Forever Becoming: Ricard

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The Death of Meaning

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Chaos - Order
Nature - Culture

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For someone who knows how to give meaning to life, every instant is like an arrow flying toward its target. Not to know how to give meaning to life leads to discouragement and a sense of futility that may even lead to the ultimate failure, suicide.

[Mathieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p. 348

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The Road (2009)

The Road shows a world in which most structures of meaning have broken down; in which those ideas that make us human - morals, ethics, love, compassion - have been thrown out the window in favour of a single imperative: to survive.

We see humanity in the process of losing its "humanity," people becoming animals. Animals have no meanings, they do not imagine themselves to be something; they cannot craft themselves into one image or another, a saint or a sinner. They do what they must, to survive.

The Father's meanings have shrunk down to one: "Keep the boy alive," and in this sense he is not far from becoming animal. His vision is centred on the boy, and he does not see anyone else. It is his job to care for the boy, and it is left to the boy to care both for his father and for the Other (to keep alive the idea of relatedness, of the Whole). He may be his father's keeper, but he is also his brother's.

The boy is left to carry the fire, a flame from which meanings spark and ignite. In a world in which humanity is dying, both in body and in spirit, the boy's capacity to imagine - to give life meaning - keeps him alive, and keeps him human.

The Road shows us how vital it is that we are able to breathe meaning into life, and reminds us that our ability to imagine helps form the bedrock of our humanity.

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Guiding Fiction

Everything and Nothing

Nothing Something Everything
Rest Motion Rest

0
'The Sea'
'Metaxy' (Plato/Hillman)

'The Real' (Freud/Lacan)
'Emptiness' (Buddhism)
'Wuji/Wu chi' (Taoism)
'The zone of no-thing' (R.D. Laing)
'O' (Wilfred Bion)
'Creative Indifference' (Salomo Friedlaender)
'The fertile void' (Fritz Perls)

The womb

The Chinese word Wuji (pinyin) or Wu Chi (Wade-Giles) refers to the unmanifest aspect of Tao: Tao-in-stillness, in other words.

Wuji is the undifferentiated timelessness which, in the Taijitu Shuo (a traditional Taoist diagram) is represented by an empty circle. In Taoist cosmology, Wuji refers to a state of non-distinction prior to the differentiation into the Yin and Yang that give birth to the ten-thousand-things-- all the phenomena of the manifest world, with their various qualities and behaviors.

The Chinese character for Wuji (Wu Chi) is composed of two radicals: Wu and Ji (Chi).

“Wu” includes the meanings: without/ no/ none/ non- / [where there are] no.

“Ji (Chi)” includes the meanings: limits/ extreme/ end/ ultimate/ extreme boundary.

Wuji (Wu Chi) can, then, be translated as: infinite, unlimited, boundless or limitless.

[Elizabeth Reninger]
'Wuji (Wu Chi): The Unmanifest Aspect of the Tao'

If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succour out of nothing. He is a magician.

Their source is from the Silence at the centre of each of us.

The zone, the zone of no-thing, of the silence of silences, is the source. We forget that we are all there all the time.

[R.D. Laing]
The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, p.37, 38

In nothingness there's nothing at all, while 'emptiness' is in fact the opposite of nothingness - it's a universal potential, the universe, beings, movement, consciousness.

No phenomena at all could ever be manifested if their ultimate nature wasn't emptiness.

In rather the same way, though this is only an image, the visible world would not be able to unfold without space to unfold in. If space was intrinsically substantial and permanent, no manifestation, no transformation, would be possible. That's why the texts say, 'Since there is emptiness, everything can exist.'

Emptiness thus contains all possibilities, and those possibilities are interdependent.

The analogy of space allowing worlds to be formed is only an image, to show that nothing in the phenomenal world is substantial, permanent, or intrinsically existing [...]

The idea of emptiness is to combat the innate tendency we have to reify the self, consciousness, and phenomena.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.137, 142

When I flowed out from God, all things declared, "God is!"

Now this cannot make me blessed, for thereby I acknowledge myself a creature. But in the breakthrough I stand empty in the will of God, and empty also of God's will, and of all his works, even of God himself -

then I am more than all creatures, then I am neither God nor creature: I am what I was, and that I shall remain, now and ever more!

Then I receive a thrust which carries me above angels. By this thrust I become so rich that God cannot suffice me, despite all that he is as God and all his godly works; for in this breakthrough I receive what God and I have in common.

I am what I was, I neither increase not diminish, for I am the unmoved mover that moves all things.

Here God can find no more place in man, for man by his emptiness has won back that which he was eternally and ever shall remain.

[Meister Eckhart]
Meister Eckhart, p.221
Found in 'Psychology and the East' by Carl Gustav Jung, p.158-9

[The Garland Sutra] calls the world of ordinary life "the Dharmic World of Phenomena."

Its condition is such as we ordinarily experience when there are two separate things, A and B.

A has its own particular characteristics, as does B; A and B thus are clearly distinguished from one another, and there is no question of confusing the two.

If the boundaries between phenomena are removed, however, we see the world differently.

This dissolution of boundaries is characteristic [...] of Buddhism in general and other Eastern philosophies. "The minute and infinite differences of actual existence instantly disappear in a vast space of nondiscrimination.

