Your influence is non-zero

In my previous post I shared a quiet commitment to not complain so much about the ills and evils of the world.

Well, that lasted only a few days. (◕‿◕✿)

I don’t know why I do this to myself. The wiliness within me does not like to be caged. Like the Teumessian fox, large parts within me elude capture and resist containment.

As it should be. For me, for you, and for all peoples.

Besides, it’s far better to move towards something.

Towards warmth

Because, as soon as I shared my quiet commitment to not complain, life seemed to deliver me so much cause for complaint.[^ Mostly related to the ongoing genocide and its ongoing human rights violations, coupled with the blatant gaslighting of our complicit media and politicians. But also: the increasing signs of our descent into fascism, the uptick in police brutality, and the accelerated rise of artificial intelligence and ubiquitous corporate surveillance (with no care or concern for society and its children). None of this is surprising or new—this is part of the grim realisation you arrive at when you have the metacrisis insight-cascade and become collapse-aware. There is a post-tragic disposition that can be found, on occasion, of course. But you can’t skip past the grief—it lives with you.]

It would have been far better for me to make a quiet commitment to that which I seek to honour and attend to more. It’s not too late, of course. Any day is a good day for a renewal of intent.[^ Only this time I might not make such a public proclamation. Maybe.] It doesn’t have to be exactly aligned to the solstice.[^ Though such times are potent.]

At the heart of this all is—as ever—a move towards authenticity.[^ It is always ever thus; a stumbling, non-linear, asymptotic quest.]

The whims, the stirrings, the inklings and hunches you harbour—these want to be attended to. If you feel moved, be moved. Let it move you—closer to coherence, congruence, integrity, and alignment.

The more I attune to the glimmer that embeckons soul[^ I still harbour legacy allergies to the word ‘soul’—but I love how Bill Plotkin describes it, as it quells the rational part of my mind (the same part I need to hush when navigating pararational and transrational domains). Soul, in this context, could be considered as your unique ecological niche. Of course, there is much more to be explored on the matter.]—the more enlivened I become. And the same is true for you.

What inspired me to write to you today is the sense that my sharing of ‘a quiet commitment to complain less’ might inspire a kind of surrendered apathy in some of us. A dampening or deadening of sorts. And that is not at all what I hope for.[^ I wanted to ‘complain’ less because the mode of complaint upholds prevailing power, and is (potentially) a little bit pathetic. Like whinging. Occasionally cathartic, sure. But nowhere near as effective as higher-agency moves. Social media baits complaint, because it deludes us into thinking we are ‘doing something’. And we are, kind of. As I wrote in late 2023, it’s okay to signal virtue. But the real virtue is in our subversive being.]

I want you—and all of us—to be enlivened.

Awake and enacting whatever part of the shared, unfurling story we each hold. To venture deeper into our calling—not as ‘individuals’, but as individuated “withindividuals”.[^ I know this looks like I just dropped a paradiastole here, but I swear this post is 100% free from any artificial intelligence.]

Withindividuals

We—you and I—are not individuals.
We all contain multitudes.

And we are the gestalt of parts.[^ ‘There is no such thing as “individuals” in the traditional sense; individuals do not preexist as such but rather materialise in intra-action. Matter is not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency.’ – Karen Barad writes in Meeting the Universe Halfway).] These parts, in relation, form an intermittently-continuous and somewhat fluid and metastable-ish self-concept (whomst we call ‘I’). But even in this we are just a part of a larger whole. A part, that sometimes acts apart, but yet is always-already connected to The Alltogether and the vast wholeness. Thus we are, at once:

• with individuals,
• within dividuals; and
• dividuals within.

‘One cannot be human by oneself,’ James P. Carse writes in Finite and Infinite Games.

‘There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.’

Ergo, to quaintly use the old branding adage:

You cannot not influence.

And, furthermore:

You cannot not be influenced.

I know the last few paragraphs might read as unnecessarily wiggly. Vexingly so. But the wiggle is the point! All paradox is generative, and we must find our way within the mess (not without).

