michael-dean-k/

Thought from an anarchist book store in Seattle: to be against hierarchy is to misunderstood nature. Is most of nature not a vast nothingness pierced with monuments of beauty? What about the food chain? Even our very perceptual systems have hierarchies.

Your life is composed of thousands of overlapping hierarchies, and in each you exist at different points in it. Consider where you stand as a parent, vs. where you stand in geopolitical conflict. I think “progress” is when the average person has mobility to shift between hierarchies and then, gain skills or do whatever they need to exist within or climb up the hierarchy they want. What we need is cognitive liberty: the awakening of mind to the degrees of freedom around you, and the opportunities possible within your single life.

Instead, social justice seems fixed on this myth of a monohierarchy that dominates everything. Of course bad hierarchies exist, but those are most likely out of your scope. Even if you protested Gaza, and got 50k people to join you, and even persuaded some high-level politicians, you still likely won't change anything. Consider the opportunity cost of those 50k people not focusing on what they’re uniquely capable of doing because they are distracted by mob politics.

Historically, centralization has had problems, and it's easy to see today how it could lead us further into a dystopia. But decentralization, the opposite, could also bring emergent vectors of chaos that could be equally problematic. Neither tyranny or anarchy are ideal. What's required for centralization to work? Tolerance, correction, impeachment, transparency, plurality, data sovereignty, freedom from propganda—all hard, but all solvable things. To create an honest and principled centralization, leaders would need to actively build and implement systems that promote justice over power. That's only possible if citizens have the means to hold them extremely accountable. The original American project was effectively a question of "how do we design a system to centralize power without falling into despotism?" and it's time we revisit that question in a 21st-century circumstance.

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

A "stabilizing fiction" is when the controller tells a lie to controlled to maintain order and spirit. Think about XMAS as a stabilizing fiction between parents and kids. Think about democracy as a stabilizing fiction between rulers and the ruled.