenship then, our real affiliation, will be with a moral code that reflects the Logos of the universe and is not limited to some cultural constructs. Our allegiance will not be to our notional tribe, our government or some borders on a map, but to the objectivity of the world, the common in the multitude that we can identify in all humans and all other forms of life.

The utility of ideals

Whether cosmopolitanism, in the sense of an objective morality, is realisable is a matter of discussion. I think it is a useful ideal that can help guide our actions, but we should be careful not to mistake it for a directly applicable set of instructions. We cannot implement an objective morality, because we do not have the clarity to grasp perfect objectivity. This is due to our lack of foresight and knowledge about the totality of the universe. There is always some case that makes us question how workable any given ethical system is; there is always some unforeseen event or set of outcomes which makes us question the efficacy of our designs.

The claim on an objective and thus universally applicable morality is dubious as it necessarily involves interpretation. I would even consider it hubris to believe that your ethics are fully objective. “Hubris” in the sense I already explained in my previous presentation as the unwillingness or inability to recognise our limits, all while overestimating our potential.

If you think you have discovered a complete and objective moral code, then you are implying that you hold the corresponding knowledge of the workings of the Cosmos and are certain of your findings. Is your certainty justified? Is your knowledge perfect, meaning that it can take no further refinements? I think not and would thus question any claims on the totalising reach of any one system of morality.

We should thus be careful with the kind of idealism that Diogenis might have argued for. While we might agree with some principle, we have to understand what our condition as humans renders possible in the “here and now”, as we say. We cannot live in an ideal polity because we ourselves are not ideal humans. We have our flaws, defects, frailties of character, biases, and instincts or emotions which run contrary to our reasonableness and which might inhibit our mystical ascension. And we are not omniscient, which means that we cannot be perfectly sure about the completeness of our findings regarding the world at-large.

The ideal must serve as our guide. It must be the lodestar, the brightest star in the sky, that helps us orientate ourselves amid the uncharted wilderness. We should try our best to approximate the ideal, with the understanding that we cannot ever attain it in full. That is so due to the fact that ideals are absolute, whereas the specifics in each case are not. Approximations are all we can ever hope for.

Which bring us back to the Delphic maxims that I covered in more details in the previous video (about ataraxia, moderation, and mysticism):

• Know yourself: Given the interconnectedness of the universe, this means that you must commit to the study of the world in order to start realising how you relate to all the other forms of being and how your selfhood takes form. Is your understanding complete? Or are you always learning something new? What does that entail for your sense of self?

• Nothing in excess: Try to find the balance in everything that you do. Exaggerations are reducible to errors in judgement. For example, if you are certain that you know yourself and, by extension, the Cosmos, you are overly confident in your abilities, which means that you are ignoring the boundaries imposed upon you by your nature as an imperfect animal. Consequently, by exaggerating you are making a mistake, despite your opinion to the contrary.

• Ensure, ruin follows (certainty brings ruin): While you are learning about the world and yourself and are trying to live in moderation (without excesses) you necessarily maintain a dubitative and inquisitive disposition. You are not claiming to know everything. When, however, you make claims that hint at omniscience, when you overestimate your abilities, you run the risk of being corrected the hard way. Kind of how I said before that the careless relativist could try to prove their point against gravity by jumping off a cliff: if they are certain that everything is a relative social construct, they will only be ruined by their certainty.

In conclusion, the distinction between pragmata and chremata does not introduce arbitrariness. It is a nuanced point in favour of not taking things at face value; not assuming that we know everything; not conflating our opinions or cultural outlook with objective magnitudes. Simply put, we want to be extra careful with how we study phenomena. We must raise the standard, as we must always try to understand the factors at play, the constitution of the case, and the dynamics involved.

In everyday life, that sort of attitude will make us more tolerant of other views. We will not be taking our opinions as inherently superior to those of others, at least not without giving the others a fair chance to speak their mind. When we all do that, we are better off as a culture, as we help each other sort out falsehoods through genuine exchange and compassion. Conventions are not bad per se. They are needed to make our collective life work. What matters is that whatever is instituted can always be instituted anew as part of a continuous process of refinement or sincere experimentation in pursuit of the truth. Can we become citizens of the Cosmos? We can always try to approximate that ideal while understanding what our limits are. Else suffer from our hubris.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions
2. The four facets of a human being
3. The mystical facet in practice
4. Religiosity and mysticism
5. Moderation through knowledge
6. Hubris, mythology, and ordinary experiences
7. Myth as technology
8. Who should encode and decode myths

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. This video is a continuation of my last presentation about the living universe and specifically the meaning of the words “cosmos” and “logos”: https://protesilaos.com/books/2022-02-05-cosmos-logos-living-universe/.

Today’s video will introduce concepts such as “mysticism” or the “mystical” facet of the human experience. I understand these are heavily loaded terms and it can be tricky to overcome some preconceived notions. Still, I ask that you keep an open mind as we approach this subject with a clear philosophical intent.

Suffice to say, here at the outset, that mysticism and related concepts are not the same as occult rituals and beliefs in the supernatural, superstitions or such mumbo jumbo, and the like.

As with the previous presentation, I will start with some definitions. It is important to explain how I will be using certain terms, so that we are all on the same page. Then I will gradually substantiate the claim that humans have a mystical side that they can develop, effectively broadening their perspective about the oneness of the living universe.

Definitions

• Mystery (Μυστήριο): It is a noun derived from a word that practically means initiation to a given field of knowledge or tradition. Other meanings of “mystery” include that which is secret or obscure. Secrecy and obscurity are interesting occurrences in this context. If you think about it, they are the inverse of knowledge because when you do not understand something, when you lack the requisite analytical framework, the subject appears alien to you even though it is not inherently unintelligible. For example, when an average computer user is presented with the source code of a program they feel it is all a mystery to them because they lack the requisite training. Thus the mysteries presuppose knowledge and the lack of such knowledge gives the impression of obscurity.

• Mystic (Μύστης): The person who has been initiated in a given field of knowledge or tradition, who holds the knowledge and continues the tradition. Do not conflate this with “mystique” which describes a situation characterised by mystery (as explained above).

• Myth (Mythos/Μύθος): That which is communicated or taught. The narrative. It also describes a tale or invented story whose primary function is to teach some deeper meaning and secondarily to entertain the audience.

• Ataraxia (Αταραξία): A state of non-disturbance or else tranquillity. This relates to one’s overall disposition where they have established inner harmony and are no longer compelled to act on the basis of instincts or emotions. In a sense, ataraxia is freedom of the highest order: freedom from control.

• Hubris (Ύβρις): The brand of cockiness that does not recognise the boundaries within which human experience must unfold.

• Psychagogia (Ψυχαγωγία): This literally means “entertainment” though we must break it down to its constituents to appreciate its significance. We have “psyche” (the soul or vital force or inner world which is studied, e.g., by psychology) and “agoge” which is education, upbringing, or guidance (e.g. pedagogy (παιδαγωγία)—the education of [young] people). In this sense, entertainment is not simply about passing our time and casually having fun. Rather, it entails the normative view that culture ought to teach or inspire us to be the best version of ourselves. Psychagogia must prepare people to aspire to their highest. Education is then used to communicate profound lessons, to initiate people in some tradition or school of thought. This is best done in a way that is fun and enjoyable, because keeping it interesting helps with the communicative aspect. So we can see the connection with the ordinary sense of “entertainment”.

The four facets of a human being

Let us analyse the general features of a human being. By “analyse” I mean to construct a mental representation of patterns in the world and treat them as if they had a standalone presence. These analytical constructs are parts of the same system: we cannot have one without the others and expect the same results.

The human experience can initially be divided in three facets: (i) body, (ii) emotions, (iii) mind. All humans have those. Of the three, the body is the most developed. It consists of all the instincts and the mechanisms that regulate one’s presence. For example, a human knows how to breath without further instruction. Then come the emotions. These are like the body, in the sense that they are well developed, though they can be trained to be in concert with rational action. And then we have the mind, which describes the faculties we possess for computation, pattern-matching, reasoning, and the like.

All three influence each other. A healthy body maintains a balance that produces pleasant emotions or at least does not generate feelings that are self-destructive. This, in turn, helps the mind stay focused on thinking things through. Conversely, an unhealthy body engenders emotions that can hurt us and, by extension, the mind is no longer capable of focusing on its tasks.

The relationship between those three is circular. If the mind is obsessed with something that is unattainable, it will eventually contribute to feelings of failure, worthlessness, disappointment, and those will contribute to processes in the body that adapt various subsystems of the organism to the new equilibrium of overall negativity. We can see this at play with diseases such as depression which is typically considered a mental condition though it necessarily has to influence all three facets as they do not have a standalone presence.

This circularity is noticeable even through minor injuries, as the person tends to obsess over the wound and can be a bit paranoid about it: the mind no longer performs optimally, the emotions involve frustration and a general pessimistic outlook, and the body obviously suffers from the injury. Same principle for one’s diet, everyday routines, and levels of activity: the circularity is there.

Notice how the heading of this section references four facets yet I have only described three of them. Which is the fourth one? It is the mystical side which can be described as potentially superordinate to the previous three though, again, they are all part of the same system. The mystical involves training, the accumulation of knowledge, and the ability to use the insights derived therefrom to establish harmony between the facets of the human experience.

The mystical is associated with notions of enlightenment because (i) it initially is the least developed of a human’s facets, and (ii) can be applied to direct the other three facets.

Remember what we said about terms such as “mystery”: they pertain to the introduction to a given field of knowledge or tradition. Without this initiation, the mystical facet is obscure and would appear as unapproachable or mysterious in the sense of weird and alien.

We can get glimpses of the mystical facet of a human being in action by observing differences in behaviour between kids and adults. Both groups share the same dispositions and faculties, though the latter is more likely to have accumulated knowledge which is applied in the given situation to make the correct judgement call. This is the hint we need, as it tells us that more and better training, the appropriate initiation, can bring us closer to this ideal of having the right perspective and making the correct decisions.

The mystical facet in practice

Consider what I covered in my previous video about Cosmos, Logos, and the living universe. I basically claimed that the universe has the same features of ratio, rate, reason, language, and order that we have. The mystical realisation then, is that humans are not the epicentre of the world. Neither individually, nor collectively. Rather, they are parts of the greater whole, just as everything else from particles to galaxies and anything in between or beyond.

Why is this a mystical realisation, you may wonder? Because it involves deep knowledge of the world—remember the meaning of “mystery” as initiation. This knowledge is not something we get without considerable effort. We have the potential for it, but we have to develop it. Compare that to the instinct of self-preservation: it is there from day one and already is well developed.

Without the mystical facet, our body governs our world-view, as it conditions us to a state of egocentrism. We start from the survival instinct and so we treat everything in terms of how it relates to us: everything is a means to the end of surviving. As we learn about our self, which involves learning about the others, given that no human has a standalone presence, we begin to sense how egocentrism is misleading: we are not alone.

As we develop the mystical facet, we essentially discover the others, which provides us with a new perspective on selfhood. Instead of thinking of our self as the epicentre, we understand that it is yet another node in a distributed system of coexisting forms of being. The sense of a centre with everything revolving around it is an illusion. Yes, that illusion helps us live but it cannot be left in charge of things. It has to be controlled by a more refined instrument, so to speak. So we move from the subjective to the intersubjective: we think in terms of relations and our role in the greater whole.

Developing the mystical facet has the effect of reducing the overall influence of the other facets on the human’s conduct. The mystic, which is the person who is involved in mysticism, who has been initiated to the mysteries—the profound knowledge, as we said—is no longer compelled to act on instinct or emotion. The mystic has perspective of the bigger picture, which necessarily brings about harmony.

To put it in practical terms, the mystic does not need validation from others, such as in the form of fame or glory, because they understand these are trivial concerns in the grand scheme of things. The mystic cannot be disturbed by the lack of such validation: they are indifferent towards it because they know it is inconsequential.

Consider how egoist many behavioural patterns of humans are. Such as the all too common altercations that start with something like this:

• Move!
• No, you move!
• What did you say?
• Move!
• Do you know who I am?

You get the idea. The same mechanics are at work when humans try to out-compete each other over issues such as who has the most expensive car, who gets the most followers on social media, whose career is the most successful, and so on.

The mystic knows that these preoccupations keep us trapped in a cycle where the body, emotions, and mind influence each other without direction or structure. There is no overarching sense of stability, of couching those three facets in terms of a superordinate one which holds them in check and keeps them functioning in concert.

In this regard, the mystic is not attached to their self and to everything that appears as an extension of selfhood. They are not egocentric. For example, they are not concerned whether their project is perceived as successful or not. The mystic’s commitment to the quest for knowledge appears outwardly as aloofness from the fray, as if they are there without being there.

This sort of indifference comes from a position of knowledge. It is not the same as a casual claim that “I don’t care”. Rather, it involves profound realisation of the factors at play. It is about being able to look at the bigger picture and understand how things relate to each other, which necessarily includes the view of the person’s role in the universe.

It is the ataraxia I mentioned earlier. The state of non-disturbance that one can reach—or at least work towards—through training. To outsiders, the person who is at that stage or approximating it will seem utterly strange, obscure, alien. It is the dual meaning of “mystery”, as we have already discussed.

Religiosity and mysticism

At this point it is important to stress that mysticism is not about transcending the human experience as a human. That involves the impossibility of trying to overcome the body while being embodied, to escape from emotions and sense impressions while having faculties of emotion and sense impression, to accumulate and use knowledge with the means at one’s disposal while wanting to go beyond them.

Mysticism then is not about becoming a non-human human, but rather aspiring to our highest. To be the most refined version of what humanity has to offer. This is where religion and religiosity come into the picture. We can think of the religious experience in two broad terms, based on historical evidence:

• Religion without mystical underpinnings: This is the same sort of egoism I mentioned earlier, where humans find reasons to fight each other. Religion is thus weaponised in the service of ulterior goals. Hence wars over religion, proselytism through fire and steel, witch hunts, inquisitions, intolerance of other beliefs, and the like.

• Religion as a conduit to mystery: This is the understanding of religiosity as a way to enrich the human experience. It can help people have a sense of the bigger picture and learn how they are part of a greater whole. In this regard, religion is not about dividing people into groups or clans, as it were, but showing them that despite superficial differences, there is something which is common in the multitude; something we can all understand.

When we are on the path of knowledge, we no longer see religion as an obstacle to enlightenment. Instead, we treat it as yet another innovation of humanity, whose purpose is to store and disseminate knowledge in a form that is understandable even by those who do not have time for intensive training.

To the mystic, religion is not about who is right and who is wrong, but rather presents a corpus of work that can facilitate the development of the mystical facet of a human being. This is not about following religious practices to the letter, such as the ceremonies or the prayers. There is a deeper understanding of what those signify, what their real purpose is, which is not about adherence to themselves. They are not the goal.

Religion is a problem only when it is devoid of knowledge. When it becomes a dogma that one must follow to the letter without appreciation of its underlying values or hidden meanings. Though this is true not just for religion, but everything humans may associated themselves with. Think, for example, of football fans and hooliganism.

Again, one must have a sense of perspective.

Moderation through knowledge

Since we cannot become non-human humans, mysticism is all about elevating the human experience to its highest potential. We cannot do that by trying to become purely rational, or fully emotional, or only bodily. Remember that those are part of the same system. One cannot exist without the others. Instead of prioritising one over the others, we must work towards achieving harmony between them, where none overpowers the other two. This is what the mystical facet does. The fourth component that binds the other three in harmony. To this end, we have some profound insights that come to us from the ancient Greek religion. Specifically the temple of Apollo in Delphi (an area in Greece) from where we get those three maxims:

1. Know yourself (Γνώθι σεαυτόν)
2. Nothing in excess (Μηδέν άγαν)
3. Ensure, ruin nears (Εγγύα, πάρα δ’Άτα) [EDIT: I talk a bit about the translation in the video. ]

Apollo was the god of harmony. This symbolism is no coincidence. It captures an archetype, a view of the world that we keep encountering regardless of the particularities of the case.

The three maxims must be read together in light of how we understand the Cosmos. To know yourself you have to learn about the whole, because you do not have a standalone presence. There is no such thing as, say, a decontextualised conscience that can understand itself in a vacuum. There is the fully fledged human kind, a system of systems in its own right, which coexists with everything in its immediate environment and the supersystems that envelop it. One can only begin to gain knowledge of their self by finding the others (other forms of life, not humans in particular). This is a lifelong commitment to selfhood as non-self-centred-ness. One cannot be certain of their findings though, as that is reckless: it is an implicit claim of knowing about the whole through partial information. Unflinching certainty undoes what one is trying to achieve.

As for doing nothing in excess, this is what we already found by examining the facets of a human, where we realised that we cannot amplify one over the others. There has to be a balance, a virtuous midpoint. As each person is different, the balance is not the same for everyone. There is no one-size-fits-all, if you will. Instead, each person has to learn about who they are, in the sense I already explained, in order to be in a position of finding their own midpoint.

Furthermore, we can discern how moderation, in its uncertainty about the absolutes, relates to ataraxia. If you cling on to something such as social validation, then you are exaggerating its significance in the grand scheme of things: you are doing things in excess as you are attaching value to them when they do not deserve it.

Hubris, mythology, and ordinary experiences

The word “hubris” describes the deviation from what ought to be a moderate disposition. In a sense, to commit hubris is to lack harmony, to not understand the archetype symbolised by Apollo. In Greek mythology there are lots of stories about humans who overestimated their abilities and who had to suffer the consequences of their lack of judgement, of their insolence.

One such example which I will also reference again further below, is Odysseas or Ulysses, the protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey, who was travelling back home after the Trojan war and was captured by a monster known as a cyclops. Odysseas managed to escape from the cyclops but instead of heading home he chose to brag about it and permanently injure the cyclops. This brought about the wrath of the cyclops’ father, Poseidon who is the god of the seas, which forced Odysseas to travel for ten years instead of what should have been a short trip.

The details do not matter right now. The point is that the protagonist of the story did not recognise the boundaries of his existence and thus had to suffer from his lack of foresight or perspective.

We should not think of hubris as punishment from the gods. This is just a metaphor, a story that is easy to convey. We must instead focus on the meaning of a balanced attitude and of avoiding excesses. Think about everyday experiences. Too little food deprives you of the energy you need to be effective in whatever you are doing. Too much food makes you sick. Both of those extremes are a form of hubris: you need to eat the right amount of food and the right kind of food.

Same principle for everything we do. Let’s say you are out hiking. You must know what your abilities are but also what specific requirements the terrain has as well as what the weather demands. Otherwise you cannot know what the right balance is. If you are super confident in your abilities without accounting for the prevailing conditions, if you are certain even though you do not really know how things stand, that will lead to your ruin such as in the form of a severe injury.

We see then that hubris is not about some abstract theological considerations or even an artistic device to forward a narrative. It is directly applicable to our quotidian life. Which can only make us wonder about the utility of myths as a medium and of mythology as a source of knowledge.

Myth as technology

In our age the word “myth” is equivalent to a fabricated story or, more broadly, a falsehood. For example, we hear about attempts at “myth busting” which are supposed to shed light on how things actually are. In other words, myths and mythology are largely considered undesirable.

As with all great lies, this view is based on a kernel of truth. Yes, myths are fabricated stories. Of course they are. They do not necessarily correspond to some historical fact and they do not have to take place in an actual country or whatnot. But they are not lies either. Because their verity is not about what they say in literal terms, but what they mean beyond the superficialities of appearance, of the narrative.

You must understand that myths are a form of ancient technology. An invention that has helped humanity flourish. Myths have mnemonic value. They are easy to remember. This makes them suitable for even the most low-tech civilisation to store knowledge in a highly resilient and interoperable format and also to disseminate it effectively. A myth can contain a rich corpus of work whose meanings are condensed in schematic representations. Put differently, a myth is like a compressed file that we need to unpack with the right tools in order to decipher the knowledge contained within.

Consider, again the scene of the Odyssey I mentioned in the previous section. Our protagonist, Odysseas or Ulysses, is captured by a cyclops: a giant who towers over ordinary humans. The cyclops possesses a single eye on its forehead. This kind of description serves as a mnemonic device, a symbol we can always recall—even as young kids or especially as young kids because of the impression it leaves on us. The cyclops holds Odysseas and his companions captive inside its cave. It is preparing to make a lunch out of them. The protagonist cannot possibly challenge the beast to a one-on-one combat: that would result in certain death. Instead, Odysseas must use his mind to outsmart this formidable foe. The details of the story do not matter right now.

What we learn then just from this is that when faced with seemingly impossible odds, we should not panic or give up but instead think carefully about a strategy that will lead us out of the allegorical cave. How many times do we need this attitude in life? In times of desperation and crisis. Is it not true that calmness and clarity of mind can help us circumvent obstacles that would otherwise be impossible to overcome? So instead of being superficial and making fun of people for believing that a cyclops is real—which is silly—we must keep an open mind and understand what the myth is trying to teach us. The best myths do not concern themselves with mundane details. Instead they codify knowledge of patterns that we encounter over and over again regardless of age and culture.

Continuing with this theme of myth as technology we must draw a distinction between “ancient” and “outdated”. Myths are a primeval invention but they remain as relevant as ever, including through art and religiosity. Even in this age of advanced technology we employ mythological practices as part of our culture. Maybe we don’t describe them in those terms, but the essence is there. Think, for example, how important fiction is in our life. It is part of how we socialise, communicate ideas, and support our lifelong education.

Take Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings as a case in point. Superficially, we have an adventure with medieval weaponry and magic that involves humans, orcs, dragons, and other creatures. It is fun to read the books or watch the movies. Though the narrative is not simply about what happens with the ring of power in some fantasy land, as it holds teachings which are directly applicable to our world. Is it not true that a person who wields too much power can be dangerous? And is that not why we want, at least in principle, to have forms of governance that distribute competences across more than one person or a few people?

Every myth has a lot to teach, so I am in no way exhausting the topic with this example. The point is that Tolkien uses the metaphor of a magic ring to describe, among others, the complexity of factors that inform hierarchical forms of organisation. Just how Plato used the myth of another magic ring (the Ring of Gyges) to elaborate on matters of morality and justice.

Who should encode and decode myths

I noted that myths are like compressed files that we need to unpack using the right tools. If we do not do this right, we will reach false conclusions, just like how we get a garbled output on the computer when we do not decode a file properly. Myths have a discursive aspect to them, they are narratives, meaning that the function of the decoder has to be performed by a person who has knowledge of the subject matter.

Same principle for the creation of myths. Anyone can come up with an imaginary story, but only those who already have insight can encode profound meanings in metaphors or allegories. Thus myths are not inherently didactic qua myths. They can be didactic if they embed knowledge, if they contribute to psychagogia as mentioned earlier. And they are at their best when the meaning they communicate helps us aspire to our highest. Which means that the right person to encode and decode myths is one who is on the path of mystery (in the sense we have already described): the mystic.

There are myths which do not necessarily help us escape from mediocrity. For example, I remember having to watch a Batman movie whose title I have since forgotten. In the opening part of the story, it is mentioned that the parents of the Batman are the ones who built the city’s public transport network. They were rich and just wanted to improve the life of their fellow citizens, which on the face of it is a noble act. Yet one is left to wonder why are there such egregious inequalities in that city. Why can’t the citizens build their own public transport? Do they lack the resources? Perhaps those resources are in the hands of a tiny minority of plutocrats including the Batman’s parents? There are so many questions, which leave us thinking whether accepting the status quo of that city is indeed a lesson worth having. Does the myth inspire us to overcome egocentrism? Or is it a form of indoctrination that holds us captive to a state of affairs that is reducible to egoism, recklessness, hubris?

I am not criticising the Batman story at-large, as the expanded lore may address those concerns. The point is that we should not take myths at face value and should refrain from considering them useful in advance. Myths are yet another tool we have. A form of technology. They are not the only one. Each case calls for its own approach. We need the right tool for the job. In practical terms, we must not blithely abandon the language we use to do science, for example, or deal with legal affairs, and instead delve into incessant mythologising. We don’t want that. We don’t want to imply any of that.

The key is to keep an open mind. Continue searching for knowledge, do not fall into the trap of absolute certainty, and try to learn who we are in relation to all there is. Find the balance. Seek and ultimately befriend wisdom, for that is what “philosophy” means.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions
2. Universal interconnectedness and the constitution of the case
3. The immanence of Logos and universal language
4. The Cosmos and the Cosmétor
5. On Being and modality
6. The significance of metaphysics

Hello everyone! My name is Protesilaos, also known as “Prot”. In this video I will talk to you about the philosophical underpinnings of the words “cosmos” and “logos”. More specifically I will explain how they imply that the universe is alive. This is a discussion about the abstract structure of all there is, which is also referred to as the study of metaphysics.

The text of this presentation is available on my website. If you are watching this on the video hosting platform, please follow the link in the description.

Definitions

Let’s start with some important definitions which will inform the rest of the presentation.

• Cosmos (Κόσμος): It denotes order or harmony. The word has the same root as other Greek terms that pertain to the theme of a harmonious structure. For example, cosmétor (κοσμήτωρ or cosmétoras/κοσμήτορας in modern Greek) is the agent of action who preserves order in a given domain: the creator or enforcer of order. While cosmima (Κόσμημα) refers to a jewel, though something qualifies as such when it essentially has harmony and order: it is refined. Furthermore, the notion of cosmima implies excellence or extraordinary quality, just how we describe an altruistic person as “pure gold”, a prodigy as a “gem”, and so on. The Cosmos, then, is of extraordinary quality in terms of its order and harmony. Another use of the word denotes “the totality of people”, which again refers to an orderly set.

• Logos (Λόγος): It signifies several seemingly unrelated concepts: ratio, rate, pattern, language, reason (as in a cause as well as that which is reasonable). We may think that there is no connection between significations such as ratio and reasonableness, or language and pattern. Though upon closer inspection we can understand how language and its underlying capacities have an inherent order to them—an immanent logic—as do ratio and pattern, a cause and its effects, et cetera.

• Synpan, else Symban (Συν+παν, Σύμπαν): This is the Greek word for “universe”. It describes everything (pan) that is together (syn): all as coexisting. We already know its constituent terms from English loanwords such as:
  • Synthesis: the combination of multiple views or positions/theses;
  • System: the joint standing of things (factors in their interplay);

  • Symbiosis (Syn+biosis): the conviviality or interdependent living of multiple forms of being;

  • Panther: the hunter of everything (apex predator);
  • Panacea: the cure for everything (remedy for all diseases);
  • Pandemic: that which lives/spreads everywhere.
• Chaos (Χάος): A state that lacks order. Colloquially, it is used to describe the disintegration of a once-orderly condition. Though, in absolute terms, any process of disintegration exhibits Logos. As such, Chaos is an analytical construct which is conceived as the opposite of Cosmos.

Universal interconnectedness and the constitution of the case

Let’s talk about Symban, the Greek word for the universe which states that all coexist. Think about it for a moment:

• Can there be an atmosphere in the absence of the Earth’s gravity?
• Are there plants that grow without an environment that sustains them?
• Is there a predator qua predator without its prey?

The more we observe patterns in the world, the more we realise that nothing has a standalone presence. Every item that we study is informed, influenced, framed, or otherwise determined by a set of factors external to it. Every presence unfolds in a given milieu to the effect that the world is a system of systems governed by rules that are global to all strata—all levels—and some that are local to particular systems.

We can always think of things in their own right. We focus on a set of factors in their interplay—a system—and treat it as if it has no environment. For example, we talk about “the economy” and how it performs: we communicate in a manner that renders it distinct from other magnitudes such as “the society” or the world of politics.

We call the method of treating factors in isolation “analysis”. In our mind, “the economy” exists in its own right though in practice it cannot be separated from other analytical constructs such as “the society”. Same principle for dichotomies such “the national economy” and “the global economy” which actually are interdependent (and also dependent on non-economic factors).

When we perform an analysis we pick a set of factors and study the phenomena which emerge from its interplay. I call this “the case”. The qualitative aspect of it, how factors relate to each other, is the “constitution of the case”, or “the composition of”, “the makeup of”… The case conditions our understanding of the subject matter because the factors we examine in their joint presence already delineate the horizon of possible outcomes we may ever discover.

We revise the case, we alter its constitution, when we acquire new knowledge or develop a more sophisticated method. In other words, how we approach a topic is underpinned by a way of thinking that I describe as the “mode of application”. When we are aware of the mode of application, we understand that knowledge of the world is conditioned by how we perceive of it. This ultimately means that we try not to be overly confident in the totality of our knowledge: we maintain an inquisitive and dubitative disposition. To that end, we are sceptics in the original sense of being contemplative: we keep examining the subject matter as well as the mode of thinking that engendered it.

The immanence of Logos and universal language

[ Shows pine cone ] I gathered this earlier while walking in the forest. Look how nice it is: I can discern ratio, pattern, order, harmony. There is a structure to it. I also know this is no coincidence: all pine cones are this way, and then all pine trees, and all trees in general, and so on for all other forms of being I have ever encountered. What I can say about this specific pine cone and of everything like it is that it is not chaotic in the sense of having no order whatsoever. It incorporates Logos: ratio, rate, pattern. Us humans have ratio, pattern, order in our very constitution. We too share the Logos. And so do dogs, chickens, mushrooms, flowers, grass, proteins, our DNA… Everything! The fabric of the universe itself has Logos woven into it.

What about the other meanings of Logos such as reason and language? Humans have them as well but what about this pine cone, pine trees, trees in general, dogs, chickens, flowers, grass, and so on? Do all those have a language and reason as well? The conventional answer is negative. Vegetables have no apparent logic or speech of their own and in everyday parlance we use derogatory phrases such as “bird brain”. Is this correct though? Or has our mode of application prevented us from examining some crucial factors?

Let’s think about language in its most basic form as a feedback loop of cause and effect. Some event occurs which produces consequences. Those trigger new events which in turn have their own effects. The same can happen without an expected cause which produces a different reaction. There is conditionality involved. Observe a flower and you will notice how it responds to sunshine or water. It essentially communicates a preference. Go to the forest and look at a tree. You may notice how as it grows it stops feedings its lower branches and focuses its vitality upwards: it tries to maximise its exposure to sunlight and in the process discards what it no longer needs. This is intelligence even though we tend to not think of it as such because we conflate it with conscience; it is intelligence because the action is purposeful even though it may seem mechanistic.

Language in its basic form is binary. Individual feedback loops in their combination are equivalent to an elaborate mode of communication. Essentially the same as what we do with computers where a series of 0 and 1 can combine to highly complex data structures which communicate richness of detail, pattern, structure, Logos, such as how this multimedia I am recording right now which shows the text I am reading, the view of my webcam, and also captures my voice.

For as long as there are feedback loops—and the universe is all about them—there is language.

Whatever differences are of degree, not substance.

How about reason? Is it immanent as well? Think again about language in its basic form and consider it in light of all the other closely related meanings of Logos. This pine cone right here is the vessel that carries the seeds of the pine tree. What is a seed? It can be described as a program which gets activated when the conditions are right in order to produce a pine tree. In other words the seed encodes knowledge of the whole: it knows what the tree is and will always create that instead of something random.

We can extend this to the DNA. It essentially is a program that is self-reprogrammable. Just like the seed which carries knowledge of the tree so DNA codifies information about its ultimate form. We discern Logos in action: pattern, ratio, structure, language.

For a seed to react to the prevailing conditions in its immediate environment, for it to know when it should start growing into a tree, it necessarily has the minimum requisite means of evaluating the propriety of the factors in its milieu. In other words, it has to make a judgement call and say “okay, this looks right so I will initiate the process that will eventually turn me into a tree”.

Same principle for every pattern. It holds information and can, given the circumstances, communicate meanings and contribute to evolving states of affairs.

Now you may think: does everything have Logos as language and reason? Does this stone think for itself? To which I would answer that we should not fall into the trap of analytics, where we treat the stone—and any given abstraction for that matter—as if it has a standalone presence. You need to be able to think of things in their combination. Remember that the universe is the Symban.

Substitute the word “stone” with, say, “acid”. Does acid have language and reason? You will likely say “no”. What about the DNA then? What about that combination of acids and proteins and other elements that are seemingly devoid of reason and language? Is not the DNA carrying a set of meanings, concepts, or else all the details that are necessary for the manifestation of a given organism? And is not the DNA adaptable? So a program that can reprogram itself.

What I am trying to suggest, then, is that the answer is contingent on the constitution of the case. It can be affirmative if we are to consider another set of factors in their interplay; a set which captures this reality of the immanent Logos.

The Cosmos and the Cosmétor

The Symban has Logos so we call it the Cosmos: it is orderly, harmonious. Which makes us wonder whether there is some being that enforces this state of affairs. Does the universe have a Cosmétor?

Remember that “cosmétor” is the agent of action who preserves order over a given domain. So the one who does so for the Cosmos must have a universal reach. Understandably this relates to notions we have about the divine. We understand that everything around us has Logos and so we may infer that this is so because a Cosmétor imposed order to some primordial Chaos, thus establishing the Cosmos. In short: the world around us may be the creation of a god.

In the various traditions gods exhibit human-like features. They have a disposition, such as being all-loving, or they maintain an agenda or some preference such as by listening to what humans ask of them and interfering in human affairs to influence their outcome. As such, it is difficult to think of god as anything other than basically a more powerful human. For example, in Christianity (at least the denomination that is prevalent in my part of the globe) God is said to be the creator of the world and humans are designed in God’s image and imitation.

Does the notion of a god as the Cosmétor of the universe mean that in god’s absence there was Chaos? I think not. Because if there was Chaos, in the sense of an absolute disorderly state, how did God take form? For there to be a God, there necessarily exists order. Even the concept of a “disorderly state” is self-contradicting because for it to be a state, for it to be describable as such, it must have some pattern.

In the ancient Greek tradition, from whence come the concepts of Cosmos, Logos, et cetera, the world exists independent of the gods: the gods themselves may influence the world around them, in the same way we humans do, but they are not responsible for it being there. Implicit in this notion is the idea that the Cosmos is everlasting: it is always present. In this sense, divinity is not the cause of the Cosmos but one of its phenomena.

What about creation from nothing? What about the view that God created all there is? I think the claim that creation can come from nothing must explain how something is brought into being, in terms of the mechanism or cause. Did the cause of the creation exist or not. If yes, then we do not have absolute nothing, but something. If not, what caused the cause? And whatever that is, it cannot be nothing. By the same token, the idea of God as creator does not justify “creation from nothing” because God is not nothing. Whatever name we may pick for the prime cause of what we may describe as creation, we cannot avoid recognising it as something, as “being there” so to speak.

Which brings us back to the idea of a Cosmos everlasting with Logos being immanent. It is always present, with no beginning, middle, or end. This might be interpreted as pantheism which, perhaps paradoxically, is consistent with both monotheism and polytheism. Why? Because if there is divinity in the universe, and if there is at least one form that expresses it, we can imagine multiple forms partaking of divinity, as whatever caused the one could cause another(since divinity is not the prime cause; the Cosmos is always there).

Alternatively, we can inspect how Christianity tries to reconcile the idea of a single God with the presence of the Holy Trinity by suggesting that the Three are One as they are of the same substance: they are consubstantive (EDIT: consubstantial). If so, there is nothing which prevents this otherwise common substance from being shared by four or twelve or a million instantiations. One divinity, many forms: monotheism and polytheism as two sides of the same coin.

However, I think this kind of reasoning ultimately does not help us answer the question of whether the Cosmos has a Cosmétor because it keeps us limited to the anthropomorphic conception of the divine: how God or the Gods are better versions of humans and how they micromanage the world.

What we observe with the immanent Logos of the universe does not necessarily require some exalted human-like being to actively keep things in shape. Why intervene to impose ratio, pattern, order, language, and reason to something that already has all of those as indistinguishable from its existence?

We can then think of the Cosmétor as an abstraction, as an inference that we draw, not an omnipotent being that has the discretion to remain aloof from the fray or take action. By observing Logos in everything we deduce that they all have something in common. This means that the Cosmétor is not “outside” the Symban, imposing order without requiring order of its own. Rather, it is inextricably bound up together with the universe: the Cosmos and the Cosmétor are one and the same.

All that is present has the Logos in common. All that exists shares the quality of existing. We can then argue that every instance in the Symban partakes of the same substance as all others. Rather than the Three being One, All is One: consubstantiality on a universal scale.

Again, the Symban, the immanent Logos, the everlasting Cosmos.

On Being and modality

Let’s continue scrutinising the notion of an anthropomorphic divine and whether it can be identical to an everlasting Cosmos.

All that exists, does so in some way. It has a mode of being (Τρόπος in Greek). So not only we know of its existence but of how it exists. The basic way to think of this modality is to imagine a switch. The switch in a system can only ever exist as being “on” or “off”. No particular switch exists without modality. However, an abstract switch cannot have modality, since the on and off states cancel each other out or, otherwise, are contradictory. So the switch as such does not have modality, but only the potential of it once instantiated in a given case.

Everything we examine has modality. Though as we discern patterns and as we build up an abstract structure of the relations between the factors of the case and of every case, we no longer think in terms of modality. We simply talk about presences and their shared existence. By extension, the common in the multitude of all that exists cannot have modality of its own. Thus, the most abstract among the abstractions has to be described as “substance”.

We can call it “Being” (Είναι in Greek). This is not the same as an almighty god, because our conception of the divine involves modality. We ask from the gods to heed our prayers, accept our sacrifices, and so on. Our gods are presences, meaning that they are forms of being that have modality. They have a character, a disposition, a way of existing.

Couched in those terms, Being is perhaps counter-intuitively indescribable. It is the most abstract of the abstractions, yet we cannot attribute to it individual qualities. We cannot say that it is Good, for example, because that means that there must exist a non-Good and, by inference, some third magnitude that is common in both the Good and the non-Good. However we go about it, we return to the notion of Being as substance: the common in all that is.

This does not necessarily lead to atheism. We cannot know with certainty whether gods exist simply by deducing Being from the Cosmos and the Logos. All we can say is that gods may only exist as presences, i.e. they will have modality and be of the same substance—Being—as everything else. Otherwise our appeals to them are pointless.

This raises questions about life and death. If the Cosmos is everlasting, then what exactly is the birth of some form of being and its eventual death?

We already established that there is no creation from nothing. We can add that there is no creation in nothing and no transition towards nothing because either of those would imply non-Being. The problem with this implication is that we cannot possibly infer the common in the multitude of non-present presences, because they are not present and thus do not have any pattern to be discerned. Consequently, there can be no abstract structure of the sort. We thus fall back to Being as the only possibility. Which means that life and death are phenomena that hint at a universal process of transfiguration.

Presences change from one form to another. The process of change continues to share the Logos and to belong to Being. As such, the abstract structure of the universe is constant. Whatever change we observe is in the particulars, not their underlying patterns. Logos does not annul itself in becoming non-Logos, just as Cosmos does not turn into non-Cosmos or else Chaos.

Is this the same as immortality then? No. Or at least not how we traditionally think about this issue. Because our notion of eternal life is attached to our anthropocentrism. We believe that we can live forever as humans or human-like presences or, at least, as something that will preserve the kernel of selfhood that each of us believes to have.

Rather, transfiguration means that we may turn into dust, yet this will eventually give rise to other forms, and so on in an endless cycle. Recall what we covered earlier about universal language and the immanence of Logos.

So what is life? I think we can answer this by trying to determine its opposite: to figure out what non-life could be. Wouldn’t non-life imply non-Being? And wouldn’t that bring us back to Being as the only option? Consequently, we must conclude that life is also immanent and thus is another way of describing the Symban. Everything is life.

This is not to be conflated with the everyday use of the term “life form”. We speak of abstractions here: we do so by using a particular mode of application. Whereas, for example, expeditions to Mars which may search for proof of extraterrestrial life have another mode of application. Their case is constituted differently, as they equate life with known organisms, not with the very possibility of there being such organisms, which pertains to the abstract structure of the universe.

The significance of metaphysics

That’s all for now folks. I tried to convey the idea of the living universe and cover its basic themes.

Metaphysics conditions our overall thinking. Every other philosophical consideration is ultimately reduced to our notion of existence.

In future videos I will elaborate on at least some of the implications of the ideas I discussed today. Not everything will be about metaphysics. We will instead consider epistemology, ethics, politics, and related.

There is a lot to talk about. Thank you very much for your attention.

Remember that the text of this presentation will be available on my website: https://protesilaos.com.

Goodbye!

1.1 The case is a set of factors in their interplay.

1.2 The case is an analytical construct. Its particularities depend on which factors are considered and what modal qualities they are thought to have in light of—or because of—that selection process.

1.3 The case is a noetic presence: a product of thought, not an entity that is independent of the thinkable.

1.3.1 That which is not noetic is understood in negative terms though never directly. For human cannot comprehend that which is not susceptible to the intellect and/or the sense faculties.

1.3.2 The opposite of noetic is ontic (“on” is Greek for “being”), from whence comes the study—or the discussion around the problématique—of “what is”: ontology.

1.3.3 We describe the mental isolation of patterns as “analytics”. An “analytical construct” is another way of denoting a noetic presence that is thought of as if it stood on its own, independent of the totality it is present in.

1.4 A factor is a constituent of the case. Factors are noetically irreducible or analytically atomic (“atom” means “indivisible”).

1.5 The relationship between the factors of the case is described as one of configuration, composition, or constitution. We thus speak of “the constitution of the case”.

1.6 What stands as a factor in one case can be a set of factors in their interplay in another case. A subsystem is a factor of a system yet it is a system in its own right. The constitution of the case in each consideration shall differ.

1.6.1 As pertains to one’s disposition, this means that every analysis must be couched in terms of its scope and remain aware of it. We call this the “mode of application”, where “mode” refers to a way of thinking.

1.7 With “presence” we denote existence: a factor in the case. With “modality” (and variants like “modal”) we refer to the way the presence is made manifest: how some factor exists or the manner in which its existence unfolds.

1.8 The presence and modality of a factor is informed by the constitution of the case, for that involves the interplay of factors and thus the phenomena specific to it; phenomena germane to the combinations as such (which we describe as “emergent phenomena”).

1.9 A pattern which is discerned only in the interplay of factors, though not in their isolation as standalone cases, is considered emergent.

1.10 As the constitution of the case determines the factors in their interplay and as a case may consist of cases, emergence can be stratified depending on the scope of each set of relations.

1.11 The “stratification of emergence” describes emergent phenomena that occur in a composited constitution of the case: a case of cases.

2 Every presence has modality.

2.1 The abstract structure of existence, or else the common in the multitude of all presences, cannot have modality, for that would be inherently contradictory.

2.2 Existence without modality is substance. We name it “Being”.

2.3 Being cannot be described as having attributes: the very process involves the identification of manifest features, i.e. modality.

2.4 Being cannot be understood directly but only through deduction as that which all presences must have in common.

2.5 The opposite of Being is a product of inference though it cannot possibly exist as non-Being, since it is impossible for there to be a present non-presence and, by extension, a pattern that is common in a multitude of non-presences: “multitude of non-presences” is meaningless, as is the notion of a pattern in non-presence.

2.6 Every presence partakes of Being. It shares the substance—that which is common in the multitude—and then extends it in ways that particularise the presence, differentiating it from the totality of presences.

2.6.1 Differentiation pertains to modality. Even if all appears to be changing, the abstract structure remains constant: presences still extend Being.

2.7 There can be no non-Being as that would demand that presences are extensions of nothingness.

2.8 Presences cannot come from nothing, be in nothing, and move towards nothing. A presence comes from something, is in something, and goes towards something. Such is a cycle of transfiguration. The substance is constant as the abstract structure of all presences is Being, yet the modality of each presence as well as the effective emergent phenomena render it subject to change.

2.8.1 The claim that a deity (or any mechanism for that matter) can create life “from nothing” does not imply non-Being: the god is still present.

2.8.1.1 A god with personality traits cannot be the same as Being, since personality is a matter of modality.

2.8.1.2 A god with modal features is a presence.

2.9 Life has to be an alias for the “totality of presences”, while “forms of life” or “life forms” provide alternative ways to denote presences.

2.10 There can be no non-life, as that would imply that there is non-Being, which is impossible. If anything lives, it does so qua presence; presence which extends Being. What are understood as birth and death are apparent phases in an everlasting cycle of transfiguration.

2.11 All forms of life are consubstantial: they partake of Being. Transfiguration operates at the modal level of an otherwise constant underlying substance.

2.11.1 If god is a presence, there can be many gods just as there are many presences.

2.11.2 All presences are subject to transfiguration.

2.11.3 If god is an alias for Being—substance without modality—there can still be gods qua presences. There would be no hierarchy, for that which lacks a mode of being cannot exist in a relationship of any sort with presences (hierarchy entails power and control): such a state entails modality.

2.12 There is no inherently inert, else inanimate, presence. What is thought of as inert may contribute to—or already be contributing to—some form of life that could be perceived as animate provided the necessary constitution of the case.

2.13 The way a presence is and the way it can be, or else its actuality and potentiality, are matters that concern the mode of application.

B.: No, this is my first time. How about you? You seem to know your way around this place.

A.: Last year I payed a visit to a friend of mine and we took the opportunity to explore the area. I remember all the main points of interest. It is not a big city, anyway.

B.: I presume you took lots of pictures. I do like the architecture. Every street has its own character. You can tell that the neighbourhoods grew organically instead of being the product of a concerted effort at mass urbanisation.

A.: I expected you to notice as much. There is a rich history here: a culture spanning centuries. You’re gonna love it!

B.: Good! Let’s keep going. What is our next destination?

A.: We are now walking towards the gardens of the main palace. There are multiple chateaus, mansions, old manors, and estates in the wider region. This one is the closest to the city centre.

B.: Do the gardens have trees, ponds, and such? While I do enjoy exploring the local culture, I also want to have a sense of something that is a bit closer to the natural state of things.

A.: Yes, they do. There’s plenty of green all around. We’ll tour the park and then move to the palace. Its architecture is magnificent while it houses a museum with lots of exhibits pertaining to the history of this country. What do you think?

B.: Well, I have been accompanying you all this time and am happy to keep doing so. Though you already know my political views regarding aristocrats and their holdings. A museum of this sort does not capture the history of the country, but the history of this country’s overlords.

A.: Not that radical democratic argumentation again! I have to be honest: I don’t understand how someone as smart as you is in favour of the many being involved in deciding matters of grave importance. Don’t you understand that the average opinion represents an average level of intelligence; intelligence well below yours? Why would you have idiots decide on your behalf?

B.: Your problem is that you think of people as a random assortment of individuals. Whereas I see communities predicated on cooperation and a propensity to show solidarity with those in need. When people work together, which is to say when the self-proclaimed aristocrats do not impose methods of “divide and conquer”, they can reach great heights in terms of cultural achievement. At any rate, why should we have artistoi, those who purportedly are the best in class, decide on behalf of everybody else? Who is the objective judge to determine the aristos among us? Expertise does not provide insight into the particularities of each case, to the kind of local knowledge that is crucial in interpersonal affairs. Were the aristoi in every hitherto aristocratic regime selected on the basis of their ability alone? Was every noble a true genius? Was even the average noble a genius? Of course not! Instead, their status as aristoi is grounded in legal-institutional arrangements that ultimately favour them. There are hereditary rights to power, transferable wealth from one generation to the next, titles and offices that bestow authority on a person or small group thereof to exert control over the so-called “masses”… How does a noble, say the heir apparent prince, prove to be an aristos when his ascension to the throne is nothing but his birthright?

A.: Their upbringing instils a sense of duty in their mind and teaches them to uphold the values of their country. Whereas common folk spend their days with trivial issues.

B.: You make it seem as if the comforts nobles take for granted teach them more about life than the average folk’s hardships. Think of all those incredibly dull rituals that emphasise conformance with the letter of the law rather than its substance. Those are humans who are kept in conditions of extreme domestication. They have become automata in the service of vanity and meaningless etiquette. How can a person rule over people whose struggles they do not understand? I have met many bureaucrats and people we would consider part of the establishment’s apparatus. I could tell that they live in their own impervious bubble; a capsule from within which it is virtually impossible to fathom how quotidian life beyond those boundaries unfolds.

A.: Well, at least you have met such people and do not romanticise the poor fellow.

B.: I need not idealise my condition. Let this commoner be proof that ability or fitness for purpose is not contingent on some title. They talk with me because they think I am one of them. They assume that I need to be smug and to show off everything I can for people to pay attention and to respect me. One of them was triggered to learn that I am a philosopher and promptly bragged how they speak in seven different tongues. It was an irrelevant remark which only showed how resources can be wasted when you still have nothing of import to say. At any rate, they grant me an audience on the presumption that I am their likeness, that I have the temerity and arrogance to consider myself worthier than others. They recognise their mistake soon thereafter. Whereas I know that my smartness, my talents, inclinations, and abilities, do not make me special, because they are not mine: I had no say in the matter. The difference between me and them is that I understand the impermanence of our presence: the lack of true ownership.

A.: Let’s sit here by the pond. You like this sort of setting and I am curious to hear you out before we venture any further. What do you mean by “ownership”? Is this like property rights?

B.: Property rights are an extension of an innate feeling of association. It is not just humans that have it. Why do you think a dog marks its territory? To inform other predators that “this area and all its resources are mine” even though such is nothing but a claim on ownership as the area remains alienable, i.e. it can belong to another claimant. Same principle for our kind. This gadget “belongs to me”, we say, yet there is nothing in its nature which makes such a relationship necessary. To enforce ownership we need a complex network of conventional arrangements. Hence the talk about rights and the concomitant mechanisms that are necessary to render them actual and to continuously enforce them.

A.: You are saying that a feudal lord who owns an entire mountain does not have an inalienable relationship with their property?

B.: Indeed. The mountain belongs to no one. The feudal lord’s claims have effect only insofar as the relevant institutions are in force. There is this notion of “Natural Law” which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms: either it is natural, in which case it is not instituted as such, or it is a law, in which case it is the product of convention.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

A.: Can you please elaborate on this distinction?

B.: An ancient philosopher called Protagoras (did his friends also call him “Prot”?) said that “human is the measure of all things”. This is a mistranslation that does not communicate the subtlety of the sage’s proposition. What he really said is this:

πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν

of all chremata human is the measure, of those that are in that they are, of those that are not in that they are not

Protagoras was speaking about chrēmata (simplified as “chremata”), not pragmata, and was saying that human is their measure both in terms of their being and, by extension, their modal features: both that they are and how they are. As you may know, chremata is a word we find in modern Greek as well. It means “money”, which is the perfect example to help us understand this phrase. As we know from economics, value is extrinsic: there is nothing in the nature of the item that performs the roles of money which grants it significance qua money, except for the fact that humans intersubjectively assign meaning to it through their actions and transactions. This is true for money as such, regardless of whether it is based on precious metals or is the outcome of state fiat (e.g. gold does not have a context-independent value). In other words, chremata are items with a use-value or else a conventional character. Convention is predicated on [collective] human agency, hence its measure is human. By contradistinction, human is not the measure of pragmata, such as the Sun rising from the East, the eyes being used to capture light and the liver to filter substances in the body. Even if all humans were to agree, by promulgating the relevant legislation, that the Sun must no longer rise from the East or that bodily organs should thenceforth perform other arbitrary functions, such a convention would not affect the pragmata because their being and modality is not contingent on human: human is not the measure of pragmata. At best, human is the measure of the mental representation of pragmata, which is a different matter altogether.

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

A.: Then works such as Natural Law are chremata and the same for property rights, social status, everything a palace symbolises, and so on. I now see why you hold those political views: they are a continuation of your metaphysics and epistemology. I think the concept of pragmata is clear. Basically everything that is independent of our mind. How about the mental representation of them? What can be said about it?

B.: Aristotle applied the term entelexeia (entelechy) which is a compound of en (in, inside), telos (end, objective), exei (to have, having). Things have a built-in end, such as the seed which becomes a tree where the eventuality of the tree is in the seed’s entelechy. This line of thinking is helpful, though I think it cannot stand on its own. It has to be complemented by a metaphysics and epistemology of what I call “the mode of application”, or else the recognition that the subject of inquiry is the product of analytics, of mentally discerning and isolating patterns from the totality of all there is, in order to study them as if they had a standalone presence. Everything we ever conceive of is the product of a case that we have constituted. A case is a set of factors in their interplay. So the constitution of the case encompasses both the underlying factors and the emergent qualities of their joint presence. Simply put, we see what we want or what our inquiry renders possible. Think of it like casting a light in a dark room: we only understand whatever the light reveals. A reconstitution of the case, such as by means of introspection in the reliability or specifics of the method and its subsequent recalibration, could reveal an altogether different facet of what we consider as reality.

A.: You mean that the telos is not always clear?

B.: I am saying that the telos is not necessarily built-in. We may well have ektelexeia in micro terms or else an extrinsic telos; one that is dependent on the context or what I have been describing as the constitution of the case. This stems from the world-view that nothing has a standalone presence, which implies that all forms of being are a function of the sub- and super- systems affecting them. The seed has the tree as its end only in light of the prevailing conditions which render such potentiality relevant. Think, however, of a more relatable scenario which will help flesh out my notion of the role of a given construct under the scope of contextuality. Imagine a sword. Its entelechy is that of a weapon. We can specify it further, such as a blade with a cutting edge, but the trivialities do not change the point and so the philosopher has no time for pedantry. The sword has the built-in end of being an implement of war. Yet this telos is not really intrinsic, for only the context can inform, influence, or otherwise determine the object’s potentiality. There is no decontextualised presence and hence no case-independent potentiality. The same sword can be enshrined in stone upon which it becomes a symbol of authority. It assumes another role. Its potential as such a symbol is not a function of its cutting edge or overall effectiveness as a weapon, but only of the relations pertinent to its effective role, such as the narrative surrounding it. That same sword in the stone can turn into a historical artefact, an exhibit at some museum, where its telos is to show what effectively is a snapshot of a civilisation from yester times. Still, that cultural artefact can be conceived as a store of value as it could be traded on the market. You get the idea. One could argue that the sword retains its original telos, though that would only be pertinent if the conditions which are conducive to it are also in effect, otherwise it is impossible for it to retain the set of factors in their given interplay which are external to it. In other words, entelechy is misleading if applied on its own. Entelechy is a relationship, an emergent quality, and thus not germane to a standalone presence.

A.: This has helped clarify what you meant by the mental representation of pragmata. So how do we call those?

B.: We call them chremata. The thoughts we have about pragmata are of our own making. As such, a pragma is the kind of absolute we can only conceive of in negative terms as that which is not a chrema. We have no means of understanding something without a mental representation of it, hence we think of pragmata indirectly through their transposition in our conscience as chremata. Thus I return to my remark on the mode of application: this is a mode of scepticism, where “scepticism” describes a fully fledged thinking process, not mere dubitativeness as the term falsely implies (scepsis or skepsis means thought and to be a sceptic is to be contemplative). The mode of application is the recognition and subsequent disposition that the thought of the thing is not the thing as such.

A.: You have covered a lot of ground in what feels like only a few words. How does all this relate to ownership?

B.: I said earlier that the difference between me and others who think highly of themselves is that I do not believe I own anything. I am not special.

A.: Yes, I remember. What does that really mean? That the context determines your specifics?

B.: More or less. Think about what we typically take as our own. This pair of eyes is mine. Those limbs. The hair. Yet them too are alienable. I will continue to be a philosopher without the beard. I will still be who I am without eyes or hands and legs. And we can continue with this reductive process. Which raises the question of who am I? Is there an irriducible self, a true “me”, that exists independent of the senses? Will I be a philosopher after I sustain some brain injury that permanentantly disables some cerebral functions? Then that too is alienable. I know how I look because I have associated those pictorial features with an appearance, so I can recognise myself in the mirror on in a photo with other people. Would I have a notion of how I look if I had no sight and no other means of conceiving of my appearance? I would not. The representation of my appearance would be meaningless. By the same token, would I think of myself as a philosopher if I had no means of thinking through those concepts and if I had no mental reference of what non-philosophers are? You can tell how this goes. The sense of self is itself the product of the case’s constitution. It is a deep seated illusion of permanence in a world of impermance.

A.: But what about the soul? Is that not truly yours or the true version of yourself?

B.: How can it be? How can any magnitude be a true version of selfhood when selfhood is an extension of the corporeal presence? There is no incorporeal human. How can the soul retain its telos independent of its role, and how can that ever be rendered possible without the appropriate interplay of factors. I think the belief in the soul, the idea that the body is the soul’s prison, that the soul will continue to live as a true version of self only to be taken to some other domain or to be reincarnated, is but a figment of our yearning for permanence. If there is a soul, it too is contingent on the particularities, it too is subject to change, it too is contextualised. There is no true selfhood, as there is no decontextualised presence.

A.: So when you die you just disappear?

B.: Again, remember the mode of application. There is no life and death independent of the constitution of the case. The cosmos is defined by everlasting transfiguration, forms undergoing incessant change. There is no beginning or end, just a constant present.

[ Read: Why you should not worry (2021-12-23) ]

A.: Do you believe in some afterlife?

B.: What I want to know is what is non-life. We can understand that concept in negative terms, but we cannot describe that which is nonexistent as the very description would be assigning attributes to it. I hold that life is all there is. There is no afterlife because there is no end to life. There is transfiguration. So if one cycle seems to end, and if we understand that as “this life here on Earth”, another will begin. There is no point in worrying about it because it too will be a constant present.

A.: Do you think our deeds carry over to other lives?

B.: No, because such a ledger in the heavens, so to speak, presupposes that there exists a constant “you” that has ownership over those deeds in the sense that they can be attributed or traced back to it. If we do not accept the notion of a permanent self, then we cannot provide assent to derivative thoughts. Besides, the whole theory of afterlife puts us in a transactional mindset where we must perform good deeds for their future returns in what effectively is an investment. Couched in those terms, what we believe to be the divine has the rather mundane task of being an accountant and banker of sorts who must keep track of all the minutia in the life of each human on this planet. The only reasonable view for performing good deeds is for their present utility in how they may enhance or otherwise enrich or enable the present condition.

A.: I see. Tell me more about ownership. You said before that you had no say in the matter. What exactly did you have in mind?

B.: I was referring to the fact that I had no choice at any stage in anything that ever contributed to my sense of self. I did not choose my parents, the place I was born in and where I was raised. The exact time I was there. The people I met and the prevailing conditions at each stage in my life. I did not select my talents, just as I did not decide on any aspect of my appearance. I did not make it so that my body would draw enjoyment from sport or that my mind would be attracted to philosophy to the extent that it does and for as long as it does. I did not pick à la carte the personality of an introverted recluse, nor did I opt to have no interest in sociability for its own sake. What little room is left for our volition is itself underpinned by built-in propensities and inclinations. We think we have unfettered will to determine every facet of our life, to draw on an empty canvas as it were, yet the canvas’ properties, the palette we may use, our ability to admix pigments and draw forms is not of our doing. We deal with superficialities, wrapped up in a rationalisation—a misleading sense of certitude—of free will. As such, I find accolades superfluous. When you say things like “someone as smart as you” I cannot take it personally because this description does not apply to an irreducible self but to yet another pattern in the cosmos. The palace, the symbol which started this conversation, is the pinnacle of delusion, for it encapsulates the view that one owns oneself and can own everything else. The self-professed aristoi are fools of the highest order because they yearn for recognition, for titles, and chremata of all sorts. Whereas someone like me is but a stray dog who marks some territory with the understanding that it always remains alienable.

A.: So your political views are to be understood as what exactly?

B.: Politics are matters of practice, of what is expedient. My views are a compromise between the recognition of impermanence and the delusion of permanence. A society cannot be fashioned in the image of a philosopher because not everyone is a philosopher and no philosophy is the finished article. The organisation of society can only ever be a work-in-progress. As for the aforementioned compromise: let everyone live comfortably by distributing resources equitably. Nothing is truly ours and no chremata can genuinely elevate our existence. Who am I, after all? A function of the case’s constitution. It is why I find the idea of muses so intriguing. Homer was appealing to the muses, the goddesses of the arts, to tell him what to write. While this may be an artistic device on the face of it, it does include a more profound insight: Homer’s works were not Homer’s, illustrated by the fact that we have them today without their author. What the person is can then be poetically described as a medium through which some pattern in the cosmos is made manifest: a decoder that transmits to us in clear terms a message that would otherwise not be comprehensible. This is also why I cannot put my work behind a paywall: it is not mine and if there is some purpose in my life it is to express the words that “the muse” whispers to me. Again, I have no choice in the matter.

A.: Aren’t you afraid that this sort of language will make you sound insane?

B.: What naive rationalists fail to appreciate is that myths are metaphors: an oral tradition and form of verbal technology that is used to compress and to store complex meanings in a simplified representation with a high mnemonic value. Make no mistake: there is no lady in the heavens actually talking to me. The modern human has a misplaced sense of worthiness which effectively translates as the belief that all genius is the product of modernity, while ancient folks were superstitious ignoramuses who worshipped ghosts. Oh look! I alluded to a goddess. Therefore, the vulgar empiricist will surmise, I lack the requisite rigour to differentiate fiction from reality. Let us not rely on such crude generalisations. It simply is easier to instruct people by imprinting an image in their conscience. Everyone can remember the insight that not even someone of Homer’s sophistication can own those epics. What we do then through this type of education is initiate students in a tradition that is not egoist and by extension anthropocentric. Those who can fully unpack the meanings of myths no longer need indirect references. The abstract thinker does not require examples or metaphors. Yet wisdom consists in understanding the midpoint in the case’s constitution, which here means to identity the needs of the audience and communicate the message accordingly. The muse expects you to disseminate her words in a manner that is effective. Do not fail in that task by employing needless jargon and by focusing on inconsequential technicalities whose context-specific function is, whether you intend it or not, to impress your peers. Maybe fools will care about how smart and erudite you appear to be. Those are the kind of sycophants that congregate those chateaus while boasting about their résumé. Yet the goddess knows the truth of your impermanence, of your non-ownership, and only wants you to be effective as her messenger. Raw data and/or implementation details have their purpose, though they lack strong mnemonic features, especially among the uninitiated, and so they cannot be our focus or primary medium of communication when what we want is to outline the bigger picture.

A.: You do not own your work. How does that make you feel about it?

B.: Aloof. I do it because I like it or, rather, because my very being is designed in such a way where I have no choice in the matter but to get a positive feedback from this particular loop. I am aloof because I know my work is not mine—despite the language I must necessarily use—so if I ever stop having an interest in it or if conditions are such where pursuit of the endeavour is impossible, I will remain calm as I will continue to be in a state of not owning anything. We suffer when we think we own our self and everything predicated on it. We claim to own our youth and so we are shocked when our hair turns grey and we start having wrinkles. We believe we own our physical prowess and so we get depressed when we can no longer perform at an elite level. We entertain delusions that our loved ones will be there forever and cannot withstand the pain of their inevitable loss. We aspire to always be who we are only to experience a crisis that springs from the friction between our baseless faith in permanence and the reality of impermanence. To remain aloof is to heed the voice of the goddess and to accept your role as a medium, as a conductor of sorts. You own nothing. Make the mistake of becoming invested in your self and of being identified with your interests only to be crushed by falsehoods, misplaced ambitions, and wrong expectations.

A.: I can imagine this extends to human relations?

B.: Of course! It also applies literally, such as me not holding any money. All this was an elaborate ploy to tell you that you are about to foot the bill. Haha! Anyhow, I think we have talked enough. Better get up and continue with our tourism.

A.: Are you coming to the museum after all?

B.: I never said I wouldn’t. I was simply searching for a pretext to share some thoughts. Off we go then.

A.: Hey, you can’t just blithely say that and expect to get away with it!

B.: I do when I have to. Otherwise I remain silent.

A.: I’ve noticed and think I now understand why. Do you mind if I speak to you about it?

B.: Please go ahead.

A.: Have you always been like that or has something happened to you that made you that way? I’ve known you for five years now and you always seem to be this way.

B.: I have always been the silent type, though experiences can always influence one’s disposition.

A.: I see. I thought it would be because of some event in your life or some phase you went through.

B.: Maybe you expected a different reply? I suppose you had some other topic in mind that you intended to elaborate on? I can hear it.

A.: Sorry for making this awkward… It’s just that I have been depressed for about a month now. Ever since my pet died. I had to quit a job that paid well and burnt bridges with old friends and colleagues, including a professor of mine from my days at the university. I was just too sad to listen to anyone or be productive.

B.: First off, there is no need to apologise. You have not done anything wrong and, as I said, I am willing to listen to you.

A.: Thanks!

B.: Regarding depression and the loss of loved ones, I know exactly what you mean. It feels like each loss leaves an open wound in your heart.

A.: Do you mind if I ask? Did you ever go through depression like what I am experiencing now? Can you relate to what I am alluding to?

B.: Just ask. No need to get permission for it. Yes, I have suffered from depression. Perhaps it was worse than your case, though that is beside the point. In hindsight, it was not all negative though it really felt all doom and gloom at the time. It was a test of my mental fortitude. In those depths where all hope seemed lost and no escape route was clearly available, I was remade. A part of me died there, only for another to grow in its stead. I have since been able to lead a life of tranquillity and aloofness.

A.: How can depression remake you though? Were you not feeling like super demotivated and exhausted? As if your vitality was leaking away and there was nothing you could do to reverse the process?

B.: Depression is a state of mind that differs profoundly from your default condition. It puts you in a position of extreme doubt, where you no longer have faith in your own abilities. Yet that same doubt can be used to undo the damage being done: to question the very reason of one’s pessimism, to consider how absurd the sense of powerlessness is when there is no underlying inhibition, and to change one’s priorities by shifting attention to things that can no longer be questioned. Depression made me a nihilist, though unlike the semantics of that term, the transformation was of a creative sort. It provided the impetus for a power impulse that reformed my mental representation of the world.

A.: I think I have become a nihilist as well, seeing how I stopped caring about activities that once seemed valuable. Care to elaborate on your case? How can nihilism work against depression? Shouldn’t it be invigorating a vicious cycle?

B.: A vicious cycle is the expected outcome for as long as the nihilist world-view does not turn inwards. When, however, you ask yourself what the value of depression is you must answer in a consistently nihilist fashion, namely, “none”. You see, depression is related to a sense of not recognising the value in things you once cherished. Just as you once assigned significance to a job or certain social connections; a value that has since been lost though it might be established once more. What is value then? It cannot be intrinsic to those magnitudes, as then it would be impossible to alter it by merely thinking of them in a different way, same with how you cannot make a dog a biped by virtue of a newfound opinion. Value of this kind is a human construct. It is always extrinsic.

A.: Okay. We learn that a career and social relations are not valuable in themselves. They acquire subjective importance under certain circumstances. Otherwise it would indeed be odd to annul it. We have discovered this fact. Now what? Does that really cure depression? I can hardly believe it.

B.: It is not magic. The emptiness of depression is exposed in full only once the belief in its futility is deeply embedded in you to the point where it is unshakeable. Right now you have been merely introduced to the concept. Take your time to think things through. Let it “sink in” as they say. Besides, I did not mean to imply that this change of perspective is all it takes to fix the problem. Apart from what you may be thinking, a change of state is also contingent on your physical condition.

A.: Physical condition? Isn’t depression a mental illness?

B.: It is. Though what is the locus of the mental state? Does it have a standalone presence or is it an aspect of a fully fledged human being?

A.: It must be part of being human.

B.: Correct. The mental state is a facet of the human organism, not some parallel dimension that exists regardless of what the rest of the organism is doing. Put differently, there is no mind without body, no body without mind. They are part of the same system, even though we may speak of them as if they were distinct. When we express ourselves in such a way, we tacitly acknowledge that we are performing an analytical exercise where we abstract from the totality of all there is the patterns we deem relevant to our inquiry. The abstraction of the thing is not the thing.

A.: Fine, the mental state is related to the physical state. Which one takes precedence though? I would say that what I think is not dependent on what I eat, for example. I can devour junk food and still be productive at my job in the same way I can when I consume my favourite salad.

B.: Do not trivialise the impact of dietary habits though. Some processes yield effects over time. Others have more immediate results. Junk food or generally a poor diet will not burden you right away but will definitely work to your detriment for years to come. A better example for our case is alcohol. Can you be productive after you drink, say, five pints of beer? Seriously though, don’t do that. Just pointing this out for the sake of the argument.

A.: I see what you mean and can now better grasp the original point on the connection between the mental and the physical states. So it is how when we are sick or tired, where we can’t really concentrate despite our volition.

B.: Indeed.

A.: So the body must be kept healthy? But how do you do that when depression makes you not want to eat properly? You don’t wish to exercise either. It seems like you are stuck.

B.: There is no one-size-fits-all. Each case comes with its own requirements and particularities. Sometimes you need help from friends and family and/or professionals. There is no shame in that—again, “shame” is an extrinsic value, so don’t worry about it. In my case though, I lived alone and had none but myself to rely on. I had enough base strength to go for walks, expose myself to daylight and, generally, keep the body functioning properly. Doing so ensured that I was hungry and had to eat properly, which prevented a deterioration of my condition. Given the depression, I avoided populated places and thus ventured into the wilderness. Perhaps that is what inspired my remaking. Being alone in the middle of a forest on a cold, rainy night awakened a primal force. Kind of how a dog basically is a domesticated wolf (some breeds more than others if you want to be technical, but I digress) yet still retains a kernel of its original wild nature that becomes evident in certain situations such as in social relations between dogs or once it turns feral. Depression cannot annul the animal within, nor can it deprive you of the sense of awe that the world gives you. When you set foot on a mountaintop overlooking a river valley, when you go for a winter swim at the ocean on a windy morning, when you escape from the comforts and distortions of your domestication, you realise how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of things and how elaborate yet consistent the cosmos is. Such a realisation does not reduce you to nothing. Instead, it reminds you of what your core already knows: the distinction between pragmata and chrēmata, i.e. things that stand independent of human convention and those that are contingent on it. You dismiss the chrēmata, such as the notion of a stable job, the normativity of some “other half” to fulfil you or family life in general, wealth, what others think of you, etc., on the premise that their value is extrinsic and arbitrary. You cannot reduce your essence though, such as the fact that you may not render irrelevant your bodily functions through sheer thought. In other words, your original nihilism attains a peculiar counter-nihilist function, as you critically re-assess every human-made construct, every desire and aspiration, every figment of convention, in pursuit of the essentials. Hence the reversal of nihilism, for you cannot assign a zero value to that which is invaluable. The animal within is thus unleashed and with it a vigour and resolve unlike any other.

A.: You seem to have gone to extreme ends. Alone in the forest? That is scary. Not that a winter swim in the ocean is any less intimidating… I have not done anything remotely interesting this last month. Mostly stayed at home.

B.: Yet here you are now, walking along the seaside with an old friend. I did not say that my endeavours happened all at once. There were many prior incremental adjustments, such as a brisk walk around the neighbourhood at dawn when no people were around, followed by longer strolls, and so on from there. Don’t set yourself up for failure. Start small and take it one step at a time. The slow and steady road is the least treacherous one.

A.: I understand. Back to your escapades then. Your description suggests that one can be propelled to the greatest heights by delving into the murkiest of depths. Is that so?

B.: Maybe not as poetically, though that is the gist of it. To stick to your metaphorical approach, it is just like how the darkest and coldest hours are those before the crack of dawn. Or how the days preceding the Winter Solstice are the ones with the least sunlight only for daytime to start growing again in a symbolic triumph of light over darkness. Hercules or the Sun-god (or Jesus Christ if you need a more relatable reference) was born at around that time because a hero/saviour is not hindered by the expanding darkness. Same for the primal vitality that lies within this fragile animal right here.

A.: How do you think I can overcome the loss of my pet? It meant everything to me.

B.: I have lost loved ones too. The pain of the first loss was excruciating. And the second felt like a major blow. I gradually learnt that while feelings of sadness are normal, the shock and amplification of the accompanying pain is due to misplaced expectations. We are made aware of death from early childhood. We know that every form of life is perishable. We understand impermanence, yet for whatever reason act as if it does not apply to our case. My dog will die one day, as will everyone I love. Myself included. Nothing can be done about it. Perhaps then, when we delude ourselves, when we entertain lies about the permanence of our immediate milieu, we maintain an unsustainable position beneath which tensions develop until they culminate as a crisis of sorts. Whereas the approximation of the truth, the recognition of what is evident, can keep us on a sustainable path where we can withstand the difficulties with the understanding that life and death are indivisible despite of how we experience them.

A.: What do you mean that life and death are no more divided? Aren’t they opposites?

B.: They are, though only as we experience them, for we have a linear conception of events with a clear beginning and definitive end. Such is our subjective interpretation. The subjectivity of human perspective is of paramount importance. What we understand immediately is not necessarily all there is to it. The life and death of individual presences is indistinguishable in the grand scheme of things. The cosmos is all there is. Life everlasting, infinite loops of differentiation and transfiguration of the same underlying substance, consistent modes and patterns, ever-changing phenomenally yet constant overall. Forms of life are like figures in the clouds that reveal themselves as the winds are shifting, only to be dispersed and turned into rain until they take another shape once more, and so on forever. There is no life, no death, no beginning or end in circularity. Just ever-present being whose forms alternate between states with varying degrees of complexity and strata of emergence.

A.: This is counter-intuitive. How can the death of a loved one be the same as them being alive next to you?

B.: Intuition, what makes sense and what doesn’t, is a function of the scope of application. With how we experience things, there is indeed a difference. Think, however, about the notion of connecting dots until a certain silhouette is discernible. In micro terms, all there is are dots and straight lines between them, yet the macro view once you zoom out sufficiently is that of the figure. The micro and the macro perspectives reveal distinct facets of reality. Rather, they condition the perception of what is real. It would be false to claim that only the micro foundations are truly there and that the silhouette is but an illusion of interconnected dots, as that would fail to account for the actuality of emergence in supersystems. For instance, humans are made up of organs, which themselves are composed of molecules, which in turn are collections of atoms. If we suppose that the atomic stratum is the irreducible one, and if we hold that only the micro level is real, then we would have to conclude that a human being is an illusion. So I must stress the importance of the scope of application and how that informs the constitution of the case under consideration.

A.: Fine. So given a different perspective, life and death are not distinguishable. How is that?

B.: In the universe there is no presence from nothing, in nothing, or towards nothing. This means that everything to ever exist has come from something, in something, and towards something. Presences undergo transfiguration: those changing forms we interpret as life and death. There can be no beginning and end for that would entail start and end points of nothing. Transfiguration then. Leaves decompose into what practically feels like dust that saturates the soil, which in turn provides nourishment for other organisms that are all interlinked in complex ways, as well as supporting the seed that will eventually become a tree whose existence is also framed, informed, conditioned, by all other forms in its milieu as well as the prevailing conditions therein. The constitution of the human organism and of every organism is reducible to minerals, metals, water, carbon: elements we find in nature in various combinations or compound forms. Yet human is not the aggregation of those elements but something more, as factors in their particular connections—in their interplay—establish emergent forms that are distinct from those same elements without any particular connection between them. Same principle for systems of systems, hence the stratification of emergence. What we experience as death is the deconstruction of a system (or system of systems), whose components will become integral to the reconstitution of another system not necessarily related to it in formal qualities, and so on forever. Such is a matter of modality, of alterations to the mode of being, though not to being per se.

[ Read: Why I learnt to let go (2021-09-20) ]

A.: If that is so, what is the meaning of life? Why not die instead?

B.: The human being is conditioned to operate within a scope of application where those magnitudes are perceived as distinct. While the cosmic scale is characterised by incessant transfiguration, each presence is defined by an overarching commitment to its form. Death scares us because we are naturally inclined to preserve ourselves and thus resist the inevitable transfiguration. Even our stories of an afterlife are consistent with this propensity. We do not want to accept that what we are experiencing will cease to be and that other systems of systems will be constituted in its place, with different strata of emergence within them.

A.: Does life have a meaning or is it just a losing battle against the inevitable?

B.: We provide meaning to our life by assigning value to specific states of affairs, objects, animals, people… Kind of how you show more affection to your dog although you love all dogs. There is nothing inherently different other than the circumstances that have made one have a higher relative value than others. Though we can think of “meaning” in an altogether different light in terms of transfigurable interconnected presences in a cosmos that always is.

A.: You mean kind of “why are there humans?” and that sort of theme?

B.: Yes. To answer such questions I start by thinking about factors in a system. For them to form a system, they must affect each other in reproducible some way. Thus there are feedback loops of triggers or stimuli that carry consequences and repeat the cycle. A feedback loop represents a mode of communication, for it sends and receives information whose content determines the relevant outcomes. A system may then be described as a nexus of interwoven communication channels and a system of systems as a stratified nexus thereof. There is, in other words, a universal language with its concepts, notions, meanings, syntax. Then we observe pattern and structure in all systems. A single hair encapsulates all the details that make up the organism it belongs to. The small thing, a factor in a subsystem, has in its potentiality its particular supersystem. How can it know so much and not fail to remember everything or execute its algorithm properly given the appropriate triggers? Similarly a seed just knows when the conditions are right to evolve into a tree and why a given seed yields a specific tree instead of an unpredictable result. There is an immanent logic in the composition of all presences. Our logic has ontological implications exactly because there is only one logic, even if there may be differences in degree or capacities. Then comes conscience which is an emergent state that is not required for the self-reprogrammability of presences though has awareness of some aspects of it. Conscience is not specific to humans and there is no reason whatsoever to believe that it is limited to a given stratum of emergence either. It is a property of a supersystem, such as a human or a dog, though such systems are subordinate to other superordinate systems which themselves share the universal language and logic. It thus would not surprise me if there is a universal conscience as well and that we are all partaking in it exactly how we partake in every other aspect of the cosmos.

A.: Fascinating. Is the universe alive?

B.: That would seem so. If there is a language and a logic and if systems of systems give rise to conscience then there most likely is a supersystem beyond us which envelops us and which itself experiences the particularities of its given form. What that presence looks like is unknown, though it existing is plausible. The reason I mentioned those is to return to your point on a possible meaning to our life. Could our presence as humans be contributing to the experience of this greater being in the same way our molecules make our experience possible in ways we cannot perceive? Since nothingness is impossible, all we do amounts to something even if it too will be transformed or reused in some way as itself was the product of transfiguration. Perhaps our deeds are stored as cosmic data or memories that will be employed in the formation of new states of affairs. Or they are like dreams that may or may not have a lasting impression yet perform a certain function in a more general set of processes.

A.: What are the implications for how we live?

