The Phoenix Gambit[Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 16 seconds. Contains 2856 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges.

A newsletter about getting weird and personal with it.

I’m your host Stephen and this week we’re going to be following up last week’s After Disillusionment

The General Zapped An Angel by Karel Thole, 1970

Today we’re not going to be trying to dissect some esoteric shit as much as contending with our own most basic instruments for experiencing, well, anything.

The Mortifying Ordeal Of Being Known

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.” ― Marshall McLuhan, War & Peace in the Global Village (1968)

I want to start off with two observations:

1. Awareness is often a source of discomfort

2. We often don’t pay enough attention to the most basic things.

The sense of self intertwines with both. People have been speculating how the mind, self, and body work long before writing started and it’s tricky to pull together a coherent picture of its mechanisms.

It seems many of us go whole lifetimes without really speculating on the subject though, and speculation on the consequences of that ranges wildly from Plato’s Socrates saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living” to Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” there are plenty of hints that this is a problem.

Perhaps they’re right.

But perhaps they’re merely pitching what fine sages they are.

It certainly seems that most people don’t suffer much from avoiding introspection. Usually those consequences fall on those around them.

But we should be suspicious of assuming we can tell how much introspection someone has done. Many people have no interest in sharing their deep struggles with strangers and it’s hard to fault that.

It’s an easy appeal to one’s own vanity to assume you’re the only mind and many fine grifts have been built on selling people exactly that.

Sonder; Noun; the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles:

Now this is somewhat at odds with my epistemology but one must take doubt seriously and apply it to our own ideals to see what survives it.

In talking with people, I’ve rarely gone too deep into a conversation without finding a world of thoughts, feelings, associations, and constructions I couldn’t imagine if I worked the rest of my life.

But I’m rambling now. Let’s refocus.

The point of all this is that we have minds that only partially understand themselves. How much we understand of ourselves is dynamic and shifting because those very minds shift and change moment by moment.

Those minds operate as best they can given a variety of conditions. Take away nutrition or sleep or comfort and they begin to degrade. Beliefs once believed can fall away in extreme circumstance.

Last week we talked about the decay of what we vastly oversimplify by calling European or Eurozone culture, the crisis its been trapped in for the last few centuries, and some of the ways that pushes and pulls individuals today.

A “Brief” Digression

In my writing last week, I focused entirely on the Eurozone culture I grew up with. But this oversimplifies a much more, uh, muddled cultural picture.

I won’t do much to remedy that here. While I’ve sampled much excellent contrast from other cultural systems of thought (In books and in person), I’m only really competent to talk about the Eurozone stuff.

My belief is that looking at a wide variety of cultures and time periods lets you find contrast with your own time much easier. It’s a way for a fish to recognize water, to use McLuhan’s idiom.

There are thousands of other cultural systems on the Earth. And even “Eurozone” is a gross oversimplification built on settler colonialism, empire, and industrialization.

These three systems stamp out local variation, enforce conformity through violence.

So even the great variation in cultural values and history within Europe and its colonial annexes like the USA and New Zealand get reduced to some orthodoxy.

But the last orthodoxy (Organized, shared beliefs) that function did so under the dying light of Feudalism’s complexity and Renaissance idealism. The age of discovery and Enlightenment broke orthodoxy and killed God as Nietzsche put it.

That cacophony of ideas, impulses, material conditions, and technologies has brought us to this place beyond postmodernism. With the dominant macroculture confused and self-critical by its own victories, and those dominated are increasingly fighting for greater autonomy away from it.

This is happening at all scales and in all places: From China’s ascent, multipolar politics, indigenous activism reclaiming territories, and many many other examples.

The bind we’re in as a macroculture is who gets self-determination. The great machines Europe has built says: Billionaires, corporations, and nation-states do.

The current order says you can do just about whatever you like as long as it doesn’t matter or get in the way if you’re part of a protected group and that you should SUPER stay the fuck out of the way if you’re not at the threat of injury, further impoverishment, or death.

Here’s the thing: orthodoxies are bad actually. They only exist with violent suppression of alternatives. Otherwise people always develop their own ideas in opposition.

Crisis, Death And Rebirth

Much of what we know we learn through friction and context. That is, we want to move some direction and find we can’t or we have some idea what’s going on and apply from that.

