The lawyer and the doctor
Risk, training, habit & inclination. Mary Douglas and narcissism. Not in that order.
Part 1 The lawyer and the doctor
When I was a younger adult I was very briefly on a team sports club committee. In a mixed gender competition of a sport with a low profile in Australia. The committee were all of a similar age and contained some early career tradcore professionals.
Being mixed it was low contact gameplay. Officially it was no contact, but crashes and tumbles and errors were always possible.
The lawyer on the committee said we must take out the insurance with the mostest. The doctor, who had surely seen sports injuries and understood the dangers to the body, was more, dare I say, sanguine. They took a more, I felt, statistical view, and while the outcomes could be very bad, they were unlikely to happen on our watch, given the general well behaved attitudes of the players. All teams were a good sort.
The lawyer rejected this approach out of hand because the downside were catastrophic. This was an all or nothing approach, or rather, always assume the worst and conserve what you have in order to maintain it. No moving fast and breaking shit here.
Most of the committee just listened as they argued their cases back and forth. I would have said that the doctor won on points but we went with the lawyer anyway.
In the end we went with more insurances and raised the subscription fees to play.
What struck me was the professional differences and the question of their personalities. The perception of risks presented was influenced, at least in their argued positions, by their training. But would they have held the same positions had they studied each others’ career?
Did they choose that career because of their personal preferences? Did that chosen career double-down on their inclinations? Did the career allow the opportunity to test or prove the limits of their preferences? Did the study and application affect in anyway one’s perception and world-view?
It was about this time that I read works by the anthropologist Mary Douglas. See below. First we’ll have a digression or two.
Case work
While I have split here by profession the legalistic and the statistical approaches, both methodologies were ruled by cases, both have a great deal of detail in the devil of their routines.
In the legalistic profession the cases are tests that prove judgements (laws and precedence in common law jurisdictions). In law each case is judged according to an exemplar, or model singularities which index and sort other decisions in each case. The law is an application of a method that compares what is before them to a type specimen (agreed or inherited). (It is odd that this model of the ‘law’ is used in science, that such socially constructed rituals are used in objective ontologies: as in the “laws of physics” to indicated something not subjective or constructed, consensually or not, but I guess the imperial god above is not thought to be constructed either).
In the statistical professions the cases are not taxonomical models with or without a hierarchy of structure. Here each case is a point on a graph, which as data is collected, gives an overall picture which can be grokked in aggregate, and may change with newly collected data. Then it is all mathematical in attention to detail.
Sometimes the two ways are mixed as where results (of examinations) are normalised to a bell curve of expectations, where the picture judges the cases. (When this, in the early 1980s, was explained to my higher school certificate class morale dropped appreciably, I mean, why bother to excel when you’ll be algorithmed anyway. People are naturally open to more systems based approaches in my opinion/feedback).
So, the important thing to note with this mixing, is that the split here illustrated between professions can also happened within professions. In taxonomy these types of approaches are called the lumpers and the splitters.
These do not directly map to the legalistic and the statistical types. For both lumping and splitting are legalistic, their cases are the individual examples chosen are type specimens, that represent a population regarded as a species. Taxonomy is a type of counting, of where to make a mark and score a notice into the fabric of reality, and then ritually arguing your case based on precedence of tradition and prior judgements.
It is only a surface game of categorisation, as the moral implications are few and far between.
Lumpers and splitters differ in how different cases must be in their differences before this mark is made to score the game of reality into different bits.
Splitters have a lower threshold to separate out one population from another to which any particular case/individual belongs. If it walks like a duck…
Lumpers think splitters get to carried away into the fine details of difference. There are more important things to do. Those who work outside of taxonomy but use their work, like ecologists, will tend to favour the lumpers, but personal preferences will override this.
But lumping is like looking at the overall picture of the data points making up the graph and splitting is like assuming the worst by trying to assume nothing.
Boxes of words
Decades later, as I write, at the periphery of my vision the terms Nomothetic & idiographic arrive at my door. Like a baby left in a box.
The nomothetic represents the method, or perhaps bias, to generalise, and the idiothetic approaches the detail with greater specific efforts.
This lumpy general view of the two approaches immediately gets complicatedly split.
In any, if not all discipline’s these two tendencies are not neatly separated by professional intensities. But, not only can these two approaches or biases be intermixed within a profession, (the bell curve example above) some specifics are generalised bits, some generalised cases become the specifics for a meta-discipline (with or without any conscious considerations as to the matter). And all of these can necker cube all the way down, and up, and out sideways, if not into any direction our propositions can metaphor our headspaces with or by.