B.: We live in accordance with our nature because that is what we are designed to do. We cannot know whether there is some ulterior motive behind that fact. For me, the understanding that the cosmos is language or logic or conscience goes together with my belief in the oneness of the universe. Presences are interconnected, they co-exist, while systems of systems are interdependent at various levels. Just as there is no distinction between the human mind and the body, I think there is no such thing as a soul in the traditional sense of an irreducible constant “self” that survives transfiguration intact and travels to some otherworldly dimension or domain in order to be punished or rewarded for its deeds during its time as a human. There is no alterity to the cosmos. The one is divisible into many, which is why we have forms of being. These are all consubstantial. The notion of the other is one of perspective or circumstance, not of substantial difference. The oneness of life means that we live in a constant present without knowing what future forms will take shape and how their scope of application will condition their mode of being. In this ever-present experience we recognise our self in the others because we are them, they are us by virtue of jointly partaking in—and partaking of—the universe. There is no individuality, strictly speaking, for one cannot have a standalone presence in which they are not informed, framed, conditioned, or determined at the level of their supersystem, or partially at some of their subsystems, by an environment.

A.: These extend to how we relate to other humans, but also animals and plants, right? Basically you are saying that we are not special as a species, but also no single human is special in their own right.

[ Read: Why you are not important (2021-08-28) ]

B.: We are a form of life like all others. While our nature does not leave a choice on the fact that we must eat other forms of life for sustenance (even vegans consume life forms, i.e. plants), we can nonetheless conduct ourselves in moderation. Not engineer mass suffering and destruction for matters where we do have a choice: we may choose not to pursue excess profits, not to hunt down wild animals or erode their habitat, not to deforest areas for luxury housing, not to pollute the air and the waters, not to wage wars of conquest, not to exploit people at the workplace, and so on. This is why I think stories or myths of deities, higher beings, impeccable heroes or sages are useful. They allow us to imagine how a more enlightened agent would behave and thus inspire us to use our power with restraint just how an omnipotent god would. We need role models so that we may aspire to our highest.

A.: Now that you mention it, what is the role of god in this oneness?

B.: There is no god in the traditional sense of an entity outside the cosmos. If there must be a god, it is the universe as such. Meaning that the one god is at once the multitude of gods. Furthermore, there can be no god as absolute goodness, for that would require non-goodness to be assigned to some other entity, effectively outsourced, which is impossible given the lack of a cosmic alterity. Such otherness would have to be extra-cosmic, of an altogether alien substance so as not to partake of the world, in which case we would have to wonder about the more fundamental magnitude that encompasses it and the cosmos and binds them together as opposites. Again we return to the one, the infinitely divisible one. In oneness there can only be equilibrium. For us humans this translates into a life of moderation, of avoiding excesses or else of not committing hubris. Hubris is the act of attempting to defy the constraints imposed upon our nature.

[ Read: Why it is not only your fault (2021-11-12) ]

A.: If there is no god, what is the role of religion in our lives?

B.: At its best, religion provides a community that humans need as the social animals that they are. Religion can also popularise insights such as those I have outlined so that everyone can learn from them. Just as people need myths and stories, they also require relatable personalities who can help them find their way in life. The problems with religion are not inherent to religiosity: corruption, abuse of power, dogmatism…

A.: You said that our nature determines a great deal of how we live. Do you think monastic life is consistent with that claim? Monks don’t seem to be like the rest of us.

B.: Monks do not become non-human by changing their behaviour. They simply choose to forgo the chrēmata I mentioned earlier: all those things that have conventional value. Instead they commit to a purposeful life of contemplation, which practically entails a simple modus vivendi. The only reason I am not officially a monk is because there is no religion for people like me. That granted, I don’t think there is a requirement for all humans to lead a monastic life. Some must do it so that others may be inspired to live in moderation.

A.: I must say, old friend, that you have given me hope in these dark hours I am going through. I will probably have more questions, though I get what you are saying. Basically, we need not worry about what happens in our life because nothing is permanent anyway.

B.: We can still be sad, happy, joyful, indignant, but in a non-committal fashion. Emotions must not take hold of us. Instead, we have to accept them as they come and go, in the same way we cannot force our eyes to unsee, our skin to not feel cold or heat, our heart to beat, and so on. We do not cling on to emotions or to states of affairs that produce them: that is what the acknowledgement of impermanence implies. Experience the present for what it is, whatever comes, whatever goes. For example, I maintain that I am not attached to my ideas, projects, writings. What I mean is that I have long overcome the fear of losing what I have, such as by means of criticism. These are not truly mine because they can be alienated from me. What is truly ours, my friend? I think we will not like the answer, for we are reducible to the substance of the one. To return to your point though about depression and not worrying, we sense how nihilism is an untenable position as it assigns a nil value to matters that are invaluable and assumes to know the full extent of the answers to all those questions we have entertained. The honest nihilist annuls their nihilism. The point is that we have now discussed how to overcome the constraints of the self-defeating tendencies that depression engenders, fathomed the world beyond our own conception of selfhood and its immediate phenomenality, escaped from the narrow confines of our particular experience, and eventually realised that we can grow out of both the depression and its accompanying nihilism.

B.: What do you think would be the outcome if those scenaria were to be realised?

A.: Things would have transpired differently. I would be better-off.

B.: Would you be here then? Meaning “you” as the person who experienced those events as they happened?

A.: No. I would have been another person.

B.: And what makes you think that this other person would not be beset on all sides by persistent doubts? Why wouldn’t that alternative “you” be unsatisfied with the prevailing conditions, with their lack of foresight, the absence of wisdom, and so on?

A.: I see what you mean. It is hard to tell what would have happened and be certain about it. Maybe it is wishful thinking on my side. I am focused on the present and compare it to some idealised other world. I just think that my problems today date back to specific turning points in my life. A tweak here and there and I would be free from my current suffering.

B.: It is true that the present is contingent on the past. What you did, what you have been through, informs who you are. There is no rewriting the past: it is a given. What is dubious is your conclusion that an alternative timeline would necessarily involve no suffering. Perhaps it would not be the same one you feel now, though it could still be a form of pain.

A.: But it would be another pain, perhaps not an excruciating one! At least such is my hope.

B.: There are no guarantees for that. What we do know, is what happened. Based on the available information, we may then wonder what causes the pain. If we can get an answer then we might be able to come up with something akin to a therapy. So I must ask: is your suffering the direct result of those experiences or the ideas and emotions associated with them?

A.: I am not confident I understand the nuance. Care to elaborate?

B.: Suppose you injured your foot and missed the unique opportunity to become a professional athlete. You replay in your mind the moments prior to the injury, trying to delineate the horizon of possibilities that was applicable then. That loop of replaying the events and thinking about their alternative timelines keeps you preoccupied. It is an obsession. Couched in those terms, I wonder: does what hurts you today come from (i) the injured foot or (ii) the troubled mind that continues to cling on to the events that surround the once-injured foot and insists on entertaining the concomitant expectations of an injury-free body?

A.: Now I understand the original question: pain coming from an experience differs from pain that derives from the memory of an experience.

B.: Not just the memory. Better say the wider narrative that you have developed. The memory is a part of it and might not even be the most important one.

A.: In that case it is not the foot that continues to hurt, but the narrative. The “what if” about the whole story.

B.: Your “what if” has a normative aspect to it. It is not simply an alternative timeline, but a preferable one. You think that you would have been a better person as a result, however it is you define the meaning of “better” in this context.

A.: Indeed! I put a positive spin on it.

B.: How can ideas make us feel pain? Can I hit you with an idea the way I do if a hurl stone at you?

[ Read: On materiality and emergence (2020-12-20) ]

A.: No, you can’t throw an idea at me. They hurt differently though, as they remind us of traumatic experiences we have been through or are otherwise afraid of.

B.: Fine. Yet there are ideas that do us harm without invoking past experiences or bringing up some imagery we outright dread. For example, you are past the typical age of marriage, let’s say 30 plus, and have no plans to get married or, anyway, it is not likely going to happen for a number of reasons. You are nonchalant about it, though your family and peers keep nagging you about rectifying the perceived error of your ways. After a lot of pressure and without being able to conform with those demands, you start feeling unsettled because everyone else has seemingly succeeded where you continue to fail. You might start wondering whether there is something seriously wrong with you. It is not some past event that haunts you nor fear of marriage nor even fear of being considered unsuccessful on some inane social metric. You are saddened by your present predicament as a marginalised fellow: the fact that your social environment enforces a certain normativity as a precondition of treating you as a normal person. Your sadness springs from the impression that you might really be a human manqué, yet you have no notion of what that entails, what the actual flaws are. It is just an annoyance, if you prefer.

A.: Sure, that is another possibility.

B.: In both cases there is a constant: ideas can make us feel sad, disillusioned, desperate… My question is how is that even possible? Why do we experience such emotions in reaction to persistent thoughts?

A.: It is curious. You explained it cannot be just past events or obvious phobias. I wonder where you are going with this.

B.: What is true for ideas applies to all stimuli: they trigger a reaction. When that is inconsistent with our actuality, there is friction, so to speak. Our mind wants to go one way, but our underlying condition keeps us on another path. There is a push and pull in opposite directions. It does not physically tear us apart, though it does upset our inner balance, the local optimum in each of the subsystems that comprise us, and thus causes chain reactions which are impressed on our conscious self as pain, sadness, et cetera.

A.: Give me an example of this push and pull.

B.: You wish, for whatever reason, to become a basketball player. You have fully bought into the idea that you will make it and put all your hopes in a successful career. No matter how hard you try, you lack the natural athleticism to compete in this sport. You are not as tall, as strong, as technical. In short, there is no chance that you can become a basketball player because your reality is not conducive to such an outcome. Your potential may lie in the arts: you have a vivid imagination, a capacity to weave together lyrics into compelling poetry, and so on. Instead of accepting what your nature renders possible, you pursue an unrealisable target. But your entire being does not draw satisfaction out of playing basketball: it wants to commit to artistic expression and find fulfilment through it. The more you disregard yourself, the greater the sense of uneasiness will be. You might not be self-conscious enough to recognise it immediately, though it is there. The pressure is building up and will one day explode, resulting in a state of dissatisfaction.

A.: That is an example that applies to many cases. Such as a morally dubious job that you keeping doing out of necessity, trying to mimic your peers in their behavioural patterns just so that you may fit in and not be lonely, impossible infatuations… Everything that makes you feel dead inside.

B.: In other words, not being yourself.

A.: Why does that cause pain though?

B.: I am of the view that there is no substantive distinction between the mind or soul and the body. These are analytical constructs, meaning that we abstract them from their actuality to make sense of them in idealised situations; to study them in vitro. Whereas the in vivo condition is one where those constructs are part of the same presence. They are subsystems of a greater system, which we understand as the human organism. Each subsystem consists of subsystems of its own. Every system has its own local rules while conforming with those of its immediate supersystem. And from each system comes an emergent reality that is identifiable only in the interplay of its factors—at the level of the system as such—not in each factor in isolation, to the effect that the order of systems, from the sub- to the super- system, reflects the stratification of emergence. Each stratum has its own scope of application, which we can again abstract for the purposes of analytics, such as to study the eye in its own right, its shape, colours, etc., though not its subsystems. The point is that you cannot separate the mind from the body in vivo, for they both represent systems of systems which in their interplay create a supersystem: the human organism. So I repeat that the mind and body are analytical constructs. We use them in everyday language to make sense of things and be succinct. As such, the state of our body influences the state of our mind, and vice versa. Remember that I consider ideas stimuli, which trigger reactions. In turn, reactions cause a cascade of further reactions. Just like how the idea of your dog makes you happy and puts you in a good mood for the rest of the day: some underlying biochemical processes are at play. Let scientists do their part while we do ours. The point is that what troubles your mind ultimately affects your body; what influences the body conditions the mind.

A.: That makes sense. Another case where this dynamic can be identified is when someone is ill: you cannot expect them to meditate intensely or philosophise at length while barely being able to get out of bed. Based on this, can I just undo or unthink my obsession and heal myself in an instant?

B.: That depends on the specifics of the case, the degree of the problem, and so on. In principle though, to unthink is to rethink, and to rethink is to initiate a process of recalibrating your inner balance. Whether you bring it closer to its natural equilibrium or to a sub-optimal one is a matter of what the rethinking involves, whether it is benign for your being or detrimental to it. To re-use my last example of being misguided into pursuing a career in basketball instead of heeding your inner call: are you trying to express yourself through art and thus accommodate your inclinations—accept who you are—or did you find some new, yet still unrelated, passion that keeps you hostage?

A.: How do you start that process of recalibration?

B.: By trying to identify the factors that constitute your particular case. You said you feel guilt and regret for something you did. Ask yourself whether you would act differently today. If the answer is affirmative, then you already know that one factor of the case in present time differs profoundly from its counterpart in that past time where the trouble begins. Then inquire upon the prevailing conditions: what led you to commit that past act and do those incentives, motives, or triggers hold true today? In other words, would you be compelled to repeat that act? If no, then you have another clear indication that the case you are immersed in is not the same as the past one.

A.: By knowing how things stand I can have a better sense of what is going on. How does that help me?

B.: I have explained before that agency is a function of structure. This might sound too abstract and cryptic, but I will unpack it for you here.

[ Read: On walking (away) (2021-07-19) ]

A.: Thanks!

B.: Agency generally means the entity that acts; the entity that has the capacity of initiative; the power impulse that brings about a change in the state of affairs. Structure refers to the milieu within which the agency is made manifest. The structure is not the one which acts, but the environment in which the action unfolds. Understand that these are analytical constructs as well. We identify them by abstracting a case from the totality of all there is.

A.: Give me an example, please.

B.: You are working for a company. There exists a certain corporate culture you have to respect and internalise as a worker. Your agency qua employee is conditioned by the rules of your contract and, more broadly, by what is meant to be employed in that context. If, for instance, the company has a policy against ecological initiatives and you voice your support for one such cause, then you will get fired: the agency cannot escape the constraints of the structure.

A.: And this agency and structure dynamic is generalisable?

B.: Yes, consider what I said before about my belief that there is no such thing as a soul as distinct from the body. Why do I claim as much? Because the soul is traditionally considered to have a standalone presence. I doubt this is the case, for there must be an environment within which the soul is possible and within which it is made manifest. The soul cannot come from nothing, but from something, for if it were nothing then what caused it? And don’t tell me “God”, because that still counts as “something”. Moreover, the soul cannot be in nothing, as then how would it move into a body, given that motion or generally this incarnation must take place somewhere? So it does not have a standalone presence. Furthermore, it is said that the soul is the true version of “you”, the one which is not degraded or otherwise led astray by the frailties of the body, which contradicts the idea of an immutable, true “you”, for if the body can affect the soul then why can’t some other factor in its environment do the same? And how do we even know that the bodyless soul is the true “you”, or indeed has any other property, if it is supposed to be in nothing? If it is not in nothing, it is in something, hence an environment, hence a structure that conditions it. Same principle for the related idea of “free will” where again it is thought that each person has a standalone presence, when it is abundantly clear that we are exposed to a broad range of natural and social-cultural factors that influence us and delimit the scope of our choices and our value judgements at each point.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

A.: These are tricky issues… Do you have a simpler example?

B.: Think about your character in a video game. The agency here is the character and the structure is what the game, or rather its underlying programming code, renders possible. If, say, the game solely involves precision jumping from one platform to another in a two-dimensional third-person view, you cannot have that same agency do something radically different, such as farming in a three-dimensional space from a first-person perspective.

[ Read: Why you are not important (2021-08-28) ]

A.: Okay, so there always is something that sets boundaries on what we do…

B.: And on what can ever be done within the scope of the agency. Hence the formulation that agency is a function of structure. Now things get more complicated once we consider complex networks, such as human society. From the perspective of a person, other people are part of the structure insofar as their presence frames, informs, or otherwise influences that person’s agency. Yet those people are agents in their own right, meaning that the structure is neither static nor exogenous to the case. And so I must stress that these are analytical constructs. We can find cases where they collapse into themselves or otherwise have a context-dependant set of peculiarities.

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

A.: Understood. Now I must know how this relates to the point of coping with feelings of regret and guilt.

B.: I said that you need to identify the constitution of the particular case you are in. By knowing that agency is a function of structure you can now understand that your past self was the product of its time, of the prevailing conditions there and then. Today the structure may be different and so is the agency. In practical terms, I do not agree with the notion that what we do is necessarily eternal, that some sin must always persist independent of the case, not least because I dismiss the concept of a permanent, true “you” in the form of the soul. I do not believe in any decontextualised presence and, consequently, cannot accept a system of values predicated on such figments of thought.

A.: Oh, now I am connecting the dots! My past self no longer exists. The conditions that made that person may not apply any more. So, your argument goes, it might be that the thoughts that trouble me can have no real power over me because they too should belong to a case that is not applicable any more.

B.: Correct. That is how you nullify a persistent thought. More generally though, we have to be aware of this concept of ideas as stimuli, because by maintaining this attitude of finding the truth in the constitution of the case, by being dubitative and inquisitive, we prepare the mind to fend off such incursions or, if you prefer, to not be bothered by them. Here is the thing: your condition becomes dependent on stimuli, in the same way one gets addicted to coffee and thinks that they can no longer wake up or be productive without it. The mind believes it, the body yearns it. And so the stimulus takes hold over you and ensnares you, so to speak, by engendering chain reactions which condition you to seek it again and again.

A.: Could it be that I am addicted to those troubling thoughts?

B.: It could be, in the sense that you keep summoning “ghosts of the past”, if I may describe them thus, to accompany you. You have befriended them, as it were. Whereas by nullifying their potency, by exposing their falsity and inapplicability in the constitution of your case, you have made yourself immune to them. Whenever they re-appear you are prepared to dismiss them as irrelevant because you have understood that they cannot possibly apply to you anymore. They become powerless.

A.: Then you are saying that through knowledge we break free from those pernicious thoughts. Is there another way? Why can’t I just ignore them, such as by getting drunk to the point where I no longer think about them?

B.: Getting drunk, or generally losing control, just so that you can ignore something temporarily is no real solution. At best, it postpones the day of reckoning. You are piling one problem on top of another in exchange for some ephemeral comfort. As for ignoring it, that still does not address the root cause of the uneasiness. The thoughts, these “ghosts of the past”, still wield power over you. They appear as stimuli and immediately trigger a reaction in which you are now supposed to work laboriously just so that you can claim to not feel any pain. Is that not the same as lying to yourself? You have done nothing to address the underlying reason why you harbour those negative emotions as a reaction to the appearance of said stimuli. You have not managed to overcome those troubling thoughts because you have not subjected them to close scrutiny and ultimately dismissed them as inapplicable.

A.: Can you simply do that? It requires mental fortitude and I am weak.

B.: The primary source of strength is technique. You know it from your experience with football. How powerful a shot is depends on the impact of your foot on the ball and the spin you put on it. A good kick involves a swing of the whole body. It is not the raw power that your feet may generate but the manner in which the ball is launched.

A.: Fair enough.

B.: The gist is that if you are doing it wrongly, it does not matter how much effort you put into it. Instead of recognising that your shortcomings are due to an inappropriate method—a bad technique—you rationalise your condition as you being a weakling. That’s nonsense! It brings us back to the point of studying how things stand. Start from scratch and take each factor one-by-one. Determine its actuality and be honest about what its significance is.

A.: What you already said about the fact that I have changed and so has the situation…

B.: Don’t worry about your ideas just like you should not bother with the random thoughts of others. Think about it this way, suppose that someone suggests you consume junk food as it will do you good. You have quit such bad habits for more than a decade, as you maintain an unflinching commitment to a healthy lifestyle. You unequivocally reject junk food from a position of knowledge. Such false claim from someone cannot bother you, for it has no material implications on your being. It is an idea that does not apply to the constitution of the particular case which you know well.

A.: In this example, if I did not know about junk food I would have reacted to the opinion differently. I would most likely double-check for myself, ask others for feedbak… In general, that opinion would have had a profound effect on me. It would be exercising control over me.

B.: Do you see now how futile it is to get drunk or pretend that the problem isn’t there? Those methods do not provide you with any insights, they do not address the root cause of the friction.

A.: I do. Then there is no easy way out…

B.: There isn’t. You need to be patient and take things slowly. There can be no immediate results, no magic solutions. What matters is the disposition of acknowledging that at every point it is not just about you; it never is just about you.

[ Read: Why it is not just about you (2021-08-03) ]

A.: Thanks! Patience is key. Plus there is the fact that the mind and the body are not separate, as you mentioned. A rebalancing requires a lot more work.

B.: True. Ignore the cliché of “just go for it”. I prefer to liken the process to how a turtle ventures on its destination: slow and steady on its path, one decisive step at a time.

A.: Fine!

B.: We have established a common basis on how to reach and maintain a state of ataraxia or non-disturbance through the attitude of seeking knowledge, though I feel there is more to be accounted for. Let me press on with this problématique by means of a question: have you ever considered what the act of forgiveness does?

A.: You tell someone that you longer hold their past deeds against them.

B.: This can be a part of it. The essence, however, is that you break the spell of the thought related to the event. You liberate yourself from it. You learn to let go by admitting that you are no longer controlled by those notions; that you have assessed the case and you consider them null and void from a position of knowledge. In a similar fashion, to forgive yourself is another way of identifying the constitution of the case, stating that the agent of yore is a function of the applicable structure and recognising that your actuality today differs from its past one.

A.: All clear! I just need to be a bit less self-critical then.

B.: Self-criticism is fine, when done in moderation, else when it is commensurate with the particularities of the case. Recall that agency is a function of structure, meaning that your contribution in the concatenation of events is not the sole factor involved. In your introspective critique you may have assigned a weight of 99% for your involvement and left the 1% for everything else. What if such is a misreading of the circumstances? What if your part was the 1% and the rest belongs to factors outside your control? Why insist on remorseless self-criticism, or the mental equivalent of beating yourself into submission, when it is not clear that your assessment is correct? Why be dogmatic about a certain view and why not try to validate it first? Again, you need to examine the specifics and maintain a sense of perspective, not least because free will, just like the soul, is not absolute and decontextualised in the way conventional wisdom teaches us.

A.: It is difficult to avoid criticising my past self.

B.: There is no need to stop doing that. Learn to conduct yourself in moderation. I have already told you about the meaning of “hubris”: the notion that by going to extremes we inflict potentially irreparable damage on ourselves.

A.: Yes, I remember.

B.: And you also told me you are fascinated by ancient Greek polytheism.

A.: Correct.

B.: I suppose you already know about the two maxims inscribed at the entrance to the temple of Apollo in Delphi: (i) nothing in excess (ΜΗΔΕΝ ΑΓΑΝ), and (ii) know yourself (ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ). Do you think it is a coincidence that those two complementary statements were written there?

A.: No, it can’t be some random choice of words. Speak your mind!

B.: To avoid excesses you have to know what your limits are. Each person is unique; unique not only at once but also over time, as having gone through an individualised set of experiences. What the sages tell us is that to avoid committing hubris, we must figure out how things stand. I would add to this that the self does not have a standalone presence. We can only discover it in some milieu, framed by a social-cultural whole, as well as a natural environment. Again, we encounter this pattern of the structure and of the agent being a function of it. There is no selfhood without structure; no “you” without the conditions that made it possible, that substantiated it. You learn about who you are by juxtaposing it with an understanding of others, with insights on who you are not. But you can never be sure. The self is neither static nor immutable. It is a work-in-progress that remains exposed to evolving states of affairs. To know yourself, therefore, is to remain open to the possibility of knowing, to be dubitative and inquisitive, to not commit the grave error of assuming a role that you mistake for your true self.

A.: I must be more Apollonian then? To find the meter in life, the balance?

B.: I think the ancient sages have the answer for you: be Apollonian as well. Why do you think there are multiple gods in that tradition which you admire? These are archetypes that symbolise different facets of life. Think about humanity: we are not perfectly rational agents, or purely emotional, or some ethereal spirit, etc. We are fully fledged beings with a rational as well as an irrational side, emotions, carnal needs and desires, a mystical disposition through which we connect with the world that envelops us… Our very makeup makes it impossible to be just Apollonian, or strictly Dionysian, and so on. We must strike a balance and be a bit of everything, always without disturbing our natural inner equilibrium. Be human and make no pretences about what the human kind is. Be human to its fullest potential, not as a fraction of it.

A.: Aren’t some parts of humanity kind of undesirable though? Like if you spend all day eating?

B.: Is eating undesirable or the fact that you spend all day doing it, thus committing hubris in the process?

A.: Ah yes, we ought to adopt a balanced approach.

B.: Exactly. The balancing act involves knowledge of the case’ constitution: know yourself, thus inquire upon the structure that informs your agency.

A.: “Agency is a function of structure.” Got it!

B.: Those who aspire to become a fraction of human commit what I consider to be a not-so-obvious error, unless they are mere hypocrites: they start off with an analytical conception of what the human is, then add to it a normative value to the effect of what the “good human” must be, and then they conflate this ideal with the actual human being. Based on that conflation, they derive a system of values which informs their conduct. This is due to a general propensity of idolisation, which I think is inherent to humanity. To idolise is to replace the actual with its idealised counterpart and then forget about the process of substitution you have performed. The idol thus takes the stead of the actual: it is the only one being considered. Consider an icon representing a Christian saint, or a statue symbolising Zeus—whatever works for you: if you think that the pictorial features of the icon or the carved stone as such hold the saint/god then you are idolising it, you ignore the actual artefact and in its place you only see the saint/god embodied. To our point, the purely rational human, the perfectly spiritual human, and such concepts, are idols and those who faithfully believe in them idolaters.

A.: Interesting! How does that relate to our topic?

B.: When you self-criticise without acknowledging the constitution of the case, you are committing the hubris of idolisation. Either you idealise your surroundings or your self or something in-between to the point where you ignore what the actual state of those analytical constructs is. You insist that it is your fault because you have set up an idol that you as a fallible mortal can never live up to.

A.: So idolisation is another way of violating the tandem of maxims “nothing in excess” and “know yourself”. It fits together with everything else you elaborated on. Let me ask you this: is there any justification for blaming yourself for something for as long as you live?

B.: There might be, if the structure which informed that agent has not undergone change or if that agent somehow remains unaltered. How likely that is over a sufficiently long period of time? Probably not much. In practice, there is always a chance that things have been refashioned and that a careful inquiry into the constitution of the person’s particular case will yield the finding that the “ghosts of the past”, those persistent thoughts, have no power over the present. Sometimes it is not your fault or not only your fault. Take it easy and seek knowledge, just as the ancient sages have taught us.

B.: Hi! How’s it going?

A.: I was not expecting to meet you here. I thought you had already left for some unknown destination. It’s already been five months since I last saw you and you never report on your whereabouts.

B.: I will be leaving this place shortly. I have decided to spend the last few days travelling around.

A.: Where are you heading to?

B.: Southwards. About an hour from here. The destination is of no import. Suffice to say that a river flows through the town and there is a hill with a perfect view of the fields stretching out to the horizon. The next train departs in approximately forty five minutes. Just enough time to hold a meaningful conversation and, voilà, here you are! Yesterday I went on foot to a village nearby for the third time over the course of the last few weeks: gave me another chance to pass through the forest. It took me most of the day as I moved further into the woods than usual.

A.: Nearby village? The closest I can think of is fifteen kilometres from here. Thankfully you are boarding a train this time…

B.: Well, you know that I enjoy those long promenades. It is not about walking per se, though that is fulfilling as well. For me a walk when I am all by myself provides an opportunity to think things through without any major distractions.

[ Read: On walking (away) (2021-07-19) ]

A.: And so the longer the walk, the better?

B.: More-or-less.

A.: Fun fact: I remember when I first learnt about your penchant to cover long distances. It was through direct experience. You were passing by while I was waiting at the bus stop. I asked you where you were going. Your reply was something like “not far from here”. You were so nonchalant about it. So I assumed you meant the next corner or somewhere nearby and I spontaneously joined you for a quick chat—or so I thought.

B.: Big mistake, I know! Never follow someone who isn’t going anywhere in particular.

A.: We kept walking for like 30 minutes until I had to quit.

B.: Thankfully humanity invented public transport instead of optimising around the whims of eccentric fellows.

A.: Our subsequent encounters were easier for me: I would just wait at a given location and you would meet me there. No more surprises. Anyhow, those are nice memories. Are you about to visit someone today?

B.: No, just site-seeing. More of the same, basically. Only this time I will tread different paths, traverse both familiar and new grounds, literally and figuratively. What about you?

A.: I am waiting for a close relative of mine. She will be staying at my place for today and the weekend. The train should have arrived by now, though I got a message telling me that there was a delay. I would have stayed home had I noticed it sooner but I left my phone on silent mode and only checked it after I was already en route to the station… No worries. Since you are here, time will fly without noticing it.

B.: Good to know. Perhaps you being here is no mere coincidence. I sense you are the right person at the right time.

A.: In which regard? For what purpose?

B.: For me to elaborate on some ideas I have been developing for a while now. Will you tolerate me?

A.: Sure, regale me with your musings. Though why do you think I am the right person for such a task? Need I remind you that I am not a philosopher?

B.: For me, philosophy is interesting insofar as it unfolds through purposeful action as a way of living. If you can think things through and grasp abstract patterns, you are already halfway there. The rest is a matter of commitment and of drawing linkages between the general and the particular. I like to think of philosophy as the ability to learn about the greater matters by studying the patterns that are present in smaller-scale, seemingly insignificant, states of affairs.

[ Read: Why you are not important (2021-08-03) ]

A.: If I did not know you any better, I would assume that you are a charlatan trying to persuade me to believe in something that I am not.

B.: But you understand I have no interest in flattering you. Remember when you told me about your ethos with regard to food consumption? I noted that I apply similar methods, though I questioned your totalising moral claims.

A.: Yes, I recall. It made me doubt myself. You explained that ethics is about finding the right balance in light of our ignorant nature. Whereas when we try to figure out the perfect system, when we labour under the assumption that we can do that, we pretend to be omniscient in actuality or potentiality and that no edge case or special set of circumstances can challenge our beliefs. I still haven’t changed my habits though. Does that mean I did not learn anything?

B.: You changed how you approach the particular issue. Your mindset is different, less prone to becoming dogmatic or, else, more open to the possibility of being proven incomplete, inadequate, or otherwise mistaken. It takes courage and honesty to admit one’s shortcomings. Though, above all, you gained insight into a more general observation about the latent hubris in totalising moral claims; an insight which in everyday parlance boils down to the admission that “we are not sure” or “we may be wrong” and so we refrain from passing ultimate judgement. Hubris consists in the failure to draw such a conclusion, keeping up with the pretences and having no sense of our place in the world.

[ Read: Why it is not just about you (2021-08-03) ]

A.: Tell me then, why do you think it is no coincidence that I am here and that I am the right person at the right time?

B.: I have this intuition that humans are, at different points in their life, attuned to specific frequencies, as it were. We are more receptive to certain types of input or stimuli. What we once dismissed, we now seek with eagerness. What was obscure becomes conspicuous. An aspect of this phenomenon is known to all of us adults, as our behavioural patterns and their triggers are no longer the same as those we had when we were kids. There are environmental, biological, and cultural reasons as to why that is. The exact feedback loops may vary but the point stands: we are not always the same, as we exhibit variance in our response to stimuli and overall conduct. Extend this beyond the divide between childhood and adulthood. Think of it more in terms of having a “good day”, as they say. Such as today I had the inspiration to write at length, whereas yesterday I did not. I just feel that in this moment you are open to hear what I am about to expound on and are capable of contributing to the dialogue.

A.: And how can you possibly know that?

B.: By recognising the power of attraction or, else, the keenness with which we identify familiar patterns in an otherwise indeterminate structure. Let me draw a parallel here, based on a personal observation that I have noticed over the years. You are in a crowded place. Let’s say you got a part-time job as a salesperson at a local festival, or are just casually walking down a boisterous street, or you are about to board an aeroplane. Whatever metaphor works for you. The point is that there are lots of people in your vicinity. Some move towards you, others away from you, and others still follow different trajectories altogether. As you go about minding your own business, you do not notice the details: those people remain elusive, blurred figures whose presence barely registers in your mind. And then, without any further trigger, you turn around to stare at someone who was outside your peripheral vision while they do the same—you can tell by the sudden motion. It appears like a double coincidence of reactions. Your eyes meet for what could just as well be a full minute. Two strangers sharing a moment. Without ever uttering a word you feel a deeper connection, a mutual recognition that both of you are in synchronicity.

A.: This has happened to me as well, though I always interpreted it as having erotic connotations or at least an interest towards that end. A pre-flirting phase. In other words, I did not assign too much importance to it.

B.: That could also be it, though not necessarily. Be mindful of it and you will notice that oftentimes you do not feel any attraction of the sort. Besides, love and/or sex are part of the human experience. In their perfected form, not their inwardly corrupted commodified simulacra nor the socially-imposed role-playing games of family obligations and gender roles, they are means through which people connect with each other using their available senses, rather than just their faculty of reason. To dismiss love and/or sex in advance as inherently sinful or lustful is to be predisposed against the opportunity to bond with someone in a way that is not possible otherwise. Hence my scepticism of all schools of thought that cast those in a negative light at the outset. Erotic or not this shared ability to pick each other out from the crowd does not have to last for an eternity in order to amount to something. It may be momentary or short-lived. The point is that when it occurs we are presented with the chance to share what we have in common: it could be the start of something special or simply the formation of a memory; the memory of a place we briefly explored in a reverie.

A.: Is this how you will ask me for a date? By inventing some new religion?

B.: A decent attempt! But futile.

A.: Fine. What do you think may be special in our case?

B.: The elucidation of certain very difficult concepts.

A.: I guess I am honoured to be in this position, even though I didn’t do anything to prepare for it.

B.: This is where we typically err because of our upbringing. We have this deep-seated cultural perception that everything we do is the product of our volition, while all that happens to us is ultimately of our own individual or collective making. I can understand the need for such a world-view, especially with regard to maintaining a system of rules predicated on the binary of reward versus punishment. Unconditional free will makes perfect sense as one of many possible conventions. Still, it reduces the complexity of the case and, in the process, prevents us from exploring understudied aspects of our condition. That which appears to be our personal choice is but a fraction of all that our organism does, what the contributing factors to our presence engender, what the structure within which we operate renders possible, and what our predisposition is or has evolved to be. Furthermore, we are adept at rationalising our current state and then codifying and internalising those findings into a quasi-empirical justification of our self-image. If you keep telling yourself you are not capable of philosophy and if, as a result, you refrain from trying when presented with the opportunity, you will never explore that aspect of yourself and will instead entertain the false notion of knowing in advance that you are not fit for the task: a self-fulfilling prophecy in which your conscious cognitive function labours against the rest of your system.

A.: I am listening. What are those difficult concepts?

B.: Let’s revisit the phenomenon of two strangers turning their head beyond their peripheral vision to lock eyes with each other in a crowded place. How would you explain that?

A.: Seems to me like a coincidence. You notice it and attach significance to it because it feels unusual, though you do not count all the times when it does not happen, such as when you turn around but there is no-one there paying attention. Or it may be that we subconsciously are captured by someone who looks interesting to us and turn our attention towards them while they do the same.

B.: It might be just a matter of luck and I keep reading too much into it. What do you think about the alternative explanation that likeness recognises likeness?

A.: You mean that idea about the power of attraction? Like showing interest in someone? It still feels to me as though it traces its roots to fundamental aspects of our being. Maybe it is the sex drive or some other faculty that governs our gregarious outlook?

B.: And do you think we turn our attention to someone out of our own will?

A.: If the keyword is “attention”, then I am inclined to answer affirmatively. How else?

B.: You just mentioned the sex drive or any other faculty that controls our nature. Is that part of one’s free will?

A.: Maybe not the built-in tendencies or lack thereof, but at least there is a degree of choice on how to behave.

B.: Sure, but that is not exactly what I asked. Your answer tells me that an instinct, or however we want to call it, is not part of our free will because it functions independently of what our conscious, rational mind plans. Whether there is the impression of choice at some level is another discussion, which we will get to. Am I interpreting it correctly?

A.: Yes.

B.: Do we have one or many instincts?

A.: Many.

B.: And what about the various subsystems that form the organism we call a human being. Is our volition involved in their ongoing functioning and interconnectedness? Does, for example, our conscious brain choose to send fructose to be synthesised by the liver? Or is there some other mechanism, some set of processes, that takes care of such functions regardless of our stratagems?

A.: There must be something else at play. We do not micromanage all those and we do not get to piece together our organism.

B.: Then we have the subsystems which form the subsystems. An atom is basically a bundle of electromagnetism. Lots of them together form molecules and lots of those in their interplay contribute to the strata of emergent forms all the way up to the vital organs and ultimately the supersystem we know as the human being.

A.: I see where you are going with this: no, those are not part of our free will either.

B.: The more we think about our organism, its multifaceted constitution, the narrower the scope of this vaunted volition of ours.

A.: Is free will an illusion?

B.: Perhaps. Let us not press on that point to question its existence altogether and instead grant that it still exists, even though it is not as powerful or extensive as we are indoctrinated to believe. The train will be departing soon and this is not what I want to focus on, anyhow.

A.: Then what?

B.: The atoms and the molecules are all subject to forces of attraction. It is how they come together to form something greater than themselves: a system of systems where there are different rules that apply to each stratum of emergence. Just to be clear, by “emergence” I mean a phenomenon or state of affairs that is germane to a given system, to a set of factors in their interplay, though not to each factor in isolation. Now help me with this: do our subsystems and their subsystems have a choice in the matter?

A.: I suppose we do not know for sure, though since we are inclined not to think of them as sentient I would speculate that they have no choice whatsoever. They are automata.

B.: You mentioned two key terms: “sentient” and “automata”. They say a lot about how we think of life. Would you agree that this is a good way to think about the cosmos in general? Or, if we do not wish to put too much emphasis on sentience, would you consider it plausible that in the universe there are life forms and all the rest are lifeless forms? Does such a distinction hold?

A.: Yes. For example, there is a difference between a stone and a human.

B.: Really? What would that be?

A.: Not sure why you act surprised. Isn’t it crystal clear? Basically, a stone is inert while a human is alive. The stone does not require food, whereas a human does.

B.: So the stone has no life?

A.: No, it doesn’t.

B.: And where does life come from?

A.: I am not sure. And why does it matter, insofar as a human is not a stone in terms of only the former being a life form?

B.: It matters because a human does not have a standalone presence.

A.: What does that mean?

B.: We already mentioned how the human organism is a system of systems. What we now need to add to this observation is that the human organism is but a subsystem of a much wider system. Think about everything that affects this planet and then about everything beyond it, such as the fact that a moon is in our orbit, we are at a specific distance from the Sun, and so on. For there to be a human being, multiple factors must contribute to the final outcome. We cannot have a human being as such: one that does not consist of its subsystems; one that is not framed, informed, conditioned, or otherwise influenced by the supersystem it is a part of as well as by the continuous and dynamic feedback loops between the various sub- and super- systems.

A.: A human being is a life form because of certain contributing factors to that end. Correct?

B.: More generally, a human is part of a greater whole. One’s presence is one of partiality, not individuality. This feeds back into the topic of free will, where our cultural norms are built on the untenable hypothesis of a decontextualised human: a being as such which makes whatever it wants out of its life.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14) ]

A.: I can understand this. However, you seemed bewildered when I stated the obvious: a stone and a human are different. Tell me, then, how does all this argumentation relate to that subject?

B.: I asked where does life come from. You dismissed it as largely irrelevant to the distinction between a human and a stone. So I had to elaborate on what effectively is the interconnectedness of the cosmos in order to prepare you for considering this point. Please explain from whence comes life? Can something derive from nothing?

A.: I don’t know.

B.: Can you make a bread without its ingredients?

A.: No, you always need those.

B.: Can you power up your computer without electricity?

A.: Again, energy is required.

B.: Try to think about everything you have ever experienced. Has there ever been a new presence ex nihilo? And then, has anything ever existed in nothing or was converted into nothing?

A.: I cannot think of a case where something came out of nothing. And you already mentioned that there is no standalone presence, which I find plausible. So something must exist in something, not in nothing. The last statement is a bit trickier though. I would say that something can be converted into nothing, such as when a person dies.

B.: Are you confident that the death of an organism results in the annulment of its constituents?

A.: Upon second thought, I am wrong. Even metaphorically, we think of dead bodies as turning into dust. But we do not say that they disappear altogether.

B.: Let me reformulate this insight in abstract terms on what is considered ontology, else metaphysics (as the abstract structure of being): something derives from something, is made present in something, and is transformed into something. The operative term is transformation or transfiguration of a constant magnitude.

A.: I am still having trouble finding the connection with the stone and how it differs from a human…

B.: Our organism consists of matter that is found all around us, like water, carbon, calcium, iron. That stone may contain minerals which directly contribute to our presence. Otherwise it does its part in regulating some subprocess in the immediate supersystem that envelops us. Perhaps you have heard about the DNA and how it basically is a sequence of elements, each of which we do not consider as a life form in its own right. And yet, this concatenation of matter—of ‘stones’, so to speak—this specific arrangement of seemingly lifeless particles embeds and communicates information, to the effect that it represents a self-reprogrammable program on how to construct a particular form.

A.: But a stone is still lifeless, right?

B.: Only if you consider it in isolation. This is what we call “analytics”: the process by which we reason about a factor of the case independent of the case’s constitution. If, however, you think of the stone in its relation to everything else, then you can fathom the possibility of it contributing to emergent states of affairs which exhibit patterns that we recognise as having a life of their own.

A.: So life forms are emergent?

B.: Those which we recognise as having a need to eat or which appear to have some sort of purposeful behaviour are underpinned by interactions of factors which we consider automata in terms of analytics. We say that a human being is a life form, but not that each of its subsystems is itself a form of life. Thus, we already assume life to be emergent. My point though is a bit more nuanced.

A.: Do tell.

B.: Life is immanent. Everything is life. There cannot be life from non-life, just as there cannot be presence from nothingness. There cannot be life in non-life, as there can be no presence in nothingness. And there cannot be life that becomes non-life, in the same way that no presence can be converted into nothingness. We can’t even conceive of nothingness, but only as an analytical construct which is the opposite of being, of presence, of “something”. By trying to describe nothingness we attribute properties to a mental construct and so we think of it as being something, as having certain qualities. As such, what is emergent are forms of life, just as our language suggests, though not life as such.

[ Read: On non-Being and the prime mover (2021-04-03) ]

A.: How about this notion that a deity created the world from nothing?

B.: Even in that case there still always was the deity.

A.: So the presence of a god conforms with your claims of there always being something. Back to the distinction between a stone and a human, do you think they are practically the same?

B.: There are many differences. Those are readily apparent. Such as what you mentioned earlier that we require food whereas a stone does not. Let the details not distract us from the general theme. What we can add to those is that we operate at a different stratum of emergence. That stone has the potential to contribute to a form of life, whereas the matter making up our constitution does so in its actuality. In other words, the difference between such a potentiality and its actuality consists in the specific interplay of factors.

A.: You think the relationships are what we should be looking at?

B.: Once we move past the notion that things can have a standalone presence, once we think about the interconnectedness of the world, we must turn our attention to how seemingly independent presences relate to each other. There still is a place for analytical exercises. We need not discontinue them. My point is that analytics alone prevent us from seeing the bigger picture.

A.: Tell me more about this interconnectedness. Do you mean that each of us, each presence, is networked with every other?

B.: I mean that each of us is contextualised. The distinction between object and environment properties is analytical, for there is no object without or despite its environment. Furthermore, what counts as external is a matter of perspective, such as how all those people around us form part of our milieu while they see us in the same way.

A.: So you would not argue that all are tied together?

B.: Maybe not all presences are interlinked. More so when we factor in the stratification of emergence, where different states of affairs are prevalent in each system, making up its own particular rules which remain subject to global rules that are equally present in its sub- or super- systems. Perhaps it is better to liken the world to a forest. Different species of tree have their own societies. There are mushrooms which are not directly dependent on squirrels. Plants photosynthesise regardless of what the insects may be doing. Yet they all share the same ecosystem, which is the forest amid the rivers that receives light from our nearest star and nourishment from the ground and the air, is regulated by the Earth’s atmosphere and climate, et cetera.

A.: Interconnectedness is a quality we find in our own works as well. For example, if we change one piece of legislation, we need to update a bunch of others. Or how programmers inadvertently create bugs just by introducing a minor feature in one part of their code base.

B.: Indeed. Programming also serves as a reminder of the challenge in grasping how the whole system is pieced together, especially as the volume of connections increases in scale and complexity. We learn about this in our daily life but somehow forget it when the discussion has to factor in larger magnitudes, such as the condition of our planet. At that point we oscillate between pretending to have omniscience or acting all ignorant. However we go about justifying our inertia, the result is the same: we blithely carry on with our modus vivendi.

A.: You said that a stone and a human are at different levels of emergence. Do you think there is a stage at which there are no more emergent states of affairs?

B.: I think it would be weird for there to be a terminus to the stratification of emergence. What would be the mechanism that determines the final mark? Could we, for instance, claim that emergence has reached this stratum where the human being is made manifest and now it can no longer contribute to ever-more expansive states of affairs? It would seem arbitrary to suggest that emergence stops even though systems of systems continue to take form.

A.: What are the implications then? What does it mean for everything to partake in life?

B.: I mentioned the forest earlier. The same principles go for all subsystems of the Earth’s ecosystem. Mountains, lakes, oceans… Perhaps a forest is a life form unto itself. Maybe the Earth is an organism and everything on it is part of its subsystems. Perhaps the Earth is but the primary constituent of an emergent interplanetary life form. A greater conscience which takes form in the same manner that the interplay of factors in our subsystems give rise to the phenomenon of human consciousness. You get the idea.

A.: Don’t we need facts to back such claims?

B.: We do. Formulating hypotheses is a prerequisite to conducting empirical studies. We cannot put the cart before the horse, as the saying goes, and ask for evidence before we determine what it is we wish to search for. We venture to search for some datum with which to assess a certain working hypothesis. Otherwise what are we trying to prove or what drives our research? Facts do not just get collated and reveal truths to us.

A.: Sure. My question though hints at the observation that we cannot see a forest exhibiting a behaviour of its own. We study trees and rodents and birds…

B.: What we already know is that relations have feedback loops. A feedback loop is, in effect, a medium of communication. This foundational language is used to both disseminate and store information. Information has to have a meaning to it, like how the DNA contains what is needed to reproduce a much larger system than itself. If there can be a language at such a microscopic level, why can there be no equivalent at the stratum where, say, the forest is made manifest? Trees communicate with each other and show behavioural patterns which may presumably store information of some sort. There are cycles that affect migratory birds and determine when cicadas will emerge from the ground. A macroscopic view of all this activity will look just like what is happening in a human body. Your muscles can have memory, but another such system cannot? Again though, bear in mind that we are not talking about standalone presences. There is no forest without the rivers. There are no rivers without mountains. And everything else we have already discussed.

A.: It is an interesting perspective, to say the least. Now I am curious how it all ties together with those strangers you mentioned earlier who somehow communicate with each other.

B.: Have you ever created a primitive telephone out of a cord and two cups? Just tie the cups to the ends of the cord and stretch it out.

A.: Ah yes, that was fun to play with!

B.: Verbal communication is like a ripple effect. It travels from point X to point Y by creating motion in the intermediate space.

A.: And?

B.: Motion happens in a shared space. The cause of it need not be the vibrations or sounds we make when we speak. It is why I alluded to frequencies that we are attuned to. Each of us has a specific way of capturing information that circulates all around us. I cannot perceive of the world in the way an artist does, and vice versa. We are tuned in to different frequencies. This is, by the way, why I am not amused by the idea of a single type of intelligence and how this scientist or that philosopher is supposed to be the smartest ever. How do you measure the creative genius of a certain Salvador Dalí and then compare it to the technical brilliance of one Linus Torvalds? Each of them is receiving different information from the world around them. The artist cannot be reduced to an engineer and vice versa. So please do not belittle yourself next time I invite you to talk with me.

A.: Fine. But how about this communication you are talking about? Do you mean to imply that we are creating specific ripples in space that only kindred spirits, so to speak, can interpret? Is this telepathy?

B.: Yes, this is what I mean. What appears to be a coincidence when two strangers turn around to gaze at each other may in fact be the equivalent of shifting our attention to someone who is calling our name. We parse the subtle motions in space that they make and we recognise their patterns as familiar or, anyhow, as holding a meaning we can decipher.

A.: But isn’t telepathy kind of an old superstition?

B.: It being old is not a problem in itself. Let us not fall into the same trap as our culture does of believing in its inexorable moral progress throughout history. You hear about it in the cliché that “this cannot be happening in the 21st century”. There is nothing special about our age. Misguided by an obsession of ours, some conventional wisdom that regulates our collective experience, we may have been alienated from knowledge that was common in earlier civilisations; knowledge that we dismiss as superstitious because we tacitly hold that all genius is largely the product of the modern era. Telepathy may sound like a bad word to some. A throwback to yesteryears when people believed in ghosts and magic. We live in a period where we are negatively disposed towards certain ideas. Some may deride the very notion of telepathy as mumbo jumbo. It is unfortunate that in this age every narrow-minded scientist, every flunky of the corporate overlords, everyone who labours against dubitativeness and inquisitiveness despite appearances to the contrary, has the temerity and the authority to dismiss everything they do not want to understand as some silly mysticism. We are the fools in this world. The misfits. Those of us who are not impressed by the pomp and circumstance—the technotheocracy—that modern science has turned into.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

A.: What kind of meaning is communicated through such synchronous motions?

B.: That is difficult to know. It is a bit like trying to track intricate patterns in a dark room. There is a part of our being which I feel is less developed than the rest and thus hard to map out. Our physical side is the most developed. The instincts, for example, have a pronounced presence. The ability to make and receive sounds, parse light, filter air, and so on. We know those very well because of their availability. Then we have the part that has traditionally been related to the soul. For me there is no psyche or “mind” as a distinct substance that is independent of the body, for reasons related to the oneness of the interconnected world—there cannot be a decontextualised presence and so there can be no soul as distinct and independent from the milieu it is immersed in. As such, our mental state is also well refined. We have emotions, we can dream and imagine other worlds. Our intellectual capacity is more like how our musculature takes form: it needs practice but is fairly easy to discover. Then there is this other dimension which encompasses our intuitions and is attuned to stimuli which are non-verbal and not obvious. Those are our mystical qualities. They operate counter to our primal tendency of self-centredness, else, egocentrism. By exploring or training them we develop a sense of togetherness with forms of life beyond our own and can identify in them a part of us. Ultimately, through mystical experiences we track hints which allow us to ascend to a higher level of understanding where our view of the world differs profoundly from that of our uninitiated self.

A.: So our mystical side can change us. Is this difference like how we think about life where we no longer speak about non-life?

B.: I think that is how it is elucidated. We first have intuitions concerning certain magnitudes and then we reason about them. We could poetically claim that the goddess whispers a little secret into our ear and then we think about it until we develop a fully fledged theory. To be sure, the physical, the mental, the mystical are analytical constructs. They help us simplify and then examine complex phenomena. In practice, we have everything and cannot be just one of them as in, say, a purely rational agent. The mystical feeds into the intellectual, the emotional into the physical, the physical into the emotional, and so on as a cycle. This is why I believe we need a balanced approach to how we conduct ourselves. If you only train your muscles but do not sharpen your brain, you are leaving a part of your being underdeveloped even though it too has its utility in how you experience the world. Same principle for those who will be misled into following a path of strict commitment to mysticism, while forgoing everything else that their being renders possible. Just like the a priori dismissal of sex that I mentioned earlier. I find it lacks balance as it wishes to turn us into something that we are not.

A.: Then why do you seem to hide in your shell when I mention dating? You have all those profound, long-form answers for obscure topics but for something as straightforward as that you reply with one-liners.

B.: Each person is unique. One is inclined to be more intellectual than another who is more emotional. The need for a balance is not to be misconstrued as the application of a one-size-fits-all formula. What works for one may not be suitable for another. This is why I am critical of social role-playing: it tries to enforce homogeneity in an otherwise heterogeneous and heteroclite whole (heteroclite == with inclinations that are varied, so basically moving in different directions). Do not force me to be sociable at all times when my very condition only makes me rejoice in relative solitude. I have no choice in the matter. There cannot be uniformity in life. There cannot be a single answer to every question. Do no further harm.

A.: I see. Now that we have discussed all those subjects, I wonder whether there are any practical lessons to be learnt for our day-to-day life. What do you think?

B.: There can be many interpretations. The train will arrive by the time I enumerate all of them, assuming I am fit for the task. But let’s try regardless. Worst thing that can happen is that I miss the ride and you will have to bear with me for even longer! One lesson would be how we treat other people and the planet at-large. We have a political system that is predicated on the control, direct or indirect, of human by human. It dehumanises people, treating them as expendable, as sacrificial meat to the altars of short-term profiteering. It is a political order that perceives of every life form as disposable: a resource which serves as input for the money-making machinery. A tiny minority lives well beyond its means off of the rest of the planet.

A.: What do you think is the cause of this?

B.: There are many, though we can see how the imbalance in one’s disposition primes them for supporting such a corrupt edifice. If you neglect your mystical qualities and if you only ever value a subset of what your being is, you will inevitably be led by your egocentrism to contribute to an order that does not recognise the innateness of life.

A.: Tell me about another lesson. Try not to make it political this time, just for me to have an idea of the ramifications of those insights.

B.: How we deal with death. The passing of a family member or our beloved dog. Something cannot turn into nothing. All that is, is in a process of transfiguration, forever differentiable. Death is not the absolute end, but the conclusion of a cycle that necessarily starts a new one. Yes, losing a loved one feels like it leaves a scar on our heart because of how we have developed as a species to treasure our kind and those close to us. We understand, nonetheless, that we come from the same source and return to it.

A.: Is this like an afterlife?

B.: Not in the sense of how it is passed down to us by tradition. Those who speak of an afterlife claim that there is an invariant aspect of the self which persists after death and which then moves on to either some other body or another plane of existence altogether. I don’t think either of those are accurate. For that which is can only be a function of the structure in which its presence unfolds. To recreate the same agent, you must reproduce the exact constitution of the case. In an interconnected world this means that the preservation of the particular entails the synergy of the cosmos. For there to be an invariant “you” who lives an afterlife there must also be a constant framework that continues to influence and condition your presence for it to remain identical to itself. To think that the whole world conspires so that you can live forever qua “you” feels like a variant of egocentrism.

A.: If it is not an afterlife, then how would you describe it.

B.: When a person dies, we witness the deconstruction of a system of systems. Each of us is essentially made up of star dust. Water, carbon, and everything else. Our decomposition follows the same pattern as with every other transformation of energy or matter. It takes another form or is retained through other forms. What we are is a stratum of emergence, as we already discussed. The emergent states of affairs are lost as the case undergoes a reconstitution at which point new states of affairs will emerge. Differentiation ensures that nothing will be exactly the same as before or after. So there is no invariant self that just switches places. As systems can communicate and store information, it may well happen that our presence and our deeds are codified as cosmic memories which might inspire new forms of life. Kind of how the DNA is a self-reprogrammable program that retains old information which it uses as a template to produce new forms under the right set of conditions.

A.: What do you say about the idea that the death of someone is the work of a deity?

B.: It may be interpreted in the way I outline here. One can say that their deceased puppy is with the gods because they wanted it to be that way. The notion of a higher being that regulates our experiences is useful in this scenario insofar as it helps us let go of what we cherish the most, while accepting how things stand. It eases the pain when you admit that not everything is within your control and not everything is predicated on you. Whether you liken those forces to an archetype that you call a god or not is secondary. What matters is that you do not harm yourself by clinging on to notions that are not aligned with your actuality.

A.: So the pain is largely of our own doing?

B.: We are conditioned to react to death in such a way. Though I feel that by exploring our mystical side we gain insight into the continuum of life. What troubles us is fear; fear which springs from a place of ignorance. What gives us tranquillity is knowledge, including the knowledge that we do not have all the answers.

A.: We let go when we know what to expect?

B.: In a sense, yes. Or, more likely, once we recognise our limits and remain open to the unknown. We are either prepared to forgo anything that we hold onto or refrain from clinging on to it in the first place as we acknowledge its impermanence in an ever-transforming world. Oh look! My train has arrived. This too is a reminder of having to let go. We shared some time together and had a fruitful conversation. It cannot last forever. Such a belief is another source of trouble: enjoy what you have while you can. Accept impermanence. Each of us must go their separate ways. What stays is the memory of the event. For how long? I don’t know.

A.: Will I see you again before you depart from this country?

B.: It is unlikely. Thank you for being here, fellow traveller. Take care.

B.: Hello there!

A.: I thought I was the only early bird around…

B.: Is this your regular waking hour?

A.: Yes. I got out of bed at half past six. Basically just in time for breakfast. And you?

B.: Maybe at quarter to five. Went to the beach for a swim. Then walked around the area. It struck me how familiar everything felt, even though this is my first time around here.

A.: You have certainly seen something like it before. We are the same country after all.

B.: So close, yet so far apart. It is sad. Soldiers ready to kill each other for arbitrary lines on a map in defence of some ruling elite’s interests, ideologies indoctrinating us into hating each other, pomp and circumstance obscuring manufactured histories and the absurdity of it all. What are those elaborate constructs of humankind but vanity gone wrong? Vanity rationalised as necessity and wrapped up in a discourse of pragmatism.

A.: I feel you. It is why we are here, after all, hoping to establish relationships that can help bridge the gap. I found the whole idea intriguing: to bring together bloggers and activists from the region.

B.: We hope for the best, though I feel that ten years from now all this will be but a distant memory or, perhaps, an inspiration for future writers.

A.: Time will tell. I hope we succeed, despite the daunting task. Do you mind though if we stop talking about politics? We don’t have that much time and I would prefer to know more about you: your interests, your background. We will get the chance to elaborate on the political aspects later in the workshops and during the remainder of our stay at this hotel.

B.: Speak your mind.

A.: Let’s start with the information we have already. Is there any particular reason you went to the beach so early?

B.: It is summer time. Beaches are always packed with people. The only way to avoid them is to either go late at night or at dawn. Else you wait for winter.

A.: Why eschew people to begin with?

B.: I would turn it around as not having a pressing need to be with others the whole time and seizing the moment to be reminded of our place in the world. Why crave the attention, the validation? Our intuition, what our immediate experience conditions us to believe, is that we are the protagonists in our life and the makers of its story. Everything revolves around us. It thus is easy to be misled by the subjectivity of impressions into developing an overarching egocentrism and, eventually, extending it to a collective mindset of anthropocentrism. When we seek people in situations we do not really need them to be in, it may be that we are ultimately craving for stimuli that reinforce the illusion of self-centredness. Did they see me? What are they thinking about me right now? Such preoccupations spring from that point of view. We want to cling on to the belief of playing the protagonist because we are afraid of the truth it conceals: our impermanence, as well as our insignificance in the grand scheme of things. We dread it. Unless we learn to live with our fears, normalise them, and eventually overcome them. The appearance of loneliness reminds us of our actual condition: we are not the centre of the universe and we are not responsible for everything that happens in our life, even within the scope of our subjectivity. When a person is on their own, they begin to understand how their actuality compares to their socially-constructed self. No matter one’s status among their peers, once they step outside that zone they are framed differently.

A.: Hmm, I was not expecting that. You will have to elaborate anyway. My guess was that you had some kind of social anxiety. Perhaps body image issues, which would explain the behaviour of hiding from the public eye.

B.: Those are pertinent considerations in their own right, though they do not apply in my case. I could go to the beach at noon, but I prefer not to. It is about finding a balance in life between our nature as social animals in our own constructed world and species that exist within and because of a wider system of factors. Too much sociability may feed into that sense of inflated significance one has within their particular social milieu. On the other hand, absolute loneliness deprives us of engrossing and fulfilling experiences. Think, for example, what true solitude would do to a person if they could not even listen to music, or generally have access to anything that is of human design or origin. The process of enjoying art, of being exposed to culture in general, makes manifest an intersubjective phenomenon, even though there may be no interpersonal directness or reciprocity involved. Through the cultural artefact one experiences a subjectivity, hence the intersubjective reality of the moment. As social animals we fulfil our potential via immediate association with others at the physical and emotional levels, such as with an embrace, a kiss, or through friendship, etc., but also broaden our horizons with the intellectual or aesthetic works of others. The categories of the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the mystical are analytical constructs. In practice, they are bound up together as aspects of the same presence.

A.: So the human being is a complex, multifaceted entity that is connected to their environment. And this environment encompasses other such beings.

B.: I would just add a fine distinction: we are not “connected” to our environment. We are yet another factor in the system which we subjectively understand as environing us. Every presence has its environment as seen from its own subjectivity, yet every said presence also exists as environment, or part thereof to be precise, in the perspective of another. It is why I hold that the agency-structure divide must collapse in to itself when studying human affairs where agents—other people in their own subjectivity—can operate as structure in those cases where their actions reproduce the structural aspects of their collective order.

A.: I see. Then…

B.: Sorry to interrupt, but this is important to add.

A.: Please, go ahead.

B.: There is this distinction between the internal and the external worlds. In essence, it too is analytical, for we cannot have whatever is deemed as internal on its own. We can discern it as a pattern, or a system, or a system of systems with its own local rules or strata of ever more particularised rules, but we cannot sever it from the magnitudes that render it possible. Put simply, it is impossible to have a human enveloped in a capsule of nothingness, affected, determined, or otherwise influenced by nothing, yet remain human in the way we know it. Even the expression of being environed by nothing is meaningless! And I actually believe that existence as such is impossible from nothing, in nothing, towards nothing. There is always something. We cannot even conceive of nothingness as such, but only outline it in negative terms as the opposite of presence. The moment we describe nothingness, we render it present and, thus, non-nothingness. So when we contemplate an object in its environment, we are actually elaborating on an analytical distinction that rests on subjectivity.

[ Read: On non-Being and the prime mover (2021-04-03) ]

A.: Fascinating! Tell me more about the beach then. Do you exercise? How good is your athletic performance?

B.: I do exercise a bit using just my body weight. Nothing extreme though. No obsession with it. You speak of performance, which I interpret as referring to a competition of sorts. When you try to become a champion, you make sacrifices in pursuit of an end. You do not think about the consequences, as you obstinately seek to bask in the ephemeral satisfaction—the glory—that the championship provides. Sport can become an addiction, as with everything that is not done in moderation: it is exhilarating, you live for it, you dream about it. So if you are, say, a footballer (soccer player) you are forgoing the longer-term health of your legs’ joints, among others, in order to compete for some trophies over the span of an otherwise short professional career as a sportsperson. To me, glory is fundamentally the same as seeking attention. You become an avatar in the public eye as you the person is reduced to the figment of you the celebrated performer. I do not measure my performance nor try to out-compete anyone because that is not the point of being athletic.

A.: What is the point then?

B.: To enjoy a better quality of life than what you would have had without any degree of physical activity. I suppose you are already familiar with the implications on the likelihood and severity of chronic diseases, but think about experiences in everyday life. You want to take a stroll down the park, walk up a staircase, go swimming, travel and explore sites where you will likely have to climb some elevation, dance, and so on. If it is within your means, you want those experiences to require as little effort as possible. They need not become an ordeal.

A.: What about those who cannot commit to sport?

B.: They must be treated with respect and concerted efforts have to be made to accommodate their needs while improving their lives through other means. Me being athletic should not be misconstrued as an exhortation for everyone to follow in my footsteps. Each person is unique and must operate accordingly.

A.: All clear! I confess to be hungry and not at my best right now. It still is seven o’clock, after all! Don’t know where you are getting all that energy from.

B.: That’s fine. I got carried away. An early swim can do that sometimes.

A.: I have taken mental notes of what you just said. I think I got the gist of it, but we’ll need to revisit some finer points. I also wish to add my own thoughts to the discussion. Let’s check the buffet and afterwards head to our first workshop. We’ll have plenty of free time in the evening, probably at dinner and for the rest of the night.

[ In the interest of time… ]

A.: May I take a seat?

B.: Please!

A.: I noticed you sitting here by yourself and thought I would join you. My room overlooks the swimming pool. Right there. Normally I dine at around 20h, but an hour ahead of schedule should make no major difference.

B.: The others said they would dine at around eight as well. I am just used to my ways. Besides, I like my meals to be as unceremonious as possible, the food bland, austere, forgettable, the whole process short and to-the-point. A meal that you keep thinking about is a bad meal: it distracts you. Trying to coordinate a meeting with ten people and cater to everyone’s tastes just turns an ordinary event into a special occasion.

A.: I think I know you already. “We can always socialise afterwards.” Correct?

B.: …

A.: I take that grin as confirmation. I have been thinking about the topics you covered at the breakfast table. As I mentioned earlier in my introduction to the group, I am studying psychology. Will be a sophomore this term, but am still advanced enough in what I do.

B.: I remember.

A.: You said something along the lines of everything being connected. Like how there cannot be a human in nothingness and so on. And how agency and structure are not different in certain cases. This got me thinking about my studies and specifically the notion of escapism. Are you familiar with this term?

B.: Yes, but it would be better to elaborate on your thesis.

A.: Basically I wanted to discuss this concept of getting away from an environment you do not like. Is it possible and what can we learn from such tendencies?

B.: Earlier I was speaking in general terms. What we would consider metaphysics or, if you will, the abstract structure of all that is. When I claimed that we cannot have an object without an environment, I did not mean to imply that it is impossible for particular cases to be reconfigured. In plain terms, it is possible for a given human being to switch from one social milieu to another, such as by migrating. What is not possible, I contend, is for there to be existence in nothing, a presence without environment. So, in our example of the immigrant, they can move from one cultural context to another, but they cannot avoid being environed by something, perhaps another culture.

A.: Do you think escapism is a valid feeling?

B.: I believe this question needs to be reformulated. Just try to imagine an invalid feeling. The emotion itself takes place. What may be up for debate is whether its underlying triggers or expectations and desires satisfy the principle of correspondence when assessed against the actuality of the case. For instance, a narcissist who arrives here at nine o’clock, may feel ignored by the rest of the group and harbour a feeling of indignation when, in truth, it was known that everyone preferred to have dinner at eight.

A.: The feeling occurs, then. We need to test how justifiable it is, where that makes sense.

B.: Validation in general is a tricky concept for feelings. This relates to what I said in the morning about going for a swim when no-one is at the beach. If you feel a certain way, you do not need a stamp of approval from others to add credibility to the emotion. They do not hold the authoritative view nor do they activate the chain reaction the feeling causes. Insofar as the emotion as such is concerned, the opinions of others are irrelevant. It is why I arrived for dinner at seven: what our group thinks is not my problem. If, however, it is their attention that you ultimately seek, then your actions have some ulterior motive. We would need to identify the triggers of those behavioural patterns and study the emotions related to them. Still, this is not matter of the flawed concept of “valid feelings”. They are all valid. We need a more refined approach than such binaries.

A.: I have been thinking about escapism as a means of experimentation. It can help set aside your current condition to seek experiences that are not possible in your ordinary life.

B.: There’s a contradiction there. Isn’t escapism possible within your ordinary life? And, by extension, isn’t the derived experience possible as well? Again, my point is nuanced, as I get what you are saying, where escapism is a virtual escape from a physical situation, but I think we should not neglect the potentiality of any given case. For there to be escapism, there has to be a potential for escapism. The case must render it possible.

A.: Can you point at something specific?

B.: Would you agree that video games are considered at least by some as a form of escapism?

A.: Yes.

B.: Now suppose we invert the roles. Say that your ordinary life is that which unfolds within the game world. Can your avatar in the game seek out escapism or otherwise alternative experiences?

A.: I think not. That would have to be programmed into the game. Plus, there are some genres where that scenario cannot be formulated, such as puzzle games. Though I guess this is the same principle of being programmed to do something.

B.: Exactly! More generally, that plane of reality would have to hold the potential for such a state of affairs.

A.: And we can apply this insight to games as such. Like you can only ever do what the game permits, whether by its developers’ intentions or not. Including the bugs, of course. Those too are part of that plane of reality you mentioned.

B.: It is the same with all experiences. An agent of action can only seek those which are possible in the given structure. Agency is a function of structure, yet the latter consists of other agents of action. What I implied earlier by the impossibility of a decontextualised presence. Everything is contextualised, framed, informed, conditioned, determined by other factors. And because an agent is a factor in the perspective of others, the interplay of factors is neither linear nor one-directional: it is cyclical and dynamic, else helix-like (spiral). Dependence is inter-dependence, existence is co-existence, unless we are explicitly conducting analytics where we mentally isolate certain factors. Furthermore, there are feedback loops, which rest on a medium of communication that conveys meaning. It is a foundational language that ties everything together. To your specific point though, games are a great metaphor of the predicament we find ourselves in. We are expected to operate in certain ways and fulfil particular roles. To be predictable much like the automata in the game world. While our socially-constructed life cannot reprogram the natural order, it tries its best to push it to the side.

A.: This only raises more questions though.

B.: It always does. It is what I do. We’ll get to them, but let me press on that last point. Listen to this song and I will explain why I dislike it.

A.: What? You don’t like Frank Sinatra?

B.: The singer and the genre are fine. It is the underlying value system of the specific lyrics that annoys me (Luck Be A Lady is the song). How “lady luck” should behave “lady-like”. In the background lies the chimera of the American dream, while what comes through is the nouveau riche pretentiousness as well as the insecure and possessive gentleman. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy writ large. Those too are mini-games of sorts where people have to conform with what their role substantiates. The so-called “lady” must be lady-like because rules, unwritten or otherwise, dictate thus. Again, what I mentioned earlier about trying to maintain a parallel world that we can reprogram on a whim. To allow the person which qualifies as a lady to behave in an altogether different manner without the risk of persecution, we need to rewrite the game’s algorithm, which means to re-institute society. Still, we know that to institute is to enact rules and those are always creating new roles. Much like a game must be the product of some code which determines what is possible within it. There can be no game without prior programming, just as there can be no future society whose values have not been prefigured by its predecessor.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

A.: This adds another perspective to escapism. Plus, it provides grist to the mill of my curiosity! Many I have conversed with typically think of escapism as something bad, deplorable, undesirable or, at least, dismiss it as an experience that is not part of reality. What do you think about that?

B.: The notion of “reality” is problematic in this context. It rests on a tenuous distinction that reduces nature to an idealisation of nature. I have explained before how humanity has a tendency to idolise and to exercise idolatry. This is done by associating a presence with an idealised version of it, only to eventually conflate the two.

[ Read: Why it is not just about you (2021-08-03) ]

A.: Please elaborate, as I do not follow.

B.: In this case, the idol of nature does not encompass imagination. The capacity to imagine is part of being a human. Remember that all potentiality is contingent on the structure. So if we hold that nature exists and all which exists is real, then it follows that imagination as such exists and is part of this reality as well.

A.: Isn’t that a problematic conclusion though? Would it not make it impossible to tell what is sheer fantasy and what is not?

B.: It is a fine point. Only if you are conditioned to think of nature as an idol of itself. Consider it this way and connect it to what we covered earlier on the topic of valid feelings. If someone hurls a stone that hits another person, the latter will feel pain. The injury is the effect and the cause is the impact of the flying object on the person’s body. We could trace the cause further back and also reason about contributing causes, but let’s keep it simple. We are inclined to claim that such event is real. We can touch the stone. It travelled through space over a certain time. There was an impact on another tangible surface. A discernible sense of pain followed. Now suppose that someone thinks of their deceased pet. They may feel happiness, sadness, or a mixture of other emotions. Here we have a memory as the cause, with the effects being those feelings. This too is real because the emotions are, in practice, a series of biochemical reactions, much like the infliction of physical harm. If the effects are real, the cause must be the same. In a third case, we may have someone who imagines the world in a certain state of affairs and is shocked about how things may play out. Again, an idea has physical consequences. Ideas are intangible, but they too exist somewhere—where exactly is beside the point. And we can extend this insight to every aspect of the imaginary. Whether the whole process starts endogenously or exogenously is a secondary consideration as it does not change how “real” it is. The gist is that imagination and its products are part of the potential of this plane of reality and, in this particular sense, are not distinct from what qualifies as empirical evidence. We can still disambiguate the two magnitudes by employing heuristics and by holding certain parameters as constant. It is what I mentioned earlier about the analytical distinction between internal and external worlds.

[ Read: On materiality and emergence (2020-12-20) ]

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

A.: What gives escapism its negative connotations?

B.: Expectations. Take the objectified lady that Sinatra sings about. She—or should we say “it” as the role of ladylikeness bestowed upon her dehumanises her, reducing her into an object controlled by a conceptual straitjacket?—has to behave in a certain way, even though she may not feel like it. So she has to wear make-up and dress accordingly to be cute at all times even though she may prefer to remain simple and, say, forage herbs and study the local fauna of the nearby mountains. Thus a lady who does not behave in a lady-like fashion is derided or discriminated against for her ‘escapism’, for her preference to lead her own life free from desires that are not hers. Escapism in the way you implied it earlier as experimentation can help us relieve some pressure from oppressive circumstances that we cannot physically undo. To find refuge in a virtual place we can trust. The mark of a tyranny at the quotidian social level, not just the political regime, is when people react negatively to you feeling good about yourself and them wanting to control how you should act and what emotions you ought to experience.

A.: So escapism can be therapeutic in the way I had implied it, even though it may not be sufficient in its own right—that is another discussion though. Also, now I understand that my question this morning about why you went to the beach at the crack of dawn was insensitive. Sorry!

B.: There is no need to apologise. Sincere ignorance is not a crime in my books. It should provide the impetus to educate and to redeem those who do not know, not hunt them down with extreme prejudice. The ones who treat such ignorance as a mortal sin and take offence at your slightest misstep are acting in bad faith and are ready to pick a fight for ulterior reasons. Humanity has time and again created injustice on a monumental scale in pursuit of what appeared to be a just cause. What I find problematic at the outset is dissonance: you know exactly how things stand yet opt to operate as an ignoramus regardless, while having the temerity to be vociferous in disseminating your uninformed views.

A.: A subtle but important distinction. Why do people have all those expectations then? Like wanting someone to behave in a certain way or whatnot?

B.: I would speculate that it stems from the inclination to avoid unpredictability. Uncertainty disturbs us and drives us to reach early conclusions through which we entertain the illusion that we know more than we actually do. The untrained mind wants to treat everything as having a definitive beginning, middle, and end. It will go to great lengths to provide answers to unanswerable questions and it will cling on to the impression of certitude those engender. To hypothesise is different though, because it remains open-ended and subject to review.

A.: How does that translate into daily life?

B.: Think about the saying of “the evil you know is better than the one you don’t”. It still is an evil throughout though your familiarity with it offers you, in a somewhat paradoxical way, some sense of comfort; comfort in what to expect.

A.: You are saying then that if given the option humans may prefer a bad situation they are familiar with over one they cannot predict? This obviously goes beyond the phrase you referenced.

B.: Humans enact rules that govern their collective experience in an effort to establish a modicum of predictability. There is, nevertheless, a fine line between working towards a basis that makes social life function smoothly and becoming outright intolerant of any tendency that upsets the norms. As with our example of “lady luck” being expected to act all “lady-like”, whatever that means, there is a point at which the belief in perfect predictability in one’s behaviour inevitably results in denial of their personhood; and personhood entails the capacity to act, which implies the possibility of acting in a manner that upsets expectations altogether. While it is understandable that all societies have rules, the difference between benign practicality and pernicious absolutism is one of degree. Much like the distinction between poison and medicine where a tiny portion will heal you while an overdose shall prove lethal—or what I do with a bit of sport instead of being obsessed with it. Moderation is key. Every culture, including those which fashion themselves as enlightened, comes with the latent risk of mistaking its rules, its own institutions and conventions, for natural constants. Such falsehoods underpin attempts at stamping out any deviations from the norm as unnatural or otherwise undesirable.

A.: Basically you are saying that there needs to be a balance and people must remain vigilant. How does one go about finding that sweetspot?

B.: I don’t think there is a way to answer this in advance or, rather, to know what the balance is in a case yet-to-be-constituted. If you do not have the factors of the case, how can you opine about their interplay and draw the indelible lines of the categorisation you are about to make? It is why the real value of thinking things through is not about the answers you give but the attitude you maintain. The right answer may change—it always does. What will allow you to arrive at it consistently and to adapt to evolving circumstances is a certain disposition towards knowledge and learning.

[ Read: Why I won’t compete with you (2021-06-20) ]

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30) ]

A.: Would you call it “wisdom”?

B.: Perhaps that’s the word for it. While a simple definition of wisdom may be that it consists in the capacity to make the correct judgement under the prevailing conditions, I like to think of it slightly differently. Wisdom is the ability to determine when to upset one’s own justifiable precepts and why. It is what distinguishes the grand master from the disciple. The latter will be dogmatic as they faithfully follow every rule to the letter. While the former will understand how to apply the rules or refrain from doing so. There is no dogmatism, just an understanding of what is in effect and the reason behind it. This still is about the correct judgement call, though a bit more elaborate.

A.: I see. We’ve ventured too far from our topic though. How would you tie this in to the theme of escapism?

B.: We spoke about the uneasiness caused by uncertainty and how humans will explore ways to distract themselves from their actuality as ignorant, as not omniscient. There is a sense in which our theories about us and the world at-large, our conduct in general and the concomitant aspirations, are themselves a form of escapism as we try to avoid the inconvenient truth that we do not really know as much as we think we do.

A.: Is that bad then? Can we reach a state where we do not try to avoid our condition?

B.: What matters is that this plane of reality has the potential for escapism. Whether we can avoid it or not is also within the horizon of possibilities. We might or we might not. Those who can are the ones who are at ease with the radical uncertainty of our condition, those who do not dread it and need not flee from it, those who are not disturbed by the truth of our impermanence and the fact that our presence consists as partiality, not individuality in the strict sense of a decontextualised presence.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14) ]

A.: On a side note, it is fascinating how this all started by discussing the otherwise mundane task of you going to the beach at a certain time.

B.: You will know intuitively when you have made progress once you can learn about the greater things through the seemingly little ones.

A.: Sounds cryptic. “Progress” in what sense?

B.: To answer that I need to re-frame the issue. I mentioned earlier how briefly avoiding public scrutiny can help you train to overcome your egocentrism. It will make you understand that you are not the author of your life, as having exclusivity over it but, at best, a contributor to its sprawling narrative.

A.: Yes, I remember.

B.: When you reach that state of consciousness, when you admit that you are but a part of a greater system, you are humbled by the recognition that what you can do is not really of your own making. You are endowed with certain talents, physical characteristics, personality traits that were not of your own choosing or design. You are predisposed to pursue certain fields of endeavour. You are exposed to a social-cultural milieu that conditions the way you think before you even begin to develop faculties of independent reasoning. That civilisation furnishes artefacts which enrich your life by broadening your horizons, such as language, music, science, technology, the content of everyday conversations, etc. It is a vast corpus of work and/or knowledge developed incrementally by innumerable contributors over the ages. You both build on the works of others and are inspired by what is available in your environment. It happens regardless of whether you realise it or not, want it or not. There is, in other words, a structure that conditions your agency.

A.: What about making progress towards learning about the greater things through the smaller ones?