Over time we refine these into being pretty good maps of ourselves and our world. But this view is still too static.

There are at least thousands of processes going on in the human brain beneath our notice, mostly processing sense inputs into the sensorium we experience as a whole.

But much of it also goes to generating our sense of self, the necessary processing for us to do all the being a person stuff. Personality, preferences, social awareness, whatever.

I know that’s obvious but it needs said because the next part is easy to overlook: All of that causes friction and stress and adapts to the same. It’s not one feedback loop but a mess of them.

Eventually this builds up into an emotional crisis. The most famous of these are probably alcoholics or addicts hitting rock bottom and your old fashioned Mid Life Crisis.

What defines The Crisis is a particular relationship between information the conscious mind has been avoiding, details of the external context, and a process of radical change aiming to bring a person’s life situation into greater balance or consistency, or whatever.

The Crisis can be set off by just about anything or nothing at all. Usually it comes out of a realization of either how short life is or how old one’s getting or holy shit I’ve been in abusive relationship for years.

The stereotype is a middle age man buying a cherry red convertible and cheating on his wife.

You might be surprised to hear this… is not a particularly good way of handling it. Another important component is a combination of increased tolerance for risk and a high degree of motivation. Once someone realizes they, say, hate their life, they may find themselves far more willing to try things they’ve avoided.

The risks of The Crisis are more complicated than may be obvious. First, many people find they’re not really able to affect their life circumstances enough to escape whatever caused the crisis. There are many ways to adapt, but the worst of them is to simply endure things anyway.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

What Is The Crisis For?

It’s important to understand the purpose and potential of such moments. The Crisis is a chance for a substantial redefinition of self and the relationships one has with the world and people in your life.

I tend to believe the point is to successfully reintegrate into a more functional sense of self, abandoning older values/habits/etc, and starting to lay new tracks for a different life.

The Crisis happens when a particular path becomes literally unbearable. Kept under stress, the mechanisms that maintain the self break down. Pressure builds up.

We’re pretty good as a species at ignoring little things until they become big problems. A person about to hit The Crisis is likely suffering on a slew of levels they’re only half aware of because that’s the easiest way to get through the day.

I don’t know if people are born with a purpose or anything along those lines. I’ve seen some evidence for it and some against it. Perhaps it varies by person. For myself, if I’m not writing I feel like I’m wasting my time and my life. Everything else is secondary.

It’s a deeply personal thing.

Oftentimes, the Crisis comes out of the conflict between other people’s expectations and a person’s internal compass. But once this becomes impossible to ignore it’s much bigger than any single conflict, it’s reshaped relationships and all sorts of other things.

Anything that feels out of alignment can be a cause.

Navigating The Crisis

The most important two things to know are if you’re in a Crisis and how urgent things are.

It’s possible to see things building up, to have an understanding that some kind of break will be needed, and to be able to plan for it. This can make things easier, but as usual it depends on circumstances.

Urgency defines timeline. Even in a Crisis things might not need to happen immediately. But sometimes you literally need to throw together a couple days worth of clothes, grab the kids, and get out while you can.

As my old social psychology professor said: It’s the power of the situation!

Once you know how much time you’ve got to work with you can start to work out the boring stuff. I realize most of this post is supposed to be about transformative psychological shifts but you almost cant imagine how much easier this stuff is if you can squirrel away resources to handle things in an easy timeline.

But, of course, any time there’s a large break you can expect a large mess.

I don’t want to get too much into individual examples because they can be so varied. What might be the perfect thing for one person might be life-destroying for another.

The big thing to understand here is The Crisis will probably challenge or change many beliefs no matter how deeply held. This is something of a crapshoot because you can’t really predict which beliefs or how they’ll change.

Following that it’s worth going through the basic domains of life and figuring out where pressure is coming from, what’s wrong, and what you can do to change your relationship to it: Intellectual, Emotional, Social, Financial, Moral, Spiritual, Relational are all areas to check in with. Any or all can need overhauled.

(You might want to check in with sexuality and gender too)

Some situations can be bent, but most people are probably going to push things off long enough to create a break. The Break is a radical change in how a person lives their life. What work they do, their daily schedule (or lack there of), what people are in their lives, and how they relate to themselves and others.

It can be comprehensive.

And it can hurt others around them.

