Narrative Warfare
We midwife reality into being
METAMODERN MEANING CRISIS
What does it mean to be human? What is reality? Who is in control? Does God exist? and so on.
Is the Narrative Mythic closer to reality? Or a way of seeing the world and explaining experience?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ten-key-principles-in-met_b_7143202
Articulating Processing Stories
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW AND INHABIT A PERSPECTIVE, AND WHAT IS THAT KNOWING LIKE? SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS. PARTICIPATORY KNOWLEDGE.
Part one and part two of this essay were originally published as “Platonism of the Future” in S.Ph.: Essays and Explorations.
"What is most needed in our present crisis is a philosophy that can move through the impasse between modernism and postmodernism. This philosophy must be able to assimilate, if it hasn’t already anticipated, what is best in each...
It must do more than describe reality in terms without value, as if the world were nothing but meaningless collisions between lifeless matter...This philosophy must, in other words, present a world suffused with value. Finally, if we are to know anything about this world, our new philosophy must allow knowledge of it to be possible...it must close the gap between knower and known."
Modernism and Postmodernism are at an impasse. This was the conclusion of the first part of this essay. Without its argument, though, you are unlikely to agree. Most people aware of this debate—whether in the hallways of academia, the online magazines, or the corridors of power—are partisans of one side or the other. For them, there is no impasse, only a conflict between the reasonable and the foolish, the duped and the woke. Most readers of this site favor modernism, and there are many reasons to do so. The first part of this essay catalogued the main ones, especially universal rights and empirical science. But it also presented some scientific reasoning about reason, showing the limits of the modernist approach, including science itself.
“The Impasse” began with Michael Aaron’s division of our culture wars into three camps: postmodernists, modernists, and traditionalists. After quickly knocking down a straw-man of traditionalism, Aaron reproduced the critiques of postmodern political excesses that are familiar to every reader of this site. Modernism was the winner by default. What he failed to consider, and in this failure he is not alone, are two points that need to be absorbed by champions of universal rights and empirical science. First, while postmodernism fails as a positive politics, it is still powerful as a critique of the blindspots of modernism. That was part of the argument of “The Impasse.” And second, that there is more wisdom in “premodernism,” especially the philosophies of Greek antiquity, than is dreamt of in most accounts of our present crisis. This is the argument of the essay’s second part.
What is most needed in our present crisis is a philosophy that can move through the impasse between modernism and postmodernism. This philosophy must be able to assimilate, if it hasn’t already anticipated, what is best in each. It must preserve the universal rights and empirical science promoted by modernism, but it must do so in a way that respects postmodernism’s sober recognition that both can be co-opted by the powerful, corrupted to serve their unjust domination. “The Impasse” considered whether empirical science itself could be this philosophy and argued that it could not. If science can be corrupted by the powerful, after all, science itself cannot be the remedy—not without arguing in a circle. Something else is needed to break that circle.
This something else, this new philosophy, must be able to surpass the limits of science drawn in “The Impasse,” limits which were simply redrawn on the lines charted by skeptical philosophers since antiquity. It must do more than describe reality in terms without value, as if the world were nothing but meaningless collisions between lifeless matter; otherwise it cannot help us in this or any other crisis. For however accurately such a philosophy describes a valueless world, it will never be able to prescribe what we should do within it. This philosophy must, in other words, present a world suffused with value. Finally, if we are to know anything about this world, our new philosophy must allow knowledge of it to be possible. In the terms presented in “The Impasse,” it must close the gap between knower and known, a gap that afflicts every method which relies ultimately on the senses.
https://quillette.com/2017/12/07/premodernism-of-the-future/?fbclid=IwAR3SG4LfHUXVZwefB928D0razdh7P-jvV7ItRerncvNQCnGYNU-lJTtwkWM
Camille Paglia: "As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil...A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.
