Still here at the F.*.C.K.I.T.TM Academy? Congratulations! You are now officially part of the Fear, Uncertainty, and Confusion-Killer Ideas Team.
If you missed the introduction, you can find it at (new organization: F.*.C.K.I.T.).
If you missed seminar one, you can find it HERE (seminar one: the many levels of F.*.C.K.I.T)
Previously, we described an acronymical compendium called the F.*.C.K.I.T. StrategyTM which explained that:
F stands for Facts
U stands for Unknown
C stands for Courage
K stands for Karma
I stands for Intuition
T stands for Truth.
We also looked at some useful orienting generalities in the form of an overall sequence of cognitive development:
pre-rational –> rational –> trans-rational
and a general sequence of moral development:
pre-conventional –> conventional –> post-conventional.
In this seminar, those sequences will be described in terms of a more specific stage development language (still just useful orienting generalities, not dogma):
egocentric –> ethnocentric –> rational –> multicultural relativism –> integral
and the forms of thinking that specifically go with the first three of those stages:
magical –> mythical –> rational
We will explore foo, the technical name for magical and/or mythical thinking, In all their foobulous manifoostations. We will learn about both magical thinking and mythical thinking, and what they look like, and how to recognize them. We will learn how both magical and mythical thinking are the modus operandi for persons still at the not-yet-rational stages of egocentric and ethnocentric, respectively. We will learn how so-called “conspiracy theories” are actually just normal but unhealthy expressions of magical or mythical thinking done by persons who have not developed beyond, or have regressed back to, egocentric or ethnocentric stages (the scary part: there are so many).
We will use the F.*.C.K.I.T. StrategyTM to deconstruct foo whether it takes the form of magical thinking or mythical ideation, and then forever cast it into the outer darkness (i.e., discard) where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. And the reason for attempting this impossible task at all is that the world is really broken, there’s a lot of toxic bullshit out there, and getting people through egocentric and ethnocentric to at least rational is the only way any of us have any hope of survival because a two-year-old wearing face paint and yak horns on his head and carrying an AR-15 is just freaking alarming.
Ideally, we actually need a critical mass at integral because rational and multicultural relativism also carry their own deadly expressions, but I’ve already lost most of my readers trying to do just this much.
But first more FAQs!
Q: WTF is ideation? I was with you until you used that word.
A: Ah, sorry, it.slipped out. It just means the way concepts are formed and constrained by one’s particular cognitive structures and paradigms.
Or if that’s too convoluted, Wordnik says it’s
The faculty or capacity of the mind for forming ideas; the exercise of this capacity; the act of the mind by which objects of sense are apprehended and retained as objects of thought.
Q: What’s with this stage development bullshit? Isn’t that just more religion? What if I don’t believe in developmental psychology?
A: Fine by me. But I’m guessing you are becoming mightily frustrated discussing Heidegger’s Being and Time with your toddler who is in the middle of having a mystical experience filling his diaper, which you are now going to have to clean up. Developmental theory suggests there is hope for progress from fighting poo to fighting foo.
Q: Where’s my f*cking tie-dye F.*.C.K.I.T. Academy t-shirt?
A: We’re having supply-chain merch issues. But on the other hand, you haven’t sent any money either, you cheapskate.
Q: Get real. Are people really frequently asking these questions?
A: Why, no! No they are not! But everybody knows “FAQs” is simply an artificial rhetorical device intended to anticipate annoying questions before anyone actually asks them or, more likely, a sneaky way of “answering questions” no one has actually asked but should be asking. Glad you asked!
All set? Here we go, starting with an elegant example of magical thinking:
Rust is caused by pixies. If you have anything metal that is rusty you can be sure you have a pixie infestation. Fortunately, there is a simple way to get rid of pixies: paint. Pixies hate paint, especially stuff like Rust-Oleum damp-proof red primer. If you paint your rusty metal, the paint will chase the pixies away and just like magic, there will be no more rust (at least until the pixies come back)!
