Why Am I Imperceptible? (Re: Terrance)
Answering paid subscriber questions.
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There are people who have genetic or material factors that make them functionally illiterate, but I'm not referring to that. None of the jargon or concepts or arguments I make are beyond a college level. I talk about things that most people find boring or irrelevant. They may be “capable of understanding” in some vague, hypothetical, theoretical sense, but their lack of interest creates a barrier.
The question at hand is this: what is important? What makes something interesting or compelling? I refer to these distinctions of importance, focus, and relevance in my discussion of "class."
The merchant class cares about "what," the results, the material conditions of life (my wife, my car, my house). The warrior class cares about "how," how does it feel to walk down the street, how safe do I feel, how respected am I, how can we accomplish this, how far can we take this. The warrior class is concerned with the limits and extents of methods and processes -- both in engineering, athletics, and business. They are attempting to optimize systems, not just because of the result, but because the process is beautiful in itself -- they are dancers (martial artists). The priest class cares about the “why” — why do we do things this way? What is our intent? What is our will, or the desire of our hearts?
The Priestly Motive
The entire question of “what is relevant?” is a priestly question in itself. For merchants and warriors, “relevance” is an obvious and intuitive matter. Sex, glory, battle, money, beauty, power, and fame need no explanation. They are good in themselves. This isn’t good enough for the priest, because the priest wants to investigate, “what is good? Why is it good? What makes it good?”
That said, there are two approaches to these questions: dogmatic and philosophical. The dogmatic approach is older and more common. Why should this be the case? If priests are the ones who ask “why,” then why should they tend toward dogma rather than philosophy?
The “why” question is a question of purpose and intent, of will. “Why” seeks to discover the causal origin — chronologically, it necessarily must peer into the past. Priests were concerned originally with the following matters:
The course of the stars. What path do they take as they travel through the sky? How did they originate?
The nature of the seasons. What accounts for seasonal rain, flooding, heat and cold?
The origin of species. How did mankind come to be? How did animals come to be?
The origin of morality. Where does morality come from? Was there a time or place before or outside of morality?
The origin of suffering. Why is life painful? What is its purpose?
The origin of dynasties and rulers. Why do some rule over others? Where do rulers come from?
Prophets and Dogmatists
Early mythologies, invented by priests, all attempted to provide answers to these questions. Within this process, called mythogenesis, there are two components. Firstly, there is the generative process, and secondly, there is the transmission process. The generative process creates new myths or modifies or changes old myths, often through “retroactive continuity.” Retroactive continuity is still used today in “prequels,” where, if a story is popular enough, the author can create a “backstory” for the events of the story, an origin story.
The transmission process maintains, transmits, communicates, represents, or ritualizes the myth. Without a transition process, mythogenesis is like a seed without soil. Mythogenic transmission allows for a myth to take root, spread, evolve, adapt, and syncretize with competing mythic systems.
The two processes of generation and transmission are initiated by different subdivisions of the priest class. The generative subdivision is “prophetic,” while the transmitting subdivision is “dogmatic.” The ratio of prophets to dogmatists is like the ratio between chefs and waiters. Too many cooks spoil the soup.
A culture of schizophrenics, each one with their own prophetic vision, has no mythological unity. The utility of the priest class, in providing an understanding of the world, is to provide the basis and template for centralized authority via ideology. To understand why this is powerful, a simple understanding of game theory is necessary.
The Matrix of Authority
Consider a tribe of nomadic individuals who are tracking a herd of aurochs, mammoths, or bison. A storm comes in the night which disorients the tribe and causes them to lose track of the herd. In the best case scenario, the tribe would have certain empirical evidence to determine which direction to go. However, in the case that the tribe has uncertain information, there must be some determining authority. Without a determining authority, the tribe will be paralyzed with indecision and die, or else split up in different directions and die. If the tribe chooses the wrong direction it may also die, but assuming that one of the four cardinal directions is correct, it has a 25% chance of survival if it makes a random but united decision, a 0% chance of survival it makes no decision, and a non-zero but less than 25% chance of survival if it splits up.