Here, the differences between objects disappear, and so self-nature is negated. This state Zen Buddhism calls "nothingness or emptiness" [...]

Such terms as "nothingness" and "emptiness" do not signify an empty world of no things, but rather a world that contains infinite possibilities for "being." "Emptiness" in the Dharmic World of Principle is pregnant with the dual meaning of nothingness and being.

[...] in order to have such "emptying" of existence [...] it is necessary to empty our ordinary consciousness, our "discriminating mind," which discriminates things one from another, always wanting to see the differences.

The world of phenomena embodies various kinds of discrimination. Each and every thing can be seen separately. But once a person acknowledges their Emptiness before or beneath such discrimination, one can see the world entirely nondiscriminately.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.99-101

The ubiquitous absence of 'God' in ordinary life is this sense of non-existing, of mystery, of incalculable potentiality; this eternal doubt that hovers between the thing in itself and our perception of it; this dimension in and by which all other dimensions exist.

The white paper that contains a drawing; the space that contains a building; the silence that contains a sonata; the passage of time that prevents a sensation or object continuing for ever; all these are 'God'.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p. 27

"'You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friendliness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph.'

As if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to stop. He spoke the words with some effort, as though he had not used his lips for speaking for a long time.

And at that moment he laid his hand on my arm - it was light as a butterfly - looked penetratingly into my eyes, and smiled. At that moment I was conquered.

Something of his cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me;

and suddenly I understood the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity.

I understood what I was privileged to see here, and now for the first time grasped the meaning of this smile, this radiance. A saint, one who had attained perfection, had permitted me to dwell in his radiance for an hour; and blunderer that I am, I had tried to entertain him, to question him, to seduce him into a conversation.

Thank God the light had not dawned on me too late. He might have sent me away and thus rejected me forever. And I would have been deprived of the most remarkable and wonderful experience I have ever had."

[Hermann Hesse]
The Glass Bead Game, p. 257

Wolfert (2000) describes the Gestalt principles of refraining from preconceptions, and openness of the self to what emerges, as rooted in and parallel to Taoist traditions.

Through this attitude of openness, a flexibility is present that allows for creativity and sacred experience to emerge. This practice of open attention within Gestalt therapy is similar to many forms of meditation (Naranjo, 1970).

A Gestalt approach also challenges us to sit in openness with feelings of not knowing, lack of meaning, or emptness. These feelings are often associated with the feeling of “a void.” Sitting in “a void” is a familiar aspect of Taoist and Zen Buddhist traditions (Van Dusen, 1977). This is often called a “fertile void” by Perls or place of “creative indifference” by Friedlaender in Gestalt psychology (Frambach, 2003).

It is the center from which all phenomena arise.

Wolfert (2000) tells us that it is through dwelling in the fertile void that we can have deeper contact and allow spiritual experience to enter. This fertile emptiness also has been compared to the psychological openness of grace in Christianity.

[Lynn Williams]
'Spirituality and Gestalt: A Gestalt-Transpersonal Perspective'

The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

Everything in the universe comes out of Nothing.

Nothing - the nameless is the beginning;

While Heaven, the mother is the creatrix of all things.

Follow the nothingness of the Tao,
and you can be like it, not needing anything,
seeing the wonder and the root of everything.

And even if you cannot grasp this nothingness, you can still see something of the Tao in everything.

These two are the same only called by different names

- and both are mysterious and wonderful.

All mysteries are Tao, and Heaven is their mother:
She is the gateway and the womb-door.

[Lao Tzu]
Tao Te Ching, Chapter One

Kristeva's elaboration of the semiotic situates it at a point prior to the Lacanian imaginary, i.e., prior to the moment at which the infant identifies with its own ego and distinguishes itself from an object.

Still in porous relation to another body, without clear borders or limits, the infant is propelled by the anarchic, heterogenous, rhythmic flow of drive energy “which has no thesis and no position”. Mobile and provisional, moving through the body of the not-yet subject, the semiotic is a chaotic force anterior to language, unlocalizable because it courses through an as yet undifferentiated materiality in which the infantile body is not yet distinct from the maternal body.

Kristeva calls this stage pre-thetic since it is prior to the reign of propositions, judgments, positions, and theses, these being subsequent possibilities that might arrest or seize a movement that always exceeds them. Since the image is itself a kind of sign, a first representation, the advent of the imaginary demarcates the first thetic break, a break from nature and into the realm of convention.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Rights and Responsibilities

Rights             -                    Responsibilities
Freedom                -                    Bondage
Chaos                    -                   Order
Individual                -                   Collective

You must choose between making a man or a citizen, you cannot make both at once.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]
Émile, p.39

M. - The Dalai Lama [has] tried to introduce into the constitution not only the notion of individuals' rights but also the idea of individuals' responsibility toward society and the state's responsibility toward other states in the world.

J.F. - Yes, it's true that one aspect of what we could call the crisis of modern democracies is that in our own state of law the citizens feel that they have more and more rights and less and less responsibilities toward the community [...] people are a lot less interested in the question of citizens' responsibilities than in that of their rights. They're nevertheless two side of the very same thing.

