michael-dean-k/

Toying with this idea of "the geometry of the meaning crisis." Maybe this abstract society-scale idea will make more sense through (8) visuals and patterns. Before I unpack each, here’s a sentence on what’s going on and how to fix it: Society used to provide rigid/objective packages of meaning; we found value in shedding them, but now we’re in a world where meaning is completely subjective, and we’re lost; so instead we need to understand the structures we dissolved, synthesize opposites, and not discard them, but transcend them. (What triggered this)

OLD WORLD OBJECTIVITY WAS BAD:

• Oppressive kings
• Male dominance & slavery
• No individuality at all
• Sexual repression
• No ability to build wealth
• Single world view
• Crammed in cities
• No autonomy of thought

BUT SUBJECTIVITY LED TO EXCESS & SCRAMBLING:

• Hierarchy flattening (decline in excellence)
• Duality dissolution (gender dysphoria)
• Downsampling (identity politics, psychographics)
• Hyper-salience (sexualization of everything)
• Hyper-commodification (influencer culture)
• Rationalization (death of religion)
• Disaggregation (isolation in the suburbs)
• Complete relativity of thought (conspiracy theories)

AND SO TO SOLVE THE MEANING CRISIS, WE NEED TO NOT ABANDON FORM, BUT TO RECONFIGURE AND TRANSCEND IT:

• Create your own journey in context of death
• Honor opposites & resolve paradoxes
• Defy labels & become 1 of 1
• Build attentional discipline & immunity to triggers
• Act with agency, honest income
• Pursue mystical experiences & altered states of consciousness
• Take responsibility to forge community
• Intentional evolution of your consciousness every week

David and I got into this talk on how technology will bring us to a point of serious disorientation, and how a Christian (or religious/moral) framework can help ground all the turbulence. At some point I made the point that I think it’s important to die. I believe that some kind of soul-flight is the main climax of consciousness. I don’t believe in the Christian eternal afterlife, but in a 3-minute moment of time dilation that is, in essence, an eternity—1,000 lifetimes. As so while I never want to be literally immortal, I want literary immorality. All the text of my life establishes a moral foundation for a text-based replica to outlive me and interact with and hopefully guide future generations, whether it’s 10 or 10 million people. Books already fill this function, except now books are agentic and interactive.