DYNAMISM - PART I: ADDING AND SUBTRACTING

June 7th, 2019

This two part episode is dedicated to @SE_Cauldron who prompted this topic with a quote from Carl Jung. Find him on twitter

Carl Jung once wrote: “It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism.”

When it comes to that shadowy side of humanity, there’s a lot of sexiness that we can often attribute to it or often see attributed to it, and it often seems to have a kind of seductive pull.

The overt reference to intimate relations is an easy place to start in order to begin unpacking some questions and thoughts that orbit this idea that Jung is putting forth about demonic dynamism.

It’s perhaps useful to note further that dynamism: is the quality of vigorous action and progress.

We can begin by asking: when does something like sexual attraction actually cause destructive negative outcomes?  In a trusting relationship it is widely deemed as a very good thing, but then in other contexts it flips into this shadowy function that perhaps has a touch of evil.  Speaking both bluntly and very generally, why would a married person cheat, and why does the prospect of that experience offer so much pull for so many people?

For those who find themselves in an unhealthy relationship, or simply an unhappy one, the attraction of such an experience is generally greater, and perhaps due to a straight forward reason:  the act itself becomes a viable reason to dissolve the unhappy marriage. 

The ‘evil’ act in this case actually serves a practical utilitarian purpose.  It’s much easier to end such unhappy relationships with such a blatant violation of the verbal agreements that often serve as the foundation for behavior in such relationships.  While the reasons for dissolution of relationships are varied, this particular avenue is by no means rare, and it is perhaps because this specific violation is built into the original framework that is supposed to hold such people together. Put simply, the way most traditional marriages are verbally constructed specifically states this avenue for making it fall apart.  It’s as though we were following instructions for putting together a piece of IKEA furniture, and discover the manual simultaneously describes the method for taking it apart.

To highlight the same point with another example, we can think of a kid playing with LEGOs. 

Anyone who played with LEGOs as a kid knows the inevitable limitation of pieces that you run up against while building something.  You build something with a finite number of pieces, and it’s often part of the building strategy to take into account what you have for pieces in terms of quantities and variety.  Even more important is when something is already built and the next time rolls around that you want to play with LEGOs.  In order to do so, you have to destroy what you already have, in order to free up the resources to start over. 

In a case of finite resources, destruction is an absolute necessity in order to further create based on the lessons of the past.

If we take this as a tenant of progress and reapply it to the romantic situation of relationships, it again still fits:  in order to make the situation better, something about the current situation needs to be changed, and often: destroyed.

[As an aside about monogamy, we can wonder if monogamy as an idea fits humans effectively or if it’s like a glass bottle full of water being placed in the freezer.  Is it our natural behavior that fails to fit the monogamous framework?  Or does the monogamous framework fail to fit our natural, and potentially healthy inclinations?  How many instances of infidelity have ultimately resulted in better situations for all people involved?]

We must carefully and cautiously wonder: do our natural inclinations towards destruction actually help us improve things in certain circumstances?

If we think about a kid who wants to play with LEGOs but is faced with the product of yesterday’s creativity, then the answer is: absolutely.  Destroying yesterday’s creation frees up the resources to make something that is potentially better.

All feelings have a kind of hope designed into them so that they function with the aim of one thing: make things better.  Often this just means feeling different.  We act on the current feeling and our feeling changes to one that is closer to a state that was imagined by the hope of the initial feeling.

Often this can backfire, as when we feel it would be an improvement of our situation to feel the pleasure of eating a donut.  Short term improvement in terms of raw sensations, at the cost of long term detriment.  We feel good for those moments of sugary-goodness and feel miserable looking at vacation photos, not to mention the specific consequences to our health.

We can mirror this short-term /long-term trade off back on to the example of relationships.  The excitement and pleasure of infidelity can have a negative long term effect of destroying a really good primary relationship.  The long term health of the relationship is compromised for short term pleasure just as our personal long term health is compromised for the short term pleasure of tasting a donut.

Through this lens the tension of shadowy destructiveness can boil down to a simple question:

Do you want to add?

Or do you want to subtract?

To reiterate: in a circumstance with finite resources, subtraction, or destruction is necessary in order to continue creating with recycled resources.