An inclination to do one of the other may end up doing the opposite style depending on context, or maintain coherency with some practical aspect of an inquiry, or its traditional context in mind.
One way to look at this is through the lens of the great chain of being of university-based faculties, or our sciences and humanities in their general departments: mathematics:physics:chemistry:biology:psychology:anthropology.
In the study of othered societies, anthropology, the idiothetic is regarded as the specific groups/culture/society/polity under study, in the field work which gives anthropology its reason for bothering to exist. And the nomothetic is the general chatter about the what-might-be-common-to-us-all despite our diversity of groups/culture/society/polities.
In the study of the individual self, psychology, the nomothetic is the general diagnosis (the type specimen) and the idiothetic is the particulars for the individual case in this patient presenting before us.
Each studies the world and the self, in the very general and the very specific, in relations more or less, but in comparison with each other, or indeed other faculties or sciences, their placement in the great chain of these investigating necker cubes, our preferences adjust the resolution in ways which mix up or strike out one or both, in a lazy alignment between preference and methodology. We lose sight of this almost immediately. We gloss over it as our eyes glaze over.
It is that loss of sight which leads us to the double-downing and rash intensities we do in error when we encounter a gap and seek to fill it with our own most favoured answer syndromes. Politically these are our worst moments, when worlding becomes world-building in-the-name-of. Perhaps the blur is a blessing. Or at least a gift if we take time to notice its implications, rather than struggle on in-the-name-of.
So in between all those flickering necker cubes of investigation, some have labels, some (like the world as I use that word) do not, and some have more than one label as each cube matryoshka dolls up its fractalicity down like onion domes pupping kittens and cats on the hot tin roof of our alignments, and pet hates.
This part 1, beginning with the illustrations of the lawyer and the doctor, is a very long way to introduce again the thought of Mary Douglas, the cyberneticism of incorporating attitudes to risk as an index to the study of society, its neckering of individual choice as we meet with each other, as we reject… whatever… in maintaining boundaries and inclusive relations, and add one more idea as an empirical measure, or at least, a hard fact of the real world we often choose to forget if not forgive, a little too easily.
(For my takes on Mary Douglas see the linkpost page).Text book case
I would like to consider the narcissist/psychopath from the point of view of someone who is a social theorist (i.e. every single one of us).
That is, if we take the psychologist’s nomothetic stance of the pathology of narcissism, but not towards an idiothetic diagnosis of an individual case, but as a danger to us all.
(And I mean all as in each, every, altogether, grouped and gridded, or not, and as part of the worlding we each do together and alone.)
And that, if we do not do so then the risk of damage narcissists do is multiplied by our lack of direct policing of those behaviours. And so we the deal with it even worse as the damage they do then suits them in doing the damage, if not protecting them from such policing.
Instead we bicker about motivation, culpability, structural or systemic failures affecting individual agency, which may not exist unless you are woke, or shout freedom at ghosts, after taking the pill, and the responsibilities we inherit is wasted on categories of identity or faith, and their rash implementations.
The narcissist collapsoid has no self and no world that can be nomo-idio-theticaly captured or resolved. All other discussions in the _noyaux_ of our lives are therefore possible distractions or deflections that suit the narcissist. I.E. don’t attack the ideologue opposite, watch your back you naive fool. {and remember preferences are not always ideologies}The psychopath in their narcissism ignores the world in suiting themselves, as a collapsoid of [self=world] they refuse or are unable to Janus dance, to admit the necker cube of life, they cannot do this to necker, nor to generalise beyond the self to the world. This aggrandizement refuses, or fails, to specifically place the self in the world.
This is because their entitled point of view does not exist separately from {their [self=world]}… —(no pronoun for that one me-mateys].
So it is impossible to put something therein which is already [itself].
But from our point of view in the world this looks selfish… —at the very least. To Janus dance this neckering cube of self and world, generally and specifically, requires empathy, which in the narcissist is broken, or it never existed as even a possibility.
If we take Mary Douglas descriptions of choice, perceptions of risk and our inclinations as well as our professions of investigations, our traditions of response, in raising our next generation, we can see that if we fail to police our groups and ourselves from the damage narcissists do, the healthy Janus dance (which sometimes some called Reason) collapses and we are left with zero sum games in which we are made offers we cannot refuse, which both obliviate the world from sight, and sight from our selves.
