I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Charlie Kirk lately, and his assassination. It’s no surprise that as the holes get filled in, there is more and more sexual perversion coming to light — Tyler Robinson, his assassin, had a male lover, embroiled in some version of the hopped up hormonal soup the medical establishment has decided is A-OK as far as a legitimate treatment for obvious mental illness. This is an unfolding story, with the latest chapter being his lover displaying about the level of loyalty you’d expect for someone who wants to engage in self-mutilation of his genitalia. Crazy doesn’t do any of this justice.
What is more interesting to me is Charlie, and his career going around to various campuses, and in a very relaxed way, dealing with all sorts of comers in discussion and debate. The videos I’ve seen indicate that Charlie was very good at defusing tension to an acceptable level in stressful situations, and moving through the crowd and their issues. This is not easy — Charlie was an obvious master, and there are really no words to describe his loss. I pulled apart the memetics in this piece — Charlie was someone who believed if you sat down with someone and established your own, independent relationship, you might change their mind. I call this empathetic brain-borrowing. There’s no way that any of Charlie’s opposition stood a realistic chance of doing anything other than drawing a stalemate with him. Charlie had mastered the venue.
Few people have actually had the exact experience Charlie lived. But I actually have. As an environmental activist, I, on more than one occasion, found myself facing a large, hostile crowd who wanted to do damage to my person, that I had to talk my way out of. Sometimes that crowd was large — I remember well, testifying at a 500 person hearing in Orofino, on the roadless initiative back in the 2000 timeframe. That resulted in some chanting to off me, so I left quickly. Outside, the same people who were wishing my demise had their children, who seemed to be trying to grab me, but in reality, were attempting to shake my hand. “You’re telling our parents things we can’t,” they said. And while it was moving, I still got the hell out of there.
There were other episodes in all of that, giving speeches and such. It was a rush. And I think it might be easy to ascribe to Charlie that for him, it was a rush as well. He was bold, and obviously far more famous than I ever was. But I’d caution anyone about jumping to conclusions on any narcissistic reasoning that he was doing it just for himself. I think, as a fundamentalist Christian, he believed in his mission, just as I believed in mine. But his never stopped, whereas mine did. And what happens that I can attest to is that each time you’d end up in one of those conflict-laden situations, it dulls you. Or rather, you become dismissive. You’re going to end up on the other side, very likely having dinner with people who you like, and the debates, especially with college kids, are not going to vary that much.
What likely happened with Charlie was he got into a routine where he may not consciously, but certainly unconsciously, viewed himself as invincible. There was enough security, enough handlers, to dull down the prospect of a true low probability event. And it seemed that he didn’t really mix things up as far as his routine. Somene wanting to kill him could — and did. He was predictable. And he was known by the masses. Almost no one in the timber industry, save actually for the top level, ever knew who I was. I would have been far more likely to die through an actual assassination, and I just wasn’t that important even to do that. You’d have had to read my book, and follow far more closely actual actions.
What happened to Charlie seems to me to follow a movie that I’ve found very relevant to my own experience. Called Fearless, starring Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini and Rosie Perez, it involves a plane crash survivor who becomes convinced he is basically immortal. He doesn’t have to worry about getting killed. It’s just not in the cards. The movie catches well the mental gloss that settles in after wave after wave of severe trauma. And you better believe Charlie had trauma.
But he learned to deal with it, powering through repeated attacks on his person, all the while being reinforced in his belief system by some of the most powerful people in the world. What’s the mental effect of having the President of the US tell you you’re doing important work? It’s not going to make you back off — especially at 31.
I like to think that my own experiences, which while not being at the same level as Charlie’s, and were far from trivial, helped me to evolve the perspective of an enlightened master. But sometimes, I think I engaged in that dismissive mindset myself. I’ve been attacked since the pandemic started four, and really five times. Each time, I seem to wave off the attack, instead of processing through potential increased risk. Some of us turn into psychopathic targets — we’re just too interesting to leave alone — and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to decrease my own modest profile.
But there’s something about deeply believing in something that brings out the psychopaths. They came for Charlie. We’ll have to see how this story really unfolds. But the bottom line is there is always a true price for being a hero.
I also look at my sons, who have no grand expectations of political action. They’re reasonably earnest and resolute young men. Noble, in fact. But they have no interest in the crowds. Still, when shit hits the fan, they don’t think twice. They run towards the trouble. It simply doesn’t occur to them to be afraid. Having kids almost Charlie’s age makes me ponder the level of integrity you want to raise your kids at. It’s a foregone conclusion with my own. But the answers aren’t as obvious as you might think.
Ladle Rapid on the Selway River, from another life
One of the things that is exquisitely irritating to me is when people go on about “the truth”. Why? Because the person talking about it usually isn’t in possession of it anyway, and anyone that knows much about a given subject realizes that, for the most part, it’s a scaling problem, in both time and space. Truth at a small scale is too often an inadequate descriptor with truth at a large scale, and if you don’t have any real sense of epistemology (at least if you’re here on this blog, you might be looking for one) you won’t even get there.
