Acting the Age

Competent people are mature people. Competent people are surrounded by incompetence, but they understand why everyone around them is so incompetent. Furthermore, they have means of redressing that incompetence, and faith in their process. And so they aren’t so liable to get angry or upset about that incompetence. That is maturity.

Competent people are necessarily paternalistic in many senses. But with eloquence, grace, and faith in the processes which can reproduce more competence, they can be paternalistic without being condescending or judgemental in a non-constructive way..

By “processes which can reproduce more competence,” I am of course referring to the processes of maturation. Paternalism, of course, means being father-like. We can’t fault kids for being kids. But when it comes to incompetent adults, we also can’t be exactly like their fathers, except that we wish maturation for everyone to keep pace with chronological age. There is a difference between acting your age and being your age, and maturity is discerning that difference, and subtly developing the latter by incentivizing the former.

To act mature, or to act one’s age, means dealing with knowns in a way a mature person would. You know what the mature thing to do is, you’ve been informed, by example or by rules. You can work within ordered systems.

To be mature is to be competent in addressing unknowns as well. To be able to take on the responsibility for handling events which occur in reality, given the complexity of reality.

Chaos Cometh Regardless

There is an overwhelming profundity when, during maturation, one has to confront the chaos which a truly competent person must be competent in handling. It is the perceptual dissolution of order into chaos, and the refinement of a mode of being which can discern and create and wield new orders within that chaos. All traditional rituals and rites of passage entail some form of this death or rebirth, or departure and return, or destruction and reconstitution of psyche. We’ve made a big deal out of it, culturally—perhaps too much of a deal. It’s perhaps too mystified and blown into insane, religious proportion to feel possible. It’s been aggrandized and worshiped, commodified and stultified and cheapened.

I think that, if you asked someone if they wanted to experience a) psychological death and rebirth under shamanic guidance, or b) to grow into a mature, competent adult under guidance by other mature adults, most people would probably prefer b. That’s because most people are not adventurous when it comes to self-definition, but still aspire to be, basically, good people who can take care of their responsibilities for themselves and others.

If you then told those same people at a) and b) were the same thing, they’d insist otherwise. One sounds cultish, magical. The other sounds rather mundane. They assume that b) is happening all over. They assume that that’s what all good parents do for their kids. It’s what schools and colleges and universities do to their students. It’s what militaries do to their members and commissioned officers.

But then if you ask them if schools are producing mature adults, they might start cottoning on to your meaning. And then they might ask if you’re proposing turning schools into cults. And then you ask them what they think schools are doing now…

Age of Religion? No, Artificial Chaos

If everything is a cult, nothing is a cult. If everything is mundane, nothing is mundane. If we assume that chaos is part of the world, then dealing with the insanity of perceiving chaos is part-and-parcel of maturation, of competence. And the insanity of chaos is something which we speak of, today, almost wholly within mystical, mystifying, “spiritual” terms. Cult terms.

The generic cultural understanding of a young boy being sent away from the tribe, alone for the first time, to undergo a “spirit quest” in the wild indicates a recurrent feature of maturation—breakdown as breakthrough. Without the shared perception of the rest of the tribe—following the eyesight and posture and gesture and mood of how the adults relate to circumstances and situations—the young man is left hallucinating wildly in any unexpected or unknown situation. There is no recourse to comfort—there is instead an explosion of immeasured, disproportionate, incommensurate possible interpretations of events and responses. Fear, confusion, chaos. If only the adults were here to model how to act, how to feel, how concerned to be in this novel situation!

We don’t send twelve year old boys out to survive in the wild for a few days anymore. Our modern environment, with it’s handrails and signage, public announcements, books and role models, television families and superheros, provide constant order, constant examples, constant models. Everything, on the surface, seems taken care of. Food is regulated, stair steps are of uniform height for easy, thoughtless, mechanical bounding—you don’t even have to look down to climb or descend a step of stairs! The environment seems totally ordered.

And so we feel the need to go out of our way to encounter chaos. Sensory-deprivation tanks are one new means for vision quests of the old environmental-change sort. Psychoactive substances are another one. So are artificially chaotic scenes which rely on ordered, but imperceptible technical means. I mean raves with lasers and smoke and flashing images, or trippy, highly complex film sequences full of symbolism, designed with intentions of ritual initiation. Self-described shamans use these techniques to try and instill the encounter with chaos which our apparently ordered-environment denies us with its uniformity, with its standardization, with its commodification of everything.

Hacking Recast

But the appearance of order everywhere is the illusion. There is, actually, constant chaos everywhere. That’s what all our high-fallutin’ critical theorists see. Their theories about all the order all, inevitably, spiral into chaos. They panic, overwhelm, subvert the rational, declare the non-existence of reality.

The people who actually live in the chaos that theorists describe are, for the most part, easily identifiable as crazy. To be pitied, avoided, and taken care of by those with larger hearts than our own. Self-destructive, anti-social, potentially dangerous, probably unsanitary.

