Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[zbigi]

In approach to the meta crisis, Bill Gates

That's the guy that's making me throw away two perfectly workable computers because it's better for his bottom line (i.e. Microsoft no longer supporting Win 10 after Oct 2025, and not allowing to upgrade to Win 11, rendering the computers useless if one needs Windows). He's more of a cause of the meta crisis.

[7Wannabe5]

He's more of a cause of the meta crisis.

Yes, both are true. The Rational Optimists firmly believe that the only way out is through more innovation. Still, he is facing/stepping up to the meta crisis in the sense that he is not a denier, doubter or dilletante.

[delay]

not allowing to upgrade to Win 11

There are tens of ways to upgrade to Win 11 without TPM or secure boot.

Even older versions of Windows still work fine. A friend uses the 23 year old Windows XP without problems.

[thef0x]

Catching up and goodness this has been fun to read. I also feel like I'm learning a lot. It's great to be the dumb one / noob in the room. Thx for hosting, G+J.

I wonder what everyone thinks about pragmatism as a stand in for "mature post-modernism" as a positive philosophy. One of the cooler things American philosophers have produced, not sure how I feel about it though. I can definitely find myself in that modernist mindset -- damn you physics!

I could see a version of pragmatism x post-modernism where pockets of "true for us" get represented by "and is working for us in a powerful, interacting with the world, kind of way". This seems to describe what's happening, politically, in the USA, to me.

Almost a kind of nicheing-down of 'the' truth, segmenting it to specific communities where their collective ideology (this can be causual/loose/not-culty) finds practical benefit from believing their own version of what is true / real.

Ignoring taking a stance on abortion for example, I can see how specific communities can "be right" about their particular stance on abortion in an operative, this-works-in-the-real-world-(in-my-community) kind of way. Instead of saying "this is right" they are showing "this is useful in the world (and fuck right-ness)".

Perhaps it's easier to grok examples of this where normative rules govern behavior more than say scientific experiment results.

I guess I wonder if this is a small pitstop on the pendulum swing that Jacob described between modernism and postmodernism (on page 39), or if epistemic pragmatism might be its own endgame in terms of the value memes you're describing, J+G.

Also thinking: is this bad? Pockets of truth that work for that pocket of people. Shouldn't we all agree on some basic, objective truths (even moral propositions)?

I'm torn on where we should go post modernism, which is what motivated my original post. Curious what everyone thinks.

Said another way: what do we do with these value-meme discoveries? How do we answer "why" when we give up on objectivity (not that it answered why for us in the first place)?

[zbigi]

There are tens of ways to upgrade to Win 11 without TPM or secure boot.

None of those ways are legal. I paid for a copy of Windows which I'm now required to hack, which means breaking the law. Also, they require using third-party software, which is a security risk.

A friend uses the 23 year old Windows XP without problems.

It works. It also stopped protecting him against being hacked ten years ago. [*] I'm not going to access my net worth from a machine that is likely to have spyware on it.

[*] https://www.tomshardware.com/software/w ... sed-online

[7Wannabe5]

I wonder what everyone thinks about pragmatism as a stand in for "mature post-modernism" as a positive philosophy.

Very intuitive of you. Pragmatism does come back into play at the post-post-modern level AKA Level Yellow. However, just as the Sincerity of Level Yellow is leavened with Irony, the Pragmatism of Level Yellow is leavened with Abstraction/Systems-Perspective/Principles. Permaculture offers a good example of this, because the Principles of Permaculture are universal, but the practice is very pragmatic and localized. If you conceive of Permaculture as just a series of projects you can copy off of YouTube videos, then you are doing it "wrong", because you doing it Early Modern. The same holds true for ERE. It's just more difficult to see this if/when the vast majority of Permaculture projects are based in similar regions in Australia or the vast majority of FIRE-> ERE adherents are affluent-region MBTI rational types.