And to make things worse, seems like the primary reason anyone brings up “the truth”, as opposed to making the argument, is to gain power and control over someone else. It’s not like they’re really looking to share.
That doesn’t mean that objective truth doesn’t exist. It’s just powerfully difficult to get to, and really depends on how you bound the problem, as well as possess access to the different change processes extant in any given observation. I wrote a whole piece on “truth in information” if you’re interested. Short version of that piece — “truth” is what you use, from an information perspective, to coordinate with your homies. If you take that concept, and meld it to the latest meme — FAFO (fuck around and find out) — you’ve probably got most of what you need. What FAFO really is for those that read my stuff is FAFO is the same as “grounding validity” — some set of experiences that you either create, or get tossed into and endure — that then shows whether your notion of the truth maps to anything in your larger world.
Scientists have all sorts of fancy schemes for FAFO, with lots of other acronyms, like RCTs (random control trials) which are more reliable ways of determining if you found out. Whole fields won’t even permit you to FA (theorize) because inherently, that’s going to replace some old dude’s theory that a certain group is ferociously fond of. So you can’t even get to the FO part of everything, not because you might be wrong. Rather, because you might be right. My favorite example of this was portrayed in the National Geographic series “Genius”, in the sub-series on Albert Einstein. Philipp Lenard, an experimental physicist in Germany (and famous Hitler supporter) was one of the people who condemned Einstein’s various theories as “Jew Physics” and was in part responsible for Einstein leaving Germany and coming to the U.S. where he persuaded Roosevelt to build a nuclear bomb based on his theories. Talk about FO indeed.
OK — I could go on. But let’s do a simple example to understand this truth thing a little. Hopefully, this will show you how it works a little better.
Let’s say we have three scientists at a conference, standing around, drinking the bad coffee one drinks at conferences. These three scientists study gravity. They are typical scientists in The Matrix— not a single hell-raiser like me in the bunch. They exist in a classical Legalistic v-Meme social hierarchy, and as such, they follow rules with their experiments to come to conclusions. What THAT means is they set up complicated, ever-more-precise experiments to study this phenomenon.
How do they do this? Let’s just assume they are highly sophisticated ball-droppers. They drop a ball in one place, and they measure the acceleration of the ball as it speeds toward the ground. The first scientist says to the other two: “Hey, I’ve been studying this phenomena where when we drop a ball, it speeds toward the ground. We’re very diligent and precise in our measurements, and at that place, it seems that the ball accelerates at about 9.8 m/sec*2!”
The other scientist chimes in “well, we’ve been running similar experiments. We carefully calibrated EVERY part of OUR experiment, even buying a bowling ball polisher, and we’ve dropped our balls, and it turns out when we measure the acceleration it’s 9.81 meters/sec*2!”
The third scientist takes a swig of that nasty conference coffee, and says “I’ll bet that if you two stepped outside of your labs, and measured the acceleration of this so-called ‘gravity’ in the downtowns of your respective cities, you’d find out the acceleration of those dropped balls would also be 9.81 meters/sec*2.”
OK. What do the other two scientists, locked in their Legalistic v-Meme social structures say?
“If you want us to believe that, you’re going to have to run another experiment and prove it!”
Of course, we all know that when it comes to gravity, we’re far past that particular point in how physicists understand all of this. There are a host of reasons why (math being one) that this is a kinda-silly example. But it illustrates how an empiricist/experimentalist might approach this situation.
And here’s the point. The knowledge structures that you have access to come out of the social structure where you operate. Legalistic social structures are title- and process-driven, and such, the relationships inside them are low empathy. You are supposed to follow the rules in dealing with someone inside them – that’s the knowledge structure tool you have access to. And that’s going to be dependent on their position in the hierarchy. They MUST know what they’re talking about if they have the title and position they have, and there is a rule-based order to things. And metacognition? Knowing what they don’t know? And especially guessing? That’s an agency-driven ability. You certainly don’t have that. You’re supposed to color within the lines. It’s all spelled out for you on what their rights and privileges are. (Note — anyone wondering why Ketanji Brown Jackson, our most recent Supreme Court Justice, refused to say what a woman is during her confirmation hearing has their answer in her portrayal of a person lacking agency for even basic information. She was stating loud and clear that she was not a legal constructionist. Sheesh, though.)
If you doubt this, listen to any university president conferring degrees on students during this graduation season. “Rights and privileges, rights and privileges” blah blah blah. It’s how the social system operates. Hand over a big wad of cash, and you never have to think again. Except maybe what kind of donut you get to eat. That’s the limits of YOUR agency outside your rights and privileges.