Maturation means finding the order which exists across all these perceptions. Finding the common, relatable, human posture for the arenas we all partially perceive we exist in. Discovering the orders which undercut apparent contradictions or mutual exclusivities.

R.D. Laing had a word for crazy people who managed to find sanity again. He called it “super-sanity.” He was grandiosely mystifying something we’d be much healthier and wiser to treat as no-big-deal, and mundane. We should wish that competence was mundane, and that the traumas and terrors of getting there were something we understood as part of the normal human condition, not as some special, grandiose, mysterious thing.

Mysterious, at least, not to adults. All adult things should be mysterious to kids. If the adult world isn’t mysterious to a teenager, then what you’re calling the adult world isn’t. There are no adults, in that case.

The desire that, at the end of maturation, one would desire to adopt the theatrical guise of some shaman or grandiose mythical figure seems, to me, to be rather childish. Immature. Anybody who grows up wanting to be a shaman will cringe at that impetus when they get there. If anything, I’d expect a mature person to act this sort for the children, as a rather mundane affair. Adults still impressed by such an act need more role compassionate role-models who might demonstrate how to act their age.

Stop Pretending Your Doing Religion

I believe that I have matured, in many ways, in the past few years because I’m no longer unproductively angry at adults who marvel and mystify and speak grandiosely about the rites of maturation, in religious and mythic and cult terms. I am productively angry at them mostly in private. But I’m understanding and sympathetic as much as I can muster, and in public I strive to competently demonstrate and model better, more proportionate and sustainable, human-scale ways of managing the chaos of insanity. And I use language which does not needlessly occult or mystify or grandiloquise the processes of maturation and confronting chaos which are all those things in their own right, and need no further dressing up! The trembling reverence, the down-cast, furtive eyes, the solemn intonations… give me a fucking break. If everyone has to do it, it must, among the competent, be mundane! If the reverence isn’t a put-on for the kids, then it’s immature by definition.

“Yeah, yeah. The time knife. We’ve all seen it. Let’s get back on track.” This is the way. I’m not advocating flippancy, rashness, or lack of sympathy. Merely proportionality outside of the excess we see today toward ludicrous grandiosity, because that leads to messianic delusion. We want a whole bunch of responsible, sane adults, not a few impossibly-pure world-saviors. We want people who volunteer to shovel their neighbors driveway, or coach little-league, or invest hours into helping children learn their alphabet or practice their multiplication tables. We don’t want self-sacrificing martyrs hell-bent on saving the planet. I have far more faith that the planet’s salvation lays in mass-producing maturity in the style of the former, not the latter.

Alienation vs. Individuation

Confronting chaos doesn’t need to be as lonely as it is.

Making a computer confront the chaos for us, and then just accepting the order it provides, so that we don’t get scared by experiencing insanity unmediated by drugs or controlled conditions like sensory deprivation tanks… that’s cowardice. And it’s a reduction of humanity to machine intelligence, not the lifting of computers into human intelligence. And you’ll just go insane anyway.

We should try having a world with more adults in it first, before we take the mystifications of religion and throw them onto inanities like the singularity.

 

If there is an order which machines can help is enter into, an order which confronts and manages the chaos in a way which helps us, then it is an order which our embodied, human-scale lives can feel agency in in relation to our material environment, both natural and artificial. And it’s an order which enables our human scale existence, too, within our perception of each other, within our social environment, across differences of maturity and culture.

Unreal Order is Post Modern

This is where Jordan Peterson’s metaphors on order and chaos lose me. Because he’s lecturing to university students, He assumes their lives are “thrown into chaos” when their cars break down, as he puts it in his Piaget lecture. Because he assumes they aren’t handy—and they aren’t. Handy, to these people, means Red Green and Tim ‘the tool man’ Taylor—i.e. not handy at all. My life was thrown into chaos when my computer broke as a kid because I was a kid. And fixing it, over and over, trained my perception of it. It may take a long time, but turning computers into order is actually extremely easy. Computers are the most orderly thing in the world! You can’t have a machine that operates smoothly at a rate of billions of state-changes a second without absolutely-fucking maximal order. It’s you who is in disorder, not the computer. That the point I’m getting as I read Piaget.

Low-resolution, human perceptions and reductions and simplifications and abstractions of that order may be hard-won, but infinitely valuable and grounding.

There is something chaotic to me about a good guitarists fretting. They are dancing about a crazy pattern upon a relatively simple grid. Same with pianist’s fingers—the songs they release from so few keys. Same could be said of chess, etc. But this chaos comes from my lack of experience practicing guitar, or paying chess.

Materially, computers are complicated as all hell. But they could be way simpler if we learned them, rather than desiring that they learn us. They’re complex and scary because we don’t learn them.  A lot of their complexity, however, comes in compensation for human refusal to learn them at their much less complex form. How much complication was added to make Plug ‘n’ Play work (i.e. “Plug and Pray”) so that people could be spared sorting out IRQ channels? How much more complicated was the Mac ROM than the CP/M BIOS/BDOS infrastructure? “Easy to use,” in computers, means harder to learn—the more convincingly that the high-level interface pretends to be something it’s not, the more complicated what it really is, as a physical object, becomes.

