Stoic Missionaries on Pornhub
Tomorrow’s event:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Newly posted event:
Part Moon, Part Traveling Salesman: On the Enduring Relevance of Ivan Illich w/ David Cayley. October 27th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to maybe get excited about:
The Stomp Reflex and Emergency Emancipation w/ Luke Kemp. October 12th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, visits The Stoa to discuss the “Stomp Reflex,” the phenomenon of governments abusing emergency powers. Recommended readings before the session: The ‘Stomp Reflex’: When Governments Abuse Emergency Powers & The Most Hellish Scenario of the Meta-Crisis.
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October 8th, 2021
A reader responded to the recent “The Club” journal entry with ...
I can feel the knife’s edge in the work of The Club.
This response was riffing on The Stoa’s original motto: The Stoa is a digital campfire where we cohere and dialogue about what matters most at the knife's edge of what’s happening now.
I dropped that motto at the start of year two of The Stoa, as it was starting to feel cringe for me to say. That’s how it usually goes for me; I feel super sincere and cool with doing something, followed by this sense of being a tryhard who peddles in cringe. I shed the cringe then begin to feel somewhat sincere and cool again. I sense this has been a decent enough process, albeit an unpolished one. I also sense it’s helping me get better at the “art” of showing up as truthfully as possible in the “hyperconversation.”
I do like it when the reader wrote: I can feel the knife’s edge… I felt the knife’s edge as well. The Club was meant to be a knife edgy experiment and I want Beyond Self-Discipline (BSD) to have knife edgy vibes as well, perhaps engaging in Blue Church mimicry on the clearnet surface, while being infused with a countercultural cathexis in a dark forest.
If the BSD experience works as we think it will, then it will live beyond its official January launch. The idea is for BSD experiences to happen on a quarterly basis, for those who need to be released from their vassalage, and require an intensity-induced momentum towards a new life - a more sovereign life.
The BSD experience is designed to cultivate “discipline” by helping participants design their day towards a daily rhythm that brings aliveness. The word “beyond” before the phrase “self-discipline” plays with two meanings:
BSD is about engendering a communal discipline
BSD is about engendering a state where discipline is no longer needed
“Euthymia” is the phrase I like to use to describe the second meaning. Euthymia for me is about being in the right relationship with thumos, or as Seneca describes: Believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction.
Stoic euthymia is similar to a Taoist “wu wei” (“effortless effort”) and a Hindu “karma yoga,” or what Dave Chapman calls “enjoyable usefulness.” I sense they are all gesturing towards the same lived experience of being deployed in a way that brings joy while being of value to others.
With the BSD experience, we want to have a core offering that is in service to invoke this euthymia. In addition to the core BSD, we are also playing with an idea of BSD eventually having special themes, utilizing the BSD psychotechnology to get into the right relationship with finances, fitness, consciousness, and even the meta-crisis.
I do not have a jazzy phrase or a perfectly coherent framing for all of this, but I sense something like a roaming digital monastery that has enough structure, or what Richard Rohr calls “hot edges,” for euthymia to emerge, with the right enabling constraints for a harmonizing wholeness to emerge as well.
We were flirting with the idea of one BSD theme being dedicated to men, with a focus on porn. I was dunking on porn before in these journals, quoting Father Seraphim Rose: Pornography is the devil's iconography. From that entry:
I know I might be sounding like some crazed anti-porn Christian lobbyist here, but I am not anti-porn necessarily. I have watched my share, and I am somewhat optimistic it can be used for good, if created or used with care. I do think the bulk of it is a deathwork though, Philip Rieff’s term I have written about before, which I defined as: works of art that undermine the sacred underpinnings of a society.
I have no clue what the society-wide implications are of so many men watching porn, but I do not sense it is a good thing. More from me in that entry:
I think porn, in its popular manifestation, is like the male gaze on steroids, and a lot of it is violent towards women, which I assume is serving as a perverse way for heterosexual men to take out their relational frustrations on women. If you want to create a world of what Martin Buber calls “I-It relationships,” where we instrumentalize each other, especially in a way that creates a “war of the sexes,” then for men’s part, watching modern porn is a great practice for this.
I was talking to Jote yesterday, who did a Collective Eros session at The Stoa. We were discussing finding the right balance between the best of the sex-positive movement along with the valid critiques directed towards the gross porn industrial complex, while not regressing to some puritan relationship with sex. I sense it can be done, and I sense eros is the thing that will find this balance.
I read this great piece from Tara Isabella Burton on “eros-positivity” the other day, a term she contrasted to sex-positivity. A question she posed in the piece was this: what is eros for? What a sexy question.
From Tara’s piece:
As a Christian, of course, I’m inclined to see all human eros as a way of making sense of, and exploring, our desire for God. But I think there is something useful in that model even outside the language of orthodoxy or doctrine. The erotic life is where, and how, we discover ourselves and one another most fully as interdependent beings; where we, too, explore the truth that the kind of desires that shape us are desires for something more, and stranger than we can ever commodify, explain, or fulfill.
The self-making of the capitalistic world view offers little space for the self-breaking inherent to the erotic life. Maybe the problem with all our conceptions of sex, both “sex-negative” and “sex-positive,” is that none of them are nearly sexy enough.
Fuck, that’s so sexy. I would love to eventually do an eros-positive themed BSD for men, so heterosexual dudes like myself can become directly intimate with eros, not intimidated by it, collapsing in its presence, impulsively seeking the “little death.”
I appreciate the “NoFap” scene, as it warns against the harmful aspects that addictive porn-viewing and masturbating have on men, and offers a supportive program to overcome them. With the exception of me recently having fun with a 90’s Playboy magazine at a fertility clinic, I have not properly masturbated for about nine years now. This has been really great, as I believe the sexual transmutation of doing this has definitely helped with my thumos levels.
The NoFap scene has a focus on negation though, and while its woke critics seem really silly to me (“not masturbating = white supremacy”), mainly focusing on a negation does open up a scene to be memetically captured, as the manosphere and alt-right memetic tribes have attempted to do with NoFap. I sense more than just a critique and a negation is needed. I sense offering an experience that affords to get into the right relationship with eros itself is what is needed.
I was thinking about how I would even market this speculative BSD: Eros-Positive NoFap Addition and the daemon offered a wild idea: engage in missionary work on the site where the devil's iconography is released. Some people have posted videos other than porn on Pornhub, like comedian Ryan Creamer, who uploaded non-pornographic films, filled with porn tropes that were flavored with wholesome vibes. Seeing clever stuff like this opens up the possibility space for me. So instead of Christian missionaries visiting foreign lands to preach the word of God, how about we visit digital sites like Pornhub to embody a Stoic euthymia.
Imagine this: we hire amateur porn stars to do guided meditative or breathwork practices on Pornhub. They will be mostly clothed while encouraging men not to masturbate, but for them to feel into the power of the eros they experience, allowing it to be channeled towards something more beautiful than a little death. The video on Pornhub could also channel the viewer to the BSD website, where they can sign up for what hopefully becomes a wholesomely transformative experience.
I like this. I feel the knife’s edge in this. If we are going to steal/seduce/heal the culture, we have to erotically play with the boundaries of existing games.
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