Beyond Order book notes
linked from goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5261968799
people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized
We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them
All creatures of reasonable complexity and even a minimally social nature have their particular place, and know it. All social creatures also learn what is deemed valuable by other group members, and derive from that, as well as from the understanding of their own position, a sophisticated implicit and explicit understanding of value itself
Play with others depends (as the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget observed5) upon the collective establishment of a shared goal with the child’s play partners
Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.
No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn.
It is said, with much truth, that genuine communication can take place only between peers. This is because it is very difficult to move information up a hierarchy. Those well positioned (and this is a great danger of moving up) have used their current competence-their cherished opinions, their present knowledge, their current skills-to stake a moral claim to their status. In consequence, they have little motivation to admit to error, to learn or change-and plenty of reason not to.
“Victory,” in one of its primary and most socially important aspects, is the overcoming of obstacles for the broader public good.
the position of top dog, when occupied properly, has as one of its fundamental attractions the opportunity to identify deserving individuals at or near the beginning of their professional life, and provide them with the means of productive advancement
Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them
Highly social creatures such as we are must abide by the rules, to remain sane and minimize unnecessary uncertainty, suffering, and strife. However, we must also transform those rules carefully, as circumstances change around us.
(and if you are a person with sufficient character to manage that distinction), then you have served the spirit, rather than the mere law, and that is an elevated moral act. But if you refuse to realize the importance of the rules you are violating and act out of self-centered convenience, then you are appropriately and inevitably damned
Every society is already characterized by patterned behavior; otherwise it would be pure conflict and no “society” at all. But the mere fact that social order reigns to some degree does not mean that a given society has come to explicitly understand its own behavior, its own moral code.
Each of us, when fortunate, is compelled forward by something that grips our attention-love of a person; a sport; a political, sociological, or economic problem, or a scientific question; a passion for art, literature, or drama-something that calls to us for reasons we can neither control nor understand
You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. It is a perilous journey, but it is also the adventure of our lives. Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process. Think, as well, of the traveling you have done, or of the work you have undertaken, whether for pleasure or necessity. In all these cases you experience what is new. Sometimes that is painful; sometimes it is better than anything else that has ever happened to you
We understand reality, therefore, as if it is constructed of personalities. That is because so much of what we encounter in our hypersocial reality, our complex societies, is in fact personality-and gendered personality, at that, reflecting the billion years or so since the emergence of sexual reproduction (ample time for its existence to have profoundly structured our perceptions). We understand male, and abstract from that the masculine. We understand female, and abstract from that the feminine. Finally, we understand the child, and abstract from that, the son.
peace is the establishment of a shared hierarchy of divinity, of value. Thus, an eternal question emerges whenever people of different backgrounds are required to deal with one another on a relatively permanent basis: What do all gods share that makes them gods? What is God, in essence?
[Harry Potter in book 2] does this, significantly, through the sewer, acting out the ancient alchemical dictum, in sterquilinis invenitur: in filth it will be found. That which you most need to find will be found where you least wish to look.
But another form, more abstract-more psychological, more spiritual-is human evil: the danger we pose to one another. At some point in our evolutionary and cultural history, we began to understand that human evil could rightly be considered the greatest of all snakes. So, the symbolic progression might be (1) snake as evil predator, then (2) external human enemy as snake/evil/predator, then (3) subjective, personal, or psychological darkness/vengefulness/deceit as snake/evil/predator. Each of these representations, which took untold centuries, perhaps millennia to conceptualize, constitute a tangible increase in the sophistication of the image of evil.
Every story requires a starting place that is not good enough and an ending place that is better.
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back. And that is particularly true for those daily events that everyone is prone to regard as trivial-even the plates on which you eat your lunch. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.
perhaps that was part of the problem: because she did not know what she liked (and was equally vague about her dislikes), she was not in the strongest position to put forward her own opinions.
The former problem-willful blindness-occurs when you could come to know something but cease exploring so that you fail to discover something that might cause you substantial discomfort.
there is certainly fear of falling down a hole of that size (again, particularly when much has remained unspoken) that motivates the proclivity to keep things to yourself when they would be better, but dangerously, said.
Imagine that you are so afraid that you will not allow yourself even to know what you want. Knowing would simultaneously mean hoping, and your hopes have been dashed. You have your reasons for maintaining your ignorance. You are afraid, perhaps, that there is nothing worth wanting; you are afraid that if you specify what you want precisely you will simultaneously discover (and all too clearly) what constitutes failure; you are afraid that failure is the most likely outcome; and, finally, you are afraid that if you define failure and then fail, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was you that failed, and that it was your fault.