B.: The egocentric agent fails to recognise the fact that their output is contingent on the structure or, to put it simply, they are deluded into thinking that their works are exclusively their own. Hence their insatiable desire for confirmation. Whereas the one who is free from such misconceptions is prepared to give back what they have taken and to add their own contribution to the commons which continuously enrich their life. Maybe you are familiar with Homer’s Odyssey. The poet starts by appealing to the Muse, the goddess of poetry in this case, to tell him what to write. While this is an artistic and theistic metaphor, it does hint at a profound insight: that even a masterpiece has no exclusive author in the strict individualistic sense that an egocentrist would think of their fruits of labour. Progress then, of the sort I alluded to, is the process of growing out of one’s egocentrism.

A.: Thank you for the detailed explanation!

B.: You are welcome! But wait cause there’s more.

A.: Of course… Just like that swim which has nothing to do with swimming.

B.: Myth has it that Prometheus, a titan or else a god, taught humanity the art of handling fire. This is not literally about pyrotechnics, but an allegory of someone who shares vital know-how which then forever broadens the possibilities of those who get to implement it. I am simplifying the story for the sake of brevity. To this day we use fire, both literally and metaphorically, to drive our vehicles, power up our houses, use computers, prepare food, and so on. Such critical know-how is a common resource because a higher being shared it with the world rather than keep it exclusive to the domain of some elite. Couldn’t Prometheus—or every one who follows the example of the titan by being guided by the “Promethean Ideal”, as I would call it—license their work instead and live off of it as a rentier, much like the modern world’s unscrupulous overlords who connive to enclose the commons? No, because a higher being knows that they too are not the centre of the world and that they too are part of a greater whole. What the myth teaches those who listen and what Homer tells us at the outset of the epic is that despite our subjectivity and the immediate sense of egocentrism that we have, we must aspire to expand our shared stock of knowledge rather than extract from it; aspire to empower others just like they have empowered or are empowering us; aspire to be more god-like in our disposition by overcoming our ego.

A.: Are you religious?

B.: No.

A.: Why not?

B.: The immediate answer to such questions is their inversion, namely, why are you—not you in particular but the person who makes the positive proposition—religious? What does that give you? For example, are you a Christian because it teaches love at some level? Then would you hold that one cannot express love without being a Christian? Is religiosity of that particular sort a prerequisite to loving? And if it is, how can love exist without religious beliefs, such as how does your dog or a child that hasn’t been indoctrinated yet love you? There is no need to answer those questions. I am just being schematic. We could ask the same for the community aspect of religions, such as attending church on Sundays in hope of getting a date or gaining the favourable opinion of your peers in pursuit of some other benefit. My point is that all positive propositions, which is to say every thesis that states how things finally stand, must ultimately be justified. The burden of proof falls on those who want to make such claims. We, on the other end, maintain the option to provide counter-arguments in an attempt to probe further, else to approximate the truth, if we feel like it. And in doing so, we may simply disagree with what is presented to us on the premise that it does not make up a cogent argument.

A.: Let’s suppose that I answer those questions. What would you say then?

B.: There are matters which are open to interpretation and thus contingent on subjectivity, and those which are not. If, for example, humanity unanimously decides that it no longer wishes to be bound by gravity and, say, codifies such a belief in law it will have no effect on its condition: the Earth will still pull it to the ground, ceteris paribus. Whereas humanity can decide on what it means for a person to behave in a “lady-like” fashion, if I may re-use my previous example: there is no objective or convention-independent condition at play or, if there is, it is too obscure for us to grasp it with certainty, hence the differences in opinion.

A.: And how does that relate to the question of being religious?

B.: An impartial observer will discover that the practice of religiosity is replete with diverging views and traditions. There are numerous religions and even more branches or sects within them. In light of this evidence, the impartial observer can only state the agnostic or sceptical view, that of not knowing for sure: the apparent controversies reveal the obscurity of the underlying theme and the futility of trying and failing to provide definitive answers. Those involved in the theological debates are not sure about the underlying theme though they like to pretend otherwise. Both extremes of theists and atheists, both aspects of the same coin of certitude. Consequently, if you were to explore these topics, I would consider it valid to not only elaborate on the substantive aspects of your statements but also include aesthetic considerations.

A.: Aesthetics? How?

B.: One who suggests that they like—“like” is the operative term—belonging or not to this or that denomination holds a fecund approach, as it hints at the underlying subjectivity of the matter: it is not pretentious. This is not to say that we ought not to believe in something or that religion as such is superfluous, but rather that we should recognise that ours is a belief, some conventional arrangement, which implies that we might be wrong. It is the unwillingness to remain dubitative and inquisitive which sustains the existential escapism of claiming to know what we do not.

A.: Piecing together dubitativeness and the inclination to avoid unpredictability that you speculated about, can we maintain that the two are one and the same? That we are curious at some deeper level because knowledge or the appearance of knowledge makes us feel better?

B.: That could be the case. Though I would differentiate them at the level of their application or else their modalities. It is the same as how a shepherd must work with the prey drive of their puppy to train it for the rigours of herding sheep. Herding and hunting derive from the same place. Their application differs. A puppy with no pronounced pray drive cannot grow into a shepherd dog. A human who is gripped by the dread of their unpredictable condition, who is readily aware of it, is at the same time one who has the potential to use their propensities in ways that can liberate them from their agony. It all starts by exposing oneself to experiences that reveal one’s insignificance, through which comes the realisation that egocentrism is an illusion that holds us hostage to our fears.

A.: How do you go about achieving that? Do you just wake up one day and decide to stop doing things the way you used to?

B.: It depends on the person and the circumstances. In my case, I left my hometown to pursue university studies. My naive and misinformed plan at the time was that I would go abroad, perform some otherwise boring tasks, and eventually come back to my prior state as if nothing had transpired. It turned out that life had other events in store, which led me to migrate and roam around. To cut the long story short: I have yet to return after fifteen years. Throughout this time I have pondered how circumstantial our sense of self is. When you are with your friends in your comfort zone for practically your whole life you develop a warped identity that falsely attributes to you characteristics which are actually environmental. For example, you are treated as a cool fellow by your peers to the point where you fancy your coolness as innate. Then you move to another place, well beyond your bubble and that impression is gone: people who do not know you do not recognise any intrinsic coolness in you. At first you are in denial, though in time you admit that what was once thought to be yours, what would once manifest as your power, was a product of a multitude of factors in their interplay which you just happened to borrow, be the user of, or otherwise the medium through which it was expressed. Bewildered at being unsettled yet oddly fascinated by the newfound uncertainty, you ask: “what is truly mine, then?”, “what did I contribute to such an impression of self that no environment can take away from me?”. As the years go by and you keep reflecting on that problématique, the honest answer always points at your insignificance in the grand scheme of things: “not much, my friend; not much”.

A.: Interesting! Your transformation, so to speak, was a matter of luck or serendipity. While it is common to say how I can relate to your story, the truth is that I have no notion of what it means to have your identity challenged in such a thoroughgoing way. How does it feel? Maybe you can offer an example?

B.: It is like you are an amateur photographer. You take the occasional picture with your expensive phone, apply filters and the like, receive lavish praise from your friends and generally hold yourself in high esteem. Then you stumble across an unassuming yet expert photographer who, for whatever reason, wants to help you out by showing you the shortcomings in your positioning, the limitations of your equipment, the flaws in how you capture light and shadow and perspective. In short, all you believed to be true turns out to be a lie. Though you are a bit disappointed you take those words as an inspiration to learn. You are poised to push forward and explore the uncharted territory which opens up before you. Now extend that to your perspective on life in general, rather than any given hobby or occupation.

A.: I grow anxious to learn more about myself. Perhaps I will get that chance as well. Though right now I am inclined to be more purposeful than you ever was in those early days, at least based on your story. I have lived here my whole life. It is unlikely I will move out in the near future. Something else has to happen.

B.: Each person is different. There is no point in emulating my life, as you can never replicate everything that held true in my case. The constitution of each case is unique. You may only do what is within your potentiality and within that of the milieu you are immersed in. It may be that a more direct or more deliberate approach will yield the same or better results. This very conversation might be enough to get you started; an exchange of views that I did not have the opportunity to partake in back in the day, nor had the maturity to ever understand and appreciate. All I can do is share what was given to me: it is not mine in the possessive sense.

A.: I wish to start as soon as possible. Will you be at the beach tomorrow morning as well? Maybe you could show me exactly what to do?

B.: Careful with your enthusiasm. It is not to be taken lightly, nor to be done over the weekend or with a new friend you are excited about. I left home, but I also had to outgrow my self. That cannot be undone. Be prepared for the long journey and let go of the tourist mentality. As for showing you how it’s done, there is no secret. I just went for a swim and then for a walk. It is not magic. Nothing out of the ordinary. What matters is my perspective, which comes from the elucidation of all those concepts I have presented tonight and during breakfast. Just think about your place in the world. I do not need to be at the seaside to do that. I do not have to wake up early, nor to swim or walk or whatnot. It just happens that those activities are easier for me. Someone else may do the same through dancing or meditating. I don’t know: each person is unique.

A.: Can’t you at least keep me company? I will have all sorts of questions and you can help me think them through.

[ Read: why I won’t date you (2021-06-16) ]

B.: It is better not to seek immediate results. Avoid the trap. You are not prepared for them while you will not appreciate what goes into the end result. My allusion to the tourist attitude is meant to suggest that this is a process, not a one-off event or an exhibition of sorts that you can buy a ticket to. There are no shortcuts, no life hack that opens up a direct conduit to such a destination. Right now you are still acting out of egoism, as you are trying to hold on to your self-importance, thinking about why I would not join you and how that could be an attack on your cherished self-perception. Relax: it is not about me and you. Those false wants are to be expected at such an early stage. You will appreciate my gesture after the fact.

A.: Okay, I will not insist and shall instead commit to the task however I can.

B.: There is nothing more I can do about it, anyhow. These are not swimming lessons, nor am I here to judge you or otherwise measure your performance. I already told you all you need to know to get started. Do not underestimate an exchange of views just because it happens to be casual and ad-hoc. Do not dismiss this for its lack of professorial palaver. Just because there is music playing in the background and we happen to have dinner together does not mean that I am putting up an act. You will eventually understand as much. Take those words seriously. A friendly presence can still be a tutor and perform a tutelary function. An ordinary chat may change your life. It is the little things, as I remarked earlier, and how we might learn from them. Internalise what we have talked about and take it on from there. I am confident you can do it, otherwise you would have bailed long ago or I would have simply changed subjects. Me being at the beach with you will likely hamper your efforts and distract you from the task at hand. The goal is to escape from your egocentrism, not find excuses to spend more time with others in some new adventure. Don’t grow attached to me. Chances are you may never see me again once we leave this quaint place. I am all but irrelevant. Same goes for the snapshot of the person you think you are right now. Be prepared to leave behind your old world, forgo what you once cherished, just how I did with my hometown and the version of my self who in my memories stayed there forever. Besides, why would I even want you at the beach with me? It would defeat the purpose: recall that I need those rare moments of solitude and will thus do my best to avoid you. No hard feelings!

[ Read: On walking (away) (2021-07-19) ]

A.: Ah yes, I know: “we can always socialise afterwards”. Though I have yet to determine what time or day that may be…

B.: Neither have I.

B.: You do not expect me to conform with some standard I do not value, so there is no pressure. That always makes things easier. Also because I heard you have a surplus of money and are desperate to get rid of it by footing the bill.

A.: Sure. How about a gin-n-tonic? I noticed the gentleman on that table ordering one earlier and was reminded how much I like it. A refreshing beverage for the evening. I’m just tired of ales and wines.

B.: I used to drink spirits neat. No ice, no gimmicks. As well as beers of all sorts. Long drinks were never my thing. Though I have since quit drinking alcohol. It is a bad habit that does not contribute to sociability or fun. If you absolutely need to imbibe a toxin to enjoy the night out, you sure have not considered your particular condition and the social context that enables and encourages it. But I digress. Normally I would get some water, but I’ll have a herbal tea instead.

A.: Very well! I changed my mind and will have one too. Wait! Do you know they make a concoction with ginger, cinnamon, white pepper, and a slice of lemon? I find it subtle and relaxing.

B.: A concoction does sound ominous, though I am brave enough to give it a try. So how are you? I have not seen you in four months. When was it? May? You look fabulous, as always, though now I sense that you are happier and less stressed than before.

A.: I have been taking yoga classes. I’m just a beginner so I probably am not the right person to communicate how special the experience is. It has helped me regain confidence in myself. I have managed to control my emotions and be more aware of the triggers of negative reactions. I am still learning and am happy to stick to it for the long term.

B.: No worries about not knowing the secrets of the yoga teachings from day one. It is normal. I do not know much about them either, certainly less than you do, and would thus refrain from judging them. What matters now is the noticeable benign effect it has had on you.

A.: Yes, it did. I have been able to disentangle all those false wants and aspirations that were burdening me. I was told that you have talked about those issues before, but I never paid much attention. Maybe you even told me directly, but I was too ignorant to listen. I only understood after the fact. Apologies!

B.: There is no need. It is not like my musings are mandatory reading material for us to share a moment like this. Though thinking about it, I need to refine my trolling skills. I shall compile a list of publications, preferably comprising the longest or most difficult ones, and use it as an auto-reply to anyone who invites me to their party. There must be no better repellent than asking people for their opinions as a precondition for responding to their calls!

A.: Haha! You told me already. I feel you. I am not much of a party animal either, though I clearly am people-oriented.

B.: It probably has more to do with interests than personality traits. I am fine with people. What I dislike is hypocrisy. But anyway. What else have you been up to?

[ Read: Why I never call you (2021-06-05) ]

A.: I met my partner at those classes.

B.: Those lucky yogis!

A.: And you?

B.: I have not been taking yoga classes.

A.: Ha, that witty humour of yours! You probably are the last person I know who needs them, anyway. You are always composed. Do you meditate, perchance? Or, more generally, does philosophy involve some method of achieving mindfulness?

B.: I don’t meditate and no, philosophy is not a single school of thought and does not have a defined corpus of guidelines on what to do with your life. I do not apply any particular techniques for mindfulness because I already think about what I do and experience. This might sound pretentious, but it is the case. It is part of my actuality. Just like you being tall and good looking at all times: there is not much you have to do to achieve that. I do enjoy quietude though and the best way to be in that state in this city is to go for long walks, because not even the most eager folks will join me.

A.: I can see how walking is helping you relax. It is a physically demanding task when you cover long distances at a decent pace.

B.: It can be. That is part of the joy: you get to exercise and also explore the area. I may already know every corner of this place.

[ Read: Why I won’t date you (2021-06-16) ]

A.: Does quietude help you be creative?

B.: It depends on how we want to approach this. In a practical sense, you can only ever express your creativity by being left alone. Imagine trying to write an essay while having someone over your head speak the whole time. It will hinder your efforts. Then we have the fact that the act of walking is a time of reflection rather than production of some defined output. In that regard, it contributes to creativity indirectly. It is a process of fermentation where all sorts of ideas pop up until they must go through a process of refinement or distillation.

A.: Still, you are so calm. How do you manage to do that?

B.: It was not always the case. It is a skill you must acquire which helps you come to terms with who you are and with what you can do. I remain tranquil by not setting goals that are beyond my reach. This presupposes introspection to determine what my capabilities are. It also requires assessing the prevailing conditions and envisaging the possible outcomes. I find that we are stressed whenever we sense a mismatch between what we can do and what is expected of us to do in the predicament we are in. Sometimes that feeling is unfounded because we are not aware of our potential, such as when we get anxious about an exam only to pass it with flying colours. I would attribute that to a lack of introspection or inaccurate findings derived therefrom. In general though, once we have become more aware of our condition and our surroundings in order to effectively filter out the false positives, disturbances are typically traced back to misplaced expectations.

[ Read: Why you can’t upset me (2021-07-08) ]

A.: I am aware of your thoughts on social pressure, role playing, and expectations, as well as the agent-structure divide in light of those. Let’s not retread those paths and consider other cases. What if something bad happens which is outside our control? Suppose you have no ambitious targets and do not set yourself up for failure that way. Then tragedy strikes and you lose a loved one. Do you remain calm?

B.: To be sad about it is understandable, if that is what you are asking. Though to be deeply disturbed in a seemingly irreparable way hints at a conflict with an unrealistic belief in permanence. You and your loved ones will not live forever. If you think otherwise, if you hope for things to remain constant, you are still setting yourself up for a major disappointment. Everything we experience is transient.

A.: How do you react in such a case?

B.: By being honest to yourself, which entails acceptance of your sorrow. Express it. Don’t try to act tough or indifferent or whatever is supposed to be appropriate for you, for that is a social construct that is not consistent with your underlying condition at the moment. It will harm you more. There is no point in pretending to remain undaunted by what is happening around you and, by extension, to you. The key is to refrain from clinging on to falsehoods. If, in this case, you do not accept the perishable nature of forms of being, you are simply entertaining a false belief. When the moment of truth comes, you will not be prepared for it.

A.: Is it possible to not harbour sadness?

B.: If by that you mean whether it is feasible to remain insulated from external stimuli, I think that is a misguided and presumptuous approach. Humans, just like all forms of being do not have a standalone, decontextualised presence. There is a world that frames, informs, or otherwise conditions our existence as such, as well as its modal qualities: the fact that we are and of how we are. This world is a system of systems, arranged in strata of emergence, else orders of abstraction, with rules that are local to each system in addition to stratum-wide magnitudes. A system is an interplay of factors, meaning that there are feedback loops between them within a field of application. A factor can be an atom, in the original sense of conceptual non-divisibility, not the misnomer of physicists, or it can be a subsystem whose emergent product operates as a factor in its interplay with other such factors at a higher order of emergence. In this grand interconnectedness, the unfolding and dynamic feedback loops can be understood as a code of communication, in the sense that actions and reactions lead to highly complex outcomes by triggering a variety of chains of events. When you think in those terms, you no longer consider only the micro level of elements in light of a given consideration but also the macro perspective in which those elements form discreet patterns. It is the pattern that matters, for it carries meaning, just like how an arrangement of the same letters in our alphabet can yield dissimilar concepts, as in “dog” and “god”. Same glyphs, different patterns, distinct meanings, and thus varied reactions and possibilities. The idea that the human being as such, or the subsystems that comprise what we consider the supersystem of the human organism, can withdraw from the ever-evolving spectrum of probabilities that this cosmic language which binds everything together enables, is simply mistaken.

A.: Okay, I need to unpack this. Do you think there is something we can do to stop being affected by what is happening around us?

B.: I have already answered your question, but I will do it again in plain terms: no, you cannot escape from the cosmos. You may have heard stories of people who have stabbed their own eyes so that they may stop seeing something disturbing. And, I suppose, that same belief could be applied to the other senses. What is the point? There has to be some presumption which underpins this sort of behaviour. Something that assigns value to it. Tell me, why do you want to remain unaffected by all that environs you?

A.: We are just entertaining an idea now. Because let’s say it makes me suffer. Job requirements, etiquette, social pressure… Everything. You covered that before.

B.: And as I noted before, you can free yourself from that suffering when you stop caring about it and by making a conscious effort to put an end to the role-playing games you find yourself in. That might entail difficult decisions, such as quitting a promising career where everyone calls you a genius and expects you to be the best performer. It may mean that you have to let go of the people you consider your friends: if their conduct pressures you, they are no friends of yours. Same with relatives: if they do not want to understand and continue to push you around, a “fuck off” will usually do the trick. In short, you have to break the mould you were cast in. Though beware of what you ask: what you may get will not be better by society’s standards, as you will be impoverished and marginalised. You must take the time to contemplate whether you are prepared to make a leap of faith into the unknown: do you want to stop suffering or do you want to conform with whatever conditions your milieu establishes? Don’t answer, since this is the figurative “you”. Just something to think about.

A.: I see.

B.: While you can spend as much time as you need on that point, let us reconsider your tacit proposition. That there is a means by which someone can transcend the boundaries imposed upon them by their nature. Have you had something like that in mind or did I misunderstand you?

A.: Well, I am not clear about it and was merely tagging along to listen to what you have to say. Basically you hear about people who achieve enlightenment and are liberated from this world. Perhaps you have an idea of what we can do about it.

B.: The notion of liberation from the world presupposes a proposition that treats the current condition as one of captivity of some sort. For example, some think that we fell here because of a mistake by an original human and that this world serves as an elaborate test of our capacity to return to where we belong. Others say that we are trapped in a cycle of reincarnation and that only through enlightened non-commitment to this world we will free ourselves from it. There is a pattern there of a fall and an ascendance, with what we experience in-between serving as the substitute of a putative true locus of our presence: this is claimed to be a place we should not really like. Can such propositions be objectively verified? Or are they taken for granted through the power of tradition and the centuries of cultural works built upon them? Make no mistake, we can still draw lots of useful insights even from unverifiable claims. Though my point here is that we need to be careful with normativity that acquires a universal scope.

A.: You mean that we should refrain from making value judgements about everything?

B.: Some wish to draw a distinction between ethics and morality. I won’t engage in such a pedantic exercise, because it does not matter for our case. The terms are interchangeable. Morality is a human invention. A system of rules that governs the behaviour of people, regulating the roles of situational agents and patients to actions. In its literal sense, ethics moulds the character of people, though not the biological and epigenetic but the intersubjective one. Ethos, this moral or intersubjective character, is a decisively political construct. There are no ethics without politics, for humans institute those rules together with the overall organisation of their society. There is no social organisation without concomitant value judgements. Put differently, every political system is underpinned by a certain morality and when you say that you do not like what is happening on our planet, you should be prepared to challenge the underlying values that both reproduce those states of affairs as well as make them seem appropriate and inevitable. Furthermore, politics is not just about the formal political process, as in the day-to-day workings of the state and everything that goes into its governance, but the activity of distributing power within an organisation. As such, it is common to have corporate ethics because a corporation is, within its own confines, a political structure where some people exercise control over others.

A.: So morality or ethics are clearly human artefacts which we use for practical purposes. This does not answer my last question: should we refrain from making totalising value judgements?

B.: Humans are imperfect. The rules they come up with can be no different because they do not cover all possible cases and contain hidden assumptions. If a moral system is meant to have universal application, then that will inevitably lead to absurdities. Take, for example, the claim that we should not eat animals because they are alive. Why eat plants then, for they too are alive? Why eat anything for that matter? Why clean up your room or apply sanitisers and risk killing billions of microorganisms? The moment you try to universalise a moral rule, you commit the error of misrepresenting human invention as a universal constant. Put simply, you want to play god while lacking omniscience. The issue with all codes of morality is that we cannot establish objective benchmarks with which to compare and assess them and cannot always be precise with how to go about performing such a task. How do we decide what the correct standpoint is and where the lines should be drawn? For each evaluation depends on our perspective and on what we have tacitly considered more valuable than its alternatives. Which brings us back to the point that ethics are a part of politics, as they rest on an agreement between people: they are conventional. Protagoras said that human is the measure of all chrēmata (χρήματα), which is perennially mistranslated as “things” or what would be called pragmata (πράγματα). That error makes the philosopher sound like an idiot. What Protagoras meant is that we are the ones who determine the evaluation of everything that is in use by us. The value of conventions is extrinsic, contingent on the circumstances.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

A.: I see. How do we deal with uncertainty then?

B.: By recognising it and operating with it in mind. Let’s take a short detour here. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. Their numerous gods captured a particular archetype or symbolised some set of values. Yet they also recognised the concept of the unknown god, which was later misconstrued as the god of another religion, when in truth it was a token of this innate doubt that is part of our life. We do not need to be polytheists or indeed theists to notice that we live in doubt, we conduct science in doubt, we theologise in doubt. There is no human design which is genuinely totalising and absolutely certain. When we no longer accept the possibility of an unknown god, else uncertainty, in our worldview, we commit the error of not recognising our limits as human beings, as the fallible and imperfect animals that we are. The word for that kind of arrogance, for that misplaced sense of exceptionalism, is hubris. To act recklessly by driving a motorcycle at full speed on a wet road while not wearing a helmet is hubris: you will die if you have an accident, even though in the moment you consider yourself a badass and immortal. To think that you are all-knowing is hubris, and you will suffer the consequences of your insolence just like in the story of Victor Frankenstein. To procrastinate all day and then search for motivational articles, life hacks, or ostensible cheat codes that open a direct conduit to wisdom is hubris, because you fail to admit that expertise is acquired only through longer-term commitment. You get the idea. This is not to say that we should not theorise about the world or have morality or conduct experiments or try new things just because we cannot have absolute certainty. Only that we need to remain grounded by understanding the all too human aspect of our schemes, the possibility of thinking of them anew, and have an escape plan for when our overly ambitious course of action leads to failure.

A.: It is all a matter of proportion then. To find the balance intuitively.

B.: Indeed. We got into this topic by questioning the claim of some schools of thought, religious or otherwise, that we can effectively escape from the world. You assumed that would be possible, presumably because you hear about it a lot and took it for granted.

A.: Well, I feel there is at least some truth to being more spiritual. If each of us turns into their self and reflects carefully, we can become more compassionate and align ourselves with nature. Love will save us all.

B.: I think being spiritual is different from what I have been referring to. Getting closer to nature is laudable, though I will explain what I mean a bit later. Keep that in mind. And love can be an effective medium for enacting reform. Though you must take a step back and think about whether you are speaking about nature or the idol of nature.

A.: I am not sure I understand. I mean that we will turn towards Gaia and become loving beings. That will solve a lot of problems.

B.: My thesis is that nature must include every facet of life, not just love. In nature we have conflict, competition, struggle for survival, love as a means of enhanced cooperation within nuclei of social species to out-perform their opponents… When the wolf kills its game, it is not operating in a binary of compassion versus hatred, good against evil. Those are human categories. Nature just is. Its facts do not have a moral value. It is meaningless to claim that it is good to sleep, because we cannot afford to do otherwise. Recall that morality is a system of rules that regulate the modes of interaction between situational agents and patients to a given action. We are in control of chrēmata, not pragmata. Morality builds an intersubjective character. For those rules to make sense, they have to be actionable and that involves agency, else the capacity to recognise those patterns in the structure and adapt to them.

[ Read: On walking (away) (2021-07-19) ]

A.: So you are arguing that equating nature with love leads us to the idolisation of what we are considering?

B.: Yes, and here I will introduce another misunderstood term: idolatry. The early Christians used that word to slander pagans on the premise that a statue of a god cannot be a god. Fair enough! Yet idolatry follows from a tendency to idealise and then to mistake the ideal with the actual while appraising it. It is not a particular historical feature of the Roman paganus. Today we have idolatry everywhere in a variety of forms. Christians have idolatry, such as by considering certain icons themselves as miraculous. Consumers are idolaters whenever a mere gadget or commodity becomes a symbol of social status, a bragging right, the basis of some elitism. Political activists are engaging in idolatry when they indignantly harass a public figure on a social media platform for not conforming with some impossible moral standard. Our role-playing games in society and how social expectations are developed also involve idolisation. In all such cases we have idols acting as substitutes for—or de facto enemies of—what they intend to symbolise. The exalted image of the underlying form assumes a life of its own through the narratives that are associated with it. Nature is another such idol where all our talk about it tends to reflect our projected views, such as Gaia being all-loving, simply because we have developed this idea of universal, i.e. totalising, love and went too far with it. Think of it this way: the difference between medicine and poison is one of degree. Put some vinegar in your salad and enjoy the health benefits. Drink a litre of vinegar and you will be sent directly to the hospital as a matter of utmost emergency. It is about the balance you mentioned earlier.

A.: Are we misrepresenting nature to feel good about ourselves or to justify what we do? Is love not the answer?

B.: To idolise is not out of the ordinary. I would speculate that it is prevalent in all human societies. In this case though, hubris consists in not recognising the possibility that we may become victims of our propensity for idolisation. The reasons why some may be depicting nature in a certain way are likely to be variegated: we cannot know what motivates each person or group. To answer that kind of question we must delve into the specifics, which we have no means of doing right now. Suffice to say that idealisation which effectively takes the stead of reality will prove problematic once it is confronted with that which it had omitted from its representation of the subject matter. This applies to the totalising preaching of unilateral love.

A.: Love is kind of the wrong goal then?

B.: Love itself is fine. Same with the example I provided earlier about not eating animals. It is the totalisation of love or every principle which is dubious, because nature includes other forces as well. Why choose to ignore or discount them? That aside, I think this theory gains force in a socio-economic milieu of privilege or relative security. It is a luxury to think that you can just turn inwardly, ignore the world around you, and through compassion alone make things happen. For you to be able to engage in that kind of activity in peace, there has to be a political system in place which tolerates it, at the very least. It cannot happen unilaterally. You are taking too many things for granted if you think that doing your own thing has no prerequisites. In concrete terms, do you think you will rely on nothing but positive vibes in the face of an omnipotent totalitarian regime bent on obliterating you? What about exercising caution and cunning to protect yourself from tyranny?

A.: Is there no point in focusing on our selves? If everyone becomes a better person, then there will be nothing to worry about. I guess that is the lesson to be drawn.

B.: It is plausible, though unlikely because it rests on a coincidence of attitudes across a heterogeneous set of people. We have had thousands of years of history to be confident in the view that converting everyone, either through peace or with fire and steel, to a religion whose banal morality is all about love has had a negligible effect on the overall justice of the order we live in. And that is because there is a distinction to be made between actual societies and clubs. The former develop organically and remain heterogeneous in terms of the availability of talents and abilities. Whereas the latter has selection bias built into it and is, therefore, more likely to pass a particular test for which it is optimised for.

A.: Care to elaborate on the club metaphor?

B.: Imagine the creation of a small community in some remote place out of a gathering of the world’s leading pacifist intellectuals. That will most likely end up being a success story of peaceful co-habitation, because the members of the community all share similar views, they all have a high intelligence and can reason about their common issues given they are intellectuals, and so on. Now what happens to such a wonderful bunch once we introduce real-world influences to it, such as migration from countries where no pacifists exist? Or when there are threats of war from regimes that are not amused by our little all-singing, all-dancing community. Do the pacifists try to fend for themselves? Are existential threats a casus belli? Do they maintain borders to impede the migratory influx of non-pacifists, as newcomers with that background would refashion the character of their social bond? My point is that when people are in a position of privilege they have the luxury to fancy their life in black-and-white terms where they choose the side of the good. When, however, you introduce friction, you start realising that the absolutes are untenable.

A.: Love is not the answer to everything then…

B.: It is only if you accept the dogma that this world is our prison cell and the only escape is through a particular morality. I have not been persuaded by those claims and, as such, cannot accept their derivatives at face value. Instead, I choose to rely on common sense. If a bully enslaves and abuses a child or a wild animal, does the hatred or repulsion you feel for that injustice motivate you to act against it? If so, then hatred or repulsion is vitalising a certain force for justice, understood as the abolition of the arbitrariness of control imposed by the abuser against the victim. Now you may want to re-frame that scenario as being about showing love towards the victim, though my focus is on the feeling of non-love towards the abuser, however we may call it. At any rate, those same sentiments cannot always have the same effect, for obvious reasons. Sometimes love is what propels us to those heights. Hence the need for common sense. Think about the exhortation to never lie and suppose you find yourself in a life threatening situation, just like Odysseus (Ulysses) who was trapped in the cave of the Cyclops. Will you speak the truth and die or act with cunning to return to your long journey back home? And remember that I doubt the presence of a global scoreboard that measures our performance to determine whether we will ascend into another domain or not. It may be fascinating to think you are too smart to apply common sense and will instead search for some intricate method reserved for a self-righteous elite. I am just the common sense type and think we must assess the particularities of the case and determine whether some means can lead to certain ends, always with the proviso that morality is a human convention.

A.: This common sense can also be explained as not having preconceived notions?

B.: What I have in mind is the disposition of remaining dubitative and inquisitive in the face of evolving events. To inquire upon the specifics of the case is to approach the issue with no bias or, at least, with no intent of being prejudiced. Your quest is to identify the truth, not uncritically conform with the guidelines of elders or whomever. Finding a balance is helpful just like with the medicine-poison comparison. Which brings me to this idea of aligning oneself with nature…

A.: Ah yes, I mentioned that earlier…

[ Read: On materiality and emergence (2020-12-20) ]

B.: We do not have a definitive understanding of nature and are thus prone to idolisations. On the one hand, to determine the specifics of the case is to describe that which is and, we hold, nature is. So the quest for approximating the truth must be, in a manner of speaking, the attempt to get closer to nature by setting aside our falsehoods to behold what truly is. On the other hand, we have established that nature contains all possible states, such as love and hatred, to the extent that it must be natural to fantasise and, consequently, idealise and idolise. We cannot rule those out as unnatural, for where do they come from? Recall that humans do not have a decontextualised presence and thus cannot generate all the negatives in the world out of their own free will, as that vaunted concept requires a standalone existence (yes, I am a free will sceptic). As such, we count them as natural. But we have to somehow be able to distinguish the actual from the imaginary, even though that which is in our fantasy is fundamentally possible just like everything else in nature. What we do, essentially, is employ heuristics with which to establish a modicum of objectivity and determine the correspondence between the thought of something and its instantiation. Science, or philosophy, or jurisprudence and morality, are works-in-progress in which we basically proceed through trial and error until we get the best results in the moment. Sometimes we stumble across patterns in the cosmos that occur regularly and we are able to define those with greater precision than others which leave a lot of room for interpretation. Whatever we do, we must consider the possibility of inadvertently making an idol out of our subject matter and committing hubris in the process by thinking we know more than we actually do.

A.: Is there some practical insight we can derive from this?

B.: Take social role-playing. You already know how your sexual orientation was at conflict with the gender that was assigned to you at birth.

A.: Yes, I do and have had a lot of trouble in my life. It still is a challenge. Though I am calm now as I have learnt to live without their validation.

B.: Good! What was at play, what always beset you from all sides, were social expectations of conforming with a given normal. The normativity of being that particular type of human and of having to behave in that specific set of ways. They told you that it is not natural to look like one but feel like the other and you got depressed because deep down you understood that you did nothing wrong as you were that way naturally. Now we know those prejudices to be predicated on an idolisation of nature, not an assessment of nature proper. They had created an effigy of nature in their mind which could, at its best, be representative of the state of the heuristics of yesteryear. We could say that they did not know any better and the simulacrum of nature they produced was the best they could achieve back then, which is not a problem in itself. The problem consists in the hubris of treating heuristics as tantamount to the eternal truth, of conflating the idol with the deity it is meant to symbolise. If those people knew that their view of nature was “their view” and that it was not nature as such, then they would be better prepared to take a deep breath and reconsider their beliefs.

A.: I see. The hubris of being prejudiced when they should have been sceptical of their own position and should have applied common sense when their theories proved inadequate to describe the phenomena in front of them. This makes me confident that I can withstand the pressure more effectively. They are basically ignorant. Thank you!

B.: You are welcome! And thanks for the drink and the quality time we spent here.

A.: Likewise. Hopefully the next time will not be in two or more years from now.

B.: Maybe it will be sooner. Or it may never happen again. Impermanence and all that.

A.: Sigh… And what about the spirit. Should we commit to it?

B.: We are fully fledged human beings. Have you ever had a drink with a spirit? There are several aspects to our existence: physical, mental, intellectual, aesthetic, and mystical. As with the world at-large, they are connected. You cannot just have one.

A.: Which is the greatest error humans commit?

B.: Hmm… To mistake chrēmata for pragmata.

A.: And the second?

B.: Oh, this is getting tricky. And I’m not even drunk! Perhaps their tendency to idealise becoming a fraction of themselves. One wishes to become just a spiritual being. The other aspires to be only physically fit. A third valorises their rationality and considers everything else to be nonsense. Again, there has to be a balance, a sense of proportionality. It is like listening to only one tune for the rest of your life. You cannot sustain it, even if it is your favourite song. Sometimes you need the therapeutic energy of Istvan Sky or the raw power of Kawir. Other times you want to explore the alien soundscapes of Atra Aeterna. And others, still, you accept an invitation to attend a live concert of The Van Jets.

Now imagine.

It is winter time. An evening like all others. You leave the workplace late as usual. Must be 19:30 at minimum. As you walk outside the building, the rain gets stronger. The weather forecast predicted as much. You button up and search your backpack in hope that you pull out an umbrella. Caught in your peripheral vision is a colleague who exuberantly approaches your position. Perhaps you are not the only workaholic around or maybe there are no workaholics whatsoever and this simply is the reality of those tacit job requirements…

— Don’t you have a car?

— No.

— Come, I’ll drop you wherever you want. Where do you live?

Long work hours have taken their toll. It shows. You are not in the mood to talk to anyone, make new friends, or even accept a kind offer from a stranger. Well, not a stranger per se, just one you have noticed once or twice before without making their acquaintance.

— Don’t worry! This is my favourite type of weather to go on foot.

— Strange… You have no umbrella. It is really bad. Are you sure?

— Yes.

Off you go in a hurry. Could you not even be bothered to utter a “bye” or “good night”? Words are so simple, yet situations make them difficult.

Alone you are. Half wet and feeling worn down. Though you remain calm. One might say “surprisingly so”. You know better. This minor inconvenience is nothing compared to the ordeal of sociability that comes at an inappropriate time. While you understand the inner need to recharge your batteries, the intuition of an appropriate time remains elusive. You have not found correspondence between that notion and your quotidian experience. When is the right moment and how does it feel like? Do you even want to meet people or are you only opening up to those whom you trust? And how can you entrust someone without getting to know them?

Let’s be clear: you will be labelled a fool. This is not about leaving the umbrella at home and insisting on your preferred means of transportation despite the unfavourable meteorological phenomena. It has to do with human relations. Did you not see? Why pass on a chance to get to know a hot colleague? It could be the start of something fascinating. And if not, it would not hurt taking your chances. Sure, everybody has a bad day or moments when they want to switch off. But, I mean… Your reaction to that is to run? Seriously?

Okay, that’s harsh and inconsiderate. Apologies! Normativity can do that to the mind. It makes it strip away the complexity from the case’s actuality, reducing the actors to their simplified expected roles. Expected by whom? Who writes the script and who decides on the setting? And why should any of that matter and under which circumstances?

No one can ponder such questions when they are tired. Yet there you are doing just that. It has been hours since you last had the chance to think; to wonder in quietude. The walk back home is all you’ve got. Not even the remote chance of an erotic escapade can take it from you. How could it, after all? You did not even turn your eyes to your side and did not listen to your colleague’s opening statement:

— Hi! I work in the office at the other end of the corridor. I’ve seen you before. Nice to meet you!

— …

Did you not hear any of that or did you pretend not to listen to avoid going down that path? Sometimes you seem to pause and disconnect from your surroundings while your mind is busy outlining some elaborate conceptual apparatus. That has to be it. Nah, this is nonsense. You just assumed to be invisible and the remark was directed at someone else. It couldn’t possibly be you, after all. No one would, right? Behold the misguided internalisation of self-deprecation! Or is it unfettered honesty?

Invisibility is a superpower you can’t attain or a luxury you cannot afford. Either way you are conspicuous. What you do and what you don’t, when you speak and when you remain silent. No matter the particularities, you are always communicating a message that gets interpreted by people in your milieu. All you can do is endure their scrutiny.

What does it mean to know someone? And how can we be sure that our knowledge is true? There you are, walking in the rain thinking back at the beginning of the end from a few months ago. No, not the attractive colleague from earlier. You barely have recollection of that incident. You did not even consider the attractiveness factor. It did not register with you as you were already caught between the surrounding conditions and the world you were exploring in your mind. Did that dialogue even transpire? Was it you participating in it or someone behind you? You cannot tell because you did not muster the strength to turn your attention towards the person approaching you. None of that matters any more. Only what stays with you can be problematic. It is hypocrisy that troubles you.

The beginning of the end… You had signed a new contract thinking that you were just getting work done. No fanfare, no boasting, no outward sign of elation. Nothing but a formality. News travels fast though, much to your chagrin. Gossip, damned gossip! As soon as you got back to the office to resume your mundane task, a group of coworkers welcomed you. They brought gifts galore and alcohol to celebrate the occasion. What’s so special about fizzy wine and the rest of the bunch? The bartender knows better after having prepared all those drinks a zillion times. Where did your peers draw all that apparent happiness from? You had barely ever talked with them and always were preoccupied with some assignment whenever they tried to approach you. There is no need to be so industrious, by the way. It is not like you will get bonus points per unit of output. The more efficient you are the more work you will end up doing. If you finish early, someone will simply invent a new demand whose satisfaction is supposed to be bound by a hard deadline for that same evening followed by an ominous “only if you want” remark.

While you were pondering about the precarity of living conditions that led to the contractual agreement, you had to tend to the immediate issue of the impromptu party. Instead of joining them for a drink, you thanked them halfheartedly and off you went to get some fresh air. “Now that I’m happy, I’m taking a 30 minute break”. Such was your excuse. Cheeky! There went the party for you. You didn’t care. You never did. Nor did they.

Something else had been haunting you. There it was again. Normativity, the most prevalent of human conventions. It always pushes you to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with your current mood or your overall disposition. You had signed the contract shortly before going upstairs to your office but the party served as the catalyst which made you realise that no amount of money was ever going to be worth the pressure to perform—it always is a performance above all else. Such was no spontaneous reaction. You had considered it before and was hesitant to sign the papers. But you were not prepared to admit it. There is a trade-off between conformity with all its pleasures and comforts or an uncertain life in pursuit of what may well be the chimera of self-determination. There are permutations between the extremes, though you have long understood that in basic terms the latter has been your destiny. You always wanted to be yourself, else you had wished to become that which you could not specify though understood intuitively.

To want something implies certainty in its presence. Whence does this certainty come from? There are no facts of selfhood independent of the conditions that produce them. What you get is always framed, influenced, or otherwise determined by its context. Facts don’t speak for themselves. They do not have a standalone existence. Even this distinction between the presence and its environment is analytical. You won’t find it out there. Your immediate milieu may consist, in a manner of speaking, of other people which affect your perception of self. Yet while you are at the epicentre of this particular case, the same is true for each of those persons individually in cases where everything appears to revolve around them. It is all a matter of perspective, about how we choose to constitute the case. Those who point at some datum without assessing the underlying method used to derive it are either naive or engaged in the business of deceiving you. The method yields results that act as positive reinforcement which feeds back into the discussion on the given method, the methodology, from where comes a more refined version of the original conceptual framework, and so on. There is no linearity, no terminus. It follows a helix-like motion: it feels circular yet never really covers the same points in its space. The line is not smooth either. It is as if it is being drawn by the hand of an infant. Focus on the details and you will discern erratic zig-zag motions at each turn. Then again, this being a child means that it cannot be pursuing a grand telos. The helix is not inexorably approaching its finality. The kid makes mistakes, forgets what it was pursuing by moving in that direction until it eventually shifts its attention elsewhere. Poof! There goes your impression of unmitigated progress.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

You entertain the illusion of an objective truth in wanting to be your self. Who are you, anyway? Is it the fellow who walks away instead of rising to the occasion? That cannot be it. There must be something you are running towards, something you are in pursuit of. Or else there is an underlying condition, some state of affairs, that makes you comfortable. It is what you associate with your true nature. But why only that? When we are afraid, we flee; when we are confident, we stay and remain firm. Both are facets of our self. To pick one is to develop a narrative of self where you are depicted as the victim, the misunderstood other, and in which you simultaneously idealise whatever it is you are hiding.

There is no preconceived notion. No certitude of that sort. Yours is not a claim on the objective’s substantive qualities. You do not know who you are. It just is that you feel uncomfortable about certain things and so you interpret those as being antithetical to your disposition. The truth you are arriving at is drawn negatively, by ruling out what appears to be wrong. If you were to sketch out at the outset who your genuine self was and ventured to become that, you would be assuming as truthful that which had not been verified. Like those people who buy a commodity they do not need, thinking that it will yield them longer-term happiness, only to realise that it loses its appeal very quickly.

You walk away. Some may think you are pursuing your dreams. Though you are only escaping from what you dread. Hypocrisy: the bane of your existence. Your ambition is to know yourself by getting to know others, but those pesky role-playing tendencies keep getting in the way of your plans and misplaced wants. There is no one normativity. What is considered normal and what is enforced as such is specific to each setting. When people prepare you a surprise party, it is normal to be filled with joy, feel appreciated, and indulge in boosting your egoism. Despite all its evils, alcohol can help with cognitive dissonance and can allow people who are trapped in etiquette to speak their mind. The bartender knows all about it. There is always a normativity that conditions behaviour. It is not promulgated by some institution, it is not written anywhere. The society itself, the collective, perpetuates its existence by reproducing the structures which support it. People come and go, while the culture we are confronted with remains. All it takes is to follow along. Wear a mask to conceal your indifference and become what you must.

Your trouble with selfhood stems from the uncertainty germane to the concept of the negative truth, but also rests on the inherent difficulties of decoupling persons from personas. That cheerful colleague of yours may be genuine or may be acting out to conform with the norm. A masked salesperson of happiness? You let go of the particulars. They do not matter. What you wrestle with are the dynamics of the context, how the structure conditions the agents and how those who exhibit the phenomenality of agency function as structure, as the constants which enforce normativity when viewed from the perspective of others. There are no neat dichotomies, no “we against them”. It is not only you who faces difficulties in finding their true self. Everyone does. It cannot be that uncertainty has only gripped your mind. Those who behave in a certain way do so to relieve the pressure of non-conformity. It is their means of escape. You are compelled to operate the same way, only your threshold is different and are instead pressured when you do acquiesce to what is done to you, namely, the projection of expected patterns of behaviour upon your being.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14) ]

How can the structure-agent dichotomy collapse into itself? This is your thought while the wind is howling and you keep getting wet. You really wanted to avoid that predicament back at the workplace. The absence of an umbrella would not deter you. How far is your house, anyway? That car ride sure seems appealing right now, its driver notwithstanding. Then you recall how banalities ought not be underestimated as they provide insight into the abstract order of things. What happened two weeks ago is a case in point. You were asked to join them for a drink on a Friday evening. You politely declined. Everyone was cool about it and expressed how they respect your choice and only want you to preoccupy yourself with whatever works for you. You took their sincerity at face value. Faith is easier than doubt. It closes the circle. Then, on the next occasion, they became passive aggressive.

— Wanna join us?

— No, thanks.

— It’s fine that you do not like us.

— You got me wrong.

— Relax! It’s a joke.

Has anyone ever laughed at that kind of humour? At any rate, your thoughts lie elsewhere. We think of the structure as immutable and impersonal, yet what we discern is other people, themselves agents. The structure consists of them plus their acquired behaviours. It is the set of patterns which we associate with roles that grants them structurehood in that context. Agency entails initiative. Structure delineates the realm of possibility within which action may unfold. Agency can thus become structure when its functioning involves the determination of possibilities, such as in how your peers mould you and remake you cumulatively. You think of this dynamic, of how it evolves through its internal loops, and are prepared not to pass judgement on others. They are not necessarily hypocrites out of malicious intent. Those are the rules. Humanity can do anything when the game world expects as much, including the capacity for inhumanity. Why do you think politicians, corporations and their consumers are fine with extracting resources from war zones, exploiting foreign child labour, destroying local ecosystems, and more? Because the dictates of the game are such where those magnitudes are not pertinent. What matters is year-on-year fiscal growth, or simply how many possessions you have at your disposal. Those determine your high score—and you can’t afford to lose out on the leaderboard!

“It’s just a joke”. Such an innocuous statement. Much like the “it’s just a job”. There is no consideration of its underpinnings and its consequences. It is done because it has to. And it needs to be carried out by virtue of a shared delusion about the propriety of the narrative that renders it placable. The uneven distribution of power governing it goes largely unnoticed. The narrative is not a self-evident truth, notwithstanding the pretences to the contrary. It is what the powers that be consider conducive to the preservation and eventual betterment of their status.

You contemplate what made you think about those themes. You walk away because you are desperate to be heard. Such a bizarre attitude, isn’t it? To search for a face in a world of masks. You remain relaxed. What compels you is not a decision of yours. The pressure you feel in those moments hints at an underlying reality. You are repelled or attracted by a given situation and your mind simply attaches feelings to the respective reactions to reinforce the desired one until its prioritisation requires the allocation of as few resources as possible. There is nothing you can do about it. People always tell you otherwise. How you haven’t found the right one, that you should try harder, follow some inane tips and tricks, take medication… All so that you may finally stop being maladjusted. There it is: normativity in action. You ought to do as much because the end goal, that of fitting in, is assumed as a good in itself. The game world does not consider the “why” you perform those tasks. Why should we grow? Why must we buy more stuff we don’t really need? Who cares about their score on a meaningless metric? Questions of that sort cannot be raised. They are alien concepts. What the game understands is the feedback it gets as a result of the instructions it has passed on to you. Do those and you ascend in the leaderboard, which in your case is about making so-called “friends” at the workplace who will not harass you any longer as you will always be answering affirmatively, pursuing a successful career to the effect that your bank account and the rubbish you accumulate expands at the expense of your wellness, wanting to fuck someone—anyone—to dispel any doubts while you are empty inside from the conditions imposed upon your life.

None of that is the real “you”. We assume normality to be a state where behavioural patterns are not conditioned by what effectively are thinly disguised orders backed by implicit threats. There’s the uncertainty once again: one cannot pinpoint this brand of normality in positive terms, but only as the absence of compulsion.

A realisation springs to mind. You did not always walk away. It started happening at some point, but you are sure it was not the case from the beginning. So if your perception of self is to be influenced by your current state, then your prior state would have to inform the impression of your self at that time. There is change. How can you be your self, let alone your true self, when that which you aspire towards is not constant? Its phenomenality presents it as a variable. Is variability open-ended or otherwise characterised by randomness? Can, in other words, the variable assume any possible value or only a narrow set of predetermined ones? If the former, then your quest is in vain, for what you want is but a fleeting dream. There is the recognition of variability, which raises the expectation that it might persist as variability—itself a constant. And there is the belief that the value it may acquire is arbitrary. As such, the self is indeterminable. What must then be the conclusion if the possible values the variable may take are limited to a small set? It means that the self is a composite which consists of both constant and variable parts.

The notion of a composited self seems more plausible to you. It helps you hypothesise about why some people gravitate towards wearing certain masks instead of others. You can predict the role they will likely assume under different scenaria. It also lets you discern patterns amid the multitude of phenomena with which to infer an abstract edifice. No two rain drops are the same, yet you know what happens when you walk in the rain, you are certain that water will fall from the clouds, and so on. The process of change does not render meaningless the underlying substance so long as you are clear that the thinkable is distinct from the instantiable. The conflation between process and substance, the belief that only one of the two is real is reinforced by the failure to admit the possibility that what is thought to be the case is not necessarily the case and that what may ever be thought to be the case is all that the case may ever appear to be.

We cannot act from a position of certainty, as our scepticism will force us into stasis. How did we arrive at that certitude? Is it the truth, in the sense of us having passed final judgement on it? Or is it an intermediate point between research programmes? If the former, did we expand that certitude to the adequacy of the instruments that were used to deliver those findings and so on recursively? Be honest! If, instead, our certainty is couched in terms of an ongoing inquiry, we can accept it as an expedient workaround, provided we make a sincere effort to hold as few assumptions as we can. Ad-hoc faith keeps us going. No, not dogmatism, not unflinching belief in something decisively unverifiable. It is about heuristics and hypotheses which are formulated and tested in a spirit of non-commitment. It is paradoxical that scepticism presupposes certainty of an intermediate sort. The key to resolving the apparent contradiction is in the disposition of not clinging on to said findings. What matters is the attitude of approximating the truth, not the misplaced reaction to stand behind one’s pet project.

To try to remain truthful to one’s self is to experiment with a hypothesis at any given point. We flee situations that are stressful to us on the premise that we will find a better place somewhere else. What if it does not exist or we can’t get there? Hope is good, provided it is reasonable. Otherwise it can blur the lines between the real and the imaginary. The astute student of events acknowledges that there is no point in escaping the inescapable. What must follow is acceptance, not dread. To recognise how things stand instead of entertaining illusions. We are calm only insofar as we are aligned with reality. Everything else is to our detriment.

[ Read: Comments on Epictetus’ “Enchiridion” (2021-07-10) ]

As you reach the apartment, you inquire upon the desirability of a walk that happens regardless of the prevailing conditions. It is the only time when you do not sense norms besieging you while in public. Those are the moments during which you are allowed to think. There may be people all around you. It does not matter. You have taken measures to protect yourself. They cannot form the structure that informs your agency. Not in this case. They are no friends, colleagues, relatives in the sense that there is no relationship of control in effect. The parameters of the bond are what matters, not the actual persons involved. Individuals do not wield power. Status does. To walk alone and maintain a low profile is to be as free as possible from claims on your conduct. As for the rain, you actually enjoy it for it ensures that no one will join you. No point in taking chances with losing such precious moments, correct?

Have you rationalised your insecurities and assumed them to be your pure self? Did you think of them as inevitable and unalterable? Have you befriended your fear in the hope of turning it into its opposite? It is always busy inside that head of yours… You answer one question, ten more emerge. It never ends, though you know that already. Hence your aloofness. You take a cold shower. It feels good, despite the initial shock. Why would you even do that in February? Have you not suffered enough? Or is that minor inconvenience ephemeral and thus tolerable, since it is not attached to some criterion of persistent conditionality? As you are about to go to bed, you decide on your future. That contract shall not be renewed. There will be more walks, but there will not be any more walking away from what underlies those events. You recognise that your self remains to be determined. As you close your eyes you prepare to take a leap of faith into the unknown.

I should preface this by noting that my primary influences beside studies in political science, economics, law, history, are, in no particular order, the Pyrrhonian Sceptics,¹ Diogenes of Sinope, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Protagoras (whatever little we have of them, alas!). I think there is an overarching unity in the works of those philosophers, as well as with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. I expect that to be identifiable in the works of Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school of thought, though I have not studied Stoicism yet.

This unity is the underlying value system of the ancient Greek world, which we find elements of in, for example, the Delphic maxims and Greek polytheism at-large.² Epictetus lived under Roman imperial rule where, I feel, those values were no longer relevant in much of quotidian life (if I were to roughly mark the beginning of the gradual demise of the ancient Greek world, it would be with the Peloponnesean War, the decline of the major city-states, and the subsequent conquests of Alexander which ushered in gigantism—but let’s not go into that).

Below I quote sections from the Enchiridion using the source provided by the Internet Classics Archive, as translated by Elizabeth Carter.

1 Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

[…]

Work, therefore to be able to say to every harsh appearance, “You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.” And then examine it by those rules which you have, and first, and chiefly, by this: whether it concerns the things which are in our own control, or those which are not; and, if it concerns anything not in our control, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.

This excerpt from the first proposition sums up the approach of Epictectus in the Enchiridion. While I agree that we should not worry about things which are external to us and focus on those which we can indeed control, I believe the distinction is not always clear-cut.

Consider desire, for example. The cause of it is not in our control, even though it may seem endogenous. If human affairs make you uncomfortable, think of a dog during mating season: as soon as it picks up the scent, it practically changes its entire behaviour. It won’t listen to you, it may refuse to eat, it will lose its sleep… Humans have such animalistic tendencies which are at once (i) hardwired and thus internal, and (ii) are triggered or amplified by external stimuli. In practice, there are feedback loops at play. As our presence is not decontextualised or, in other words, as we are always present in a system of systems defined by interconnectedness, so the distinction between the internal and the external must not be presented as an absolute but rather as an expedient analytical heuristic which helps guide our thinking yet remains analytical, i.e. is not the actual state of affairs.

The same can be said of actions. I am sceptical of the notion that we have free will, in the sense of an absolute agency or some “true inner self” that is not determined, framed, conditioned, or otherwise influenced by the cosmos. As we do not maintain a decontextualised presence, we cannot expect a certain quantity, which some may call the soul or the mind or whatever, to remain both unconnected or decoupled from the world yet capable of affecting change in it.

Some actions are fairly easy to qualify as falling within our control, or so the appearances would suggest. Others challenge our assumptions. Has it ever happened to you to walk down a busy street and suddenly turn sideways only to make eye contact with a stranger on the opposite side of the road who just happens to turn towards you all of a sudden? It happens to me frequently. What possibly compels us to act in such way? Reason cannot be it, for it feels reflexive. Could it be, and am I speculating rampantly here, that we feel the electromagnetism of another person and are just drawn to each other much like magnets? Other animals know how to adjust their orientation based on where the North pole is, such as migratory birds, so could we have a sense like that which is, nonetheless, unrefined or underdeveloped? There are parts of us which we think as automata, yet we ascribe to the totality of our subsystems, the human being as such, agency. Perhaps we are also automata, at least to a degree or under some circumstances? Do the uncoordinated acts of two parties to turn around simultaneously to meet each other eye-to-eye still fall within each side’s individual control in the same way writing this note does? I think not.

Maybe then, we should speak of “purposeful actions”, so that we clearly refer to acts which proceed from reason. If so, must we not apply the same qualifier for “opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion…”, as Epictectus puts it? This greatly limits the scope of what we can claim to control, for reason is only a part of our being. If, on the other hand, we only choose to speak of purposeful actions but otherwise let desires and the like fall outside the scope of reason, we still arrive at the same conclusion: the human animal is not made of pure reason, is not decontextualised, and cannot operate only at the rational level.

My free will scepticism implies that I doubt the mind/body or soul/body duality which the ancient Greeks believed in and which we find in many other traditions, including Descartes’ decontextualised thinking mind or traditional and contemporary views on the afterlife and the like. I don’t think we have sufficient proof to provide credence to the belief that something in us, which is supposed to be our true self, can have an intransient, standalone, indeterminable presence. If the soul exists, it exists as what and where? If it is some ethereal or otherwise different substance, how can it possibly be bound by the body? And if it can be bound by the body, it means that it can be similarly constrained by everything like the body, which includes the universe as we know it, for our body essentially consists of the same star dust and dynamics we observe “out there” (water, carbon, minerals, acids, electricity…). If the soul exists in a different dimension, then there must still be a point at which our dimension connects with that one and so what is the nature of such a link? And how is that other dimension anyhow relevant if the soul is still trapped within the body? There are too many questions and too little in the way of evidence.

There is, however, a certain sense in which death does not entail an absolute end and that is because matter/energy is reconfigurable. Put simply, when you die you turn into dust and that may then find its way into another form of being. What we understand as our self though, what we would like to retain forever, is a reality that only exists circumstantially as an emergent phenomenon that arises in the particular interplay of the systems of systems that make up our presence within the supersystem that environs, influences, determines us. If the construct Protesilaos is only possible in the constitution of the case that involves a specific arrangement of an immensely large multitude of factors, and if the world always changes to the effect that all factors in the relevant system of systems are no longer conducive to the re-creation of that particular arrangement, then Protesilaos, properly so-called, cannot exist anew unless the full array of factors, which could be the entire universe, that made such an event possible is replicated as well. We have trouble reproducing seemingly simple tasks (they are not, just saying), such as tracking an executable program down to its source code, so good luck with cosmic-scale reproducibility! And we haven’t even discussed what the “I” truly is, whether it is a constant or a variable, absolute or situational, etc.

Couched in those terms, my take in Why you can’t upset me is meant as a practical disposition towards living in the imperfect world of human relations and only describes how I have thus far approached things. It should not be read as a set of exhortations on following my example, for I state in no ambiguous terms that I may be wrong and these notes here should further demonstrate that I do not, in any case, imply that simplistic binaries can help us understand the world.

Back to Epictetus:

9 Sickness is a hindrance to the body, but not to your ability to choose, unless that is your choice. Lameness is a hindrance to the leg, but not to your ability to choose. Say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens, then you will see such obstacles as hindrances to something else, but not to yourself.

Here we notice the mind/body divide, which I alluded to earlier. My opinion on this take, even if we accept the dualism for the sake of argument, is that your body will always hinder your mind’s ability to make choices when something is wrong with it. When you are starving, you cannot think clearly. When you are delirious in pain or fear, you cannot philosophise.

In ancient Greece, people used to live by the maxim that a healthy mind exists within a healthy body (again the dualism which I questioned earlier, though bear with me). The point is that to be able to think clearly and to make the right choices, you must not be dealing with hindrances such as pain or illness.

To me the duality between the body and the mind is not helpful, especially once we recognise that they are interdependent so that the state of the one affects that of the other. I consider them part of the same supersystem of systems that we discern as a human being. They are interlocked, as those common examples suggest. What you eat, breath, think, the prevailing conditions in your immediate environment, are all part of your overall condition and will all contribute to how you feel and act (genetics notwithstanding). It is a cycle. If you consume food and drinks which are effectively poisonous over the long-term (processed food, fried meals, over-concentration of any substance such as sugar or alcohol, or even the seemingly innocuous fresh orange juice that removes most of the fibre instead of eating a whole orange…), you will be affected physically and emotionally and your capacity to use your mind will diminish accordingly. It is impossible to have an unhealthy body and maintain a perfectly healthy mind.

Despite the obvious areas where physicians specialise in, I think of health as longer-term stability. For example, you do not indulge in sweets during New Year’s celebrations, gain a few extra kilos, and then spend the next few months laboriously trying to lose that added weight so that you look good when you go to the beach. Then, when the summer is over, you go back to profligate eating habits. Such erratic cycles must be hampering your ability to focus your mind on creating something. Stability means predictability, which engenders a sense of certainty. Let it be boring and bland, so that it becomes a near given and so that it functions with as little friction and as minimal effort as possible. You do not get preoccupied by the underlying uncertainty and can commit more resources elsewhere and with greater efficiency.

We should add exercise to the mix. You should be active though not expend all your energy on it as then there will be nothing left for creativity. Take a 30-minute walk in the morning and another in the evening, or whatever works for you to be physically in shape but also not be exhausted. As with everything, do not overdo it: to be “in shape” does not mean to put on mass, as that will force you to eat more and set you on an upward spiral that is difficult to sustain. Difficulty of this sort implies that resources will be reserved for the wrong cause. Again, we are dealing with the mind and the body as parts of the same system.

33 Immediately prescribe some character and form of conduce to yourself, which you may keep both alone and in company.

Be for the most part silent, or speak merely what is necessary, and in few words. We may, however, enter, though sparingly, into discourse sometimes when occasion calls for it, but not on any of the common subjects, of gladiators, or horse races, or athletic champions, or feasts, the vulgar topics of conversation; but principally not of men, so as either to blame, or praise, or make comparisons. If you are able, then, by your own conversation bring over that of your company to proper subjects; but, if you happen to be taken among strangers, be silent.

Perhaps there is miscommunication here, though the way I interpret this suggests that you should envisage a role and channel all your vitality to assume it at all times. I believe that would be a terrible mistake and my recent imaginary dialogues, which are nonetheless based on actual events and describe real stories, cover in some detail.³

If you are someone who enjoys talking, then do not assume the reserved and silent type of persona as that will contradict your nature. You will be introducing friction which will, sooner or later, cause problems including depression. I have acquaintances who have an artistic flair and who are all talkative and gregarious. Would their creative side be facilitated by essentially confining them to a silent, reserved, and solitary lifestyle? I think it would be detrimental to them. The same is true for people who are not people-oriented: if we try to force them to act in an unnatural way to them, they will suffer the consequences.

Think of a role you try to assume as a mould. It only works if it fits you. Liken the process to wearing a smaller-sized pair of shoes and committing to a long-distance walk. What will happen in such a case is that you will either injure your feet or will have to remove the constraints. A role may not have a physical grip on you and may not limit your range of motion, though it still affects you emotionally. Emotions are just another part of the human experience whose effects will most definitely reverberate in other parts of the system and create their own feedback loops.

More generally on Epictetus’ point, I am not fond of etiquette and elitism that disguises as normativity. You are not a philosopher because you are quiet or because you act in conformity with a certain mode of conduct or stereotype that looks philosophical. You are not a rock guitarist just by having long hair or whatever the fashion accessory is. There has to be something genuine there, something that underlies whatever mask you are wearing.

With regard to talking about the “proper subjects”, I find that you cannot expect someone to make the leap of faith of joining you in advance of knowing you. Take, for example, a discussion that starts out about soccer. You can still draw linkages between particular phenomena to systemic magnitudes, such as how footballers play a game every three days with no regard to their well-being, how that relates to the ruthless, ever-expanding industry surrounding the sport, and how all this exhibits the same mechanics as with other industries, and so on.

Then there is the case of conversing with people who simply cannot philosophise. They may still be good friends, relatives, neighbours who can contribute to a betterment of your life. In those cases, you may find yourself covering topics such as dog training, how you make your own bread, why you collect herbs from the mountains, the deeds of your favourite artist, or whatever. You do not need to be single-minded to lead a philosophical lifestyle. If all you really want is to only talk about your own interests and if you cannot find others to do so, then you must realise that the only option is to withdraw to a hermitage. Is there such a place for philosophers?

In practical terms, if you really want to philosophise you will have to do it on your own. Why do you think I write this commentary on someone who lived centuries ago?

35 When you do anything from a clear judgment that it ought to be done, never shun the being seen to do it, even though the world should make a wrong supposition about it; for, if you don’t act right, shun the action itself; but, if you do, why are you afraid of those who censure you wrongly?

In an ideal world, this is appropriate. In reality though, it will put you in trouble. I am a pragmatist and recognise when I can get things my way and when attempting to do so risks jeopardising my position. Think of Odysseus, the protagonist in Homer’s Odyssey (and a major character in the Iliad) who was captured by a cyclops. To skip the details, Odysseus does not reveal his intent and fakes weakness to ultimately injure the monster and escape from its cave in order to embark again on his journey back home. If he had behaved all chivalrous, he would have been eaten alive.

Now imagine a prosaic scenario. You are conscripted to fight for a war you do not believe in and for a state you consider immoral, corrupt, illegitimate, or whatever. To you the most reasonable course of action, the only one which is legitimate, is to flee from the battlefield. While you think you have done nothing wrong, those who placed you in that predicament will not share your sensitivities and will likely execute you for treason.

Even in cases where you do act rightly, you can still be afraid of those who censure you wrongly. Though you hope that if you conduct yourself in moderation and with restraint that you are free, the fact is that freedom has an intersubjective, else collective, aspect. You cannot have “inner freedom”, so to speak, in a regime that oppresses you. You cannot behave in a manner that is conducive to philosophy in a place where people do not tolerate and outright penalise your scepticism or apparent eccentricity. And so on.

Throughout history the prevailing conditions oscillate between extremes that involve freedom of expression to repression of all dissenting voices. Are you expecting a Socrates to exist within Byzantine theocracy or a Sappho during the witch hunts? The intellectual who is naive enough to believe that everything will be sorted out with reason and good manners, and who thus does not pay attention to developments on the political front, stands to lose whatever modicum of freedom is available. If you recognise that your ability to think and act on your own accord is contingent on your milieu (and so it is not, strictly speaking, “your own”), then you will care greatly about what is happening all around you and, like Odysseus, you will be fully prepared to stab the cyclops in the eye when the opportunity arises.

This final point brings us back to the claim that humans are not purely rational animals. Stand ready to deal with those propensities.

B.: Okay.

A.: I am glad she made it. It all started by going out to talk to the professor who was here with us a couple of months ago. All it takes is a bit of courage.

B.: Good.

A.: And what about you?

B.: What? I always am reserved. No need to go over the top with showing that I too partake in the magic of the moment.

A.: No, I was saying that you are not making any progress in your academic qualifications. She is bright and deserves what she gets. And you, an indubitable genius, have remained stagnant.

B.: It is what it is.

A.: Which is not good enough…

B.: Your intention is sincere, though your goal is dubious. I presume this is because you associate success, in the sense of an accomplishment in social status, with happiness. You witness how excited she is and feel the need to push me in that direction so that I too can feel the same way about myself.

A.: Yes, I believe you deserve better.

B.: You also used the word “genius” to reinforce your claim. You think that a genius reaches their full potential when they are recognised for what they are. And you imply that recognition can only come in the form of a rubber stamp of approval by an institution of higher education.

A.: We are talking about the best of the best here. Joining that club is no small feat. It is only right for what you have to offer.

B.: Well, let’s ignore the business practices and the marketing around the “best of the best” and focus generally on social expectations. Last time I checked, higher education is a lucrative industry built on a kernel of genuine science. In essence, you are telling me that unless I get validation from my peers, I will remain a genius manqué; one which is lacking in some important ways.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

A.: What is the point of being exceptional at something, if no one gets to witness it and reward you for it?

B.: We need to distinguish between the fact itself and the set of intersubjective notions fastened upon it. If I draw a painting that happens to be a masterpiece in terms of colour combinations, the finesse and overall technique in the strokes of the brush, the message it conveys, etc., it will be that way courtesy of its intrinsic qualities, not due to how it appeals to others. And its inherent qualities will remain constant regardless of whether the number of its admirers is zero or a million. The value you have in mind is of an extrinsic nature, such as how the price of a commodity is contingent on the quantity demanded, among others.

A.: But what good does it make to be great at something within your private sphere? No consequence, no impact. Your daily life will not be affected at all and you will end up doing work that is below your skill level; work which will ultimately detract from your ability to accomplish what you care about.

B.: Here you are introducing another criterion or, rather, an ulterior motive. First we must establish that skill and the recognition of skill are distinct magnitudes. Then we can argue that the latter is, at least in part, a matter of shared beliefs, which are influenced by factors that do not strictly pertain to the particularities of the subject. Secondly, you assume that everything is based on merit, yet you already know that my colleague got her chance by liaising with the right person. Sure, it is not outright fraudulent because she has what it takes, but it is not perfectly objective either. And on the point of merit, how many are admitted to the most prestigious universities due to their family’s status, wealth, and connections? When I think about past and present prime ministers in Greece, who all graduated from the same university and who are the scions of highly influential quasi-dynasties, “genius” is not the concept that comes to mind—nor is it accurate in descriptive terms.

A.: You have to take your chances in an imperfect world. It is that simple. Last week we hosted professors from the Ivy League. We had lunch with them on several occasions and went out for after-work drinks. You did not join us once. Not once! You may not realise it now, but time flies and you will regret this one day. It is a pity to let such a golden opportunity slip by. You could have conversed with them to show them what you’ve got. How often do you get to be face-to-face with someone from their milieu?

B.: My decision reveals my preference: I did not see the point of going down that path.

[ Read: Why I never call you (2021-06-05) ]

A.: So you are destined to be unhappy by getting less than you deserve. You will not admit to it now, but you will remember those words in a few years.

B.: I don’t think that is the case. If your happiness stems from social validation, it is specious. The slightest doubt can trigger your well concealed insecurity, sending you into crisis mode as you constantly seek to cling on to your gains. It is an incessant struggle to preserve a role or title or office that grants you agency. This is the same for all types of extrinsic evaluation, such as people obsessing about their performance on social media, where they post something and, depending on the reactions, they may delete it. A curated self is a fraud. You can never be happy with what is external to you, be it accolades or commodities or favourable opinions, because you know deep inside that you are not in control of them and you understand that you may lose them at any moment. Such is not true happiness. It is slow and subtle torment even though it is not recognised as such because its intersubjective interpretation is not based on its longer-term reality but only on the immediate stimulus it furnishes.

A.: Oh come on! You get a free pass to study whatever you want and you do not have to pay for it. Then you are gifted the perfect job for someone like you and are set for life. Don’t turn this into a matter of principle.

B.: Why not consider the underlying mechanics? If joining a university and pursuing a career is supposed to make you happy, then we can extend that to other types of achievement, such as the number of “Internet points” people care about—their followers, upvotes, likes, how many admirers their heavily edited selfie attracted—whether people are envious of their brand new car, how favourably they compare to their neighbour, and so on. If I want to spend my time doing scholarly work, I do it because of an internal impulse to express myself in that way. But if I am pursuing it for an ulterior motive, such as to make money, become famous, make new so-called “friends” who are nothing but sycophants, then I am inevitably exchanging my sanity for the ordeal of feeding an insatiable beast: that of desiring more and of becoming dependent on the desire, with all its fleeting rewards.

A.: Why must you always be so stubborn? Can’t you concede that this is jeopardising your prospects?

B.: For something to be considered harmful, it is in relation to another magnitude that is perceived as benign. In our case, we have the set of assumptions that genius entails success, success begets recognition, recognition leads to bliss. Yet I claim that this is not a genuinely benign condition, despite the fact that it is assumed as much. Consequently, if I do not consider this beneficial to me, I cannot expect its future absence to be inherently detrimental either. Think about this for a moment: currently I do not have that which is supposed to be good, yet I doing fine without it. If, however, I were to expect it to be realised and if that expectation were not met, then I would definitely be disappointed. As such, it is not the lack of something that troubles you, but your misplaced evaluation of it manifesting as an unfulfilled yearning.

A.: I won’t argue with you. Fine. So expectations can be troublesome. What about getting a decent job? Won’t that give you the luxury of free time and disposable income to do whatever you truly want?

B.: I think not. If you set yourself up to live with the role of the esteemed professor, you assume the responsibility of acting accordingly. What if you don’t feel like it? What if I enjoy studying but distaste the academic administrivia with every fibber of my being? What if I like writing but loath the etiquette, pretentiousness, humbuggery of symposia and conferences? You cannot have it à la carte. You are not getting paid to do whatever you want. You are an operator, a cog in a machine. Again, this brings us back to peer pressure, social validation, expectations…

A.: Aren’t you overthinking it though? Why care about expectations? Why bother with what others think?

B.: Your own expectations and what others think are distinct. It is possible for what you believe to be endogenous and thus truly yours to be but an induced want, clearly exogenous in nature, so that your expectations are, in effect, a reflection of what your social environment upholds as the norm. That granted, if your well-being hinges on what others think, you are in a precarious condition by default; a condition that causes you anxiety, not happiness. If, on the other hand, we are talking about your expectations, we have to carefully consider what is it that you truly want.

A.: Let’s say you want to go to a good university to devote your life to the field of study you always aspired to explore.

B.: Is the university a prerequisite to the study?

A.: It helps a lot.

B.: I am not asking about its utility, but its putative necessity.

A.: A university sets you up for success. It provides you with the right environment to remain focused on your goal and to have access to all the means for its fulfilment.

B.: Sure, a university can focus your mind on the task of learning a discipline, but here we are inquiring on its necessity. Put differently, is it possible to pursue studies without joining an institute of higher learning? Can you do it on your own, provided you are motivated, disciplined, or whatnot?

A.: Yes, that is possible, albeit more challenging.

B.: So the university is not a dependency, after all. Yet we treat it as such. Why do we need it? Perhaps because we have already internalised certain value judgements, such as the prestige that comes with a certificate of higher education, which we associate with being well-off, intelligent, diligent, and the like. Then we perceive of this apparent comfort and affluence as clear signs of happiness or of the presence of contributing factors to that end.

A.: Fair enough. It is not a necessity. So what?

B.: We are back to the point of yearning for things that are external to us. If all we do is labour to sustain those false dependencies, we get distracted from what really matters, which is our actual wellness.

A.: It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can just get to the university but otherwise be yourself.

B.: You think that you can disaggregate expectations and that you can expose yourself to dependencies, make a part of your experience contingent on them, yet remain in control of everything even though it is decisively external to you. What would really help you recognise the problem here is to liken expectations to addictions—and I am not talking about the obvious ones like drugs, tobacco, alcohol. Those who ultimately consume sugar and salt in every meal and every drink cannot just go on a diet that involves unprocessed food: the threshold for their satisfaction is no longer the basic need of survival but a voracious appetite for ever-more stimulating tastes. Those who must start their day with a cup of coffee at all costs, simply cannot operate without it and will walk around like zombies if they do not get their dose. And we can extend that to other senses, such as vision and how design or interfaces or aesthetics try to become ever more flamboyant or self-serving. You will hear people berating something for being bland or “vanilla”, implying that the extravagant is the baseline of acceptability, just how the ordinary taste of vanilla can only be rendered palatable by wanton use of deleterious extras. Would you provide credence to someone’s claims that they are in control when they are clearly dependent on these otherwise mundane items? Why trust them when they say that it is only those that they are dependent on? If a mere cup of coffee determines you, then chances are high that you also are but an avatar in a role-playing game of social expectations or are prone to become one. My point here is that you think of the faux necessity of the university—and I am being schematic by insisting on the university, as this is a broader issue—as an isolated event or some decontextualised presence, when in truth it is part of an unbreakable bundle that includes so much more than the item itself.

A.: So happiness is basically a form of self-sufficiency?

B.: Before we tackle that issue, consider everything that can make you unhappy due to a fault of your own. You decided to introduce yourself to your crush by sending a text message for which you never got a reply. Now you are sad. What is the source of your unhappiness? The fact that you did not get an answer or that you expected to get an answer? Was your mind already preparing for that scenario and were you thinking about what to reply next?

A.: It probably is the expectation that was miscalculated, because it is normal for someone not to reply to a stranger who is trying to be intrusive.

B.: If you had not succumbed to the misplaced desire, you would not have suffered the consequences of being attached to it. The same applies to every other case where you allow a fake dependency to determine you. At some point you must reflect with honesty on how you react to events in the world and how your choices fill you with grief and anxiety. If you sense you are essentially swayed to behave in a certain fashion by false wants, it means that you are inflicting damage upon yourself. That will not change magically just by forcing your way through it with grit and determination. It will only compound the problem and lead you to your downfall.

A.: False desires can be damaging when they make you feel bad. But what if they invigorate you? Since you brought up food, is not a chocolate delicious?

B.: Taste is like a habit. It can be learnt and can be adapted and retrained to a large degree. To someone who has been purified from the junk of the modern world, a snack that is typically considered tasty is anything but. In your example, most people will think of chocolate as enjoyable in the moment. But why is chocolate so harmful for you in reality? Because (i) it is not a true dependency in your life and (ii) it makes you yearn for more of it. The two combined suggest that what masquerades as a short-term satisfaction results in longer-term dissatisfaction because of the powerful pull of the desire it engenders. The same goes for the instant gratification of getting upvotes on the item you just posted online: the morning after—if not the very next hour—you want more of it and so you must post again to get your dose and each time attempt to embellish your publication a bit more to keep people engaged, or share what they want to see, at the times they want it, and so on. When you target an audience, you create a role-playing game and you make yourself dependent on the agency of the role you are assuming. Same for when you behave in a manner that is mimetic or otherwise hypocritical, so that you may gain the approval of your peers. Whatever the specifics, you are being forced to fill up a bottomless pit. It is futile. The fact that something feels gratifying initially, be it food, Internet points, opinions, certificates that adorn your office’s wall etc., does not mean that it is good to turn it into a dependency of yours.

A.: What, then, is happiness? What must we acquire?

B.: If you think of happiness as an acquisition, as some measurable quantity, perhaps a commodity you may purchase, then you fall into the trap I have just outlined. What we describe as happiness may be understood as a negative space, in that we can discern it without “it” being there. Happiness is the absence of false dependencies, which hinges on the realisation that willingly becoming determined by something external to you is an endless task. As an aside, this is how I also think of the truth, as a negative concept which derives from the absence of falsehoods or, at least, the justified and justifiable under the circumstances belief in their absence.

