literary criticism

Incorruptible Organizations AMA with Eric Ries. Wednesday 2/4 at 3:00 PM CT

Lean Startup author who now focuses on legal structures to protect mission-driven organizations from corruption. incorruptible.co

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Amazing hack to assess accuracy of your writing. As I’ve been building this project I’m calling Better Political Conversations, I’ve stumbled across an AMAZING virus detector for my writing. When I think a section of my content is complete and fully edited, I copy-paste it into NotebookLM and have it generate a podcast of the content. The way the podcast AIs talk about the content makes the flaws in my explanations very obvious, and I go back and edit. It also gives me a sense of how and where people will be likely to fold pre-existing knowledge and assumptions into their interpretations of my words, and I’m challenged to find a less-interpretable-but-still-accessible version. When it finally gives me a good podcast, I feel way more confident in what I’ve got.

AMA with Ali Beiner. Wednesday 2/4 at 11:00 AM CT

Kainos host Alexander Beiner exploring cultural sensemaking around psychedelics, popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics, and spirituality.

How to really tick me off as a fiction writer, and part 2 of my review of Carr's multiply named novel.

There's this move that writers of fiction sometimes make. I've seen it in novels, movies, tv shows. It's most often a little thing. A throwaway line. And I hate it so much.

It's when a character says something like "It's not like it is in the movies"

or "This isn't one of your fairy stories"

or "Things might work like that in a mystery novel, but this is real life"

You've heard some version of this a hundred times in different works of fiction. I can't stand it. 

I think they (the writers) think they're being clever? Giving a sly wink to the reader. But it's not clever. It's a weird tick, and all it achieves is to remind you that the events of the story ARE a fiction, and to pull you out of it and back into the world.

This is directly counter to the first job of fiction, which is indeed to make you forget that you're a reader, consuming fiction.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Carr's Hollow Man / Three Coffins, and he did a little version of this. That's actually what prompted me to start writing this earlier post, but I never got to round to kvetching about this thing there. Christie is also sometimes guilty of this, a rare lapse from the queen.

I've now finished Carr's book.

And something happened towards the end that was frankly shocking. Mild, non-plot spoilers for the book incoming!
In the last quarter, Carr indulges in the mother of all immersion breakers.

So, the reason I started reading the book is because of the famous "locked room lecture" that's what the book is known for. This is mentioned in the third Knives Out Movie. In the lecture, the detective Gideon Fell gives a run down of every possible kind of solution to a "locked room murder."

This kind of murder was Carr's stock in trade, and it is of course quite an interesting idea: someone is found murdered in a locked room, with no obvious way that anybody else could have gotten in or out. (Fun fact, the earliest well known locked room mystery is "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" by Gaston Leroux, who also wrote the novel "The Phantom of the Opera". I read both a long time ago. Phantom is quite fun, I don't remember anything about Yellow Room).

So I was looking forward to hearing a lecture from a master of this genre, about all the possibilities. And when it arrives, here's how he sets it up:

“I will now lecture,” said Dr. Fell, inexorably, “on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph. All those opposing can skip this chapter. Harrumph. To begin with, gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say—”
“But, if you’re going to analyze impossible situations,” interrupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?”
“Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book."

Carr, John Dickson. The Three Coffins (The Hollow Man) (pp. 210-211)

!!!

So, the first line, he commits the sin I started this post discussing; he refers to the existence of detective fiction within a piece of detective fiction. I rolled my eyes.

But then, he commits the much more egregious, and frankly insane, move of having his characters just start talking about the fact they're characters in a novel. For no reason. It's a completely unforced error. He could have delivered the lecture through the mouthpiece of Fell, completely in fiction, and it would have worked fine.

And, to add insult to injury, the lecture is not that great. He rattles off a bunch of different ideas, but it's just a laundry list, he doesn't really extract general principles or broader conclusions.

After this, the characters go back into character, never acknowledging again that they're in fiction. The resolution of the mystery IS very clever, but the book as a whole is chaotic, long winded, self-indulgent, psychologically unconvincing, and transparently artificial. So, idk if I recommend it.

