Welcome back to F.*.C.K.I.T.TM - the Fear, Uncertainty, and Confusion-Killer Ideas Team. If you’re reading this second installment you are to be counted among either the very wise, or the very foolish, or the merely curious, or all at once! To briefly recap:
This bold new initiative started as a small but gnawing feeling deep in our gut that the world is going to hell, or has gone to hell, or maybe has actually been hell all along, but whatever - somebody ought to do something about it and that’s us. Our mission is to courageously seek out fear, uncertainty, and confusion and, without a shred of remorse or second thought, kill them dead along with fatalism, acedia, hopelessness, thinning hair, anomie, worry lines, depression, forlornity, flatulence and other right-wing tendencies, doubt, obligation, guilt, dry skin, constipation, apathy, anhedonia, brittle fingernails, despair, elevated cortisol levels, and, worst of all, the compulsive urge to bang your head against a wall. You will soon Feel Better With F.*.C.K.I.T.
If you missed the introduction, you can find it at new organization: F.*.C.K.I.T.
The next installment can be found at seminar two: fighting foo with 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.
In this seminar, we will explore the many levels of F.*.C.K.I.T. and how disastrously fubar the F.*.C.K.I.T. Strategy can be misunderstood and mis-interpreted based on one’s perspective.
But first some FAQs.
Q: What does it cost to join?
A: Membership is free, there is no form to fill out, there are no meetings, and ABSOLUTELY NO Robert’s Rules of Order. The only requirement is, as one commenter put it (emphasis mine):
I am required by my consciousness of conscience (awareness of right and wrong) to pay attention, whether I like it or not, because a truth is about to be revealed.
As we shall see, however, “awareness of right and wrong” itself requires exploration of the crucial questions: “Whose right and wrong?” and “Right and wrong from what perspective?”
Q: Who appointed you to initiate this initiative?
A: No one. It is a volunteer position. Perhaps full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but volunteer nonetheless.
Q: What if I don’t have brittle fingernails?
A: Go you! Do you drink Knox Gelatin? Or did your titanium fingernails come with 25 cents and four boxtops from Post Toasties? Inquiring minds want to know.
All righty, now that we’ve dealt with the major housekeeping issues, let’s get on with the seminar at hand.
F.*.C.K.I.T. has a number of developmental levels, and as we will see, what F.*.C.K.I.T. looks like at any given level can be so completely different from what it looks like at any other level that you would think we were talking about completely different F.*.C.K.I.T.s.
And, you would be right. I give you two examples:
Example One. In the cognitive realm, there’s a F.*.C.K.I.T. that is pre-rational (magical, not yet rational), a F.*.C.K.I.T. that is rational (not less than logical and reasonable), and a F.*.C.K.I.T. that is trans-rational (beyond rational, into the transpersonal realms like the highest forms of love, art, and spirituality). Pre-rational and trans-rational are utterly different perspectives/realms of experience (the former is the magical world of toddlers and Q-Anons, the latter the collected wisdom of the world’s great mystics and sages). The problem is: pre-rational and trans-rational get confused and conflated because they are both non-rational. Human beings, if we grow at all, develop from pre-rational to rational to trans-rational. It’s a sequence, and no skipping. A childish pre-rational f*ckit (especially coming from an adult) is more likely to result in discord, doubt and fear, selfishness, stinginess, ignorance, hate, greedy possessiveness, and peeing in one’s pants, where a trans-rational f*ckit (even coming from a child) will more often result in greater peace, assurance, gratitude, generosity, wisdom, love, and compassionate service in the world. We will see how this works in greater clarity a little further on.
Example Two. In the moral/ethical realm, there is F.*.C.K.I.T. that is pre-conventional, a F.*.C.K.I.T. that is conventional, and a F.*.C.K.I.T. that is post-conventional. Pre-conventional morality says “f*ckit, no one tells me what to do, I can break the rules because they do not apply to me and I can do whatever I want.” Conventional morality follows all the rules. Post-conventional morality will be willing to break the rules in service to the higher callings of peace, assurance, gratitude, generosity, wisdom, love and compassionate service in the world. Human beings, if we grow morally and ethically at all, develop from pre-conventional selfishness to conventional rules, norms and expectations to post-conventional understanding. No skipping. Pre-conventional and post-conventional get confused because they are both un-conventional, a confusion with disastrous consequences. We will also see how this works in greater clarity a little further on.