The outcome of which is collectivizing in the name-of, or the individualizing of us into quantum foam. These are extinction level events, the collapsoid becomes a singularity of narcissistic alignment. They are not just self-centred, not just selfish individuals, when, where or if the entire world is aligned with their collapsoid fantasies. For the death cult beckons.
Because Mary Douglas’ descriptions directly inquire into our necker cubes of response to our hopes and fears, I argue it provides the beginnings of a method to re-dress calmly the damage done by narcissism over generations of bad policing. Policing which is so often carried out by narcissists, who love positions of power and opportunities to concierge who is in and who is out. It is the damage we must police well. To world well is to self this damage to a minimum. To self well is to world this damage even less.
Damage is not a moral category. Damage is a practical matter, this is why it is morally important. If only to morale.
The good news is that the narcissists influence is not complete. Parasites may overwhelm a host, but their ongoing opportunistic infections do declare in our survival, that we are not facing extinction because of them, we survive. We do enough indirect policing and nurturing to have got as far as we have done without (consciously) dealing with it directly. But we could do better.
Indirect dealings often get captured by narcissists and their flying monkeys. All the various death-cults illustrate this. There is a policing message sold which blinds the membership in binding them to their hunt-master. The dictator raised in an emergency becomes tyrant in the ongoing crisis of maintaining power.
It is at this stage one may raise the spectre of witch-hunts and their bad social outcomes, and so in listening to the potential claim that policing narcissism might become a witch-hunt there are two points to be made clear:
Yes, all and any such processes when captured by narcissists become witch-hunts; and,
Witches do not exist but narcissists do exist.
In reference to this second point, narcissists do exist because they do damage, for example, what they do in point 1.
So, because witches do not exist, but narcissists invest themselves as witch-hunters anyway, in order to generate narcissistic supply (sometimes called power with those with less sensitivity to narcissistic issues), we must always look very carefully at how the hunt-master benefits from saying who is a witch, and not think we can avoid the issue by saying witches do not exist (as if that alone made witch-hunting bad).
The main thing about witch-hunts is that there is a hunt, and the hunt-master determines who is a witch. But as witch do not exist what is really going on?
If we do nothing about the hunt-masters because witches do not exist, this does not mean the witch-hunter is not at work, especially if we do not police them. Thus, do so directly, consciously, calling a spade a spade (if it walks like a duck, talks like a rabbit) and not getting them indirectly, say, for tax-evasion on their ill-gotten proceeds.
If we do nothing, we do ourselves and the world a disservice. We thus world badly and let those who world as the self themselves off the hook, while occasionally indirectly remediating the damage done without naming the failure, our failure to police, and instead go after the crime. This is a game they play to well too be caught at.
If we do nothing and say “It was always this way” then we fail to police the hunt-master as narcissist, and they can continue to surf-hunt the world for victims at our expense, as we subsidise the world for their benefit without generosity of spirit. Now if you point this out to them, they will say things like “it has always been this way” as they hide (unknowingly) behind our continuing failure to police them, or, “I am just doing god’s work’ as they hide behind the goodness that worlding facilitates.
For it takes empathy to realise that the self is not the world. Empathy is a dance, if not the dance of life as a self worlding in the world of others. This is what makes us human, the ability to meet with each other.
If there is no dance we get the collapsoid example of the grandiose psychopath.
Re-neckering the essay so far
If we take the psychologist’s nomothetic type of the narcissist and use it idiothetically in society/worlding applications, the pathology in situ will provide the social theorist (i.e. each and everyone of us self worlding along) with very useful warnings and guides.
However, we should not take onboard the well-meant advice (given to survivors of narcissists’ games) to run away. This might be good for the survivor selfing their way idiothetically to recovery of self and world, but it can be very bad worlding nomothetically for the rest of us.
The main warning: narcissists just ‘say stuff’ and see if it has some effect that suits them. Trolling (for narcissistic supply) is one example. Trolling generally is a type of theft, whether it is pilfering or arm robbery depends. Just because they make a hit with some truth that you with your empathy can recognise, does not mean you should listen to them. A broken analogue clock is right twice a day. The narcissists have probably also said twenty other half-jokey half-hatey things which fail to hit you at all. They sling gravel like mud to see what buttons you have.