This is a trickier thing to talk about because while I tend to think, if handled well, these transformational processes are a net good, they can permanently harm relationships.

Sure, some of those have harm coming to them but it’s also easy for other people to end up in the crossfire.

I’m dancing around the question of having kids here because I figure anyone with kids already knows how much impact this kind of thing can have on them.

But it could be any relationship.

Sometimes those can be repaired after but sometimes they can’t. If it’s worth it is…. a case by case situation.

So, you’ve figured out what’s wrong and what to do about it. All that’s left is…

Making a Break For It

So you’re doing whatever the big scary change is.

What’s next?

Spoilers for a movie older than you probably are.

There are two things that need done: The first is recovering from whatever prompted the Break in the first place. Remember, you took damage to get here.

That part is, if nothing else, simple: Pull out ye ole Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and spend as much time as you can get away with caring more about your physiological and security needs then anything else.

Sleep, eat better. Nap. Hydrate yourself.

If you can find a safe place with low-ish expectations you’ll be able to do some real healing. And with that will come more questions and more problems to work through.

At this point you’re probably far enough in that you’ve found some trust in the process and that will probably get you through the rest of it.

Which brings us to the hardest thing of all: Finding a new context.

In short, you can’t just leave a bad thing. You have to find a good thing to move towards.

Otherwise you’ll just kind of move from halfthing to halfthing until you’re worn out.

Chances are you’ll already have a good idea where to go. Afterall, by this point you’ve spent a while introspecting and figuring some of your shit out. New paths may open up and you might find the right opportunity.

The trick here is becoming very conscious of what you want vs what you need vs what the world wants for you and finding some mix of those you can live with. Some people get to live their dreams and some don’t.

It’s harsh but true.

I’m not going into a ton of detail here for two reasons: First, the kind of detail that’d be necessary is WAY more than a blog post. Second, if you’ve read this far you probably won’t need it. Most of the time problems and solutions are connected enough that finding out what’s wrong will either tell you what you need to do or push you in the right directions to find the right thing you need.

A metaphor for navigation can be handy though: Locks and keys.

I picked this up from the far better than it sounds How To Argue And Win Every Time by Gerry Spence.

Often we only recognize parts of what we need and our point of view will generate problems until we find the appropriate alternatives.

You can view those problems as locks and the alternatives as keys. Psychologically this will be easy to recognize because keys change your point of view and how you feel instantly.

The two most important things, to a successful Crisis, I think, are combination of listening to one’s body even when it hurts and taking responsibility for your own life.

What I see as a large part of the point of this process is allowing you to reexamine your assumptions and issues from a new perspective, allowing you to build a new worldview from the inside out.

This doesn’t mean forgetting that you’re still more shaped by external forces than not, I’m not selling some petty “personal responsibility” to have no responsibility for anyone else. What I’m saying is that once you see the forces that shaped you and get a bit more outside their power you’ll be able to either shape them back, know not to engage, or find ways of moving with those forces without being overwhelmed.

It fucking rules, tbh.

But that’s the kind of thing that comes with success which is far from guaranteed. Nor is a process this extreme necessary. You can, in fact, just kind of listen to your body and your problems and not let shit build up.

But that’s tricky to do in a society that doesn’t have a fucking clue what mental health actually is.

Anyway, I don’t want to harp on the benefits of this kind of things. You’ll find them yourself if you go through it (or have gone through it).

What Can Go Wrong

There are many ways this kind of process can fail or get jammed up or whatever. The trick is to just keep taking a step whenever you can.

But since those are so situational and I don’t have much to say without context let’s just leave it at, “Anything bad that can happen can happen in Crisis.”

Alright, that’ll do for now.

I’ve rewritten a few bits here trying to blend my views with Dabrowski’s and found that almost impossible.

So I’ve cut him out and focused on my views on how to deal with a major Crisis.

I really can’t overstate the importance of listening to your body though. That’s where all the information really is.

Surprise book recommendation

Wrapping Up

Alright, I’m about done tonight.

Let’s leave it to say that next week will be about Dabrowski’s Positive Disintegration.

And beyond that…. UFO month.

We’ll see where things go from there. I don’t really want to do UFO stuff but there are so many interesting threads to pull on I can’t really stop.

Fun.

See you soon.

-SF