The fog that hides is the refusal to notice-to attend to-emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you.
Every ideal is a judge, after all: the judge who says, “You are not manifesting your true potential.” No ideals? No judge. But the price paid for that is purposelessness. This is a high price. also expected, when we are without purpose: chronic, overwhelming anxiety, as focused purpose constrains what is otherwise likely to be the intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility and too much choice.
Experience with the possibility of betrayal opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete. I will trust you-I will extend my hand to you-despite the risk of betrayal, because it is possible, through trust, to bring out the best in you, and perhaps in me
there is no shortage of genuinely good people who are thrilled if they can give someone useful and trustworthy a hand up
You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequence. And what is that consequence? All the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?
That is the curse associated with the human discovery of the future and, with it, the necessity of work-because to work means to sacrifice the hypothetical delights of the present for the potential improvement of what lies ahead.
There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself-once you realize that you are a community that extends across time-and how you should treat other people.
no happiness in the absence of responsibility. No valuable and valued goal, no positive emotion
No matter how much we wish to discount the future completely, it is part of the price we paid for being acutely self-conscious and able to conceptualize ourselves across the entire span of our lives.
people are generally very loath to talk publicly-it is a common fear, often severe enough to interfere with career progression.
If you are at work, and called upon to do what makes you contemptuous of yourself-weak and ashamed, likely to lash out at those you love, unwilling to perform productively, and sick of your life-it is possible that it is time to meditate, consider, strategize, and place yourself in a position where you are capable of saying no.
(on changing jobs) One hundred and fifty applications, carefully chosen; three to five interviews thereby acquired. That could be a mission of a year or more. That is much less than a lifetime of misery and downward trajectory. But it is not nothing.
I find it heart-wrenching to see how little encouragement and guidance so many people have received, and how much good can emerge when just a little more is provided. “I knew you could do it” is a good start, and goes a long way toward ameliorating some of the unnecessary pain in the world.
Helping people bridge the gap between what they profoundly intuit but cannot articulate seems to be a reasonable and valuable function for a public intellectual.
You might even consider the inculcation of responsibility the fundamental purpose of society.
As the purpose of human life became uncertain outside the purposeful structure of monotheistic thought and the meaningful world it proposed, we would experience an existentially devastating rise in nihilism, Nietzsche believed. Alternatively, he suggested, people would turn to identification with rigid, totalitarian ideology: the substitute of human ideas for the transcendent Father of All Creation. The doubt that undermines and the certainty that crushes: Nietzsche’s prognostication for the two alternatives that would arise in the aftermath of the death of God.
Individuals who take this [Ubermensch] route, this alternative to nihilism and totalitarianism, must therefore produce their own cosmology of values. However, the psychoanalysts Freud and Jung put paid to that notion, demonstrating that we are not sufficiently in possession of ourselves to create values by conscious choice.
The first players of a given (intellectual) game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity. Their followers, desperate to join a potentially masterable new dominance hierarchy (the old one being cluttered by its current occupants), become enamored of that story. While doing so, being less bright than those they follow, they subtly shift “contributed to” or “affected” to “caused.” The originator(s), gratified by the emergence of followers, start to shift their story in that direction as well. Or they object, but it does not matter. The cult has already begun.
Consider the characters fabricated by second-rate crafters of fiction: they are simply divided into those who are good and those who are evil. By contrast, sophisticated writers put the divide inside the characters they create, so that each person becomes the locus of the eternal struggle between light and darkness. It is much more psychologically appropriate (and much less dangerous socially) to assume that you are the enemy.
The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.
That which is valuable is pure, properly aligned, and glitters with light-and this is true for the person just as it is for the gem.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher.
A case can be made for the arbitrary and even meaningless nature of any given commitment, given the plethora of alternatives, given the corruption of the systems demanding that commitment. But the same case cannot be made for the fact of commitment itself: Those who do not choose a direction are lost.
This, it should be noted, is not repression. This point must be made clear, as people believe that the things discipline imposed by choice prevents us from doing will somehow be lost forever. It is this belief, in large part-often expressed with regard to creativity-that makes so many parents afraid of damaging their children by disciplining them. But proper discipline organizes rather than destroys.
A child who has been disciplined properly, by contrast-by parents, other adults, and most significantly, by other children-does not battle with, defeat, and then permanently inhibit her aggression. Such a child does not even sublimate that aggression, or transform it into something different. Instead, she integrates it into her increasingly sophisticated game-playing ability, allowing it to feed her competitiveness and heighten her attention, and making it serve the higher purposes of her developing psyche.