...post-structuralism was abjectly reactionary, resisting and reversing the true revolution of the 1960s American counterculture, which liberated the senses and reconnected the body and personal identity to nature, in the Romantic manner. It is very telling that Foucault’s principal inspiration, by his own admission, was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which I loathed as a college student for its postwar passivity and nihilism."
Wesley Yang is one of America's best journalists.
"None of the demographic categories presumed to be aligned with [political correctness], or to fall within its protective embrace, actually support it...
PC’s opponents are a portrait of rainbow-coalition America itself—people of all ages and all colors protective of their liberties, who sense instinctively who is really at the core of the politically correct movement and oppose the ideas and motives that animate it."
"Political correctness doesn’t just threaten us with a democratic crisis and collapse by feeding a cycle of political reaction. It is not just bad for what it summons up in opposition to itself. It is bad for what it does, which is to threaten the core values of those for whom truth seeking is the lifeblood of their calling. In place of such activities, it actively empowers a cohort of bureaucratic mediocrities and opportunists who launder their personal pathology and power seeking as the height of political and social virtue. No one is as endangered by political correctness as the comedian, the artist, the scientist, and the philosopher—all those to whom we turn for correction. These are the figures who have silently permitted the opportunistic mediocrities in their midst to enforce a false consensus that no thinker or writer or performer of any integrity endorses. So long as we allow ourselves to be ruled by a toxic power-seeking minority in this undemocratic fashion, our subjugation is a choice."
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/272486/political-correctness-minority?fbclid=IwAR2FNX_9JS5ZItjZFFH_gaww9z6iYw04DobYqZYwv1ZoDJ4CMpBZrpuTZmw
There is a tendency tendency for acquired knowledge to be used for ego identity protection:“The more highly educated also tend to be more strongly identified along political lines.” And the depth of their education plays a role:
"Political knowledge tends to increase the effects of identity as more knowledgeable people have more informational ammunition to counter argue any stories they don’t like."
...
More Education Means More Polarization
A study has found that the more educated people are, the more regard they have for other people who share their political leanings. The more fervent their liberal or conservative beliefs, the more pronounced their respect for similar people (and disrespect for dissimilar people) as education levels increase...
Mason, in a paper released last month, “Ideologues Without Issues: The Polarizing Consequences of Ideological Identities,” puts this point succinctly: “Identity does not require values and policy attitudes,” she writes. Instead, it simply requires “a sense of inclusion and a sense of exclusion.”
Identification as a liberal and conservative, Mason argues, confers
"a sense of group identity that is not neatly connected to any set of issue positions, but nonetheless motivates political judgment. These effects of identity-based ideology on political evaluations are psychological and emotional, and help explain how “liberals” and “conservatives” may dislike each other for reasons unconnected to their opinions."
...
In contrast to issue and principle-based ideology, Mason calls this “identity-based ideology.” As a result,"liberals and conservatives are distancing themselves from one another on behalf of their identity-related feelings about who is “in” and who is “out.”
Matthew D. Luttig, a political scientist at Colgate, made the case in his 2016 dissertation, “The Rise of Partisan Rigidity,” that, "elite polarization has strengthened the relationship between a basic psychological motivation for group membership — the need for certainty — and partisan strength, in-party favoritism, out-party derogation, and conformity to group leaders. Because the need for certainty is a form of motivated closed-mindedness, I argue that the American electorate today is increasingly composed of rigid partisans: partisans who are uncritically extremist, biased, and intolerant."
‘The Story in Our Bones’
https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/a-story-to-bind-us-the-intellectual-deep-web-and-a-new-grand-narrative-9b32e36857c3
SELF-AUTHORING
"But he who is not true himself will not see the Truth" -Paracelsus
"The individual level, as Jung, Emerson, Rumi and countless other thinkers in dialogue with both nature and the ephemeral soul understood, is the place to focus your attention. Until individuals are honest, the sum total of those individuals will be a mess of self-deception."
