Alignment notes ① New Norway, June 2025
Zarathustra is a lazy bro.
‘Alignment’ or ‘aligning’ came to my greater attention while in the latter half of my travels in Canada in 2025.
These Alignment notes ⓧ posts are based on short notes from my red journal, an overwritten 2023 moleskin diary. [Writing up the notes will generate annotations put between square brackets.] [Often new thoughts rather than better expression.]
The word entered my notes more and more after I wrote about values as an effort and not a coin. An alignment is an intentional effort, it is a key psychological piece of the worlding puzzle, without it the talking solution, the talking problem-making, would not happen. Thus we have the grunting barbarians always at our gates.
I begin these notes just where alignment takes over from value. All the previous posts on Alignment ⓧ is informed by these notes. They are in some way preparation for posting these notes.
24 June 2025 New Norway, Alberta
Values: I have now described or aligned values as effort in worlding.
This is to say, what may seem to be a bias/preference/inclination is still, always, an effort. [Because we are alive.] As such these alignments [or their values] are not qualities that are held intrinsically or by definition, i.e. as a property of some thing, [as an essence —that might be corrupted or diseased]. [Instead these qualities might as readily be something else (fungible collections or accessories) the way any one might wear any hat, [if it fits the occasion we live].
[In this frame] Nietzsche: I have wondered about that “re-evaluation of all values” for decades.
[Now I am so far away from having read him in translation.]
[I guess I would call a re-evaluation of all values an alignment project, but if values are not seen as an effort, all might be lost. Values have a taphonomy of usage. Use is an effort. Tradition maintains efforts across generations in a social learning species. [Boring paragraph on Nietzsche excluded here, but suffice it to say the vicar’s son needs more education on recent evolution theory but he is dead, if only his undead fan fiction writers could learn some more recent stuff.]
It is a truism that children copy (align) their parents’ models. What else have they got?
[To grow up is to align more widely from the world.] [The ratio differs across time and geography, as that proportion ranges across acceptable ages, genders, seniority, inheritance.]
Thus we can, in an elaborate economy, make a range of efforts and, with recursive effort, turn it into a swathe of options on a menu, and a life of identity becomes a life style.
In turn, again, in making an effort, we value this range of options, so that any life [however styled] is as valid as another.
In doing we may miss the point. Effort, labour itself, baptises nothing.
[If it did then hoarding labour as capital might work to allow heaven on earth, a similar example of alignment lies when we see empire equate ruler-ship with the one-god, or the sun-god, and it then fails by falling, despite repeated efforts to avoid such an ego-collapse, and, importantly, the world goes on regardless. The world requires no empire, no state, no particular alignments of order or loyalty.]
The original sins of value require no forgiveness. [That arises later in aligning efforts in the effort of aligning our lives raising children and washing their grubby bodies dirtied by learning.]
Yes, Nietzsche is still the pastor’s son, [his proposed efforts of re-evaluation] seek to clean the cassocks and vestments that past efforts/values have sown into tradition. [But still he refuses to be naked and grunt, even alone and misunderstood in the wilderness of social exclusion, so he rents his dresses rebirthing…—what exactly: popular culture, economy of effort and satisficing demands??]
Re-evaluation of all values is a type of baptism or confession. [The clothes-washer as god who labours at the riverside, the flow must go on…]
This labour is not required, at least that configuration is not required, the world will wash it out regardless. It is better to acknowledge the effort, the labour, the value of discernment, is an effort, [and not a coin]. And in any case not restrict this work to a sky-god or über-shamans. In terms of effort, Zarathustra is a lazy bro.
Crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com