Wednesday, September 2, 2015

How we ended up here

We used to be awed by our accomplishments. The pyramids, the colossus, the metropolis, the moon landing. The sheer scale of these shared works inspired awe and pride. A feeling that we, or our rulers, must be doing something right if this is what we can build. Sparked with human toil the feeling one gets staring into a naked night sky or down a canyon.

Today we are awed by our problems. The sheer scale of runaway warming, racial animus, hunger, sadness, death. The fact that all of our great acts have not changed a basic truth about our lives and our race - that we all die and suffer along the way not in spite of but because of one another.

We are cowed into a listless silence. Standing at the base of the pyramid of skulls we don't speak. We don't act. We look away. And yet there are so many simple steps to take.

Eva Brann here identifies two concepts of the will that are unhelpful to live with:

1. A super-human or sub-human will, a will with no human agent, that will deliver an inevitable future that we need to accommodate ourselves with.
2. And the idea that if any of us is to be successful, we need to act swiftly and that decisive action is the manifestation of the will.

The second midwives the first. We are hasty, "intuitive", unreasoning in our desire for action. The document requires quick "iterating" (tl;dr). The pace of our give and take in our working days has left no time to weigh options and make a reasoned choice. Instead we let intuition guide our moves, hoping that quick action will stop disaster. But in quick action lies all the enemies of reason - our biases, our blindness, our unspoken fears, our basest wants that our reasoning, moral mind would check.

And so in quick action we give life to the invisible hand. Capital loves the swift action of unthinking masses. It is the key to "revealed preference". Rational markets are a lie but the mass market capitalist just needs us to make our will manifest, even if through a billion thoughtless clicks. We create that super-human will that brings us our future - all our unthinking has a mind of its own. And this will builds pyramids of skulls and we gawp.

Self-help is creeping towards solutions. Marshall Goldsmith's Triggers is a modern day take on Socrates' call to build yourself a character and a life that cannot help but do good. Habit-forming apps encourage us to make small commitments first, and work our way up to big changes.

We can't stare at the pyramid of skulls and say, "I can't do anything to fix the world without destroying this pyramid of skulls first." It takes simple, personal steps. Take your eyes off the massive problem and cast them on the ground in front of you. Your complaint that what you do doesn't matter is an arrogant, bullshit cop out. What you do is all that matters because if enough of you do it, we won't have these yawning pits of hopelessness all around us.

I will slow down, reflect, and act deliberately. That is my reasoning mind made manifest. And if that action only serves to grow my knowledge or deepen my relationships with those I love, then that is meaningful to me, and it hasn't burned another drop of oil or sent another child to a sweatshop for my pleasure.

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