There are, of course, more lines of development than these two, but these two are a good place to start. Any decent F.*.C.K.I.T. Analysis would start by turning on itself with F is for Facts. Are the previous two examples I described above expressions of fact? Are they opinions? Are they religion? Are they lies? Are they bullshit propaganda?
They could be any of those! It would depend on the author’s and the readers’ developmental perspectives. I, the author, intended them, for our purposes here, to be hypotheses, based on a decades of empirical observations done by a great many developmental theorists employing the scientific method. Which means, don’t take my word for it. Go at it hammer and tongs to disprove them, and to prove me wrong (but I will flunk your sorry ass out of this course if you try to pass off garbage from facebook or twitter or some oodoovoodoo-create-your-own-reality website as “research,” for f*ck’s sake).
If you do honest research, which will require much reading of books (remember books?) and a merciless application of critical thinking skills, you’ll be in exceptional company because reading, critical thinking, observation, and testing is where developmental theory comes from. You will encounter the names of significant contributors to the provisional advancement of developmental theory, names like Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, and Ken Wilber among many others, all of whom have been correct but incomplete. U is for Unknown, remember? If you read, you will encounter the gradual coalescing of empirical facts and observations into provisional hypotheses that have been tested and tested again, and despite all that work, there is still far more, by several orders of magnitude, that we do not know.
C is for Courage, remember? It takes courage to say “I don’t know.” It takes courage to stand up for what is trans-rationally and post-conventionally right when so many others around you are yelling and screaming pre-rational and pre-conventional obscenities. Remember to consider the source, the volume, and who benefits. If it’s pre-rational and pre-conventional (source), loud and obscene (volume), and it unjustly benefits one person, one group, or ExxonMobil at the expense of any/all others or the planet we live on, f*ckit, it’s discard. And by the way, for all their shortcomings, legal systems are intentionally not less than rational constructs and not less than conventional moral systems, and so the argument that laws benefit one group (law-abiding citizens) at the expense of another (criminals) is itself a pre-rational argument that has often been made by pre-conventional criminals: “Shooting you is my first-amendment protection of my second amendment right to be an apex predator which, like bald eagles and bakers of un-gay wedding cakes, is an expression of my religious freedom which is protected by the Constitution of the Untied State of the Onion.” Ya, f*ckthat.
Flatlanders hate developmental sequences because they are hierarchical, and in their view, all hierarchies are categorically evil and must be squashed down into a kind of bland pre-digested pablum of “everything has equal value” (a state of affairs that physicist Ilya Progine actually calls, interchangeably, “equilibrium” and “chaos”). This flatlander perspective is an ideological opinion that does not hold up when we look at facts: there are, everywhere we look, useful and necessary nested hierarchies such as subatomic articles —> protons, neutrons, electrons —> atoms —> molecules —> organic molecules like proteins, RNA, DNA —> cells —> organs —> living organisms. And, as another example, letter —> word —> phrase —> sentence —> paragraph —> essay. In contrast, socio-political dominator hierarchies (like white supremacy, voter suppression, gerrymandered elections, economic class distinctions, male privilege, ethnocentrism, notions of pure-bloodedness, racism, sexism, anthropomorphism, bigotry of all kinds, Q-Anon conspiracy theories, fascism) are all based on pre-rational ideologies of inherent but false-construction superiority (egocentric and ethnocentric) and pre-conventional moral constructs; dominator hierarchies are a different matter altogether. They are hugely destructive perspectives that in the end, can not work. If you see any of these toxic weeds in your own life, root them out immediately, they will surely be your death, or worse, someone else’s. By their fruits you will know them.
The flattening of all hierarchies is irrational and does not hold up in the harsh light of F is for Facts. It is as destructive and perniciously toxic as the notion that all opinions are of equal value or even that all facts are of equal value in a given situation. And we know that K is for Karma, the pain and suffering that results from clinging to static patterns of value, especially ones that do not work. Clinging to static patterns of value such as socio-political dominator hierarchies, white supremacy, voter suppression, gerrymandered elections, economic class distinctions, male privilege, ethnocentrism, notions of pure-bloodedness, racism, sexism, anthropoporphism, bigotry of all kinds, Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and fascism, will result in massive pain and suffering. Confusing pre-rational perspectives and ideas with trans-rational ones because they are both non-rational will result in massive pain and suffering. Confusing selfish, pre-conventional morals with genuinely post-conventional perspectives will result in massive pain and suffering. Look around, you do not need me to point it out.