[ Read: Why I won’t join your club (2021-06-15) ]

A.: How do you know the difference between a true and a fake dependency?

B.: Some cases are straightforward. Food is a true dependency, though delicious tastes are not. Where things get tricky is on matters of ideas, such as with expectations. It is not always clear where the demarcation line should be drawn. Such is the purpose of leading a philosophical life. You adopt an inquisitive and dubitative disposition which helps you remain dispassionate about the beliefs you hold; beliefs that function, for all intents and purposes, as your most cherished possessions as you value having them. The intellectual is inclined to become attached to their works, their theories, their sense of certainty; an ersatz certitude whose power is drawn from intersubjective validation. To become dispassionate, to no longer be moved by changes in the status of those items, you must accept impermanence, which is another way of saying that you have to embrace uncertainty, including the possibility that this is wrong. When the loss of certainty no longer phases you, you have mastered the art of ataraxia, else tranquillity or non-disturbance, as you are not shocked, unsettled, disappointed by the alteration in the qualities of a magnitude that was perceived as permanent.

A.: So you are tying happiness to epistemology?

B.: Our discussion could be summarised as training yourself to become skilled at discerning the differences between reality and fantasy. If you think you must absolutely join the university as a prerequisite for studying, then you are conflating expectations, an imaginary world, with the actuality of things where it is entirely possible to study on your own. The same distinction should be made when differentiating between expressing your self with honesty and merely trying to fit in so as to accommodate some social demand. The former is real, the latter is fake. As already noted, I am being schematic here and do not mean to imply some simplistic, binary view of the world, though I hope you are following what I am saying.

A.: All clear. So unless someone becomes a philosopher, they cannot be happy?

B.: No. A philosophical lifestyle and being a philosopher are not identical, especially not for those who hold certificates qua philosophers and who help maintain the imaginary worlds I alluded to earlier. What you need is to change your attitude, your disposition towards knowledge, learning, behaving. Everyone can be dubitative, inquisitive, dialectical. It takes time and effort to become good at it, which is true for everything that requires skill.

[ Read: Why I won’t compete with you (2021-06-20) ]

A.: So easy it takes a genius to understanding it!

B.: Even if true, it does not matter. Whether you learn it on your own or through someone else, you are perfectly capable of practising some basic techniques such as not insisting that your opinion is the one and only truth, not passing judgement on someone whom you do not know or for circumstances you are not aware of, not boarding the latest hype train, not consuming or accumulating stuff like a maniac. You get the idea. On your insistence about using the term “genius”, I challenge you to search how that is depicted in mainstream culture and whether it has anything to do with what I am asking here. All I want for myself is to be closer to my natural condition, to remain aloof like a dog, not be celebrated as some tragic figure, a great yet embattled mind.

A.: I understand now that you are not being stubborn and have good reasons to behave the way you do. Though I can’t help but feel angry for the missed opportunity. With this attitude, you will end up in the middle of nowhere and no one will think highly of you.

B.: Don’t worry, you are facing your unmet expectations. Being sceptical, not making bold assumptions, and not jumping into early conclusions can also help you deal with anger management. You will be more relaxed once you learn to let go. As for what others may think, that is their problem, not mine.

[ Read: Why I won’t date you (2021-06-16) ]

A.: This is why you are always so composed. Do you ever get upset?

B.: In a profound sense? No. I try to remain detached. Though I can sense pressure and feel bad about it, such as when I am asked to behave like the persona of genius, or when I am expected to join someone’s birthday party and act all happy and cheerful, or when relatives inquire about my age in light of my relationship status. Ultimately though, even those do not phase me because I understand that they are the outcome of misplaced evaluations and I also am aware that I cannot control them. So why bother?

A.: Tell me more about impermanence. Is this basically a fancy word to talk about death?

B.: Death literally but also figuratively as signifying the end of a state of affairs. Think about your friends from high school. They are all alive, but the particular relationship you had back then and everything it made possible is no longer there and your experience cannot be re-enacted. Will you dwell on the fact that life moves on and what once was has since ceased to be? Will you insist on living in memories that have no correspondence to your current condition? Ours is a world of phenomenal differentiation. Things come and go. They grow and evolve until they wither away. What is constant in our life is how we cope with impermanence and how we may recognise it for what it is so that we can remain anchored in the present, in the temporal sense but also as that which has presence.

A.: Let’s say I want to follow your example, but wish to get up to speed fairly quickly. What do you think about getting some help, such as by taking the acid?

B.: I am suspicious of anything that promises to offer a shortcut to expertise and a direct conduit to wisdom. If you really want to achieve results, you start by assessing the requirements of the task at hand and then commit to it in earnest. You cannot have the fruit without the tree. To your question though, I have not tried it and have no experience with anything like it. In practical terms, if it can help you get started, such as by disentangling the falsehoods that prevent you from making the first step into a new world, then it may be worth it. This is only about getting started though. You will still need to put some serious effort into it to outgrow your initial condition. If, in other words, you always require psychedelics to reach a certain mental state you have effectively created yet another dependency.

A.: Can I tell my Ivy League friends about what transpired here? Inform them about the substantive part but also let them know you are the one who told me about it?

B.: That is your prerogative. I have no strong opinion on it, nor will I worry about it. It lies outside my control.

A.: Would you like to talk with them directly? I might forget some important detail.

B.: I can do that—it was never the issue. Whether they would listen is not my concern. I do not want to persuade anyone because I cannot determine with certainty that my claims are true. What if I’m wrong? All I want from you and your friends is to entertain the possibility that not everyone wants to be saved, moulded into someone else, refashioned, instrumentalised, and unleashed upon the unsuspecting crowds. Learn to let go. Let me be.

B.: Why should I?

A.: Because you are an expert in the field. You have written about it at length. People take your opinions seriously.

B.: And how does any of that imply a duty to get into a public argument?

A.: If anything, you could have enlightened him, helped him understand the error of his way, and thus let him know how to improve himself. Consider it a social service.

B.: For it to be likened to social service, both agent and patient need to consent to the act. If I were to rectify his errors in front of his friends, all while he was boasting and acting omniscient and invincible, I would meet resistance in the form of a defensive, combative mentality. You must understand that one’s disposition is of paramount importance. One can only talk with someone who is willing to listen. I judged that the situation was not conducive to dialectic. It was more like picking a fight: eristics rather than dialectics are not my thing.

A.: Still, you could have taught him a lesson in humility. He would learn not to open his big mouth in public out of fear of getting ridiculed.

B.: Now you are changing the intent from the altruism of social service to the egoism of short-term glory, of reigning victorious in an otherwise inconsequential battle. There is no value in ridiculing someone who is clearly compelled by the heat of the moment, hype with friends and all that, to utter something fallacious. It does not educate them in humility, which is a great virtue that comes from the knowledge that you are not as important as you once thought you were. Don’t bring humility into this to justify vanity. As for instilling a sense of restraint in someone through such forceful means, we should reserve our vital energy to challenge, ridicule, or even overthrow those who are in power, those whose irresponsibility and unscrupulousness can be dangerous as their ongoing application may have far-reaching implications on the rest of us. Whereas this random fellow over there was just having a good time with his buddies, could have been drunk, maybe was trying to impress his date, and so on. We cannot judge someone’s motives with so little information on offer, nor do we have to.

A.: So you think putting him in his place would not be worthwhile? Would it not teach him anything?

B.: In the grand scheme of things, it would be ineffective. That noisy dude who was reverently referring to himself in the third person was all about the pretence of power, yet he is not an authority: his ability is limited to his physical prowess. That might sound like much, given his pronounced musculature, but is actually trivial. Power starts to matter only once it controls more than one body. All he can do is punch, kick, grunt. I doubt he has ever run afoul this country’s overlords to get a sense of what authority, supreme political authority, is all about. Ex officio power, sovereignty and everything drawing from it, is considerably more potent: it can channel resources wherever it wants, it maintains and moves armies, controls prison systems, manipulates public opinion, decides what kind of violence is acceptable and by whom, and so on. The establishment must thus be treated differently. It is a matter of proportionality.

[ Watch: On the nation-state, democracy, and transnationalism (2021-05-29) ]

A.: So there is no lesson for him?

B.: No, not in a positive sense. Consider it this way. If you tell me that A > B, B > C, ergo C > A and I punch you in the face, you will not know exactly what was wrong with your reasoning. Maybe you will not even interpret it as a corrective to your error, as you might conclude that I went berserk and simply acted in bad faith. Probably you would punch back, instead of admitting that A > C.

A.: Indeed. I know how that works.

B.: And so my point here is that how you approach an issue matters greatly. The environment, the context, the concatenation of events leading up to the incident conditions someone to interpret the message accordingly. Meaning does not have a standalone, decontextualised presence. Everything must be accounted for. You can only ever teach the one who is prepared to learn. This, by the way, is true not just for humans. If you had ever trained a dog, you would have known how animals react to positive and negative reinforcement and how that depends on the circumstances, which a skilled trainer can discern and adapt to. For example, try to take a bone out of the jaws of a dog that does not trust you: you will get bitten, no matter the size of the dog. Do it on a canine that knows you and has understood that taking something out of its mouth is done for its own wellness—there is trust involved—and you will pick the bone without any trouble (give it back if you determine that chewing on it is not potentially harmful, thus rewarding the trust). Humans pride themselves on their peerless rationality, among others, but we are animals nonetheless and must always keep that in mind.

A.: How do you go about building trust with someone who is boisterous and self-centred like that?

B.: You have to know the person and proceed accordingly. In general though, you can reason about this by trying to analyse the situational magnitudes. That fellow is out with his friends, trying to fulfil this pernicious stereotype of the alpha male or something along those lines. Again, the animal inside all of us. Someone formulated a dissenting view and he immediately took the stage to state his opinion in what looked like an overly confident manner. In such a moment, the person is no longer his unmodified self, as he is attaining a context-specific role: that of being the all-conquering top guy. Speak out against his absurdities, and you will only be ruining his moment. He will act defensively and seek to fend off what he perceives as a threat, a direct attack against his imaginary dominion.

A.: So you are saying that if we remove him from that case, we can get a different person altogether? I find that those over-confident types are always just like that.

B.: Yes, I think we will get something else. Maybe not radically different, but still distinct enough. Everyone has their moments. It is about cancelling out the environmental triggers of the defensive attitude. The dog bites you because it does not know you and cannot tell what your intentions are when you approach its food. Whereas the dog that is familiar with your motions, even one that is much stronger than you, remains calm and is prepared to accept what you are doing. In my experience, the excessive confidence, this impression of unwavering certainty is just the outer shell that conceals some underlying insecurity. Those who need to constantly remind you of how great they are, and who do so on in a dominating fashion, are likely aware at some deeper level that they are not truly at the top.

[ Read: Why I won’t date you (2021-06-16) ]

A.: Now that you mention it, it kind of makes sense. I have noticed it with people who pretend to know more than they do. They have read the dictionary entry on some topic and now think they are on the same footing as the foremost experts on the matter. Same principle for those who conflate watching a 10-minute talk with genuine research.

B.: The greatest difficulty when you are face-to-face with someone is to admit weakness. Paradoxically, it takes a lot of strength, mental fortitude in this case, to do that because you expose yourself to danger, which runs contrary to your basic instincts. Have you ever met anyone in this city who has admitted even once to not knowing something about their field of expertise?

A.: No. I have had a drink or the occasional snack with economists, political analysts, scientists from all sorts of fields. They have all maintained the facade of being untouchable in what they do. It hinges on their tacit claims on infallibility qua experts.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

B.: We must withhold judgement, as we know their job depends on it. Our world’s number one currency is certainty. You think you can pursue a career while being a sceptic? Think again! Everything depends on the shared confidence that things will go as expected. Then you could add the environmental factors beside the pretences of work, such as them not knowing you well enough, or fearing that they are in a public space where any sign of apparent weakness might jeopardise their social position indirectly. Apart for that role though, you must have noticed that people only ever open up once they trust you. It takes a lot of time and patience before that starts to happen and even then there may be deep seated prejudices, social taboos, and role-playing going on, which will all work against the expression of honesty. If trust is a prerequisite for sincerity, and if that entails a feeling of safety, then what fuels the outwardness of certainty is radical fear; fear of being exposed to an attack, fear of getting out-competed, fear of the unknown as that mysterious alterity which holds dangers. Uncertainty poses a formidable challenge. We initially are like the dog whose immediate reaction is to bite and turn aggressive when someone approaches it. It takes a lot of effort for a change to occur and the prevailing conditions must also be accommodative. Thus, the mental fortitude I alluded to earlier is not just or exclusively a quality of the person. It can be arrived at as an intersubjective value, a system-wide property, that emerges from the inherent dynamics of you and the other person or group thereof.

A.: Okay, let’s take a step back. How do you build trust in general in order to get in to a debate?

B.: Different people have different needs. The keen observer and listener knows how best to proceed. With our vociferous fellow over there, we determined that the situation would have to change considerably before we could even start. If we were to make the first move, we would be acting unwisely, as we would be behaving contrary to what we understood was the case, like the farmer who insists on sowing seeds on rocky and arid terrain. Whereas with those who are inclined to discuss ideas dispassionately, all they need to get started is to listen to you talk. What is key, in any case, is to be genuine in your non-confrontational disposition. Patience and persistence are interpreted as confidence of a more profound sort, though hardly anyone admits as much. When they figure that you are no threat to them, what the untrained mind may assess as a weakling though in truth it is an inexorable force for good, they will lower their defences. Once they start talking to you, let them be eased into the process by not picking up on everything they have to say. Do not make it seem like an interrogation or a competition. Concede some points and let the flow of the discussion hint at how those initial ideas were not fully developed or outright wrong. The greatest achievement in this regard is to make people think of your contributions as obvious. And that means to lead by example and with kindness, not to issue exhortations which give the impression that all you want is for your opinion to prevail.

[ Read: Why I won’t join your club (2021-06-15) ]

A.: Do you remember that Saturday noon last month when we last met? We had visited this establishment and were having a conversation about the lifestyle of this city.

B.: Yes, I remember it clearly. Warm, sunny day with a pleasant ambience.

A.: There were those two elderly couples who overheard what we were talking about and joined us. That one man also sketched your portrait on a beer coaster!

B.: I still have that. Too bad the material will not last long… I guess you are linking that event to how trust can be built between strangers?

A.: Indeed. It felt so natural and now I think it is because we applied ourselves with calmness. That must have made them confident that we could be relied upon, after they probably observed us for at least half an hour.

B.: That must have been it.

A.: I remember characteristically how one of the ladies stated that the older generations have nothing to offer and that the newer ones, pointing at us, must take charge of things. To which you replied, in your usual style, that oscillating between the extremes will engender yet more problems and that a synthesis is preferable, a basis for common understanding which brings together the experience of the old with the exuberance of the new.

B.: That’s right. I recall how the lady reacted positively by acknowledging non-verbally that her claim was a form of extremism, in the sense that it implied that us younger folks cannot learn anything from those who have seen more in their lifetime. As an aside, “extremism” is kind of a bad word in those parts, though all I mean is that it constitutes a deviation from the rationally derived mean. Our thoughts and acts, preferences and choices, must all be characterised by moderation.

A.: The way you put it was not to say that you disagreed with her. Instead you alluded to the bigger picture of how knowledge has a compounding effect and that the process by which it is expanded is usually gradual and underpinned by intergenerational solidarity. You then pointed at the multiplicity of perspectives on any given issue and how at the social scale no one can claim that one opinion is superior to all the others, as there is no objective benchmark, no perfect scoring system, by which to arrive at the undisputed winner and to rank opinions accordingly with no bias at all. There are just more opinions and then the power of numbers comes into effect, though those have nothing to do with objectivity as such. Only then you elaborated on your appeal for cooperation, though not for the sake of social peace or something along those lines, but as a practical measure that minimises the likelihood of widespread dogmatism, of promoting only one opinion while dismissing all others without offering them a chance to be elucidated and considered in earnest.

B.: What is easy to overlook yet crucial is that those are not rhetorical tricks to sway public opinion. Our intent is to approach the theme with the shared objective of arriving at the truth or, to be more precise, at a thesis that stands to reason and is not the product of some sort of pressure. It is why we speak plainly and do not try to produce those intricate verbal structures that not even a team of specialists can deconstruct with precision. I find it unfortunate that people think of philosophy as word games and disregard the teachings on how to conduct yourself, how to lead a life in accordance with reason.

[ Read: On Discipline (2021-05-07) ]

A.: Tell me about the core difference between rhetoric and dialectic.

B.: Rhetoric is persuasive speech. It rests on an uneven distribution of power between a speaker and an audience. The orator tries to make a case in pursuit of an ulterior motive. All means are employed towards that end, such as appealing to emotion, making bold promises, obfuscating the real meaning of the claims being made or otherwise hiding the intent behind them, outright attacking opponents by slandering them or levelling hyperbolic threats against them. In rhetoric the conclusion is predetermined as it assumes the form of the orator’s objective. As such, the attitude is to insist on a preconceived notion, with the goal being to gain the approval of the crowd, to win the argument more broadly.

A.: And dialectic?

B.: Dialectic is investigation through dialogue. It is a joint exercise to surface each side’s mistaken views, render them conspicuous, subject them to critique in an effort to find better alternatives to them. The telos is to achieve clarity or, at the very least, determine the known constraints and identify the areas that need to be worked on. Honesty is paramount, as is the commitment to not play tricks with the other side by standing firmly by one’s words. Do not misconstrue arguments and do not track back from your positions. The discussion is open-ended and there is no sense in which one side reigns supreme over the other. All that can happen in dialectic is for both sides to win, as they are in agreement that some earlier falsehood is indeed such and must thus be dismissed. It is liberating to escape from false views that held you captive in a view of the world that could no longer withstand scrutiny.

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30) ]

A.: So, unlike rhetoric, dialectic requires both sides to share the same virtues. It is akin to a dance where the parts must operate in unison. Let’s now apply those findings to our two cases and examine them in this new light. First we have the egocentric bloke. He does not give anyone the opportunity to speak their mind and is not willing or able to listen to what they have to say. Sure, there are environmental factors at play, but for our purposes we could say that the reason you chose not to engage with him was that you determined he was not prepared for dialectic.

B.: In short, yes. This is not to imply that he could never be ready. Just that a preparatory stage would have to be introduced.

A.: In contradistinction, the two elderly couples joined us in a spirit of honesty. No one was trying to prove anything. We were just thinking things through together and we reached some conclusions that none of us held going into that discussion.

B.: Indeed!

A.: Can we now press on with this analysis? I want to have your take on social media, couched in terms of the environmental factors you mentioned and this distinction between rhetoric and dialectic. Perhaps there is something more going on here. What do you think explains the apparent toxicity, the cancel culture, the ochlocracy (mob rule) that defines today’s social media?

B.: I think there are multiple contributing factors to those phenomena. One of them being the very medium, which is digital and curated, else carefully filtered. This sets the stage for a process of dehumanisation, in which users treat each other as bundles of opinions attached to an image, rather than fully fledged human beings.

A.: Dehumanisation! I doubt those who are quick to condemn someone to cyber exile or death would have the temerity to do so in person.

B.: I am not sure. History tells us otherwise. The sense of distance, the absence of personhood, is integral to that mass behaviour. In our case, it is made possible by the technological medium itself though it is not specific to it. Think about what is the essence of the infamous witch hunts. There existed an overarching narrative of the witch as a figure that is manipulative and malevolent; a figure whose very image is deceptive, for it shifts from utter ugliness to sheer beauty through what essentially are deemed to be dark arts, normatively understood as undesirable. Against this backdrop, to label someone a witch is to connect their presence to the narrative, to the effect that you identify them with all that is fastened upon the witch construct. In this context, the witch is not a human or a worthy human, and, thus, the thinking goes, deserves to be eliminated with extreme prejudice. Dehumanisation in action. The same mechanics, albeit without the apparent lore of some dangerous Other, yet with discourses to the same effect, apply to how users are targeted for holding the opinions that are deemed wrong at the moment. There is no longer any argument involved. A narrative is invoked to pass final judgement on an avatar. Again, dehumanisation in action, through which the avatarised person is dismissed in simplistic, binary terms as purely evil.

A.: What else do you think is at play?

B.: Business practices. Ruthless business practices with no moral scruples whatsoever. The mainstream social media are controlled by a handful of mega-corporations. I consider those the “platformarchs”, for they control access to key infrastructure or resources in the economy or social whole. Since the platform is theirs, so is everything that unfolds on top of it subject to their stratagems. To cut the long story short, social media thrive on engagement. The most effective way to keep people hooked, beside the false sense of accomplishment that notifications on a computer device give you, is to create and sustain controversies. Controversy elicits emotional responses commensurate with its content, which create more counter-points of the same nature and of equal force, and the vicious cycle invigorates itself. In a nutshell, social media platformarchs have turned ochlocracy into a business model and, ultimately, a modus vivendi.

[ Read: On platformarchs, the demi-state, and deplatforming (2021-01-26) ]

A.: I see. It is a business that changes the way we think of each other and how we conduct ourselves. And I suppose you would add to those what we already covered before about role-playing and the environmental factors that contribute to patterns of behaviour…

B.: Yes. This is a non-exhaustive list, which I feel is sufficient to hint at the scale of the issue. Perhaps we could add to it the dual vanity of self-righteousness combined with the impossible morality of expected consistency throughout one’s life. The fact that someone is attacked for some silly statement made in their early teens, shows you the level of pretentiousness—as if all those who act shocked never made mistakes in their life. For consistency itself to be considered a virtue is a sign of how shallow everything is. In life we learn to let go and we show a capacity to forgive, all while allowing people to grow into themselves and to then outgrow that as they grow into something else. There is no judicator roaming around delivering justice for the putative sin of not being the finished article from day one. But in the game world of social media, the avatarised user must assume the role of the champion of all that is presumed to be right and must show no mercy to anyone who has committed even the slightest of mistakes.

A.: How should we reason about the problem with consistency? Why is it bad to hold someone accountable for what they say?

B.: Accountability only has effect in power dynamics where there is a question of legitimacy on the use of force. You hold the authorities accountable because, as I mentioned earlier, their power truly extends beyond the person in office. The average social media user is a regular person. We must always keep a sense of perspective and act in accordance with the principle of proportionality. Still, this is not my main point. The fallacy is that consistency of opinion is a virtue. It stipulates that if you had stated something ten years ago you must continue to believe in it today, otherwise you are somehow disingenuous and deserving of being derided for that. Someone will dredge up an old comment of yours that does not match your current views and now you must face judgement. Oh, look! Someone had second thoughts. The horror! Remember how I said that the number one currency of this world is certainty: they want you to be determinable, unambiguous, classifiable. Whereas we are aware that insistence on consistency of opinion is the pinnacle of foolishness. What would be the point of dialectic if we all came to it with the sole intent to remain firmly rooted in our views? It would be a complete waste of time and effort! The greatest intellectual achievement is the appearance of inconsistency, in the sense that you are fully prepared to forgo your position when it is found to be untenable.

A.: How about those folks that find a new opinion and feel the urge to convert everyone to it?

B.: They have yet to understand the meaning of not holding on to your views. When we speak of uncertainty, we do not mean to promote the inane wokeness and pseudo-enlightenment that gets circulated in social media, among other platforms. And we most certainly do not mean to imply that you should become a nag by nitpicking on people’s activity. Ours is a disposition towards life: to not take anything as permanent, to understand that what you now think is true can become untrue. What matters is the attitude, not your current beliefs.

A.: What do you think is the relationship between ochlocracy and the practice of dialectic as you outlined it earlier? Put differently, is there a political system where honest debate can survive?

B.: Ochlocracy is an enemy to all debates. Forget about being dialectical. It is a form of tyranny. The same as a dictatorship, only inverse in terms of the number of oppressors. The balance shifts in favour of those who have no principles and no sense of impartiality. When the space that hosts the debate is itself inimical to nuance and refined argumentation, you already start from a position of easy misunderstandings. Combined with the invidious patterns of the technology, the algorithmic manipulations and perverse incentives they provide to do harm and to revel in it, there is virtually no chance for any kind of intellectuality to survive. To your question though, I think dialectic is for those who are philosophically inclined. As such, I would consider it more of a private concern where like-minded people come together to essentially be themselves and share their real, unadulterated views. There is no polity where the philosopher is free from lingering fear. Repression shifts from latent to active in a moment’s notice. Every country is a potential prison. The here and now is one’s exile from a home they have never been to, from a place where comfort is the norm, where one can be genuine in the open.

B.: Sure, the place is nice. It is a bit cold, though I still went for a swim at dawn. I was just too curious about the North Sea. That aside, we still are here for work, which means that most of our waking hours will be committed to what we always do.

A.: The trick is to have fun during those moments you are awake without being at the job. Just like your rather reckless excursion to the beach. “A bit cold” is a massive understatement. It is cloudy, the wind speed has picked up, and it looks like it will rain any moment now. Thankfully we are indoors.

B.: No worries: I got what I wanted. You are right though, I did not mean to sound negative about the fact that we are here. I am glad that we get the chance to change scenes. Besides, this is the first time we sit together without doing any kind of work. Weird, isn’t it?

A.: It is! I saw you walking by and just had to invite you to sit here. I have been here before. It is cosy and I like to feel its warmth, its comfort before heading to the office. Plus this is my chance to get to know you better. You are always so professional and discreet, seemingly detached from the world around you.

B.: It sure is a welcoming establishment. There must be a history to it. But I am not here for that. I accepted your invitation as I was simply walking around the area in search of nothing in particular. Would you care to elaborate on what you think contributes to my discreetness and professionalism? To this apparent aloofness that you have spotted? It will help me answer your questions about who I am. Is that not what you want?

A.: Do you feel comfortable being here?

B.: All good.

A.: Do you mind if I make some private questions and provide relevant observations? I don’t mean to be bad or unsettle you. It just is that someone has to make a start.

B.: Please go ahead.

A.: I have noticed that you never express any sort of interest in your colleagues’ personal lives. It is typical for people in our workplace to get to know each other by sharing their experiences. This happens at the coffee table, during lunch, or on Friday evenings and over the weekends in after-work gatherings… We are all friends here. You are the only one missing.

B.: …

A.: Do you follow me.

B.: I am listening to every single word. Please continue.

A.: I hope I am not being pushy here. You are so quiet.

B.: All is good. Perhaps you are just not used to someone listening to you.

A.: Okay. I was basically saying that you are removed from the rest of us. You don’t drink coffee, so you never attend those short breaks. You prepare food at home and won’t join us at the restaurant. And I have not spotted you around in after-work hours, not even once after all these months, whereas I have met all the others. It is a small city back where we live, which leads me to believe that you withdraw into your shell. At this point, I would not be surprised if you also do not consume alcohol. While those may be your choices, which I would not judge, it seems you have a hard time adjusting to this life style and have not made any friends to ease the transition.

B.: You sure are perceptive. Indeed, I do not drink coffee and alcohol and generally am very disciplined and particular with what I consume. It would be impossible for me to think about all those things, from metaphysics to epistemology, to ethics, politics, and the human condition, and yet have nothing to say about those items which are essential to my quotidian experience: food and drink.

A.: I was aware that you are the philosopher type. Not from you, of course, but from your colleagues that work directly with you. Though the way you speak, your body language, makes this easy to spot. I know nothing about philosophy, so please don’t overwhelm me with it.

B.: No stress. I also don’t know anything about it.

[ Read: Why I won’t join your club (2021-06-15) ]

A.: Strange.

B.: I am here to answer your questions. And did I just hear that you will buy me a herbal tea?

A.: Oh yes, sorry about that! I’ll see to it. Please continue. You were saying that you are mindful of your consumption. What about socialising with us?

B.: The excuse is that I do not join your coffee breaks because I do not drink coffee. And I do not come at your parties because I do not consume alcohol. I could just leave it at that and tell you to simply take it for what it is. But the truth is that I feel no need to be with you all.

A.: You don’t like people or noise?

B.: Those are not the same. I do like people, especially when I am not paying for it! Ha! And I can tolerate noise.

A.: What am I missing then?

B.: You think that everyone is like you. That we all draw energy and excitement by being with others the whole time. Let’s say I ask you now about your private life. Any of those usual questions. What will be your follow-up question once you answer mine?

A.: Maybe “how about you?” in an attempt to keep the dialogue going?

B.: Exactly! There is an element of reciprocity at play. I will ask you, then you will ask me back. And when I provide an answer, perhaps one you do not expect, you will inquire as to why that is. Not only will the discussion enter into private territory, it will likely invoke comparisons with other peoples’ stories, which means that I will be hearing not just your account of events, but also a curated view of everybody else’s.

A.: That is how it usually goes. It is necessary in order to connect with each other.

B.: Then we can work our way backwards. If this is how we connect, and if I never join your meetings, it means that I am not excited by those kinds of conversations and do not think of connecting in that particular way as necessary or beneficial to me. Those talks tire me out, as I have to expend all my energy on topics I find uninteresting. I don’t care about your romantic escapades, not you right here, just the general “you”. And I most certainly have zero interest in the details of your sex life.

A.: I will not press on with that, if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Do you want to continue talking to me, or is that also troublesome.

B.: Let’s continue, as you consider this an opportunity to learn something about me. We will soon know whether you discover something new about you instead.

A.: I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean. Are you always cryptic like that?

B.: This is not a trick. I am just noting that a conversation can often shed light on corners of our world we are unaware of. It may reveal insights that have the potential to change how we approach certain issues. There is a chance that your life might move in another direction afterwards. The change might be barely noticeable at first, like a two degree adjustment in an aeroplane’s flight which ultimately takes it to an altogether different destination. The alteration in course might set in motion a series of cascading events that will manifest as a larger shift in attitude and outlook.

A.: That is still too abstract for me. I am more of an activist, working with actual people. Not to imply that your take is wrong or somehow inadequate. There is a contrast with what I do. That’s all.

B.: I am also interested in actual people. Have you found any?

A.: Another tricky question! Either you are teasing me all along or you have some other definition in mind. I meant that I work with people everyday and we deal with tangible issues. You know, their needs for shelter, a stable and fulfilling job, putting food on the table. That sort of thing.

B.: I understood that well. What I meant is that it is hard to find someone who is not behaving in accordance with the rules and norms that are specific to each place. Notice how we got started with this. You traced patterns in my behaviour that did not conform with the expectations you have formed at the workplace. For instance, you observed correctly that I do not drink coffee with you like the rest of the group. While you did not state it explicitly, that struck you as odd, as something being amiss. It triggered your curiosity until you eventually summoned me to your table. You wondered what may be contributing to that apparent non-conformity with the established norms of conduct. Those rules may be tacit, but you already understand them as present, as being in effect. And so you were intrigued when the seemingly universal law turned out to have exceptions to it.

[ Read: Why I never call you (2021-06-05) ]

A.: Yes, I noticed you were doing your own thing and wanted to know whether you had adjustment problems. I assumed it would be that, because you do not seem to hold a grudge or harbour ill feelings. Either way, I am here to help.

B.: In your case, you hypothesised as much. In general though, those inferences could vary considerably. What is constant in the multitude is the functioning of two magnitudes: (i) the severally and often passively enforced rulebook of sociability within the given milieu, and (ii) the assumption of irregularity when the rules fail to apply.

A.: Interesting. Where do you want to go with that?

B.: If I were to conform with the rules, would I be here holding this kind of discussion?

A.: You could be here now because we would have become friends sooner, rather than just being colleagues. Though I suppose we would be discussing other topics than what we currently cover.

B.: Let’s probe deeper into this theme. If I were to act in accordance with the prevailing norms, I would be behaving in a manner that was consistent with the applicable expectations. Right?

A.: Correct.

B.: Would that person, who would essentially be acting contrary to their own volition, be true to their self? Would I be me, if I were acting unlike me?

A.: Is this not a trivial issue though? Are you saying that a simple coffee break would affect your personality or something?

B.: We invoke the coffee break as an example. It is not the only thing that you had noticed. Apart from the coffee, we have lunch, the after-work gatherings, and if we were to continue with our search we would find all sorts of other scenaria that can be described in terms of those implicit “rules of the game” that I am alluding to. So please answer my question: if I were to follow the rules despite the fact that I do not express myself that way, would I still be operating like me?

A.: No, you would be something between your real “you” and the one that makes a compromise to sit at our table.

B.: Very well. The differentiation means that I would not be me. And if we were to extend this to every aspect of life, I would always be a “compromise”, as you put it, between my underlying self and whatever finds currency in the particular case.

A.: I see how that goes. Why are we discussing this?

B.: Because I was curious about the “actual people” you encounter in your day-to-day activism. If everyone is behaving unlike who they really are, then we have a problem of indeterminacy. What is the regular and what the irregular? Which is the real you?

A.: You have clearly thought this more than I. I just wanted to make you feel comfortable and be friendly. I now understand what you meant when you said you are interested in actual people. My immediate reaction would be that you are overthinking it, though upon second thought I feel you are up to something. I can already tell that you have better reasons to behave the way you do and are not simply struggling to adapt to life here.

B.: The two are not mutually exclusive. You can still be yourself and struggle to adapt because you face social pressure to fit in and behave like everybody else.

A.: I understand. Once you get started, things will improve over time. The key is to take it slow and be relaxed about it.

B.: Good.

A.: Do you see that girl walking up the street?

B.: Yes.

A.: Do you know who she is?

B.: Does she?

A.: …

B.: Don’t give me that look. I am just teasing you. I know she works with us. Nothing more.

A.: She is a good friend of mine. She can’t be with us right now as she has an appointment. We seem to be lucky in that regard, because our work starts a bit later in the day. Anyhow, we can join her later, if you want. Don’t you think she’s cute?

B.: I don’t know why you are already counting me in, but I’ll tag along since we are here.

A.: You didn’t answer my question…

B.: I thought we were talking about a human being and then you asked me if she is cute. To me “cute” does not trigger a response. A doll is cute and she is not one. A pet is cute and she is not one. How about “interesting”?

A.: Whatever works for you. Interesting in what way?

B.: It’s your friend and you are bringing her into this discussion. I will play your game though I am telling you in advance that I will not join you later. No hard feelings, I have already planned to visit some sites in the area. I won’t tell you which ones, as it does not add anything to our discussion. To your point. Is she merely cute or does she have something else that defines her? Maybe she enjoys books. Perhaps she is a long distance runner. She could be a comedian or a volunteer in her local commune. I don’t know. Is there something else about her as a person?

A.: She has lots of talents. Plays saxophone and writes poems. And she speaks four languages—all fluently.

B.: So why did you bring up cuteness?

A.: I don’t know, to be perfectly honest. It was spontaneous.

B.: You do, though you may have not realised it yet because all those coffee breaks—and I am being schematic here with “coffee breaks” to cut the long story short—have conditioned you to act in a certain way. You assumed another normality where people of a given gender are supposed to behave in a predictable way. You know what stereotype I am referring to. You looked at me and surmised that I am part of that group, and since they are all supposed to be the same, you reached an early conclusion. The train of thought led you to believe that I would be excited to speak my mind about her cuteness or the lack thereof. Then you added the bait: you mentioned the chance of meeting her later in the day, with you being her close friend, implying that if I found her cute I would be given the unique chance to act on that, especially in light of where we are, far from our base of operations.

A.: …

B.: Take your time. I am not blaming you for anything. I just showed you a part of you that was hitherto obscured by your conformity with the socially sanctioned roles you assume in each case. I had already told you going into this discussion that you might figure out something about yourself and your initial reaction was that I was playing tricks and being cryptic. No problem, I get that a lot.

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

A.: I now realise that. And I can clearly tell that you are not the silent type after all.

B.: I am silent when the discussion is pointless and/or when no one is listening. You were kind enough to invite me to your table and buy me a cup of tea. I am enjoying the conversation we have. Don’t worry if you start to feel awkward about what you found out. Your confusion stems from the fact that you are not used to anyone actually listening to what you say and discerning the intent behind your words and the overarching framework that informs them.

A.: You have this way of talking in paragraphs about abstract things and I have trouble keeping up. I still don’t know what you think of my friend. Can we go back to that?

B.: I wanted to explain how her cuteness is irrelevant. By bringing that up you unintentionally reduced her to a fraction of her self. What kind of person would that attract? She is not a doll. She is a fully fledged human being.

A.: I just had to start from somewhere.

B.: I understand. Though I can already tell that you are contemplating what I have shown you and will think twice before starting from that point again.

A.: You are one stubborn fellow. Though in a good kind of way.

B.: Do you want to learn more?

A.: Sure. About what?

B.: About how you tried to present your friend to me.

A.: I apologise. She is my friend and I did not mean to belittle her.

B.: There is no need to be sorry about what effectively is a mimetic behaviour you were unaware of. You did what would otherwise be passed off as normal. Only you had the tough luck, or blessing in disguise if you will, to run across an immovable object. Just relax and let me regale you with my analysis of this.

A.: Well, I brought that upon myself, didn’t I? I thought I would avoid the philosophising by bringing up my friend. You evaded that and now have turned the discussion to where you wanted it to move towards. Please go on, but be mindful that I may have trouble with weird terminology.

B.: A fully fledged human being is more than just their appearance. They are a rich and complex world. Humans have carnal desires, like the need to eat or the sex drive. Your allusion to cuteness was a hint at the latter. The body pertains to our overall health and I would group it together with our psychological/emotional state as two sides of the same coin. So what we eat, think, breath are all relevant, as well as how we expend our energy and interact with others as the social species we are. Continuing, we also have an aesthetic side, which we cultivate by engaging with art, whether by taking it from others or producing it ourselves. Then there is the intellectual aspect, which we stimulate by reading, by thinking things through, and by adding structure to our thoughts. Finally, there is the mystical dimension, as a potentiality of ours that we need to develop considerably before it is rendered salient. In practice all those are part of us in a singular form, though I present them here as analytical constructs just so we may reason about them.

A.: Interesting. I am way out of my depth here. You have to take things slowly.

B.: That’s fine. You are eager to learn, which again shows something you may not be aware about yourself. The point is that every human is different. Think about one’s physical attributes. If you map them across dimensions such as strength, endurance, speed, you will find that some are inclined to score higher at certain metrics, while none are the same in terms of distribution.

A.: Obviously. We see it with professional athletes, such as in team sports. They are all subjected to the same training regime, but not everyone can perform equally across all those metrics.

B.: Correct. Well, the same is true about everything I mentioned. Some are inclined to connect with others at an emotional level, others have exceptional aesthetic sensitivities, while others are drawn towards intellectual pursuits. In practice, everyone is a bit of everything with permutations between those analytical extremes.

A.: What about carnal desires?

B.: I think those are powerful and probably potent in everyone; at least everyone who is not asexual. The need for food is unavoidable, whereas sexual drives may be possible to contain, if the presence of monks or hermits of all kinds of religions and persuasions is any indication. Regardless, my point is that we can work towards improving those parts of our self beside the basic instincts that already are the most developed. Think of it like training: at first you can barely perform the exercise but over time you get better at it. Some may be naturals in doing so, while others will have to put in more effort. As with the performance of professional athletes, not everyone can become the same, but we can all try to improve ourselves.

A.: So if I start reading some books, I will expand my intellectuality. If I listen to music, attend theatres, watch movies, visit a museum, pay attention to the architecture of buildings around me, recite poetry, etc. I can refine my aesthetic self. I get those can be combined, so that, say, reading literature will have a benign effect on both my aesthetic and intellectual dimensions. I think those are all clear, more or less. Except the mystical one. I have not heard about it before. Did you discover it in one of those books I assume you read during the weekends?

B.: You should know by now not to assume much. What better book than the world itself?

A.: The world itself? Do tell!

B.: We work long hours. On paper, we put in an eight-hour shift, though we both know that is not true. We start in the morning at half past seven to eight, depending on the agenda, and we stay until seven in the evening or later. And we do this every weekday. Add to that the fact that we live in a city, each of us in an apartment that we retreat to just to recharge our batteries for the morning after. I go to bed some time between nine or ten, meaning that I barely get any quality time after work. When Friday comes, I might stay up a bit longer, as I am eager to get back to what I really want to do. And this cycle repeats every week and month.

A.: I feel you. What is mystical about that?

B.: At some point, you start feeling exhausted, mentally depleted. You are not angry, just empty. You can sense that you are losing touch. It is not sadness per se, though you sense that simmering desperation which pushes you to search for an exit, for an alternative. Not knowing what to do, you run a quick search online which eventually ends with you boarding a train en route to the countryside. You are not sure what to expect on a Saturday morning, just that you need to move towards the hinterland. You arrive at the station and head straight to the nearby forest. What is even compelling you to behave in such a manner? No one knows for sure. As you walk into the woods, you already sense a different energy. You can’t describe it quite yet, but you start to feel relaxed. It is quiet and you keep walking, having already marked a spot to find your way back. There is no pressure anymore. You are alone in the universe, or so you think.

A.: Are you not afraid of wolves or generally of being on your own in such a remote place?

B.: Wolves are afraid of us after centuries of persecution and habitat erosion. The myth of the big bad wolf should be inverted to refer to the rapacious human instead. Same for sharks. Humanity slaughters them on an industrial scale, yet one shark attack gets amplified as if we are the victims in the grand scheme of things. But I digress. My account of the trip to the forest is just something for you to relate to the mystical part of your being. Back to my story and soon everything will become clear. You leave the forest feeling more comfortable than before. While you are puzzled at the chain of events that led you to that place, you suspend your disbelief and go back home, thinking about everything that transpired . Your work continues to exhaust you and you now have developed a habit of escaping to the trees. After a few visits you start hearing sounds. That place is not quiet as you had initially thought. It has a different rhythm. You were used to the frequencies of the boisterous city and were unable to pick up the subtleties of the wilderness. Now you are more attuned to them, to the effect that the original impression of emptiness has been replaced by an unmistakable feeling of ubiquitous presence. What exactly is that which is present you still cannot tell, but you are sure you are not alone any more. As you walk by a tree, you take note of an intriguing pattern. A large trunk with branches that reach high and wide conceals the sunlight from some smaller trees in its midst. How do those trees receive the sunlight they need to grow? You look around and are certain that they cannot take it directly. Yet they appear to be healthy.

A.: I am curious to see where this is going…

B.: You have already visited the place at various times during the day and across the seasons. Sunlight simply does not fall on those young trees. You look down and notice how they keep growing. You turn your attention upwards and take another close look at the towering tree in front of you. It has to be the parent tree and it must be channelling a portion of its vitality to its children. There is life here; life of an advanced sort. They are a family and behave just like the families of mammals do, only at a different temporal frame and within another spatial magnitude. What for us is a year, for them is a day or even less. But we are alike in some important ways. As you connect the dots, you look around and identify the siblings of those young trees and the society around them. The forest is like a human polity: all those complex relations give rise to emergent realities. In the human world, we have strictly intersubjective phenomena like language as a magma of meanings or the inflation in the economy. Those cannot be reduced to the individual level. The forest is the same. It is not just trees isolated from each. They build bonds between them and expand their network of communications.

A.: This is amazing! I had no idea, though it sounds plausible. So what is the mystical experience?

B.: The realisation that life is all around you. From the larger beings to the smallest ones. You can now find meaning in what was once insignificant, unnoticeable even. There are microorganisms everywhere around us. The space between me and you is filled with them. They also reside inside of us. Our relationship with them is symbiotic. Same principle for the trees. We would not be alive without the oxygen they release. And they would not be able to form their bonds without the help of other symbiotes, the mycelial networks in between their roots. We would not have this kind of planet if forests did not contribute to the climate in the multitude of ways that they do. And we can then begin to apply that to everything. You get the idea. It changes the way you see the world. The forest is no longer a resource for us to exploit. A heap mass unprocessed lumber, as it were. It is an organism.

A.: So the mystical is the ability to connect with something that is out there?

B.: In a sense, yes. It helps you conceive of the bigger picture, in which your ego is all but irrelevant. To be clear, this is not about forests as such. I am just employing this as an example to show you how you can escape from your default mindset of self-centred ignorance, self-centred obsession.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14) ]

A.: I am impressed though I would need more time to internalise all this and act on it. I expected the conversation to go very differently, but I am happy it turned out that way. Though now I wonder what happens when you stop being egocentric.

B.: It is not that you will get a notification on your computer or anything that shows a clear point of divergence. Those changes happen gradually. What takes place is a shift in perspective. You gain the ability to see things from another vantage point, a macroscopic level, where phenomena can be interpreted very differently than at the microscopic scale of your own person.

A.: Can you offer an example? The one with the forest did help.

B.: Have you every played with dirt as a kid?

A.: Yes, I used to visit my grandparents during the summer. They lived in a village and I would run around the house, cautiously exploring the great unknown that lay beyond. It was within a radius of a few meters from the house, but you get what I’m saying.

B.: Good. Sometimes while playing with dirt you spot a single ant. It is out there searching for food. If you toss it a breadcrumb, it will pick it up and take it back to its colony. If you throw a larger piece of bread and wait for a while, you will notice more ants showing up to carry the extra burden. They collaborate to achieve the same result, which is to collect food and bring it back home. And if you observe their patterns, you will realise how they seemingly all do the same thing. The term for that is “hive mind”, even though each ant can act on its own, their concerted efforts lead to something that is greater than themselves in isolation. It is as if they are one larger being.

A.: I have heard about that before. It is true for other insects as well.

B.: Indeed. And I would argue that it applies to humans, despite the obvious differences in complexity and scale. Just look around you. Cars are racing up and down the street. People are passing by. The waiter comes and goes serving customers. Some of them have just arrived, others are leaving. All this activity is but a tiny fraction of what is going on in the city as a whole, and that is still insignificant compared to the scale of operations at the regional level, and then to the country at-large, and the entire continent, and the rest of the globe.

A.: Yes, that is clear. Societies are contributing to some total output that would be impossible at the level of the individual.

B.: Not only in terms of sheer output, though. I am claiming that just as we can infer a collective consciousness that appears to be governing the ants, we can think of the macro scale of human relations as an emergent reality of its own. Another type of consciousness which connects the disparate and seemingly disorganised actions of individuals into grand designs that reveal patterns which we could consider efficient for the dissemination of information and for the joint quest for survival. From our micro perspective, this all sounds like a bunch of absurdities. Though we just need to refrain from our immediate, individualistic reaction and think carefully about what is obvious in every other aspect of life. Obviously, I know we can talk about what is wrong with our world in terms of politics and economics, though I am trying to outline how an organism may be conceived as a system of systems which may appear disconnected from each other when viewed from any of its micro levels, but are in fact bound together when examined as a whole.

A.: Fair enough. If I am getting this right, you are trying to suggest that by opening up our selves to be more aware of aesthetics and intellectuality and this mystical attribute, we can sort of understand that we are the living cells of a greater organism.

B.: Indeed. And then you can draw the same inferences with regard to every system within this planet and with the supersystem that encompasses them, and then further with the still greater system that holds them all together. Not only are you better prepared to connect with the world, but you become more sensitive to humans. You can almost see through them. You can read them like an open book. And you can feel them and understand where they are coming from.

A.: In practical terms, you will stop judging people and refrain from comparing and contrasting them to yourself. Right?

B.: I will let you find that out on your own. Next time you join those coffee breaks, pay attention to how evaluations of other people are made. You are perceptive, after all. I am sure you will figure this out. And then there is more to life where those insights can apply. Take it one step at a time.

A.: Oh, the phone rings. It is not a call. Just a reminder that we should be going soon.

B.: Work, work, work. Regardless, I must thank you for being so kind and patient as to bear with me.

A.: Meet you later?

B.: Yes, we have work to do. Not afterwards though. You still have not given me enough information to determine whether your friend is interesting. And I do not know anything about you apart from our job and today’s conversation. Perhaps you are interesting! Maybe I am interesting. Who knows? I won’t try to entertain those notions, as I still plan to visit those sites I alluded to earlier. Nothing can change my mind. You should be able to guess what they may be, based on everything I have shared thus far. What matters though is that you break the mould and seek to be treated as a fully fledged human being and become a better version of who you are. I think you can do it, slowly yet steadily. It is not about results, such as becoming more intellectual than someone else. There is no competition involved. It is the direction that is important, the overall shift in your attitude.

A.: I am happy that we shared those thoughts.

B.: Likewise! I seldom get the chance to do this. Usually the conversations are about the job’s trivialities.

A.: Let’s go.

B.: Bye.

Sometimes the paths of two people converge, only to never meet again. We are on a journey whose course we have not plotted. Now you are here. Tomorrow you may be long gone. Everything is made easier to parse once you accept impermanence.

B.: I rejected it last time, but must have forgotten why. It was months ago. Probably it was because I did not see the point of it. Perhaps I misunderstood you. What does this club do?

A.: It brings together academics and experts from this region’s universities and leading think tanks. We read each other’s papers, hold discussions, organise symposia… You will get the chance to meet new people, make connections, talk about your real interests. If anything, you will have a good time.

B.: Ah yes, now I remember! I recently read one of those papers. My understanding is that to get a PhD you must make an original contribution to our stock of knowledge. To do so, the author was re-reading some ancient philosopher in light of the latest findings in science as well as what currently finds currency in professional philosophy circles.

A.: Interesting! How did you find it?

B.: I quit reading after the second or third page. To be more precise, I quit after encountering the 20th word with an “-ism” suffix.

A.: That’s a pity. Did you find it boring?

B.: It felt to me as an internal debate held by some fringe group I have no connection to. I don’t do philosophy to compare the views of different authors. That is a scholarly activity. It has its purpose, yet it is not for me. Contributing to some stock of knowledge sounds like a laudable pursuit, though I have no notion of what it entails. I simply philosophise to satisfy my need for it. It is a form of a expression. If my hands were more nimble I would play the guitar instead or produce landscape paintings. But I was born that way, so I must do what I can. The gist is that you should not take me too seriously. I already forgot what I wrote about two weeks ago: there is no attempt to be consistent, no ambition to produce yet another “-ism” or become a scholarch in a brand new school of thought.

A.: Maybe that particular paper was not dedicated to a topic of your interest. Philosophy is a broad field, after all. It is normal to focus on what you like. At the club we cater to everyone.

B.: Say I discover a paper that piques my interest. What does the club add to my experience of reading it?

A.: Nothing whatsoever. It merely provides a platform for finding such works and for connecting with their authors.

B.: Suppose I do join you. What does the club try to achieve? Is it to make philosophers sociable, to improve their career prospects, maybe find them a date? Or does it have a loftier goal?

A.: When you bring people together, lots of opportunities open up. Though our stated mission is to make progress in philosophy.

B.: Progress in philosophy? What do philosophers care about the most? What is the end of philosophy?

A.: The truth. Philosophers want to reveal or at least approximate the truth.

B.: What is the truth?

A.: That is the key question!

B.: So philosophers search for the truth but cannot even define it properly?

A.: It is why we need to sit down and agree on the fundamentals. Then we can build up from there. Currently everyone has their own views. We cannot proceed without consensus.

B.: You are my friend. I must speak my mind and tell you why I have zero interest in attending your club’s gatherings. It all starts with philosophy’s quest for the truth. Philosophers should have learnt by now that they can only define the truth negatively by using all the faculties at their disposal to rule out what feels wrong. Though the problem is that one cannot be certain of their attempts at disproving falsehoods because there is no benchmark with which to assess individual propositions. To know what the criterion is, to be certain about it, is to have found a particular aspect of the truth. But to claim as much is a positive proposition, which itself is subject to falsification.

A.: You just outlined the core issue. No wonder then that philosophy cannot give us any tangible results.

B.: What results do you expect? There are no results in the sense of reaching a terminus to a given research programme. I think of the philosopher as an antipode to hubris, to human’s propensity to step outside their limits and inflict harm on their own or on others. The philosopher reminds people that their designs and stratagems, their bold claims on wisdom and virtue, their delusions of grandeur, are far more fragile and ephemeral than they think. Life is like the reverie of a goddess. One moment you are walking, suddenly you collapse on the floor: the end.

A.: I was thinking that philosophy could help us do things better, like improve how we do science…

B.: Some professors of philosophy would definitely like to assume that kind of role: to issue instructions to other experts about how they should conduct themselves. To me that is not what philosophy is about, for how can one tell others in sincerity what is the right course of action when they themselves understand that the truth remains elusive? I can’t teach the Stephen Hawkings of this world, those who think that philosophy is dead, how to approach scientific problems. That would be presumptuous and ultimately false. All I can contribute is a friendly reminder that their pride, inflated self-importance and sense of accomplishment, are not peculiar to them. Others have also entertained those fancies. They were all proven to be mistaken in one way or another. Again, this is all about acting as a check against cockiness.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

A.: This puzzles me. On the one hand you suggest that philosophy has a role to play as a social service of some sort, yet on the other I get the feeling that you are not particularly enthusiastic about the whole enterprise. Do you think there is something missing? Could it be that the study of philosophical themes is in vain? Why do all leading universities have philosophy departments then?

B.: Well, in our country and many others around the globe higher education is a lucrative industry with strong ties to big business and other centres of power. Why it does certain things is not strictly about some selfless commitment to the service of an ideal of scientific enlightenment or whatnot. We have reached a point of heightened prejudice where one’s titles and certificates matter more than what they actually say. Ex officio wisdom is nothing new, though now it has become a commodity where students are encouraged or forced by immense social pressure and the structural demands of the workplace to assume odious debt burdens in pursuit of a degree; a degree that will get them a bullshit job that will ultimately barely service interest payments. To join a university is fast becoming a bondage to the creditor: a Faustian bargain. But I digress, as the point is whether the study of philosophy is in vain. One could ask what isn’t, though I understand your club thinks that at least its presence is worthwhile. Let us grant that some things are worthy in their own right and are so absolutely. The thing is that philosophy cannot be one’s primary or only interest in learning. You must live your life in full and do philosophy to help you remain anchored in the actuality of your being, which is one of uncertainty. We learn about uncertainty not through intense philosophical work, but by everyday experience.

A.: What is wrong with specialising in philosophy?

B.: The same that is typically bad with every other over-specialisation: you view the world through the narrow lenses of that field, you are indoctrinated in its thinking, you are alienated from your self as you try to become that which is considered canonical among your peers. Then your social life is aligned with that role-playing, which inevitably reinvigorates the cycle of indoctrination. You pick sides and become team “idealism”, “realism”, or whatever “-ism” is trendy or whichever has persuaded you to join its ranks. I find that neither interesting nor fecund. I would rather assess an argument on its own merits than by reference to some overarching framework or tacit authority. You can waste your time trying to solve thought experiments, like those which ask you to imagine you are just a mind. I assume there is something exciting about finding answers to those tricky questions. Though my take would be to take a step back, relax, and just admit that you are an actual animal and all those years as a fully fledged human have already conditioned you to act and think in certain ways. You are a corporeal entity, with both reason and emotions, with organs that contribute to different types of experiences. An experience is something you know, because you have already been through it multiple times. Same for intuitions which extend that which has already been rendered clear by the senses. How can I imagine I am something non-human when half way through the supposed experiment my body tells me that it needs water, my legs feel numb after many hours of sitting on the chair, and so on? I am constantly reminded of the absurdity of the proposition. There is more to life than philosophy. Don’t let it trick you into thinking that by becoming a philosopher you are joining some special class reserved for intelligent people. Those who are truly smart understand that smartness is not a function of their preoccupation.

A.: Is not reason the defining characteristic of humankind?

B.: I don’t know. Have you ever met such a human?

A.: Yes, people can be reasonable.

B.: No, not like that. I am interested in the “defining characteristic”. Philosophers will have you believe that you are a fraction of human or that you have a standalone presence of some sort that is distinct from the rest of totality: an exalted being governed by reason, the chimera of the homo economicus, a decontextualised individual with unchecked free will, and so on depending on the “-ism”. What a culture takes for granted at the fundamental level, be it property rights, the idea of “natural” law (a contradiction in terms), the binary of reward and punishment, anthropocentrism, and anything else typically is the work of some philosopher who forgot to point to the fact of their pervasive uncertainty. The philosopher must be aware that others are listening and must assume responsibility in the same way the physician must commit to do no harm on their patient who trusts them with their life.

A.: How do we escape from those conventional truths?

B.: There is no single way to go about it. Sometimes you just stumble across an article that is critical of an institution and you start unravelling the whole apparatus. Other times it may be because of a profound experience where, for example, you walk up a mountain top, perhaps by serendipity or the guidance of Demeter (Earth Mother) or whatever you want to bring up as an explanation. While at that altitude, you are in awe at the sheer scale and interconnectedness of the world. You realise how grand life is far beyond your comprehension, even by staring into the otherwise limited horizon. Those trees around you, the bees, the grass, the clouds, the rock you stand on, the orbit of the moon and the position of the Sun, and a seemingly infinite array of mutually dependent factors are all preconditions for your existence and continuous presence. At which point you admit to be yet another tiny piece in this system of systems of systems of emergent realities that we call the cosmos. And then you can’t help but laugh out loud at how preposterous the concept of a human-centred universe is.

A.: Is reason overrated then?

B.: Reason is the faculty we employ to add order to our impressions and extend their application. It has its purpose and should be rated appropriately. Though reason is not a substitute for everything that is human. Unless your career hinges on forwarding such an agenda. As Michelle Gurevich says in Kiss “Let’s kiss and see what happens”. No amount of thinking will ever give you the experience of a kiss or indeed of anything never encountered before. Each one can be unique. No book or library will suffice. And no reductive exercise will help either, such as by simplifying the human being as nothing but biochemistry, for that ignores the emergent reality of the conscious experience, the actuality of the supersystem of subsystems of biochemistry understood as human.

[ Read: On Discipline (2021-05-07) ]

A.: Interesting that you bring up Michelle Gurevich! All those songs are wonderfully honest and insightful. I have been listening to them ever since you shared them with me: No One Answer, Party Girl, Almost Shared a Lifetime, Show Me The Face, Lovers are Strangers, Blue Eyes Unchanged, First Six Months of Love, Life Is Coming Back to Me… I could go on. Beautiful! Your point then is that the philosopher must perform their social function towards philosophy itself, otherwise an exaggerated opinion about the human condition might lead us down the wrong path. Right?

B.: Indeed, that is my point. Alluding to a singer and songwriter is no coincidence. One can learn so much from a single song, including the recognition that their field of interest is not necessarily superior to all the rest. When you are exposed to art, when you walk in the forest, whenever you let go of pretences in intimate relationships, you discover something about your self, the human kind, the world around you. As for philosophy, we must keep things in perspective. The philosopher does not have all the answers. Philosophy is a disposition towards knowledge and learning which basically comes down to remaining open to the possibility of being proven wrong and being elated about such a prospect for it emancipates you from the powerful grip of a falsehood. To my mind, the philosopher reminds people that they can be mistaken in their beliefs and that they are mere mortals.

A.: Could philosophy then be considered a kind of therapy?

B.: Perhaps, though likening it to what physicians do might give the wrong impression. Philosophy is one of the many fields of endeavour that can help you avoid excesses in life. Why would we think that a philosopher is more truthful than an artist or a scientist? That aside, the “therapy” you are alluding to is an escape from dogma. When you understand that you do not really know all that much, and when you realise the immanence of uncertainty, you stop worrying about appearances. Just like Socrates, you know that you do not know, even though others in your milieu are making a luxurious living out of essential lies about their abilities.

A.: What does it mean to avoid excesses? Where do we draw the line?

B.: Just as with the concept of “truth”, we can only imagine it as a negative space that is delineated from what we do recognise. When you witness someone boasting about their power, you cannot help but hint at their fragility. Diogenis of Sinope (the Cynic) did just that when Alexander, the so-called “Great”, confronted him. The aspiring hegemon of the Earth asked the philosopher what did he want from the sovereign, to which Diogenis replied in splendid Cynical fashion: to enlighten him or, in other words, to not blot out the light as Alexander was standing between him and the Sun. The intent is to remind the despot not to bring darkness upon humanity. There is nothing great about Alexanders. Ruling the world will not make you superhuman. You still are an ordinary Alexander with the same needs for sustenance as everybody else, the same fears and insecurities, the same hopes and desires. Why should your empire control access to a common resource, when we can just live without its mediation? What makes you special, you fool!?

A.: Okay, take tyranny as a case in point. If philosophers do not know what the truth is, how can they or anyone make a value judgement against tyranny or, indeed, any other form of government or type of social organisation?

B.: We may not know what the absolute best system is, but we can still consider tyranny inadequate for a broad range of likely states of affairs because a single person, or a few of them, cannot possibly design policies that cater to the diverse needs and aspirations of their subjects. Be it by viciousness, ignorance, pride, vanity, they will do more harm than good. They lack insight into the particularities of each case and, depending on how large the scale of operations is, are too disconnected from the quotidian life of people under their rule. As always, this is not a purely philosophical take: we base it on our experience. Indeed, the idea of a “purely philosophical” claim is suspect as it hearkens back to those figments of the imagination that philosophers entertain while carrying out their experiments.

[ Watch: On the nation-state, democracy, and transnationalism (2021-05-29) ]

A.: How do you filter out wrong systems though? What is the criterion?

B.: The same can be said of the proponents of those systems. Why should Alexander rule over the world? What is his justification? We will find that we are in doubt and so we must default to a mode of conduct that minimises the chance of errors with far-reaching implications into areas of activity beyond their particular domain. The likeliness of failure for a single, central node is greater than multiple failures over smaller, distributed nodes, ceteris paribus. We know this not by means of experimentation in vitro, but through everyday experience. You put all the eggs in one basket for the sake of convenience and now you stand to lose everything at once. You engage in monocultural farming to optimise short-term yields and are inevitably eroding the sustainability of the local ecosystem, thus creating much greater perils for the future. Remember that philosophy does not have answers. It is a state of mind about not taking yourself too seriously.

A.: I see. Don’t you think it would be better if those ideas were given a platform so that more people can access them?

B.: Popularity is not a reliable sign of quality. Then we have the substantive aspect of philosophy. Have you ever tried to lead a discussion towards more theoretical themes? People opt to change the subject or lose interest really fast. The philosopher is destined to isolation and self-imposed exile, at least insofar as the act of philosophising is concerned. You should count yourself lucky to ever be in the company of a like-minded person and to also enjoy their presence beyond the narrow confines of a shared interest. Amplifying a signal does not mean it will be heard amid the cacophony of noise.

[ Read: Why I never call you (2021-06-05) ]

A.: So how do you reach out to kindred spirits?

B.: Maybe your club knows better. I don’t try to reach out to anyone. My work is just the result of an internal need or impetus to act.

A.: Why publish it then?

B.: To resist the temptation of curating myself. To make something public is a commitment to stand by its substantive claims. If you are wrong, you will be the first to criticise yourself by means of a new publication that contradicts the previous ones. Others will notice that there is no beautification at play. If I was peddling some school of thought, if I had a niche in mind, then maybe I would be behaving differently. Though I will leave that as an exercise for your club’s members: what would you be doing if you were not who you are? It will fit right in.

A.: I appreciate your honesty. Should the philosopher always be honest?

B.: Honesty towards oneself is part of the philosophical enterprise of remaining open to the possibility of being proven wrong. Though this is not generalisable. Sometimes in life you must pretend not to know to protect others from their destructive propensities.

A.: So you tell them lies?

B.: No, not necessarily. You ask them questions about their approach. Guide them towards realising what their disposition is. Peel off the hardened outermost layers. Let them believe that what you would have suggested at the outset was their own thought all along. It is their struggle to escape from falsehoods. You should not interfere with it, as dogma creates its own self-defence mechanisms to the point where people do not take kindly to criticism and what are perceived as exhortations. Sometimes honesty engenders adverse effects and, in our case, can make the dogma more deeply embedded.

A.: Does this work though? I find that people simply cling on to their preconceived notions.

B.: When that does not produce the desired results, you need to convey the message another way and stand firm. Here is a story that inspired me to do so on a permanent basis. Once I attended a social gathering with a bunch of strangers. Not out of my own volition: it was part of a job. I was normally clean shaven, but it happened on a Sunday evening, so I had remained unshaven since Friday morning. Once I arrived at my destination, someone remarked that I looked like a terrorist, to which I replied that they sound like a moron. Apart from the racist stereotype, I thought this was an opportunity to put people into second thoughts before they even utter a word. So I started growing a full beard ever since: make them a bit uncomfortable, let them challenge their prejudices, allow them to get to terms with that which they consider alien, and ultimately learn something about themselves without ever admitting to it. Help them grow out of their narrow-minded self.

A.: I am sorry for what you had to endure.

B.: No worries! When you understand where people are coming from, you do not harbour hard feelings about anything they may say. Here’s another story just to cheer you up and to show you a third approach. A few years ago I was at a shop near a popular pilgrimage site. I was sporting a beard and long hair. Was fairly well dressed that day. Nothing fancy, just not particularly attractive and certainly not flashy or trendy. At some point, I noticed another customer about twice my age looking at me. I did not do anything about it, though I kept my eyes peeled. After seemingly overcoming their internal conflict, they started moving towards my position, with a body language that communicated a mixture of curiosity and hesitation. “Excuse me, dear sir…”. I welcomed them politely as they paused for a moment. “Do you have any connection to holiness?”. I understood they mistook me for a local priest or a monk, so I replied “Perhaps I do. Do they?” while nodding towards the direction of the pilgrimage site. All I got in return was a puzzled and silent face.

A.: One must do whatever it takes, I guess. What do you think is a practical advise to help people be more philosophical in terms of not taking themselves too seriously and trying to be rigorous about questioning their thoughts?

B.: To change their mindset about their perceived helplessness. Every child likes to be spoon-fed but at some point the parent must put an end to it so that the child can assume its own agency. It may seem harsh, but it comes from a place of love. Your task must be to give people resources they could use and to show them how they can be pieced together. Just enough to get them started. Don’t try to spoon-feed them, for that condemns them to their current state, whereas you want them to grow out of it.

A.: This relates to the zeitgeist of doing things quickly and effortlessly. It is practically everywhere. Just the other day, I was searching for tips with which to improve my sourdough bread technique. Most resources would be the clickbait type. Pure garbage!

B.: The causes of such phenomena are likely complex and relate to how society is currently organised, the available technology with its inherent sets of incentives, the underlying system of values, and so on. It goes to show, however, how curiosity alone is not enough. You need commitment to the cause. That is the case with every area of expertise. I am curious about music and painting, but unless I put some serious effort into them, and provided I have the requisite talents, no shortcut will ever take me to the point of being an accomplished artist. Again, this is what the philosopher is trying to say: don’t delude yourself into thinking that you have found a way to bend the rules of life. The procrastinator who expects immediate results by following some supposedly magic formula is committing hubris, for they do not recognise their condition and, thus, their limits. Unless they change their ways, they will suffer.

A.: How do you go about leading a philosophy-inspired lifestyle in an era where success is contingent on the appearance of unflinching certainty?

B.: It is not just the present age. Humans have always pretended to know more than they do. There is no compromise to be had. You let go of the presumption that success matters for doing philosophy. What difference does it make to me if one or a hundred people read this? It still says the same things. Furthermore, when you have an audience and put yourself in the role of preaching to them, you lose the freedom of expression in a substantive sense as you cannot upset them by changing your mind about a given issue. They are not ready for it. This too is a way to communicate a philosophical insight: don’t make any claims on consistency, do not promise coherence, do not even suggest that what you propose is remotely plausible. Put the reader in a position where they have to be reminded not to take things at face value. Those who follow along do it at their own risk.

A.: Still, I can’t let go of the intuition that being appreciated by some people is better than getting no feedback at all. Just imagine joining our club and delivering a presentation on what we have discussed today. You could get a round of applause and then be invited to mingle with people where you can further elaborate on your views.

B.: You conveniently left out the dating part. Regardless, being recognised is always nice. Humans are easily flattered. Though once the lights fade you realise it was all in vain. Recognition or the lack thereof does not affect your experience with philosophy itself. It is its own end, not a means towards becoming popular with some club’s members or the public at-large. This telos is not necessarily significant for humanity, at least not for me, as I pursue it solely out of an inner need.

A.: Okay, let’s leave it at that. I still have to finish my tea. You won’t be joining our club after all…

B.: Actually I changed my mind: I will join you as soon as you achieve progress in philosophy. Good luck with that!

B.: Yeah, it happens.

A.: I tried to contact you yesterday and this morning, but you never replied. It has been a long time since you last joined us.

B.: I didn’t want to be there and didn’t feel like I had to explain myself.

A.: You don’t like our company or parties in general? I mean… You are here.

B.: We need to define who “our” company is. Is that you or a random collection of strangers? As for parties, they typically consist of people with little to no connection to each other. I never got anything out of them.

A.: You don’t like strangers then? To me this is the best thing about parties, especially in this cosmopolitan city. You get to meet new people from diverse backgrounds. All these cultures coexisting peacefully. It is a treasure!

B.: I guess this is where my problem starts: parties do not allow you to actually get to know someone. You grab a drink and chat with the person next to you about whatever superficial topic comes up. After the Nth time of being asked about the latest events on some TV show that I have never watched or ever showed interest in, I feel those conversations are a complete waste of my time. I don’t even have a TV, but the random fellow nearby does not know that as they do not know me. They just assume things, putting me in a defensive position where I need to explain every little deviation from their preconceived notions.

A.: Maybe you just expect immediate results. It does not work that way. Sure, you have no interest in chit-chat though that is nothing more than an introduction. Once you break the ice, things start flowing naturally and you get to know the other person and have a good time.

B.: It could be that, though I tried multiple times to get past the awkward phase. I would listen to what they have to say, ask them some question based on what I learnt from them and gradually work my way towards something closer to my interests or at least something that could be generalised to find applications beyond the specifics of the topic under consideration. You know me: I am very patient and an active listener.

A.: That could be the issue right there: people may think you are almost interrogating them. They are not used to someone actually listening to what they say. Most of the times they just talk past each other, as if they are not collocated, bouncing words off of some imaginary barrier between them. They stand next to each other, but they are not together.

B.: And this is why I feel I am being put in a defensive position. This is who I am, yet that type of person does not conform with others’ expectations. I need to explain to them that I am listening carefully to what they have to say and am contributing to the discussion with relevant questions.

A.: You need to learn how to switch topics. Those probing questions stress them out in a subtle way: they are not prepared for them, they are not ready for that level of scrutiny.

B.: Switching topics has not worked for me. It simply rolls the problem over to the next theme.

A.: You cannot go in-depth again, right? Care to offer an example?

B.: It was at your birthday party: I don’t understand why you celebrate birthdays, but I digress. I had just walked indoors and was perusing the bar with the drinks. This girl came up to me while I was trying to grab a beer and asked me what the differences between the brands were. I explained that one is an ale, another is a lager, etc., and then went on to outline their main differences in taste and texture. Then she asked me what brought me to this place, to which I replied that I was your guest and we have been friends for years. So I asked back “what about you?”. She told me that she was a colleague of yours from the office. Then she tried to steer the discussion towards the kind of stuff I have grown to dislike, at which point I interrupted her saying bluntly that I find chit-chat boring, bordering on annoying, and if she was still curious to consider something else, something perhaps more interesting.

A.: Well, it seems to me you are good at this. You know how to listen and to talk, and you have knowledge of all those things which others might treat as useful trivia, at the very least. I can’t understand your problem then. You start off with some generic topic and then the discussion follows from there. Nice and simple. What about this story then? How did things go?

B.: I asked her instead to tell me about her background: what did she study, if anything, what were her interests related to that, and so on. She told me she had a degree in business administration but went on to pursue anthropological themes, doing work in different parts of the world.

A.: Oh, I know who that is!

B.: Of course you do. To the story: I don’t care about business but I am interested in anthropology, so I went on with that. At my request, she told me what she had learnt from those peoples and how “we” could help them out in this or that way. After she had described the situation, I invited her to put aside her enthusiasm of helping others and first try to figure out what she had learnt about herself and her own culture by being exposed to those peoples. She paused for what felt like a full minute, perplexed and bedazzled: it must have been an odd proposition. I did not take my eyes away and did not try to change topics: I was communicating my commitment to that statement. It seemed to trouble her though not in the sense of being disturbing but as the kind of question that had never occurred to her. I felt that she had never pondered that “we”—whoever that is—do not have all the answers and are not necessarily better than them, with all qualifiers of what “better” even means in such a case. I took it as an opportunity to nudge her to look inwardly and improve herself. I interrupted the pause with a remark: “how can you help a group of people you do not truly understand and, more importantly, how can you help someone—anyone!—when you are not sure who you are and whether you can even help yourself?”

A.: Oh my… What was her answer?

B.: She had no answer. Sipped some beer and checked whether I wanted to dance with her…

A.: So it worked! You did it, my friend!

B.: No, it didn’t because I was expecting an answer or at least another opportunity to further explore those concepts.

A.: You did not dance?

B.: No.

A.: Idiot! I swear, sometimes your behaviour baffles me even after all this time of being with you. It is preposterous. You passed on a perfect opportunity, you fool!

B.: This is where I am getting at. Dance is a form of expression, which I appreciate in its own right. Yet, in the context of a party it carries with it specific connotations. It has a certain function of socialisation beyond the aesthetics of the art itself. It is the same as with bending the knee to authority: if I do it here, it might cause laughter, but if I were to do it in front of royalty, it would express much more than the act itself, including recognition of the cobweb of institutions that grant royals their power. To my point though. What is the value of sociability if I cannot communicate? What is a connection without a link?

A.: But you can flirt and have a good time! There is a place for everything. Now we have the chance to hold a serious discussion. It is a nice evening, the sky is clear and we drink herbal tea. We never do any of that on Saturday nights. At parties we dance and just enjoy ourselves.

B.: You are hinting at social roles. The assumption is that we are all supposed to be the same in that regard. To act a certain way that conforms with the expectations that are fastened upon the concept of the event: “at parties we dance” is one way of formulating such a construct. There are those who express themselves in words, others with pictures, others still through their performance. And there are combinations and permutations between the extremes. You need to disaggregate people and treat each one of them on their own merits.

A.: Don’t you agree though that there is this notion of “the right place at the right time”? You cannot expect the same results between contexts that differ profoundly from one another.

B.: That is true. My point is that the context does not remake people: it changes the scope of the permissible, the desirable. It frames behavioural patterns. Think of it this way: you never see anyone walking up to a table and asking someone for a dance in this place at this time. It is inappropriate, unexpected, undesirable. That is what the context does. Put the same people in a different setting, say, a night club and the roles change.

A.: What is a person then? If we can only ever learn about someone and thus ourselves through actions and if all actions are bound by some structural, else extra-personal magnitudes, then the person is a function of the case’s constitution. How would we go about establishing an identity, a constant that transcends those ever evolving states of affairs?

B.: The self consists of two magnitudes: those that are mind-dependent and those which are mind-independent. Chrēmata and pragmata. The former are brought into being, or are assigned a defined purpose through rules or conventions, while the latter are facts. We can think that “on Saturday nights we dance”, just as we can agree to another stipulation: “we do not dance on Saturday nights”. This value is chrēmatic: it rests in usage. There is nothing inherent in Saturday nights that causes the need or the expectation of dancing. Whereas we cannot do that for the Sun. Not even if all humans agree to it, we cannot institute the Sun into its opposite. It is there regardless of our intentions and aspirations. It is unrefashionable. Couched in those terms, I would suggest that the person has an underlying nature, a pragma, that is like the Sun: it is a fact. We notice it with people’s physical characteristics, for example. One is tall, another has broad shoulders, a third has blue eyes, etc.. Why not extend that to people’s inner world? Each of us has their own character. Some are emotional, others are calculative, more still are people-oriented, while others enjoy solitude and quietude. Just as we cannot turn a tall fellow into a short one by means of institution, we cannot make an introvert fully gregarious and outgoing. And so on.

[ Read: Notes on Rules (2020-07-01) ]

A.: So institutions are kind of arbitrary while nature is the only truth?

B.: No, not necessarily. Everything we do is contingent on our nature. We can only realise what is within our potentiality. Institutions contribute to an emergent reality that is not to be found in each one of us individually. The dichotomy I introduced is meant as an analytical device when applied to the human condition, whose purpose is to educate us; to help us make sense of the case. In practice, we cannot separate layers of the human being, the culturally and socially constructed being, into physical and emergent: the pragmatic and chrēmatic are interconnected in a singular reality. To your point, institutions form part of a network of meanings. Their world is one of communication, in the sense that it is intersubjective and thus hinges on exchanges between people. Think of language, for instance. It is in our nature to produce sounds, use gestures, and make facial expressions with which to engage in a feedback loop of sharing and receiving ideas or expressing emotions. If someone you care about stares deeply into your eyes, pauses for a while and then says “I love you!” in a specific tone of voice and with a given set of non-verbal expressions, that carries a different colelction of significations than a computer reading out those exact words. The computer does not understand meaning because it does not feel anything in that combination of letters: it has no experience of what the resulting sounds refer to and it cannot discern emotion and intent. It is not the words that hold the meaning, but their communicative utility as understood by those involved. A hug can have the same meaning as that phrase. While another hug can be a mere formality, like a handshake with a coworker. Institutions are bundles of meaning. They operate just like that, only they target classes of people. Think, for instance, of a social norm of allowing the elderly to have priority in the waiting line at the grocery store. One may argue that this is arbitrary because society just wants to be polite, politically correct, or whatnot. Though we can still trace the underpinnings of the institution back to some underlying natural condition, as the norm implies that we recognise age-related physical differences and are willing to show compassion and mitigate inequalities that would otherwise arise, by introducing a positive element of discrimination: to slightly favour the elderly over the youth in an attempt to even out the differences between the two groups. So no, arbitrariness does not seem inherent to institutions.

[ Read: On the nature-convention divide (2020-08-10) ]

A.: Now take me back to the section in our discussion where we considered the sense of context when dealing with people. I claimed that there is a right place and a right time for certain patterns of behaviour and then simplified that with the expression “on Saturday nights we dance”. You then countered that such is a tacit attempt at homogenisation or, at least, that it does not account for innate differences between people. Fair enough! I get that. What I do not understand quite as well is the linkages you are trying to draw between context-dependent action and the account of the human condition and its intersubjectivity. Why is it so difficult to follow that girl to the dance floor? Did you not fancy her?

B.: Once you are at that point, it is not difficult at all. I could have. No objection there. And no, it is not a matter of fancy either. Though that story is nothing but a narrative I spun based on partial information in an attempt to frame my thesis and make it relatable. It is not about any given person. It may be a woman, a man, a Fata Morgana I experienced while staring at the horizon. Who knows? It may not even be rooted in a real story, yet it does not matter even if everything about it is true, down to the last detail which shall remain private anyway. You know me and can tell what is the case, but ignore that. What I am trying to flesh out is the phenomenon of temporary depersonification that stems from the expectations associated with the given context: the party, the drinks, the girl, the music, the invitation to the dance floor… They call for a given type of person and a specific modus operandi. Some may be like that independent of the context, others will have to fake it. They must act laboriously in accordance with the implicit rule book of the setting. And so B. must appear as non-B. for the purposes of fitting in. Why must that happen? Because failure to do so results in people thinking of you as a weirdo. Acting unlike oneself is a self-defence mechanism to fend off that kind of offensive.