Which brings me to the main thrust of this post.

Your influence is non-zero

I want you to know this, deeply.

Your every action—and inaction—is of non-zero significance.[^ Yes, you could adopt the nihilistic stance and decry that we are insignificant and that nothing matters. But this is an obviously wrong stance that is difficult to maintain. ‘Some things,’ to quote David Chapman, ‘are meaningful; some are meaningless. Some are vaguely in-between.’]

It’s as Einstein once supposedly said (unverified):

‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’

You’re here, you exist, and you have influence.

Your friends, your family, your acquaintances—even folk you’ve never met—notice you, and what you do, and what you don’t do.[^ Even if they aren’t consciously aware of it.]

But there’s an interesting interplay between that which you are concerned about, and that which you can influence.

Some (many) would suggest you should only focus on the things you can directly influence. For example, early this week I saw a post from Richard Bartlett:

re: existential risk / ai safety etc

it’s psychically hazardous to expand your sphere of concern very far beyond your sphere of influence. a felt sense of powerlessness spoils your epistemics like nothing else

And this is partially true—there is a peril to extending our sphere of concern very far beyond our sphere of influence. If you believe in spheres. But now I am going to do an unfair thing and riff off of this tweet, on my own trajectory (and away from the nuance Richard—who is smart and wise—would no doubt bring).

Good grief

The psychic hazard and peril of expanding your ‘sphere of concern’ is, largely, that we might open ourselves to Weltschmerz—world grief—and finally feel the sorrow we have been suppressing for so long. This is a lot, and ours is a society that has withered away its rituals and communal holding for grief. Thus there is indeed a felt-sense of powerlessness that can overcome us when we expand our ‘sphere of concern’ beyond our ‘sphere of influence’.

But, I would contend, this feeling of powerlessness only emerges when our sorrow is suppressed. Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes that depression is what happens when we don’t meet and metabolise our grief.

And, as discussed previously, more than once—

“[...] I quite appreciate Professor Randolph Nesse’s theory of depression. Nesse and his colleagues speculate that depression could act as a biological constraint system that helps to minimise wasted effort and loss by forcing the individual to slow down, reassess, and potentially change strategies.”

So it makes sense that a sense of powerlessness comes upon us.

Expand your sphere of concern anyway.

Or, better yet, have no sphere.

Infinite players do not presume to measure.

Dissolve the boundaries of your concern. Don’t artificially limit your concern to only that which you can directly influence. There are so many things you indirectly influence, too. Simply by your way of being.

Because what is the alternative? Stay small? Succumb to the requisite sociopathy of our times? Sacrifice your inner child to M̸̲͗̈̄̏̌̌͊̅̽͘Ø̶̥͙̮̹͖̀̋̆̋̒̈́͑͑͠͝Ł̵̫͔̓̒͛͊̅͗̈́́̆͌͐̚ͅØ̸̡͍̤͙̪͙̜̜̯͔̜͂͆̌̀̅͐̌͑͐̈́͠Ĉ̴̭̮͙̹͙̈́͜Ħ̴̂̈́͊͊̏͂͂̈́̒̒̍̕͜? Submit your soul to The Infinite Machine?

Nay. Go the other way, I say. Venture deeper into your humanity. Attend to your soul’s stirring.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.

Expand thy heart

Expand thy sphere of concern, horizonally.[^ ‘One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view.’ – James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games]

You won’t lose yourself amidst it all. Quite the contrary.

We are living amidst the metacrisis, in a time betwixt worlds. You don’t need to “change the world”[^ This is how capitalism dreams, as Bayo Akomolafe suggests.]—you just need to attend to that which is true for you.

‘Make a covenant with honesty,’ as Martin Shaw writes. ‘Honesty is often a case-by-case disclosure. Orientate to what feels like truth. Endless fictions fatigue us. Be your naturalness, then commit to the lively disciplines such naturalness is calling forth in you.’

It has been a while since I have read this piece, Navigating the Mysteries. The essay remains as resonant as ever.