M. - The East is more inclined than the West to think that society's harmony shouldn't be compromised by people using the notion of human rights to justify doing anything they like, at any time, however they want, as long as it's 'allowed'.

For indeed, such an attitude is really a form of anarchy. It leads to an imbalance between right and duties, between liberty for oneself and responsibilities toward others.

The individual is supreme in Western societies. The individual can do practically anything, as long as it's within the framework of the law.

The individual's responsibility is to consciously preserve the harmony of society. That's something that can only be done if individuals respect the law, not as an obligation, but in the light of an ethical sense, both spiritual and temporal.

The point is not to restrain individuals' freedom but to instill in them a sense of responsibility.

[...] the public's fascinated by violence and sex, and commercially it works very well. The producers only see money to be made, while the legislators are paralyzed by the fear of even touching people's freedom of expression.

The result is complete ignorance about responsibility and an inability to translate such a notion into either law or convention.

If human rights are considered on their own, without human responsibilities being taken into account, there's never going to be a solution to the problem.

In the end, a sense of responsibility has to come from the maturity of individuals, not from restrictive laws. And for individuals to attain such maturity, spiritual principles that make inner change possible have to be alive and well in society, instead of being cruelly missing.

[Matthieu Ricard]
and [Jean-Francois Revel]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.282, 284, 286-7

We must offer to a young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart can act, which expand and extend it to other beings, and which cause him everywhere to find himself again outside himself.

On the other hand, he must carefully avoid those objects which might restrain and repress his heart and stretch the mainspring of the human I or ego, etc.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]
Émile, p.115-20

In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

[Harold Pinter]
Nobel Lecture, 'Art, Truth & Politics'

Developing maturity is not, therefore, simply a slipping of the chains of constraint. It also involves learning to carry a heavier load with intelligence, to manage the complexities of social relations.

The other part of moving through the life cycle is the ever-increasing establishment of relations with others. Most of these new ties derive directly from participation in ritual: They include the people who went through initiation with a man, those who taught him, those he himself taught, and so on.

At each stage he reaches, a man experiences both a wider domain of autonomy and a greater responsibility.

Not only is this sense of responsibility a psychological product of the periods of seclusion, ritual discipline, and subordination, it also derives from the very construction of a social identity that is increasingly related to other men through exchange and shared participation in events.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.245

Buddhism and Psychoanalysis

While Buddhism aims at freeing ourselves form the stagnation of thoughts like a bird taking off from the fumes of the city toward the pure mountain air, psychoanalysis, or so it seems, brings about an exacerbation of thoughts and dreams - thoughts that are completely centered on ourselves, in fact.

Patients try to reorganize their small world, and to control it as best they can. But they stay bogged down in it.

To put it in a nutshell, the problem with psychoanalysis is that it doesn't identify the basic causes of ignorance and inner enslavement.

Conflict with one's father or mother, and other traumatic experiences, aren't primary causes, they're circumstantial ones. The primary cause is attachment to the ego, which gives rise to attraction and repulsion, infatuation with and the desire to protect oneself.

Where Buddhism's approach and that of psychoanalysis diverge is the means used to attain liberation. Psychoanalysis is correct, and works within the framework of its own system, but that system is limited by the very goals it sets itself.

Take the problem of libido, for example. If you try to repress all the energy of desire, it's bound to come out via some roundabout route and be expressed in an abnormal way. So psychoanalysis tries to redirect it toward its proper object and give it back its normal expression.

But according to Buddhist contemplative science, you neither try to repress desire nor give it free reign in its ordinary state - you try to be completely liberated from it.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.299-300

Related posts:-
Step toward Madness
Forget Yourself

Neomania

Novel -                     New
Horizontal -                      Vertical
Surface - Depth
Playful -                      Serious

M. - If you're always looking for novelty, you're often depriving yourself of the most essential truths.

The antidote to suffering and to belief in a self consists of going to the very source of your thoughts and recognizing the ultimate nature of the mind. How could such a truth ever grow old?

What novelty could 'outmode' a teaching that lays bare the very workings of the mind?

Very often, fascination with things that are new and different is a reflection of inner impoverishment. Unable to find happiness within ourselves, we desperately look for it outside, in objects, in experiences, in ever stranger ways of thinking and acting. In short, we get further away from happiness by looking for it where it simply isn't to be found.

It seems to me that the notion of novelty, the desire to keep on inventing things through a fear of copying the past, is an exaggeration of the importance given to the 'personality', to the individuality that's supposed to express itself in an original way at any price.

J.F. - [...] Do you think [that] Buddhism might provide a refuge for people who are fed up with the whole tyranny of novelty?

M. - [...] If you try to see where that thirst for novelty comes from, it seems to arise from neglect of the inner life.

We stop going back to the source of things, and the idea occurs to us that by trying all sorts of new things we might be able to compensate for that feeling of lacking something.

[Matthieu Ricard]
and [Jean-Francois Revel]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.313

[...] the idea that the artist should always be trying to give free rein to his imagination is clearly foreign to traditional sacred art, which exists to provide material for meditation and reflection.

Artists put all their heart and talent into what they do, but their personality vanishes completely behind their work.

For that reason, Tibetan painting is essentially anonymous.

