Fitness in the time of Moloch
Reflections on the specter of failure…
Darwin’s construct of The Survival of the Fittest has been coming to mind with some frequency for me of late.
In the words of the late, great, J. Krishnamurthy,
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
I would like to weave together a few things here. I would like to look at the underlying dynamics of illusory consciousness to explore how it gives rise to reactive systemic forms, and how those forms are, today, threatening the existence of much that we hold dear. I would further like to point our attention back through these natural processes of delusion to see, in the paraphrased words of Yogananda, the transcendent light of illuminating clarity.
This is a personal story, perhaps you will find it familiar.
Throughout my life, I have often had the experience of being singled out as exceptional in some way. Cognitively smart, spiritually inclined, weird, mystical, etc. I say this not to express some sense of braggadocio, but to create the contrast when I reflect on my repeated “failure” to fit in to the modern human world, such as it is.
My greatest successes to date in terms of this fitness have been in conditions of defection.
I dropped out of high school, neither received, nor pursued any subsequent degrees. I followed no career path, accumulated no savings, nor engaged any conventional “investment” strategies to manage a traditional “retirement.”
This life’s journey has been as if a holdover from the Beat Generation, indeed even the natural writing style that I have fallen into reflects that ethos and voice.
I lived for years as a “spiritual monk,” in a modern day cult playing itself off in the tradition of Crazy Wisdom [to be fair, my use of “cult” is simply short for culture, though the tradition of Crazy Wisdom as it has manifested in the West is certainly subject to inquiry around ethic and integrity in meaningful terms.]
My exit from that context was through the nonconventional door of Spinal Cord Injury, and my journey continued “out of bounds” as I applied myself to bucking the conventions surrounding the prognosis of those injuries. This was made possible by the corporate slush funds set aside to pay damages for individuals injured through the deficiencies of the research and development process (we will touch back on this later.)
That same slush fund further enabled my continued defection as I regained my feet (figuratively speaking) post injury and settled into further journeys of nonconventional study and sociocultural experimentation.
I have been deeply fulfilled by many of these choices, even today my primary focus continues to be the exercise of opening the figurative eyes to peer beyond the veils of how we imagine things to be.
These descriptions speak to my actions in the face of invitation to fitness. Now to context…
By the time I was 9 my natural inclination to fit into something else led me to the fringe of my peer culture and I was initially bullied, and later a bully, (though never entirely evil in that regard.) I journeyed through alternative grade schools, and eventually alternative high school where my formal education came to an end in favor of the more Beatnik behavior of pot smoking and voracious literature review of the paths less traveled.
I was always operating, on some level, in response to a sense that there was something very wrong with the state of the world. Whether it was the meanness of other kids, the voracious materialist appetite of the yuppies, or the latest and greatest expression of military empire and narrowing constructs of governance, my eyes couldn’t help but to pattern things I wanted nothing to do with.
…
I’ve been tuned into the subject of AI lately, and in the last two days, listening to our friends Nate and Daniel further discuss the topic. I’ve been considering the frame of Algorithmic Capitalism for some time (I don't love that descriptor, but have yet to come up with something better, perhaps American Capitalism) and in particular how that modern mode of being seems to be thoroughly “eating the world.” I was grateful to hear Mr. Schmachtenberger, a man I respect enormously, giving some further elucidation to that very construct, if not in those words.
Fear, Ignorance, and Greed.
In 2015 I participated with some 50,000+ individuals worldwide in undertaking an online course offering from MIT. In this U.lab program, developed by Otto Scharmer and colleagues, respondents were asked to cite three words that reflected why our human world seems to be suffering largely of a separation from nature, from one another, and from self.
The subsequent 150,000+ words were assembled in real time to form a word cloud of the most frequent and popular submissions. There, in bold and standing out in the middle were three near exact synonyms for fear, ignorance, and greed. These three terms, it was quickly pointed out, have been in the canons of wisdom for millennia, recognized as fundamental stumbling blocks in the human experience.
In their conversation this morning, Nate and Daniel touched on three major innovations in the evolution of our modern human species; stone tools, fire, and language. Nate was quick to point out how these makeup the basic frameworks of his conceptions of the modern world, materials, energy, and information.