The digital age is a welcomed hack when it comes to things like writing.  Early in the history of writing, paper was a difficult and rare resource so what was written had to be important, or palimpsests were created in order to recycle the paper.  But notice once more, in order to create a palimpsest, one must first erase what was originally written on the page, thereby destroying the writing and the message.  In that circumstance of limited resources, destruction was necessary.  But in the digital age, hundreds of pages takes up the tiniest bit of space in a hard drive.  There’s simply no need to destroy, unless of course we are talking about the process of editing. 

With editing we enter a new realm of the usefulness regarding destruction, but it again follows the same pattern as the little kid with LEGOs but the reason for destructive change is different.  With editing the destructive change is not for resources, but for quality.  We realize that something would actually be better if it were leaner, and so we destroy what we have in order to create a better, different version.

Our questions now change. It isn’t: should we add or subtract?  

But rather:

 Exactly what and where should we add and subtract?

For example, editing involves both the process of adding material in order to fully flesh out an idea and taking away material that does not add to the overall effectiveness of the piece, whether that be writing, music, film, drawing, painting, or product design.  Part of the genius behind Apple products is how much they take away from the design of a product in order to simplify it.  The original Ipod had a click wheel, a button in the center and an on/off button at the top.  Now think for a moment about how many buttons your average CD player had back in the day.  The minimalism was a welcomed change that clearly resonated, but this required taking things away.

Dynamism, or rather action and progress, is a process of growth and decay.  The demonic aspect the Jung tints this dynamism with, most likely refers to the subtraction, or destructive aspect of this process.  But he perhaps seeks to highlight it in a more extreme way.  As should be obvious, thoughtful destruction can yield great good, but destruction that is hooked up to a kind of chain reaction, or a vicious cycle lacks all sort of thoughtfulness and devolves into a force that erases the process of progress and leads to potentially terrible and irreversible circumstances.

Check out Part II

PERFECTION PARALYSIS

June 6th, 2019

If for a moment we think about the word ‘perfect’ or ‘perfection’, what exactly comes to mind?

The current cultural concept evokes something that is flawless, precisely accurate and fitting an ideal without even the tiniest exception.

This concept guides much of our thinking about the future regarding the plans we try to imagine and the results that we wish to see, but this concept, and our willingness to entertain it ultimately pollutes our ability to act.

The imaginative world that we can conjure is itself an immensely imperfect beast.  At a base level there is the sheer magnitude of information that we do not have available in our imagination, due both to the limitations of our senses, their ability to take in such information, and also our inability to remember every single detail that might come our way.  Beyond these first limitations, the double edged blessing of our imagination allows us to be host to this virus-concept of perfection.  The current cultural concept is in fact not a fair representation of where the word comes from.

Arriving via French from 11^th century Latin, the word ‘perfect’ arises from a meaning that is more akin to ‘completed’ or ‘accomplished’.  Dissecting it’s original roots we can arrive at an equation of ‘completely’ and ‘to make, or do’.  With this etymology in hand, we can see how far the meaning of the word ‘perfect’ has drifted.  It’s long history indicates something more like ‘finished’ as opposed to some kind of product or result that meets an ideal in absolutely every way imaginable. 

The differential here created by the drift in meaning is perhaps a bit more intuitive when we reframe it with a question:

When we try to imagine something we think we’d like to accomplish, do we focus on how we would actually do it, or do we instead imagine something fully formed?  Like an animal emerging from an egg?

The original meaning is about the cessation of doing.  To make or do completely.  The backbone of meaning in the word perfect is actually an active verb: that of doing.

And yet our modern idea of perfect so often keeps us from even starting.  This is the insidious effect that our new concept of the word inflicts upon us.

Something perfect is not necessarily flawless, it’s just done. 

If we accomplish something and it’s good enough but it doesn’t actually meet a lofty ideal, then it actually still fits the original meaning of perfect. 

This feels like a contradiction, but the feeling evoked by such a strange sounding sentence is perhaps an indication of territory where our imagination can go that reality cannot.

The nuance that connects our current concept to the original meaning in a practical way, is that some accomplishment is probably not done if there are flaws with the result, which merely implies that we are not actually done yet and that we simply need to keep tinkering.

Efforts here become asymptotic.  There is ultimately a bridge to the ideal that cannot be crossed and it’s wise to remember something an English professor once said:

You never actually finish an essay.  You just stop working on it.

An episode related to this one is Episode 154: Progress or Perfection?

EMBRACE WEAKNESS

June 5th, 2019

No one enjoys feeling weak.  At least not without a rigorous understanding, either through trial and error or through a strong intellectual foundation, that feeling weak is a solid path to increased strength.