Western art often tries to create an imaginary world, while sacred art helps to penetrate to the nature of reality. Ordinary art's aimed at rousing the passions, sacred art at stilling them. Sacred dance, painting, and music try to establish a link with spiritual wisdom in the world of forms and sounds. They're arts whose goal is to link us through their symbolism with spiritual knowledge and practice.

The traditional artist puts all his skill into the quality of his art, but he'll never just give his imagination free rein to invent completely new symbols or forms.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.310

It is very easy to fall into the notion that if the new is viable, then there must have been something wrong with the old. This view, to which organisms already suffering the pathologies of over-rapid, frantic social change are inevitably prone, is, of course, mostly nonsense.

What is always important is to be sure that the new is not worse than the old.

It is still not certain that a society containing the internal combustion engine can be viable or that electronic communication devices such as television are compatible with the aggressive intraspecies competition generated by the Industrial Revolution.

Other things being equal (which is not often the case), the old, which has been somewhat tested, is more likely to be viable than the new, which has not been tested at all.

[Gregory Bateson]
Mind and Nature, p. 194-5

The left hemisphere ‘creates’ newness by recombining in a novel fashion what is already known, not as imagination does, by allowing something that we thought we knew to be truly revealed for the first time.

It is like those children's books with pages split into three, in which you can invent a new animal by putting together the head of a camel, the body of a seal and the legs of a goat.

It produced, by the reliable contrivances of inversion or random juxtaposition, the novelty of the artificial, the bizarre, the unnatural and the obscurely menacing: Gerard de Nerval, with his green hair, taking a lobster for a walk on a string; the perverse self-indulgent world of Huysman's À Rebours (‘Against Nature’); or de Lautréamont in Les Chants de Maldoror (from ‘mal d'aurore’, an ‘evil dawn’) speaking of the ‘chance encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting-table’.

Newness (seeing afresh what one thought of as familiar, as though for the first time – the patient process of Romanticism) and novelty (deliberately disturbing the representation of reality in an attempt to ‘shock’ oneself into something that feels unfamiliar) are contrary concepts.

[...] one can make something that the explicit had deadened to total inauthenticity come to life again: as ‘perceived and not as … known’.

[Iain McGilchrist]
The Master and His Emissary, p. 408, 412

[...] the reason for looking for new interpretations is always that they will be better than the readings (or some of the readings) we have produced so far, and not simply the fact that they are new.

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 63

Gradually we become tired of the old, of what we safely possess, and we stretch out our hands again. Even the most beautiful scenery is no longer assured of our love after we have lived in it for three months, and some more distant coast attracts our avarice: possessions are generally diminished by possession.

Our pleasure in ourselves tries to maintain itself by again and again changing something new into ourselves; that is what possession means.

To become tired of some possession means tiring of ourselves. (One can also suffer of an excess—the lust to throw away or to distribute can also assume the honorary name of "love.")

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 14

Humanity has not got the good out of its inventions; and by making more and more inventions, it is only leaving its own power of happiness further and further behind.

[G. K. Chesterton]

The Outline of Sanity, p. 131

To see anticapitalist propaganda in a series like Dallas, however, requires a suspension not merely of critical judgement but of ordinary faculties of observation. Images of luxury, romance, and excitement dominate such programs, as they dominate the advertisements that surround and engulf them.

Dallas is itself an advertisement of the good life, like almost everything that comes over the media - for the good life, that is, conceived as endless novelty, change, and excitement, as the titillation of the senses by every available stimulant, as unlimited possibility.

“Make it new" is the message not just of modern art (the "adversary culture" deplored by neoconservatives) but of modern consumerism. The modern capitalist economy rests on the techniques of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford but also, no less solidly, on the principle of planned obsolescence introduced by Alfred Sloane when he instituted the annual model change. Relentless “improvement" of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising, and these imperatives are built into the mass media at every level.

Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities—for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.

The very concept of news celebrates newness. The value of news, like that of any other commodity, consists primarily of its novelty, only secondarily of its informational value. As Waldo Frank pointed out many years ago, the news appeals to the same jaded appetite that makes a spoiled child tire of a toy as soon as it becomes familiar and demand a new one in its place.

As Frank also pointed out (in The Rediscovery of America, 1930), the social expectations that stimulate a child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions. “A fresh plaything renews the child's opportunity to say: this is mine." A child who seldom gets a new toy, Frank noted, "prizes it as part of himself.” But if "toys become more frequent, value is gradually transferred from the toy to the toy's novelty. ... The arrival of the toy, not the toy itself, becomes the event." The news, accordingly, has to be seen as the "plaything of a child whose hunger for toys has been stimulated shrewdly."

We can carry this analysis one step further by pointing out that the model of possession, in a society organized around mass consumption, is addiction. The need for novelty and fresh stimulation becomes more and more intense, intervening interludes of boredom increasingly intolerable.

Neoconservatives sense a link between drugs and television, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection any more than they grasp the important fact about news that it represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda. Propaganda in the usual sense of the word plays a less and less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Mass media themselves contribute to the prevailing skepticism; one of their main effects is to undermine heroism and charismatic leadership, to reduce everything to the same dimensions. The effect of the media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction. Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction. It is true that drug addiction is one of the things that undermine "traditional values," but the need for drugs - that is, for commodities that alleviate boredom and satisfy the socially stimulated desire for novelty and excitement - grows out of the very nature of a consumerist economy.