These “games” can be played with hunting a herd, going to war, or finding an oasis in the desert. A stupid decision, made arbitrarily and randomly, but which produces a united effort, has a better chance of working than decision paralysis or disintegration of the group. This is one of the reasons why CEOs are tall. Height does not necessarily make better decisions,1 but having a CEO who is tall helps reduce decision paralysis and disintegration. A confident leader who makes imperfect decisions is better than a weak leader with perfect knowledge.
In this sense, priests have a functional role in creating a matrix of authority. This matrix may not have any immediate practical application in its substance (what is the relevance of the origin of the universe to the migration patterns of cows?) but the purpose of the matrix is not to be relevant to each individual decision (as there are cases where relevant information is impossible to obtain), but rather it is to achieve universal, general, unquestioned authority.
This dynamic in humans is identical to the herd, hive, flock or school dynamic in animals. There is safety in numbers. The importance of religion becomes relevant because of the scale of human societies. Apes have an intuitive social determination process. They form tribes and stick together.
But each tribe has a Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number is the number of individuals that a human can conceptualize as “real,” with a name, face, and a personality. Beyond this, people are mere strangers in a crowd. In order to scale human tribes beyond Dunbar’s number, it is necessary to introduce non-intuitive means of social arrangement.
Birds travel in a V formation due to a very simple set of local rules. Each bird does not calculate in its mind the entire V formation and assemble itself as one node in that grand formation. Instead, it focuses on its immediate neighbors and positions itself simply with respect to those local nodes. The same principle of “local rules forming complex structures” applies broadly to any mathematical model of cellular automata (cellular being synonymous with node, and automata meaning acting locally).
Mythology inverts this process. Mythology creates an inductive matrix where a highly specific, ritualized, dogmatized scheme is used to create a narrative, theatrical production, or story which then empowers the wielders of the story. People don’t love or hate Trump because they know him intuitively, personally, or locally, but because they believe in a story in which he is a major character. When scale puts stress on Dunbar’s intuitive faculties to the point where they no longer function as a decision making matrix, then mythology becomes necessary to arbitrate authority.
Of course, from the philosophical point of view, none of this helps discover the truth. The term “matrix” is not used accidentally, but for its multiple meanings:
As a mold into which any “substance” can be cast. “What direction should we go?” is the substantive question, which is then poured into the “matrix” of a priest class, who produce an arbitrary answer out of the mold of mythology.
A womb, or mother — indicating a parental force which is capable of guiding, leading, protecting, moralizing, and punishing
A womb, in the sense of an “origin point.
As an illusion or myth, a cast of archetypes that forces people to conform to pre-determined roles.
A mathematical array or Punnett square, categorizing everything into binaries. “If the sign appears, then we go west.” Reducing or collapsing a spectrum of possibilities into a single certain outcome.
A binding agent, as in religion.
Dogmatism becomes harmful when it directly contradicts the possibility of using empirical evidence. For example, if there are animal tracks heading north, but the priest determines the tribe should head south because the sacred tea leaves told him so, this level of “superstition” harms the tribe.
The Birth of Philosophy
Philosophy is born when dogmatism becomes bifurcated into “atheism” and “fanaticism.” Atheism is the point at which dogmatism is not longer useful because it is no longer believed, and has no power of unification. Fanaticism is the cancerous growth of dogma beyond its domain. Dogma is useful when the outcome of a decision cannot be known by empirical means. In this case, some of kind of irrational decision must be taken, and the stronger the “faith” of the tribe, the more likely this “hail Mary” will be successful. On the other hand, fanaticism represents the overreach of dogma into areas where it is unnecessary because rational determination is possible.
These two failures of dogma create an incentive for the birth of philosophy, which is a rational means of going back to the drawing board to re-ask the question, “why?” Plato went as far as to question the myths of the Gods and monogamy. Socrates was called an atheist, not a fanatic. At the same time that Plato and Socrates were engaged in atheism of one kind, Judaism was emerging during the Second Temple Period as a fanatical hyper-dogmatic cult. This extreme dedication to minor and pedantic laws eventually led to a backlash with the rise of the Jewish Philhellene, including both Herod the Great and Jesus of Nazareth. Paul of Tarsus personifies the backlash to the fanaticism of Jewish dogma in his conversion and later invective against the “Judaizers.”2
Mythology and Science
The process of mythogenesis and dogma is a “truth independent” strategy for group survival when the scale of the collective stretches beyond “Dunbar’s intuition.” However, there is an parallel argument to be made, which neither adds to or take away from this “truth independence.” This parallel argument concerns the substantive, scientific truth often embedded in myth and dogma.