Pragmatism from its conception was criticized for simply being an apologia for American business practice, and in some other ways it definitely represented an attempt to salvage Traditionalism as Modernity swept in. As in "We have always lived in Classist societies, so it would not be Pragmatic to attempt to alter this." The perspective applied pragmatism at Level Yellow would be more akin to "In order to have any member of society functioning at Level Yellow, all the previous levels of functioning must have been/be included/transcended." Relating this to your comments about current society in the U.S., when I teach in public schools in very rough neighborhoods in my Midwestern "Purple" state, it is highly likely that I will encounter other humans functioning across all developmental levels and within micro-cultures still operating across many levels. For example, you might think that the 13 year old gang member operating at Level Red of Organized Violence is the most basic level of functioning you are likely to encounter until you reflect upon how the typical 13 year old gang leader is usually noticeably brighter/sharper/more-likely-to-be-bringing-home-the-bacon than some of the still Level Purple "Magical thinking" lucky-number-lotto-ticket crowd around him or the kids who are treading trauma in Level Beige survival mode due to random violence and neglect in their households. And you also may admire how the very sincere, always wishing you a "Blessed Day" Level Blue 6th grade teacher and choir director does such a great job of bringing together her class to function as one moral social unit, even some of the kids that were likely to become gang-bangers, but you also notice that some of the kids in her class clearly understand their math assignments better than she does, and you wince just a bit when she informs you that she didn't cover Earth Science with her class, because not in alignment with the creationist teachings of her church. Then you may talk with the other 8th grade Level Orange math/science teacher about your crypto investments and the difficulties in teaching Earth Science 2 to kids who didn't receive instruction in Earth Science 1, while on lunchroom duty along with the mace-carrying Level Red/Blue security officer, and then walk down the hall to the counseling office and chat with your Level Green colleague who has a PhD in Social Work and prefers gender-neutral pronoun about your rather surprisingly successful attempts to integrate Emotional Awareness through the Play of Drama with your homeroom group. Finally, you might meet with your approaching Level Yellow Permaculture Partner after school to discuss plans for integrating school-based permaculture project with science teaching objectives, job training, and providing organic produce for school lunch program within the scope of larger city-wide urban farming collective.

My point here being that a good deal of the pragmatism of Tier2/Level Yellow is based on accepting the level of functioning needed in various contexts, but this is leavened by the belief that there is a direction which is UP the spiral. I don't have a firm grip on Level Turquoise: Holistic, but it could maybe be imagined as a meeting of the hearts and minds of individuals such as the great permaculturist Toby Hemenway who had gained the perspective on how many different regional permaculture projects might naturally integrate with each other under core principles towards seeing the whole planet as a system operating under these principles.

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks for the discussion everyone!

I'm enjoying the vMeme discussion a lot. For the purpose of this writing, which is what's rattling around my mind, I am using the Hanzi Freinacht vMeme model put forth in "Listening Society" and "Nordic Ideology." It may be that I'm interpreting this wrong as well.

I don't need a strong agreement about exactly what the post-modern vMeme is or how useful it is for where I'm going. I am very much enjoying the discussion though and the SD descriptions are a helpful addition to my own*.

* I hope I've been clear about this, but please continue all intriguing lines of conversation, tangents and "derailments" around my posts and comments.



For this series of posts I am interested in talking about Modernism and its failures. One thing I'm interested in exploring is the phenomenon of existential ennui that tends to strike people at WL6. I also have a theory for why people are so addicted to consumerism and why it's so difficult to get people to quit (and even why I at times struggle to totally quit as well).

I'll save the rest for my actual posts, but one idea I have that I think is relevant to this conversation is that I believe modernism tops out for ERE at WL5 or perhaps said better, if you achieve WL5 mastery, you have topped out modernism and will need to start finding answers outside of the modernist paradigm. And part of the difficulty is that, in most of the world EREers inhabit, modernism is the dominant social paradigm.

[Jin+Guice]

Modernism and Actualization

As I thought about actualization, a question that I kept coming back to is "why does actualization appear to be achieved by so few?"

I think the modernist value meme makes actualization difficult. The trap of modernism is ignorance and devaluation of the subjective social and emotional spheres, focusing instead on observable reality. This was necessary in early modernism, when objective truth was believed to be determined by large-scale monotheistic religious institutions. In order to develop our understanding of objective truth it had to be differentiated from the social realm of understanding controlled by large social institutions.

A problem faced by modernist societies is conflating subjective human well-being and the meeting of subjective human needs with objective proxies, such as technological or economic progress (mo' money = mo' happiness). This creates an issue where we devalue social and emotional well-being, failing to differentiate subjective from objective well-being.

I think this is why we culturally focus heavily on economic indicators and technological progress aimed at making human life longer, easier and/ or more comfortable (expending less human effort to accomplish the same thing).

