The Stoa Game Plan
Tomorrow’s event:
The Glass Bead Game w/ The Metabeaders. Every Saturday @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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February 5th, 2021
I got smacked with a headache yesterday, which rarely happens to me. It came out of the blue. This was unpleasantly accompanied by a general sense of fatigue and an upset stomach.
Opportunities.
I slept in today to rest up. I feel somewhat better. It is snowing out and Socrates wants to go outside. An espresso is here and indie rock is playing in my ears. Things to be grateful for.
I was thinking about having a series of “brain trust” sessions about The Stoa, which will be private sessions with high discerning people, who are not afraid to call me out on my bullshit if they sense I am bullshitting, and who are plugged into what is happening at The Stoa. Luckily, there is no shortage of people here who have this trifecta.
The purpose of these sessions is to think through what is next for The Stoa or whatever can manifest from this place. There is so much potency here. It is pregnant with something. Spiritual midwifing is a skillset though, one I am making up as I go.
I thought it would be good to create a document to send out to the brain trust beforehand, one that shares some of my thoughts, and what is possibly next. Doing this in my journal is a good enough place as any …
THE STOA GAME PLAN
North Star: Steal the Culture
Steal the Culture = Seduce the Culture + Heal the Culture
How do we seduce the culture?
The Stoa does not tell you what metamodernism is, it shows you what metamodernism is. Similarly, The Stoa does not talk about how to do Game B, The Stoa does Game B.
Step 1. Seduce the intellectuals (or “thought leaders”). Invite influential nodes of all of the memetic tribes, in a way that gets them warm by the digital campfire. Set up conversations we have never seen before and get them into dialogos with one another. The cross-pollination effects will have unforeseen benefits, amongst the nodes and their followers. Starting with intellectuals is important, because they are the ones that influence the scripts in the noosphere, and most people have a certain awe-struck reverence towards them.
Step 2. Seduce the artists. Most good artists are imprisoned by a nebulous woke egregore, and are spouting shibboleths from it. That is okay. Coyote Men are good at planning epistemic prison breaks. Instead of attacking this egregore head-on, you engage in the principle of charity and “yes and” the best of the coherent and valid arguments of it, while artistically side-stepping the shamey, over-prescriptive, and resentful aspects.
You do this by creating a home where aporia is the basis, and where a kaleidoscopic metamodernism can be witnessed in an embodied way, and not just talked about from a disembodied propositional lens. There are many musicians, filmmakers, and actors who have a metamodern openness and are longing for something new. You get them first, then the others will follow. The Stoa as a music venue, a theatre, and a place for artistic performances to occur was always something on the table.
Step 3. Seduce the normies. Once this place gets the reputation of being cool amongst the cool, the “blue checkmarks” and self-help and wellness authors from the Big 5 publishers will want to come. They will come on our terms though, not theirs. The normies will follow, and their default setting of following unexamined norms will be released thanks to their engagement with this space.
How do we heal the culture?
The general movement is to alchemically transmute memetic tribes to become embodied tribes, and create the conditions so that culture is no longer in service of ego. There are people out there that want culture to be in service to ego, and they want us to be in a cult state. We cannot let this happen.
Communitas is the key of course. Each relationship has a culture, and you want to have the agency and skill to craft these relationships so they are not in service towards ego. I sense a “protean tribalism” needs to emerge for this, which is to say developing the capacity to get into communitas with many people before jumping into some commune-type setting with one group of people.
I am not quite sure what the broad steps are here. The wisdom gym, a psychotechnology incubator, and a hub for squads or mastermind groups to form seem to be a part of the daemon’s plan. Perhaps “temporary autonomous squads/mastermind” is the right framing. The best squad/mastermind is the one that gets you to the next, and each one is in service for us to become more embodied, sovereign, individuated, and awakened.
I desperately need an admin assistant, but The Stoa does not need to “scale” too much for any of this to occur. I sense this place or a place like it can have a great cultural influence on a shoe-string budget. It is also needless to say, but all of this might not even be about The Stoa, and everything I wrote above could be wrong and batshit crazy.
I have a good sense of what to do after the “Maybe the End of The Stoa” party now. I also sense it is best not to tell anyone, not even Camille or Socrates. I have to keep a little bit to myself.
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