So here’s the summary:
F stands for Facts
U stands for Unknown
C stands for Courage
K stands for Karma
I stands for Intuition
T stands for Truth.
can all be understood from pre-rational, rational, or trans-rational perspectives, and from pre-conventional, conventional or post-conventional moral perspectives. F.U.C.K.I.T. can range from “take all you can, give nothing back, because nothing matters, we’re all dead anyway” (pre-rational, pre-conventional) to “give all you can, hold nothing back, because we have nothing outside the precious time we have with each other, right here and now, on this brief journey we’re all on together” (trans-rational, post-conventional).
The perspective from which, through which, we are viewing anything is an a-priori selection process that predisposes us to see only certain facts. There are no alternative facts: there are alternative interpretations of facts and those interpretations will themselves be filtered through our developmental perspectives. Growing up into more complete, more comprehensive perspectives is crucial, as is cleaning up the garbage left in the wake of our own growth and development.
Every perspective may be correct as far as it goes, but every perspective is also incomplete, which does NOT mean they are all equivalent. What is unknown from one perspective will be perfectly clear from another, usually larger, perspective. Some perspectives amount to what can be seen from the bottom of a pile of steaming bullshit. Others give us the view from the top of an anthill on that pile of bullshit. Others give us the breathtaking view from the surface of the earth’s moon or from the Hubble Space Telescope (and even the Hubble needed corrective lenses).
What feels like courage can range all the way from stupicide (intentionally running red lights at 70 mph as appears to be a popular trend) to risking one’s life to save another’s, or putting your own well-being at risk in order to take a stand for justice for another. We can probably all agree on a platitude like “have the courage to do the right thing” but is that thing right for me, right for us, or right for All Of Us? All three have their appropriate place, but it takes courage to know when we’re being selfish disguised as altruism, and it takes more courage to clean up our own lies, and to give up self-interest in exchange for compassionate service in the world and living with awareness of our responsibility to one another.
Karma itself can take the form of a stingy and mean-spirited schadenfreude or even self-righteous glee at some horrible person’s demise, all the way to taking the form of a sober realization that you yourself have been the victim of self-inflicted mortal wounds. John Donne wrote, “Therefore never seek to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” Walt Kelly’s Pogo wrote “We have met the enemy and it’s us.” Karma is not a bitch. Karma is a crystal-clear, completely unforgiving mirror.
The bullshit detection system known as intuition generally operates within a given level of development and, when challenged even by the excellent work of critical thinking and growing into a better, more comprehensive perspective, it will start its howling, gut-twisting, and complaining. At times like this it is most helpful to be able to consider everything rationally and courageously, lifting up everything carefully in the light of peace, assurance, gratitude, wisdom, generosity, love and compassionate service in the world. And if it all looks reasonably good, and beautiful, and true, then gently and kindly explain to your amygdala that you have appreciated its rabid vigilance lo these many years. Tell it to stay near in case it’s needed, but otherwise to just pad along obediently like a good and faithful collie while you stride boldly into:
Truth. While it is accurate to say that truth is not mutable, it is also accurate to say that there are no static patterns of value, Truth is not “whatever works” or “whatever you say it is,” nor is it a thing to be boxed or caged and defined forever. It is a dynamic process. It should never have been classified as a noun. It can only be an active verb. But that is just my opinion.
So bring it on, apply the entire F.*.C.K.I.T. Strategy to my two examples, cognitive development and moral/ethical development. Have at it hammer and tongs to pound the bullshit out of everything I have written here, shine the harsh light of F.*.C.K.I.T. on all of it. And if you’re gonna pound on me, use the tools of the F.*.C.K.I.T. Strategy in your own life and in your own experience as well (fair is fair). Pound the living daylights out of your own assumptions and pronouncements, mercilessly examine your own motivations, hold up your actions and behaviors to the harsh light of the F.*.C.K.I.T. Strategy. Observe your results and make notes on what you observe. Identify the discard, and then, by all means, do take out your own trash, sifting through it carefully to see what might be re-used, repaired, or recycled.
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footnote:
This essay is shot through with perspectives that have come from 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.