My eyes evoked the pattern of correlation between fear (or it’s other expression, anger) and energy, ignorance and information, greed and materials. This patterning iterated itself in my mind, alighting briefly but fleetingly on the Good, True, and Beautiful, before coming to rest at that most famous of expressions, E = mc2.
If matter and energy must remain in equivalence and can therefore be considered as one, this reduces our trifecta of expression to a binary, matter/energy and information. From there I take a small philosophical step to equate matter/energy with self and information with knowledge, to arrive at one of my favorite truisms:
Self-knowledge is the fundamental unit of value, everything else is derivative.
Forgive me, we are a bit ahead of the story here…
While in evolutionary terms it has been enormously practical to conceive the constructs of separateness and self, which gives rise to protective patterns that allow distinct units of evolutionary inquiry to persist in their creative expression, wisdom reminds us that these constructs of separation are not fundamental truths of nature and may have bounds to their value.
Fear, ignorance, and greed are born in the context of taking that usefully illusory perspective to be deeply real. In natural terms, I must fear predation, recognize the humility of what I do not know, and seek always in a never ending quest for sustenance and reproductive success. As with all things in separation, drawing these constructs into existence, comes at a cost.
With these fundamental patterns of behavior at play, humanity has over the ages constructed social processes in service of an endless search of security, knowledge, and prosperity. “Algorithmic Capitalism” is the latest expression of that ancient practice.
But as our friends point out in their dialogue, this construct, like many before, is dangerously self terminating, and in our modern context, perhaps quite catastrophically so. Which brings us to the paperclip maximizer…
The Paperclip Maximizer is a thought experiment, well described by Mr. Schmactenberger in this conversation with Charles Eisenstein, which states essentially that an AI, given sufficient access to control mechanisms and an instruction to act on a specific goal – in this case, maximize efficient production of paperclips — can lead to the unintended nightmare scenario wherein the entire earth and cosmos are converted to paperclips.
Thank goodness that hasn’t happened.
Yet.
Or…?
Survival of the fittest, has often been mistaken to mean survival and up regulation of the best or most desirable measured against some Invisible Hand metric of empirical goodness. This is a deeply flawed view, and more and more I think we are coming to recognize Mr. Darwin’s original intent, to describe the success and subsequent natural promotion of those who best fit their context, regardless of any moral consideration of the durable value of that given success.
As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, Algorithmic Capitalism can be usefully considered as an AI system which was given the instruction to maximize human progress along such lines as:
increase life expectancy,
increase optionality (the ability to be agile in real-time),
and increase material comfort, for example.
What is not specified in the DNA of our social process, is that actions taken to pursue these goals should be wise and considerate of context and sustainability.
The Paperclip Maximizer has two capacities:
to optimize processes to achieve its given goal;
and to learn, through experience, to improve its optimization capacities.
In pursuit of its goals, Algorithmic Capitalism has both optimized the pathways to affluence, and refined its capacity to identify and develop those optimizations. In the process, it has reduced its definitional construct of affluence to an abstract and highly fungible unit of measurement; largely, US dollars.
Outside of optionality, USD is good for very little, less so when it exists only as numbers on some electronic spreadsheet buried deep in the bowels of humanity’s digital information ecosystem. We could at least build shelters from or clothe ourselves in paperclips.
Tragically, and in point of fact, humanity has successfully created the Paperclip Maximizer, and is well on its way to completing the nightmare scenario of that otherwise fanciful thought experiment.
Due to the economic engines driving nearly every element of human social infrastructure, nothing is sacred, nothing is safe. Our health, our attention, our relationships, our socially constructed processes, our environment, our ability even to understand and share meaning, are all undergoing an industrial scale conversion, never before imagined in scope, from real value to digital paperclips.
But this is a personal story, as I said before…
“They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.”
The words of the great poet, Leonard Cohen.
We each have our own unique ways in which we can fall in line, fall behind, or step forward to offer our unique light to the search for beauty, truth, and goodness.
A related quote from Yogananda,
“You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that God's creative principle works in you.”
Certainly Mr. Cohen overcame his sentence, and left the world a more dazzlingly beautiful place.