Narcissists (often covert or victim narcissists) arbitrarily denigrating whoever is not in the room at that moment, is another example. This can provide a way to police them. In defence of that third person not in the room.
Generally they get really good at finding and targeting peoples’ buttons or triggers, as they have been doing ever since they failed the reality principle as a toddler, but still had to come to some settlement with their failure (but our responsibility). Generally they settle on being the world either openly as grandiose larger-than-life love bombers of control, or covertly as the-best except for all those people and circumstances stopping their true natures from being worshipped by all (incipient conspiracy theorising).
What this “say stuff” means is that they can inhabit any and all groups or lifestyles of whatever type or grid you can imagine or identify in either lumps or splinters. They are always there with us, they are always on our side where we are most likely to not notice them. Watch your back. Guard your police.
Narcissists are everywhere and espouse every value that has arisen in time. They are not just on the other side, they are not the reason for the other side to exist. It is much more important for worlding to police on your side. Don't let them distract you with some far away enemy.
Part of that narcissistic supply they engender is setting up structures that suit themselves. (It has always been this way/ I do god’s work).
This may be more important than the systemic failures that structuralists point out. This may be more important to history than agency among normies with empathy who world well. In this view history is a failure to police narcissists, even as worlding succeeds by providing the host, and perhaps vector, for the parasite.
Curiously narcissists will also cry victim to those same systems and structures which other narcissists have set up before them, both do so in order to generate supply. Now that is a bad social ecology. That is bad worlding, that is a dysfunctional noyau, a dialectic of nonesuch.
Importantly, narcissistic behaviour is a sociological constant through time and across geographies. As a constant it should be used in all social sciences, if not as an index, then it must be allowed for in any model in application to the world.
Those who either have given up on structure because | utopia, or who say structure X has never ‘truly been tried’ are both right in the frameworks on offer where the narcissist has not been considered, or not controlled for.
In the blur of these two cynicisms (because | utopia, and, never | 'truly been tried’] what signal arises above the threshold of notice? What index can we add? Let’s add the self/world ratio or Janus dance. Let’s add that necker framework of the duck-rabbit. Here, that the collapsoid of that self-world ratio that is the narcissist is the main event. At least they think so, and as members of a death-cult we believe them. Immortality is here and now I suspect however. That is the world, it goes on, it has always been here.
I argue now, as a thought experiment, that perhaps no structure X need ‘truly be tried’ if we policed narcissists. Perhaps any system would work fine, perhaps that what the diversity of anthropologies of othered societies shows us. Perhaps the contradictions of a system and the failures structures generate would be better meliorated and insured against if we policed narcissists better.
In this thought experiment, all systems are a utopia, but never utopic, if we police narcissism. Perhaps our human natures fail us because we are too forgiving and reliant on the world to world for us in generosity, and so are too slow to police narcissism for fear of losing that generous spirit that is the world. Fear is a funny thing that stops us laughing.
But narcissists don’t care about the world, generosity is a sign of weakness in the zero-sum games they play. They play to win over losers who do not even know they are playing, who rely on the assurance of the insurance of the world to tide them over these bad times that narcissists generate. It works its true, as we survive, but it could be better.
In part we fail to police them because narcissists have too often policed us and we do not see that role then as a good one to act in. See how the narcissists have taken on the role and suited themselves??? See how they run things?
If we do not police narcissists then they will play cop to their heart’s content, they will play us as fools in the name of god, order, loyalty, love and any virtue or value under the sun. In the name of everything they consider to be our weakness. That’s why they smirk like that.
All strength are weaknesses too.
Part 2, The stickler and the do-gooder
In part 1 by way of two professions, the doctor and the lawyer, and attitudes to insurance by way of lumping and splitting our notices in relations to risks of catastrophic injury in sport, I skirted over the ideas of training, habit and bias to focus on our reticent to police narcissism and psychopathy directly. (There are costs. There are outcomes.)
Here I wish to focus again on the earlier part of the lawyer and the doctor, in regard to the idea of that by dealing with life (lumping it) and its inquiry by way of cases in their ritualised minutia, a general outlook is worlded by those splitty decisions.
The chosen professionals used to illustrate this, each in their own way, were the lawyer and the doctor. The lawyer legalistically extracts and applies one case of its distillation in law and applies it with rigour (and less expediency in its doubled-down idealised form). The doctor seeks a diagnosis rather than judgement in relation to a recognition of the potential for intervention to do no harm, and with that practicality in mind, looks at cases with an eye on likelihood.