In My Dinner With Andre, while discussing the development of a “reconstructive” philosophy inside a postmodern culture rife with cynicism, Andre Gregory—perhaps presaging the “New Sincerity” of the late 1990s and thereafter—says,
“[Some] feel that there’s really almost no hope, and that we’re probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period. Others see it a little differently. They’re feeling that there will be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world, and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the world, grow colder, we can take invisible ‘space journeys’ to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back. And it’s their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. And actually, these ‘centers’ are growing up everywhere now. And what they’re trying to do—I mean, these things can’t be given names—but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery. And [a friend] talks about the concept of ‘reserves’—islands of safety where...the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the the species through a dark age. In other words, we’re talking about an ‘underground.’ And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to ‘preserve the light’—life; the culture—how to keep things living. What we need is a new language, a language of the heart, some kind of language between people that’s a new kind of poetry. In order to create that language, you’re going to have to learn how you can go ‘through a looking glass’ into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything.”
the fact that we live in a “post-truth” culture gives us an opportunity to instrumentalize that very culture in the service of—you guessed it—Truth. (Metamodernism is, in fact, a “post-post-truth” phenomenon for exactly this reason: it takes the wreckage of meaning and goodwill and hope and refashions it into a new “meta-narrative”—a narrative about how we make narratives—that is fundamentally optimistic. For this reason, metamodernists often celebrate so-called “informed naivete,” this being a willful decision to act as though the facts on the ground aren’t the facts on the ground. Informed naivete helps us come up with shockingly fresh ideas. In such instances it’s not that one forgets reality, it’s rather that, informed by reality, one makes a quite conscious decision to temporarily sidestep or even ignore it in service of one’s own mental health and/or the greater good.)
POIESIS AFTER POST-MODERNISM
We know ourselves through stories,
and we know each other through the stories we share. But for all the beauty of stories, we are drowning in them. This is, after all, the promise of postmodernism; the grand narratives that bound us together have been stripped away and instead the world is fragmented into an infinity of individual perspectives, weaving into a tapestry so thick we can no longer see through it. Wherever we look now, either online or at our institutions and ideologies, we find no single story strong enough to bind us together.
Against this backdrop, at Rebel Wisdom we have been trying to find the voices who are making sense of this chaos and finding the threads that might lead us beyond it. Many of our guests have talked about the crisis of meaning pervading culture. It is a meta-crisis that grows with every passing moment, in which our ability to make sense of reality and live meaningful lives is lost to a post-truth world.
It seemed for a while that The Intellectual Dark Web, a group of heterodox thinkers who took the step of having good-faith, long-form conversations about divisive cultural topics, might offer a way forward. While it has played an important role, I believe it never quite reached the new synthesis we need to have a firm foundation for sensemaking; the debates between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were an example of where we might have seen a radically new type of conversation, but didn’t quite.
What was missing? A year ago I coined the term ‘Intellectual Deep Web’ to try and capture how a new conversation might look. It would include several elements I believe could bridge the gap: developmental thinking, the mythopoetic, the transcendent and above all, narrative. Many of the voices we’ve sat down with recently fall into this category, including Ken Wilber, Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and John Vervaeke among others.
Can their ideas help us to find new meta-narratives that ground us and give us a way forward? Perhaps, but there’s a catch. To revive the stories that bind us, we must delve into the stories that blind us.
We have to engage fully in the postmodern tapestry in which we’re drowning, not from an ivory tower, but from the level of popular culture. It may be that the seeds of the narrative we need are already there, and what’s required is the discernment to see what’s right in front of us. And so, drawing on the wisdom within the Intellectual Deep Web, I will try to unravel some of these stories, to see if in their unspooling they reveal something deeper.
https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/a-story-to-bind-us-the-intellectual-deep-web-and-a-new-grand-narrative-9b32e36857c3
We know ourselves through stories,
and we know each other through the stories we share. But for all the beauty of stories, we are drowning in them. This is, after all, the promise of postmodernism; the grand narratives that bound us together have been stripped away and instead the world is fragmented into an infinity of individual perspectives, weaving into a tapestry so thick we can no longer see through it. Wherever we look now, either online or at our institutions and ideologies, we find no single story strong enough to bind us together.