Now here is the devastating insight. Even THESE systems can, through a process of convergence, get to a global truth. In our case (let’s keep it simple) that gravity across the planet pulls toward the center of mass of the Earth, and it accelerates things at ~ 9.81 m/s2. But absent some guiding/binding principle of mathematical physics (if you go back up and look at the knowledge structure necessary for that, it’s all the way up in the Yellow/Turquoise Global Holistic level) the way you’re going to get there is 2-D area covering. In short, you’re gonna unroll the map of the globe, charter a sailing ship and an ATV to take you to a ton of places all around the globe, where you’re going to run your measurement OVER AND OVER.
If you know about fractals, what you’re attempting to do is in the fractal space, you’re using a one-dimensional covering space (a single point gravity measurement) to map a 2D phenomenon – the surface of the Earth (as you’ve defined it.) And for those that know a little about this, is you are NOT using anything resembling a multi-fractal, with different covering capacities, to make your life easier. You’re not throwing a higher-dimensional blanket over the entire globe. You’re plodding along, point by point, at whatever temporal and spatial scale your community lets you. Or you get denied that bad coffee at the next conference, you pariah!
And THOSE scales are directly tied to the social structure (how big of a circle that your gravity measurement applies) and enforced by the membership. You break the rules and say something like “this is an obviously generalizable phenomenon” and people ain’t gonna like it. And now you can bring in all the other structural forcing functions that exist in your social structure that are used. There might be a large contingent of researchers whose sole job it is to traverse the planet, measuring the gravitational constant. They’ve got mouths to feed. This guiding principle shit you might be proposing is moving their cheese. And on and on.
Maybe someone’s concerned that the constant will change over TIME — it’s not just space that matters. What does that do to the measuring business? Might be great! Folks can keep doing this for their ENTIRE career, in more and more sophisticated modalities, adding significant digits along the way. And once you’re locked into a given social structure, where the real incentives are rising in status in the social hierarchy, as opposed to really figuring out what the gravitational constant is (that’s just a bus you’re riding) then supposed boredom really isn’t the issue.
So if you’re a Guiding Principles guy like me (phone home, ET!) what we now have is a way of viewing exactly how a given truth is found — and if it’s a good mechanism. We can look to see if we can construct a model that will provide “covering” for reality in the space. We could ask the researchers if they would create what we call a Concept Map to describe their research in their field. And then we could examine that Concept Map to determine exactly how their brains are working to cover information in their field, and how they’re building truth.
Here’s an example of a low v-Meme, low sophistication concept map. Just FYI — the example I’m going to use to explain this is gonna be simple, because it takes TIME to make these pictures! Let’s start with an airplane.
Top-Level Concept Map for an Airplane
Let’s say we wanted to ground this particular concept map more to reality — we might use photos of a real plane, serving up an example that the author would choose to illustrate the point. That now also tells you about the author of the concept map’s perspective. If someone, for example, worked in Boeing’s structures division, their concept map of an airplane might likely include a dissected Boeing 737. And on and on.
One can also infer how higher order v-Memes might generate increasingly complex concept maps, and start including multidimensional information inside that space. The 2D map tells you precious little about how a plane flies (obviously, we’re all familiar enough with airplanes to know wings are involved) but increased evolution of perspective, as well as sophistication of the person drawing the map, will cover the n-dimensional aspect of the “truth” of an airplane more than the simplistic block diagram above. Around the wings might be air! Or Bernoulli’s equation – the governing physical principle that creates lift, that allows the wings to work. Someone might need to add how an airplane works in the different seasons of the year — hauling holiday travelers during Christmastime, or business travelers during the week. A spatial representation of the globe might be included. And on and on.
What is interesting is doing this with an unprepared audience and seeing what the implicit functioning of that person’s thought process is. I originally did this with students in my mechatronics class a long time (25 or so years ago!) and had them draw a block diagram of a military jet attempting to launch a missile. As impossible as it may seem to be, students would draw some version of a block diagram, maybe giving a block to wings, and a pilot, and a missile. But then they would draw arbitrary connections between the blocks, with what were obviously erroneous connections between the parts. It was one of the “ah-ha” moments when I started understanding that people have to be evolved to consequentiality and higher level coherent thought. I wish I had saved some of the originals. What was fascinating was that students did remember, almost perfectly, little sing-songy stories (one could call them a mnemonic device) on almost everything we covered. Hello, Tribal v-Meme. Once you see how people actually think, v-Meme-wise, you can’t unsee it.
One can also start seeing the need for all the different knowledge structures — and the people that think in them. A highly sophisticated observer might have the ability to sketch an airplane seen on a runway, as part of a spy operation, and then return with that sketch for analysis of the constituent parts. Someone process-oriented might track larger aircraft patterns, and then assign a given agent to show up at the right time to see the aircraft in question. On and on.
But back to the Truth. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that our brains are going to frame up whatever question we’re asked with the models that are spawned out of the value sets we’re programmed with. That doesn’t mean with the addition of appropriate process, we can’t overcome our perspective. We certainly can. But it behooves us to understand our own minds as we navigate through the world, attempting to find a given truth. It could be hidden in plain sight — but our unlovely minds just might not be able to see it.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 