Processing his alignment towards the world is one of the hardest problems an ingenopath faces. A hominid designed for a 6-12 person tribe of fellow ingenopaths is not equipped to face the fluid hybrid mega-populations of toxic modernity.
My left hand koan cluster was intended to deal with this problem:
cross
crescent moon (mostly dark)
war
Intentional design, as usual, never quite fits. I swear, running koans is just like running a startup.
To an ingenopath’s ears, war means self-sacrificial combat of total annihilation. Strike one. War is for something and against something. Strike two.
If I am at war with the Silent Planet, on whose behalf do I fight? Do I wish to save the inhabitants? Christianity would say yes. Yet how can I simultaneously war against a party, and fight on behalf of that party? It’s a recipe for dissonance.
No, the truth is much simpler. The nations of the world have made their choice. They or their fathers rejected the truth. I owe them nothing. There is no one to rescue; no damsel to save; no people to liberate.
Jim’s most recent brilliance comes to mind: “It is right and just that men should prey on feral women.”
I had argued the same in a long comment thread at Frost’s. But to see it from Jim, put clearly, stripped of all crusading nobility, finally brought me clarity.
There are indeed two groups: One is my tribe. The other are the prey animals.
Neanderthals may be ingenopaths, but they are excellent hunters. Their current paralysis results from the ambiguous gradient between in-group and out-group, one they were never meant to process. Attempt a crusade, and (right now) they’d find their own in-group mystified and condemnatory, still lost in the fog.
But predate? That’s what the moderno-adaptive do anyway. That’s adaptive behavior. And it’s behavior I understand perfectly.
It fits, with perfect congruence. And I don’t have to lose my soul-core to put it on. At last, at last: Freedom.
Naturally, this is just one more river stone.
UPDATE:
This can be expressed more generally as follows:
Koanic’s law: Past the Dunbar limit, the only functional paradigm is predation.
Corollary 1: When interests align and betrayal is punished, cooperation temporarily arises.
Corollary 2: Cooperation is coordinated predation.
Hume, Locke and Rousseau were wrong. The state of nature is adaptive bliss, rights exist only when defended, and government is nasty, brutish and short.
To stand on the shoulders of giants requires a gymnast’s intellectual poise – or a good left hook.
(Get it?)