Anyone capable of rational ideation (oh, damn, I just did it again, didn’t I?) will see the problem in that example. It is mostly logical, but based on a faulty premise: “pixies cause rust.” Everything that follows can be empirically demonstrated - if you paint your rusty metal, the rust will stop, that is a useful fact. Science has (adequately, but still provisionally) come to determination that the cause of rust is not pixies. Rust is just the common name we give to iron that has combined with oxygen to form iron oxide. Science has also hypothesized, and tested, that a layer of paint is one of a number of effective ways of preventing oxygen from getting to the iron. No pixie-repellents required.
But people who believe in pixies will not be convinced, because pixies are magical creatures, they are a belief structure typical of the egocentric stage of development, and science is the result of reason.
Egocentric/magical ideation is pre-rational. No amount of reason will budge that belief, because pre-rational is, by definition, incapable of reason. Developmental theory, backed up by empirical evidence, states that human beings must grow through two previous stages - egocentric/magical thinking and ethnocentric/mythical thinking - before getting to rational, and it generally takes 3-5 years to grow through each stage. There are healthy and unhealthy forms of every stage, and no skips, because each stage becomes the stable platform for further growth.
Let’s look at another example, this time one of ethnocentric/mythical thinking. Ethnocentric is a stage past the egocentric/narcissistic I-me-mine into the exclusive, perceived-superior in-group structure of my people/my tribe:
Poverty and disease is caused by people born of muggle or mixed-blood parents. If you are living in poverty or are sick you can be sure you are a muggle or a mudblood, and that unfortunately makes you inferior. In act, all the poverty and disease in the world is caused by impure muggle blood. Fortunately, there is a simple way to get rid of the muggles and mudbloods: oppression and suppression. If you get rid of all the muggles and mudbloods, the genetic inferiority will disappear and just like magic, there will be no more poverty or disease!
This example is drawn from the fictional world of Harry Potter, but change the muggle/mudblood descriptors to BIPOC, LBGTQ+, indigenous, Jewish or Roma (in Hitler’s Third Reich), educated people (in Pol Pot’s Cambodia), female (in any male-supremicist culture), infidel, heathen, shit-hole country, heretic, or pick whatever despised cultural, social, or ethnic group you want, and you get violence and genocide. It’s justified on the basis of mythical, or even magical, constructs like “race” (which has absolutely no basis in biology whatsoever - we’re all homo sapiens sapiens), class, ethnic superiority, and the like. We might as well just as irrationally argue that, as a class, blonde-haired, blue-eyed people are genetically superior... oh... wait...
Like egocentrism, ethnocentric is also pre-rational. Of course there are healthy expressions, and these are critically important. Even the Oatly oat milk people have “You’re one of us now” on the side of their shipping boxes. A solid, healthy family or tribe is the best place to train up a narcissistic, egocentric two-year-old. The problem today is that we are seeing the destructive consequences of unhealthy ethnocentric piles of foo flung everywhere thanks to social media and FOX and Friends, and now backed up with AR-15s.
What makes ethnocentrism so pernicious is that it ascribes characteristics to anyone not part of the in-group that may, or may not, actually be accurate, and there’s little help in telling the difference. If we take karma in Robert Pirsig’s sense of “the pain and suffering that results from clinging to static patterns of value,” then a karma-dump is when one person or group gathers up everything they cannot accept in themselves, and then find some scapegoat person or group to dump it on (called projection), and then hate them for it and blame them for all the pain and suffering.
Worse yet, persons and groups at egocentric and ethnocentric stages have learned to hijack the language of rational and multicultural relativism to promote regressive pre-rational agendas. An example of this would be the hijacking of the motto “My body, my choice,” originally used by groups supporting women’s reproductive freedom (the right to choose whether to be pregnant). The motto has been hijacked by persons and groups using the exact same language to support intolerant, anti-vaccination sentiments (the right to refuse to be vaccinated, and therefore more likely to infect others with the SARS-CoV-2 virus during an unprecedented public health emergency). I’m not arguing that one does not have a right to not be vaccinated, I just find it interesting that militant, pre-rational, magical-thinking, conspiracy-theory-believing, anti-vaccine groups have appropriated, or hijacked, the (in most cases) post-rational and post-conventional language of reproductive freedom.