I think actualization is difficult because it requires individuals to value both objective and subjective well-being. This is difficult in a modernist society obsessed with external objective measures and convinced that they are the same as the key to subjective well-being.

This is why I think so few are able to actualize. I believe that actualizers learn to differentiate subjective well-being from objective well-being, after their physiological needs are safely and reliably met (this does not require that actualizers consciously realize they are doing this, which is why it sort of just happens for a few people).

[Lemur]

That is an interesting thought Jin+Guice (the speculation on why so few are able to actualize).

I think why so few actualize might actually even be simpler than this though. For one, I think a lot of people grow up in an environment that doesn't cut it for love and belonging and actualization is simply not a priority anytime soon when a person is dealt those cards. These people are sometimes forever chasing these needs unconsciously.

But even when those needs are met, either from childhood for those who were dealt a good hand or perhaps in young adulthood when someone eventually finds their own tribe (or simply learns to love themselves), do you think there is some correlation or overlap between Maslow's hierarchy of needs (the level at self-esteem right before actualization) and Susanne Cook-Greuter's last conventional stage (stage 4 conscientiousness)?

I speculate that since the majority of humans are social conformists by nature, that the majority of us have an ego that sort of maxes out at competition /achievement mindsets which is pretty much perfect for modernism, competing in the economy, and Western culture/values in general...and thus the social conformity reinforces this collective behavior.

Breaking out to the next stages in ego development, and self-actualizing, both require that one is also willing to stand out, be different, and go against the grain. Also requires a self-awareness. As you've alluded to previously, it also requires someone to accurately differentiate between needs and wants. The early FIRE movement was pretty good at analysis between needs/wants, and there was an undercurrent of self-actualization promotion, but now its become a movement that sort of sucked itself back into maxing out stage 4. It is probably the reason why Vicki Robin can't really relate to it anymore https://vickirobin.com/my-life-with-fire/ .

[Jin+Guice]

@Lemur:

I think we may be saying the same thing? I agree that many don't grow up in an environment where esteem or belonging needs are likely to be met. I agree that even if they find their tribe they are still unlikely to actualize.

I think that, given the current environment, reaching Cook-Greuter stage 4 is likely pre-requisite for actualization. The question I am asking is why?

And the answer is already given. The present environment does not contain the conditions for most people to actualize. What determines the present environment? Well, right now our environment is largely artificially constructed and so I propose the "social value meme" sets the condition for our environment.

And when I examine the values of modernism vs. Maslow's Hierarchy, I see a disparity develop exactly at esteem/ love and belonging needs. I think a conformist will mute these needs in themselves since they are no the norms of modernist society and it therefore takes someone who is at least Cook-Greuter 4 to recognize this disparity in themselves and move towards actualization.

[jacob]

The early FIRE movement was pretty good at analysis between needs/wants, and there was an undercurrent of self-actualization promotion, but now its become a movement that sort of sucked itself back into maxing out stage 4. It is probably the reason why Vicki Robin can't really relate to it anymore https://vickirobin.com/my-life-with-fire/ .

From my interactions with her, the inability to relate has more to do with the FIRE movement's lack of interest in social or policy causes such as what she lists towards the end of her post. The original motivation behind YMOYL was to become FI in order free up time to make the world a better place. Instead, the FIRE movement, especially since its popularization and resulting turn towards fatFIRE has increasingly focused on luxury spending. Even MMM's latest budget post demonstrates this turn.

[Jean]

@GnJ

https://radioparadise.com/episode/vivian-dittmar

This might interest you. Mainly, her books might interest you. Some of them have been translated to english. I think the podcast is a good introduction to Vivan Dittmar, even if it doesn't go extremely deep into the subject she treats in her books. I find it very ere complementary.

[Lemur]

@GnJ

Yep, we're on the same page. I think self-actualizing is actually a driving force for most people sans severe mental impairments and the like. But this driving force sits in the unconscious and a person does not become self-aware of its existence until the prior needs are mostly* met.

* I think individual temperament can allow some flexibility here. For example, some individuals might still primarily self-actualize despite being physically injured or not being loved by their family or what have you.