‘If your life feels peculiar, flamboyant, occasionally shameful, then those are the markings of that emerging authenticity. The more you settle back into your naturalness, the less likely you are to be endlessly buffeted by unease and unseated by paradox. If you are steady in your own precarious character, you recognise these energies as fundamental to the business of both living and deepening. Such honesty will also introduce both limit and consequence into your life. It creates a code, a kind of gallantry. Not from the outside, but from a daily, sometimes troubling, discourse with your own soul.’

Honesty.

I was chatting with Nikhil Suresh the other day. He’s the author of I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again and the recent hit Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI. We both agreed that we could make a lot more coin if we simply changed our stance on AI and became one of the many who champion it. It’s just that, intellectually, ethically—we both have reservations.[^ Albeit from different perspectives.]

I feel moved to express concern about the uncritical hype that surrounds artificial intelligence. And whilst I bemoan this Cassandra role, it’s still a part I feel compelled to play.

Because I just don’t know that enough of us are paying attention, and I would rather we proceed with a little more wit, wisdom and grace. And appropriate fear.

Authentic wisdom

For example, the educational philosopher Zak Stein has been warning us about how we are systematically betraying the youth.[^ Here’s someone who has a boundless sphere of concern.] Allow me to present you with some paraphrased notes I took from this conversation with Daniel Thorson on The Emerge Podcast along with his recent conversation with Nate Hagens on The Great Simplification.

• Education is not preparation for life—it is life.
• We are telling children to prepare for a future we don’t understand, using tools we haven’t vetted, in a system that itself is in collapse.
• We’ve allowed the most sensitive stages of human development to become the target of the most sophisticated attention-hacking and intimate data-harvesting machines ever built.
• We are creating a generation who will grow up knowing we knew better—and still failed them. That is a profound moral injury that cuts both ways.

Now, I don’t have kids. I don’t even particularly like kids. But I still love and care for children and young folk the world over. I can’t not.

And so when TED platforms the cofounder and ceo of a synthetic media generation company that develops software used to create AI-generated video content, who then boldly opens with—

‘Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write.’

—I can’t help but cock an incredulous eyebrow.

‘I think we're at the dawn of a new era of AI-enabled communication,’ Victor explains, ‘and I think that future generations will slowly replace text with more intuitive forms of communication, like audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies.’

I’m frowning with consternation now.

How excited am I about private companies rushing to develop artificially intelligent corporate tutors groomed to be maximally convincing to young minds?

Not very.[^ I mean, ‘ChatGPT is pushing people towards mania, psychosis and death—and OpenAI doesn’t know how to stop it’ is the title of an article that came out yesterday. Seems like we might want to slow down a bit, first, right?]

Again, it would be easier for me if I just did what 98% of thought leaders and speakers are doing now. To merge with The Infinite Machine and become an Artificially Intelligent AI evangelist. I’d be making a lot more coin.

But then, it wouldn’t actually be easier. It would be dishonest. And, despite my complaining—yes complaining, ugh—about this for over two years now, I know that my intellectual honesty gets in the way of any effective grift. I harbour a seemingly infinite wellspring of love, sorrow, and care. So annoying.

Which brings me, once more, to the encouragement-intent of this post.

Your myriad subtle significances

You cannot not influence, dear reader.

Your sphere of influence is always-already boundless.

The question is one of expanding your sphere of concern—or, more aptly: dissolving its boundaries—without losing your centre.

There may be an initial panic that such a provocation evokes in you. You may want to turn your face away. But: stay with me, if you can. For just a little longer.

I’m not advocating for you to become a monk or some kind of saint. I am far, far, far from that. But—we’re all of-and-in this mess together, always-already complicit and entangled.

The encouragement I want to leave you with is this: develop your acuity for the subtle and indirect influence you evoke and respond to. Find and feed the leaks.

We are living amidst the metacrisis, in a time betwixt worlds.

