Damn, hadn’t read this. This is basically C. S. Lewis 1944 edition of my Gervais principle, but with reco that you aspire to a sort of conscious cluelessness (“craftsman”) and avoid sociopathy because it a) tempts you into being a “scoundrel” and b) sucks you towards nihilismhttps://twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1320449302129500160 …
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If I were to tldr this in a Christian way it would probably be: “Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but recognize it for what it is. Stay in the Garden of Eden even after realizing there’s a world beyond. Nothing good comes of leaving it.”
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Lewis was born in 1898 so was 46 when he delivered this commencement speech, same as me now. But the maturity and compactness of the formulation suggests he probably thought it through in his mid thirties like I did. So like 1934-35 when Hitler and Stalin were on the rise.
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Which would explain his biases. I thought it through 2008-09... peak GFC but otherwise a pleasant late-neoliberal zeitgeist with no obvious big villains or dark clouds looming. That explains my biases. If I were thinking it through more recently I’d have landed darker too.
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In case it isn’t obvious, Lewis’ version is *much* darker and more pessimistic about human nature than mine. He’s essentially advising you to skip an entire large zone of the human condition that plays out in inner rings out of fear of moral corruption.
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My advice is to learn the game and how to play it. Don’t get addicted to it, but don’t sit it out either. It’s a kind of acting dead/waldenponding. Especially if fetishizing “craft” as an embodiment of “good” is the alternative. Inner rings are part of life.
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This is well worth reading as a counterpoint in the genre. I was actually looking for it earlier to add to the thread but had forgotten the ref. tldr of this: real inner circles (Ie informational) as a burden of being misunderstood you are not free to clear up. Much Straussian.https://twitter.com/calcsam/status/1320540431298502659 …
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End of conversation
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hobbled blacksmith
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