They deal with risk differently. Doctors deal with the empirical body, lawyers less so, legally all bodies are social facts, and so end up play hard.
I pointed out that this stereotypical division between professions, is also at play within professions. Notably, and self-aligning with the topic at hand, that of taxonomy and its lumpers and splitters.
These preferences do not preclude us in our lives from splitting in one domain, while lumping in another, legalistic viewing results in one arena and statistically remaining sanguine in another. In alignment with our inclinations, and in their contrary routines we get trained in along the way, I.E. in how we compose our movements in regard to our hopes and fears as they bear on perceptions of risk (a potentially useful indexing example).
When we move from the illustrations of these professions, legalistic and empirical, and use them to generate a more mythotypical fable, we can re-label these two vectors of behaviour as the stickler and the do-gooder. The stickler and the do-gooder do not directly map with the lawyer and the doctor, even if stickler and being-legalistic seem like a good isomorphic match. So the comparison between the professions and the fabulous mythotypes is not so much an analogy looking towards some reasonable proportions, or proportionate Reason, but the metaphor that fabuous animals (types of movement) allow us to story. That literature allows us to live in empathy with each of our moves, and which ideology, dogma, doubled-down world-building maybe not be able to do well, or at all.
I will describe the mythotypes negatively first, as their appellations suggests.
The stickler is someone who by nature/nurture copes with the vagaries of life by applying some order or inherited rituals and routines with no exceptions outside of received categories. Dogma, ideology are potential outcomes of the stickler for the rules. These can be very annoying.
There is no frame not to be stickled in. But re-framing is often outlawed. The Janus dance is not something sticklers encourage, even if one cannot live without it, is not to be admitted and often repressed.
The do-gooder (where not a wowser of the stickler type yes even these fabulous animal mythotypes get complifexicated by neckering potentialities) seeks to interfere in order to help get everyone to get along, often in the name of order (order not as an instrument but as a goal). Occasionally in contrast to the stickler, the rules will be bent in the name of good nurturing, the way a mother rules gameplay between siblings of various ages and abilities, such that they all get a chance to grow up into sticklers or do-gooders on their own time-frames. The interference maintains the lump that is the family, that allows the individuals to grow up into the world. Doing that in the ‘real world’ can be very annoying.
Whether you stickle or do-good, or otherwise, depends on your own nurture/nature-plex and how you Janus dance the gap between them in our everyday routines in which we self the world into the world I self. Wisdom does more than know the difference.
The complication of this split is we each do both, I.E. we lump it.
We do both, in our different roles, and in these roles there are edge cases that prompt us to negotiate our compositions the other way. Some might see that as hypocritical, but we, unlike some, contain multitudes.
The compositions are are not so much a compromise as a mess of annoyance.
This is why people can be so annoying even when they are good empathetic selfworlders.
That is our crowing glory.
We are human because we can share meals and have meetings, meetings r’ us. That why we hate meetings, because they are an annoying responsibility where the world comes to us each and together.
At other times we seek to raise awareness in order to stickle or do-good, we rush out into the world
Or, if we keep out heads down, and don't look up, in fear, then wedges are driven to split us up into our lumped fears and we become the mere playthings of the hunt-masters.
Meetings are the middle-ground.
Generally there is no conspiracy, even if crises occur, people are just worlding badly. Conspiracies are never true, but are always self-fulfilling. The want to conspiracy is yet another outcome of the worlding urge. Worlding is not always good. The worlding urge is selected for by evolution and evolution doesn’t care whether it is good or not. That bit is entirely up to us as we negotiate our way in the world. The conspiracy theorist is a do-gooder. Like any missionary they are naive and yet cannot keep away from the ways of the world, and so instead of reaching some separatist settlement with the world, and like a covert narcissist in some ways (their empathy for the world is inverted) they ended up blaming the world for the fact that they cannot control it (no one can of course) so they end up denigrating it in the name of some subset they feel they are not a part of, if only because they reject it all. Fuckwits, but we must have empathy for them if the world is to work. The correct response of course to not join a club that would have you as a member.Mary Douglas has a quartered system of feedback that looks like a four way relational typology, but underneath, the vectors of the dimensions involved in the graph are based (and woked) on ‘perceptions of risk’ borne with us, and borne by us, as bias, as well in training (socialising the individual through living out the reality principle into empathy and worlding). Mary Douglas says each quarter can be quartered, that each grid-group will grid and group differently in different domains just like the way our professions stickle and do-good as they lump their splits and split their lumps. Society is an ever increasing complexification, which may or may not be fractal-like all the way down to the next phase change. The typology does not separate the way a stickle would expect, nor whole the way the do-gooder would fix things.