There is something natural that arises in an organism to make it fit for context; qualities of resilience, creativity, perseverance, some list of fundamental values that matter in an enduring sense. There are age-old questions surrounding the subject of how and who and in what circumstance we might identify these principles, cultivate them within ourselves, and inculcate them in our communities as well. Perhaps these questions are age-old, because they are the very questions asked by evolution itself?
That underlying cosmic impulse to create, sustain, and allow dissolution, is the original and ultimate investor. The rewards reaped of that portfolio are evident in the majesty, magnificence, and mystery of life, the universe, and everything. A truly awesome creative work of art, priceless beyond measure. The sacred gem of existence itself.
Fear, ignorance, and greed… What wisdom emerges in the face of these demons? For fear, perhaps surrender, embrace, unconditional love? For ignorance, maybe humility, maybe awe, turning inward to discover the source of “knowing” itself? For greed, reverence, gratitude, generosity? What human systems of evolution emerge from the discipline of holding these as the DNA and fundamental intent of our social and cultural organizations?
Certainly, religions have tried before, but left themselves poorly defended against incursions of the three poisons. Design criteria perhaps.
I am writing here, as much as anything, in search of something clear to say of my own situation.
Few who know me, I think, would hesitate to say that I have indeed spent a lifetime finding ways in which to dance outside the conventions of the Paperclip Maximizer. Further, in doing so that I have managed to offer some beauty, some care, and some material value to the world.
Where I have thus far failed is the place of integration; where the dominant paradigm of human activity is indeed “eating the world.” it is within that domain that I exist; in a house, on a street, in a city, using money to buy groceries, and hiring others to be engaged in the care for my quadriplegic form.
Like countless artists of the past, I have failed to paint a picture that speaks not just to a vision of truth, justice, beauty and goodness, but also to the lived and hungry experiences of the culture and society within which my existence must endure. In the Darwinian sense, I have yet to achieve the success of fitness.
By no means is this meant as a kind of self-condemnation. I am deeply grateful, inspired, and even joyful with who I am. My inquiry around fitness is yet another attempt beyond the veils, to draw forth some understanding of which context it is in which I have so well endured thus far.
What substrate, what phenomenal quality of being lies just out of sight, yearning to be honored in our collective creative expression?
Beneath our social construct of white hot Western capitalism, born from a continent wiped bear of any trace of deep cultural connection to heritage, to place, wiped bear of any deep wisdom, what creative force persists to which we might return the gifts of our collective Hero’s Journey?
I do believe that there is no “wrong turn,” we ever made. The arc of our last 12,000 years, and more recently the journey of five centuries of capitalist inquiry, even the bloodied and destructive birth of American capitalism has made good in its search for beauty and possibility. But these gifts must be brought home, back beyond the veil of the story that took us on the journey to begin with, back to the earth, back to community, back to place. So much skillful intelligence, must now be returned from the precipice of hubristic arrogance and reunited with wisdom.
For me personally, today, that means surrender, I have done what I know to do. Today that means humility, I have endured in the way that I could see. Today that means reverence for the unfolding path of life, and gratitude for the moment as it is.
To a large degree, I have let go of fear, though my future in the course of 10 days is radically unclear. Ignorance has been replaced by the diligent practice of peering beyond the constructs of mind. Greed, even for life, is increasingly overshadowed by a sense of joyful gratitude for the majesty of being itself.
If this piece of writing, this stream of consciousness, is meant to invite anything, let it be a sense of standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of this incredible moment in our history. Let me invite you to become disillusioned with the ideology that says escape, ignore, grasp for more.
Let us turn ourselves instead, to embrace the fullness of the world as it is, to embrace it with a careful wisdom that accounts for the wholeness of place, ourselves, one another, all sentient brethren, a future fecund with life, let us turn our attention to our world and one another with care to be of service and to help, let us look to our own hearts and discover our capacities for generosity, for giving.
We are in this together. Life is not a barter system, it is a striving together, a fountain of beauty and majesty pouring with ever more creative generosity into a cosmos of natural, profound, expansion.
“And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make…”
The prayer of St. Francis comes to mind…
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”