Enlightened Doomsaying
Hello friends,
Bonnitta Roy will not be at the Psychotechnology Playground tomorrow, but I will be doing something fun in her stead.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Psychotechnology Playground w/ Bonnitta Roy Every Friday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Focusing: Felt-Senses as the Liminal w/ Abby Wen Wu and Zach Valenti. June 26th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly Every Friday @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
The Dark Stoa w/ Pat Ryan. Every Friday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 25, 2020
Yesterday I was writing about aspects of the meta-crisis: doomsday curve, surveillance capitalism, traumacene, etc. Basically, all the fucked up shit we are collectively wrestling with that could be or could lead to an existential risk or suffering risk.
I wrote that the meta-crisis might be the ultimate Stoic opportunity. I dig this framing. How can us Stoics view this as an opportunity to practice our Stoicism? The philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy had this idea called “enlightened doomsaying,” which I quite like. He argues that some catastrophes are events we know will happen but do not believe will happen and once they do happen it is seen as obvious that they have happened. These catastrophes then become a part of our “ontological furniture”.
This lack of belief promotes passivity and we collectively end up doing nothing. Dupuy gets philosophically fancy with his solution, but the essence of it is that we need to project ourselves into the catastrophe before it occurs, to see it as obvious. This will make us believe what we know could come true, and provide us the imagination to change our fate, or as Dupuy says: To believe in fate is to prevent it from happening.
This is in a similar spirit as Pat Ryan’s Dark Stoa series, which Pat describes as “existential ultracatastrophies for the sole purpose of reframing them into navigable and sane pathways of action and meaning.” If you are familiar with Stoicism, this is basically the Stoic exercise of negative visualization or premeditatio malorum, “the pre-meditation of evils,” but this enlightened doomsaying is doing this on a collective scale.
As Seneca implored: Rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck. All the terms of our human lot should be before our eyes. I think this would make for an excellent workshop series at the Stoa. We could visualize things like ecological disaster or economic collapse or civil war or some other meta-crisis event.
It is not enough to know the world could end, as some cute mental exercise, we’ll need to believe the world could end, because that will make us feel the world will end. This workshop series could lean on various acting and improv techniques, along with somatic psychotherapy methods, to make these visualizations feel embodied.
When I hosted the Toronto chapter of Extinction Rebellion for an event, they were doing something similar to this, but I felt how they presented had a demoralizing effect. I was not pumped up to save the environment or get arrested by the police afterward.
I think if a possible “enlightened doomsaying” psychotechnology could exist at the Stoa’s wisdom gym, within an ecology of practices that promote sovereignty and communitas, then I think we can sidestep this demoralization, and get after it.
Now it is time to give our gifts to the world and maybe for us to be motivated to give our gifts we need to not only see the world is burning, but believe it could be completely burnt down, and we need the wisdom to know that our gifts can put out the fire.
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