Now, The Hollow Man was published in 1935, 6 years before Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths", which I think is the earliest stirrings of postmodern, deconstructivist, fiction writing. (Honestly it's pretty upsetting to mention Carr in the same sentence as Borges).

So you could say that Carr was ahead of his time with this move, a move that anticipates the postmodern, fourth wall breaking antics of Wes Craven's Scream, the Deadpool franchise, or (most interesting) the work of comic writer Grant Morrison.

But Morrison, and Craven, and even the writers of Deadpool, are breaking the fourth wall deliberately, purposefully, to create a new kind of experience, a new kind of fiction.

Carr's book is squarely in a modern, generic mode, chugging along, promising to deliver one thing, and then just randomly breaking the fourth wall for a chapter, before going back to it's completely conventional format.

Anyway, it made me mad. I'm back to reading Christie, and having a lovely time. Read Borges, Christie, and Morrison. Skip Carr.

ps - Every jacket illustration of Fell makes it look like the character was modeled on GK Chesterton (another comparison that does no favors to Carr)

Ordinary Love. An invitation to true wellness culture

Postmodernity is too egocentric. This includes current “spiritual” trends.

Here’s what an alternative can look like: Yesterday Dara asked Jason to install a window A/C unit in Val’s room; he came over and did it. Last night a participant shared struggling with a contract at work, and a lawyer in the session volunteered to help her redline it. My sister watches the kids while I help my brother-in-law move their furniture to make room for the new baby. If this doesn’t sound special, that’s the point. You’re already doing this, that’s also the point.

I’m not writing to admonish us to “get rid” of the “ego”—a particular self-identity*. I think it’s too hard for modern Americans, steeped in a culture of individualism. I love life, people, experience, and I think a good life includes a sense of “me.” Instead, I want to expand the sense of self to go much beyond the concept of “my body, my history” to see the larger whole these are part of. One upshot of this is gratitude, even for what I usually think of as “Jordan’s”—like these thoughts thunk in English. I needed English to think ‘em, so how much are they ‘mine’? 

Automated & consensual narrative lock-in

We know that social media exacerbated this. Many studies show narcissism and loneliness increasing faster with mass adoption of social media, especially after 2012. Young kids don’t want to serve as a fireman or doctor anymore, they want to be adored as an influencer (We’re working on this social media problem by launching UpTrust). 

Now I worry that AI is exponentiating this self-reification trend to unprecedented levels.

Last week I met four people who were convinced that their personal ChatGPT interface, molding its “personality” to respond based on their unique interactions, was a sentient being. If you think our filter bubbles are bad now, imagine what it’s like when we have 8 billion of them? Each individual’s personal collection of bots reinforcing whatever identity feels special, safe, and comfortable, no matter how limited and delusional?

There’s nothing wrong with specialness, safety, and comfort, but neither is there anything wrong with ordinariness, risk, and discomfort. Transformation, life, intimacy, and play all demand both. Are we bleaching the color of life in pursuit of maintaining a self? What are we so afraid of that we hide from becoming? Life is transformation. Relating requires and changes our uniqueness. Other people providing friction and challenge—that’s a service, freely given to all at birth.

Perhaps the trap isn’t narcissism. It’s any reification of identity via any narrative frame, especially spiritual ones, designed to parade as if they’re narrative-free. And the cost is ordinary love.

Transcend and exclude often means we fall back into less maturity

I’m still trying to get my mind and language around this, so I’m going to highlight the contrast to see the phenomena more clearly. Does your coach / (AI) therapist / culture / practice help you:

• Express more gratitude? Become more forgiving? Be more accepting of others’ flaws? “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court”?
  Or say you should be treated a very particular way (reifying a victim identity?)

• Build infrastructure that’s super helpful but unsexy? Do things that are good for others without recognition? Feed those who are hungry? Do mundane things for the local whole like pick up trash that’s not yours?
  Or build a marketing funnel that will help you promote yourself and perpetuate the ‘me’ ‘me’ ‘me’ cycle? 