This world will certainly be a better place if millions of humans can be freed up to pursue just that. And that might be a requirement as well...we need more actualizers in general to show different paths. People who are freed up to make the world a better place with whatever knowledge, skills, and abilities they can bring. There are a lot of big problems out there to tackle! Pick your own adventure. FIRE/ERE has certainly helped with that I think. More stage 5s will eventually lead to more stage 1s-4s to be brought up and the tackling of big world problems by stage 5s will level them up as well...kind of like instead of PPP per capita rising we get rising social values.

Of course we humans are messy and rising population + resource constraints at large does not bode well for the long run of this. I hesitated to toss in that pessimism. I consider myself lucky to be self-aware of these topics to begin with.

@Jacob

I get a taste of self-actualization when I'm focused on physical health (nutrition, exercising, and the like) because I find the topic innately interesting and there isn't an external money, status, power for why I'm focused on that. On the flip side, I am still recovering from lumbar spine issues so...this self-actualization has to some degree turned into a physiological needs obstacle instead. The former is psychologically far better for my subjective well-being..

But my fitness metrics do not help the world at large. Not that all self-actualizing requires one to help solve the world’s problems but I've had this background idea in my head about a call to action* for some years now that Vicki has alluded to in that above article as well. Should I find that, that will give me something to do when I finally shed this 9-5.

I think most people also don't need to do something big to accomplish this either. The lady that walks around my neighborhood every morning on a mission to pick up every piece of trash she can find is certainly on to something. Part of our daily behaviors and personal systems can make the world a better place without bearing the responsibility of the world.

* Sometimes I think this topic indirectly makes a great case for something like a Universal Basic Income (set up everyone’s base economic needs would more than likely free them up to self-actualize would it not?) and perhaps I could write a book or blog heavily on that idea. And spend some times exploring the full ins and out of a policy like that. But always have to caution that because for me, if I was to write a book or blog my ideas about tackling world problems, especially abstractly, there would be an innate fear that my ideas would be misinterpreted by others. Or implemented to cause more issues. I would have to tread lightly. Perhaps the fun in something like that could be that I end up finding out this policy wasn't a great idea afterall.

[Jin+Guice]

@Jean: thanks for the rec, I'll check it out.

@Lemur:

What I think is that the world is not set up in a way that leads most to actualization. This is why I think Cook-Greuter level 4s are much more likely to actualize, because one needs to get off of the beaten path in order to actualize. Under the current social value meme (which sets social norms) people are unlikely to actualize if they follow the rules. Thus, people are more likely to actualize if they break out and self-author their own values.

Since social norms don't encourage us to meet our actual needs, we need to be able to challenge norms in order to both realize and meet those needs. Often it's the realizing that is hard part.

In a society that more fully encouraged and catered to all of our needs, more would actualize without becoming Cook-Greuter level 4, as following the rules of society would cause people (or at least encourage people) to actualize.

I don't think the issue is economic resources. I think that's a myth of the current value meme. From a needs perspective, UBI already exists in the rich world, as it is very hard for functional adults to lack access to the resources to stay biologically alive*.

*I'm not saying I am against UBI, or redistribution of resources or that economic wealth is not correlated with higher levels of needs being met. I am saying that physiological needs are materially covered for all adults in first world countries.


From the perspective of esteem, social, emotional, cognitive and aesthetic needs, we are poor indeed. These are things that rich people have more access to (some more than others and the financially rich generally still remain impoverished) and things that are very difficult to buy.

[thef0x]

Not to bog you down with another book but I think you might enjoy Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals".

People abstract some very wild moral imperatives from this text that are mostly a reflection of their own, potentially psychopathic wants and desires (hello Nazi propaganda), but IMO the book does not state anything about what one's moral content ought to be; rather it describes how morality has been given to us and what we ought to do about it.

A few youtube videos or a long back and forth with an AI will get you 90% of the way there; unlike Nietzsche's other aphoristic work, this one is pretty straightforward in its message and stands on its own.

Fucked me up in a good way. You might dig it.

Really enjoying your ongoing series, has me thinking. Cheers

[Jin+Guice]

Modernism and Physiological Needs

As we move from one effective value meme to another, we increase human complexity and organization.

From a needs perspective we can judge value memes based on how well they fulfill our needs. At the bottom of the hierarchy we have physiological needs and physiological safety. The current stage of modernism is extremely good at fulfilling physiological needs.

