James Stockdale
Hey friends,
I hope everyone had an amazing weekend. Next week at the Stoa is going to be something special.
Here is the line-up:
Monastic Conversations w/ Soryu Forall. May 11th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Towards a Metamodern World w/ Tomas Bjorkman. May 12th @ 10:30 AM ET. RSVP here.
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right w/ Michael Brooks. May 12th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Unasked Questions w/ Nora Bateson. May 13th @ 1:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Relational Exegesis: The Guru Papers w/ Freyja. May 13th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Radical Honesty During a Pandemic w/ Brad Blanton. May 13th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Concept Unfolding w/ Nicolas Benjamin. May 13th @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
A Theory of Knowledge for the 21st Century w/ Gregg Henriques. May 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Anti-Social Virtue, or Cynical Enlightenment w/ Justin Murphy. May 14th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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May 10, 2020
This quote is coming to mind, from my fellow Stoic, James Stockdale: Do the right thing even if it means dying like a dog when no one's there to see you do it. I do not know why it is coming to mind, but let us see if we can find out.
I wrote a poem the other day, which I will not share in full because it is probably bad, but I will share this part:
A return to normal
I already miss the otherworld
I miss going crazy
I got snapped into another state the other day. I got snapped into the state of normal. I launched the Stoa project almost two months ago now, and since it was launched, I have not felt normal. I felt like a man with no tomorrow. During this time period I did not feel like I belonged to this world. On a phenomenological level my life had an otherwordly feeling to it. It felt like I was swimming in the liminal.
But now normal is back. It feels like I have a tomorrow again. There is this comfortable feeling to this. A safety, and a lack of urgency. I have the option to procrastinate again, in the fullest way. Is the daemon still here? I do not know.
I have a sense of why this happened though. Fear. I have been uploading a backlog of YouTube videos from the Stoa, and I received a few comments that were negative, and gestured towards the cancel culture stuff I mentioned yesterday. On the surface, it was nothing serious. But as a chess player, with metagame proclivities, I am always thinking a few moves ahead.
So far, I've had a few people on the Stoa who were, let's just say, not Blue Church kosher. And I intend to have more. I want original and interesting thinkers to share their thoughts at the Stoa, not correct thinkers. I am not trying to be edgy for edginess's sake. I do not want to hunt for the likes so I can masturbate to my own avatar in the spectacle, and I do not care about being a based troll. I want all the hands on the elephant to share their voice. I want a new world.
If I keep going here, with his project, I sense I might have to be at the knife's edge of being canceled. But there are worse things than being canceled, and I might find myself at the knife's edge of that as well. Reflecting on all the chess moves last night, and doing my negative visualizations in a half-assed way, I experienced fear. When I experienced fear, tomorrow returned.
Writing channelled journal entries about how much you want to be virtuous is fun, and it is very easy to signal your desire for virtue. It is a different thing to be James Stockdale, held prisoner for seven-and-a-half years in Hanoi Hilton while being beaten and tortured on the regular. He went in a Stoic, and came out the other side as a Stoic, and he held tightly to his honor. Now that is a man of virtue.
Reflecting on Stockdale, I feel like a little boy. I also feel like I just insulted that great man, by daring to call myself a Stoic. I feel like a fucking coward. Here I am worried about being canceled, when Stockdale willingly disfigured himself to ensure that he would not be used as propaganda by his captors. Fuck me.
I am a soft man, born into the world of the womb. Everything is easy and consumable, if you're born somewhat well off, and live in an urban environment like I do. And yeah, most people I know do not fully speak what they believe to be true, because most people fear being canceled.
In a previous entry I mentioned the Cancel God. This was a thought that Lubomir Asrov and I were considering creating a short graphic novel on. I recall when Steve Bannon debated David Frum here in Toronto at the Munk Debates, there were all these protesters shouting Nazi Nazi Nazi at the people lined up to see the debate. They were yelling at middle aged and upper class white people, who had that snobby dinner party liberal look. The attendees looked annoying to me, but they were not nazis.
A thought came to mind: hearing these people chant "Nazi" to people who were obviously not Nazis felt like they were casting a spell. It was like they were summoning the devil they needed in order to justify their narrative. The argument Lubomir and I were going to present was that from these chants, which were happening in safe spaces all over the western world, a Cancel God got summoned.
But this Cancel God became untethered from woke purity policing, and was freed from having fidelity to any memetic tribe. Now it is nihilistically hunting to cancel humanity itself, and we are all afraid of it. If we are going to address this meta-crisis, we all need our truth in the game, and if we are afraid of getting canceled ourselves by speaking our truth, we might risk canceling the world.
That is not a risk I am interested in taking. Stockdale inspires me to step up my Stoic game. I am not going to march into the liminal war, and start swinging at the Cancel God with wild abandonment. That is stupid, and I am a metagamer. We have to be clever here, and I like being clever.
It feels like I am ready to do the right thing, and it also feels like I do not have a tomorrow again. A Stoic cannot have a tomorrow, if he wants to be dangerous in the right way.
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