• Love your friends and family better? Accept being misunderstood? Show up to their events and support their successes? Take care of them when they’re sick? Be more generous? Patient, humble, respectful, loyal, temperate? Maintain commitments regardless of feelings?
  Or emphasize your in-the-moment desire above all else, calling impulsivity and self-centeredness ‘surrender’?

• Develop boundaries as expressions of love and connection? Face challenges with grace and acceptance? Take responsibility for your pain, flaws, mistakes, shadows, and limitations?
  Or use "boundaries" to control others and force them to change according to your preferences?

• Admit ignorance, learn from criticism, hold your beliefs lightly, speak simply about profound experiences, work steadily without needing dramatic breakthroughs, notice your defensive patterns without performatively announcing them, contribute to social understanding, love others as they are?
  Or position yourself as having rare insights to help others transcend their limitations through your techniques and advice?

This list can go on; I wish I could speak to the connection and community side more but I’m stuck in my own bias. 

I’m not saying it’s easy, we of course need guides, mentors, feedback–it’s so complicated! Nor am I saying its special—all of this has been said for thousands of years! I’m trying to highlight a healthy version of one pole and unhealthy versions of another on purpose to get more clarity on where we are deeply unbalanced today. This is especially true of ‘spiritual’ hotbeds like San Francisco, Boulder, Ubud, Amsterdam. Austin is somewhat counterbalanced by its Texas-ness—cowboy culture still emphasizes family, duty and sacrifice to a greater good beyond ‘you’. Plus our immigrants are a little more integrated.

What’s up with me?

Anyway, I ask myself: Why do I care?

Sure, practices purported to transcend ego instead teach self-absorption. But it’s in the name— "personal growth" and “self-help.” What’s got me?

Because I’m guilty of all of this. 

Sometimes despite my best efforts, I’ve taught people to ignore their minds in order to stay with the sensations of their bodies (rather than integrating them); to ‘surrender’ to their feelings-in-the-moment and ignore larger consequences or agreements and the greater wholes that hold them. I’ve corrected a lot of these mistakes, made amends, even evolved the practice and training. Yet I still can’t quite escape the selfishness of ‘wellness’ culture. Prime example: a couple years ago we hosted a “Give Fest” at the Relateful Studio in Austin with a reverse silent auction, where people bid on what they wanted to give to a local nonprofit. Even my wife and I didn’t follow through on what we ‘won.’

Let us redefine wellness and self-development. Let us change the metrics to gratitude, forgiveness, acceptance of our and others' flaws, showing up for family, friendship, and our greater communities. Let us celebrate unglamorous, unwitnessed interdependence.

Three alternatives: what is it all for?

Burning Man is actually a great example of a positive alternative. The economy is about gifting—and after your first year, it’s well known that to get the most out of the experience, you need to give. People camp in communities, build massive art projects and cars together, and give them freely without credit, burning them at the end. It’s all about creating for the whole, being present with each other in non-transactional relating. All of this disrupts the self-reification loops in such a way that people are consistently shaken from long held encumbrances, and come out of the desert transformed. I say this as an admirer but not a fanatic—I went to Black Rock City in 2012 and 2014, and then didn’t go again.

Relatefulness

Relatefulness, especially in Level Up ⬆’s Leadership Program and the The Relateful Coaching Training, does not fall into these problem nearly as badly as almost every other community I’ve seen. We claim our directionality of truth + love. This means the personal can’t be number one—individual expression and growth is always in service of something greater. Of course we make mistakes. (For example, the Level Up structure highlighted individualism. We’ll be returning to a cohort-only model this Fall—more on that in a future email). But we’ve done a really good job focusing on being with what is, especially relationally and communally. 

We don’t abandon compassion and honesty in service of making sure people feel seen, heard, cultivating a ‘safe space,’ or maintaining instagram-defined-trauma-therapy-norms. This is hard, because I not only want people to feel seen, heard, safe, and heal, I think it’s crucial for a healthy community and for the true pursuit of truth and love. It just needs to be in service of love/truth, rather than an end unto itself. It needs to come authentically from the moment, not as a script or status signal or performance. We run into generative friction embracing the seeming paradox of this polarity all the time, and it is incredibly demanding of our facilitators to walk this tight rope. It demands that we are always changing, individually as leaders, as a community, and even the practice itself. Even our coaching teaches revealing identity commitments, inherently making the self an object in a larger self that can choose “yes” or “no” to, versus reinforcing a self and an existing worldview.