It is only in their capacity as quintessential consumers that young professionals dominate the airwaves and set the tone of American life. Their distinctive manner of living embodies the restless ambition, the nagging dissatisfaction with things as they are, that are fostered by a consumer economy.

Their careers require them to spend much of their time on the road and to accept transfers as the price of advancement. Though they complain about having to move so often, their willingness to travel long distances even in pursuit of pleasure suggests that they would find a more settled life unendurable.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.520-1

Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration.

Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one experience to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure. Watching film series is so popular today because they conform to the habit of serial perception.

At the level of media consumption, this habit leads to binge watching, to comatose viewing. While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention. Intensity is giving way everywhere to extensity. Digital communication is extensive communication; it does not establish relationships, only connections.

The neoliberal regime pushes serial perception, reinforces the serial habitus. It intentionally abolishes duration in order to drive more consumption.

The permanent process of updating, which has now extended to all areas of life, does not permit the development of any duration or allow for any completion. The ever-present compulsion of production leads to a de-housing [Enthausung], making life more contingent, transient and unstable. But dwelling requires duration.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.7

[…] rising timber prices after the Wars inflated the costs of building; a passing change of fashion (lace for ribbon) might silence the looms of Coventry […]

[E.P. Thompson]
The Making of the English Working Class, p.224

Having / Being

Having - Being

Dynamic - Static

Merchant - Priest

Material - Spiritual

When the merchant class dominates society, then the material takes precedence over the spiritual.

Liberal democracy removed all stratification and levelled society - no aristocrats, or God above - making an open marketplace of the world, in which every newly freed individual was invited to compete.

In a stratified system competition was horizontal, between those on the same level, but under liberal democracy competition also becomes vertical, as individuals seek to move upwards. As a result, competitiveness is foregrounded, and this open, free, and competitive environment creates an ever present tension - “Every moment must be profitable.”

To this mindset, spiritual values - meditative practice, simply ‘being’ - become an inexcusable waste of time.

Material development without spiritual development can only lead to the general feeling of discontent that we see today.

In a society based on the education and development of wisdom rather than of information, the whole orientation is very different.

Although it's an oversimplification, you could say that one is centered on being, the other on having.

The fascination for always having more and the horizontal dispersion of knowledge are both things that take us away from inner transformation. Since the world can only be changed by changing ourselves, always having more of everything doesn't matter very much.

Dissatisfaction arises from the habit of seeing what's superfluous as being necessary. This isn't just a question of wealth, but also of comfort, of pleasure, and of 'useless knowledge'.

The only thing one should never be satisfied with is one's wisdom, and the only efforts that one should never see as sufficient are the efforts one makes toward spiritual progress and achieving others' good.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.316

We can usefully understand our time, I often think, by seeing in it the final result of the centuries-long tension between the merchant class - that ‘bourgeoisie’ - and everyone else.

Pre-modern societies, in every case that I know of, always kept the merchant class in their place, and that place was usually right at the bottom […] below the farmers and artisans, because their work, while sometimes necessary, essentially created nothing of value. This was the pattern worldwide.

In medieval Europe […] the merchants, bankers and money people were hemmed in by a network of customs, religious edicts and structures like guilds and professional bodies. Money had to be kept under control, precisely because of the power it had to ignite the powerful flame of want.

[…] the story of the world since the eighteenth century has been the story of the setting of that flame, and the resulting fire. We are all bourgeois now: which is to say that we are all driven forward by want.

[Paul Kingsnorth]
‘Want is the Acid’, The Abbey of Misrule

In trying to articulate the causes of American restlessness, Tocqueville […] focuses first on the fact that a democratic social condition inspires a love of material well-being. He explains that aristocracy suppressed the concern with material well-being by putting it beyond the reach of most people and placing it almost beneath the notice of the privileged few, who rarely needed to concern themselves with it.

Democracy, on the other hand, removes the barriers to material prosperity among the poor as well as the protections of it among the rich. In this way, a democratic social condition encourages people to care about material prosperity and to focus their attention and efforts on it.

And democracy does more than open up a path to material prosperity. It also magnifies the significance of material well-being by collapsing all other distinctions. Tocqueville observes that in democracies, “money is virtually the only thing that still creates very visible differences among the [men of democracy] and sets some apart from their peers. The distinction that is born of wealth is enhanced by the disappearance and diminution of all the others.”

When the old sources of prestige—birth, estate, or occupation—cease to be important, money becomes the arbiter of success.

Tocqueville saw the magnified importance of material well-being as problematic for a few reasons. The person who seeks only material pleasures is tormented by the thought that life is short and his time to enjoy himself is limited. “The memory of life’s brevity constantly spurs him on.”

This makes the pursuit of material pleasures urgent and frenetic. It fills the man of democracy with “anxieties, fears, and regrets, and keeps his soul in a state of constant trepidation that impels him again and again to change plans and places.”

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.448

The Preoccupied Mind

Fast - Slow

Shallow - Deep

Emerson's “work and live” keeps us from scaling up; from indulging in the kind of “low curiosity” - the “culture of criticism” - that precipitates technological and cultural change.

