Thread by @enkiv2

How much is accusations of 'cultural relativism' actually about personal fears of metacognition -- i.e., knowing at some level that your revealed preferences are at odds with your expressed preferences, & that allowing yourself to consider reevaluating either

will result in total personality collapse?

There's an idea, once sort of widespread in certain countercultural corners but now I think almost totally lost, that total personality collapse isn't necessarily bad.

Some personalities are so dysfunctional that they ought to be thrown out entirely. If you choose to scramble your personality through psychedelics or limit experiences or occultism (or, usually, a mix of all three) and re-roll your preferences, nobody ought to stop you.

There's a countertrend to that now, with assumptions that:
1) whatever your personality is, it has positive value because it is rare (i.e., 'personal brand')
2) any modification is dangerous in proportion with its scale: you either lose your uniqueness or become an acid casualty

3) 'personality' is fixed anyway, part of essence, and so all you're doing is hiding it with inauthentic behavior or vandalizing it shallowly

I think this is all backward -- maybe because I read a lot of shit from the 60s and 70s (where the idea that somebody might seek limit experiences to change the whole personality was much more normal).

We do this with machine learning all the time too.

Percussive maintenance is absolutely dangerous. But it's also dangerous to go through life with behaviors that you know are reliably fucking you over and that conventional incremental means of personality change have been unable to touch.

Percussive maintenance comes from Outside, sometimes. UFO contact, cryptid sightings, visitations by elves. They have a lot in common with heroic-dose type trips. But you don't, generally, get abducted by aliens on purpose.

(If you'd like to, Greenfield's versions of Crowley's versions of some rituals might be worth looking into. Read Secret Cyphers of the UFOnauts & Occult Rituals of the Men in Black for details. Follow up with Cosmic Trigger, I guess.)

Anyway, it's not terribly surprising that postmodernism/poststructuralism/etc shows up and becomes popular not just during the 20th century (when, as John Higgs notes, it becomes hard for most people to ignore that the rules of the world are not comprehensible to man), but...

... in the mid-century, when shock treatments (not just electroshock but insulin shock etc) and psychedelic psychotherapy and cybernetic conceptions of cognition are a big part of the popular consciousness.

All these movements are about not relativism but the enabling mechanisms of metacognition: putting aside the personal beliefs whose validity you are trying to evaluate, even when you are emotionally attached to them, and temporarily accepting counterintuitive premises.

Most beliefs are not created through rational processes and will be killed by rational processes if they are allowed to. They are created by accidents of history, and then reified by the haphazard structures we build on top of them. Self-analysis is playing jenga with your mind.

And nothing is really immune to this. Philosophy of science shows us that even science has essentially historical and political blindspots, related to what we are incentivized to look at or ignore. So even if all the things scientific consensus accepts are true...

... (which no scientist would claim, ofc), the *meaning* of all of that can be radically recontextualized by a new discovery such that the 'big picture' changes drastically & our behaviors must change in turn.

"Facts don't care about your feelings" is an emotionally-driven attempt to deny this contingency of factuality on context -- to claim that the foundation of a personality on empirically-tested laws is not subject to any disruption. But these 'facts' are rarely empirical either.

And, they are chosen in order to construct something relatively stable at time of construction, rather than being constructed to be antifragile, let alone 'true'. You can build an enormous variety of apparently-contradictory personalities on carefully chosen sets of facts.

And 'carefully chosen' isn't necessary, because any fragile structure eventually collapses into a sturdier one. Any persistent structure is sturdy (on average), and any possible structure eventually becomes sturdy through collapse.

So it seems to me that the appropriate way to produce a maximally functional personality (if you've got the support to be temporarily dysfunctional) is to stuff your head with an infohazard battle royale, like a kodoku / guu box. Whatever thoughts are left are maximally deadly.

(Ofc some memes will literally kill you, eventually. So this is kind of dangerous.)

@threadreaderapp unroll