And to pile on too many worse yets, we are currently seeing a regression to earlier stages of development on a massive scale, brought on by social disorganization and cultural upheaval. We are indeed at a turn of the ages, and there is no guarantee that we will move forward. We could indeed regress backwards from multicultural relativism, whistle right on down through rational, and screech to a bloody halt at the last-known-stable configuration: ethnocentric, but now with nukes. Regression has happened before, it demonstrably happens to most human children at the point they are in transition to a next stage of their development. Social science has an abundance of empirical, historical and sociological evidence to support the hypothesis that major social/cultural shifts have always resulted in social disorganization. During times of major social and cultural transition, many things fall apart, while new, more comprehensive things are yet coming into being. That’s no foo. That is, for better or worse, where we are at,
So let’s summarize:
F is for Facts. So-called conspiracy theories are not facts, they are not even theories. They have no complex theoretical structures that have coalesced out of the rigorous gathering of empirical data into hypotheses that are then tested in the fire of reason until all that is left is precious gold of provisionally dependable. “Conspiracy theories” are magical thinking, used to prop up the ethnocentric mythology (pre-determined beliefs) of a subculture group claiming inherent superiority. So, if it involves pixies of any kind, f*ckit. If it’s based on a faulty premise, everything that follows is going to be foo, so f*ckthat too. If it’s pixie bullshit cherrypicking supportive evidence and disregarding anything unsupportive, it’s more foo, foock that as well.
U is for Unknown. We do not know what is going to get us through this horrible fubaritic transition we’re going through. We’ve never been here before. We do not know who, or what, we will be when we get through it. We don’t know what the world will look like. This transition is unprecedented in that the potential for global destruction is severe, but it is like all other transitions in human history: they all involved real risk, many fits and starts, with no guarantee of success. We cannot go back, that’s for sure.
C is for Courage. Right? In a previous seminar we talked about courage as heart, and about “walking the path that has heart.” I won’t repeat it here, links are at the top of this article. But here’s a new wrinkle: Castenedas’ reflection that all paths lead nowhere, now means that all paths lead to just another stage of development, a new stage that will indeed solve the problems of the previous stage, but will also create new and different problems. So, we spell “nowhere” as “now here.” All paths lead now here.
K is for Karma, and that means we who hope to do any good for all of us in the world will need to bend over backwards to make sure we’re cleaning up our own karmic garbage and not dumping it on anyone else. Woe to anyone who does a karma dump. Fighting foo as a way of avoiding cleaning up your own poo is Really. Bad. Karma.
I is for Intuition. And intuition suggests we must learn to speak the language of previous, pre-rational stages. Appealing to reason with someone at a stage incapable of reason, or temporarily regressed to pre-rational stage because their life is all fubar, simply is not going to work. If a person is regressed into egocentric/magical thinking, then that is the language we will have to use (you’re talking to a two-year-old).
If a person is regressed to ethnocentric/mythical, then that is the language we must use (you’re talking to a neighborhood gang member). It’s the opposite of hijacking the language of a later stage to promote the regressed worldview of an earlier stage. In this case, it is using the language and worldview of the stage with which we’re attempting to communicate to get across important concepts for which that stage does not yet have adequate language. This is called skillful means, and elementary education teachers do it all the time.
T is for Truth. And what is truth? It’s right there in the apparent gaps between egocentric/magical, ethnocentric/mythical, rational, multicultural relativism, integral. How might we bridge them? Whatever bridges we build, they will need to be constructed from peace, assurance, gratitude, wisdom, generosity, love, and compassionate service in the world, or they will surely carry us only backwards to where we do not want to go.
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footnote:
This essay is shot through with perspectives that have come through the work of Ira Progoff, Robert Pirsig, Ken Wilber, Meister Eckhart, Mary Oliver, Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. Their excellent work is available in... wait for it... books.