written <2014-03-14 Fri>
I recently edited my vpreneur koan to vpredeur. But let’s take it from the top.
Koanic Soul is multifunction, but one of the fundamental purposes is the construction of a universal (thus deepsock compatible) Earth-adaptive meta-ethics.
This is necessary because my bio-default meta-ethics is extremely maladaptive. It stymies my every move.
To review, I am melon back, Thal deepsock front.
The absolute selfless ethical universalism comes from the deepsocket front. In a small Neanderthal tribe, money does not exist. The intimacy of bonds and absence of freeloaders makes absolute altruism practical and in fact optimal. Processing power and information accuracy/storage required for rational group utility maximization calculations do not exceed the hardware specs of the human brain. I am thus hardwired to make decisions on that basis. By design, I unquestioningly, gladly take a bullet for the team, and feel honored to do it – as if I am fulfilling my ultimate purpose.
Unfortunately, as has been made abundantly clear to me, there is no team. And even if there was, rational group utility calculations in a world of 7 billion vastly exceed available processing power.
A Neanderthal is only concerned with the welfare of his bondmates (or in the absence of any, with nothing). However, as a Melon back I am concerned with society. This squares the above problems.
However, it also gives me a motive to solve. Unlike the pure Neanderthal, I still have something that exists to care about.
In my previous post I mentioned that I’d changed “war” to “prey”, in favor of the predation paradigm for interactions past the Dunbar limit.
Today I felt a clash, an unresolved eddy, generated by the interplay of “vpreneur” and “prey”. As I investigated, I discovered a trace of my original ingenopathic programming lurking in “vpreneur”, which stands for “value entrepreneur”.
I realized that this koan symbolized a commitment to maximizing value in the universal sense, rather than for my own particular.
What am I, a damned communist? Yet I could not expunge the concept without damaging/depressing my ingenopathic core. I was stuck. One or the other had to give, but which? Neither would budge without a depressive reaction.
I cast my mind over the latest passage of Beard’s history of the US that I’d read, on the post-civil war Republican dominance and concomitant increasing corruption, as American scope spiraled further orders of magnitude past the Dunbar limit and expanded in wealth and power into Glubb space. I projected this first batch of maggots into the writhing holdful of Millenial America. I considered the rise of the predator and parasite – and I grokked.
Destroyers create, creators destroy. The parasites hasten the end. Decomposition is a function of nature. The lions cull the heard. Winter kills the diseased. Strength is moral; weakness is moral. Entrepreneurship is a special case of rapine. Lie to a (feral) woman; speak truth to a (real) man. Cooperation is a special case of predation.
Vpredeur means eat value. Predation (sales) is king. Social exchanges are about extracting value. So easy, so simple.
The back end, the digestive tract, is simply situational ethics, rooted in game theory and biological programs. Sometimes conditions to enforce virtue exist; usually they don’t. Skull and bones or Union Jack, makes no difference to me.
The Neanderthal was weak, and has been punished until he now learns strength. Sela.
The best part? It’s fun.
If you feel a wave of depressive affect threatening to reject this ROM update, remember – it applies ONLY to interactions with the non-allied, or the non-ingenopathic, or past the Dunbar limit. Furthermore, even past the Dunbar limit, conditions such as tit for tat, credible cultural mores, and biological kinship are valid modifiers of game parameters.
The point is to slip into the situational fluidity of the full melon, without compromising the ingenopathic Neanderthal soul that makes us God’s best-loved children (said the half-breed).
UPDATE:
Holy shit, this fixed my constant low-grade guilt over any form of relaxation. If the ethical duty is constant value creation, then any downtime is at least somewhat deplorable. No matter what one tells oneself about the necessity of recovery to maintain performance. But if the paradigm is value capture, then relaxation = success.
Not that my workaholism is likely to diminish. Rather, that my recovery will be more efficient and my performance in settings where relaxation is adaptive will be more natural. Plus it feels great. Hoo fuckin rah.
UPDATE II:
I was thinking about value. What is my core value metric? Happiness? Hell no, doesn’t work. You think “Am I happy?” and happiness vanishes. You emotionally introspect at all and happiness vanishes.
So I needed an objective yet accurate external metric for an internal state. Tough.
At the time I was watching The Ultimate Fighter. I noticed I could call the first fights by which interviewee had fewer unconfidence tells during the interview. The verbal content of the interview didn’t matter; just the tells.
Then I realized that the same applies to me. Value maximization for me means tracking unconfidence tells. That is the KPI. Easy, common sense, doesn’t cause introspection. Don’t even need to actually record it, just be aware.
UPDATE III:
I added “ok” below the right hand cluster:
halo
bone flute
home
ok
I was watching The Ultimate Fighter season 17. Uriah Hall and Chael Sonnen conversed on Uriah’s problem with self-dout. Chael shared a similar story. Went to a sports psychologist. Said that must accept this is normal.
Truth in that. Fight against it, makes it stronger. Accept, can move past. That’s the meaning of the “ok”. Prevents negativity-repression/self-condemnation/overreacting-false-confidence spiral. This is a key part of ingenopathic dysfunction.
Similar to self-forgiveness, I suppose, except it’s not. Forgiveness implies higher authority, moral imprimature. This isn’t about that. That stuff doesn’t work. We don’t have that authority, and anyway to forgive yourself is to excuse yourself, which is not what a man does.
It’s more about simple acceptance. That’s why it’s linked to the belonging cluster, and works only in that group. The antidote to toxic ingenopathic shame spirals is belonging. This is the key to removing my maladaption in multiple domains – perfectionism at work, second guessing in socializing, depressive cycles started by laziness during biological downtime, feelings of inadequacy before mission scope, etc. All these sources of negative affect interfere with performance. It is all about removing the negative eddies, not amplifying the positive current.
That is the fundamental, counter-intuitive psychological insight that is missing from so much self help. You cannot bury a negative with a positive. You unravel the sources of negative, so that the positive organically flourishes, waxes and wanes, according to its own nature.
With this update, I feel that the constant battling against myself is over. Work and performance will happen naturally, efficiently, sustainably.
My next priority is to reclaim the 1-2 days per week I lose to biological downtime. Poor circadian management is most of the problem, driven by work overload from learning a new job. That learning curve is past, and I’ve learned the new schedule, meal sizing and timing, etc. I’ll implement that this week, then work on self tracking to test more technically complex gains with supplements etc. None of that was sustainable while these psychological issues were in play.