At the beginning of modernity, it was not obvious that this would happen. Jobs in early modernity did not always pay enough to adequately cover physiological needs and were often physically dangerous. Modernity strips people of both agricultural knowledge (while previous value memes had stripped them of H/G knowledge), making them wholly dependent on the money economy.

However, the physiological dream of modernism has been realized for over a century in rich countries.

Being able to fulfill our physiological needs so easily is amazing. Seriously take a fucking second to crack some champagne (abundantly available thanks to modernism) and celebrate, because we fucking did it. The modernist dream we all wake up and strive for everyday is more or less our birthright. Don't feel guilty that you didn't notice, it happened before you were born.

The highlights of modernism aren't iphones and cars. The highlights are abundant food and physical safety. So much food that we are literally throwing it out and so much safety that we are willing to pay for entertainment that scares us.

When people defend modern institutions and the abundance of our current world, this is what they are usually defending. The downsides to this are that (1) we are somewhat locked into this level of production as the population has expanded beyond what other value memes can provide for and (2) we are somewhat locked into this level of technology as most did not learn ways of doing things for themselves and are thus dependent on the technologically leveraged modern financial economy.

In spite of these shortcomings, I still claim that the modern world is miraculous. I think that this level of physiological safety and basic resources is modernity's greatest victory.

[Ego]

The highlights of modernism aren't iphones and cars. The highlights are abundant food and physical safety. So much food that we are literally throwing it out and so much safety that we are willing to pay for entertainment that scares us.

Well said. I believe Maslow made a point that a need does not have to be fully satisfied for a new need to emerge and most of us are working on various levels simultaneously. Which begs the question, Is it possible for a need to be so fully satisfied that the over-satisfaction inhibits something important, something necessary to cope with higher level challenges? Low level threats produce heightened awareness. Is that heightened awareness necessary to strive higher? Did modernism so thoroughly satisfy base levels for some people so much so that they never learned to calibrate responses to lower level threats. Is the ability to produce an appropriate, calibrated response a necessary skill for higher levels?

In other words, can a world that fully outsourced the satisfaction of physiological and safety needs produce human beings with the skills necessary to reach higher levels?

[jacob]

In other words, can a world that fully outsourced the satisfaction of physiological and safety needs produce human beings with the skills necessary to reach higher levels?

The closest experiment would be the Scandinavian welfare states, where people effectively no longer have to worry about these things. The murder rate is very low, health care is completely outsourced/covered, and becoming homeless only happens if the rent money available from the state for the asking is used on drugs instead. In terms of measures for "higher expression" like e.g. patents/person, scientific papers published, innovation, quality of life, self-reported happiness, vacations taken, lifestyles changed, etc. these areas rank the highest in the world.

To prove your thesis, we'd have to look for the reverse though. Are there places where people struggle more in terms of health and safety that rank higher on those indices. Not really.

Of course, this is doing sociology so the strongest argument here would be a scatter plot with a trend line and many individual exceptions.

Otherwise, humans gotta human so if they don't have to focus on health and safety, they'll focus on other things such as love, belonging, or patents. The key to Maslow is not that satisfying health+safety generates higher forms of actualization. Rather, it's the other way around. Those are the foundation. IOW, take away people's paycheck and stability or health insurance and they'll start worrying about those instead of being good at their job or any higher mission or purpose they might imagine themselves pursuing.

[Jean]

It could also be that scandinavian societies can afford to have welfare state, because they are the most innovative and good at their jobs, and the less murder prone.

[Ego]

The closest experiment would be the Scandinavian welfare states, where people effectively no longer have to worry about these things. The murder rate is very low, health care is completely outsourced/covered, and becoming homeless only happens if the rent money available from the state for the asking is used on drugs instead.

Indeed, the homogenous Scandinavians are good examples of the WEIRD bias. The WEIRD world has shown an insatiable appetite for psychotropic meds. A need for psychotropics is a pretty good indication that someone is unable to accurately calibrate their psychological response to the real world. We WEIRDos have also been far more sheltered from real hardship than our non-WEIRD countrymen, who experience far higher actual risks, yet use psychotropics at much lower rates. Second generation immigrants become indistinguishable from WEIRDos. A natural experiment?

Places in the developing world with much greater actual risks usually have much lower rates of psychotropic use, despite the fact that generics are available, often OTC, very inexpensively.