There is a tendency, seen in Marx, to think of work as a drudgery that ultimately should be overcome, but this fails to differentiate between the alienated wage-slavery of large scale society and the more integrated and meaningful notion of work that prevailed in bygone, simpler cultures.

It is the mind which is tranquil and free from care which can roam through all the stages of its life: the minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them.

So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind.

And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.

[Seneca]
On the Shortness of Life, p.16

Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity.

It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

... the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature.

[John Gray]
Straw Dogs, p.194, 195

[...] with the new tools of observation that psychoanalysis offers, we can recognize that so-called rational behaviour is largely determined by the character structure. In our discussion of the meaning of work for modern man we have dealt with an illustration of this point.

We saw that the intense desire for unceasing activity was rooted in aloneness and anxiety.

This compulsion to work differed from the attitude towards work in other cultures, where people worked as much as it was necessary but where they were not driven by additional forces within their own character structure.

Since all normal persons to-day have about the same impulse to work and, furthermore, since this intensity of work is necessary if they want to live at all, one easily overlooks the irrational component in this trait.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.242

As this is written, a sow bug crawls across a desk. If he is turned over on his back, one can observe the tremendous struggle that he goes through to get on his feet again.

During this interval he has a “purpose” in his life.

When he succeeds, one can almost see the look of victory on his face. Off he goes, and one can imagine him telling his tale at the next meeting of sow bugs, looked up to by the younger generation as an insect who has made it.

And yet mixed with his smugness is a little disappointment. Now that he has come out on top, life seems aimless.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.71

The East is grateful to the West for progress in medecine and increased life expectancy. These are things everyone appreciates. But on the other side, a civilization oriented almost exclusively toward that form of action on the world clearly lacks something essential that material progress can never bring - indeed, it's not what it's designed to do.

That lack appears clearly in the confusion so many minds are plunged into, in the violence that reigns in the inner cities, in the selfishness that governs so many human relationships, in the sad resignation of all those spending their last years in old people's homes, and in the despair of suicide.

If spiritual values stop being an inspiration for a society, material progress becomes a sort of facade that masks the pointlessness of life.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.158

Has it been observed to what extent a genuine religious life […] requires external leisure or semi-leisure, I mean leisure with a good conscience, inherited, by blood, which is not altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic idea that work degrades - that is to say, makes soul and body common?

And that consequently modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly proud industriousness educates and prepares precisely for ‘unbelief' more than anything else does?

Among those in Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose 'free-thinking’ is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that they no longer bare any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement.

They feel they are already fully occupied, these worthy people, whether with their businesses or with their pleasures, not to speak of the 'fatherland and the newspapers and ‘family duties’: it seems that they have no time at all left for religion […]

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 58

Tocqueville repeatedly points out how busy Americans are, and he stresses that Americans make themselves busy. They “feel pushed by an irresistible need for action.”

Their activity, he argues, has the character of a flight from something. That something seems to be the contemplation of their own demise.

In America, he remarks, “you feel existence less,” and “you arrive at the great abyss without having had the time to notice the road you followed.”

Leisure becomes viewed as a break from paid work, which is regarded as the serious business of life. With the downgrading of leisure comes the demotion or loss of respect for the intellectual and artistic pursuits that people once used leisure to pursue.

Americans thus tend to see leisure as a problem to be solved, as time to be filled.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.450, 458

Whereas in volume 1 [Tocqueville] emphasized the efficiency and productivity that resulted from democracy’s unleashing of man’s energies, in volume 2 he points to a different consequence of social and economic mobility: no one has the time or the inclination for “meditation,” the kind of sustained attention that allows for in-depth study of a difficult subject.

[…] when confronted with literary and artistic productions, democratic peoples find it hard even to pay attention. The thought that they ought to be doing something more practical and productive is a constant drain on their focus. Moreover, democratic peoples are always in a hurry. They can give but little time and attention to each thing they pursue. “Habitual inattention,” he reflects, “is the disease of the democratic mind.”

Democratic habits of mind thus discourage people from deriving meaningful experiences from the artistic creations with which they fill up their leisure time. And yet they want to find meaning in them.

Tocqueville notes that, for the most part, Americans live orderly, productive, one might say bourgeois lives. They are practical, prudent, and focused on their work. “It is impossible to imagine anything as insignificant, dull, or encumbered with petty interests - in a word, as antipoetic - as the life of an American.”

Like all people of democracies, when they turn to literature and theater, they want to be transported. They want “deep emotions of the heart”; they long to be moved. But they are ill-equipped to be transported, because they are “impatient in their desires.” They want every moment to be profitable.

“They insist on facile beauties that yield of their own accord and can be enjoyed immediately. ... They have need of intense and rapid emotions, sudden illuminations, and glaring truths or errors to wrench them out of their own lives and plunge them instantly and almost violently into the heart of the subject.”

Needless to say, a certain skepticism about the depth of such experiences is detectible in Tocqueville’s characterization of the democratic experience of art.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.458-9

Carlyle's Puritanism discloses itself in the reminder that labor is the human lot; that the age-old dream of paradise, “where the the brooks should run wine, and the trees bend with ready-baked viands,” is an "impossible dream"; that labor alone, necessarily the “interruption of that ease, which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness," provides him with such ease as he ever enjoys; and that “what we call Evil” - the “dark, disordered material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order and Good” - will exist as long as humanity exists.