And even as we teach people how to meta-narrate as a way to witness and disembed themselves from unconscious habits that have been running them, we recognize that the compulsion to name and categorize experiences—spiritual or otherwise—often becomes a form of conceptual possession, serving self preservation rather than self-transformation.

(continued in comment)

(this will be sent out to my #TTT email in a couple of days, but UpTrust gets the early exclusive ;) )

 "For Lacan, ‘full speech’ took place on the level of the Symbolic; here was where meaning was produced and expressed. By contrast, ‘empty speech’ occurred at the level of the Imaginary, a pure signification devoid of true meaning... ‘Full speech is speech which aims at, which forms, the truth such as it becomes established in the recognition of one person by another. Full speech is speech which performs"

This is a different cut on the question of earnestness and sincerity, and I find it quite powerful.

Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.

- James P Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

In a smaller way, this speaks to part of the spirit of not enforcing a certain kind authenticity in relateful sessions. And for taking full responsibility for your experience.

How do we realign the incentives in Healthcare to actually support wellbeing? Currently, there are many conflicts of interest and misaligned incentives in the Western medical system. For example, Doctors by default fight for their patients to live as long as possible, even when that’s not what might actually benefit the patient’s overall wellbeing (or even when it contradicts the patient’s stated preferences), because they rightfully fear litigation for not doing enough.

In general, the medical system is full of multi-polar traps like this. Collaboration and humility and vulnerability are devalued, because unless everyone simultaneously were to adopt them (which would actually benefit everyone), then individuals suffer for adopting them.

We need new gender categories, while preserving the distinctness of "man" and "woman". I don’t mind using different pronouns—I’m happy to love someone with whatever language they prefer.

But I’d like to propose that deconstructing traditional genders is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful.

Not necessary

• It’s not necessary because we’re free to create as many new genders as we’d like, while preserving the standard ones.

• This is the transcend and include approach, as far as I can tell. The current approaches I’ve seen are either all transcend (reject the historical categories) or all include (reject the creativity and proof-by-existence of new genders).

• I believe this will better honor the person who was misassigned a gender at birth, because their life experience is very different from someone who was assigned the gender they identify with. Eg: if I’m a trans-woman, I didn’t grow up with all the social pressures of being a woman, or going through a menstrual cycle, or whatever; I grew up feeling like a woman but getting the social pressures of being a man, going through the hormonal changes associated with male-body-ness. Which is a totally unique experience, that I will find more belonging and support from other people like me, not from trad-females.

Harmful

• It’s harmful because the people who want acceptance into the traditional category are never going to get it. Eg: If i’m a trans-woman, I was assigned male at birth, and I probably have some male parts and hormones and stuff, so when I try to identify as a woman and join in those discussions and groups that are for women I’m likely to always feel outside, different, and to a certain group of cis-women, threatening.

• This further divides society and polarizes certain populations against including the reality of the trans-experience, which then polarizes the trans-supporters, which begets the vicious cycle.

• Sex differentiation started around 1.2 billion years, so the male-female experience has ancient roots that are in our bodies and impacting us every single second. Denying this altogether is destroying massive chesterotn fences— denies tons of wisdom that is passed down not only culturally over the past 200,000 years, but instinctually for a billion.

What about bathrooms and sports?

Instead we can just have single stall bathrooms and locker-rooms. Or trad-male, trad-female, and a third for whoever of whatever gender, which is much larger than the trad lockerrooms and bathrooms. We can have a third category of sports—all gender. We’re creative, we’re growing, we have plenty of people to populate them and who will want to win, why stick with a binary?

I’m sure I’m missing something, and I apologize to the new-gendered people who I’m sure I’ve insulted or missed somehow. But, leaning in to potentially contentious convo…