The most natural example to illuminate this intuitively is the physical one, specifically with regards to exercise.

To use one’s strength to it’s limits in the gym paradoxically makes a person feel the most weak.  We can easily compare bench-pressing 225lbs to lifting a cup of coffee.   Lifting a cup of coffee is no problem – totally within our capabilities, but if we’ve only ever bench-pressed 220lbs, finally lifting 225lbs is going to bring us to the limit of our strength, where strength fails to perform the task well.  And this is perhaps a good local definition of weakness:  not being able to perform a task well.  However, the natural anti-fragility of our body’s systems reacts to this feeling of weakness and creatively imagines something even more difficult and begins to reorganize and prepare for that circumstance.  This is how we build muscle and get stronger.

But this strange interplay between strength and weakness extends far beyond the physical realm of our muscles and their capacity to fight gravity.

If we do not occasionally feel very weak in our ability to do any given thing, even something we are very good at, something which we have practiced, then we are not extending our strength and mastery of the task at hand.  Increased strength lies beyond this experience of weakness.

The general mental version of this weakness is confusion.  Only by embracing what we do not understand can we forge a path towards understanding, and this means entertaining things that are confusing, and continually engaging with this territory of confusion until we experience a sensible fusion between the parts that do not seem to connect.

Anyone who has travelled to a foreign country with absolutely no knowledge of the local language knows just how debilitating the experience can be.  We feel weak in this new environment because we are not able to perform the task of communication well.  We inevitably resort to old child-like forms of charades, an ability that we often only have a slightly greater command of compared to a totally unknown language.

There is, at this point, an extremely dangerous thought that can wiggle it’s way into our world view.  Perhaps we hear it quite often:

Don’t know, don’t care.

This might be an acceptable strategy for some things, such as how big the largest star in the Milky Way is, or not knowing a local language during a layover, or even a couple days, but this strategy is something we should be extremely wary of adopting.

To ignore weakness is not to stay at the same static level of strength.  To ignore weakness allows our strength to decline.

This is again most obvious in the physical sense.  Without constantly testing the limits of physical strength, our muscles atrophy to the level of exertion that our body is accustomed to predicting.

Use it, or lose it, is a pithy and helpful guide here.

Whether the issue is physical strength or some sort of mental strength, what becomes clear is that we are either moving forward or we are drifting backwards.  There is no comfortable middle ground where we can coast.

If we feel as though we are coasting, chances are we are subtly degrading in some way, and the change is slow enough that we do not notice the day-to-day changes.

This is even true of something like meditation.  If we do not mindfully invoke the practice and technique, our ability to do so fades.  But to consistently confront the challenges of meditation on a daily basis is to slowly unravel the benefits and skill through embracing -simultaneously- the limits of our strength and the beginning of our weakness.

The greatest mentor we can take in this kind of endeavor is time.

It marches forward without mercy nor pause.

Our willingness to embrace weakness should likewise follow suit.  This is perhaps what the pop culture adage is referring to when we are prescribe to do something everyday that scares us.

The quick and superficial assumption here is that we should have a roller-coaster-like experience everyday.

But if we give this just a moment’s more pause, we can see a deeper conclusion:

what is scarier than feeling weak?

THE OPPOSITE OF FREE WILL

June 4th, 2019

This episode was inspired by reading Annaka Harris’ book ‘Conscious’. You can find a link to her book at the bottom of this post.

The debate that surrounds free will is often an unproductive quagmire.

One problem with this debate is that it’s often approached as a binary topic.  Do we or don’t we have free will? 

The phrasing of the question here is perhaps the first problem regarding the debate.  Even worse, in such debates, it’s never thoroughly discussed what is left over if free will doesn’t exist.  Surely something must exist, some sort of consciousness at the very least.

Without free will, the default assumption seems to be a kind of zombie existence (to reference David Chalmers’ philosophical thought experiment).  When we think of a zombie, we think of some sort of robotic being with simple drives that lacks a greater awareness of what it’s really doing and why.  Many other entities, however, seem to fit into this description but which on further reflection seem to be more aware than we realize.  For example, it’s been shown that trees care for their young in complex ways via underground root systems and through a symbiotic relationship with fungi networks, and if this doesn’t imply some sort of awareness, we can certainly highlight the Venus Flytrap which is quite clearly aware of an insect that lands in it’s ‘mouth’.