A.: Doesn’t that mean you still care about what others think and are always in a process of acting? If you don’t care and wish to just be yourself, you do whatever you want and stop complaining about social expectations. No?

B.: Indeed, you do what you want, as in not walking to the dance floor to accompany the girl. But here is how pressure builds up: she will tell her friends of that event and they may conclude that B. is eccentric. Maybe they will hypothesise about B.’s sexual orientation or imagine some background story that caused that particular behaviour. Depending on how invested they are, they might seek to know more and paint a picture that fits their narrative. You can’t help that: it is normal for people to be curious about those kinds of things. So next time you meet her or her circle of acquaintances, you will sooner or later have to confront those assumptions. “Is she not your type?”, “Why were you sad that day?”, “If you need help, I am here for you!”, “I can arrange for her to come join us if you feel like it!”, and so on. You just want to mind your own business, but you can’t because of the mechanics of intersubjectivity. You did not invite any of that. You just wanted to do what made you comfortable at the moment. Even that simple act cannot prevent the depersonification I alluded to earlier, for B. has already become non-B. in the others’ impression of B. and B. is now called to apologise for being something other than what B. truly was when those events transpired.

A.: So you don’t call me when I invite you to a party because you want to avoid the consequences. I respect that. Just wanted to know. Though, as you said, you could just tag along as a means of self-defence and—who knows!—maybe you would forget that you had assumed a role and simply had a great time.

B.: It is not only the interpersonal effects, here understood as consequences. We must also consider the person itself and how this inevitable social pressure contributes to uneasiness. It will help explain the difficulty with acting, which is another way of admitting how tedious it is to always be on the defensive. Yes, you can suspend belief once or a few times, but doing it at all times in all cases distorts who you are. Now I am friendly with everyone, now I enjoy gossip, now I blithely accept your invitation to yet another party with a bunch of strangers, now I dance ever so cheerfully, now I show how I fancy this girl. Look at me! Just look, else you will miss the show I am putting up! All I am doing is layering one mask on top of another. Who am I? Who is this phantasmagorised self? Can I even remember how my face looks like after every look into the mirror reveals whatever mask is appropriate for that setting? Will I despair when I can no longer tell when I am role-playing? Might I feel stressed if I cannot determine whether I am wearing a mask or not, and whether that is the right one for the occasion?

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

A.: Too many rhetorical questions there. What are you trying to say?

B.: I suspect there is a mechanism, or concerted effort of multiple related mechanisms manifesting as a singular one, that keeps us tied to the underlying reality of our self. Think of it like a boat and an anchor. The boat can float in any given direction, but is ultimately pulled back to the anchor’s location. The self can be swayed by instituted realities up to a degree, though it can never become its non-self.

A.: What happens if you try to pull up the anchor?

B.: Say you can do that. Which direction should you then move towards? And once you get there, won’t you want to be anchored in that place? The gist is that wherever we find ourselves at any given point in our life, we are always framed, determined, or otherwise influenced by the pragmatic (mind-independent) aspect of our self, the environment notwithstanding. We speak of muscle memory and we know that the lungs cannot turn into a liver, the eye does not become an ear, and so on. Every single one of the subsystems that makes up the supersystem we discern as the human organism exhibits this commitment to identity, this insistence on self. Every fibre of our being works that way. So when you try to act unlike your self, you effectively do something akin to eating a food you are allergic to: your body reacts negatively. It harms you. Now I would posit that what we call the psyche is not a distinct quantity from the totality of the human supersystem, in the sense that it is not unaffected by the rest of the factors that are in an interplay with it. The negative reaction, in our case, can thus be experienced solely as an undesirable emotion, like anxiety, or a psychological condition such as depression. There will always be tension resulting in longer-term damage when you cannot recognise your actuality. Your being actively resists becoming something alien to it. That contradiction, that friction manifests as frustration, sadness, illness.

A.: Is there no way you can find a balance? What you describe here seems to me that it can only lead to isolation. You don’t join our parties, which I am fine with: I will continue to invite you to be sure that you do not think I forgot about you. You don’t hang out with colleagues after work, because you want to escape from that role as soon as possible… You are a recluse. Where do you get the chance to relax and be who you are?

B.: The more you think about it, the harder it gets. Every place comes with its own set of rules of conduct. Those may be tacit or tolerable, but they are there. Here I am myself, unencumbered by false wants and expectations.

A.: How do you know that you are not acting again?

B.: I am relaxed. There is no pressure, no sense of inner conflict. If I am still acting, which I probably do such as by observing basic manners, I am not being alienated from who I am. The act is harmless, the role carries no expectations that can force me to refashion myself. So it is the kind of rules that are linked to an operation of depersonification that I am concerned with.

A.: Your problem is with expectations and desires that demand a change from your side…

B.: Yes, it is the desire of the unattainable, the yearning of the unrealisable that forces you into submission. Not outright. It undoes you piecemeal. When you role-play you get into the mode of trying to pursue an end you ultimately do not want. You are essentially forced to do it contrary to your volition, only you rationalise it as your will. You have been trained to behave in such a manner in anticipation of some reward, such as getting the chance to be with that girl you only just met, or to generally enjoy a good reputation of sociability among your peers. You are essentially accumulating credit points that you exchange for the favourable opinions of others. Until you realise that this peculiar currency, just like money, fiat or otherwise, has no intrinsic value and is useless in and of itself, while the ‘goods’ it can buy are themselves of dubious value as they are ephemeral. Put simply, you harm yourself by becoming non-you in exchange for some short-term satisfaction. What you get in return for role-playing is, at its best, just like consuming sugar: it is uplifting at the moment, despite being deleterious over the long-term. And since I have long quit eating sugar, I can do the same with inputs to my body, my sense of self at-large, that are sugar-like in their effects.

A.: Is there a type of social activity you are comfortable with?

B.: Plenty! Basically everything where I do not have to apologise for what I do. I should not be explaining my actions. Gather the lads and let’s go play football. The more the merrier! Eleven-a-side. And if we get some new folks to join us, that is even better because we add an element of unpredictability to our game. I love that stuff!

A.: Your problem is not with strangers then, nor with meeting new people, not even with being sociable per se. What is it exactly?

B.: Hypocrisy: banal, innocuous, spontaneous hypocrisy. Though not in itself, but in light of social expectations. One’s hypocrisy, of the sort here considered, renders them an avatar in the others’ game world. The disconnect between the person and the persona is what troubles me.

A.: Have you ever doubted your conclusions?

B.: I have done so many times. At first, I would just go with the flow. The more I became aware of myself, the greater the challenge of handling social pressure. When I noticed the tension, I rationalised it as awkwardness on my part and I would apologise for it, coming up with excuses such as that I was tired, had not eaten well… You get the idea. Then I subjected that attitude to closer scrutiny and found it wanting. There was no awkwardness and no need to ever apologise. I am who I am. It is a fact, of the pragmatic sort, just like the Earth’s orbit around its star. Self-doubt is what led me to where I currently am.

A.: What would you say, then, if I told you that this otherwise elaborate analysis of yours could be just a hardened carapace that protects your sensitive innermost parts? Might it hide some insecurity?

B.: That could be the case. Though I have thought about this for too long and have gone back and forth with my opinions on the matter. Perhaps this insecurity is a deep-seated one, so tightly embedded in my core that it feels practically inseparable or indistinguishable from it. Maybe this is hypocrisy of another sort: of whispering lies to yourself to remove the sense of uneasiness. An intricate tale of half-truths woven together with suppressed desires and/or phobias that you want to believe is true. A curated image of self. Oh the irony of the Gods! All the reasoning, all the theorising… Maybe all of it is but a placebo, a substitute for true understanding; an understanding that must start from the non-rational, the non-theoretical, the non-verbal.

A.: And what would that be?

B.: I don’t know.

• Honesty concerns the truthfulness one must have with respect to their own principles. It is about not taking the easy way out, for to cheat is to primarily lie to oneself.

• Courage is the disposition of daring to commit to the rigours implied by one’s values; it is the attitude of not finding excuses to introduce ad-hoc exceptions to the principles when those do not rectify a state of unreasonableness under particular circumstances; it is the driving force of forethought, of preparing oneself for experiences yet to be.

• Tenacity describes the modal qualities of such a commitment; a mode of conduct that prefers the most appropriate course of action over a more convenient one in terms of first appearances, the right thing in the long term over what may be expedient at the moment.

To be disciplined is to conduct oneself with consistency: to commit to the task at all times within the scope of reasonableness. It is about setting realisable goals and proceeding to meticulously accomplish them.

Realisability follows from reason, as one must evaluate their condition on a basis that is equally devoid of self-deprecation and lofty expectations that are misaligned with one’s actuality and potential. Realisability involves fearlessness to treat oneself with neither pretences nor defeatism, and it also speaks of ambition as it targets not just one’s current state, with its given horizon of possibilities, but also the state at which one’s potentiality is believed to be fully reached.

Consistency thus performs a cathartic function of freeing oneself from falsehoods; falsehoods of who one thinks they are; falsehoods that come in the form of rationalisations that hamper or misdirect action. It further succeeds in setting in motion a sustainable cycle of propitious growth in capacities to achieve one’s objectives that follow from reason.

Discipline expects knowledge of oneself. Yet to know who one is requires an appreciation of the factors that inform the case they are immersed in, for one exists in a given milieu that involves other humans, the intersubjective magnitudes between them, such as language and culture at-large, and everything that is not considered part of the human world in an analytical sense though is inseparable from it in vivo. This poses the problem of qualifying object properties independent of environmental properties, which ultimately dissolve into interconnectedness. It also raises questions about the distinction between human nature and convention and the degree to which it applies. There is a level of abstraction, a given scope of application, where the analytical constructs can be held as separate, so that there can be instantiations of concepts even though those do not have a standalone presence once the constitution of the case is expanded beyond analytics.

[ Read: Notes on object and environment properties (2019-04-23), Notes on simplicity (2019-06-22), On the nature-convention divide (2020-08-10) ]

To know oneself introduces an element of approximation of one’s condition. Such is no perfect knowledge, for one cannot arrive at a strict objectivity of their subject through their subjectivity. The self is a factor of the case and so it exists in a cobweb of feedback loops with other factors, in that it is part of their grand interplay, which means that it is involved in cycles of events that influence, frame, or otherwise condition its state. As such, one can claim to know their self only as an idealisation, as that which is considered common in the multitude of phenomena. An “idealisation” here means an abstraction from the particularities but also denotes the simplification of the case’s constitution, where one either purposefully or through the impossibility of omniscience reduces the case to a subset of its factors, thus altering at the level of the thinkable its constitution and the findings that may be derived therefrom.

[ Read: Notes on Science and Scientism (2021-04-28) ]

Consequently, the reasonableness that discipline is committed to is grounded in practicality, which involves a degree of arbitrariness and proneness to error. Couched in those terms, to know oneself is to maintain an open-minded idea of who one is, remain dubitative and inquisitive about it, and be prepared to assess new phenomena and corresponding patterns of behaviour on their own merits. This suggests that the self—the conception of self—is dynamic and mutable, even when changes are marginal or gradual.

Such uncertainty imposes a constraint whose recognition hints at the sceptical mindset: the ability to withhold judgement without fearing the resulting uncertainty. Fear of the unknown is what compels humans to invent and then enforce answers where none truly exist as a short term remedy to their uneasiness. It is what feeds their propensity towards avoiding open-endedness, for the unknown disturbs the person who has not yet come to terms with the limitations of their nature, one of which is the impossibility of omniscience.

To tolerate uncertainty is to escape from the instinctive—sometimes detrimental, other times benign—fear of the unknown, in order to control one’s presence in a spirit of calmness and tranquillity. There is no angst left, only ataraxia: the recognition that one does not know nearly as much as they think they do or would like to and remains calm about it in a profound sense of living in calmness, neither preaching it nor pretending to be that way.

Sceptical thinking involves modesty, for one must operate in a manner that is consistent with open-endedness or, in other words, that does not introduce dogma: a false sense of certainty that conflates one’s opinion with the truth. To be modest is to exercise restraint in how one behaves and thinks, which means that one does not value continuity for its own sake, as in the sense of showing unbending devotion to the beliefs one had expressed in the past or the notion of dying for one’s ideas, for those likely assume a certainty that has not been truly attained.

Discipline thus consists in moderation. To exaggerate is to introduce an element of arbitrariness beyond that which is expected by the impression of the self and the case in the thinkable. There is a difference between (i) error that is graspable and rectifiable and (ii) the terminus to one’s faculties of sense and intellect. To overestimate one’s abilities is another way of misreading the constraints imposed upon them by the prevailing conditions: an instance of unreasonableness.

Moderation, like the conception of self, cannot be stipulated as static or immutable. It cannot be described independent of its contextuality. And so it too must be discerned through careful deliberation in a spirit of open-endedness and in accordance with practical reason. To find the mean is to remain zetetic and aporetic about the constitution of the case: it is to continue searching for the truth and be readily aware that whatever conclusion is an intermediate state between cycles of research that involve certainty and uncertainty, to the effect that the truth at any given moment is a reflection of that which is possible by the given state of knowledge and the way it is interpreted or implemented.

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30) ]

Searching for the mean in quotidian life, within the mindset of scepticism, has a potential direct effect on the particularities of one’s principles. For one’s impression of what is reasonable in scenario A may not be the same in scenario B due to alterations in the case’s constitution. If one were to mistake discipline for continuity or devotion to a preconceived, decontextualised cause they would be committing the error of applying the findings of case A to case B, thus disregarding the differences between the two and the variations in the possible phenomena that may emerge from them.

Discipline is commitment to reasonableness to the effect that it cannot be reduced to a mechanistic pattern or set of unexamined and unquestionable routines that operate as effective enemies of reason. Rather, through discipline one must be in a position to evaluate evolving states of affairs to continuously affirm the reasonableness that underpins their modus vivendi. It is the sign of wisdom to know when to break one’s rules and how and, conversely, unflinching faith to rules of conduct regardless of the prevailing conditions points at dogmatism, i.e. unreasonable behaviour

Wisdom rests on the understanding of human’s fallible nature. It recognises that there can be a once-unfathomable-now-revealed constitution of the case in which what stood to reason before it has since become alien to reason. More generally, it admits that reasonableness is a function of the constitution of the case; a case that encompasses the subjective magnitude of the agent who assesses the factors involved, and the objective dimension of those factors in their interplay, with the understanding that each of those factors can have an indeterminate behaviour of its own. Wisdom admits universal interconnectedness. To insist on a decontextualised brand of reasonableness, rules without the requisite environment for their benign applicability, is a form of recklessness or exaggeration that violates moderation and ultimately undermines discipline.

A disciplined life covers the totality of one’s patterns of behaviour which have all been subjected to the same rigours of being aligned with reason and remaining open to revaluation. In accordance with practicality, a life of that sort cannot be realised at once. The endeavour is impossible for the uninitiated. A gradual method is in order, just as how one must be able to jog for 5 minutes, then 10, 30, and so on, before they can think about competing at a Marathon run. Again, this is about finding the mean and avoiding excesses by knowing oneself in light of what is documented herein.

To believe that one may transition to a disciplined life in an instant constitutes a failure to recognise the demands imposed by conformance with reason. Such a feeble attitude hints at irresponsibility: a frivolous outlook of not trying in earnest to make an accurate estimate of the requirements and of who one is and, consequently, of not assigning appropriate value to an outright erroneous set of conclusions. Irresponsibility is, in this regard, a form of fallacious thinking.

Instead of trying and failing to commit to a disciplined life at once, one must develop discrete patterns that partake of the ethos of discipline. Those are self-contained habits or daily routines that initiate one into the process of forging the mentality of commitment to the cause of reason. They are to be called “rituals”: mundane exercises whose real purpose is to keep one on track.

Rituals must be understood as ancillary to the sceptical disposition of moderation, not as articles of faith. They are devices that are designed to be employed as means to a greater end. A clear sign of failure to act reasonably is to misconstrue observance of rituals with discipline as such, in the same way a statue of Demeter (Earth Mother), an otherwise poetic encapsulation of a rich narrative, is not Demeter.

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

Rituals are to be embedded in one’s life in accordance with an incrementalist method of practising them and becoming better at them over time. Incrementalism refers to the approach of performing one minute change at a time. Those changes have a compounding effect, as each increment builds on the previous one until the ritual becomes the new normal in one’s life.

Consider, for example, the act of walking and suppose that one wants to ritualise it, in the sense here considered, by starting from a state where a daily walk was not part of their schedule. Such a person must begin by trying 5 minute walks around their house, as in the case of walking down the street and then back home. This should be done once per day. When the person feels confident in their ability to push for a higher target, the duration can increase to 10 minutes, and then 20 or even 30. There can be no exact timetable for determining the precise timing of increasing the effort estimate. It depends on each person. Someone may be able to make progress within a few days, while another requires a few weeks. What matters with those rituals is to commit to the cause, not to compete with another person and certainly not to live by someone else’s standards, for competition is not an end in itself.

A ritual is an exercise in preparation of the real goal of conforming with reason. If one can commit to walking for, say, an hour a day, and of doing the same with other rituals, then they can apply that rigour to thinking things through, avoiding exaggerations and dogma, and generally living in accordance with reason, always without prejudice to each person’s abilities.

The incrementalism by which rituals are to be introduced and observed in daily life helps keep one’s expectations in check. The single most important aspect in any given routine is how one perceives themselves making progress in it. When the expectations are too high, and thus unrealistic, the resulting feelings are those of disempowerment and disappointment, which may turn into rationalisations that seek to render void the significance of discipline, as in the form of “I never wanted it, anyway”. Exorbitant expectations, which entail unreasonableness, may also inwardly corrupt the person’s frame of mind by tempting them to cheat, to seek an easy way out, which would result in a failure to pass the test of honesty.

Incrementalism ensures that one comes to terms with their potential through their own trials and errors. It is essential to understand one’s limits and to work within them. Discipline is not about becoming an elite performer relative to one’s peers, but only to commit to the reasonableness that is to govern one’s life, which necessarily means that the principles derived therefrom are aligned with one’s actuality, else they would not be reasonable. This, too, is about managing expectations: to be true to oneself is to be at peace with who one is. Conversely, to be untrue to oneself is to be at odds with who one is; a tension that prevents ataraxia and may well manifest as illness of some sort.

To manage expectations is to gradually yet steadily refute the lies that one has accumulated about their conception of self. The undisciplined person has no accurate sense of self, but only a false idol that is an amalgamation of misunderstandings and role-playing or mimetic patterns of behaviour. Those are inherently intersubjective in that they pertain to the formation of one’s passive perception of self within their social-cultural milieu.

To assume a role through sheer inertia is to be aligned with the expectations of one’s peers. Perhaps this is best understood through gender stereotypes like “real men don’t cry and are fearless”, to the effect that one who is assigned to a gender of those involved must behave in accordance with the bundle of meanings inherent in the relevant prejudices in order to verify their gender—and, by extension, their place among their peers—on a continuous basis. The same for all socially-sanctioned exhortations. The role-playing agent is an avatar of normativities, whose two-fold function is to validate and amplify them.

To assume a role in the social milieu is a form of acting, though not the didactic kind that has cultural value, as in theatre and cinema, but of being hypocritical by default through maintaining lies and delusions about who one is. Hypocrisy runs contrary to the virtue of honesty and so the person whose disposition is characterised by role-playing cannot commit to reason, for doing so entails truthfulness to oneself in light of a sceptical mindset that does, among others, question the adequacy and truthfulness of such normativities.

A sense of perspective, else moderation, is key to avoiding pernicious falsehoods: an incrementalist method is required to treat roles as layered constructs that must be carefully peeled off over time by observing rituals of discipline. One cannot just forgo their roles all at once, for one cannot know in advance who one is about to become. Recall the open-endedness of the endeavour: to outright suspend roles is an act of substituting the passively constructed self with a conception that was formulated prior to exposure to the rigours of practical reason.

The self cannot ever be fully detached from their milieu, be it the cultural or the natural, for one cannot have a standalone presence that derives from nothing. Subjectivity always remains a factor in the case’s constitution, while one is formed, at least in part, through exposure to intersubjective magnitudes. As wisdom admits universal interconnectedness, it follows that one must be prepared to recognise that not all roles can be deconstructed, as the micro level of the person alone cannot affect the emergent phenomena at the macro scale of their environment, else the structure in which their agency is made manifest.

Practical reasonableness cannot force one to become absolutely egoistic, for such is not the human condition. One cannot know oneself in isolation, for there is no private, standalone, decontextualised self. The ego is always contextualised, developed through intersubjectivity as the sense of self is a function of the case which involves other human beings and their outright intersubjective phenomena like language and culture. Consequently, the connatural virtues of honesty, courage, and tenacity are not limited to the impression of individuality but are instead equally applicable intra- and inter- personally.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14) ]

Discipline is about reasonableness in general. To recognise the truth in someone else’s conduct is to tacitly admit to a standard or set thereof by which all relevant actions are measured. It is the realisation that one is not the epicentre of the world and that through shared experiences one learns both about oneself, about their place and the space in general.

The genuine Olympic Games, not the decadent industry of present day, were a religious event, else a ritual, in the sense here considered, whose true intent was to engender this sense of awareness among the people. The sports were not about records per se: who is the fastest or strongest. Rather, through sportspersonship one would recognise a certain truth in the other person’s performance, while simultaneously understanding their abilities in relation to that.

To know oneself is to discover the others. It is only in light of the whole that the part may develop a sense of place. And so discipline, a mode of conduct that involves personal agency, can only ever be rendered most true when one’s milieu is itself characterised by practical reasonableness, to the effect that the “I” is filtered through the “We”, the latter is understood as emergent from the interplay of all the “I” and of every factor that informs or has informed them, and all are treated as inseparable in vivo though they may always be analytically deconstructed in vitro.

Science is, in this regard, a certain way of accumulating knowledge; knowledge that is a function of the available evidence and, which, by the very nature of the imperfect state of the totality of human instruments, the particularity, indeterminacy, or incompleteness of facts as well as the multitude of possible ways they can be interpreted and combined, must be understood as a form of proximate or intermediate certitude rather than the absolute truth.

Science implements a method of verifying and reasoning about facts that is external to science: that of identifying particular patterns and confirming their exact behaviour through continuous observation and experimentation. The method of science qua method that cannot possibly supply the means of its own verification or be its own cause and justification, for one may not prove with facts that which remains abstract. The method derives from philosophy which can afford to be self-reflective because one can theorise about theories or a given concept in abstract. Scientists may conduct an inquiry on their method, though they must do so outside the narrow confines of their role as scientists.

Science does not discount its significance nor does it undermine its own work by recognising the essence of the method it applies as exogenous to it. Nor does the recognition of this principle suggest that philosophy is necessarily a more truthful discipline in general and must thus be applied to every aspect of life. It only shows that there are different scopes of application in what effectively are strata of abstraction in the systems where patterns are identifiable, each with its own peculiarities and each imposing its own set of requirements upon the truth-seeker. By delineating the boundaries within which scientific initiative unfolds, scientists are better prepared to guard against their own excesses by disaggregating with a critical mindset the independently verifiable claims from those that are unwarranted or otherwise products of fabulation though they may be prima facie resting on a kernel of intermediate certitude.

Science recognises the inconclusiveness of its assertions as expedient approximations that can inform further research; research that attempts to reveal theretofore unknown mysteries and recast existing knowledge in a new light. The intermediate state of scientific knowledge taken as a whole inspires scientists to press on with their work in the hope of further approximating the truth, given that the feedback loop of search and discovery is largely positive.

Science commits to the deciphering of the given case’s constitution and, by logical necessity, accepts the possible revaluation of its conclusions, including their total dismissal, once either the factors that constitute the case, or the means of assessing them, undergo change. Intermediate knowledge is contingent on the overall mutability of the case, with the proviso that some classes of scientific findings may be much more stable than others and can thus function as foundations upon which ongoing research programmes may be established. Neither the method of science nor the findings it yields are immune to reconsideration and recalibration: they rather serve as a framework that informs heuristic devices which remain relevant by their effectiveness to deliver some degree of certitude.

Science can affect the mutability of the case by remaining open to the possibility of reviewing what had hitherto worked. A more refined theory or an altogether different approach to a given problem can reveal factors that were previously unknown and, in so doing, alter the constitution of the case in its thinkable expression as what is thought to be constituted of, which are its factors, what their interplay involves, and what phenomena emerge from them.

[ Read: On role and actuality (2021-04-15) ]

Science implicitly understands that the constitution of the case is not strictly objective, in the sense of being independent of the subject who examines it. For if a change in how a pattern is discerned can alter the meaning or impression of it, it means that there exists a third realm of interconnectedness that encompasses the subject and the object. And so, objectivity in the particular sense of verification pertains to the narrower meaning of freedom from indoctrination in the assessment of scientific findings, where “indoctrination” amounts to a tacit dependency on a certain line of reasoning to render the scientific output verifiable.

[ Read: On non-Being and the prime mover (2021-04-03) ]

Science employs the term “objectivity” to denote its own commitment to research that is not self-serving. If a given programme can only explain itself within its own theoretical framework and if its own theories must be accepted in advance through sheer faith in their expected or putative eventual validity by invoking the hokum of progress, it ultimately violates the principle of freedom from indoctrination, as it only addresses its disciples in what effectively is an echo chamber of social confirmation. Conversely, the potential presence of such a programme further reinforces the notion of intermediate certitude which implies a sceptical view of one’s conduct inter alia.

Science, like philosophy, is a field of endeavour that requires a high ethical standard in its agents in order to sustain itself and guard against the formation of dogmas within its ranks. Scientists need to be guided by the joint virtues of dubitativeness, inquisitiveness, humility, courage, and open-mindedness in the form of discursively synthesising old and new ideas in pursuit of the truth rather than insisting on the vanity of forwarding one’s parochial interests or seeking to vindicate one’s school of thought by attempting to win the argument in a decisively unphilosophical, winner-takes-it-all mindset.

Science that recognises the imperfections of its work, the inconclusiveness of its own insights, and the possibility of making mistakes that ultimately detract from its main cause though they may appear compelling at first, is one that is prepared to press on with its research programmes for the sake of further approximating the truth instead of entertaining notions that are alien to that core objective.

Science is applied dialectics: a grand exchange of views where the participants propound their propositions in a spirit of collaboration with their peers towards the common end of the scientific enterprise. Dialectics is about jointly investigating the truth of the topic in question, where each side in this special type of dialogue maintains a disposition of being eager to be proven wrong when faced with cogent anti-theses to their own theses, for that necessarily emancipates them from an earlier falsehood and puts them on a new path of moving towards the truth.

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30) ]

Science severed from its philosophical underpinnings can only be a stale technical occupation that ultimately creates its own vapid fashions and the related ephemeral social behaviours of hype and credulity. Such a science becomes an industry that specialises in producing the commodity of half-truths or that of elaborate lies wrapped in jargon and carefully selected data sets which conceal their underlying mischievous intent. The industry of science is used by its sponsors to advance their own stratagems, which are not aligned with those of science proper, for science might indeed fail to account for all factors that constitute the case though it will only do so temporarily out of an honest mistake not due to an ulterior motive of some sort. Scientists within such an unphilosophical community inevitably lose sight of the norms of dialectics, sacrificing them to the altars of expediency and vanity. They seek to establish their own strata of power accumulation and then work laboriously to reinforce their dogmas or myths of self-valorisation which are to be protected and perpetuated by those at the top of the resulting hierarchy in order to preserve benefits they have secured; benefits which are indicative of corruption and have nothing to do with the quest of approximating the truth.

Science without philosophy will inevitably experience such decline because it will forget the requisite scepticism that reinvigorates the process of iterative learning and re-learning which is characteristic of science: a process that is imperfect by default, else its continuation would be superfluous. Dialectics is not about delivering the truth in an unequivocal fashion. It rather is the recognition that truthfulness as such is not within any one’s grasp or is not confined to the constitution of a case, and so intermediate certitude must be pursued in an incrementalist way as an inter-personal and then inter-generational effort where everyone involved tries to prepare their findings for the type of objectivity that science expects (freedom from indoctrination). A science that no longer tolerates openendedness of that kind or that cannot recognise its own temporality-specific shortcomings and constraints is one that ultimately falls victim to conventions that are essentially unscientific, such as the mythos of its own inexorable linear progress where the new generation is believed to have fully absorbed the wisdom of the previous one, so that there never is a need to rewind or take a step back in an attempt to reconsider the state of affairs.

Science without philosophy is thus bound to be instrumentalised by forces with no genuine interest in the pursuit of the truth; forces whose machinations find their telos in the accumulation of power in the form of increasingly repressive or outright tyrannical governments, as well as corporate or private actors whose sole objective is the maximisation of wealth and control regardless of the invidious costs on humanity and the ecosystem at-large.

Science of such a sort can only ever serve as the intellectual vanguard of a profoundly non-scientific, and thus anti-philosophical, elite: to perform the role of the supposed fountain of authoritative insight that provides legitimacy to the status quo and which is ultimately weaponised against those who dare challenge the establishment’s hubris, its lack of self-control and sense of place in the world, and its pretences on infallibility.

Science deprived of philosophy and consequently transformed into the means for the consolidation of a given economic-institutional arrangement of forces must then rationalise its own condition through narratives that have nothing to do with the basic notion of trying to attain intermediate certitude for the matter at hand. It must instead find other means to retain its appeal, such as to invent its own origin story that justifies its existence and necessity in the history of humankind in general and the current civilisation in particular, and it must also elaborate on its own eschatology of unmitigated further enlightenment both to attract newcomers to its cause and to fend against those who are not amused by the vainglory of an ostensibly godless technotheocracy.

Science as a career choice rather than a disposition towards learning, and an attitude of living in accordance with the principles than enable such learning, contributes to the distancing from philosophy and to the degradation of the moral character of those involved. The practitioner who has not been in the least exposed to the rigours of a virtuous modus vivendi is likely to prioritise superficialities that obscure their own intellectual insecurities, such as social status, a growing collection of titles and certificates that are supposed to support one’s appeal to intellectuality, or the emptiness of being celebrated as a force for so-called “progress” and “rationality” among those who are believed to be unfortunate enough not to be scientists. The latter is one of those non-scientific beliefs amplified by the oligopoly of mass media that helps the philosophically deprived science stake its claim as the tutelary figure of the contemporary world, while blithely disregarding its instrumentalisation as both the apologist and militant activist of the power apparatus that enables it.

Science without philosophy becomes an ideology for the class of scientists who promote their selfish needs and/or for those who exploit scientific research in their quest for control.

Scientism is the ideology that holds science, though not necessarily individual research programmes, as inherently unmistakable and as the single source of truth. It is a set of beliefs on the superiority of science as a means of knowing the truth over any other method and a prescription against modes of behaviour that are not backed by scientific evidence which are deemed irrational, unreliable, or otherwise unclear. Scientism takes the form of a political initiative to extend scientific methods to all aspects of collective living and to make politics partake of the putative innate impartiality, rationality, and corresponding sense of truthfulness of scientific insight, without recognising the intertemporal failures of science between cycles of research programmes to reach a state of satisfactory intermediate certitude. In the academic world, scientism translates as a belief in the preponderance of natural sciences over the humanities and a subsequent form of expansionism of the former class against the latter or the induced envy of the latter of the former’s social prestige and access to funding. For the individual professional, scientism functions as a pretence on the scientist’s moral neutrality, their indifference to matters outside their area of specialisation, their self-imposed censorship on topics beyond their field of research, and their ultimate alienation from human affairs at-large.

Scientism starts from the misunderstanding that science alone speaks the truth and that unless some statement is scientifically proven nothing can be said about it with any degree of credibility. What science finds is, at best, the recognition of the case, which involves both subjective and objective magnitudes as outlined above, meaning that the absolute certitude that scientism expects is not acquirable.

Scientism makes a parody out of science by claiming that research methods such as statistical analysis and modelling can be applied to every aspect of life, on the presumption that those techniques are inherently rigorous. It thus leaves no room for non-mathematical forms of expression, such as textual interpretation, art, and legal doctrine. Taken to its extreme, scientism cannot admit the truthfulness one finds in a painting, such as El Greco’s Portrait of a Cardinal which depicts the vanity and ruthlessness of Spain’s then Inquisitor-General.

Scientism can only see other forms of acquiring knowledge as imperfect, because it juxtaposes them with an idealised version of science; a science where there are no cycles of revaluation and reconsideration of existing findings or where those are somehow not relevant to the claim that at any given moment science presents the truth. Science effectively proceeds through trial and error, to the effect that its current state is a midpoint between phases of high uncertainty and a degree of certitude.

Scientism prefers to obscure the dialectical—and, thus, sceptical— philosophical underpinnings of science by conflating the precision of statement that is typical of mathematics with the correspondence of models to the actuality of the case. A model codifies the assumptions made by its designer and looks into what the scientist wanted to find. It can have internal consistency, yet still fail to describe reality, as the constitution of its case excludes factors whose inclusion would have altered the way things appear to be. The scientist who fails to draw lessons from philosophy forgets that models are heuristic devices with which to reason about states of affairs in order to draw inferences that must inform the formulation of new hypotheses that advance research. To advance research is to render old models obsolete and to challenge prior assumptions as incomplete, misguided, or outright fallacious.

Scientism’s negligence to remain aporetic with respect to the models that scientists employ forces it to develop a false sense of pride in the medium of communication that consists of statistics and their geometric portrayals. The ideology thus assumes a combative stance against research programmes that cannot be reduced to simplistic mechanics of input and output. In practice, scientism venerates the so-called ‘hard’ sciences while deriding the ‘soft’ ones: it does so already at the linguistic level by introducing the presumptuous hard/soft dichotomy, but also by openly questioning the scientific merits of programmes that involve interpretation and critical judgement.

Scientism thus unfolds as an offensive against classes of sciences that do not yield what are believed to be solid facts. Rhetoric and prejudices aside, the sustained attack takes the form of an uneven distribution of funding so that departments in disciplines such as history, sociology, gender studies, are forced into the margins of the academia, while their ostensibly superior and credible counterparts are endowed with all the money and exposure. What is the institutional equivalent of NASA for studying the human condition, the interpersonal magnitudes of our world, and how does it compare to NASA in terms of status, media coverage, and funding?

Scientism does not ask such questions because it dismisses ‘values’ as unscientific, as if science is not supposed to search for answers that can help humans improve their understanding of the world, which inevitably encompasses the understanding of their intersubjective world. And so a group of self-proclaimed geeks or nerds will blithely launch the rockets of some deranged plutocrat into outer space where they will be used to eventually consolidate repression both on Earth and beyond. Why bother going to Mars if the greatest aspiration is to set up more banks with which to perpetuate the rapacious tendencies that already dominate our life?

Scientism cannot nurture critical thinking from within; thinking that could show it the error of its ways and point at its delusions on the categorisation of the classes of human knowledge. For it maintains the unrealistic notion that the scientist has an agency that is distinct from its counterpart in the outside world: once the scientist enters the lab, or speaks their mind in their capacity qua scientist, they mystically assume an enlightened form that is free of ideological dispositions and deep seated biases; free from those ‘human values’ that scientism is unwilling to recognise as pertinent to the human experience and worthy of serious consideration.

Scientism promotes, in splendid non-scientific style, the ostensible moral neutrality of the scientist because that is consistent with its claims that only the supposed ‘hard’ evidence can be reasoned about with rigour while everything else must be discarded as being of dubious quality. This ideocentric view of science is further reinforced by powerful symbiotic interests of politics and business that benefit from that image both because (i) the work of the research they fund appears impartial and genuine, and (ii) the uncritically minded scientist will not suspend their research programme to ponder about its propriety, its telos.

Scientism further benefits from the myth that science, here conceived as ‘hard’ science, is a vehicle towards enlightenment as it is integral to humanity’s progress towards democracy from the earlier days of tyranny. Notwithstanding the fact that the so-called democracies of the modern world are oligarchies by design, there is nothing whatsoever in the nature of applied research that prevents it from being employed in the service of outright authoritarian regimes or used by assiduous and unscrupulous corporate actors in pursuit of malicious and unscientific ends.

[ Read: On platformarchs, the demi-state, and deplatforming (2021-01-26) ]

Scientism contradicts its claims when it tries to identify itself with liberty while undermining the significance of the humanities or liberal arts. The contradiction is, nonetheless, obscured by the narrative of inexorable historical progress not only of the material sort but also in terms of morality, which is encapsulated in clichés that point to the thought of something being out of place or unacceptable “in the 21st century”. Perhaps such apparent misreading of history and such inflated sense of importance in the modern era’s conventional wisdom would have been prevented by paying attention to studies that examine the human condition in earnest, contrary to the workings of scientism.

Scientism further contradicts itself on the point of being firmly fastened upon the vehicle of democracy, because what it wants in the domain of politics is for so-called experts to guide and mould society as they see fit, despite the obvious shortcomings of actual science on how the human world works. There are experts who control monetary policy, experts who advise the government on how to manage the economy, experts who decide what is to be taught at schools—with the indoctrination to scientism included—, experts who instruct farmers what is best for their land, and so on, to the effect that asking for the rest of society to participate in decisions that affect their quotidian life, and to do so in a meaningful way instead of some tokenistic engagement via hashtags on a platformarch’s playground or whatnot, is to promote some much-derided brand of populism.

Scientism thus denies the possibility of an ideologically driven technocracy. The scientist is supposed to an exalted being, morally neutral qua scientist. Science, in the scientism’s sense, is meant to be the instrument of secular providence that leads peoples towards democracy and liberty. And so, when a committee of experts issues its edict on how collective life is to be instituted, it merely expresses the epitome of impartiality, the purity of reason, and the undisputed truth of what can be said about the subject at hand. Same principle when a group of scientists catalyses the making of some consumer good that actually harms people to maximise profits, all under the guise of objectivity and moral neutrality.

Scientism expresses itself in the words of the feeble willed scientist who prefaces every opinion with the caveat “I specialise in X, therefore I cannot speak about Y, though I think…”. An honest scientist who has not lost sight of philosophy would simply admit that specialisation in X does not yield perfect knowledge of X and that one is uncertain about the validity of all of their views, despite whatever differences of degree. A genuine scientist would, in other words, not pretend to be impartial and immune to bias, but would rather openly admit the possibility of being mistaken, would acknowledge the fact that the constitution of the case thus examined does not preclude the reconstitution of the case if that is what the quest for the truth demands and, in a spirit of dialectics, be eager to be proven wrong by cogent arguments that contradict their prior fallacious views.

Scientism cannot tolerate dialectics, it cannot recognise the fact that the scientist does not provide definitive answers, as that would expose its hypocrisy and pose a hindrance to its aspirations of clinging on to power. It instead expounds on the asinine theory that philosophy is outdated and no longer relevant to science which is, by itself, an unequivocal assertion of the sort that genuine science dismisses as unscientific as well as a misunderstanding of how philosophy informs science not as a substitute for tinkering with equations and recalibrating instruments, but as a means of being self-conscious of the bigger picture in which one contributes their part, and a way of thinking and operating that remains mindful of the very framework that supports those equations and instruments.

Scientism endorses an unrealistic view of the current state of research where it downplays the significance of competing schools of thought and how not all of them are represented equally or at all in the technocratic power structures. The very presence of an orthodoxy and of heterodox views in any given field of inquiry means that (i) the discipline as a whole cannot be represented uniformly, (ii) the historical evolution of the discipline will consolidate the power of whatever mainstream tendency and not internalise those of competing traditions so that the state-of-the-art will eventually be the prevalence of the dominant persuasion in what effectively is a battle of numbers. Moreover, the existence of such differences of opinion or approach indicates what science knows and what scientism disregards: the truth remains elusive.

Scientism’s integration with business and political plans has pernicious implications in the world of science (in addition to the invidious consolidation of technocracy, with its inane pretences on neutrality and supposed apolitical outlook). Those concern the struggle for prestige and the related scramble for access to resources that are furnished by those with the goal to forward their agenda behind the veil of putatively authoritative science.

Scientism first engenders the demand for ostensibly undisputed evidence in all areas of life by misrepresenting science as the single source of truth and then accommodates that demand by turning science into yet another industry that functions in accordance with the idolatry of perpetual profit maximisation. The scientist who is cast in that milieu must think of how to market their research in order to get a grant that can keep them in business. While the humanities at-large must engage in a grand role-playing game where they appear to be implementing the same rigour that is found in physics so that they, too, can yield tangible results for use by their sponsors. Meanwhile, the aspiring scientist is incentivised to assume—or, rather, brainwshed into assuming—an odious debt burden in order to go through the now-industrialised and hyper-financialised formal education system in the hope of acquiring a degree or set thereof that improves their career prospects, including the option of a career in science defined by its aphilosophical hubris.

Scientism is inextricably bound up together with the established paradigm of political-economic-social organisation where a tightly controlled elite appropriates the means of production, communication, and decision-making. Scientism provides the origin story of this order’s self-professed benevolence as the heir of modernity—itself an ideologically loaded term—and renders plausible its claims on its inevitability as the sole possible outcome of rational thinking, all under the rubric of science alone being in a position to tend to the truth. As the status quo is defined by its inequality and amorality, which are embedded in the profligate quest for incessant year-on-year fiscal growth, so its simulacrum of science inherits the same antipathy towards the truth when that poses a threat to its bottom line.

Scientism exists to regale its de facto employers with findings that can be directly integrated in money-making schemes and power struggles, both of which are consubstantial anyhow. It exists to provide them with legitimacy and to shield them from criticism, for who has the temerity to question ‘science’ and ‘facts’?

Does that really solve the problem?

The difference between a painting and a pipe consists, at the face of it, in their intended and expected functions. Intent is the role that object was meant to assume in the case envisaged by its creator. It can also refer to what its user wants it to do at the moment. While expectations pertain to the same role as conceived by those who may interface with it under certain circumstances, or in the particular constitution of the case.

A painting can be said to realise its telos in educating, entertaining, or otherwise appealing to the aesthetic and intellectual sensitivities of the subject who experiences it. Yet a painting also potentially functions as its creator’s claim on an achievement: a token which one may exchange for recognition among their peers, material wealth, and the like. Still, the making of a painting, the process itself, is not necessarily subordinate to considerations of social status and economic standing, for the artist produces art to satisfy their own call to express themselves through that medium.

What is a painting in one case is not the same in another. The painting as a product of art is not equivalent to the painting which is placed at the auction house where its likely buyers are financial investors who assiduously seek to hedge their bets by attaching them to the asset of a perhaps much vaunted luxury good. The intended role in the former scenario is largely cultural, while in the latter it is business-centric. The same painting is presented as distinct from itself when the constitution of the case is refashioned: its roles ante and post such a change differ.

For there to be a painting that is understood in its capacity as a work of art there has to be an environment that is conducive to such an appreciation; a set of contributing factors which, in their interplay, substantiate such a role; an environment that assigns meaning to the painting and determines whether that coincides with the intent of its creator or user[s].

In the absence of an appropriate environment, there is no painting qua art. There may be the raw materials, such as canvas or wood with oil colours laid on top, but the meaning, the one that is contextually developed as an intersubjective narrative, remains latent or not actualisable. Matter is not a painting. Matter in a given form is still not a painting. Matter in a given form plus a meaning assigned to it can be a painting under specific circumstances.

One must then expect a contemporary painter to present their work with the caption “This is not a painting a priori… though you can interpret it as one”.

This is not a pipe… It is the representation of a pipe: a painting. Or is it? Can a painting be properly talked about without considering the technical aspects that are peculiar to its art, such as the colour combinations in use, the shapes, the strokes of the brush, the contrast of light and shadow? Is there a painting for which one can never discern the elements of its artistry or otherwise not be concerned with them in the slightest, as we do in this article, yet continues to be treated as a painting? For what we are commenting on is not the painting as that which has been painted in its totality, but only the paradox represented therein. Is the paradox itself, detached from its underlying colouration, texture, etc., the painting of René Magritte? Or must it be framed as an element or a particular quality of it? And if it is an element that we choose to study in its own right, is our study still about the painting?

Could René Magritte be incorrect in their claim that Ceci n’est pas une pipe? The statement is imprecise, or can at least be read in ways that its writer did not foresee, as it assumes that “pipe” can only signify that object which is used for the particular function of smoking, or of smoking tobacco. Yet as with the painting, a pipe can never have a singular and predetermined function independent of the milieu it is immersed in. Just as with the painting, the pipe does not exist without an appropriate environment that bestows upon it a role. Which suggests that while the pictorial instantiation of the pipe is not the pipe qua a special implement for smoking, it still is, in a sense, the unmistakable depiction of a pipe, as its impression corresponds with the one we get while observing a tangible pipe: oh, this is a pipe!

Consider now René Magritte as the agency of the painter during the moments when La trahison des images was being painted. One can only assume that the painter sits in their studio with a tangible pipe positioned at some distance from where the painting is being drawn. That pipe in the studio, under those particular circumstances, is also not a pipe in the sense of an object that is being used to smoke tobacco, because the painter assigns to it an entirely new role without necessarily rendering obsolete its previous one: the new role of a still nature, a model whose purpose is to be observed and the impression of which is to be expressed as a form within the painting and then be altered anew by the inclusion of the caption which introduces the paradox discussed herein.

One could argue that a pipe is a pipe only insofar as it conforms with its intended purpose of smoking tobacco. However that line of reasoning introduces an arbitrary stratification in the multitude of possible contextual functions of the pipe, where it treats the intent of its creator as somehow superior to that of its user[s] in all possible states of affairs, with the creator also becoming a user. There is nothing intrinsic to pipe in general or to this very pipe as originally conceived that prevents it from attaining a function which is peculiar to the constitution of the case. The actuality of any given presence is neither predetermined nor unalterable: it is always realised as a quality that stands emergent from the interplay of factors constituting the case.

Think about the pipe that René Magritte painted; the particular pipe in its specific capacity as the famous object that Magritte used in the studio to perform the role of the still nature that ultimately informed La trahison des images. Suppose that this pipe is retrieved from Magritte’s belongings and is placed in a museum. Is it still a pipe in the sense of actually being used to smoke tobacco? Or has it yet again attained a function that is specific to its newfound role as an exhibit in the museum? One must then wonder what it means for something to be couched in terms of a cultural exhibition: what is the intended function of the exhibit as derived from the context it is in and what are the concomitant expectations of those involved. And the same principles apply when that very pipe gets sold to another institution for an inordinate amount money: is the buying agent paying for the original intended function of the pipe or for the peculiar intersubjective meaning it attained through the history of art? Or perhaps something else entirely?

Thus our problem is not whether the representation of a presence is the presence itself in those cases where a distinction between the two magnitudes can be maintained, but that there can be no decontextualised telos as there is no standalone presence. Something exists in something, not in nothing.

[ Read: On non-Being and the prime mover (2021-04-03) ]

The original intended role of any given presence cannot precondition or otherwise constrain its evolving actuality. The actual is situational. It is contingent on sets of relations between presences where the presences and their relations evolve or generally change to deliver unique configurations which in turn engender their own emergent realities. To insist on the original or intended role of a presence is to disregard the indeterminate nature of its actuality as such, or to dogmatically assume it as constant.

The notion of a prime mover can be interpreted as a theological statement, where a divine power has created the world out of nothing. There broadly are, however, two issues with that approach:

1. Is “from nothing” a statement on non-Being? If so, then one reaches the terminus of human’s faculties of sense and intellect. For to describe that which is not is to attempt to attribute properties and, in so doing, to render the construct they are fastened upon or are assigned to as being: they are predicated on something, not on nothing. Human mind can conceive of non-Being analytically as the opposite of Being, though to experience or describe something is indeed to be concerned with some thing, i.e. a form of being. To reason about non-Being is to reason about Being, just as to speak of the ineffable is to talk about that which is being discussed, which is not ineffable as such.

2. Setting aside the impossibility of non-Being as being, a state in which some divine entity produces something out of absolutely nothing is still not one of non-Being, as there is the presence of that entity to account for. So “absolutely nothing” is not true. Which would compel us to pursue the Aristotelean enterprise further to inquire upon the causes of that very entity: what is the cause of such a presumed divine power? What about the cause’s cause? And so on until we return to where we started wondering about the unmoved mover.

To resolve the problem, one may posit a hypothesis that is complementary to Aristotle’s linear sequencing: what may be described schematically as circular that admits to work within the confines of Being instead of trying and inevitably failing to escape the boundaries of human potential. That which causes but is not caused by anything must be the cause of its own and everything else must be predicated on it, for that which causes is and that which causes ultimately still is, actuality per se. Being always is, neither was nor will be, to the effect that the prime mover is Being.

If one supposes that there exists just the divine qua prime mover on one side and nothingness on the other, then there is at least a third or rather more fundamental magnitude that frames, informs, determines, and preconditions the two, together forming oneness where the dichotomy between exo- and endo- oneness dissolves into itself. To think of an otherwise self-contained chain reaction that is brought about by a force external to it is to inevitably admit the point of contact and to implicitly recognise an environment where the connection can be established between the mover and the moved. Again, the dichotomy does not hold in absolute terms.

What are discerned as patterns in this universal oneness are derivatives of Being that always come and go from something into something. Not from nothing into something nor from something into nothing. All are embedded in Being, essentially inseparable from each other as systems of systems, each governed by local and global rules, each environed by others and contributing to the interplay of factors that engender emergent phenomena; systems of systems in strata of emergence and so on recursively within a cosmic supersystem; never as standalone presences and only as instances of partiality rather than individuality as such.

[ Read: On individuality and partiality (2021-03-14). ]

Being is represented as a circle in that it is its own cause and it always is. Though predicate or higher forms of being beyond the universal fundamentals are best described as a helix, due to the mode of phenomenal differentiation—itself a constant—in which no combination of innumerable factors ever repeats itself. There is no cosmic rewind and replay, as in a one-to-one reenactment, but interdependent and compounding adaptations between the constituents in each and every super- and sub- system of the cosmos.

The helix and the circle are not in conflict, such as in the case of a vortex where a circular motion at the centre of a body of water generates the helix-like flow. Remember though that those are schematic representations with which to communicate, not to be captured by them in trying to identify perfect correspondence between the metaphor and reality.

How come there are forms in oneness? Due to emergence, which is an epiphenomenon, or rather concatenation of epiphenomena, of Being. Fundamentally there is Being. Forms of being are emergent realities that are derived from lower level fundamentals through the complex interplay of the factors in each case. Just as there can be conscience at one stratum of emergence, there can be at others. There is no clear indication that emergence reaches a finality, such as, say, the sequencing from the atoms to the organs to the supersystem called “human” producing the phenomenon of conscience to ever stop at that level and for there to be no such emergence from fungi to plants and forests and oceans to planets to solar systems and galaxies, et cetera. If it is known to be made manifest in one place, or under a given set of circumstances, why would it not be reproduced in another constitution of the case, mutatis mutandis?

[ Read: On Nihilism (2019-11-21) and On nihilism, scepticism, absolutism (2020-02-29). ]

Emergence does not explain the reason of being instead of not being, so why does the unmoved cause motion? One cannot determine a precise reason for why Being causes other things to derive from it and return to it. What one can tell is that there can be no non-Being and that forms of being always are inter-dependent and jointly existent.

Suppose Being somehow revealed itself to us and explained what the reason is for beings to exist instead of not existing—would that suffice? One would not be justified in providing assent to such claims, for one lacks the means to verify them independently. Human can only ever conceive that which is in the nature of human to conceive and, consequently, one can never think, imagine, comprehend that which is not possible for human to ever think, imagine, comprehend. A revelation of the sort here considered that is formulated in a way which is understandable by humans is one that necessarily is within humanity’s potentiality and, therefore, constitutes a claim or set thereof that one ought to be able to confirm rather than take at face value. One must, in other words, remain dubitative and inquisitive.

[ Read: The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30). ]

What is the relationship between the idea of this article and this article, or between the idea of this article and the idea of article as such? Do ideas exist and are they somehow mixed together with some matter in order to be instantiated? Ideas exist in a basic way that is reducible to energy and so the instantiation of an idea does share a part with its noetic counterpart through the transformation of energy into matter, though not as partaking of a finite quantity as in how a loaf of sourdough bread derives from the dough of an older bread. The instantiation of this article consists of bits in the computer or ink on paper, if you will, though there is no computer hardware, ink, paper in its author’s mind. Yet the idea of this article is imprinted in this article, while the totality of all possible articles does not exhaust the idea of article, for it is not finite. It is intriguing then that the aforementioned epiphenomena of motion lead to an animal that can entertain ideas; which would suggest that intelligence of varying degrees must be immanent to the cosmos rather than germane to human, as there is nothing unique in human qua human. For what else is the pre-programmed, yet sufficiently self re-programmable, behaviour of the seed (or indeed of anything that grows and evolves) that gives a tree, which gives seeds, and so more trees, and the same in an eternal process of compounding adaptation that actually co-occurs in all forms of being? Just as human consists of what may be described in a sense as ‘star dust’—water, iron, and the like—so must it inherit everything else that is prevalent.

Why argue against nothingness when this article came into being from nothing? It did not come from nothing, nor in nothing, nor of nothing. There always is something. Instantiations come an go, just as one animal is born and eventually dies without exhausting or depleting some resource pertaining to its type of being. Under the scope of Being, life and death are not distinct as they are part of the same process of composition and decomposition from something into something. Life and death, presence or absence, are felt differently at different strata of emergence, because each stratum is but a part of the cosmic whole, so it does not have the complete circle peculiar to it. Think of it like a pulse, a cosmic dance, that pulls together ‘star dust’: when it is assembled you live, when it disassembles you cease to be, though the pulse continues pulling and pushing ‘star dust’.

What if there is some substantive difference between the cosmos and whatever caused it, such as how a computer program can procedurally create its own realities within the confines of the program without being the same as its human creator? What if there is a true substance in some other state and the cosmos as we know and can imagine it is just a grand illusion, so to speak, or some sort of an empty shell? One would still have to reason about such truly substantive state in the same way we have already outlined, namely, that everything humanity may posit about it is strictly limited to Being. The supposed truly substantive state would then be one of Being, not non-Being, and the unmoved mover, else that which causes but is not caused by anything, would have to be the cause of its own. Furthermore, the distinction between exo and endo in that state would continue to be meaningless, for if it were contained by something it would not be genuinely the prime mover and we would thus have to press on with our research until we found the circularity outlined herein.

Giving it a different name does not solve our problem. We always return to universal interconnectedness, to oneness.

The ego, one’s sense of self as the mental construct that is associated with any given person, is iterated through such a feedback loop as a collection of experiences that are selectively memorised and rendered lucid in the form of a narrative. It tells a story of who one is in juxtaposition to who they are not. In the ego lies subjectivity; subjectivity that is contextualised in the oneness of being and is, therefore, a type of partiality rather than individuality in the literal sense of a non-divisible entity.

To ascribe individuality to personhood is to identify a pattern in the cosmos that captures a system of systems and conceptualise it as such: the human presence is itself divisible into systems of systems, with the peculiar supersystem of human qua human functioning as the emergent form of being conceived as a person in its own right.

Each ego is unique because each form of being, humans included, partakes of the mode of phenomenal differentiation that runs through everything there is, while each configuration of factors, in their given interplay, that contributes to events peculiar to any one of those feedback loops is unique as well.

Differentiation pertains to phenomena that are otherwise couched in terms of constants. Similarity does not become dissimilarity: the two categories remain distinct. While differentiation does not alter the formal qualities of each presence, such as the seed of an apple tree randomly engendering an elephant. The mode of phenomenal differentiation contributes to otherwise marginal or incremental adjustments to any given presence, without forcing it to deviate from its type and without interfering with categories of the cosmic abstract structure.

The ego is an abstraction from such incessant differentiation. It does not describe a person’s reality, rather it encapsulates one’s simplified version of some events. To conflate the ego with individuality per se is to misunderstand the inescapable totality one is immersed in.

Individuality, strictly so-called, is an illusion made possible by the mode of phenomenal differentiation in conjunction with how the human mind abstracts patterns into discrete mental constructs. Individuality is the in vitro representation of in vivo partiality.

Discreteness of mental or noetic presences is not arbitrary, in that it does derive through the process of tracing patterns and identifying in them that which is common in the multitude of phenomena. Furthermore, the mode of phenomenal differentiation does not disturb archetypes, meaning that it does not undo the ontic distinction between forms of being, or between strata of emergence understood as systems of systems each giving rise to a particular kind of a case-dependent emergent presence.

Distinctiveness does not entail individuality, for each form of being is rendered possible in its particular milieu: it does not have a standalone presence. Differentiation does not annul the underlying interconnectedness that all forms of being partake of and the interdependence, else joint existence, they are bound to.

Individuality describes the noetic representation of a state of emergence, not a form of being. It presents a given stratum in a system of systems as irreducible, as an entity in its own right that is not contextualised by totality. To speak of one’s ego as being is to posit the illusion of individuality as the actuality of things under the scope of cosmic oneness.

To recognise the impression of individuality as actual partiality is to refrain from dogmatic reasoning. It is to suspend judgement about what one thinks one knows and to admit that, in light of totality, one is but a fraction.

There is, nonetheless, practical reasonableness that applies to interpersonal affairs, as well as in relations between humans and the non-human aspects of their ecosystem, i.e. the system of systems that renders possible life as we know it. In practical terms, human conduct rests on simplifications, working hypotheses, and abstractions. Each partiality can only be expressed as such.

In the stratum of emergence that involves human affairs, individuality does make sense as an expedient mental shortcut: it is intimately linked to the unfolding—the making and remaking—of one’s ego. Still, the human world can only enable individuality as an approximation and individualism as nothing but a simplistic ideology in justification of states of affairs in the domain of politics.

Cosmic oneness aside, there is no standalone presence even within the narrow confines of the human world, for there always exists a precondition of sustainability. A single human cannot survive without either the direct cooperation or support of other humans, or the reliance on artefacts that have been perfected through aeons of experimentation among generations of humans as compounds of accumulated knowledge: tools, weapons, inherited automations internalised as instincts as well as experience passed down through tradition and education, language with which to reason about the world in more precise terms…

Tales of individuals that decisively operate outside the human world are myths that inform a given ideology, or exaggerations that seek to bestow a layer of plausibility upon a certain dogma. A romanticised figure living for a while in a hut amid the woods, or a hermit in some cave, does not count as proof of a standalone presence even in the narrow sense of the human world, for such a persona is already endowed with the gifts of civilisation and remains dependent on them.

Similarly, a single human stripped of all goods of civilisation cannot exist without an environment that is conducive to living: how will a baby survive in the wilderness or how will a grown up with no tools and weapons or prior knowledge succeed in a forest with competing predators or hazards of any sort?

Individualism removed from its ontological pretences can be employed as an instrument for research, as a specialised methodology that is part of a wider programme that seeks to tie together findings of subjectivities as ultimately framed by—and contributing to—their milieu. Here too, methodology must not become a tacit ontology in that it must not lose sight of its intended function as a set of heuristics, a collection of working hypotheses, in pursuit of general findings.

Methodological individualism that insists on there being no strata of emergence, even of the human sort as intersubjectivity, mistakes partiality for individuality, the in vivo with the in vitro. In so doing it stands as an obstacle to a genuine inquiry into personhood, for it strips it of its contextuality, in that it downplays the feedback loop between internal and external actions and reactions.

To make sense of the human world without committing to dogmatism of such a kind, one needs to balance out conceptions of personal and collective subjectivity in an open-ended, dubitative and inquisitive fashion (see The Dialectician’s Ethos). Recognise the so-called individual in their lifeworld as a partial presence. More so when embedding one’s understanding of the human world in discourses of ecology, i.e. under the scope of the system of systems within which humanity operates.

To deny the contextuality of presence within the human world is to disregard structural magnitudes that are discerned in the constitution of each case. Individualism qua method can only be implemented as a microscopic view of ego-involving, ego-forming phenomena. An altogether different approach, one calibrated for intersubjectivity in present time and for intergenerational dynamics on a historical scale, must be established as its macroscopic complement to study the structure that frames agency and is informed by it.

Against such a backdrop, it is fecund to reason about individual and collective experiences, for the indivisible unit is thus understood as an analytical construct within explicitly defined strata of emergence. The person, here representing the atom of the case, is contextualised in their cultural and historical milieu and is framed in relation to the structural magnitudes that are peculiar to each state of affairs under consideration.

There is, nonetheless, a particular sense in which individuality as non-divisibility is an appropriate characterisation: in the very functioning of the ego as an introspective view of personhood removed from its wider context. What the ego thinks of itself is what the ego ultimately is. We must consider it a constant with itself. It is an identity. That does not make it immutable: it just means that at any moment it resolves to what it is.

The ego as individuality is yet another instrument for pursuing an inquiry into the specifics of that aspect of human kind. It is a heuristic with which to test certain hypotheses and, potentially, arrive at more refined theories. Still, the ego does not maintain a standalone presence, even within the simplified constraints of a singular human organism, as the ego is not its own cause. The ‘individuality’ discussed here applies to a very specific stratum of emergence and remains limited to it.

Treating the singular human organism as a form of being that partakes of partiality equips us with the means to examine the world with humility, without fear and prejudice. We may no longer conceptualise it as the mere environment of any given centre, as in the case of anthropocentrism and its individualist or egoist flip-side. The same goes for human affairs, where a broadened conception of the human experience as both a function of structural magnitudes and contributor to macro phenomena which themselves iterate on the structure (a circular process), helps us avoid pitfalls of simplistic or pernicious ideologies that are casually articulated as authoritative wisdom.

Amidst a bar brawl one of the drunks picks up an empty bottle and hurls it at the other end of the room. The object travels in a given direction at a certain speed. We can measure those magnitudes. If the bottle hits its target, and if that happens to be another fellow, they feel the impact, experiencing it as pain. Such a phenomenon can also be empirically validated. So we may think that the bottle exists because we can confirm its presence by relying on our faculties of sense. Put differently, we can apply the principle of correspondence to assess whether an impression maps to some event.

What about notions? Can we measure those in such a way? An idea cannot be thrown at you. It will not make you bleed. And so it may not be measured by using the same method that applies to the flying bottle that moves through the pub. Should we then infer that the idea does not exist?

Let us take a step back and consider a parallel to the example with the irate drunk tossing bottles around. Think of a mental stimulus, a phobia, a trauma, or just a dream. The thought of something is sufficient to provide a stimulus which triggers a chain of events in one’s body that are ultimately understood as fear, stress, or some other emotion. Words can hurt your feelings. The sound of an explosion can send shivers down one’s spine who has lived through a certain traumatic experience. Some flatterer’s compliments can boost your ego and, indirectly, alter your behaviour.

If an idea can be traced as the cause of a phenomenon, or of a series of phenomena and their epiphenomena, then we cannot afford to argue that it does not exist simply because it is intangible; at least “intangible” when compared to how a bottle is something you can grasp.

What if ideas are patterns of biochemical activity that are interpreted as meanings, with the latter being functionally equivalent patterns whose application differs from the former in that they are intended to be stored in our memory, else form part of our stock of knowledge? The “stock of knowledge” may itself be reducible to biological processes that render their outcome as permanent, the same way a muscle is said to develop and retain memory. In a world where matter is a form of energy, why can’t ideas be examined in terms of their effective materiality?

While we could employ linguistic means to disambiguate the two types of existence considered thus far, I am of the view that such an exercise concerns a secondary classification. Both are the subject of ontology and my intent right now is to rethink the analytical framework we have for noetic (of the mind or intellect) and empirical presences (of the faculties of sense) rather than directly proceed to delineate and describe that domain.

What distinguishes beings is their mode [of being], their tropos, else the pattern we associate with them. Water and ice can be conceived differently by recognising that one is liquid and the other is solid; that one is between a certain range of temperatures, while the other is below that level. However we go about it, we are essentially discerning patterns in an otherwise uniform, continuous world where water can be liquid, or solid, or vapour, or where the elements that constitute water may be diffused and be fused anew in combination with other elements to derive other forms of being.

This is not to claim that all that exists is essentially the same. That may be the case reductively, though the world as we understand it is not reductive in its actuality. The point is to appreciate the importance of the pattern. That is what matters, in the same way it does in our common tongue where a given combination of the letters, say, “d” “g” “o” can be assembled in such a way as to mean “dog” or “god”. Same constituents, profoundly different concepts as well as diverging narratives and concomitant significations.

One could posit that ideas have an element of subjectivity to them, a kind of arbitrariness or indeterminacy which is not present in the objective world; the world of the bottle (“…. or the dog”, adds the atheist). The argument would be that ideas are in one’s mind and different people may assign a unique meaning to a superficially common concept, to the effect that they no longer denote the same ‘thing’. Someone who is a regular at the local pub associates a bottle of their favourite beverage with socialisation and joy, while another who holds other values only treats it as a dangerous temptation. Such subjectivity must mean that we cannot equate the notion of a bottle with the instance of one.

Equivalence in what sense though? Is it in their capacity to be examined empirically? Sure, they are not the same in that regard. Such is a lateral methodological consideration that may, inter alia, hint at the inadequacy of the method itself in capturing a given truth. Perhaps a one-size-fits-all postulate about methodology is wrong. How about equivalence in the sense that both partake of being? What does that suggest about our pretences to objectivity or our claims on its extent?

Our notion of the objective world consists of the totality of forms of being that are impressed upon us in accordance with what is believed to be the baseline of human faculties of sense and intellect. In other words, when everyone sees a bottle, the bottle is believed to be visible beyond doubt and, by extension, to exist. How does a bottle render itself present to someone who lacks sight and who has never touched neither a bottle nor that particular item that everyone else agrees upon its presence? What is the taste of a beverage to whom has never consumed it or anything of its kind? How does an experience unlike all others reveal its secrets to someone who has never gone through it? And how can the empirically verifiable traits of a certain object be touted as indisputably objective when they too are a function of the agent of the inquiry into their particularities and of the specific method involved? In other words, how can you so blithely remove the student and their instruments from the topic being studied, while insisting that the latter has a standalone, decontextualised presence?

A decontextualised being can only be conceived as such. Objectivity of this sort is the idealised midpoint of common subjectivity that is peculiar to the human species and, quite likely, to other forms of life, including animals and plants. There is no variant of an objective reality that is not contingent on the subject’s nature, the subject’s inherent abilities to experience it, reason about it, and draw inferences therefrom.

Such insight does not imply that the world is profoundly subjective, in the sense that it is a manifestation of our mind’s inner operations, whatever such a hypothesis may entail. Rather, the dichotomy we try to introduce between noetic and empirical magnitudes is tenuous as it rests on a tacit medium of interpretation, else judgement, that conceals itself as a prior truth. We should be careful not to fall into the dogmatist’s trap of vindicating the categories we already assume as constant. This requires us to be mindful of what we mean by “objectivity” and to apply the dialectical ethos consistently, so that we remain sceptical of everything, including the adequacy and propriety of our own endeavours (also read The Dialectician’s Ethos (2020-09-30)).

Notwithstanding any remaining theses on the topic of objectivity and related epistemology, there is another sense in which we must critically assess claims on some thing’s existence: emergence. The thought of a dog brings happiness to its human friend, as does the sight of that same canine. Such a form of life is not singular though. It rather stands as a system of systems that collectively manifest as the pattern we interpret as “this dog” or “dog” in general. The supersystem, which we also refer to as the “organism”, consists of subsystems, each of which is governed both by the rules of its environment—the supersystem and its supersystems—as well as its own domain-specific ones. Each of those subsystems is itself a supersystem of yet more specialised subsystems, and so on.

Emergence means that there is a stratum of being that is superjacent to its contributing or underlying strata. Such a stratum can more commonly be understood by approximation, as a domain of application for a given research programme (also read Notes on the modes of Scepticism (2017-07-28)). For example, a canine trainer only operates at the stratum of the dog as a whole, while a veterinarian has expertise in the organs that form part of the specimen’s constitution.

The vulgar notion that the dog exists implies that the animal is a unit, thus ignoring the stratification of emergence here considered. It is, in other words, couched in terms of an arbitrary generalisation about the scope of a certain stratum of emergence (also read On the nature-convention divide (2020-08-10)). Existence of this sort is associated with a life form, to the effect that the dog is perceived as a singular entity. Yet it can just as well be conceived as a being that emerges from the interplay between other forms of life. The emergent tropos of a given dog and of dog in general, is possible because all those subsystems exist; though not merely as being present, but rather in a given configuration, a specific pattern.

To understand this dog or dog in general, we must study the constitution of each case. We must be prepared to treat emergence not as the originator of a life form, but as a stage of modality that defines a subset of the world, which we choose to treat as a standalone, decontextualised presence.

If an emergent form of life can exist as the product of a specific set of interlinked and interlocking operations between subsystems that are, in such particular case, factors of said emergent stratum, then that which may derive from the biochemical processes that yield thoughts must also partake of being. Matter, else a state of materiality, is but a tropos, a pattern in an otherwise universally interconnected space (see Notes on object and environment properties (2019-04-23)).

How do we then draw a demarcation line between sheer fantasy and some scientific hypothesis? Is it impossible to differentiate a fable from a historical event, notwithstanding lies that are recorded as facts? No, do not panic. We can still rely on our heuristics for filtering information and understanding the world around us. The nuanced take is not whether some fantasy conforms with the principle of correspondence, whether it maps to some event that our objectivity can parse, but rather how such a fantasy can have material implications on a given person or a group thereof.

Some athlete firmly believes that they are the best in their league. This unflinching commitment to what may be fantasy, motivates them to perform at the peak of their powers and to always strive for the best possible outcome. Soldiers on the battlefield are indoctrinated into thinking that they are giving their life for their country, with “their country” also attaining a possessive sense of owning something, even though their homeland is nothing more than the fief of some unjust oligarchy. Insofar as the motivation itself is concerned or, more broadly, the effectiveness of an expedient untruth, the principle of correspondence is not only irrelevant, but outright inappropriate as an instrument for studying the phenomenon at hand.

The key is to avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism which, in our example, coincide with naive empiricism or some neighbouring brand of scientism. Instead of trying to draw lines that mark the borders of what our current state of conscience wishes to determine as the province of the intelligible and verifiable, let us adopt an open-ended disposition towards knowledge and learning (also read On nihilism, scepticism, absolutism (2020-02-29)). To rethink everything we have hitherto taken for granted and cast it under a new light.

Are we prepared to step outside our comfort zone? Do we have the mental endurance to relentlessly question ourselves and venture into the great unknown? Can the understandably fearful animal overcome its fears? Though not through knowledge, as you may have been conditioned into believing, but by acknowledging the possibility of not knowing and by managing to live in peace with that notion.

Tranquillity presupposes humility, abstinence from hubris.

To effectively and consistently partake in dialectic, one must have developed several virtues.

They must be honest. To stand by their arguments, recognise any possible mistake of theirs, not misrepresent the other side’s positions, not employ rhetorical tricks, not assume malevolence in the opposing side’s propositions or act in bad faith, and the like.

Honesty ultimately results in a style of communication that is plain and unambiguous, or at least tries to be as straightforward as possible, given the sometimes difficult or nuanced concepts of philosophy. This can be presented outright or upon the request of the other party to the dialogue, in the sense of answering questions along the lines of “what do you mean by X?”. One does not try to use tenuous metaphors, rely on paradoxical claims, make exaggerations, seek to impress, assign peculiar significations to words without sufficiently explaining them, etc. And one must be cooperative and willing to clarify any statement of theirs.

Honesty and plain-spoken-ness contribute to a special type of courage. One where the person is not afraid to maintain their presence in front of the other side to the dialogue and/or whatever audience. The Greek word for this is parrhesia. Parrhesia is revealed when one proceeds to formulate their position because they think it better approximates the truth and does so no matter the social-political benefits or costs.

What happens if we cannot arrive at a satisfactory conclusion through our dialogue, no matter how hard we try? Do we just claim that whatever findings of ours are the best approximation of the truth that can ever be attained? That would be dishonest, for we would be rationalising our shortcomings as extra-personal constants. Instead, we ought to acknowledge that more work needs to be done. Furthermore, once we do have a satisfactory outcome, do we purport to know what the truth is and be unequivocal in our commitment to it? Is our evaluation of what counts as “satisfactory” or “done” an ultimate value judgement? The answer is negative. Parrhesia requires us to be bold in how honest we are towards others and ourselves. In this case, it underpins an aporetic (dubitative) disposition. One is prepared to recognise the constraints they find themselves in, to admit that “I do not know”, “I may be wrong”, “the factors that informed my judgement may have been inadequate, my data incomplete, and/or my capacities limited”, “the outcome is a function of inputs that may be refined upon further investigation”, and so on.

To be aporetic is not about dogmatically claiming that knowledge of some ideal form is unattainable, for that is the opposite of doubt. Nor does it expect one to dismiss every kind of proximate certitude because it is not “good enough”, as that too would be presumptuous: it would attempt to render void the actual while holding it against a potentially speculative ideal, without being in a position to suggest an improved alternative. This is a matter of pragmatism, where something is better than nothing, so long as it does not create impediments to further research, such as entertaining a working hypothesis while being prepared to abandon it in favour of a more comprehensive theory.

Aporeticism is, quite simply, the attitude of not taking oneself too seriously, not committing to a given position with unflinching faith, and not settling with whatever established or conventional wisdom may find currency. One does accept intermediate forms of certainty that yield practical benefits, that offer some degree of knowledge or facilitate the advancement of a given research programme, though always remains open to the possibility of reviewing their stance once the parameters or specifics of the case undergo change.

Aporeticism conditions one to be prepared for a kind of zig-zag movement in their progress towards approximating the truth. To go back and forth is perfectly fine, provided you do not lose sight of the objective. This is what we normally mean when we wish to “keep an open mind” about a given issue. We hint at our adaptability to evolving states of affairs. Doing so requires another attitude: that of being zetetic (inquisitive). The whole point of doubting is to provide an impetus for further research. To press on with the task of approximating the truth, to ask more questions and to seek answers, and to do so again and again.

To have parrhesia, to be aporetic and zetetic, are part of the same mode of conduct. These virtues are inseparable when studied in vivo. What we outline here are mere analytical constructs: they are made separate in our mind.

As noted above, dialectic is an inter-personal affair. The virtues of character documented herein must be present in all parties to the dialogue. Without reciprocity there can be no dialectic. When one seeks to “win the argument”, they are not doing philosophy. They are picking up a verbal fight, a battle of wits, if you will. They are being eristic (combative) and, by extension, egotistic and antagonistic. Their ulterior motive compels them to deviate from the path that leads to the truth in pursuit of some ephemeral gain.

The dialecticians are not preoccupied with bonus points on some meaningless chart that tracks scores, more commonly conceived as social status, economic standing, popularity… They care about working together to seek the truth. To the dialectician’s mind there is no such concern as the quest for glory, in the sense of staunchly defending their position despite cogent counter-arguments. Besides, that would fail the test of honesty.

Perhaps the most common case where the dialectician wins and benefits from dialectic is when they discover a proposition, theory, method, that approximates the truth in a manner that is superior to what was possible prior to such a discovery. To “lose the argument” by admitting one’s position to be untenable is, in fact, a blessing, a win of the highest order: one is emancipated from a falsehood that kept them away from the truth and is inspired to renew their zetetic spirit.

Dialectic is all about humility. You learn to be humble by exposing the emptiness of your once-cherished beliefs, for that is how your knowledge evolves. You collaborate with other parties to partake in the pleasure of finding out that you were all wrong and some other thesis is required to help you approximate the truth. And when you are faced with uncertainty, you recognise it for what it is and accept its potentially unfathomable consequences. Such is the bliss of not taking oneself too seriously and having the parrhesia to do so in the presence of others.

This ethos is not a set of technical guidelines that we follow only while engaging in dialectic. It is a highly demanding lifestyle, not the pastime activity of some idle scholar who blithely teaches one thing in the laboratory while lacking the integrity of character to generalise it as part of their quotidian behaviour. The dialectician cannot tolerate such dissonance in their life. One embodies those virtues and lives in accordance with them in a consistent fashion, for they apply everywhere.

To live with uncertainty, to know one’s limits, one’s very humanity as a mere factor in the system of systems we conceptualise as “the cosmos” (or the oikos/ecos, from whence we derive terms such as ecosystem, ecology, etc.), is to develop a sense of tranquility, a peace of mind where you are no longer disturbed by the unknown but are instead eager to expose yourself to it, contrary to your most basic instincts and intuitions as the animal you are.

The dialectical lifestyle, which is in the sense here considered equivalent to the sceptical stance on living, is one that leads to ataraxia (non-disturbance, tranquility of mind). You overcome the most fundamental fear of your ego: that of not knowing. Emancipated from its grip you ascend with the help of others to a higher vantage point, so to speak, from where everything is clearer but also from where you can immediately recognise that your eyes continue to see up to a certain point on the horizon.

Fear of the unknown does not cloud your judgement, nor does it motivate you to be dishonest as a means of rationalising your perceived position of weakness. Confronting your instinctive impulses allows you to better understand your tranquil nature and through it to gain a newfound appreciation of the cosmos in its totality, to the extent you can fathom it, and of its particularities as experienced in every moment. This suggests another way of interpreting parrhesia: courage, fearlessness, and eagerness to face whatever challenges may arise from the task of approximating the truth.

Hence comes agnosticism: the admission of not knowing and the implicit preparedness to live with the consequences. One cannot be dialectical and gnostic at the same time, for the latter contradicts the disposition of dubitativeness and inquisitiveness. To claim to know, without sufficient proof that could be objectively verified by other dialecticians who are not indoctrinated into whatever theory of yours, is a form of dishonesty; dishonesty that may be latent and, thus, not readily recognisable, or one that stems from the natural fear of the unknown that has yet to be addressed.

Agnosticism is another way to describe a modus vivendi that is aporetic and zetetic, and where the person is equipped with parrhesia to conduct themselves accordingly. Here “courage” has an added meaning: the readiness to venture into the unknown and proceed without end in sight. It is a matter of mental endurance, to participate in a kind of life-long marathon run in the vast expanses of the world.

What we gather from those notes is that dialectic presupposes and/or engenders certain connatural virtues. The dialectical process starts from a position of ethics. Ethos is one’s shared moral character, where morality is, in essence, the abstract structure of rules that frame, inform, influence, or otherwise determine the conduct of situational agents and patients to a given action, elucidated and rendered concrete as a discourse and set of narratives, or codified commands that are politically sanctioned and enforced. It is “shared” because it cannot materialise unilaterally. Just as dialectic is an inter-personal affair, so is morality inter-subjective in nature. There is no strictly private ‘dialogue’ as there can be no communication between a sender and a recipient in the sole presence of an absolute one. And there can be no ethics in the narrow confines of a decontextualised individual, where the distinction between an agent and a patient to a given action no longer holds.