There’s an ongoing genocide happening right now, with unspeakable harm being inflicted upon children (directly and indirectly). There is a hollowing of democracy happening right now, with police brutality, state overreach, and much that could be described as fascism. There’s accelerated global heating happening right now, the dire impacts of which are too late to avert.[^ Earlier this week, the academic, scientist, author and environmental activist David Suzuki said ‘it’s too late’—we’ve lost the fight against climate change. This isn’t surprising to me, much as it still fills me with despair. It echoes what many in the field have known for some time. But our response to this is not to simply ‘give up’ and go survivor-mode. Nor do we hoard toilet paper. That will only diminish you. If there’s any preparing to be done, it will need to be in community.] There’s mass extinction happening right now, with whole species losing their home and habitat. There is cruelty, malice, apathy, and worse. Much of this is all indirectly (and sometimes directly) funded by complicit corporations and governments, and aided via the perverse incentives that shape our media landscape. Welcome to The Metacrisis. (ʘᗩʘ')!

But wait—there’s also: kindness, goodness, aliveness, and the potential for better.

Collectively—as individuated withindividuals[^ I am not confident my clunky neologism will go viral.]—we can each choose how we orientate, the way we play, and what we invest our efforts towards.[^ I may be in solipsistic territory again, writing the words I need to hear myself. But I am hopeful this lands resonant for you, too.] You can learn to see how the machinations of M̵̈́͆͂̾͜Ø̷͕͉̀Ł̷̫̝̫̟̜͇̓̈́̀͛Ø̴̧̖̬͇̪̦̟͋͒͆C̸͖̆̂̐͋̈̾̆̍Ħ̴̧̹͈̀̀̇ lead us astray. You can develop your Eye of Value, and allow yourself to be guided by your heart.

Practically, what does this look like?

I... can’t tell you. Only you know.[^ Okay fine, let me allude. Practically, this looks like myriad subtle significances that radiate from everything you choose to do (and not do). It looks like the honesty and kindness you exemplify, in yourself, to yourself, and to all of Life. It looks like the encouragement you offer, large and small, that ripples and extends through the stories that shape the lives we share. It looks like the times you reshare and signal-boost the broadcasts that journalists risk their lives to make, so that the world can see the horrors being committed. It looks like the choice to shop locally and buy directly, wherever you can. It looks like mutual aid. It looks like consistently being a good and decent person—who works to uphold the dignity and sacredness in others and all of Life—whatever version of that is true to you.]

But I will give you a hint. It comes with a move toward authenticity, honesty, relationality, and enlivenment. It comes from recognising our machine-like automaticity[^ The ‘mechanical sleep’ that Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way works to awaken us from.], being present (even amidst discomfort), and coming back to life.[^ Coming Back to Life is also a book by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown.]

‘Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response.’

This was from Dr. Joanna Macy—a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. A true elder. I’ve found Joanna Macy’s work so very apt for These Times. Particularly this deeply touching podcast series.

In an article titled The Greatest Danger, she writes potently of the stance my own museletter was attempting to convey. I had been wrestling with how to conclude this piece for you, and then—via a series of coincidences—found what I was striving to say in words that Joanna Macy had written, decades earlier.

I will share some passages with you here. I know from a friend that Joanna is currently transitioning away from this life; and so this all hums with great poignancy.

‘In our culture, despair is feared and resisted because it represents a loss of control. We’re ashamed of it and dodge it by demanding instant solutions to problems. We seek the quick fix. This cultural habit obscures our perceptions and fosters a dangerous innocence of the real world.

Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigour.’

There’s that word—enliven.

‘When we open our eyes to what is happening, even when it breaks our hearts, we discover our true size; for our heart, when it breaks open, can hold the whole universe. We discover how speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity. That solidarity, with our neighbours and all that lives, is all the more real for the uncertainty we face.’

Solidarity, relationality, honesty, warmth.

Wherefore art thou poetic sensibilities, nay?