That word may in fact be on the other side of the free-will debate: awareness.  Even if we are to take the stance that free will does not exist, that certainly doesn’t imply anything about awareness.  Anyone who can reflect on the fact that they are experiencing something has awareness.  Even a tree without a brain can be aware of all sorts of things. 

However, is a tree aware of the planet Mars?  or the Andromeda Galaxy?  It’s hard to think that any tree in the history of trees has ever been aware of these things in the way humans are.

This reveals a gradient of awareness that is separate from free-will, and perhaps, we can think about the free-will problem on a spectrum where one end is simply unattainable.  Free will is that unattainable end of the spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum is the least amount of awareness possible.  The easiest example might be something like a rock, or a chair… though, that does mean these things are not aware.  We need only wonder if any of the carbon making up the chair was once a part of Cleopatra’s amygdala.  That possibility is certainly quite real, and if it was the case, does that mean that at one point in the time part of the chair was more aware?  We can think of a deceased person.   Such a body was certainly more aware while living, presumably.

So perhaps the question of free will is a red herring: an unproductive question that fuels merry-go-round debates and discussions.  Perhaps the harder, and more fruitful question is: can an increased awareness approach free will like an asymptote: forever getting closer but never actually making the jump.

How might this work?  Well, it seems that our brain hands us a slightly delayed version of reality, we are continually experiencing everything with a lag.  We are in essence living in the past, however incredibly recent.  We essentially experience what happened.  We are taking in the results of prior conditions.  What happens to our reactions to such conditions relative to different levels of awareness?

The more sensitive or aware we are to what is going on, or what has just happened, the more thoughtful we can be about our plans, actions and behaviors for the future.  Someone who lacks awareness is clearly bound to make the same mistakes over and over.  But someone who is paying more attention more acutely is more likely to pick up on the key factors that can ensure that such mistakes don’t happen again, or at least happen less often in the future.  This does not necessarily imply free will, but it’s certainly a welcomed improvement from a total lack of awareness.

The opposite of free will need not imply that we are zombies, but perhaps that we exist on a spectrum of awareness.  And even if we concede that free will is a bit at odds with scientific determinism, we can still strive to increase our awareness and therefore precipitate a greater possibility of a better future by being more in tune with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

This episode was inspired by Annaka Harris’ book ‘Conscious’.  You can order your copy by clicking on the book below:

NOT SUCCESSFUL

June 3rd, 2019

A virtue of language is that there are many ways to say the same thing.  Though these different ways might in essence communicate the same thing, each way imparts a different flavor that can greatly alter the way a message lands.

Doctors are phenomenal in this regard.  When talking about test results, doctors don’t say “You’re healthy,” they say “Your test results were negative.”  Imagine for a moment a teacher in high school saying this to a student. . .

An area where this strange flip-flop nature of language’s flavor can benefit us is failure.

How shall we say it?

I failed?

How can ‘I failed’ be rephrased with a different, better flavor without losing the meaning of the message.

Perhaps we can say:

I did not succeed.

This means the exact same thing as I failed and yet it imparts a wholly different flavor.

One leaves it more open-ended, the other is a conclusion.  This later way that frames failure in terms of success is also phrasing the situation with a positive word.  We hear the word ‘success’, which is inherently positive. To help us wonder what sort of effect this flavor has, we can test it immediately in this way:

don’t think of a pink elephant. 

What do you think of? 

A true absence is impossible to think of, so even though there was no success, there is a ghost of the idea, and more importantly there is an absence of a far more negative way of phrasing the same exact thing: we do not hear the word ‘failed’.

Any effort to achieve something positive is inherently a success over inaction, so even if our efforts do not produce our imagined result, there is still something tiny to celebrate – the fact that we tried.  This tiny positive kernel can perhaps be very important during a time when we have to reorganize our idea of how things work, since our efforts didn’t work out the way we imagined.

Language is full of small subtle hacks like this.  Another one is explored in Episode 100 regarding the word ‘yet’.

Such small flavors might seem innocuous or too small to be concerned about, but we need only think of actual flavor, of foods, and how often the smallest subtle addition can suddenly bring a meal to life.  That secret ingredient as the mythical meal always has.  

We must also remember the phenomenon of compounding interest.  Small changes, repeated over and over, add up in ways that go far beyond our intuition.

Who can tell just how much radical good might bloom from phrasing our language in more virtuous ways.

This episode references Episode 100: Yet, a Way Out of the Box