Returning is the Way Of The Blog [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 46 seconds. Contains 1554 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges.

I’m your host, Stephen and today we’re doing our traditional random left turn here.

We’re going to do aliens again. But things have shifted, I’ve been digging myself out of other projects like finishing my goddamn Bachelor’s degree.

Finally got that promotion from Associate.

St Brendan's ship on the back of a whale, and his men praying, in Honorius Philoponus, 'Nova typis transacta navigatio' (Linz: s.n., 1621)

Our fourth anniversary looms next month and I didn’t want to lose more time to who I am as a person with that oncoming. And I’ve got too much on my plate intellectually between a project proposal and trying to churn through Deleuze & Guattari’s wacky books without embarking on a masters degree worth of reading their influences. Oh, and going back through some of the core works of Daoism, especially the I Ching and some of its commentaries.

I’d very much like to have momentum back here so I can start producing my first podcast, an outgrowth of this newsletter, on Bill Cooper’s Mystery Babylon podcast.

So you can expect, well, a lot more of me in June.

Hah. For realzies. At least I make myself laugh, right?

Anyway, we only need 7 more people to pay to get the first season of that going. What I want to do today is a bit simpler than our usual fare.

This blog has been a fine practice ground for me to try out bits of ideas and slowly kind of build up a coherent point of view or two.

We’re going to explore some of the ideas that unite both what we discuss and how we discuss it.

A Specter Haunts The World

Even in this allegedly fallen and materialistic world there’s no shortage of claims of the miraculous. Most of these, alas, are just cheese in a variety of mousetraps leading to cults or MLMs or cults running MLMs. Some of them lead to extremist politics!

Many of you probably had the same experience I did with The Weird: I grew up thinking conspiracy theories were mostly harmless or fun and have slowly become very, uh, critical of that position.

See, conspiracy theories often serve as breadcrumbs towards actions that get people hurt, often for nothing. We’ll be talking more about those as things go on.

The best defense against this stuff as far as I can tell is awareness of what’s going on and how it works. The line between a silly but harmless belief and something dangerous is just proximity to an affinity for people who want to push you a little forward.

But that doesn’t mean that “Mainstream” ideas are automatically better. There’s no shortage of people cheerleading war crimes and atrocities because they didn’t think about the news. But the problem is complicated. The news doesn’t lie all the time, it just mostly takes predictable editorial lines to corral an audience.

So you have to learn to think for yourself. And that’s where I think all this weird stuff can be really helpful. Lots of claims feel more credible than they actually are. And if you know they’ve been making those claims since 1882 without much evidence, well, you might be dealing with someone looking to justify a sunk cost belief, not a serious hypothesis.

Honk if you know who I mean. 1882 heads unite.

I’m presenting these in no particular order. A constellation of little points of reference.

Compassion For People, Not Ideas

Let’s just start this off: Pretty much everyone (especially anyone who’s found this page) is only a few weird experiences away from apparently going off the deep end.

Error is easy and in the real world there aren’t really objective standards for truth. Like, sorry to people who hide from the problem of knowledge with bibles or dialectics but the world’s complex and shifting and even without the messiness of language it’s easy to veer away from accuracy even under ideal conditions.

Any of us could pick up new dangerous delusions or be in a deranged situation with the right circumstance and those can be very thin indeed.

But compassion isn’t the same thing as pretending someone hasn’t made mistakes or that all ideas are equal.

Truth being a moving target isn’t an invitation to say whatever you want.

For people acting in reasonably good faith, though, try and treat them like you’d want if you’d fucked up as bad.

Digging Toward Deep Context

So many of the ideas we’ve talked about here have incredibly deep roots. The New Age movement doesn’t look like Christianity at first glance, but it’s ideology and roots are a continuation of the Great Awakenings going on since the 18th century.

Individualistic, ecstatic, a rejection of Old for its own sake, and a marketplace of would be influencers.

Add that with the long tail of American esotericism such as Spiritualism or New Thought and their own complex relationships with Christianity and it becomes more evident.

But when did that start? Surely the First Great Awakening wasn’t really the first of these moments.

Roots tend to go deeper as different ideas and trends clash and remix each other. As in everywhere else, truly new ideas are rare.

Playful Reuse

Nothing ever ends. No ideas ever really go away.

That’s maybe the most important thing I’ve learned from these explorations.

One way we can take advantage of that is looking for stuff that’s no longer part of its original living culture and remix it into something a little more useful.

There’s a mess of discarded ideas that can serve as wonderful inspiration or raw material for new ideas.

Oh look it’s our old friend The Bullshit Cycle

This isn’t without peril, particularly if you try to pick stuff from living culture; people still believing and practicing them. Not every idea is just up for grabs.

Some of my most popular posts have been about this very thing.

But, like, while I’m currently studying the I Ching I wouldn’t claim expertise or insist that some insight I had into the Hexagrams was authoritative.

Gotta be polite when you’re a guest ;-)

Weird Materialism

I live an odd position: Internally, I’m pretty much an intuitive anti-materialist. But my uh persona for all this is a semi-materialist rationalist.

Rather than running from this as a scary paradox I’ve found a way to work both edges of it. See, imagination is the faculty of navigating all possibilities. Used poorly you can get lost in a hall of mirrors you can throw lifetimes at without finding your way out. That’s why I find materialism handy. It puts some convenient limits on what can happen.

The downside is it’s a bit boring away from the edges. The edges, of course, are fascinating as hell if you can keep up with them. Basically everything falls apart at them. Trees aren’t real. Everything becomes a crab. Time and causality aren’t what we think they are. Spooky action at a distance if you nasty.

The last thing you want is to be trying to argue some God of the Gaps nonsense, that’s a losing position you have to retreat anytime someone learns something new.

Instead I suggest, “Well, it’s probably this… but maybe…” as a way of understanding things without being led by assumptions.

It’s also a lot more fun knowing that aliens *could* show up any day.

But those rude bastards refuse to.

Exploration Over Debunking

Growing out of the rest of these, this is a better way to manage skepticism rather than trying to drag everything to the same baseline.

Debunkers are notoriously just looking for some gotcha. Which can be useful but also gets tedious.

Rather than looking to dismiss things at the first glimpse, I’d suggest it’s more fruitful to get good and in there and see what’s fun or interesting or thought provoking about another PoV.

Understanding, if nothing else, why a certain idea is popular is a really useful way to find it. What do believers get for their trouble? How does it change the social world?

There are many questions well worth asking even about wrong ideas.

The Trenchant Edges

I named this blog in a bit of a panic. 4 Years ago someone wanted to *shock* pay me to read what I wrote. I threw everything together in about 20 minutes and made a first post.

The name is intentionally weird and ambiguous. Trenchant and Edges are both words for cutting and Trenches are dug. Edges are also the outer part of maps. Together I see them as an invitation to look at the world a bit differently than you otherwise would.

To be critical in a creative way, but also not worry if things get a little dicey and not every idea survives. Somethings just aren’t true.

I’ve collected a lot of open loops over the years.

Fitting, really.

If I can keep all the plates in my life spinning I finally have a chance to edit up the first volume of this damn project.

So I figure this next month will be a good time to look back, take stock of things, and try and rebuild some kind of foundation here.

I hope y’all will join me.

See you soon.

-S