Regarding the study of the stars, astrology can be described as an arbitrary pseudoscience, insofar as it attempts to predict specific events. However, the study of stars is crucial for both navigation and chronometry.
An understanding of seasonal weather patterns, as represented by the astrological calendar, would have been highly useful for directing agricultural activity.
Defenders of the Kosher diet indicate that pigs contain parasites, and avoiding pork may have conferred a dietary advantage. There are many other examples of dogmatic, shamanic, or superstitious medical practices, involving various herbs, psychedelics, or blood letting, which were once thought of as arbitrary and have now been empirically validated as having healing properties.
The attempt in science to de-mythologize mythology is itself priestly in that it asks, “why did ancient cults engage in these practices?” Like Nietzsche, they are seeking a “genealogy of morals,” and genealogy is the prime concern of a priest class. History is a priestly endeavor.
In short, I am boring because most people are not concerned with priestly endeavors. Most people are not asking “why?” Most people are concerned with earning money, status, sex, power, or friends. Most people “just want a decent life.” The priestly motive, as Nietzsche describes it, is still driven at its root by a “will to power.” But it is highly refined and obscured. This “refinement” is different from “intelligence.”
Building a ship out of toothpicks does not require intelligence, but it is a certain expression of a will to power. There is no “why” asking here, only “how?” How long? How much? How far and to what extent can I go to build the largest ship out of toothpicks? This question may seem silly, but it is a crucial question to ask in all matters of engineering. Mountains of computer code run every single modern industrial process, including auto manufacturing, clothing, agriculture, construction, finance, the stock market, social media, computer generated special effects, cellphones, logistics, shipping, air traffic control, autopilot in airplanes, live streaming, and so much more. All of these are answers to the question “how?”
I may find building a ship out of toothpicks to be boring, but someone else finds it interesting. I cannot possibly, for the life of me, justify building a ship out of toothpicks, but for one man this is his life’s passion. My life’s passion is asking “why?”, especially in the realm of politics and philosophy. My answers, whether right or wrong, are simply incomprehensible to most people, because they cannot even fathom why anyone would spend thousands of hours on such “irrelevant” matters. But like the toothpick ship builder, I need no mercantile payout or external motivation. It comes from within my blood, my DNA, or my soul. I was born this way.
Like the beaver making a dam in his house, there are times when my “why” asking veers off the deep end into true nonsense. I lose the plot and the question of relevance vanishes into a dark horizon. I am compelled by an ancient force with a genealogy of its own. Like the beaver who once built dams to survive, I also ask “why” as a matter of life and death.
I have some self awareness of my own irrelevance, and I attempt to “square the circle” by asking questions which I think could have a meaningful impact on the world. But ultimately, there is some Platonic sense that this world and its “results” are but mere shadows of something higher and ineffable.
I am not intentionally incomprehensible. I do not attempt to speak in jargon, coded or technical language. But the questions that I ask and answers I provide are outside the scope of most people’s perception. They are "incapable of understanding the implications" not because their brains are too small or incapable of abstract thinking, but because they “don’t see the point.” Where this ability to “see the point” comes from, what exactly it stems from is not entirely clear.
A counter-argument is that men who are tall — above 6’0” — and who are not anorexic, crippled, or lame show genetic health. Compare this to a building: if you build a backyard shed with poor materials and bad measurements, it might remain standing, because the weight and height of the structure are not great enough to put significant stress on the system. However, a skyscraper requires the most optimal materials and engineering perfection to remain standing. Similar, to be athletic at 6’1” or beyond requires a low level of mutational load. The skeleton must avoid scoliosis, the muscles must be strong to avoid injury, the tendons remain tight, the posture straight and erect. All of these systems come under greater stress as height increases. An individual who is average height and healthy may have perfect genetic integrity, but an individual who is tall and healthy shows a stronger signal, marker, indicator of the probability of high genetic integrity. If women are hypergamous, and the fittest women seek the tallest men, then height (with good posture) will over time become correlates with other selectively valued traits, such as intelligence, low-neuroticism, high testosterone, and so on.
Galatians 2:14.