Doubt about which game is appropriate right now is not relativism. It is the intelligent consideration of context.
To think that peace can exist without the overarching and voluntarily accepted game is to misunderstand the ever-present danger of the fragmented tribalism to which we can so easily and devastatingly regress.
The master can allow himself his intuitions, as the knowledge obtained by the discipline he has acquired will enable him to criticize his own ideas and assess their true value.
It is worthwhile thinking of these Commandments as a minimum set of rules for a stable society-an iterable social game.
If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful-even one thing-then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine.
you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization.
You need to establish a link with what is beyond you, like a man overboard in high seas requires a life preserver, and the invitation of beauty into your life is one means by which that may be accomplished.
To share in the artist’s perception reunites us with the source of inspiration that can rekindle our delight in the world, even if the drudgery and repetition of daily life has reduced what we see to the narrowest and most pragmatic of visions.
Art is exploration. Artists train people to see.
a psychological truism: that anything sufficiently threatening or harmful once encountered can never be forgotten if it has never been understood.
We literally make the world what it is, from the many things we perceive it could be. Doing so is perhaps the primary fact of our being, and perhaps of Being itself. We face a multitude of prospects-of manifold realities, each almost tangible-and by choosing one pathway rather than another, reduce that multitude to the singular actuality of reality.
If we were the source of our own values and masters of our own houses, then we could act or fail to act as we choose and not suffer the pangs of regret, sorrow, and shame.
the insistence of God on the goodness of creation reflected the fact that Truth, Courage, and Love were united in His creative action. Thus, there is an ethical claim deeply embedded in the Genesis account of creation: everything that emerges from the realm of possibility in the act of creation (arguably, either divine or human) is good insofar as the motive for its creation is good. I do not believe there is a more daring argument in all of philosophy or in theology than this: To believe this, to act it out, is the fundamental act of faith.
There are many serious obstacles both to knowing what you need and want, and to discussing it. If you allow yourself to know what you want, then you will also know precisely when you are failing to get it. You will benefit, of course, because you will also know when you have succeeded. But you might also fail, and you could well be frightened enough by the possibility of not getting what you need (and want) that you keep your desires vague and unspecified.
romance requires trust, and not blind faith but the mature trust of one wise enough to distrust but courageous enough to risk putting their trust in a partner. the vow that makes a marriage capable of preserving its romantic component is first and foremost the decision not to lie to your partner.
A marriage is a vow, and there is a reason for it. You announce jointly, publicly: “I am not going to leave you, in sickness or health, in poverty or wealth-and you are not going to leave me.” It is actually a threat: “We are not getting rid of each other, no matter what.” You are shackled together, like two angry cats at the bottom of a barrel with the lid on. In principle, there is no escape. If you have any sense (besides the optimism of new love) you also think, “Oh, God. That is a horrifying possibility.”
Do you really want to keep asking yourself for the rest of your life-because you would always have the option to leave-if you made the right choice? In all likelihood, you did not. There are 7 billion people in the world.
But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble.
Traditional roles are far more helpful than modern people, who vastly overestimate their tolerance for freedom and choice, tend to realise. tradition is what has worked so far, ceteris paribus.
If there is no template for what either of you should be doing when you live together with someone, then you are required to argue about it-or negotiate about it, if you are good at that, which you are probably not. Few people are.
When I am helping someone straighten out their marriage, let us say, we do very mundane things. I am not interested in vacations, special occasions, or anything that happens that is out of the ordinary. It is not that those things are unimportant, but they are not vital in the same sense that daily routines are vital. It is the latter that must be set right. I want to know what interrelationships constitute the bulk of your typical day.
(sex frequency) Zero is bad. If you go to zero, then one of you is tyrannizing the other, and the other is submitting. If you go to zero, then one of you is going to have an affair-physical, emotional, fantastical, or some combination of the three.
do not ever punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing. if not done well, correct, don't admonish.
We conceptualize what we experience as a story. That story is, roughly speaking, the description of the place we are at right now, as well as the place that we are going to, the strategies and adventures that we implement and experience along the way, and our downfalls and reconstitutions during that journey.
We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human. We would not even be able to communicate.
The fundamental representation of reality, as an eternal treasure house guarded by an eternal predator, is therefore a perfect representation of the way you are wired to react to the world at the most fundamental depths of your Being.
posit, despite your mistreatment, that you are in fact worthy of care; and the second step is to give it, where you can, despite receiving tragically little yourself.
too much sentimentality is dangerously infantilising.
a much less romanticized perception of the true nature of the animals we raise and dine upon: They are sentient beings, in part, and we have a responsibility not to inflict any more suffering upon them than necessary, but they are not human beings, and they are certainly not children
the dream is the birthplace of the thought, and often of the thought that does not come easily to the conscious mind. It is not hiding anything; it is just not very good at being clear.