Against this backdrop, at Rebel Wisdom we have been trying to find the voices who are making sense of this chaos and finding the threads that might lead us beyond it. Many of our guests have talked about the crisis of meaning pervading culture. It is a meta-crisis that grows with every passing moment, in which our ability to make sense of reality and live meaningful lives is lost to a post-truth world.
It seemed for a while that The Intellectual Dark Web, a group of heterodox thinkers who took the step of having good-faith, long-form conversations about divisive cultural topics, might offer a way forward. While it has played an important role, I believe it never quite reached the new synthesis we need to have a firm foundation for sensemaking; the debates between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were an example of where we might have seen a radically new type of conversation, but didn’t quite.
What was missing? A year ago I coined the term ‘Intellectual Deep Web’ to try and capture how a new conversation might look. It would include several elements I believe could bridge the gap: developmental thinking, the mythopoetic, the transcendent and above all, narrative. Many of the voices we’ve sat down with recently fall into this category, including Ken Wilber, Jordan Hall, Jamie Wheal, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and John Vervaeke among others.
Can their ideas help us to find new meta-narratives that ground us and give us a way forward? Perhaps, but there’s a catch. To revive the stories that bind us, we must delve into the stories that blind us.
We have to engage fully in the postmodern tapestry in which we’re drowning, not from an ivory tower, but from the level of popular culture. It may be that the seeds of the narrative we need are already there, and what’s required is the discernment to see what’s right in front of us. And so, drawing on the wisdom within the Intellectual Deep Web, I will try to unravel some of these stories, to see if in their unspooling they reveal something deeper.
https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/a-story-to-bind-us-the-intellectual-deep-web-and-a-new-grand-narrative-9b32e36857c3
https://metamoderna.org/game-denial/
https://metamoderna.org/stop-game-acceptance/
The metamodern aspects of archetypal psychology, include the deconstructive, aesthetic, and Romantic. Writing an article on same. Metamodern allows our integrative/developmental post-Jungian tendencies to freely mingle with AP, without polar dissonance.
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself, which was Hillman's main point in Re-Visioning Psychology.
Hillman has argued for a psychology that acknowledges all the myriad facets of our nature as important and integral to our general psychic well-being. Whereas Western psychology has largely tended to be "monotheistic" in its emphasis upon rational ego-awareness, Hillman has suggested the need for a more "polytheistic" view of psyche, one that might draw fruitfully from the pantheons of ancient mythology for a more fitting representation of psyche's diversity and needs.
Fictional virtual realities are constructed by aspects of the self as imaginal conversations. Imaginal dialogues play a central role in our daily lives, existing alongside actual dialogues and interactions. The dialogical self can be seen as a multiplicity of I positions or possible selves, with a decentralized, polyphonic character. This view dissolves the sharp "self-not self" boundary. Ecological fundamentalism has sought absolute truth in nature, but nature rejects this naivete. The notion of "relativity" implies that there is no absolute truth, therefore, no absolute self. Thus arises the notion of "radical pluralism", which is reflected in our chaotic modern society as exposure to virtually every religious belief, every political view, and a myriad of social values.
There is no central belief system in a pluralistic society. The social construction of reality is up for grabs. The whole concept of reality has been called into question by a variety of ideologies and lifestyles. There are widening splits within traditional belief systems. There is transition in human cultural evolution, with the new paradigm in dialogue with the old, seeking a new synthesis. The move is toward a substitution of "story" for Truth, reflecting that sense of movement, change, flow.