So the typology here, and this is the most useful part and is why I keep badgering you, dear reader, with words like neckering and Janus Dancing, is, …it is not a structure like a chassis, like a framework we can hang the wheels of reality on, or off, and so make, or make of, society a wagon or a repressed conspiracy about its true nature as a chassis, or even a type 2 relational structuralism. Structuralisms are quite staid models, and society is not a house we make, the polity is not a super-homunculi. We build stuff sure, its an obvious metaphor to use as a model but… but while we are searching for the best word, can we use the word ‘worlding’ as a stopgap please. It’s nice and nebulous and honest and inclusive and individually available.
Systems theory adds feedback and cybernetic corrections to those structuralisms, staid or relational, and so the view Mary Douglas gives us is born somewhat pre-term, and the humidicrib for it has not been invented yet. Most big ideas arrived before their time, but then they still need some nurturing to be prepared for the right time. in any case, the key insight might actually allows us to leave these typologies behind for good, as their anthropological ‘dev’ context becomes more moot as time goes on.
What will remain is the index of perceptions of risk as a common human denominator, with the addition (mine) that narcissists as collapsoids of the world/self urges is a common pathology that needs policing. And in any social theory requires to be controlled for as a variable, and not be ignored, or idiothetically shoved under a lower necker cube.
The result of the (worlding) urge is that the world is a type of insurance, it maintains through time and places all responses to dangers via our various perceptions of risk in an inherited noyau or two. And thus here in the world at any time, what risk is… —is never clear, it is a constant creative compositional blur from which social realities and stories fall out like star dust. The worlding we each do in the world selfishly selflessly is the result, in large measure, on our response to risk perceived, shared and agreed on… —ish.
Here, in this context of risk and response, freedom is often both overblown and underwritten.
Seeing the world as a negotiation of insurance (at the very least) means that it is not order (the stickler assumes) nor the good (as the do-gooder assumes) but a outcome of the processes we each live together, which supplies our agency, and supports our buildings/structures/categories. Those buildings/structures/conspiracies do not explain the world.
As such the world is not a whole. But it is more than the sum of its bits, and less than the parts would have you believe. The world is no lump. Nor is it some sum or particle, it does not wave back at you with thanks, nor shout at your rejection of it. We have an urge to world it, and often think this means building it, but that is often an overly ambitious tower. Nor that the world must have an order we can or should discover, perhaps in the name of. But it has no orders for us at all, not even an emergent ontology of purpose or care, for these are all outcomes of worlding. Even as the world has things of our desire, if not objects, that we can agree on so we can disagree again later on, the noyaux is always with us. That urge, that space the body takes up, that becomes the world among us.
The world is a well used track of our movements. A pavement of practices, routines, rituals, applications and abilities.
The stickler and do-gooder seek an order of sorts, which so often totalises, and destroys the village in order to save it, that invades that which is not there, these over-determined conflicts destroy the noyaux in which conflict creates the world, and thus when empire passes into dust again, the dusty world remains regardless of the sand. The world is old, the new world is thus even older.
Order as an outcome of good worlding is lived by doing well, working harder, loving better and not by shouting 'freedom' at the nearest witch. Good neighbours don’t shout MINE MINE MINE MINE all day long. They don’t say “I am calling the police” when you knock on their door to welcome them to the neighbourhood. Or shout at passersby “do you deny my right to exist!”
Anything that engenders self-fulfilling paranoia does so at the expense of the world. Where the world deteriorates then our selves degrade.
This is why good worlding must first police the narcissist our our own sides, we should know them better (whatever that might be given our lumpsplit movements (bias versus routines), as they will surely distract us as they naturally seek to lead the charge and drag us all off the cliff at the edge of the world of their collapsoid self=world, and into the singularity of madness and death. Their power is our responsibility.
In addition to their unworlded selfcentredness, we must also avoid anything that flattens (by stickle or good) the dance of fractal like necker cubes all the way down, it is the flattening that gives your world an edge. Take care not to fall off, and keep the world round about and our children’s extinction is much less of a potential end.
Then we can move on to safely deal with the risks that good worlding well creates.
And so it goes.
The search for stability leads to change.
Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com