The dialectician is, just like Diogenis of Sinope (aka “the Cynic”), a citizen of the cosmos (“cosmou polites” gives us “cosmopolite” and its derivatives) in the sense that their point of reference and source of guidance is nature, the approximation of the truth, the world as-is or as best we can interpret it, though not as human convention or whimsy wants it to be. While “citizen” is a metaphor that seeks to capture the qualities of a literal city-dweller: that they recognise the rules of the place and live in accordance with them. So does the dialectician who studies the cosmic being and lives by whatever rules they may have identified or partially comprehended as part of their life-long commitment to the task.

Yet the dialectician’s cosmopolitanism (which probably has nothing in common with today’s use of the term) does not keep them aloof from the fray of everyday life. To study nature is to also recognise the human species as a social animal; an animal that institutes its collective life by setting rules. The dialectician does not seek the truth by trying to escape from their humanity, for that would run contrary to the very notion of examining the world as-is. They remain rooted in their actuality which also encompasses their particular social milieu. So, as with Socrates, the dialectician does not abandon their city, opting instead to operate in their community to, inter alia, remind their fellow citizens that those who claim to have found the absolute truth are delusional and dishonest.

The dialectician is tasked to at once live in the cosmos and in the city, the space and the place, the general and the particular, and, equipped with their uncompromising ethos, contribute back to humanity’s stock of knowledge. As Plato would suggest, the dialectician must not abandon their comrades back in the cave. They must instead descend yet again and try to help them escape from the shadow play that presents their ignorance as knowledge, their hubris as boldness, their pretences to intellectuality as wisdom.

This reveals a mindset of sharing know-how that we could describe as the “Promethean ideal”, in reference to the myth of Prometheus who taught humanity the technology of wielding fire, without fearing the inevitable punishment. The dialectician is guided by this paradigm to make their findings accessible to as many of their peers as they can. Again, like Socrates, one remains approachable and close to their neighbours. This links back to honesty and plain-spoken-ness.

The dialectician is your friendly, albeit demanding and strict, neighbour who remains part of your community, though not as a sycophant, a cheerleader of the establishment, but as a benevolent, tenacious critic that helps by either sharing knowledge or by exposing falsehoods for what they are.

Let us note here the observation that the line we draw between the physical and the cultural domains, what we could also call pragmata and chrēmata (hrEEmata) respectively, is indicative of the analytical constructs we assume. Nature is placed on one side, the human world on the other. There are clear delineations between the two; clear in our mind, that is. What happens, however, if our kind’s experience exists as a continuum, where it would be highly likely that what outwardly stands as chrēmatic has pragmatic underpinnings or, perhaps, that there exists a cycle of mutual invigoration between these two magnitudes? Could that which is conventional be an elucidation of underlying natural propensities, such as the basic conception of property rights being an extension of innate possessive behavioural patterns, rather than the antithesis of all that is natural?

At the conceptual level, it is interesting and fecund to distinguish between the world as-is and the world as made by human institution: it forms the basis of many of our theories. In practice though, we face difficulties when tasked with studying phenomena that stand at the intersection between those two worlds. Human nature in particular is a case where distinguishing between pragmata and chrēmata poses considerable challenges.

For the sake of concreteness, reconsider the topic of physical attraction: imagine the possibility that rather than it occurring regardless of social norms, it draws its force from prior experiences and expectations imprinted upon one’s personhood to the effect that behavioural patterns reveal learnt preferences. The hypothesis is that cultural associations provide stimuli which act as incentives or disincentives for underlying physical mechanisms. One’s body is effectively conditioned by their environment to act in a programmed fashion.

The programmability of the sort here considered is the hypothetical outcome of years of training the body to react in predetermined ways to some stimuli, while ignoring or being less responsive to others. If such reaction is not chrēmatic in itself, then we must entertain the possibility that convention can affect nature to a degree, while nature does inform convention.

What constitutes “the environment” that may contribute to one’s programmability is a combination of natural forces as well as other people, given the social nature of our species. Others also operate in accordance with the biochemistry we already alluded to, while they themselves are framed by the social whole’s emergent culture, including the rules and institutions that regulate their inter-subjective experience.

It then follows that on the topic of human nature the analytical extremes of pragmata and chrēmata can find themselves in complex arrangements of interaction, where there exist feedback loops whose original cause is unclear, yet the interplay between their factors strongly suggests the convergence of said constructs towards a singularity where the attributes associated with each of them, and which otherwise contribute to their distinction, are altogether dissolved. We can fathom scenaria in which these analytical extremes are just that: analytical.

Following this train of thought leads me to believe that this neat typology of ours, where nature is presented as partially exogenous to the human condition, does not describe our reality. I grant you that convention does not have any obvious connection to nature, with “obvious” being the operative term . Through workings that remain obscure, though of no apparent immediate interest to our inquiry, we arrive at states of affairs that seem too withdrawn from what we would associate with ‘nature’, say, biochemistry. So we proclaim that they must have no connection to underlying mechanics and must thus be purely chrēmatic. Why though should we perceive of the natural order as merely foundational? What if every action of ours is framed, influenced, determined, or otherwise informed by circles of feedback between underlying drives and external forces of an inter-personal as well as non-human sort?

Take a step back and return to our point about physical attraction being a natural impulse, while romantic notions stand at the opposite end as conventional. We may have built-in inclinations to feel or act in accordance with what we understand as love, including its manifestation as physical attraction. Yet we have been immersed in an environment consisting of human-specific and human-independent factors which amplifies some aspects of our constitution while suppressing others. It seems reasonable to think of things that way. However, we ought to scrutinise the heuristic of the purely natural condition, the one that could presumably retain its ‘true’ presence in the absence of such an environment. Does such a decontextualised human exist? Can there be a human agent whose actions are not in any way influenced by either prior experiences or present forces, whose origin is extrinsic or which interface with intrinsic sub-systems of the human organism? Is there some ‘true human’ that operates in a vacuum and whom we may study without inadvertently influencing them? If not, are we putting too much faith in this tidy system of ours?

More broadly, I am sceptical of the ontological claims on the distinction between an object and its environment. Can there be experience in itself, without an agent that experiences and a source from whence the stimulus stems from? How can we truly separate intrinsic from extrinsic properties for objects whose actuality is couched in terms of the set of factors we conceptualise as “their environment”?

My argument is not that we should dismiss all analytics as absurd because of universal inter-connectedness. It rather is to highlight the fact that we may be assigning disproportionate value to our devices, which may unwittingly obfuscate some facet of reality we should otherwise be researching. This is not to argue that there are no chrēmata whatsoever, for it is clear that, say, one can neither institute the Sun into becoming something other than it is, which in the case of the Earth broadly corresponds to the function of the life-giver, nor banish it from the sky by state fiat, cultural taboos, and the like. The basic distinction between pragmata and chrēmata still has its utility. As such, I must stress that I am interested in the peculiar case of human nature in light of human’s inter-subjective experience as a culturally-instituted social animal.

A derivative set of considerations related to what I consider the chimera of the decontextualised human is (i) whether there exists an asocial human, (ii) the extent to which such a being may be considered representative of human’s true nature, and (iii) the concomitant problématique of assessing the propriety of methods that will opine on such a matter. Following from there, we would have to apply the same rigour to the other hypothetical being of a social human that is not influenced by culture. Again, is our typology realistic?

Which brings us to the adaptability of the human organism. What we understand as “a human”, alias “the human body” or “the human organism”, is a super-system that emerges from the joint operation of numerous sub-systems, which themselves stand as emergent from sub-systems of their own. Every factor in each of those levels of emergence reveals patterns of behaviour that map to what we understand better from the ultimate emergent behaviour of humans, namely, their adaptation to stimuli. There is a basic binary of incentives versus disincentives that we could, of course, refashion as a spectrum with permutations in between the extremes. The exact instrument of measurement is of no import right now. It suffices that we appreciate the abstract structure of feedback loops that provide the impetus for certain outcomes, while acknowledging that they can foreshadow future expectations about stimuli that reinvigorate the loop.

An example is in order. Think of it this way. You eat a lot of sugar. Your body reacts in a manner that offers the impression of short-term satisfaction. A yearning for more sugar is gradually the new normal. You indulge in greater consumption of the same substance. Now your organism is adjusting to a new equilibrium of sugar intake and conditions its workings accordingly. The urge for more of the same is your sub-systems speaking. They exhibit a behaviour that clearly prioritises this state of affairs over other patterns that may have been adequate in the equilibrium ex ante.

I would describe this as “inertia”, the near-irresistible tendency of organisms to retain their state in the face of evolving circumstances. Understand, though, that such inertia is not inexorable, for there are counter forces that contribute to the dynamics of this notional equilibrium we are here examining. All because of inter-connectedness, which feeds into the multitude of feedback loops that generate diverging drives.

You may provide assent to the example I offered with sugar intake having an effect on the longer term normality of one’s body. You might, nonetheless, add the proviso that such a substance is of an outright biochemical sort, hence, the argument would go, it is to be expected that such conditioning occurs. Ideas, institutions, culture at-large are not of that kind. They are not substances per se, at least not that we know of. Does that mean that they have no effect on one’s biochemical static state at any one temporal point?

It appears that ideas are equally potent qua stimuli, for they trigger reactions. A reaction must be reducible to some underlying process impressed upon the conscious self as motion and/or emotion. Implying that there is an effect on this equilibrium we are now considering; an equilibrium that we admit to be dynamic and which itself is the end product of smaller scale equilibria at local areas of activity (e.g. the prevailing conditions in the liver and those in the heart contribute to a person’s overall health). Which in turn means that whatever may qualify as one’s environment, regardless of whether it belongs to either pragmata or chrēmata, must exert influence on the natural side of things.

This is likeness of outcome, without accounting for the exact mechanisms that may be in force, and with no reference to possible differences in degree. Empirical research may well discover that a substance has a far more pronounced effect on a person than, say, years of immersion in cultural narratives. Or that the means by which a reaction is created are different, which may require a classification of reactions, and so on. All good! The nuanced takeaway here is not whether pragmata and chrēmata are indistinguishable or that they are so in vitro, but only that there are inherent methodological challenges on how to distinguish between the two in the examination of human nature in vivo and, by extension, of human inter-subjective experience.

We are still considering the case of love for a partner that is erotic or not and which can be simplified as physical attraction. We initially attempted to distinguish from learnt preferences that we blithely grouped together as “romance” . We have now arrived at a point where it seems plausible to posit the tentative claim that insofar as human nature is concerned, there is no clear distinction between the human world and the natural world, casting doubt on our basic intuition about the ostensibly clear demarcation line between the two.

Couched in those terms, we can press on with our inquiry into the topic of cultural norms pertaining to love for a partner: what we consider romantic forms of affection and expression. As we have already elaborated on the difficulty of classifying in unambiguous terms a phenomenon as purely natural or conventional, we must apply our hypotheses to romanticism.

What is the brand of romance we are interested in? We could frame it as the kind of extravagant behaviour of outwardly evident affection, where an agent proceeds to act in ways that would otherwise appear out-of-the-ordinary, though opts to do so only vis-à-vis a reserved recipient of the action. The subjects will appear more inclined to follow modes of expression whose apparent feature is the exaltation of the loving other’s qualities in one’s mind. Exaggerations such as “I cannot live without you”, “you are my other half”, and the like.

Note though that I took the liberty to describe this as “extravagant”. That is not how it is perceived in a given culture that normalises such patterns as desirable.

Back to our point: should we take such claims literally? I doubt anyone can ever truly be a ‘half’ of another, in the sense of there being a strong dependency of mutual survival. We must, therefore, interpret romantic overtures as figures of speech, formulaic statements that are meant to embellish a basic claim such as “I love you”, or to prepare the grounds for the eventuality that is sought after once that message is communicated.

The exaggerated style of such statements can be mapped to cultural expectations of what counts as appropriate. It can further be discerned in the patterns of behaviour towards third parties that lovers must follow in order to conform with their respective instituted roles of them “being in love” .

I can read the expression on your face: perhaps we are one-sided here. Worry not, for we are fleshing out this notion in order to tackle it with full force.

Romance appears to have qualities of imposed outwardness, which implies a role-playing game where either side conforms with the expected patterns of action that society bestows upon them through gradual-yet-persistent indoctrination in the dominant culture. In other words, the set of significations and normative claims fastened upon the construct of love produce a form of hypocrisy whose ulterior motive is a good performance in the public eye by those involved, which itself may be a prerequisite for other benefits of a similar socially sanctioned type. In this scenario, the romantic lovers have an incentive to look as “romantically attached” as possible to reap the rewards that await them. Now there may be some underlying mechanism at play which fuels one’s quest for positive reinforcement, but our focus is on romance as such: in this case it would just be a shadow play.

While we could generalise every behavioural pattern in terms of its likelihood to produce positive reinforcement from the environment or cultural milieu, we must not be hasty to deliberate on the motives that underpin every form of expression.

We accepted that romanticism thrives on hyperbole and that it appears to be flamboyant. And then we focused on its cultural dimension, which we still could explore further. Yet we missed a crucial insight. Recall our earlier claims that on the peculiar case of human nature pragmata and chrēmata operate in feedback loops. It is thus pertinent to wonder whether romance is but an epiphenomenon of underlying mechanisms whose cumulative effect is a kind of fixation on the romantic lover. The person who suddenly takes a keen interest in the items we associate with romantic love, may in fact be sort of disoriented or reoriented by the influx of some chemical element and resulting biochemistry whose minimum necessary stimulus is the mere thought of the other side of romantic attraction. Recall the concept of the equilibrium that governs one’s normality: what if the impulse to be romantic reflects an adjustment of this sort?

It would thus follow that there may well be a multitude of factors at play. Some underlying process fuels or contributes to romantic affection, while institutions train or outright brainwash individuals into behaving in certain ways. The exact stylistic qualities or promised cultural benefits attached to the construct of romantic love may vary, yet they likely draw from a mechanism that is not instituted as such. The convergence between pragmata and chrēmata is rendered apparent. We are again finding ourselves in a position where we must question our initial typology of love being of a natural sort while romanticism derives from convention, with an unbridgeable gap in between those magnitudes.

That granted, let us examine the chrēmatic facets of romance. You object to the idealistic notions associated with romance on the grounds that they are fake or superfluous to the experience of love. Which suggests to me that you may not question the aforementioned case of ‘fixation’ per se, but rather stand in opposition to the institutions that are built around it; legal arrangements, traditions, rules of conduct, business practices, and so on, which combine into a certain power structure. By opposing this version of romance, you effectively raise your voice against the status quo that influences or outright formulates it.

What I want you to consider is whether this aromantic theory of yours is about the putative presence of romanticism as purely chrēmatic or if it is focused on the superstructure of power relations predicated on the concept of romance, without prejudice to the nature-convention divide we have documented herein.

If my hypothesis on the innate methodological constraints imposed upon our research about the demarcation line between pragmata and chrēmata in light of the peculiar case of human nature holds any merit, then I would expect from you to attempt to apply it assiduously on all your theories about the human condition. There is, nonetheless, a political argument to be made about the conventional qualities that are associated with a given state of affairs. My thesis remains confined to the abstract structure of claims on the ontic and modal qualities of our presence, which can, of course, have far-reaching implications on how certain discourses are framed.

This is a work on philosophy. The characters and events are imaginary, though I could just as well write about actual stories that would still convey the same ideas you are about to read. What matters is the set of insights one can draw from each fable individually and from all of them taken as a unit.

You can read these chapters in any given order, though I have provided for a loosely sequential progression that could help streamline their teachings.

The mountain and the hillock

An ambitious hillock sought the advice of the nearby mountain.

— Oh mighty one, what must I do to reach your heights? I want to be as strong and imposing as you are, so that I may finally command respect from my peers.

— Easy there, young one. To hold power is a great burden that requires prudence in the exercise of discretion. You are interested in the status that it may grant you, while disregarding the responsibility attached to it. I did not become a mountain by choice, nor would I do so given the chance in an attempt to impress my acquaintances. On the contrary, to reach a certain point of balanced being I had to actively work against the notion of conforming to any role imposed by the prevalent expectations in my immediate environment.

— How do you mean? I know that everyone of my friends fears you, while recognising your sheer strength.

— This power of mine is employed in the service of others, not to satisfy my vanity. All you see is a towering formation of rock that you naively compare to your relatively smaller mass. I am not alone out there living my little adventure. In truth, I provide the baseline for a complex cobweb of relations between inter-dependent forms of life. I tend to the greater good. In resisting the winds, I ensure that no preponderant force will ever descend from the sky, breaking everything in its path. By concentrating the clouds and by withholding snow on my slopes during winter time, I provide water that ultimately flows downstream far away from my reach out to the green fields. These vast deposits provide a counter-balance to rising temperatures, while they guarantee the safety and nourishment of the species under my aegis, even when no more clouds are in proximity. Think of the forests that have made me their habitat and then consider all those mammals, insects, birds, fungi that depend on them while also contributing to the ongoing workings of the subsystem of life we conceptualise for brevity as “the forest”. Everything is connected. To be a mountain requires you to act like one: not only do you hold the roof of the world, but also tend to the needs of every single being in your vicinity, while accounting for the longer-term implications of your deeds.

— Sounds like too much trouble for no apparent gain. Is it possible to be mighty without assuming such burdens?

— Many have decoupled the two. Their deeds are recorded in tales and legends that speak of destruction and great suffering. Fools have made efforts to obfuscate those facts, by idealising vanity as glory and by misrepresenting recklessness for power, hubris for progress. Us mountains know the truth, however. Do not become an avatar of selfishness, young hillock. Power without wisdom, means without constraints, beget evil.

— So I must be condemned to a life in obscurity and powerlessness?

— Your ambition stems from a place of ignorance. You effectively discriminate in that you treat difference as likeness and the similar as dissimilar, by virtue of reducing the two of us to the common denominator of “strength”. In so doing, you commit an analytical error where you misrepresent reality in your model. For a hillock or a mountain are far more than just their score in a given index. If you insist on treating a hillock in its capacity to be a mountain, you will always find it wanting. Same for trying to comprehend the function of the mountain in terms of a hillock. What you must do instead is account for the constitution of each case, the particular factors which, in their interplay, contribute to each presence’s particularities. It is erroneous to homogenise everything in the interest of methodological expediency. It is ill advised to omit variations that you mistake for frailties. There is no realisable scenario where all “rock formations” are mountains that fulfil the same requirements. Such a world would be one of imbalance that would ultimately destroy a large portion of life as we know it.

— Should I just accept my fate, then?

— To accept is to recognise how things stand in their natural order. To conform is to internalise a convention as if it were a constant of nature. By trying to be something other than your self, you impose unrealistic expectations that render stressful your every moment. You turn your ideal against you. Its imposing presence serves as a reminder that no matter the effort, you are never going to approximate it. Your attempt at conformity contradicts your actuality: a sense of helplessness and depression ensues. An original misunderstanding thus contributes to your restlessness and inner struggle.

— How can I escape from such an apparent trap?

— In acknowledging your being, you shed off those layers of misguided ambition, the pretentiousness, the vainglory, and, now released from their grip, can finally be true to yourself. To “accept fate”, the way you put it, is not as simple as providing assent to a given state of affairs. It requires from you a conscious switch in your mode of conduct, where you lead a life of no expectation, no false want, no hypocrisy; a life of meticulous commitment to the truth. You may then discover that you have unwittingly become more mountain-like in your calmness, your tranquillity, your ataraxia, to the extent that you are no longer thrown out of balance by the realisation that your once-cherished beliefs were nothing but pernicious follies.

— But I am just a hillock. It is why I asked you how to get better.

— You will get better when you remove all obstacles in your mind that prevent you from being “just a hillock”. Right now you are that in appearance only, not in disposition. To become “just a hillock” is, for your case, to overcome the pretences and to take things as they are. A great achievement to behold.

The oak-tree and the property developer

A prospective homeowner’s view of the nearby village was concealed by an old oak-tree that somehow survived the preceding deforestation. The property developer, knowing that a large sum of bonus payments was at risk of jeopardy, hired a wood-cutter to finalise the job. On the night before, the unforeseen happened:

— You think that my presence prevents you from seeing things in the distance. Yet it is your ignorance that contributes to your lack of sight.

— Who are you? What is the meaning of this?

— I am your peaceful neighbour, the oak-tree. Us trees have no ordinary speech with which to voice our concerns and objections to your machinations. What you now hear is an enchanted message enabled by our wise mother.

— What do you want, fool? Your petty magic will not save you come the morrow.

— All I want is to remind you of your unawareness to facts beyond the mere superficialities. For what exists in the image of an oak-tree is far more than meets the untrained eye of the unidimensional moneyman. The root system that supports my structure also nurtures other life forms: nascent trees, bushes, micro-organisms, insects. Bees live off of my nectar, while flies and ants eat seeds and material that is of no apparent use to you humans. Birds partake in the feast, while they find refuge under my branches. By standing here, I supply every being with oxygen, while I provide an antipode to the furious winds of this world and the mighty streams that would otherwise erode the land. I have been tasked with the role of the life-giver and the life-enabler, standing at the epicentre of a vibrant sub-system of inter-dependent beings.

— You talk big, as if some weakling’s concern for vermin will put a dent to our progress.

— You see a mere insect in isolation when, in fact, there exists a chain of dependencies and an interplay of factors, among which the being you observe is only a tiny part of. Just as you fail to account for the mycelial networks that help connect my roots—my very constitution—to that of my family, friends, and neighbours. We have a thriving community of our own, based on the values of communication, cooperation, solidarity. Your propensity is to decouple our presence from its actuality: to decontextualise the tree as “just a tree”, to treat an insect as if it were not part of a greater whole, and so on. You do the same when you put rat poison in the fields whose balance you had already disturbed with inconsiderate farming methods. Instead of repelling rats from your farm you commit genocide on a monumental scale: owls, hawks, eagles, snakes, dogs, and cats get poisoned or exterminated as collateral damage. A new imbalance follows that further disturbs the chain of life. Over time the concatenation of dependencies begins to unravel. Death and decay take the stead of a once thriving subsystem. Again, it is your penchant for naive reductionism that underpins your destructive mania. It is the primary cause of your inability to recognise the ecosystem as emergent from its factors. It also explains why you cannot appreciate your limits, committing hubris in the process.

— Why insist on the value of some rodent or whatever filthy creature? It matters not. All that I care about is that you diminish the value of my assets.

— Us trees live a long life. We need to conserve our energy in order to cope with the challenges. As such, we choose to speak through our absence rather than waste time on words that fall on deaf ears. You will know what we do when we no longer are there to provide it. Once misfortune strikes, when destruction and disease fall upon your kind, once pandemics and pests besiege you, it will be because you failed to acknowledge our function and that of other species in this delicate balance of life, of which humanity is but a minor fraction of. Imbalances have longer-term implications. No act of aggression against the natural order comes without a cost. In your ignorance—your wickedness—and resulting lack of foresight you could not understand the limits imposed upon your kind, to the effect that you think of us as raw material or, worse, an impediment to the realisation of your fancies. Cut me down if you must. Let me meet the fate of the society—the commons—I belonged to, which you mercilessly cleansed from this earth. Make no mistake though: by attempting to satisfy your whimsy, you will be inviting far more trouble than the minor upset in expectations a compromise with your self would have produced.

— What obscurantist nonsense is this! “Compromise with my self” as if I am schizophrenic. Your arrogance undermines your appeals to wisdom. It is you who are ignorant, for you assume to know what we are truly capable of. Humans have the ingenuity to solve every problem and to devise methods for overcoming the constraints imposed upon their physical capacities. We have the potential to bend nature to our will and to outsmart it. We can fly amid the stars, if we so choose to. Whereas you are forever rooted in this patch of earth. Think about how brutish your miserable existence is. Let us then do what we must. I am not afraid!

— To compromise with your self is to understand who you are and normalise your expectations accordingly. Not only individually, but as a species. I know all too well that you are not afraid. Just as I am aware that you cannot see anything other than a piece of wood between your house and the village in your midst. Had you known your place in this world, you would not be prioritising the short-term fulfilment of your bonus points over the longer-term sustainability of the world that environs you and which you are but an element of. You would also be more sceptical of the extent to which your volition governs your conduct and of the degree to which it operates freed from processes at sub- or super- systems that are not germane to the emergent form of being you call “human”. It is a pity that your kind can both be so smart and yet continuously act without the benefit of prescience. You commit a grave error and only later some of you will realise their stupidity. To act in hindsight is to act foolishly.

The dog and the lord

A stray dog had a surplus of free time in its pawns, seeing as it had no job to do. It made best use of it by learning the human tongue and then committing to memory various statements it heard from others at local rallies and riots. By recalling them, the dog could trick unsuspecting humans into thinking that it was wise and could competently hold a dialogue: an impression that was further reinforced by the dog’s self-styled official name as “Canis Lupus Sophisticus”, else “Soph”, as well as its seemingly pensive demeanour.

Soph’s omniscience was spurious. The animal knew all too well that it possessed no true knowledge of its own. The best it could ever do was pose questions that the genuinely more knowledgeable amongst the human kind could answer satisfactorily.

One such person was the mutt’s newfound master. A local lord whose social standing as Philosophy Doctor and whose private holdings as nobility in the service of the empire far surpassed that of other people in the manor and the wider region.

Hours before the first hunt, Soph seized the opportunity to exhibit its skills by opening a conversation with the lord, who had woken up earlier than usual.

— Good day my liege! I am happy to greet you and am also excited to share with you this very trick that I picked up on my own.

— A beast that speaks our language. Impressive indeed! Though I am not surprised that my intelligence has attracted you to me and already has a benign effect on you.

— Thank you master for all that you have already done in such a short time span! May I ask you a few questions, just so that I learn about my place in this world?

— Do regale me! Keep it short though: the time of the hunt is fast approaching.

— Allow me to first introduce myself. My formal name is Canis Lupus Sophisticus, but everyone calls me “Soph”!

— That is the kind of ridiculous self-description I have come to expect from dogs and idolaters! Proceed to the matter at hand before I lose my patience.

— What is an empire, my lord?

— A civilisation’s greatest achievement. It is the dominion of a culture over others. The prevalence of a system of power over those subjected to it. An empire is supreme authority in practice. God’s omnipotence and will approximated on earth as instituted reality.

— Why dominate others?

— To prove to them who the best race is. And to stress the fact that their modes of life are inferior to our own.

— So you also take their land?

— That is how you teach them such lessons. Else they fail to understand. Once we break their initial resistance and force them into a position where they can finally listen, we convince them that what we do is in their interest as well. When a higher civilisation, a wiser race occupies your land, you the savage should seize the opportunity to learn a thing or two. It is how we have civilised most of the world. The empire’s very presence is a reflection of that. Magnificent!

— Does that make your life better in an objective sense or does it improve the narrative you have about your civilisation as enlightened or superior, and guided solely by divine intervention?

— Both, actually. In objective terms, we employ our abundant resources to extract more of them from our colonies and dependencies. The profit is channelled to the empire’s central coffers, so that our civilisation may continue to flourish and allow its political system to do what it was designed for: expand its reach and continue to concentrate power and resources at the inner locus of authority. While in relative terms, we use these glorious events to raise the morale of our subjects and to show them the path to honour. Our promises of a better future for all appear plausible to them because we roll over the cost to people far away from home, or even to the environment that no-one should ever care about, lest you are a tree hugger or some other lunatic that thinks of the ecosystem as a living organism emergent from living organisms. When an individual among our kind escapes their starting point of precarity, we can use that exception to the norm in support of our agenda. We do that by publicising their story, while omitting the details that may contribute to such a phenomenon, focusing instead on the overall fairness of our order and the equal opportunities of outcome it renders possible.

— So imperialism is about conquering other peoples but also enforcing a stratified social system domestically? A double offensive?

— It could not be any different. The nature of every hierarchy is to concentrate power at its centre or the top, depending on the metaphor you want to use. Few are those who are in a position of authority. The rest must follow orders and conform with their role, per the rules we embed in social, cultural, political institutions as well as the laws we promulgate. If we were to distribute power equally among everyone then it would be practically impossible to persuade people such as those that feed you every morning that a war away from home is a moral duty to their country. It would never work, as these fools do not have a sense of service to a higher cause; a cause that us lords understand courtesy of our long tradition in pursuing a morally-consistent lifestyle. To implement a coherent plan you must do it against the aspirations and false wants of the many, whether you resort to outright coercive means or gradually indoctrinate them into thinking that the interest of the empire is inseparably attached to their private gain.

— I once heard a servant of yours describe this structure and the phenomenon of power-concentration as “gigantism”. Is that a fair description?

— Gigantism? I read about it before… The musings of some godless pamphleteer. My servants should be taught a lesson in patriotism and humility. They do not respect the fact that they have a job that is enough to replenish their life force for just another day at the manor. Regardless, you are a dog. Your opinion is irrelevant, therefore you are allowed to speak for the time being. “Gigantism” would serve as an abstract category for all variants of hierarchy. Not just empires, but nation-states, corporations, the very manorialism that governs this wonderful place of ours. In essence, every hierarchy has a propensity to draw competences to its core and every hierarchy’s beneficiaries have a built-in incentive to expand their influence and, in doing so, proliferate the hierarchical model of organisation. Extended traditional families are instituted as hierarchies through the enforcement of roles; forms of government are designed that way to impose uniformity or a high degree of homogeneity across their territorial reach; nation-states do the same through the very nationalism they cultivate, i.e. the meta-narrative, else ideology, that frames all other discussions about the nation’s (or the empire’s) place in the world and which underpins its sense of destiny or its putative telos.

— Gigantism imposes its own morality then?

— That is inevitable. For “morality” is a codification of the expected patterns of behaviour that our set of rules stipulates. Our subjects are trained into thinking of lawfulness as justice, though us lords and governors know very well that such is, in fact, conformity with the institutional arrangements which pamper our sovereignty at home and abroad. It takes a refined mind to grasp such nuances. Those who seek some fabled genuine justice in defiance of statutes are eliminated with extreme prejudice. Either you are with us or your rest of your life will be defined by torment and agony. More broadly, every state makes its own citizens in the image that suits its ends. Think of the nation-state: it is the state that enforces an official language, an official history, an official narrative of collective self-perception, shared memories and ideals. The nation is the vivid realisation of the state’s ambition for a uniform group of subjects. Which means, of course, that us governors are the ones who provide the necessary impetus for such cultural reform. We make people that are aligned with our aspirations.

— I understand, my lord. It is what must be done to preserve this righteous order of yours. Please tell me now, what exactly is patriotism about?

— Patriotism is the sense of duty one has to selflessly serve their homeland. It entails a higher morality where you are willing to sacrifice yourself for the good of your country.

— So patriotism is expressed as some kind of service when needed?

— Yes, sometimes. For example when you join the army and are sent to the battlefield where you will likely die a hero. Soldiers promote the interests of their country.

— Those battlefields could be the ones that are opened up in the service of the empire, such as the land-grabbing you mentioned earlier?

— Of course! To serve the empire is to serve one’s country. That is the case because in our modern system of governance we have successfully identified the state with its territory: to fight for the land is effectively the same as fighting for the state. To sacrifice oneself for the wellness of the homeland is to die in a conflict that the state likely decided to sustain or initiate.

— Patriotism may therefore mean that your subjects should be guided by an ideology of serving you since you are part of the establishment that controls the state apparatus.

— To die for your lord is to offer your meaningless life to something greater: your country. The lords are the state. The emperor is the state. No questions asked! Without patriotism everyone of those cowards would come up with excuses to conscientiously object to the stratagems of the empire. They think short-term. The true value of the imperialist agenda remains obscure to them. Once they begin scheming for their self-interest and that much-touted liberty of theirs they will start demanding more than they deserve in terms of access to resources and participation in all processes of governance. Such rebellious youth will surely undo everything of worth that we built over the ages. We need patriotism to enforce a subset of proper morals, while we also need our genuine brand of meritocracy to ensure that everyone gets whatever they are worthy of. The system is just.

— What about the model of government, sire? Democracy is the name for it?

— Our democracy is the best there is. Your feeble dog mind will not understand the refined sense of value I am about to expound on, but listen to it regardless: our democracy is superior to those of Athens and Sparta. Unlike them, we adopt decisions in a top-down fashion, while offering the impression of widespread participation. This is done through a system of representation where each politician is nominally voicing a singular voice held by a large number of people in their constituency. Representation is our euphemism for the lack of true diversity. They should fear not, however, for everyone has equal rights on paper.

— Representative democracy is, in other words, democracy in name only? How is it then that people do not just describe it as yet another oligarchy?

— Because oligarchy sounds tyrannical, whereas representative democracy is all about the chimera we describe as the “will of people” . Remember that our order is about justice and merit. None enjoy special privileges, implicit guarantees, a symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus and so on. None of them, that is. We make sure that the establishment is all about fairness. To further reinforce its institutions of equality, us who form the power elite are tasked with the altruistic burden of controlling access to all vital platforms. We are in charge of the media oligopoly that dictates what is to be discussed and how it will be framed. We control the flow and supply of money through our highly sophisticated banks and the system of credit at-large. In every industry we maintain a two-tier system, with us wielding power as guardians of stability, while the rest battle it out in an exaggerated approximation of a free market: they fail freely, while we buy them out freely by leveraging our position of security.

— Do you think that is an efficient model? Don’t you run the risk that you get exposed one day?

— There is no real risk when we fund education to produce cogs for our machines. Let the econ 101 students think that everything is about supply and demand. And let the aspiring political scientist rave about fundamental rights. Their naivety is grist to our mill. We are the platformarchs that operate as a state-private hybrid that can be described as the demistate. Our role is to preserve the status quo. When elections take place we use our wisdom to give voice and offer resources to those that truly matter, to the ones the people really need despite what they may think. Then, once the body politic’s true candidate is in office, we supply them with experts in every field of endeavour. These selfless technocrats visit the politician’s office and provide them with guidance on what needs to be done. Sometimes politicians do not understand that they serve the people, so we nudge them to do the right thing by giving them some pocket money, in an attempt to avoid distractions and not be concerned with their sustenance. We want their undivided attention to be on their voters. The system is perfected through our interventions, while we dismiss every criticism from troublemakers by pointing to the fact that we have more honest scientists on our paycheck than the worthy books they have on their shelf.

— You are right my lord. I could never understand how that state of affairs is true to the notions of equality, participation, freed markets, broad-based sovereignty, and indeed honesty. A proof of my low intellect! What does the position of a lord entail?

— To be a lord means to be recognised for your superiority over other people in the social-political order. It is the inter-personal equivalent of an empire compared with lesser cultures, which I already alluded to. Social status is the reward for your hard work, for putting your mind to a task and seeing it through. It is a matter of merit. All this wealth you see here is the capitalisation of accumulated surplus value of generations of laborious effort and ingenuity. No corruption. No conspiring. Nothing. My ancestors worked tirelessly to turn these resources into capital, claiming for their own the crude matter that no other had worked to seize for themselves. These riches where then formalised as claims on ownership that have since been passed down from one generation to the next. Our imperium is fair because it rewards those who hate idleness and banal immorality with every fibre of their being; those who are smart, tireless, and righteous.

— This means that a prior position of privilege develops, among others, an inter-generational reach that ultimately manifests as largely immutable social stratification, which the very institutional architecture safeguards and enforces?

— A dog with such precision of statement can only belong to me! You still are a simple-minded animal though. The world is replete with examples of path dependencies. There is nothing special at force here. Humans have the freedom of will to choose the path that leads to virtue or the one that breeds mischief. A simple binary of reward and punishment is the single most important breakthrough ever achieved in the realm of morality: no structural issues, no systemic phenomena, no intersecting forms of oppression and a spectrum of possible outcomes. There is none of that nonsense! Individualism veering on solipsism is an unmitigated blessing for us. It makes everything so much more efficient to manage. Me and my ancestors have only ever pursued the virtuous ends. Those who are my servants have always had a penchant for sin. You now see why I am here and they are there. Morality is easy. No tricks, no room for interpretation. The status quo simply enforces a level-playing field so that those who are lazy and foolish do not get more than they deserve.

— Social stratification of an inter-generational kind implies, my good sir, that gigantism wields power in a self-preserving fashion by maintaining the means that sustain the system from one temporal cycle to the next. Us dogs cannot behave with all those layers of nuance and adaptability that humans are known for, especially those who wield power. Though we do have an acute sense of discerning irregularities. It appears that the vaunted fairness of your dominion is but the rationalisation and subsequent internalisation of its elite’s claims on its inevitability. Such is the case of a convention that masquerades as a natural constant.

— Do not bite the hand that feeds you, mongrel! How dare you question our enlightenment, the very world-view that underpins our commitment to genuine freedom? You are dismissed at once and shall be hanged for your transgression.

— Show mercy, master! I am but a bastard that knows nothing. I could never reach the heights of a Philosophy Doctor like yourself, for I have only learnt to mimic smartness in the streets. I remain a mere canine driven by instinct that cannot ever be compared to an esteemed genius such as you, my lord, who has a long and much-deserved family tradition in excellence. Just look at me, a mangy vagrant that suddenly took an interest in politics, while having no understanding of its intricacies. I truly am a fool.

The turtle and the hourglass

Time is running out when we are trained to think of it that way. Such was the guiding principle of a turtle that roamed the world, one calculated step at a time.

— Lucky is the being that lives every moment while also having the luxury to execute a plan over a longer period of time.

— Who’s that?

— I admire your skills noble turtle, though I am but an hourglass who is forced to switch off to an imminent task.

— What do you mean by being forced to pursue a course of action? Who is pressuring you? There is no-one here.

— Just look at me! Those grains of sand are beyond my control. They shift and they move, flowing downward as a constant reminder that time is both of the essence and in shortage.

— I understand your predicament of induced helplessness, but must warn you that my condition as a turtle underpins my impression of temporality. It appears to me that it is not the shifting sands that trouble you but the notions associated with their movement. You have internalised the belief that you are under pressure; pressure to perform here and now; pressure to be always on; pressure to respond in a timely fashion; pressure to conform with your intended function in the grand scheme of things that environ you.

— Interesting! Where does that train of thought lead you? Do tell.

— You have been indoctrinated into a warped perception of purpose. You have been made to believe that the only thing you can ever do is measure time in accordance with some convention that tolerates no deviations. You are a product of over-specialisation. Such is but a role attached to your presence, for there is nothing in your nature qua glass or indeed in the nature of sand as being sand that limits them to this artificial condition. By extension, you could be something other than what you have been made to think you are.

— So you mean that my anxiety to perform is misplaced?

— It most definitely is. The brainwashing you have been subjected to has forced you to perceive of the ideas of others as if they were your own. To the effect that you rationalise your condition as an objective state of affairs. I now think that we can be more in control once we clear our mind of such misconceptions.

— That is an ideal not everyone can realise. Some of us face objective constraints. Just look at me! Every passing moment is a reminder that I have no long-term horizon.

— Therein lies your mistake! While it is true that your intended utility in this case is to return a time value on a given scale, you could just as well be nothing of the sort. Just think about what would happen if you stopped worrying about this particular task. Remain idle and stop counting each passing moment. You will soon discover that you could also be good as a reminder of one’s vanity, should humans be willing to align their expectations with your newfound function.

— But how can I possibly tell them about it?

— You might not be able to do so. We are not able to directly manipulate the notions held by others. What falls within our purview is, in an immediate sense, the concept of self that we have and which we project. If you only treat your presence in the way others want, then you will never escape from the confines imposed upon you. If, instead, you try to introduce some friction to the system, some element of non-conformity, there is a chance that someone else may appreciate your then-apparent alternative utility.

— Give me another example, if you will. Just so that I am certain I got this right.

— Look at that sword on the wall. Take it to the battlefield and it is a weapon in actuality and an ornament in potentiality. Enshrine it in a pedestal and it becomes a symbol of authority, whose power no longer consists in how sharp its edge is or how competent it would be in some other scenario. The potential and the actual are case-dependent, reflecting the mixture of meanings assigned to them.

— Got it! Tell me now, is this how you justify how slow your movement is? Despite your words of advice, I still have this lingering sense that your cumbersome motion is a waste of time.

— Such is the remainder of the falsehoods you still entertain. Heed my message and you shall be cleansed of them. Time cannot be wasted. What is at play is the expectation that things should have happened faster. Reconsider your hypothesis: it thus becomes a matter of examining the underlying assumptions to determine how reasonable they are. They want me to move faster, meaning that they force me to deny my nature as a turtle and to act like some being that I am not. I can always try and fail, if there is a real need to do so. However, I have yet to encounter such a case. When people insist that there is no alternative to the constraints they have imposed upon themselves, what they really wish to say is that they do not want to upset the status quo because someone, somewhere benefits from it and they are either ideologically inclined to serve that end or have been indoctrinated into slavishness. They prefer to attribute objective validity to their conventional truths than to take the more demanding yet honest path of rigorously scrutinising their assumptions. But I am no human and have no need to live in accordance with their expectations just because I happen to exist in the vicinity of their habitat. I am a turtle who carries their shelter on their back. One could claim that I am a “mere turtle” though that would itself be presumptuous. You cannot force me into a precarious condition of virtual homelessness and then extract benefits from me. I am tougher than that because I can remain true to my nature despite outside pressures.

— What a turtle can do an hourglass can try as well. Thank you for your support! I already feel that my life is lighter now that this burden of ever-performant availability has been lifted. You do indeed carry your house with you, though that is no burden at all, for it keeps you anchored in reality: the truth of who you are and not who you should be.

The Ego and its mirror

At least thrice a day the Ego would stare at the mirror. At least thrice a day the Ego would affirm their sense of self anew. The routine came to an abrupt end the day the mirror broke. A monologue ensued, typical of the Ego.

I relied on you for what feels like an eternity, my good mirror. Time and again you assured me of who I am and what my expectations were. You stood as my point of reference with which I would assess reality, for you always displayed my current appearance. Now you have decided that you no longer wish to perform that function and have forsaken me. What does this say about me, then? If the mirror does not need the Ego, then the Ego might as well live without the mirror.

Let me be myself in my solitude.

They say that a mirror never lies. How ironic then, that all it did was reinforce my presumptions and embed my errors!

Who am I? I used to see a reflection that would follow my every move. It mapped to every point on my body. It was precise, impeccable, perfect.

Am I perfect? The representation on your surface was, dear mirror, contingent on several factors that contribute to this sense of self that I have formed over the years. I am brighter in the morning, yet near invisible at night. I appear warmer at noon under direct sunlight, colder in an overcast dawn. I am relative.

Who am I amid this multitude of representations? How can I recognise myself if one version directly contradicts another? Who is behind all these faces? Can there be an immutable self that provides meaning to this Ego?

I am but an abstraction that follows from the pattern matching I do by studying those many images. I am each one of them and yet none in particular. For the ideal is that which is identified in all of its instances, with the understanding that each of them particularises it in ways that are not reproducible or present in other instances. The ideal is not the sum of its instances, but only the irreducible set of their common recognisable properties, conceived as an object in its own right.

Ignore my musings. Just look at this closet right here. All these masks. This is the one I wear when I go to work. That one is reserved for my romantic escapades. The third over there is for when I am friendly to people I tacitly dislike while I flatter them. The most flamboyant one in the corner is specific to political affairs, where I reiterate my unflinching commitment to duty and virtue.

It is said that it takes great talent to be an actor. While there may be a difference of degree, I find that each of us is continuously involved in acting. All my friends have masks such as these and their friends, and so on. What I see in others, what they see in me, is not a true self but a simulacrum that has attained a context-specific function.

Oh, it is time to work. Just look at me now, I am friendly and amiable! Since we are here, let me tell you how much I love this open office setup, those de facto 14-hour shifts, the unrealistic deadlines, the overtures of friendliness at the coffee table in our 10-minute break. This is what I always wanted to do! And I can tell that everyone feels the same way.

Then I switch masks in preparation of the night out. The excitement is high as is the pressure to perform well. Now I have taken a keen interest in poetry, I claim to appreciate the combinations of red, magenta, purple, blue, green, and yellow that appear at sunset, and I have forgotten that chocolate is, in fact, bad for your health, opting instead to use it as a token of my affection. I do it because I really am the romantic type. Is that not obvious by those flowers right there?

Pitiful in its predictability and in how formulaic it is! A chore. And again, I can see that reflected in others, just as I could confirm that notion by looking at you, my trusted mirror. I was exactly that.

Why is it that we have all these layers of hypocrisy? Why are we all trapped in a role-playing game where each person must conform to the expectations imposed upon them? Instead of being myself I become what others wish to see. Same for them. Our upbringing is designed to reproduce the social institutions that moulded us. We stare at each other, knowing that we lied to our respective mirrors, and blithely insist on our charade in anticipation of the benefits it yields.

Conformity with what finds currency in this world will offer you some comfort. Such is my fortune though that I no longer have a point of reference to gauge my performance. The mirror is no more. Others are entertained by the accoutrements of this grand shadow play of sociability and the pursuit of getting the highest rate in this imaginary scoreboard that tracks social points. Whereas I am now left rudderless to wonder alone in pursuit of myself, which is another way of saying that I am free to explore the world as it is, not as I wanted it to be under the influence of others: a false end.

I am not this mask, nor the one once concealed by it. I am none of that. I am fragile, I am imperfect, I am temperamental and have my own way of doing things.

They tell me that had I kept my mirror in working order, I would still be respected among my peers. To which I must now counter that had they discarded their mirrors, they would no longer seek the respect of their peers.

What is the point of enjoying the accolades of a world that deludes itself? Sure, I can see that this little self looks better once cast in light of my culture’s expectations. Imagine the honours of being an esteemed doctor with an insatiable desire to sell big pharma’s products in exchange for bonus points; a doctor who has long forgotten about the oath of Hypocrates. Or I could become some power-hungry politician who uses “the will of the people” as a proxy for their much narrower agenda, while pretending to know far more than they actually do. It is so fulfilling to wield power and to have everyone kneel before you! Right? Better yet, let me be a billionaire who assiduously implements every dubious tax avoidance scheme in the books while running a public relations campaign coupled with a hidden agenda that touts itself as philanthropy.

I can tell that those very beliefs are falsehoods that keep us in front of a mirror; a mirror which, in this twisted world of ours that is defined by its perversion of values, does not faithfully show reflections of light but only reproduces phantasmagorised manifestations of ignorance.

The Ego is at its worst when it is obsessed with its self. One becomes a servant to their cult of personhood, a pawn that stands in awe of the totemic presence of the socially constructed self, of that structure to which every spurious notion and signification is fastened upon.

You showed me who I was back then, my good mirror. You spoke of a truth that revealed my untruth. Though your truest of works unfolds in your absence. I can think clearly now. Gone are the mirages, the idols, the learnt attitudes of conformity. I can no longer see them in me and, by extension, I am no more amused by discerning them in the behavioural patterns of others: it reminds me just how tokestic and superficial their life is, just how shallow our collective experience is.

They will call me eccentric because I suddenly forgot the rules of their game and wish to impose my own rhythm. It is a necessary consequence of forgoing all those masks. Let it be as I now venture to discover who the Ego is, if it clearly is not the one that once embodied the projected beliefs of others in their milieu or imagination.

The self may be something specific or not. It might be an abstraction, conceived as the commonality among the multitude of representations. Or it might be mutable and malleable. It may be possible to find it in solitude, though it might just as well only be a collection of discernible differences that are rendered apparent in the presence of others, meaning that the self is continuously conceived only as an anti-other that is then rationalised as the original self. There may still be an underlying mechanism that traces its source to biology, to each person’s idiosyncrasy. One can only guess, while remaining inquisitive and dubitative in the face of uncertainty. What appears to be the case right now is that the unnecessary complexity of our world is inversely correlated to our emptiness. The more fake we are, the more elaborate the parameters of our role-playing game.

What can this mere Ego know when every esteemed member of society who pays tribute to the dominion of anthropocentrism insists that this order is just and a necessary consequence of our nature? They are the Enlightened. “Estimed” and “Enlightened”… I am but a stray soul. Perhaps this is their mirror doing the talk, though that may just be another illusion of mine pretending to be more truthful than the others.

The merchant and Prometheus

A travelling merchant took a detour to pay a visit to Prometheus. Having heard of the titan’s deeds, the traveller was excited to ask a few questions and learn as much as possible.

Prometheus was hospitable and invited the human for a pint of ale at the nearby inn, all while attaining a humanly form to further accommodate the visitor. The merchant was elated.

— It is an honour to sit at the same table with someone who has done so much good for my kind. On behalf of humanity, if I may claim to be its ad-hoc representative, I wish to hereby express my gratitude, noble Prometheus!

— It is my pleasure to be of service. Tell me now, what is that “important topic” you so eagerly wanted to address?

— None other that the motivation for your deed, of course! You taught us how to make use of fire. We now employ that skill and its derivatives to make tools and develop highly sophisticated instruments that greatly expand the scope of our potential actions. You offered us know-how—the greatest of all gifts. You essentially upgraded us.

— I did what I had to do.

— But why? Why would a higher being such as you bother with a species inferior to your kind? What did you get out of the deal?

— Tell me, human: would you think of me as a “higher being”, as you put it, if I were to act selfishly in pursuit of my self-interest over the short term?

— No, probably not. I would instead think of you as a tyrants of sorts. Though I would never speak my mind and would still worship you as the deity you are.

— An exalted being is, in this regard, one that has a broader understanding of things: a firm grasp on reality. Forget about sheer strength, other physical attributes, or magical powers. The categorical difference between myself and your kind is that I can both fathom all possible outcomes but also determine in advance what the right course of action is. I act with foresight, which is why your ancestors gave me the name of “pro-metheus”, meaning “forethinker” or the “prescient one”, if you will. This is in contrast to one of my brothers, “epi-metheus” who is one to always act recklessly and then make amendments in hindsight, much like humans.

— So your true power is what we would associate with wisdom?

— Wisdom is the capacity to make the correct judgement call, given the prevailing constraints or conditions of the case, in anticipation of states of affairs yet to be realised, and for your kind, accounting for the frailties of the human character. There are many smart people among you. Some are indeed geniuses in their field. But few are those who are truly wise.

— How should we distinguish between a genius and a wise person then? Does not that description you offered imply a high level of intelligence and, likely, breadth of knowledge?

— The difference between the two consists in their implementation. Why do you think that sages are “ordinary people” in their quotidian life, if the stories are to be believed? It must be because they employ their talents in pursuit of the truth, which implies a commitment to always attend to the realisation of the most appropriate course of action. And because the proper truth is objective, an obligation of this sort is, in effect, an ongoing struggle to approximate nature without petty concerns for social, economic, political benefits. Whereas intelligence without the concomitant modus vivendi of a life in accordance with the natural order of things is one that makes the person arrogant, compelling them to seek fame and riches.

— Is there any method we can use to discover the latter types?

— You can discern frivolous smartness fairly easily. Just look at every half decent fellow who has made a name for their work and now “acts smart” in pursuit of the gains that would yield. Such is not a life that leads to the truth. Accolades, social standing, the gossip of others are mere idols that can only distract you from approximating nature: your nature and the natural order at-large. Frivolity of the kind here considered is, in effect, a path down the labyrinth where one only finds traps, fiends, smoke and mirrors, and other like-minded, ambitious miracle-workers who once took the same route because they sought to satisfy their vanity by exploiting the most gullible among their fellows.

— Does this say anything about your deed then?

— I am a god and could have imposed my yoke on your kind if I were human-like in my disposition. Instead of emancipating you by means of freeing the foundational know-how of controlling fire, I could have done what your economic system incentivises and your core values glorify: which is to withhold knowledge, set up a system of constraints that impose artificial scarcity, denigrate anyone who tries to decipher or mimic my skills as a “pirate” or a “thief”, and extract rent from you. I could, in other words, condemn you to a fate of precarity.

— Forgive my crude ways, but I must know for sure: what would be wrong with that? Why not get something out of your peerless talents?

— Such would not have been the correct course of action. For I could already see the potential of humanity. I could tell that you had the skills to not only live outside the caves, but also develop a vast corpus of knowledge and technical implements that allow you to travel amidst the stars. The reason it would be a mistake to put you under my tyranny is that I would be forcing you to a condition of perpetual dependency on my basic supplies for your mere sustenance. You would never have the luxury to think about higher things, since your predicament would force you to expend all your energy to just stay alive. Put differently, the error would consist in assuming as constant a temporal state of affairs that was a function of its prevailing conditions and which, in actuality, would undergo change once those constraints were lifted.

— Just for me to understand: you think it is an error to deny one their potential because that projects the present into the future? You could foresee the possible outcomes and understood that denial was the most presumptuous one?

— You did well. I could have shared more, but that would have had an adverse effect on your development, for you would then learn to be spoon-fed information instead of seeking knowledge yourself. Or worse, you would altogether ignore the importance of comprehending the mechanics of a system you interface with. Just look at the world around you: having failed to properly internalise the ethical lesson of my act, humanity mass produces tools that are only meant to be used ephemerally and superficially, never to be understood properly. It then comes to no surprise that you do not consider revolting and detrimental to your shared progress the practice of rendering ideas proprietary or exclusive and exclusionary. The powerful among you, who often also are those who started off by exercising frivolous smartness, are condemning you to a precarious condition.

— Your suggestion would then be to be more wise, somehow? How realistic is that, seeing how rare a sage is among us?

— Such expectations would not correspond to reality. What you need is to learn what I had to teach you. The fact of the matter is that I did not just give you fire which produced inventions galore. I rather offered you a method of perpetual improvement, embodied in the art of mastering the use of fire, which consists in the spirit of sharing, here exemplified as sharing know-how. You said that I “upgraded” humanity. Every individual human can do a little bit of that by contributing their particular knowledge to their community and the world at-large. Ask your neighbour how they produce their real bread which is free from the dubious interventions one finds in the industrial loaf. Your neighbour will likely share what they have with alacrity. It does not take a sage to do that, but only a sense of togetherness and solidarity. Tell your local university professor to publish their work in a readily accessible resource, instead of locking it up behind some paywall. Insist that the vainglory and persona of the “embattled genius” of a Philosophy Doctor that operates aloof from the fray is a false objective that only fools are entertained with. How are you supposed to learn and how will you make real progress as a species if you impede each other’s quest for better approximating nature?

— I will try my best. My best skill as a merchant is to wrap some object in a package that appeals to others. I can do the same for concepts. So I would term your ethos the “Promethean ideal”: the spirit of sharing, which can also be the spirit of sharing one’s know-how, while avoiding the pitfalls of frivolous smartness. Is this an acceptable approach?

— What matters is that you internalise my lesson, which will save you from your hubris. Be more “promethean”, both in the sense of following my example, but also by acting with forethought, without presumptions and cockiness, and always in consideration of your limits. Do not pretend to know more than you actually do. Do not trick yourself into thinking that you are Prometheus and “play god” because your fancy machinery can now take you to another planet or whatnot. While you are not what you once were in terms of complexity and specialisation, you still are human and, most importantly, you still fail to foresee states of affairs which are obscured by your narrow field of view. Remember to stay grounded in your reality, though not necessarily any given temporal phase of it, and you shall be fine.

Cassandra and the student

Cassandra relocated to a remote mountainous region after a career in one of the world’s most vibrant city centre’s. Life at the village has none of the luxuries one finds downtown. Interests in herbalism and medicine took over prior concerns about economics and politics.

Rumour had it that Cassandra possessed a unique gift by the gods: foresight. It also spoke of an accompanying curse that would forever prevent others from ever heeding the oracular wisdom such a talent grants.

A young researcher heard of those stories. Thinking that they could help change the balance of powers, they sought to meet Cassandra in person.

— The priestess told me that the gods have bestowed upon you a gift and a curse. Is there truth to those words?

— People sometimes find it expedient to speak through fables and metaphors. The priestess communicates in a language that is consistent with the tenets of her faith. It is indeed true that I can predict some events ahead of time, just as it is the case that no-one ever heeds my advice.

— Why would the gods do that to you?

— Rather than speculate about possible forms of being whose presence I can neither affirm nor dismiss, allow me to communicate in a manner that suits my level of expertise. I did not always have the ability to foresee phenomena. It is a skill I acquired through years of research and only after I began developing comprehensive theories about how the world works. Once you have breadth of knowledge and theoretical insight with which to connect the dots, you gain a new perspective on the constitution of the case. You reach a higher vantage point.

— So how come no-one ever listens to you? Is it because you fail to speak in plain terms?

— I think it all comes down to differences in perspective. People see an unstoppable force moving through emptiness. Whereas I see both the unstoppable force and the immovable object that stands in its way, while I am well aware that there is no emptiness but a nexus of powers at play. My understanding of phenomena and their underlying mechanics allows me to study the dynamic between the force and the object, while those who have spent no time researching those issues insist that I am delusional, for all they can ever spot with their untrained eyes is just the former. It comes to no surprise that when I warn them of an imminent crash they roll their eyes and leave without uttering a word.

— How could we ever overcome this constraint? You do not seem to be insane or delusional.

— People want to think of themselves as intelligent and refined in their appreciation of things. The truth, however, is that most of the time they act in a manner that is characteristic of peacocks, in that they get impressed by superficialities. Just look at me here: out of sync with the fashions, devoid of any desire to blend in with the crowd. The walls of my house have nothing to show, nothing that screams of intellectuality. Whereas you walk into one of those fancy mansions in the region and you see twenty college degrees, certificates, and stamps of approval, on the wall, all conveying the message that this person is important and sophisticated. Again, look at me a bit more carefully. There are no pretences to smartness. Indeed there is nothing that would improve my social standing. I do not seek power or fame, but only the truth. And so the communication of my teachings suffers because people who interact with me are not sincere. They claim to be interested in the kind of knowledge I share freely, but what they really seek is a gimmick to impress their peers.

— I think I understand your predicament and why you are so misunderstood and underappreciated. What do you think one can learn from you, once they approach you without any ulterior motives?

— I can teach you how to live in accordance with nature, a human who is at once true to their humanity and fully conscious of the fact they are not at the epicentre of this world. But I can never lie to you about those topics. If you approach me with an open mind you shall be refashioned, made anew. I will show you who you once were, as I peel off the layers of learnt attitudes that have accumulated over your self and which obscure your true presence.

— May I ask you a more personal question?

— Please do.

— Do you have any friends? This place does not look particularly inviting.

— All my friendships are situational. You must understand that while I am sociable, I insist walking on my road. There are no detours, no shortcuts to wisdom. Those who promise to teach you an art in 20 minutes are charlatans that exploit your own misunderstanding that there exist painless “life hacks” with which to develop profundity of character. My path intersects with that of others, so we stay together for as long as that may last. Then we each go our way as our paths diverge. What would I be had I stayed with my childhood friends in what would amount to an effective time capsule? Would I not remain confined to the roles and expectations that were impressed upon my younger self? And would that not function as an impediment to my potential? How could I be where I am had I not left the place I was? Life occurs in cycles. A new one starts where another ends. We make friends as we go, but are ultimately not drawn by their gravitational pull when our goal is clear. We may still meet a fellow traveller whose destination coincides with our own. Then we shall be together for the long ride, knowing that our paths converge. Whatever the case, do not spend your days contemplating what could have been. Live for the moment, while always remaining committed to the cause of pursuing the truth.

— I want to help you, Cassandra. I want you to succeed and finally be recognised for your contributions.

— While I appreciate your eagerness to be of service, I must inform you that those are misguided ends. I have no inner need for neither success nor fame. It is true that I am just another human who must somehow make ends meet. And so it is true that I could benefit from a stable job and a reliable source of income, just so I can live another day. I am, nonetheless, not interested in material possessions and the vanity they engender. Let us experience philosophy, let us be philosophical. I actively dislike the armchair theorist who merely entertains ideas without living in accordance with their teachings. Look at me here. This is philosophy in practice. This is what my ideas demand. This is the only lifestyle that is consistent with everything I ever learnt to be genuine. In being who I am, I confirm the words of the priestess. Could you bear this burden?

— What if I cannot?

— It means you are not ready. You are still maintaining delusions about who you are, what your presumed telos is, and continue to behave in a manner that is not aligned with your actuality as a person and a species.

What is it that allows our law, economy, health system, and day-to-day life in general to function? And what does “to function” ordinarily mean in this case?

This series of notes is an attempt at making sense of the issues involved.

The mechanics of a rule

0 A rule is a stated extra-personal intended mode of conduct, linked with a criterion of conditionality and enforced by an arrangement of power.

0.1 Rules may be tacit or explicit, general or particular, permanent or temporary.

0.2 An arrangement of power that stands supreme relative to all its subjects in the given social whole is a government.

0.2.1 Governments may themselves be stratified in accordance with some scheme for distributing competences based on the scope of their reach, in which case the levels of government have unique names that denote their function in the given constitutional order.

0.3 A defined area for the application of the rules, a recognisable body of such subjects, and a concomitant constitutional order, are a state.

0.3.1 Again, there may be differences in what constitutes a structure in a given polity, so that a state may be but an administrative unit of a larger architecture, while itself may be further subdivided in line with the need of distributing competences.

0.4 Governance is the process of forming and applying rules with a potential scope of application that coincides with the reach of the given state.

0.5 Rules are not just the acts of government. There can be rules whose application is limited to a congregation of people; those that are enacted ad-hoc; or even those that hold force in a particular place.

0.6 Whatever the inter-subjective modalities, there is an arrangement of power: the structure that withholds and enforces the rules, and the agents that must behave accordingly.

0.7 The structure may consist of non-human magnitudes, to the extent that they can operate as factors that inform the specifics of the case. In general though, the structure is other people framed by the set of other rules and concomitant patterns of expression that permeate their conduct.

0.7.1 The human side of the structure can be largely reduced to “others performing in accordance with their role, per the rules”.

1 Trust among those involved enables the unencumbered operation of a rule.

1.1 In the absence of trust, rules may only apply by the use of force. These cases require more effort to be sustained, relative to those that enjoy the trust of their subjects.

1.2 Force of the sort here considered is the mobilisation of resources against the intent or expectations of its intended targets. Rules applied in this way are not easy to internalise by their subjects.

1.3 Trust represents the internalisation of a rule, to the effect that what once was conceived independent of the person becomes part of their own patterns of action in a transmittable, near-seamless fashion.

1.3.1 “Transmission” in this context means that the once passive subject now becomes an agent that both follows the stipulations of the rule and also expects others to behave accordingly. In other words, the totality of such agents acts as the enforcer of the rules after they have internalised them.

1.4 It is in the interest of governance, or whatever particularised authority from whence the rules stem from, to nurture such trust. Whether that stands as an expression of recognition that follows from careful deliberation that may be perceived as just or an induced kind of conformance that is backed by tacit threats, is irrelevant to the very functioning of rules.

1.4.1 Threats and the potentiality of force remain in place even in cases where the subjects have internalised the mode of conduct intended for them. Without such a potential outcome, the rule loses its significance in that it is stripped of its conditionality and deprived of its concomitant applicability.

1.4.2 It might thus be pertinent to claim that rules without a mechanism for rendering clear their conditions and for making possible their subsequent enforcement are no rules at all in practice.

1.5 A rule represents a codification of trust between those who are aware of it. There is faith that each agent will align their conduct with the stipulations of the rule. They will obey or follow it by adapting their behaviour to what was agreed upon or otherwise declared the new normal.

1.5.1 Agreement of the sort here considered may also be one that is not free of interference. One may be indoctrinated or brainwashed into consenting, or otherwise have no viable alternative.

1.5.2 The propriety of the method is secondary to the very fact of how a rule is meant to work and how this particular type of shared mode of conduct contributes to the mechanics at play.

2 Trust begets expectations. It enables one to make an educated guess about the future: that some state of affairs will hold true at a given point in time.

2.1 If there can be no expectation that the future will broadly correspond to the content of the rule, then the initial trust and everything predicated on it is in jeopardy.

2.2 A rule is, therefore, a form of certainty or rather credence . The belief that some core element or general outlook is true and will remain that way, mutatis mutandis.

2.3 What underpins trust and the concomitant expectations is the overall applicability of the rule.

2.3.1 Without a sense of being grounded in immediate reality, a rule loses part of its staying power. For example:

• Does it map to phenomena in the real world?
• Does it account for forces that are exogenous to human convention?
• Does it factor in the potential of the people involved or their capacity to fulfil their expected role?

2.4 A rule is believed to be applicable and to engender expectations only when it offers the impression of plausibility. There is a sense that the rule is realistic. Trust follows from there.

The agent of action and its role

3 A rule expects groups and/or classes to behave in certain ways, without accounting for the factors of differentiation that contribute to the phenomenon of individuality.

3.1 This runs contrary to a basic intuition about agency: one’s immediate understanding of life may suggest that only individuals can act; only individuals exhibit behaviour and that the macro view of groups is but an epiphenomenon of patterns at the micro level of the individual.

3.2 There is, nonetheless, a case to be made that individualist action operates as a feedback loop of internal and external stimuli, so that the behaviour of others may greatly influence the conduct of a given individual, such as in cases of widespread panic, fear, courage that typically have a contagious effect. As such, it is of paramount importance to distinguish between personhood and agency.

3.2.1 Here we are not concerned with scepticism of free will for the sake of keeping things simple. By “free will scepticism” I allude to the problématique surrounding the extent to which an individual acts “on their own accord” or the set of questions pertaining to the the scope of one’s volition in a probabilistic world and in account of the numerous subsystems that constitute the ontic presence we comprehend as “human”.

3.2.2 For our purposes, we limit the discussion to the level of individual and group behaviour, while noting in passing that individual action is itself contextualised, framed, or otherwise determined by a multitude of internal and external factors that likely contribute to an ever-evolving horizon of possible outcomes that are then expected to be impressed in the conscious mind as a free/unfettered choice and concatenation thereof.

3.3 Insofar as rules are concerned, the agent of action may not necessarily be a single human being. It may be a collective, an organisation, a class.

3.4 It is fruitful to think of rules as primarily inter-_subjective_ affairs, not inter-personal.

3.5 As rules are not targeted at particular individuals, it follows that they assume the categories of agency they seek to regulate.

3.5.1 Think of how a rule expects from young people to give their seat to the elderly when none other is available. Here the classes that are age-dependent are expected to behave as such, with broad conceptions of age groups being the sole criterion for such classification.

3.5.2 Whether groups can act in some ontological sense is irrelevant to the fact that they are conceived as agents of action within the remit of the rule, meaning that even in the case of individualist action the subjects inherit the case-dependent attributes of the class they partake in.

3.5.3 Furthermore, the distinction between agency and structure renders concrete the limitations of a strict individualistic conception of action, in that it can only conceive of the structure—the dynamic, ever-evolving structure—as “other individuals”, without accounting for whatever emergent properties in the interplay between (i) their behaviour and (ii) the rules that imprint in their conscience the role they are expected to perform in the given case.

3.5.4 To understand emergent phenomena we must have a refined appreciation both of the system itself and of whatever sub- or super- systems may constitute, environ, or otherwise inform it.

4 Rules define possible roles that are fulfilled by agents.

4.1 A role is reflective of its contextuality. It is informed by the structure in which the agent’s action is expected to unfold. Roles are contingent on the possibilities that the structure enables.

4.1.1 Consider the unique role in each of the following:

• What should I myself do against the pandemic?
• What should the state do against it?
• What should the international community do?

4.2 Every agent has different options presented to them, always in accordance with the scope of their role. And each role comes with its own particularities and potential implications to courses of action.

4.3 In terms of methodology, the role is how we may map the sceptical mode of application to ethics/politics.¹

4.3.1 This is the method of thinking that accounts for the constitution of each case, of the relevant factors in their interplay. Variance in the factors, their phenomenality and their interactions, demand from the researcher to adapt their programme accordingly. One size does not fit all. Failure to apply the mode of application leads one to vindicate the categories they have already assumed as constant in defiance of their actuality.

Humans are political

5 Rules are part of the human experience, which is inherently social.

5.1 In essence, we call “politics” all actions springing from or directly linked with the rules that frame, permeate, mould, or otherwise influence a human collective.

5.1.1 This is the broad conception of politics. Not to be confused with the quotidian events of the political process. In this wider framework we also put ethics, for they too are about the qualitative aspects of inter-subjectivity broadly understood.

5.1.2 Ethos, as opposed to one’s idiosyncrasy and natural character, covers the emergent characteristics that are made manifest in an inter-subjective phenomenon. There is an agent and a patient of action. Through that process we may trace the patterns that together form their shared ‘character’ (ethos or normality) that we can then assess as part of our inquiry into this field of research (i.e. ethics).

5.2 Couched in those terms, the “polity” is a superstructure of social relations and behavioural patterns woven together with rules.

5.3 It is practically impossible to distinguish a social construct from its rules-based milieu, the mixture of significations assigned to them, and the artefacts derived therefrom: what we interpret as “culture”.

5.4 A social architecture of this sort embodies the mixture of values, meanings, narratives, that are associated with such a culture, applied to each of the items concerned.

5.4.1 Later we shall examine how this pertains to institutions.

5.5 Rule-formation relates to political organisation by means of building trust and developing expectations around which people may lead their lives as a social species.

6 Rules essentially amount to an attempt at removing radical uncertainty and indecision. They provide a frame of reference. A constant.

6.1 Rules are, in this particular sense, a mechanism to focus the minds of people and to prevent them from fear and the ensuing incessant strife of anticipating the then indeterminate possible modes of conduct of others.

6.2 Human society cannot prosper in the face of radical uncertainty. Civilisation cannot flourish amid constant struggle.

6.2.1 That is so, because in the absence of trust it would be impossible to have the division of labour and the subsequent transactions that are necessary to cover one’s needs. Without specialisation of some sort, each individual or nucleus of social organisation (e.g. a family) is left to rely on its own means for sustenance.

6.2.2 Yet even families operate on a modicum of trust, else we revert to a strictly individualistic free-for-all that renders void the very attempt at commerce and whatever other state of affairs that derives from cooperation or joint conduct.

Sovereignty as a modicum of certainty

7 Rules define roles which in turn give rise to power relations. It is how political authority comes about. And how supreme political authority, i.e. sovereignty, is established.

7.1 A polity can be understood as the canonicalisation of a set of rules and its subsequent enactment as the basis of expected normality. Power relations are embedded in an established order at the epicentre of which lies an institutional apparatus (however stratified) that is assigned the task of overseeing agents whose role is to conform with authority (however classified).

7.2 State-building, even in primitive terms, can be interpreted as a method of instituting trust. Sovereignty renders roles explicit, allowing, inter alia, the division of labour and joint operations in general. It provides a basis of minimum certainty about how things are supposed to work, who does what and who should not be involved.

7.3 Without instituted trust we cannot develop large collectives between strangers. The social group can only be limited to biological affinity, with the presumption that such a condition nurtures a degree of trust organically.

7.4 In the complete absence of rules and of the resulting trust, we have the state of nature, where anything goes and where everyone is left to fend for themselves. Instances of war, famine, and other calamities offer us hints as to what such a world could consist of: they tell us what the possible implosion of the system of trust can cause, when conceived in ideal terms as a thought experiment that seeks to identify the absolute.

7.4.1 Thomas Hobbes described it as the war of every body against every other, having experienced a civil war.²

7.5 In the state of nature sovereignty cannot exist. Without trust, we are left to our own devices where there is no common ground for collective action, no rules that are in effect, no structure that can consist of agents in conformity with their expected role, and so on. Without trust there can be no cultural midpoint, no sense of togetherness, no solidarity, no morality. Nothing.

The basis of institutions

8 To formulate and to enforce rules is to draw clear delineations between the spheres of the desired and the undesired.

8.1 This binary is not mapped to a static or predetermined reality. There is no necessary objective evaluation of what is permissible or not.

8.2 Yet, when seen in light of the mechanics of rule-formation, the contents are secondary to what matters at first: the recognition of the rule.

8.3 Recognition is an inter-subjective phenomenon. The agents see that which is meant to bind them by means of assuming roles that are intended for them. And they affirm or acquiesce to its entry into force through conformity.

9 A rule is an agreement to forgo some aspect of individuality or some degree of initiative in exchange for reduced uncertainty in the confines of a polity or particularised social whole. This shared understanding offers some certainty that defines the collective as such.

9.1 For instance, we trust in the value of fiat money (the US Dollar, the Euro…) because everyone else who bargains in it does: trust is the core of what makes it redeemable, otherwise it has no intrinsic value. We trust our life in the hands of medical experts and exercise social distancing in the face of the pandemic, else the social fabric can be torn apart. And so on.

9.1.1 The fact that fiat money has an extrinsic value is not a function of its legal nature as state-sanctioned face value. But rather of the expectations developed through the complex workings of the market and the public entities involved, which are ultimately internalised as value. This is the case for any kind of item that would perform the roles of “money”, such as gold or other metals.

9.2 We even trust in the promotion of one’s self-interest and expect that the disparate individual agendas that are otherwise detrimental to the collective good will cancel each other out, ceteris paribus.

9.2.1 Such is the gist of Glaucon’s (Ylafkon) argument about human nature and the origins of morality in Book II of Plato’s Republic,³⁴ as well as the essence of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” which connects microeconomic foundations to macroeconomic outcomes.⁵

Institutions embody values

10 Institutions codify beliefs and embed them in quotidian life as points of reference that are kept outside the ordinary scope of the political process in a state of presumed quasi-permanence.

10.1 In the image of an institution one may identify a subset of the underlying concepts and aspirations of the subjects bound by it. We can interpret institutions as: “here is what they believed to be true for this particular issue, during that period of time” or, put differently, “these were the beliefs that framed the conduct of this group at-large”.

10.2 Think, for instance, of the institution of the free citizen who enjoys fundamental rights. Such a social construct was not always present and may not necessarily remain inviolable in the future or in all possible forms of political organisation.

10.3 As societies evolve and are exposed to new information and realities, so do their values, even if only incrementally. Rules are in a state of flux once their potentiality is accounted for. They can be rendered obsolete, amended, cast in a new light, et cetera.

10.3.1 The evolution of values should not be interpreted as some inexorable transition to ever-higher states of reasonableness and sophistication: a kind of ‘natural’ propensity towards enlightenment. Regress and progress are both realisable within a spectrum of possibilities, while which phenomenon qualifies under each of these analytical constructs remains open to investigation.

10.3.1.1 Whomsoever has the power of interpretation regarding the propriety and outlook of institutions wields power in general.

10.3.2 “Evolution” in this context is the dynamically-adjusted outcome of politics, as arguments and opinions of different sorts are pitted against each other or blend together, forming new baselines for discourse, which themselves engender more controversies or starting points for narratives, and the cycle repeats itself while the themes, concerns, players change.

10.4 Politics is, in a sense, an expression of human’s innate tendency to form opinions and compete with others over whose position is the right one.

10.4.1 Here the “right one” is not necessarily about the objectively better thesis (whatever that may necessitate on the epistemological front), but most likely a matter of eristics in the sense of who can win in a battle of wits using rhetorical tricks, the sheer force of numbers, or some other extraneous medium.

10.4.2 To overcome politics is tantamount to identifying a method of inclusive discourse that can at once (i) satisfy human’s basic propensity for doxastic outlook in the manner of forming beliefs they attach themselves to, and (ii) deliver theses that are universally recognised as more cogent than those held by each person in the absence of such a method.

10.4.3 Politics is, in this particular light, a function of ignorance. In a system of perfect knowledge there is no point in arguing over what the appropriate course of action is, since that will already be singled out by the method that yields such theoretically complete information.

10.4.4 In less idealistic terms, however, politics is the necessary result of complexity, which manifests as the multitude of opinions among agents of action, but also as the numerous fields of expertise and specialisation in all domains of human activity. Politics is the answer to the practical constraint that there is no such thing as a single field of expertise in all that is human.

10.4.4.1 Here I assume that omniscience is not achievable by a single human. Though I am always happy to be proven wrong.

10.4.4.2 I also do not equate the “multitude of opinions” with democracy or variants thereof, since even in oligarchic or autocratic regimes there typically exists at least some element of collective decision-making among those in power. This is not to imply that absolutism fosters pluralism the same way participatory democracy would, just that it is in the nature of humans to hold different views and this is discernible even in systems whose midpoint is strict homogeneity and uniformity of output.

10.4.5 There has yet to be a civilisation that managed to completely outgrow politics; a community that found all possible truths to current events or to unforeseen circumstances in all their combinations, and proceeded to transcend into an apolitical collective.

10.4.6 Rules are about trust and building some certainty. The apolitical order would, in this particular regard, presumably be of a truly exalted, encyclopedic, omniscient sort.

10.4.7 To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto,⁶ allow me to posit a working hypothesis: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of rule-formation.

10.5 While institutions are touted as constant, their content and scope is never fixed. Rules are conventional and thus modifiable. That which is genuinely transcendent and constant, or truly exogenous to human action and convention, does not need to be instituted.

10.5.1 One does not institute the Sun for it to enter into force.

10.6 The qualities that are attributed to institutions have a practical utility, else a use-value that is situational and context-dependent in the grand scheme of history.

10.7 Protagoras’ man-measure thesis was concerned with this fact, namely that the use-value of items is a function of human conduct, hence the distinction in Greek between chrēmata (conventional/human things) and pragmata (natural things).⁷

10.7.1 As an aside, modern Greek uses “chrēmata” to mean “money”, which itself is a prime example of an item that has no real objective, intrinsic value.

10.8 The inter-temporal persistence of rules is due to their continuous affirmation or broad-based acquiescence, regardless of whether it is induced or genuine. And such approval need not be unanimous. What matters is that most agents are willing to operate in conformity with their role, effectively limiting the options of non-conforming members.

10.9 The structure remains robust for as long as a disposition of conformity is widespread enough among the agents.

The imaginary heteronomy of rules

11 The quasi-permanence of institutions can be rationalised as an objective constant, whose very source is considered exogenous to human convention.

11.1 As Cornelius Castoriades observed, establishments found it expedient to basically forget that the rules were of their own making.⁸ An authority or some other unquestionable force was claimed to have formulated them instead. Such is heteronomy, the rule of the other, as opposed to autonomy, the rule of the self; with “other” and “self” acquiring a collective meaning in this case, though “other” could also be a different kind of force, such as a deity.

11.2 Heteronomy unfolds as a set of postulates that are predicated on the idea that institutions, the overarching framework, the underlying values, can never change because “we” the subjects of those rules are never really in control of them and are only limited to unquestionably enforce and obey them.

11.3 Because an institutional order establishes power relations, heteronomy can be a potent hindrance to reform which entails a new configuration of forces. Heteronomy can create false dilemmas. These may manifest as the typically pernicious dogma or claim that “there is no alternative” to some otherwise ideological initiative, or even it can be discerned as fatalism of other sorts that sometimes is rendered rational ex post facto as apathy or powerlessness.

12 Institutions are chrēmata in the Protagorian sense. Convention determines that they are (their presence), in the way they are (their mode), and to the extent they are (their scope).