As with the Sleeping Beauty of fairy tales, my client’s family had failed to invite the Evil Queen, the terrible aspect of nature, into their child’s life. This left her completely unprepared for life’s essential harshness-the complications of sexuality and the requirement for everything that lives to devour other lives (and to be eventually subjected to the same fate).
Conservatives are necessary for maintaining things the way they are when everything is working and change might be dangerous. Liberals, by contrast, are necessary for changing things when they are no longer working. It is no easy task, however, to determine when something needs to be preserved or when it needs to be transformed. That is why we have politics, if we are fortunate, and the dialogue that accompanies it, instead of war, tyranny, or submission.
It is difficult for any of us to see what we are blinded to by the nature of our personalities. It is for this reason that we must continually listen to people who differ from us, and who, because of that difference, have the ability to see and to react appropriately to what we cannot detect.
there exists a hero and an adversary; a wise king and a tyrant; a positive and negative maternal figure; and chaos itself. That is the structure of the world in six characters.
Partial knowledge of the cast, conscious or unconscious, leaves you undefended; leaves you naive, unprepared, and likely to become possessed by deceit, resentment, and arrogance.
we need to be awake to the fact that our functional hierarchical structures can become unproductive, tyrannical, and blind in the blink of an eye. We have a responsibility to ensure that they do not become radically unfair and corrupt and begin to distribute their rewards on the basis of power or unmeritocratic privilege instead of competence.
You try to design a system that sinners such as you cannot damage too badly-too permanently-even when they are half blind and resentful. To the degree that I am conservative in orientation, I believe in the wisdom of that vision.
This false misapprehension that the terrible experience that has befallen you somehow singularly characterizes you-is aimed, particularly, at you-is part of what turns exposure to tragedy into the very resentment we are discussing. The fact that unfortunate things are happening or are going to happen to you is built into the structure of reality itself.
We commit the sin of omission, alternatively (and perhaps more subtly), in the belief that what we are avoiding will just go away, which it seldom does. We sacrifice the future to the present, frequently suffering the slings and arrows of outraged conscience for doing so.
But everyone should take their turn-both at receiving the benefits of social interaction and of bearing the responsibility for ensuring that such interaction remains possible.
If you take your turn at the difficult tasks, people learn to trust you, you learn to trust yourself, and you get better at doing difficult things. All of that is good. If you leave all that undone, you will find yourself in the same position as the child whose parents insisted upon doing everything for him or her: bereft of the capacity to thrive in the face of the difficulties/challenges of life.
If you deceive (particularly yourself), if you lie, then you begin to warp the mechanisms guiding the instinct that orients you.
The right attitude to the horror of existence-the alternative to resentment, deceit, and arrogance-is the assumption that there is enough of you, society, and the world to justify existence. That is faith in yourself, your fellow man, and the structure of existence itself: the belief that there is enough to you to contend with existence and transform your life into the best it could be.
I do not believe you can be appropriately grateful or thankful for what good you have and for what evil has not befallen you until you have some profound and even terrifying sense of the weight of existence. You cannot properly appreciate what you have unless you have some sense not only of how terrible things could be, but of how terrible it is likely for things to be, given how easy it is for things to be so.
That is the spirit who works against-and that is exactly how he describes himself: “I am the spirit that denies.” Why? Because everything in the world is so limited and imperfect-and causes itself so much trouble and terror because of that-that its annihilation is not only justified but ethically demanded.
“Life is so terrible, because of its limitations and malevolence, that it would be better if it did not exist at all.” That is the central doctrine of the spirit that works at counterpurposes to you. I think the reason that it is wrong, in part, is because, when realized, all it does is exacerbate an already admittedly bad situation.
To collapse in the aftermath of a tragic loss is therefore more accurately a betrayal of the person who has died, instead of a tribute, as it multiplies the effect of that mortal catastrophe.
You are grateful not because you are naive, but because you have decided to put a hand forward to encourage the best in yourself, and the state, and the world. You are grateful, in the same manner, not because suffering is absent, but because it is valiant to remember what you have and what you may still be offered-and because the proper thankful attitude toward that existence and possibility positions you better than any other attitude toward the vicissitudes of existence.
Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself.
Gratitude is therefore the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of the catastrophe of life.
And so you make the same fundamental decision, when you join communally with your people, that you make when you grieve: “Despite everything, it is good that we are together, and that we have one another.”