The Hemingway Heuristic
My friends,
We had a really fun Socratic Speed Dating event today at The Stoa. If you missed it, we’ll have another one this Friday at 7:00 PM ET. Here are the events we have lined up for tomorrow and Wednesday:
The Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. April 7th @ 9:00 AM ET. Learn more. RSVP here.
Circling Through the Meta-Crisis w/ Guy Sengstock. April 7th @ 7:00 PM ET. Learn more. Registration closed.
Prototyping Collaboration w/ Richard Bartlett. April 8th @ 12:00 PM ET. Learn more. RSVP here.
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April 6, 2020
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
I am leaning hard on this heuristic from Hemingway. I need help. Help with sensemaking, with choicemaking and with making The Stoa the best gift it can be. I cannot do this alone. Nor do I have time for relational foreplay. I am hoping that my ability to sniff out egos will help my discernment to quickly find out who is trustworthy.
My good friend Daniel is coming through in this regard. As a fellow Stoic with meta proclivities, he gets what is going on with The Stoa. He is becoming an important sensemaking and choicemaking node I can rely on. But this relationship is the result of years of friendship. Having witnessed his fidelity to truthfulness, his word has a currency for me that most people’s words do not have.
However, maybe Hemingway’s heuristic might invoke the Pygmalion effect. Does invoking the spirit of trust with regard to someone create a desire in them to be trustworthy? Let's find out. To circle back to my claim that I can sniff out egos, this includes my own ego—but I think it's important to say this with humility. I have been kidnapped by my ego many times before, and it could happen again.
I find that, when I get egoically kidnapped, the relationship I have with my daemon dries up. I lose access to the magic. I want this time to be different. This time, I want to get it right. This is why I want to conduct a pre-emptive strike against the ego. I think the antidote to ego is truth or truthfulness: the constant act of mapping your words to what is. The ego does not care about truth, or, if it does care, it cares only for instrumental purposes.
So I think it's important for me to be forthright in truthfulness. This is what I am attempting to do in these daily entries—to build my truthful muscle using the written word—and I am trying to do the same thing with the spoken word at The Stoa. I also deeply appreciate people who can be truthful to me and call me out on my shit, people who can compliment me with a genuinely warm heart, and also point out where they see me missing the mark, where I am sinning.
My working theory is that, done right, Stoicism engenders a para-egoic state of being. It does not aim for non-egoic or transegoic states of consciousness, like those the Buddhist traditions seem to advocate. In my experience, following the Stoic algorithm allows the ego to exist, but puts it to one side, so that it does not interfere with one's choicemaking.
You still feel and have access to the desire to dominate, to be special, to experience that me me me attention whorishness, but if you diligently practice your Stoicism, you can experience all of that without letting any of it hijack you. It's a tough slog, but life wasn’t designed to be easy—nor would you want it to be, if you're a good Stoic.
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