Work is our lot; and our works, indeed, bring order out of chaos - as long as they are carried out in good faith, with the understanding that the creative power that makes them possible comes to us as a gift of the gods.

In works lovingly and loyally conceived and carried out, we triumph over necessity, though not by surrounding ourselves with technologies that eliminate the need for labor. (Here again, the ideology of progress reveals its kinship with the nostalgic dream of a lost Eden; modern abundance, according to the myth of progress, will eventually relieve us of the need to work.)

Our triumph lies in our ability to transform labor, a necessity, into an act of faith and free will.

The illusion of self-sufficiency […] stands in the way of genuine insight and the heroic actions that issue from it. In the modern world, this illusion finds its characteristic expression in the machines by means of which mankind seeks to liberate itself from toil - that is, from the inescapable constraints of human existence.

The power and majesty of the sovereign creator of life; the inescapability of evil in the form of natural limits on human freedom; the sinfulness of man's rebellion against those limits; the moral value of work, which at once signifies man's submission to necessity and enables him to transcend it - these insights represented the heart of Calvinist theology, along with its analysis of religious experience, the psychology of despair and conversion; and they represented the heart of Carlyle's work as well, or at least of the work that continues to matter.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.238-40

"Work and live," Emerson exhorts his reader; but honest work is hard to come by. The more we need it, the more it eludes us.

An honorable calling, which Emerson regards, in effect, as the everyday form of heroism, helps to reconcile us not merely to everyday disappointments but to the metaphysical terror and pain of existence. We are oppressed by the disparity between our oceanic desires and our satisfactions, which are measured out in "drops"; between our longing for immortality and the certainty of death; between our need to know what will happen to us after death and the impossibility of finding out.

In a faithless age, Emerson seems to suggest, the religious spirit lingers on chiefly in the "low curiosity" that makes us demand definitive answers to everything, or again in the nagging speculation about the "origin of evil” that he compares to mumps, measles, and whooping cough - adolescent diseases to which the "simple mind" is immune.

"The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses," Emerson says, "is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.277

The compulsion of work erodes life's durability. The time of work is a time that passes, that runs out. If the time of life fully coincides with the time of work, as is the case today, then life itself becomes radically transient.

For Hölderlin, the festival is a 'bridal festival', an exalted time humans spend with the gods. During festivals, humans come close to the gods. A festival founds a community among humans and between humans and gods: it allows humans to participate in the divine. It brings forth intensities. The gods embody precisely the intensities of human life.

Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.41

The question of what the work does to the worker is hardly ever asked, not to mention the question of whether the real task might not be to adapt the work to the needs of the worker rather than to demand that the worker adapt himself to the needs of the work - which means, of course, primarily to the needs of the machine

[...] we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows:

First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.

Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.

Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 3-4

Power, Control and Conscious Purpose

Negative Father - Positive Father

The King is dead, long live the King!

J.F. - When the head of the Sicilian Mafia, Toto Rina, was arrested in Palermo, it was a big success for the Italian police - but five minutes later Toto Rina must have been replaced by someone else as the boss of the Mafia.

So the real adversary is the organization, not any one person.

M. - [...] if you want to treat the causes, it's the individuals that need to be reformed. They need help in changing themselves.

[Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.201

Every one of us, and every group with which we live and work, must become the model of the era which we desire to create.

[...] we must recognize that our thrust toward self-realization is profoundly hampered by outmoded, industrial-age structures.

We are presently constrained and driven by the impact of man's ever growing powers.

Our existing systems force us to develop and accept any weaponry system which may be technologically possible; our present systems force us to develop and accept any improvement in machinery, equipment, materials and supplies which will increase production and lower costs; our present systems force us to develop and accept advertising and consumer seduction.

It is [...] tempting to attack those holding roles such as national leader, administrator, manager, executive, labour leader, professor, student, parent. But such attacks on individuals often disguise the real nature of the crisis we confront: the demonic nature of present systems which force man to consent to his own deepening self-destruction.

The way ahead will be found by those who are unwilling to be constrained by the apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age.

The celebration of man's humanity through joining together in the healing expression of one's relationships with others, and one's growing acceptance of one's own nature and needs, will clearly create major confrontations with existing values and systems. The expanding dignity of each man and each human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems.

We have failed to discover how the necessary changes in our ideals and our social structures can be made. Each of us, therefore, through our ineffectiveness and our lack of responsible awareness, causes the suffering around the world.

[Ivan Illich]
Celebration of Awareness, p.17-19

The faces change but the roles remain the same. The game goes on.
For 'real' change we must change that which creates the roles, sets the rules: the system.

Lester works his way up the hierarchy - the pyramid - 'following the money,' hoping to find the puppet-master, see the wizard. But if he goes high enough what he will find is that even the highest player is contained by the pyramid itself. All heads butt against the same ceiling.

The wizard is nothing more than a fanciful idea based on a short-sighted view. The pyramid - that is, the structure that surrounds them all - is his real enemy. Whilst his targets remain players then he is merely playing a game - albeit for higher and higher stakes - because any position within the pyramid can be replaced, and will be. Bust one, and another surfaces.

