Life is just a game we playWe make up rules every day.
From Palladium Magazine, December 29:
Everyone’s Existential Crisis
Many believe we are undergoing a crisis of meaning as a society. This sentiment is common among my friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I have encountered it far and wide beyond my social circles. The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is the sense of meaninglessness that prompts some people into wistful longing for war, causes others to turn inward and overindulge in meditation and psychedelics, and prompts many to talk about needing a sense of “shared mission.”
The experience has spurred and will continue to spur discussion of values, policies, and culture—arguments over which beliefs and tenets are importantly right or importantly wrong, and which behaviors we should encourage or discourage. Much of this discussion is futile, because the problem we are facing runs deeper than the question of what to believe or how to behave: it is our very way of determining these things that is broken. We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.
Epistemology is the study of how we know things and what it means to know something. For example, do you know that an event occurred if someone told you it did? If you saw it with your own eyes? If you read it in a book? If you have a vague hazy memory of it? Do you really know that the sun will rise tomorrow? What we treat as certain may or may not correspond with our actual state of certainty. Our current historical moment is one where the epistemic approaches that have served well enough to keep our social fabric alive and functional until now are breaking down. We have changed our environment enough that our current ways of understanding what’s going on no longer hold: technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us, and this trend will only quicken with time. This is not merely the obsolescence of an understanding of what’s going on, i.e. a world model or a culture; it is the obsolescence of a way of reaching understandings of what is going on, i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.
The discussion that could address this would be one examining our social epistemology, but we have not quite begun to do that yet. There are different types of knowledge and social knowledge is its own special class that we need to distinguish from personal knowledge. Social knowledge is the body of things “we” know. This is an odd category. It contains things like the theory of relativity, the idea that democracy is the most advanced form of government, the idea that cheating on your romantic partner is immoral, the concept of IQ, the law of gravity, and so on. Our social epistemology is strange because it allows for the idea that “we” can know things without most of us knowing them—for example, we as a society “know” about the theory of relativity, but most of us don’t actually know the details of what it is or how it works. Similarly, many people have the social knowledge that cheating on their romantic partner is immoral without any true visceral understanding of why or what the exact consequences would be.
We must go beyond the question of what we should believe or do, to the question of how any of those choices are formed in the first place, because that is where the breakdown is actually happening. Unless and until we address our social epistemology, we will be trapped in increasingly rapid cycles of cultural death.
The Unstable Foundations of Knowing
There are different ways for individuals to know things. There is direct sensory experience, like knowing that a kitten is soft because you touched it. There is logic, in the way you know that 128 is an even number despite the fact that you will never see our touch “128” or the “2” that divides it. There is gnosis, meaning the way some people experience certainty that they are in contact with the holy spirit. And there is testimony: knowing your friend feels sad because she told you.
Social knowledge is largely made up of testimony, but most of it is not direct personal testimony. If my friend Brian tells me he stayed late at the office last night, he is speaking from his direct personal experience, so I know it through one degree of removal. However, if the video of the reporter on YouTube tells me that inflation is down 0.5%, that testimony is several more significant degrees of removal from the fact in question than Brian’s testimony, including: I do not know the reporter. The reporter may or may not know the person he got the information from. I may or may not know what inflation is. The reporter may or may not know what inflation is. The person he got the information from may or may not know what inflation is, or agree with the reporter about what it is. The data used to generate the inflation report may be altered by the government. The reporter may be an AI deepfake.
Another strange thing about social knowledge is that its contents are both confusingly dynamic and vary from subculture to subculture and demographic to demographic. When I was growing up in California, we knew that fat and red meat were bad for you, and we all drank skim milk and avoided beef; now we know that carbs are bad for you, and people who are extremely dedicated to health go paleo and live on butter and meat. In South Korea, many people know that sleeping with your ceiling fan on will kill you; here we know that that’s ridiculous. I remember, as a child, reading the introduction to a book of Greek mythology and being struck by a sentence that ran roughly, “in the old days people believed in many gods who were angry and temperamental, but today we know that there is only one God and He is infinitely loving.” I grew up in an atheist household, and we knew no such thing; the book seemed strangely primitive to me, but would not have had I grown up in a different part of the country....
....MUCH MORE
Earlier today:Reality: A Post-Mortem