Perhaps the hallmark of Post-Modern philosophy has been disbelief or skepticism of all "metanarratives." The breakdowns of the story lines of religions, ideologies, even science has led to chaotic social change. We are beginning to realize, individually and as a world-wide culture that "realities" are all human constructions. The task becomes one of "catching ourselves in the act" of creating our own "reality" from the flow of events. Human truth is always an engagement of mind with experience. The sociological message of Chaos Theory and CCP is that we don't have to fear the collapse of what we think we are. We don't need to fear the collapse of our personalistic belief system, nor our belief in absolute truth.
Seth Abramson in metamodern- "If you want an analogy to help you picture all this, imagine a pendulum that swings so quickly between two poles that the naked eye can’t even see the back-and-forth movement anymore. Instead, all the naked eye can see is a pendulum hanging straight downward, vibrating slightly. In other words, the pendulum is spending an equal amount of time at every single point on a spectrum—a straight line between two points that are distant from one another—but does so in such a blindingly fast way that all you can see is a weird, vibrating action in the central space between the two opposing points (called poles). The basic idea here is that moving with such quickness along a spectrum deliberately defeats the purpose of having such a binary (two-pole) system in the first place; in this sense, we could say that the sort of movement I’ve described here allows us to over-leap or “transcend” a spectrum altogether. Which is a good thing, as spectra (the plural of spectrum) are necessarily two-dimensional. And, therefore, limiting."
https://www.ecstadelic.net/top-stories/phenomenal-consciousness-the-cosmic-self-and-the-pantheistic-interpretation-of-our-holographic-reality?fbclid=IwAR1mFuybGOQuxlnG__zuJ4V8ec-VH1sApKN2Vw0OjXtVVw1gEQ7Rc7Nlfl4
theology of digital physics
https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0iNUVbwyoKs7rh-v4rKxPK9jVHG7xyS6sEliJZMXicdi5Dvo-vs6W2UJs
https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0iNUVbwyoKs7rh-v4rKxPK9jVHG7xyS6sEliJZMXicdi5Dvo-vs6W2UJs
METAMODERN
Mystery Becomes MyStory
Metapsychology is theorizing about the structure of psychological theorizing itself. Archetypal Psychology, a poetic of depths, is a move from reductionism to a true holism that embraces what is as it is, inclusive of plurality and pathology without an integrative agenda.
"to those who can proceed despite the puzzles, a way opens. Submit to puzzles and what is absolutely incomprehensible. There are bridges, suspended on depths of perennial depth. But you follow the puzzles."
C.G.Jung, Red Book, pg. 308
Modernity is based on a critique and abandonment of premodern forms of
metaphysics, while postmodernity has only deepened critiques of metaphysical truth claims further. This has created a novel historical situation in which a planetary society revolves around the absence of a shared metaphysics. The vacuum of meaning at the core of postmodern societies has resulted in a sense of exhaustion and alienation, a state
uncomfortable enough to initiate a metamodern “return” to metaphysical speculation. ... the ideas and practices of metamodern metaphysics remain
in flux and on the margins. To counter the regressive and dystopian possibilities entailed by a “return” to metaphysics, I propose a form of cosmo-erotic humanism and discuss its implications through an
exploration of the newly released book, A Return to Eros
(Gafni & Kincaid, 2017). The discipline of metaphysics is notoriously
controversial and metaphysical claims are suspect in modern and postmodern discourse. Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place.
...metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. “Scientific metaphysics” is a “return” to metaphysics at a higher-level, a post-postmodern or “metamodern” revival of metaphysics is part of our historical moment. The term metamodern is used simply to describe the structure of what is emerging “after postmodernism.” --Zachary Stein
https://books.google.com/books?id=dMIrDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=,Listening+Society,+meta+modern&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwis6-fv_tToAhVFsp4KHYQHCPUQuwUwAHoECAYQBw#v=onepage&q=%2CListening%20Society%2C%20meta%20modern&f=false