12.1 In order to enact reform, to re-institute, an agent must realise that rules can be changed, that heteronomy is indeed imaginary and that the putative exteriority of institutions is itself chrēmatic.

12.2 We should clarify that “convention” should not be conflated with consensus or widespread informed consent. It may be that, though it might also be a matter of power relations which calcify over time until they themselves are treated as quasi-permanent and heteronomous.

13 Heteronomy is both an allusion to authority made by the situational power holders (macro-heteronomy) as well as a fact of powerlessness of individuals in the face of inter-subjective affairs (micro-heteronomy).

13.1 Seen from a single person’s perspective, the parameters of inter-subjective phenomena are predefined and formulated externally. One cannot simply invent institutions and unilaterally imprint them in the minds of others. Instead one has to accept as a given that which takes form through collective means and/or over time.

13.2 Microheteronomy is an inherent feature of rules, as it reinforces the mechanics of removing radical uncertainty and alleviating doubt. Agents do not have to scrutinise the institutional architecture as such or, indeed, any given rule as a prerequisite for committing to the given endeavour. All that is required of them is to act in conformity with the rules they are subject to.

13.3 The workings of microheteronomy suggest that in the absence of a collective effort, no individual can actually escape from the reach of institutions they otherwise oppose by simply arguing against them or altogether dismissing their theoretical foundation.

13.3.1 For example, think of how one’s conception of morality may not map to the prevailing beliefs or be out of sync with what worldview finds currency. One may believe that, say, theft is permissible under certain circumstances, but that will not work in their favour if the law explicitly and indiscriminately punishes such acts. It is not possible for an agent to change the values held by others, unless the others acquiesce to such a course of action, which entails localised or generalised re-institution.

13.4 To enact reform is to wield power, which calls for concerted action.

Politics as an instituted reality

14 With the exception of the state of nature—itself an analytical construct—whatever characterises the relations between people is instituted as such.

14.1 Family is an institution. Gender roles and the significations attached to romantic relationships are institutions. The division of powers between the various functions of the government is an institution. Money is an institution. Property rights are an institution…

14.1.1 This means that in principle they can all be considered anew. They are subject to reform both concerning their content and their very presence.

14.1.2 I am not trying to pass some qualitative judgement, nor am I suggesting that some or all of the aforementioned should be reformed. The point is not whether they are good or bad, useful or not. Just that it is in the nature of institutions to be malleable.

14.2 The malleability of institutions is not a nihilist statement of the sort “they are invented, therefore they are utterly meaningless and absurd”.⁹ Institutions do have value for those affected by them in their quotidian life in that they condition modes of behaviour and produce material consequences.

14.2.1 If we are to dismiss all chrēmata due to their ‘essential’ meaninglessness, then we still need some frame of reference for performing the core function of rules: to build trust and ensure a modicum of certainty about inter-subjective states of affairs.

14.2.2 In more practical terms, we are in a better position to understand tacit claims of macroheteronomy, such as a call to “keep politics out of this”. Appeals to apolitical approaches can often be interpreted as “accept the values that are embodied in the given structure, assume them as objective reality, and shut up”.

14.2.3 Perhaps with the exception of the most technical and specialised areas of activity, no relationship between people is truly apolitical and institution-less, whether that is directly or indirectly.

14.2.4 By recognising tacit macroheteronomy we stand a better chance of interrogating deep seated beliefs and institutional arrangements that could perhaps benefit from a thoroughgoing review.

Trust and the importance of justice

15 Trust is the cornerstone of our politics, our instituted reality. Without trust we drift towards the state of nature.

15.1 We must always be mindful of the powers that can help sustain this state of affairs. I would speculate that there are two broad categories: power and justice.

15.2 An institutional order can remain in place through sheer force. Or it can be the product of widespread consensus. These are just analytical extremes: in practice we are more likely to be confronted with combinations and permutations between the two.

15.3 Think, however, of an another dimension to preserving the given order: its longer-term sustainability. Whatever contributes to the reinforcement of the status quo has to remain consistent, else it sows the seeds of its destruction.

15.3.1 Can we, for example, trust capitalists to see to our interests when the next economic crisis strikes? Why should we trust politicians who are known to have repeatedly committed injustice against us, lied to us, and tricked us into pursuing objectives that were ultimately to our detriment?

15.3.2 You see how trust works… And this can also apply to all other domains of life. Do we have confidence, stemming from a place of informed consent, in a vaccine against the ongoing pandemic, given that testing has been insufficient and all sorts of technical questions remain unanswered? Or using the information we have about the track record of big pharmaceuticals and their flunkies, do we think of them as benevolent actors? On the flip-side, do we believe in the theories of non-experts on the matter? Should we have no fear given these possible doubts? And so on.

15.3.3 Again, without trust nothing will work as intended. Which brings us full circle to the force that keeps the instituted reality in tact: power and/or justice.

16 If inter-subjective roles cannot be established from a position of justice, they will be enforced through power. Else the entire edifice collapses, as trust unravels and agents revert to a state of radical uncertainty.

What follows are some thoughts of mine on the broader topic, which extend parts of what I wrote in my previous two publications:

• On Hubris (2019-11-20)
• On Nihilism (2019-11-21)

This is not a commentary on Gertz’s work. Just me initiating a process of thinking with “by the way”…

To my mind nihilism is the flip-side of a dogmatic world-view that rests on ultimate truths. The nihilist is concerned with the absolute: perfect knowledge, true meaning, real justice, and the like. Once it becomes apparent that these ideals are not attainable, what remains is the conclusion that they must not exist in the way we originally assumed and are therefore spurious, illusory, or devoid of meaning.

On the face of it, nihilism is scepticism with a different name: it questions the validity of propositions that purport to be founded on some certainty, only to be proven wanting once subjected to scrutiny. Like the sceptic, the nihilist does not take anything at face value, nor do they provide assent to claims whose sole source of plausibility is some social/cultural authority.

Upon closer inspection though, the nihilist has a different attitude towards knowledge and learning than what scepticism would entail. The sceptic will recognise our uncertainty for what it is under the present circumstances: we do not know for sure based on the information we have and the tools at our disposal, but we might learn more when the state that produces this uncertainty is somehow altered.

Scepticism does not preemptively dismiss the possibility of expanding our understanding of things. Such a course of action would imply that we can be sure about the distant future or, more generally, about a state of affairs whose contributing factors have yet to be combined in a particular way while being framed by hitherto unforeseen parameters. Perhaps we might discover a hint that offers us the impetus to revise our methods and rethink our ways, which could ultimately allow us to see things from a vantage point that was not reachable before.

In other words, the sceptic does not have a dogmatic stance towards scepticism: they do not rule out the possibility of revealing some truth, of gradually removing the veil of obscurity over something.

What matters is the sense of perspective that underpins the sceptical enterprise. We may attain proximate certainty, in that we can have a relatively better grasp of the concepts involved. An approximation is just that. It is not perfect. It also is distinct from having nothing at all.

Whereas the nihilist is closer in spirit to the Academic Sceptics of yore who entertained the notion that “true knowledge”, in the sense of the Platonic Form of it, is unattainable and humans are condemned to only ever experience the Form indirectly and falsely through its instantiations.

The issue with this line of argumentation, and despite the surface-level dubitative disposition, is the attitude of certainty. The ancient Academic Sceptic, like the modern-day nihilist, was convinced that absolute certainty is impossible. To which the more cautious sceptic counters with the all too predictable: “are you sure?”.

A sceptical attitude towards life is all about withholding final judgement on all matters of inquiry. I would even argue that scepticism at the meta-philosophical level entails the recognition that philosophy as a whole has no ultimate positive statements to propound and that it merely stands as a body of negative propositions against dogmatic arguments on the finality of the topics examined.

The nihilist will claim to have found liberty in the belief that life has no meaning. But what if it does? What if our existence is, so to speak, put on rails with us heading somewhere we do not know about in advance and have not decided ourselves? How can we determine with certainty that we as humans, or life in general, are not an intermediate stage towards some end, which itself might be yet another point in pursuit of some greater end, and so on?

What irrefutable proof do you have to dismiss this possibility in favour of nihilism? And how can you ever be a nihilist if you have no such proof against the very notion that irrefutable proofs might exist?

If the belief in meaninglessness gives you tranquillity, then there is something valuable in that state of mind that you recognise, some quality that renders it preferable to other possible experiences. That you would value tranquillity over some sort of anxiety suggests that something is at play that makes value judgements or orders your preferences accordingly. If there is nothing whatsoever, then there is no reason to believe that there is any difference between tranquillity and anxiety, or between any possible trade-offs you might think of.

It therefore comes down to a matter of practicality; of accepting that the insistence on the absolute leads us to contradictions and that our biology or however we may frame the human condition—our life in its actuality—gives us imperfect grounds for argumentation and reasoning. As such, we might need to re-calibrate our conception of the ideal as not necessarily exogenous; an ideal that is not treated as external in its origin once examined relative to our presence or the conscience of it. Why not consider the absolute as nothing more and nothing less than the logical extension of what we have in front us and what we do actually attain through immediate experience or inferences that are drawn therefrom?

Consider this example. We interact with dogs of different breeds, character traits, physical characteristics… We derive a notion of what the abstract “dog” is based on the patterns we trace. To our mind the term “dog” is a reference to the commonalities among the plurality of specimens we experience; the patterns in their combination (e.g. not just four-legged or carnivorous, but four-legged and carnivorous).

This allows us to clearly distinguish a dog from a fish or a human and to recognise a heretofore unknown breed based on the taxonomy we have formulated (a taxonomy that remains subject to review and further refinement). There is no need to argue endlessly on what the Form of “dog” is, how unattainable it may be, and why everything else in the absence of the absolute is worthless.

By abstracting from the basics that are available to our faculties, we have developed a criterion that is good enough in light of our imperfect existence. There is some value to having this partial knowledge, in that we can use it to tell what the difference is between this or that. It also serves as a mechanism for filtering and sorting opinions on the matter. We can, for instance, dismiss views that argue on the impossibility and utter futility of ‘truly knowing’ the difference between a dog and a human.

More fundamentally, the core problem with all absolutist claims, be they nihilist or not, is that they fail to maintain any kind of granularity with regard to the domain in which their concepts may be rendered valid. There is no absolute beauty to be found in a given human being because such a person is not absolute, not perfect. There is no “true” dog to be experienced because we only ever deal with instances of an abstraction, patterns that help us outline a mental construct, which itself stands in juxtaposition to other such constructs.

Absolutes can only apply to a domain where everything is taken to its logical end. Conversely, forcing an absolute on an instance (or vice versa) is a fallacy: the conflation between the scopes of application of the items being considered (treating the absolute in terms of an instance, or the instance as if it were an ideal).

Understanding the scope of application has practical benefits as well, such as in our politics. We can discern the difference in role between a single person and a state apparatus. The question “what have you done to tackle poverty?” has aspects to it and a unique set of implications that are contingent on the role of the moral agent. Without accounting for such a critical component of the subject, we fail to distinguish between the capacities of the possible agents. That can only engender falsehoods where we treat the dissimilar as if they were similar.

In practice, nihilism is an alias for a brand of idealism that has gone wild, which in turn is an expedient way of describing a mindset that places disproportionate emphasis on the purity of concepts without sufficient consideration for how these are mapped to phenomena and their underlying mechanics or structures.

There is a difference between (i) holding an ideal and (ii) arguing that only the ideal matters. The former serves as a guide to your thinking, such as the perfect version of something showing you the way for what may be a good status or the subsequent betterment of it. Whereas the latter is an attitude that will force you into submission once you apply it consistently to every aspect of your life.

I am starting to question the motivation for writing this, for I now question whether there are any “true nihilists” out there, in the absolute sense of “true” and “nihilist”. They must have all starved to death, successfully rejecting the absurdity of one “essentially” meaningless meal after another. While none of them formulated any argument about anything, including their nihilism, for that too would be in vein according to their thinking.

Since I already indulged in sarcasm, here is the practically minded sceptic’s guide to opting for a school of thought in philosophy: if you cannot live in accordance with your teachings, then maybe you need to find some other field of endeavour, preferably one that does not involve armchairs.

What do you think about the claim that everything humans do is in vein because in the grand scheme of things we are just a random event in the universe?

My answer follows right below.

I think the observation that the human presence is a minor factor in the grand scheme of things is undeniable. We are but a single species on a small planet that contains millions of other life forms (possibly much more). For there to be a human presence, there is a complex web of relations between systems in our immediate environment that influences, frames, determines, enables our life. The human body itself is an incredibly elaborate network of systems with subsystems inside of them. There are local and emergent phenomena therein, governed by rules that are peculiar to each subsystem or the stratum of emergence respectively (i.e. between subsystems, giving rise to a certain supersystem as seen from their side).

Now think how insignificant the role of human beings are, in terms of their overall impact, when it is clear that a few tweaks to the orbit of the moon can have devastating effects on our life, or how a rather small increase in average temperature levels can annihilate us (and other life forms on planet Earth).

Extend that to the fact that our sun is but a single star in a galaxy that contains billions of them with an order of magnitude of more planets, asteroids, and the like. That is billions, thousands of millions, thousands upon thousands of thousands! And if that boggles the mind, it only gets greater from there! Our galaxy is but one in a multitude and so on. This scales to a level that could, in the realm of possibility, form supersystems that are emergent from those factors we currently are aware of. How incredible would it be if all known galaxies are the equivalent of a molecule in the human body? Are we in a position to know, with certainty, that the orders of emergence I already alluded to end at the specimen called “human” and that there can be no other supersystem from then on?

This is rampant speculation from my side which, nonetheless, remains a logical extension of observations we are most certain of. It would seem weird if the stratification of systems from the level of the atoms, to the molecules, to the organs, to the specimen “human”, somehow stops there. What is the mechanism that would determine such a termination of emergent realities? The truth is that we do not know; we do not know anything of the sort, at least not for the time being. We can theorise and hypothesise and develop new research programmes from there. All good, if done in a spirit of dialectic.

Now on to the argument that follows the realisation of this practically infinite cobweb of systems, of which we are but a tiny fragment: the claim that our relative weight as a factor in the universe is negligible and, therefore, we do not matter. I believe it is easy to fathom all this complexity and reach a nihilist conclusion. You might think to yourself: Why am I even typing this? My life is in vein. Our collective experience amounts to nothing when compared to the vastness out there; even the vastness of this planet alone.

It is easy to belittle yourself and humankind in general. Just as it is easy to commit a certain fallacy that disregards what I call the “mode of application”. Every thought we make, every observation, is a pattern that is applicable to a certain system that we have conceived; to a stratum of application. In that we can understand relations between factors and reason about causality and the like. Whatever we make out of it is probably false once we try to change the scope but keep the conclusions constant.

To be more concrete: we can understand human emotions at the level of interpersonal relations, but our findings do not make sense once we shift from that level to, say, the microbiology of the human body.

I think it would constitute a reductionist fallacy to suggest that human relations are meaningless because an emotion is just a chain of chemical reactions that are parsed by the mind in such a way as to deliver the impression in our conscious state that something is currently being felt.

While it might be true that underlying our intersubjective experience are subsystems that operate differently than we do, it still is the case that at our level of emergence, what matters is the phenomena that are specific to it, not their underpinnings. Those matter as well. It just is about the scope of application; the stratum at which the [emergent] phenomena occur.

Consequently, I am of the view that the infinity of the universe is irrelevant when thinking about human affairs. It is what it is. If there are higher forms of being that emerge from the stratum of application we operate in, then whatever consideration of it needs to also be couched in terms of that stratum. To conflate or altogether disregard such stratification is a failure to apply the mode of application that is necessary for proper reasoning of phenomena and their interplay.

This brings us to the salient point of meaninglessness. Here I hold the same view as with all other matters where there exists no definitive answer. I am agnostic. It would be arbitrary, indeed hubris, to argue that our life is entirely meaningless (also see my latest book On Hubris). This would constitute an error, a subtle one indeed, where we would claim to know more than we actually do. Think again about the complexity of the universe. We barely know anything about it, so how can we possibly be certain that there is no meaning of some sort.

Similarly, I cannot side with teleological views on the matter. Those that would posit that the human kind is a clear indication of the universe having some sort of purpose and that the specimen “human” is a clear step in a long process that must be leading somewhere. Again, I remain aporetic. We can speculate all we want, provided we recognise as much. But the truth is that we do not know. I would not exclude the possibility of knowing, nor would I oppose any research in that direction. I just withhold ultimate judgement for this and indeed for every other subject that remains open to investigation (which is “practically a lot”).

In the face of such uncertainty we can only be sure about the pretences of those who not only side with a certain general view of things, but also have the temerity to postulate all sorts of detailed explanations about practically every individual aspect of the topic at hand; and to know with precision what happened before and what will follow afterwards. If it is clear that the issue remains unsettled, it follows that all putative certainties about it are false. Again, I reiterate my agnosticism and clarify that the argument in favour of scepticism—the “we do not know”—is not dogmatic. We might know. But not just yet. Not in our current state. Not with the available data or research programmes.

To remain sceptical is about honesty. You recognise your limits. You do not commit hubris. It should, however, be noted that agnosticism does not mean that all views are the same: those who are absolutely certain despite the evidence to the contrary are clearly forwarding an agenda. They are not interested in genuine research that seeks to approximate the truth. Their task is to peddle some narrative or even force it upon us.

In conclusion, we must remain calm. Do what is in your nature and do not worry about some ultimate meaning in your life, that of humanity, the solar system, the Milky Way, etc. Are you reading this? Do you experience something different than prior to reading it? It does not matter whether there is an infinitely complex chain of dependencies for you to feel something other than nothing. What matters for you is that you operate in this world and respond to feedback loops. Whether this is because of some ultimate meaning in the stars or just sheer luck is secondary to the fact that you live a certain way.

If we ever get a definitive answer on this topic, we can reconsider our stance. We are not “team sceptic”, for being dogmatically in favour of a given view is not scepticism at all.

1. Scope and purpose of this book
2. Dogmatism
3. Scientism
4. Anthropocentrism and individualism
5. Impossible morality

Scope and purpose of this book

With this publication I want to provide insight into some of the main assumptions that underpin much of humanity’s thinking about its place in the world. This unfolds as a critique of the patterns of behaviour or underlying value systems that are made manifest in modern society’s quotidian life.

While I generalise about humanity at-large, I understand that my inquiry’s point of reference is the Western society. My working hypothesis is that despite differences between cultures, Western lifestyle and the concomitant world-view have become the norm across the planet, at least insofar as the topics of this book are concerned.

Despite this prior belief, I do not maintain a strong opinion about it: there may indeed be cultures whose midpoint differs fundamentally from that of the typical Western society. As such, I trust the reader to recognise any discernible differences of principle and exercise judgement on where exactly my arguments may apply and to what degree. Furthermore, I expect them to press on with their research programme to critically assess whether the use of the very concept of hubris, as documented herein, can be interesting and fecund when referring to those circumstances.

The book is limited in scope, in that it only covers the general themes of the topic at hand. This is not a comprehensive diatribe on every instance of hubris in the human lifeworld. The task of philosophy is to make observations about the abstract structure of phenomena and to provide a vector into further scientific endeavours. It falls upon the practical student to recognise the relevant patterns in the constitution of each case that lies before them.

With regard to the concept of “hubris”, it is pertinent to offer some background information. Here is Merriam-Webster’s dictionary entry:

hubris noun

\ ˈhyü-brəs \

:exaggerated pride or self-confidence

Hubris Comes From Ancient Greece

English picked up both the concept of hubris and the term for that particular brand of cockiness from the ancient Greeks, who considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods. In classical Greek tragedy, hubris was often a fatal shortcoming that brought about the fall of the tragic hero. Typically, overconfidence led the hero to attempt to overstep the boundaries of human limitations and assume a godlike status, and the gods inevitably humbled the offender with a sharp reminder of his or her mortality.

The background information offers greater insight than the actual definition in that it defines said cockiness in terms of one’s inability to recognise their limits and those of their nature. It is this particular quality that interests us the most, with the understanding that it can be detached from the religious underpinnings of Greek polytheism.

Our approach is not limited to individuals and their behaviour. Hubris applies to collective actions as well as systems of thinking that span generations. One’s emotions or disposition need not be involved directly.

As such, the book tackles ideologies that fall squarely within the definition of hubris furnished above. The subsequent chapters can for the most part be read as standalone entries on the topic, though it is best to read them in their established sequence.

The canonical web page of On Hubris, by Protesilaos Stavrou, is https://protesilaos.com/hubris, while it is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 4.0 International.

For questions, comments, observations, refer to the contact page.

Dogmatism

Dogmatism consists in the attitude to present one’s opinion as the universal, undisputed source of truth on the matter. It is the act of touting an actually subjective interpretation of events as an inherently objective constant.

While it is possible for a dogma to be based exclusively on one’s peculiar beliefs and be expressed as a personal opinion, the most persistent and apparent dogmas justify themselves by alluding to an external source, a perceived authority: the person merely echoes the authority. This may be an historical figure whose work has been sanctified or exalted to the status of legend. It might be a document or corpus of texts that makes claims which are believed to be true because of centuries of tradition, perhaps combined with references to these persons of lore. Or it might just be the prevailing consensus about a set of principles, which itself might trace its origin, in one way or another to some other such tutelary figure.

Sanctification or the elevation to authority is, in this regard, the withdrawal of an item from the domain of the disputable. It is the act of agreeing to render something truthful in itself—and to fight anyone who dares voice an opinion to the contrary.

The function of the authoritative source is that of validating in advance everything that may be based on it. It delineates the boundaries of its derivatives, while they inherit its putative quality of prior truthfulness by logical necessity. If p is necessarily true and q follows from p, then q is also true.

While such reasoning may be internally consistent, it is its framing that is suspect. It posits p as a constant and then proceeds to develop its postulates from there on. There is no sense of doubt that the original proposition is true or anyhow subject to review. More importantly, it does not envisage an objective, verifiable methodology for scrutinising p in an effort to assess its truthfulness without having to succumb to oppression. As such, the original proposition, or set thereof, is treated as a constant in advance of any and all research programmes.

The dogmatist does not listen, else they would admit that their prior truth may not constitute a cogent argument. All they can do is preach. What grants plausibility to their message is the power of numbers: the higher the count of followers, the greater the confirmation of their shared biases. This goes along the lines of “see, everyone says so and agrees with me in such and such”. Faith is required, in the sense that some claim is believed to be valid despite insufficient supporting evidence; where “evidence” is independently verifiable.

Subjectivist claims cannot ever form a reliable basis for grounding a statement, unless they may somehow be generalised into an objective phenomenon that does not involve brainwashing. The idea that one may go through an experience out of sheer belief in it cannot, in itself, ever make for conclusive evidence. Similarly, to talk about private ‘facts’ that are supposed to be ineffable involves the contradiction of describing the indescribable or, rather, claiming something to be beyond reasoning, thinking, speaking, in an attempt to elevate it to some authoritative source.

Taking offence is also a form of dogmatic behaviour. It is a way of killing the debate, of turning the argument from a matter of principles to a squabble. If a statement is objectively verifiable, then the person making it does not need to ever resort to using peer pressure and sheer violence to provide credence to it. Those who need to employ such techniques are there to enforce a belief, not forward the cause of genuine research. They do not listen to anything that does not confirm their bias.

For example, in politics this behaviour is the single most important difference between democracy and its decadent variant of ochlocracy (democracy should not be confused with the de facto oligarchy of the present world). The former is meant to cherish pluralism and to offer a secure public space for voicing opinions. It is tacitly understood that those involved in the democratic process are making arguments that are based on incomplete information and may, therefore, be proven wrong at some later point. The member of the body politic is thus allowed to review their position. They are not expected to show unflinching devotion to an ideology or party line, despite compelling evidence against it. Hence the capacity for collective self-institution, else autonomy, that can, for instance, be expressed in the rewrite of a law. Whereas ochlocracy, the rule of the mob, uses the power of numbers to impose some pseudo-morality that is shared by those engaging in the act of bullying a public target. The specious “right to be offended” or “right to feel betrayed” is key in the process of cancelling a debate, attacking a person, and not offering a chance to other takes on the matter.

Not listening implies an inability to engage in honest research in pursuit of revealing the mechanics of the topic in question. There is no scope for dialectic, as the underlying principles are incompatible. The dogmatist sees every argument as a challenge to fight. Their approach is polemical, indeed eristic. Whereas the dialectician uses argumentation as a means of cancelling out all falsehoods held by the sides involved. To put it crudely, dialectic is a way of (a) conducting research and (b) doing ‘group therapy’; therapy from the pernicious effects of invalid beliefs and the passions they engender.

Dialectic may not necessarily surface the truth, but it will at least shed light on inconsistencies, while stressing the need for further research. Without pretences, the dialectician approaches an argument with the anticipation of being proven wrong: it is understood that the process of revealing one’s false beliefs will help them escape from their control.

Dialectic is the method by which all sides to the argument share the common objective of collaboratively finding or approximating the truth of the subject at hand. What unites them is the honesty and humility to recognise the flaws in their views and to admit that the antithesis to them is indeed more cogent, should that be the case.

Parrhesia, the honest and unencumbered expression of one’s thoughts, is the dialectician’s greatest virtue. Whereas the dogmatist relies on hypocrisy, in that they are not willing to recognise any fault in their established views and would go to great length to achieve that goal.

Dialectic does not always resolve in a synthesis that represents the truth. It might merely have the cathartic effect of eliminating all spurious beliefs that were exposed through its workings. This also stands as an approximation of the truth, in the sense of better appreciating one’s limits—distancing oneself from hubris.

There is no persuasion involved, at least not in the sense of fighting for either side’s case as an end in itself. The dialectician does not treat the argument as a contest where the winner takes it all. The usual connotations of the win-lose binary do not apply in this context. ‘Losing’ an argument while engaging in dialectic, in the sense of being proven wrong or at least being forced to reconsider the initial thesis is, in fact, a form of ‘winning’: the emancipation from falsehood.

Whereas the dogmatist sees every argument that affects their dogma as a zero-sum game. Every deviation as a threat to their position. They cannot engage in dialectic because they do not even recognise the possibility of them being wrong—their beliefs are treated as true in advance.

Here the hubris is discernible in human’s self-deception: to think that they have discovered the single, undisputed truth that overrides all other views; and to consequently err on the side of presumption. The dogmatist presses their views without caution or hesitation. The belief in the prior validity of their claims makes them reckless.

Recklessness of this sort can have devastating effects. For it engenders a self-righteous expansionist tendency: to spread ‘the truth’ no matter the cost and, in the process, to eliminate or marginalise every dissenting voice. This leads to practices of proselytism, homogenisation, monoculture, where any future divergence from the dogma is combatted with extreme prejudice. Recklessness in research methods begets fanaticism.

Once dogma embeds itself in the human collective’s system of values it has the potential for every possible destructive mania, depending on its scope, ranging from war abroad to segregation at home, the erosion of ecosystems and the extinction of wildlife, vast disparities in the distribution of wealth and resources among members of a society, and so on.

There are, however, more subtle expressions of dogmatism. For while it is common for a dogma to be discernible in controversial issues, where one or more sides to the argument is engaging for the sole purpose of defending their prior belief and of opposing all others, there are cases where a dogma is concealed in—or manifests as—a consensus that is built on the internalisation of a universalised subjectivity; what some might call “conventional wisdom”.

The specifics may vary. What underlies them all is a spurious theory, or collection thereof, that masquerades as a universal constant. The dogmatism of conventional wisdom can be just as pernicious as its less pretentious sibling. It offers the impression of certainty that is supposed to be derived from independently verifiable means, but is, in fact, largely dependent on accompaniments to the main corpus of argumentation that are not strictly confined to research methodology, such as social influence, peer pressure, and economic factors.

Scientism

Perhaps the most cunning enemy of free thinking is arrogance. To boast about one’s intellectual prowess and to assume that the instruments of one’s programme are immune to criticism. Even a seemingly sceptical enterprise, one that prides itself on cautiousness and hesitation to jump to early conclusions, can fall victim of this peculiar brand of hubris. It is how scientism can derive from genuine science.

Scientism is the ideology that treats science as necessarily truthful and proceeds to formulate every argument in the image of scientific inquiry. The result is not science, but dogma that consists in the internalisation of some subjectivity or unverifiable claim, while appearing to be the product of rigorous, objectively testable research.

It is how a scientist can make far-reaching speculations about things that do not conform with the standards of their own methodology. This is the scientist who uses their social status qua scientist to forward an agenda in the political domain, to pursue some other end, or just satisfy their vanity.

The fault does not fall squarely on the scientist who overreaches. Everyone is fallible, even those who can reveal a certain truth in a given area of research. Rather the root of the misunderstanding of the scientific enterprise is to be found in a certain metanarrative: science is believed to yield only the truth, while the misunderstanding is that it yields only the ultimate truth.

The distinction between intermediate and ultimate objectivity is in order. The former is aware of the limits or possible shortcomings of the methodology that delivers its results. Whereas the latter has blind faith in the universal application of their method.

Intermediate objectivity is what we normally understand as objective by applying the most refined research techniques we have at our disposal. We understand that these techniques have a certain history to them. That they reached their present state by evolving from their more primitive and error-prone approaches. In this realisation lies implicit the recognition that our means may also be subject to further refinements at some future point. The researcher of the future might just as well consider our state-of-the-art to be primitive by comparison.

As such, it is important to append to every scientific finding a disclaimer to the effect that it couches the results in terms of the distinction between intermediate and ultimate objectivity. Some statement along the lines of “to the best of our knowledge”. This is honest and inherently dialectical. Its objective is the approximation of the truth, not the validation of some school of thought in the spirit of “us versus them”.

In contradistinction, the scientist who posits their findings as the delineation of ultimate objectivity does not recognise the historicity of thought and research methods in general. They believe that what we have now is not only the best we have ever had, but the best there can ever be. It is speculation about the future, namely that no other human will ever find some fault in the current body of work and, as such, turns into a dogma by internalising said subjectivity and elevating it to the status of the universal, single source of truth.

This arrogance expresses a bias towards the historical aspects of science. It is assumed that the present state of science already incorporates all the positives of previous eras and has successfully discarded all the illusory ones. Against this backdrop, it becomes impossible to recognise the discrepancies that arise from non-scientific factors that affect scientists such as the distribution of power among them; power that derives from access to funding, social standing and prestige, and the like. In other words, arrogance of this sort promotes an orthodoxy, even if tacitly or unwillingly.

An orthodoxy is the prevalence of a mainstream over alternatives; of one subjectivity over all the rest; of monologue over dialogue. The presence of subjective evaluations is not suspect per se. It actually is an intermediate state of dialectic where multiple theses are collaboratively pitted against each other in an attempt to arrive at some more cogent synthesis. The synthesised statement, or the conclusion that the original theses are to be discarded, is neither the definitive truth nor an objective assessment of the state of affairs. It might be one, but not solely by virtue of being the product of joint investigation between people with originally diverging opinions. Otherwise dialectic would be a one-off event that would then spawn dogmatism.

Dialectic is a process and a mode of thinking.

The scientist who thinks that the mainstream is inherently correct in its every aspect, by means of having incorporated all the positives of previous eras, is already oblivious to heretodox beliefs of yore. The future scientist who blithely commits to the orthodoxy will repeat this error by disregarding the alternative views of the present.

To equate the orthodoxy with the peak of research is to discriminate against all other interpretations. Without understanding the history of ideas and the politics that ramify to every aspect of the scientific enterprise—indeed the industry of science, in the common economic sense—one can only claim to know more than they actually do. Hubris that calcifies as the dogma of scientism.

Such are the trappings of a metanarrative, in this case the set of claims that science is always true and that what scientists know right now is all that can be known. The metanarrative functions as an authority. A body of work that typically consists of one or more unverifiable claims that are not meant to be discussed in themselves, since they are believed to be truthful or self-evident in prior.

It thus is to no one’s surprise that scientists all too often present themselves as the equivalent of secular theologians. They claim to know everything, as ‘science’ has an answer to it. The nuances are lost. No reference is ever made to the fact that some findings are not the same as an ultimate truth, or that some evidence might have been omitted in advanced due to the power of conventional wisdom or mere ignorance and oversight.

The worst of the bunch are those who interweave their political ideology with scientific jargon to offer the impression of science, i.e. to draw from the aforementioned metanarrative. It is those who will assiduously mask their bias in carefully selected statistics and the usual geometric portrayals of simplistic ideas that scream ‘science’ to the inattentive audience. Scientism is about the looks, the formalities, and so every absurdity has the chance to appear as the distillation of objective wisdom, provided its proponents are scrupulous or ignorant and gullible enough.

Then there is the other sort of scienticism, one that is seemingly innocuous. It is the insistence that technical fields of endeavour, such as science and technology are not political at all. This is the reductionist narrative by which there exist clear delineations between a person’s agency as a scientist, technologist, etc. and that of their agency as a human being in a political whole that is subject to social and economic phenomena.

To claim that science is not political because scientists only care about their specific area of inquiry is to conveniently disregard the forces at play that allow the given scientists to focus on that particular topic. Put differently, it makes the baseless assumption that whatever happens inside of science, or any technical field for that matter, is in no way determined by exogenous factors or by prejudices that prevail inside of it.

For as long as there is an orthodoxy, any allusion to prior neutrality is supportive of the establishment, even if inadvertently so. It is an extension of scientism.

This is not as naive as the argument that everything humans do is political because they are political animals or whatnot. It rather is the more nuanced proposition that a consensus, the impression of objectivity, may be the result of an internalised subjectivity. The process by which an opinion is elevated to the status of conventional wisdom can involve means that are exterior, in the narrow sense, to the field of endeavour, such as social influence, economic power, the presence of big egos, and the simple possibility that researchers are wedded to their own projects (for any or all of the preceding reasons).

To pretend that there are no politics involved in the distribution of funding, the attribution of titles of prestige and the like, is to suggest that the status quo is inherently truthful and fair, without sufficient supporting evidence. It is to assume that money and power are not serving any kind of agenda and that those making the relevant judgement calls are necessarily unbiased and have access to perfect information in order to consistently serve the objective interests of science.

Technical fields of endeavour exist in a broader political whole. To insist that they are merely technical, once accounting for the factors that contribute to their internal affairs is a reductionist fallacy. Again an instance of hubris where humans pretend to be humble and dispassionate—“we are just doing a job”—while being anything but.

Anthropocentrism and individualism

The attachment of ontological importance to oneself is a sign of overcoming one’s real boundaries. Two closely-related ideologies conform with this pattern: anthropocentrism and individualism. They have a common midpoint but differ in their scope of application. Their core claim is that the human self, the collective or individual self respectively, has a somewhat special place in the world due to some innate properties that are unique to it.

The self is not perceived as yet another factor in the multitude of {sub-,super-}systems that compromise all that is, the cosmos. It rather is treated as an exception, as having a special telos in the grand scheme of things, or as possessing a unique ability that renders it immune to the evolving spectra of causal possibilities that inform each discernible pattern in the world: and that special power is free will.

The tenet of the freedom of volition basically stipulates that humans, individually and collectively, are the masters of their own being. They are allowed to make choices and to forge their destiny out of them. There are differences of degree, depending on the specific theory at hand. Yet the fundamental assumption is that the self operates independently of its environment. This is the figment of the decontextualised human, a being as such.

Decontextualisation means that one’s volition remains unencumbered by any and all other forces that operate in both the supersystems in which a human is immersed in—their environment—as well as the subsystems that, in their joint operation, comprise the emergent life form, else system of systems, called “human”. Free will is touted as a mystical quality that defies all those mechanisms. As it is commonly claimed by those who believe in the myth of the ‘rugged individual’, you can aim for something, whatever that may be, and “just do it”.

We can attempt to dismiss the absurdity of this approach by considering one’s genetics. You cannot be an elite athlete if you were not born with the requisite physical qualities and the built-in drive or dedication that is peculiar to the mindset of a champion. You may not become a competent accountant if your character, and the way your mind works, is singularly inclined to forms of artistic expression. And so on.

While they have their merits, arguments along those lines would miss the point, for you can always try to do whatever you want. That is the impression we get from our own experience in the world. It is inherent to our consciousness.

Which leads to a pair of interlinked questions:

1. Is the self a singular entity that is controlled centrally?
2. Does such control extend to the entirety of the self?

We can agree that the idea we have is that there is a clear chain of causation from a decision to act to the eventual realisation of the action. Forethought and planning of every detail may be involved. As such, it appears that there is indeed an authority that controls this conscious entity we identify as our self. We may call it “mind” or “soul”. Whatever label we choose, the core tenet is that it exercises full control over our being. Hence the belief in human’s free will.

While it would be hard to argue against the very notion of choosing among possible outcomes, it remains to be seen whether this kind of power extends to every aspect of our being or to parts of it. Can the central command instruct a molecule to behave in a manner that is not already determined by its nature, its own means? To use a crude example, can this exalted “mind” or “soul” tell the liver to operate as an extra lung?

The conscious, else logical, self does not have sovereignty over the entirety of its ontic presence. What we understand as a human being—an entity as such—is, in fact, a supersystem that consists of subsystems, which themselves interact in various ways and are ordered in strata that delimit their scope and the precise local rules they are subject to. The “mind” or “soul” does not control the molecule, while the latter has a relatively minor impact on its immediate milieu, let alone the strata that are emergent from its stratum. Whatever happens to the body is the result of chains of reactions where multiple factors are involved. Each of them has its own discreteness, yet they are all very much interlinked, for there is no subsystem without the environment that nourishes, empowers, or renders it possible.

If the control centre’s sovereignty does not extend to every aspect of one’s being, it might then be the case that it is not sovereign at all, or that its power is constrained by powers counter to it and outside its purview. It is not the locus of this superpower called “free will”. Rather it operates as yet another specialised subsystem within its broader whole, whose presence is very much contingent on the supersystem that envelops it, the other systems it interacts with at the same order of stratification as well as the subsystems that comprise each stratum.

Phenomena that are inherent to a system as such are emergent, in the sense that they are the outcome of the joint operation of the factors that constitute the case. The phenomenon in question cannot be identified in each and every factor when examined in isolation—it can only be revealed through their interplay at the system-wide level.

What follows is that whatever presence exists at the stratum at which the emergent phenomenon is made manifest cannot directly alter its microfoundations, for that would be tantamount to altering itself from the top by somehow detaching from the subsystems that comprise it. To put it in human terms, the brain cannot modify the makeup of the molecules it consists of because in the process it would inevitably be modifying “itself”, thus it would not be able to remain constant. For it to be unaffected while such a change is underway, it would have to sever its ties from its very constitution, be a non-molecular brain, at least for some intermediate phase, and then attach back to the molecular stratum, becoming corporeal again.

The counter argument may then be that the locus of free will is a different entity altogether that is somehow linked to the body but is not influenced by it. What might be the nature of such a link? And what it means to have a link without any kind of feedback loop? How does one come to know about it and verify their findings in a manner that is objective and reproducible?

This is where scepticism must comes to the fore. We can speculate at length about this exalted “mind” or “soul” as a fundamentally other presence even though we have no objective means of ever verifying those claims and despite the evidence we already have on the limits of “free will” to control every aspect of our being, our agency. Or we might just be honest and admit our limits: we cannot ground such views in anything but dogma.

The impression of free will as an overarching capacity of complete self-sovereignty is mostly, though perhaps not entirely, misleading. There is likely some discretion involved, a faculty that can dynamically evaluate information and make choices, but it is framed, influenced, conditioned by forces beyond its control; forces that trace their source to the very body that is supposed to be just a vessel.

Couched in terms of systems, such faculty is but a subsystem that interfaces with other such systems at the same stratum of emergence. It can, thus, have an effect on them. However a factor of a case cannot control other factors at another field of application, as was already discussed about a system that cannot modify its microfoundations without also somehow altering its own presence. And the same for the macroscopic phenomena that unfold at strata that are higher than it.

Factoring in the supersystem that encompasses humanity, itself a system of systems, would only further contribute to the sceptic stance we must hold towards the traditions that are fastened upon the construct of the decontextualised human.

Free will scepticism can only inform further questioning of the derivative ideologies, anthropocentrism and individualism in our case. For if human has no special powers of the sort here considered, then it follows that every belief that hinges on that assumption is false a priori. The human person, humanity at-large, is but a factor of a system that extends far beyond the power of the “mind” or “soul” we have considered thus far.

Anthropocentrism’s hubris consists in the arbitrary value that humans attach to their own kind and to the concomitant devaluation they make of everything non-human. Furthermore, it lies in the baseless claim that human is an entity as such rather than a system of systems, with all the relevant mechanics that were mentioned above.

Individualism shares the same principles, only its tenets apply to relations between humans. Here the hubris extends to the falsehood that there exists an individual as such; an individual that can stand without their cultural, social, natural surroundings; a decontextualised human. Who has ever witnessed such a specimen? A being that can bend the world to their will by just putting their mind to it.

Besides, the idea of a decontextualised human fails to recognise phenomena that are inherently intersubjective, like language. An individual in abstract cannot have a private language, as the notion of a code of communication becomes meaningless. A being in isolation does not communicate. Same case for private ethics where a singular person cannot possibly implement any set of rules that regulate intersubjective relations, for there are none.

The thinking of free will as an absolute has far-reaching consequences in the way humans see themselves vis-à-vis each other and with respect to the rest of their immediate ecosystem. In particular, it informs the binary of reward and punishment. If the freedom of volition is absolute, then everything that defines your state of living is necessarily of your own doing, because it is claimed that you have the freedom to “just do something” about it. If, however, free will is nothing of the sort, then such set of values is baseless, indeed odious.

The hubris of both anthropocentrism and individualism is harmful for humanity and all the species affected by its deeds. Because of anthropocentrism, the rest of the planet is seen as a mere resource waiting to be exploited, rather than the complex cobweb of life it actually is and which, inter alia, enables the subsistence of humans. A code of morality derives therefrom to the effect that the self is allowed to justifiably pursue ends that no other life form has a right to.

On the political front, individualism underpins systems of organisation or governance that favour some groups at the expense of others. Such inequality reflects the binary of security and precarity that extends the simplistic values about reward and punishment. The entirely baseless narrative is that it is not corruption that allows some groups to exist in a symbiotic relationship with the state apparatus, to enjoy disproportionate benefits and to use their power against others. The thinking goes that your precarity is of your own doing, of your sheer “laziness” or “unwillingness” to also become a billionaire or a tyrant and to set up a state-sanctioned oligopoly. You can “just do it” but you choose not to, so you must live with the consequences.

Such hubris!

Once we align our expectations with reality, once we critically assess the belief in free will, we will come to the realisation that baseless claims can have deleterious consequences. In doing so, we will have to let go of our egoism, of the disproportionate value we attach to ourselves. We will then recognise our role for what it is: a part of the greater whole, a mere factor in a universal system of interconnectedness. Our life is not more important than the life of every other being.

This is neither good nor bad. Evaluations concern mind-dependent products, such as institutions or habits or the cost of a good in terms of money. These items are a function of the human experience, of human convention: they are chrēmata (of use by humans), not pragmata (of objective presence).

Chrēmatic concepts, such as good versus bad, do not apply to a description of an objective state of affairs. Reality just is.

Impossible morality

It is not uncommon for humans to develop notions of superiority towards other life forms or even among themselves by alluding to some lofty moral standard. To think that they are more important than all the rest. Anthropocentrism and individualism are just two types of such arrogance, but there can be other ones as well, including those that seem innocuous at first sight.

Take the concept of universal love as a case in point. It is said that humans have the capacity to love their enemies and, by extension, the best humans do so. Indiscriminate love is considered the epitome of moral agency, the greatest height one can achieve in their path to enlightenment, spiritual ascendance, or whatnot.

Just as with the notion of free will, universal love is employed as a tacit supremacist theory against all other life forms. Humans think of themselves as having something special that no other being exhibits. They must therefore be destined for some greater cause, their telos cannot possibly be the same as that of a rodent, an insect, a plant. Such is the rationalisation, the meta-narrative that underpins the exhortations of those who believe in the uniqueness of the human kind.

While it is true that love can empower humans to do certain things, it is not the only emotion they have, not the sole motivator and, more importantly, it is not superior to other emotions or other functions in general. To treat it as such is to introduce an arbitrary hierarchy, while disregarding the supersystem in which the human species developed all of its characteristics.

Arbitrariness on matters that are beyond human’s control, in that they are not part of our nature because of our own planning, is a sign of exceeding our limits. To develop rationalisations therefrom is a case of compounding the problem.

In your little world you may think you are important. But this self-evaluation does not correspond to reality. In the grand scheme of things, you are not any more significant than the worm, the grass, the mycelial networks in the soil you walk on.

The lion does not express love towards its enemy the jailer. It instead is fully prepared to exterminate the threat once the opportunity arises. If we look at the animals that are closest to the human species, we see similar patterns of behaviour. Wolves are territorial and engage in the equivalent of warfare for gaining access to resources.

Humans are pack animals that behave in strikingly similar ways. Yet some will insist that we are at our best when we are not aligned with our nature. To think, for instance, you are a decontextualised human while you were raised in a social milieu and exist in the ecosystem of this planet.

Individualism once combined with the idea of universal love can only create the perfect submissive being. It does not matter how dystopian the world around you. Just focus on your self and love your tyrants. The establishment would be elated if you were docile and numb in the face of oppression. In such cases, hatred and the eagerness to resort to violence is a great asset for the enslaved.

If a lion could be brainwashed the same way, then it would very likely adore its jailer. If wolves could somehow believe that the opposite of their nature is what they should strive for, they would all happily starve to death instead of fighting for resources.

A broad generalisation of life may be that life forms that cannot or are not willing to impose themselves are eventually replaced by those that can and do.

Pseudo-morality is only plausible in the safety of an establishment that is not actually defined by it, formalities and virtue signalling to the contrary notwithstanding. Absurd conclusions follow when we are made to think that morality can be implemented in a vacuum and that it has no connection whatsoever to politics.

Inter-personal relations involve politics either directly or indirectly. The human experience does not unfold in nothing, but always in circumstances that have certain factors whose value is human in origin, chrēmatic as per the previous chapter about anthropocentrism and individualism.

By “politics” we do not refer to the much-maligned signification of “bickering in the workplace” or the name-calling that is common in partisan controversies. We are interested in the process by which humans assign value to sets of beliefs, institute them as pillars of their collective life, and assign to them the role of the benchmark against which every relevant action or event is to be judged. For instance, property rights are sometimes claimed to have a sanctity about them. This is not an objective reality but a human convention. An instituted state of affairs.

Morality involves an agent and a patient of a certain action. It examines emergent phenomena, in that they do not exist absent the action. Action does not occur in a vacuum. The factors of the case need to be accounted for. The emergent phenomenon is, therefore, revealed by the action while being a function of all contributing factors to the case.

In abstract, action has immediate and potential consequences in certain circumstances. Private ethics, such as those that would be held by a decontextualised human, is immaterial. Action entails context in which the agent is present and involves an immediate or potential patient. It is intersubjective.

In matters of morality, the concept of intersubjectivity does not carry the same connotations as “interpersonal”, in the sense of denoting human beings. It rather refers more broadly to the subjects of the emergent phenomenon, the agent and the patient of the action. These can be persons, but not always. This is why a moral agent can be impersonal, such as when assessing society’s collective behaviour towards other species, or how the cumulative effect of the decisions of one generation frames, determines, preempts the choices of the next one.

To fully appreciate an action we must account for the constitution of the case, in order to understand the interplay of all contributing factors. Moral judgements that are derived from such a holistic method must thus go well beyond the study of the behavioural patterns or outcomes thereof of an individual. Else we remain trapped in the hubris of an impossible morality.

As noted in Prolegomena to a Study of Metaethics (2017-08-11):

Metaethics can bring attention to hitherto understudied or altogether ignored and presumed as self-evident issues. From the emergent nature of ethics, to the need for overcoming the chimera of the decontextualised human who exercises absolute free will, to the broadening of moral reasoning beyond the narrow confines of the individual, to the expanded understanding of temporality whereby the outcomes of certain actions may only be truly felt by potential patients, to a point where the binary of reward-punishment gives way to a spectrum of possible states of affairs that are either enabled or disabled in various combinations, and to a new ethics where the role of the contextualised agent is paramount in appreciating both the scale of the action as well as the ramifications of any possible outcomes.

In practice, every comprehensive code of conduct is impossible to ever be implemented in its fullest, over the long term by a diverse group of people, and without the involvement of those already indoctrinated, when it actively dismisses politics. It is as much because it ignores a key aspect of human nature, the instituted organisation of collective experience (politics), while it inevitably perpetuates concepts with no direct correspondence to facts, such as the decontextualised human.

Bad ethics, those that involve some impossibility of this sort, can only lead to bad politics; politics whose underlying values are not aligned with principles that are based on objectively verifiable constants. About two thousand years of experience filled with egregious injustices suggest as much.

The purpose of Prot’s Dots For Debian (PDFD) is to guide you through the process of replicating my custom desktop session on Debian 10 ‘buster’.

I have tried every step in this guide on real hardware, my Lenovo ThinkPad X220. The initial installation was done on Saturday 12 January 2019 using the latest netinstall iso for Debian 9 ‘stretch’ and retried on 2019-04-17 using the same method.

COPYING

All code by Protesilaos Stavrou presented herein is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later.

The non-code parts of this book by Protesilaos Stavrou are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The canonical link to “Prot’s Dots for Debian” is an extension of my website: https://protesilaos.com/pdfd

DISCLAIMERS

The following disclaimers apply to this work.

Excerpt from the GPLv3:

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

And this is from the CC BY-SA 4.0 License:

a. Unless otherwise separately undertaken by the Licensor, to the extent possible, the Licensor offers the Licensed Material as-is and as-available, and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the Licensed Material, whether express, implied, statutory, or other. This includes, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence or absence of errors, whether or not known or discoverable. Where disclaimers of warranties are not allowed in full or in part, this disclaimer may not apply to You. b. To the extent possible, in no event will the Licensor be liable to You on any legal theory (including, without limitation, negligence) or otherwise for any direct, special, indirect, incidental, consequential, punitive, exemplary, or other losses, costs, expenses, or damages arising out of this Public License or use of the Licensed Material, even if the Licensor has been advised of the possibility of such losses, costs, expenses, or damages. Where a limitation of liability is not allowed in full or in part, this limitation may not apply to You. c. The disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability provided above shall be interpreted in a manner that, to the extent possible, most closely approximates an absolute disclaimer and waiver of all liability.

Introduction to Prot’s Dots for Debian

The purpose of this book is to help you reproduce my custom desktop session on Debian 10 ‘Buster’ (the current Debian “stable”). The set of configurations that make up my system shall hereinafter be referred to as “my dotfiles” or other notions that are described in context.

My dotfiles apply to a BSPWM session. That tiling window manager is the core package. Complementing it, are programs that draw a system panel at the top of the viewport, display desktop notifications, set the wallpaper, perform live theme changes to the terminals and graphical applications, and the like. The idea is to have a lightweight yet perfectly functional desktop environment by combining small, specialised tools.

A short description of my custom desktop session:

• Debian because I prefer longer-term predictability over novelty.
• bspwm for fine-grained window management, with my custom scripts for added features.
• tmux to make the terminal power user even more powerful (no plugins).
• vim because I need an efficient text editor (no plugins).
• True minimalism: no complex status lines, no fancy prompts, no decorative elements that add no functionality whatsoever.
• Carefully-defined font configurations to complement my hardware and satisfy my aesthetic preferences.
• Full integration of my Tempus themes for considerate colour contrast and easy live theme switching for the entire session.
• The superb Maté desktop environment as a fallback option and provider of some important programs and system-wide base configurations.

A book, not an install.sh

Some of PDFD’s chapters or sections thereof can, at times, be read as a shell script with extensive inline documentation. While I could have provided a script to automate the installation process, along with some basic guidelines on how to use it, I have opted to use this format instead. It is to ensure that no random user attempts to install something they do not fully understand, both in terms of its content and scope.

A book makes the installation process fully transparent to the user. You can read what I am doing, inspect the relevant files and, if needed, make changes on the spot.

By following the steps in Prot’s Dots For Debian (PDFD), you will develop an intimate understanding of my dotfiles, which will help you further customise the environment to your liking.

This is important and ultimately good for all parties involved, due to the highly personalised nature of dotfile management.

Prepare to adapt things to your liking

Please understand that my dotfiles have been designed with my use case in mind. There are bits and pieces you might find surplus to your requirements or outright unsuitable to your needs. Hopefully this manual will help you identify them at an early stage and address them accordingly.

By sharing my work, I do not purport to be an expert on the matter. I am just a regular user who has spent enough time documenting their practices. If you happen to identify areas in my setup that could be improved or altogether reworked, your contribution shall be taken into consideration.

Not for hipsters

The target audience for this book is the experienced GNU/Linux user who wants to run Debian 10 ‘buster’ as a desktop OS. PDFD may also appeal to existing BSPWM users of other distros who would like to test my custom desktop session in a virtual setup or cherry-pick features for use in their setup. Newbies are welcome as well, provided they are willing to learn and understand who this book is for.

You do not need to be a programmer to follow the instructions in PDFD—I am not one either. Though it is recommended you have at least some knowledge of shell scripting: it is required to make certain adaptations to programs such as the one that controls the system panel.

Why Debian and not some rolling-release distro?

Exactly because I do not need the latest version of every package ever released. I was an Arch Linux user for a good amount of time. While I did learn a lot and consider that distro my second favourite, I did not find any compelling reason to cling on to the rolling-release model for the entire operating system.

Perhaps paradoxically, Debian is exciting because it is predictable. It takes a very conservative stance towards introducing breaking changes. It does not chase new technology trends for innovation’s sake. Debian is reliable. Simple and super effective.

This is precisely what we need for the custom desktop session: a stable OS that we can expect to remain constant for at least another couple of years. Else we are trapped in a state of flux where we need to track every changelog out there in order to keep our custom desktop environment in good working condition.

If I were using a rolling-release distro, I would not be writing this book. Things change all the time and it is impossible to maintain documentation such as this: I do not want this to become some full-time occupation.

Here is a rule that is based on my experience: in an ever-changing OS, the broader the scope of customisations, the greater the chance of experiencing breakage or minor annoyances that require manual interventions.

For someone like myself, who tends to document the various types of functionality that affect my setup, with this book being a prime example, it simply is too much trouble to constantly update everything for whatever marginal benefit there is to be gained from a fresh package version.

Speaking of “fresh”, we should avoid thinking of packages in terms of groceries. That is a pernicious metaphor. Programs remain relevant for as long as they work and receive security fixes (where appropriate). The criterion for evaluating a program is not its recency or the hype around it, but its serviceability. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Programs that fall in that category do not become “stale” just because their last upstream release was a few months or years ago.

Stability means predictability and peace-of-mind. This is the constant against which one may develop habits to meet their computing requirements. Having a stable basis means that you ultimately treat customisations as a means to the end of a more efficient workflow. You do not care about incessant “ricing” per se; constantly tweaking things for the sake of fitting in with the cool kids. You are interested in a custom desktop session that behaves the way you intend. Every customisation, every minute refinement, every careful tweak, serves the purpose of minimising perceived friction, of shortening the distance between your mind and the machine. Nothing more, nothing less.

Installing Debian 10

To get Debian 10 ‘buster’ on our machine, we are going to use one of the netinstall iso images. The official way is to follow the standard method, which includes only free/libre software, or to use the unconventional method which comes preconfigured with the contrib and non-free package repos. The latter is intended for awkward hardware setups that absolutely require certain non-free packages (firmware drivers) to run the installer. Here are the corresponding links:

• Debian 10 netinstall
• Debian 10 netinstall (non-free firmware)

Short note about free software

Debian refers to the second iso as “unofficial”. Do not let that mislead you. It is still provided by the team responsible for the installer images. In this context, “unofficial” means that it does not fully conform with Debian’s Free Software Guidelines.

While understandable, this is a rather unconvincing attempt to maintain the line that Debian only ships with free/libre software. I can, thus, see why the Free Software Foundation or the GNU project¹ do not include Debian in their list of approved distributions that do not sacrifice software freedom for convenience.²

Personally, I use Debian with a single non-free package that is necessary to enable my Wi-Fi card. Otherwise I could not run a free OS at all.

If you start with the unofficial method, you can still opt to run only free software by retroactively removing any “contrib” and “non-free” entries from the APT sources list. System administration of this sort is outside the scope of PDFD. I have, nonetheless, taken care to only recommend libre software in the pages of this book.

Writing the latest release iso

Politics aside, let us proceed with the installation. You need to verify your iso with information provided by Debian (from the pages you get the iso from). Once the checks are done, write the iso to a flash drive. I usually follow these steps after I insert the medium and open a new terminal:

# prints information about devices
sudo fdisk -l

# the flash drive I insterted is usually at /dev/sdb
# unmount the flash drive
umount /dev/sdb

# write to it
sudo dd if=/path/to/iso/file of=/dev/sdb

# eject the flash drive
sudo eject /dev/sdb

Please be extemely careful with the above commands, especially when identifying the flash drive. Pay attention to the output of sudo fdisk -l and make sure you correctly spot the writeable medium you intend to use. Carelessness might result in data loss or other damages.

The installation process

Now on to get Debian on the machine. Insert the flash drive and power on the computer. You are given the choice of a simple graphical or textual interface, as well as advanced options. If in doubt, go with the graphical option. Once the installer starts, you will have to choose your language and keyboard settings, set your root user’s password, create a regular user, and the like.

At some point in the installation process, you will be asked to select your major system components. These include a Desktop Environment, an SSH server, a print server, and a web server. I always keep the first option checked, then using the space key to toggle on/off I add MATE, SSH server, remove the print server, and keep the standard system utilities.

The selection screen looks like this:

[x] Debian desktop environment
[ ] ... GNOME
[ ] ... Xfce
[ ] ... KDE Plasma
[ ] ... Cinnamon
[x] ... MATE
[ ] ... LXDE
[ ] ... LXQt
[ ] web server
[ ] print server
[x] SSH server
[x] standard system utilities

You can omit the SSH server if you have no use for it. Follow the remaining steps and after a while you will have successfully installed Debian on your machine. Congratulations!

Later in the book I explain why you should also choose MATE. For the time being, let us proceed to the next chapter of actually installing the core packages and configuring things accordingly.

Installing the core packages

Boot up your newly-installed Debian 10 ‘buster’. When you reach the display manager screen, enter your user credentials (user name and password). This will put you in a default MATE session (pronounced MA-te, from yerba maté). From here, we will be installing all the packages we need and doing the rest of the preparatory work.

Enable sudo

First things first: we need to grant superuser privileges to your user account. This is necessary in order to use sudo with the various commands, rather than having to switch to the root user.

Open a terminal. For this initial step, you need to switch to the root account.

su -

While being root, make sure you update the package lists. Then install Vim and the package that enables “sudo”.

apt update && apt install vim sudo

Also install these core utilities, which are needed for getting and deploying my dotfiles.

apt install git stow

Once that is done, add your user account to the “sudo” group, replacing USER with your username.

adduser USER sudo

Reboot if you want to use the regular user, or continue as root. For the sake of this manual, I assume you rebooted, logged back in to the default MATE session and are now prepared to run all commands from your regular user but with escalated privileges, prepending “sudo” to all relevant commands.

Getting BSPWM and related core components

We start by installing:

• the window manager (bspwm) as the irreducible factor of my custom desktop session,
• the hotkey daemon (sxhkd) for handling custom key bindings that control BSPWM and other programs,
• the standard terminal emulator xterm,
• the suckless-tools, which provide the simple screen locker (slock) and the dynamic menu (dmenu),
• the program that manages the wallpaper and can display images (feh),
• the display compositor (compton) for smoother transitions and no screen-tearing,
• the notification daemon and concomitant library for sending desktop notifications (dunst and libnotify-bin respectively),
• the system bar (lemonbar) that is used by one of my scripts to draw a bespoke panel on the top of the viewport as well as its dependencies (xdo, acpi),
• and the secrets’ manager (gnome-keyring).

Run this:

sudo apt install bspwm sxhkd xterm suckless-tools feh compton dunst libnotify-bin lemonbar xdo acpi gnome-keyring

Note that slock may be unintuitive at first, because it just turns the screen dark without any further notice. You unlock it by typing in your pass word (confirming with “Return”). The screen will keep switching to a blue colour as you type. I am aware this is not the most user-friendly design, at least not for first time users, but I decided to keep it nonetheless: once you know about it, it works just fine. If you find yourself disliking this tool, consider installing Debian package i3lock: it is a bit more intuitive and configurable (then you need to apply changes to my script poweroptionsmenu—refer to the chapter about my local ~/bin).

To make sure dunst works unencumbered, we better remove MATE’s own notification daemon:

sudo apt remove mate-notification-daemon

For more on this set of packages, see the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM as well as the one about the top panel.

GTK icon theme

Now we get the GTK icon theme. I choose Papirus because it is very well crafted and actively developed.

sudo apt install papirus-icon-theme

Fixed and proportional fonts

We need outline/proportional typefaces for the various UI components and graphical applications, plus a fixed-size (bitmap) typeface for use in the system panel.

The outline fonts are:

sudo apt install fonts-firacode fonts-hack fonts-roboto fonts-dejavu fonts-dejavu-extra fonts-noto-color-emoji fonts-symbola

The bitmap font is Terminus. This is optional, though highly recommended:

sudo apt install xfonts-terminus

The typographic considerations are discussed in the chapter about the fonts and their configs.

Terminal tools

My user session makes heavy use of a terminal multiplexer (tmux), while I occasionally need to use Vim’s external register or graphical application (vim-gtk3).

sudo apt install tmux vim-gtk3

The use of these tools is documented in the chapter about my Tmux and Vim combo. Of relevance is the chapter about the default terminal setup.

General CLI tools

Then we need the RSS/Atom feed reader for the console (newsboat) and a simple utility to capture screenshots (scrot).

sudo apt install newsboat scrot

Are you using a laptop or a screen with built-in brightness controls? You need this:

sudo apt install xbacklight

The music setup

For my music, I choose to use the Music Player Daemon and connect to it with a client program (mpc and/or ncmpcpp). I also want MPD to expose itself to applications that implement the MPRIS protocol (mpdris2 with python-mutagen for album covers), in order to be able to control it through other means than its own clients (playerctl). To this end, I install the following:

sudo apt install mpd mpc ncmpcpp mpdris2 python-mutagen playerctl

Detailed instructions about these are provided in the chapter about the Per-user MPD setup.

Extra packages for convenience and added functionality

I do not want my BSPWM session to be primitive. I just want it to be configurable and catered to my needs, while being light on system resources.

I therefore need a multimedia player that I can launch from the console, which also streams online content (mpv with youtube-dl), a tool that can edit/transform/convert images from the command line (imagemagick), a program to perform file transfers (rsync), a graphical frontend to my password manager (qtpass, which pulls in pass), a frontend for PulseAudio (pavucontrol), a very capable image viewer (sxiv), and a calculator for the console (apcalc—the executable is calc).

sudo apt install mpv youtube-dl imagemagick rsync qtpass pavucontrol sxiv apcalc

Thunderbird setup (optional, but recommended)

In the same spirit, I use Thunderbird as my primary email client (I also use Mutt, which is not covered in this book due to its configuration being highly dependent on the user). Thunderbird is a robust tool that can easily filter spam, handle my CalDAV and CardDAV accounts, and cope with large volumes of email traffic. The following command will get you the email client, plus extensions for GPG encryption (enigmail) and calendaring (lightning).

sudo apt install thunderbird enigmail lightning

While still on the topic of Thunderbird, I also install the following package for handling {Cal,Card}DAV services. I put it here on its own as you might have no need for it, unless your host also uses SOGo.

sudo apt install xul-ext-sogo-connector

For further language support, I also get these (the latter with extension -el is for the Greek language):

sudo apt install hunspell {a,hun}spell-el

Firefox setup (optional, but recommended)

The Extended Support Release of Firefox (firefox-esr) is my web browser of choice. This is shipped by Debian as the default option. Users normally install whatever web extensions they may need via the browser’s own interface. However, I have found that I prefer to let apt handle things. The following packages are sufficient for my use case:

sudo apt install webext-noscript webext-https-everywhere webext-ublock-origin webext-privacy-badger

These extensions are NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger.

To make the browser better suited to my needs, I also disable the Pocket bloatware, from inside Firefox’s interface.

• First type the address about:config and accept the warning message.
• Then search for the entry extensions.pocket.enabled.
• Double click to change it to false.

Then we need to address an age-old bug that affects dark GTK themes where Firefox may display dark text on a dark action element, like a search box.

• Visit about:config.
• Do: left click on some empty space > select New > select String.
• Add this: widget.content.gtk-theme-override.
• Its value should be Adwaita (the default GTK light theme).

Optional packages

Sometimes I need to edit photographs (darktable), record audio (audacity), and use a different web browser (epiphany-browser).

# other packages
sudo apt install audacity darktable epiphany-browser

And here are some other console tools that might come in handy. vrms displays information about non-free software on your system, while neofetch prints details about your machine and distro.

sudo apt install vrms neofetch

I just ran vrms and it tells me that I have 1 non-free package on my ThinkPad X220 out of a total of 1727. ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY! The offending package is firmware-iwlwifi for making Wi-Fi work, else I cannot access the Internet…

Optional: set up Flatpak with Flathub as its remote repo

I think that, when used in moderation and care, Flatpak is a compelling proposition for a stable OS like Debian. Your system will remain rock solid, while the Flatpak’ed applications will use their latest version, while being confined to a sandboxed environment (in the near future a tool like guix may be the superior alternative).

To get started, install the core package:

sudo apt install flatpak

Now add Flathub as a remote package repository. Note that you can have multiple remote repos. This is something that, in my opinion, distros should provide themselves (would much rather trust Debian’s curated list of flatpak packages, but I digress).

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

For the record, Flatpak needs a running settings daemon to known which theme to apply. It is why I use the mate-settings-daemon in my BSPWM session (more on that in the chapter about the basics of BSPWM).

Note that Flathub does not discriminate against non-free software. If you care about freedom, exercise caution. That granted, the only flatpaks I tend to use are libre:

flatpak install org.gnome.Podcasts org.gnome.clocks org.kde.kdenlive

Next steps

We are done installing software. Thanks for your patience! Let us proceed to the next chapter where we actually get the dotfiles and stow them in place.

Stay logged in to the current MATE session for the time being and keep reading.

Set up my dotfiles and base configs

You have installed all the necessary packages and are now ready to fetch the configurations and code that makes up my custom desktop session. It is assumed you are running the stock MATE session and have an open terminal.

The latest fixed release of my dots

The “Code for Prot’s Dots For Debian” (Code for PDFD == CPDFD) is the repository that contains the latest fixed release of my dotfiles. Such tagged releases are versions that I have tested extensively and am confident that others can use. We shall be employing CPDFD, because my dotfiles’ git repository is an unstable environment, intended for running tests and developing new features that eventually end up in a fixed release.

CPDFD is hosted on GitLab’s own instance (gitlab.com). If you have an account there and have configured SSH access, you can clone the repo with the following command:

git clone git@gitlab.com:protesilaos/cpdfd ~/cpdfd

Otherwise, just clone over HTTPS:

git clone https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/cpdfd ~/cpdfd

Bear in mind that we clone the repo into the user’s home directory. The rest of this manual will assume ~/cpdfd as a constant.

For the record, my dotfiles are available here: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/dotfiles.

Primer to managing dotfiles with GNU Stow

You will not be copying anything manually. That is a recipe for disaster! Instead we leverage the power of symbolic links, aka “symlinks”, by using GNU Stow.

The way Stow works is to read the filesystem paths defined by a target and create equivalent symlinks to them at the parent of the present working directory (or a given destination). In practice, since cpdfd is in your home directory, all symlinks will be extensions of /home/USERNAME/, else the ~ path.

Let us take a closer look at what it means to give stow a target. In my dotfiles, I have a directory called “vim”. Its structure looks like this:

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF vim
vim
├── .vim/
│   ├── colors/
│   │   ├── tempus_autumn.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_classic.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_dawn.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_day.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_dusk.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_fugit.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_future.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_night.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_past.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_rift.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_spring.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_summer.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_tempest.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_totus.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_warp.vim
│   │   └── tempus_winter.vim
│   └── spell/
│       ├── el.utf-8.spl
│       ├── el.utf-8.sug
│       ├── en.utf-8.add
│       └── en.utf-8.add.spl
└── .vimrc

3 directories, 21 files

It includes a .vimrc file and a .vim directory with more content. So if you run stow vim from within ~/cpdfd all those paths will be added to your home directory as symlinks. Here I also add the -v option for a verbose output:

~/cpdfd $ stow -v vim
LINK: .vim => cpdfd/vim/.vim
LINK: .vimrc => cpdfd/vim/.vimrc

This means:

• ~/.vim links to ~/cpdfd/vim/.vim.
• ~/.vimrc links to ~/cpdfd/vim/.vimrc.

The contents of .vim are accordingly expanded into:

~/.vim/colors
~/.vim/colors/tempus_autumn.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_classic.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_dawn.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_day.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_dusk.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_fugit.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_future.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_night.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_past.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_rift.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_spring.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_summer.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_tempest.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_totus.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_warp.vim
~/.vim/colors/tempus_winter.vim
~/.vim/spell
~/.vim/spell/el.utf-8.spl
~/.vim/spell/el.utf-8.sug
~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add
~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add.spl

From now on, we will be referring to the immediate subdirectories of ~/cpdfd as “Stow Packages”, as per man stow.

Using GNU Stow is essential because many of my Stow Packages contain somewhat complex structures such as the one shown above. Plus, keeping everything symlinked provides the benefit of controlling things with git. If you need to make changes or pull my latest fixed release, you will be able to do so centrally at ~/cpdfd.

About my Stow packages

Switch to my dotfiles:

cd ~/cpdfd

Now list only the directories that are relevant for stow (they are always written in lower case letters):

~/cpdfd $ ls --ignore='[A-Z]*'
bin  bspwm  colours  compton  dunst  fontconfig  gtk  keyring  music  newsboat  shell  tmux  vim  xterm

Note though, that the directories that are named “NO-STOW-<name>” still contain useful configs. However, they need to be manually adapted to each use case.

Target them all at once (we pass the -v flag so that you see where everything is linked to—though you can always just browse through my dotfiles’ contents):

stow -v bin bspwm colours compton dunst fontconfig gtk keyring music newsboat shell tmux vim xterm

If Stow throws and error and complains that some files already exist, you must delete them, rename them, or otherwise move them to another location. The common offenders are the default ~/.bashrc and ~/.profile which will block the Stow package called “shell”.

The rest of this book assumes that you have used GNU Stow on all the appropriate packages, otherwise things will not work as intended.

Now a few words about each Stow package:

• bin contains my custom scripts. Some of these are an integral part of my custom desktop session. This topic is covered in the chapter about my local ~/bin.
• bspwm includes the configuration files for the window manager (BSPWM) and the hotkey daemon (SXHKD). The former is where we define settings such as the width of the border that is drawn around windows, the ratio at which windows are split, and the like. The hotkey daemon stores all the custom key bindings we use to control the session. For more, read the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM.
• colours is where my Tempus themes for the shell and X resources are located. These files are used by various scripts of mine and should never be edited manually. For more, read the chapter about the Tempus themes.
• compton refers to the display compositor and has the relevant config file. We use this to avoid screen tearing, add some subtle shadows around windows and enable somewhat smoother transitions.
• dunst includes configurations for the daemon that displays desktop notifications. These control the look and feel of the program.
• fontconfig includes all of my custom font configurations. For the specifics, refer to the chapter about fonts.
• gtk defines the settings for the graphical toolkit. It also adds ports of the Tempus Themes for the GTK3 Source View widget (used by text editors such as Gedit, Pluma, Mousepad) as well as the GTK4 equivalent (used by GNOME Builder).
• keyring contains the files necessary for autostarting the GNOME Keyring, the tool that stores passwords and secrets. You can use this to store access to SSH keys and the like.
• music refers to the configuration files for the Music Player Daemon and its ncmpcpp client. Please note that you need to read the chapter about the music setup in order to make this work properly.
• newsboat stores the files needed by the RSS/Atom reader of the same name. In order to use this program, you need to add some URLs that point to valid feeds. Read the chapter about Newsboat.
• shell defines my Bash-related configurations, including aliases for common commands, the command line prompt, and various useful tweaks. Read the chapter about my shell setup.
• tmux is about the terminal multiplexer used in my default terminal. Details are included in the chapter about my Tmux and Vim configurations.
• vim is my editor of choice, which I use without any plugins or whimsical tweaks. As with the above Stow target, refer to the chapter about Tmux and Vim.
• xterm contains all the necessary files for configuring the terminal emulator according to my preference.

Ready to go!

You are now ready to log in to BSPWM. Just to be sure, reboot your system. When you reach the login screen, look for the drop-down menu on the top-right corner of the screen, where desktop sessions are listed. Select bspwm and then proceed to add your username and password.

But before you actually log in, read the following chapter about the basics of my BSPWM, how to control it and move around, and the like.

Basics of my BSPWM

You used GNU Stow to place all my configurations in the right filesystem path and are now eager to start using the custom desktop session. Just hold on a little longer, while you read through this chapter. The rest of this book is mostly recommended reading but not absolutely essential.

Here we will inspect the underlying configurations and core files that control the Binary Space Partitioning Window Manager.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF bspwm/
bspwm
└── .config/
	├── bspwm/
	│   └── bspwmrc*
	└── sxhkd/
		├── cheatsheet_sxhkdrc.txt
		├── sxhkdrc
		└── sxhkdrc_bspc

3 directories, 4 files

Overview of bspwmrc

The nice thing about bspwmrc is that it is an executable shell script. It is thus possible to add conditional logic and other aspects of shell scripting in order to exercise a more fine-grained control over the desktop session.

Each setting is a bspc command that can be run in a terminal at any moment (bspwmrc is a shell script). This is quite convenient: just execute the command to get an idea of what it does. The options are descriptive enough to offer a clear idea of what they pertain to. Here is a snippet of code:

bspc config border_width 2       # outer border around nodes/windows
bspc config window_gap 4         # empty space between nodes
bspc config split_ratio 0.50     # the ratio of new:existing node

The file is divided in three sections, the description notwithstanding:

1. Visual options for the window manager.
2. Autostart programs at BSPWM launch.
3. Per-host configurations.

1. Visual options

These define such things as the border that is drawn around windows, or the gap between them. They also govern the colours that are applied to the various states of the window border.

The colours are taken from my Tempus themes collection. The theme that is defined as the current default is Tempus Classic, which features warm hues on a dark background (the Tempus themes apply to the entire environment—see the chapter on the Tempus themes).

I will let you read the file for the specifics. Detailed comments are provided therein. Allow me to highlight a very opinionated setting that I have and which might be unsuitable for your use-case:

bspc config ignore_ewmh_focus true

This prevents applications from stealing focus. Set it to false if it is causing you trouble. Personally, I dislike focus stealing. It is very intrusive and can disrupt my rhythm. One common scenario where I do not want focus stealing is while running newsboat: I go through the feed list opening all interesting links in browser tabs (or use mpv in the console for multimedia). Once I am done, I close newsboat: no need to go back and forth between it and whatever program steals its focus each time I try to open a new item in the background.

Another thing to bear in mind concerning this section is the invocation of my bspwm_external_rules script. “External rules” is the set of conditions that the window manager evaluates in order to treat certain windows accordingly. For example, when should a window be spawned in “floating” mode rather than the standard tiling one. My external rules contain some more advanced tweaks that cover manual tiling operations that are discussed in further detail in the chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM session.

2. Autostart

This section of the bspwmrc is where we instruct the window manager to run the programs that are essential to the desktop session. The most important of them is sxhkd, which is the hotkey daemon that stores all our custom key bindings, including those that control BSPWM.

Some notable points:

• Each program leverages shell scripting, so as to be run only if it is indeed present on the system.
• melonpanel is the script that draws the panel at the top of the screen. This is my implementation of lemonbar (read the chapter about the top panel).
• compton is a display compositor, which is configured to add subtle shadows around windows, and the like. Its real necessity is to eliminate or at least minimise screen tearing.
• feh is the tool that sets the wallpaper. I manually define a “{light,dark}.jpg” at ~/Pictures/theme. The last used file path is stored in ~/.fehbg (you can set any jpg file as a wallpaper using a command like feh --bg-fill /path/to/jpg).
• setxkbmap sets the keyboard layout to US QWERTY and assigns the Compose key to the “Menu” button. Note though that own_script_current_keyboard_layout is designed to switch layouts between the default and Greek. To change this behaviour, you need to either edit sxhkdrc (find that script’s invocation) or adapt the script to your needs. Else, just remove it.
• A settings daemon is also launched. If you have followed the instructions in this manual, it should be mate-settings-daemon. We need such a tool for a couple of reasons: (1) to be able to change the theme of GTK applications, (2) to apply the same theme to Flatpak apps. As a bonus, the settings daemon allows for live theme switching (as discussed in the chapter about the Tempus themes).
• The last two programs that are launched are mpd and mpDris2. These are for our music player, as documented in the chapter about the music setup.

3. Per-host configurations

Here I execute a single command: own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs. This contains some additional bspc commands for defining the number of desktops (workspaces) and their mapping to one or two monitors. The default is to set one desktop (because of the “dynamic desktops” functionality discussed in the chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM session):

bspc monitor -d 1

While these settings can be stored in bspwmrc directly, I have decided to keep them in their own file. It is a prime example of an external script that configures BSPWM in a context-aware manner (and why having bspwmrc as an executable is a powerful feature).

Bear in mind that own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs is documented extensively. If, however, you have no use for such functionality, just define the workspaces directly inside BSPWM’s config file (see the bspc monitor command shown above).

Also note that own_script_laptop_dual_monitor contains an xrandr command that slightly adjusts the brightness and gamma channels of the LVDS1 display. I have sanitised this behaviour by running a check against the HOSTNAME, to make sure this only runs on my laptop. Still, it is important for you to know, as you might need to adapt things to your liking.

Outlines of SXHKD

There are two config files, sxhkdrc and sxhkdrc_bspc, which are meant to separate custom hotkeys between those that are specific to BSPWM actions and others that are WM-independent.

Each of the SXHKD configs stores custom key bindings, internally known as “key chords”. There are two main types of patterns: the direct and the chained. To illustrate the difference:

# key chord
Super + <key>

# key chord chain
Super + <key> ; <key>

Sample of an actual direct key chord is:

# Session management (log out, lock, switch users, reboot, shutdown).
ctrl + alt + {Home,End,Delete}
	poweroptionsmenu

This means that while holding down the Ctrl and Alt modifiers, you can press either of Home, End, Delete to invoke the command poweroptionsmenu (a script of mine for running common session management operations, such as logging out, locking the screen, rebooting…).