The means of artificial chaos listed above—raves and trippy movies—are trivial, childlike challenges compared to computers. McKenzie Wark’s impulsion to “get fucked by music” in a rave indicates a desire, a great hunger for melting and merging into chaos. That necessitates as naivete about how music is made. You can’t lose yourself when you’re reverse-engineering the room, when you’re playing back-seat DJ, or arm-chair shaman. There is order underlying artificial chaos, and maturity entails hacking through the falseness of the chaos down to the order. Down to the technique, the human science, of how the “magic” was done. This is what skeptics do to hucksters and charlatans. It’s how illusionists and magicians get their tricks. To analyze a film like a film-maker, to take it apart, perceptually, to understand why scenes work or fail to work, is to escape captivation, and get to the underlying ground.

This is also what hackers do—cut through the top to get down to the order at the bottom. Contrary to Wark’s theorizing, hackers do not employ abstraction. Precisely the opposite—they methodically work through abstractions down to an embodied relationship with the real. She wants hacking to entail more and more layers of artificial order constructed away from the chaos of the real. What hackers are actually doing is trying to reverse engineer all the little chips on their motherboard so they can free themselves of proprietary drivers, binary blobs, and corporate control. That’s defeating abstraction, not creating it. Fighting fire with fire.

I’m sure there is an equivalent attempt, cognitively and perceptually, for psychonauts exploring drug-induced perceptual changes. They study brain chemistry, cognitive science, and whatnot, and try to match the models to the qualia and experience of the trip, demystifying the chaos.

Gathering the Scattered Pieces

I have benefited greatly by learning so much about audio engineering, and analyzing music with my friends. In a rave or concert, I’m relating to the crew as much as I am the audience or dance floor. Those who are invisible, working backstage or behind the camera—those are who competent people, who have understood that which orders their world—relate to and identify with as humans forces.

Right now, that identity is well-understood within terms of abstract social systems, hierarchies, and whatnot. Doctors, astronomers, detectives and gamblers all get their stories told in prime-time television—their systems are biological, cosmological, psychological and the more relatable kinds of math. Technicians, engineers, hackers, and other domain specialists—the ones manipulating the technology—they are expressed mythically still. And so our material world, and the artificial chaos which exists in our world today owing ignorance of easily-learnable orders—remains a barrier to perception and stability within order.

How can a mature person handle chaos when they haven’t matured into understanding—even in low resolution—the firmest, most ubiquitous forms of order which surround them? Mechanical and electronic and engineered order? When the orders they learn are configurational and abstract /upon/ the material order, but not penetrating into the material itself?

Sports fans, if they’re attentive to the basics of their field of passion, know way more about the human body, and perhaps even medicine and nutrition, than I do. Construction workers know way more about the complexity of building and of modern regulation and safety than I do. Audio engineers understand electricity and the manipulation of wave-forms more than I do—or carry the fundamentals necessary to more intuitively understand electricity should they choose to.

It is configurational thing, abstract things, “social constructions”, which exist “only in our minds.” A more material way of putting this is to say that it is media “content” which exists in our minds. Artificial chaos and artistic illusions. When your car breaks down, it’s not in chaos. You’re in chaos—that is, if you can’t troubleshoot cars.

With the division of labour comes the mythical task of re-gathering the means of perception of our material, human-made world. It’s an encyclopedic goal, taking years. I was fortunate to start with computers—the most complex thing we’ve ever made, and then work backward to simpler things.

The methodical work of eliminating the artificial chaoses imposed by your own ignorance about how the regular things around you are ordered leaves only the real chaos remaining. And that chaos is, more often, other people and their own self-imposed chaos. This is where the lessons of maturity and humility come in, and the broader context wherein trite-sounding lessons such as “everyone has something of value you might learn from” can be taken more seriously.

Coming Down from Coming Down from Above

The work of learning all the different domain knowledge necessary for perceiving, at human scale, the order behind all of our technological systems is a fantastic way of combating the distorting tendency of modern culture toward messianic ideation. Learning to understand, and relate to, the man behind the curtain is the only way I can see to escape the solipsism of childhood, and enter the maturity necessary to cultivate competence with patience and affection.

Adults know how to fix things. And they see order in the world where kids, who are still learning the ropes, see chaos. That’s what makes adults stable role models, and good guardians for children. Learning how physical reality works is essential  to embodied living—living within artificial chaos and refusing to learn the technical make-up behind those sensory illusions is surrender to perpetual childhood. So if you aren’t hacking down through illusions to the human-made order—the audio engineering, the set design, the manufacturing processes, the pistons and pulleys and header systems—your accepting the world as post-modernists describe it. As hopelessly beyond comprehension, and only subject to theorizing and word-games.

The work is in training perception and finding the solid ground, I’d argue instead. And that’s not religious—it’s just sometimes insanity-inducing. Such is life.