Those who are long-sighted see the pyramid - i.e. the larger picture.
Those with near-vision see the players - i.e. the near view.

The Wire is not without long-sighted characters. McNulty, Colvin, and Lester are all are thwarted by the stifling myopia that surrounds them. But when it comes down to it, none are far-sighted enough - they all have their own games to play. None of them take their battle to the pyramid.

It is amazing that The Wire can enjoy such popularity and yet its lessons go largely unheeded. We still go on looking at the layers whilst ignoring the system that contains them; believing that by voting for this or that politician, or by busting this or that person we will really change things.

It should, perhaps, come as no surprise. As a society we are dangerously myopic. Short-sighted eyes cannot see any further than the immediate players, so when a party or a figurehead falls and is replaced it represents a victory, a new dawn. Those with long-sight see that it is nothing more than a changing of the guards.

One plays the short game, one the long. A society needs both, and each has its place and time.

If we truly want change - that is, the long-term sort that Lester and his like seemed to be after - then we must look beyond players. This is the resounding lesson of the Wire. Its final shots couldn't make it any more clear: the old roles remain, only with new faces. Michael becomes Omar, Carver becomes Colvin, Sidner becomes McNulty ... the game goes on.

For all that 'change', nothing is really different.

[...] in our situation we're all powerless.

I mean, we pretend we're run by people. We're not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere."

Some commentators, he says, think we're run by an oligarchy. "But we're not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don't have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don't have any. None of them have any power.

[Rory Stewart]
'The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere'

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans.

Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.

Just as people can level terrain and build canals, so people can alter the incentive landscape in order to build better institutions. But they can only do so when they are incentivized to do so, which is not always. As a result, some pretty wild tributaries and rapids form in some very strange places.

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do.

Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.

[Scott Alexander]
'Meditations on Moloch'

Individual elements are ignorant of the behaviour of the whole system in which they are embedded […] Single elements cannot contain the complexity of the whole system and can therefore neither control nor comprehend it fully.

Because of the overwhelming amount of information available in postmodern society, we often live under the illusion that we get the complete picture. Because of the complexity of our society, this is not possible. Since we are in part creating society through our actions, no complete picture of its present state is available to anyone. In this regard all elements are in the same boat.

Certain elements may have more control over specific aspects—our political models are still geared in a way that allows single individuals far too much power. Single elements should not, and normally do not, exert complete control over a decentralised system.

The claim that the structure of society is an emergent property of the social system may create a feeling that one’s own activities are irrelevant or insignificant. This need not be the case.

In the first place, the relevance of your activities is determined by the effectiveness with which you enter into the agonistics of the network, not by attempts to understand life from God’s viewpoint. Secondly, it must be kept in mind that since the interactions are non-linear, small causes can have large effects.

It also means, however, that the effects of our actions are somewhat unpredictable.

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.122-3

[…] it is important to lose any notion that our systems of liberal democracy are designed for, or respond to, bottom-up movements […]

One thing I have not done in this paper is to discuss the vested interests and pressure groups behind so many of these changes. The big money that funded the activism. The specific personalities and groups involved […] these forces are always in a tiny minority, organised, and extremely well connected.

The charge I have most frequently faced in advancing my idea that culture is downstream from law is by the reflexive counter-charge that the people making these laws must have a culture. This is not necessarily so. If culture is downstream from law, law is downstream from interests. All you need for laws to be made are the vested interests of some portion of the elite minority.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that talk of ‘black rights’ are in the interests of black people as a group – I have a library of Thomas Sowell books that could easily kill a small deer should they fall on one – to show you that is far from the case.

How many real women has feminism actually helped beyond the careers of feminists? Do you think the 79% of women who said they were not being held back because they are women in 1971 are more happy or less happy now in 2021 when they spend the majority of their fertile years stuck behind a corporate desk being told over and over again that they are being held back? Fighting at once the likely confusing biological urge to have babies while at the same time believing they can never sit on the board.

The interests served by laws are seldom, if ever, in the interests of ‘the people’.

[Academic Agent]
‘Culture is Downstream from Law’, The Forbidden Texts, Substack

The Machiavellian Frame

In the Machiavellian frame democracy is impossible, not simply undesirable, impossible […] This is the frame that derives from the study of elite theory and the work of James Burnham. Here, what we are witnessing first and foremost is the logic of power and its centralizing tendencies.

All systems, whatever you call them, are controlled by elites, the rulers, who are always a tightly organized minority. The ruled, the masses, are always disorganized, passive, disinterested, and easily manipulated.

The iron law of oligarchy works on an institutional as well as a national level. Given that the key to all power is the organizational principle, it stands to reason that as societies get larger and technology gets better, a type of specialist will arise, who we might call managers. This is Burnham’s famous thesis, The Managerial Revolution, which was then expanded and updated by Samuel T. Francis.

[…] Managerialism, by its nature, must seek to dissolve all resistance which includes bourgeois culture – which is synonymous with white culture – in all its forms, as well as the world of tradition. It is also inherently trans-national and internationalist.

[Academic Agent]
‘How Did We Get Here (Part 1)’, The Forbidden Texts, Substack

Part / Whole

Force of Will

Top Down / Bottom Up