I know my museletters are a lot, these days. Part of me is sorry about that, and really wishes I could summon the chipper alacrity of the Dr. Fox of a decade ago, bequeathing sagely advice and such. But a lot has changed since then, in the world and in me. Perhaps with you, too.

And so I’ll continue to oscillate amidst and betwixt it all, as honestly as I can.

But my next challenge is... actually sharing my writing a bit more publicly. I think?

I got burnt when I made my post on Moral Courage 611 days ago, in response to Isræl’s actions against the Palestinian people. I’ve since come to know that this is by design—there are all sorts of mechanisms to shadowban folks who support human rights and international law, and there are many trolls who will sap your time and energy with fake arguments. It had me feeling gaslit, depleted, and wanting to hide away from it all. But thankfully I was able to persist because of the encouragement and inspiration of so many folk around me. Folk much better than I.

This effect, though, is happening as a consequence of the open internet turning into a dark forest, teeming with predators. It has seen so many of us retreat to the cozyweb. But, as Venkatesh Rao writes:

‘The world has retreated too far, and in too self-serious and fearful a manner, into the cozyweb, leaving the public sphere to the most humourlessly self-righteous extremists who are certain they’re on the right side of history, and are acting in ways that don’t take unseriousness seriously enough. People who can only laugh, if at all, at the pain they can inflict on others in their winning moments, and at themselves not at all.

The public sphere has turned into a lemon market, and its inability to laugh at itself, along with its growing taste for laughing at the pain of the powerless, is the clearest sign of its profound bankruptcy.

⁠The result is our present condition — caught up in a joyless historical grand narrative that juxtaposes chaotic new realities none of us has any sort of handle on, with the flimsy totalizing certainties being peddled by unholy alliances of joyless extremists and gormless grifters all taking themselves far too seriously.⁠⁠

⁠⁠And we’ve lost the ability to even maintain a collective public sense of absurdity about it all.’

This may hardly seem the time for humour, given how grim things are.

And yet the last thing we’d want to see is an end to satire, humour, poetry and art. In the past couple of years there have been some heavy handed attempts to silence artists and musicians speaking out against genocide.[^ How’s that going?] This is because true artists—and true poets—are a threat to totalitarian powers.

James P. Carse writes of this in Finite and Infinite Games (emphasis mine).

‘Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war-unless they tell stories that agree with the “general line” established by the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.

The danger of the poets, for Plato, is that they can imitate so well that it is difficult to see what is true and what is merely invented. Since reality cannot be invented, but only discovered through the exercise of reason—according to Plato—all poets must be put into the service of reason. The poets are to surround the citizens of the Republic with such art as will “lead them unawares from childhood to love of, resemblance to, and harmony with, the beauty of reason.” The use of the word “unawares” shows Plato's intention to keep the metaphysical veil intact. Those who are being led to reason cannot be aware of it. They must be led to it without choosing it. Plato asks his poets not to create, but to deceive.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets—that is, creators of all sorts—seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.’

I would love to be more poetic in how I show up. I feel I might have the orientation, and the sensibilities, but not quite the eloquence in my allocutions. Too much “explanation,” I fear.

But I am committed to showing up and writing, as honestly as I can. The default gravitational pull for media these days is short, succinct, and pithy. A stream of sanctimoniously succinct and sage advice, delivered in tiktok soundbites. I can’t do it.

But—even if I don’t always fully agree with—I took some solace in what Venkatesh shared:

‘Contemplating this condition, ⁠⁠I think I get why, this year, even though I feel like my writing is not really up to the task of keeping up with reality and providing any sort of useful or even entertaining signal to you, the reader, it feels important to continue writing. Even at the risk of only adding only confusion, wrongness, and failed attempts at humour to an already confused, wrong, and largely unfunny condition.’

We need more of us to eschew the path to optimised sterility (and the parroting of consensus memetics) and to instead: openly engage with the complexity, sorrow, and mystery of the context we share. And we need more of us to encourage such, when we see it.

Okay I really ought to wrap this up. Thank you for reading.

Soften ye orbs, and always be warmening.

—fw