The Adventure or: A Weird Stoic Weirdly Reasoning During the Great Weirding
Tomorrow’s events:
Live Journaling w/ Peter Limberg. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Doomer Optimism: Antifragility, Localism, and the Limits of Labels w/ Joe Norman. May 25th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Social Meditation: Mini-Practicum w/ Vince Horn and the Buddhist Geeks. May 25th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
An event to (maybe) get excited about:
A Bestiary of the Anthropocene w/ Nicolas Nova, Maria Roszkowska, and Nicolas Maigret. June 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The radical art collective that is Disnovation recently teamed up with Nicolas Nova to create “A Bestiary of the Anthropocene.” They will visit The Stoa next month to discuss their “bestiary” and the many hybrid creatures that are residing on our damaged planet.
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May 24th, 2021
I have written about reasoning in these recent entries in a pretty weird way, and the following thought came to me after submitting yesterday’s entry: man, this is some weird reasoning.
Weird reasoning. I like that. I am a weird Stoic, weirdly reasoning during the great weirding. The great weirding is the term from Venkatesh Rao, which describes our “gradual unraveling of normalcy.”
Venkat started using this term in 2016, and things were getting weird then. Most salient was that a reality television star with questionable hair was defying all of the Blue Church’s weaponized good opinioning to become the President of the United States of America.
Caroline Busta recently gave me her take on the great weirding, which I think sums up this hyperobject quite nicely: the moment when the internet started directing non-internet existence rather than the other way around.
2016 was indeed a turning point. A worldwide unconscious collective intelligence started to influence reality in unexpected ways. This intelligence was unconsciously stewarded by alpha nerd techbros, who were creating mediums tethered to the profit motive, with naive ambitions of bringing “the world closer together,” while ruthlessly competing for eyeballs in the attention economy. Yeah, that is going to create some weird feedback loops.
Now, here in 2021, things are just getting weirder. We are in a worldwide pandemic, alongside a normalizing panopticon. UFOs are a serious thing, Epstein still did not kill himself, and deepfakes are here to play. The weirding is going to continue, in a hard way, especially with all the accelerating technological changes that are happening.
People are becoming deeply disoriented. This great weirding thing is similar to what Alvin Toffler called “future shock,” which is a “shattering stress and disorientation” that come from accelerated changes in technological advancements, along with their societal shifts.
The cool thing about the great weirding and this future shock thing is that real philosophy is back in business. There is no “going back to normal” now, and whatever normie or memetic tribal stagnant worldview that someone holds onto will be disabused fast thanks to this unraveling that is occurring from the great weirding. We need to start really reasoning again.
The unadventurous scripts that provide a false sense of security, and offer existential red herrings away from focusing on what matters most at the knife’s edge, will burn on their own, whether we like it or not. This Stoic cowboy is greatly excited for this, as we here at The Stoa are the frontiersmen and frontierswomen of the noosphere. This is such a fucking wonderful Stoic opportunity.
During the conversational portion of my recent Interintellect salon on Stoicism, I mentioned that the majority of the original Stoic texts went missing, and that Stoicism died out (or faded into Christianity) around when Rome fell. Evan McMullen said that because of these holes in Stoicism the philosophy not only affords a minimum viable philosophy, but offers an explorative space that most other philosophies simply do not allow.
This is exactly it. This is why I view Stoicism as an opportunity. I do not vibe with most Modern Stoics, and the critics of Stoicism are super boring, as both are doing “boundary work” as to what Stoicism is. Boundary work is that nerdy work that academics and people who are narcissistically attached to their intellect do. It is all that setting up conceptual demarcation to separate one field from another.
I do not care about doing boundary work. I want to engage in boundary play. How much can I get away with here, by boundary playing with this thing called Stoicism? That is the question I am asking myself. I presented Stoicism at my salon in a way that allows Stoicism to do a lot. That was on purpose, because Stoicism is an opportunity, and it can do a lot. I am surprised no one else has “seen” this before.
Okay fine, you teased it out of me dear journal readers. Here was my sort of secret plan all along, explicitly stated...
Do boundary play with the philosophy of Stoicism, so that its philosophy leans out in such a way that it offers an accessible minimum viable philosophy. The side effect of this is that it affords a “hypersanity” during the great weirding. You can then fuse reasoning to the daemon, which is the reasonable thing to do. This gives you a very large logical space to play in, so you can wildly explore the noosphere, and check out all these cutting-edge reality tunnels and the psychotechnologies associated with them. You can then listen to Bruce Lee’s simple advice: Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless...
This is how the religion that is not a religion gets discovered.
I should guard my premise here: This is maybe how the religion that is not a religion gets discovered.
I would like to summarize my thoughts on how to reason well tomorrow, but the basic movement here is the thing I mentioned above: fuse reasoning to the daemon. In his lovely little book called The Adventure, philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that there are four gods that preside over us from birth…
In Marcobius’s Saturnalia, one of the characters participating in the symposium attributes to the Egyptians the belief that four deities preside over the birth of every human being: Daimon, Tyche, Eros, and Ananke.
This is translated to the daemon, chance, love, and necessity. This seems pretty right to me. Giorgio argues that if you accept these gods, then your life will become an adventure, one that is intimately intertwined with truth. Giorgio writes:
Daimon must be honored because we owe him our character and nature; Eros because fecundity and knowledge depend on him; Tyche and Ananke because the art of living also involves a reasonable degree of bowing to what we cannot avoid.
This adventure framing, along with the four ingredients that Giorgio suggests, is spot on. Reasoning, done in a wild way, is not in service to truth as the atheists, rationalists, or even academic philosophers ostensibly advocate for. No. It is in service to adventure. As I wrote in a previous letter exchange exploring the notion of “wild reasoning”…
It’s clear to me, both denotatively and connotatively, that wild reasoning is not in service to institutional status, tribal affiliation, or profane belongingness. I would also argue that it is not even in service to truth, the coveted value to which so many academics pay lip service. I sense that wild reasoning has a different master: that of adventure.
Giorgio adds more deliciousness to my adventurously bold claim: Adventure and truth are indiscernible, because truth happens (avviene) and adventure is nothing other than the happening (avvenire) of truth.
Adventure is the happening of truth. So much ‘heaven yeah’ to this. Here is the process that seems to allow for a wildly weird reasoning to enter your life:
You reason in such a way that reasonably puts reasoning in its place, which allows you to start listening to the daemon. You then bring reason back and fuse it to the daemon. This puts you on an adventure, because now everything is up for grabs, including a new world.
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