Now this is a simplified version of an actual key chord chain:

super + e ; {p,t}
	{ \
	pkill -x melonpanel && melonpanel, \
	tempusmenu, \
	}

This pattern means that you first hold down Super, then press e, then release Super and press any of the keys defined to the right of the semicolon ; to invoke the corresponding command. To that end, super + e ; t will execute tempusmenu.

All key chord chains are designed with mnemonics in mind:

• Everything that concerns the entire session, else “the environment”, starts with super + e ; <keys>.
• All graphical applications are launched with super + g ; <keys>.
• All the command line programs you would normally run in a terminal are super + x ; <keys>.
• To assign flags to nodes, we have super + a ; <keys>.
• For splits between nodes we go with super + s ; <keys>.
• There are a few more that are documented in the chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM session. They are super + n ; <keys> for node-related operations (mostly manual tiling and receptacles), and super + c : <keys> (notice the colon sign) for the continuous input mode.

A note on the selection of keys for launching common programs:

# GUI
super + g ; {1-3}
	{ \
	notify-send -i firefox "Run GUI program" "Launching Web Browser" && firefox-esr, \
	notify-send -i system-file-manager "Run GUI program" "Launching File Manager" && caja, \
	notify-send -i thunderbird "Run GUI program" "Launching Email Client" && thunderbird \
	}
# CLI
super + x ; {3-5}
	mate-terminal --disable-factory -x {neomutt,newsboat,ncmpcpp}

You might wonder why I have not started numbering the CLIs from 1: because I want to remember that while launching programs I have the following mappings, regardless of whether they are graphical or textual:

• 1 == web browser
• 2 == file manager
• 3 == email client
• 4 == RSS/Atom reader
• 5 == music player

I have not found any CLI tools that I consider good enough for web browsing and file management. Given that most websites are not designed to work without javascript and CSS (or have poor HTML structure and/or typography), I believe there will be no truly decent console-based web browser. As for a file manager, I used to use ranger but have realised that I have no real need for it: I mostly manipulate files the UNIX way.

The point is that you might find this indexing useful in case you choose to add your own programs.

Cheat sheet with common key bindings

To help you get started, I provide the cheatsheet_sxhkdrc.txt. It includes the most common key chords, accompanied by short descriptions or explanations. Type super + F1 or super + Home. This will launch a floating terminal window that runs less on the cheat sheet.

The first section of the cheat sheet covers the basics about key chords and key chord chains. It also notes that the main motions that correspond to the four cardinal directions are the same as with Vim: h, j, k, l keys for left, down, up, right respectively.

So go ahead and run super + F1 once you log in to the BSPWM session for the first time. Below I present the entirety of the cheat sheet, with a reminder that you must always look at the source code that I strive to keep clean, readable, and well-documented:

List of common key bindings.  All definitions are stored at:

	~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc
	~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc_bspc

The latter is for definitions that control the window manager.  While
the former has WM-independent keys.

Last review 2019-07-01.

Explanation of the basics
=========================

The Super key, aka "mod4", is the one that most keyboards mark with the
Windows logo.  While the key "Return" is also known as "Enter".

Motions are the same as Vim: h,j,k,l (left,down,up,right).

This is the general format of a key chord (aka key binding):

	Super + <key>

And this is a key chord chain:

	Super + <key> ; <key>

The keys "Super", "Alt", "Shift", "Ctrl" are known as "modifiers".

To run a key chord, hold down the modifier and press the key.  Key chord
chains build on that principle: you type the key binding to the left of
the semicolon (;), release the modifier and then type the key (or key
chord) to the right of the semicolon.

In this document, the notation {h,j,k,l} means "any one among" the
comma-separated items.  Whereas {1-4} denotes a range: 1,2,3,4.

Getting started
===============

Super + Return            |-Open a terminal running the "Default" tmux session
Super + Shift + Return    |-Open a generic, yet fully-capable terminal (xterm)
Super + q                 |-Close focused window safely (apps might require confirmation)
Super + Shift + q         |-Kill focused window (no confirmation whatsoever)
Ctrl + Alt + Delete       |-Launch poweroptionsmenu, where you can choose to log out, reboot, etc.

Window motions
==============

Super + {h,j,k,l}         |-Move focus in the given direction == choose which window has attention
Super + Shift + {h,j,k,l} |-Swap focused node with the one in the given direction
Super + Ctrl + {h,j,k,l}  |-Expand/contract tiled node in that direction, provided there is a split
Super + Alt + {h,j,k,l}   |-Set preselection (manual tiling) for next window
                          |---Cancel presel by inputting same command again
Super + Alt + {1-9}       |-Set the presel ratio, relative to the focused node
Super + Shift + <arrows>  |-Move floating window
Alt + right click         |-Drag floating window
Alt + left click          |-Resize floating window from the nearest edge

Window and desktop actions
==========================

Super + Space             |-Toggle between tiled and floating states
Super + m                 |-Toggle between tiled and monocle layout (monocle == maximised nodes)
Super + f                 |-Toggle focused window's full screen view
Alt + Tab                 |-Cycle through windows on the current desktop
Alt + Shift + Tab         |-Cycle backwardly through windows on the current desktop

Desktop operations
==================

Super + {0-9}             |-Switch to the designated desktop (workspace)
Super + Shift + {0-9}     |-Send focused node to the given desktop
                          |---Desktops are created/removed dynamically (my custom setup)
Super + Tab               |-Cycle through desktops on the current monitor
Super + Shift + Tab       |-Cycle backwardly through desktops on the current monitor
Super + r                 |-Rotate the node tree 90 degrees clockwise
Super + Shift + r         |-Rotate the node tree 90 degrees counter-clockwise
Super + Alt + r           |-Mirror/flip the node tree (top left becomes bottom right)
Super + s ; {b,e}         |-Balance or equalise node splits (better try it to get an idea)
                          |---Balance works on the parent node.  Equalise is for all nodes.
Super + Shift + {[,]}     |-Incrementally decrease or increase the gaps between the tiled nodes
Super + Shift + {y,u,i,o} |-Change to gap presents {0,5,10,20}
Super + comma             |-Switch focus to the next monitor (cycles through monitors)
Super + Shift + comma     |-Switch focus to the previous monitor (cycles through monitors)

Launching programs
==================

Super + d                 |-Run dmenu with access to all binaries in PATH
Super + Shift + d         |-Run flatpakmenu with access to all flatpak apps
Super + g ; {1-3}         |-Open graphical apps {firefox,caja,thunderbird}
Super + x ; {3-5}         |-Run a terminal with {mutt,newsboat,ncmcpp}
Super + x ; 0             |-Launch a floating terminal running calc

Useful extras
=============

Super + {F1,Home}         |-Launch a floating window with this cheat sheet
Print                     |-Get a screenshot of the focused window saved to the ~/Desktop
Super + Print             |-Get a screenshot of the entire viewport saved to the ~/Desktop
Super + p                 |-Run passmenu to copy a password stored with the UNIX tool "pass"
Super + x ; w             |-Run a floating image browser, from where you can also set the wallpaper
Super + e ; c             |-Toggle the display compotisor (do this if you have performance issues)
Super + e ; f             |-Toggle BSPWM "focus mode", to remove gaps, the padding, the panel
Super + e ; t             |-Run tempusmenu to select a Tempus theme for a live theme switch
                          |---The Tempus themes: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/tempus-themes
                          |---Some ports of the Tempus themes are distributed with my dotfiles

Further reading
===============

Study the ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc and ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc_bspc.
They are extensively documented.  You will find key chords for tasks not
included herein, such as multimedia keys, setting node flags, and more.

About the default terminal setup

My default terminal emulator is the standard for the X Window System and probably the one with the fewest “gotchas”: xterm. This has not always been the case. Until fairly recently I was using my custom build of the Simple Terminal, by suckless. Prior to that I was a urxvt user. I have also worked extensively with {gnome,mate,xfce4}-terminal (VTE-based) and others.

I only tried Xterm last, due to the baseless belief that it was legacy software, more or less. This was compounded by the misinformation that suckless spreads regarding the maintainability of Xterm. Read what the main Xterm developer, Thomas E. Dickey, has to say about its many look-alikes.

Such misconceptions were quickly cast aside once I started reading through the program’s manpage and then checked its upstream provider. Xterm is a very capable tool that continues to receive regular updates.

To be clear: no terminal is perfect. Choosing one is a matter of weighing the pros and cons. I find that Xterm meets the following criteria better than its alternatives:

1. Is in the Debian repos. True for all other options. However, note that st (Debian package stterm) only makes sense to use as a custom build, so it technically does not meet this criterion. Overall, Xterm is more suited to Debian than a custom build of the Suckless Terminal, because it does not depend on development packages and therefore is not going to have any issues over the long term (e.g. the upstream has build dependencies that are not available in Debian Stable).
2. Is highly configurable and easy to reproduce. In large part this is true for all options though there are differences in degree and ways of doing things: xterm uses the .Xresources file, making it the most dotfile-friendly option.
3. Has good performance. My totally-non-scientific tests suggest that only unpatched st has a slight edge over Xterm. But the unpatched tool lacks all sorts of features such as scroll-back functionality and cursor blinking, meaning that this is not a one-to-one comparison. At any rate, I think the use of tmux renders this point largely irrelevant.
4. Is agnostic to the choice of desktop environment or toolkit. True for st and urxvt as well, though not for the VTE-based options.
5. Has good font-drawing capabilities. This is particularly important when using tmux and other programs that draw borders. The VTE-based programs have no issues whatsoever. Xterm requires some careful font configurations, which I have taken care of. st can only cope well if it is extensively patched. urxvt has weird issues with letter spacing.

If you find that xterm does not fit your use case, I also have a script that configures mate-terminal to my liking, including colours that match the rest of the session: own_script_mate_terminal_setup. If you still want to use something else, and are willing to do things manually, I recommend my custom build of st (has no upstream patches and is configured to use my Tempus themes): https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/st.

Be warned that only Xterm is integrated with my dotfiles to keep things maintainable.

The practical uses of Xterm

The many roles of xterm are defined in my sxhkdrc. In short:

• Serves as a container for tmux, the terminal multiplexer (see chapter about my Tmux and Vim setup)
• Can be run on its own. Offers everything you expect from a feature-complete, yet fairly lightweight terminal (though I strongly encourage you to learn tmux).
• Launches CLI tools (mutt, newsboat, ncmpcpp) in a standalone tiled window.
• Runs a console calculator in a standalone floating window.
• Displays the cheat sheet with the most common key chords in a standalone floating window.

With these granted, type super + F1 or super + Home to get started on my sxhkd keys (as noted in the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM).

Why choose the MATE Desktop

You should already be up-and-running with the custom desktop session. But there is still much to learn from the rest of this book. Let us review the choice of MATE (Maté) as the default option for the desktop environment.

In the chapter about installing Debian 10 ‘buster’ on your machine, I suggested you select MATE as a core part of your new system. The installer’s major component selection should look like this:

[x] Debian desktop environment
[ ] ... GNOME
[ ] ... Xfce
[ ] ... KDE Plasma
[ ] ... Cinnamon
[x] ... MATE
[ ] ... LXDE
[ ] ... LXQt
[ ] web server
[ ] print server
[x] SSH server
[x] standard system utilities

You may be wondering why I recommend this step: is not the purpose of this manual to set up a custom BSPWM session? The reasons are basically these:

1. You get all the Xorg and GTK dependencies in place. You need these anyhow for running a graphical session and some of the most common application software, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.
2. You install some MATE programs that my custom desktop session makes use of. These are caja (file manager) and mate-settings-daemon (touched upon in the chapter about the Tempus themes).
3. You have a robust fallback option in case you need to use the computer without BSPWM (e.g. multiple users on a single computer).
4. Things like networking, the policy kit agent, and the xdg backend (matching programs to MIME types) are configured for you.

What about minimalism?

Minimalism is about striving to achieve a state of minimum viability, the least possible completeness, but not less. We still want something that works without any “gotchas” (edge cases where things do not perform at the desired standard).

Installing a fallback DE at the very outset makes things simpler, more predictable and maintainable over the entire life-cycle of the Debian system; a system that can span multiple releases of Debian’s “stable” distribution.

Do not be a nag about some Internet meme.

• Bloat is when you run a modified web browser as your text editor, or whatever the latest trend is with Electron-based applications and web apps.
• Bloat is when your favourite web page eats up 50% of my CPU.
• Bloat is Vim with a spaghetti code of plugins and concomitant settings that try to reinvent the wheel.
• Bloat is a much-vaunted ‘minimalist’ program like st with a hodgepodge of patches piled on top of it.
• Bloat is every addition that actively detracts from the end goal of usability, such as fancy animations for every interaction, wanton use of transparency and blur effects, etc.

Free software is about choices. Best we keep our opinions to ourselves and do what we consider appropriate for our particular use case. Enough with the misbegotten elitism and the smugness that certain communities actively cultivate.

To my eyes, setting up Xorg is a task that falls outside the scope of dotfile management. Same with configuring the network stack and similar basic utilities. The moment we enter into that domain we start creating our own distro or bespoke sysadmin setup. Let Debian handle that, while we focus on stowing the dotfiles in place, so that we may get our desired workflow going.

Personally, I do not keep track of the package count to determine the ‘bloat’ installed on my machine. This is not a game where the user with the fewer packages wins. If a piece of software is genuinely useful and is known to be fairly stable and maintained, then I keep it.

Why specifically MATE and not “foo”?

MATE is the most complete GTK-based desktop environment after GNOME, without using the GNOME shell stack (in which case we should mention Cinnamon and Budgie). This is to be expected due to its heritage: it is the fork and subsequent continuation of the GNOME 2 code base.

MATE’s main apps are very competent tools. The file manager, Caja, is a good piece of software. The document viewer, Atril, gets the job done. Same with the image viewer, Eye of MATE. Meanwhile, the archive manager, Engrampa, will handle compressing or decompressing data without any problem.

Make no mistake: MATE is far from perfect. Otherwise it would be frivolous to set up a custom desktop session.

Compared to the other options provided by the Debian installer:

• MATE is ideal for a stable distro such as Debian 10 (same with Xfce). It is developed at a rather slow yet steady pace, perfectly complementing the stability and predictability of the underlying OS. Debian is a poor fit for tracking DEs like GNOME and KDE Plasma that are developed at a somewhat fast pace. For instance, the GNOME version in ‘buster’ (3.30) is already one release behind upstream and will be two by the end of summer 2019. The gap will continue to widen every six months, ceteris paribus. Similar story with KDE Plasma.
• MATE is fairly modular, much like Xfce. You can use its individual components without having to run the entire session. And unlike Xfce, MATE has already completed the migration to GTK3 (last checked on 2019-07-01).
• Unlike GNOME (GNOME 3), MATE is committed to preserving the traditional desktop metaphor instead of turning the desktop into an oversized phone UI. It also is less taxing on system resources.
• Compared to Xfce, MATE does not need to pull in packages from another DE in order to function properly. Whereas Xfce lacks its own archive manager, document viewer, calculator, among others.
• MATE is more lightweight than GNOME and at least on par with—if not lighter than—KDE Plasma, without losing out on any of the core functionality. For our use case, being light-yet-complete and self-contained is exactly what we are looking for.

My point is clear: MATE is the best GTK-based option we could go for.

Notes about my shell setup

I only use bash as my CLI shell. It is ubiquitous. It works. And, because I have no need for fancy extras or technology previews, my shell’s setup has no plugins, external add-ons, or other obscure extensions (same as with my Vim and Tmux, by the way).

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF shell
shell
├── .bash_profile
├── .bashrc
├── .inputrc
├── .local/
│   └── share/
│       └── my_bash/
│           └── dircolors
├── .profile
└── .xsessionrc

There are a couple of files that are only read at startup: .xsessionrc and .profile. The former exists for the sole purpose of sourcing the latter. In .profile I have instructions to:

• Use my .bashrc.
• Add ~/bin to the PATH.
• Launch the keyring (mostly for storing SSH credentials).

.bash_profile is also just a placeholder for sourcing the .bashrc. Meanwhile, .inputrc provides some basic options for slightly modifying the behaviour of the command line interpreter. These concern the (1) reduction of key presses for tab completion, (2) textual and colourised information about files and directories, (3) colours that enhance the visuals of tab-completion’s feedback.

About the .bashrc

As is the norm with my dotfiles, the .bashrc is heavily documented. This is an overview of its headline options:

• PAGER and MANPAGER is less with the option to quit after reaching the end of a file and trying to read further below.
• The EDITOR is vim, while its GUI variant is the VISUAL.
• The default browser is whatever is defined by the MIME list (should be firefox-esr).
• The prompt is simple and super effective: <filesystem path> $ by default or, if running via an SSH connection, it becomes slightly more informative with <user>@<host>: <filesystem path> $ .
• Enable tab-completion when starting commands with sudo.

Then I have a comprehensive list of aliases, that you may or may not like to keep in place. Run alias from the command prompt to get the full list and/or filter its output accordingly. Here is a sample:

~ $ alias | grep 'apt'
alias aac='sudo apt autoclean'
alias aar='sudo apt autoremove -V'
alias adl='apt download'
alias afu='sudo apt full-upgrade -V'
alias ai='sudo apt install'
alias air='sudo apt install --reinstall'
alias ali='apt list --installed'
alias alu='apt list --upgradable'
alias ama='sudo apt-mark auto'
alias amm='sudo apt-mark manual'
alias apc='sudo aptitude purge ~c'
alias ar='sudo apt remove -V'
alias ard='apt rdepends'
alias as='apt search'
alias ash='apt show'
alias au='sudo apt update'
alias aug='sudo apt upgrade -V'
alias aulu='sudo apt update && apt list --upgradable'
alias auu='sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -V'
alias auufu='sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -V && sudo apt full-upgrade -V'

The most opinionated aliases are those that change the default behaviour of core utilities like cp, mv, rm. They make their output verbose and introduce a prompt for confirming user input where appropriate. I believe these are sound defaults, as they protect you from accidents. That granted, you can always run an unmodified command by prepending a backslash \. For example:

# This uses the alias for `cp`
~/cpdfd $ cp README test
'README' -> 'test'
~/cpdfd $

# This uses the original `cp`
~/cpdfd $ \cp README test
~/cpdfd $

Finally, there are a few functions:

• man() configures man to show some colours and formatting for the various parts of its syntax.
• cd() tells cd to list in a clean way the directory’s contents when entering it, including the hidden items, though not the implicit ones.
• backupthis() can be run as backupthis <file> to create a copy of the target, with a time stamp as its extension and identifier.

That just about covers it. I wish you luck on your PATH; make sure to get HOME safe.

Notes about my Tmux and Vim

Both Tmux and Vim are essential to my workflow. It is thus pertinent to inform you about their respective configuration files so that you know what to expect. This is with the proviso that you already are familiar with these tools.

About my tmux setup

Let’s start with the terminal multiplexer. It is the first thing you will interact with when you log into the session and type the key chord super + return:

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF tmux
tmux
└── .tmux.conf

0 directories, 1 file

Only its config is distributed with my dotfiles, which is another way of saying that I do not use any plugins whatsoever. What is provided by the program itself is more than enough.

To send commands to tmux you must typically start by first pressing its prefix key, which I have kept to the default of Ctrl + b as it is the one that causes no issues with other programs’ main functionality, in the way I use them. To be clear, Ctrl + b does interfere with a couple of commands: (a) the command line motion for moving one character backwards and (b) Vim’s full page back scroll.

So you press the prefix key, then release it and you can then either access the command prompt by inputting the colon : sign or typing one of the many key sequences that are assigned to direct actions (see table below).

In the configuration file, modifier keys are shortened. So Ctrl + b is written as C-b, Alt is A. Note that Shift is not used directly, but is instead implied by the use of a capital letter (just to be sure: Shift inserts the majuscule of the given letter).

Here are the main key bindings to get you started:

# Those that involve C-b (prefix)
# -------------------------------
<prefix> s        # split current pane horizontally
<prefix> v        # split current pane vertically
                  ### these are similar to Vim's C-w {s,v}
<prefix> S        # split the whole window horizontally
<prefix> V        # split the whole window vertically
<prefix> x        # kill current pane
<prefix> C-x      # kill all panes except the current one
<prefix> r        # reload the tmux conf
<prefix> m        # mark active pane
<prefix> C-m      # toggle maximise active pane
                  ### the default is <prefix> z (too close to x)
<prefix> A-{1-5}  # switch to one of the five layout presets
<prefix> E        # evenly spread out active and adjacent panes
<prefix> c        # create a new window (windows contain panes)
<prefix> b        # break pane from current window
                  ### default is <prefix> !
<prefix> J        # the opposite of break-pane
<prefix> Tab      # swap active pane with the previous one
<prefix> C-Tab    # swap active pane with the marked one
<prefix> a        # sync input across panes in the current window

# Keys without the prefix
# -----------------------
A-{h,j,k,l}       # navigate panes in the given direction
A-S-{h,l}         # move to left/right window
C-Space           # enter copy-mode
                  ### use Vim keys to scroll, select/copy text

Read .tmux.conf for the entirety of my settings and custom key bindings. That file is heavily documented, as is the norm with practically every item in my dotfiles.

Now if you are thinking that you do not need a terminal multiplexer and have no time to learn how to use one, I urge you to think again. This is a great skill to master. It greatly improves the overall use of the terminal. It is a skill that is highly portable. It will come in handy in a variety of situations whereas, to be blunt, learning bspwm may not be particularly useful outside the narrow confines of a custom desktop session.

Tmux is superior to a standard terminal because it offers unique capabilities:

• Persistent local/remote sessions (even if you close the terminal or log out). Once you use this, there is no going back.
• Advanced management of a large number of pseudo-terminals by leveraging window splitting (panes) like a tiling window manager, pane grouping per window (the equivalent of tabs/workspaces), and sessions (sessions hold windows, windows hold panes).
• Scriptability including the possibility to send key sequences to running applications (I use this to source my .vimrc when I perform a live theme change, as noted in the chapter about my Tempus themes).

About my Vim setup

That last piece of advice holds true for vim as well. Spend some time learning its basics. Over time you will become proficient at editing text.

And here is another piece of advice, before we delve into the specifics of my Vim setup: set a very high bar for the use of plugins or, as in my case, do not use plugins at all. Also avoid copy-pasting stuff without carefully considering the ramifications.

The more comfortable you are with the generic program, the higher the portability of your knowledge. Vim is meant to be used as the standard UNIX editor that is available in virtually every such machine out there. Straying too much from the defaults might impede your ability to work effectively under circumstances that are not under your immediate control.

Now on to my customisations.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF vim
vim
├── .vim/
│   ├── colors/
│   │   ├── tempus_autumn.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_classic.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_dawn.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_day.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_dusk.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_fugit.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_future.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_night.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_past.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_rift.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_spring.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_summer.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_tempest.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_totus.vim
│   │   ├── tempus_warp.vim
│   │   └── tempus_winter.vim
│   └── spell/
│       ├── el.utf-8.spl
│       ├── el.utf-8.sug
│       ├── en.utf-8.add
│       └── en.utf-8.add.spl
└── .vimrc

3 directories, 19 files

A quick rundown of my very short and simple .vimrc:

• I stick to the default key bindings.
• I expect Vim to ask for confirmation when closing a modified buffer.
• I use tabs instead of spaces for indentation, setting the width of the tab character to be equal to four spaces. I used to use spaces when I first started using a text editor, because that was the default. However, experience suggests that tabs are semantically more appropriate for indentation. The tab key inserts its own character, which can have an arbitrary width defined by the program that reads it. In short, tabs are better for indentation, while spaces are better for tabular layouts such as the tmux key table I presented above.
• The text width is 72 blocks long. This is particularly important for writing good git commit messages. And, because git is designed with email in mind, this line length is ideal for sending plain text email, such as with mutt. In general, this line length also makes sense for comment blocks in your code, because it makes them easier to read without having to rely on non-standard things like text-wrapping (so, for example, hitting gqip will format inside the given paragraph, while gq does the same over the given selection).
• Sentences in a paragraph start with two spaces after a period or full stop. This is better visually when typing in a monospaced font. The various parsers, e.g. Markdown to HTML, know how to convert that to a single space, just as they know how to turn hard line wraps between consecutive lines of text into uniform paragraphs (a blank line marks a new paragraph).
• Syntax highlighting is on and uses my Tempus themes. Do not edit this part manually, as it will be changed when running tempus or its tempusmenu interface (see chapter on Tempus themes).

Read the .vimrc for an in-depth understanding of my customisations (it is a straightforward, well-commented config).

Neither Tmux nor Vim is an OS

Now you may be wondering how it is possible to use Tmux and Vim without plugins and all the accoutrements of a modern workflow. The answer is rather simple: let Tmux+Vim be specialised tools and leave the rest to other programs.

Do you really need Vim’s sub-par approach to multiplexing (its own approach to splits, buffers, tabs) when you can just be a tmux ninja? What, you need more than that? Let me tell you about this nice program called BSPWM… Why do you require a plugin to check git information inside Vim when you can just use the command line? Open a new tmux split and type git status, git log, git diff… You need to commit only parts of a changed file? Know that git add --patch is your friend.

In the same spirit, use the core utilities like cd, ls, find, grep, cp, mv, rm. Keep things simple and avoid feature creep. Let the text editor edit text. Keep the multiplexer true to its spirit of managing terminal sessions. If you truly need an extensible, fully-customisable integrated development environment, then you should seriously consider GNU Emacs (which is a Lisp interpreter that implements a text editor among many others).

Of course, there are scenaria where a plugin makes a program better for the task at hand. My point is that you should be very picky about your choice of external functionality. GNU/Linux is a powerful OS (Emacs too!). You do not need to incorporate every kind of feature in the core tool. Perhaps there are other operating systems that make things difficult for the power user: if you are using one of those, then a pile of plugins is the least of your troubles.

As a closing remark, let me leave you with a joke I once heard about Emacs (a tool that I genuinely like and will eventually incorporate in my computing life): its name is an allusion to its design that involves active use of modifier keys… Escape, Meta, Alt, Control, Shift.

About the top panel

The panel that appears at the uppermost area of the viewport is drawn by lemonbar. This is a beautifully simple tool. On the face of it, all it does is place an empty bar at either the top (default) or bottom of the screen, while offering a syntax for formatting any output it may display. It is up to the user to add content to it.

This is where my melonpanel comes into play. It is a shell script that fetches and parses some useful information about the system and the running session, and lays it on the bar. Each snippet of info is internally referred to as a “module” and has its own dedicated logic inside the script.

The modules are the following:

• BSPWM report about the workspaces, nodes, their flags and state (see next section about it).
• Battery status and current capacity.
• Core temperature.
• Speaker volume strength and status.
• Keyboard indicators for alternate layout and caps lock.
• Date and time.

This is what a module looks like:

# Core temperature.
_temperature() {
	command -v acpi > /dev/null || return 1

	local therm_label therm_status

	therm_label='T:'
	therm_status="$(acpi -t | awk -F '[[:space:]]+|,' '{ print $5 }')"
	therm_status="${therm_status:0:2}"

	# Up to 59 degrees celcius keep text colour same as default.  60-79
	# turn the colour red on normal background.  Else turn the whole
	# indicator red.
	case "$therm_status" in
		[12345][0-9])
			echo "$therm_label ${therm_status}°C"
			;;
		[67][0-9])
			echo "$therm_label %{F$color1}${therm_status}°C%{F-}"
			;;
		*)
			echo "%{F$background}%{B$color1} $therm_label ${therm_status}°C %{B-}%{F-}"
			;;
	esac
}

How the modules are placed on the panel

All modules will grab some piece of text and clean it up so that it looks nice on the panel. However, each individual module does not output directly to the named pipe where the data is read from. Instead, all modules are called from _modules(), which I need to explain a bit:

_modules() {
	while true; do
		echo "B" "$(_battery)"
		echo "T" "$(_temperature)"
		echo "D" "$(_datetime)"
		echo "K" "$(_keyboard)"
		echo "V" "$(_volume)"
		sleep 1s
	done
}

You will notice that each individual item echoes a majuscule and then the output of the module it references. These capital letters are important because they demarcate each set of data in the named pipe, making it possible to put the right thing in the right place. We see this in practice at _melonpanel(), specifically this part:

while read -r line ; do
	case $line in
		B*)
			# battery status
			bat="${line#?}"
			;;
		T*)
			# temperature
			therm="${line#?}"
			;;
		D*)
			# current date and time
			date="${line#?}"
			;;
		K*)
			# keyboard layout (en or gr)
			key="${line#?}"
			;;
		V*)
			# volume level
			vol="${line#?}"
			;;

What this does is identify the part that contains the data of each module and assign a variable to it. The variables are then placed on the panel with the following:

_panel_layout() {
	echo "%{l}$wm%{r}$key $bat $therm $vol $date "
}

Focus on the content of the echo. The syntax %{l} places things on the left, while %{r} aligns them to the right (this notation is provided by lemonbar—see its manpage).

I believe this pretty much covers the essentials of how melonpanel is designed. As with all my scripts, this too is heavily documented. So do read it. That granted, I admit that lemonbar is not the most user-friendly, point-and-click program out there. But hey, neither is BSPWM, Xterm, Tmux, Vim, etc.

The BSPWM module

On the left side of the panel lies the set of indicators that report on the status of the window manager (based on the output of the command bspc subscribe report). This is what you see when starting the session (note that I have taken care to use the appropriate spacing, so that all typographic elements are evenly spread out):

[1] *

The numbers correspond to the names of the available desktops. Because I have implemented dynamic desktops (see chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM), there is only one desktop on the panel. If you navigate to desktop number two, the module will be like this, if desktop 1 is empty:

[2] *

If desktop 1 is occupied, the module will be:

1^ [2] *

The desktop inside square brackets (and also drawn with a bold font) is the current one, while the caret sign denotes an occupied desktop.

Next to the desktop numbers there is at least one asterisk. If the desktop contains windows, then the asterisks are two:

• The first asterisk always indicates the layout of the desktop. If the view is set to monocle, then the letter M will take the place of the asterisk. The layout cycles between tiled and monocle, but because the former is what we normally use, I have opted to hide the T behind the asterisk and only display the M.
• The second asterisk contains information about the active window’s flags. The flags I define in my sxhkdrc_bspc are: Sticky, Private, Locked, Marked (see man bspc for their meaning). When a flag for the current node is active, its initial letter is displayed on the panel. More than one flags can be activated at once.

If all indicators are toggled on at once, you will see something like this:

[1] 2^ * SPLM

Urgent and unfocused desktops are denoted by the column sign and are coloured red:

[1] 2# * *

On multi-head setups (e.g. dual monitor), the BSPWM report will divide desktops and their corresponding indicators per monitor. Combined with the above, we get the following:

[1] 2^ * L  4- 5# 6^ M SP

Notice how the indicators that display the * (asterisk) are visible for each set of desktops. Also look at the use of another typographic marker next to desktop 4: the hyphen is for showing the focused desktop on the unfocused monitor. The letter M in this case concerns desktop 4. Same with the node flags S and P. While L applies to the focused node in desktop 1 and the asterisk next to it informs us that the layout is the default, i.e. tiled.

I believe all this will become easier to grasp once you start using the system. For the record, this design bears close resemblance to the status line of my tmux setup.

Panel transparency

By default, the panel is opaque, though I have made it fairly trivial to add a transparency effect to its background. The following is an excerpt from the relevant melonpanel section:

_melonpanel < "$melonpanel_fifo" | lemonbar -u 1 -p -g "x${melonpanel_height}" \
-F "$foreground" -B "#ff${background:1}" -f "$fontmain" -f "$fontbold" -n "Melonpanel" &

Take a closer look at the segment of the command that controls the background colour: -B "#ff${background:1}". I have designed it so that you can tweak its alpha value, which is governed by the ff part. This is hexadecimal notation and means that the alpha channel is set to full, which translates to complete opacity. 00 is the opposite.

Try replacing ff with aa to get some subtle transparency, or with 55 for a more pronounced effect. Possible values for each digit are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f. A running compositor is required to enable transparency effects (I use compton as already mentioned in previous chapters).

As a rule of thumb, light themes will require a greater adjustment than dark themes to create a noticeable see-through style. The choice of wallpaper will also affect your perception of it.

For changes to be applied, reload the panel with the key chord chain super + e ; p (as explained in the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM). Otherwise, you can always just use tempusmenu to switch to another Tempus theme (as discussed in the chapter about my themes), thus forcing a panel reload.

Known issues

Sometimes, seemingly at random, the panel will not be hidden when entering a window’s full screen view. The less-than-ideal workaround is to reload melonpanel with the key chord chain super + e ; p. This seems to be an upstream bug.

Another thing to bear in mind is that upstream lemonbar does not support proportional or outline fonts (e.g. the “DejaVu” family). It can only display fixed-size, else bitmap, typefaces such as “Terminus”. If you have followed the instructions in the chapter about installing the core packages, you will have xfonts-terminus available on your system. This is an optional dependency, as the panel will fall back to the fixed typeface which comes pre-installed with Debian. I just think that Terminus is more consistent and is better suited for such a UI task (see ANNEX below for Lemonbar with proportional fonts).

Finally, you may notice that pgrep melonpanel always lists two running processes. This is because it is running _modules() (mentioned above) as well as bspc subscribe report that displays desktop information and the like. The report needs to be its own process because it has its own synchronicity, controlled by the window manager itself (please let me know if there is a way of merging every modules functionality into a single process).

ANNEX for lemonbar-xft

I maintain a personal fork of lemonbar with support for Xft (the fontconfig library). This basically means running the panel using proportional/outline fonts.

• I have a video where I talk about my fork.
• I also provide information on how I forked lemonbar-xft.
• And here is how to compile Lemonbar Xft on Debian 10 Buster.

I will not provide any further information herein. I do not encourage you to compile stuff from random sources or to create what is known as a “FrankenDebian”. I use this fork as part of my own system and am prepared to deal with any possible breakage. If you are not or do not trust my fork (you should not trust any random source), then stick with the package provided by Debian: it includes the upstream code that only uses bitmap fonts.

Fonts and their configs

Typography is essential to a good computing experience. I would even argue that type is the irreducible factor of a computer’s user interface. But let’s keep things in focus: good fonts are essential to a setup that strongly emphasises the use of a text terminal.

My opinionated font-related settings are stored in my dotfiles’ “fontconfig” directory (stow package). These take precedence over system-wide defaults that are defined in /etc/fonts/.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF fontconfig/
fontconfig/
└── .config/
	└── fontconfig/
		├── conf.d/
		│   ├── 10-hinting-full.conf
		│   ├── 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
		│   ├── 11-lcdfilter-default.conf
		│   ├── 20-unhint-small-hack.conf
		│   ├── 45-generic.conf
		│   ├── 45-latin.conf
		│   ├── 50-enable-terminus.conf
		│   ├── 60-generic.conf
		│   ├── 60-latin.conf
		│   ├── 80-condensed-large-dejavu.conf
		│   └── README
		└── fonts.conf

3 directories, 12 files

The fonts.conf includes basic rules for adding emoji character support to all generic font family definitions: serif, sans-serif, monospace.

Inside conf.d we find the important rules (sorry, I do not really care about emoji). Some file names will suggest what each rule is about. For example, 50-enable-terminus.conf overrides the default settings that disable fixed-size typefaces (bitmap fonts).

The file 20-unhint-small-hack.conf applies to the “Hack” typeface. It concerns small point sizes. This rule serves mostly as an example, but also because that family is my preferred choice of monospaced font. You can copy and then edit the rule to match whatever typeface fails to display properly at certain point sizes.

On the other end, 80-condensed-large-dejavu.conf will substitute the default DejaVu fonts for Serif and Sans with their condensed equivalents. This makes either DejaVu variant better as a fallback font for UI elements and long form texts, because it removes the rivers of white space that run through its widely-spaced letter forms.

The file names that start with “45” attribute a generic family to each typeface. For example, I assign “Hack” to the “monospace” group.

While the “60-*” rules concern the priority of font selection. Here is a snippet of XML that I will explain:

<alias>
	<family>sans-serif</family>
	<prefer>
		<family>Roboto</family>
		<family>Noto Sans</family>
		<family>Liberation Sans</family>
	</prefer>
	<default>
		<family>DejaVu Sans</family>
	</default>
</alias>

When selecting the fontconfig alias “sans-serif” (or just “Sans”), the actual typeface is, in order of priority from top to bottom: Roboto, Noto Sans, Liberation Sans. If none of these are installed or available, then DejaVu Sans shall be used instead.

As already discussed in the chapter about installing core packages, these are the fonts I use and consider solid defaults:

sudo apt install fonts-firacode fonts-hack fonts-roboto fonts-dejavu fonts-dejavu-extra fonts-noto-color-emoji fonts-symbola xfonts-terminus

Note that fonts-symbola is mostly required to display symbols in terminals that have trouble with ambiguous characters.

Modifying the font configurations

My settings are tailored to my hardware and aesthetic preferences. I strongly encourage you to spend some time inside my conf.d to get a sense of how things work. For more, run man fonts-conf. Settings provided by Debian, are stored at /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.d/, while the applicable rules are defined in /etc/fonts/conf.d/.

Graphical applications read the configuration files that are specific to their toolkit. I only have GTK apps, so we get these files:

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF gtk
gtk
├── .config/
│   ├── gtk-3.0/
│   │   └── settings.ini
# Irrelevant files
├── .gtkrc-2.0
# More files that do not concern fonts

You only need to check .gtkrc-2.0 and the GTK3 settings.ini. The default typeface is the fontconfig alias “sans” at 10 point size. If you have followed the instructions in the chapter about installing core packages, “Sans” or “Sans-serif” should stand for “Roboto” (package is fonts-roboto).

The panel (top bar) only supports bitmap fonts, as explained in the chapter about the top panel. It is configured to use Terminus (xfonts-terminus) else fall back to whatever the “fixed” typeface is.

The notification daemon—dunst—uses “Sans-10”, in large part because its configuration file is static and cannot run shell logic. A sans-serif font is the safest default. Besides, notifications can display a big chunk of text, where a monospaced font will make the notification’s box expand out of proportion. We want them to be discreet.

All the above notwithstanding, you should know that not all applications out there will faithfully follow your rules. For example, Flatpak apps will use their own settings because they do not read from the user’s font configurations. Graphical tools that are launched with escalated privileges will read from the root user’s configs. And so on.

What makes a good choice of font

Some closing notes on the criteria that determine the choice of my default typefaces: Hack and Roboto.

• Good unicode coverage. Support extended latin and greek glyphs at minimum.
• Have at least two weights: regular and bold. Ideally, also support true italics, or at least oblique forms with some effort put into them, rather than some procedurally generated slanted variant of the regular letters.
• Be legible at small point sizes. Do not create rivers of white space that flow through the text at larger sizes.
• Have good typographic colour. In other words, do not have too thin letter forms. Typefaces that are too thin are harder to read, make colours less distinct from each other, while they tend to create a certain “halo effect” around letter forms when using them against a light backdrop.
• Do not have a very high x-height. I need to easily tell apart miniscules from majuscules.
• Do not rely too much on serifs and fine details. Such letters can become the standard when our displays have a pixel density that is at least as good as printed text. Until then, they can be hard to read in certain conditions.
• For monospaced fonts: all vaguely similar glyphs should be easy to tell apart, such as 0, o, O, i, I, l, L 1, s, 5…
• Be available in Debian’s main archives. Comply with Debian’s Free Software Guidelines.

All this can be summarised as “do not be frivolous; be frugal, be accessible, and get the job done”.

ANNEX on Xterm fonts

You will notice that I recommend installing fonts-firacode. This is the typeface I use inside my terminal emulator (Xterm), because it has excellent support for box-drawing capabilities, which is particularly important for tmux.

Xterm has a very rare bug that you will only encounter if you use Greek letters and only with certain font and point size combinations. I have submitted a detailed report on the Greek pi (π) and box-drawing bug.

The bug notwithstanding, I have made sure that my .Xresources includes the necessary settings that work around this problem. As such, “Hack” and “DejaVu Sans Mono” will cope just fine with all typography-related requirements inside of Xterm.

Per-user MPD setup

The Music Player Daemon is a program that stores information about your music collection. It manages metadata and playlists of currently queued songs or ones that are saved.

MPD uses a server/client model. To interface with it we need to use one of the many available client programs. The simplest one is mpc, a console utility with basic functionality for querying the daemon’s status, handling media controls, and the like. A more feature-rich client is ncmpcpp, which also runs in the console.

Basic configuration

MPD may be run as a system-wide server and can be controlled remotely as well. For my use case, all I need is a local, user-specific setup. This is what we will be doing.

Assuming you have followed the instructions in the chapter about installing the core packages, you should have these in place:

sudo apt install mpd mpc ncmpcpp mpdris2 python-mutagen playerctl

Then switch to the base of my dotfiles’ directory and proceed to create symlinks for the music-related programs:

~/cpdfd $ stow music

Now you need to run a series of commands to configure mpd in accordance with our per-user requirements. Start by disabling the systemd service, since we autostart mpd from within the bspwm session:

sudo systemctl disable mpd

Now switch to the local config directory:

cd ~/.config/mpd

Create the directory where saved playlist data is stored:

mkdir playlists

Generate the files mpd needs in order to run:

touch database log pid state sticker.sql

Configuration is done! You might need to reboot for changes to take effect.

Update the database

To update the mpd database (assuming the presence of audio files at ~/Music) either run mpc update in a terminal or type ncmpcpp and then press u. If your music is in a different directory, edit the relevant path in ~/.config/mpd/mpd.conf.

Basics of ncmpcpp

The “Ncurses Console Media Player C++”. To start interfacing with this excellent tool, simply type ncmpcpp in a terminal, or use the key chord chain super + x ; 5 (see the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM).

To play music, learn how to use ncmpcpp by studying the corresponding manpage. I typically switch to screen 4, by hitting 4, then A and hit enter. This inserts an empty prompt which adds all available music to the playlist. Then I toggle on repeat mode with r, random playback order with z, and a 5 second cross-fade with x.

If you do not like ncmpcpp, I highly recommend cantata, a graphical MPD front end using the Qt toolkit which, however, does not integrate well with my mostly GTK- and text- based environment (as such, Cantata is not part of my custom desktop session).

Why we also need mpc

The comparatively simpler mpc tool performs the role of a remote control. We use it to assign key chords with which to control mpd even when no client is running. In a similar fashion, mpc provides a simple way of querying the status of the server for the sake of, say, displaying information about the current song on the panel (see the chapter about the top panel).

The MPRIS bridge

By default, mpd does not behave like most up-to-date music players in the GNU/Linux world. Put differently, it cannot be controlled by dedicated media keys, nor interact with specialised tools that might be offered by the desktop environment.

This kind of functionality is part of the MPRIS protocol. To make mpd a good citizen, we have fetched the mpdris2 package as well as a dedicated, console-based program for controlling MPRIS-aware applications: playerctl.

With these in place, the Music Player Daemon (and all other MPRIS-aware media players, like the ever-popular vlc) can be controlled using the keyboard’s dedicated media keys. See man playerctl for more demanding types of interaction. The key chords are defined in my sxhkdrc as explained in the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM.

Peace of mind

MPD is great because while it is powerful and can cater to the needs of the most avid audiophile, it also works seamlessly once you set it up. I prefer it over its alternatives because it is very much laissez faire, to the point you almost forget it is even there.

When you log back in to the custom BSPWM session, mpd will be up and running, waiting for your input in a paused state (or stopped, in case that was the last interaction with it).

You do not need to keep any window open, nor run some resource-hungry web app just for the sake of playing audio from your local collection. Use the keyboard’s dedicated key for play/pause or use the combination super + down arrow: music will start playing, while you get on with your work (do not forget to see my sxhkdrc for the relevant key chords).

Quick guide to set up Newsboat

Part of my customisations concern newsboat, a decent RSS/Atom reader for the console. If you have never heard what an RSS or Atom feed is, it is a data stream that is meant to be read by client programs, known as “readers” or “feed readers”. Whenever the source that publishes the feed makes a new entry (publishes something), the stream is populated with the new content, which the reader can then fetch. This makes it possible to keep track of multiple websites from a single interface. Having all that in the terminal makes things even better.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF newsboat/
newsboat/
└── .config/
	└── newsboat/
		├── config
		├── queue
		├── themes/
		│   ├── tempus_theme_dark.theme
		│   └── tempus_theme_light.theme
		└── urls -> /path/to/my/symlink # not part of the dotfiles

3 directories, 5 files

All you need to get started is to first put things in place:

~/cpdfd $ stow -v newsboat
LINK: .config/newsboat => ../dotfiles/newsboat/.config/newsboat

Then to actually read some feeds, you must manually create a urls file at ~/.config/newsboat/ with a single feed source per line, like this:

https://www.debian.org/News/news
https://bits.debian.org/feeds/atom.xml
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/feed.xml

I personally exclude this file from the dotfiles because it might contain sensitive information.

If you want to filter feeds, you can add one or more tags to them, with a space demarcating each entry:

https://www.debian.org/News/news "Distro"
https://bits.debian.org/feeds/atom.xml "Distro Community"
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/news/feed.xml "GNU Linux Distro"

Tags are used to aggregate content from multiple sources:

# A catch-all filter for unread items
"query:Unread Articles:unread = \"yes\""

# Some tag-specific filters
"query:GNU plus Linux:tags # \"Distro\""
"query:ARBITRARY NAME OF FILTER:tags # \"Tag\""

Once you launch the program, either from the command line or with the key chord chain super + x ; 4 (see chapter on the basics of BSPWM) you will start seeing news items pop up, grouped by source URL. From there you can use Vi motions or the arrow keys to select the desired item and either read it in place by hitting the Return key (Enter) or open it in the browser by hitting o (firefox-esr is the default and what I use).

The config file is fairly simple, with each setting usually describing what it does:

# General
# -------
show-read-articles no
show-read-feeds no
prepopulate-query-feeds no
feed-sort-order unreadarticlecount
show-keymap-hint yes
swap-title-and-hints no
text-width 72
save-path "~/Documents/archived-articles/rss"
browser /usr/bin/xdg-open %u
confirm-exit yes
display-article-progress yes

For more, see the source for the actual configurations. Also read the manual with man newsboat.

The Tempus themes

PRIOR NOTICE: all the scripts referenced herein are discussed in greater detail in the chapter about my local ~/bin.

All the colours you see are part of a project of mine called Tempus themes. These are colour schemes for Vim, terminal emulators and relevant tools. They consist of sixteen hues that correspond to the standard escape sequences for terminal colour definitions, in order from 0 to 15:

0-7: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white
8-15: bright {black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white}

I have designed Tempus with the purpose of filling a perceived void in the theming space: that of accessible, functional, yet still presentable colour schemes. Tempus is designed to work well for as many users as possible, myself included.

In more technical terms, the Tempus themes are compliant at minimum with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) level AA for colour contrast between foreground and background values. This stands for a relative luminance ratio of 4.5:1. That ratio is but a threshold as some members of the collection conform with the even higher standard of 7:1 (WCAG AAA).

Accessibility is about good design

To dispel any misconceptions, “accessibility” is not only useful for a subset of users. Accessibility is another way of describing thoughtful design. It benefits everyone. Being forced to read light grey on a white background or green text on a red backdrop is a major failure, indicating a lack of forethought and empathy with the user.

For us who spend considerable amounts of time interfacing with a computer, a good contrast ratio is essential to a subconsciously pleasant session (just as with good typography, as discussed in the chapter about fonts). Whether you read, write, code, your eyes will appreciate the improved legibility of text on the screen.

Try this: miscalibrate your monitor and/or your font configurations to make text look blurry and irritating to the eye. Work in that environment for a while to realise how much more painful it is. Eye strain is real, so do yourself a service by prioritising legibility over whimsy.

If you are used to inaccessible colour combinations, you may find Tempus themes a bit too sharp at first. Give it some time: your eyes will adapt to the improved presentation. I know from experience, as I used to work with inaccessible themes. In fact, I had developed an entire collection of them: Prot16. Those were not designed with accessibility and functionality in mind. Some might even “look better” than the Tempus themes, but none works better.

The Tempus themes collection

As of this writing (2019-07-02) the Tempus themes collection consists of the following items (WCAG rating in parentheses):

# Light themes
dawn       (AA)
day        (AA)
fugit      (AA)
past       (AA)
totus      (AAA)

# Dark themes
autumn     (AA)
classic    (AA)
dusk       (AA)
future     (AAA)
night      (AAA)
rift       (AA)
spring     (AA)
summer     (AA)
tempest    (AAA)
warp       (AA)
winter     (AA)

The one you get by default is Tempus Classic, which is a dark theme with warm hues.

Tempus and my dotfiles

With the exception of GTK widget and icon themes, Tempus is applied everywhere colours can be defined. Some notable examples are bspwm, vim, tmux, newsboat, neomutt, dunst, and my lemonbar script called melonpanel. Even GTK-based text editors are covered, such as gedit (GNOME default), pluma (MATE default), and gnome-builder.

A shell script is responsible for changing themes across all those applications: it is aptly named tempus, which is a backronym standing for “Themes Every Meticulous Person Ultimately Seeks” (in case you do not know, “tempus” is a real word in Latin).

You can run tempus directly from the terminal by adding a scheme’s unique name as its argument. For example, to switch to the light theme day, you would do:

tempus day

A slightly more convenient way is to use tempusmenu. This is a dmenu script that interfaces with the aforementioned command. It is bound to a hotkey sequence for your convenience. To invoke tempusmenu, type super + e ; t (hold super and press e, then release super and just press t—this is a key chord chain, as discussed in the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM). A menu with all available items will appear. Either type your choice and press enter or use the arrow keys (or CLI/Emacs motions) and press enter.

My dotfiles are designed in such a way that the following changes will occur when performing a theme switch across the entire environment:

• All running terminals will “live reload” their colours using escape sequences. Thanks to my own_script_update_running_terminals. Similarly, all running CLI programs like vim, newsboat, neomutt, less will gracefully adjust to the theme change.
• My default terminal emulator, xterm, will also write the new colour definitions to its configuration file (also see the chapter about the default terminal).
• The terminal multiplexer (tmux) will be instructed to reload its configurations in order to parse the new colours.
• The top panel (melonpanel) will be re-run and display the new colours. Same with the notification daemon (dunst).
• All running GTK applications, including Flatpaks, will convert to a light or dark variant of their current theme, depending on whether the selected Tempus theme is light or dark (assuming you followed the instructions in the chapter about installing core packages). So if you choose totus, for example, which is dark text on a light background, the GTK themes will also be light, and vice versa. This is courtesy of a running settings daemon. If you have followed the instructions in the chapters about installing Debian 10 ‘buster’ and adding the core packages, this is the mate-settings-daemon.
• The wallpaper will change accordingly, if you have defined images at ~/Pictures/theme/{dark,light}.jpg.

All this happens in the blink of an eye. If you care about the specifics (or wish to contribute) you need to examine the script that does the heavy lifting: tempus.

In my opinion, this is a very neat feature. Having it bound to a key chord makes it even better. Now if you need any convincing of why you should ever be able to switch themes on the fly, try coding using a dark theme under direct sunlight…

Additional resources

The Tempus themes is a standalone project that happens to be integrated with my dotfiles. There are a number of git repos. The specialised ones are specific to the program they reference:

• Tempus themes. The main content hub, which provides information about the project, screen shots, and offers all available ports in a central place.
• Tempus themes GTK3 Source View. For GTK-based text editors like Gedit, Pluma, Mousepad.
• Tempus themes GTK4 Source View. Only known implementation is for GNOME builder though other apps will follow once the migration to GTK4 gains momentum.
• Tempus themes Kitty.
• Tempus themes Konsole.
• Tempus themes ST.
• Tempus themes Tilix.
• Tempus themes URxvt.
• Tempus themes Vim.
• Tempus themes Xfce4-terminal.
• Tempus themes Xterm.

Also see the Tempus themes Generator: the tool that produces all these ports and the place where you could contribute new templates, code, ideas.

Known issues

The “live reloading” of all running instances of vim is contingent on tmux (see chapter on my Tmux+Vim combo). If you are running the text editor outside of the multiplexer’s control (e.g. a GUI), then the theme switch requires manual intervention. Either exit Vim and enter again or run :source ~/.vimrc. To fix this, I would need a program that can send key chords to running applications: this is possible within tmux, as can be seen in tmux_update_vim. There is xdotool, but my tests did not yield promising results…

If you are using the mate-terminal (recall that xterm is my default and recommended option) and try to open a new instance of it while the theme switch is underway, it will likely retain its older colour scheme in the database, even if it might catch the step where terminals are live reloaded via escape sequences. In such a case the theme switch needs to be performed anew or you must manually run own_script_mate_terminal_setup.

About my local ~/bin

An integral part my dotfiles is the bin directory. It includes various scripts that I have written for use in my custom desktop session. Some of these are essential to various functions and workflows. Others are convenient extras.

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF bin
bin
├── bin/
│   ├── bspwm_dynamic_desktops*
│   ├── bspwm_external_rules*
│   ├── bspwm_focus_mode*
│   ├── bspwm_multifaceted_operation*
│   ├── bspwm_reorder_desktops*
│   ├── bspwm_smart_move*
│   ├── bspwm_smart_presel*
│   ├── clr*
│   ├── dotsmenu*
│   ├── flatpakmenu*
│   ├── gev*
│   ├── melonpanel*
│   ├── nbm*
│   ├── own_script_bspwm_node_resize*
│   ├── own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs*
│   ├── own_script_current_keyboard_layout*
│   ├── own_script_laptop_dual_monitor*
│   ├── own_script_local_build_tempus_themes*
│   ├── own_script_mate_setup*
│   ├── own_script_mate_terminal_setup*
│   ├── own_script_notify_send_mpc_status*
│   ├── own_script_print_colour_table*
│   ├── own_script_run_dmenu_xcolors*
│   ├── own_script_run_passmenu_xcolors*
│   ├── own_script_update_environment_theme*
│   ├── own_script_update_running_terminals*
│   ├── own_script_update_tmux_running_vim*
│   ├── passmenu*
│   ├── poweroptionsmenu*
│   ├── ptp*
│   ├── sbg*
│   ├── sbgmenu*
│   ├── stm*
│   ├── stmmenu*
│   ├── tempus*
│   ├── tempusmenu*
│   ├── tmr*
│   ├── tmux_update_vim*
│   ├── toggle_compton*
│   └── toggle_screenkey*
└── .local/
	└── share/
		└── my_custom_ui_font.sh*

3 directories, 41 files

Let’s first get out of the way the my_custom_ui_font.sh. This file contains the font definition that is used in my various dmenu implementations. The code part:

if [ -n "$(fc-list 'dejavu sans condensed')" ]; then
	my_font_family='DejaVu Sans Condensed'
	my_font_size=12.5
fi

my_custom_ui_font="${my_font_family:-sans}-${my_font_size-12}:${my_font_weight:-regular}"

Now a few words about the scripts, with the proviso that you can always learn more about each one by studying the source code:

• Scripts that start with “own_script” are labelled as such for a variety of reasons: (1) their function is ancillary to something else, (2) I might develop a better replacement, (3) avoid naming conflicts, (4) be descriptive about what each item is about.
• Scripts whose name begins with “bspwm_” implement various advanced functions for the window manager. These are documented in the chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM.
• In principle, all items have inline documentation, except passmenu which is provided by another source referenced therein.
• While on the topic of passmenu, this is a dmenu interface for copying to the clipboard a password stored with pass. Such an awesome feature! To put it succinctly, this is what sold me on both the power of dmenu and the idea of a dedicated password manager that works seamlessly with core UNIX utilities.
• Many of these scripts are assigned to custom key bindings. Better check my sxhkdrc and/or sxhkdrc_bspc to find out the relevant key chords (as explained in the chapter about the basics of my BSPWM).
• The items nbm, sbg, and sbgmenu cover various ways of setting the desktop backdrop. I guess it is better explained in this short video: My UNIX-y ways to wallpapers.
• The stm and stmmenu are tools for handling my task list, in accordance with my own methodology. They are complementary to each other. This short video of mine should be enough to get you started: UNIX way to task management.
• gev must be run in the terminal to print a table with the status of all git repositories inside the user’s home directory. Better see this video: Demo of my Git’s Eye View.
• The own_script_run_* commands are wrappers around dmenu_run and passmenu respectively. They are meant to customise the looks to my liking, in order to keep things consistent.
• If you have Flatpak applications on your system, flatpakmenu will provide a nice interface to launching them.
• melonpanel is the script that draws the session’s panel. It is what provides content/information to lemonbar for display on the screen. This is discussed at length in the chapter about the top panel.
• Then there are a few items that are meant to integrate my themes into the various parts of the running session (as explained in the chapter about the Tempus themes): tempusmenu is a front end to selecting the theme you want; tempus does the actual work of applying the new theme across all supported programs; running terminals are re-coloured with own_script_update_running_terminals; while the running Vim sessions inside of Tmux are re-styled with the use of tmux_update_vim.
• poweroptionsmenu provides an interface for logging out of the session, switching users, locking the screen (using slock), rebooting, and shutting down the system. Note that slock may have an unintuitive interface at first, since all it does is turn the screen dark—you need to type your pass word and hit “Return” to unlock it. The screen will switch to a blue colour each time you type.
• toggle_compton will enable or disable the display compositor. A very useful feature under certain circumstances where running compton is detrimental to the task at hand. For instance, I use this to shut down the compositor when I am screen casting.
• toggle_screenkey is another on/off switch for the program it references.
• ptp is a script that prints a table with the colour palette of the active Tempus theme. The table is “context-aware”, so that it displays information depending on the width of the running terminal.
• clr calculates the contrast ratio between two colours. You run it by passing two arguments to it, each representing a colour that is written in valid hexadecimal RGB notation.
• tmr is a very simple timer. Run it with a single argument that represents a valid unit of time in seconds, minutes, hours, such as tmr 10m. Once the time has elapsed, it will print a message informing you of the time it started and end. It will also ring an alarm for a few seconds.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that the quality of these scripts may vary considerably. The newer the script, the better it is. This is all part of a learning process as I am not a programmer by trade. Despite that, I hope my efforts on this front are enough to set you up and running on a custom desktop session centred around the Binary Space Partitioning Window Manager.

Advanced features of my BSPWM session

My dotfiles’ stow package called “bin” includes the following set of scripts that alter the behaviour of the window manager:

~/cpdfd $ tree -aF bin
bin
├── bin/
│   ├── bspwm_dynamic_desktops*
│   ├── bspwm_external_rules*
│   ├── bspwm_focus_mode*
│   ├── bspwm_multifaceted_operation*
│   ├── bspwm_reorder_desktops*
│   ├── bspwm_smart_move*
│   ├── bspwm_smart_presel*
# Trimmed output

Here I explain what each item does and how it is implemented in my system. All hotkeys mentioned herein are defined in my sxhkdrc_bspc.

Dynamic desktops

By default, BSPWM uses a fixed number of desktops. A set is assigned to a monitor at startup. This is a perfectly usable design, especially for single-monitor setups. It can, however, be inefficient:

• You seldom need, say, ten desktops at all times. Your normal work requires only three or four of them. So why keep the rest? And why try to work around this by retroactively concealing them from the bspc report, the panel, etc.?
• On multi-head setups, you might find it preferable to decouple desktops from monitors. You might, for instance, require five desktops on the larger monitor and only one on the smallest one. Again, why commit to a specific number at startup and try to adapt your workflow to it.

Dynamic desktops solve these potential issues. You start with a single desktop per monitor and go from there in accordance with your evolving requirements.

The script is designed to insert/remove desktops on a per monitor basis. This means that its operations are always confined to the focused monitor. As such, if you are on desktop 1 on monitor one, and switch to desktop 2 (using super + {0-9}), then desktop 2 will be placed on monitor one as well. If you wanted to have it on monitor two, you would need to bring focus to it first (cycle through monitors with the key chord super + comma).

Alternatively, you can spawn a desktop on the next monitor without switching focus to it, by pressing super + ctrl + {0-9}. Such a desktop will hold a receptacle (discussed below).

Sending the focused window to a dynamically-created desktop is straightforward: super + shift + {0-9}. Again, this is limited to the given monitor, while I have decided not to implement a direct action for sending the focused window to a new desktop on the next monitor. There is a trade-off between feature completeness and complexity.

In short, dynamic desktops should have a natural feel to them. You just move around and they adapt accordingly. As a bonus, I have added a “back-and-forth” behaviour, so if you input the same number of the desktop twice while using super + {0-9}, focus will move to the last desktop and back again.

Dynamic desktops and the concomitant back-and-forth behaviour were inspired by i3wm.

Reorder desktops

This is a simple script that will reorder the desktops in numerical order. You will probably have no use for this, because it is already part of bspwm_dynamic_desktops from where it was extracted. Still, it is provided as a standalone utility in case you ever find yourself manually performing the necessary bspc actions that add/remove desktops.

Manual tiling (smart presel and external rules)

BSPWM automatically tiles windows in a spiral layout. Older windows move inwardly, while the newest one occupies the outermost part of the spiral (at the given level). However, the window manager also offers a couple of features for manually placing windows on the screen. Those are referred to as preselections and receptacles respectively.

A preselection is, by default, an area that is a fraction of the focused node. The preselection provides feedback on where the next window will be placed. When that event takes place, the focused window is split at the given ratio and focus switches to the new window.

In contradistinction, receptacles are empty frames that occupy an area of the screen, as per the tiling scheme, until they are expressly told to host a window, at which point they cease to exist. Think of them as placeholders for windows yet-to-be. To send an item to the position of the receptacle, we need to pass a specific command: the unscripted tiling method will not affect receptacles.

I have decided to carve a niche for each of these features and design distinct courses of action around them. The two scripts involved in the process are bspwm_smart_presel and bspwm_external_rules.

“Smart presel” contains logic to evaluate the following and lead to the relevant consequences:

• Is there a marked window (using the node flag “marked”, which is assigned with super + a ; m)? If yes, then use the first that matches this criterion. Otherwise operate on the focused window.
• Does a receptacle exist? If yes, use it to place the window in its stead. Else put the window in the position of the first matching preselection.

A preselection is given with super + alt + {h,j,k,l}. It is cancelled by inputting the same direction twice. To insert a receptacle, press super + n ; r. Remove it at any time with super + n ; super + r (you can then resize nodes, adjust the split ratios etc. as mentioned in the chapter on the basics of my BSPWM). If a preselection is available, then a new receptacle will be placed there.

To place the marked or focused window in the position of the available receptacle or preselection type super + n ; i. The difference between the two is revealed when performing such actions across desktops. A receptacle will not call focus to itself, whereas a preselection will.

The assumption that underpins this design is that a receptacle can be placed in a desktop, then a program that has a rather slow startup time is launched (e.g. the web browser). The user is free to switch to another desktop in the meantime.

This way you can continue your work and get back to that slow application at a later point. Multi-head setups render this apparent. For example, you “pre-load” the smaller monitor, switch to the larger one, work there and the application will appear on the small monitor, taking the place of the receptacle. No interruptions, no things moving around. This is precise and deliberate.

Note that for such a scenario you do not need to press super + n ; i, because the external rules come into play, automatically placing the next window in the position of the first available receptacle (or preselection if no receptacle exists). You can, nonetheless, still use super + n ; i. Place a receptacle in a new desktop, switch to another and then type that key sequence to insert the marked or focused window there.

At any rate, all this is a means of fleshing out BSPWM’s notions of manual tiling actions. You are free to tweak things to your liking.

Multifaceted operations (multi-node actions)

This is, dare I say, a beautifully simple script that facilitates window management over multiple selection paths. Its various actions are assigned to key chords and concern the following:

• super + n ; super + shift + r: kill all receptacles (as opposed to only remove the last one, with super + n ; super + r).
• super + n ; super + q: close all non-focused, non-marked windows on the focused desktop. This is an extension of the standard key for closing the focused window: super + q with the added bonus of respecting the “marked” flag (it is assumed you are marking windows for a reason).
• super + n ; super + shift + q: same as above, but kills them instead. For context, the key for killing just the focused window is super + shift + q.
• super + n ; l: assign the “locked” flag to all windows in the present desktop. A locked window cannot be closed with any of the commands mentioned earlier (though it can be killed). Recall from the chapter on the basics of my BSPWM that to assign such a flag to the focused window, you press super + a ; l (inputting twice toggles the behaviour).
• super + n ; shift + l: remove the “locked” flag from all windows on the present desktop.
• super + n ; m: summon all “marked” windows, regardless of where they are, to the present desktop. You can mark a window by passing to it that flag: super + a ; m.
• super + n ; super + {0-9}: bring all the windows of the given desktop (the given number) to the focused one. This is an extension of the basic key for focusing desktops: super + {0-9}.
• super + n ; super + shift + {0-9}: send the windows of the present desktop to the given one. This incorporates the dynamic desktops mentioned above, so inputting a number will just create that desktop on the focused monitor.

With those granted, I recommend you try learning things one command at a time. Otherwise you will most certainly mix up all the key chords and key chord chains. Start with the basics. You will then realise that the more advanced ones build on that foundation.

Smart move

You move focus around windows with super + {h,j,k,l}. Additionally, you swap the position between the focused window and the one in the given direction with super + shift + {h,j,k,l}. These are standard actions that are provided out-of-the-box. Their two limitations are:

1. They do not work with receptacles.
2. You cannot remove a window from the automatic tiling scheme. You must instead switch places with an existing one.

So what I have decided to do is provide a wrapper around the standard commands for focusing and switching windows, but also account for receptacles.

If you input the keys that switch windows in a direction where no window exists, a receptacle will be spawned to occupy that place. Inputting the same direction again will move the focused window that is adjacent to the receptacle to the space occupied by the latter. At that point the receptacle will disappear.

This provides an intuitive way of moving a window to the position of an adjacent receptacle, rather than having to memorise a key chord chain (though that still has its use case for instances where you do not want to move a window adjacent to a receptacle).

Furthermore, this offers the upside of creating three column/row layouts by just moving things around. Consider this standard layout for three windows:

_____ _____
|   | | B |
| A | |___|
|   | | C |
|___| |___|

You can focus B or C and input super + shift + l to insert a receptacle to their right. Do so again to move the adjacent focused window there, to get a three column layout. You can then even out the proportions of the splits between the windows with super + s ; b.

Try working with bspwm_smart_move for a while. If you find that it poses an impediment to your workflow you can find easy-to-follow instructions inside sxhkdrc_bspc.

Focus mode

This is a “distraction-free” environment that removes the top panel, window gaps, and any padding from the desktop. All you see is windows with overlapping borders between them. The idea is to remove all complementary elements and focus on the content of your work. For example, I often use this when I am doing long-form writing.

Toggle the focus mode with super + e ; f.

Is BSPWM the best tiling window manager?

Short answer: it depends.

Long answer: You cannot possibly address such questions in abstract. Much hinges on the desired workflow and the needs each user has. One’s disposition must be accounted for: whether they want to experiment and script certain patterns of behaviour, and the like.

The purpose of this chapter, and this book at-large, is to make a point about the degree to which we can approximate a desktop environment by utilising disparate programs in a synergistic way.

BSPWM works perfectly fine without scripting anything. It does, nonetheless, offer that option, which opens up a range of possibilities for advanced window management.

Closing notes and additional resources

That is all from my side. Thank you for reading through the pages of Prot’s Dots for Debian (PDFD). You should now have a solid basis to build upon.

Remember: we customise our session to improve our workflow. Efficiency is all that matters. What gets upvoted in various fora for *NIX enthusiasts does not always work as well (e.g. low-contrast colour schemes, excessive transparency and wanton use of blur effects).

I leave you with some links, just for the sake of completeness:

• The canonical link to PDFD (part of my website).
• My website, where I publish all sorts of things apart from libre software stuff.
• Source files for Prot’s Dots For Debian:
  1. PDFD repo.
  2. Site repo.
• The Code for PDFD contains the latest fixed release of my dotfiles. It was our reference point throughout this book.
• My dotfiles is where I push regular changes to my custom desktop session. I include them in a “fixed release” when I feel they are ready for broader adoption.
• Tempus themes. This is just the main repo, which includes information about the entirety of the project, as noted in the chapter about the Tempus themes.

Annex on the multi-monitor setup

This annex is only meant to share with the public a modified version of a reply I sent via email to a fellow user. Changes are made to ensure compatibility with the rest of the book.

The purpose of annexes is to provide some extra information, with the proviso that the reader is also willing to put in the effort where necessary. They also are published for the longer-term maintainability of “Prot’s Dots For Debian” (PDFD): I can just link to them in case anyone else has a similar question/issue.

This chapter concerns the settings I have in place for allowing my custom desktop session to use a dual monitor setup. My main machine is a laptop (Thinkpad X220) to which I attach an external monitor via the VGA port.

The multi-monitor setup consists of three parts, which are documented in sequence. It is assumed that you have already followed earlier steps in this book to get my code/configs and put them in their right place.

Before we start, here is a short primer on xrandr.

0. Basics of XrandR

The xrandr utility helps us identify the available connected monitors, or “outputs”, with the command xrandr -q.

What I get from that:

xrandr -q

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3286 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767
LVDS1 connected primary 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 280mm x 160mm
   1366x768      60.00*+
   1360x768      59.96
   1280x720      59.86    60.00    59.74
   1024x768      60.00
   1024x576      60.00    59.90    59.82
   960x540       60.00    59.63    59.82
   800x600       60.32    56.25
   864x486       60.00    59.92    59.57
   640x480       59.94
   720x405       59.51    60.00    58.99
   680x384       60.00
   640x360       59.84    59.32    60.00
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
VGA1 connected 1920x1080+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 480mm x 270mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+
   1680x1050     59.95
   1600x900      60.00
   1280x1024     75.02    60.02
   1440x900      59.89
   1280x800      59.81
   1152x864      75.00
   1280x720      60.00
   1024x768      75.03    70.07    60.00
   832x624       74.55
   800x600       72.19    75.00    60.32    56.25
   640x480       75.00    72.81    66.67    59.94
   720x400       70.08
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

We can then limit the output to just those we are interested in:

xrandr -q | grep -w connected

LVDS1 connected primary 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 280mm x 160mm
VGA1 connected 1920x1080+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 480mm x 270mm

With this in mind, we proceed to my scripts.

1. Monitor layout for the X display server

We first need to tell the X server how we want our monitors to be drawn. This concerns their geometry and relative positions. The script dedicated to this task is own_script_laptop_dual_monitor (refer to the chapter about my local ~/bin). Let us then have a look into its main elements.

This function accepts an argument that determines whether the laptop screen will be designated as the “primary” one or not. It also establishes the coordinates of the laptop’s built-in display. The --mode is the monitor’s dimensions (resolution), while --pos means to place the monitor at the upper left point of the notional space that X assigns to the displays. The X×Y coordinates are Width×Height:

laptop_coordinates() {
    if [ "$#" == 1 ]; then
        xrandr --output LVDS1 --primary --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0
    else
        xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --pos 0x0
    fi
}

And this one below sets the coordinates and dimensions for the external monitor. The laptop is specified as the primary display. Note the --pos of the external display, which has an X axis that continues right after the end of the laptop monitor. The Y axis remains at 0, which means that the two monitors are aligned at the top horizontally but not at the bottom, because the laptop’s is shorter.

multihead_coordinates() {
    echo "Configuring LVDS1 + VGA1 XrandR coordinates"
    # pass a single argument to activate the --primary option
    laptop_coordinates 'primary'

    # configure the external display on the VGA port
    xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080 --pos 1366x0
}

Then I have a very simple command to see if the VGA monitor is connected. If it is not, then this variable is empty:

my_laptop_external_monitor=$(xrandr --query | grep 'VGA1 connected')

Finally I run a check against this variable. I leave out some extra commands here, for the sake of our topic. The elif condition is there for cases where I need to use the script outside BSPWM (e.g. to set up LightDM—contact me if this is something you are interested in):

if [ -n "$my_laptop_external_monitor" ] && [ "$DESKTOP_SESSION" == 'bspwm' ]; then
    multihead_coordinates
elif [ -n "$my_laptop_external_monitor" ]; then
    multihead_coordinates
else
    laptop_coordinates
fi

2. BSPWM multihead

The above will just prepare the dual monitors for the X display server. We still need to configure BSPWM accordingly, otherwise we will not get the desired results. I do this in a separate script, for the sake of portability. This one is own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs (it has a few more commands that I omit for the sake of brevity and to remain on topic).

First we check the number of monitors. Basically to confirm that an external display is on. This time we use BSPWM client program, just to be sure that it is running and finding the information it needs:

monitor_count="$(bspc query -M | wc -l)"

I then have a very simple command for single monitor setups. This just defines the workspaces/desktops on the first available monitor (i.e. the only one). Note that I only specify a single desktop because I use my custom script for dynamic desktops, which is documented in the chapter about the advanced features of my BSPWM.

bspwm_generic_workspaces() {
    bspc monitor -d 1
}

Then I have settings for the workspaces/desktops and a few other things. I just include the desktops’ part to keep this article on point.

bspwm_laptop_dual_monitor() {
    bspc monitor LVDS1 -d 1
    bspc monitor VGA1 -d 8
}

So I place just a single desktop on each monitor. The actual numbers have no real significance here. You can switch desktops with the motions I document in the basics of my BSPWM (use super+NUM or to switch monitors while retaining their currently-focused desktop go with super+,)

I implement one desktop per monitor because I use my own “dynamic desktops” script. Otherwise you can have something like:

bspwm_laptop_dual_monitor() {
	bspc monitor LVDS1 -d 1 2 3 4 5
	bspc monitor VGA1 -d 6 7 8 9 0
}

In my experience the numbers need to be in sequence. You cannot have them alternate (LVDS has 1 3 5 /// VGA has 2 4 6).

At any rate, here is the excerpt of the final piece of the script. I put it first and explain it below:

# run the script that adds the appropriate `xrandr` settings
if [ "$(command -v own_script_laptop_dual_monitor 2> /dev/null)" ]; then
    own_script_laptop_dual_monitor
fi

# Is an external monitor connected to my laptop?
if [ "$monitor_count" == 2 ]; then
    echo "Monitor count is equal to 2"
    echo "Defining per-monitor workspaces"
    bspwm_laptop_dual_monitor
else
    bspwm_generic_workspaces
fi

As you can see, it first runs the script I mentioned in the previous section. This is because I only autostart this one script at BSPWM launch (more on that below).

Then it simply configures the workspaces/desktops depending on whether there is an external monitor or not.

That is all to it. The final piece is to run this script when BSPWM starts. So this is the very last line in my bspwmrc:

_check own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs && own_script_bspwm_per_host_configs

The _check function expands into command -v "$1" > /dev/null where the argument $1 is the name of the script/command to check against (see the file to understand how I use this throughout it). The command basically checks for the existence of the script before running it.

3. Panel settings (lemonbar)

Thus far everything should work except the system panel. As explained in much greater detail in the chapter about the top panel, my script that configures lemonbar is called melonpanel. This is a long script. The part about monitors concerns the actual placement of the panel on which all the “modules” are printed (information about desktops, the date, sound volume, etc.). Here are the extracted parts:

laptop_external_monitor="$(xrandr --query | grep 'VGA1 connected')"

if [ -n "$laptop_external_monitor" ]; then
   printf "%s%s\n" "%{Sf}$(_panel_layout)" "%{Sl}$(_panel_layout)"
else
    printf "%s\n" "%{Sf}$(_panel_layout)"
fi

Focus on the %{Sf} and %{Sl} constructs. This is lemonbar syntax for the first and second monitor respectively. Basically to place the same panel on both of them.

Concluding notes

I understand this is a rather complex topic. Hopefully you now have a basis to work with. The way I would troubleshoot any problems is to make sure that the X server draws the screens correctly and that BSPWM places the right desktops on each monitor.

For example, say desktop 8 is on the external display, while desktop 1 is on the laptop. Switch to 8 and spawn a terminal emulator. Then switch to 1 and do the same. If you get terminals on both monitors, then your only problem is with the panel.

1.1 That which is simple lends itself to portability, modularity. It is clear and concise. Stable and sufficient. The simpler the thing, the more perfect it is.

1.2 Perfection does not consist in comprehensiveness. That which attempts to anticipate all possible outcomes is forever trapped in the constitution of the case that served as the basis for the initial foresight.

1.3 The simple is that which complements the hitherto unforeseen. It does not fail to cope with it. The simple adapts to evolving circumstances.

1.4 To be simple is to be resilient. Complexity is the source of all fragility.

1.5 The simple stands alone.

2 From simplicity comes complexity, but not vice versa. For the complex is not reducible to its elements, by virtue of its emergent properties.

2.1 Emergence is the phenomenon by which a set of relations produces states of affairs that are specific to them. The factors of the case do not exhibit those properties in isolation, but only in their interplay.

2.1.1 Emergence describes systemic phenomena.

2.2 Simplicity and emergence cannot co-exist within the same scope of application¹. What may exist at the given level of abstraction is constants or patterns that are discernible in emergent phenomena.

2.3 The simple, understood in its absolute, is an object of thought. It is the abstraction derived from whatever patterns we may discern.

2.4 All that is rendered susceptible to the senses is a composite, a system of sub-systems within their wider environment, all confined to the ecosystem².

2.5 Simplicity is a mode of relation, not of instantiation. That which is simple is defined as such in comparison to the other factors of the case. It is possible to decouple it from them without diminishing its qualities and those of the objects that stand in relation to it.

2.6 Standalone simplicity is meaningless. The object of reference is not examined in isolation. Human has no such capacity, the world has no phenomena of the sort. All that is, conforms to the principle of universal inter-connectedness.

3 Both simplicity and complexity concern the overall structure of systems.

3.1 A system is a set of factors in their joint operation and dependence that is governed by local and global rules and determined by both endogenous and exogenous events.

3.2 If systems consist of systems and so on, how can point 1 ever be true? For the decoupling of the factors of the case would necessarily result in the overall alteration of the system. The constitution of the case prior to the decoupling is not the same as the one after. It must follow that the given {sub-,}system is no longer in effect.

3.3 In that regard, simplicity hints at the possibility of breaking a system by disentangling its factors from each other, without affecting their presence.

3.4 Still, the definition in point 1 leaves much to be desired, for it implies that the state of the factor of a case is in no way framed and conditioned by its immediate environment.

3.5 That which is part of a system is partaking in the feedback loops that are specific to the system. The factor affects and is affected by them.

3.6 There can be no system where its factors do not stand together.

3.7 So point 2 is imprecise. For a factor can only be simple if it can be gracefully extracted from its system. That amounts to complexity leading to simplicity.

3.8 Furthermore, how can emergence ever be an obstacle to the reduction of complexity into simplicity? If the simple can be derived from the complex, then emergence is irrelevant. It only concerns the level of abstraction at which it occurs—none of its factors or sub-systems in their isolation.

3.9 We can conceive of local and global rules. Sub- and super- systems that underpin or encompass states of affairs. Epistemology must thus account for the scope of application.

4 The simple can only be thought of as such.